Jesse Gerber, co-founder of Partners With Parents is a neighbor and good friend. He was initially resistant to a redesign partly due to the cost of the redesign and implementation and partly due to a certain level of fear of how a new website might change the nature of his business.  The focus of his fear was the possibility of an overwhelming number of inquiries without the necessary support or conversion to real customers. After much conversation, we began the redesign process over the summer.

We decided to go with a WordPress-driven website, which would give the company the flexibility to change the content on their own, without them needing to come back to us every time they wanted to update a page, or add new information.

Partners With Parents has been in business for over a decade. They specialize in custom private tutoring, with the tutors preparing lessons suited to the each individual's needs and educational environment. They have also had much success in test preparation, like the SAT, Regents, AP tests, GRE, MCAT, LSAT and others. Additionally they have extensive experience in homeschooling children with special needs and unique situations.

I took this opportunity to begin a program of my own, an internship program for my web design students. A talented student, Nusrat Bintun, was Slicksurface's first intern. She showed great initiative, and where she lacked in skill and experience, she made up for with enthusiasm and consistency. She was particularly involved with helping to develop the illustrations used on the site. By the end, she gained additional skills in photoshop and illustrator, plus received insight in working with a real client.

An interesting thing to note about this redesign is that it promised to be easy to improve the performance of the site. The previous designer had very little experience creating real professional websites. So instead of designing the pages so that the images were images, and the text was html, he made the text into images as well.  There was basically no text anywhere on the site for the search engines to index.

Two weeks following the launch, we were fully indexed by Google.  We were not indexed by the other search engines, but we knew that would come in time. Partners With Parents immediately ranked for "New York City tutoring" and "NYC tutoring" falling on page 4 and 3 respectively. We now are guiding them in content development to rank for other relevant search terms like "New York City homeschooling" and "test prep".

Although the site has been indexed fully, the traffic hasn't increased by leaps and bounds in the first month following launch. In studying Google trends, "New York City tutoring" does not have enough data to even warrant a chart. "NYC tutoring" ranks very well with a Brooklyn audience, although "Brooklyn tutoring" does not have enough data to warrant a chart. For just "tutoring" or "tutoring service", the New York audience is in the top 10.

Surprisingly, they immediately received requests for tutors, had tutors inquiring about positions, and had subscriptions to the automatic email updates (see description below).

After we have ranked for the key search terms, the next goal is to work towards getting PartnersWithParents.com to show up on the first page for them.

Partners With Parents is looking to build a community among parents, educators, support professionals, and themselves. They decided that one way they would do this is to regularly write posts on everything including articles about education and parenting, family challenges and things to do in New York City, and parents and children dealing with stress and anxiety.

Finally, we also implemented Feedburner on this site.  Because we used blog software to run it, the site inherently has a feed.  We've taken advantage of this by inviting users to subscribe to regular updates of the site. Whenever a new blog post is written, those who have subscribed will receive emails automatically of the full blog posts. An inexpensive feature that keeps people reminded of the company's services and expertise.

But the first step, of course, is to install WordPress. To do that, go to wordpress.org and follow the directions given there (the directions they have are pretty excellent). To do the install you will need a web host with FTP access, PHP running on the web server, and a MySQL database. How you set up your MySQL database depends on your ISP - contact them to determine how best to do it.

Many ISPs have "one-click" installs for WordPress, but they don't install the latest version. If that's the case with your ISP you then want to do an upgrade and install the latest version of WordPress. This is still less trouble than installing it from scratch since the database and a few other things will be set up for you.

The rest of this post assumes you have WordPress installed and working. The terms used in this post are from WordPress 2.6.x - I know some of the terms will be changing in 2.7, but the general concepts will still be there.

The things we'll be changing are found under the "settings" menu.

Settings: General

Most of these don't need to be modified, but do change the name and tagline for your blog as they usually appear on your site and in your RSS feeds. The URLs should be the base URL for your blog, which may be the root URL of your site or the directory you installed the blog in. The e-mail address is important as it will be used to send you notifications about things like comments that need moderation.

Settings: Writing

There are a couple useful items on this page. First is "Size of the post box" which I recommend you change to 25 or 30 as it will make writing easier since you'll be able to see more when you're writing posts.

The second is all the way at the bottom where it says "Update Services" - those are the services that you want notified when you do a new post. From what I've heard recently WordPress pings these services when you make edits, not just new posts, and some services may think you're spamming if you make too many pings, so use this with a little caution. Nevertheless it is useful to get your posts picked up quickly. Below is a list that you can copy and paste into the area so your posts get maximum exposure as quickly as possible.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php

There are more places you can ping, but you risk pinging them twice since some places like Ping-O-Matic pass pings onto other services (more info).

Settings: Reading

The settings on this page are pretty important...

"Blog pages show at most xxx posts" - this determines the maximum number of blog posts that will show up on a page. Some people like to set this to a big number so the reader can scan and see a lot of information. I recommend against doing that since it will create duplicate content problems. You want content to move off of the pages that change so search engines understand that the stable pages are the post pages. I typically set the number to 5 or 6 which is a decent balance between duplicate content issues and usability, if you have a very active blog with multiple posts per day that number can be upped without causing any real problems.

"Syndication feed show the most recent xxx posts" - here you want to up the number so people who look at your feed can find articles they saw recently in your feed. On numerous occasions I've wanted to tell something about an article I saw recently only to find it had expired from the feed which made me search for it on the site (not always an easy task). I tend to put this number at 20. If you have a very active blog you may want to raise that to 30 or 40, but much larger than that and you may create feeds that are so large they're cumersome and slow.

"For each article in a feed, show..." - RSS feeds can either show snippets or the full article. The people who use snippets use them so people will have to come to their site to see the full article. When they come to their site they're exposed to advertising which the blogger hopes they'll respond to. The problem is that snippets aggrevate feed users, and regular visitors are far less likely to click on ads than new visitors. So I recommend picking "full text". In my opinion it's best to keep your loyal readers happy than try to make them jump through hoops to read what you write.

A word about "Front page displays"... The idea here is that you can show a page other than the normal home page of the blog. This is useful if you don't want the blog to look so much like a blog. What the option doesn't reveal is that there's a better way to handle this if your comfortable editing HTML. If you put a page named home.php in your theme it will be used for the home page. In my opinion this is far better than the options presented in "front page displays" since you can completely break out of the structure of your theme and have a completely custom page. If you use a home.php page it overrides anything you set with "front page displays".

Settings: Permalinks

WordPress allows you to customize the directory structure of your blog. It's one of the really powerful aspects of WordPress. The default URL for WordPress looks something like http://www.somedomain.com/?p=1234 which is a dynamic URL that shows the post ID for the particular post. WordPress URLs can be a lot better than that, however. The settings pages gives you some of the mor popular options and also lets you have a custom URL.

But first, let's explain what the core issues are. First, is the number of directories down the post page is. If you use a date directory then you'll have something like /2008/10/02/post-title, but if your blog is in the /blog/ directory then it's more like /blog/2008/10/02/post-title - that's 5 directories deep in the site. Research has shown that Google and others favor pages that are no more than 3 pages deep on the site, so that URL structure actually works against you.

There's a whole debate on whether you should use dates in URLs or not. Personally, I think dates in URLs are useful, but others disagree. There is no right or wrong answer to the question.

We use a custom permalink structure that combines the year and month into one directory like /2008-10/ - to achieve that we enter the following under "custom":

/%year%-%monthnum%/%postname%

The other options under permalink settings are for "Category base" and "Tag Base". WordPress posts can be categorized and tagged. Just briefly, you should think of categories as the main subjects in your blog, and tags all the little things that pop up in the blog post that are minor, reoccurring themes. For this post "blogging" is the category, and "WordPress" the tag, but you can have multiple categories and multiple tags.

By default category URLs start with /category/ and tag URLs with /tag/, but "category base" and "tag base" let you change that. This can be useful from an SEO perspective. Let's say you have a travel blog and it's divided up into virtual blogs one for each destination with each destination virtual blog being a category. In that case you might change the category base to "/destination/" or "/sightseeing/" or "/tourism/" (there are many options...). You could do the same thing with your tag base if you wanted.

Changing the category and tag bases helps get keywords into the URLs which is useful for SEO. But you want to think ahead. If you chose /destination/ for your category base it would mean you couldn't have "budget travel" as a category since it isn't a place someone would go. So before changing category and tag bases, make sure you think ahead.

At the bottom of the Permalink Settings page you may see an area with a bunch of code and a note above it saying something about .htaccess... All of these URL rewrites require special rewrite rules on the server. Those rewrite rules are handled in a file named .htaccess. Some ISPs set things up so WordPress can modify the .htaccess file, but many don't. Working with .htaccess files is a separate subject, but the imporant points are that files that start with periods are invisible on the Mac - so you'll need to use something like Dreamweaver that lets you see them - you won't see them in the Finder.

Settings: Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous settings are where image related settings are currently located...

"Store uploads in this folder" - This setting lets you modify where images you upload for your blog posts are stored. The default setting is OK, but a bit deep in the directory structure. Just realize that if you modify this, you may need to modify your .htaccess file so WordPress doesn't try to control the serving of the image files.

The other thing about the images folder is that it needs to be writable. Making it writable is beyond the scope of this post - if it's not writable (which you'll know when you try to upload something). Contact your ISP and have them make the directory writable.

"Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders" - This is highly recommended as it avoids the possibility that you get too many files in one directory.

"Thumbnail size" and "Medium Size" - WordPress manages your images when you upload them. These settings let you determine the dimensions of smaller versions of the image.

The Askimet Plugin

One other thing which I highly highly recommend is installing the Askimet plugin. This examines the comments that are posted to your blog and automatically marks suspicious ones as spam. As you site/blog gets to be mature you'll be amazed at how many spammy comments appear on the site. Many just say things like "Great site, love your perspective on things", but they exist to have a link back to their site. Askimet is incredible at determining which comments are spam, though it does make mistakes.

To install Askimet you go to the plugins area, find Askimet and click on "activate". It will then give you links to get an activation key from wordpress.com. You'll need to register there and retrieve your key there. Once you tell the Askimet plugin your key, you're all set. If you start another blog, just use the same key - the key is for you as a person - you don't need a different key for each blog.

Once Askimet is installed you'll see an Askimet Spam section in the Comments area it will capture all the spam there and you can deal with when you have time.

I figured this meant things would take slightly longer to show up in the Google web search, but that's not the case at all...

Just before lunch today I wrote a post on my personal blog on why we have changed vets - from Scott Luckow back to West Chelsea Veterinary Hospital. When I came back from lunch about an hour later I did a Google search for "Scott Luckow" and see that the post I wrote an hour earlier is showing up as number 3 and 4 in the search results. I wasn't sure if it was some sort of effect of personalized search (even though I search with personalized search turned off), so I remotely controlled a server and did the same search. This time the pages are in positions 2 and 3...

You'll see a couple of things in the screenshot. First, Google has gotten the relevance issue tackled and lists the page with the post first, not the home page of the blog, which would have higher PageRank, but in the end be less relevant to the search. Second, the fact that the home page is listed at all on this search means that in the hour since I did the post they crawled not only the post page, but the home page of the blog as well.

That's actually pretty incredible. Up until this particular case I had noticed that they generally ignored my personal blog... So to have that level of quickness on a blog they don't feel is important shows how incredible their system is.

The bottom line is that Google hasn't stopped using feeds in their primary search results, they just use them differently. Rather than directly using the contents of the feed, they crawl new pages they find in feeds immediately, index them, and incorporate those fresh pages in their search results. It's not an easy thing to do, but it's really the best way to get things done.

Today I want to cover how to get off Blogger completely and move to WordPress. This is a pretty technical discussion and it assumes that you know the basics of Blogger and WordPress. It's also going to assume that you've migrated your blog from blogspot.com to your own domain. If you haven't done that, start with the post from the other day - that will step you through what you can to get off blogspot.com. The other assumption is that you're using an Apache server to host your blog (over half of all web sites use Apache).

The first issue you need to deal with is the fact that your URLs are going to change. They have to, and this is generally a good thing. If you're using Blogger with FTP publishing your URLs look something like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/2008/03/post-title.html
http://www.yourdomain.com/labels/label-title.html
http://www.yourdomain.com/2008_03_archive.html

There will be many URLs, but those are the basic types. If you're using the new blogger templates (not available if you're using FTP), you'll have more URL options, but those three are the primary ones you need to concern yourself with. Also realize that WordPress isn't typically configured with file extensions on URLs. So you'll lose the .html portion of the URL, but we'll handle that below...

You can configure WordPress to act like Blogger in respect to "labels" - you can even keep the directory so it's named "labels", but WordPress actually has "categories" and "tags" and the two are far superior to Blogger's labels. A Blogger label is a one-size-fits-all solution. Whereas you should think of WordPress categories as items that would appear in the table of contents of a book, and tags as things that would appear in the index of a book. We'll come back to labels in a moment, but just realize that the URLs will change.

One of the other issues is that Blogger shortens long post titles when creating URLs, but WordPress doesn't. So if you had a title to one of your posts that was "Tech stocks up today after long decline over many months". Your Blogger URL might be /2008/03/tech-stocks-up-today-after.html whereas your WordPress URL would be /2008/03/tech-stocks-up-today-after-long-decline-over-many-months - that will create the biggest headache in a proper transition from Blogger to WordPress...

Getting into the nitty gritty of the transition. First, don't delete your blog on Blogger. In fact you want to leave it exactly as it is now. If you're hosted on blogspot, follow the guidelines in the post from the other day, which boil down to putting some Javascript in the <head> tag on your pages. That will redirect people who come to your blogspot blog to the blog on your new domain. If you're using Blogger with FTP already then you're a big step forward. Just leave things where they are...

Next, install WordPress in the same directory as your Blogger blog on your domain (if you're using Blogger with FTP, otherwise your target directory).

Now we need to tell Apache the general rules for how the URLs have changed. There are two ways to do this. Most people use .htaccess files which is an invisible file in the directory that tells Apache what to do. We use what are called virtual host files which are better to use if you can get access to them. If you use .htaccess files you'll need to change some of what we say here since things are slightly different with .htaccess files than they are with virtual host files. You also need to make sure that mod_rewrite is enabled on your server.

I'm going to go over the Apache instructions for my personal blog and explain what's going on...

RewriteEngine On

This turns on mod_rewrite for your site. All of the items that have RewriteRule below depend on mod_rewrite being on.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.slicksurface\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.slicksurface.com$1 [R=301,L]

This isn't something that's particular to the blog, but I highly recommend it for any site. In enforces the canonical domain - making sure you don't have some links to www.yoursite.com and others to yoursite.com (the search engines treat them as two sites which will hurt you in organic search).

RewriteRule ^/jay-harper/blog/2007/10/netflix-home-of-damaged-dvds.html$ /jay-harper/2007-10/netflix-the-home-of-damaged-dvds [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^/jay-harper/blog/2007/09/manhattan-wildlife-encounter-of-smelly.html$ /jay-harper/2007-09/manhattan-wildlife-encounter-of-the-smelly-sort [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^/jay-harper/blog/2007/06/ny-commercial-real-estate-rentable.html$ /jay-harper/2007-06/ny-commercial-real-estate-rentable-square-feet-vs-usable-square-feet [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^/jay-harper/blog/2007/05/florence-knoll-tables-harry-bertoia.html$ /jay-harper/2007-05/florence-knoll-tables-harry-bertoia-chairs-for-sale [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^/jay-harper/blog/2007/05/likesdislikes-2003-mini-coooper-s.html$ /jay-harper/2007-05/likesdislikes-2003-mini-cooper-s [NC,R=301,L]

The part above can be the worst part of the project. After you've done everything else, you need to figure out where Blogger shortened the title and the Blogger URL and WordPress URL aren't substantially similar. This requires going through every URL, figuring out which ones are broken and writing exceptions to fix them. It's not quite as difficult as you think. First you do everything else, then you go to Blogger and click on all the "view" links and when you find one that doesn't work, you note what the original URL was and what the new one should be and write the rules you see above.

Please note each line above starts with RewriteRule. If you copy it into a text  editor you'll see how it should look. The limitations of HTML mean that I can't quite show it the way it actually should be.

RewriteRule ^/jay-harper/blog/atom\.xml$ /jay-harper/feed [R=301,L]

This redirects the feed from the old location to the new one.

RewriteRule ^/jay-harper/index.html$ /jay-harper/ [NC,R=301,L]

This redirects the old index file for the site to the new location since WordPress won't handle index.html correctly by default.

RewriteRule ^/jay-harper/blog/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/(.+)\.html$ /jay-harper/$1-$2/$3 [NC,R=301,L]

This redirects the old blog post URLs to the new ones. We incorporate dated directories in our URLs that look like /YYYY-MM/. We like these over the ones that look like /YYYY/MM/ since it reduces the number of levels of directories which is good for SEO. If you want a similar URL structure you'll need to go to Options -> Permalinks and enter /%year%-%monthnum%/%postname% under "Custom, specify below" (make sure that radio button is highlighted as well). If you use a different directory structure, you'll need a different rule that's appropriate for how you've structured WordPress.

One note, the root Blogger URL was http://www.slicksurface.com/jay-harper/blog/ whereas the root WordPress URL is http://www.slicksurface.com/jay-harper/ - this change is reflected in the rules. You probably won't have a similar change, so you'd tweak things accordingly.

RewriteRule ^/jay-harper/blog/labels/(.+)\.html$ /jay-harper/tag/$1 [NC,R=301,L]

This redirects all the labels pages to tag pages. If you want you can redirect them to category pages, or write custom rules to send some to category pages and others to tag pages.

RewriteRule ^/jay-harper/blog/(\d{4})_(\d{2})_01_archive\.html$ /jay-harper/$1/$2 [NC,R=301,L]

That rule redirects the archive URLs to the WordPress structure.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (googlebot|slurp|msnbot|teoma) [NC]
RewriteRule ^/jay-harper/page/ /jay-harper/ [NC,R=301,L]

This rule is for search engine optimization. Essentially we want to eliminate duplicate content problems, so since I publish the full post on the main page of the blog (and also the "older posts" and "newer posts" links at the bottom of each of those pages), I don't want search engines to see the full posts anywhere except the post pages and the home page (which things will expire off of). So the rule redirects requests for older/newer posts pages to the home page if it's one of the four major search engines making the request.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !(feedburner|googlebot|slurp|msnbot|teoma) [NC]
RewriteRule ^/jay-harper/blog/feed$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/jay-harper [R=302,L]

We track our feeds with FeedBurner, so we want average people to be redirected to FeedBurner when they request the official feed URL, but we want the search engine spiders (and the FeedBurner spider) to not be redirected because they need the feed from that specific location. FeedBurner obviously needs the original file, the search engines need to get it from our site because we're using the feeds as sitemaps which have to be located in the same directory (or a higher directory) as the URLs they reference.

We could also link to the FeedBurner URL directly for users, but this puts FeedBurner in too much control of our subscriber list. The way around that is to list the official URL and do a temporary redirect to FeedBurner. It's not perfect, but it's better than putting the FeedBurner URL in our link tags.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/jay-harper/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/jay-harper/blog/wp-
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/jay-harper/resources/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/jay-harper/blog/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/(.+)\.(jpg|gif|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /jay-harper/index.php [L]

WordPress actually serves most of it's pages from a single page. If you've noticed the old style WordPress URLs (with query strings at the end) you're well acquainted with this issue. In other words, all of the "good" WordPress URLs are somewhat fake. This rule is what makes them work. But certain directories need to be exempted from the rule. We like our images in a /resources/ directory, so that's exempted. We've also exempted any image files that are in the old Blogger directories, and so on...

There's so much more that could be discussed when it comes to WordPress and Blogger, but those are some of the basics when you're moving to WordPress. And believe me, you'll be glad you did... It's always a good thing to be in control of your online assets. And there's really no better way than to use something which is completely under your control, like WordPress.

Good luck!

It used to be that the first step was to publish the blog on your own domain via FTP. Blogger used to be great about this. You'd change your setting to publish via FTP and then they'd do 301 (permanent) redirects from the page on your blog on blogspot.com to the corresponding page on your own domain. That's how it should work.

But apparently spammers abused the system and set up a 100,000+ blogs and then switched them to things like pharmacy sites so blogger now pops up a warning that looks like this when you hit a blogspot.com URL that has been moved to another domain:

Yes, it really looks that bad - they didn't even manage to get the graphics working properly. But beyond that, there are no 301 redirects. It's really a huge disaster for anyone wanting to get off blogspot.com.

So, what do you do if you want to get off blogspot.com to your own domain? If you want to stay with Blogger as your blogging software, you'll need to endure that horrid warning. But how many of your readers will actually click through to your new site?

Instead, you'll really need to migrate to something like WordPress to get things on your new domain running smoothly. But it's not nearly as smooth a process as it used to be...

Here's the bad part... It's still really easy to use Blogger to spam - they didn't fix anything - they just made it worse for people who aren't spamming. The technique I'm about to show you does just about everything the spammers want to accomplish, but it's only an adequate solution for the average person.

The basic idea is that you put a Javascript on your page that when the page is loaded, checks to see if you're on your domain or on blogspot.com. If it's on blogspot it does a Javascript redirect to your domain. If it's on your domain, it does nothing... Here's what the Javascript would look like:

<script language="javascript">
if(top.location.href.substring(0,27) == 'http://myblog.blogspot.com/') {
top.location.href = 'http://www.myblog.com/blog/'+top.location.href.substring(27);
}
else if(top.location.href.substring(0,31) == 'http://www.myblog.blogspot.com/') {
top.location.href = 'http://www.myblog.com/blog/'+top.location.href.substring(31);
}
</script>

If you adapt that code for your own use you'll need to change the bit where I reference the numbers 27 and 31 (each is referenced twice). There are 27 characters in 'http://myblog.blogspot.com/', and 31 in 'http://www.myblog.blogspot.com/' - count the numbers in your case and use those (I was too lazy to write a more generic routine).

Now, that's all the spammers really need to do to get people redirected to their spammy sites. True there's no PageRank flowing to their site, but Blogger could have accomplished that with 302 redirects instead of 301 redirects.

Now the big problem with doing what I just mentioned is moving your feed. The issue with what I've spec'd out above is that the feed won't get redirected since you can't insert the Javascript in it. Since you'll be needing to migrate to a different blogging platform, I doubt you can even effectively use the tool to have FeedBurner host your feed instead of Blogger. It might work, but I haven't tried it. You'd have to tell FeedBurner to host the Blogger feed and then tell FeedBurner the feed should actually be pulled from somewhere else. Something tells me they've got that angle covered, but it's worth a try...

That's how you get off blogspot.com. Of course, then you need something to catch the redirected traffic when it comes to your domain. I'll cover migration to WordPress in another post.

It's one thing to republish the story, after all RSS = Real Simple Syndication and syndication is all about republishing things. But when you do that you've gotta at least put a link back to the authoritative source for the material, which this person didn't do. With the link you're giving the original site some "link love", without the backlink you're causing duplicate content issues for them.

So, I'm hunting around wordpress.com looking for how to file a DMCA complaint and can't find the form to fill out. Their support form makes it really clear that it only exists to support their clients. So I put in the blog in question under "my blog" to get past the automated script that won't let you submit the request unless the blog is on WordPress.

Maybe an hour later I get a response which is just about perfect - 1) they took down the site, and 2) they tell me where to go to submit WordPress DMCA complaints. Bravo, thumbs up, cheers, etc... That's exactly how it should be handled. Danny Sullivan was right when he said WordPress was doing well with spam.

I should also mention that once again I saw again how on top of things the folks at Feedburner are. They had found the spammy blog post within a day, read it, and posted a comment asking how the blogger could have possibly done what the post said given that the person was on WordPress which doesn't let you do any of what the post talks about. Too bad I can't buy stock in Feedburner - they seem like an incredible company...

When you have spaces in your blog post title spaces are inserted to take the place of the spaces. For example:

Spaces in Blogger Labels - A Change

would turn into the file name:

spaces-in-blogger-labels-change.html

which was great because search engine spiders interpret dashes as spaces. If the same phrase were a label/tag, then it used to come out looking like:

Spaces in Blogger Labels - A Change.html

which was horrible because it contained actual spaces in the file name. Instead of fixing things properly, they've now made the situation even worse and the file names for labels now look like:

Spaces%20in%20Blogger%20Labels%20-%20A%20Change.html

While that's a properly constructed URL (if you're unlucky enough to have spaces in your URL), it's not a proper file name. In fact, it just won't work - your server will serve the old file with the spaces in it, not the new file with the %20. To get the new file you'd have to put a %2520 to indicate that you want a file that has a %20 in the file name.

How can they get this so wong??? I mean they're owned by Google - you'd think they could do better...

So, what I'm now going to go through and do (and what I suggest everyone else do), is replace every space in every label with a dash. It won't look so great at the bottom of your post, but it will work...

Speakers:
Stephen Spencer, Founder/President, Netconcepts LLC
Rick Klau, VP Publisher Services, FeedBurner
Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus, Inc.
Greg Jarboe, President/Co-Founder, SEO-PR

[L-R] Stephen Spencer (Netconcepts), Rick Klau (Feedburner), Sally Falkow (Expansion Plus), Greg Jarboe (SEO-PR)

Stephen Spencer, Founder/President, Netconcepts LLC

Best practices: Use full-text feeds, 20 or more items in the feed, subject-based feeds, be careful with your feed descriptions.

Incorporate tag clouds and tag pages -> get into Technorati tag pages -> do better in SERPs.

Optimize your title tags. It's best to decouple the page title and the post title - page title should be longer with more keywords.

[Discussed various WordPress plug-ins to handle these issues.]

Tag conjunction tags are a great idea - they combine tags like SEO + eCommerce.

Insert links to related posts to cross-link within your blog.

The blog name can also be really powerful since it can contain keywords and you'll see yourself ranking for those keywords.

<h1>, <h2> tags helps.

Don't use "permalink" links, link the title.

Put in "sticky" posts to add intro copy with more keywords...

His daughter ranks well for [neopet cheats] and starting to do well for the more general term [neopets] and even has AdSense to generate revenue.

Rick Klau, VP Publisher Services, FeedBurner

FeedBurner manages 600,000 feeds. Several hundred million feed requests every day.

If you're putting tracking codes in the links in your feeds, redirects are important because search engines are paying a lot more attention to feeds.

Auto discovery is important to help search engines find the feeds.

Stylesheets are being over-ridden more and more by the feed readers.

Yahoo! Pipes repurposes and puts things into aggregate feeds - not everyone wants it and FeedBurner lets you tag your feed as not wanting to participate in Yahoo! Pipes.

Click through URLs are useful, but be aware of whether it's a 301 or 302 (if you use tracking tags)...

They recommend you have people subscribe to a feed URL on your site and 301 it to FeedBurner.

There are more and more end uses for feeds - be aware of the ways your feed is being used.

There are also services who pick up feeds and figure out who they're linking to and then you'll get a backlink. The more you put in your feed, the more you'll benefit from sites like that (e.g. TechMeme). Without the full text they have to visit the site to fully understand the feed and they might not visit.

You can use a noindex flag if you don't want the feed indexed by search engines.

Auto-discovery is incredibly important. You're not limited to one auto-discovery tag. It's useful for both end-users and bots.

Ping when you update your content otherwise it will take a while to update. This will prioritize the crawling of your feed.

There are a dizzying number of services crawling feeds.

Add metadata into the feed - especially for audio and video. And make sure your titles and descriptions contain keywords.

Include links in the feed to get people to click thru to your site.

Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus, Inc.

Test case for client selling "shielding lotion" - a new kind of skin lotion.

Feed aggregation sites/pages is seen as a blog in the eyes of Google (their definition of a blog is a constantly updated sites with feeds). They've become one of the authority blogs in Google for "dry skin care" without actually writing any content.

Their pages are growing traffic and links and getting good positioning in the SERPs.

They've created a buzz about "shielding lotion" when no one talked about it before.

Greg Jarboe, President/Co-Founder, SEO-PR

Using feeds get you found more quickly which gets you indexed more quickly...

Case study of work done for StubHub!

News blogs, sports blog, entertainment blogs are MUCH more popular than corporate blogs. In other words, blog about your industry, not so much about your business. Provide useful information.

Target keywords for what your customers are interested in, not so much for the transaction. They used Keyword Discovery by Trellian which lets them look at seasonal trends.

They put out 15 blogs - hired 5 bloggers part time and trained them to optimize their writing. They brought with them the passion for the subject. Sometimes you can get the bloggers for free - your only cost is the cost of training.

The blogs were set up using sub-domains and made it clear they were sponsoring the blogs.

Do old-fashion PR when the circumstances warrant it.

They did research on bloggers based on inbound and outbound links and targeted the most important bloggers and blog rolled the important ones. Your blog roll is important to how Google and others think of you.

StubHub! did so well with this and other projects that eBay bought them for $307 million.

Q&A

Use the "noindex" tag when it's for a select audience.

When putting links in to the original content use 301 redirects so they don't think your tracking URLs are spammy.

To avoid duplicate content filters/penalties on tag/topic pages only show excerpts, not the full article. The full article only goes on the "permalink" page.

FeedBurner has 60 million people subscribing to feeds. The critical mass has been reached. However, putting an icon, "xml", or "subscribe" doesn't do much. ("Subscribe" often means money to people). Put it in words they can understand - "bookmark", etc.

However, the most aggressive users of feeds are the influencers and you want to reach those people. You can actually get particular people to read your posts if you use their name in their post.

On the other end - Burpee Seeds uses feeds and sales went up 4 fold because of them. AARP has feeds proving all demographics use feeds.

Tools can do keyword strategy for you but you have to use your own judgment.

Greg recommends a soft sell - don't be too aggressive with your blogs.

Don't confuse people with different flavors of feeds (Atom/RSS) - pick one and go with it. Pick the format that best suits your content (if it makes a difference).

I've played with the new "layout" functionality on "new blogger" and I have to say it's impressive (everything is database driven - so there's no more republishing all the files for your blog), but the layout functionality just isn't an option unless you're hosted on blogspot - everyone else is stuck with old-style templates...

Something told me that there must be a blogger template tag you could insert, since whenever a post has a label blogger will republish just about every file in your blog that has anything to do with any label, but when you publish a post without labels, just the basics are updated (the atom feed, the home page, the archive page, and the blog post page). However, I never did find the tag that just hast to be there somewhere, but I did find another way to achieve the same goal...

Finally at long last I did find a post by Lee Robertson that explains what to do, but you'll need to have PHP installed on your server and be able to make PHP execute in .html pages.

One word of warning however... Do not use this method unless you have at least some form of authentication for the comments that are posted on your blog, otherwise someone could post some PHP code in a comment which would do bad things when visitors come to your page.

I won't repeat his source code here, but will mention that if you need to set up Apache to do PHP processing on .html documents, then you'll need a line like this in the VirtualHost file for your site:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

If you use an extension other than .html for the main page of your site, then you should have a similar line for that extension as well.