Features include:

• Embed quizzes into your posts or pages

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 the WordPress Quiz Plugin, be sure to deactivate the old version beforehand.)
2. Upload the wordpress-quiz-plugin directory and the files within it to your wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Activate the plugin.

To-do

• Include more quiz types
• Tracking of results
• Additional types of code snippits

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 in the comments below.

Many companies intuitively “know” what they want but are challenged structurally to “ask” for it in a way that is clear, succinct, informative, and constructive. If written properly, an RFP will facilitate the sales process and ensure that everyone involved on both sides gets to a shared understanding of what the purpose, requirements, scope, and structure of the intended engagement are. By following a few, key steps in the beginning of the RFP process, you will be able to rest easy, knowing that you are going to get what your company wants in the way that is best for you.

Step One: Nominate a “point person” for the engagement

One of the most challenging concepts for any large company with multiple working parts is to determine what the “end goal” of the engagement is. Often, marketing departments may voice different wants and needs than an IT department; even though they may be asking for the same thing semantically, they are not using the right language to communicate what they are looking for. Every successful project needs a champion who is invested in that project’s success and can pull together the disparate groups who have a stake in the outcome or a role to play. Without that person at the helm, the project will struggle. By nominating that champion as the SEO firm’s “point person” even before you send out your RFP, you will ensure the steady flow of information throughout the process so that internal and external expectations are met.

Step Two: Define “needs” and “wants” using a decision matrix

RFP recipients will understand that you aren’t the SEO expert, and therefore you aren’t going to be able to adequately define the scope of your desired SEO engagement. As the saying goes: “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Just try to be reasonable when formulating your needs and wants and recognize that the RFP recipient may actually know what you need more than you do.

In addition to disclosing to the SEO firm the basics such as your objectives, your site’s “conversion” event (e.g., online purchase, newsletter subscription, whitepaper download, etc.), target audience, constraints, and so forth, in all fairness you will also need to clearly spell out the criteria for which you will evaluate the SEO firm’s suitability. This means you will need to define these criteria—in advance. None of this “going with your gut” nonsense!

SEO firms know the selection process is usually governed by gut feel, and so any RFP recipient without a preexisting relationship with you is automatically inclined not to respond because they know the deck is stacked against them. This is exacerbated the more SEO firms you send the RFP to. You can allay this concern by candidly sharing with the firm your biases and clearly defined criteria by which you will be evaluating them. This will be mapped out into in a decision matrix, which is simply a chart listing the attributes you are looking for in the SEO firm, a weighting factor for each attribute, a score from 0 to 10 for each, and the weighted score (e.g., the score multiplied by the weighting factor). The weighted scores are added together to arrive at a total score.

Judging criteria that are both quantitative and qualitative brings objectivity into a subjective process, which will aid you in managing expectations internally. And by sharing your list of criteria along with the weighting factors with the RFP recipients, you increase the likelihood—as well as caliber—of responses.

Step Three: Define your success metrics

Now that you’ve identified what you are looking for in an SEO firm, it’s important to let the SEO firms know how you will measure the success of the engagement. Some firms, like ours, can report on SEO health metrics well beyond just rankings (e.g., page yield, keyword yield), thus facilitating troubleshooting and reviews of program performance. Others will rely heavily on your own analytics package to track the program’s success. For example, you might pose the question internally, “What are our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?” SEO firms often use KPIs to prove the value of the services that they provide; online retailers often get caught up with conversion, a metric that isn’t really under the SEO firm’s control. If you aren’t sure which KPIs your company would like to use, I often recommend baking that request into the RFP, stating something like, “Do you offer monthly program performance reviews indicating the program’s growth? If so, please elaborate on the deliverables of such reviews.”

Step Four: Prepare to disclose all known influencing factors

An SEO firm can easily examine your existing website—the “on-page” factors (title tags, navigation, HTML)—to gauge project scope. But there are other factors that will influence your rankings during the engagement, some of which won’t be immediately obvious or known to the RFP recipient without prior disclosure. Does your company have other domain names, subdomains, or microsites? Is a massive redesign of your website in the works? Do you employ a third party for your site’s internal search, and if so, who is it? By disclosing as much information as possible, you spare the SEO firm the time and expense of discovering these things on their own.

Step Five: Provide an Estimated Timeline and Budget for Project Completion

One of the biggest deterrents in any RFP is the confusion over when a project should be completed and how much it might cost. A company hiring an SEO firm may not know how much time it takes to complete something like an SEO audit, but they may have pressing, internal matters that require a specific deadline. Retail sites may want to schedule new launches around a particular theme or season; for example, if you want your site launched in time for back-to-school, be sure to write that into your proposal. Not only will an expected deadline save your company time looking for an appropriate firm, but it also serves as a professional courtesy to the SEO firms you are querying.

Budgets often coincide with a project deadline depending upon how your company conducts its business. Our firm recommends assessing a budget based on the “range” of services; i.e. instead of saying the project absolutely has to cost $X, you are willing to spend within a range from $X to $X. Budgets may or may not be included as part of the RFP, and there are benefits (and drawbacks) to both approaches. Even if you do not provide an SEO firm with your budget in the RFP, we recommend determining a budget beforehand regardless, because the money you are willing to spend will help you determine a target ROI.

A sample RFP document outline

Now that you’ve gathered the above information for your RFP, you’re ready to sit down and write it. There are several different ways that you can structure an RFP; here is a brief outline.

• Section One: Summary and overview. This section is where you will introduce the challenge you are having and provide your SEO firm with an overview of the rest of the RFP. I also recommend outlining “how” you would like SEO firms to respond to your RFP. Think of this section as an “Executive Summary” where you will provide the highlights of the RFP without the technical details.
• Section Two: Technical summary. Often, SEO firms need gritty details to determine how they can best help you. In the technical summary, this is where you will provide key pieces of information relevant to your project, like technical requirements, description of technical issues with the project, your site’s current platform, etc. The technical summary might originate from your IT department, as this section is often for an SEO firm’s programmers and delivery team.
• Section Three: Administration & management. By describing who will be involved in the project on your end and what the timeline is for completion, you are finalizing the framework of the project.
• Section Four: Project expectations & delivery. If you’ve done your homework, this should be the easiest section to write. From outlining your evaluation criteria to outlining what monthly deliverables or training you would like to receive to assessing your KPIs, this section helps an SEO firm determine their cost to complete your project, as well as their suitability.

RFPs can be pretty daunting to write, but if you really think about it there are several benefits to creating one. Not only will your company uncover and identify potential barriers to project success, you’ll also facilitate great internal communication, develop better budgets, and identify what types of SEO firms you’ll want to work with.

When you write an RFP, keep in mind that the purpose of an RFP is to hire an expert SEO firm that will propose what their recommended actions are for your company’s website(s) to achieve the greatest chance for success. Sometimes, an SEO firm’s feedback highlights other potential issues that you may not have considered, which may change the scope of your project entirely. If you really don’t know what the best solution is for your web properties and only have a vague idea, you can submit a Request for Information (RFI) that is typically not contractually binding but allows you to ask questions about an SEO firm’s products and services.

A few weeks ago, Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering, announced the advent of Google Knol, a program meant to challenge Wikipedia, the popular user-generated encyclopedia. The idea, like Wikipedia, is to let anyone create a page of information on a specific topic, and all of those pages will be organized like an online encyclopedia. Google has not announced when Knol will launch.

Jeff Muendel, Search Analyst for Netconcepts, writes about how this upcoming feature from search giant, Google, may affect eCommerce.

Jeff reminds us that if you perform a lot of online searches, often Wikipedia will show up in page one of Google results. If Google’s new project will be poised to compete, Jeff provides a few recommendations for online retailers to make sure they keep up with (and take advantage) of this new technology when it appears.

Keep an eye out for the beginning of public access to Knol and be ready to assert yourself with regard to your area of expertise. Position yourself as an expert on a subject that is related to what you sell. Sign up with the program and carve out your niche immediately by writing an article or several articles that are neutral and honest. Use the bio section to correlate yourself with your ecommerce site. Above all, though, offer real and accurate information in the articles that makes no reference to your company.

The goal here is to get in early on an encyclopedia service that is sure to be high in Google results.

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”):

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.

Despite my griping, they rolled it out anyway with this feature unchanged, and they made it impossible to view the data through the old UI as of July 19th. They report adding more requested features, but how about adding back some of the functionality they destroyed? Perhaps they’re more involved in getting the daily data processing issues resolved, and admittedly I’d agree that would surely be a higher priority. I’m just still flummoxed because it seems so unnecessary to revoke good functionality in the first place.

I’ve found yet another irritating change that I consider to be even more serious: you apparently can’t view the data in monthly units – only daily:

(click to enlarge)

Why did they revoke the ability to visually compare monthly periods?!? Most search marketers I know like to compare overall figures from month to month since it tends to reduce some of the spikiness of short-term bursts, and lots of folks are using monthly billing cycles and such.

If I’m mistaken and there’s some where to set the period to display monthly, I hope someone will let me know. I hunted and hunted, and checked their help section to no avail. If they really did revoke monthly display, I can only reiterate further how bad this so-called “upgrade” really was! All glitz with little beneficial substance.

The Analytics team should borrow some of the members of the Google Maps team, since comparatively the Maps team seems to get it right a lot more lately.

*** 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 it 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 Stephan Spencer. Version 2.0 was a collaborative effort — Stephan did the concept development and 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.

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About the Author

This plugin was developed by SEO specialist, Stephan Spencer. You can read more at Stephan’s website.

If Google refers a visitor to your site, a custom phone number (specific to Google traffic) or a custom link (to a specific Google referred landing page) will be displayed to that visitor. The same technology can be applied to MSN (rebranded as Live Search), Yahoo, and all other search engines as well without having multiple pages for each search engine.

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

Features include:

• Allows you to replace specific text strings in pages and posts with search engine specific referrer content.
• Session identification specific to search engine. Replace by Referrer remembers which search engine the visitor came from throughout your entire site.
• And best of all, itâ??s FREE!

Download the plugin!

Installation instructions

1. Upload replace_by_referrer.php to your wp-content/plugins directory.
2. Activate the plugin.
3. Go to Plugin Editor
4. Click the “Replace by Referrer” file in the right hand column
5. Scroll down to “// comment about this replacement” (See example below)

   // comment about this replacement
'{test1}' => array(
    'google' => 'google1',
    'msn' => 'msn1',
    'yahoo' => 'yahoo1',
    'default' => 'default1',
)

   Replace google1, msn1, yahoo1, or default1 with any text string.

   For Example:
   // comment about this replacement
'{test1}' => array(
    'google' => '1-888-207-1109',
    'msn' => '<a href="http://www.netconcepts.com">netconcepts</a>',
    'yahoo' => '<img src="http://www.example_image_URL.com" />',
    'default' => 'This default text would appear in place of {test1} if the referrer is not Google, MSN, or Yahoo',
)

6. When you have everything configured, insert {test1} within a post or page where ever you want the specified text seen above to appear.

Note: In the example seen above, if Google were the referrer, {test1} would appear as “1-888-207-1109″, if MSN were the referrer, {test1} would appear as netconcepts, etc.

To-do

• Configure all the referrers and replacements via the WordPress options menu in the Admin, as opposed to hardcoded in the plugin.
• Modify the code so that you can serve the text string based on referring keyword, as opposed to referring by search engine.

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.

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

• 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!