One of the things I like most about the WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast is that once you have the settings tweaked the way you want them, you can export, then import them elsewhere.

At Pubcon last month, I gave my presentation on exactly how I like to use that plugin,  and why I make the choices I do. As I explained, not every site is the same, and there are choices to be made.

This post has been several years in the making, because since 2007, as fast as I’ve written things down in my notes, the WordPress plugins keep getting built.

Sometimes we build them ourselves, as was the case with my desire to have a WordPress plugin that sets everything up with one click, or in other cases someone else will build the solution.

If you use WordPress to manage a website, thanks to their auto-save feature, and the fact that it stores every revision you ever make, the database can grow quite large.

In turn, I can tell you from experience, that someday, when you least expect it and can least afford it, your large database filled with old junk you don’t need will become corrupted or broken, leading to eventual backup, restore, or changing hosts, or some other problem. Trust me, it will happen.

There is something wrong the widget behavior when I log into a few sites, but ONLY with my own login credentials, and the drag and drop features don’t seem to work.

Not only is drag and drop disabled, but there is a completely different interface for each and every widget, forcing me to manually choose the location of the widget I want to edit, and it happens no matter what browser or computer I log in from.

I’m really looking forward to giving this year’s Pubcon presentations, not only because I’m heading to Las Vegas, November 8-12 for the longest running internet marketing conference, but because in both sessions, I get to speak about things that I have a strong passion for.

I’m proud to announce that we are one of the sponsors for Portland WordCamp 2010 that is taking place this weekend, although I’m very disappointed that I can’t go.

When I was first approached about sponsorship, I wasn’t really sure that it would be a huge value for me, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I just had to support the event and the community.

I accidentally came upon another way that WordPress isn’t working quite right, so I made a quick 2 minute video.

Over at SEO Automatic, I had created a page long ago to use for a new feature, my Automatic SEO Tip of the Week but I never made it live because I didn’t yet have enough content.

I love WordPress, I really do, but i just screwed up a site by changing a bunch of permalinks to 302′s.

Worse, WP won’t allow me to change it back without digging into the database, so I effectively rendered my child page permalinks (URLs) useless.

In this short video I’ll show you exactly what not to do -( besides assume that WordPress will work the way it’s supposed to).

I’ll bet you $1000 that if we took an existing and well established default site installation today, and first upgraded it to WP 2.82, then we set WP up correctly with our chosen SEO plug-ins, correct permalinks, etc. that we would LOSE rankings in the search engines within 90 days.

In WordPress, the traditional behavior of the past few months has been that if you edit the Permalink of a page or post, the old URL will generate a 301 (permanent) redirect to the new URL.

This action follows SEO best practices, and in general it follows anyone’s common sense. It tells search engines that the page has been permanently moved, and it also retains the value of any incoming links that may have accumulated for that URL

I can’t even begin to count the number of WordPress blogs that I’ve set up personally, much less count how many have been done by various members of our team.

We used to use an actual checklist, to ensure that everything was done the right way with consistency, and for optimal visibility in the search engines.

We use WordPress to build a lot of websites, not only because it’s so easy, but because it’s great for search engine optimization.

However, when I began using it to build full sites as opposed to just supplementing existing sites with blogs, I noticed a big shortcoming.