2009 SES San Jose is coming up as well are several other big conferences, which one will you be attending?

The recent controversy over Nofollow and PageRank sculpting, Twitter SEO, custom URL shorteners and upcoming Search Engine Marketing conferences are the subject of this latest Wicked Quick.

• One of the biggest developments in the SEO world over the past couple of weeks concerned the use of the Nofollow attribute for PageRank Sculpting. The Search world blew a collective gasket when Google’s Matt Cutts revealed that PR (aka link juice) was divided by the number of links on a page no matter if they were nofollowed or not. Read the blog post that sparked it all and see if you can make it through the 305 (as of now) comments. [Matt Cutts]
• “But, never fear, you still have time to start optimizing your Twitter presence before your random tweets about what you ate for lunch start appearing in searches for your name. By following these ten Twitter tips, you, your company or your brand can build up more prominent links in high places on the engines.” [Mashable]
• In the crowded world of URL shorteners that was once dominated by TinyURL and is now pretty much owned by Bit.ly, a new player has entered the game offering a much more custom solution. Awe.sm gives brands the opportunity to retain branding while offering SEO and Twitter friendly URLs for use out in the Social Media wild. This helps give shortened links immediate trust and authority as no one else can generate links using the brands custom domain. [TechCrunch]
• Finally, SEOmoz gives a quick rundown on all of the SEO/SEM conferences happening over the Summer. I went out to SES San Jose last year, and I can definitely say that it was worth the trip. The top notch instructors and quality of content definitely make attending one of these events worthwhile. [SEOmoz]

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1. Wicked Quick In Marketing – 10.20.09
2. Wicked Quick On Social Media Week 2010
3. Wicked Quick in Social Media – 04/16/10

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Use WordPress' built in URL shortener to keep your own branded links on microblogging sites.

Today’s Wicked Quick in Search Engine Marketing includes the importance of using graphics for SEO, improving SEO using PR and Social Media and using WordPress’ built in URL shortener:

• Graphics and images are important in this age of short attention spans as they can help “hook people in.” [SEO Book]
• “The increased use of search and social media both by the media and by end consumers should motivate PR professionals to better understand the digital PR strategies and mechanics of successful SEO and social web participation.” Couldn’t agree more. [Top Rank Blog]
• If you have a website running on WordPress, why abandon your branded links on networks like Twitter or Facebook to bit.ly or tinyurl.com?  These shortening services could disappear (a la zi.ma) or suffer from service downtime, leaving your precious links in the lurch. WordPress has it’s own built in URL shortener and it’s a lot more simple than you think. [The Blog Herald]
• Some great additions to every Internet Marketers arsenal of weapons courtesy of Rhea Drysdale. [Outspoken Media Blog]

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1. Wicked Quick In Marketing – 10.20.09

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The DiggBar backlash came as a surprise to founder Kevin Rose.

Today’s Wicked Quick in Search Engine Marketing includes the SEO world’s reaction to the new DiggBar, how to use long-tail keywords effectively and the Google vs. Newspapers discussion, which led to a much larger debate over journalism in the Web 2.0 age:

• Digg founder Kevin Rose says backlash against DiggBar has been a “crazy learning experience.” [search engine land]
• Michael Gray gives a step-by-step on how to abuse said DiggBar for profit. [Wolf Howl]
• Aaron Wall‘s rundown on why long-tail keywords should be the foundation on which your SEO efforts are built. [SEO Book]
• Rand Fishkin put up a great visual and breakdown on how the different elements of Google’s algorithm have changed over time. [SEOmoz]
• The whole Google vs. the newspapers and the value of journalism online thing exploded last week with Danny Sullivan‘s excellently written rant on why newspapers are being ridiculous. [Daggle]
• That was then followed by Sarah Lacy‘s post on TechCrunch about the declining relevance of journalism schools in an increasing online news world. [TechCrunch]
• Lacy’s post then prompted a response from Lisa Barone in yet another well-written rant. [Outspoken Media]

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Example of category description on The Wicked Blog archive page

Well, it looks like I get to write the first boring technical post on our new blog. Yay.

I spend a lot of my days playing with several WordPress installs (my CMS of choice) tweaking and testing different things on different sites. Something I am going to be instituting globally across the sites I manage, especially here on The Wicked Blog, is using the built-in WordPress category description function and the template tag to help build keyword authority for category archive pages.

If you’ve ever looked at the category management section on WP, you’ve probably seen the description box in the Add New/Edit screen along with the super-helpful note:

The description is not prominent by default, however some themes may show it.

I personally have yet to come across a theme that actually makes use of this category description on the archive pages, or any other pages for that matter, and, for me, this is a key place in which you can help boost your category archives’ authority in search results.

If you subscribe to the idea that the best way to manage duplicate content on your site is to put each post into one category and either disable or noindex the tag, date and author archives (all of which can be accomplished using Yoast’s excellent Meta Robots plugin), then you have created several powerful top-level pages. We can then help those pages on their way by putting static, keyword-rich text on the archive pages.

Archive pages are by nature dynamic and constantly changing as you post more content. This makes it difficult to keep consistent keyword-rich text on these pages to give the search engines some meat to sink their teeth into. If there’s a way you can make part of the page look the same keyword-wise every time the spiders index it, the better for your site.

Basically, the category description is exactly what it says it is, the description of your category. So simple, in fact, that it’s easy to make use of. Here’s how you can go about incorporating this in your archive template:

1. Have your SEO copywriter put together a short paragraph, two or three sentences, that effectively describes your subject using the keywords you are targeting for that category.

2. Go to your WordPress dashboard and enter that paragraph into the description area. If you are using the Headspace 2 SEO plugin (recommended), add it in the Page Description box for that, too.

Now for the coding part. Here’s how I set it up for this site:

3. Open up your theme’s archive.php file and look for the start of the WordPress loop. Depending on your theme, the way the different types of archive pages are handled can be written many ways. In the default theme that comes with WordPress, these are defined at the top and the section for the category archives looks like this:

4. Now, replace line #2 of the above with the below:

5. Here is the CSS that I used to style that section:

6. Save your files and voila, you will now display the category description at the top of your archive pages….like so: Social Media.

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