Optimize your Blog with these 4 Powerful Tools

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If you haven’t heard yet Matt Cutts (Google’s SEO Spokesman) announced last month that performance (measured by page load speed) is a big indicator in SEO now. I’ve taken that indication seriously and have been searching out some ways to optimize the performance of my blog and think you should too.

When assessing your blog, there are really 3 separate factors that play into it’s performance:

  1. Number and Complexity Database Calls pages on your site are making: This performance issue is caused by code running on your blog that is reading and / or writing to the database. The only way it can be fixed is to identify code that is making too many database calls and eliminate it or get the author of the code to optimize it. Take it from me — database queries can be tricky and small changes to them can either make them run quickly or grind your server to a screeching halt. If a software vendor releases something without optimizing queries (which, sadly, I have been guilty of in the past as well) then they could be responsible for slow performance on your site. To optimize your site you absolutely *need* some kind of tool that will show you what calls are taking the longest and where they are located.
  2. Script Execution Time: There are many different factors that can influence this one. Poorly coded software in your website, your server’s hardware or just your web server software settings.
  3. Memory Management: This is possibly the most elusive problem of the three. This one could be caused by how much software is loaded by your website on page loads, poor software implementation or just software that is just crunching a lot of data.

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Successful Affiliate Link Campaigns: Replacing Keywords with Pretty Link Pro

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Pretty Link Pro is a very powerful application for successful Affiliate Link campaigns — and one of it’s most important features for Affiliate Link campaigns is Keyword Replacements. This feature allows you to attach keywords to your pretty links and have those keywords replaced throughout your blog with click-able links to that pretty link. This technique can help to meet link density recommendations for SEO and successful affiliate link campaigns on even very old blog posts (since PLP replaces these links through all your posts & pages).

Pretty Link Pro also provide ways to throttle the number of keywords replaced per post, number of replacements per keyword per post, and specify link attributes like styling and nofollows. These options will allow your posts to not get too “spammy” — which can be very bad for affiliate link campaigns in particular.
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Unveiling your SEO Mysteries with Scribe

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Scribe SEOIf you’ve been blogging for even a small amount of time you’ve no doubt already started the process of figuring out how to get your posts appearing in everyone’s favorite search engine (well, er … Google).  Links from Google can still be huge sources of traffic for your site and so Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be a core activity for any blogger.

SEO = Witchcraft?

Google has always been tight lipped about how to influence rankings because they want the best content to appear in their results — not sites gaming their algorithms … But this leaves SEO as a pretty deep mystery for most of us and to spend months working on a blog without any real traction in Google could be the cause of some serious angst for any blogger.

To make matters worse, self-proclaimed experts in search have spread so many bizarre techniques to get rankings throughout the web that it has begun to look more like witchcraft than a logical set of rules.

The New Science of SEO

Luckily, there have actually been some credible SEO experts who have applied both what Google has revealed to us about getting rankings with some good old fashioned experimentation to come up with a relatively decent set of to-dos for any website. And yet, even this is troubled because going through this to-do list for every piece of content you post can be extremely time consuming and difficult to check.

Among these SEO to-dos are technical and content based tweaks you should make on your site. Now if you use WordPress with a decent theme (like Thesis), the first part of the equation (the technical tasks) are, for the most part, already done for you. But the second part of this, the content has been difficult if not impossible to get right … until now.

SEO Scribe

Recently an amazing WordPress SEO tool was released called Scribe.

Scribe is a tool that analyzes blog posts and pages on your site to help you with SEO. What makes it different than Thesis for WordPress SEO is that it has the ability to look at and score your content on how search friendly it is.

Scribe works with Thesis (or the All-In-One SEO plugin) to make sure your title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords, link densities and keyword densities are adequate. It will pull the keywords out of your post that Google would see and shows you a detailed analysis of what you need to do to get rankings on the keywords you’re interested in. Scribe will even grade your post on the Flesch Reading Ease Score to make sure it’s accessible to a large audience.

In short, Scribe is like having a credible, SEO expert analyzing each piece of content before it goes out to the world! It rocks.

Scribe was created by a team organized by Brian Clark — the Copyblogger — who was also behind the awesome Thesis WordPress theme.

Any Serious Blogger, Affiliate Marketer or Online Entrepreneur should use Scribe

I signed up for scribe right after it came out and since that time I’ve been using it on new posts and on older posts (yeah — it does help to go back and update your old posts to optimize them) and I can honestly tell you that it is the best SEO tool to hit wordpress in a long time.

If I were you, I’d pop over to the scribe website to learn more — you’ll be glad you did.

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Stop Using WHOIS Privacy and 3 Other Strategies For Increasing Your Website’s Credibility

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Domain NameThis article will show you some simple steps you can take to increase the credibility of your site with a very low amount of effort. Today I came across this fantastic article by Daniel Scocco:

Time to Stop Using Whois Privacy?

His article inspired me to write about this topic and to extend his thinking a bit beyond Private Registrations.

Scocco’s argument is that using private registration on your domain names leads to less trust. This is 100% true but here’s another big reason not to use Private Registration if you ever plan to install an extended verification SSL certificate on your site you’ll have to remove the privacy registration settings (and trust me, that can be a pain in the butt). [Read more...]

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