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Anyone Can Use WordPress Hooks

by Blair Williams · May 18, 2010

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

WordCamp 2010 Orange County Style

by Blair Williams · Apr 7, 2010

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:

Pimp Your WordPress Plugin — this presentation's going to show people how to create their own Platform Modifying Plugin (PMP or Pimp) using a Model View Controller (MVC) approach … you can expect that I'll be sharing some tips & tricks of plugin development in addition to the MVC stuff as well 🙂 .
How to Create a Premium WordPress Plugin — In this presentation, I'll be covering some material that I have seen nowhere else — trust me, as I've been building premium wordpress plugins I've had to figure this all out from scratch … This presentation will cover a lot of strategy, higher level architecture but will also get into the nuts and bolts of how to do this technically.

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!

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.

Tweet Your Blog Posts … Automatically

by Blair Williams · Mar 23, 2010

Shrinking your blog posts' permalinks (on existing or newly created blog posts) and then sending a tweet out for them can be a hassle — especially if you have multiple twitter accounts. Luckily, you can automate this process and auto tweet your blog posts right from your wordpress website using Pretty Link Pro. Hopefully this article will show you how this can save you time and the simple steps you'll need to go through to get this auto tweet feature working for you.
[Read more…] about Tweet Your Blog Posts … Automatically

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.

How To Create Even Shorter Pretty Links

by Blair Williams · Mar 11, 2010

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