Seo | Dan Patrick

Posts Tagged ‘seo’

analytics, article marketing, backlinking, blogging, google, reviews, seo, traffic building, uniquearticlewizard

UniqueArticleWizard.com Review: How UAW Increased Traffic 40% On An Established Website

In Uncategorized on March 2, 2011 at 5:31 pm

Quick background: Unique Article Wizard, or UAW for short, is a monthly membership site that takes articles you create or pay someone to create (they now offer that service too) and distributes “unique” versions of that article to hundreds of websites based on the category of the given article.

Though some people claim to get traffic directly from the articles themselves I have seen no evidence of this in any substantial matter, certainly no more than what you would get from EzineArticles, which is meager fair enough. Instead, I have used UniqueArticleWizard as a strategy for building links to boost rank in Google’s search engine results pages (serps for short), thereby indirectly bringing in traffic.

Basically, you send out an article, and then immediately get an incoming link from every website that accepts your article, and since Google relies on link popularity it counts all of these new pages on tons of websites as “unique” pages that are linking to your content and thus indicating that it is more important for eyeballs on the web.

As I mentioned in briefly in my recent post entitled “Zeroing In On Backlinking with Unique Article Wizard,” I have recently really been going the extra mile to drop all other projects not consisting of using UAW and go “full-tilt” so to speak on backlinking with this tool to really get a feel for what kind of results can be achieved. If I’m going to pay the membership fee I might as well really get a feel for it, right?

I’ve established three different experimental backlinking scenarios, only one of which I’ll talk about in this post since I feel it is the most meaningful:

Backlinking an older (years), established retail website that is already experiencing a significant degree of success.
Backlinking a newish website that has an extraordinarily large number of pages, but very little search traffic.
HEAVILY (and I do mean heavily) backlinking a brand new website receiving zero traffic that is in a challenging niche in an attempt to “break through.”

The website I’ve chosen to discuss in this post is several years old, has a couple of thousand pages, and I used UAW submissions to systematically backlink the top 100 of them with varying anchor text. In total, about 30 articles were submitted on a wide variety of subjects not necessarily pertaining to the actual subject matter of the retail website.

The annotations at the bottom of the graph denote the period of time I was still writing, and submitting new articles daily to UAW.

There’s a few interesting things to note here. The page that experienced this jump was already receiving well over 300 visits a day strictly from search engines. A nearly 40% change on a website receiving 10 visits a day is not that notable, however, a jump of this magnitude on a website that’s well established is.

The other experimental scenarios did reveal some interesting things as well, however, I will save that discussion for a future post. If you enjoyed this post, or are looking to use UniqueArticleWizard.com, I would like to take a moment to point out that the links in the preceding paragraphs to the UAW website are, in fact, affiliate. Despite this, I can assure you that the results in this review on uniquearticlewizard’s effectiveness are in fact, genuine, and I believe show that this service is worthwhile as a tool for traffic building via article marketing.

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analytics, backlinking, blogging, google, seo, traffic building, uniquearticlewizard

Zeroing In On Backlinking with Unique Article Wizard

In Uncategorized on February 12, 2011 at 9:28 pm

Recently I’ve been really cutting out a lot of the noise. I took about a month off from facebook with a few small exceptions, completely dropped all Reddit browsing, and pretty much scaled back a lot of my normal leisure activities. I included ordinary blogging as one of those activities to be scaled back.

Despite the fact that daily blogging recently had showed me some really great results (read 1 Post A Day For 61 Days), as much as it pained me to do this, I abruptly stopped posting in preference for generating articles, and posting them on numerous article directories.

I used Unique Article Wizard, which is a monthly subscription service, to also distribute them more widely than just Ezinearticles.

I’ve had success on most sites I’ve worked with in local niches just submitting 2 or 3, but I really wanted to go full tilt on this one and submitted around 30 articles for one successful website I haven’t done any backlinking on in a few years, as well as another which is brand new and I’m trying to break into an already competitive niche.

So far I’ve seen a 15% increase in traffic on the established site (it’s been less than a month since my last article went out, and the traffic was originally pulling about 400-500 qualified visitors a day), and a larger increase with the new site (proportionally).

The cool thing is, actually, since every article I submitted could have two links, I slipped in links to every site in my possession. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve seen an increase across the board on every single site I own.

I expect to see some really compelling results in the coming months, which I’ll report back here.

Maybe.

I might just post travel pictures, instead, and leave you to infer things. By the way, that Unique Article Wizard I posted is affiliate. If you’re thinking of signing up… Give me some love.

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blogging, facebook, facebook shares, retweets, search engine optimization, seo, social media, social media strategy, twitter, writing

Timing & Frequency of Blog Posts, Facebook Shares, and Tweets

In Uncategorized on December 16, 2010 at 7:32 pm

Perhaps I should become a Problogger reader, because this post a friend of mine shared with me is pretty much pure dynamite: When’s the Best Time to Publish Blog Posts?

In this post Dan Zarella comes to a few conclusions which I will simply summarize:

The greatest amount of re-tweet activity occurs around 4pm EST each day. This is, perhaps the best time for you to tweet your new posts.
Articles get shared more on Facebook when published on Saturdays and Sundays — this is probably because many workplaces have Facebook blocked.
Articles tend to get shared more on Facebook when published around 9AM. (So publish at 9am, and tweet at 4pm.)

And his last point… which I think struck a a little closer to home (based on my own tests) and seemingly over-shadowed the rest in terms of things to tuck away and make a rule of thumb:

Frequency of publishing posts seems to be the largest predictor of blogging success.

Read up on my own experiment involving posting frequency at: 61 posts in 61 days.

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backlinking, experiments, google, google analytics, search engine optimization, seo, statistics, traffic

1 Post A Day for 61 Days = SEO Awesomeness

In Uncategorized on December 5, 2010 at 2:39 am

I’ve had a blog (not referring to this one) that’s been floating around for years. I’ve backlinked it previously to some degree, and it’s had a steady flow of traffic probably floating around 80 visitors a day for several years. Up until recently I had neglected it, mostly because I didn’t have time for it.

But recently I’ve taken to updating it again. Instead of necessarily posting very large articles, I mostly took snippets from interesting articles I had read, shove them in a blockquote, throw a “via” link on the end, and maybe a few sentences of commentary.

61 Days. 61 Posts.

Nothing big, but I basically went from posting virtually nothing on the blog and letting it coast off of it’s own steam, to suddenly a flurry of virtually daily blog posts since October 2nd. Today is December 4th, and since October 2nd I’ve posted approximately 61 short blog posts. Incidentally, it’s been 61 days (unless I miss counted). The fact that the numbers come out at exactly 1 blog post per day is simply a strange, cool coincidence that occurred entirely by accident.

In the several months prior to this 61 days I posted roughly once per month, and in the middle of the 61 day period I bumped a single, spun article out to a mass article distribution service for backlinks.

Results: A 35.86% Traffic Jump

The results are in. Basically, I compared the last week’s worth of traffic — starting at December 4th backward — (a total of 846 visits) to the traffic that was flowing in during the week prior to the beginning of the blog binge (a total of 608 visits). That’s a 35.86% increase.

It’s important to note that this traffic is traffic *exclusively* from search engines. On Google Analytics that report can be accessed via Traffic Sources > Search Engines. The reason I used this report, obviously, as opposed to the general traffic is it removes other variables like the absence or presence of a few facebook share visits. The only thing I’m interested in is what the *search engine* effects were from this result. Not unrelated viral traffic.

One of the other really cool elements of this experiment is ultimately I was really only taking a previous behavior I had — obsessively social bookmarking — and instead channeling that same energy into simply publishing it on my blog instead of delicious. So we’re not talking a lot of extra energy here: I’d definitely put this in the behavioral hack department.

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advertising, analytics, marketing, seo, social media, socialblade, statistics, video, youtube

SocialBlade Releases Awesome YouTube Tool

In Uncategorized on November 25, 2010 at 12:42 am

SocialBlade just released a freaking AWESOME YouTube tool. Check it:

Do you have a YouTube channel and want to see how it ranks with 15,000+ other channels in the database that are tracked every day? Do you want to easily see how many subscribers you gain hourly or daily? Do you want to see how much you could potentially* make as a partner or how any other YouTuber compares on any of these items as well? If you answered yes to any of those you have come to the right place!

http://socialblade.com/youtube/

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employment, job searching, jobs, resume, seo, work

Unusual SEO Resume Advice

In Search Engine Optimization, SEO on September 24, 2010 at 7:06 pm

I scored this quote off of Reddit, and wanted to save it somewhere just because it’s… like… wow. Warning: It may be technically unethical to do this. Originally found in the /r/jobs subreddit:

This probably is obvious to your Dad at this point, but here’s an important suggestion when applying to jobs online: stack your resume with buzz words.

I don’t mean just make sure you’re using “power words” throughout the resume… what I mean is, create a list of maybe a couple hundred power words that HR likes, and then a few thousand buzz words that are relevant to the field (and they can even be vaguely relevant).

When I was applying for the “presitigious” well-paid biotech internships as an undergrad, I added a list of about five thousand biology, engineering, and power words to my resume.

All you have to do is make them size 1 font, font color: white, and put them in the footer. I went from around a 1-2% response rate to getting interviews for almost a third of the jobs I applied for (which was a shitload).

Hope this helps.

edit: cool anecdote. I really wanted an internship with Genentech and spent a long time polishing my resume and my experience before applying for the summer after my soph. year. I didn’t hear from them. I intern at another company, still respectable, and meet an older intern who had interned at Genentech when he was my age, despite being less qualified as far as basic research experience at the time he applied. After a few F7U12′s, I realized that he went to MIT as an undergrad and thought maybe that had something to do with it. Next year, my resume comes hidden with the top 200 public and private schools in the US. BINGO, get an interview, get the job. Now correlation isn’t necessarily causation (I also added the rest of the huge list), but it makes for a cool story. I spliced the school names throughout the Bio words to avoid any accusations of fraud.

edit 2: a couple redditors suggested that SEO can be dangerous. I know this has worked for me, but proceed with caution

Sooo… Inquiring minds wanted to know where this profound little tip came from… Poster’s response follows:

It was listed in a nice little Forbes blog about resume database search optimization a couple years ago. Some resume-builders suggest a “keyword dump” on your resume, but it looks extremely tacky.

If I remember correctly, the blog suggested filling in the words in the spaces between sections (eg Work Experience and Education). I just figured I’d take it to the nth level. I found a huge biology and bioengineering glossary online that had simple to advanced terms. I also added in things that are totally random: every programming language known to man, a bunch of “common” community service and membership acronyms, etc. At no point am I claiming that I did these things, I’m just listing the words.

With pretty much all job applications done online now, this is one of those things that when you hear it, you know it will help.

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facebook, facebook lists, Mashable, seo, social media

Identifying the Interests of Facebook Friends

In SEO on August 15, 2010 at 7:40 pm

Facebook has put me into a conundrum. Recently I’ve made the observation that I get less interaction on my personal facebook profile each post than I did a year or so and 450+ friends ago. I believe the reason is, as my list has grown I’ve begun interacting with other people in my various “niches” (i.e. marketing), but because many of these people I’m interacting with have a unusually large friends list themselves, often on a post-by-post basis I get less reciprocity from them. But, never the less, my interacting with them has caused facebook to show these big-lists proportionately more than other people that may have in reality reciprocated more.

The good part of this whole situation is I have found the cure to my problem: the answer to this problem is lists. Lists allow you to sort your stream based on your list. Using this I can make categories or groups of people centered around topics of interest. So, instead of only paying attention to my default stream, I can use the lists to sort my stream based on what group I feel like needs to be interacted with at that moment.

Big Hint: Choosing the part of my network that needs to be engaged will have a lot to do with what my most recent status update pertained to. Who do I want to see it? If it’s an “SEO” update, I’ll probably want to spend a little time “giving back to the community” and engaging some of my SEO friends. Usually this is done by scrolling down that SEO list I’ve compiled, and checking out and commenting on everyone else’s recent updates and links. Golden rule at work!

But this left me with an important question… Now that I have nearly 1,000 friends (as of this posting) how do I go about categorizing the niches of interest that they are in? Thankfully, facebook recently changed *all* interests/activities into fan pages of their own. While at first I was very averse to this… I now see the light. You can visit virtually any “interest” or fan page and IMMEDIATELY identify who among my friends has “liked” that topic/brand/fanpage.

So, let’s say for example I want to build a “social media” list… What’s the next step? I’ll visit the Mashable fan page, open up a new window to my lists page in a new browser which I’ll sidle up next to my browser with the mashable fan page open, which… conveniently… lists all of my friends that have already liked that page! Since Mashable is a “social media” hot spot this makes it very easy to rapidly identify just who belongs to that “social media” list I’m creating.

Now go forth, blog, and engage that niche of your personal network that actually cares about the topic you’re writing about.

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analytics, article marketing, backlinking, google, kpmrs, search engine optimization, seo

Article Marketing Increases Speed of Google Indexing

In Uncategorized on July 24, 2010 at 2:42 pm

Whenever I start doing search engine optimization work on any new website I try my best to get a few different forms of analytics setup (such as Google Analytics, and the awesome KPMRS) and start making good notes early on. This can help me refine and narrow down what techniques yield the most quickly.

Today I checked on a website I had started a drip distribution of spun articles on ~24 days ago and was surprised at the robustness of the results. Not so much that the website is pulling heavy traffic — it’s not. More so that the articles so rapidly helped the site go from getting virtually zero traffic from search engines, to at least getting some minor traffic. The graph really shows the difference! See below:

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backlinking, digg, linkbait, reddit, seo, social bookmarking, social media, stumbleupon, traffic

Linkbait and the Incredibly Virality of Infographics

In Uncategorized on July 16, 2010 at 1:12 am

An interesting phenomenon in some of the popular social news aggregators like Reddit, and Digg is the appearance of infographics. Well-designed infographics are like crack to Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon users. (Actually, while StumbleUpon is not my expertise — perhaps this is even more true of StumbleUpon since pictures do well over there). Basically the formula is interesting facts + visually stunning digital art = viral insanity.

To illustrate this point I’m going to share a number of infographics, which also serves to familiarize you in the overall format and common themes.

A friend of mine put this infographic together – 12 facts about bottled water (PIC) – 2,190 Reddit votes. Bonus: This one has very thorough criticism by the Reddit community, despite being so successful.
Striking Infographic: Tallest Mountains to Deepest Trench (Gives good sense of Deepwater Horizon drilling depth) – 1,618 Reddit votes. This one got posted and was successful, twice (with the second post getting ~280 votes)
how to spot a concealed weapon. Infographic – 710 Reddit Votes.
Which Health Supplements Are Backed by Science?[Infographic] – 1078 Reddit Votes. This one also, interestingly enough, had another interactive, presumably flash based version which I didn’t see on the front page — though it may have also hit. It occurs to me that the links in the comments to the other versions may have also been placed there by someone who knew the content producer.
1 Pixel = 1 Million Dollars. [Infographic] – 811 Reddit Votes.
Music sales on different media types. [Infographic] – 322 Reddit Votes. This one was produced by the New York Times. Cool.
Europes Web of Debt [Infographic] – 325 Reddit Votes
How to predict the weather (Infographic) – 434 Reddit Votes

One of the more salient features that seem to be important that I notice is that data is represented graphically to scale at every opportunity. Another is that on many sites (the smart ones) they offer the opportunity to put the infographic on your own site, so long as you use the code they provide you, which then links to their site — hence, the term linkbait.

Anything with more than 600 votes is like… insane on fire, and almost certainly means it exploded on at least one other major site. Above 1,000 is beyond my knowledge with the exception of rumored sick level of virality (i.e. 100,000+ unique visitors — never seen this level personally). Often times things pertaining to important global events is what can rock these huge numbers. I’ve heard Twitter trending topics is another good place for ideas.

Make sure to also read my post describing the aftermath of a Digg front page hit. … and also check out The Oatmeal — a popular webcomic that launched his career largely via websites like Digg and Reddit. He’s since gone on national TV, published a comic book, and also been hired by Reddit for illustrations.

Update: I ran across this page giving infographic design tips and examples! Check it out!

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firefox, search engine optimization, seo, stumbleupon, wordpress

Useful SEO Tools and Links

In Uncategorized on July 5, 2010 at 8:50 pm

Just starting a post to compile useful tools, with a short description of why they’re useful. Most of these were compiled by going on a huge stumbleupon spree using very specific tags (in this case “seo”). I would say this experiment was very successful, and I’ll be using StumbleUpon in this manner in the future.

Scripts, WordPress Plugins, Firefox Plugins, etc.

“Link Building Pro” (seox.com) – A javascript for automatically inserting a source link� with keyword rich anchor text to the clipboard if someone copies ANYTHING from your page. Good for SEO, and encourages people to list you as a source. Discovered from the SEO tag on stumbleupon.
Cross-linker – WordPress plugin that may no longer be functional, worth a shot however. Turns all instances of a phrase throughout a blog as a link to a pre-defined URL.
wp db backup – A plugin that automatically backs up a wordpress database.
Breadcrumb NavXT – A wordpress plugin that adds some nifty navigation/link hierarchy thats useful for SEO and usability.
Intense Debate – A wordpress plugin that alters the commenting system, allows comment email subscription, reply by email, and comment threading. Increases reader� engagement. View the features page here.
Digg Digg – A wordpress plugin that immediately inserts all the share/bookmarking buttons on your posts and pages, and allows custom formatting options. Very useful. Not restricted to digg as name might imply.
Better Google Analytics Firefox Plugin – Will take a snap shot of a report and export it to google docs.
Firefox addon to turn off google personalized search.
Seoaddons.com – A long list of firefox addons, cms mods, and other SEO-related goodies. My personal favorite found from here was a firefox addon called KGen which shows you the keyword composition of pages you’re viewing so you can scope� out the competition.
Google chrome plugins for SEO

Informational Articles

Keyword Analysis

Spyfu.com – Keyword that gives approximate traffic to website/keywords, and adwords price range for hits. Pretty cool.
Google Alerts – A useful tool that allows you to setup emails watching for keywords. Sets up an RSS feed for your use OR sends you daily/weekly emails. Can use advanced google search operators (big key to success there).
Nichebot.com – A pay membership service that helps with appropriate keyword targetting.
Keyword Discovery (Trellian) – Another membership site, similar to wordtracker or nichebot, but surprisingly expensive. $200/month.
Google Keyword Research Tool – Gives approximate amount of monthly trafic, as well as average cost per click rate. In order to see the CPC information click the “Choose columns to display” drop down, and click show all.
Google Trends – Information on� keywords that are hot right now.

Video Sites

blip.tv – Video hosting website. Allows clickable links to be placed within� the videos.

Useful Pay Services

Read the rest of this entry »

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backlinking, forums, google, seo

Google Maps Local Business Listings

In Uncategorized on June 17, 2010 at 5:48 pm

I’ve been reading WarriorForum posts and started noticing a common theme for suggestions on how to penetrate the top “Google Places” spots in relevant searches.

Most of them center around three main points:

Getting them more customer reviews by asking customers for reviews.
Adding� multiple forms of media� to them (videos, pictures, etc.)
Backlinking them with appropriate keyword specific anchor text.

I have not attempted to boost a Google Places ranking before, but I bet that most people do well without getting them thoroughly backlinked — but I bet it couldn’t hurt! All three ideas sound on target, because there really aren’t many more variables to manipulate other than those, to be honest.

By the way, if you’re interested in searching internet marketing forum posts I’ve setup a special google configured to just such a task! We’ll call this the SEO Search Engine. These forums are where I go to feel out new areas of theory for SEO, and I find the best way to navigate them is by using google to search through them!

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backlinking, google, seo

What is Google Pagerank? Is it important?

In Uncategorized on June 5, 2010 at 6:48 am

Google Pagerank is a score ranging from 0 to 10 given by Google and can be viewed from their toolbar, or my personal favorite, with a Firefox Plugin called Quirk SearchStatus. In addition to showing Google Pagerank Quirk SearchStatus also shows Alexa rank (not that useful) and highlights nofollow links (very useful – see my backlinking tips post). Alternatively, if you’re wanting to do a quick check you can also find out Google Pagerank via this website.

Using Paid Links for PageRank Score Boosting

Some people will sell links from high Google Pagerank pages, and this can boost pagerank, but I would strongly discourage this practice. In my personal experience artificially propping up a websites google pagerank score by what is often a link derived from an otherwise unrelated webpage does not seem to offer significant advantages in search engine results pages (serps). Not only that, but it’s also inviting trouble from Google if you get caught purchasing links.

Google PageRank Score Correlative with Good Serp Listings, but Often Not Causal

That being said, I have noticed pagerank often being correlated with a sites overall health and visibility in search engines. I believe it is actually MORE valuable to have a large number of pages with a decent pagerank than a few with a very large Google Pagerank score and many with a significant drop off.

“Deep-linking” Subpages Is Key

This former configuration appears to ultimately result in more organic search rankings and ultimately traffic as a whole, and is a product of good off-site SEO or backlink building practices. This can be achieved by getting links from a number of means such as: directory submissions of various types, so-called “social bookmarking”, and going to the hot or popular section frequently on popular web2.0 social media destinations with a high pagerank.

The key here is that more than just your website’s homepage is being backlinked, but that there are many subpages, ideally each focused on their own niche keywords which they are each individually well backlinked for. This style of linking reflects what would often occur entirely “organically” or naturally on each new post on a popular site which has visitors that read, value and enjoy the content, and then link to each post as its presented to the public. If you don’t already have a popular enough blog that your visitors give your high quality posts (“linkbait”) automatically, then you can also simulate the same experience for search engines in a true fake it until you make it fashion by ensuring that each and every “linkbait” post you� produce are targetted for appropriate keywords and then backlinked. I have several good backlinking rules of thumb that can be used consistently to produce good results, and increase your Google Pagerank, and consequently actual rank in search engine results pages (serps) as well.

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google, marketing, seo, wordpress split testing plugin

Using Google Website Optimizer to Split Test in WordPress

In Uncategorized on May 31, 2010 at 3:24 am

Today I’ve made it one of my goals to tackle using the “Google Website Optimizer” to split test something. Split testing is a way of experimenting of delivering alternative forms of the same page to assess which variant leads to more conversions. What a conversion is can vary: it could be clicking a specific link (even one that leads offsite), or the visitor landing on a thank you page for a product sale/ebook download/newsletter sign-up. The page that is responsible for registering the conversion gets the conversion script.

Choosing a test type: a/b versus multivariate

Snapshot from Google Website Optimizer interface

a/b versus multivariate

So there’s two types of split tests you can perform with website optimizer: A/B or multivariate. The A/B variety involves making up multiple version of the same page and saving them as a separate file. Then, by inserting a code in to the original it will sometimes redirect people to the other, alternative page. Multivariate, however, allows people to stay on the same page but instead uses javascript to switch out certain sections of the post with other variants. Multivariate certainly appears to be more powerful, and for the most part probably the only real tool I’ll need — one article I was reading suggested that they were able to effectively use multivariate exclusively for all of their purposes.

In fact, now several hours into tinkering with Google Website Optimizer I’d even suggest that the a/b split testing is a needless complication, and that multivariate can do everything you could possibly want to accomplish with a/b but better. Save yourself some trouble and stick with multivariate.

I decided a natural candidate to try this tool out would be a newsletter sign-up, in this case MailChimp autoresponders in particular since they offer a limited free trial. So I picked a popular page on my blog and decided I’d put insert points for my variations at the top and bottom of the post. At both the top and bottom I made a few different options available: no form at all, one with a persuasive call to action on the form, a LINK to a form (instead of the form itself, and perhaps a few others. In total I had about 20 different combinations — 5 different twists for the top, and 4 for the bottom. This is a bit excessive, and consequently I set it to aggressively disqualify non-performing ones to thin the stack a little sooner. As a consequence I will setup an additional experiment with fewer variations and easier to achieve goals. Twenty is too many combinations to expect results too rapidly. I will be using the information gleaned from this post to test the successfulness (read:clicks) of various social button styles in the near future. This should serve to speed up my results so I can get a grasp more quickly of the effectiveness of using this process.

Website Optimizer WordPress Plugin

Plugin adds places for code underneath wordpress posts

I was able to plug the appropriate code into the posts using a nifty wordpress plugin I found that’s specifically for adding website optimizer code to wordpress posts and pages. This plugin is very useful, but only if your split test only involves a single page or post per experiment. If your tests involve more pages and you happen to be a Thesis user, thesis openhook may accomplish the task sufficiently. (Unfortunately, I don’t know how you’d go about it with other themes.)

One issue I ran into repeatedly when trying out different code to use was formatting issues with wordpress. I kept noticing extra space between my form and surrounding content, and it turns out the WYSIWYG features was causing this in WordPress. I temporarily turned this off by visiting the users page for this administrative account, and unchecked it. The WordPress post editor is still surprisingly easy to use and effective with this feature off.

In the coming weeks or months (more likely for the newsletter split test) one combination will hopefully show itself to be the clear winner relative to the rest at getting people through that sign-up form and onto the thank you page which has been strapped with the “conversion code.” After this happened I will be able to end the experiment and run a follow up experiment, which allows me to run a new variation which I make on the spot against the winner of the last test. Additionally, data from the last experiment will remain available during the follow up experiment. This setup allows you to continually complete cycles of further refinement on your experiments.

While I didn’t think this was necessary for my current experiment… Anyone interested in google website optimizer might also benefit from these links:

Once you setup your OWN split tests you’ll have some waiting to do before the results roll in so you might as well check out this interesting book on Google Website Optimizer which I ran across on Amazon…

Expect a round 2 post with lessons learned from the results coming soon!

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database, disqus, facebook, google, plugins, seo, themes, thesis, twitter, wordpress

Top or “The Best” WordPress Plugins – Dan Picks!

In Uncategorized on May 26, 2010 at 8:03 pm

This is my list of top wordpress plugins that are absolutely must have, and I generally install on every single blog I setup.

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded – This plugin is excellent for boosting a blog’s stickiness. It lets readers subscribe to a comment thread.
wp-db-backup – A plugin that automatically backs up a wordpress database.
WPTouch – Instantly create a mobile version of your blog.
Simple Tags –
Breadcrumb NavXT – A wordpress plugin that adds some nifty navigation/link hierarchy thats useful for SEO and usability.
WP-Cumulus – Not particularly SEO friendly since it’s flash based, but a truly visually stunning tag cloud.
Subscribe2- An excellent email subscription plugin allowing people to get digest emails of your blog updates on a daily or weekly basis. See the guide for pictures and the other options I didn’t bother to mention.
Topsy Retweet Button – This button retweets your post, much like the more common tweetmeme variety. This one, however, adds in a nifty post ranking (top 10k, top 5k, etc.) that is generated by topsy’s specialized algorithm. In all other respects functions identically to the tweetmeme retweet button.
WP-to-Twitter – This plugin allows you to setup wordpress to tweet either a default or custom tweet to an account of your choice, complete with bit.ly shortening, at post time.
TwiBadge – This plugin enables a widget that can be dropped onto a sidebar that shows a twitter stream. I like this particular one because it looks really cool, and has a few different color options. There’s a million different plugins that serve this same feature, however.
Facebook Fan Box – This plugin adds a facebook fan box widget letting you advertise your facebook fanpage with ease.
Share and Follow – Creates social media buttons both for sharing posts, and to allow users to follow you. Very customizable and has a level of functionality that is the equivalent to a combination of other plugins.
Google XML Sitemaps – This outputs an xml file to be given to google to increase indexability of the website. Presumably a boon to SEO.
Contextual Related Posts – This inserts a short bulleted link list of “related posts” to the end of every post. Good for SEO, and giving people more to read about automatically.
DISQUS Comment System – This plugin integrates the Disqus comment system into the blog. Disqus adds really cool features like avatar import from and posting to facebook, and twitter. Additionally it allows for subscription to posts, and inserts the comments into the actual wordpress database for easy removal if you later decide Disqus isn’t for you.
EzineArticles Plugin – This allows you to submit EzineArticles directly from your blog, as well as monitor their status from the administrative panel.
WP Super Cache – This plugin is so important it’s actually automatically included in all wordpress blogs setup at my webhost provider, Dreamhost. It can prevent a website from crashing when suddenly receiving a large number of hits (like those sent from a story going popular on Digg).

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mdpatrick

Dan Patrick

Posts Tagged ‘seo’

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