I am glad to finally release Homepage Excerpts, a WordPress plugin that I have been developing with a friend for some time already. The plugin has two main objectives. The first one is to make blogs that use full posts on the homepage more search engine friendly. The second one is to give flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.
Interview with Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror
Even if you are just slightly interested in programming you probably know Jeff Atwood or his blog Coding Horror. The blog is attracting over 500,000 unique visitors every month, and it also counts 60,000 RSS readers, meaning that Jeff probably knows what he is talking about.
I have always been intrigued by his success, hence why I decided to throw some questions on his way. He was kind enough to answer them promptly. There are some interesting points, check it out!
Collection of Robots.txt Files
The implementation of a suitable robots.txt file is very important for search engine optimization. There is plenty of advice around the Internet for the creation of such files (if you are looking for an introduction on this topic read “Creat a robots.txt file“), but what if instead of looking at what people say we could look at what people do?
SEO Checklist
The WebConfs website has a very useful list of “Best and Worst Practices for Designing a High Traffic Website.” Basically they collected all the major factors that might affect the search optimization of your site, attributing a score to them. The score ranges from -3, which is very bad for your site, to +3, which is very good. Below you will find a summary of the most important factors:
Gather .edu and .gov backlinks (enhanced)
Sometime ago I wrote the article “Gather .edu and .gov backlinks” where I argued that, despite the lack of official documentation, most SEO experts agree that .edu and .gov backlinks do carry a higher value for search engines.
Stay Away from In-Text Advertising
This is going to be a polemic topic given the wide spread in the usage of such advertising networks. In-Text advertising refers to networks like Vibrant Media or Kontera that place advertising links on your content.
Gather .edu and .gov backlinks
It is widely accepted that .edu and .gov backlinks carry a larger weight for search engine algorithms. Despite the fact that Google has never admitted it (sometimes it even neglected) most SEO and online marketing experts would confirm that .edu and .gov links outperform other extensions in terms of search ranking juice.