This Week’s Links:
Check them out and let me know what you think!
All the best,
Please leave a comment below.
Note that I don’t reply to all comments, but I do read them all. If I don’t reply to your comment, it most likely means that I agree with what you say and don’t have anything meaningful to add, myself. I appreciate and read all comments and your comments play an important part in what I write about, so keep them coming.
Spammy comments are always filtered or removed. No surprise there.
Hi Shane!
I own both the Backlink Battleplan and the SEcockpit tools. Your products and your updates are great!
Thanks.
Shane you say that design is not about SEO but think about it, Google’s big thing is about improving the quality experience for it’s users, so if your site is pleasing visitors will stay longer and the Google bot monitors that.
Plugins are great but remember to only keep ACTIVE the ones you need ACTIVE all the time because too many can decrease loading time of your site and that is also a quality factor.
I know you use Elegant Themes which I agree for $39 is a steal for access to all their themes, especially with their epanel, it enables you to do away with some SEO plug-ins, so better loading speeds. It also has places to easily paste bits of code. So for me with plug-ins less is more!
Another tip would be to think about your visitor, if you were the visitor would you like the site or would it look like dross.
Thanks for your Sunday update, looking forward to the next one.
Yes, that’s certainly true. In the long-term the better-designed site has an edge over the sloppily designed one, that I’m sure of. :)
Hi Shane,
I’ve noted with some dismay that you are recommending 800+ word posts these days. Having dozens of years old blogs, that makes for some severe updating requirements, not to mention the on-going costs of longer posts being doubled.
I’m not saying that I think you are wrong, only that I wish it were so.
In my desperation to comply, I’ve come up with a thought that harkens back to the early days … the -more- command. While originally intended to create 2 posts out of one for yesteryear’s seo advantages, might this have some Google appeasing benefits when reversed?
IE. take 2 related 500 word posts and stick a -more- command at the bottom of the first post.
What do you think?
Best wishes,
Oran
Yes, that might work.
I read a case-study where someone got a page 1 ranking for a competitive keyword by having 20 full blog posts display on the homepage and he just kept adding new posts on a regular basis. He also did link-building, of course. He got the homepage ranked, eventually, which at that point consisted of 20 full blog posts.
The reason I bring this up is that it goes to show that the content doesn’t have to be one single piece or all closely related for it to work.
Hi Shane,
I thoroughly enjoy your Sunday updates and am following your work with great interest.
I too am a bit of a perfectionist and I know so many say ‘ Oh just slap up the website, dont worry what it looks like ‘ but that is so wrong.
I land on a page, I decide within a millisec whether it appeals to me or not, and if it doesn’t,then I’m gone and I bet millions are the same.
I really like your striking theme with the clear video- what theme would you recommend for adsense sites?
Thanks
Libby
Hi Libby,
Thanks for your comment!
Yes, I agree and I’m the same way. If the site doesn’t look compelling, I’m out of there.
For AdSense sites, the best theme I’ve come across is CTR Theme. It really rocks, is very easy to set up and you can easily test different ad setups to find the best converting ones.
Great video Shane. Your talking head videos are brilliant. I have struggled to do these in the past. Maybe you could share your secrets in the future…
I am also a perfectionist and your tip of a deadline will help me.
Thanks for the great content.
Ian McConnell
hi
i would like to learn how you take a theme and clean it from all the blog sign (comments,date and etc.) and make it a clean page which is like a regular html page
thanks
eli
Shane,
I open your emails because I get to see your face. That builds trust. To many people hide behind fake names, etc. When people get to she your face – you develop trust.
PS – what theme do you use for your website? It is so clean and crisp!
Thanks, Robert!
The theme I use here is called Striking.
It’s an absolutely brilliant theme in many regards, but two warnings:
1) It’s become extremely popular, which is a bit unfortunate. Makes it less unique.
2) It needs a lot of tweaking, otherwise it will load extremely slowly.
Hey thanks for your video I’m curious about something with SEO details it would be nice to know which of the SEO details are the most relevant/important for exemple H1 Tag first etc .
Also i kinda laughed at your swiss army T-shirt lol I’m also part of it ;).
Hello,
To get a detailed answer about these SEO details, please refer to my free guide, which you can download here.
Nice thanks I’ll check it out.
You might want to check out Skybound Stylizer. I’ve been using it for years for CSS editing. I used to edit css by hand, but… put simply, Stylizer is Firebug with a ‘Save’ button (built-in FTP client in the save dialogue). So you can edit your CSS in real-time on the server, the same way you do with FireBug, but you can save it when you’re finished.
It’s really a time saver. (and you can quickly preview changes in all major browsers for compatibility)… *highly* recommended. I think they’ve got a Lite version that is free as well.
PS. I have the same character trait and that’s exactly what I have to do sometimes… set a deadline and just write down all of my perfectionist thoughts on making it better to an ‘ideas’ or ‘todo’ file and just get it launched… or I’d spend an ETERNITY on the most seemingly arcane aspect of a project. :)
Hi Steve,
Thanks a lot for the recommendation! I’ll have to check that out. :)