SEO Egghead Consulting Group

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Excerpt: Traditional SEO is dead.  Gone are the days when we can get to the top by studying keyword densities and trading links.  Gone are the days when optimization involves pious devotion to the H1 tag.  I'm not saying these things are, or will ever be irrelevant, and I'm certainly not saying site architecture is not important; but I posit that SEO will eventually evolve into a branch of conventional marketing. So let's forget most of what we learned about traditional SEO for a moment.  Let's talk about link bait.Soliciting links via link-exchanging is less effective than it once was to the end of…

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Excerpt: So I got Dugg — but I'm convinced this trivial WordPress Plugin is part of what helped me top the Digg charts for so long.  All it does is examine every incoming HTTP_REFERER, and if a Digg URL (of a specific Digg) hits a blog post URL, it assumes that it's a Digg of that post.  Then the plugin automatically stores that URL and inserts the Digg button code.  It's not perfect, but it should mostly work automagically.  Just call the function within your template somewhere.  If you find any bugs, leave a comment.  Here it is: …

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Excerpt: This is a compilation of stuff Matt Cutts has said historically, minus some of the more recent stuff here, here, and here.  I decided I'd dig backwards and document some of the older stuff.  I dated it accordingly.  Here it is:1. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/Matt recommends using dashes over underscores to delimit words in urls. 2005.Google does not algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url despite the fact that some have raised it as a possible heuristic for spam detection. I think WordPress pretty much precludes this anyway. 2005.2. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-sneaky-javascript/Google takes action on individual instances of spam when they find it, but they…

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Excerpt: This is a terribly simple but useful WordPress plugin that puts an interactive counter-style Reddit interface on your blog — but only when someone has already bookmarked the URL.  It looks rather lame when everything isn't bookmarked, but the JavaScript interface with the arrows is a definate enhancement over a simple icon.  So why not show it only when applicable?  I'll narcissistically bookmark this post to demonstrate.  Just call the function "reddit_this()" and specify one of the styles enumerated here.  Enjoy! <? /* Plugin Name: Reddit Plugin URI: http://www.seoegghead.com/ Description: Creates an interactive Reddit button. Author: Jaimie Sirovich Version: 1.0 Author URI: http://www.seoegghead.com/ */  function reddit_this($reddit_style = 1) {     global $id; …

Last month I reviewed a web hosting company here. This month I'll make sure to do something different.  Submit your site by leaving a comment!

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Excerpt: One of the things that irks me most about programmers getting involved with marketing is that most of them just don't know grammar.  SEO Black Hat mentioned "Google are," I mentioned "then vs. than," and now I'll mention one more thing — "a vs. an."  This one is a little different.  Most people know this rule intuitively.  But programmers frequently get lazy and do not look programmatically at the following word to decide which indefinite article to use.  Being a programmer makes me slightly more forgiving, but this still looks bad.  After I release this code, there are no more…

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Excerpt: Many people hate automated emails.  I especially hate emails that look like this:From: do-not-reply-or-we-will-sacrifice-your-children@somecompany.comHi,Your order (#12345) has been shipped.  Thank you for your business.  This is an automated email.  Do not reply (because we hate talking to people, and besides we will sacrifice your children if you do!).Thank you,Some Company Inc.We've all gotten these emails.  What I don't understand is why.  It's just bad marketing.  You can argue that some people are used to this — but it's just plain anti-social.  Large companies especially can invest the time and money to create a Procmail script that parses out the order…

Here are a list of my favorite WordPress plugins that are SEO-related.  My install also includes quite a few hacks directly to the source, but only because I didn't do it the "right" way.  These are the essentials:

Chicklet Creator http://www.twistermc.com/shake/RSS-index.php
Adds feed subscription buttons to a WordPress blog.

WP-Email http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php
Enables users to send a post to a friend.

Sociable http://push.cx/sociable
Automatically adds links on posts to popular social bookmarking sites.

Google Sitemaps http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final
Creates a Google-compliant sitemap of a WordPress blog.

I will also mention Mudbomb's WSYI-Wordpress, which is much better than the WYSIWYG editor included with WordPress, and allows for hand-editing conveniently.

Anyone else have anything to add? Leave a comment.