I looked at quite a few Twitter pages to determine the best sizes.  Since screen resolutions can vary, you need to find your sweet spot.  Some will always be too tight, but you don’t want to make it too small, either.  With that in mind, I chose the following sizes:

• The image is 2048×1024
• The top bar is 80 pixels tall and runs the width of the image
• The sidebar is 20 pixels from the side, and 20 pixels below the top bar
• The sidebar is 175 pixels wide

As for the content, I mixed and matched.  I listed a few sites, my locations and my e-mail address.  Anything else that you’d suggest?  Check it out here.

Have you done this yourself?  List your account in the comments so we can check it out!

Post from: MickMel SEO

I finally built a “proper” Twitter background

Each of my blogs has probably let about six of these get through today, when normally I have to manually remove maybe one comment (often none).  Askimet is up-to-date on all of them, so I don’t know what’s up.

Anyone else seeing this?  Any idea what the spammers have to gain from this crap?

Update: Here’s the solution, at least for now.

In your admin panel, go to “Settings” –> “Discussion” and scroll down to the “Comment Blacklist” box.  Enter the following:

94.102.60.

That’s it!  That’ll stop all of the IPs that doing this round of attacks, though more may be coming soon if this proves to be a useful thing for them…

Post from: MickMel SEO

Anyone else getting a ton of random WP spam today?

He covers four areas where increased PageRank can benefit a site: crawling, inclusion, freshness and ranking. It’s a fairly short video (8 mins) and it’s well worth your time. Do you agree with Rand’s conclusions?

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-What’s PageRank Got to do With It? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Post from: MickMel SEO

SEOmoz asks — What’s PageRank got to do with it?

Have you tried either of the WP 2.7 betas?  If so, what did you think?

Post from: MickMel SEO

WordPress 2.7 beta 2 is out

The video is about 30 minutes long, but well worth watching.  Even if you’re a WordPress SEO expert, you’re bound to pull a gem or two from this video.

Post from: MickMel SEO

A great video with some WordPress SEO tips

As Matt Cutts explains, it’s an easy way to get some links to your site.  There are probably sites out there that meant to link to you, but messed up a character, or put an extra letter on the end or something, resulting in a 404 error (and no link juice).  By noticing that error and contacting the linking site, that link will become beneficial.

You could also just create a 301 redirect from the broken URL to whatever page they intended to link to.  The advantage to this is that you wouldn’t have to wait (and hope) for the other site to fix their link.  The downside is that it could become cumbersome to manage if you have a lot of them.

In any case, there is a lot of usefulness to be found with this tool.  I’ve been digging through my sites and finding some jems, so give it a shot!

Post from: MickMel SEO

Get more links by fixing erroneous links to your site

Here is the video:

It’s looking quite slick. I love how easy it will be to customize the admin area, as I have a number of clients for which it’d be very useful to simplify things quite a bit. I’m really looking forward to this release.

Post from: MickMel SEO

Demo of WordPress 2.7

For years, CAPTCHAs have been getting more and more complex in order to stop the bots.  However, I think we’ve reached the end of that road.  They’re already too difficult for most humans to get on the first try, and making them more difficult will only serve to frustrate more users.  So what can you do?

I have an answer for today, and an idea for the future.  The answer today is to use a “question and answer” type CAPTCHA, which many sites already use.  The key is to use the right kind of question.  Rather than asking something generic like “what is 3+1″, ask something that can only be found on your site, like “In our site title at the top of the screen, what is the second letter?”.  It’s still painfully obvious for a human, but much more difficult for a bot.  If your script can handle it, write a variety of questions and answers to help keep the bots thrown off.

Going forward, I’d love to see the questions put into a CAPTCHA-style box (embedded in an image).  Doing that would add another step to the spammers job, but would still leave it quite easy for a user.

Picture this.  You have:

• 10 questions in rotation
• When a bot visits the site, they are presented with one embedded in an image.
• They need to decipher this very long image (50-100 characters, instead of 6-8).
• Now that it’s deciphered, they need to look at your site and do what it says.

While bots could certainly start keeping a database of answers for various sites, you can just change your bank of Q&A’s from time to time to stay ahead.This also would eliminate the popular technique of showing CAPTCHAs to users on another site in order to break into yours.  For example, a bot might go to your site, pull the CAPTCHA you showed them, show it to visitors on a porn site (”fill out this captcha to see the next page!”), then get into yours.  If the CAPTCHA contained a question that could only be answered by someone on your site, that problem goes away.

The problem of spamming will never go away, but we need to work hard to stay ahead of them.

Post from: MickMel SEO

CAPTCHAs are dead. Now what?

It’s only going to last for a month, so go play with it.  There’s certainly no SEO value in using it, but it’s kind of neat to play with it and see what was first for various terms.

Post from: MickMel SEO

Search the web as it was in 2001

According to Google, automatic updates on the dev channel will occur every 1-2 weeks.

Post from: MickMel SEO

Get more frequent Google Chrome updates