I just tried to leave a review at Google, while I was logged in, and instead of being given the old review screen, I was asked to set up a new profile. Here, it’s easier to show you…

(*update four months later the name “Hotpot has finally been dumped. What a dumb idea that was anyway, huh?

I’m attending Pubcon in Las Vegas this week, and there is a poker tournament taking place Thursday night that I want to attend. Interestingly, the organizer chose to tie attendance in with a charity, so I thought I’d tsake this opportunity to write a little bit about a local Portland organization called Snow-Cap.

Last Wednesday, I attended an East Portland Chamber of Commerce meeting that was hosted by Snow-Cap, and I had a chance to hear more about them.

As they did their short 10 minute presentation, I could hear the passion in their voices, and I also witnessed the nodding heads in the crowd, as many of us were already very familiar with them.

Snowcap has been providing food, clothing and advocacy for needy people in East Multnomah County since 1967.

In the mid 1960′s, the basic needs of many in East Multnomah County were not being met by any agency or organization.

The original purpose of Snow-CAP was to discover the actual needs of area residents, then communicate those needs and help organize local church and community leaders to meet those needs.

Snow-CAP was bordered by East 82nd Street and the Columbia River, stretching south to the Clackamas County line, and including Troutdale, Fairview, and Wood Village.

Originally three centers were set up, and in 1968 they merged and were headquartered at Savage Memorial Presbyterian.  A Gresham office was opened in 1967, and by 1980 there were 39 actively participating churches.

By 1983 Snow-CAP was serving 36,000 people, and by 1987, their 20th anniversary, they had 145 volunteers. All this was done with just one-full-time worker and 7 part-time employees.

By their 25th anniversary in 1992, more than one-half million people had been served, and in 2007, their 40th, over 1.4 million people had been served. Wow.

If you’ve had any experience with Snow-Cap, you can leave them a review here and if you’re able, you can make a donation of food or  your time here, or you can donate moneydirectly  online

Again, I admit that I was prompted to write this post by dk, of Purpose Inc.  but don’t let that sway you. Snow-Pac is a great organization, and I’m proud to live in their community.

If I play, and if I happen to win anything, I’m declaring here that I’ll donate 1/2 of my winnings to Snow-Cap.

As I promised this morning, I have uploaded my East Portland Chamber of Commerce presentation here, including all of the links that I spoke about.

You may open it directly from this link, or just right click here and choose “save as” to get it onto your own computer.

For those that weren’t in attendance, it’s a basic presentation with a few site-usability tips, and links to what I believe are the best 12 places for listing your website for free in local directories.

Believe it or not, the board of SEMpdx has been getting a number of emails asking us where to register for SearchFest 2009, coming up in March.

So, I figured I would take a minute to point out the SearchFest registration, as well as the entire SearchFest 2009 agenda, and a link to our sponsors.

This year’s event promises to be the best ever, with a lineup of speakers including:

• Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land
• Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
• Vanessa Fox, Nine by Blue
• Marshall Simmonds, New York Times
• Neil Patel, ACS SEO
• Riona MacNamara, Google
• Laura Lippay, Yahoo
• Matt McGee, Small Business SEM
• Greg Hartnett, Best of the Web

and many more…

I will be moderating two sessions myself, including SEO For WordPress, and SEO for Bloggers and copywriters.

The event will take place at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Oregon on March 10, 2009, so what are you waiting for? Go register now!

Well, here it is, Google Friend Connect in action. I’m not quite sure exactly what it is yet, but I’m in, after signing up a few weeks ago. Are you?

Apparently it’s Google’s answer to My Blog Log, which I have in my right sidebar, but it lets users sign in with their Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account. Nice…

According to Google…

Enrich your site
Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.

Attract more visitors
Your users can easily invite friends from social networks and contact lists to visit and join your site.

No programming whatsoever
Just copy and paste a few snippets of code into your site, and Friend Connect does the rest.

You can read more about it here Sadly, it’s not working, because you SHOULD be seeing images right here below…

Colleen from Search Engine Academy of Oregon has invited me back to speak again to her class in November, and I’ll be taking her up on it.

My session will be about how to make the most of your efforts when marketing via the social networking sites, and I’ll be covering my own agenda, as well as some of the materials from SEA.

Even more important, I’ll be discussing this real life example of “How to not look like an idiot”,  as I describe the antics that took place recently by a “search marketing” company out of Colodado and how they spammed the SEMpdx forum, and then to compound matters, Peak Studios owner Quince Wyss then defended the practice.

My sssion will take place on Tuesday morning,  November 18th at 10:30 AM, on the second day of the three day advanced search marketing class.

As an affiliate of Collens, I can give readers 10% off the enrollment fee if you enter the coupon code “commander”.

Google Suggest has been around for quite awhile now, but at the moment I’m noticing it take effect on the regular Google homepage.

Basically, you just begin type in something, and Google will pre-fill beneath your text, trying to guess what you’re looking for, showing you related searches, and showing you the number of results it will find.

I’ve only seen it before by going through Google labs, here at this page

A moment ago I did a search for something, and the search box popped down to bring me suggestions like this, when I begin to type “Internet marketing” -

Is anyone else seeing that?

It’s taking place whether or not I am logged into my Google account…

It’s not often that a world-class Internet marketing event comes to Portland, but on August 5th, I’ll be at the Online Marketing Summit, taking place here at the Portland zoo.

Whether you’re looking for best practices in search marketing or e-commerce, analytics and measurement, testing and behavior targeting, or even e-mail marketing, there’s bound to be sessions that will educate and enlighten key members of your staff.

If your company is a member of SEMpdx, you can get a discount on attendance too, by visiting the SE SEMpdx member discount page.

Take a look at the agenda, and I hope to see you there!

Over the past couple of years, we’ve become quite dependent upon WordPress because of the versatility of this open source management system, allowing us to do nearly anything we can imagine.

In many cases WordPress can be a good supplement to existing website, allowing users to easily add and manage search engine friendly content without the need of the Web designer.

In other cases, entire project developments can be done in WordPress, allowing the site to be managed well by non-technical users, with all of the “SEO” aspects happening in the background.

In addition to recommending WordPress for clients, we’ve built dozens of our own affiliate websites on the platform, and have even launched a separate business, matching WordPress themes to the look and feel of existing sites.

Regardless of what the purpose of the WordPress site is going to be, or what particular plug-ins may help the owner meet those needs, there are some fundamental steps that need to be taken regarding WordPress, and I’ve outlined them for you here.

1. Host on your own domain
The free version of WordPress that’s hosted at WordPress.com is fine for familiarizing yourself with the functionality of writing posts and trying it out, but I recommend never using it for anything permanent. Here are just a few of the reasons…

On WordPress.com hosted sites, you cannot use any plugins, since you have no FTP access. That means that you can’t use any of the cool things that have been developed, or any of the things that will be developed next.

Even though you own the content, you can’t monetize the site with ads, since it’s against WordPress rules.

Most important of all, since you don’t own the domain, if you one day decide that you’d like to host on your own domain, you can’t 301 redirect all of your old URL’s to your new location.

After you install WordPress -

2. Change the Admin Password -
Change your administrator password immediately after installation. Sometimes things are just flaky, and the admin email doesn’t arrive for hours, and in some cases, it never arrives.

I’ve also seen servers where the “lost / change password” function doesn’t work either. There is no way you’re ever going to remember that autgenerated password, so as soon as you see the splash screen showing you a successful install and the password, log right in and change it to a familiar and
secure one that you can remember.

3. Change your permalink structure
Search engines have gotten much better about crawling dynamic URL’s but it’s my belief that it’s still slightly beneficial to have keywords in them.

Not to mention that search engines are far less important than actual humans, aren’t they? Let’s face it – People are more likely to share and click on links that have decent URL’s, where they can tell what the item is about. For example, which of these two URL’s would attract your interest?

http://www.domain.com/free-superbowl-tickets or
http://www.domain.com/?p=32 ?

There are many options for permalinks, but my choice is this…
%category%/title%

Change by going to options – permalinks – and paste that code into the bottom line. If you get a message telling you that you need to update your HT access, then you should either do that manually, or simply change the permissions (CHMOD) for your .htaccess file so it’s writable.

If for some reason your posts don’t work after that just returned to the options section and recheck the default box, putting it all back to normal while you troubleshoot.

4. Make your display decisions –
If you’re using WordPress as a static site, then you need to decide whether you want to display your most recent articles (posts) on the homepage, or you want to have a separate homepage, and display your blog posts elsewhere. These options are chosen in WordPress admin at the settings – reading menu.

By default the homepage will show your latest posts, but if you prefer, you can choose to select a static page as your homepage, and a different page to show your posts.

Of course if you choose this latter option then you’ll first need to go create a new page as “Home”, and probably create a “news and articles” page as well, for the blog posts. You can also use the existing About page that comes added by default, but if you do that, I recommend you change the permalink for it as well.

5. Edit your title tag preferences –
(THIS IS THEME SPECIFIC)
By default, the WordPress titles are sort of weird. To better optimize them, here’s my solution. Just replace the <title> calls in header.php of your theme with the following code…

<title>< ?php if ( is_single() ) { ?>< ?php } ?>< ?php wp_title(”); ?> < ?php if (is_home()) { ?>< ?php } else { ?> | < ?php } ?> < ?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> </title>

This does a couple of things -
a. It places the individual post title at the beginning of the tag

b. It adds a “pipe” character | , or you might prefer to use a dash instead, but either one will have the desired effect of separating the title of the post from the title of the blog.

c. It gets rid of the >>blog archive >> that ends up going into many of the WordPress URLs

6. Change or delete “Hello World” post, permalink, and comment –
The first post that is installed by default for you is called “Hello World”. If you do a search on Google for “Hello World” or “Welcome to WordPress, this is your first post” and you’ll see how many people don’t even do that first part.

I also recommend changing the permalink to that post, which otherwise, will forever read /hello-world no matter WHAT the actual post title gets changed to. This is easily done on the right of the edit post screen.

7. Change “Uncategorized” category & permalink
By default, the name AND permalink to the first category is “uncategorized”, so you want to change that, by going to Manage > Categories in the admin panel. Be sure to choose a good master category name that will cover your bases for the occasional post you accidentally leave uncategorized, since this will become the default.

You’ll also want to be certain to edit the permalink at the same time, since that category is going to become a part of the URL.

8. Change “About” page title & Permalink
Depending on how you use static pages in your blog, this may not be necessary, but for me, it can’t be overlooked. Since I frequently use WordPress for static sites, the first thing I dio is go to the edit > pages – and change the title of “About” to Home, and make it the home page. Unless I forever want the permalink to be, /about I change that at the same time to home.

9. Update your ping list
Every time a new page or post is added, WordPress can notify multiple services that you have new content. Doing so will be spidered and visited more frequently improving your rankings. These options can be found in the Admin section, by going to settings > writing, and scrolling to the bottom.

Instead of using just the one service provided by default, (Pingomatic), I prefer to paste about 100 known and functional ping sites in the list, and I’ve made my entire WordPress big ping list available

10. Install your first plugin – BACKUP
This takes under 60 seconds, and can potentially save you a lot of misery. After the blog is going, I like to use the WordPress automatic backup plug-in, that will email your entire database to you on a regular basis, and even keep a copy on the server too – Download it here

Some people may argue that blocking or nofollowing your monthly archives (or even your category archives) belongs on this list,  but I think those choices are to be made on an individual basis, and chose not to include them on this list. Personally, I have not blocked either one on my blog, and Google seems to be figuring it out just fine.

It’s only after all these steps above are done that I’s recommend beginning to make your plugin choices and installing them.  Since there are literally hundreds of plugins that are rock solid, and will make WordPress do amazing things, I’m not going to get into them here.

I will say though, that If you want your site to be found, and you want it to perform well, then you need to do some reading. Talented developers all over the world are creating little miracle plug-ins every day, and you should make your choices wisely, and do lots of homework…

The owner of this site wants to be found for more “Second Life” related search terms, and In the 10 minute video I offer some intermediate level suggestions that may help with overall visibility.

Pay per click campaigns can be somewhat tedious to set up, primarily because all the data that you get from the keyword research tools need to be reworked into a more useful list. My new keyword multiplier tool should make it a lot easier!

By that, I mean you need to consider every variation that might be possible, whether that be by city name or even a synonym for a certain service or occupation, and it always seems that many get overlooked.

For example, let’s say you ‘re doing a PPC campaign for plumber in the San Fernando valley, down in Southern California.

You’ve used all your different keyword research tools, and now you have dozens or even hundreds of primary key phrases, like Plumbing, Plumber, clogged drain, sink repair, unplug my toilet in, etc.

You know that there are an almost endless number of cities and towns that people are searching besides Los Angeles, like Woodland Hills, Tarzana, Encino, Calabasas, etc.

Manually putting that list together was a pain in the neck, and a couple of years ago while performing this tedious task, it crossed my mind that this job could likely be accomplished in an Excel spreadsheet.

Now I know nothing about writing macros, so the first person that crossed my mind, was Karen Westermann, the Excel Queen, and in a few short days, I had my tool. (Thanks, Karen!)

Fast forward to 2008, in a recent discussion with my best programmer about various projects, I asked her if she could turn the spreadsheet into a web application that would run inside a WordPress page.

Much to my delight, she said “sure, in a snap” so the keyword multiplier tool was born. I suppose it’s a little bit like keyword tumbler, but I think it’s far less complicated.

All you have to do is take one group, and put them on the left side, and another group on the right side, and press the button to combine your list. That’s it.

You can also use the tool more than once, which is something you might do for an attorney with more than one type of practice, or a contractor, with many different specialties and departments..

For example, on the left side you might phrases like pizza, chicken and tacos. In the second column, use delivery, restaurants, and reviews.
in column three, put cities, and you can even put in a fourth column, of state spellings, for example.

Here’s a quick 90 second video -

Try my keyword multiplier for yourself, and please tell me what you think!

Mark this date down in history, because Google is getting really ambitious today. First they rolled out the ability to search future Web content,  which is really slick. Although currently its active only in Australia, It will work on all .com domains,  including my own, so I was able to easily take care of my blog posts for the next 90 days.

Next, they announced Project Virgle, which is a joint venture with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group to establish a permanent settlement on Mars.   Again, make note of this date, April 1, 2008, because it’s not something you’re going to read every day.