Ultimate Marketing Strategies Blog

Socrates

There’s a new WordPress theme on the block called Socrates.  I’ve been checking out Socrates over the last few days and I have to say that it has some really cool features specifically designed for anyone in Internet Marketing.  In fact, I liked it so much that I installed it on this site.

It’s incredibly flexible and has very easy to use menus to set up all the various monetization features you are likely to need.

This theme was designed specifically towards online marketers, so you find it covers all the areas you need without having to resort to multiple plugins and customizing PHP or CSS code.

Socrates Features

Some of the features include:

• Custom Header Design System
• 160 + Niche Headers
• 1000’s of Design Combinations
• Built in Clickbank Monetization
• Built in Social Media Slider
• WordPress Tutorials and Training
• Internet Marketing Training videos

Out of all those features, the one I like best is the collection of headers available.  There are header images for all the major niches and it has a really cool feature where you can overlay your title (as well as change the font and size) over the image.

See the short video below for a brief summary of some of the features.

If you’ve been in Internet Marketing for long enough, you know just how important it is to submit articles to article directories for effective backlinking/SEO results.

There are many article spinning products and services currently available, but pretty much all suffer from the same symptom of producing poorly spun articles that at best, are barely acceptable to most article directories, and at worst, they are virtually unreadable and have a high rejection rate.

I’d heard a lot of good things about The Best Spinner, so I decided to check it out for myself and see if it lived up to all the spin (pun intended).

Luckily, you can get a $7 trial, where you get 7 days to try the software to see if you like it, and if you decide to keep it, you are charged $77 per year.

What’s Good About The Best Spinner?

The main thing that sets The Best Spinner apart from other similar spinning software products is the user generated thesaurus. This means that whenever The Best Spinner shows you a list of synonyms, the list of suggestions has been built over time by the thousands of users.  The software uses a weighted system, so that the more people use a particular synonym, the higher up the list it will be.  This means that you generally get very useful set of synonyms to choose from.

The Best Spinner will also work with short phrases as well as single words.  Some spinning products will only do single word replacements.  Having phrase replacements increases the uniqueness of the article.

Some of the other very good features of The Best Spinner are:

• The ability to export to various spintax formats.  This is great if you want to use your spun article with another product or website that uses a different spin syntax.  You can even define your own syntax.
• Nested Spinning.  The Best Spinner has unlimited levels of nested spinning, which you can color code up to four levels in order to make it easier to track.
• You can automatically generate up to 250 spun articles from your spun text.
• There is a word count and uniqueness percentage which is constantly updated as you work on your text.
• You can save a “Favorites” list of commonly used synonyms that you commonly use in your articles.

What’s Bad About The Best Spinner?

To be honest, I can’t really find any bad points.  Possibly the only thing that might put some people off is the $77 per year charge, but I consider that to be a pretty good payment for a piece of software that works really well.  Don’t forget that the annual subscription fee ensures you always have access to the latest thesaurus.

Conclusion

The Best Spinner is a very useful tool to have in the arsenal of the Internet Marketer if you use it wisely.   Like any Internet Marketing piece of software, it’s not a magic bullet, but it sure makes the process of unique article generation a lot easier and much faster.

What is Caching and Why Does it Matter?

Caching is a facility where data is stored so that subsequent requests  can be served faster.

WordPress pages use PHP (a web programming language).  Every time a page from your WordPress site is viewed by a user, there are all sorts of overheads from having all the PHP code generate the HTML and database calls.  The more users you have hitting your site, the slower the page responses will be.  A cache keeps a static HTML version of the pages, so that if a user requests a page that has already been viewed, they get the cached version and the website doesn’t need to suffer all overheads of generating the page.

In terms of SEO,  Google announced that that page speed will be a factor in search rankings.   The following quote is taken from the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

“Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.“

I’ve emphasised the last part in bold as I think it is a very important point.

While Google only implemented this change in April 2010, and they state that speed doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page, you can be assured that page speed will become a much more important factor as time goes on.

Watch the video below to see what Google have to say about page speed.

WordPress Cache Plugins

There are quite a few WordPress cache plugins.  Some are very specific like “del.icio.us cached++” which caches del.icio.us bookmarks from its RSS feed, but most of the caching plugins are designed to make your WordPress site serve pages faster.

Probably the two most popular caching plugins are WP-Cache and WP Super Cache.  I’ve been using WP Super Cache on all my WordPress sites, but I built a new site today and decided to revisit the plugins.  One cache plugin that caught my eye was Quick Cache.  While I have no specific complaints with WP Super Cache, I decided to give Quick Cache a go.

Main Differences Between Quick Cache & WP Super Cache

The following summary comes from the Quick Cache documentation:

Conclusion

If you have a WordPress site, then enabling caching should be one of the essential tasks you perform.  Make sure you add it to your default list of plugins to be installed.

If you use Firefox, then the Google Page Speed plugin is a very handy tool for measuring the response times of pages.

There are so many article directories available that you could spend a lifetime trying to post to all of them.  However, that would be a monumental waste of time and effort as not all article directories are created equal.  What you really want to do is target your articles to the directories that are going to have the most authority.

In general, this means posting to article directories that have a high PR and have dofollow links.  That last point is very important.  There’s not much point in posting your article to a directory that has nofollow links as that will have minimal/no effect on your search engine rankings.

I’ve put together the following list of what I consider to be the best directories to post to.  If you’ve discovered any others that are valuable, please let me know.

Also, if you are serious about writing articles, you should read my The Best Spinner Review.

There’s a lot of information, misinformation and myths regarding nofollow/dofollow links, so I thought I write a short summary to hopefully clear up some of the confusion.

Firstly, some background.  The ‘nofollow’ HTML attribute was designed by Google in 2005.  The original intent of the design was to prevent all the comment spam that were being posted to blogs from actually being counted as a valid backlink.  I’m sure you’ve seen your blog or forum being blasted with all sorts of spam comments with links to pretty much any type of product/service you can imagine.

So what does ‘nofollow’ actually mean?

A ‘nofollow’ link tells some (mostly Google) search engines that the link should not be counted in the search engine rankings for the site the link points to.

Note that there is no definitive guide as to exactly how each major search engine treats nofollow links as they don’t actively publish the information and sometimes the information they do publish can be contradicted by results obtained via experimental testing.

That said, the following table based on information from Wikipedia, should be accurate enough for most purposes:

Here’s a short video from the horses mouth (so to speak), that talks about how Google treats nofollow links:

What is a dofollow link?

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a dofollow link.  The term dofollow was coined as a way of referring to a link that wasn’t a nofollow link.  Another way of putting it is that any link that doesn’t have the nofollow HTML attribute is treated as a standard link and is followed by search engines.

A dofollow link is a lot more valuable in terms of SEO than a nofollow link.  That’s not to say a nofollow link is worthless, but you are much better spending your time getting dofollow links.

If you do a Google search for “dofollow blog”, you’ll find plenty of resources to add your links to.

A while ago,  Free Traffic System users were asked to send niches where they need established sites with targeted traffic from search engines. The information was gathered in a Request a Niche poll.

Below you can see a table with the results of the most demanded niches.

This information is very useful if you are planning on creating a niche site with the intention of building traffic and ranking and then selling the domain.  It is also useful for knowing what niches people are wanting to most be involved with.

Every now and then, you come across a really effective, but simple tool that is great for SEO.  The Rank Decoding Engine is one of these.  It is totally free (just requires entering your email address) and is a very small download.

Rank Decoding Engine is a  very clever piece of software.  It basically reverse engineer’s the Google’s result pages.    The most amazing and unique feature of this software is that it shows sites that Google regards as  trusted sites with high authority, and that’s why they are ranking consistently well.  In case you weren’t aware, Google have publicly stated that links from authority sites are more important than links from lesser ranked sites.

Here’s a couple of quotes from the horses mouth:

• “Thematic incoming links from authority sites carry more weight than on-page optimization”. – Matt Cutts (Google Engineer and unofficial Google SEO spokesman).

• “Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote from Page A to Page B.  Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help make other pages important. – Google

So targeting trusted, high authority site in your niche is a great way of boosting your site’s authority and ranking with Google.

You can download the free Rank Decoding Engine from

http://www.crowdmountainsite.com/decoder

Here’s a short video showing how powerful this tool is: