Awesome Twenty Ten Weaver

I have been quite busy with doing a few new builds and recently was turned on to the Twenty Ten Weaver Wordpress themes. Everyone has seen the new default Wordpress theme, Twenty Ten, well the Weaver child themes makes easier than ever to customize. The theme extends the Twenty Ten theme by offering much more functionality such as customizing design colors and inserting code into the head area of your site as well as other areas. The best thing many of you will like is that it is easy to use and free. The video below does not do it justice, but the Weaver system is great for a newbie or advance webmaster. I have always liked themes with easy to add headers and this theme will let adjust sizes very easily. You need to play with this as it includes several child themes that look great and are easy to change colors on as well. Try it, you will love it too.

CloudFlare Free Content Delivery Network Service Review

A reader recently asked me if I have ever used CloudFlare, a free and paid Content Delivery Network service. I had never used it but recently put it to the test on a few sites without any problems. It is very easy to set up and point your nameservers in their direction. It honestly took me only 15 minutes from, start to finish. I am putting it to the test on a few moderately heavy traffic sites along with the W3 Total Cache plugin and am impressed with load times. I will let this run on these sites for a few months now to see how it goes. Here is the promo video below and a full tour here.

Us in 90 Seconds from CF Vimeo on Vimeo.

Site Structure By Yoast

Joost de Valk tackles Intelligent Site Structure for better SEO in his latest post and it is a great one. Yoast walks you through developing a good site structure, naming your sections and internal link structure. Such an easy to follow post with great images to illustrate the flow of the structure as well. Best thing about it it that it is nothing new as Yoast later reveals that the post was originally wrote in October 2007 for dev.opera.com. He says the only thing that has changed since is it's appearance and the adding of a few reference links. As you can see there is nothing magic, mostly common sense, but easy things like this are easily overlooked. Great post for a Friday. Have a great weekend everyone.

Cosmetics Last On A Site Rebuilds

I am all ready for the meat of the holiday shopping season on most of my sites and am now turning most of my attention to a few more sites that need rebuilds from the old BANS days. I plan these out, but try to move very methodical on them so I do them right. I don't like it to eat of large chunks of my day either. The biggest urge I have to fight is trying to play with the looks and cosmetics first instead of functionality. This is a big no-no, because the site needs to function right and all links, plugins and addons taken care of first. It is better to have a site working right using a base default Wordpress template, instead of having a pretty site that is half done. I tell you this from experience. Doctoring up your look, headers and CSS styles can get time consuming if you let it. Make this the last thing you do on a rebuild. There are many times when I wish I would of followed this very advice. Of course if you have the time and means, you can have EVERYTHING ready and done on a test domain or subdomain. This way you just move the theme and etc over to the rebuild. However you do it, make sure this site is down as little time as possible.

Fresh Blogger Template Designs

A few of you still may utilize blogger as a main blog or a feeder site and I came across a Mashable post I bookmarked that features 10 fresh blogger templates for any type application. Although EPN frowns on you using Blogger with their affiliate program, Amazon endorses it. I hate to see people not be able to make money because they are technically challenged by Wordpress, hosting or are just flat out broke. If you are any of these, you should start with Blogger. These templates are easy to use, the platform is easy to use and there are tons of free videos on using the platform out there. You can indeed build a review type site very easily using Amazon or many of the other affiliate programs out there. It is true you do not actually own the site, you can easily back it up and buy a domain to forward to it. If for some unknown reason you delete the site or Blogger takes it from you, you still have the domain you can point elsewhere. Enough about that. Where there is a will, there is a way and these Blogger templates look like they will do the trick for you.

Do Not Ignore The Trust Factor

I think what I have learned most with building niche sites over the years is not to ignore the trust factor of a surfer. It is very important as they must trust in order to buy. That is most of the time mind you. I have broken down 4 areas on your site that the trust factor must not be ignored on.

Look - Does your site look trust worthy? Does it look like a 5th grader built it? Sometimes less is more and it is a trap we all fall into. A simple clean layout with a small professional logo is more than enough. Also stick to just two or 3 colors. Black, white and one primary is perfect. I have gotten over creative before. You likely have as well.

Content - Does your content make sense? Does it read right? Is it factual? I love the Best Spinner, but it can be used to the wrong way very easily to create plain crap that is unreadable. Also make sure the facts are right about a product or an article. Surfers pick up on inconsistencies very easily. You do not need to be a Pulitzer Prize winner to create simple, to the point, factual content. Use your content to paint a pretty picture and sell the product. It is not hard to do.

Ads - Are the ads you are showing trustworthy looking? Do the banners look good? Do the ads match what you are selling? No obnoxious clams? Any stats you can look at for the banner conversions inside your affiliate admin panel? This is often overlooked. Too many times we head for a banner we like and fail to look if there is one that has been converting better. It draws clicks because the surfer trust it.

Exit - Are you sending the surfer to a trustworthy site. Did you trick them to go there? Are they going to where they think they are going? Will where they are going have what they need or are looking for?

Free Arras Magazine Wordpress Theme

I like to pass along good clean Wordpress themes I find and found one last night that happens to be a magazine type Wordpress theme as well. The name of the theme is Arras and this theme comes in brown, blue, green, red, orange, violet and legacy. It features top and main navigation with full menus support. Also it offers custom post types and taxonomies support which means multiple selection of categories. It has an improved thumbnail system and a few theme options you can customize. The thing I like about it is how clean and simple it is and it's ease of use. You may not need it now, but be sure to bookmark it and give it a try down the road.

How & Why To Speed Up Your Website

Another week and another medical exam is in my future on Thursday morning. This one also entails me emptying out my system again. Oh the humanity. This week the suggested cocktail is Magnesium Citrate. Ah, the joys of getting older and paying for abusing your body in it's younger days.

Any ways, in between running to the porcelain throne, I thought i would post a link and video from one of our favorite sites, SEO Moz. In this White Board Friday segment from last week, Danny Dover goes over 7 ways to take advantage of Google's site and speed algorithm by showing 7 proven techniques well known websites use to boost their site speed.

Convert Wordpress Pages To Post With Vice Versa Plugin

If you have worked with Wordpress long enough, you have run across the need to convert pages to post or post to pages. It happens. I recently tackled the vice versa plugin that can make this happen. As always, I suggest backing up your database and files just in case something were to go wrong. I was able to convert pages to post on a whole site I am rebuilding with no problems at all. I would only install this plugin if you have the need for it and remove or deactivate after using as not to clutter things up. I can tell you that it does as it says it will do with no errors on my end and I am using the latest Wordpress version as well.

Pixlr - A Free Online Image Editor

I stumbled across a great free online image editor named Pixlr today. You can create and edit images and photos right online, for free as well. This is great for those of you that do not own Photoshop and have had problems learning the free Gimp program. Now I am no image pro, but do get around quite well on Photoshop, so I found this free Pixlr program a breeze to use. It does lack some things, but if you are new to creating images, this will be a great starting point for you. I am sure some tutorial will show up on Youtube and they have a Facebook group as well. They also have a tool called Pixlr Grabber that you can install on Firefox, Chrome or use as a Windows addon!

FireLinkReport Firebug Extension

I came across FireLinkReport 0.1 Firebug extension addon today and it is quite a useful tool to use to view information about links on a current page you are browsing. If you are not using the Firebug addon yet, you are way behind the times as well. Firebug is a must for web page elements. Getting back to FireLinkReport, Ann Smarty has a great run down at Search Engine Journal on using the extension to research on page links. It can give you a quick snap shot of ever link on the page for better understanding link structure of a well ranking site or who that site is out bound linking to. This is a great tool to quickly help examining your competition.

Free Sites For Royalty Free Stock Images

I am no graphics guru by any means, but can hold my own in Photoshop. I do all of my own graphic work and often times I am on the hunt for the perfect royalty free image to use in a logo or header design. Over the years I have collected quite a few bookmarks to great sites that offer these royalty free images, but today I came across a post that boast 180+ such sites. Wow! Now I must admit I have not heard of or visited well over half of these sites, but the list is quite impressive. One is bound to find what they are looking for in one of these many sites. Most of these sites do require you to register as well. I would bookmark this post and even copy the URLS into your bookmark folder for image sources for future reference. Happy image hunting.

Yet Another Clean Wordpress Theme

A reader of mine knows how much I like clean Wordpress template themes with tons of white space and emailed me one that I had yet to see. The name of the theme is Plain Scape and you can see a screenshot below. The color is easy to change in the CSS file as well and with a clean logo, makes for a great theme for a niche site. Looks really sharp in maroon or dark red as well. If you know of a clean Wordpress theme with tons of whitespace that I might like, feel free to send it to me and I will post it in the future.

EDITED TO ADD: Seems his hosting is none to good. You can also get the template here I believe. http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/plainscape

Google Browser Size Tool

I came across an interesting post on the new Google tool from Website Magazine that test your website pages for visible call to actions. Here is the post right here. The browser size tool is right here. The post makes a great point about how visible the call to action sections like Subscribe Now and Advertise Today are visible to 99% of all surfers. Google has a page dedicated as well to How Google Browser Size Works. This is definitely something to think about, especially moving forward with design and layout aspects of your sites. I am sure this will be further expounded on more by experts as we get into the new year. Fascinating to say the least and does indeed make sense.

A Great Wordpress Template For Niche Sites

I am pretty picky when it comes to templates I use for niche sites. I have learned the cleaner the better. I do use the Arthemia theme that is suggested in the new N1WAY BANS Guide among several others. I recently found another that fits the bill as far as what I look for in a theme. The theme is called the Ads Theme and a demo can be found here. The colors are easy to change in the CSS and it has top navigation as well. It looks great with niche sites and products. Give it a try on your next site.


EDITED TO ADD: Gerry reminded me I forgot add the correct download link: http://www.eblogtemplates.com/ads-theme/

Widget Context Wordpress Plugin

I am setting up some testing on a few sites in which I will be using this Widget Context Wordpress Plugin to show Ebay listings in the sidebar for each different product page. Each page will have it's own tailored product listings depending on what product is being pushed on each page. I have not set it up yet, but I do believe it will fit my needs. Regardless, the plugin has a number of uses that I will explore as well. The whole idea is to put more focus on selling higher profit items via a few other affiliate programs in the main page portion, without pushing the auctions down past the fold and losing visibility. If anyone has used this plugin, please comment below. Or you might have seen a better plugin to do the same thing. I will report back on this soon.

Here is some more on what this plugin can do.

Products & Ads Above The Fold

I was asked a question by email last night from a newer blog reader who wanted to know what "above the fold" meant. I thought I would address it to give some clarity on it and how it relates to your niche sites.

The fold refers to the section of a web page that is visible to the surfer without having to scroll. The fold will vary on a site depending on the resolution settings on a visitor's screen and the type layout or template you are using. When a surfer arrives to your site, you will want to try your best to have the most important ads or product listings visible to the surfer without them having to scroll down. This is pretty basic stuff from a web advertising point of you, but is also over looked quite a bit. Niche site builders have a tendency to become blind to the basic things, I do it myself on certain site characteristics myself.

If you have a page with a ton of unique content on the page, odds are it is pushing the product listings or ads below the fold. If need be, list your product listings in the middle of the content between heading changes or paragraphs. Make sure to check each page in both Explorer and Firefox and in different resolution settings on your home computer. You should be able to tweak everything to the point where most users will see the ads or products above the fold.

Below is a link to the statistics of most commonly used screen resolution settings of internet users.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

Great Landing Pages Make Great Filters

One of the biggest overlooked things, especially in the new N1WAY BANS Guide is the the landing page. The landing page can act as a filter to better guide the surfer to EXACTLY where they want to go. Obviously we all want the surfer to come from the SERPS to the exact page of the item they want to buy, but depending on the search they use, that may not always be the case. By building a great landing page such as this one, the surfer now has 3 main choices, 16 choices to other filter landing pages and 2 escape links to other sites with your affiliate code. If you build these landing pages the correct way, you will also increase your chances on product items clicked being exactly what the surfer MIGHT buy and thus scoring better in the new EPN payment structure. I have seen a few sites by readers that try to bypass this page and I think they truly do not understand their usefulness as not only another page that can garner organic traffic, but a page that can filter broad searches that arrive to your site.

Landing Page For Less Important Pages

Now that page rank sculpting is all but dead, we need to concentrate more on where exactly to flow the juice of the site. Let me again reiterate, that I am more concerned about a page getting the most juice possible than I am about page rank itself. Often times we put our Privacy Policy, About Us and Contact pages all linked off of the front page of the site. These are pages that we really do not care so much about ranking for or getting maximum juice. If you you have 10 links to internal pages on your home page and 3 are the type pages I listed, you are only getting 1/10th of the juice sent to the more important pages of the site.

Now lets say we only had an About Us page linked from the home page navigation and on the About Us page we used it as a landing page to link to our Contact Us and Privacy Policy pages. This would remove 2 links from the original 10 and thus you would be driving down 1/8th of the juice to the more important pages. Also by not having those 3 pages linked from EVERY page of the site, should an internal page develop good backlinks and juice, it would not be wasted on the lesser important pages.

In the past, we would just tried to nofollow the unimportant pages links to drive the juice elsewhere, but now that it has been announced that nofollow still takes it's portion of the link juice regardless, it makes more sense to better structure the site by having less links to unimportant pages on the site. You can call the landing page anchor text whatever you want really so the surfer knows where they are going. Instead of just "About Us" you could title it, "About Us/Privacy Policy/Contact", it really is up to you.

Things That Make You Go Hmm - Duplicate Navigation Links

I get some great questions from time to time via email from readers. One really made me go hmm this morning. The email asked if duplicate navigation links took away from page rank flow. Let me show you want he meant. There are sites that will have a logo in the header linked to the home page, a navigation text link that might say "Home" that links to the home page and perhaps even the site name in the footer linked to the home page. In essence this is three links on one page linking to the same page. The question was, say there are 7 links to other internal pages on a page and in essence 10 total links on the page, would this mean that each link gets 1/10th of the juice or 1/8th being as 3 of the links are duplicate. The closest I can really find to an answer is here from SEO Moz.

Quoted from link:

p.s. Two good questions were asked in the comments that deserve addressing in the post. First, this would appear to apply to the position in the code, not on the actual visual representation of the page, as Google isn't currently running 30+ billion documents through visual page analysis. Second, as far as PR "leaks" go, ideally you'd only want one link from any page to any other, but the original PR formula appears to do this for you, as they don't consider multiple votes for a URL by a single page to provide benefit (each page can only vote for another once).

Also if you search Google website itself, you will come across pages that have more than one link to the same page. So if they do it, you should be fine without leaking juice passed. Now let me say, I am not so concerned about page rank as I am just link juice. Page rank is just a number in my eyes. I want the most juice passed from page to page.

Now another interesting thing I did come across in my research is that by trying to use the site name in the footer as anchor text linking to your home page, COULD cause a Google penalty. Read more here from Rand.

Ok, now for my own recommendations. If your logo is linked to your homepage, I would at the very least make sure you have the ALT text value of the image filled out as you should do with EVERY image regardless. In my opinion by looking at my own stats on various sites, I see very very few people actually click the image anyway. So in my opinion I would un-link it. Secondly if you have a few links to the home page with the anchor text "Home", I do not see it as a problem. Thirdly though if you are using the site name text in the footer linked to the home page in addition to an anchor driven "home" link, I would un-link as well. Let me say though that if it is a brandable name, I do not see a problem, but if it is targeted spammy keyword phrase, I would un-link it. Normally this is just a copyright notice of the site and to avoid trouble I would un-link it. The same goes for a site that may have the site name in the header as an h1 header tag. I am going to even un-link it on this very blog to see if it hurts anything.

If you make ANY of these changes, I would notate them in your journal of the changes you made and when you changed them. Watch your rankings on some of your highest ranking keywords and see if it makes ANY difference good or bad. You can always go back and undo the changes, but I really think my suggestions hold water based on the research.

Keep up the great questions as well. I lost an hours worth of production, but did enjoy it. If something else makes you go hmm, let me know.