Zemalf's Posterous

If you believe in love, you need to see this

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 04:46:09 -0800

I found this video as I was checking the song contest winners of the Blizzcon 2010 today...
The winning song was The Queen of the Blades by a guy/girl/band I hadn't heard before... Sure enough, I check their YouTube channel and find The Armada...
And I gotta say, this is one of the most awesome videos on YouTube this year. It's creative, it's original. The song is good. And hey, it's a love story and it's an adventure...
If you believe in love, and enjoy creative videos, watch this one and tell your friends about it too (I think it deserves way more attention than the 85k views it has now):
Here's the link The Armada by Galt Aureus. (if you can't see the embedded video below)
It'll make you feel good
p.s. if you enjoy their music, check out their website at www.galtmusic.com

Amplify’d from www.youtube.com
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Revealed: Why Your Email Newsletters Are Left Unread (and 3 Ways to Ensure That Never Happens Again)

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 21:35:00 -0800

Email marketing still works. It never stopped working. In fact, it works better than ever:

When it comes to customer relationships, newsletters must be seen as a long-term investment: they work their magic over time.

BUT email has changed, and every email newsletter owner and marketeer with a mailing list should pay attention to the Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for November 2010...

Or what do you think about study showing that the: number of new or unread messages is now 300% higher than it was just 4 years ago.

To get your emails read, here's what you can learn from Nielsen's findings (E-Mail Newsletters: Increasing Usability):

The most important thing (still) is to use clear "from" and "subject" lines to ensure your messages attract attention; in fact, busier inboxes simply make these guidelines even more important.

Focus on high-value content at the start of a message, since users are less likely now to look beyond it.

Pay attention to message previews, since users do that more and more. (mobile usage!!)

And don't leave it at those three tips...

I clipped some interesting notes below too, but the whole article is a must read for every email marketeer. Read it here: E-Mail Newsletters: Increasing Usability

Amplify’d from www.useit.com

Summary:
New research finds improved usability metrics for subscribing to newsletters, but problems with reading them on mobile devices.

It's clear that users are falling further behind in keeping up with their email. This doesn't change the old guidelines regarding the importance of using clear "from" and "subject" lines to ensure your messages attract attention; in fact, busier inboxes simply make these guidelines even more important. In the past, a newsletter might have gotten away with a generic or spammy subject line. Today, that same design will doom it.

In addition to subject lines, users now pay more attention to message previews. This change is partly driven by the increasing email volume (users can decide whether to dispose of or keep messages without opening them all) and partly driven by more mobile access (users can't see much on a small screen).

It's always been a guideline to start a newsletter with the most important stuff, but the increased use of previews makes it even more important to focus on high-value content at the start of a message, since users are less likely now to look beyond it. (It almost goes without saying that "high-value" is judged based on what's valuable to the recipients – not on what you feel like promoting today.)

Read more at www.useit.com

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How to Build Links with a Link Wheel

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 08:12:00 -0800

Inbound links are the most important search engine ranking factor. Great content can pull links naturally, but it's a common way to do SEO and link building by building forced links using article marketing and various web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages.

Many people do this by linking all those articles and web2.0 pages directly to the "money site", but it's more effective to build a link wheel instead, where each article or web2.0 page links to another web2.0 page in addition to the money site and all links are one-way, thus creating a wheel.

Link Wheel? Link Trio?

Instead of just including a link back to my website, I can also add a link to another article I’ve written.

In his post, Glen of Viperchill calls the link wheel a link trio, but it's the same thing.

Whatever name you use, the fact is that this thing works...

How to build a link wheel

The individual services you use doesn't matter, but do start building the wheel from a site that allows to easily edit the links, e.g. Squidoo or HubPages. (This example uses the same "relationship blog" and "online dating" example as Glen's Link Trio post.)

(you have your blog / site / page you want to link to, e.g. "relationship blog")
(you have your other blog / site / page, e.g. "online dating")
start with a service where you can add/edit links (to close the wheel in the end), and continue counter-clockwise and build the wheel
create a Squidoo lens related to online dating and link it to the online dating blog
create article to GoArticles related to online dating, and link to the online dating blog and the Squidoo lens you just created
create article to EzineArticle related to relationships, and link to the relationship blog and the Go Articles you just created
create Hub Page related to relationships, and link to the EzineArticle article and the relationship blog
edit the Squidoo link and add link to the Hub Page

You'll need to wait in between, if you use article directories like EzineArticles, which take a while to approve each article.

You could grow the wheel by adding more properties instead of closing the wheel at step 8, and you can even leave the wheel open, or "break the wheel" intentionally, but the above is the basic link wheel.

The key is to use different sites on the wheel, e.g. not have two Squidoo lenses or two EzineArticles.

Here's what it looks like in the end:

Continue growing the wheel by building links to the articles and web2.0 pages. Pat Flynn explains one way to do this in his backlinking strategy.

Take another blog / site / page optimized to another phrase, rinse and repeat.

If you liked this SEO / link building tip, check my blog at http://zemalf.com for more and send me an email using the contact form there, if you have any questions.

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Work Hard, Build a Tribe - Build an Asset

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 04:36:14 -0800

You can wait, and hope to get picked.
Or you can do something about it.
No knight, no shining armor.
Amplify’d from sethgodin.typepad.com
The magic of the tribe is that you can build it incrementally, that day by day you can earn the asset that will allow you to bring your work to people who want it. Or you can skip that and wait to get picked. Picked to be on Oprah or American Idol or at the cash register at Borders.
Getting picked is great. Building a tribe is reliable, it's hard work and it's worth doing.
Read more at sethgodin.typepad.com

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Interesting experiment on how Google treats the anchor text of a page that uses the rel=canonical tag

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 22:21:35 -0800

Check the full post at SEOmoz: Using Canonical Tag to Get More Than One Anchor Text Value
Remember that messing with the canonical can screw indexing fast, so unless you're a SEO-pro, I think this falls into the "don't try this at home (page" category
Amplify’d from www.seomoz.org
Some weeks ago my coworker Leandro Riolino published in our blog an experiment he was working with. The idea of the experiment was to try link to a page A from a page B with 3 different anchor texts providing value of all those anchor texts.
The idea is simple: we chose 3 random keywords, created an internal page, created 3 links to different URLs that have a canonical tag to the main page. You can see this idea illustrated bellow:
With this small experiment we have a hint on how Google treats the anchor text of a page that uses the rel=canonical tag and now we can try to create some new experiments (eg.: use a parameter in the logo link to your main page, and then receive the anchor text of the second link – because we know that only the first anchor text counts).
Read more at www.seomoz.org

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Post Formats vs. Custom Post Types in WordPress

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 22:03:00 -0800

Will we finally see themes use the power of WordPress when the Post Formats will be introduced in the 3.1? I hope so, and I'd like to see more theme-support for Custom "Post" Types as well.
I'm happy even the WP lead developer Mark Jaquith admits that the Custom Post Types functionality in WordPress was poorly named, I think no one really got those...
I mean, it says Posts, but means all but posts Even "Custom Pages" would've been better, but Custom Content Type does make a lot more sense does it? I wonder why they don't just rename it...
To add into confusion, we'll now have the Post Formats too - If you were/are confused as well, the quotes below are from Mark's post "Post Formats vs. Custom Post Types", explaining the difference.
But why theme developers are not using these things in their themes? We haven't seen much of theme support for custom taxonomies or the custom "post" types, have we? A theme with microformatted support for custom types like 'product', 'review' or 'recipe', anyone?
I'm afraid we won't be seeing much Post Formats either
Yes, the new Post Formats coming in 3.1 are awesome, but we'll need themes to put them into use. As the new post formats will help (auto-)formatting special posts, like podcasts, video, images, links, etc. we could have very powerful themes in our hands when 3.1 comes out.

Amplify’d from markjaquith.wordpress.com

Some people are confused about the Post Formats feature that will be made available to themes in WordPress 3.1, especially how it differs from Custom Post Types.

Custom Post Types

These were poorly named. Think: Custom Content Types. That is, non-post content. Examples: employees, products, attachments, menu items, pages, pets. If you want it to show up in your site’s main RSS feed, then it’s probably not a custom post type.

A Post Format is a formatting designation made to a post. For example, a post could be a short “aside,” or a Kottke.org-style link post, or a video post, or a photo gallery post. The data you input might be slightly different — video post should contain a video, an aside should probably not be very long, a link post should have a link. And the way that the post is displayed on the site might be very different — an aside will typically be displayed without a title, a link post may have the title point to the link. A video post may be wider, or have social sharing buttons auto-appended. But they’re all still posts. They still show up in your feed, and you still find them in the Posts section of the WordPress backend.
Read more at markjaquith.wordpress.com

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Number of Self-Employed Bloggers More Than Doubled in 2010

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 23:48:23 -0800

The annual state of the blogosphere survey results are being published at Technorati... For me, one of the most interesting stats has every year been how many bloggers "blog for fun" and how many blog for living, or at least make some money blogging.
Majority of the bloggers are hobbyists, but the number is going down, and there's a lot more self-employed bloggers than there were in 2009. (I covered the state of the blogosphere 2009 at my blog back then).
In 2009, there were 71% hobbyists (now 65%) and 9% self-employed (now whopping 21%). So we're looking at 233% increase in self-employed bloggers!
I'm thinking part of this increase comes from how the question was set in the survey, and now the small business owners who blog are included in the self-employed. As they say in the study: "I blog full time or occasionally for their own company or organization". Thus, I think the self-employed does not mean that the blog itself would be the main source of income.
But anyway, I think we can still conclude that blogging is growing and more and more people are making money either directly or indirectly through blogging, and some are turning blogging into full-time careers, which is just awesome.
That's what I had mind as the first impressions of the SotB2010 - What do you think of the state of the blogosphere 2010 results?
p.s. check all the stats at: State of the Blogosphere 2010
Amplify’d from technorati.com
Hobbyists – Hobbyists remain the backbone of the blogosphere, representing 64% of respondents. Hobbyists say they blog for fun, and do not report any income from their blog. It's not surprising, therefore, that 51% say they blog to express their personal musings, and 74% say they measure the success of their blog according to their level of personal satisfaction.
Self-Employeds – After Hobbyists, Self-Employeds make up the largest cohort, representing 21% of bloggers. Such bloggers say they “blog full time or occasionally for their own company or organization.” 57% say they own a company and have a blog related to their business, while 19% report that their blog is their company. 65% say they manage their blog by themselves. Reflecting their professional nature, Self-Employeds are the most likely to blog about business, with 62% saying they have much greater visibility in their industry because of their blog.
Read more at technorati.com

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Affiliate Promotion Sweet Spot

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 08:24:52 -0800

Most affiliate marketers, especially those in the beginning of their journey, forget to think about their readers. If you find the right product that meets the reader intent and need, and deliver the message correctly, you hit the sweet spot.
If you set up a website just for affiliate marketing (some call these "niche sites"), you need to incorporate the reader intent into the keyword research when looking for primary keywords. Find the keywords people use to search for a solution that the product you promote solves, and you're one step closer.
The message depends on the product and the readers of course, but honest and personal review will nearly always do the trick. If you only promote products you have personally used and liked, it's hard to go wrong (and this is where many beginners do get it wrong, as they've not used the products they're promoting and can't really post personal review on it).
If you promote a product you have not used yourself, the message can come from added value you create for the product with the page / site you use to promote the product.
Finding the sweet spot is not easy, but when you do, you'll know it and you'll see it your metrics. All in all, fascinating concept this sweet spot Darren brough up on the Problogger...
Amplify’d from www.problogger.net
One of the most powerful affiliate marketing concepts—one that can make or break an affiliate campaign—is summed up in this slide:
The key is to find the overlap between the intent and need of your reader, the product you’re promoting, and the message you use to promote it with.
To say it another way, the product, reader need, and your promotional message need to be related. The product needs to relate to your audience, and you need to promote it in a relevant way.
Read more at www.problogger.net

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30-Day Social Media Makeover

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 05:28:00 -0800

The Social Path is running daily tips on how to improve your social life — online, at least.

via thesocialpath.com

Check out the 30-day (all parts now posted) social media makeover from The Social Path. Published on January 2010 I think, but it's as good now at the end the year as it was at the beginning...

You'll learn a lot, whether it's for yourself, your business or both. Bookmark the page and start working it through the "days". Get back the next day, until you're done - it'll be awesome and you'll thank yourself later (and during).

You'll learn things about LinkedIn, Posterous, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, reading RSS feeds, using cool plugins and addons on Firefox and Chrome like Shareaholic (http://www.shareaholic.com/) and much more.

Good stuff, thanks Luckie and The Social Path.

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Beyond Blogging Book and Review

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 05:15:48 -0800

The Beyond Blogging -book was published as an eBook at the end of 2009. The book features 15 top bloggers, their stories and their strategies on how they took their blogging to another level and on to build their up to 6 or 7-figure businesses.
The interviews and stories of bloggers like Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Chris Garrett, Chris Brogan, Gary Vaynerchuk, Steve Pavlina and nine others is a good read to get inspired by the success of others, and the book goes on and turns the methods and tactics into actionable advice.
The book was first published as an eBook and later in print as well. Both versions are still on sale, and the electronic version comes with a workbook in addition to the core book.
After creating and publishing the book, Mike CJ and Nathan Hangen, went and launched Beyond Blogging Project, a premium blog training program for entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Earlier this year, I made a Squidoo lens featuring the 15 bloggers, who they are and what they're doing. Using Squidoo made it easy to feature their publications at the same time. You can check out the Squidoo lens here: Beyond Blogging - Meet the Top Bloggers
For more in-depth look on the book itself and my thoughts on it, check out my Beyond Blogging review.
Amplify’d from www.squidoo.com
"Find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you'll achieve the same results." - Tony Robbins
This page features 15 successful bloggers and entrepreneurs who have built profitable businesses, turned their life's passion into way to earn money, and started much of that success through blogging.
See more at www.squidoo.com

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Learn to Build Long Term Authority Faster with Mentoring

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:36:00 -0700

Building an authority means getting deep into a specific topic and becoming known for knowing stuff about a topic.
I believe anyone can get there eventually, become a true authority on their area of expertise. For that, there's the need for training, coaching and studuying, researching the information, getting the perspective.
Eventually anyone can make it. But there's a learning curve. For some, it'll take weeks, for others, it might be years.
And that's where mentoring can help. This is what Dave Doolin talks about in his post about smashing the learning curve flat. I think you should go check it out and read the whole story...

Amplify’d from website-in-a-weekend.net

A good mentor will have a huge reservoir of ideas, notes, articles, references, links, contacts, and various and sundry miscellanea waiting for that enthusiastic someone to pick up the ball and run with it.
Read more at website-in-a-weekend.net

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Success: Doing the things that you don't enjoy, which have to be done

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 02:14:52 -0700

People don't get what they want, because they are not willing to do the hard work, do the things that are painful and frustrating. Also, because of fear of that pain, that frustration, most people don't even start. "I can't do it anyway", they say as an excuse, even that real reason is that they would have do stuff they don't enjoy.
There's a lot of wisdom here if you're willing to listen, so I suggest you read the whole story at: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/3657/why-people-struggle-to-get-what-they-want/
...
Amplify’d from www.entrepreneurs-journey.com
The challenge when running a business is not completing the 80% of tasks you do enjoy, it’s waking up and getting the job done for the 20% of things that you don’t enjoy, which have to be done, which separates the successful from the not.
Taking action when you just don’t feel like it is hard. Finding a way to transform the task from something you hate to something you enjoy because it helps you experience a result you want (thus the emotional gratification that comes with it), is the trick. You need to restructure your conditioned response to the task, to anchor it to a desirable emotion that helps motivate you to get it done.
Read more at www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

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DreamHost Gives Go Daddy the Finger - mod_pagespeed ENABLED

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 10:46:26 -0700

As you know, I'm deep into optimizing websites, I've written numerous posts on the subject, randing from htaccess tuning to harnessing the enormous power of W3 Total Cache...
Anyway, this was VERY exciting for me...
Yesterday, I read and tweeted the news when Google announced mod_pagespeed, an Apache module to speed up websites. Amazing news.
In the article, Google said that "they're working with Go Daddy to get mod_pagespeed running for many of its 8.5 million customers..."
Well, while Go Daddy is "working on it" - DreamHost has done it already! And they're not afraid to rub in on their competitors face(s).
*THIS* is why I run my blogs at DreamHost!
I'll be testing this right now on my blog at http://zemalf.com
p.s. Check my resources-page for a very special DreamHost Coupon, if you're looking for the best hosting service there is: http://zemalf.com/resources/
Amplify’d from blog.dreamhost.com
Yesterday Google announced a new Apache module, mod_pagespeed, whose only purpose is to get websites hosted on Apache web servers to load faster.
On average, Google found that sites that had mod_pagespeed enabled served websites up to 50% faster than their un-endowed brethren.
In short, mod_pagespeed has the potential to make your websites load twice as fast as they did before. And this is just the beginning. The whole project is open-source, so who knows what future enhancements and speed-uppers may be included in the future!
And while Google is still “working with GoDaddy” to roll this out across their entire customer base, today we’re announcing that DreamHost has enabled mod_pagespeed support for all DreamHost customers.
See more at blog.dreamhost.com

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The W3 Total Cache -guide gets a major update

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 14:47:55 -0700

I installed and configured W3 Total Cache to the rest of my blogs today, and used the opportunity to tune my W3 Total Cache -guide up-to-date...

I probably used way too much time on it, and definitely broke my blog only 10 minute a day -rule, but I wanted to do it.

The installation and configuration guide started to attract some attention and traffic, and the plugin had been updated since I wrote the guide in July.

Anyway, it's now out there, all 45+ pages of it, all yours, for free.

Get the free PDF here: W3 Total Cache -guide

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To seize everything you ever wanted

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 23:48:00 -0700

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted - One moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?
- Eminem

(can't see the video above? watch it on YouTube: Eminem - Lose Yourself)

"One moment"

I believe in second chances, but if you always take action when have the (one) chance, always when you have the (one) opportunity, you don't need the second chance.

By taking the (one) opportunity every time you can, you are in control.

You do it, one inch at a time.

You don't need to worry about "letting it slip"...

"One shot, One opportunity"

Imagine living a life, never saying "I wish I'd..."

Imagine that you don't need to look back thinking "If I'd only... then."

What if I told you that you can have that life very easily?

"Would you capture it or just let it slip?"

There is no excuse, but yourself.

p.s. Thanks for the inspiration to Christopher S. Penn's post "This opportunity comes only once in a lifetime" (and to Chris Brogan for sharing it)

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What if you only had 10 minutes a day to blog?

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 05:40:46 -0700

If you only had 10 minutes a day to blog, what would you do? Would you browse through your settings, and list of widgets to find if there's more crap to add to your sidebar, or would you use that 10 minutes to create content?

This is my experiment, I will run for the rest of the year. As some of you might know, I've been on kind of a hiatus from my blog at zemalf.com. Hiatus meaning that I haven't done any new content to it.

I forced myself to the break because I was using too much time on the blog. And with too much time I mean I was using too much time on stuff that didn't matter.

And I used way too much time on tweaking the content. I used up to 6 hours to create one post. Yes, some of the posts are absolutely amazing, mind me saying it myself, but it's true, after all - I spent 6 hours on it :)

But now, that's about to change. I have new rule. I must not spend more than 10 minutes to a post on one day. I might use 30 minutes in total to a post, but only 10 minutes a day.

But the target is to use 10 minutes to write, edit (not!) and publish a post. With limited time like that I'm trying to fight my urge for (unnecessary) perfection and go for shorter blog posts.

I'm not promising I'll post every day, I don't even promise I'll post every week. I might, or I might not. But I'm not gonna waste time on my blog. I will make the time I use count for more. By limiting myself to 10 minutes a day, I'm forcing myself to use time wisely.

I'm writing this on email and posting it via Posterous, and I'm doing this to test how much text I can output in about 8 minutes. 2 minutes I leave to publishing. Although on Posterous it's matter of seconds to send the mail, but anyway.

But now, I'm out of time, and it's your turn. What do you think about this concept of "10 minute blogging"?

p.s. The urge to polish, edit and write more is here again, but I'm forcing myself to stop after this "p.s." and hit send :)

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What would Bilbo Baggins say to his Twitter followers?

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 05:28:07 -0700

You know what Bilbo Baggins would say about his Twitter followers?

I'm pretty sure it would be along the lines of...

"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve"

Clean-up!

Go through your follow list and if you feel like that, do a little cleanup and stop following people you really don't want to follow.

Good tool for this is Tweepi.

(and it hasn't disappeared after couple of months, like so many Twitter tools do)

I like to be liberal with my follows, then list people I really like and unfollow equally liberally.

Thus, I do cleanup every three months or so, and it always make Twittering more pleasant experience...

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30 minutes of goodness about WordPress Security

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 03:26:00 -0700

Watch this video for GREAT info on how to secure WordPress. Brad Williams gave this "Lock it Up" -presentation in WordCamp Boston 2010. I found it via WordCamp.tv

The Video:

Watch the 30-minute video at WordCamp.tv: Brad Williams: Lock it Up

The Presentation Slides:

WordPress Security - WordCamp Boston 2010

View more presentations from Brad Williams.

Find the presentation from Brad's SlideShare account here: WordPress Security: WordCamp Boston 2010

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20 Most Useful WordPress Plugins

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 03:32:00 -0700

Instead of spending weeks, months or even years like I have, a beginning WordPress blogger should *NOT* be testing and trying different plugins. Instead of getting the "widget mania", it will save you tons of time to pick a set of proven plugins that make things better and focus on stuff that matters, like creating content and writing posts.

In this post, I will give you a complete list of best WordPress plugins you can install to your WordPress blog for free and not worry about what plugins you should use and have.

When Darren Rowse asked What are Your Favourite Free WordPress Plugins?, I left a comment on that post, but wanted to do an extended version of the comment here, since I didn't want to bloat the comment too much.

So in my comment on the WordPress plugin -post at Problogger, I narrowed it down to 4 from my 8 must-have WordPress plugins, which I would recommend for any, and every, WordPress blog...

1. W3 Total Cache - hands down, and without a question, the number one caching plugin for WP, making blog A LOT faster. (WP Super Cache only sees the rear lights of this one). To learn how to install W3 Total Cache, download my free W3 Total Cache guide from my Scribd -page.
2. Google XML Sitemaps - the most simple "SEO" one can do in a blog is to create an XML sitemap that will help search engines index the site (and not just Google, despite the name), and this plugin makes it super easy.
3. WP-DBManager - automatically optimize and BACKUP the WordPress database, making sure the blog runs smoothly and you won't lose you precious work in case something bad happens.
4. WP Smush.it - automatically optimize images uploaded to the media library, making the images smaller, without affecting the image quality.

The 4 plugins above would help any kind of blog, no matter the purpose. For the typical blog, I would add these 4 to the mix

5. Google Analytics for WordPress - tracking traffic is essential, and this plugin is the best there is to setup Google Analytics into a WordPress blog, with the new version adding advanced (yet easy to use) features like tracking clicks with events and tracking traffic per category/author/tag/etc.
6. Akismet - If a blog has comments active, like most blogs do, Akismet must be in the blog to avoid most blog comment spam. One might add other plugins on top of it, but Akismet is the foundation.
7. All in One SEO Pack - A plugin that takes care of the oh-so-important search engine optimization needs for the blog and individual posts. There are great SEO-plugin alternatives, like HeadSpace2, but I've used using the All in One SEO Pack, and haven't found a reason to switch.
8. Redirection - There comes a time when you might move a post, or need to make short and sweet affiliate linking, and redirection helps you to do that. It automatically redirects posts you change, and it can also track 404 (page not found) errors, helping you to spot possible errors on your internal links.

Personally, I add all the 8 plugins to every WordPress blog I create for myself or for my clients. To continue the list, here's 12 more that make things easier and better for many things, including SEO and other things.

9. Wordpress Firewall - Security, blocking common "attacks" against the blog
10. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin - Automatically add related links and content to all posts
11. FeedBurner FeedSmith - Redirect feeds to Feedburner (without editing all the links)
12. RSS Footer - Add any stuff, like link back to your blog, at the bottom of each post in the RSS feed. Good for directing readers back to blog, and also get something back from people who rip your feed
13. Contact Form 7 - Simple and easy contact form to the blog, with loads of features
14. WP-Pagenavi - Adds improved page navigation to the blog
15. Yoast Breadcrumbs - Breadcrumbs help both people and the search engines to navigate the blog and the posts, and this plugin makes it easy to add'em to the blog
16. Sociable - As far as I know the ONLY "social bookmarking plugin" that uses CSS sprites, making it the most effective for page loading and speed
17. Robots Meta - Micromanage index/noindex of posts, pages, archives, etc.
18. SEO Smart Links - automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Can be used for automating internal linking and also automatic affiliate linking if you're doing affiliate marketing
19. WP Security Scan - helps you check possible security issues on the blog. Acts as a checklist of security tweaks that should be in place in every blog
20. Search Regex - If you need to mass edit anything in your blog posts, this plugin will help you search and replace stuff in all posts without manually going through them all. Amazing time saver if you need to update links for example.

The full list of recommended WordPress plugins is part of the resources for bloggers and Internet marketers that I've included in my blog at http://zemalf.com/.

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The Real Truth About WordPress Speed

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 06:57:00 -0700

I've been obsessed about WordPress speed and website performance in general for a while now. As a result, my WordPress blog is faster than yours - I don't say that to brag, but just to show that I know this stuff inside out...

It seems that everyone's an expert when it comes to site speed

The topic of website performance and site speed has been hot for a while because on April 2010 Google announced that site speed is part of their search engine ranking factors now...

What makes me sad that most of the blog posts and articles I see about speeding up a site are either full of crap or too advanced.

The first kind are the posts, where the author has no idea how to speed up a site, but just wants to take advantage of the hype about speed...
The other kind are the posts made by geeks to geeks.

I get the advanced posts, but they are often way too advanced for someone who's building their first website or blog. And the bigger problem is that many of these posts focus on stuff that takes a lot of time, but only bring tiny results.

They look advanced and geeky and cool, but actually better results could be achieved with less effort.

I'm talking about tweaking the php-code of WordPress themes, optimizing the MySQL, optimizing the PHP, etc. All great things for WordPress optimization, but also something one should do as the last thing after doing the basic optimizations first (which still speed up the site more)

It's interesting that often these same people often offer help to do such advanced operations - for a cost of course...

I'm not saying they don't know their stuff, but most of the people making these advanced guides are typical engineers, they refuse to see the simplest and easiest solution, because... well - because it's easy, and if it's easy, why would anyone need them, the engineers anymore?

SEOmoz's post this week is something in between. It does give the good tips, but it also gives some unnecessarily advanced tips while at it. On the other hand, SEOmoz has relatively geeky/advanced readership, so I think it's OK...

7 Ways to Improve Site Speed (according to SEOmoz)

I made a lengthy comment about speeding up a website (this whole post is an extension of that comment) on SEOmoz's White Board Friday post: Whiteboard Friday - 7 Ways to Take Advantage of Google's Site Speed Algorithm (Pop-Up Video Style)

Enable Gzip
Minify Javascript/CSS
Use a CDN (Content Distribution Network)
Optimize Images
Use External Javascript/CSS
Avoid Using Excess Redirects
Use Fewer Files

All good tips I think. But using CDN and using external js/CSS are quite advanced techniques, so I wouldn't worry about those at first. If you just remove crap (using fewer files), enable gzip, optimize images and minify the js- and CSS- files, you've done 90% of the speed optimization you need to do.

For most, especially beginners and smaller sites, this is enough. You'll spend a lot more time getting the right 10% done, but only see minimal gain, compared to the first 90%, which you can do really fast.

My comment and thoughts about speeding up a site

Let me simplify this for you.

Speeding up a site is three step process:

loading less stuff,
loading smaller stuff, and
delivering the stuff in optimal manner

...in that order.

First remove all the crap, then make the stuff that's left smaller (= e.g. compress/gzip stuff and optimize images), then focus on delivering stuff optimally, beginning with configuring things for browser and proxy caching and caching in case of dynamic content, e.g. on WordPress. After everything else is done, THEN one can start looking into subdomains and Content Delivery Networks.

External js/CSS is quite advanced technique, and you have to mind that the number of domains must be kept under four for things to speed up. CDN is an option which beginners don't need, and I don't like it that each and every "speed up your site" guide/tip/blog post suggests that first...

Why go for paid solution when you can do stuff for free and more easily?
Why suggest something most users don't even need?

Focus on stuff that brings maximum impact for minimum effort.

Don't get stuck on the hard stuff, because you know what...

The truth is... that speeding up WordPress is EASY!

Speeding up WordPress

For people on WordPress, you can take care of 88% all optimization needs by installing the W3 Total Cache -plugin and configuring it the right way. That and 3 other optimization steps is all it takes.

Add little tweaks via .htaccess rules, like gzip (deflate) and cache control for browser/proxy control, use WP Smush.it -plugin to automatically optimize images and you are pretty much set. After that it's about cleaning up stuff, getting rid of unnecessary scripts and such.

p.s. If you want to know more, I have tons of free information about speeding up WordPress on my blog... start by checking out the WordPress Speed Challenge now.

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