Everything is an Experiment
There was a great writeup on WebProNews about a blogging service (Blogetery) housing 70,000 blogs was shut down today by an unnamed government agency. Apparently it was due to some user generated content on Blogetery's servers.
Seriously — if your blog is at the center of your business, don't trust it to a free (or ultra-cheap) hosting service… Get some decent hosting and use self-hosted WordPress — it will give you more control and peace of mind.
WordPress.TV just posted my presentation from OCWordCamp, “Pimp Your WordPress Plugin” … FYI — it's actually quite a bit more technical than it sounds — but if you want to learn some of my techniques for developing & maintaining larger-scale plugins, this is the one for you:
Here are the slides for this presentation: Pimp Your WordPress Plugin
Hooks are one of the greatest features of WordPress — yet they are unseen by most WordPress users.
Okay, I'll admit, hooks are only available in the code — but I believe they're simple enough to be used by anyone technical enough to use a text editor and FTP.
WordPress has a really good Intro to Hooks and there are a couple of WordPress Hook databases out on the web too … but these might be a bit technical and overwhelming for many users wanting to customize their blogs.
This is my basic overview of what hooks are for and how they can make your life easier as a WordPress user. [Read more…] about Anyone Can Use WordPress Hooks
I'm excited to announce that I'll be speaking at WordCamp in Orange County, California on April 24th! The organizer of this event — Brandon Dove (of Pixel Jar, Think Press and @brandondove fame) and I met & became friends at Blog World / WordCamp Las Vegas last October.
Brandon has asked me to cover two topics related to building WordPress plugins — here they are with a link to the blog posts I did over on OC WordCamp's blog for each of them:
You might now be asking yourself:
Uh … is this just one of those technical conferences? … No, it is going to be much more than that.
My topics are fairly technical but OC Wordcamp is going to have something for writers, entrepreneurs, bloggers, developers, graphic designers and marketers alike. If you'll be in or around Orange County that weekend then I hope you'll attend — it's going to be awesome!
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:
[Read more…] about Optimize your Blog with these 4 Powerful Tools
If 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, where they even promote health products you can find in this Granddaddy Purple Weed Strain Review By FreshBros that is a company that also sells online.
Google has always been tight lipped about how to influence rankings using rank tracker 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. Most website newbies dig this fact, and try to maximise the usage of a healthy, organic SEO for their websites.
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.
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, browse around this site to find out more. 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.
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.
Do you wish you could use a shorter domain name with your Pretty Links? Take the www out of the beginning of your Pretty Links? Is the WordPress portion of your website in a sub-directory and would like your Pretty Links to come from the top level of your domain name? Well, Pretty Link Pro can help you solve any of these problems to make your Pretty Links as short as possible.
So, granted, there are some small hurdles to get through initially but you'll find that it's quite easy to put your short links on another domain name and continue to manage them from your wordpress admin — even if your wordpress blog is in a subdirectory of your website.
Here's what you'll need to do to get a custom short link working: [Read more…] about How To Create Even Shorter Pretty Links