O:9:"MagpieRSS":19:{s:6:"parser";i:0;s:12:"current_item";a:0:{}s:5:"items";a:20:{i:0;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:37:"WordPress Archive Pages: the tutorial";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/ituadafIpro/";s:8:"comments";s:50:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-archive-pages/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 22 Aug 2012 13:26:41 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:9:"WordPress";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45944";s:11:"description";s:813:"<p>On any bigger site, you&#8217;ll get archive pages of some sort. Whether they are taxonomy or category archives, like this SEO category, Custom Post Type archives like this one for our WordPress plugin reviews or my speaking engagements, or even date archives: they all share the same common traits. In WordPress an archive will, by default, consist&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-archive-pages/">WordPress Archive Pages: the tutorial</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:10:"Array     ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:46:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-archive-pages/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"12";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:3:"   ";s:13:"content_title";s:78:"WordPress Archive pagesGenesis Archive SettingsWordPress category introduction";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:108:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-archive-pages/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wordpress-archive-pages";}s:7:"summary";s:813:"<p>On any bigger site, you&#8217;ll get archive pages of some sort. Whether they are taxonomy or category archives, like this SEO category, Custom Post Type archives like this one for our WordPress plugin reviews or my speaking engagements, or even date archives: they all share the same common traits. In WordPress an archive will, by default, consist&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-archive-pages/">WordPress Archive Pages: the tutorial</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:1;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:56:"Why relative URLs should be forbidden for web developers";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/qPbEHoWyZgc/";s:8:"comments";s:47:"http://yoast.com/relative-urls-issues/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Fri, 17 Aug 2012 09:52:18 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:23:"Webdesign & development";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45908";s:11:"description";s:782:"<p>Twitter is the website / web service most of us love and sometimes hate, a service that has become an integral part of most of our online identities. It&#8217;s one of the services we expect to be there when we Google ourselves or other people. So when you Google yourself and instead of twitter.com, you&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/relative-urls-issues/">Why relative URLs should be forbidden for web developers</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:7:"Array  ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:43:"http://yoast.com/relative-urls-issues/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"38";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:1:" ";s:13:"content_title";s:17:"yoast – twitter";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:102:"http://yoast.com/relative-urls-issues/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=relative-urls-issues";}s:7:"summary";s:782:"<p>Twitter is the website / web service most of us love and sometimes hate, a service that has become an integral part of most of our online identities. It&#8217;s one of the services we expect to be there when we Google ourselves or other people. So when you Google yourself and instead of twitter.com, you&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/relative-urls-issues/">Why relative URLs should be forbidden for web developers</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:2;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:20:"Redesign and more :)";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/Dzq5aIAuyBM/";s:8:"comments";s:44:"http://yoast.com/redesign-and-more/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 15 Aug 2012 11:47:45 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:8:"Offtopic";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45894";s:11:"description";s:794:"<p>Yoast keeps changing and growing in many, many ways. One of those is a redesign, which is now live. We&#8217;re finally using the theme framework we&#8217;ve been recommending to others for ages: StudioPress&#8217; Genesis. We used an external developer for most of the development, just because I&#8217;m too pressed for time myself and didn&#8217;t want&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/redesign-and-more/">Redesign and more :)</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:7:"Array  ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:40:"http://yoast.com/redesign-and-more/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"71";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:1:" ";s:13:"content_title";s:14:"yoast redesign";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:96:"http://yoast.com/redesign-and-more/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=redesign-and-more";}s:7:"summary";s:794:"<p>Yoast keeps changing and growing in many, many ways. One of those is a redesign, which is now live. We&#8217;re finally using the theme framework we&#8217;ve been recommending to others for ages: StudioPress&#8217; Genesis. We used an external developer for most of the development, just because I&#8217;m too pressed for time myself and didn&#8217;t want&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/redesign-and-more/">Redesign and more :)</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:3;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:30:"Tag Optimization for WordPress";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/99yY97SLdX4/";s:8:"comments";s:42:"http://yoast.com/optimizing-tags/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 04 Jul 2012 14:51:30 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:9:"WordPress";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45845";s:11:"description";s:769:"<p>In our website reviews we regularly encounter websites who&#8217;ve got just as many tags as posts, or 20,000 posts and 5,000 tags. This is undesirable as it means you&#8217;re not using tags to relate your posts together, which is what you should do. We usually tell them to optimize their tags but that&#8217;s easier to&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/optimizing-tags/">Tag Optimization for WordPress</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:13:"Array        ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:38:"http://yoast.com/optimizing-tags/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"86";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:4:"    ";s:13:"content_title";s:188:"Easy Tag Optimization with Term Optimizer by YoastWith selected tags, do the following: merge, delete & redirect, shows posts with term, search & tagDelete & redirect tagSearch & Tag posts";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:92:"http://yoast.com/optimizing-tags/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=optimizing-tags";}s:7:"summary";s:769:"<p>In our website reviews we regularly encounter websites who&#8217;ve got just as many tags as posts, or 20,000 posts and 5,000 tags. This is undesirable as it means you&#8217;re not using tags to relate your posts together, which is what you should do. We usually tell them to optimize their tags but that&#8217;s easier to&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/optimizing-tags/">Tag Optimization for WordPress</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:4;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:44:"Twitter Cards, Open Graph & Social Meta Data";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/QeKlh469Q54/";s:8:"comments";s:40:"http://yoast.com/twitter-cards/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Sat, 16 Jun 2012 06:22:25 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:45:"Social MediaOpenGraphTwitterWordPress Plugins";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45800";s:11:"description";s:784:"<p>Two days ago, Twitter introduced a new system called Twitter Cards. It allows site owners to enhance the expanded tweets Twitter creates for their site, much in the same was as  OpenGraph tags give site owners the chance to determine what their posts &#38; pages will look like when shared on Facebook. In fact, Twitter&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twitter-cards/">Twitter Cards, Open Graph &#038; Social Meta Data</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:7:"Array  ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:36:"http://yoast.com/twitter-cards/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"35";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:1:" ";s:13:"content_title";s:20:"Example Twitter Card";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:88:"http://yoast.com/twitter-cards/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=twitter-cards";}s:7:"summary";s:784:"<p>Two days ago, Twitter introduced a new system called Twitter Cards. It allows site owners to enhance the expanded tweets Twitter creates for their site, much in the same was as  OpenGraph tags give site owners the chance to determine what their posts &#38; pages will look like when shared on Facebook. In fact, Twitter&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twitter-cards/">Twitter Cards, Open Graph &#038; Social Meta Data</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:5;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:32:"User Contact Fields in WordPress";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/gHUBwi4FUAk/";s:8:"comments";s:56:"http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wordpress/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 13 Jun 2012 08:00:26 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:47:"WordPressFacebookGoogleTwitterWordPress Plugins";s:4:"guid";s:24:"http://yoast.com/?p=1593";s:11:"description";s:778:"<p>WordPress comes with a &#8220;default&#8221; set of user contact fields, which has always looked random to me: AIM, Yahoo IM and Jabber / Google Talk, instead of what I&#8217;d want to have there: Twitter, Facebook and Google+. A while back I got frustrated enough to have a look at how this was actually dealt with&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wordpress/">User Contact Fields in WordPress</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:3157:"<p>WordPress comes with a &#8220;default&#8221; set of user contact fields, which has always looked random to me: AIM, Yahoo IM and Jabber / Google Talk, instead of what I&#8217;d want to have there: Twitter, Facebook and Google+. A while back I got frustrated enough to have a look at how this was actually dealt with in the backend of WordPress, and fix it, so in WordPress 2.9 an API was added as a result of ticket <a
href="http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10240">#10240</a>.</p><p>This change allowed for developers to add user contact fields in a very simple way. The example code below adds Twitter and removes Yahoo IM, and yes, this is all the code that&#8217;s needed to do it:</p><pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">function add_twitter_contactmethod( $contactmethods ) {
  // Add Twitter
  if ( !isset( $contactmethods['twitter'] ) )
    $contactmethods['twitter'] = 'Twitter';

  // Remove Yahoo IM
  if ( isset( $contactmethods['yim'] ) )
    unset( $contactmethods['yim'] );

  return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter( 'user_contactmethods', 'add_twitter_contactmethod', 10, 1 );</pre><p>Easy does it, right? Retrieving the user contact field isn&#8217;t much harder either, for example, if you&#8217;re on a singular page, use the following code:</p><pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">if ( is_singular() ) {
  global $post;
  $twitter = get_the_author_meta( 'twitter', $post-&gt;post_author );
}</pre><p>And there you have it! My <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/">WordPress SEO plugin</a> uses this exact method to add a Google+ profile field for users to be used in conjunction with the <a
href="http://yoast.com/highlighting-wordpress-authors-search/">author highlighting</a> features of Google. If you&#8217;d want to echo the Google+ user contact field that plugin creates, do the following:</p><pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">if ( is_singular() ) {
  global $post;
  the_author_meta( 'googleplus', $post-&gt;post_author );
}</pre><p>As you can see this uses <code>the_author_meta</code> instead of <code>get_the_author_meta</code>. The <code>$post</code> global and the <code>$post-&gt;post_author</code> reference would strictly speaking not even be needed as they&#8217;re called from the global otherwise within the function, but this might prevent issues with retrieving the wrong user contact fields.</p><p>That&#8217;s it! Now you can add and remove user contact fields as you wish. You can do this in your theme&#8217;s <em>functions.php</em> or in a plugin, be sure to add the <code>isset</code> code around it to prevent notices though!</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wordpress/">User Contact Fields in WordPress</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/gHUBwi4FUAk" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:52:"http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wordpress/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"20";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:120:"http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wordpress/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=user-contact-fields-wordpress";}s:7:"summary";s:778:"<p>WordPress comes with a &#8220;default&#8221; set of user contact fields, which has always looked random to me: AIM, Yahoo IM and Jabber / Google Talk, instead of what I&#8217;d want to have there: Twitter, Facebook and Google+. A while back I got frustrated enough to have a look at how this was actually dealt with&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wordpress/">User Contact Fields in WordPress</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:3157:"<p>WordPress comes with a &#8220;default&#8221; set of user contact fields, which has always looked random to me: AIM, Yahoo IM and Jabber / Google Talk, instead of what I&#8217;d want to have there: Twitter, Facebook and Google+. A while back I got frustrated enough to have a look at how this was actually dealt with in the backend of WordPress, and fix it, so in WordPress 2.9 an API was added as a result of ticket <a
href="http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10240">#10240</a>.</p><p>This change allowed for developers to add user contact fields in a very simple way. The example code below adds Twitter and removes Yahoo IM, and yes, this is all the code that&#8217;s needed to do it:</p><pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">function add_twitter_contactmethod( $contactmethods ) {
  // Add Twitter
  if ( !isset( $contactmethods['twitter'] ) )
    $contactmethods['twitter'] = 'Twitter';

  // Remove Yahoo IM
  if ( isset( $contactmethods['yim'] ) )
    unset( $contactmethods['yim'] );

  return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter( 'user_contactmethods', 'add_twitter_contactmethod', 10, 1 );</pre><p>Easy does it, right? Retrieving the user contact field isn&#8217;t much harder either, for example, if you&#8217;re on a singular page, use the following code:</p><pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">if ( is_singular() ) {
  global $post;
  $twitter = get_the_author_meta( 'twitter', $post-&gt;post_author );
}</pre><p>And there you have it! My <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/">WordPress SEO plugin</a> uses this exact method to add a Google+ profile field for users to be used in conjunction with the <a
href="http://yoast.com/highlighting-wordpress-authors-search/">author highlighting</a> features of Google. If you&#8217;d want to echo the Google+ user contact field that plugin creates, do the following:</p><pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">if ( is_singular() ) {
  global $post;
  the_author_meta( 'googleplus', $post-&gt;post_author );
}</pre><p>As you can see this uses <code>the_author_meta</code> instead of <code>get_the_author_meta</code>. The <code>$post</code> global and the <code>$post-&gt;post_author</code> reference would strictly speaking not even be needed as they&#8217;re called from the global otherwise within the function, but this might prevent issues with retrieving the wrong user contact fields.</p><p>That&#8217;s it! Now you can add and remove user contact fields as you wish. You can do this in your theme&#8217;s <em>functions.php</em> or in a plugin, be sure to add the <code>isset</code> code around it to prevent notices though!</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wordpress/">User Contact Fields in WordPress</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/gHUBwi4FUAk" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:6;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:35:"WordPress SEO 1.2 – Major Upgrade";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/9gwcWupQ9Is/";s:8:"comments";s:44:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-1-2/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 12 Jun 2012 13:11:26 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:39:"WordPressWordPress PluginsWordPress SEO";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45751";s:11:"description";s:751:"<p>My WordPress SEO plugin has been updated to 1.2. A few weeks back I did a series of bug fix updates and while doing that I noticed there where things that were really bugging me in the plugin. Everybody seemed to focus on the settings and hardly anyone was working with the snippet preview and&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-1-2/">WordPress SEO 1.2 &#8211; Major Upgrade</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:15:"Array          ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:40:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-1-2/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:3:"370";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:5:"     ";s:13:"content_title";s:137:"Titles Meta settingstitles meta settings for post typesScore buttonsSEO Score shown inside the publish boxSEO Score in the pages overview";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:96:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-1-2/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wordpress-seo-1-2";}s:7:"summary";s:751:"<p>My WordPress SEO plugin has been updated to 1.2. A few weeks back I did a series of bug fix updates and while doing that I noticed there where things that were really bugging me in the plugin. Everybody seemed to focus on the settings and hardly anyone was working with the snippet preview and&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-1-2/">WordPress SEO 1.2 &#8211; Major Upgrade</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:7;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:39:"Push rel=”author” through your head";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/Aq4UeMKt4bQ/";s:8:"comments";s:47:"http://yoast.com/push-rel-author-head/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:36:41 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:42:"SEOWordPressWordPress PluginsWordPress SEO";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45687";s:11:"description";s:848:"<p>No this title wasn&#8217;t a pun. It&#8217;s dead serious. My buddy Arjan discovered yesterday that Google is now allowing rel=&#8221;author&#8221; markup through a &#60;link&#62; element in the head of your site. This makes adding rel=&#8221;author&#8221; to your site properly a lot easier, and allows me to add it to my WordPress SEO plugin. The rel=&#8221;author&#8221; link&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/push-rel-author-head/">Push rel=&#8221;author&#8221; through your head</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:11:"Array      ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:43:"http://yoast.com/push-rel-author-head/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:3:"132";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:3:"   ";s:13:"content_title";s:85:"rel=author in actionGoogle Plus for rel=”author”rel=author drop down for homepage";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:102:"http://yoast.com/push-rel-author-head/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=push-rel-author-head";}s:7:"summary";s:848:"<p>No this title wasn&#8217;t a pun. It&#8217;s dead serious. My buddy Arjan discovered yesterday that Google is now allowing rel=&#8221;author&#8221; markup through a &#60;link&#62; element in the head of your site. This makes adding rel=&#8221;author&#8221; to your site properly a lot easier, and allows me to add it to my WordPress SEO plugin. The rel=&#8221;author&#8221; link&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/push-rel-author-head/">Push rel=&#8221;author&#8221; through your head</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:8;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:29:"Common sense for your website";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/6FCA-xZElVg/";s:8:"comments";s:39:"http://yoast.com/common-sense/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 06 Jun 2012 13:34:17 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:16:"Michiel Heijmans";}s:8:"category";s:37:"SEOUsability & ConversionSocial Media";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45649";s:11:"description";s:740:"<p>I am the last one to tell a website owner that his job is to become the local SEO or usability expert. That would be unrealistic. Why should a constructor learn SEO? He should not. Why should a gardner know all about user experience? He should not. But how about applying some common sense to&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/common-sense/">Common sense for your website</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/michiel/">Michiel Heijmans</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:8071:"<p>I am the last one to tell a website owner that his job is to become the local SEO or usability expert. That would be unrealistic. Why should a constructor learn SEO? He should not. Why should a gardner know all about user experience? He should not. But how about applying some common sense to your website?</p><p>Let&#8217;s go over an imaginary website, top to bottom:</p><h2>Browser</h2><p>Your browser has a couple of spots where your &lt;title&gt; is shown, like in the upper left and on a tab. That means your page title should start with he main subject of the page, not your site name. If it would start with your site name, all tabs would read the same title.</p><p>Next to that, you want your browser to display the website as quick as possible, meaning you should make your website as fast as possible. Sure, browser cache and compression might be way over your head, but how about not using a template with tables and combining your CSS and JavaScript files? Or lowering the number of CSS and JavaScript files by losing all &#8216;extra&#8217; WordPress plugins, assuming your site is in WordPress of course.</p><h2>Header</h2><p>Do your really think putting all these items in your header help visitors or Google:</p><ul><li>RSS, Facebook, Twitter, Google+</li><li>Telephone number</li><li>Additional menu for About Us, Privacy Policy, Contact, Directions, Terms &amp; Conditions</li><li>Subscription form for email newsletter</li><li>Banner for your own or even worse other company&#8217;s products</li><li>Quality Marks</li><li>etc</li></ul><p>And all that in the first 100px of your website. Squeezed together and made to be skipped anyway. That header area should contain only the necessary, all other items should be in a sidebar or footer area. If you want people to call you, list your phone number. Make it large, but no larger than your logo. If you are the best painter in Maine, make that statement in the header. No need for all the other fuzz.</p><p>With your header comes the menu (in most cases). If you would list 30 items in the menu, do you think that would add focus to your website or do you think just using six items would guide your visitor more? Consider creating a submenu and add that structure to your breadcrumbs as well.</p><p>So far I have not mentioned anything strange or difficult to implement, right? It&#8217;s all common sense and you have thought at least 10 times &#8220;I know that already&#8221;. So why are not all websites set up with these basics? Why is there so much crap on the web?</p><h2>Content</h2><p>Your page content should contain at least 300 words. That has a simple reason: would your page be a great source for the topic or keyword you want to rank for when it would only contain 50 words? Is that all there is to say about that keyword? I don&#8217;t believe that, you don&#8217;t believe that and Google does not believe that. There should be a significant amount of content for your page to be considered a great source of information.</p><p>Of course you will write some posts or pages that are much shorter, like your contact page, but do your really want to rank that page? No, not on most websites. Don&#8217;t go crazy over this on pages like that, that&#8217;s not worth the effort. Get them on your site with other pages and guide them to your contact form.</p><p>An easy way to do that is by using <a
title="Where do you want me to click?" href="http://yoast.com/call-to-action/">a call-to-action</a>. Make that call-to-action stand out by using colors that are not overused in your design or use a much larger font. Surround the call-to-action with enough whitespace. If you are adding your fourth call-to-action, please realize that that again is killing all focus on the website. Stick to one and let the content do the rest.</p><p>Focus in your content can be achieved by adding subheadings to your text that should be structured in (again) a logical matter, pretty much the same way you should set up a Word document:</p><ul><li>H1<ul
style="margin-bottom: 0;"><li>H2<ul
style="margin-bottom: 0;"><li>H3</li><li>H3</li></ul></li><li>H2</li></ul></li></ul><p>That also means one H1 per page, being the site name on the homepage and the page title on the other pages.</p><p>I think we all agree nowadays that reading on a computer screen is not as pleasant as reading text on paper. But we should make things as convenient as possible: make short sentences and even more important, create short paragraphs. I&#8217;d like to create paragraphs that are four to eight lines long and I hope this is a nice read ;)</p><p>In these paragraphs you should link to your own pages as well as to other websites. The great thing about these links to your own pages is that these links are really valuable as they are surrounded with relevant, related content. Next to that, you can easily use your keywords of choice in the anchor text. Unfortunately most people seem to think that these links should only go to other websites. A regrettable misunderstanding.</p><h2>Sharing</h2><p>If you write great content.. Let me rephrase that: <strong>provided</strong> you write great content, people will be more than willing to tell others about your piece. Of course you should add social sharing buttons below the content. These buttons should not be styled in some fashionable way, but should look like the commonly used share buttons &#8211; see below this post ;) &#8211; for better recognition as sharing buttons.</p><p>I&#8217;d use Facebook, Twitter, Share-by-email and Google+ for all websites, Linkedin for business news / economy related websites and Pinterest only when you have that amazing image in the post that people might want to share. Do not list a share option, just because people you know are using it, but only use those sharing options you think are relevant for your website.</p><p>The fashionable buttons can be used for subscription options, like links to your Facebook profile or your Youtube channel. In most cases, the square icons are used for this, or the round icons you find on yoast.com.</p><h2>Footer</h2><p>This is not a great footer:</p><blockquote><p>© SomewebsiteImade.com. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this content only after written permission.</p></blockquote><p>First: really? Share buttons <em>and</em> telling people they should not use your content on other websites? We actually encountered this in one of the <a
title="Website Review" href="http://yoast.com/hire-me/website-review/">websites we have reviewed</a>.</p><p>Next to that, I think the entire footer should be used for extra contact information (or a small form) and other information that you really want to list on your website like a small link list, perhaps some recent news items and a small category list (max 8 items or so). Not sure about this, but why not throw in some social profiles as well..</p><p>What I really dislike is a footer that has one million links in it. That reduces the value of all other links and all focus on the page.</p><p>So, in conclusion, I think you should not so much focus on hearsay about SEO, but think about what seems logical and makes the most sense. Only when your website makes common sense to you, you should go look for someone that can help you with the not so logical Search Engine and Usability optimization issues ;)</p><h3>Any additions?</h3><p>Common sense is not as easy as it looks for a lot of people. If you have any comments or additions to the list above, please drop me a line in the comments!</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/common-sense/">Common sense for your website</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/michiel/">Michiel Heijmans</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/6FCA-xZElVg" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:35:"http://yoast.com/common-sense/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"43";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:86:"http://yoast.com/common-sense/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=common-sense";}s:7:"summary";s:740:"<p>I am the last one to tell a website owner that his job is to become the local SEO or usability expert. That would be unrealistic. Why should a constructor learn SEO? He should not. Why should a gardner know all about user experience? He should not. But how about applying some common sense to&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/common-sense/">Common sense for your website</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/michiel/">Michiel Heijmans</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:8071:"<p>I am the last one to tell a website owner that his job is to become the local SEO or usability expert. That would be unrealistic. Why should a constructor learn SEO? He should not. Why should a gardner know all about user experience? He should not. But how about applying some common sense to your website?</p><p>Let&#8217;s go over an imaginary website, top to bottom:</p><h2>Browser</h2><p>Your browser has a couple of spots where your &lt;title&gt; is shown, like in the upper left and on a tab. That means your page title should start with he main subject of the page, not your site name. If it would start with your site name, all tabs would read the same title.</p><p>Next to that, you want your browser to display the website as quick as possible, meaning you should make your website as fast as possible. Sure, browser cache and compression might be way over your head, but how about not using a template with tables and combining your CSS and JavaScript files? Or lowering the number of CSS and JavaScript files by losing all &#8216;extra&#8217; WordPress plugins, assuming your site is in WordPress of course.</p><h2>Header</h2><p>Do your really think putting all these items in your header help visitors or Google:</p><ul><li>RSS, Facebook, Twitter, Google+</li><li>Telephone number</li><li>Additional menu for About Us, Privacy Policy, Contact, Directions, Terms &amp; Conditions</li><li>Subscription form for email newsletter</li><li>Banner for your own or even worse other company&#8217;s products</li><li>Quality Marks</li><li>etc</li></ul><p>And all that in the first 100px of your website. Squeezed together and made to be skipped anyway. That header area should contain only the necessary, all other items should be in a sidebar or footer area. If you want people to call you, list your phone number. Make it large, but no larger than your logo. If you are the best painter in Maine, make that statement in the header. No need for all the other fuzz.</p><p>With your header comes the menu (in most cases). If you would list 30 items in the menu, do you think that would add focus to your website or do you think just using six items would guide your visitor more? Consider creating a submenu and add that structure to your breadcrumbs as well.</p><p>So far I have not mentioned anything strange or difficult to implement, right? It&#8217;s all common sense and you have thought at least 10 times &#8220;I know that already&#8221;. So why are not all websites set up with these basics? Why is there so much crap on the web?</p><h2>Content</h2><p>Your page content should contain at least 300 words. That has a simple reason: would your page be a great source for the topic or keyword you want to rank for when it would only contain 50 words? Is that all there is to say about that keyword? I don&#8217;t believe that, you don&#8217;t believe that and Google does not believe that. There should be a significant amount of content for your page to be considered a great source of information.</p><p>Of course you will write some posts or pages that are much shorter, like your contact page, but do your really want to rank that page? No, not on most websites. Don&#8217;t go crazy over this on pages like that, that&#8217;s not worth the effort. Get them on your site with other pages and guide them to your contact form.</p><p>An easy way to do that is by using <a
title="Where do you want me to click?" href="http://yoast.com/call-to-action/">a call-to-action</a>. Make that call-to-action stand out by using colors that are not overused in your design or use a much larger font. Surround the call-to-action with enough whitespace. If you are adding your fourth call-to-action, please realize that that again is killing all focus on the website. Stick to one and let the content do the rest.</p><p>Focus in your content can be achieved by adding subheadings to your text that should be structured in (again) a logical matter, pretty much the same way you should set up a Word document:</p><ul><li>H1<ul
style="margin-bottom: 0;"><li>H2<ul
style="margin-bottom: 0;"><li>H3</li><li>H3</li></ul></li><li>H2</li></ul></li></ul><p>That also means one H1 per page, being the site name on the homepage and the page title on the other pages.</p><p>I think we all agree nowadays that reading on a computer screen is not as pleasant as reading text on paper. But we should make things as convenient as possible: make short sentences and even more important, create short paragraphs. I&#8217;d like to create paragraphs that are four to eight lines long and I hope this is a nice read ;)</p><p>In these paragraphs you should link to your own pages as well as to other websites. The great thing about these links to your own pages is that these links are really valuable as they are surrounded with relevant, related content. Next to that, you can easily use your keywords of choice in the anchor text. Unfortunately most people seem to think that these links should only go to other websites. A regrettable misunderstanding.</p><h2>Sharing</h2><p>If you write great content.. Let me rephrase that: <strong>provided</strong> you write great content, people will be more than willing to tell others about your piece. Of course you should add social sharing buttons below the content. These buttons should not be styled in some fashionable way, but should look like the commonly used share buttons &#8211; see below this post ;) &#8211; for better recognition as sharing buttons.</p><p>I&#8217;d use Facebook, Twitter, Share-by-email and Google+ for all websites, Linkedin for business news / economy related websites and Pinterest only when you have that amazing image in the post that people might want to share. Do not list a share option, just because people you know are using it, but only use those sharing options you think are relevant for your website.</p><p>The fashionable buttons can be used for subscription options, like links to your Facebook profile or your Youtube channel. In most cases, the square icons are used for this, or the round icons you find on yoast.com.</p><h2>Footer</h2><p>This is not a great footer:</p><blockquote><p>© SomewebsiteImade.com. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this content only after written permission.</p></blockquote><p>First: really? Share buttons <em>and</em> telling people they should not use your content on other websites? We actually encountered this in one of the <a
title="Website Review" href="http://yoast.com/hire-me/website-review/">websites we have reviewed</a>.</p><p>Next to that, I think the entire footer should be used for extra contact information (or a small form) and other information that you really want to list on your website like a small link list, perhaps some recent news items and a small category list (max 8 items or so). Not sure about this, but why not throw in some social profiles as well..</p><p>What I really dislike is a footer that has one million links in it. That reduces the value of all other links and all focus on the page.</p><p>So, in conclusion, I think you should not so much focus on hearsay about SEO, but think about what seems logical and makes the most sense. Only when your website makes common sense to you, you should go look for someone that can help you with the not so logical Search Engine and Usability optimization issues ;)</p><h3>Any additions?</h3><p>Common sense is not as easy as it looks for a lot of people. If you have any comments or additions to the list above, please drop me a line in the comments!</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/common-sense/">Common sense for your website</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/michiel/">Michiel Heijmans</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/6FCA-xZElVg" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:9;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:32:"Why should I visit your website?";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/um_-AjHfIe4/";s:8:"comments";s:47:"http://yoast.com/introductory-content/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 28 May 2012 19:18:17 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:16:"Michiel Heijmans";}s:8:"category";s:22:"Usability & Conversion";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45638";s:11:"description";s:775:"<p>One thing we often recommend in our site analyses, is the use of introductory content on a homepage. We get quite a lot response on that, with people being unclear how to do that. &#8220;Where should I put that content?&#8221; or &#8220;How long should that content be?&#8221; or the one I dislike the most: &#8220;I&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/introductory-content/">Why should I visit your website?</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/michiel/">Michiel Heijmans</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:11:"Array      ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:43:"http://yoast.com/introductory-content/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"27";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:3:"   ";s:13:"content_title";s:50:"Chicago Tribune logoHypedc.com source codewp-types";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:102:"http://yoast.com/introductory-content/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=introductory-content";}s:7:"summary";s:775:"<p>One thing we often recommend in our site analyses, is the use of introductory content on a homepage. We get quite a lot response on that, with people being unclear how to do that. &#8220;Where should I put that content?&#8221; or &#8220;How long should that content be?&#8221; or the one I dislike the most: &#8220;I&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/introductory-content/">Why should I visit your website?</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/michiel/">Michiel Heijmans</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:10;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:49:"Penguin, Panda, it’s not that black and white..";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/UDijxOyZ450/";s:8:"comments";s:47:"http://yoast.com/penguin-panda-issues/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 14 May 2012 12:37:38 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:3:"SEO";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45611";s:11:"description";s:818:"<p>We&#8217;re getting quite a few site review requests and SEO consultancy requests recently for people that have been hit by a sudden drop in traffic after the recent Google Penguin update. Because there has been quite some news about Google&#8217;s Penguin update and before that its Panda update, people are blaming those. In our perspective,&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/penguin-panda-issues/">Penguin, Panda, it&#8217;s not that black and white..</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:7:"Array  ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:43:"http://yoast.com/penguin-panda-issues/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"85";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:1:" ";s:13:"content_title";s:24:"Yoast – Penguin update";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:102:"http://yoast.com/penguin-panda-issues/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=penguin-panda-issues";}s:7:"summary";s:818:"<p>We&#8217;re getting quite a few site review requests and SEO consultancy requests recently for people that have been hit by a sudden drop in traffic after the recent Google Penguin update. Because there has been quite some news about Google&#8217;s Penguin update and before that its Panda update, people are blaming those. In our perspective,&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/penguin-panda-issues/">Penguin, Panda, it&#8217;s not that black and white..</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:11;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:30:"Having a blast at BlueGlass LA";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/r_uYdP0kJkU/";s:8:"comments";s:45:"http://yoast.com/blast-blueglass-la/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:18:26 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:13:"SEOConference";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45602";s:11:"description";s:775:"<p>I&#8217;m currently sitting in the conference room for BlueGlass LA, listening to Marty Weintraub and finishing my presentation I&#8217;ll be giving this afternoon. Which leads me to the point of this post as I&#8217;m going to try and prove a point, therefore the following video is not really meant for you to watch but for&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/blast-blueglass-la/">Having a blast at BlueGlass LA</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:10:"Array     ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:41:"http://yoast.com/blast-blueglass-la/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:1:"4";}s:5:"media";a:4:{s:7:"content";s:1:" ";s:13:"content_title";s:71:"BlueGlass LA • Best Online Marketing Conf on the West Coast • Yoast";s:19:"content_description";s:93:"Having a blast at BlueGlass LA with some of the most awesome internet marketers in the world.";s:16:"content_keywords";s:46:"BlueGlass,BlueGlass LA,conference,BlueGlass LA";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:98:"http://yoast.com/blast-blueglass-la/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=blast-blueglass-la";}s:7:"summary";s:775:"<p>I&#8217;m currently sitting in the conference room for BlueGlass LA, listening to Marty Weintraub and finishing my presentation I&#8217;ll be giving this afternoon. Which leads me to the point of this post as I&#8217;m going to try and prove a point, therefore the following video is not really meant for you to watch but for&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/blast-blueglass-la/">Having a blast at BlueGlass LA</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:12;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:19:"Why I dislike Bo.lt";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/6OfPelIL784/";s:8:"comments";s:39:"http://yoast.com/dislike-bolt/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Sat, 21 Apr 2012 21:59:41 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:12:"Social Media";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45589";s:11:"description";s:710:"<p>When I released my updated WordPress SEO article a few weeks back, my buddy Avinash was kind enough to tweet it. He tweeted it, at first, with a bo.lt link. Bo.lt is a sharing service that allows you to basically make a copy of a page and add some notes or even some changes to&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/dislike-bolt/">Why I dislike Bo.lt</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:7:"Array  ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:35:"http://yoast.com/dislike-bolt/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"14";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:1:" ";s:13:"content_title";s:10:"bo.lt logo";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:86:"http://yoast.com/dislike-bolt/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dislike-bolt";}s:7:"summary";s:710:"<p>When I released my updated WordPress SEO article a few weeks back, my buddy Avinash was kind enough to tweet it. He tweeted it, at first, with a bo.lt link. Bo.lt is a sharing service that allows you to basically make a copy of a page and add some notes or even some changes to&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/dislike-bolt/">Why I dislike Bo.lt</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:13;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:27:"WordPress Stats Infographic";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/RkHT86bonB8/";s:8:"comments";s:42:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-stats/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:30:37 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:9:"WordPress";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45554";s:11:"description";s:871:"<p>[pin img="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/wordpress-stats-infographic-yoast-full.jpg" title="WordPress Stats infographic by Yoast"]My Google Analytics plugin recently hit 3 million downloads and my WordPress SEO plugin hit its first million downloads. I thought those stats were cool and I decided to have an infographic made with more WordPress stats and dive in a little bit more and gather some stats that I&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-stats/">WordPress Stats Infographic</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:7:"Array  ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:38:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-stats/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"57";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:1:" ";s:13:"content_title";s:36:"WordPress Stats infographic by Yoast";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:92:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-stats/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wordpress-stats";}s:7:"summary";s:871:"<p>[pin img="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/wordpress-stats-infographic-yoast-full.jpg" title="WordPress Stats infographic by Yoast"]My Google Analytics plugin recently hit 3 million downloads and my WordPress SEO plugin hit its first million downloads. I thought those stats were cool and I decided to have an infographic made with more WordPress stats and dive in a little bit more and gather some stats that I&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-stats/">WordPress Stats Infographic</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:14;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:17:"The ethics of SEO";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/YfVDkmGVt78/";s:8:"comments";s:37:"http://yoast.com/ethics-seo/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 04 Apr 2012 08:29:32 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:7:"SEOSpam";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45531";s:11:"description";s:774:"<p>The type of SEO I help my clients do and promote to you using this blog is often labeled white hat SEO because it stays within Google&#8217;s and other search engines guidelines. Other SEO&#8217;s don&#8217;t care about Google&#8217;s guidelines as much and do what&#8217;s called &#8220;black hat SEO&#8221;. Far too often though, black hat SEO&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/ethics-seo/">The ethics of SEO</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:6527:"<p>The type of SEO I help my clients do and promote to you using this blog is often labeled white hat SEO because it stays within Google&#8217;s and other search engines guidelines. Other SEO&#8217;s don&#8217;t care about Google&#8217;s guidelines as much and do what&#8217;s called &#8220;black hat SEO&#8221;. Far too often though, black hat SEO is confused with the hacking of sites and the use of other tactics not outside the laws of Google but the laws of our lands. I think it&#8217;s time for me to explain where I stand in this.</p><h2>My background</h2><p>As a former Theology student and as someone raised in the Christian tradition, I have a fairly specific (and in some eyes: stringent) set of ethics. I don&#8217;t work on gambling or porn related sites because of that. I&#8217;m aware that others have different opinions on this and I don&#8217;t judge others when they have other ethics with regards to their work. To each his own. Sometimes though, I draw the line. Among my friends are some of the world&#8217;s best black hat SEO&#8217;s. These are also guys that will <em>never</em> break a law or willfully hurt other people to get their rankings, they just game Google&#8217;s algorithms. I know <a
href="http://mattcutts.com/blog/">Matt</a> knows at least some of them and there&#8217;s even a form of &#8220;honor&#8221; among them: he seems to appreciate their ability to outwit their algorithm. Unfortunately not everyone in the SEO &#8220;community&#8221; is that clean: some people <em>are </em>willing to break laws or hurt other people. After the last SES conference in Amsterdam, which I arranged the speakers for, one of the speakers (not the keynote :) ) admitted to me he wouldn&#8217;t mind teaching other people how to hack sites or how to build trojans to gain links. I was too startled to give a proper response but decided later that day that I would never allow him back on a conference I arranged speakers for.</p><h2>Spammy Link Building in the Netherlands</h2><p>The last few days there&#8217;s been <a
href="http://www.molblog.nl/bericht/douwe-egberts-kpn-pon-en-randstad-betrokken-bij-icomment-spam-i/">an outcry</a> in the Netherlands over several companies using comment spam and forum spam as a method of gaining links. They&#8217;d been caught creating fake profiles on all sort of sites and pretending to interact while really only inserting their links. I had to laugh a bit, as would most of my UK, American and German friends, as that&#8217;s <em>so</em> common outside of the Netherlands nobody would be surprised to see that anymore. There was <a
href="http://www.molblog.nl/bericht/de-buzzmollen-van-groupon/">one specific case</a> though that &#8220;hurt&#8221; more than others (which was by another company by the way). Someone had willfully created an account on a forum for MS (multiple sclerosis) patients, claiming to be a patient, while was spamming links there to health related offers. That&#8217;s so low that it hurts.</p><h2>Outing Non-ethical SEO practices: immoral?</h2><p>Recently Joe Hall, whom I respect a lot, did a post saying <a
href="http://joehall.me/seo-outing-is-immoral/29/">SEO &#8220;outing&#8221; is immoral</a>. He mentions that while the outed practices themselves might be non-ethical, those people have families too, etc. Basically: people lose their jobs because of it. That&#8217;s true. And that&#8217;s sad. Especially as most of those people will not know what hit them. I will counter that though: those companies have grown by using their unethical methods, costing other people their jobs in other companies. This is a zero-sum game in most cases. Google doesn&#8217;t tell people what to buy, it helps them find <em>where</em> they can buy it. Keep this in your mind at all times: search doesn&#8217;t create demand, it merely funnels it. I refuse to let people who use unethical SEO methods &#8220;win&#8221; because they support families, simply because their more ethical competitors support families too. I recently <a
href="http://yoast.com/godaddy-link-building/">outed GoDaddy</a> over using spammy link building techniques and got a lot of flack for that from other people in the industry. Some seem to think that it&#8217;s all of &#8220;us&#8221; (SEO&#8217;s) against &#8220;them&#8221; (Google). I wholeheartedly disagree. GoDaddy was using its paying customers to strengthen their own SEO without consulting them, in fact, they were specifically hiding what they were doing in their editor. I don&#8217;t mind them &#8220;playing&#8221; Google&#8217;s algorithms. I mind them abusing their customers websites without their consent. The only way of making that stop is to ask Google to remove the value that abuse has. In the same way I loathe WordPress plugin developers who add links to their users sites without consent. I will <em>not</em> &#8221;out&#8221; people for buying high quality, relevant links from high quality websites related to their own topic, I have less issues outing people who hack into my website to gain a few links. This happens more often than I dare to admit.</p><h2>Policing the web</h2><p>Joe goes further and says:</p><blockquote><p>&#8220;If your paycheck doesn’t say “Google” on it, it’s not your job to police the web.&#8221;</p></blockquote><p>My paycheck doesn&#8217;t say Google. I&#8217;m not policing the web. Neither is Google. Google is trying to maintain a set of rules <em>within its own index</em>. It has all the rights in the world to do that. My paycheck doesn&#8217;t say &#8220;WordPress&#8221; either, yet I help develop that project because we all benefit. There <em>really</em> is such a thing as &#8220;the common good&#8221;. That&#8217;s entirely different from outing every SEO I find that does something outside of Google&#8217;s guidelines, I&#8217;m smart enough to create my own set of ethics. I hope you are too. I for one intend to help them battle unethical SEO&#8217;s because I think we all benefit from that.</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/ethics-seo/">The ethics of SEO</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/YfVDkmGVt78" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:33:"http://yoast.com/ethics-seo/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:3:"101";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:82:"http://yoast.com/ethics-seo/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ethics-seo";}s:7:"summary";s:774:"<p>The type of SEO I help my clients do and promote to you using this blog is often labeled white hat SEO because it stays within Google&#8217;s and other search engines guidelines. Other SEO&#8217;s don&#8217;t care about Google&#8217;s guidelines as much and do what&#8217;s called &#8220;black hat SEO&#8221;. Far too often though, black hat SEO&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/ethics-seo/">The ethics of SEO</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:6527:"<p>The type of SEO I help my clients do and promote to you using this blog is often labeled white hat SEO because it stays within Google&#8217;s and other search engines guidelines. Other SEO&#8217;s don&#8217;t care about Google&#8217;s guidelines as much and do what&#8217;s called &#8220;black hat SEO&#8221;. Far too often though, black hat SEO is confused with the hacking of sites and the use of other tactics not outside the laws of Google but the laws of our lands. I think it&#8217;s time for me to explain where I stand in this.</p><h2>My background</h2><p>As a former Theology student and as someone raised in the Christian tradition, I have a fairly specific (and in some eyes: stringent) set of ethics. I don&#8217;t work on gambling or porn related sites because of that. I&#8217;m aware that others have different opinions on this and I don&#8217;t judge others when they have other ethics with regards to their work. To each his own. Sometimes though, I draw the line. Among my friends are some of the world&#8217;s best black hat SEO&#8217;s. These are also guys that will <em>never</em> break a law or willfully hurt other people to get their rankings, they just game Google&#8217;s algorithms. I know <a
href="http://mattcutts.com/blog/">Matt</a> knows at least some of them and there&#8217;s even a form of &#8220;honor&#8221; among them: he seems to appreciate their ability to outwit their algorithm. Unfortunately not everyone in the SEO &#8220;community&#8221; is that clean: some people <em>are </em>willing to break laws or hurt other people. After the last SES conference in Amsterdam, which I arranged the speakers for, one of the speakers (not the keynote :) ) admitted to me he wouldn&#8217;t mind teaching other people how to hack sites or how to build trojans to gain links. I was too startled to give a proper response but decided later that day that I would never allow him back on a conference I arranged speakers for.</p><h2>Spammy Link Building in the Netherlands</h2><p>The last few days there&#8217;s been <a
href="http://www.molblog.nl/bericht/douwe-egberts-kpn-pon-en-randstad-betrokken-bij-icomment-spam-i/">an outcry</a> in the Netherlands over several companies using comment spam and forum spam as a method of gaining links. They&#8217;d been caught creating fake profiles on all sort of sites and pretending to interact while really only inserting their links. I had to laugh a bit, as would most of my UK, American and German friends, as that&#8217;s <em>so</em> common outside of the Netherlands nobody would be surprised to see that anymore. There was <a
href="http://www.molblog.nl/bericht/de-buzzmollen-van-groupon/">one specific case</a> though that &#8220;hurt&#8221; more than others (which was by another company by the way). Someone had willfully created an account on a forum for MS (multiple sclerosis) patients, claiming to be a patient, while was spamming links there to health related offers. That&#8217;s so low that it hurts.</p><h2>Outing Non-ethical SEO practices: immoral?</h2><p>Recently Joe Hall, whom I respect a lot, did a post saying <a
href="http://joehall.me/seo-outing-is-immoral/29/">SEO &#8220;outing&#8221; is immoral</a>. He mentions that while the outed practices themselves might be non-ethical, those people have families too, etc. Basically: people lose their jobs because of it. That&#8217;s true. And that&#8217;s sad. Especially as most of those people will not know what hit them. I will counter that though: those companies have grown by using their unethical methods, costing other people their jobs in other companies. This is a zero-sum game in most cases. Google doesn&#8217;t tell people what to buy, it helps them find <em>where</em> they can buy it. Keep this in your mind at all times: search doesn&#8217;t create demand, it merely funnels it. I refuse to let people who use unethical SEO methods &#8220;win&#8221; because they support families, simply because their more ethical competitors support families too. I recently <a
href="http://yoast.com/godaddy-link-building/">outed GoDaddy</a> over using spammy link building techniques and got a lot of flack for that from other people in the industry. Some seem to think that it&#8217;s all of &#8220;us&#8221; (SEO&#8217;s) against &#8220;them&#8221; (Google). I wholeheartedly disagree. GoDaddy was using its paying customers to strengthen their own SEO without consulting them, in fact, they were specifically hiding what they were doing in their editor. I don&#8217;t mind them &#8220;playing&#8221; Google&#8217;s algorithms. I mind them abusing their customers websites without their consent. The only way of making that stop is to ask Google to remove the value that abuse has. In the same way I loathe WordPress plugin developers who add links to their users sites without consent. I will <em>not</em> &#8221;out&#8221; people for buying high quality, relevant links from high quality websites related to their own topic, I have less issues outing people who hack into my website to gain a few links. This happens more often than I dare to admit.</p><h2>Policing the web</h2><p>Joe goes further and says:</p><blockquote><p>&#8220;If your paycheck doesn’t say “Google” on it, it’s not your job to police the web.&#8221;</p></blockquote><p>My paycheck doesn&#8217;t say Google. I&#8217;m not policing the web. Neither is Google. Google is trying to maintain a set of rules <em>within its own index</em>. It has all the rights in the world to do that. My paycheck doesn&#8217;t say &#8220;WordPress&#8221; either, yet I help develop that project because we all benefit. There <em>really</em> is such a thing as &#8220;the common good&#8221;. That&#8217;s entirely different from outing every SEO I find that does something outside of Google&#8217;s guidelines, I&#8217;m smart enough to create my own set of ethics. I hope you are too. I for one intend to help them battle unethical SEO&#8217;s because I think we all benefit from that.</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/ethics-seo/">The ethics of SEO</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/YfVDkmGVt78" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:15;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:42:"7 ways to Increase Sales by creating Trust";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/1ssU1JMTUtQ/";s:8:"comments";s:69:"http://yoast.com/7-ways-to-increase-sales-by-creating-trust/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:09:54 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:16:"Michiel Heijmans";}s:8:"category";s:50:"Usability & ConversionConversion Rate Optimization";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45457";s:11:"description";s:779:"<p>The key to conversing a visitor into a client is the creation of trust. Your product can be the greatest thing on earth or the dullest office supply ever, both can be sold online when your visitor knows you are the best supplier for that product or service. We often advise on how to gain&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/7-ways-to-increase-sales-by-creating-trust/">7 ways to Increase Sales by creating Trust</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/michiel/">Michiel Heijmans</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:15:"Array          ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:65:"http://yoast.com/7-ways-to-increase-sales-by-creating-trust/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"44";}s:5:"media";a:3:{s:7:"content";s:4:"    ";s:13:"content_title";s:113:"Testimonials as seen on cloversites.com“Verified” signsStock photographycheckout message on bloomingdales.com";s:19:"content_description";s:55:"Testimonials as seen on cloversites.com"Verified" signs";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:146:"http://yoast.com/7-ways-to-increase-sales-by-creating-trust/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=7-ways-to-increase-sales-by-creating-trust";}s:7:"summary";s:779:"<p>The key to conversing a visitor into a client is the creation of trust. Your product can be the greatest thing on earth or the dullest office supply ever, both can be sold online when your visitor knows you are the best supplier for that product or service. We often advise on how to gain&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/7-ways-to-increase-sales-by-creating-trust/">7 ways to Increase Sales by creating Trust</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/michiel/">Michiel Heijmans</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:16;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:33:"Over-Optimization vs Optimization";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/B9ePvnQWSRs/";s:8:"comments";s:60:"http://yoast.com/over-optimization-vs-optimization/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:10:51 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:3:"SEO";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45454";s:11:"description";s:776:"<p>So Matt said something at SXSW last week about Google introducing a filter / penalty / change. As my inbox is already overflowing with emails from people asking whether they should stop optimizing their site and/or using my plugin, I thought I&#8217;d do a quick post. What Matt said was vague at best but he&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/over-optimization-vs-optimization/">Over-Optimization vs Optimization</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:2235:"<p>So <a
href="http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/">Matt</a> said <a
href="http://searchengineland.com/too-much-seo-google%E2%80%99s-working-on-an-%E2%80%9Cover-optimization%E2%80%9D-penalty-for-that-115627">something at SXSW</a> last week about Google introducing a filter / penalty / change. As my inbox is already overflowing with emails from people asking whether they should stop optimizing their site and/or using my plugin, I thought I&#8217;d do a quick post. What Matt said was vague at best but he said one thing that leaves little room for speculation:</p><blockquote><p>All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site.</p></blockquote><p>So, Google wants to do something about <strong>over</strong>-optimization. That&#8217;s not saying they want to do something about SEO. As Matt said on that same panel one more time, they have nothing against SEO, they have something against spamming.</p><p>So, if you write texts with a keyword density of 25%, you maybe should be worried. If you install an <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/">SEO plugin</a> that helps you write more search engine friendly content (and even <em>warns you</em> when it thinks the keyword density is too high) and optimizes most of the technicalities for you, there&#8217;s nothing to worry about. <a
href="http://www.seozen.com/about/">Several</a> <a
href="http://www.filiwiese.com/about-fili/">Googlers</a> use my plugin, do you really think they&#8217;d do that if they considered it over-optimization?</p><p>Now, stop over-analyzing everything Matt says and get back to work, building good websites for users.</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/over-optimization-vs-optimization/">Over-Optimization vs Optimization</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/B9ePvnQWSRs" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:56:"http://yoast.com/over-optimization-vs-optimization/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"95";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:128:"http://yoast.com/over-optimization-vs-optimization/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=over-optimization-vs-optimization";}s:7:"summary";s:776:"<p>So Matt said something at SXSW last week about Google introducing a filter / penalty / change. As my inbox is already overflowing with emails from people asking whether they should stop optimizing their site and/or using my plugin, I thought I&#8217;d do a quick post. What Matt said was vague at best but he&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/over-optimization-vs-optimization/">Over-Optimization vs Optimization</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:2235:"<p>So <a
href="http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/">Matt</a> said <a
href="http://searchengineland.com/too-much-seo-google%E2%80%99s-working-on-an-%E2%80%9Cover-optimization%E2%80%9D-penalty-for-that-115627">something at SXSW</a> last week about Google introducing a filter / penalty / change. As my inbox is already overflowing with emails from people asking whether they should stop optimizing their site and/or using my plugin, I thought I&#8217;d do a quick post. What Matt said was vague at best but he said one thing that leaves little room for speculation:</p><blockquote><p>All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site.</p></blockquote><p>So, Google wants to do something about <strong>over</strong>-optimization. That&#8217;s not saying they want to do something about SEO. As Matt said on that same panel one more time, they have nothing against SEO, they have something against spamming.</p><p>So, if you write texts with a keyword density of 25%, you maybe should be worried. If you install an <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/">SEO plugin</a> that helps you write more search engine friendly content (and even <em>warns you</em> when it thinks the keyword density is too high) and optimizes most of the technicalities for you, there&#8217;s nothing to worry about. <a
href="http://www.seozen.com/about/">Several</a> <a
href="http://www.filiwiese.com/about-fili/">Googlers</a> use my plugin, do you really think they&#8217;d do that if they considered it over-optimization?</p><p>Now, stop over-analyzing everything Matt says and get back to work, building good websites for users.</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/over-optimization-vs-optimization/">Over-Optimization vs Optimization</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/B9ePvnQWSRs" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:17;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:16:"SEO Campixx 2012";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/_LJSE4ckdDw/";s:8:"comments";s:43:"http://yoast.com/seo-campixx-2012/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:28:08 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:32:"WordPressConferenceWordPress SEO";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45444";s:11:"description";s:749:"<p>I spoke at SEO Campixx 2012 in Berlin last weekend. It was an awesome conference and I met up with loads of good friends. During that time I was interviewed and my presentation was recorded, so I&#8217;ll let you view both below: My presentation on how to use my WordPress SEO plugin (warning, I was a bit groggy&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/seo-campixx-2012/">SEO Campixx 2012</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:11:"Array      ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:39:"http://yoast.com/seo-campixx-2012/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:1:"5";}s:5:"media";a:4:{s:7:"content";s:2:"  ";s:13:"content_title";s:42:"SEO Campixx 2012 • YoastSEO Campixx 2012";s:19:"content_description";s:300:"I spoke at SEO Campixx 2012 in Berlin last weekend. It was an awesome conference and I met up with loads of good friends. During that time I was interviewed and my presentation was recorded, so I'll let you view both below: My presentation on how to use my WordPress SEO plugin (warning, I was a b";s:16:"content_keywords";s:13:"WordPress SEO";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:94:"http://yoast.com/seo-campixx-2012/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=seo-campixx-2012";}s:7:"summary";s:749:"<p>I spoke at SEO Campixx 2012 in Berlin last weekend. It was an awesome conference and I met up with loads of good friends. During that time I was interviewed and my presentation was recorded, so I&#8217;ll let you view both below: My presentation on how to use my WordPress SEO plugin (warning, I was a bit groggy&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/seo-campixx-2012/">SEO Campixx 2012</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:18;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:41:"WordPress SEO Webinar with SEO Braintrust";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/SL6wHcKzwRw/";s:8:"comments";s:63:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-webinar-seo-braintrust/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 07 Mar 2012 20:58:51 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:22:"WordPressWordPress SEO";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45420";s:11:"description";s:774:"<p>Last week I did a webinar with SEO Braintrust, which was incredibly fun. So much fun in fact that I have asked Andrea Warner, who hosted that webinar, to help me with setting up a paid webinar series around WordPress SEO, going into the subject matter even more deeply. More news on that will be&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-webinar-seo-braintrust/">WordPress SEO Webinar with SEO Braintrust</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:10:"Array     ";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:59:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-webinar-seo-braintrust/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"32";}s:5:"media";a:4:{s:7:"content";s:1:" ";s:13:"content_title";s:51:"WordPress SEO Webinar with SEO Braintrust • Yoast";s:19:"content_description";s:300:"Last week I did a webinar with SEO Braintrust, which was incredibly fun. So much fun in fact that I have asked Andrea Warner, who hosted that webinar, to help me with setting up a paid webinar series around WordPress SEO, going into the subject matter even more deeply. More news on that will be comi";s:16:"content_keywords";s:21:"Webinar,WordPress SEO";}s:10:"feedburner";a:2:{s:8:"origlink";s:134:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-webinar-seo-braintrust/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wordpress-seo-webinar-seo-braintrust";s:17:"origenclosurelink";s:81:"http://seobraintrust.s3.amazonaws.com/Andrea/WORDPRESS-SEO-WITH-JOOST-DE-VALK.mp4";}s:7:"summary";s:774:"<p>Last week I did a webinar with SEO Braintrust, which was incredibly fun. So much fun in fact that I have asked Andrea Warner, who hosted that webinar, to help me with setting up a paid webinar series around WordPress SEO, going into the subject matter even more deeply. More news on that will be&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-webinar-seo-braintrust/">WordPress SEO Webinar with SEO Braintrust</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:19;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:40:"Why some WordPress Themes hurt your SEO.";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/dSqNZ0996gY/";s:8:"comments";s:52:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-themes-hurt-seo/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:57:25 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:22:"WordPressWordPress SEO";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=45416";s:11:"description";s:782:"<p>Once again, I want to tell you to not blindly trust theme authors when they say their theme is SEO friendly. &#8220;SEO friendly&#8221; is just a label they put on their theme and since most of their customers don&#8217;t know what to look for to see if it&#8217;s actually true, yet know that it&#8217;s important,&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-themes-hurt-seo/">Why some WordPress Themes hurt your SEO.</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:2547:"<p>Once again, I want to tell you to not blindly trust theme authors when they say their theme is SEO friendly. &#8220;SEO friendly&#8221; is just a label they put on their theme and since most of their customers don&#8217;t know what to look for to see if it&#8217;s actually true, yet know that it&#8217;s important, it helps &#8220;sell&#8221; themes.</p><p>Yesterday I was helping out Rick, and found something that was the reason for this post. His blog, Noah&#8217;s dad is a blog about a <a
href="http://noahsdad.com">child with Down syndrome</a> and aims to help other parents with children with Down syndrome. Rick contacted me over Twitter as he&#8217;d recently switched to my WordPress SEO plugin and a new theme, but his rankings were dropping.</p><p>Turns out that the theme he was using had a faulty <a
href="http://yoast.com/canonical-url-links/">rel=canonical link</a> in its header, pointing to the site&#8217;s homepage instead of the proper URL for a page or post. He was also using my SEO plugin, which added the correct canonical link, but because of how the theme was built, the canonical from my plugin was below the one in the theme and thus Google picked up the wrong canonical. That caused Google to literally <em>remove</em> a lot of the blogs pages from the index.</p><p>I&#8217;ve since emailed the theme authors and they&#8217;re taking action to fix it, so there&#8217;s no reason for me to name them here, but I think it shows that they, as goes for many theme authors, didn&#8217;t really know what they were doing.</p><p>Some themes have a better reputation in this regard. StudioPress first hired me and later on my good friend Greg Boser of BlueGlass, one of the best SEOs in the world, to make sure their themes were SEO friendly. <em>They</em>, unlike others, have earned the right to say their themes are SEO friendly. Others might have invested in the same way, but it&#8217;s hard to know for sure. Do you want to bet your site&#8217;s rankings on that?</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-themes-hurt-seo/">Why some WordPress Themes hurt your SEO.</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/dSqNZ0996gY" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:48:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-themes-hurt-seo/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"59";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:112:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-themes-hurt-seo/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wordpress-themes-hurt-seo";}s:7:"summary";s:782:"<p>Once again, I want to tell you to not blindly trust theme authors when they say their theme is SEO friendly. &#8220;SEO friendly&#8221; is just a label they put on their theme and since most of their customers don&#8217;t know what to look for to see if it&#8217;s actually true, yet know that it&#8217;s important,&#8230;</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-themes-hurt-seo/">Why some WordPress Themes hurt your SEO.</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:2547:"<p>Once again, I want to tell you to not blindly trust theme authors when they say their theme is SEO friendly. &#8220;SEO friendly&#8221; is just a label they put on their theme and since most of their customers don&#8217;t know what to look for to see if it&#8217;s actually true, yet know that it&#8217;s important, it helps &#8220;sell&#8221; themes.</p><p>Yesterday I was helping out Rick, and found something that was the reason for this post. His blog, Noah&#8217;s dad is a blog about a <a
href="http://noahsdad.com">child with Down syndrome</a> and aims to help other parents with children with Down syndrome. Rick contacted me over Twitter as he&#8217;d recently switched to my WordPress SEO plugin and a new theme, but his rankings were dropping.</p><p>Turns out that the theme he was using had a faulty <a
href="http://yoast.com/canonical-url-links/">rel=canonical link</a> in its header, pointing to the site&#8217;s homepage instead of the proper URL for a page or post. He was also using my SEO plugin, which added the correct canonical link, but because of how the theme was built, the canonical from my plugin was below the one in the theme and thus Google picked up the wrong canonical. That caused Google to literally <em>remove</em> a lot of the blogs pages from the index.</p><p>I&#8217;ve since emailed the theme authors and they&#8217;re taking action to fix it, so there&#8217;s no reason for me to name them here, but I think it shows that they, as goes for many theme authors, didn&#8217;t really know what they were doing.</p><p>Some themes have a better reputation in this regard. StudioPress first hired me and later on my good friend Greg Boser of BlueGlass, one of the best SEOs in the world, to make sure their themes were SEO friendly. <em>They</em>, unlike others, have earned the right to say their themes are SEO friendly. Others might have invested in the same way, but it&#8217;s hard to know for sure. Do you want to bet your site&#8217;s rankings on that?</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-themes-hurt-seo/">Why some WordPress Themes hurt your SEO.</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/dSqNZ0996gY" height="1" width="1"/>";}}s:7:"channel";a:9:{s:5:"title";s:5:"Yoast";s:4:"link";s:16:"http://yoast.com";s:11:"description";s:17:"Tweaking Websites";s:13:"lastbuilddate";s:31:"Thu, 23 Aug 2012 07:07:25 +0000";s:8:"language";s:5:"en-US";s:2:"sy";a:2:{s:12:"updateperiod";s:6:"hourly";s:15:"updatefrequency";s:1:"1";}s:9:"generator";s:29:"http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.1";s:10:"feedburner";a:4:{s:14:"emailserviceid";s:11:"joostdevalk";s:18:"feedburnerhostname";s:28:"http://feedburner.google.com";s:9:"feedflare";s:158:"Subscribe with PodnovaSubscribe with NewsGatorSubscribe with NetvibesSubscribe with PageflakesSubscribe with My Yahoo!Subscribe with ODEOSubscribe with Google";s:15:"browserfriendly";s:195:"This is the combined feed for Yoast.com and the WordPress podcast. Subscribe now to get WordPress & Magento tips & tricks, helping you optimize your site for speed, search engines and conversion!";}s:7:"tagline";s:17:"Tweaking Websites";}s:9:"textinput";a:0:{}s:5:"image";a:6:{s:5:"title";s:5:"Yoast";s:3:"url";s:69:"http://yoast.com/wp-content/themes/yoast-v2/images/yoast-logo-rss.png";s:4:"link";s:16:"http://yoast.com";s:5:"width";s:3:"144";s:6:"height";s:3:"103";s:11:"description";s:17:"Tweaking Websites";}s:9:"feed_type";s:3:"RSS";s:12:"feed_version";s:3:"2.0";s:5:"stack";a:0:{}s:9:"inchannel";b:0;s:6:"initem";b:0;s:9:"incontent";b:0;s:11:"intextinput";b:0;s:7:"inimage";b:0;s:13:"current_field";s:0:"";s:17:"current_namespace";b:0;s:19:"_CONTENT_CONSTRUCTS";a:6:{i:0;s:7:"content";i:1;s:7:"summary";i:2;s:4:"info";i:3;s:5:"title";i:4;s:7:"tagline";i:5;s:9:"copyright";}s:4:"etag";s:27:"EhOByoSUaf0PWTxlJeXBHwzkces";s:13:"last_modified";s:29:"Fri, 24 Aug 2012 17:15:41 GMT";}