We have converted! Most of us at TastyPlacement are now on the Android platform for mobile use and we’ve found a few handy apps to assist us in our SEO analysis and daily work.

mAnalytic – Google Analytics for Android

This handy plug-in/app is so easy to use, I find myself reaching for it rather than logging on to my PC to see Google analytics. One feature that makes it so easy to use is that the blogs you in automatically. Also, the app displays all accounts and subaccounts in a single list, so you won’t have to go hunting and subaccounts if you just need to check analytics for one site.

SEO SiteRank & SiteRank Lite

This app comes in both a paid and free version. SiteRank lets you grab the page rank and Alexa rank for a site while viewing in your browser.

SEO Stats

Similar to SiteRank is SEO Stats, which gives you information about your position in social networks; it includes information on page rank, twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and more. SEO Stats is a paid app, 1.50 Euros.

SEO Keyword Checker

This free app analyzes a webpage and returns basic information about keyword use in keyword density. It’s a helpful app, however, some users report does not work on all devices.

we will update this article as we learn about more new apps. All of the apps from this article are available in the android market.

We’re Halfway Done!

It’s been a lot of work, but our upcoming SEO for WordPress guide is coming together nicely. We’ve teamed up with technology upstart publisher, Packt Publishing to put everything we know about SEO for the world’s leading website platform, WordPress, into a easy-to-read and comprehensive guide. Expect the book out in December of 2010.

Preorder Now

Don’t pay just yet! There are two ways to preorder: One, you can join our Facebook Page. Also, if you’d like to be notified by email when we are taking orders, please let us know by filling out the following form, and we’ll keep you posted.

We Wrote the Book

Our complete guide to SEO for WordPress. Out on Packt Pub., December 2010
In Stores 12/2010

If you are like most people either in business on the web or in business generally, you may have accumulated some extra domain names. And, like most people, you might tend to leave those domain names in a dormant or parked status. GoDaddy is a perfect example: they offer free domain parking for domains purchased through their service.

Domain Parking: Almost a Scam

If you use domain parking services, it really isn’t a service at all– the parking service places ads on your domain and does not share of the ad revenue with you–I wonder how much revenue GoDaddy earns in the aggregate from the 100s of thousands, or millions, of domain names parked there. Also, parked domains in most cases will not be indexed by search engines. So, in the eyes of a search engine, a parked domain doesn’t exist.

Best Approach for Parked Domains

The better approach is to “park” your domain by yourself. Set up a very simple page, or better a few pages with some text that is original and contextually relevant to the domain name itself. You can even place some Google Adsense Advertisements on the site to earn a few dollars a month. Meanwhile, the search engines will crawl and index your site because of the original content they find there. Then, when you finally go live with your domain, you’ll have an indexing history—old sites with some age and history always outrank brand-new sites.

An extra tip: always leave your contact information easily findable on a parked domain– you never know when someone will want to offer money for it.

What Does it Do?

Google’s secure search protects the transmission of data between a user’s computer and Google’s server. So, a user searching for “ways to pass a drug screening” would enjoy enhanced security for that search: the user’s search query could not be intercepted in transit by persons snooping on internet traffic–which in an unsecured environment, is largely open to viewing by anyone. It’s the same technology that protects the transmission of credit card numbers.

However, it has limitations: the user’s browser settings may retain the search query, making it visible to coworkers, spouses, or anyone with access to the physical computer on which the search was made.

No Change in Search Results

But will this new feature change search results, the order in which search results appear? No. We tested a variety of phrases in both environments, and the search results are unchanged.

Who Won’t Like It?

That’s easy: the Chinese Government and the North Korean Government. These governments snoop on their citizens by intercepting all sorts of internet traffic–including search queries. The secure connection means that a dissident in China can search for information without having his or her search queries read by China’s ubiquitous internet police. Of course, once a person clicks on a link–the visit to the destination website will be visible to snoopers. And, of course, the Chinese government can simply attempt to block access to all of Google’s servers.

Google has confirmed long ago that webpage load times will be used as a factor in the calculation of its AdWords Quality Score index–meaning that a faster load time can save you money on your AdWords budget.

You can use the tool for free at Pingdom. Here’s a screenshot of what you’ll see.

What’s a good load time? You want the last item on the page (the bottom of the list) to load in under 5 seconds.

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Following a tip from Gary at Topside Media, I finally got a handle on Yahoo Search Marketing’s import function. Yahoo Search Marketing (Yahoo’s sponsored ad offering) is a necessary evil in competitive markets; but their Web web-based interface is both slow and unwieldy.

I was looking for a way to import some finely tuned AdWords campaigns into Yahoo directly. They have recently upgraded their import functionality, and now AdWords campaigns–complete with ad groups, bids, ad copy, and keywords can all be imported in one operation.

How to Import Into Yahoo Search Marketing

1. First of all, you need a file to import. If you are a user of the Google AdWords Editor software ( if you aren’t, you should be), you simply go to the file menu, and find “export as CSV”. You may select  all campaigns, orally particular campaigns; you can also select whether you want active campaigns, paused campaigns, or both. From the web-based AdWords interface, you do it a little differently: you generate a keyword report as a CSV file. Since I am an AdWords Editor user, I opted for that route–just another benefit of using this powerful tool.

2. Next, log into your Yahoo Search Marketing account. From the dashboard, in the upper right you will see a blue button titled “import campaigns.” Click on that button, and you will see a button to select your CSV file, add a button to import your file. That’s about it–the Wizard does the rest. You will be asked what you want to do about conflicting campaign names–I chose to simply add the new campaigns in addition to my old campaign names.

After the Import

Warning: your geo-targeting will not import–you will need to do that manually, or you’ll be advertising in far-off cities. Also, as with any import, you want to do a thorough review to make sure everything is working properly. Overall, a real timesaver.

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Inserting images into WordPress posts and pages can usually trip up new users–we get asked about this a lot. Once you do it a few times succesfully, though, you’ll feel like a master. What follows is a quick and dirty overview of how to do it.

1. Open a New Post or Page, or Edit and Existing Post or Page

The first thing you need to do is to open a document to work on. In WordPress you can choose from posts or pages, and they both work the same way. Go to your WordPress dashboard and click on the left navigation for either posts or pages. When that navigation button expands either select “edit” or “add new’.

2. Upload Your Image

Next, you want to upload your image. When you have the Post/Page edit window open, place the cursor where you want your image to appear in the document. Then click the icon that appears at the top of the edit window, indicated by a red circle in the following image (it looks like a grey rectangle with a thin grey border around it):

Next, you will see that once you click the graphic icon for image uploads indicated in the picture above, the “add an image” dialogue box pops up, as shown in the picture below. You’ll note that in this picture the “from computer” tab is highlighted– but you can also upload from a URL. Today we will learn how to upload from computer. Keep in mind that once images are uploaded, resizing them or editing them is difficult or impossible, so you want to make sure your images are sized right before you upload.

Hit the “choose file” button and browse to where the picture is on your computer– just like you do with e-mail. Once you have the file selected, hit the “upload” button. Don’t close this window yet–you will enter parameters in the next step.

3. Choose Your Parameters

Once you have hit the “upload” button your image will upload (your image is now stored on your web server/web hosting), the “add an image” dialog window changes dynamically to show you a range of parameters. You can see a picture of the dialog window below:

I have highlighted the common parameters that are most important when uploading an image.

Link URL

First is the “Link URL”–this selection box fills automatically with the link location of the image file. If this box contains a URL (as shown in the picture, it is filled with a long URL), then the image will be a clickable link in your post. If this box is empty (you can empty it by clicking the “none” button just under the box) then your image will not be a clickable link. In most cases, you do not want your images to be clickable links, so I almost always hit that “none” button to empty that box.

Alignment: Left, Right, Center

The next parameter is “alignment”– you simply select the radio button for left, center, or right. Left and Right alignment will make your text wrap around the image; “none” means that your text will not wrap around the image.

Size

The last parameter is “size”– here you simply select the size, in pixels, for which you want the image to appear. As you can see in this example, I have selected a full-size image that is 560 pixels wide, and 492 pixels high.

Insert Into Post

The last step, once your parameters are set, is simply to hit the “insert into post” button–your image will be inserted into the post in the position where your cursor was when you upload your image.

If you have made a mistake, simply highlight the image, hit the delete key on your keyboard to remove it and start over.

4. Making Changes Later

Of course, this tutorial would not be complete if we did not at least brush on how to make changes later– and WordPress is pretty well set up to make edits to the way your image displays. See the screenshot below:

When you wave your cursor over the image in the document edit window, you will see two small icons appear–the icon of an image will bring up the edit window from step three–from there you can change parameters, like size and orientation left, center, or right. The second icon is the familiar “do not enter” symbol– clicking this will remove the image.

Good Luck!

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We have just launched an adsense revenue sharing site. The site is ArticleShare.info. It’s a general article site (like ezinearticles.com), except authors share in the revenue generated by adsense dollars! ArticleShare.info pays an 80% share of revenues to authors.

Signup is quick and free.

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We get asked a lot about WordPress’ suitability for search engine rankings. WordPress’ reputation and having a sound foundation for SEO has certainly seeped into the public’s mind. For the most part, the reputation is deserved. This site, TastyPlacement.com runs on WordPress, and ranks very well for our intended keywords.

There are a few drawbacks with WordPress, but like most things SEO, it’s really about the cumulative effect of everything. Overall, we’d grade WordPress an A- on it’s suitability and power for SEO purposes. But it’s so good at so many things, that it presents a compelling story overall.

Now, we’ll dig into the nuts and bolts.

WordPress SEO Benefit: Google Just Likes It

I have seen it time and time again: WordPress sites rank very well in Google search results pages, even in competitive markets. I can only conclude that Google favors the platform over others. I never thought that WordPress was much use to hard-core spammers, so it’s possible that WordPress sites enjoy a “trust factor” in Google’s eyes.

WordPress SEO Benefit: Speed of Content Creation

WordPress is built to run: it is designed for the speedy and continual publishing of content. Since I have converted nearly all my sites and most of my client’s sites to WordPress, our speed to publishing has increased. On a static html site, the creation of content would generally involve either hard-coding the article, or using a WYSIWYG interface, then adjusting menus–sometimes on multiple pages. With WP, sites grow big and grow fast. All that content brings breadth to your keyword families quickly, and your large site can quickly become “bait” for inbound links from other websites.

WordPress SEO Benefit: Crawlability

Websites must be crawlable by search engines in order to be indexed properly and appear in search rankings. WordPress’ internal logic and link structure is simple and shared universally among millions of websites–so WP is familiar ground for search engines. This familiarity means that Google’s spiders can find what they are looking for, and index and rank the content with confidence.

SEO Benefit: Plug-Ins and Support

Because the WordPress community is so large (enormous, really), the variety and number of plug-ins for SEO support has grown tremendously (Plug-ins are small software modules that website owners can optionally install in addition to the default WP installation). The All in One SEO Plug-In, or the Platinum SEO Pack are both quick and easy “one stop” plug-ins that accomplishe a basic, but sound set of SEO goals such as manual Title Tags and Meta Descriptions.  These plug-ins extend WordPress’ functionality to rival the control and customization you would achieve under a static site.

SEO Benefit: New Content “Bump”

Another great feature of WordPress, which is also shared by other blogging platforms is the “new content bump”. A new post (generally not a “page” though–WP divides its content into two classes of webpages: “posts” and “pages”) will receive an initial lift in rankings during it’s first few days after publishing. This is logical: blog posts are intended to be topical and current, like a news item–Google treats this fresh content as noteworthy and rewards it with a bump in initial rankings. Ranking position will generally settle down after a few days.

SEO Benefit: Pings, Comments and Trackbacks

Pings, Comments and Trackbacks are interactive features built into WP–these supplemental tools let other blogs and individuals interact with a WordPress site: this brings inbound links and traffic (in the case of pings and trackbacks), and free content and visitors  (in the form of comments to blog posts).

SEO Drawback: Poorly Designed Themes

But it’s not all rosy: I see a lot of poorly designed themes that undercut WordPress’ SEO power. Here’s an example I often see: a theme/template will be designed with the blog’s title bearing a Heading 1 (h1) tag–that’s not the way to go. The h1 tag should speak to the subject/topic of each page or post–to repeat an h1 tag mindlessly throughout hundred of pages on a blog is a waste of a valuable SEO tool.

The fix? Code the Blog Title in a plain old CSS class–and utilize the powerful h1 tag for the on-page title for each post or page.

SEO Drawback: Rigidity in Menu Presentation

The biggest hang-up that WP forces upon us is perhaps the way menus are presented. The Page/Post methodology described above generally means that posts and pages are kept separate in menus. That’s not an insurmountable problem, but excluding individual pages from particular menu locations (like a top bar menu, where space is limited) can require coding the WP template’s core .php files, or inserting page ID’s in Widget boxes ad nauseum. Now, to get advanced: If you want to “nofollow” certain page links, say to a contact page or a privacy policy page (in a static site, this task is a breeze) you can either forget it, or go hunting for a plug-in.

When it comes to menu presentation in WordPress, I have learned “the wisdom to recognize that which I cannot change”. I have adapted, and I got over it. It’s a small price to pay for all this power.