No, your calendar isn’t wrong.  It really is Monday and this really is an SEOpsCentre Link-Fest.  After giving it a lot of though, I’ve decided to move my regular link round-up posts from their old spot on Fridays to their new place here on a Monday.

Partly this is because work commitments have meant that I wasn’t getting a chance to publish the Link-Fests until very late on a Friday, by which time they just disappear into the crowd with everyone else’s link round-ups, potentially sitting unread in people’s feed readers until Monday anyway.
Publishing them on Mondays will give me more free time over the weekend to put the posts together and (hopefully) mean that more people will have a chance to check them out when they come up closer to the top of the list of new posts on a Monday morning.
Anyway, that’s enough of my rambling.  Let’s get on with the linkage…

Some Great Big (Romantic) SEO News

Two of my favourite people from the SEO community got engaged on Thursday.  Bill Slawski (he of SEO by the Sea) asked Kimberly Bock (from Learning SEO Basics) to marry him and, of course, she said, “Yes!”  The SEO blogosphere lit up with congratulations for the happy couple and (even though I’ve already tweeted, plurked and otherwise congratulated them far and wide across teh interwebz) I want to tell Bill and Kimberly just how happy I am for them.

So long and thanks for all the Sphinns

One of my other favourite SEOs, Dave Harry, has decided that he’s had enough of the Social Media scene and announced that he’s going to be bowing out of sites like Sphinn as a result of a few issues that he’s had recently with the way even their most dedicated submitters are treated (read: ignored and left unthanked for all their efforts finding content and promoting the community).  To clarify an important point which seems to have escaped many of the people who read Dave’s post, he’s not dropping out of Social Networking sites and will still be providing us with his usual brand of silliness on Plurk, he’s just decided to do things on his own terms rather than putting so much effort into Social Media sites which don’t appreciate their greatest assets, their contributors.
Ironically, Dave’s post was almost immediately submitted to Sphinn prompting him to plurk an enquiry as to who was “the smart ass that sphunn it?”  And no it wasn’t me.  But only because Zak Nicola was quicker on the draw

Sex and the Guest Blogger

My buddy Duthie’s been back on tour with an appearance on Tad Chef’s SEO 2.0 Blog where he explains why social media is a lot like sex.  I’ll let you read the post and see how James makes his points for yourselves, but the short version is that getting someone to give your website a link is a lot like trying to get a girl to play with your dangly bits.  Or something like that

WordPress Updates A-go-go!

If you’re a WordPress user, you’ve probably already noticed that WP 2.6 came out last week.  Which means that the authors and maintainers of all those plugins that we love so much have been scrabbling around updating their plugins to work with this latest version.  It hasn’t been without hiccups though, as Joost De Valk points out some issues that have occurred with some of his plugins.  So if you’re reading this post in a feed reader and some of the usual information that appears in the footer is missing, it’s because of these issues and the fact that I haven’t had a chance to figure out how to get the plugin to work properly yet (but hopefully this will only be temporary).
The WordPress folks have been busy with other things as well.  Last week also saw the announcement of a new and improved WordPress Theme Directory.  It’s pretty spartan at the moment, with only a handful of themes available, but there are sure to be plenty more added to the directory very soon.

28 Ways to Make Your Blog Sticky

Darren Rowse started off by sharing 21 tips to make your blog sticky (i.e. to encourage loyal, repeat visitors), then he followed that up with 7 more things he thought of to make your blog even stickier.  I guess number 29 should be, “Write a post to fill in the things you forgot to add in your previous post so that people will come back to read that as well.”  Although I’m sure Darren would come up with a snappier title for it than that.

Motivational Mondays

As part of the switch from Fridays to Mondays, I’m dropping the time honoured tradition of the “Friday Funnies” and will instead be throwing out the link love to some of my favourite motivational posts to help get you geared up and in the mood for the working week to come.

Our very first “Motivational Monday” appearance comes from Dave Navarro (NOT the Jane’s Addiction and RHCP guitarist, in case you’re wondering) with his great post about overcoming the fear that prevents you from achieving the right work/life balance.
And (for the sake of providing a little extra balance) here’s a post from my old favourite, the Put Things Off blog, which is celebrating 6 months of putting things off but still managing to become an accidental problogger.

So there we go folks.  Have a great Monday and enjoy the rest of your week.