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My good friend Galba Bright recently asked me about “podcast-enabling” his Wordpress blog. He had thought that it was necessary to install the Podpress plugin. However, while this has it’s benefits, you don’t need anything more than the sheer beauty of a vanilla Wordpress install.

You see, the only difference between a traditional Wordpress blog and a Wordpress podcast is a nifty snippet of code in your RSS feed, called an Enclosure. Essentially, all this is is a link to the media file (mp3, avi, whatever) that and other Podcatchers can use to locate and download the podcast. Here’s an example of an enclosure in your RSS feed: <enclosure url="http://domain.com/file.mp3" />.

The question is, how do you add this little snippet of code to your feed? This is where the beauty of Wordpress really shines through. Simply by linking to an MP3 file when you create a post, like so, creates an enclosure in your feed automatically. It really is that simple, so get podcasting

Coming in the new year: More practical SEO tips, advice on making your blog look and function better, why a blog is good for your business, how Wordpress can be used for much more than blogging and a whole host of other great reading.

BloggingExperiment made an called “Paidperplay”. I’m all for new advertising services, especially given the rampant reports of shady practice by certain existing players, but this one just stinks!

The idea behind PaidPerPlay is that they automatically play audio adverts when a user loads your page, guaranteeing what they call “100% conversion” — these are 2 fundamental flaws. Firstly, it’s not a conversion because the users simply had an audio clip played to them, watching a TV advert does not count as a conversion so neither does this… But this is a tiny concern compared to the accessibility nightmare this presents.

When a person suffering from severe visual impairment uses the internet, they use it through the aid of a piece of software called a Screenreader. Essentially what this does is convert the hypertext on a webpage into spoken word so blind people can still consume the content of the website. Now, imagine if a blind user visits your website, attempting to use their screen reader, and an audio advert starts playing as it loads. It will drown out the screenreader meaning your website is inaccessible and essentially discriminating visually impaired users.

In the UK you’re not allowed to discriminate people suffering disabilities from any public website and recently in the US, a blind student successfully sued Target.com for not including alt text with their images, so you really should be paying attention to how accessible your website is to people suffering from disabilities.

Over at ZDNet, Larry Dignan has written a great post about how the media sector is addicted to custom building Content Management Systems where Wordpress is more than powerful enough.

Having built a massive amount of sites ranging from standard blogs, shops and even social networks on the Wordpress platform, it’s my starting point for all projects that need rapid development on a tight budget. The reason I find developing web applications on top of Wordpress so easy is because it already has tools such as user management and templating in place, all accessible through a well documented API.

That’s not to say that Wordpress is suitable for every project, the templating system can be quite restrictive when you’re building “non-editorial” websites and the dashboard can become somewhat wild for the end user.

In these situations, Code Igniter is my choice because, like Wordpress, the basics are taken care of meaning I can focus on the code that really matters to the project, saving the client time and money.

This is the second part of my series of articles examining how to practically and ethically improve the search engine rankings of your blog. In this installment, I’m going to look at how links of an external and internal nature can help your blog climb the dizzy heights of .

Everybody knows that back links to your sites, from other sites, are the major factor in determining a sites page rank. Google’s philosophy is that the more links you have coming from other sites the more reliable yours is. The problems with this method are innumerable, but the one that applies most in our case is the question of how new sites accumulate back links and make the most of them.

There are so many ways to establish link backs that I could write for months on the topic, but there are certain methods which really stand out in the context of blogging, the foremost being Social Bookmarking. Sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon have long been the staple of traffic for a mass of techy blogs, but recently they’ve been diversifying their models to include topics which suit a much broader audience.

Submitting new posts to these sort of sites should be the first thing you do once hitting publish. They provide you with ample room to include a keyword rich title and description which Googlebot can harvest and dine out on and also provide a healthy traffic boost themselves. The key thing about this method is that it pivots on the strength of the community, if you submit an article to Digg and it makes it onto the front page, it’s much more likely to be indexed and assigned a higher Pagerank than if it lingers in the ass of nowhere without getting noticed, so make sure you’re promoting your best content to ensure it’s liked. It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of social bookmarking sites don’t appreciate you submitting your own content, so try to get your friends, or better still readers, to do it for you

Another method often used that hangs on the idea of reaching communities is commenting on blogs. This has been a favourite method for ages, blog spam is rife these days, but guess what… It’s absolutely pointless and just plain annoying. The majority of blogs now use nofollow links, so while you may get a bit of traffic from people reading your comment, it will have no SEO benefit as Google has been instructed to ignore the link. I still recommend leaving genuine comments on blogs though as it’s a great way to establish a bridge between your blog and someone else’s, leveraging their blog to extend the audience of your own.

Something else I’d advise against is paying for text links. Google has recently by dropping their PageRank and have publicly announced a vendetta against PayPerPost. Rather than buying blog posts, why not send out press releases when you do something notable, you can load the press releases up with relevant keywords and back links, making it prime for Google to crawl through and index and get in front of the eyes of hundreds of journalists and bloggers looking for something to write about. Mashable has a fantastic round up of Press Release tools, free and paid, that allow you to distribute your own Press Releases to numerous online resources.

When you’re including links to your website, it’s good to include a description of the site, rather than the name, inside the link, for example: <a href="/">Affordable blog design</a> by the449. This helps Google establish what the website is about and can rank you higher for the terms your website is most commonly linked with.

When you’re writing blog posts, try and link to as many other blog posts as you can as you can establish trackbacks this way. While these are often nofollow links, just like comments, it gives you a chance to get your websites name out there and a few keywords indexed by Google. If you’re adding something notable to the conversation, you may also receive a link from the author of the post in later follow up posts. If you’re selling a service, the majority of your potential clients/customers are going to Google your name, so if the leading results are good reviews and intelligent comments it’s going to help them make that leap from potential lead to signed client.

If you don’t get a mention as the result of a trackback, sending a short email to the author to let him know what your doing may persuade him to link you up, likewise emailing blogs in your niche may get you a few linkbacks and at the very least help you establish a few useful connections.

Whenever possible, try to link to your own blog posts aswell. Googlebot uses links to discover content, so by linking to posts in your archive you’re helping Google find something it may have previously missed (especially if you have a fast paced blog). Linking around your website also helps Google level out the page rank of your internal pages, meaning you can get your individual articles better rankings and achieve much higher traffic from the long tail.

The bottom line is that you need to be proactive in obtaining back links and the ultimate way to ensure success is to network and make friends. As I’ve told numerous potential clients in the past, you’re likely not going to find yourself at the top of the Google in less than 6 months, unless you’re doing something highly unethical (in the eyes of Google) in which case you’ll probably be banned from Google within 6 months