You’ve heard this news from everyone else so I won’t be doing more damage if I tell you that WordPress 2.6 is now officially available. There are lots of features to love about this one, but more importantly getting the latest version ensures that you are also using the most secure release available. And you need that, it’s a scary place out there.
Category: Problogging Tools
Remember my entry on WordPress being the choice of professional bloggers? That wouldn’t be entirely complete with just a blog with nothing on it, right? First of all, remember that content is king. Always is. You need some high quality content on your site, concerning your specific niche. Not just good resource, but good original content paired with writing optimized for the web.
Nowadays, good content takes you to the doorstep, helping you keep readers coming back. But you can’t get readers out of nowhere, and most of the time search engines will provide this for you. The downside to this is that you have to compete with everyone writing about the same topics. This is where search engine optimization comes in.
Using the excellent WordPress, you can apply these wonderful tips to make your weblog nicer to the eyes of search engine bots. Technically, applying these guidelines makes your pages and content more accessible for your readers, as determined by seasoned web professionals. A positive side effect is that these optimizations makes them more attractive to search engines as well, increasing your chances of being highly relevant for the said topic. A blog with good content with optimized structure for its readers will always have a greater chance at success.
Categories
Visual PageRank
Google’s PageRank has always been dependent on the inter–relation of sites, pages, and links. To summarize it bluntly, links to a page determine its level of authority, in an ideal world wide web.
Checking changes in your PageRank would generally show very little variation across several weeks. You need to manage links to and from your site’s pages, and know their PR values as well. Using this visual pagerank tool, the PR of your outgoing links are displayed right in your pages — very useful for seeing how valuable are the pages you’re linking to.
Just as I mentioned recently, a great majority of professional bloggers use Google AdSense to monetize their properties. More importantly, almost all rely on AdSense as their top revenue generator, with other programs just supplementing their AdSense earnings.
In our never–ending search for the perfect AdSense setup, this article on ten useful AdSense tools should position you a step ahead of your competitors.
Your site’s pagerank directly affects the relevance and readership statistics, an important metric that separates your pages from the rest of the other pages competing for the same keywords.
There are several things you can do to optimize your site for better pagerank, but you need to have an idea what your PR is across all Google data centers. With PageRank Watch, you can check for PR growth or decline from a simple form. This is an essential problogger tool.
Categories
Google Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps is one of the latest innovations by search leader Google to allow publishers to clearly designate parts of their site for indexing. By giving publishers the power to guide search engine bots what content they should be looking at, information is organized in a much better way, at least for a given site. The benefits are definitely worth it.
Categories
Performancing Metrics
Professional blogging has always been synonymous with statistics, be it unique visitors, pageviews, or adsense clicks. The rise of blogging has spawned the need for stat tracking systems, to the point that google now owns two promising services: Analytics (formerly Urchin) and Measuremap.
There are several other options in the market, though a good number are only available through paid monthly subscription. For those in need of basic stats, Sitemeter does the job acceptably well. Fortunately for everyone, the popular problogging community Performancing has just launched Performancing Metrics, their stats tool that is both simple yet powerful. A quick overview outlines your site’s daily stats, and you can dig deeper for detailed information. Typical data are available like unique visitors, pageviews, browsers, screen resolutions, and other visitor details. A not so typical (and very helpful) feature is adsense click tracking, which can be used to monitor the ad clicking behavior of your readers. Best of all, it’s currently free, and all you need is a Performancing account (also free). Try it!