More than 162 million people saw our message asking if you could imagine a world without free knowledge. You said no. You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. From all around the world your messages dominated social media and the news. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet.

For us, this is not about money. It’s about knowledge. As a community of authors, editors, photographers, and programmers, we invite everyone to share and build upon our work.

 

Our mission is to empower and engage people to document the sum of all human knowledge, and to make it available to all humanity, in perpetuity. We care passionately about the rights of authors, because we are authors.

SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows. What’s happened in the last 24 hours, though, is extraordinary. The internet has enabled creativity, knowledge, and innovation to shine, and as Wikipedia went dark, you’ve directed your energy to protecting it.

We’re turning the lights back on. Help us keep them shining brightly.

 

Many other sites are taking a stand with the SOPA movement by blacking out their web site for a 24 hour period on Wednesday, tomorrow.

In a blog post earlier this week, Reddit team members said they have decided to black out the site next Wednesday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST in a bid to draw attention to SOPA.

“Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit,” the blog noted. PIPA, is an acronym for the Protect IPA Act, a U.S. Senate version of SOPA.

“A few months ago, many people thought this legislation would surely pass. However, there’s a new hope that we can defeat this dangerous legislation,” the Reddit team wrote.

Visitors to Reddit’s site on Jan. 18 will be presented with a live video stream of a hearing by House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on DNS and search engine blocking.

SOPA was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Lamar Smith (R-Va.). It is co-sponsored by John Conyers (D-Mich.), Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and several other lawmakers.

SOPA is ostensibly designed to make it easier for U.S. copyright and IP owners to take action against foreign sites dedicated to selling counterfeit goods, fake prescription drugs and copyrighted movies, music and other content. SOPA supporters claim such sites cause tens of billions of dollars in losses annually to U.S. companies.

The bill enjoys support from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and predictable quarters such as the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. It also has garnered wide support from a majority of state attorneys general, law enforcement officials, hundreds of trade unions and industry groups.

Opponents say that while the intent of the bill is good, the provisions in it would lead to a form of Internet censorship.

As always, plugin and theme authors, PLEASE test your code against the beta so you can catch any incompatibilities now rather than after your users update their WordPress installation and find bugs for you. This time we really mean it, especially if your plugin uses jQuery. We’ve now updated to jQuery 1.7 in core, so please please pretty please check your plugins and themes against beta 3.

You will also begin to see recommendations for similar users when you view another account’s profile. If you’re interested in a particular user, you might be interested in these other accounts as well. All these features will be available for developers, too. They will launch an API so third parties can provide these suggestion features in your favorite desktop, mobile, and web applications. Now, go find somebody new to follow.

Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, Twitter gets 50 million tweets per day (Now I understand why Twitter home page goes unavailable so often lately) We are talking about 600 tweets per second. Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. We’ll make time to share more information so please stay tuned.

When you create a new article, each entry will be found in multiple pages, including the home page, the archives, categories, older pages, calendar, etc. All of these pages are potential duplicated content pages. Once the blog entry becomes older, it starts moving down the page stack. Soon, it takes more and more clicks to reach that article, and then at some point it gets excluded from the search engines.

There are many ways to deal with this issue. For example using a Sitemap is a good way to list all your articles directly in one page. You can use a Sitemap plugin for wordpress. Another solution is to link to the older articles from your internal pages or from your new articles. You can also bundle important long term pages in another hotspot reference area for easy finding and crawling.

Make sure to subscribe to the RSS and Twitter.

Happy blogging!

So please don’t copy! You should create your own unique content. I’m talking about original articles written by yourself. Of course you can grab some ideas from other sites, but make sure you don’t copy-paste the articles or you will be in trouble and your site will get penalized by most search engines.

For example, there are many similar titles in the search results: Top 10 SEO Tips, Top 10 SEO ideas, etc. So Google shows less than half of these content pages in its results, because it is trying to avoid duplicate pages. So no matter how cool these Top 10 or Top 100 titles are, try to avoid them. Come on, it shouldn’t be so difficult to come up with a nice, unique title created by yourself!

Make sure you install any of my WordPress Themes optimized for search engines. Both themes are coded to avoid duplicate content in every page. Download Tandil Theme here and Patagonia Theme here.

The consequences of not backing up your blog are much more serious than you can imagine. If there is any problem with your server or your site’s hard disk fails, or your website get hacked, you will lose extremely valuable data. Although you can have an automatic backup service included in your hosting plan, many times they don’t save MySQL databases. So, to make sure you save your data, you can do the backup manually.

Personally, I try to backup all my websites weekly. Below you will find a quick checklist for backing up your blog. Just follow these simple steps to backup and save the XML file that will include all your database information. If you have any problems in the future and your blog articles are lost or deleted by mistake, the data can be imported using this XML file and recover all the posts, articles, pages, categories and the rest of your Blog’s information:

1. Login into your WordPress Dashboard.
2. Go to “Tools” –> “Export”.
3. In “Options” –> “Restrict Author” select “All Authors”
4. Click on ”Download Export File” and you are done.

Now you can save all your XML files inside a folder on your desktop.

There are some services that let you submit your site “automatically”. Currently, there are only four “major” search engines, and you can’t even submit to all of them. 95% of your search engine traffic will come from one of these major search engines. This is not really a good deal, even if it’s free. The same applies to software that submits your site to “thousands” of search engines. As I’ve just stated, only a few search engines actually matter. Using this software is more likely to generate a flood of junk email than anything else, so stay away of it.

If all of this sounds like I’m recommending you let the search engines find you, rather than submitting your site, I am. I haven’t submitted anything to the search engines in years, and it rarely takes more than a week or so for them to find and crawl my new sites. If your site has some unique content, it will be crawled even faster. I recommend using WordPress, since it will ping all major search engines automatically and I recommend using one of my SEO optimized WordPress themes, Patagonia or Tandil Theme.

You must focus on getting links set up – this will not only improve your rankings, it will ensure that the search engines can find you on their own. Some search engines (like Yahoo) offer a “paid inclusion” program. Although you get no special advantage from using it, in terms of your site’s ranking, it does ensure that your site’s indexing is up to date. This isn’t necessarily a great deal, since it usually involves paying by the click for traffic you may have gotten anyway.

First Rule: Try to Avoid Frames.
Search engines don’t handle frames very well, so you’re better off avoiding the use of frames. If you must use them, simply create a “NOFRAMES” version of
your Blog that links all of your content together. But the best option is to avoid frames.

Second Rule: Flash, QuickTime, Add-ons, etc.
Search engine spiders actually can read and index Flash web sites. The problem is that they can’t really trust what they find in the Flash files, because there’s no easy way
to determine which text is visible. Designing your entire site in Flash is crazy from a usability standpoint. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use Flash, QuickTime, or other plug-ins selectively on your HTML web pages. You can. There are a lot of cool things you can do with embedded audio and video, or with the interactive elements that Flash can create. Just because search engines don’t see it, that doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but be picky and selective if you want to use those elements.

Third Rule: Be picky with JavaScript.
Although some of the search engines have experimented with reading JavaScript, you should assume that anything you do with JavaScript is basically invisible to spiders. This
doesn’t mean that you should try to get tricky, by doing “sneaky redirects” to take people away from your search engine optimized pages to somewhere else.

Fourth Rule: Image Maps.
Image maps can be useful in design, but the search engines don’t all follow them, and like images, there’s no way to include anchor text. You need an alternative form
of navigation if you use image maps.

Fifth Rule: HTML Validation.
Actually, there’s a lot of debate about whether HTML validation is important or not. In my experience, running your code through an HTML validator will almost always
generate a lot of “warnings” that don’t mean much in the real world. However, when you see actual “errors”, this might mean that you have forgotten to close a tag or
something, and this can create issues with spidering and indexing. My rule of thumb is to fix the errors and ignore the warnings or analyze the warnings carefully. For example if you have a paypal link on your Blog and you do a CSS test, you will probably get a warning, but there is no problem with the link itself, it’s just that the CSS Validator doesn’t recognize the paypal code. So in this case, you should just ignore that warning and leave your paypal link where it is. This kind of warning is not going to affect your site at all in terms of SEO.

Also remember that Tandil Theme is 100% Valid CSS and XHTML.

Good luck!