Tag Archives: search

2 Great WordPress Plugins to Find Your Blog Most Powerful Pages

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Learning which of your published content did particularly well based on some parameters is a great way to become a more successful blogger. This way you can see which of your posts are well received in social media, which of them get linked more and which of them spur a more active discussion. This week I am sharing the two best WordPress plugins that will offer you a huge variety of parameters to evaluate your posts: Blog Link & Traffic Analysis Plugin for WordPress This plugin digs into your blog posts and offers several variables to find the most powerful of them: post date page views per post in the previous 3 months inbound links (requires Yahoo Site Explorer Yahoo API which is quite easy to receive) Google bot visits (last visit and number of visits) Yahoo bot visits (last visit and number of visits) MSN bot visits (last visit and number of visits) Other bot visits You can sort by any of the column to find the pages that did best for any of the criteria. For example, if you want to find post with most backlinks, click > icon in the “Inbound Links” column: The best part of this plugin is that it gives you the ability to compare any of the variables side by side. For example, you can see how number of links effects the bot visits and traffic: Just a quick note: you will need to update the link count manually and the process takes quite some time, so you don’t want to do that too often. Popularity Contest for WordPress This plugin provides a wealth of information on how well your posts are doing. 1. The summarized popularity data: The first thing you’ll see is the table containing the following data: Post unique views; Category and archive views, Comments, Trackbacks, etc (I wish the table were sortable though) 2. Recently popular pages : the section allows to see most popular posts over the past 30, 60 and 90 days as well over the past year. 3. Most viewed pages and categories : Most viewed pages; Most viewed categories; Most viewed tags; Most viewed archives; Home page views; Feed views; 4. Reactions: Most commented posts; Posts with most trackbacks; Posts with most pingbacks; 5. Averages: Average popularity by category; Average popularity by tag; Average popularity by month. 6. Popular posts within each category. The plugin also offers a handy sidebar widget that allows to list your blog most popular posts by plenty of parameters including overall popularity, archive views, comments, etc: The widget also has quite a few options that allow to exclude views by authors, (dis)able showing the popularity rank of the posts, set the search engines, adjust the popularity values, etc: Notes: The plugin gave me an error on installation but when I left the installation screen it appeared to be working just fine; After installation you will notice that new posts are much more popular than old ones. Since home and feed views have not been recorded for old posts, they won’t be ranked as highly as new posts. Any other suitable plugins I have missed? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 2 Great WordPress Plugins to Find Your Blog Most Powerful

Google Suggest Becomes More Local and Better with Spelling

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Google has just rolled out two nifty features of its Google Suggest service – a more localized search suggest that boils down to metro areas and an auto-correction of spellings for name search.  These two new features aimed to give you a faster search experience when typing your search keywords as well as lessen the amount of time you devote typing these searches. The localization feature is actually a spin-off of previous Google Suggest feature which was limited by country searches. The new Google Suggest local feature was tailored to specific metro areas in the U.S.  This means that when you type in a specific keyword Google search immediately analyzes your search term based on your location. Google gave a good example when searching for the keyword -”bulls.”  If you are currently located in Chicago will typing this keyword, Google will quickly pull out it’s suggested keywords based on all things about Chicago.  The assumption is that you are looking for Chicago Bulls-related infromation via Google search. So, all the terms suggested by Google will be related to the Chicago Bulls team. The other new feature of Google Suggest has something to do with spelling enhancement. So, when you are searching for a general term such as “composer” Google will pull out several search suggestion which include the name of the composer. Basically the new feature makes use of the concept that people often know something about a person besides the approximate spelling of his name. Aside from this new Google Suggest feature, Google also rolled out an auto-correct  feature which lead you to the online entry for that keyword even though the spelling is correct.       Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Suggest Becomes More Local and Better with

So Now You Care About Your Website Load Times

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Google announced recently that site loading time now plays a part in their search ranking algorithm.  It has also been openly said that over 200 elements are taken into consideration when determining a sites search engine ranking.   In addition Google notes that site load time is going to be a very small portion of this algorithm.  With all that said I simply don’t understand why people are freaking out.  This should not be the first time you are considering improving your site load time. If Your Website Is Slow – Fix It! Site load time is very important however you shouldn’t be improving it for the search engines.  If your website takes longer than a couple seconds to load, you’re already in trouble.  Web users have very short attention spans, they want what they want and they want it now!  If one of these users’ clicks on your website and it takes longer than a couple seconds you bet they are going to bounce quicker than a super “bouncy” ball! There shouldn’t be a webmaster that isn’t aware of their site load times.  Not only should they be doing user tests on their own site but they should have installed site analytics.  With that said, if your site is slow you can expect your traffic bounce rate to be extremely high.  Users don’t have patience for slow website and will often click back within only a few short seconds.   This is two ways to measure your sites loading time but if that’s not enough Google even made a tool for you to use. How Do You Measure Site Load Time? Back in January I wrote an article about site loading time being a possible 2010 ranking element. (http://www.dkssystems.com/SEO-Site-Loading-Time.html) I write about how you can test your sites load times using Google webmaster tools.  Using their “Site Performance” option will give you an insight on how long a particular page is taking to load.  In addition Google gives you some specific tips on what to fix in order to increase the page loading performance. In addition, Google suggests the following free tools to evaluate the speed of your website. Page Speed YSlow WebPagetest Fix Your Websites Performance For Your Users Not Google. I can’t tell you how much it annoys me knowing that people will only now start fixing their websites load time.  You should be building a website that gives your users an enjoyable experience.  If your website is super slow then this issue should have been addressed a long time ago.  Its frustrating to hear people willing to fix their sites only after Google has released there latest ranking announcement. Do Not Over Value Site Speed For SEO. It’s really unfortunate that people are going to completely redesign their websites and spend countless hours in their code over this issue.  Now if you own one of the websites that takes 15 seconds to reach the homepage this should be something you’re already working on.  However, this is not who im talking about.  I’m talking about the webmasters who sites load in less then three seconds but will spend endless amounts of time tweaking code just so they can get down half a second.  At this point the difference between two seconds and one second will not make or break your search engine rankings.  Links and content will always be the bread and butter of SEO and it’s really disheartening to think people will waste so much time focusing on their site load time. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . So Now You Care About Your Website Load

Google Improves its Twitter ‘Updates’ Search Feature

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Short update! Google is a monster when it comes to searching. One thing that attributes to their all encompassing search features is that they are insistant on working with real-time search results and updates. It was announced recently that along with the ability to search updates for Twitter results, you’ll now also be able to search back in time to see a cluster of results from a certain time period. This is helpful if you just heard about a recent movement or news but missed out on the trending topics or social media waves that it was making. The features are not available currently- they’ll be rolled out in the next few days- but there’s a  test page available with limited search results. I tried searching a few things but they weren’t showing up… finally I used the search term “Google” and got something icon smile Google Improves its Twitter ‘Updates’ Search Feature Realizing the importance that social media trends and real-time results have  in our world today, the  Google blog stated: “All of us are just beginning to understand the many ways real-time information and short-form web content will be useful in the future, and we think being able to make use of historical information is an important part of that.” I personally can’t wait for this feature to roll out… I’m pretty nosy when it comes to social media trends but I’m not such an excellent multi-tasker that I can follow  everything the minute they happen! I can however: work hard, drink coffee, use Gtalk, post on SEJ and tweet in one swift motion icon smile Google Improves its Twitter ‘Updates’ Search Feature Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Improves its Twitter ‘Updates’ Search

WordPress Plugins to Interlink Your Blog Content Efficiently

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A couple of weeks ago I shared a handy WordPress plugin that helps to smartly interlink your blog content (best to naturally link to your categories and tags). The post was very well-received, so today I am following up with the overview of all WordPress plugins that help to (automatically) interlink your blog posts, pages and categories . Internal Link