WordPress 3.1 is out!  It has a new admin bar and adding links is “42x faster”.  If you have WordPress installed, you will want to update it.

Tip: Make sure you backup your files, deactivate plugins, upgrade, then reactivate plugins.  While rare, I have had instances in which the plugins will through it all out of whack!

If you are a client and want us to handle the backups and upgrades automatically, make sure to contact us and ask us about doing that for you.

If you have WordPress installed, you will see this plugin as it comes with each installation of WordPress.  It is by Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress.  If you are an avid WordPress fan, as I am, you probably can relate to this question every time you update your plugins or WordPress itself.    For that half second, you think, should I delete Hello Dolly?  Every time, I swear I can hear Matt Mullenweg cringe at the very thought of deleting Hello Dolly.

I am writing this post in defense for Hello Dolly.  :-)

It is described as:

“This is not just a plugin, it symbolizes the hope and enthusiasm of an entire generation summed up in two words sung most famously by Louis Armstrong: Hello, Dolly. When activated you will randomly see a lyric from Hello, Dolly in the upper right of your admin screen on every page.”

While I will admit, I typically do not have it as an active plugin, I think it would be a shame if I deleted Hello Dolly as after  all isn’t it the least we can do to say thanks to Matt Mullenweg?  He has given us WordPress, such an amazing piece of software all for the price of “Free 99″.   This plugin has been at the core of WordPress and has witnessed the uprising of WordPress.  It has been there through the ups and the downs.  To uninstall is like removing a child from its mother.  In my opinion, WordPress and Hello Dolly go together like Peanut Butter and Jelly.

So in answer to the question of whether to keep the WordPress Plugin Hello Dolly, I say astoundingly YES.

What are your thoughts?  Do you keep or delete Hello Dolly on your WordPress Installations?

I am constantly asked, Blogger or WordPress?  This is a NO BRAINER!!

W-O-R-D-P-R-E-S-S

If you are considering setting up a business blog, you shouldn’t even consider blogger or also knows as blogspot.    For personal blogs it is fine, even though I still lean on WordPress, but here are some reasons why:

A) If you host with us, we will set up WordPress for you for NO Charge! (Just mention this post)

B) With Blogger , you do not own your blog, Google does.  You will have a blog as in joesmoe.blogspot.com.   Notice that the domain is blogspot.com, which is owned by Google.    If you setup in WordPress (.org), then you own your blog and domain name and everything.

C) You get the entire WordPress community for free or little charge.  You get to use many plugins and themes and most of them are Free or relatively inexpensive.   With blogger, you simply get what Google gives you.

D) All the top bloggers, use WordPress.  Thats right, even Google’s own, and one of the leaders in SEO is Matt Cutts.  If he uses WordPress that should tell you something.  Look at the Source Code for any top blog and most of them are using WordPress.

In a nutshell, for personal blogs www.blogger.com is fine, but if you are considering blogging for your business, always choose WordPress.  If you would like more information on customizing your blog then contact us.

What is the difference of WordPress.org and WordPress.com?

In a nutshell:

WordPress.com is a FREE service that is hosted by and at WordPress.com.  It is similar to Blogger, which many people refer to as blogspot.com.  You have NO hosting fees, but you are tied down more and cannot install custom themes and custom plugins etc.

WordPress.org is the main domain for the WordPress Community.  With WordPress.org you are basically downloading the latest version of WordPress and installing with your hosting account.  The software is FREE, but you have to host it yourself at some hosting company that supports hosting WordPress, as in Webnovate.

Hosting is rather cheap and you have a ton of options with WordPress.org and you have support from the entire WordPress.org family.  Wordpress is growing and growing and there seems to be more and more plugins and themes, information, and support.

WordPress is rather easy to install.  There are a few things you want to do from scratch to help your SEO out as in changing the permalinks.  If you are a non-techy person and want us to install it for you, just give us a shout and we would love to help you out.  If you host with us, then we will set it up for you for FREE.

As we have pointed out in other post, one of the BEST things you can do for SEO, is to blog.  We recently setup a blog for Partyland Utah, locate at http://www.partylandutah.com/blog/ that is used as a great tool to keep their customers up to date on the latest and greatest ideas for thier next party.

The blog serves many purposes for thier clients and their clients can even subscribe to its feed and get emailed with any updates to the blog or new entrys.    However, at the same time they increase their SEO presence as they are gaining a ton of useful content that Google loves!

Try a few Google searches and you will quickly see that they are showing up either number 1 or 2 for many popular searches, including parytland or party supplies in utah.    The key thing to realize is that they are moving up higher and higher and it has only been a few months since we installed this for them.    I have to say, I love when a customer takes the advice and puts it into action.  Many times customers get to busy with other things and they do not put time or effort into their blog and updating it.    We have setup many customers with blogs as we are currently offering a FREE blog with any web design package, yet some are not taking the full advantage of updating it with useful content.

If you would like to learn more about Utah Web Design or setting up a blog for your business, please feel free to contact us for a FREE Proposal!

When setting up a WordPress blog, one of the most important things you can do from the start is to choose the best permalink structure.  These are not only better for your users to make sense of them, but also for SEO.  What is a permalink?

Permalinks are what you see on a wordpress blog as the URL.    By default, WordPress blogs appear something like this:

www.example.com/blog/?p=23

What exactly is the ?p=23?  Yeah, well if you don’t know, then you can imagine that search engines do not either.  In order to rank higher and push your SEO to the top, you need to use what many call Pretty Permalinks.    A pretty permalink is basically a way to make your URL have rich keywords in their title.  For example, lets assume you are setting up a blog for a Party Supply Store.    Instead of www.partystore.com/blog/?p=23 you would have the URL as www.partystore.com/blog/best-balloons-for-birthdays.

When a Search Engine sees this they can spider it and see that you are talking about the best balloons for birthdays and not just a random number generated by the blog.

So how do you setup Pretty Permalinks within WordPress? There is tons of info out on the web, but here is a link that covers setting them up in detail.  http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

One of the biggest problems people might have is that you need to setup your .htaccess file to be writable so you can make this change within WordPress.   Once that is done, you can modify the Permalink Structure.  To find the setting within WordPress, just go to Settings, Permalinks.    Note: If you have a blog that has been setup and running for a while, you will need to make sure you install a WordPress Plugin as in Redirection.

What is the best Permalink Structure for SEO? Well to be honest, I have researched this one for about 1 week straight and the conclusion is:  There is not really a consensus on it, but many people state either solely using /%postname%/ or using the /%category%/ %postname%/.

The reason people state simply  %postname% is that it is keyword rich and shows those words closer in the title.    The reason many state  /%category%/ %postname%/ is because many times your category has those rich keywords.  I think a lot of it depends on things as in how many categories you usually apply to one post as it only takes one.

After deliberating for about 1 week, I choose / %postname%/.   Why?  It gets right to the point with what you are talking about and puts those keywords up nicely in the front of the URL.  However, maybe one of the biggest reasons is, this appears to be what all the SEO Guru blogs are doing.

Here are some of the top SEO blogs that use the / %postname%/ this permalink structure:

Matt Cutts - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Yoast - http://yoast.com/blog/

SEOmoz.org - http://www.seomoz.org/

BlueHatSeo.com - http://bluehatseo.com/

Here are some of the top SEO blogs using the /%category%/ %postname%/ structure:

Grey Wolf - http://www.wolf-howl.com/

SeoPedia.org - http://seopedia.org/

One thing I noted on the solely / %postname%/ structure is that WordPress has a warning about using this structure, http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Using_only_.25postname.25.

This is further explained in this blog post, http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2009/02/04/efficient-wordpress-permalinks

They would recommend that you use a number to start your permalink structure as in with the %post_id% or %year% as this way WordPress itself can find the entry faster.  This threw a wrench in the whole decision for me, but to be honest, I had to finally come to the reasoning that if Matt Cutts blog and SEOmoz can survive this currently, my blogs would be able to and by the time I reach their status, there might be a fix for that anyways.

Anyways, in a nutshell, one thing that is 100% conclusive is that, when it comes to pretty permalinks vs. ugly permalinks, always go with Pretty Permalinks.

In conlcusion, what is not 100% sure yet is the best Permalink structure, however it appears that possibly the most popular is the / %postname%/ and second would probably be /%category%/ %postname%/.

I would love to hear what others out there think on this?

Happy Blogging!  :-)