if ($URL_HISTORY) {
$prev_seeks = "Previous searches: ";
$urls = explode(' ',$URL_HISTORY);
foreach ($urls as $url) {
$prev_seeks .= " $url “;
if (++$c != count($urls)) {
$prev_seeks .= ‘ / ’;
}
}
} ?>

Use this handy tool to check title tags across a bunch of URLs.

Enter some web site URLs (for example “http://www.netconcepts.com”):

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The WordPress plugin “Mini Manager”, written by Charlie Evans, Sr. Developer at Netconcepts, was designed for a client who wanted to manage mini blocks of HTML, then include them in posts or pages simply by using their reference name in curly braces, like so: {Reference_Name}

Examples of Use:

• Isolate tricky JavaScript or Flash code. Instead of having lines of complicated code in the content field of posts – create a miniblock of code and reference it.
• Bypass complications caused by advanced HTML within the WordPress WYSIWYG interface
• Insert an image or logo without having to create individual HTML references

It is completely free and has been released as “open source” under the GPL license. So enjoy!

Features include:

• “Manage MiniManager Blocks” form page
• Add new blocks of text
• Edit existing blocks of text
• Manage large blocks of code from one single admin
• And best of all, it’s FREE!

Download the plugin!

Installation instructions

1. Upload mini-manager.php to your wp-content/plugins directory.
2. Activate the plugin.

Implementation Instructions:

1. Once installed, Click on the “Manage” tab
2. Click on “MiniManager Blocks” tab
3. Select “Create New Block” and click “Continue”
4. Type in a “Reference_Name” and respective block of code
   Note: the “Reference_Name” is what will be referenced in the post content field to call the block of code

5. Type the “Reference_Name” within curly braces { } in the content where you wish the block of code to appear.
   For Example:
   When you have everything configured, insert “{Reference_Name}” within a post or page where ever you want the specified code block to appear.

To manage an existing block of code:

1. From the MiniManager admin page, select the “Reference_Name” you wish to edit from the drop down menu
2. Click “Continue”
3. Make the desired edits to the code block
4. Click the “Continue” button, your block will be saved and ready to use

Feedback?

Got a bug to report? Or an enhancement to recommend? Or perhaps even some code to submit for inclusion in the next release? Great! Share your feedback by commenting to this post.

Filed under: SEO, Tools | Comments Off

Have you accessed the new Google analytics package yet? Chris Smith gives us an inside look at usability in this article from the Natural Search Blog. Chris calls the new analytics “upgrade” as being “All glitz with little beneficial substance.” Read more about the updated Google Analytics from an SEO expert point-of-view.

Filed under: Articles, SEO, Tools, Usability | No Comments »

Note: SEO Title Tag 2.3.3 adds compatibility with WordPress 2.7!

*** With SEO Title Tag version 2.3.0 we have dropped support of versions of WordPress prior to 2.3 if you are still using an older version of WordPress you should be able to continue using legacy version 2.2.1.

Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization (“SEO”). It blows my mind how post titles are also used as title tags by WordPress, considering that post titles should be catchy, pithy, and short-and-sweet; whereas title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility.

Now, thankfully, there is a solution, allowing you to decouple post titles from title tags. Introducing… the SEO Title Tag 2.3.3 WordPress plugin.

SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website. Not just your posts, not just your home page, but any and every title tag on your site! If this plugin, along with a few hours of keyword research and copywriting of optimized titles, doesn’t make a significant impact on your search traffic, you’re doing something wrong!

SEO Title Tag is authored by SEO specialist web agency Covario. Version 1.0 was by Covario’s Vice President of SEO Strategies Stephan Spencer. Version 2.0 was a collaborative effort — Stephan did the concept development and Covario’s code jockeys Oliver Kastler, Mike Harding and Elton Fry did all the heavy lifting. Since version 2.1 Andrew Shell has taken over development responsibilities. It is completely free and has been released as “open source” under the GPL license. So enjoy!

Features include:

• Allows you to override a page’s or a post’s title tag with a custom one.
• New for v2.0 A Title Tag input box in the Edit Post and Write Post forms. (Previously in version 1.0 you had to use the Custom Field box.)
• New for v2.0 Mass editing of title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages, tag conjunction pages, archive by month pages, — indeed, any URL — all in one go.
• Define a custom title tag for your home page (or, more accurately, your Posts page, if you have chosen a static Front Page set under Options -> Reading), through the Options -> SEO Title Tag page in the WordPress admin.
• New for v2.0 Define the title tag of 404 error pages, also through Options -> SEO Title Tag.
• New for v2.0 Handles internal search result pages too.
• New for v2.0 Title tags of category pages can optionally be set to the category description. If you use a Meta Tag plugin like Add Meta Tags, then you should not use this feature and instead let the Meta Tag plugin use the category description for the meta description on category pages.
• If you choose to keep the blog name in your title tags (not recommended!), the order of the blog name and the title are automatically reversed, giving more keyword prominence to the title instead of the blog name. Note there is also an option to replace your blog name with a shorter blog nickname.

And best of all, the plugin is FREE!

Suitably convinced? Then Download the plugin!

NEW: Rate this plugin at WordPress.org

Screenshots

Installation instructions

1. (If upgrading from a prior version of SEO Title Tag, be sure to deactivate the old version beforehand.)
2. Upload the seo-title-tag directory and the files within it to your wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Activate the plugin.
4. Under Presentation -> Theme Editor in the WordPress admin, select “Header” from the list and replace:

   <title><?php bloginfo('name'); wp_title(); ?></title>

   (or whatever you have in your <title> container with:

   <title><?php if (function_exists('seo_title_tag')) { seo_title_tag(); } else { bloginfo('name'); wp_title();} ?></title>

5. Configure the settings under Options -> SEO Title Tag. You’ll want specify a title tag for your home page which will override your blog name as the home page’s title tag, specify a title tag for 404 error pages. You can also configure here whether you want all the rest of your site’s title tags to have your blog name, or a shortened version of your blog name, or neither, appended to the end. IMPORTANT: You must save the settings, even if you haven’t changed them from their defaults, in order to ensure that the title tags for Posts and for Pages works properly.
6. For those of you with a static Front Page chosen under Options -> Reading, the “home page” described in the point above is actually the Posts page, and as such, the SEO Title Tag options page will actually will say “Posts Page” instead of “Home Page” — because it detects that you have selected a static Front Page. In such a scenario, in order to also customize the Front Page’s title tag, specify a Title Tag on that page’s Edit Page form, or within Manage -> Title Tags -> Pages.
7. Define custom title tags for your existing posts, static pages, category pages and tag pages in the admin under Manage -> Title Tags.
8. When writing a new post/page, define a title tag by typing something into the “Title Tag (optional)” field. If you’re happy to use the post title as the title tag, then you can leave it blank.
9. Note: If upgrading to WordPress 2.3 from a prior version where you used the SEO-Title-Tag plugin with Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) in order to migrate your old tag page titles you need to first import your UTW tags into the new native tagging structure. You can do this in your WordPress admin by clicking on Manage > Import > Ultimate Tag Warrior. Once you have these imported just deactivate and reactivate SEO-Title-Tags and your old title tags will be able to be used.

To learn more about search engine optimizing your WordPress blog, you’ll probably want to read Stephan Spencer’s 10 tip series on Blog SEO.

To-do

• support mass editing of meta descriptions?
• import titles by uploading a file in CSV format
• possibly rename custom option fields and table name
• add some more text to the titles of tag pages globally. They are using the same divider as used for posts, and really there should be an option to add something like “Tag | Posts Related to Tag | Blog Name”
• create all needed values on activation so that you no longer have to save the settings in the SEO Title Tag Options before the plugin will work properly

Feedback?

Got a bug to report? Or an enhancement to recommend? Or perhaps even some code to submit for inclusion in the next release? Great! Share your feedback with the author, Stephan Spencer, either below or on his blog at this post.

UPDATE: 2.0beta2 has some important bug fixes, including the issue where Options weren’t updating and the Manage > subtab wasn’t displaying.

UPDATE: 2.0beta3 has more important bug fixes, including the issue where MySQL tables were sometimes not being created, and PHP tags weren’t all consistently starting with <?php but instead the <? shorthand which doesn’t work on some server configurations.

UPDATE: 2.0beta5 has more fixes for MySQL issues some folks were having. Also fixed a IIS server incompatibility issue.

UPDATE: 2.0beta6 fixes a problem where some folks were seeing a “No Posts Found” message under Manage -> Title Tags -> Posts even though the blog has posts. And it fixes a problem for users of WordPress version 2.0.5 and earlier, where titles on category pages weren’t showing up due to an undefined function attribute_escape (a new function introduced in WordPress 2.0.6).

UPDATE: 2.0beta7 fixes a problem with the page number sometimes appearing on static pages and a problem with a MySQL error on the Manage > Title Tags > Posts page.

UPDATE: 2.0RC1 fixes categories showing a warning if there are no category title tags set; Manage Posts filtering out everything thats not a post (images, pages). Also added and tested fix for menu links (“edit.php”).

UPDATE: 2.0RC2 fixes a problem with backslashes appearing before apostrophes.

UPDATE: 2.1.0 adds WordPress 2.3 compatibility.

UPDATE: 2.1.1 fixes bug where old title tags for UTW tag pages weren’t being imported. Also fixes WordPress 2.3 bug of not displaying page titles for tag intersections and unions correctly.

UPDATE: 2.1.2 fixes display issues with international characters.

UPDATE: 2.1.3 fixes issue with extra slashes being added. Also adds Nonce support for extra security.

UPDATE: 2.3.0 updates the layout to display better in the new WordPress admin.

UPDATE: 2.3.1 fixed an issue where in WordPress 2.6.1 saving a post/page creates multiple title_tag custom fields.

UPDATE: 2.3.2 fixed an issue where if you were using nested pages (the parent functionality) fields might not show up on the mass edit screen.

UPDATE: 2.3.3 fixed an issue with the tabs not working on WordPress 2.7 and ideally some issues with updates not sticking on the mass edit page.

Digg it! | Add to del.icio.us

About the Author

This plugin was developed by Covario, a web agency specializing in SEO, ecommerce, and blog marketing.

Filed under: SEO, Tools, wordpress plugins | 161 Comments »

Q: Does netconcepts provide software to track conversions?

A: Yes, GravityTrack software (http://www.gravitytrack.com).

Filed under: FAQs, SEO, Tools | No Comments »

I’ve just released “SEO Title Tag”, a plugin for WordPress. As the name implies, it allows you to optimize your WordPress site’s title tags in ways not supported by the default WordPress installation. For example:

• If you define a custom field (called “title_tag”) when writing or editing a post (or static page), that custom field will then be displayed as the title tag.
• The post title and blog name are reversed for better keyword prominence within the title tag.
• You can shorten or eliminate the blog name altogether from your title tags.
• You can define a custom title tag for your home page through the Options page.
• It will use the category’s description as the title on category pages (when defined).
• If you’re using the UltimateTagWarrior plugin, it will put the tag name in the titles on tag pages.
• It will also cook you dinner and all sorts of other amazing, useful stuff (not really).

Get the plugin now: SEO Title Tag WordPress Plugin

I’d love your feedback, as this is my first WordPress plugin.

Enjoy!

Filed under: Blogs, SEO, Tools | 1 Comment »

Understanding your competitors — their strategy, their tactics, their level of success, etc. — is crucial to the success of your SEO initiatives. I’m not just talking about your traditional competitors, I’m referring to the other sites occupying spots in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for keywords that you are targeting.

Many free competitive analysis tools are out there, but you have to know where to look for them. One of my favorite SEO blogs (Stuntdubl) offers a veritable Home Depot of such tools, at Mr. Ploppy’s Monday Tool List.

It’s a bit like walking into a DIY store and being faced with an overwhelming array of options. What is the right tool for the job?

Here’s a sampling of some of the SEO tools that I use for competitive analysis and what I specifically use them for:

• URL Checker, Product Page Checker — to check saturation (# of pages indexed)
• PageRank Lookup, PageRank Search, Webmaster Eyes, SEO-Links — to run bulk checks of PageRank scores, to analyze PageRank flow
• Neat-o — to review anchor text of inbound links
• Link Checker, Yahoo Site Explorer — to check link popularity and review inbound links
• Alexa — to check Alexa Rank and review traffic trends on someone’s site
• What’s That Site Running — to determine what server software a site is running
• Check Server Headers — to see what type of redirect (301 or 302) is being used; to see if a 404 is being served when it’s supposed to be, etc.
• Keyword Ranking Tool — to track positions in the SERPs

Filed under: Blogs, SEO, Tools | No Comments »

Tag clouds, a Web 2.0 sort of user interface for navigating tagged content a.k.a. folksonomies, gives certain hyperlinked keywords a larger font size treatment than others. These links lead to various category pages, tag pages, or search results pages.

One of my favorite implementations of a tag cloud on a blog is on O’Reilly Radar (on the right).

Another is the one on Eurekster’s blog (on the left).

The latter uses a new approach of “auto-tagging”. Eurekster calls this tag cloud of theirs a “BuzzCloud”. Webmasters can get one for free by signing up for their new Swicki service, which is a personalized Web search engine that is targeted and relevant to your site’s audience. You can seed your buzzcloud with search terms of your choosing, then Eurekster adds additional terms based on which searches are popular with your visitors. Visitors who click on the links are taken to a Eurekster search results page for that term. The results popular with you & your audience are promoted to the top of the search results and marked with an icon — in essence, tagging the results as well as the term.

Tagging that requires manual intervention such as del.icio.us and Technorati definitely have their use, but I think they are primarily for more web-intensive users; the combination of manual control and auto-tagging offered by Eurekster with swickis can potentially lead to mass uptake amongst web content editors. I’ve put a Eurekster swicki & buzzcloud here on my blog (on the right-hand column, near the bottom). Try it out and let me know what you think. Get your own free swicki for your blog or website here.

Filed under: Blogs, SEO, Tools | No Comments »

Here we are, the last session of Search Engine Strategies. It’s been a great, but exhausting conference. The session I attended was on SEO Tools. Three of the five panelists provided their Powerpoints on their websites (just so happens they were the three best presentations), which you should definitely check out because they show screenshots of these tools in action. Download the first two Powerpoints from www.webuildpages.com/ses and the third from www.epiar.com/ses.

Jim Boykin:
Wayback Machine
Find Age of Website Tool
Poodle Predictor (spider simulator)
Copyscape (website plagiarism search)
URLinfo
Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer
KwMap (a keyword map for the whole Internet)
Hubfinder (looks for co-occurring backlinks, which may be authoritative links that help satisfy topic dependant link authority algorithms. To use Hubfinder enter a subject, and / or competing URLs to analyze linkage data of top ranked competing sites via the Yahoo! API.)
Keyword Tracker

Todd Malicoat:
Domain/server level information: Whois Source, DNS Stuff, and Check Class C IP Address (this last one is to make sure the links that you plan on buying are on different class C blocks)
Competitive information tools: GoogSpy, SwitchProxy extension for Firefox
Backlinks & offpage information tools: Pages Indexed, Backlinks Domain, PageRank, Allinanchor, Keyword Density tool, Yahoo! Link Harvester
Keyword information: Google Sets, Keyword Density tools, Google Suggest, Snap.com Keyword Stats
Header & page level information: Server Header Checker
Spidering & indexability: Xenu’s Link Sleuth, Sandbox Detection Tool

Ken Jurina:
Firefox extensions: SEOpen, Web Developer, Search Status, PDF Download, Roboform toolbar, Search Keys, IE View (all downloadable from http://extensionroom.mozdev.org)
Web CEO
Click Tracks
LiveSTATS
Roboform
Marketleap Link popularity check, Search engine saturation, Keyword verification

Bill Hartzer:
OptiLink
OptiSpider
Keyword Combinations
Keyword Helper
URL Trends domain analyzer (it also supports notifying you via email or RSS when changes happen)
Sources of other tools: www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html, www.digitalpoint.com/tools/, www.seotoolset.com, www.seochat.com/seo-tools

Paul Bruemmer:
Alexa
RankingManager
Linxviewer
Yahoo! Finance
Hoovers Pro Plus
Print Screen Plus

Well I wanted to blog many more sessions than I did, but it ended up being a lot harder than I thought it would be. Thankfully for you, dear readers, there were many other capable bloggers blogging the SES sessions. In particular check out the coverage on Search Engine Roundtable blog.

By the way, a big hello to all the bloggers I met for the first time at SES, including Scott Miller, Aaron Wall, and Barry Schwartz, to name a few.

Filed under: Blogs, SEO, Tools | No Comments »

if ($URL_HISTORY) {
$prev_seeks = "Previous searches: ";
$urls = explode(' ',$URL_HISTORY);
foreach ($urls as $url) {
$prev_seeks .= " $url “;
if (++$c != count($urls)) {
$prev_seeks .= ‘ / ’;
}
}
} ?>

Use this handy tool to check for inbound links to your site that the major search engines know about.

Enter a web site URL (for example “www.netconcepts.com”):
(Note: www.netconcepts.com and netconcepts.com returns different results!)

Filed under: Link-Building, SEO, Tools | Comments Off