Happy Monday, folks! Big news this week: Six Apart announced the beta for Movable Type 5. The plan is to have a two month beta period, with the release coming sometime in November. Let’s take a look at some of the big new features in MT 5:

* Websites — MT 5 will have the concept of a website, which includes blogs and pages. This makes it more of a CMS, and makes it much simpler to use MT to maintain your entire site.

* Revision History — Entries, pages, and templates will all maintain a revision history. I’m particularly excited about this feature. The ability to modify templates, and return to previous version, is very useful.

* Custom Fields — Custom fields are now available on more objects and can be imported and exported. Plus, you can map them to a category/folder, so that they only appear if an entry/page is within that category/folder.

* Themes — MT 5 will have a whole new theme engine, which allows the bundling of templates, CSS, images, etc. together as a complete website theme.

…and lots more. MT5 will be a huge change from previous versions, pushing the platform more towards a CMS and further away from being a personal blog engine. We should get more details about these other changes in the coming months. read more

Google SEO expert Matt Cutts spoke at WordCamp San Francisco 2009, and the video i available over at the WordPress Publishing Blog. Why would they publish it? Well, it might have something to do with this:

WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Great praise indeed, and true at that. Launching a site using WordPress (or any other SEO friendly platform for that matter) is a good idea if you want to rank well in the search engines. If you’re interested you might want to check out Matt Cutts’ slides from the presentation as well.

In part one of this series, I gave a couple tips on using anchor text effectively including doing research on keywords and then inserting the keywords in your post titles.  Here is part two where we’ll look at other tips including optimizing internal anchor text and avoiding anchor text spam.

Optimize Your Internal Links.

Internal links are links that point to a page within the same website. These links should be optimized since they actually help with rankings. Anchor text from external links, or links from other sites, is more effective than internal links, so don’t just rely on internal anchor text. However, since you control the anchor text of your internal links, it makes sense to optimize them.

For example, look back at the first sentence of this post. I could’ve linked back to part one of this series like this:

In part one of this series, I gave a couple tips on using anchor text effectively including doing research on keywords and then inserting the keywords in your post titles.

Instead, I used the anchor text using anchor text effectively since it has the relevant keyword, anchor text. read more

StudioPress is growing, and the themes are getting some serious SEO treatment thanks to the latest member of the team: Joost de Valk, of WordPress fame. Brian Gardner and Joost de Valk have their own respective announcement posts up. They are both really happy with the partnership, this from the latters blog post:

So we are partnering up. I’m going to be optimizing all the StudioPress themes, and offering StudioPress customers advice on how to optimize their sites in regular blog posts and in a new blog optimization package we’ll be offering through StudioPress.

I caught up with Brian Gardner for a really quick chat about this latest development for StudioPress. read more

In my last post, I defined anchor text and talked about its importance in SEO.  Today, we’ll look at a couple ways to use it effectively.

Research Keywords.

It’s a good idea to do some keyword research so that the keywords you use in your anchor text are good keywords. I’ve written about keyword research before so I won’t belabor the point. read more

In a survey of 37 search experts, the 2nd highest SEO factor was the anchor text of links from other sites.  However, many webmasters who want to rank better on the search engines don’t know what anchor text is.  Fortunately, anchor text is an easy concept to understand.  In this post and next week’s post, we’ll look at what anchor text is and how to use it well for your blog.  read more

Over the weekend, the streets of Manila were pretty much empty. Which is a rare case to consider. The malls had no people. Sunday lunch out was pretty much dead — a whole nation was glued to the television watching the Pacquiao vs. Hatton fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. With 8 seconds to spare in the second round, Pacquiao landed a stunning left blow into Hatton’s lower jaw sending him to sleep, and a TKO.

But Pacquiao wasn’t the only winner that evening — dozens of Filipino bloggers cashed in from page views netting thousands of dollars from the search engines:
read more

It often takes time to see the results of link building in terms of traffic.  Compare this to social media marketing.  With social media, you can see traffic spikes right away whenever you get stumbles, diggs, and retweets.

On the other hand, link building doesn’t send as much as direct traffic as you might imagine.  In the short term, social media will usually send much more traffic to your site than link building.  read more

Sugarrae published an interesting study on her blog a couple months ago. It’s entitled You Don’t Need SEO to Rank in Google. It basically shows that increasing your traffic can help your rankings. Usually we think of it backwards. We do SEO to increase our traffic, but if you have a knack for attracting visitors without doing SEO, your rankings will improve as a by product. read more

In my last post, I talked about the importance of inserting keywords in the title tags of your blog posts. The title tag is by far the most powerful onpage SEO factor. But what about catchy titles that don’t have many keywords? Is there a place for them in SEO?

The answer is yes and here’s how you can combine catchy and keyword rich titles to improve your rankings. read more