PR and the Web 101 - Karine Joly’s latest UB column

Teens Frequent Online Video Users (Podcasting News via MicroPersuasion)

Google Co-op - Creating customized search engines for education (screencast) by Jean-Claude Bradley. A great how-to on leveraging Google Co-op to create custom search engines for education on a particular knowledge domain. (This is a pretty awesome tool - I’ve created a bunch of these searches myself and was delighted to see JC’s screencast. - DK)

Micah Sparacio at BlogHerald.com reports there’s a Google PR update in progress - suggesting that pages that have suddenly dropped to zero may not be as serious a concern as it seems - at the moment. I can confirm that some of my sites dropped from PR6 or so to zero - and Micah has a plausible explanation for this. I can also confirm that some of my sites bumped up a PR or two since early in the week. He also mentions a tool called LivePR that purports to calculate PR on the fly.

Many of you know I’m a big fan of WordPress, and many of you are using or are considering using WordPress as part of your university web presence. In this post we continue a short series on search engine optimization tips for WordPress blogs. These may have been covered elsewhere in your travels (some of them, in one form or another, on this blog), but this one and the next seem rather obscure and worth repeating. I’ve had success with these on a variety of WP installations.

Herewith, tip #2 in the series on optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines. Note that these tips are not necessarily options on Wordpress.com hosted blogs.

Tip 2 - Optimal Title

Optimal Title is a WP plugin that places your blog post title first in the HTML title (the thing that appears in your web browser’s top-most bar), followed by the blog name. The default WP setting is to place the blog title first. In some cases, this helps search engines distinguish among pages on your website, which can lead to your site being better represented in search engines and reduce the number of posts that are treated as “duplicate” or “similar” content. You’ve worked hard on those posts, now get the credit you deserve!

Here’s the difference:

Before plugin:

Peterson’s - a Nelnet Company- Syndication for Higher Ed >> Babson RSS feed image - Update!

After plugin:

Babson RSS feed image - Update! >> Peterson’s - a Nelnet Company - Syndication for Higher Ed

The free WordPress software is a popular choice on university campuses and in the business world as well. It’s commonly considered a blogging platform, but it can also be used as a lightweight and flexible content management system, e.g. for standalone department websites. I’ve been working with WP for quite a while now, and have done countless installations in a variety of contexts.

Some of the more interesting and useful customizations I’ve encountered are aimed at getting the most out of your blog in search engines, which is why I’m sharing this brief series of search engine-related tips. Of course these are a few of the many things you can do to optimize your WP blog for search engines. It starts with good content and great titles, but these tips can take you even further. Caveats: 1) Not all of these tips are implemented on this blog, which is a WordPress blog; 2) These tips apply to installed version of WordPress, not to WordPress.com hosted instances.

Tip 1 - Permalinks

We’ll start out with a basic one that many of you may know already. Consider it a warm-up exercise.

A permalink is a URL that identifies a particular bit of content on the web indefinitely. In a WordPress blog, a permalink is automatically generated for each post and each page. Clicking on the title of a post from a blog home page will usually take you to the individual post, and this is where you can see the post’s permalink in the browser address bar.

From the perspective of search engines, not all permalinks are created equal. Static permalinks (versus ones that have variables in them) can get preference in search engine results. Permalinks that contain key terms from the content on the particular page can also get preference for related searches.

WordPress offers some options here. Under Options/Permalinks with your WP admin interface, make sure you’re set to use terms from the title of the post in the URL. This will enable you to make the most of your well-researched post titles. (You are doing a bit of keyword research prior to writing your titles, aren’t you?) Karine shared a form of this tip with me some time ago, and it’s often the first one I recommend to others.

Changing this setting has the following effect on your URLs.

Before:

http://syndicateblog.petersons.com/wordpress/?p=230

After:

http://syndicateblog.petersons.com/wordpress/index.php/tips-for-optimizing-your-wordpress-blog-for-search-engines

Note the screenshots below from the admin interfaces of WP 1.5 and 2.0, respectively, showing setting options for permalinks.

Caution: If you’re using WP 1.5, note that changing this setting could render existing posts unreachable, but there are fixes for this, too. WP 2.0 seems to handle the switchover more gracefully.
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Screenshot from WP 1.5:

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Screenshot from WP 2.0

One of the unexpected things about having an RSS feed (from your blogs, conventional website, whatever) is that when other sites aggregate your RSS feed, you can end up helping those sites improve their search engine rankings. For example, a recent SHE post has managed to gain four of the top six spots in a Google search for “myspace legislation“. The top two entries point to SHE–one to the HTML page and the other to the RSS feed. Entries 5 and 6 point to the ZDNet page where the post is aggregated. As a matter of fact, look further down that page. One of the other entries is mine as well, having been scanned by an aggregator at Oneonta. Those two sites wouldn’t have shown up in the result for this search unless I had blogged about something having to do with “myspace legislation.” At any rate, it’s interesting to note that Google knows where the original post was blogged, and gives priority to that site.

Following the lead of Steve Rubel and Rafael Sidi, here are some things I learned from the new Google Trends:

1. Harvard edges out Stanford, Princeton, and Yale.

2. MIT edges out Stanford.

3. The top markets for Thomson searches are all in Europe.

4. The gap between eBay and Amazon is widening.

5. The gap between Mac and PC is narrowing.

6. Wordpress is about to overtake Blogger.

7. Blogging and podcasting are neck and neck.

8. Job search is still more popular than graduate school.

Microsoft has wisely included alerts via RSS in their new Live Academic Search product. Google Scholar still doesn’t offer RSS feeds.

The exciting education technology conference (PAETC) that took place last week at Haverford College is making its way to the web in the form of a blog linking to podcasts and screencasts of the presentations. I heard that there were some technical difficulties recording a couple of presentations, but some of the presentations are being posted, including John Dehlin’s, on OpenCourseWare, and mine, a 25-minute talk on optimizing classroom blogs for search engines. There’s a lot of information there not only for classroom blogs but also for blogs in general, and there are tips for optimizing both new and existing blogs. (Will you let me know what you think of some of my suggestions?) Thanks to Jean-Claude Bradley for posting these resources.

Presenting entirely from a blog, which I did that day, definitely has its advantages. (This time I set up pages within WordPress.) I didn’t have optimal screencasting software loaded on my laptop, but the organizers wanted to capture the presentation as a screencast, so I borrowed Jean-Claude’s notebook, connected to the Internet for the presentation, and away we went (no files to copy over!). Still, blogs aren’t ideal as the basis for a presentation. It’s tricky to get the formatting exactly the way you want it (using PowerPoint can definitely spoil you.)

It seems like there is opportunity for someone to come along and create web-based presentation software that will come close to offering the best of all worlds. Perhaps it’s out there and I just haven’t come across it. Have you?

This afternoon I’ll be giving a talk at the PAET conference near Philadelphia on the topic of optimizing classroom blogs for search engine exposure.

Here is a link to the first page of my presentation. I’ve created the pages in WordPress so that the links will be available to everyone immediately. Sorry, no PowerPoint! I will also be screencasting the presentation and posting it shortly.

Technorati tags: SEO, class blogs

I’m excited and honored to be part of the Philadelphia Area Educational Technology Conference taking place next week at Haverford College. The conference focuses on “Teaching the Millenials.” As part of a panel entitled “Reaching Broader Audiences,” I’ll be talking about a variety of ways to optimize classroom blogs for search engine visibility.

Some may ask, Why connect your classroom to the world of search? Despite media coverage to the contrary, I will argue (albeit briefly) that blogging can be good for your university, good for your students, and good for your career, so why not take a few steps to maximize your blogging efforts?

Rest assured, this will not be another ho-hum presentation on SEO (search engine optimization). Yes, we will mention the bare-minimum SEO basics, but we will quickly move on to talk about the relevance of tagging communities, Technorati, Google Base, Google Sitemaps, and RSS. We will also touch briefly on the future of blogs and search. In addition, many of the points we cover will apply no matter what the context of the blog–classroom, library, information technology, alumni, marketing, etc.