WordPress Weekly Episode 20
This was one hell of an episode. For the first 35 minutes of the show, I interviewed Patrick O’ Keefe who is the author of the book, “Managing Online Forums“. Although this is a WordPress centric podcast, most users of WordPress either have a forum attached to their blog, run a forum seperate from their blog or at some point in time, dealt with running a forum. We discussed all sorts of issues related to managing a forum and then we dived into topics which were more in line with managing a community. There is some great information which was shared within this interview and I highly suggest giving it a listen. Thanks Patrick for stopping by.
After the interview, we dove into the news of the week. Near the end of the show, Darren Hoyt, author of the Mimbo Pro WordPress theme called in and I sort of did an impromptu interview with him. I asked him questions relating to the Mimbo Pro Theme, how successful it’s been since its release, his thoughts on theme clubs, the premium theme market and a wide assortment of other topics.
This is an hour and a half episode which is jammed pack with great information. Please enjoy the show and let me know what you think.
Guests:
Darren Hoyt - DarrenHoyt.com
Dan Philibin of WPCandy
Patrick O’ Keefe author of the book “Managing Online Forums“
Richard Paul - Richard called in during the show and offered his insights and opinions to the discussions that took place during the show
Jacob Santos of Santosj.name
Topics Of Discussion:
Fight Website Content Theft by Filing a DMCA Complaint
Manage Your 125X125 Ads With The Show125 Plugin
Displaying Related Category and Author Content In WordPress
Small Potato Is Still Alive But WPDesigner Is Not
Lost E Minor Redesigns Their Site And Goes All WordPress
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Comment by Darren on 14 June 2008
That was fun, thanks for having me on Jeff.
Comment by Jeffro on 14 June 2008
@Darren - It was my pleasure. You’re welcome to come on the show at any time. Perhaps I can get you for a half hour interview or so for the beginning part of another show.
Comment by Patrick on 15 June 2008
Thanks! Great show.
Comment by Justin Tadlock on 15 June 2008
As always, great show, Jeff. I finally got a little time earlier tonight to listen to it.
I was actually the first to vote down the SEO plugin idea into the core though. I believe something like this should be left to themes and / or plugins.
Comment by Jeffro on 15 June 2008
@Justin Tadlock - Well, I can see your argument against putting into the core. It’s just that so many people use or suggest this plugin, I thought it would make for a nice addition into the standard set of features.
Here is a question for you. When creating a WordPress theme, just how SEO optimized can you create it? Can you develop it so that the need for SEO plugins is non existent?
Comment by Justin Tadlock on 16 June 2008
To answer your question Jeff, I believe that my themes are fairly well organized for as much SEO as one would ever need.
I believe if you just keep your code clean, keep your site updated, and write content that people want to come back for or link to, then all this SEO business is pretty useless in the larger scheme of things. I, for one, have never used an SEO plugin. Nor do I do any of those fancy robots.txt tricks that people keep talking about.
Of course, maybe that’s hurting me a bit. I honestly couldn’t say.
The problem with SEO is that most everything about it is that it’s users trying to game the system, or Google. And, you can’t game Google. Content will always be king. And, the WordPress developers shouldn’t be trying to figure out how to best optimize for search engines (well, not too much). Just so long as they give us the ability to update it ourselves. They should be focused on developing the platform. Leave the SEO to plugin and / or theme developers.
Now, with my themes, I do add an extra function in that takes care of title tags for you. I’ve also added in an extra custom field for additions to the title tag on single posts. For example, if the title of your post was “Justin Tadlock is wonderful.” You could add the additional custom field to make it read, “Justin Tadlock is wonderful: He’s the best person I know.”
I could develop this further, but I don’t see the point. I’d much rather spend my time working on other things. Things that won’t change next week when Google announces a major algorithm change or something. Or, some SEO “expert” releases his or her new secrets on how to up our PR.
Edit
I thought I’d try out this edit thing. Looks cool. Is this using Thickbox?
Anyway, I wanted to say that I’m also coming from the viewpoint of someone’s that’s a bit more established than your average blogger. I think the reason the SEO plugins are so popular is because they seem to offer a quick solution to something that really takes a lot of time and effort to achieve.
I do want to add that I believe using solid titles and header tags with relevant keywords is something I try to focus on.
[...] last one. I had interviews with Jeff Chandler on Performancing (part 1 and part 2) as well as the WordPress Weekly podcast. The WordPress Weekly interview garnered a mention by Lorelle VanFossen on the Blog Herald. [...]
[...] last one. I had interviews with Jeff Chandler on Performancing (part 1 and part 2) as well as the WordPress Weekly podcast. The WordPress Weekly interview garnered a mention by Lorelle VanFossen on the Blog Herald. [...]