Search Engine Land has some great tips on avoiding common blogging SEO mistakes. As this isn’t a full blown post, I didn’t think it deserved to be part 3 of the ‘Marketing Your Blog’ series.

You can check out the article here, and a follow up opinion of the article here.

The SEO Title Tag plugin mentioned in the article is part of ‘Marketing Your Blog Part 1′. Feel free to check it out along with some other great plugins.

Matt Cutts recently gave a talk at WordCamp 2007 on Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers. There’s some great information in here. The video is a bit long (over an hour), but well worth watching. You can also download the presentation. Thanks John Pozadzides for taping the presentation.

While looking through Yahoo’s index of one of our clients, I noticed something strange.

Yahoo has picked up links that are ONLY used for our Google AdWords’ or Business.com campaigns. This suggests one of three things:

1. Yahoo spiders and indexes Google’s search results
2. Yahoo spiders and indexes adSense ads on Google’s content network
3. Both #1 and #2

So what implications does this have? Well for one, it could potentially skew tracking for the AdWords campaigns if there was traffic being sent to these URLs. It also artificially inflates Yahoo’s page count (which may or may not be such a bad thing). It appears Yahoo isn’t intelligent enough to recognize what it has picked up and that the extra parameters do not yield unique pages.

So how do you go about removing these URLs from Yahoo’s index? You can delete them by clicking the ‘Delete URL’/Path’ link. Yahoo only allows you to delete up to 25 deletes per site. MovingExplorer.com has 141 variation of the index.php with tracking parameters. They have also seemed to use Google AdWords’ ad Title as the page title for of the URLs.

It appears everyone loves and uses Google. Even Yahoo. Does anyone know of a way to prevent this from happening?

Check out comments on this posting on Sphinn. Feel free to Sphinn it too…

Here are some essential WordPress plugins to assist in the process of optimizing your blog for pickup and sharing by visitors, search engines, and aggregators. Make sure you know what you are doing before you go and install these, some play nice with each other, and some do not.

Social Marketing

Share This - provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to add your posts to various social bookmarking sites.

Sitemaps

Google Sitemap Generator - automatically generates XML sitemaps for WordPress. Includes many options such as auto-ping, change and priority adjustments and selection of content for inclusion.

Dagon Design Google Sitemap Generator - support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO Title Tag - Allows full control of title tags for all pages and posts. Allows you to setup default title tags for your 404 page, homepage and categories. Includes support for Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Another WordPress Meta Plugin - adds META tags (keywords and descriptions) to your posts and pages.

All In One SEO Pack - generates META tags and lets you define them, automatically optimizes your titles and lets you specify your own, avoid indexing of duplicate content.

Feeds

FeedBurner FeedSmith - detects all ways to access your feed and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

Stay tuned for part 2…