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The WordPress tips and hacks mentioned below apply to a self-hosted installation of WordPress. You may skip if your WordPress blog is hosted on WordPress.com and not WordPress.org.
Tip 0: Change the Default Image Upload Folder
The default installation of WordPress will store all your images inside wp-content/uploads folder.
Presenting the 101 most useful websites of 2012. These sites, well most of them, solve at least one problem really well and they all have simple web addresses (URLs) that you can memorize thus saving you a trip to Google.
The Most Useful Websites and Web Apps
screenr.com – record movies of your desktop and send them straight to YouTube.
Do a simple Google search like “proxy servers” and you’ll find dozens of PHP proxy scriptson the Internet that will help you create proxy servers in minutes for free. The only limitation with PHP based proxies is that you require a web server to host the proxy scripts and second, you also need a domain name to act as an address for your proxy site.
If you don’t own a domain or server space, you can still create a personal proxy server for free and that too without requiring any technical knowledge.
Create a Free Proxy Server with Google App Engine
Here’s one such proxy site that you can build for your friends in China or even for your personal use (say for accessing blocked sites from office). This is created using Google App Engine and, contrary to what you may think, the setup is quite simple.
Step 2: Click the “Create an Application” button. Since this is your first time, Google will send a verification code via SMS to your mobile phone number. Type the code and you’re all set to create apps with Google App Engine.
Step 3: Choose a sub-domain* that will host your proxy server. Make sure the domain is available, agree to the Google Terms and click save. The sub-domain is also your App ID that will uniquely identify your proxy application.
For this example, we’ll use labnol-proxy-server as the App ID though you are free to choose any other unique name.
Step 4: OK, now that we have reserved the ID, it’s time to create and upload the proxy server application to Google App Engine. Go to python.org, download the 2.6.4 MSI Installer and install Python.
Step 5: Once Python is installed, go to code.google.com, download the Google App Engine SDK for Python and install it.
Step 6: Download this zip file and extract it to some folder on your desktop. The zip file, for the curious, contains a couple of text files (written in HTML and Python) that you can read with notepad.
Step 7: Start the Google App Engine Launcher program from the desktop and set the right values under Edit – > Preferences (see screenshot above).
Step 8. Click File – > Add Existing Application under the Google App Launcher program and browse to the directory that you created in Step 6. Click the Edit button and replace “YOUR_APP_ID” with the ID (sub-domain) that you reserved in Step 3.
Step 9: Click Deploy and your online proxy server is now ready for use.
Visual Tour – Setting up a Free Proxy with Google
You can edit the main.html file to change the appearance of your proxy server and you can even add Analytics and AdSense code to your proxy server in case it gets popular on the web.
The application is currently open to all users but you can add a layer of authentication so that only users who are logged-in into their Google Accounts can use your web proxy server.
If you have made any changes to your HTML files, you can upload the latest version to Google App Engine either by clicking the “Deploy” button again or use the following command – appcfg.py update <app-directory>
If your current Internet speed is very slow and you are living in an area where broadband connections are still not available, here are some ideas to help you download web pages faster on your computer. You may use the same tips to improve your web browsing experience on a sluggish USB modem.
Surf the Web Faster on Slow Internet
1. Turn off web images, the Adobe Flash plug-in, Java Applets and JavaScript from your browser settings as these files are often the bulkiest elements of any web page.
2. Increase the size of your browser cache. If the static parts of a site (like background graphics, CSS, etc) are stored in the local cache, your browser can safely skip downloading these files when you re-visit the site in future thus improving speed.
3. Sometimes the slow DNS server of your ISP can be a bottleneck so switch to OpenDNS as it can resolve website URLs into IP addresses more quickly. If you aren’t too happy about OpenDNS redirecting your Google queries, follow this simple hack.
4. Finch can serve a light-weight version of any website in real-time that is free of all bells and whistles. For instance, the New York Times homepage with all external resources can weigh more than a MB but Finch trims down the size by 90% so the site loads more quickly on a slow web connection.
5. Flinch (mentioned at #4) is good for reading regular websites but if you just need to check the latest articles published on your favorite blogs, use BareSite. This service will automatically detect the associated feed of a website and render content quickly inside a minimalist interface.
6. The Google Transcoder service at google.com/gwt/n can split large web pages into smaller chunks that will download more quickly on your computer (or mobile phone).
7. Monitor your Internet speed to determine hours when you get the maximum download speed from the ISP. Maybe you can then change your surfing schedule a bit and browse more during these "off peak" hours.
8. You can use a text browser like Lynx or Elinks for even faster browsing. It downloads only the HTML version of web pages thus reducing the overall bandwidth required to render websites.
9. When searching for web pages on Google, you can click the "Cache" link to view the text version of a web page stored in the Google Cache. Alternatively, install this GM script as it adds a "cached text only" link near every "Cached" link on Google Search pages.
10. Move your web activities offline as far as possible. You can send & receive emails, write blogs and even read feeds in an offline environment. Also see: Save Web Pages for offline reading.
11. You can interact with websites like Flickr, Google Docs, Slideshare, etc. using simple email messages. Uploading a new document to Google Docs via email would require less bandwidth than doing it in the browser because you are avoiding a trip to the Google Docs website.
12. Applying the same logic, you may also consider using tools like Web In Mail or Email The Web as they help you browse websites via email. Just put the URL of a page (e.g., cnn.com) in the subject field of your email message and these services will send you the actual page in the reply.
13. Bookmarklets are like shortcuts to your favorite web services. You neither have to open the Gmail Inbox for composing a new email message nor do you have to visit Google Translate for translating a paragraph of text. Add relevant bookmarklets to your browser bar and reduce the number of steps required to accomplish a task.
14. Use the netstat command to determine processes, other than web browsers, that may besecretly connecting to Internet in the background. Some of these processes could be consuming precious bandwidth but you can block them using the Firewall.
15. Use URL Snooper to determine non-essential host names that a website is trying to connect while downloading a web page. You may block them in future via the hosts file or use Adblock Plus to filter out advertising banners on web pages.
16. If you don’t want to spoil your web surfing experience by stripping images and other graphic elements from a web page, get Opera Turbo. It will first fetch the requested web page on to its own server and then send it to your machine in a compressed format. Opera Turbo won’t change the layout of a web site but can lower the image resolution so that they load faster on slow Internet.
17. Change the user agent of your desktop browser to that of a mobile phone like Apple’s iPhone or Windows Mobile. This will help you browse certain web sites like Google News, WSJ, etc. much faster because they’ll serve you a light-weight and less cluttered mobile version of their sites thinking you’re on a mobile phone.
Ranking high in Google’s search results can have a phenomenal impact on the success of your business. You probably knew that already. But did you know that there are a few simple changes you can make yourself that can have a tremendous impact on your SEO?
# 1: Keyword Research What keywords do you think your customers would type in to search for your products or services? A keyword can be one word (e.g. “optimization”), but multiple keywords or keyword phrases are usually preferred, because they are more specific and more likely to be what your customers are looking for.
Write down as many as you can think of. Brainstorm with your team. Think of alternative words. Consider geographical phrases if they are important to your customer. Also, get some ideas from your competitors’ websites. Try to make a list of 20-30 keyword phrases.
Choose the two keyword phrases you think would be searched for the most. But also remember, the more competition there is for a keyword, the harder it is to achieve top rankings. If you want to rank high in Google for the keyword “insurance”, you have a very long journey ahead. So try your best to select two keyword phrases that are the most relevant to you business but that are not vague nor competitive. It’s a good idea to have 2 or 3 words in each phrase (e.g. “wedding catering services”)
#2 Web Copy Web copy refers to all the words or text on your website. Because content is king in the world of search engines, your keyword phrases need to be placed strategically on your webpage to convince Google that your content is highly relevant to those keywords. The more prominent they are, the better. (Keep in mind that as important as search engines are, customers come first, so make sure your copy also reads well.) Here’s how you can increase each keyword’s prominence: • Place your keywords in headings, preferably at the beginning of the heading; • Include keywords towards the top of the page; • Bold or italicize keywords where appropriate; • Instead of having a link to another page that says “Click here to read more “, reword it to include your keywords.
An important tip is to also include these keywords in your HTML “title tag”. Use your content management system to make these changes yourself, or perhaps ask your web developer to do it if you’re unsure how.
Once you have fine-tuned your home page, consider adding new content, such as detailed descriptions of what you offer, FAQs and informative articles about your products and services.
It’s also good to bear in mind that search engines can only read text, not pictures. Often web developers embed words in images to look better for website visitors or use Flash for animation, but this is a major impediment to search engines.
#3 Linking Each link from another website to your website (not from your website) is considered by search engines as a vote of popularity for your business and will improve your rankings. But it is the quality, not quantity, of the links that is crucial. The other websites should be relevant to your industry, and preferably highly regarded themselves. Ten quality links count far more than 500 links from arbitrary websites. In the same way your personal business network can have a significant impact on the success of your business, so too the online network you build on the internet.
Brainstorm all the relevant websites that could link to you, such as non-competing companies, and industry bodies and organizations. Write a friendly email to each describing the benefit their visitors would get in knowing about your business, and request them to create a link to your website. Most people will not respond first time round, so a follow-up phone call is usually required. How do I monitor my results?
Monitor your rankings in Google over the next few months by typing your chosen keywords into the search box, and recording your ranking. Also look at your hosting reports to understand what search terms your visitors are using to find your website.
The above process can be also be repeated for each page of your website. Remember to keep updating your content, and continually increase the number of links to your website.
Ask your virtual assistant
And the best part of all? This is an easy task to hand your virtual assistant. A good virtual assistant can do the keyword research for you, make changes to your web copy and identify potential quality websites that could provide quality links to your website. He/she can also reach out and contact those sites for you.
Are you thinking of new ways to get visibility for your business in the coming year? Put your virtual assistant to work on a project like this now and be ready for more visibility and traffic to your website in the new year!
Looking for a simple way to get an edge on your competition?
Successful businesses who are in it for the long haul continually apply innovative marketing strategies and tactics to differentiate themselves and get that edge. Two such dominant marketing strategies are positioning and relationship building. And guess what? Article marketing is a proven tactic that just happens to address both of those marketing strategies. It does take some time, skill, and effort to write and effectively use articles; that’s why the masses don’t do it. Those looking for an edge, however,do.
So why choose article marketing as one of your marketing tactics? Here are 7 exceptional reasons:
1. People love to buy from and deal with the best. Writing and effectively marketing your articles helps you position yourself as the expert in your field.
2. As an expert, you’ll find that demand for your products and services will rise. That’s the point where you can justifiably increase your rates and charge more for your products and services.
3. If your articles are good and distributed properly, they can spread like wildfire and literally cause a viral marketing frenzy. Ultimately driving business your way.
4. A big part of Internet marketing has to do with the Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. And these search engines love fresh content! Provide enough of it and you’ll quickly find your site moving towards the top.
5. People love to be and feel well informed – It helps them make better decisions. Your articles can serve as the source for the input they seek. And who better to buy from then the source that provided the information in the first place.
6. Talk about getting major return on your investment! Articles can easily be repurposed in a variety of ways. For example: ==> They can become content for your or someone else’s newsletter; ==> Used as free giveaways to prospects/clients, in seminars, at networking events, etc; ==> Used to spark conversation in a blog or an online networking group; ==> Combine multiple articles into an eBook, book or info-product that can be sold or given away in exchange for contact information; ==> Become the basis for a live seminar or teleseminar; ==> And we can go on and on and on.
7. Articles when distributed properly are a great way to stay in touch with clients and prospects. Studies have shown that on average it takes around 7 touches before a prospect buys. Why not use articles as some of those touches? This will help continually boost your prospect’s perception of you as someone who consistently adds value.
We live in an age where information is king. We all know something others would be interested in knowing. Share your knowledge and like a magnet you’ll draw your prospects towards you.
Did you know that a virtual assistant can help with your article marketing efforts? She can:
Proof read your content
Piece the full articles together if you record your thoughts and send them to her
Edit your articles
Submit your articles to article directories
Pull out key points to tweet and post with a link back to the article on your website
Re-purpose the content from an article for a blog post
Are you considering article marketing in the coming year? Contact one of our experienced Virtual Services Representatives today and request a virtual assistant experienced with article marketing.
Attracting traffic to a blog or a web site is certainly a challenge! The market is crowded with tons of information and millions of voices attempting to get their message heard.
A successful blog is absolutely a MUST these days if you want to share your expertise, voice your opinions and get your message to your target audience. In fact, according to a 2010 HubSpot report, there is a direct correlation between blog frequency and customer acquisition http://bit.ly/aewfHr.
If you are a small business looking for bottom line results then you may already know that a blog should be part of your marketing strategy. Getting your blog noticed is the next step. Here are seven vital ingredients for building a successful blog with a loyal following.
1. Publish Regularly.
As your readers become familiar with the frequency of your posts, it will influence their visiting behavior. If your readers know that you post fresh content every day, they will probably come every day to read it. If they know you post on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, that’s when they will come.
2. Stay on Topic.
Stick to your niche. If your blog doesn’t have a niche, give it one. Readers like blog’s that are focused on a particular theme or topic. If you have no theme and just post about anything, then readers are less likely to become passionate about your blog and will probably move on to somewhere else.
3. Use Meaningful Titles in Posts.
This not only announces clearly what the post is about, but it will help people navigate your blog and also influence your ranking with search engines.
4. Interact With Your Readers.
Think of your blog like a conversation. You post. Readers comment. Be active and be positive as you interact and converse with your readers.
5. Highlight Your Best Posts.
Don’t let your best posts get lost in your archives. It’s always a good idea to link to your best posts from a ‘best posts’ category on the main page.
6. Provide Good Navigation to Popular Pages.
If you help people find the key pages within your blog, their visit will be a much more enjoyable experience.
7. Avoid Not Posting for Extended Periods.
If someone visits your blog and discovers that the last post was six months ago, they will probably be disappointed. If you don’t post, people may give you the benefit of the doubt and come back on a few days to check, but you better believe they will lose interest quickly if you fall out of your regular schedule and stop posting.
There you have it. Seven little tips that will make a big difference to your blog’s readership. It’s not rocket science. It’s all about consistency, common sense and interacting with your readers.
With hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of pages, sites, and keywords to manage and optimize, enterprise SEO has become increasingly complicated and time-consuming. Using an enterprise SEO software platform can increase efficiency and productivity while reducing the time and errors involved in managing organic search campaigns. More specifically, automating SEO through a toolset or platform can provide the following benefits:
Many tools, one interface.
More efficient management of global operations.
The ability to stay up-to-date with the search engines
Automated reporting to provide data in near real time
Enterprise SEO Platform Pricing
Licensing an enterprise SEO platform can be a significant investment, particularly for ecommerce or retail marketers with hundreds of thousands of SKUs or product pages. Marketers typically spend tens of thousands of dollars each month in licensing fees, and pay for installation and staff training to maximize the value of the platform and its capabilities.
Virtually all SEO platforms are provided on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis, i.e. the vendor makes the software available online and is responsible for all maintenance and system administration. Pricing models vary significantly from pay-for-performance, to keyword- or page- volume based, to completely customized based on volume and program scope.
Determining your overall cost can be more art than science and based upon your brand’s keyword, link building, international coverage and other SEO activities. As a result, few vendors require an annual contract, preferring month-to month licensing that is flexible as programs grow or contract. Several vendors offer a free trial lasting from 14 to 30 days. It may be beneficial to ask for an SEO pre-analysis, even if it means paying a modest fee for it, to determine the actual costs and benefits of licensing an SEO platform.
Does Your Company Need an Enterprise SEO Platform?
Deciding whether or not your company needs an enterprise-level SEO platform calls for the same evaluative steps involved in any software adoption, including a comprehensive self-assessment of your organization’s business needs, staff capabilities, management support, and financial resources. Use the following questions as a guideline to determine the answers.
Do we have the right human resources in place?
Do we have C-level buy-in?
Do we have the right technical resources?
Who will own enterprise SEO?
Can we invest in staff training?
Do we have realistic expectations?
Enterprise SEO Platform Capabilities
SEO software comes in many shapes and sizes, from rank-checking tools to keyword research toolsets to full-service platforms that manage keywords, links, competitive intelligence, international rankings, page optimization, and workflow rights and roles. Enterprise-level platforms may also provide keyword and site analytics that include predictive scoring systems to identify the potential opportunities to improve brand websites, link authority and keyword rankings. Several vendors, namely BloomReach and Altruik, are implementation -- rather than analytics -- applications. Altruik proxies websites to automate many SEO implementation tasks. BloomReach optimizes page content to drive incremental new traffic to websites by improving content relevancy to search visitors.
Virtually all enterprise-level SEO platforms available today offer these capabilities:
Keyword research and rankings
Link (also called backlink) research and analysis
Competitive intelligence
International search tracking
The platforms begin to differentiate by offering additional or expanded capabilities, sometimes requiring additional investment, that include but are not limited to:
Key performance indicator (KPI) and management dashboards
Workflow and task management
Universal search rankings
Social signal tracking
Web analytics integration
Scalability to manage thousands or millions of pages and keywords
Six Questions to Ask Potential SEO Platform Vendors
Ready to talk to SEO tools vendors? Here are six questions you should ask:
How is your search volume calculated?
Can this system track millions of searches, visits, site pages, etc?
Do you support international search?
How robust and flexible are your reporting options?
What other meta-information does your system collect that may be made available to me via API?
Is there a workflow built in that allows me to coordinate the work of my marketing, content, web development, social media and PR teams across the organization?
Handling established campaigns across multiple countries can quickly become a case of handling overwhelming quantities of data interspersed with never-ending menial jobs, preventing the SEO from developing their strategy to squeeze yet more value from their campaign ROI.
Here is part one of a two-part guide to some of the key automations our team uses to keep on top of the game internationally.
Segmented ‘Micro’ Reports
Based on the effectiveness of simple spark-line graphs and minimal data points in relevant context, micro reports should give you a quick, visual view of the campaign state of play within the context of the preceding week and the same period last year.
Result: Fast, flexible reports on key metrics with no clutter and no analysis(!).
Regardless of the metrics measured however, the report should be comprehensive in covering all areas of the campaign – so include things like click data from the last email campaign, for example – and should not include any dialogue: save that for monthly review reports.
Here’s my absolute minimum weekly KPIs for keeping an eye on just SEO & PPC multinational campaign ROI (I’ve left out Affiliates, Social, Display, etc for simplicity’s sake but can revisit if there’s enough interest).
For all reports, run for the total campaign, and for each target country in your campaign.
1. Total Organic / PPC / Total Visits
For each channel and country: 12 month sparkline; last week’s timeline with previous week and YOY comparison lines; percentage non-brand in the week and average for month vs. same month last year.
What you’re looking out for here: sudden slips, particularly in the year on year numbers. Most verticals have a distinct annual trend. Are you outperforming it when it counts? Are you simply seeing a rise because there’s always a rise?
Also, you should always look to increase your non-brand percentage because it will drive a higher proportion of new visits, growing overall sales rather than cannibalising traffic sales initially driven by another channel.
2. Top 25 Non-Brand Organic / PPC Keyphrases Driving Visits
For each channel & country: table w/ term, 12 month sparkline, visits, +/- week, +/- month, +/- YOY month.What you’re looking out for here: new breakthrough terms, and high value performance terms slipping.
Again, take seasonality into account, especially for organic. PPC YOY comparisons should be further investigated if dramatically different: has budget allocated to the term changed: why? Is it intentional, and if so was it based on CPC or CPA? Was it a valid decision or should it be reviewed?
Similar to the above point, only this time also pull in revenue generated +/- week, +/- month, +/- YOY month for converting traffic fitting the criteria.
4. Top 25 SEO ‘Opportunity Keyphrases’
For each country: term, rank, impressions, clicks, ranking URL, URL <title>, URL Meta Description.I define an ‘Opportunity Keyphrase’ as a relevant search term which has high potential traffic associated with it, that my site is currently ranking outside of the top three search result terms, but within the top 10 (inclusive).
Why are these terms worth giving special attention to?
Simply because we know that SERP clickthrough rates go up exponentially as you approach position one in the SERPs, therefore for high traffic terms, moving from position 4-10 to 1-3 will have a significant bottom line impact to your traffic.
Every URL flagged in this report should be scheduled for onpage auditing of its SEO around the highlighted term, and should have an internal and external linkbuilding strategy executed over the following week.
Of all the micro reports, this is the most useful to also send to the local country teams to act as a guide to upcoming optimisation work, but also as a reminder of the importance of core areas of optimisation (after they implement the recommended work, inevitably you’ll see the terms switch up into top three rankings on a well set-up domain).
5. Top 25 SERP Conversion ‘Opportunity Keyphrases’
Similar to the above report, except this time our focus is on SERP results where we areperforming in the top three, but are not converting impressions to clicks well enough. This time, we should be scheduling a local copywriter to review the <title> and meta description for suitability in converting searchers on the highlighted search term in their country.
Conversion Funnel ‘Points of Failure’
I call this report the ‘Points of Failure’ because a well set up conversion funnel should strive to achieve 100% conversion (although this is of course impossible!). For each country, a straightforward recreation of a funnel (a la Google Analytics’ Goal Funnel) fornew site visitors with +/- week on week, and +/- year on year is sufficient to get a good feel for where progress is being made (or not!).If you’re running major funnel optimisation then include page load speed info for your funnel URLs.
Site Speed
For each country: run for sitewide, and top 25 slowest URLs, avg. page load time, +/- week on week, and +/- year on year. Watch out for erratic results week on week as well as any sudden drops. Both are indicative of a struggling server and require further investigation into server capacity and tolerance.
Obviously, you’re striving to ensure you get as fast as possible page load times – certainly for the DOM execution to improve user experience. But remember, Google uses ‘Headless’ page execution to incorporate JavaScript execution into page rendering times so pay particular attention to parallelising your static assets and ensure you follow every best-practice piece of advice out there (page speed is nothing new!).
You may find it useful to build testing tools using PhantomJS for more robust Page Speed reporting tools.
Until Next Time, Happy Micro Reporting
So that’s my bare minimum micro-report suite recommendation. Everything in here can be automated and the data can be largely gathered from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools for that purpose.
Hopefully you’ll find the micro-report useful to spot sudden changes in activity across a range of data points, and come to appreciate its use as a bellweather for the campaign. It should, of course, not replace more considered monthly reporting containing insightful commentary and action points.
Part two of this post (next month) will cover Alert Triggered Reports, and how we can use automation to save us at critical campaign moments of crisis.
The WordPress tips and hacks mentioned below apply to a self-hosted installation of WordPress. You may skip if your WordPress blog is hosted on WordPress.com and not WordPress.org.
