Liveblogging Wordcamp SF 2009, Part 1

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I am currently at Wordcamp in (not so) sunny San Francisco getting some pointers on good blogging practices and SEO. So far, some good tips:

Check out the plugin:
Cookies for Comments – Uses a cookie to keep spammers from directly commenting on your blog…keeps out automated commenting.
Change the term “Categories” to “Topics” to increase traffic.
Add a “most popular posts” section to your sidebar for deeper reading and longer visits.
Use analytics to test the results of all blogging cliches and truisms you have learned (short posts, social links, etc). Some of them break down under analysis.
Have Fun!

Update your Wordpress install immediately upon updates. He showed us a hilarious view of the American Nazi Party’s homepage source… which had been so severely spammed it had more links about Cialis than links about hate.
Don’t stuff with keywords. Write naturally and then do keyword research for SEO.
The current Wordpress version includes the “rel=”canonical”" tag, which allows for a solution to the duplicate content problem.
Use the “Katamari Damacy” method for building your content: start with a small niche you know a lot about and then expand your posts slowly.
In your permalinks settings for Wordpress, use the /%postname%/ to include keywods for indexing. (I would actually advise using /%category%/%postname%/, as this allows for richer semantic connections between terms and allows for the creation of query spaces).

More to come later!

Liveblogging #Wordcamp SF 2009, Part 1