Friday’s Marketing Roundup: Good Reads for March 14th

Happy Friday! We’re back again with a quick update on this week’s interesting articles on WordPress, SEO, social media, and usability. It’s been a bit of an action packed week, so I have a few more links that normal.

The WPwatercooler continued to mix up education and entertainment for online viewers on Monday and two days later Sucuri further educated and protected the world of CMS with an excellent article on recent brute force attacks. On Thursday Carrie Dils launched out a new Genesis focused Google Hangout, while Rae Hoffman was live tweeting from the Search Marketing Expo.

If you’re interested in knowing where Google and Bing are headed, reading through Rae’s tweets (@SugarRae) from Thursday will give you some great insight. Some highlights from SMX include:

• Matt Cutts said if you’re aware of bad links to your site you should probably disavow them even if you’re not penalized.
• According to Duane Forrester Bing doesn’t give out a lot of penalties -and stated that you’d have to seriously, seriously spam to get one.
• Matt Cutts said Google is working on the next generation of Panda – which may make Panda appear softer.
• Duane Forrester stated Bing places a priority on ranking as content, usability then social then link building.

Web Design and WordPress

This week WordPress.org announced that version 3.9 is in beta and Nielsen Norman Group published two great usability articles designed to bring out the UX master in each of us.

• Best Ways to Learn WordPress via the WPwatercooler
• Writing Hyperlinks: Salient, Descriptive, Start with Keyword
• What Theme: A New Website Theme Detector Powered By WordPress
• Genesis Office Hours With Carrie Dils
• Top 60 WordPress Plugins of 2014
• The Best Places to Learn WordPress Online
• 35+ Resources to Become a Kick Ass WordPress Developer
• Define Micro Conversions to Measure Incremental UX Improvements
• WordPress 3.9 Beta 1
• Where to learn WordPress development
• WP Inject Makes It Easy to Add Free Creative Commons Images to WordPress Posts
• Taking A Second Look At Free Fonts
• Understanding Denial of Service and Brute Force Attacks – WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, vBulletin

Internet Marketing, SEO and Social Media

Nothing in search and social media stays constant. Google deployed a redesigned search results page while Facebook began changing up the design of pages. I’m particularly happy with the later announcement, because I’ve not been a fan Facebook’s latest page design.

• Google’s 2014 Redesign: Before and After
• Hashtag Marketing 101: Keyword Research in the Social Media Era
• Pinterest Gets Transparent for the Very First Time
• Troubleshooting Local Ranking Failures: A Beginner’s Guide
• Creating Content that Speaks Volumes in Multiple Languages
• Google: Sites Penalized for Long-Term Spam Tactics Might Never Recover
• 12 Ways to Increase Traffic From Google Without Building Links
• 4 Ways to Avoid Getting Hit by Negative SEO or New Unnatural Links
• New Facebook Page Design Lets You Watch (Spy) on the Competition

Entrepreneurship, Business and Plain Old Fashion Goodness

This month Chris Lema started a new business series called the 40 Mantras. If you’re a business owner, executive, or manager, this series is a great no nonsense read. Visit 40 Mantras ->

Upcoming WordPress Events

• WordCamp Atlanta – March 14-15
• WordCamp Charleston – May 17
• WordCamp Minneapolis – April 26-25
• WordCamp Austin – April 26-27
• WordCamp North Canton – May 2-3
• WordCamp Connecticut – May 10
• WordCamp Miami – May 10-11 – We’re a sponsor and I will be a presenter.

As always, this is not an exhaustive list. If you know of any posts related to web design, WordPress or SEO then by all means do share! Post a comment below and let us and our readers know what we may have missed.

Many thanks to those of you who have emailed me with suggestions!