The Open Source Marketer

Here are a few notes from John Pozadzides at OneMansBlog.com. He’s giving the presentation on 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog at WordCamp Dallas 2008.

I’m not going to list all 45 tips in this update, but here are a few interesting ones for you.

1. Use English Names for Images
2. Descriptive and accurate titles are essential
3. Use title elements on every hypertext link
4. Pick the right theme (SEO over Eye Candy)
5. Web hosting affects your traffic - google traffic is affected by site performance (google could flood a slow server). StumbeUpon stops sending traffic to slow sites
6. Serve images from your own server and not Flickr or risk sending traffic to Flickr and not your own site. Images searches will go to where the site is stored.
7. Use a sitemap to tell Google where everything is on your site. Get the WordPress Site Map Plugin.
8. Post regularly, no less than 2-3 days. Post in advance. Keep 2-3 post buffer at all times, a week or two is even better if you can.
9. Always show related posts.
10. Use Print style sheets to make it easy for people to print your content.
11. Use deep linking by using keywords in the link text.
12. Have your own domain name. Don’t use typepad, blogger, or other sub-domain.
13. Create a podcast and/or publish a video to connect with your audience and make yourself real.
14. Pick a theme that loads quickly
15. Use wp super cache plugin to survive a digg front page appearance.
16. Use the link attraction factors plugin to find out if your post title is digg worthy.
17. Always include at least one image per post, period.

These are all great tips, but the grand finale was the best tickler and that was the Layered Technologies real-time analytics reporting tool from Woopra.com. I’m getting a beta account today as part of being an attendee of WordCamp Dallas 2008, so I’ll update you on all the yummy coolness once I have a chance to get in and use the tool.

Updating from WordCamp Dallas 2008

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Here are some of the new announcements from the WordCamp Dallas 2008 event here in Frisco Texas.

Not only is WordPress.org getting a refresh, but WordPress 2.5 was also released today.

Media Management:

Media upload is totally redesigned with the ability to upload multiple items at one time.

Image Handling:

You can tag your images on your desktop and then upload them to WordPress and it will pull out the image information automatically so you don’t have to re-enter the information.

Plugins:

Plugins can be automatically updated without the need to manually download the files and upload them to your server. Whether this works or not will depend on your server settings.

Pluggable Features:

WordPress 2.5 has several interesting new pluggable features. Everything from color schemes to post creation tool bar buttons is pluggable in WP 2.5.

Hacking Prevention:

All WordPress 2.5 passwords are now salted and stretched to prevent hacking. Before the security was a straight MD5 Hash. What hackers used to do was to hack an old WordPress blog and then download the user database so that even if the blogger updated their WordPress instance, the hackers could still get back in. So, update to WP 2.5, keep your blog updated, and just for good measure, always always change your username and password if you get hacked. Hopefully the new WP security will help prevent hacking.

WordPress 2.6 Future Vision:

The growth of WordPress since 2006 has been virtually exponential. Both the user community and the develop community continues to grow and as it does we can only expect for it to become more entrenched in the lexicon of publishing online. WorPress is being used as The blogging platform of choice and it’s being used as the foundation for CMS systems.

Updating from WordCamp Dallas 2008,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com