At OrangeValley, we’re currently working on migrating a large Dutch blog network over from it’s own proprietary system to a WordPress Multi User install, one of our more serious WordPress MU development projects. There’s quite a few things about WordPress MU that I like, but what I like most is, well, that’s it’s WordPress

For this project I needed some fairly simple things, that I could have used other plugins for but I wanted them to be simpler and cleaner than most plugins could do for me…

In these times where everybody is low on cash, it’s very important to make those new visitors convert. Conversion rate optimization is thus one of those markets that grow very rapidly, and it happens to be the market we’re in the center of with OrangeValley here in Holland. But you can learn a lot about conversion rate optimization in just one day soon, on this awesome conference, called Design For Conversion…

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I was a guest on WPWeekly Episode 48 last saturday, where we discussed a lot of things WordPress, WordPress SEO, etc. It was fun being on with Jeff Chandler and David Peralty, and I think you’ll enjoy the interview, so go listen to it:

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On WPWeekly Episode 48

Related posts:

1. Breadcrumbs in WordPress Historically, blogs, and thus WordPress, have never had breadcrumbs…

I’ve been working with a plugin that was mentioned on the wp-hackers list last week, called debug queries, to optimize the performance on some of my sites, including this one. The plugin was pretty easy to use, and I’ve improved a bit on it. I’ve sent the patch to Frank, who authored the original plugin, and he was kind enough to immediately update the plugin.

When you’re logged in as an admin, this plugin now shows the following info in an HTML comment tag in the footer of your pages:

• the query that was executed
• the time it took to execute that query
• the function path that led to this query, with the last function being the most likely to have created the query

I’ve written down some of the things I encountered that you may encounter as well are the following:

Empty options

A lot of WordPress internal settings and plugin settings are stored in the options table…

Just testing something.

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Bla!

No related posts.

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A while ago Aaron released his SEO Toolbar for Firefox, and while I’ve been using it I’ve never actually shown it here on my blog, even though it’s become one of my default SEO tools. As this toolbar comes with a slew of features that are probably best described by just showing them, I’ve made a quick video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites…

A short while ago I moved over to a new email program called Postbox, and I’ve been absolutely loving it for it’s labelling, archive and search functions. One of the people involved with Postbox is Sherman Dickman, whom I knew from when he was still the Product Manager at Mozilla, so I decided to interview him on Postbox, what it is and why it exists.

Hey Sherman, can you give us a short introduction of yourself and your work experience?

I first started working in the software industry at really terrific company called Broderbund, where I worked in the product management group on titles such as “Prince of Persia 2″ and “Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego…

Next month Amsterdam will see the first A4UExpo Europe, the European counterpart of the highly succesfull A4UExpo conference series in London. I though it would be interesting for all of you to do an interview with Matthew Wood, the genius behind all of this.

Hey Matthew, could you quickly introduce yourself and a4uexpo?

Sure, I’ve been involved in Affiliate Marketing for over 10 years…

I’ve been working with Joachim Houtman on creating a guide to Magento SEO, much like my definitive guide to WordPress SEO. In the process we’ve created two modules for Magento, and an optimized blank theme!

Expect more from us on the Magento SEO front, as we develop more experience in the area together!

For now: enjoy our guide to Magento SEO!

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Finally, we’re pleased to announce the winner of our SunPress competition. We had a bounty of entries and after much debating we asked two of the entrants to go back and make their plug-ins a finished article.

Our final winner is David Fiske, who developed SunPress Exchange - a very clever plug-in to take sunshine’s RSS feeds and give you the ability to convert the prices to GBP/EUR/USD, and present it in a cool widget that you can theme to your own design…

I’ll try to list all the coverage of SES Amsterdam I’ve found online, please leave a link in the comments if I’ve missed one. At the moment, most of them are in Dutch…

• Live verslag Search Engine Strategies Amsterdam - MarketingFacts NL
• Verslag SES Amsterdam (deel 1: de markt & het veranderende landschap) - MarketingFacts NL
• Live coverage SES Amsterdam - SearchCowboys
• SES Amsterdam: The Changing Face of Search - SearchCowboys
• Live verslag vanaf SES Amsterdam - Tribal Internet Marketing NL
• Verslag SES Amsterdam - Bijgespijkerd NL
• SESAmsterdam: een beeld op de Nederlandse markt - DutchCowboys NL
• SES Amsterdam: De ‘Google-view’ - DutchCowboys NL

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Today’s the conference day of SES Amsterdam, the Dutch version of the internationally renowned series of search conferences. I’ve been actively involved in getting SES Amsterdam to happen, and have been the programming director, arranging speakers etc., so today is an exciting day!

Chaired by Henk van Ess, featuring speakers like Kevin Ryan and Anne Kennedey as keynotes, this should be a good conference…

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For all your lurkers in the RSS feed who haven’t come out in the last week, and I know there’s quite a few of you, there’s a new design waiting for you if you click the link!

I’m also, with this post, submitting this design to the WP WebHost Best WordPress Design Award contest. I think the new design is worthy of a price

The credits for this design go to W3 Edge Web Site Design, where Frederick and his team did an awesome job…

I’ve been following the #pubcon conversation with interest All I can say… look here. Thanks to Matt and Anindo of Google for their help on this!

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.

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Google FriendConnect API

Related posts:

1. Google: keyword density should NOT be this important I’m talking about the Dutch SERPs at the moment…

I was recently interviewed by Ross Dunn, one of the hosts of SEO 101 on Webmasterradio.fm. I thought it might be interesting for you too, so you can listen here or download the mp3 here.

We discuss WordPress optimization at a pretty basic level, so for those just starting out with WordPress optimization this might be a good one to start on!

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So in the last couple of weeks I had a bit of an issue with my server. Automatic plugin updates didn’t work as I wanted them to, WP-Cron didn’t work, and although I was able to fix all those I felt unhappy. I want my hosting party to take care of that stuff, and not think about it myself, so I started looking around. Turns out, WordPress hosting has become a fairly popular business.

I was checking the list of WordPress recommended hosting parties (you can find that here), and noticed one that I hadn’t seen on there before, called WestHost…

So when I moved to the (DV) server at MediaTemple, it turns out that my WP-Cron stopped working. I didn’t notice for a while, until I found out that the new version of Tweetbacks didn’t work for me anymore, and this was using wp-cron.

The fix turned out to be very simple, after some debugging with the help of Donncha: in my /etc/hosts file, 127.0.0.1 pointed not only to localhost, but also to yoast…

Matt Cutts has just announced a new tag at SMX West Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have just announced a new tag, which we can use to tell the search engines which URL it should have for the current page. This is probably best explained with an example, so here goes.

Suppose you have read my Twitter Analytics post, and you’ve started tagging all the URL’s you spread on Twitter with Google Analytics campaign variables…

We’re doing well, at OrangeValley, so much so, that we’ve decided to expand our team with not one or two, but three (3!) new consultants. Are you going to be that consultant?

The vacancies are listed here, in Dutch. Please pass it on to any of your friends who might find it interesting!

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.

Want to make sure you’re trying just as hard or harder as your competitors to rank in the search engines? Use SEO SpyGlass to determine their linking strategies!

Want to work at OrangeValley?

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I recently moved from a MediaTemple Grid Server to a MediaTemple DV extreme, and in that move, I lost the ability to do automatic plugin updates, and it instead required me to enter my FTP info.

As I use a gigantic amount of plugins, that becomes annoying very soon. So I decided to find out what the issue is. Turns out that I’m having the same issue as the guy who filed this bug was. Filesystem access is available, the files are owned by me, but the webserver doesn’t run as me, and thus, WordPress doesn’t detect the automatic update correcly…

Upcoming March 4th there will be an A4U Roadshow event in Amsterdam. A great place to meet and network with the A4U crew, and other people interested in online and especially affiliate marketing!

Registration is free, so register now! I’ll be there, so let me know in the comments when you’re coming too and we can meet up!

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Thanks to all of you who voted for me, I’ve won the SEMMY in the category Blogs & Blogging with my WordPress SEO article!

WordPress SEO

Thanks a ton for your support, I’m really happy with this, and congratulations to the runner-ups and the other SEMMY winners, you did a great job!

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I Won! (a SEMMY)

Related posts:

1. SEMMY Finalist! I told you I’d been nominated for a SEMMY a…

I’ve recently switched from selling my ads directly to having BuySellAds take care of it, and it’s been an absolutely awesome experience. As a result of that experience, I do not agree with Chris Brogan yet that advertising is completely broken, but it does need a good level of reinvention.

So, to introduce you to the company and to Todd Garland, who runs the company, has been kind enough to answer a series of questions for me…

I told you I’d been nominated for a SEMMY a while back, well, I’ve made it to the finals in the Blogs & Blogging category with my WordPress SEO article! I’m very honored!

So you can help me now: please go vote here, I’ll be very grateful!

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Want to make sure you’re trying just as hard or harder as your competitors to rank in the search engines? Use SEO SpyGlass to determine their linking strategies!

SEMMY Finalist!

Related posts:

1. I Won! (a SEMMY) Thanks to all of you who voted for me, I’ve…

I spoke at A4UExpo London last year and will be speaking at the upcoming A4UExpo Amsterdam. One of the sessions I had in the last A4UExpo was the session on WordPress SEO & Optimisation strategies. That entire session was taped, and the A4UExpo guys have been kind enough to allow me to embed it here and show it to all of you, so, please, enjoy!

If you’re more of a reader than a visual type, try my article on WordPress SEO…