I am not an SEO by profession and I don’t sell myself as an SEO expert. I don’t do SEO unless it is part of my developing a web site. In that case, I optimize the site based on the keywords chosen by the customer. I don’t get into the business of choosing the right keywords and building link campaigns.

With that said, I have taken the time to learn about SEO in order to market my own services and business ventures. Plus I’m just plain curious and any good web designer should know how search engines work.

I’m not going to get into the details of WordPress SEO with this post, but I will point you to some resources and give some of the main concepts that I have learned.

Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about but try these google searches and see where Papasoft ends up. I’ll post the current organic rankings as of today and we’ll see how well I can keep it up.

Google the following keywords (Papasoft rankings on page 1 in parentheses):

• custom wordpress programming – (#1)
• wordpress programming – (#5)
• wordpress miami – (#2)
• wordpress south florida – (#5)
• wordpress seo miami – (#2, I didn’t expect that one, let’s see how I fare after this post!)
• miami web developer – (page 1)

I think that I am just lucky to have used some keywords that may not be that popular. However, that proves one point I would like to make: You can find opportunities to rank your site by finding keywords that are not over saturated. It also helps in some cases that I have included my geographic location on my site title because sometimes people search for developers near them.

So, how did I get ranked high for these keywords even though I’m not an SEO expert?  Here goes…

1. Write about what you know. Write about your product or service and be natural about it. In other words, produce quality content. (I have a lot to learn here.)
2. Determine the keywords you want to target. In other words, what would someone that you want to come to your site be typing into the search box?
3. As long as it makes sense, revise your content to incorporate your keywords. Focus on only 1 or 2 per post/page. The TITLE tag of your page (what shows up at the top of the browser) is the most important place to use those keywords and they’ll also show up in links within your site about that post.
4. Use quality WordPress plugins that allow you to manage the title tags of your posts and category pages. Check out my recommendations below.
5. Get legitimate inbound links to your site. It helps that my customers allow me to add a link in the footer of sites I have developed back to my site. That builds up my search engine cred. But more importantly, get sites that are already ranked in your subject area to link to you AND even better that use the keywords you are targeting in that link to you. (I need to do better at this most definitely.)
6. Track your progress. Use Google Analytics to review your stats and your referral sources and keywords that brought folks to your site. Run queries yourself to see where you end up in the results.

That’s a start from an SEO dummy who did a lot of self study.

Here are some resources that you may find helpful. Add more in the comments if you like.

• WordPress SEO – by Joost de Valk (pronounced Yoast and at Yoast.com, definitely check out the video prez also)
• WordPress SEO Plugins – check out this list by John Carcutt who developed this site for his talk at WordCamp Miami 2009. (The guy who is #1 to my #2 above for wordpress seo miami )

One of the cool things about WordPress.tv is the channel that is just for WordCamp videos, WordCampTV.

Just in time for WordCamp Miami on Feb 22.

Check out the introductory video below.

Here is some code that I have used to update the guid in my wp_posts table. Replace ‘example.com’ with whatever your base url is for your WordPress installation.

Two update queries, one for posts and one for pages. This only updates published posts and ones which don’t have the guid set yet (remove the guid = ” line to replace existing guid values).

update wp_posts
set guid = concat('http://www.example.com/?p=',ID)
where guid = ''
and post_status = 'publish'
and post_type = 'post';

update wp_posts
set guid = concat('http://www.example.com/?post_id=',ID)
where guid = ''
and post_status = 'publish'
and post_type = 'page';

Update: Also Change Your Site URL in Posts in SQL

I have recently been using a different method when moving sites to update the guid and also to do a search and replace within posts and pages for the url of your site. This is necessary when changing your site url since uploaded image references in your posts are set to the absolute url.

/* Use this to update the guid url */
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = REPLACE (
guid,
'http://www.example-old-url.com',
'http://www.example-new-url.com');  

/* Use this to update urls in posts, good for images! */
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (
post_content,
'http://www.example-old-url.com',
'http://www.example-new-url.com');

Cake PHP 1.2 has been released! (Finally.)

I’ve been using the Cake PHP Framework for over 2 years now. If you are going to be doing hard-core PHP programming then I recommend it as an excellent MVC Framework.

Lately, I’ve been focusing on using WordPress for most of my development. While I had used Cake PHP for an early revision, I ended up moving to WordPress for the directory listings at Linoln Road Locator (still under development, BTW). The ease of applying a custom theme and not having to develop an admin section from scratch have sold me on using WP from now on.

Of course, I’m sure I might use Cake for more involved projects…we’ll see.

Congratulations Cake Team!

• Theme Development
• Designing for WordPress
• WordPress tricks
• Using WP as a CMS
• Installing WP Locally
• Uploading Pictures
• Using an Image Gallery
• lots more… get over there and check ‘em out

I now humbly apologize and I confess that I have been assimilated. Yes, I’m on Facebook and I have used it to keep in touch with old friends. I’m also on Twitter and use it to follow other professionals the same way I have been doing with RSS Feeds for years.

I also use LinkedIn for professional networking and Plaxo for my contact management. But Facebook and Twitter have seen the most use over the past few months.

I eventually saw a need to centralize my updating of status and other messages in one place. I tried using Twitter to update Facebook but realized that I use Twitter too much for geek stuff and it would wear people out on FB. I thought I could go the other way but sometimes I use FB for more private, family and friends updates that I might not want “out there” on Twitter. (There’s a FB app that allows you to post from Twitter.)

I also wanted to have a way that I could update this blog with Twitter posts. That’s easy enough with a nifty WordPress plugin by Alex King called TwitterTools. It allowed me to display the most recent Tweets in my sidebar. I also hacked my theme so that it would display the most recent message in the header. That worked for a while but then as I used Twitter more and also got replies from people, sometimes it was hard to understand the context of only seeing the latest tweet.

What I needed was ONE PLACE where I could:

• Add status messages or quick blog posts
• Update Facebook, Twitter AND my blog with general status (“Out to dinner with the family”).
• Update only one of the above with status appropriate for the audience
• Update my blog with status or a customized message for the header
• Mix and match any 2 of the above.

Enter Ping.fm. This tool allows you to update several social networking sites with status updates, microblogging posts (like Twitter) or even longer blog posts with a title. You can configure Ping.fm with what they call “triggers” to update any combination of your target sites.

The best part was that I found a WordPress plugin called Ping.fm Custom URL by Matt Jacob that allowed me to set up my site to receive posts from Ping.fm.  It’s pretty cool and since Ping.fm sends 3 different types of posts (status, microblogging and blog posts) I can have my status messages appear in the sidebar and blog posts go to one particular WordPress category.

I customized my template to grab the most recent post from the blog posts coming from Ping.fm and display it in the header. Then I had to figure out how to NOT display these on the front page along with my normal blog posts.  Enter another cool plugin called Simply Exclude by Paul Menard that lets you control what categories appear on your front page and other archive listings.

All done.  I love WordPress.

Read all about the new features of the release.

I think my favorite feature will be the ability to update WordPress installations from within the admin area.  This will make my life so much easier.

Cool new admin redesign also!

Now that some more sophisticated theme packages have been developed for WP I wanted to try some out, especially the Thesis WordPress Theme. So, I bought a license for Thesis and installed it on this site.

Programming Hooks

So far, what has impressed me the most about Thesis is the programming hooks. They take a little getting used to but essentially Thesis provides a mechanism for you to customize the CSS and also some programmatic functionality of your site without modifying the underlying core code for Thesis. I hope this will be a big benefit when it comes to upgrade to new releases of the theme.

Administration Options

Thesis has an options admin panel that lets you determine things like what pages to include in the navigation menu and it also has good support for widgets. Another cool feature is the image rotator that a lot of customers are asking for nowadays. After uploading several images to the rotator folder they just start appearing in the rotation (each page refresh).

Search Engine Optimization

Thesis comes with the ability to enhance your page titles (the most important part of SEO). However, I installed the SEO Title Tag WordPress Plugin which offers even more flexibility.

Going Forward

Well, here’s to a good start with Thesis.  Now that I have it installed I have to work on my content and information architecture.  This is one of the benefits of using Thesis.  It is designed to let you focus on publishing.  Let’s see if I can avoid hacking the core.

:p