8 Wordpress Plugins Professional Bloggers Forgot To Tell You About
Filed under: Link building, Marketing by Sasha on May 8, 2008
They always hide something from you don’t they? 
Below is a list of 8 wordpress plugins that will save you a lot of time and we all know that time is money and you don’t want to waste money do you?
Akismet- Akismet is the real king of spam catching and there is no valid reason for not using it. After your blog reaches more then one visitor per day you will notice comment spam and this is when you’ll realize Akismet is a tool that you must have.
All in One SEO Pack - This plugin will make basic and couple of advanced SEO changes to your blog and will boost you search engine rankings. It is pretty customizable so you shouldn’t have any issues with it. You can download it here.
Anarchy Media Player - Since Wordpress 2.5 you really don’t need this plugin but it made my life easier before it so I have included it here.
Google Sitemaps - To make your life simpler and to help Googlebot out you should use this plugin. It creates a Google sitemap and it can be tweaked the way you want it. Download Google Sitemaps plugin.
Got Banners - Take a look at the right sidebar. Plugin which rotates those images is Got Banners and it is really simple to use. You can find it here.
Ozg’ Better Feed - We all should have realized the importance of RSS feeds and this plugin makes it easy to create custom “addons” to your RSS feed. You can grab it here.
Show Top Commentators - It is good to be thankful so treat your commenter with a backlink. This plugin is hidden here.
Wordpress Automatic Updgrade - I have already said all the good words about this plugin so grab it here right now.
These are not all plugins activated on this blog but i believe that they are the most important.
What are your favorite Wordpress Plugins?
Marketing online with web directories
Filed under: Link building by Sasha on September 14, 2007
Last few weeks were really interesting when it comes to directories. Starting from Rand’s post about the value of web directories down at Seomoz blog and reaction to that same post from various webmasters and directory owners to Google’s experiment during which some of the major directories disappeared from its cache. One of the best know web directories is Alive Web Directory. If you take a look at it you will certainly notice that it is worth being listed over there.
Speaking about directories I always thought that every link counts and I still think like that. It doesn’t matter if the link is coming from a directory it still is a link with its purpose. Are there too much directories you may ask? Yes. But there are a lot of web sites that need to be submitted so my advice to you is to submit your web site to every place you can, even if it is a directory.
Edu links – new opinions
Filed under: Link building by Sasha on August 21, 2007
While talking about a friend of mine who gets his whole knowledge about seo from me (and that isn’t so much is it?) we got to the topic about “.edu” links. If you ask me any link given to you for free is good but how much value does a link from Texas Culinary Academy have for my blog (if they were linking to me) even though it is a “.edu” link?
Links must be subject related since search engine algorithms are getting more and more complex and one day they will certainly be able to recognize links from different topics and probably assign less value to it so my lesson for today is: get links the smart way.
We don’t need no education
Filed under: Link building by Sasha on May 26, 2007
Those of you who know me personally also know that I don’t like “modern” educational system. I believe that today’s education is created this way so that a couple of people could rule the world but I won’t go into details about that here. What I want to talk about are edu links and sites.
Most webmaster (SEOs) will tell you that .edu backlinks are really valuable. I thought that it is not true but when I saw top 10 results on Google of some pharmacy related queries my beliefs changed. It seems that if you are a college webmaster you can manipulate SERPs pretty easy. To me that fact seems scary and unfair.
In one of my first articles I wrote about old domains and the way that Google treats them. If you combine an old domain with .edu extension you get an ultimate SERP manipulator tool. I don0t know what you think bit I believe that Google should out less value on .edu links and web sites. After all, we don’t want college sites to dominate SERPs, do we?
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall…
Buying links
Filed under: Link building by Sasha on January 5, 2007
As promised yesterday I did a quick research about link selling/buying so that people who are not familiar with the subject get some idea of current prices, what things you should avoid and what things you should look for.
To do a research I went to one of my favorite forums, Digital Point Forums, and looked around link selling section picking couple of most recent link offers, pretty random if you ask me.
So here they are, I will explain more below.
|
PR |
Type of link |
Price |
|
7 |
Site wide |
25$ per month |
|
6 |
Homepage |
25$ per month |
|
5 |
Site wide |
50$ permanent |
|
5 |
Homepage |
30$ per month (high traffic) |
|
5 |
Site wide |
10$ per month |
|
4 |
Site wide |
15$ permanent |
|
4 |
Homepage |
5$ per month |
|
0 -> 4 |
Homepage |
5$ permanent |
To explain things a little bit. First column shows the PR (Page Rank) of a link. Second column describes the type of a link, is it site wide (a link across the whole site) or just a single link on a homepage. Last column shows the price asked for a link and payment period.
You will notice that some people sell permanent links, this is very good if you ask me but be careful that you don’t end up buying a link on site which disappears in couple of months…
I have to explain the last link; it is current PR0 but predicted PR4 on the next update. Since these prediction tools are not so accurate you can count on that that link will be PR3 on the next update but since (if) it shows that the owner of that website is putting effort to build it and if the homepage doesn’t have a lot of outgoing links you should definitely consider this link, I would.
You can see that there are two site wide links, one being PR5 and one being PR4. Assuming that they have similar number of outgoing links and similar traffic (although PR5 should have more traffic) I would buy PR4 link since it costs 15$ permanent! It is much cheaper believe me….
If you can afford to pay 25$ per month it would be a great idea to buy the first link on the list, it is PR7 at a reasonable price and I’m sure that if you pay yearly you would get a discount. High PR links tend to rank well on search engines and they get crawled a lot, so if you have a new site nothing will help it more then a high PR link. Great thing to do is to buy couple of high PR links from relevant sites with good traffic, they should pay out…
Of course when buying links, depending on what are you looking for, you should pay attention to number of outgoing links from site where you buy a link and traffic that site has. Always check outgoing links (there are tools to help you) and ask for a screenshot of last months traffic. Honest webmasters should provide this information without asking but in case they forget you should remind them.
I think that I covered basics of link buying. If you consider that I should go deeper into the subject I will but this is enough to get a big picture.
Again, thank you for your time.
