WordCast Conversations 8: Anne Helmond on SEO and Social Media

Anne Hel­mond, New Media Lec­turer at the Uni­ver­sity of Ams­ter­dam and an expert on the rela­tion­ship between blogs and search engines.

When it comes to the rela­tion­ship between blogs and search engines there’s no com­par­i­son to the exper­tise of Anne Hel­mond who has worked for years research­ing blog soft­ware and how it con­nects to Google and other search sites.

This week, she talks to Kym about her research and how it con­nects to search engine opti­miza­tion, Word­Press, blog­ging, and social media.

Guest: Anne Hel­mond

• New Media PhD can­di­date with the Dig­i­tal Meth­ods Ini­tia­tive at the Medi­as­tud­ies depart­ment at the Uni­ver­sity of Amsterdam
• Grad­u­ated from the Uni­ver­sity of Ams­ter­dam cum laude with a the­sis on ‘Blog­ging for Engines. Blogs under the Influ­ence of Software-Engine Relations.’
• Researcher on the sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship between blog soft­ware and search engines
• Anne pre­vi­ously joined us on Word­Cast Con­ver­sa­tions when we cel­e­brated Blog Pro­duc­tiv­ity week, to share her tips on being a more effi­cient blogger.

To pre­vent users from com­ment­ing with links to their site sim­ply to boost their search engine rank­ings, Word­Press includes a “nofol­low” tag by default with all links. To change this on your self-hosted Word­Press site, sev­eral plu­g­ins are avail­able. Below are a few of our recommendations.

DoFol­low Word­Press Plugins:

• Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin
• DoFol­low
• Link Love — Removes nofol­low tags after a cer­tain num­ber of com­ments have been made, reward­ing reg­u­lar commenters.

Mak­ing great strides in both the social media and edu­ca­tion worlds, Anne knows first-hand the stigma that comes along with young women in these fields. She shared her thoughts on this, explain­ing that, when there are more men than women, that’s the way it is, and it has no effect on what one can achieve. She also gave us a few of her favorite sto­ries as a teacher.

Of course, Kym brings you the dirt: Anne’s favorite “guilty plea­sure blogs” include XKCD and Perez Hilton

We’d love to hear your feed­back about what we can change, fea­tures to add, and guests and top­ics for future episodes! Con­tact the show by email­ing con­ver­sa­tions [at] wordcastnet.com, or call (toll free) 1–888-525-BLOG (2564). You can also dis­cuss the show in the Word­Cast Con­ver­sa­tions forum.

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