Introducing WordPress 3.0 (via WordPress.tv)

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Thelonious Has Arrived

The release of WordPress 3.0 is called Thelonious, named after the great jazz musician Thelonious Monk. It’s a game changer in many ways. By far the most impressive aspect of 3.0 is the integration of WP MU or Multi-user, which is no longer a stand-alone download and morphs into – Multi-site. WordPress 3.0 Multi-site will allow multiple sites (or blogs) to run on a single installation of WordPress – including BuddyPress. Watch the video from WordPress.tv for a sampling of the new changes.

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via WordPress.tv

Matt Mullenweg’s Take

In a more detailed video presented by WordPress.tv, Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress) discusses the past, present and future of WordPress.

The WordPress 3.0 download counter updates to the current number of downloads of Thelonious. To upgrade your current installation of WordPress to 3.0, simply go to your admin panel and click “upgrade”; it’s that simple!

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What’s More Important? Your SEO or Your Readers?

Image by marciookabe via Flickr

This is the second guest post by Karen from Blazing Minds. She’s a recording artist with the Electronica Duo band Remergence and a top-notch blogger. Karen’s blog is DoFollow.

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We all consider the SEO of our blogs and I have personally found that sometimes it takes a lot effort to find those correct keyword and or key phrases to add in to your blog post to try to produce those magic results for the search engines to pick you up and give you a good SERP.

Then you have to work on which search engines you want higher rankings on and work on producing your posts to gain better SERP in each engine. But, is this really that important, isn’t there something else you should be considering as well, your readers!

Take into consideration that it is your blogs readers that bring you the traffic and by keeping in contact with them via replying to their comments and finding out what your readers are saying as well as what they are searching for also helps with the overall way that your blog is purveyed.

Ok, so I know that a lot of bloggers will say, “keep to your niche” but, what if you enjoy blogging about anything and everything, I know I do, so I look at my stats in WordPress and see what everyone is looking for and usually go from there with my ideas for a blog post and recently I don’t try to go to over the top with searching for those magically keywords, I now have the tendency to look for related searches in Google and go from there and since doing this my hits from Google have improved as those of you who read my blog will have noticed from the weekly round-up that I post.

So at the end of the day my recommendation is listen to your readers, communicate with them via the comments they leave and find out what they find interesting, your blog stats will show the posts that get more hits than others, check those out and see what caused them to get more traffic/comments than others and use this information to improve your overall blogging.

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Google Page Rank on a WordPress.com Blog

[tweetmeme source=”ileane”]Using free blogging software from WordPress known as WordPress.com, such as I do here on this blog Ms. Ileane Speaks,  is a great way to get started with blogging.  I discuss the debate about blogging on WordPress.com over other free platforms like Blogger over at Ms. Ileane’s Blog, but using any free blogging software platform has several disadvantages. It’s much better to register a domain name, acquire a web host and download the software for a self-hosted WordPress blog.

I won’t list all of the disadvantages for using WordPress.com here, but one of the primary arguments against having a free blog is the fact that you cannot use plugins or various themes that can improve your SEO and Page Rank with Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines.

For those of us that continue to use the free WordPress.com service you can rest assured, there is still hope.  This morning I checked the page rank for this blog using Google Page Rank checker and I was pleased to see a score of 4 out of 10.

This is a pretty good score considering I haven’t applied many SEO strategies. I mentioned previously in Top 5 Blog Topics, that page rank has not been a huge concern for me on this blog.

In the upcoming year, I’ve made a resolution to learn more about SEO.  I’m finding some of the SEO techniques pretty easy to do and you can get started today. Here’s a short video from Chuck at CyberSmartMarketing called Link Surfing Your Website for On-Page SEO to give you a hand.

If you are considering the move to a self-hosted WordPress blog or website, contact Chuck at CyberSmartMarketing. You can also follow him on Twitter @MrCyberSmartSEO

In the meantime, take a look at your page rank and leave a comment to let me know where you stand.

Smooches!

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Social Networking Resources

Do you ever wonder what those tiny little icons at the end of an article or post on the web mean and what they are used for?  I put together a listing of the most common tools used for promoting with today’s social media.

According to Wikipedia, social media is defined as media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media supports the human need for social interaction with technology, transforming broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many)…

Here is the list I have compiled so far, minus a few well known omissions (MySpace and FaceBook). Let me know if you think other tools are worth adding.

Delicious http://delicious.com/

Is social bookmarking. Search the biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe. All your bookmarks in one place. Bookmark things for yourself and friends. Check out what other people are bookmarking.

Digg http://digg.com

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, and videos that appeal to you.

Flickr http://www.flickr.com/

Share your photos (and video) and watch the world.

Kaboodle http://www.kaboodle.com/

Kaboodle is a social shopping community where people discover, recommend and share products

Linked In http://www.linkedin.com/

Relationships matter. Over 40 million professionals use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas and opportunities