Occasionally I come across an SEO tool that I feel is worthy of blogging about, and oddly enough today I have two of ‘em.

Linklicious

Instead of wasting hours building RSS feeds and pinging the feeds hoping for crawls, Linklicious eliminates all of the guesswork by providing a guaranteed 100% crawl rate.   It comes with a WordPress plugin so every post is added to an RSS feed, auto-shortened, pinged, and tracked so you can see exactly when your links were spidered.

Linklicious is quite affordable too:  they have a free account and the most feature-packed paid account is only $54/mo.

Here’s a chart that shows the improved crawl late with and without using Linklicious:

Link Pushing

I was looking for a completely automated, hands-off service that combined multiple backlinking techniques.   So I headed over to the Warrior Forum and a quick search brought me to this WSO.

Here’s what the “Link Pushing” service offers:

1. User enters their information; a 2 minute process.
2. System grabs an article from a random article directory.
3. System spins the article using The Best Spinner.
4. System submits the articles to Web 2.0 Properties and Auto-Approve Article directories backlinking to the money site.
5. System then submits to various Doc share sites splitting the backlinks randomly to the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve articles.
6. System then submits to microblog sites with links randomly split between the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve Article sites.
7. System then submits spun articles to non-auto approval article sites with backlinks to the Web 2.0s and the auto approved article sites.

I had a couple questions before signing up and was super impressed with how quickly and professionally Greg (one of the owners) responded to me.  Although this service is in its infancy, so far I really like how easy it is to use and it seems like these dudes have some great features planned in the next release.  I don’t have enough data on its effectiveness to improve SERPs yet but I’ll post an update when I do.

Once and a while a WordPress plugin comes along that I consider to be a “game changer”.  The Like plugin is one of ‘em.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like/

One of the great things about Facebook Pages is that they can become viral.  It may take you a month to get to 100 “fans” (I guess they’re now considered “people that like your Page”), but you could easily reach 1000 in the next week and 100,000 a week after that.  This is due to the Facebook engine that automagically suggests Pages to your friends, and your friends’ friends, and so on and so forth.  And of course it helps that many Facebook users are addicted and will click “Like” to anything they see.

Well, the Like plugin helps to make your WordPress posts and pages viral too!

See the buttons at the top and bottom of this post?  Those are from Like.

One super cool feature is that it works with the new Facebook Open Graph API which makes it very easy for developers to integrate Facebook applications into websites.   I suppose this is furthering Facebook’s goal to take over the world…but you could at least join them for the ride and get more visitors on the way!

Here’s what the plugin settings look like:

As you can see, it also hooks up to a Facebook application, although I haven’t tested this myself yet.

So what are ya waiting for?  Download and install this wicked plugin and join the viral train.

Note: This post is related to my ongoing experiment to determine which Google prefers more – Fresh Content or Quality Backlinks

Well after a quick browse through ClickBank I stumbled across this -> Double Your Vertical Leap.

The World’s Top Selling Vertical Jump Enhancement System Is Back, Better Than Ever. 6 Months Of Extensive Testing – And A Mouth-watering Offer – Has Produced A Website That Converts At 5-7%… Every Single Time! Look For More Updates Shortly…

It’s got some decent numbers:

• $89 / sale
• 51% commission
• 93% referred
• 12.05 gravity
• And a 5-7% conversion rate on the pitch page

After searching for “vertical jump” in good ‘ol Micro Niche Finder, I came across a particular phrase that had solid results.

“jump higher exercises”

• Search Count = 1,300 (how many times per month people are searching on Google for this phrase – this is a tad low but not terrible)
• Exact Phrase Count = 13,200 (how many total results there are for this phrase in quotes – under 20,000 is good)
• Commercial Intent = 29% (how likely a person searching for this phrase is to BUY something – this is bad but I’m not doing this to make money)
• Strength of Competition = 14 (this is excellent, it means the competing sites don’t have very good backlinks)

So I’m all set!  The next steps are to create two subdomains, setup WordPress, and then work on the initial content.

Lately I’ve been wondering what Google favors more – fresh, unique content or quality (PR 4 or higher) backlinks.

There’s oceans of people that are on either side of the argument.  Some say it’s best to have lots of one-way backlinks from respected, authority sites.  Others say it’s best to be constantly adding new, unique content.

Personally I think both are useful in their own way.  But the nerd inside of me wants to figure out the “magic formula”.  Should I spend 50% of my time on each, or 80% on content and 20% on backlinks?  It’s quite the quandary.

So I’ve decided to perform a test.  The parameters and execution of the test won’t be perfect, as there’s only one of me and I’m not a robot.  But nevertheless, I’m hoping it can provide some useful insight into this problem.

Here’s what I aim to do:

• Site A (CONTENT)
  
  • Niche topic to be determined
  • A subdomain of an existing generically-named domain that I own (primary keyword subdomain name, with “A” on the end)
  • WordPress template with all SEO-related plugins activated
  • Initial content will be 2 or 3 posts, keyword-rich, appropriately tagged
  • After indexed by Google, I’ll add one new article a day for a month
  • Each article will use the keywords that I’m targeting
• Site B (BACKLINKS)
  • Same subdomain setup as Site A, but with “B” on the end
  • Same WordPress setup
  • Same initial content, but each post rewritten to be unique
  • After indexed by Google, I’ll add one high-PR backlink a day for a month
  • No new posts

Sounds like fun, eh?   Does anyone have a prediction on which site will rank higher with Google at the end of the month?

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As you can probably tell, I’m a big fan of WordPress.  I’ve used a few other Content Management Systems (like Joomla, Drupal, PHP-Nuke, etc.).  But I’ve found that for internet marketing, WordPress is simply hard to beat with its ease-of-use, maintenance simplicity, and the huge community support of free plugins and themes.

So, here’s the list of plugins that I routinely use with each WordPress installation:

Akismet

• Catches spam Comments on your posts or pages.
• I find that it’s very accurate.
• You do have to enter a WordPress API key though to activate it (which I’m not a big fan of doing…why does WordPress need to know what spam I’m receiving?).
• Does anyone know why it has such a strange name that has nothing to do with spam?

All in One SEO Pack

• I call this thing “Search Engine Optimization For Dummies”
• You don’t really have to know much about SEO to get some serious benefits from it
• It can do custom HTML headers like keywords, descriptions, titles
• You can even set “noindex” for different types of archives so you won’t get hurt by having duplicate content

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

• An easy-to-use HTML sitemap generator
• Tons of features, super configurable, but not complicated

Exec-PHP

• Occasionally with some sites I need to execute PHP within posts, this plugin makes it extremely easy
• If you don’t know what PHP is skip this one

GoCodes

• URL shortener and click tracker all-in-one!
• Simple interface
• Great for hiding affiliate links (instead of using http://youraffiliateID.vendorID.hop.clickbank.net you can use http://yourdomain.com/go/FriendlyProductName)

Google XML Sitemaps

• Rather than creating an HTML sitemap, like the plugin I mentioned above, this one creates an XML sitemap
• It also notifies many popular search engines when changes are made
• Tons of options, but works great out-of-the-box

Thumbnail Viewer

• Sometimes I like putting image thumbnails in my posts so visitors can click the thumbnail hyperlinks to see the full image
• That’s exactly what this bad boy is for
• It’s very simple and fast (full images load real quick)

WordPress.com Stats [Edit - June 30 - Now I like "StatPress SEOlution" better!]

• If you’ve ever used WordPress.com to host a site, you’re familiar with their admin “stats” page
• That’s exactly what this plugin emulates, except it works for sites you host yourself
• You must enter your WordPress API key to activate it (you can get this for free from WordPress.com)
• My only complaint is that it doesn’t show unique visitors, only “views”
• It tracks UNIQUE VISITORS and other cool stuff like which countries visitors are from and search engine spider stats

Yet Another Related Post Plugin

• Dynamically determines which posts are related to each other
• Places links at the end of each post so visitors can then view the related posts
• Lots of options, and easy to use

If you’re not sure how to find or install these plugins, you have two options:

1. From the WP admin panel, go “Plugins” > “Add New”, then use the “Search” form to find the plugins you want
2. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, download the ZIP files, then FTP the contents to your web server root/wp-content/plugins directory