I have a few cool plugins for Firefox, but one of my favorites is “Search Status.” Here are some things it does:
It provides not just Google Page Rank, like the Google Toolbar does, but Alexa ranking of any page you land on as well. And these ranks sit in your lower toolbar and you can see it automatically. You can also see a compete rank and an mozRank, which measures the link juice coming into that site, as well.
When you right click on the Search Status symbol (an @, but with a q in the middle), it will show you the following about any site you visit:
Highlights “no follow” links. Want to see if a blog is allowing spiders to follow links? Turn this option on and all “no follow” links appear in little pink boxes. You may want to use this when considering the site’s link potential.
Gives you a link report on. How many are coming in/going out? How many of them are follow links?
Shows the META tags and description
Shows what the site looked like historically.
Gives you robots.txt, whois, and sitemap
Provides the keyword density and highlights any keyword you choose
Shows all pages indexed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now bing.com)
Shows the sites linking back in Google, Yahoo, and MSN
So, you can learn much of the SEO data just from this little plugin. Of course, some of it overlaps with the data you get from SEO Quake, but I think you really need both plugins to have a fully functional SEO browser. I mean, there are other SEO add-ons for Firefox, but these are 2 I couldn’t do without.
I was reading through my feeds today, and came upon a post from Marko Saric’s How to Make My Blog blog and he was talking about all the traffic he’d got from one post. Of course, it was about Twitter, and it outlined some of the great Twitter plugins available: Top 5 Twitter Plugins to Incorporate into Your Blog.
In it, Marko outlines WP Twitip ID, which allows you to add a field to your comment form for your commentors’ Twitter IDs. This is cool for your commentor because it links their Twitter username to the comment and to their Twitter profile. Nice! So, I installed that one.
Another is Twittar, which allows the commentor’s Twitter Avatar to be shown next to his/her comment. Kind of nice. And there’s TweetBacks, Tweet This, and Twitter Tools.
You can check them all out on Marko’s blog. But here’s the thing. They all do very cool things, but they’re not for blog beginners. Well… except for Twitter Tools. Anyone can use that one. It’s a pretty standard plugin.
But if you don’t know how to edit your theme files, the others are advanced. They’re not hard. You just need to put snippets of code where you want the items to appear, but one of them, TweetBacks, for example, takes a little more finesse.
Yet, I do have some advice.
If you’re not really into editing the PHP files, don’t be scared to get in and try it. That’s how I learn to do things. I just forge ahead, and do things because I know I can go back and fix them, if I screw up (and I have done that more times than I care to mention).
Save your theme. If you mess up one of the files, you can just go to your saved theme files and upload the clean file to your theme folder. For instance, if you screw up comments.php, just go to your saved theme and upload the original comments.php to the theme folder on your hosting account. Just like new!
Never be afraid to try things. That’s how you learn.
I really like the WordPress plugin HeadSpace2. It’s easy to use and much quicker than using All-in-One SEO, but let me tell you…
I installed it and have been using it for the past few weeks. I decided that I liked HeadSpace2 a lot better than All-in-One because I have very little time, and it saves me a ton of time. So, I uninstalled All-in-One…
HUGE mistake!
I lost all of the titles and descriptions to every post for the past two years that I’d done with All-in-One. Argh! That’s like 325 posts!
So, I’m going back, and one-by-one adding the titles and descriptions back in. It’s pretty quick because I’m using HeadSpace2, but it will still take me several days to get it all done. GRrrrrr….
Here’s the deal: All-in-One will run with HeadSpace2, so if you want to switch over, just don’t uninstall All-in-One. Don’t use it, but let it sit on your blog so that it won’t lose all your information. You don’t have to see it.
Just go to the upper right-hand corner of WordPress 2.7.1 and click on “Screen Options,” then unselect “All-in-One SEO” and you won’t see it again.
Thanks to Brent over at ListBuildingNexus.com, who pointed this issue out. Luckily, it is fixable.
So, my friend Brian Terry, who’s an awesome graphics designer and just as awesome a marketer, has come out with a new plugin I know you’ll love. It’s called “Optin Pop,” and if you’re a regular reader here, you’ve probably seen it on this blog. I’ve been testing it over the past few weeks, and it’s increased the optins from my blog by about 30%. Not too shabby.
And it’s your typical WordPress plugin. Nothing fancy.
But here’s the sweet part…
It allows you to create 10 different optin boxes and it rotates them for you. So, every time people come to your blog, or every 5 times or whatever you set, they see another message. Not every message will resonate with everyone who sees it, right? So, it you can create 10 messages, you have a much higher chance of getting their attention.
You can choose a lightbox effect, where it darkens the screen, while putting your optin box right in the reader’s face, or you can be a bit more subtle and use a standard pop-up.
You can choose to make it grey, blue, red or white.
You can set it to appear on all pages, just your permalink pages, on comment pages, or category pages.
You can set the width you prefer.
You can have it appear on load or on close.
And you can decide how often you want people to view it.
Plus, it’s unblockable. How cool is that?
What all this adds up to is more optins and a bigger list for you, and we all know that list just equals money!
Do you like the ability to interact with your audience? I do, and about six months ago or more I found a great plugin that allows me to answer questions people have about my niche. Notice the top navigatin panel, which has “Blogging Questions,” “SEO Questions,” etc. Those are the result of using FAQ-tastic.
FAQ-Tastic isn’t hard to use, but don’t try it if you’re a beginner. It does involve adding pages and code to those pages so they pages will interact with the software. I mean, it’s not rocket science, and anyone who knows HTML probably won’t have any problems with it at all.
But what it does is give your readers the opportunity to ask you questions. They can be questions about what you’re posting or anything having to do with the categories you design in FAQ-Tastic. Pretty neat. I love helping folks and answering questions is what I do about 55% of my time, so it’s a no-brainer for me to have this plugin. It’s a way for me to keep in touch with my readers, too.
Another great plugin is Comment Remix (and you can search for either of these plugins right from your blog). This allows you to order the comments the way you want them to be (newest first, rather than the other way around), and the sweetest feature perhaps is that it gives you a “reply” button. You can hit it on any comment and just reply. If you don’t have this, you have to edit the post in most themes, and put your answer into the original comment, which is a pain in the butt.
With Comment Remix, you simple click the reply button, and a write blank opens up. You reply right there and be on your way.
I really like these two plugins and I’ve been using them long enough to recommend them. I hope you’ll love them as much as I do.
I have spent the past couple of years touting the coolness of the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. This one lets you add a title and description to every post you make, which is super important for SEO. As I’ve mentioned here before, the title and description are the most important parts of any web page, and the benefit of being able to add these to every post you make is HUGE!
Then today, I was reading an article in SiteProNews, “Blogs, WordPress and Google,” by Scott Van Achte and I was curious. So… I headed over to Urban Giraffe, and watched the video:
So, I’m thinking I’ll give it a try. I installed it and then went in to tweak the settings. Wow! You can give a title and description to every KIND of page in your blog: categories, tags, about, even 404. Making each one individual is a great help for your SEO advantage.
And, as you see in the video, it will suggest tags and keywords for you from the post. Pretty cool, I’d say.
I’m going to try it for a few days and see how I like it. If it’s as good as it looks, it could be my new recommendation. So far, I like it!
After you make a post, you go down to the HeadSpace area, and click on Page Title. Your title automatically populates. It creates a description for you that you can easily edit. AND, it suggests tags from what you’ve written, too.
Today, one of my workmates needed to know page rank of blogs for a project she’s working on, but had no Google Toolbar or anything that would show it to her. Immediately, I asked her what browser she was using and she told me Firefox. Yes!
Do you know how many very cool add-ons for Firefox there are? I mean, wow! You can go nuts. Here’s my list of must-have add-ons for SEO and social marketing in alphabetical order:
Bookmark Duplicate Detector: Oh, yeah… We’ve all done it, right? We think we need to save a site, and end up with a hundred bookmarks that we just keep adding. Nope! Not with this tool. It keeps my bookmarks unique and I love it.
Clipmarks: Save the stuff you enjoy and add it to your online account. Clip it! Or, add it to your blog or whatever. Neat.
ColorZilla: click the icon and get the hexcodes for any color you rest your mouse on. I also like a little program called “Pixie” for this, which you can get at http://nattyware.com free. It’s great for getting matching color codes when you’re not using a browser.
Fast Dial: Allows you to add icons for all the sites you visit regularly. No more searching, even in neat bookmarks. Just click and you’re there.
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer: This is awesome if you have more than one computer. Foxmarks stores all your bookmarks and when you log in to your other computer with Foxmarks installed, you’re golden. All your bookmarks are always up-to-date.
IE Tab: Switch between Firefox and Internet Explorer interfaces with the click of a mouse. This is great if you need to see web pages in both browsers or if a site just doesn’t work with Firefox. You don’t have to open the other browser, just click!
Rank Checker from SEOBook.com Let’s say it’s SEOElite lite. You can check the rank of any site in Google, Yahoo, and Live right from your browser.
Amason S3Fox: It’s like .ftp for Amazon S3. All you have to do to access all your S3 files is click on the icon in your browser.
Search Status: Give you Google Page Rank and Alexa Ranking plus a bunch of other stuff. Let’s you see keyword density of pages, highlight no follow links, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
SEOQuake: I love this one. You get this tiny toolbar that appears every time you open a web page. It’s transparent and really unobtrusive, until you open it. BAM! You have Google page rank, the number of pages indexed, the number of backlinks, and similar info for Yahoo and Live. You can also access Whois, SEODigger, and a whole load of info in a heartbeat. This is totally cool.
Tab Mix Plus: Lets you reorder your tabs, have tabs open when you click on links, rather than leaving pages, and you can really customize this one any way you want. It’s really great, too. Worth the effort to get it and plug it in.
TwitterFox: I know, I know… You can really customize TweetDeck so much better, but TwitterFox just sits open on my browser all day. I can see when tweets come in immediately and whether or not it’s something I might want to check out or reply to. I mean, I’m so busy that I really don’t have much time for Twitter. If I had to use Tweet Deck or another stand alone program, I doubt that I’d be able to bother with it at all. If you’re as busy as me, you might enjoy this add-on.
I have a few others that aren’t worth mentioning, but these are my absolute faves. Try them. You’ll be amazed at what you can get one free and very cool browser to do for you.
Wow. I always wait a little while when WordPress makes sweeping changes to their software. I don’t care how great the programmers are (and WordPress is totally smokin’ awesome), there are going to be bugs. I like to wait until the bugs are worked out.
But…
I have a membership site about learning to blog and Web 2.0 and all kind of cool stuff about blogging, and decided that so as not to confuse my members, I’d better do the upgrade.
Wow.
My favorite feature thus far?
Automatic plugin updating.
OMG… It’s totally awesome. Plugins aren’t hard to upgrade, of course, but they’re time consuming, especially when you have as many as I do. But the newest version of WordPress has a new feature… the automatic upgrade. You click on the link and it downloads, unzips, installs, and reactivates the plugin for you!
Is that cool or what?
I’m in blogger heaven today. Still haven’t checked out all the cool features, but if the automatic plugin installer was the only thing new, I’d still be tooting WordPress’s horn.
What’s up with WordPress? Every other day, there’s another security issue and we have to upgrade again. Argh. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could figure out everything at the same time so that we only needed to upgrade once?
Would be. Not possible, but it would be nice.
So, I’ve upgraded this blog at least three times that I can remember, and then, there are the plugins and the themes that don’t jibe, and on and on…
It’s exhausting.
People who are new to blogging are usually wary of doing things like upgrades. But here’s the thing to remember, if you don’t, you’re leaving yourself wide open for mischief.
You may or may not know this, but someone hacked my blog around September and I lost everything. It’s my own dumb fault for not backing things up properly (and WordPress Databackup Plugin is so frickin’ simple to use that I should be smacked). But you get busy and you think you’re going to do something, and who’d want to mess with my blog, anyway, and you just never get around to doing things.
How would you like to lose 2 years of posts? Thousands of trackbacks and comments, and on and on…
Very frustrating.
Still, I wish I had that stuff back. WordPress Database Backup plugin now mails the contents to me every week.
If you’re running Wordpress, unless you’ve already locked down your Wp-content folder with some .htaccess fixes, you may not notice that your Wp-content/plugins folder is naked and bare to the world. That is, navigate to http://www.yourblogname.com/wp-content/plugins and you may find a directory listing of your plugins folder, files and all. How do you fix it? Easy. Just upload an empty index.html into the wp-content/plugins folder and its all fixed.
Well, thank you, Deep Jive! Really hard to do, eh? I don’t want my plugins folder or anything else about me naked in public.
I have a few cool plugins for Firefox, but one of my favorites is “Search Status.” Here are some things it does:
