Have you ever wondered where people were clicking at your blog? Now you can track every click with the Click Tracking Wordpress plugin.
It’s designed to recored every click, no matter where it is on your website. Links, images, forms or just random spots.
I tested the plugin on two different blog and have gotten the same results; nice click tracking but how accurate are the results? It seems that clicks are recored all over the place a not centralized on any specific area. There are small hot spots, but not necessarily on top of a button or link. So, to have a hotspot without an action makes me wonder how accurate it really is.
On the plus side, it is a free plugin and it can give a good overview of click data. I didn’t see a slow down in page render time either. So, whatever it’s doing, it’s not effecting the site performance.
I also found it hard to track clicks on the homepage of the blogs as the content keeps changing. You can get an idea of menu items, but not the general content. It’s best to look at individual post pages for the best results.
When is the last time you stopped to think about the health of your feed? Maybe it’s time to head over to the Feed Validator and ensure it’s in peek performance.
While checking a sites feed the other day I ran across a validation error. It seems that Firefox’s built in feed reader couldn’t render the feed. Google Reader got around the issue, but I wasn’t sure about other readers. One way or another, the feed was in need of a fix.
A quick run though the Feed Validator and it spit out the problem; a blank line before the XML declaration.
The nice thing about the Feed Validator tool is that it gives you helpful hits on what to look into. It said:
Solution
- Check your
wp-rss2.php and wp-atom.php files for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
- Check your
wp-config.php file for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
- Check your theme’s
functions.php file for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
- One by one, disable plugins and revalidate until you isolate the one causing the problem.
While out at SES San Jose, I couldn’t pass up the SEO Through Blogs & Feeds session. On the panel were Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts, Rick Klau from FeedBurner (now Google), Doug Hay of Expansion Plus Inc. and Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.
Here are a few of the blog optimization tips they gave out.
- Ensure your feeds are showing the full post, not just excerpts.
- Up the number of items in your feed from 10 to 20 to give users more.
- Consider promoting other feeds such as categories & comments.
- Be sure your blog has a good internal linking structure. This can be done through category names, tag names or linking to your other posts inside new posts.
- The date archives are kind of pointless, instead, use good categories or tags to organize content.
- Promote your top 10 posts.
- Add nofollow to date based archives and comments links to help redirect search engines to other, more valuable, areas of your blog.
- Claim your blog at Technorati.
- Use the SEO Title Tag plugin.
- When naming your blog, use keywords if possible as that’ll help out in the log run.
Myself, along with a few members of the TopRank crew, will be traveling out to SES in San Jose next week. This is my second time to California for SES and I’m excited to get the opportunity.
While out there, I’ll be covering a few sessions over on the Online Marketing Blog so be sure to watch that next week. I may also post a few here too during or after the conference. 
If you’re going to attend too, look me up and say HI!
[tags]ses,san-jose,ses san jose,sessanjose07[/tags]
The title tag is probably one of the most important items on your blog posts. It not only attracts visitors, but is also used to help determine how the post ranks. However, what’s good for search engines, isn’t always good to attract users. The good news is that with Wordpress blogs, you can target the best of both worlds a lot easier.
To do this, you’d create a post with a title that is targeted towards getting people from blog search engines or grab their attention in feed readers. Something that jumps out a little or that makes the reader want more.
Then, using SEO Title Tag, you can customize the page title for search engines. This may be a bit more formal and include a few more keyword phrases. Still very relevant to the content, but maybe not as edgie as the actual post title.
As an example, your post title (the one that shows up in feed readers and blog search engines) can be: How I Royally Screwed My Site on Google. Now, for the actual page title you could say: Hidden Text - My SEO Experience and Google Lesson Learned.
Getting the feed for a particular label in Blogger is much harder than it should be. Really, Blogger should just give them to us, but instead, they send us to help documents that may not help. To make it even better, just because your label feeds use to work, they may no longer work as I found out the other day for a client. I did my research and here is how you can get your own label feeds on Blogger blogs.
If you have a Blogspot blog:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname
Just be sure to change blogname to match your blog. The labelname is what appears in the URL of your blog label page.
Example URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/personalization
Example Feed: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/personalization
If you host your own blog:
http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/blogid/posts/default/-/labelname
The trick here is that you need to find your blog id. To do this, login to your Blogger dashboard and click on the new post link. In the URL bar your blog ID will show up and it’ll look something like this:
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1234567980123456789
Example URL: http://www.yourblog.com/label/personalization
Example Feed: http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/1234567980123456789/posts/default/-/personalization
If you have spaces in your label, your feed URL would look like the following.
As blogs become more and more mainstream, issues are coming up that blog software is not quite ready to take on. One of them is formatting issues created by copying and pasting content from Microsoft Word, Explorer, Outlook or even from Firefox!
The issue is that users are creating or finding content with other programs, then copying and pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor in their blog software. When that happens, the editor does it’s best to keep the same formatting including fonts, font sizes, line spacing, colors and much more. Any content copied from a Microsoft document will also come across with hidden, Microsoft only, tags such as the <o:p> and [endif] tags. This formatting then overrides the blogs default font, size and formatting tags giving your blog an inconsistent look and feel.
Here are a few examples:
The first one is what the code looks like when copied from Word. Can you tell what it says?
The second one is what the code should look like in Wordpress’ WYSIWYG editor. Much nicer.
Here are a few of the inconsistent layout options that can result. There are different fonts, sizes and use bolding.
Wordpress.com is all the rage, but Blogger has been around for quite a while and there are a few perks to using it. Here are a few I could come up with.
- Editable Templates - No extra fee here, you can customize your Blogger templates to meet your needs.
- Easier Widgets - This one comes from Anthony who feels that the ability to add widgets (or page elements) to Blogger is easier than over at Wordpress.
- AdSense - Blogger makes adding ads quite easy. Before you know it, you’ll be making a quarter a day!
- Video Upload - Currently in draft mode, but Blogger is going to allow direct video uploading into your post. The functionality is much like you already do for images. Sadly it doesn’t also publish to YouTube from what I can tell.
- FeedBurner - FeedBurner functionality is built right in now that Google owns FeedBurner. More integration is probably coming too.
- Publish via FTP - This is a big one, the ability to FTP your files to a directory on your own site is great. This means you can host your own blog, on your own site, regardless of your server setup.
Have you ever had to install Google Analytics on each page of a website manually and wondered if you got every page? Or wondered if a new client’s site already had Google Analytics running? If you are a developer, than you know a quick peek at the source and you’ll know in no time. But for those that don’t know what to look for, you can install the GA? bookmarklet and it’ll do the checking for you and report back.
The GA? bookmarklet code is a small piece of JavaScript that simply checks to see if Google Analytics is installed on the page you have loaded in your browser. If it is, it’ll return “Yes, Google Analytics is installed on this page” if not, it’ll say “No, Google Analytics is not installed on this page.”
Install GA? by dragging the link below to you bookmarks bar or right click on it and adding it to your bookmarks.
GA?
Now, I had plans of making this a Firefox extension that automatically checked, or a Greasemonkey script, but both didn’t work out. There is more research to be done in those areas. If you already know how to make it work, please do tell me.
Believe it or not, social media just may be what elects our next president into office. From Obama’s Girl to Giuliani’s Girl and now Hillary’s Girl, YouTube and other social media outlets will have a much larger impact on the younger voters than anything else.
Lets face it, watching a presidential debate is not high on many people’s list. It may have worked back in the day, but now more and more people are turning to the Internet for news and filtering out what they don’t want. Included in the filtering process will more than likely be campaign speeches, debates and candidates views. Instead, much of America will wait until someone spins it on MySpace, Facebook or YouTube before they really start paying attention. They won’t stop to fact check, they’ll just believe in it. That’s the way social media works though, if your friends say it’s true, it must be.
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