Agriya

Just wanted to post a quick note of (admittedly belated) congratulations to the guys over at WordPress.org on releasing the latest 2.5 version of their software.

The newest version is another step forward to what is arguably the worlds best (not to mention favourite) blogging platform - beating other open source and commercial products alike.

The latest version has way too many new features to mention, so we won’t, we’ll let the guys over at wordpress do that here:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-brecker/

My personal appreciation for WordPress started just over a year ago in January 2007 when I decided to switch my personal blog from Drupal to WP. The ease and simplicity was a step ahead of everything else I’ve used and I’m glad to say that after upgrading this blog they have continued that tradition.

But WordPress isn’t just a great blogging tool, over the years it has also evolved in to what could be considered quite a robust content management system, and infact we are modifying WP right now to power our network of sites - I’ll tell you right now, the programmers wanted to use Drupal, but I stuck to my guns and they conceded that WP would be able to do the job

If you are thinking of using or already use Wordpress for your blogging solution, I strongly suggest you check out this WordPress SEO Whitepaper which contains loads of tips, tricks and plugin suggestions to get the most out of your blog.

Finally, if you are in the market for some custom Wordpress templates or custom plugins, then shoot us a mail to info@agriya.com and tell us what you have on your mind. We love Wordpress at Agriya, and we’re keen to help you get the best out of it!

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There’s a handy little tool provided by Google that seems to have been overlooked by many SEO’s and webmasters in general. The tool is called Google Trends and it allows you to find out the search trend of the keyword phrases you might want to be optimizing for.

Let me first start by saying Google Trends is not a keyword search volume tool. It shows you the general trend, and is relative only to that search phrase.

I have found it particularly useful when researching niches, for example, say you wanted to use Rayzz to start your own video sharing site in the niche of Base Jumping (hey, there’s a lot of crazy people out there), I can use Google Trends to find out if it’s a growing niche based on searches.

Based on the image above, we can see that the overall trend for base jumping seems to be up, great news if we were to start a new site on base jumping.

Some of the limitations of the tool is that it won’t report on every keyword if there is not enough data. So you can probably forget about using most of your long tail words in this tool.

What I find the tool useful for is to search for the higher level or more generic keywords and see what the overall trend is for the niche in general. If it’s a rising trend, then it’s a good sign it’s a growing industry.

Let’s say you were looking at Orbit Social Networking Software, you are wondering if social networking is a growing industry. We head over to Google Trends and do a search…

Awesome! The search has near exponential growth, social networking is definitely taking off. And look at the number of news reports, social networking is a hot topic right now, so it’s definitely time to hop on that band wagon

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It’s official, Google is showing off the latest offspring to be welcomed in to the family; online advertising firm, DoubleClick. Google paid $3.1 billion in cash for the company - a drop in the ocean of the reported $12 bn cash reserves the company holds.

The purchase was originally announced nearly a year ago, but legal wrangling and hoop jumping with the FTC to prove the purchase was good for the online advertising industry, and it’s only just been give the right.

To be honest, I don’t see how when the biggest online advertising company purchases another large online advertising company it’s good for competition and not a monopolization of an industry.

One of the great ironies of the acquisition is that by purchasing DoubleClick, they are also acquiring a company called Performics which is (wait for it) a search engine optimization and artificial link building company! Everything that Google stands against.

It is yet to be seen what Google will do with Performics, but it’s not hard to see that a certain conflict of interests is raised.

Once again, I’m surprised the FTC has allowed the acquisition to go ahead based on the monopolization of the online advertising industry and the conflict of interests that is raised from the subsequent acquiring of Performics.

I don’t think it’s going to be long before some serious anti-trust lawsuits are filed against America’s darling web company.

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There is an enormous amount of discussion going on in major forums like digitalpoints.com and seochat.com that Google is updating its PageRank (PR) right now. A few webmasters are saying that they found changes in page ranks of their sites.

If there is a PR update going then then it will come as a surprise to some of the people since that last update had only just taken place in the middle of Jan 2008.

It is often predicted that a Google PageRank update usually takes place once every 3 months. However it had been confirmed by most of the webmasters that pr update is happening and they have named this update as “Update Q2 2008” (not sure how they figured we are in Q2 in February).

Sometimes even though your PR has been updated for your site the updated PR won’t shown in the google toolbar. If this is the case for you, then just follow these simple steps and check again you will find that actual pr of your site;

For those who want to see the new values in their Toolbar:

On Windows XP

Navigate to C:/WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc

Open the file HOSTS with Notepad, then at the very bottom on a new line put:

72.14.255.17 toolbarqueries.google.com

(our thanks to “sweetfunny” of