Some of the greatest sources of traffic for many blogs are search engines. Whether it be Yahoo! or Google, these search engines can be a great way to drive new visitors to your blog and, hopefully, they’ll stick around long enough to like what they see. For this reason, it is important to keep search engine optimization in mind when composing some of your blog posts. Don’t write for Google, but there are some basic strategies that you can employ to improve your overall search engine rankings.

The SEO Slugs WordPress plugin is one such strategy that you may consider. As you know, WordPress automatically generates the post “slug” when you compose a blog post, assuming that you have this included as part of your permalink structure.

This is a handy feature, to be sure, but it can result in some incredible long URLs for your blog posts. For example, if you have a post called “Some of the Best and Worst Holiday Gift Ideas”, you’ll end up with a post slug that reads as:

/some-of-the-best-and-worst-holiday-gift-ideas/

With SEO Slugs, the post slug is significantly shortened by removing “filler” words like “what”, “you”, and “the”. Using this plug-in with the post title above, you’d end up with a shorter and more SEO-friendly post slug:

/best-worst-holiday-gift-ideas/

You can download and find out more about SEO Slugs though the WordPress plugin directory.

Attention bloggers if you have manually installed WordPress then you should  upgrade to 2.7. There are many new features and visual changes now in 2.7.

For those who installed WordPress with Fantastico, Netenberg usually has the upgrade released a week or two later. We do post Fantastico updates on the blog so keep an eye open for that.

Please also note we will post when it is time for Managed Blog hosting customers to upgrade in this blog.

There has been a bit of a delay with the pending launch of WordPress 2.7, but the updated content management system should be ready for primetime shortly. As we look forward to the official release, a question that some people may have is whether WordPress has become too bloated in its greater maturity.

WordPress started out as a simple and straightforward blog platform. People liked it because it was so clean and easy-to-use, but as the platform has matured, so has its functionality. Each progressive release has come with even more features, not to mention all the countless plug-ins and tweaks that further expand on this functionality. WordPress is incredibly robust, yes, but it has also become a little too crowded for some tastes.

This progression is far from unique. As you recall, Facebook started out as a very simple and straightforward social networking site as well. Early adopters adored how the interface was so much cleaner and less cluttered than MySpace, but with the arrival of so many different applications and other add-ons, Facebook is as crowded and convoluted as ever. The same can almost be said about Twitter as well, seeing how so many apps and customizations have been released for that as well.

With this, I turn back to the BlueFur community to ask: Do you think WordPress has become too bloated for its own good, possibly turning off new bloggers from adopting the platform? Or is just getting more robust and more powerful with each successive update?

Twitter has been called a microblogging platform, because it gives users the opportunity to go through a similar process as publishing a blog post, but for items that may not warrant a blog post of their own. For example, you may find an interesting link on the Internet and you want to share this with your readership, but it’s not noteworthy enough to dedicate an entire blog post to it.

As I’m sure you already know, it is very much possible to integrate your blog with your Twitter account (and vice versa). For example, there are several WordPress solutions out there that will automatically send out a “tweet” each time you publish a new blog post. On the flip side, you can install a small piece of code on your blog that is automatically updated with each of your Twitter tweets.

For this second scenario, there are generally two schools of thought. Here on the BlueFur blog, you may notice the Twitter widget in the sidebar, reminding readers of the BlueFur blog that we also have a Twitter account. People can click on that widget and follow @bluefur should they choose to do so. On Beyond the Rhetoric, however, you’ll find that the three latest Twitter updates are displayed in the sidebar.

Naturally, there are pros and cons to both approaches. The icon-only approach serves as a reminder of a Twitter account without taking up too much room, whereas the constantly updated list of Twitter updates is more comprehensive, but could also be seen as more intrusive (and possibly a waste of valuable space).

What’s your take? If you have both a blog and a Twitter account, how far do you go with integrating the two?

Spam is not a pleasant thing. We are inundated with the stuff in our email inboxes and it’s not out of the ordinary to find some spam through your blog’s contact form either. Further still, you’ve probably received boatloads of spam through your blog’s comment system. While Akismet is able to catch most of the bad guys, you can never be too safe and secure.

Rob Malon recently wrote a post that describes yet another way that you can combat comment form spam. More specifically, it is designed to fight the spam left by bots. This method won’t work against the human spammers, but bots make up the majority of your problems anyway.

In a nutshell, Malon describes a method where you insert a hidden form field as part of your comment form. The actual site visitors that you get will not see these fields, because they have been hidden. The forms are, however, visible to bots, because bots take a look at your code and not at the physical appearance of your site.

In this way, the bots will want to fill out these hidden form fields, whereas actual people will not. As you can imagine, all comments that have something in the hidden field are filled out by spam bots.

Full instructions can be found at RobMalon.com.

Attention bloggers if you have manually installed WordPress then you should immediately upgrade to 2.6.5. There are security issues in 2.6.3 which are now fixed in 2.6.5.

For those who installed WordPress with Fantastico, Netenberg usually has the upgrade released a week or two later. We do post Fantastico updates on the blog so keep an eye open for that.

Please also note we will post when it is time for Managed Blog hosting customers to upgrade in this blog.