Holistic Internet Marketing Optimization
In this week’s interview, I sat down with Aaron Wall and spoke about what it takes to get your ideas (and point of view to spread). He knows a thing or two about this, and is the only person I know who has 2 pages listed on the first page of Google results for the search phrase SEO.
Check the interview out, and if you have any comments you can plug them in below.
Back in December I did a blog post about Updating to WordPress 2.3.1. I noted in that post that I waited a long time to do the update because I knew it would be a somewhat painful process. I probably spent an hour getting the stage set (backing things up including the database), and reading and re-reading the instructions.
I then completed the actual update in about 2 hours. Not horrible, but still not something you do on a whim. Ironically, 2.3.2 came out within a week or so of my doing the update. But, I was not in any hurry to do it again. So I waited.
It was with some pain that I saw that 2.5.1 was available, and saw the dreaded words indicating that it included an important security update. That’s a good way to get my attention enough to contemplate investing a few hours in something, so I decided to go through it all again.
Given the expected downtime, I set aside a few hours of my Saturday to get this done. Saturday afternoon I went to the Upgrading WordPress page on the WordPress site. That’s when I saw it:
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What? Update in about 2 minutes? You are so full of … What the heck I decided, let’s give it a try. So I clicked on the link to go get the WordPress Automatic Update plugin. I then tried it out.
Well it definitely took longer than 2 minutes, but I was actually done in about 10 minutes. When I was done with it, I sat there a bit stunned. I had geared up for a major grueling task, and it was over in no time.
Note that the plugin does backup your entire blog and your database right at the beginning. So if anything goes wrong you should be able to restore things relatively easily.
The only odd thing in the plugin is that when I got to the last screen where it was supposed to enable my pluging again, I got an error message. I ended up having to manually reneable the plugins (which is easy of course). I then spent some time checking out the blog to make sure that everything was ok, which it was.
All in all though, this is one phenomenal tool. Don’t even think about doing an update the old way any more, unless you have reason to believe that you have done some custom things to your blog that the tool won’t be able to deal with.
Recently I put a podcast together with Pheedo’s Bill Flitter. Bill is the CEO of Pheedo and shared his insights on how RSS is being used, and also provides advice on promotion of your feed. Once you are done reading or listening, you can comment on the podcast below.
Avinash Kaushik and I sat down recently to discuss key blogging tips. This is my third discussion and interview with Avinash. Last year we did a Podcast about competitive intelligence tools, and after that we had a detailed discussion about web analytics.
Avinash is one of the brightest people in our industry, and is very enjoyable to talk to, as each conversation provides a wealth of valuable information. Please feel free to comment on the interview using the discussion using the link below.
For the longest time I let my blog remain on the 2.02 version of WordPress. One of the reasons that this was the case is that upgrading WordPress used to feel like a potential nightmare. While I am moderately technical, I am no web server geek by any means, and in the past there were steps in the process that felt like they would require me to be one to make sure everything went smoothly.
However, when I checked out the procedure for upgrading to WordPress 2.3.1, it suddenly seemed quite a bit easier to take on. So two weekends ago I took the leap and did it. I do have to say that the Basic WordPress Upgrade Instructions seemed inadequate.
I went straight to the Extended WordPress Upgrade Instructions. Even when I got there, I skipped the overview provided and went straight to the detailed instructions. This is a must do, because it’s only here that you get all the details of everything you need to do. For example, it is only here that we see that there are certain files from the old version that you do not want to delete.
With the detailed instructions everything was fairly straight forward. Plan on allocating a solid continuous 2 hours to do the upgrade, and more if you have done customizations of your theme files (because you will need to redo these). Also, be aware that your blog will be down during this process. Users will not see your content.
As a result, you should plan to do this upgrade at a very low traffic time for your blog. You may also want to provide a temporary web page to replace your blog during the upgrade to let people know that it is going through maintenance. In addition, if you are not technically very adept, make sure you have help available in short order if something goes wrong (I did).
Here is a summary of how it went:
1. The first thing I needed to do was back up the SQL database file. This is where all the blog posts for your blog live, so you want to make sure you have this backed up. You should, in fact, back this up regularly any way.
If you do not know how to executve this step, hold off on the upgrade until you have found someone who will do it for you. In my case, I leaned on the expertise of my partner, John Biundo, to take care of the backup (he has also set it up so the STC blog gets backed up on a weekly basis automatically.
2. The next step was to back up all of the files in the blog directory on my server. These are all the WordPress 2.02 files. I copied them to a separate directory on my PC. This was a very simple step. One drag and drop in my FTP client, and I was done.
3. This is the step is what the WordPress instruction calls “the most important step in the upgrade process!”. Personally speaking, I looked at the files, they were on my hard drive, end of story. In any event, don’t be too alarmed by this step in the process. Yes – it is important. It’s there to save your bacon if something else goes wrong during the upgrade process.
However, if you are patient, and take your time at this, you should be in good shape. Nonetheless, do not skip the backup setps, or the verification step (ideally verify that you can open the files).
4. Hext step is to deactivate all of your plugins. The reason for this is that some of the plugins may conflict with the upgrade process. Easy to do – just go to the Plugins menu and deactivate them one at a time.
5. Next, I donwloaded the WordPress Upgrade Package from the WordPress site onto my hard drive. I put this in a different directory from the one where I put the backed up version. One folder I called WordPress 2.0.2 (where I put the old files) and the WordPress Upgrade Package I put into a folder called WordPress 2.3.1.
In theory, you can go straight to your web server with the files, and unzip them there, but I knew I was going to have to customize the theme files any way, so I wanted to have all the files on my hard drive as well.
6. The next step was to delete the old WordPress files from our web server. Be careful! This is one of the areas where it’s only in the detailed instructions that it explains that there are files that you don’t want to delete. Take your time on this step, and make sure you know exactly what to delete and what not to delete. Failure to do this accurately will cause more work for you later.
I chose to interpret the instructions from WordPress on this point very literally. It may feel silly to not delete a file that you know is going to be overwritten any way, but the more important part of this is that there are files that are not going to be overwritten, and following the WordPress instructions precisely does work (it worked for me in any case).
I used my FTP client to handle the deletions and this took place without any problems.
7. Upload the new files! You are almost through the basic part of this process. The detailed instructions tell you that you must upload everything but the new wp-content folder first, and then you can upload wp-content after everything else is up first. Note that I did not do that quite so precisely as all that – but I would not ignore the advice if I were doing this again.
8. Next up is to run the upgrade script. All you need to do here is open your web browser and open up http://www.yourdomain.com/Your-Wordpress-Folder/wp-admin/upgrade.php. If you have WordPress installed at the root of your site (i.e. the blog is your site), then you can simply invoke http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php. This part of the process took me no more than a few minutes.
9. According to WordPress, the next step is to update your Permalinks and .htaccess file. You start by checking Options->Permalinks to see if there is anything you need to adjust (for example, if you overwrote the config file when you uploaded your files, you may need to set these options again).
In addition, if there is any reason why you would need to update your .htaccess file, this is the time to do it. In my case this was not necessary.
10. Now here is a step I added to the process – go check your blog and make sure it’s breathing. The plugins will all be deactivated, and any customizations you did to your theme will be missing, but it should be there. Just make sure before you go any further.
11. Go get the latest versions of your plugins. I first downloaded these to the plugins folder in my WordPress 2.3.1 folder on my hard drive, so I’d have them there. Then I uploaded them to the correspnding folder on my web server.
12. Reactivate each of your plugins and make sure that they work. I did this one at a time in sequence. I did have one of my plugins that did not seem to work quite right, but I can live without it, so I deactivated it and moved on.
13. Redo any code customizations you have done to your theme. I use the default theme, and whenever I edit a file in the theme, I save the original file to a different file name (e.g. sidebar.php.original), and then clearly mark my changes with comments, such as “<!– Code Added by Eric –>. Since I did this when I customized the 2.0.2 version this made this stage much easier.
I simply went to the 2.0.2 version of each edited file, found the customizations, and ported them manually into the new (2.3.1) version of the file. Once I had completed each change, I uploaded it, and then tested it out and made sure it was working before I made the next change.
14. Once all your customizations to the code (if you had any) are back in, you should be in good shape. Check out your blog home page, some permalink pages, category pages, date archives, and any special pages that you have. Make sure they look like they are all in good order. If anything does not look right, the chances are that one of your code customizations was not done quite correctly.
Do plan on this taking at least 2 hours, and more if you have code customizations to do. Be very meticulous about it, and make sure you take each step in the same order as described in the WordPress instructions.
Upgrading is worthwhile. For example, there are plugins I wanted to install (such as the Yahoo Shortcuts for WordPress Plugin that will not run on 2.02.
In addition, one of the major reasons is to reduce your vulnerability to hackers. Hackers are a fact of life on the web today, and software providers, such as WordPress, are frequently releasing updates that fix security holes. This is a major reason for staying current, or near current.
I recently had the chance to interview Eric Engleman of Bloglines. We discussed the blog market, recently released features, and more. Check it out, and feel free to comment below if you want to discuss it.
Our blog is now more than 1 year old. In fact, our first post took place on August 5th, 2006, just before last year’s SES San Jose. This post represents the 181st post on the blog. So to commemorate the anniversary of the blog, I thought I’d share a few metrics on how it’s worked out for us, and then the why of it all. First, the metrics:
This is all very cool, but let’s focus on why it has happened.
As a prelude to that, I have heard people say don’t start blogging about a highly competitive topic, where all the A-listers are established. Many people will tell you that. I can assure you that in August of 2006, the SEO blogging space was already really crowded. It did not prevent me from “joining the conversation”.
This is the great thing about the blogosphere. As long as you follow these two (golden) rules, you can start blogging about almost anything:
So I am really pleased with the progress in the first year. During this coming year, look to have the amount of the content we produce increase, and to have additional contributors. I’ll continue to write for Search Engine Watch, do more interviews, and post on the Stone Temple blog as well.
The basic message of this post is that you can start blogging in a really competitive space. Just follow the two golden rules and be patient.
Rand just put up a post about The Vast Ocean Between Shoemoney & SEOmoz and Why You Should Be Able To Trust Blog Links. Other than the fact that he singled me out in it, I think it’s a great post. I started to write this post as a comment on SEOmoz, but it just got way too long. If you want to read about this topic, read Rand’s post, and then come back to this one.
I do think there is a balance between the time you invest in blogging and content development, and making a living.
When I look at SEOmoz, I see a CEO, and a company, committed to reputation building through offering a wealth of free information offered up with nothing asked for in return. I know of no one who has shared more about their company. Reference SEOmoz’s sharing of it’s 2006 financials (in detail) and more data, such as this post: More SEOmoz stats than you can shake a stick at.
This level of openness builds an enormous amount of trust, and deservedly so. I can tell you from my personal experience that this openness is something that is quite evident when dealing with Rand in person.
Ultimately, that reputation and trust should help SEOmoz build up its premium subscriber base, and, it’s ability to get high value clients. But speaking for myself, I can tell you that I don’t regret a single penny that SEOmoz makes, and I was personally dissappointed that SEOmoz did not make more than they reported in 2006.
So now, the other side of the coin. Lack of disclosure and lack of openness builds mistrust. You become unsure about how to value the information you are receiving. You get uncomfortable with a person when you know they are not telling you something. This is not somewhere you want to be in this social web of ours.
The social web is far too efficient at spreading this type of reputation and trust information around. And, it gets more efficient every day, so this trend is going to continue for the forseeable future. In other words, the genie is out of the bottle, and has no intention of going back in.
So I agree wholeheartedly with Rand’s positioning that bloggers should be open about how they are being compensated (saying “I’m getting paid”, for example, is enough detail), and that readers deserve that, but I also think that it’s in the blogger’s self interest to be open. There is a BIG difference (should I say vast ocean?) between being paid to write a review, and getting compensated for your efforts in the way that SEOmoz does.
FYI – all of the content development efforts of STC are uncompensated (in the direct sense). This includes answering questions in comments, and in emails I receive from people, without there ever being a chance of getting a penny out of it. I really enjoy doing it (that’s compensation too!), and we do have companies that have become clients as a result of our efforts.
Recently, I came across this post at Read/WriteWeb about Technorati’s declining traffic. Evidently, Google BlogSearch has overtaken Technorati.
The article arrtibutes this happening because Google began promoting Google BlogSearch on the Google home page. One thing that is for certain, when you take a look at the chart they offer on market share of US search traffic, there is a huge spike in the Google BlogSearch numbers right around October 14th, 2006, when Google BlogSearch’s market share triples overnight.
To be fair, there is not enough data yet to say that Technorati’s traffic is declining. Only the last 2 weeks of the data shown indicate a decline, and that is not enough data to base a conclusion on. But, it is clear that Google’s traffic has leapt up.
It’s also interesting to think about Technorati’s exit options. An acquisition by someone looking to establish a major presence in the blogosphere seems the most likely option to me. Someone like Yahoo! could scoop them up and get a jump start into the space. In addition, this would provide additional ways of promoting Technorati that would increase the likelihood of their gaining market share in the future.
Big changes are taking place over at SEOmoz. A while back, Rand Fishkin (its CEO), announced that he planned to offer paid content services in the near future. Well the change has happened, and the new SEOmoz site is launched.
Premium Membership costs $39 per month or $299 for a year. What you get in return for this is access to premium content and tools, including:
It looks like the blog will continue on its merry way, by which I mean it will continue to produce the great content it always has.
However, there is some new stuff here too. Now any user can go to the YOUmoz section of the site, and write their own blog post. Built into this is a voting feature, where other users can read the YOUmoz posts, and vote for them (thumbs up or thumbs down). The most popular posts will then be shown on the main SEOmoz company blog. This is a great way for users to get some exposure in a high traffic site.
This is obviously a big step for Rand and SEOmoz. But Rand has always had a deep passion for good content and quality research. It makes sense to me that they have taken this step, and I think they will be successful with it. Check it out!
Order The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie Stricchiola.
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You can also get more info on the book here or The Art of SEO Book web site.
Eric Enge was Voted the #27 most influential marketer by readers of the Invesp blog.
