For all those Wordpress enthusiasts out there, I have found a valuable plugin which will further enhance the socialistic nature blogs have on the internet community.  It is a star rating system so visitors can rate each post.  It is called gd star rating and can be downloaded on the Wordpress website.  It only functions on Wordpress version 2.5 and higher, so if you haven’t already upgraded your Wordpress to version 2.6 you are definitely leaving your visitors with a lessor user experience.  From a functional point of view it is very easy to setup, the only slight hiccup I had was figuring out how to disable the rating system for my blog pages.  All I had to do was click on a tick box in the administrators user panel to disable it.  You are also able to insert the gd star rating widget which displays your top rated blog posts in the sidebar.

Just yesterday I used it in The Western Nostril and we are already seeing the benefits of it’s interactivity. The Western Nostril is a comic strip published in the Business Day newspaper every Tuesday to Friday, with the star ratings we can now analyse which comics are rated the best by the public.  This plugin will become a very powerful tool over an extended period of time.

The biggest benefit for me is that now I can see what my readers enjoy and what they don’t. It has forced me to sharpen my skills because of the visitor feedback.

Updated: 07 November 2008

I have found another star rating plugin which you can incorporate into Feedburner. It’s a plugin from Outbrain, now your readers can rate your post from within the inbox or RSS reader.

I am busy testing it on my site, I like it so far.  If there is a downside it is that they insert related links below the star ratings.  Is this good or bad?  I guess it offers the reader more resources in case your article doesn’t fulfill them…  Oh dear!

Over the last two weeks or so Google has changed its algorithms slightly; or at least we think so. Those who know the basics about SEO know that title tags and incoming links (anchor text) are important. Title tags are still very important for on-site optimisation and I can’t see that changing anytime soon. The areas in which changes have occurred are with visitor tracking within the website, and from the source of the incoming links.

Site Performance: For those highly competitive keywords that you are targeting, measuring a website’s speed is an important aspect of SEO if you want to beat your competitors.  When you look at short tail keywords such as cars, property, news etc, they are all highly competitive keywords having thousands of searches per day. If we said that there are 100 000 searches per keyword with an average CTR (click through rate) of 75%, you would need to return this page at an average of 250 milliseconds to be able to handle the load for optimal speed and efficiency. If you return at a rate over 1000 milliseconds, your speed will be too slow to deliver a reasonable experience.

Bounce Rate: First let’s start with a definition of what it means. There are two possible definitions to the bounce rate:

1) The amount of time the user spends on your site. For example, if they are on the site for less than 15 seconds, it is considered a bounce.

2) The number of page views by the user during their visit to your site. For example, if they see only one page and leave, it is considered a bounce.

A search engine cannot pick up on how many pages you visit (unless, using Google as an example, they leverage the Google toolbar or Google Analytics data) but the search engine can tell if you made a query, visited a site, and came back to the search engine to make a query again five seconds later.

Do search engines use bounce as a signal? The possibility is very good. One must remember that the more data a search engine can collect, the better and they have a variety of ways in which to collect this data.

If they do use it as a signal, various filtering methods would need to be applied. For example, they would look at sites placed within the same industry. If the Nike website has a higher bounce rate than Adidas’s, it might mean that the Adidas site is a better site. However, you wouldn’t want to compare the Nike site to the Amazon website. Their target market and website goals are just too different. So search engines compare data within industry categories comparing website competitors rather than all websites as a whole.

Incoming Links: The much spoken about link building algorithm is believed to have changed slightly over the last week or two. Anchor text has always been a favourite for the popular search engine, Google but it seems to be changing. More focus is being placed on actual on-page content and title tags from where links are coming. The change is believed to have taken place because many webmasters and SEO’ers were paying for their incoming links and if one is able to buy links then they also have the power to demand what their anchor text should be. So Matt Cutts and his web spam team have possibly once again refined the Google algorithm.

Another important area for successful SEO is a RSS feed. Google is putting weight onto the amount of RSS subscribers you have. So once again a blog is critical for successful SEO. Take a moment and visit Google Webmaster Tools; you will notice that Google is following the amount of RSS subscribers. This platform can have amazing implications on the ranking of your articles.

Recently conducted tests have shown that having a large subscription can shoot your articles rankings up. It seems that having a subscribers list of over 25 will give you a competitive advantage. Again it depends on your competitors - every industry is different.

So where do we focus our SEO campaigns for the coming months? Thinking out of the box to gain incoming links is a must. Although most social media sites have the no-follow rule implemented, bloggers hang out in these communities to find quality articles that they can link to. If you are producing quality content bounce rates will be low, organic or natural linking will be easy to gain and additional social media exposure will be made possible thanks to your loyal followers. The fact remains that achieving third-party incoming links is becoming increasingly difficult, so ensuring your content is the best in your industry will put you ahead of your competition and make finding those links so much easier.

Here’s a list of areas that you should target for additional exposure:

• - Blogs
• - Social bookmarking sites, such as StumbleUpon and Digg
• - Social chat engines, such as Twitter
• - Facebook — eventually things will be crawlable by search engines!

Link building is the number ONE priority for off-site optimisation. To achieve high rankings major search engines like Google and Yahoo, you will have to master the art of Link Building. Scott Willoughby of SEOmoz describes the technicalities behind their own page rank, mozRank, which is very similar to Google’s PageRank. Scott takes an in depth look into mozRank, mozTrust, Domain Juice and a little more. Although mozRank is not the exact algorithm Google uses for their PageRank, you can get an idea of what Google looks for by listening to what Scott has to say about SEOmoz’s mozRank.

Over the last ten years of search the goal for search engine optimisers was to get their client websites into the top 10 or 1st page of the search results. Recently, people’s search habits have changed slightly, they are more impatient than ever before and are getting better at selecting their own chosen search keywords. One word searches are becoming less used, people are now using ‘two to four keywords‘ when searching on the internet as they realise the likelihood of them finding what they want will increase if they use long tail keywords.

The more refined search engine algorithms become, naturally the better the search engine results will also get. With Matt Cutts and his team of spam killers doing such a good job at destroying ‘Page Rank‘ to any site that adopts black hat SEO techniques, the search results are becoming more aligned to the searchers needs. We can see in the below image the actions internet users are using when searching on the 1st page of Google.

From position 1 to 5 the click volume decreases gradually. There is a slight showing of clicks on the right - hand column, which is Google’s Adwords (paid advertising). From positions 6 to 10 very little clicks have been detected by the heat map.

This visual heatmap explains graphically how important it is to be in the top 5 or more importantly to be #1 in Google otherwise your website is losing out in significant traffic.

Chrome released their new version on 17 September 2008, users will be getting updates over the next few weeks.

Fixes have been made to flash, javascript, fixes on a few plugins so crashes hopefully won’t happen as often or hopefully never.
Here’s the link which explains the fixes in more detail:

http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2008/09/beta-release-0214930.html