Plugins to Improve Search?

I set out to see how we could bring WordPress up to par with most search engines - a vain attempt at competing with Google search. The first and most popular solution for “fixing” WordPress search I came upon was Search Reloaded by Semiologic. Certainly Search Reloaded improves the accuracy of the search which is a step in the right direction. But even Semiologic admits it’s not perfect. When using Search Reloaded the results were thinner and more accurate, but sometimes you want more comprehensive and have them sorted accordingly.

Example: Searching for “arthritis” without Search Reloaded returns lots of results, including an article on Osteoarthritis. The same search with Search Reloaded returns only one article title Arthritis.

Ideally, both the Arthritis article AND the Osteoarthritis articles would be returned and sorted accordingly.

Sprucing Up the Search Page

After realizing that I may not be able to do much with the behind the scenes searching I tried tweaking the search page itself to at least give the appearance of a smater search engine. I started with Yoast’s WordPress search tips. Per Joost’s advice I added the Search Excerpt plugin to extract the snippet of text around keywords and bold the keywords in the snippet. I also added his Search Suggest plugin that catches possible typos and suggests the correct spelling (just like Google), and in adition it displays a list of keywords related to the search keyword as suggestions for related searches.

Still Lacking

Despite all of the changes, the search results still lack exactly what we need to achieve: comprehensive, yet accurate results.
Any suggestions for improving WordPress results or are you willing to write a plugin to do so?

Advanced WordPress Optimization - Ten PHP and MySQL changes to speed up & secure your site

WordPress 2.7 “Trailer” - Short video about the new 2.7 interface

Writing Good Content - Guide to creating well written content

Best WordPress Plugins - Several post related plugins that are incredibly flexible

I’ve gained much knowledge from the authors and contributors of these sites and I owe much debt. If you’re interested in any of the things I do for a living, then this list is MUST read.

In alphabetical order…

• A List Apart - design, development, content
• Copyblogger - content
• Freelance Switch - business
• Matt Cutts - SEO, Google
• Michael Gray - SEO
• Official Google Blog - SEO, Google
• Pearsonified - SEO, WordPress, content
• PSDTUTS - Photoshop, freebies
• SEOmoz - SEO, content
• SEO Book - SEO
• SEO Theory - SEO
• Smashing Magazine - design, freebies
• TechCrunch - business
• Weblog Tools Collection - WordPress
• Yahoo! Search Blog - Yahoo!
• Yoast - SEO, WordPress

Now onto the news…

Why Freelancing?

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of owning my own business. In it I see opportunity to do things the way I think they should be done, I have much more freedom than I would have anywhere else, and I can hone in on exactly what it is I do best and utilize those talents to their fullest.

There’s been much speculation on the changes younger generations bring to the workplace. Those changes come from ideologies that younger people hold to tightly. A few of those, I think, are quality time with family & friends, transparency, and quality work.

I want all of those things. I want the freedom to have the time to deepen relationships with the people that mean the most to me and I’ll have more time to do that now. I want to be transparent about who I am and who my company is. I’d rather be completely open and honest and lose some potential customers than paint a picture of perfection and pretend that my company is all things to all people. It’s appalling to me to watch the number of companies I’ve seen sell their services for an arm & a leg and produce crappy work. It almost seems as if it’s the standard to produce crappy work and every once in a while come across something good. I guess this is the product of the American dream — everyone thinking that they need to take their shot, even if they aren’t qualified. Boy, that statement could really come back to bite to me!

What I love about working with other people is finding strengths in others. It was really neat to see how a handful of people made up the company at Lead Maverick and each excelled at what they did. Knowing this, I also know that I’m not a jack of all trades. I’m good at a few things and it’s those things I want to focus on and make even better. My job now is to take what I know, apply it, and get better at it all the time so that I can assure clients (and myself!) that I really can produce something really great.

Leaving Lead Maverick

I left Lead Maverick last week and it was harder to do than I thought I would it be. I made great relationships there and exciting things are happening for them. For those of you not in the loop yet, Lead Maverick is a search engine marketing company in Dallas, TX. I was the web designer among other things.

I left an environment of security. Having a consistent paycheck sure is nice, and what’s even greater is that someone had to be trusting enough to offer me a salary. In one hand I was comforted by the fact that someone was giving me money to survive on, and on the other hand I was comforted by the idea that I was trusted enough to be privileged with that money. It really is a neat thing to think about.

Friendship is much more easily grown in close proximity, something I’ll miss now that I’ll be working alone all day. Sure I’ll have the phone, meetings, and now I can work from a coffee shop if I want to. It’s quite different to work alongside your friends though. I’ll miss that part.

Where to Begin?

Well, I’m open for business. I’m praying for guidance throughout this process. I’m only a man and I can fall easily. All the support you can give is grealy appreciated. That’s where I’ll begin.

Welcome to Develop Daly.

Reputation Management via Twitter - Awesome customer service all because of Twitter

“Send This to Twitter” - WordPress snippet to add the link to your posts

High Quality WordPress Theme - Easily customizable, awesome SEO, and support

Find Spam You’re Linking To - Search operators to find spam links on your site

Reputation Management Theory - My YOUmoz post discussing singular vs. pluralistic link networks

How to Use Google Analytics Segementation - Easy startup guide to using Analytics’ New Features

Unpersonalize Your Google Search - Google removed the option for you to do it yourself, but this still works

ww and wwww Subdomains - Redirect to capture all link juice from link typos

Where MyBlogLog Breaks Down

From a user’s perspective there may be SOME value to a page showing the updates from any particular individual. Honestly, I’m really not that interested in other people’s feeds of bookmarks, profile updates, etc. They could be focusing on what they could do best: SEO.

Take a look at a search result listing for a MyBlogLog account. The description of my listing is:

“MyBlogLog respects your privacy—we only aggregate publicly-available information . If you wish to edit your list of services, visit the ‘Services’ tab.”

That helps no one! Searches don’t need to see that. Instead, why can’t they populate the description with something about…ME?!

So all of those sites I spent the time entering into MyBlogLog are getting their updates displayed on my home page, but what they aren’t getting is crawled. The news feed containing all of the great information about me (which is the point of the page) isn’t being utilized as efficiently as possible because the content is generated via javascript, and therefore isn’t scannable.

I think it’d be amazing if they could switch that over from a javascript feed to a pure HTML feed.

In All Fairness

MyBlogLog may not have had SEO in mind when building this page. They may seem to think that people are actually interested in viewing all of the updates about myself. They may also want to prevent their site from becoming a spam monster. Understandable.

They do have some follow links on the page that go to all of my services; they’re just without all of the awesome anchor text that I’d like and instead use the name of the service and my username (i.e. Technorati: patrickdaly, etc.).

Conclusion

If MyBlogLog corrected these things it would be a powerhouse of link juice.

Does anyone know of a MyBlogLog alternative that meets these requirements:

• Public Pages
• Follow Links (preferably custom anchor text)
• Already performs well in search engines
• Free (preferably)

Is .com better for SEO?

The short and sweet of it is NO. But of course there’s much more to learn!

Top-Level Domains

A Top-Level Domain (TLD) is the part of any URL that follows the domain name. For example, the common TLDs are com, net, org, gov, and edu. Every once in a while new TLDs are created to fulfill the need of creating more domain possibilies as well as creating TLDs specific to an industry, country, organization, or media type.

Why Do People Think .com Is Better for SEO?

We tend to think that because most people use .com it must be better, or at least it’s safe to use because it’s the norm. The fact is, though, that for SEO is doesn’t matter what your TLD is unless it’s a sponsored TLD like .gov or .edu. For those of us not maintaining websites for government agencies, there’s no need to debate about which TLD you choose because of SEO concerns.

However!

While the non-sponsored TLD you choose doesn’t matter one iota, the concern you should have is with branding. .com is the most trusted TLD you can get right now. Companies operating off of a .info domain name or a .biz domain name should be a bit concernced. It can come across as unprofessional. Your best bet, for branding’s sake, is to use a .com, .org, or .net.

This Youtube clip (and the 5 other parts following the clip) are quite biased, a little over the top, and at some points irrelevant, there are still many facts that remain to shed light on the history of Barack Obama and his close ties to extremely controversial leaders.

“Obama & Friends - A History Of Radicalism”: Obama’s ties include Jeremiah Wright, Black Panthers, Bill Ayers, Louis Farrakhan, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Bernardine Dohrn, ACORN, and Weathermen Underground.

I have no clue what happened, but two days ago Yahoo! and MSN started crawling my site like crazy. I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary but it seems like something clicked on my site. So its been like this for about two days; I’ll see how long it lasts…and hopefully Google will join in the Develop Daly craze!