Sometimes it is fun to look back, and today I want to take a quick look back at the early stages of blogging, and examine the relevance of a term that many of you are probably familiar with…trackbacks.  Flash back six years ago when blogging was a very new idea and had yet to develop into what we have today. 

Before comments really caught on, it was common for a blog post’s conversation to spill over to several blogs, because bloggers would post their “comment” on their own weblog and give their takes.  The problem was, this often made it difficult for a reader to follow conversations.  As a result, the trackback was invented by the team over at Six Apart for their Movable Type software (and eventually Typepad, etc.).   Eventually, other blogging software (include WordPress) adopted this method so readers could see a post, then see who was talking about it.

In the years since then, pingbacks were created to be easier to send are less vulnerable to spam.  People that don’t have a blog will usually leave comments.  To me, this begs the question…do we really need trackbacks any longer?  When was the last time you received one that wasn’t spam?   In my opinion, blogging has outgrown the trackback and the pingback has made it irrelevant. 

As for the pingback, I think it is great for now.   I do think, however, that we are headed towards blogs using something like a Google Blog Search or Technorati to display on each individual blog page a ”who is talking about this post” module, which would make the pingback fairly irrelevant as well.   All it would take is for Google to put a little more focus in improving their Google Blog Search or Technorati to narrow their focus in this type of area so that page load times wouldn’t take a drastic hit.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble, but I figured I would throw it out there and get your thoughts on trackbacks and where blogging is headed in the future. 

I know a lot of people that have upgraded to WordPress 2.5 have all flocked to the Fluency Admin plugin, but many people probably didn’t know that you can also change the color of your dashboard to a more “classic” WordPress look from within your dashboard.   This was added for people that are slow to accept change.

All you need to do is go into your “Users” tab and select “Your Profile.”  Once that is done, you should see the following:

Here you can select the “Classic” radio button to change to a darker and more familiar blue color.  This change is only saved for the individual user, so other users logged in will need to log in and make the change as well if they want the classic look.

Hopefully future versions will contain more options, but for now, it is at least nice to have a choice!

This guest post was written by Herbert of Digital Media Break, where he writes about the latest digital technology. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

I’ve always loved Hack Wordpress for the practical advice they offer, a recent example of which would be changing Wordpress Permalinks to be more SEO-friendly. Thus, I guess you can say I was inspired to talk about my own experiences with SEO. I’ll explicitly say this right now - I’m no qualified SEO expert, and the stuff I’m about to offer you isn’t going to work 100% of the time. I pulled off many of my traffic spikes by choosing the right images for my posts. With almost every post, I try to include relevant images. Some are screenshots that I’ve created myself, but most are images I take from other places on the web. I have personally discovered that the images that bring in the most traffic are usually already found on the first page of Google Images and are perfectly timed.

What’s so great about using images as opposed to worded listings?

Let’s think - why the heck would you want to use images to draw people to your site in contrast to worded listings? Firstly, every blog author out there would be thinking to target words that the chances of one particular blogger (us, in this case) making it to the front page is slim to none. Also, in many cases, there are much bigger sites and blogs that target the same niche that we happen to be in which have higher PageRanks and incoming backlinks, making the chances for us to appear on the first page even slimmer. Secondly, Wordpress makes it soooo easy to optimize your images for search engines that it’d be impossible for you to not try out.

Alright - what do I have to do?

Firstly, resolve to add maybe around 2-3 images for every post you make from now on. I’m not going to lie - this isn’t a one-image thing that you can nail, but rather like all SEO, it is a process and good habit that you can commit to. Those 2-3 images could be from a variety of search engines I suppose, but I’ve only given Google a try. Search for a picture of whatever you happen to be writing a post about, then try to select images from the first page on Google Image results, and copy the URL of the image and paste it right into Wordpress’ Insert Image tool. Yep - it’s fine to do that, but you have to remember to give credit (I do this in italicized text right below my image).Whoops, a special thanks to David Robertson for pointing it out, it’s actually not fine to use just any picture on Google Images - you have to ask for the author’s permission or use an image that’s not copyrighted (when in doubt, use Yotophoto or SXC.hu). Speaking of credit, this is where most people make the mistake when it comes to using images effectively. When inputting image options, be sure to actually input an image description in the “Image Description” field. As an amateur, I used to input the source URL into the description. As you can figure, I didn’t get any hits at all from those images. The image description is actually the text that will appear on the search listing (surprise - well it was for me!). For example, if you are using a Final Fantasy XIII image, I suggest using “Final Fantasy XIII” or “Final Fantasy XIII Character” as the description instead of a credit “Source:http://blahblahblah.com/image.jpeg”, which I suggest relocating underneath the picture. A little blurb about timing - when Microsoft was bidding for Yahoo!, I had written a series of posts tackling the subject. Sensing that this would make for great SEO, I used my cunning to input Yahoo!’s logo into my posts (to be honest, it was dumb luck that time). The next morning, I was shocked to see hits flooding into my blog via that link - wow, I had learned the power of image SEO. I recently ended up writing about how Sony turned their fortunes with the PS3 around, and fitted in various games I thought would end up fixing their fortunes. Thus, I found a picture of Final Fantasy XIII, and wow - tons of hits from that one. I believe that was my most successful one ever, actually.

Of course, the hits continued for a few days, but after the Yahoo! buzz and Final Fantasy XIII hype cooled, I didn’t receive many more hits.

A grain of salt..

Is there any particular reason why the images aren’t always targeted? Yep - and here’s why: from firsthand experience, when was the last time you Googled an image - and actually ended up looking at the site material? You can’t remember, right? Neither could I. Thus lies the weakness in image SEO - the traffic-to-reader conversion is very low. I’m sure that of the thousand visitors I had received, a couple would have stopped and read some of my other material, and I’m grateful that they would do that. As a relatively new blogger in the blogosphere (a mere year!), I really don’t have as much traffic as other blogs such as Engadget, Gizmodo, and Hack Wordpress, so I found image SEO to be a Godsend to me. If you’re looking for ways to get more traffic, image SEO is a great way to add to statistics. But, the last thing you expected up my sleeve was…

A little trick to counter that grain of salt

Of course, I had to figure out a little solution to this grain of salt thing. After all, I couldn’t leave you hanging there, could I? I remembered the last time I stopped to look at a site for a random image, it had a huge header at the top with the text “If you came from Google Images, read this!” I then ended up spending a few minutes to glance at that bottom frame - I never actually returned, but they had me for a few moments there. This is a minor landing page strategy, and might not be embraced by all in the blogosphere, as it does take away from the quality of your original post. I don’t know about you, but usually I don’t have the time to change it because I am either already working on another post or because the spike is over by the time I notice (a couple of days later, usually).

Conclusion

Image SEO is a great way to draw spikes of traffic to your blog, and if you’re good at it, the same people might end up coming twice on different image results and as a result, stop to read your blog. Look at it this way - even though the traffic-to-reader conversion rate might be a bit smaller than usual, at least you’re getting an extra couple of readers. And all it took was finding someone else’s image and some luck (now that I put it that way, it sounds easy, right?). Either way, if you want to give it a try, do it over a period of time - say, a month or so. That gives you around thirty (on average) posts with 2-3 images, some bound to be quality ones. That gives you around 60-90 images out there in Google Images - I believe that at least one of them will end up drawing huge amounts of traffic. How about you? Have you ever experienced a spike in traffic due to your simple image SEO? Or are you feeling a bit skeptical? I welcome everyone to comment - I’m looking for constructive criticism, but also for discussions (please, no flaming).

If you don’t have a lot of coding knowledge, you probably find that you use widgets a lot for your sidebar content.  I know many bloggers have come to rely on widgets and now WordPress 2.5 has changed some things.

If you would like to learn how to use widgets in WordPress 2.5+, I recommend you check out the WordPress 2.5 Sidebar Widgets Guide over at WordPress Max.  He does a good job of getting you used to the new look and feel of the new WordPress widgets system.