One of my clients called it “one of the best tools I’ve ever bought” and I wholeheartedly agree. It’s not often something as easy and useful as Scribe SEO comes along. If you haven’t checked it out yet, there is a free trial on the website. Like with anything great out there, I think it could be even better, so there are a few things I would do to improve it.

1) Have the Review window open in a new browser window/tab. The hover over window is no good to anyone, it opens up over the content you’re editing and areas that you need to alter, so you need to close it to alter then go back to it for the next section and so on – I end up opening the post in another window so I can edit it there without switching back and forth. At least give me the option.

2) When it tells me I need my primary keyword near the start of the title, it should tell me what my primary keyword is and say “Move Primary Keyword Scribe SEO to the beginning of the Title”. Otherwise I have to look it up to see if it’s different to what I think it should be. Lazy of me I know, but it’d be a time-saver of at least 5 seconds.

3) The Tags page/tab of the Review window should allow me to edit tags right there with the list of suggested tags. Even an “Add all tags” button would be nice and handy.

4) The SEO Best Practices page is the same on every review. I know that’s not a criticism, it’s a comment, but it is. Why it bothers me I have no idea as it’s a gold mine of useful info, but perhaps it could be linked to and stored on the settings page or something. I won’t lose sleep if that one is never addressed though…

5) The Scribe Settings page tells me how many evaluations I have left as of today, but when do they expire? So having 20 evaluations left as of today is all very well and good, but will that need to last me 25 days or 5 days? [Side note: For those wondering if evaluations rollover to the next month, they don't.]

Yes, some of them are picky and personal, but when a tool (and an SEO tool at that) is this great it’s the little things from using it that can make it that little bit greater.

You can watch my quick video of Scribe SEO here, or take a look at the Scribe website here.

Read the full post: Scribe SEO – 5 Ways To Improve ScribeSEO Plugin

JS Kit Echo Comments

You may have noticed that all my blog posts had 0 comments for a few days. This was while the team at JS Kit imported my old comments into their system. Used by sites such as Technorati and Guy Kawasaki it essentially pulls in other places where your blog post is being talked about into your blog posts comments. This keeps your blog as the central hub for your online activity, which appeals to my sense of neatness adn order!

So Twitter tweets that mention your post, Diggs, or Friendfeed updates are added to your post comments. Facebook doesn’t seem to be on there yet but I’m hoping that will be added soon.

Give it a try below in the comments and see what you think. I’m still playing with it but it looks good so far. It costs $12 per year to use, and I was a little disappointed in how long it took for them to import my comments – 6 days. I did provide them with the wrong URL to login (oops), but over 24 hours for each email reply and no reply over a weekend is frustrating for a new customer.

Lijit Search

The second addition is the lijit search. I had a great demo from Perry Quinn at Blog World, their plugin essentially replaces the standard WordPress search sidebar widget. The search results are similar in a way to JS Kit in that they also show results from my extended network. So Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and various other sites are also searched and relevant results displayed in a Content tab on the results page. It’s at the top right of each blog post page so give it a go and see if the results work for you. I’m not 100% it’s all working yet.

Although I would turn them off if I could, the ads that appear on the results page are part of a revenue share, so if you’re looking at earning some money on your blog it may be worth giving lijit a try.

As always, I’m interested in your comments so please let me know what you think below.

Read the full post: Blog Changes On BTG

It will check if certain conditions are met by your Wordpress install, such as if specific plugins are installed, the permalink structure is not default, etc. In the current version, the following checks are made:

- If user called “admin” is present
- Permalink settings are not the default
- Folder permissions are correct

Certain plugins installed and active:
- WP DB Backup
- XML Sitemap
- All in One SEO
- Subscribe to Comments
- Akismet

The plugin will suggest corrective actions to the user with on how to rectify any tested conditions which do not pass.

Some checks are not successful, with help messages.

Not all failed checks are a big problem, some are just recommended.

More details can be found on the plugins page, or you can download it from WordPress.org.

Read the full post: Blog Tech Check Plugin Released

If you don’t have Wordpress 2.7

- Make sure you’re uploading to the correct folder. This should be wp-content/plugins.
- Make sure the files have uploaded. There should be no Failed Transfers listed in Filezilla and you can see the files on your server.
- Make sure the plugin is not in a zip folder. Most plugins are downloaded zipped, you need to upzip the zip folder contents before uploading.
- Make sure there are some files in the top level folder. Some plugins have a folder, then inside that no files, just another folder. Wordpress will not see these files if there is no file in the top level folder.

A great video found on YouTube shows you how to upload a plugin:

If you have Wordpress 2.7 or above

Then to avoid these issues you can use the inbuilt plugin uploader. Go to Plugins > Add New. There you can search for a plugin and if it’s in the Wordpress repository you can install it then and there. If not you can upload the zip file from the site you have downloaded it from and it will install that for you.

Hopefully the next version of Wordpress will allow a similar action for installing new Wordpress Themes, as it’s a great feature to avoid the frustration many bloggers have with installing plugins.

Read the full post: Why Are My Plugins Not Showing In My Dashboard?

There are many tools out there that interact with Twitter, and an internet search will bring up lots of top 10 Twitter tools lists, but a couple of tools have come to my attention as I’ve been using them for clients recently. The first is Twitterbacks created by Jim Kukral.

Essentially a selection of free Photoshop files that you can download and use as templates for your Twitter profile page. Very easy to use, and free. Yaro Starak reports that he has noticed “Twitter.com profile pages are starting to rank in Google really well. Might be an SEO strategy there!” and so isn’t it time you looked at your profile page? My Twitter profile page needs a bit of work I admit, but I’m waiting for my new blog design to create a consistent image – oh yes, a new blog design is coming soon but more on that sometime soon!

The second is a plugin called TweetSuite that can display TweetBacks on your site (like Trackbacks or Pingbacks, above your comments), automatic tweeting of new posts, and many other features that you can choose to use or not.

While you’re playing around with Twitter, why not follow me? Do you have any other Twitter tools, tips or tricks you would like to share?

Read the full post: Cool Twitter Tools

The Wordpress community spend a lot of time and effort making free plugins, and I often donate to those I find most useful (and encourage you to do the same), however there are also many I would happily pay for, and Max Banner Ads is one of them, from Pawan over at MaxBlogPress.

So what’s good about it?

Pretty much everything! It makes adding ads to your site a breeze for a non-techie, though of course there is a learning curve. The more I use it the more I like it. You can set up zones – areas in your site to have advertising – and these can be within posts, in the sidebar (it can create a widget for you), above the first post, and below the last post automatically. If you want to place it elsewhere it will give you the template tag code for adding to your theme.

- Flexible layout options are available plus custom css if you need it, but there is no need to mess with code or template files if you don’t want to.

- It will automatically rotate any number of banners, say if you want to show four 125×125 ads in your sidebar, but have six ads – no problem, it will just show 4 if you want it to.

The site has an excellent video (linked above), well worth 6 minutes of your time, showing how in around 14 minutes you can have all the advertising on your site sorted out and managed through the Wordpress dashboard.

- For your own ads it will track impressions and clicks therefore giving you a Click Through Rate (CTR) for each ad.

- If you get given some ad code you can even paste it into a box and it will automatically take out the relevant image URL and the hyperlink for you – how good is that?

The free version is fully functional, the paid version ($47) simply removes the Powered by Max Banner Ads link if you want to. You can also leave it there, with an affiliate link in to promote it. So I finally bought a premium plugin and paid for this because I use it so much and think it’s worth paying for. You can also use it on as many of your personal sites as you like, I have it on two.

So what’s bad about it?

There are obviously some things the plugin doesn’t do:

- Manage payments for you. This requires a different plugin (a paid for one), or a system like OpenX. For most bloggers though direct sales are a small part of what they do, most are affiliate ads or ad server code that can be handled by this plugin.

- Not rotate ads. Sometimes it would be nice not to rotate a group of ads and just keep the same one or two in the same position. To get around this you can just create two (or more) zones each with one ad in, and then put the zones next to each other using the code provided.

- Not all locations can be managed by this plugin. Sometimes template changes are necessary to get adverts in the right location, but the options that do come with the plugin are very impressive and powerful. And for those times you do need to add code to the template it gives you the code to add. Excellent.

I recommend anyone starting out who would like to manage some adverts themselves to take a look at the free version, it really is an excellent system. I don’t even have graphical adverts on this site, but I’ve found it invaluable on others, and worth paying for even if it didn’t remove the Powered By link. Have you used it? Or something else? Any thoughts?

Read the full post: Why I Finally Paid For A Wordpress Plugin

The first is the Google Analytics plugin. You will need to install the latest version, then on the Google Analytics option page you will need to click Reset all settings at the bottom, and then re-enter your UA number and select the options you require. If you use the robots meta plugin and RSS Footer plugin from the same author you will need to do a similar thing.

Secondly the Unique Blog Designs Block Ad plugin does not currently work. A fix will be available very shortly so just hang on a few days if you use this plugin and want to upgrade.

Third, another popular plugin, Popularity Contest, has issues. A fix can be found here.

Look here for a further list of plugins that don’t work with Wordpress 2.6.

Please let me know if you would like to upgrade and have any of these plugins installed.

Read the full post: Wordpress 2.6 Plugin Issues

It’s an Alpha release which means it is early testing code, but if you want to give it a try, then here’s a demo video below. If you do try it, please let me know what you think!

[Via: Weblog Tools Collection]

Read the full post: Content Suggestion For Wordpress