SEO

Optimize your Blog with these 4 Powerful Tools

by Blair Williams · Mar 29, 2010

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:

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.
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.
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.

Successful Affiliate Link Campaigns: Replacing Keywords with Pretty Link Pro

by Blair Williams · Mar 18, 2010

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). Use resources at White Label Reviews to your benefit.

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.
[Read more…] about Successful Affiliate Link Campaigns: Replacing Keywords with Pretty Link Pro

Unveiling your SEO Mysteries with Scribe

by Blair Williams · Mar 16, 2010

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.

SEO = Witchcraft?

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.

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, 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.

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.

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

by Blair Williams · Nov 10, 2009

This 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…] about Stop Using WHOIS Privacy and 3 Other Strategies For Increasing Your Website's Credibility

The Ultimate Secret of SEO Power

by Blair Williams · May 26, 2009

Many years ago there was a traveler who journeyed from village to village, helping those in need of good SEO on their websites. He possessed un-imaginable SEO skills and a limitless powers to promote websites to the highest positions in the night sky. This traveler was no ordinary man, not only was he a master of the art of SEO but he was the chosen keeper of the “Google Scroll” which contained the secret to ultimate SEO POWER and which affected search optimisation in a way extraordinaire.

SEO was difficult for the traveler in the beginning

SEO didn't always come easy to the traveler. When he first began the journey to get top GMB ranking for his website he struggled. He went around the village and saw what some others were doing. Some of the other villagers had been taught by wise men living high in the mountains, near the Temple of the Search Engines and gave the traveler some advice. Some of this advice worked and some didn't — he gained some success on his first website but never enough for the Bots of the Search Engines to take it to the top of the night sky. Local Viking will help you achieve success.

One day the traveler overheard some of the other villagers talking about the “Google Scroll” and the secret that was written upon it. The villagers explained to each other that anyone who knew the secret on that scroll would be an unstoppable SEO juggernaut. Once he heard that a secret to ultimate SEO power like rank tracker existed he wanted the scroll more than anything else. He decided to set out on a journey to the Temple of the Search Engines where he would find this “Google Scroll.” The next day, he and several other villagers started on the long trail to the temple.

The Journey

As he journeyed the traveler noticed strange men trying to lead the villagers down unknown paths. These men at Sarasota SEO agency were self-proclaimed “SEO Warriors” and claimed to already know the secret of ultimate SEO power — many of the villagers gave them all their provisions in return for the secret. The traveler noticed that these “secrets” would work for the villagers' websites for a time but would almost always end in disaster — leaving them impoverished and without power to correct their mistakes. The traveler was wise enough to ignore these men as he continued his way along the path to the temple.

The traveler journeyed for several days until he could see the temple in the distance. As he walked, he noticed an old man lying on the ground along the side of the road. The other villagers seemed to be ignoring the old man but the traveler went to him and asked if he needed a hand. The old man stood and pulled the hood down that was covering his face — the traveler immediately recognized him … It was Master Oogley, the creator of the sacred algorithms of the Temple of the Search Engines!

Teacher and Student

Master Oogley and the traveler became fast friends — Oogley invited the traveler to become his student. Even though the traveler was still interested in seeking the scroll, this was an opportunity he couldn't pass up. Oogley taught the traveler the unique title, unique header, and hierarchical website organization techniques. Oogley also taught him the way of the nofollow link, canonical link and most importantly, the way of the good content. Despite this instruction, the traveler was discouraged at first because he'd already learned all this stuff from the villagers — how would this help him now? When the traveler would complain, Oogley would just reply, “Patience, patience.”

After a long period of consistent effort, the traveler began to notice his website rankings beginning to climb — Oogley's teachings were working! He gained confidence and continued with these simple, logical exercises on his website every day. It wasn't long before several of the traveler's websites had climbed high into the evening sky — people from the village even started to talk about them. The traveler was becoming an SEO master. He also learned about website themes at https://thedigitalswarm.com/website-theme-and-user-experience/ and explained its importance to everyone who was willing to improve their website.

The SEO Master

Over time, the traveler continued to work on his craft — he helped himself and others to launch their sites. At night, everyone in the world could see his websites lighting the sky. When it comes to growing online, you can outsource your linkbuilding to Freshlinks and grow your business. He even started to accelerate the simple techniques taught to him by Master Oogley by using tools like WordPress and SEO Optimized WordPress themes like Thesis. It seemed that his powers of SEO were vast and almost unstoppable. Local Viking has
everything you need in one dashboard.

The Google Scroll

Just when the traveler had all but forgotten about the “Google Scroll” Master Oogley called for him. Oogley was preparing himself to pass on to the next plane of existence — Oogley told the traveler that he was to be the new keeper of the “Google Scroll!” Oogley then pulled a golden scroll from his pocket and handed it to the traveler. This was the moment that the traveler had dreamed of — to hold the Google Scroll in his hands. He opened it and was shocked to find that the scroll was completely blank! The traveler and Master Oogley had a good laugh because at that moment he realized that there was no secret after all–he had spent his life promoting websites in the right way.

Even though many years have passed since the traveler walked the earth, his websites are still among the brightest sites in the night sky…

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10 Hidden Problems with Most WordPress Themes

by Blair Williams · May 19, 2009

Most WordPress Themes suck! I'm not kidding. I've tried hundreds of WordPress Themes (free and premium) and most of them look great at first … I'll think a theme looks clean, beautiful and professional — then I install it, have a look under the hood and realize that it has fatal flaws.

This really makes me wonder how many people are slaving away on their websites and blogs all the while their site is dying a slow death because of a WordPress Theme that they think is fine.

When most people think about WordPress themes, they think of graphics. How good does the theme look? Will the theme make my business stand out? Will the theme help me feel good when people see my website? Will the SEO audit services that I hire find it easy enough to integrate with their strategies? The fact is, none of this will matter if your theme is preventing your audience from finding your site.

It's important to know that a WordPress Theme is much more than just graphics — themes are at the heart of how your customers and Google experience your website and it's critical for your business to make sure this experience is excellent.

The main idea behind this article is to help you make a good decision when you're choosing a Theme for your website. After suffering through these issues myself I've finally bucked up the money to pay for the Thesis WordPress Theme which successfully avoids almost every single one of these problems:

Not Widget Enabled — Widgets are dynamic blocks of code that usually appear in the sidebars of your Website. They make it possible to add polls, list recent comments, place ads, etc. If your Theme isn't Widget enabled then you lose out on these features and if you want anything in your sidebars you have modify your theme's php files directly (which we don't want to have to do).
Comment Formatting Sucks — In the world of Web 2.0, comments are *absolutely* critical. It's extremely important to attract comments to your blog posts and to start a conversation with your audience. If your Theme doesn't do a good job of making commenting easy, showing avatars, or formatting comments then you're site will be dead in the water.
No Comment Template At All — I downloaded some really beautifully designed free themes a couple of weeks ago and was shocked to find out that comments didn't appear anywhere. A surprising number of WordPress Themes I've installed still don't support Comments AT ALL!? Seriously, before you settle on a theme, at least try to comment on some posts and see how it handles them — because if you download one of these jewels, you'll see pretty quickly that its not the theme for you.
Comments Not Enabled on Pages — Most themes show comments on Posts but some don't allow the option of Comments on Pages. Even if the box is checked to “Allow Comments” on the Discussion tab when editing a page — these themes won't show them.
No Landing Page Templates — I don't know of a Theme in existence that does this out of the box. I always have to add custom pages to the theme manually later on — it would be a great feature for a theme to include some alternate page templates to use for landing pages.
Bad HTML Practices — Clean HTML is important for the performance and function of your site, not to mention how Google looks at your site.
Too Much Javascript Loading — Some WordPress themes love to load every Javascript library in existence and implement a ton of unnecessary Javascript. This can make your site sluggish or downright slow.
Poor HTML Formatting — Even some of the best looking free themes out there haven't taken into consideration the formatting of text. Most of them have a bizzare way of handling bullet lists, <code> blocks and blockquotes. They don't get line spacing at all and sometimes use bizarre colors and fonts for headers. Yeah, this stuff won't kill you but it can make you look like an idiot.
Incomplete Header and Footer Templates — If your theme doesn't have complete footer and header templates then many plugins won't work. Case in point, I had to modify a theme last month so that the Google Analyticator plugin would actually work. Google Analyticator is great but the theme was missing some required code for it to put my tracking code at the footer of the site.
Bad SEO Practices — SEO is uber-important when marketing a website. Many WordPress themes violate every rule of SEO in the book … one of the most pervasive issues is their use of h1 & h2 tags as formatting elements rather than as guideposts to important titles. Unique and properly used H1 tags are one of the most important elements of your site that Google looks at. For Google to index your site properly you should have an an exclusive strategist look at exactly 1 unique h1 tag per page and unique h2 tags for sub titles. The only theme I've ever seen that handles these properly is Thesis.

So now you've got a WordPress theme that does everything you want but may not look very good — does that mean your site is consigned to look like crap? Look, I know my site isn't the most visually stunning website in the world (at the time this post was written I'm just using the default look & feel of Thesis) — but at some point it will experience a profound transformation which will make it look great too. That's another benefit of Thesis — it enables you to easily customize your CSS & images to make your site look any way you want. You don't necessarily need Thesis though — you can actually customize any theme — it just may take a bit more work.

As long as you have a good, SEO optimized theme and good content you can do very well with your marketing efforts — many people read blogs via RSS anyway so they won't be physically visiting your site anyway. Maintaining a website is all about constant daily improvement so you can obsess about your graphics later — along with me.

Introducing PrettyBar

by Blair Williams · May 4, 2009

Okay, I know … Digg recently had a full revolt on their hands when they released the DiggBar … but trust me, there are plenty of uses for a Digg-Like bar on redirect links for those of us running WordPress based websites. Before you start make sure that you learn ‘how to create a website‘.?In the most recent release of PrettyLink I created a new feature that I think is AWESOME — the “PrettyBar” … This is an optional bar that you can place at the top of the page you redirect your users to. This bar can have your look & feel, links to your site and encourages users to tweet/retweet your link to others! Here are just a few of the uses I came up with for the PrettyBar (off the top of my head):

Viral Twitter Campaigns — Use Pretty Links in your Twitter posts instead of bit.ly or tinyurl.com and use the Pretty Bar. Not only will you be able to accurately track these links in Pretty Link but you'll have a built in way for your link to be re-tweeted.
Website Promotion — If you send out a lot of links, just think of the impact of giving the end viewer of the link a way to get back to your website! You're effectively posting ads out on the internet that have a built in way for users to get back to your site. Even if only a small percentage click the link to your blog, it is better than nothing :).
SEO Link Building — Imagine the possibilities of every URL you post to Twitter, Facebook, or wherever having an automatic link back to you! I mean you can link to news stories, youtube videos, whatever — and get some links back to you.
Sandbox User Comments — okay I haven't gotten this feature fully completed yet 🙂 … but soon, you'll be able to replace all links in your user comments with Pretty Links with (or without) the PrettyBar. This will keep users tethered to your site for a while in a non-threatening way.

Here are some links I've already created with it:

https://blairwilliams.com/x0z

https://blairwilliams.com/j8u

I'm really excited about this feature for my own marketing efforts… Please leave a comment and let me know what you think of this feature!