SEO Optimization » SEO Tutorials

3 Ways To Increase Load Time of your WordPress Blog

Larisa M. — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:51:30 +0000

We all end up into a site that we know has something that we do really want, and we wait for a second that page to load, and another second, yet one more second..and we end up giving up and move forward looking for another source that has what we need. Result? The website owner just lost a new visitors because of his extremely slow loading website. In essence, slow loading since do turn off visitors.

The latest news in the SEO industry tell that Google will give great value to faster loading sites, even in your Google webmaster tools under Labs you will be able to see how fast your site is. In essence, the faster a site loads the faster it will be crawled and indexed, also a fast loading site will prevent that visitors find a result on Google, wait for a longer time to load the site that they found, give up and go back to Google to perform another search, what this could mean for Google is that the site that the visitor found first (most likely in first page) does not have the needed information’s for which a visitor performed the search and yet it ranks in the first page (if their algorithm had brain it would move that site into deeper page, or at least..i would).

Why You Want to Decrease Load time

There are three main reasons why I find important to decrease the load time of my website, and they are

Keep the visitors in my site (i don’t want them to give up and find another resource)
Save as much as possible bandwidth on my server (for heavy traffic sites this could mean loads of money saved)
Have the search engines crawl and index my site faster

Speed Up Your WordPress blog in 3 simple steps

Now that you know why I would want my wordpress blog to load faster let me show you three small tips that can be done and for how much you can decrease your blogs load time by simply implementing these three steps.

Optimizing My HTML Files

When I first tested the load time of my classic muscle cars website with a free web page analyzer my site had the next load time report (in seconds):

54K connection: 205.97
ISDN 128K: 67.52
T1 1.44Mbps: 11.71

now that is not a load speed I would be happy with. Not being happy with that load time I had to check my HTML and make sure there aren’t any unnecessary codes like comments or even empty space between HTML codes. Once I cleaned up my code from all the empty spaces and the unnecessary HTML comments (which I didn’t needed at all) the load speed of my site changed into this:

54K Connection: 190.63
ISDN 128K: 61.85
T1 1.44Mbps: 9.93

very well no? Well i wasn’t satisfied so i wanted to decrease the load time even more, so what I did was…

Optimizing My Images with Smush.it

Each and every time users load a page it has to load everything, CSS, javascript and images. Some images are bigger, the reason could be the size of the image, the amount of pixels a image used etc. Yahoo developers not long time ago developed a tool called Smush It, what their tool does is optimized the image and removes the unnecessary pixels to reduce the size and yet keeps the same quality of the image (on some more graphic heavy images tho the quality difference can be seen). If you have a website that has tons of images it would be a real pain to go through all the images and smush them one by one, with the WP Smush It plugin all this becomes easier. You can smush the images as you upload them in your media gallery or you can even smush images in your media library with a single click.

With the smush.it plugin I saved around 15% of the overall size from all the images and after I smush’ed my images the load time of my site decreased into this:

54K connection: 171.06
ISDN 128K: 55.85
T1 1.44Mbps: 9.41

Compressing My JavaScript and CSS files

With the above two tips I managed to gain little over 2 seconds of load time on T1 connections and much more on 128K and 54K, but there is more to do. Every time we install new plugins we get a new CSS file that the plugin uses. Most of the times we don’t really even need these new CSS files so simply edit the plugin (if you know how to do that) and remove the functions that injects the javascript inside the of our blog. The other method is to compress our javascripts and css files through the Minify Engine or you can use a wordpress plugin called WP Minify which actually grabs all your .js and .css files, sends them to the Minify Engine, compresses them and replaces the old codes with the new ones (safe to use).

After I compressed my javascripts and css files my load time decreased even more, and this are the results I have now:

56K connection: 160.17
ISDN 128K: 52.11
T1 1.44Mbps: 8.54

Impressive no? Now my site load time dropped to 8.44 seconds from a heavy 11.71 (more then 3 seconds gained). There are few more times that can be done to decrease your website load time but since I haven’t tested them yet I won’t mention them (perhaps I will update this post with the results). There are other factors that influence the load time of your website, such your web hosting. There is a good list of hosting comparison here at Astrit’s blog.

Now that you finished reading these 3 simple ways how you can decrease the load time of your site, go over and apply these techniques to your wordpress blog and come back, let me know about your results (I am eager to know), then tell your friends about it so they can benefit too. How much seconds did you gained?

Warning When Using WP Super Cache

SEO Optimization — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:42:27 +0000

To all bloggers on WordPress platform that are trying to save some bandwidth resource by installing the WP Super Cache plugin, this plugin may harm your search engine ranking positions. I will explain why this might happen (if it hasn’t happened yet) later in this post.

If you have WP Super Cache installed then most likely you know what the function of that plugin is, but since many others might have not heard of it yet..let me explain first. The WP Super Cache plugin it creates cache of your pages in static HTML and then shows those pages to your visitors (until the cache expires, which you can setup in your admin panel). This way your wordpress blog doesn’t have to query the database and show the content to the visitors, nor it needs to make other php functions so it saves your bandwidth usage, which is a good thing.

The bad thing that users have reported about this plugin is that it creates duplicate content in your site, and you have yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com/index.php indexed in the search engines, so all your efforts to eliminate duplicate content on your wordpress blog is useless at this point. The only fix for the moment known is to uninstall the plugin and wait for the search engine crawler bots to re-crawl your site and remove the duplicate pages from their index, or you can 301 redirect the duplicate pages to the original URL in meanwhile the authors of the plugin find the bug and make a fix for it, in meanwhile avoid to install this plugin.

Do you use WP Super Cache? Have you checked your site by querin site:yourdomain.com in the search engines and see if you have duplicate pages created from this plugin? Let us know..

Around the SEO World and Back

SEO Optimization — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:59:35 +0000

As time passes and I am getting more caught up with my PSD to xHTML business website and building new sites, I am always shorter in time to blog here on my Learn SEO Blog. Since the first moment I suspected I will become a “slow blogger” I urged to find ways to keep the blog alive and with fresh content. The first attempt was in late 2007 when I opened the doors for guest blogging then later one tried to remind bloggers on my article marketing to build links how-to post…but I guess neither that one worked, perhaps what kept bloggers away from guest blogging is the white PageRank bar? Well, there is a news for you PageRank lovers.

Google removes PageRank data from Webmaster Tools

Have you recently logged in your Google Webmaster Tools? Under Crawl stat there use to be a bar which displayed pagerank distribution for your site, well its no longer there. Wonder how long will take for Google to stop exporting public PageRank bar and discontinue all the PageRank toolbars. Haa panic? Yup, you are in complete panic, how will you now find quality links? Well if you haven’t learned yet to determine a quality site without the pagerank…then you are done. Big time trouble?

SEO for BING

The so much advertised new search engine operated by Microsoft, BING, has been almost on all the blogs and news medias for the past few months. Personally I haven’t been watching MSN closely enough as search engine, nor I have done the same with Yahoo, but recently I did showed some interest on BING when their search market was slowly increasing. Peter D has blogged about optimizing your site for BING over at Aaron Walls SEOBook blog and it contains some useful information’s. Pretty much whatever you have done to optimize your site for Google you should do for BING.com too. I will try to blog about my attempt on optimizing one of my new sites for BING in near feature.

Google Analytics now more Powerful, Flexible and Inteligent

I rely on Google Analytics very much for tracking purpose. ROI, Goals etc…everything new I learn about my site and visitors of my site is thanks to Google Analytics. Now, there are new features integrated with Google Analytics. Watch this video to know something more.

Guest Bloggers

Yet another reminder, as i know I won’t be blogging often as I used to (almost daily). If have a SEO blog, internet marketing or a make money online blog and would like to guest blog here register now. It’s all automated, so make sure you check your email to confirm your account. If you don’t receive the email contact me to activate your account.

ShoeMoney SEO Tools Review

SEO Optimization — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:04:18 +0000

I have been slow writing on this blog and even slower reading latest news on other blogs, things are getting busy here so really not much of time for passion as I am concentrated full time on my new project and trying to achieve my goals. However this weekend i had some spare time so surfed around the web to see what I have missed, I was literally bombed on ShoeMoney’s new SEO Tools (members only, yeah you have to pay to get access to those tools) and from ShoeMoney’s news letters too (yeah, i even received an advertisement for something completely different then his tools from him). It was obvious that I wanted to check whats so special about those tools that everyone talks about, are they really worth or is it just that little affiliate link in question, so I subscribed with the limited promotion for 10 days at $3.95.

There are two tool options I did notice there, or rather 2 groups of tools. One is SEO and the other one is for PPC, and since all the reviews I read were about the SEO tools and my interest was to check the SEO tools only I will limit my review on the that only.

SEO Tools that you can find on ShoeMoney’s membership

SEO Checkup
Backlink Analyzer
Domain marketplace
Backlink Finder
Keyword Density Tool
Most Linked
Related Blog Posts
SEO Competition 2.0
Text Optimizer
Outgoing Links

These are the tools you can find on ShoeMoney’s SEO Tools and I checked them one by one to see if they justify the membership fee or you can just simply find these tools on the web for free or if you could find even better tools then those for that price. So lets start reviewing all the tools.

SEO Checkup

The SEO Checkup tool was something I really did liked. It is one of the last tools build from his team and is something really useful if you want to learn more things about your competitor and how come he ranks #1 and not you. You have to just insert the keyword for which you want to rank and your URL (note, URL is optional) within few minutes (yeah takes a bit longer to make all the analyzes and it is obvious as it has to check several sites). Once the report is generated you will be able to see details of the top 10 sites ranking in the first page for that keyword, in addition with domains PageRank, Yahoo linkdomain, Yahoo links, Alexa ranking, age of domain, titles that your competitors use including the keyword density in title, number of words in title, as on page optimization it also counts the number of first three headings that your competitors have within the page with which they rank, keywords that are used in headings.

Other on-page factors are included within the SEO Checkup report such as,

body text and keyword density within the body text
URL and if keywords are present in URL
sitemap and robots.txt analyzes
meta description analyzes
links (well this isn’t really a report since it asks you to run another backlink checker report)
html code and page load time
Images (no report even for this section, it just gives suggestions on what you should do)
Meta keywords

Overall, the SEO Checkup plugin is sweet and a time saver, i liked this one since the moment i got the report. But lets pass over on the second tool.

Backlink Analyzer

With the backlink analyzer you get a lovely report (have to wait couple minutes for the report to complete) of keywords that your competitor has, amount of keywords that use certain anchor text, sites from where those links come and sites with which competitor has made reciprocal link exchange. Interesting and helpful tool, but definitively not something you can’t find online for free. Webconfs anchor analyzer tool is one of those free ones even tho it limits to 65 backlinks its report.

Domain Marketplace

This is another interesting tool. It has a marketplace of domains (name of domains is hidden so all you will see is xxx xxx xxx xxx.tld), but the domain names listed in here are classified based on Inlinks, .gov links, .edu links, .mil links. Even tho backlinks from .gov, .edu, .mil give a great value as far as it regards SEO, to me this tool is useless since I can’t see the actual domain but all I see is xx x x x xx x x x x jibberish stuff. However, for those interested in flipping sites and making easy profits it is a good tool to track down expired domains with decent backlinks already (saves you time building those links, someone else has done it for you).

Backlink Finder

An unknown error occured. Please wait a few minutes and try your request again.

Thats the message I got since I signed up when I try to get report on backlink finder based on my keywords.

Keyword Density Tool

With this tool by inserting your site URL and desired keyword you want to check you get a report of the keyword density in your body text report. Thing which you can get for free on many other websites, just perform a search on your preferred search engine. With WebCEO this tool is already build in.

Most Linked

This tool runs a report (based on site URL) on pages that have most incoming links.

SEO Competition 2.0

A tool to have fun with in your spare time, because it gives same results as the SEO Checkup tool and gives even less information’s.

Text Optimizer

You have your text ready to put in your website but would like to check on keyword density for your desired keywords before publishing and make sure that you have it optimized well? With this tool you get the keyword density report for your text before publishing it. Yet another tool that you can find for free if you search right through the web.

Outgoing Links

If you want to measure the outgoing links from your site (or from your competitors site) then this tool will give you report on that. Pretty simple and straight forward.

My Opinion on ShoeMoney’s SEO Tools

As far as it regards shoemoney’s seo tools, and only the seo tools, i am not very pleased, with exception of the SEO checkup tool which is something really lovely and useful if you want to learn more about your competitors. The other tools are really something you can find online for free (WebCEO’s free edition has most of those tools included for free, and even more), all you have to do is perform a search query on the search engines and the tools will be there.

Personally, after this 10 days promotion I won’t renew the membership with shoemoney’s tools as I do not see those tools justifying the price nor it makes me work easier. If i’d have to subscribe one day it would be just to use the SEO Checkup tool, but I doubt I will pay that price to use one tool only.

Have you used Shoemoney’s SEO tools? What do you think about them?
If you have used these tools I would love to hear what do you think about, you liked them? Felt they are waste of time or they helped you more then you expected? Let me know through the comments please.

Does PageRank Affect Rankings?

SEO Optimization — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:16:50 +0000

The PageRank discussion is an endless one. On every webmaster blog or forum you would most likely find a discussion related to Google’s PageRank metric and how/if that affects the rankings of a website. The sad part of the story this type of discussion are often started from those webmasters that do have profit from Google’s PageRank (yes, by selling textual links) so it is obvious they will continue and continue to defend and create a myth that will keep their business alive by confusing new webmasters.

I bet that every time you have crossed over a similar discussion you have put your own knowledge in question too, Does it really affect rankings? What if he is right, he seems so convinced. Well this kind of discussion can really get you confused, waste time and money by trying to hunt out those magic high PR sites and try to grab a link from them.

The reason why I decided to blog about this topic is the recent case that happened to me during this weekend. A client of mine from my wordpress development site for which I had build a site has been constantly asking me questions regarding seo, a topic which I love discussing often. Weeks later I had build his site I decided to check out if he has done anything to improve his sites ranking or his questions were just out of curiosity. Well i found out he had worked out pretty hard, and very wrong too. He had spend so much time to find high pagerank sites and grab a link from those sites even tho the content of those sites had nothing to do with his site. WRONG. Later the same day, i ended up in one of those threads that do spread disinformation’s and thought…hell, my client must have read one of these threads and that most have convinced him that he was doing the wrong thing.

See what happened to my client by reading those threads that concentrate only on nonsense discussions and spreading partial information’s (that often happen to turn into disinformation’s) with the sole purpose of protecting their business model? Well that is the reason why I am blogging about that subject now, I want to try and explain you in the best way I can how and when PageRank will affect your website rankings.

What is PageRank

PageRank is a metric, a numeric value representing votes casted for your site. All the links that are pointing to your site are giving a vote in eyes of Google, and with PageRank as tool Google can determine how trustworthy your site is and how many votes it has.

Explained that we have to go one step backward to better understand, how search engine spider bots work. Its pretty simple to explain for the part that we need, search engine spider bots crawl a site by following links that they find on a site that they are currently crawling. So again, those votes (i.e. links) pointing to your site do play an important role, the more links you have pointing to your site the more often your search engine spider bot will be crawling your site and yet the higher your page rank becomes as the number of incoming links increase.

PageRank Doesn’t Affect Rankings, Links DO

Just in case someone didn’t got the point while reading this post. PageRank is a metric that calculates votes/links caste to your site, nothing more nothing less, as such it can’t affect rankings at all. What actually does affect the rankings are the incoming links that have your specific keywords as anchor text.

From other point of view, incoming links from higher PR sites that are content related with your site do give a better boost to your rankings, but that is not because of the PageRank it is because the site is trustworthy enough (i.e. site’s vote weights more because of its status/credibility/trustworthiness).

Say yours

If you have anything to say/add regarding this topic please take your time and comment on this post. Comments will be closed after 14 days. Subscribe via RSS to follow my SEO Blog and be updated when new posts get published.

Buy WebCEO (SEO Software) Cheaper then Ever

SEO Optimization — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:06:49 +0000

My favorite tool for on-page optimization is WebCEO. I find WebCEO very useful when it regards to on-page optimization, it detects those parts that a human eye could have missed because we are tired or we just didn’t paid enough attention. Every time I am about to launch a new site, or a new design or even simple modifications made to the layout I first test it out with WebCEO before going online with the new layout.

Many readers of my SEO blog have previously stated they use WebCEO, most use the free edition (with limited functions) and some have purchased one of the paid licenses. Well I wanted to let you know that you have time until 22 August 2009 to buy WebCEO at incredible low price, 50% cheaper. This is a one time offer and as stated above it lasts only until 22 August 2009, after that date prices will go up to normal again.

Discount Price Comparison

Web CEO SmallBiz Unleashed: Discounted price: $129 Normal price: $339 (included: Professional Training and Certification in Internet Marketing)
Web CEO Professional Unleashed: Discounted price: $229 – Normal price: $479 (included: Professional Training and Hardcopy Certification in Internet Marketing)

As you can see the comparison above you save $210 USD if you purchase Web CEO SmallBiz Unleashed until 22nd August, and you save $250 USD if you purchase Web CEO Professional Unleashed license. Both licenses are included with professional training on how to use Web CEO and search engine optimization secrets along with a certificate in internet marketing.

If you ever wanted to own a license of this software but the price seemed too high, then this is the right moment to purchase Web CEO as I doubt you will ever get lower price on this seo software in near feature.

Which SEO Software do you use?

Do you use a SEO Software to optimize your website? Tell us which SEO software (or combination of softwares) you use and what makes you chose it over the other seo softwares in the market.

5 Common SEO Mistakes You Could do While Optimizing Your Site

SEO Optimization — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:53:06 +0000

This article will not be really useful to many SEO’s, especially to those that live from SEO (aka, work in a SEO company and/or takes SEO projects as freelancer). These 5 mistakes you could probably do are not because you lack of knowledge, but because you over estimate your self, you have got too much confidence and you are most likely not taking into account even the most smaller things when optimizing your website for the search engines.

It is not nothing new, you have already read about these 5 points, maybe not all five at the same time, you have even thought oh I just learned something new when first read about them, but still..you got overwhelmed with link building and checking your sites SERPs that you have completely forgot about those small points that can cause you to waste time, get your site sandboxes and most likely lose money. Well nothing to worry about, if nothing else these errors people usually make when they are building a new site from scratch, design part and SEO optimization too. So, lets get to the point(s).

Accidental use of hidden text
Overwhelming with keyword density
Immediate keyword repeat
Forgetting to emphasize your keywords
Not using the heading tags (H1-H6) properly

I know you have already read about this, and i know that you have a new blog that starts to rank, then it disappears from the SERPs and you get convinced that its just a Google dance, that you first ranked because Google throw a bone to your new site and then place it back to its proper ranking page. Well before you go to that conclusion you better check twice your site just in case you have done one of the 5 above mentioned mistakes. As for now, lets see options of why you could have done one of the five mistakes or even all five of them.

Accidental use of hidden text

Most likely you already know that hidden text is something Google and other search engines would penalize a site for. Most of the times it happens that people hide a bunch of textual keywords in their layout to trick the search engines since those keywords are not of any use to the visitors.

Now the scenario of how you could end up writing hidden text without knowing that the text is hidden. You have a website that has a black background, the layout container that holds the content also uses a white background image and you have set the color of the text to black, the code would most likely look something like this

body {
background-color:#000000;
}

#container {
background:url(images/yourimage.gif) repeat-y top left;
color:#000000
}

From the visual aspect everything looks perfect. Body of your site has a black background color while the content container has a white background image and the text is visible since it is black. Everything is perfect you might be thinking. Well you are wrong, search engines can’t read images which means that they do not know what color the image is. The background color of your body is set to black, the color of your text is set to back, that automatically results to “hidden text” for the search engines. So make sure that you also add a color code to the background of your container. The correct code should look like this:

body {
background-color:#000000;
}

#container {
background:#FFFFFF url(images/yourimage.gif) repeat-y top left;
color:#000000
}

As you can notice the background color of the container is set to white, while the text color is set to black so search engines can recognize the background color used for the container. Problem solved, or rather…avoided.

Overwhelming with keyword density

We do all know that keyword density plays an important role in the process of on-page optimization. Often happens that we over use our keywords in the content and overwhelm our page/site with our keyword, that often happens it makes the content not to have sense at all. Over using our keywords in our layout and increasing the keyword density of our page will alert the search engines that we are targeting that keyword, and apparently based on their algorithm layouts that have a too high keyword density are possibly spamming, hence the result of sandboxing.

Immediate keyword repeat

Same as the previous point. You get concentrate on your targeted keywords so much that you are not even aware how often you are using that keyword in your layout. This will result in immediate keyword repeat, increase the keyword weight in page and most likely end up being sand boxed by the search engines.

A great tool that I recommend you to use to better analyze your pages for keyword density, hidden text etc is WebCEO which is also listed in the seo resource page too.

Forgetting to emphasize your keyword

It is recommended that we should emphasize our keyword at least once. This gives some weight to search engines that that keyword is actually important for the content that is sitting in that page and that search engines should pay bigger attention to that keyword. In some way by emphasizing our keywords we do communicate with search engines, but of course even emphasizing keywords has to make sense, it has to be in bold when you want your keyword to make a point of the sentence.

Not using the heading tags (H1-H6) properly

I have seen this in too many sites already, people using heading tags the wrong way. Heading tags are supposed to be the headline of a chapter (read: page), so if your book (read: site) is about Website Design, then keywords website design should be sitting in the first heading (

Website Design

). Every other sub topic within your site, which might be Graphic design or Logo design should be labeled as h2-h3 respectively. By using properly the heading tags search engines understand what argument is being treated by each block of content in your site.

Hope you enjoyed reading this post. In the next days we will discuss about each of the five points individually so don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me with the updates. A great and free seo analyze tool I recommend you is WebCEO, it can help you understand and help you resolve the 5 seo mistakes you could make, and even more.

SEO for New Blogs & Bloggers | Target Long Tail Keywords

SEO Optimization — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:44:02 +0000

Since you are already on this SEO blog it means that you are interested on SEO and find out ways how to better optimize your site and rank higher in the search engines. But maybe you are just someone that has already tried the tips that you have read on other seo blogs as well, applied them to your own blog and you did still didn’t tasted the joy of having visitors from search engines. Well no worries, in this article I will tell you something that you have apparently failed to notice or you have simply ignored that fact.

Lets presume that you are just starting a blog for your self for some reason, you do have excellent content of which you are aware but you just need that touch to get notice by other bloggers or people that are looking for blogs similar to yours. I know also that you have already made your keyword research for your blog and got yourself a killer domain name with keywords in it to help you in your search engine optimization process. You have also optimized your title tag and done all the tips and advise you had read from various seo tutorials on the web. But yet, you fail to attract interest of other bloggers or of readers.

Tracking the problem in your SEO optimization process

The mistake that most bloggers do when they try for their second, third of fourth time to optimize their layout, without any real previous experience in search engine optimization is that they AIM targeting their main keywords and optimizing their blogs homepage. Doing that, I can tell that you have become obsessed with SEO and you have simply forgot about your main goal, which is to attract visitors by delivering them quality content, because thats the only thing that distinguishes two blogs from each other.

Forget about your blogs homepage and the main keywords for a second, you need those initial visitors to notice your blog, you need to tell these visitors that you DO have a blog and it is WORTH reading it because you share good information’s there. But how to do that? It’s pretty simple and the answer is… long tail keywords.

Long tail, to become visible

Long tail is actually a term to describe the strategy of targeting less competitive niche-markets. But to make it simple for everyone, long tails are those long keyphrases that consist 3-4 or even 5 words, for example a short keyword would be: Make Money Online while a long tail could be: Ways of making money online blogging (you get the point? They are longer but more descriptive).

Usually long tail keywords are less competitive, many would simply ignore long tail keywords until a year or two ago even tho people that do perform a search query very often use long tails (myself too, I often search long tail when I want to find a solution for my problem, its more specific and the results are often more accurate). Bill Tancer reported at SearchScape session that long tail search queries are increasing in 2009. That means you have a great opportunity to get visible to many readers and get your blog notice, bookmarked, shared or even linked by targeting the less competitive long tail keywords.

Aaron Wall also gives a great example why it makes sense to target longtail keywords first. In the chart as you can notice the work involved to target longtail keywords is smaller then targeting the main keywords. Your work is more concentrated on content and optimization of your content for the long tail keywords. It requires less effort on link building campaigns and yet it gives you excellent results by driving visitors to your site in a easier way, and you do need even those 2-5 or even 10 visitors a day to one page only.

If you have anything to comment please do so. Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed to read more SEO tips.

SEO Book’s SEO Toolbar

SEO Optimization — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:26:55 +0000

Aaron Wall, the author of the SEO Book (which is not distributed now, but can be found as gift if you subscribe to Aaron Wall’s SEO training) has surprised us again by providing us with yet another SEO tool.

The first plugin I blogged about that was build from Aaron Wall was Rank Checker plugin for FireFox. But now, there is something much better then rank (ronk) checker plugin, its called seo toolbar.

The SEO toolbar plugin for FireFox gives you way much more information’s that you would expect, it has the rank checker plugin integrated as well, it gives detailed information’s about the site you navigate such as:

Site pagerank
Page pagerank
Dmoz listings
Yahoo Directory listing
Total incoming links to site homepage in Google
Total incoming links to site homepage in Yahoo
Incoming links to current page you navigate (in Google and Yahoo)
How many del.icio.us submissions for homepage of the site
Total del.icio.us submissions for pages
How many people have stumbled the site
How many people twitter about the site

The SEO toolbar is an excellent plugin, something that I exactly need and is helpful when I try to analyze my competitors website and realize how much work I do need to dedicate to my site and rank.

Here is a video that Aaron Wall has made to guide you through his SEO toolbar plugin.

If you enjoyed reading this post subscribe to my RSS feed.

Most Common SEO Myths

SEO Optimization — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:11:42 +0000

SEO Optimization recommends you WordZe. Advanced web based keyword research tool that gives you detailed results on which keywords work for your business.

I hear so much talk about SEO myths lately that I decided to blog about this topic and write about those techniques and words which have proven to be seo myths during my SEO experiments. However, if any of the points I will blog about on this post is not convincing you, or you have other facts to contradict them please do not hesitate to comment.

Said this, I can now continue making the list of some common SEO myths and give explanation for each point why it is not as you have heard about it so far.

Duplicate Content Penalization

Let’s get this cleared straight up. Google will NOT penalize you for duplicate content in exception if the original author will not send a copyright infrigement notice to Google Inc. in that case the URL where the copyrighted content is located will be removed from Google’s index.

Lets take another scenario, on-site duplicate content. This is very common for wordpress users to have the same content located on several parts of the blog, even for that I have blogged awhile ago on how to remove duplicate content from your wordpress blog. The main reason why you would not want to have the same content located on several parts of your site is one: give more weight to the post page as that is the place where you would want visitors to land and have their information right in front of their nose.

Submitting your site on web directories is not good

Says who? It is true tho that web directories had a rough time with Google not long ago but having your website listed in a web directory will certainly not harm your site in the SERPs. What may really harm your site is links from bad neighborhood sites. There are several quality directories out there like the V7N Directory or the Botw directory on which you might consider to submit your site(s) at.

Advertising through AdWords will help in your rankings

A complete nonsense. AdWords is the advertising section of Google Inc, and the AdWords advertisers are published on their sister section which is AdSense through a javascript. Since we know that search engine spider bots are unable to read javascript then that myth dies right away.

Repeat your keywords to rank higher

Not only that this is a myth, but over repeating or also known as keyword stuffing will actually get you in trouble and possibly your site will be penalized. There is quiet a difference between “optimization” and “over optimization”, keyword stuffing is what we would call “over optimization” and it is harmful and not helpful.

XML Sitemap is not worth

You are going in Egypt, but you don’t have a touristic guide to show you the most marvelous places. Will you manage to see all the beauties of Egypt for the time you stay there? Maybe yes, but definitively with a tourist guider you will see more beautiful places then doing the research by yourself. This same happens with search engine, providing a “guide” through your site to the search engine spider bots will make it much easier for the spider to crawl all your content and find something. It is not that the search engine spider bots are unable to crawl your site, but with a XML sitemap not only that the spider bots will know the road to walk but they also get reminded that there is something new in your site that should be crawled.

PageRank is worthless

Worthless for…? If it’s intention is to mean that pagerank will not help in your search engine rankings then yeah that could be true…some how. However since PageRank is Google’s tool to determine the popularity of a site (where the popularity is calculated by the number of the backlinks a site receives from other popular/trustworthy sites) then it is closely connected with the fact how your site performs in the search engines (but not for specific keywords, as search engine rankings depends on the anchor that is used on those backlinks).

Don’t touch your site if its ranking

Not true at all, you can touch your site as much as you can if you know what you are doing (i.e. maintain the same keyword density, give value to those keywords for which you are ranking and of course, never stop to build backlinks to your site). Not touching your site at all, especially stopping to build quality backlinks, will give more space and time to your competitor to beat you on the SERPs.

The moral of myths

They will always remain as such unless you take your time, courage and determination to run experiments by yourself. Experimenting, learning during the seo experiment with your site and testing over techniques is the only way to really learn search engine optimization.

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