Since the Dayton Daily News doesn’t allow open access to stories forever- here is the complete text of the story about the Blogosopher seminar. Note- this was so easy to do- it was posted on the morning it appeared. Which begs to ask: Can your web site do that?

‘Blogosopher’ sings praises of blogs as marketing tools

David Esrati says businesses can craft Web sites that will lure attention through search engines like the Web giant Google.

By Leigh Allan

Staff Writer

Believe it or not, a blog need not be minute-by-minute updates of mindless self-centered blather. Or pompous political posturing. Or miles and miles of teenage angst.

So says David Esrati of The Next Wave advertising agency of Dayton — yes, the same David Esrati who a few years back was better known as a regular candidate for city offices and a thorn in the side of the city commission.

Esrati is known more these days as the Blogosopher, host of blogosopher.com and leader of seminars on how to use small blogs to beat the big guys and make big bucks.

So far, 100 people have taken Esrati’s 3½ hour course on why blogs are the best way to attract the attention of major search engines, and how a business can use that to its advantage.

Esrati says he spent years learning how major search engines work, especially 800-pound gorilla Google. He touts simple, inexpensive ways to beat the expensive, intricate attempts of major corporations to get to the top of search results.

He says he has been so successful at his own company’s site (thenextwave.biz) that searches for rival Ohio ad agencies often lead to him.

“I’m not doing that to disrespect them,” Esrati says, “I’m just getting people to take a look.”

Kris Oser, director of strategic communications for eMarketer market researcher, says the Blogosophy strategies should work to attract search engines, and thus attention, especially the constant updating.

But she says the story for blogs is the story of using the Web for advertising in general — it’s very much niche marketing, because “people who read blogs are trying to connect with people with similar interests.”

Esrati isn’t just Blogosophizing these days. He’s also involved with a local Veteran Owned Business group (vob108.org) that helps vets seek government contracts, and he has revived his old political Web site: esrati.com.

Blogging tips

Avoid Flash: Major search engines are Flash phobic. The blogs’ simplicity is search engine-friendly.

Change is good: When updating their data banks, search engines seek out changes. Blogs are the easiest and cheapest way to continually change your site.

It’s easy: Open-source WordPress software provides a simple way to produce a business-quality blog.

Using Image and File Attachments « WordPress Codex

This isn’t the easiest to read set of instructions – but it’s the best that’s out there for now.

If you want to attach a Microsoft Word doc (not recommended) or a PDF (recommended) to your WordPress blog- these are the steps.

• The reasons you don’t want to attach a Word Doc:
• not everyone has Word
• Word can contain viruses
• Word formatting will break depending on fonts and computer platform.

But- if you load a PDF:

• Everyone can read it with the free Acrobat reader
• Search engines will parse it
• Many people can read the PDF within their browser
• It will look exactly the same on every machine
• It can have fields in it to fill out on the computer

I hope to put a simple step-by-step how to upload PDF’s to your WordPress blog soon. For now- the codex link at top is the best I could find.

Development Blog › WordPress 2.0.3

In case you missed it on your dashboard- WordPress 2.0.3 is out.

We haven’t tested it yet- but will be doing so in the next few days.

If you want to find out more about what changed- read this post about the security fixes:

http://www.thecodecave.com/article154

and Matt has the definitive explanation of nonces here:

http://asymptomatic.net/2006/06/01/2370/what-is-all-this-nonce-sense/ 

If you use Google sitemap generator- see this post about downloading an update or the patch:
www.arnebrachhold.de