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In case you haven’t been checking my site’s source regularly (who doesn’t really), i removed the NoFollow tag from all comment and trackback links on this blog during the weekend, and went through about 100 comments checking each link for validity. Even with my awesome moderating skills i still uncovered a bunch of trackbacks from article scrapers to remove.

I was hoping to use a plugin that would remove NoFollow on a case by case basis after i moderate each comment but the closest i could find was Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin that will only remove NoFollow from regular commentator links. Since i wanted to reward all commenters (and encourage more people to say their mind), i just removed NoFollow completely from both comments and trackbacks.

List of blogs that remove the NoFollow tag from links.

Why remove NoFollow?

There are many reasons to remove NoFollow from your blog. You might want to encourage commenting, or reward people that actually comment. I’ve even noticed some people removing NoFollow for a while just to get on the DoFollow lists and get a PR boost, then take it off (sneaky yes?). In my experience, removing NoFolow will not hurt your PR as long as you always check comments for links that point to bad neighborhoods, which you should be doing anyway. Google PR for internal and external links is a different thing, you won’t lose any PR juice on your pages if you link to other sites.

Update
Riceblogger has a nifty list of blogs that removed the nofollow tag sorted by PageRank, from PR2 up to PR7.

I use these plugins on this and other sites and highly recommend them.

Feedburner Feedsmith
Redirects RSS requests to your Feedburner feed.

Fuzzy recent posts
Display recent posts on the sidebar.

Live
Shows real time visitor statistics for your Wordpress blog.

Popularity Contest
Display your most popular posts. Highly customizable.

Subscribe2
Manage e-mail subscriptions.

What would Seth Godin do
Shows a greeting to new users and invites them to sign up for the RSS feed

All In One SEO pack
Search Engine Optimization for Wordpress.

WP-Cache
Ultra fast caching plugin.

Akismet
Spam blocker.

Adsense Deluxe
Ad management plugin.

Subscribe2 is a Wordpress plugin that you can use to keep users up-to-date on new posts by sending them email every time you publish a new post, weekly or monthly updated: as Chris pointed out there is no monthly notification option. Email subscription seems like cavemen technology against the glorious wonder that is RSS feeds, but still, many people just don’t like RSS enough to use it.

Subscribe2 was relatively easy to install and configure, although it does require editing a file after uploading to configure the page the subscription will appear on. Configuring how email is delivered is easy using the plugin’s options page and comes with several different tags you can use in your outgoing mails. The plugin also supports automatically subscribing users that post a comment based on the email they submitted, although i find that a rather sneaky way to get people’s address.

Overall the Subscribe2 plugin is a solid way to keep readers updated via email and works with minimum hassle. And for that matter, don’t forget to subscribe to the Serverdome.org mailing list to get updates via email, which is quite glorious really.
Subscribe2 Wordpress plugin

Easily advertise on your blog with the AdSense Deluxe Wordpress plugin

AdSense Deluxe is a quick and dirty Wordpress plugin to help you insert Google AdSense (or similar ad services) code into your posts. The plugin is very easy to use, you create “blocks” which are basically little boxes with the ad code in, and each one gets associated with a snippet that you paste in your posts or templates. What’s great with AdSense Deluxe is that you can customize how each ad block will display, for example you can have different ads on the main page and different ad blocks on the archives page.

To see the plugin in action, just click this post’s title to get to the individual post page. You’ll see the ad block displayed there and in RSS feeds but not on the main page. (quick note update - the ad on this post is the only one that will appear on Serverdome RSS feeds and is there for the review’s shake, i don’t include ads with my feeds). This takes about two mouse clicks to do with AdSense Deluxe and is handled through the plugin’s options page.

Installing the plugin takes a total of five minutes to upload the file into your plugins directory, enable the plugin from the WP administration and paste your AdSense code to the default block. If you’re looking for an easy and customizable way to include ads to your blog this plugin is highly recommended.

AdSense Deluxe Wordpress plugin

Twelve simple ways to promote your new blog.

1. Add an About Me/Contact page
2. Submit to Google, Yahoo and MSN
3. Replace the default template with something better
4. Register your feeds to as many rss directories as you can.
5. Install All in one SEO and Akismet spam filter
6. Sign up at technorati and claim your blog
7. Comment on five other blogs with subject similar to yours
8. Add the address to your forum signature and reply to 5 threads
8b. If you don’t frequent a forum with interests close to your subject, start now.
9. Stumble your main page on StumbleUpon
10. Submit an article to Digg & Reddit, and ask some friends to vote it up
11. Add your blog to a blog directory
12. Sign up for Google AdSense, even if you don’t plan to have ads right away

Separating trackbacks from comments helps the readability of your comments section and keeps things clean. There is no way to do this using a plugin right now, but Michael from Problogdesign describes how to do this by editing the template files.

Many people choose to block trackbacks altogether for cramping up their comment section, i prefer to leave them on as a thank you to people that linked me and having them this way helps keep things tidy.

Search Engine Optimization has become such a debated topic, it’s hard to find a technical blog that hasn’t touched the issue in the past (and i see no reason why this one should not). If you’re just beginning with SEO for your blog the four tools below are a great way to get started.

SEO Quake add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer

The SEO Quake addon for both the major browsers helps your optimization efforts. From the SEO Quake toolbar you can see the Pagerank, Google index, Google linked pages, and similar results for Alexa and Yahoo for the page you’re viewing, as well as SEO information for links in search engine results. One interesting feature is an automatic keyword combination extraction from whatever page you’re currently viewing.

All in One SEO Pack Wordpress plugin

This plugin for Wordpress will optimize your blog to be crawled and indexed by search engines. It protects you from duplicated content, optimizes the entries titles and automatically generates meta information. The way Wordpress manages it’s categories and permalinks is already excellent and makes it very easy for search engines to crawl and index your site, and this plugin will help fill the gaps between some of the more technical aspects of SEO.

Website Grader SEO tool

This online tool will analyze your site on the fly and provide a report on where the site is lacking in Search Engine Optimization. It did miss some minor details when querying serverdome.org but provides good suggestions on where to focus you optimization efforts.

Google Adwords Keyword tool

This is a free tool by Google to assist advertisers using its Adwords network but we can use it for our own benefits. You can see exactly how competitive a keyword or a combination is, how many people search for each keyword, even how find out trends in keyword queries. While it isn’t a dedicated solution to optimizing keywords, this tool by Google is always my first stop when researching keyword SEO.

Conclusion

Like i mentioned in the title, the links above are nothing more than tools, and SEO has as much to do with tools and software as it has to do with creativity and knowledge. Third party software and plugins can help so much, but operating and writing with SEO in mind will take you to the next step. Blogs structure is generally excellent for SEO and most bloggers need do do very little to have their sites indexed and crawled by search engines.

One final tip

I’m surprised this is not mentioned more often in wordpress tutorials. When you first install wordpress, change the permalink structure to something simpler. For example yesterday’s post on ad placement had the following url structure: http://www.serverdome.org/how-the-top-bloggers-display-their-ads-percentages-and-numbers/. Having the name of the post as the adress instead of a string of seemingly random characters will help both search engines and readers. To change the permalink structure just log in to your wordpress installation, go to Options, Permalinks and as a custom permalink structure enter “/%postname%/” (without the quotes).

1. Text link ads on your content (the ones with the double underline)

Yes they will draw my attention but only for the wrong reasons. The popup with the ad text that appears when you move the mouse over the ad completely spoils the flow of reading the actual content. There is so many of them even in the smallest amount of text that it proves a pain to move my mouse from one side of the screen to the other. And more importantly, it makes me not trust your normal links. When 80% of your page links are automatically generated and paid for, it sets the mood for the rest of it.

2. Preview screenshot popup on outgoing links

It’s all web 2.0 fun and games until you take a somewhat good idea (tooltips) and give it to the wrong people. First of all, there is no way i will ever manage to figure out what is going on from looking at a 125Χ125 screenshot, you might as well be showing me blurred images of catfish. Secondly, i don’t think i have ever paid attention to those screenshots after the first time i noticed they existed and said “wow, these might get annoying soon”.

3. Two dozen social web/bookmarking icons -above- the actual posts.

If and when i want to stumble/del.icio.us/digg/whatever your site, ill do it myself. If you absolutely must have a million of these links, please keep them below each post.

4. Paypal donate buttons

Even the big guys have donate links, and if you’re giving something for free you depend on the generosity of others, but when there’s adsense, textlinkads and two paid product reviews on your main page alone, then the donate link seems a little too much. It reminds me too much of web cam girls posting their amazon wishlists so creepy old men will buy them stuff. This is a drop in the ocean compared to other pitfalls, but it annoys me to no end.

5. Only date based archives

If i find a blog i enjoy and want to read more, the obvious step is to go for the categories. Let’s say i just finished reading a marvelous post about catfish care on your blog and want to see if you have more catfish related content, the obvious choice would be to look at the categories on the sidebar, or on the tags associated with the post, not under “August 2006″. Date based archives are generally useless on the main page.

6. Partial feeds

The debate still rages on, but the general sentiment is that full feeds are way ahead. Publishing partial feeds to force me to load your ads wont help your cause. If you must offer partial feeds, then do us the courtesy of also offering a full feed option.

7. Ditch the default Wordpress theme for something better

There is a wealth of excellent Wordpress themes available to download for free. The default Wordpress theme might be well designed but reminds me too much of spam sites. If you can’t take 5 minutes of your time to upload a new theme, how can you convince me to trust your content?

From both a Search Engine Optimization and a usability point of view, everyone agrees that displaying similar entries with each blog post helps. Internal links help search engines crawl and categorize your site, and readers will spend more time if they can quickly discover content similar to what they are reading.

To that end i added Wasabi’s Related Entries plugin to posts. Installing the plugin was a breeze, i copied the related-posts.php file into my plugins directory, activated the plugin from the admin panel and from there clicked on a link to set up the database table that holds the related links information.

Modifying plugin options like the amount of related posts to appear on each page and the HTML output is all done using the plugin’s configuration page in your admin panel. To have the plugin actually display in the post pages i opened the single.php file from my template and pasted the plugin code <?php related_posts(); ?>, and some tinkering with CSS to give it it’s own box.

Overall, Wasabi’s Related Entries is a very useful plugin for any kind of blog, and can help both your blog’s SEO and your page views.

Plickr is a two column Wordpress template by yours truly. Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and a fluid layout from 1024×768 and upwards. You can view a live demo at plickr.serverdome.org

Download Plickr Wordpress theme