Lisa Angelettie

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Scribe Vs. SEOPressor: Which Plugin Is Best?

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Every entrepreneur and internet marketer has their particular skill. I have a knack for writing search engine optimized articles. I am always looking for better ways to accomplish good SEO, and so I’ve looked into the two WordPress plugins promising me an easier path to well optimized articles: Scribe and SEOPressor.

Scribe WordPress Plugin

Scribe WordPress Plugin

COST
Scribe is a plugin that requires a monthly subscription. I purchased my subscription when it was first released so I pay about $27 per month.

FEATURES
For your monthly fee you get to make 300 SEO evalutions of any article you are writing in your WordPress blog. This evaluation takes a look at your SEO details such as your title tag, meta description, and your article body to assess what your major and minor keywords are, the percentage that you are using them in the article, and an assessment of what you need to do to make the article 100% search engine optimized.

PROS
I really liked this plugin. I felt that I really learned how to tweak my articles for the search engines using the optimizer. I also felt that the creators of this plugin really designed it to be user friendly AND knew exactly what features were necessary. This is not a bloated plugin.

It’s also NOT a janky plugin. I never had any problems with installation or running it. Updates are regular with WordPress updates, etc.

CONS
I think after a time, the developers realized that they needed a few more features to justify the 27/mo fee. So they added a few features that you can access via the scribe website. I wasn’t impressed. I think that you are either going to invest in this plugin for the optimization with the WordPress admin OR you’re not going to do it all.

Also, after you’ve done a few optimizations, I think you get “the formula”. I don’t know if everyone is going to continue to pay $27 per month to use this as what will undoubtedly become a sort of “spell check” for article marketers. To keep this plugin current and use as a sort of SEO check of my articles, I would have to pay less for this. A one time fee or $10 per month maybe.

LINEAGE
Scribe is created by CopyBlogger’s Brian Clark. So there is a reason why the plugin works well and why it costs what it does. He is a trusted name in marketing and SEO.

SEOPressor

SEOPressor WordPress Plugin

COST
There are two options for buying SEOPressor. One site plugin use is a one-time $47 fee. To use it on multiple sites costs $97. That fee also includes installation.

FEATURES
SEOPressor works pretty much like Scribe albeit a little differently. Basically you set up each article to be optimized for one keyword. (With Scribe you can optimize your article for more than one keyword – primary and secondary keywords.) After you’ve chosen your keyword and written your article, you can go obtain your SEOPressor score and you will get results telling you what things are well optimized in your article and the things that you still need to add. Just like Scribe you are trying to achieve a score of over 90%, preferably 100%.

PROS
I think that SEOPressor is a little easier to use for the novice, simply because you are optimizing the article for ONE keyword. Things with Scribe could get a little more difficult because it pulls both primary and secondary keywords from your article. It was easy to install and set up, and the quick start guide was simple and easy to use. It’s also easier to promote this plugin if you are a marketer, because it is in the Clickbank marketplace.

The biggest pro is the cost. I think that this plugin basically does everything that Scribe does (the important things anyway) for a fraction of the cost.

CONS
I used Scribe for several months before I tried SEOPressor, so I could see that each calculated their respective SEO scores differently. Their “formula” for success is a bit different from each other. So your articles are optimized by two slightly different standards. As a longtime web writer, I think that I lean more towards Scribe’s optimization recipe. There are a few things about SEOPressor’s that I don’t agree with.

It’s also difficult to optimize your article towards that one keyword when article marketers write lots of articles that target long-tail keyword phrases. You cannot use those in SEOPressor.

Also, I used the optimizer and sometimes found errors. It was not seeing things that I had in place. So that was a little frustrating.

LINEAGE
This plugin is developed by SEO expert Daniel Tan. Not the same legacy as Clark, but definitely a respected marketer.

BOTTOM LINE: I own both and am still comparing and contrasting, but can say that if you are a beginner SEOPressor does the job for less money, It might be the way to go. If you are an advanced marketer and want to use the optimizer for clients, etc. then Scribe may be the better option. There is slightly a bit more flexibility as to the results you can report to your clients.

What’s New In Thesis Version 1.8?

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If you use Thesis as the framework for your WordPress blog, then you may have been notified that a new version: Thesis 1.8 has just been released. As with any upgrade, I always want to know what new and improved functionality will I get (if any), and I figured you would want to know the same before bothering to upgrade.

Feature 1 – Header Image Uploader
Yippee! One of the things that most of my WordPress clients need me to do for them when customizing their Article SEO optimized site, is to add their header image. This has been made totally easy with the new image uploader. And if your image is too big, Thesis will resize it to fit your site. This qualifies as a feature worth upgrading for.

Feature 2 – SEO Character Counters
Search engines only show a certain amount of characters in a search result. That’s why your titles and descriptions need to be air tight, but this feature will show you a word count and how many characters you have left. Typically like you see in an article directory interface. This is a pretty good upgrade for SEO novices, but pros pretty much know how to keep my titles, etc. short and sweet.

Feature 3 – New Google Fonts
Now you can give your site more personality by choosing the right font. We were limited to a few “boring” fonts, but now there are a lot more choices. Best of all, the fonts are all web-safe, directly served from Google’s server, and FREE! There were ways to get around the boring font thing, but this feature  just makes things a lot easier. Go right to Thesis “design options” and choose fonts for different sections of your site. New look in 3 seconds flat!

Feature 4 – WordPress Nav Menu Support
This feature supports WordPress 3.0’s new navigation menu builder. I haven’t used this yet so I can’t say whether or not this is a great feature.

Feature 5 – Category/Tag/Taxonomy Page Options
This feature was in 1.7 but upgraded in 1.8. Basically in a nutshell, what this does is allow you to add SEO details to your category and tag pages. PLUS you can add a unique headline and description for each category and tag page. This feature also adds full support for custom taxonomies if you choose to use them. This SEO feature is great because I have ranked for specific search terms based on the fact that I had those keywords as one of my tags. I imagine if I tweak that tag’s SEO, I’ll probably rank even higher.

Bottom line – the new features added in 1.8 are totally worth the effort of upgrading or buying the theme if you haven’t already.

*If you want the advantage of good SEO but don’t want to put out the effort, I will be offering a new service that will address both of those issues really soon. Stay tuned!

Bounce Rate: How To Improve Your High Bounce Rate

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If you publish an article blog, hopefully you are well aware of your bounce rate statistic. You can get a general look at your site’s bounce rate over at Alexa.com or you can get a more detailed look (which pages have the higher bounce rate, etc.) if you check inside your Google Analytics stats. If you already know that you have a high bounce rate, then here’s two major tips to help you improve it.

TIP #1

Create a START HERE page.
This is something that never dawned on me until I ran across one on a friend’s site. I thought it would be a great idea for all the newcomers to my site who weren’t really sure where to begin with article marketing – how to get started. So while it has been a nice way to introduce my site and my topic to new visitors, it has also helped me build my list (I guide them to signing up for my article toolkit) AND it has also helped improve my bounce rate – significantly.

New visitors who find your site through one specific article, may not know where to go next on your site once they are finished reading. Some people just happen to find your site while cruising for related topics. A great way to get people to move deeper into your site and therefore keeping them on your site LONGER which improves your high bounce rate is have a start here page.

TIP #2

Check your site’s entry pages.
If you use Google Analytics or any other type of statistics tracking tool for your site, you should be able to check what pages people use to enter your site. Of course the home page will be the first one, and you can always make tweaks to your home page to ensure that you offer the visitors several opportunities to dig deeper into your site.

But checking the other pages people enter in might shed some better light on why folks are leaving so quickly. You have to check the entry page AND the keywords they used to find the page. Your stat tool can tell you that. So for instance, if people find your page on blogging through the keywords list building, then there is probably a high chance that you will have people abandon the page. They didn’t find the content they were looking for.

You want to make sure that the content on your entry page matches the keywords that people are searching for. In another example, I have a grammar tip lesson on bear vs. bare on this site. A lot of people find this tip through the search term “too much to bear”. Now that could be because people want to know how to spell bear or bare in this sentence OR it could be that they need help because life is too much to bear.

I have left it alone because most folks seem to be looking for the proper spelling of the word for that sentence use, but this is a page that could have gone either way. So just double check that your content matches up with how the page is found. You’d be surprised the many ways that people find your pages through organic search.

If you have any other cool SEO tips you want to share on how to improve high bounce rate statistics, please share in the comment section below.

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When I Buy A Domain Should I Buy The Net Version Too?

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When I started out on the web, I remember finally making the decision to buy a domain. It was a BIG deal to me because it was one of my very first investments in my new business. Sure it was only ten bucks, but money is money:) I remember that the company I bought my domain name from offered me a chance to buy the info, org, and net version too. I bought them all.

Now there can be a case made that you should buy all your extensions so that your competitors do not have the opportunity to snatch up your keyword rich domain name in another extension. This can lead to buyer confusion. Thinking that they are coming to your site and ending up on another.

There is also another search engine optimization case you can make that you can use these other extensions as doorways into your main .com site. Which is still kind of a good idea, but NOT doing this won’t make or break your business. So I don’t know if I would bother with a  strategy where you are paying domain name fees year after year and it’s just “okay”.

So the question remains: “When I buy a domain should I buy the net version too?” My answer is – not anymore.

If you have the chance to snatch up a .com domain name for your business then you’re good. A com extension is the best and really only extension you need for your business. Why?

1. Most people recognize the .com extension.

2. When people hear a domain name, they subconsciously assume it is a .com name.

3. The search engines prefer .com extensions above the other versions although .net comes at a close second.

But the point here is that your site with a .com extension would probably outrank your competitor’s with a .net one. So worrying about your competition taking your domain names in other extensions is not as important as it once was. Com rules!

With that in mind, please recognize that the web is growing by leaps and bounds! Most businesses have created some sort of online presence. There was the explosion of social media over the past few years. People are starting their “side businesses” due to this tough economy. So it’s more important than EVER for you to grab your keyword rich COM domain names as soon as you think of them.

This includes your primary domain name, your sales page urls, any domains urls you use for testing or redirections. I learned this lesson the hard way, as one of my major competitors nabbed a lot of great keyword urls that I was hoping to secure for my business. So my advice to you is to not worry about .net extensions or any of the others, and grab the .com ones fast!

*If you absolutely cannot find the keyword domain name you want in an .com extension, then the next best thing is an .org or a .net one ( based on results in the search engines).

Thesis WordPress Theme: Adding Custom Header With Thesis Openhook

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How To Add Your Custom Header With Thesis Openhook Plugin In 60 Seconds!
This is an important post. I repeat. This is an important post. If you are about to build a WordPress Blog and are thinking of using the Thesis WordPress Theme as your framework, you can save yourself tons of customization frustration if you download the Openhook WordPress Plugin before you begin customizing your site. Why? Because it makes things so much easier. For example…

If you do a quick Google search on adding a custom Thesis header, you will find several tutorials by loyal Thesis users (such as myself:), teaching you how to customize your header by adding hook code either your custom.css file or your custom_functions file. These solutions still work but they can be messy if you don’t get the code right and you have to access those files via FTP or cPanel etc.

Instead, you can add a custom header with the Thesis Openhook plugin in about 10 seconds. No code to copy and paste, tweak, and publish. No touchy files to mess with. This is all you have to do.

Thesis Page Framework1. First, this tutorial works for adding custom headers with a Page-Framework. You can check this by going into your Thesis Design Options, then clicking on site layout, and then checking the page framework button. (This is usually checked by default when you install Thesis, but go ahead and check just to make sure.)

2. Make sure you have downloaded and updated the latest version of the Thesis Openhook Plugin.

3. Make sure you have added your header image to your media files and that you copy the complete url for where that file is located. For example: http://your wordpressblog.com/wp-content/uploads/xxxx.jpg

Your header dimensions will vary based on the dimensions of your site. You may be using Thesis out of the box or you may have had some tweaking done. You also want to consider how much of your prime “top of the fold” area you want to dedicate to a header. I don’t want to give much, so the dimensions for my header are 1010 x 142 pixels. My header does not have a white background so I wanted it to reach completely from left to right. That’s why it’s so wide. Typical out of the box dimensions could be 959 x 150 pixels, but if your header has a white background you could actually play a lot around with the dimensions.

4. Click on the Thesis Openhook link and scroll to the Header hook. You can simply scroll down to find the header hook area or you can use the “select a hook” scroll down bar in the bottom right hand corner to find the header hook area.

Thesis Header Hook

4. Now here’s the easy part, all you have to do is add a little html code to establish the image location. Example: <img src=”http://your wordpressblog.com/wp-content/uploads/xxxx.jpg”>

5. If you want to make your header image clickable, just add a little more html code: <a href=”YourSiteLink.com”><img src=”http://your wordpressblog.com/wp-content/uploads/xxxx.jpg”></a> *(This step is optional)

6. To finish, click on the “Remove Thesis Default Header” box, so that your title and subtitle doesn’t appear on top of your new header image. Instead, your header takes the place of the header title and subtitle.

7. Click on the Little Save Button.

8. Ta-da! Your header image will appear and all is right with the world.

Ultimate WordPress Ping List: Free PDF Download

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Wordpress Ping ListI always teach my article marketing students that it’s to your ultimate advantage to write and publish some of your best articles to your own website, preferably a WordPress blog. So as you write new blog articles and post them to your WordPress blog, a great way to attract more traffic to those articles is by letting other people know (right away) that you have posted new articles on your blog. This is done very effectively via WordPress through your ping list.

If you have a WordPress blog already, it is currently set up by default to use a service such as ping-o-matic to announce on the web that you have posted new content to your blog – but to really see a significant traffic increase to your website there are quite a few other services that you should use and add to your ping list.

It’s important that your ping list stay fresh AND that you do not ping the same service with duplicate content. That’s why I have compiled an ultimate ping list that should help improve traffic and buzz for your blog. Plus – no opt-in required and it’s free:)

DOWNLOAD THE WORDPRESS ULTIMATE PING LIST

One more thing, remember that implementing your ping list is only part of an overall healthy SEO Article Marketing plan. There are plenty of other tweaks you can make that will make your WordPress blog even more of a traffic magnet. For example, there is a WordPress plugin that I use in conjunction with my Ping list that enhances its usability. These are SEO tweaks that have been crucial to the visibility of my site in a sea of tough competition. Anything you can do to help your content stand out among the rest, is a tweak worth the time and effort.

Enjoy!

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Should I Buy A .Com, .Net, .Org, or .Info Domain?

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Thinking of building a new site? Have you considered registering  a .com, .net, .org, or .info domain name for it? Well, in the world of publishing information on the web, it is always important to consider some basic (SEO) search engine optimization factors when writing articles and building other content for your business. One of those basic SEO strategies is to pick a SEO domain extension for your new site, blog, landing pages, etc. that the search engines view as important. That will help make the content that you have on that particular site be seen as more important.

There is a hierarchy when it comes to domain extensions, and it’s more important than ever to know this information and more importantly act on it because as time marches on and the web grows – domain names are being reserved by the boatload. Don’t let your competitors get all the good keyword rich domain names!

.COM
This domain extension is the most common and the most important in the eyes of the search engines. It is considered the industry standard, and so my first recommendation is to always try to secure a keyword domain name in the .com extension. I mean try really hard. Most people who surf and search online think in terms of .com

Of course if the name doesn’t make sense for your business, then don’t. But if you can find one or better yet several domain names with your keywords in it AND it has a .com extension then you should secure them. Domain names are really a small investment in a long-term SEO strategy that will benefit your website for years to come. I always tell folks at seminars and during coaching calls, that my one biggest regret is that I didn’t secure enough .com keyword domains when I had the chance.

.NET
This is the second runner up. The next most important extension in terms of a regular business. If you are securing keyword domain names for a “for profit” online business — then .net is the way to go if you cannot find your name with the .com extension which is happening more often these days.

Now here’s the thing with this extension, if you have a “killer” .com domain and can grab the .net for it – then do it. You can always use it as a doorway page to your main site as long as you add different content to it. But you do not need a .net domain for every .com you own. The .com holds much more weight and is enough to have in the grand scheme of things.

Also, if your #1 competitor has the domain name you are looking for with the .com extension, then I wouldn’t bother with the .net. You’d have to work too hard to outrank them in the search engines. Just look for a better .com name.

.ORG
Now .org domain names hold as much and sometimes even more weight then .net extensions, but I put them third because it looks really silly to have an .org domain name for a magic tricks site or a marketing site (or most “for profit” sites). In hindsight, they probably should have reserved .org names for people who really run organizations like they do for .gov or .edu sites. But I digress, my point here is that the search engines give me them just as much value as a .net – so if you can’t find the domain name you want in either a .com or .net extension than this is third best option.

Now even if you do run a real organization, like a non-profit for children or something, you STILL will do better in the search engines with a .com – so keep that in mind.

.INFO
Many registrars  run specials on .info names. You can pick these up some days for .99 cents. So do I have to tell you the importance of this extension? There isn’t much importance placed on them at all. I don’t know why, really no one does. The fact is that the search engines do not view .info websites as very important. SEO experts have run a lot of tests on this theory as well. They have created similar sites at the same time, but one as a .com and one as a .info. Even with little competition, the .com ranked very quickly and over 4  months later – you still couldn’t find the .info site in the search engine results at all. So need I say more. Don’t buy these.

While there are .BIZ and a lot of other new domain name extensions, they really do not hold too much more weight than an .net, so having said that, I think it’s better to just find a name based on the top 3 domain extensions in this hierarchy and your keywords. If you cannot find one, then you may need to reconsider your keywords or your approach to even penetrating your niche with content on the web. Grab your keyword rich seo domain names while you can.

Article Marketing SEO: Writing Your First Paragraph

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The Article Marketing SEO Series
Part III – First Things First! Writing Your First Paragraph

When the search engines decide how to rank content they look at many factors. While there are many small hidden factors on analyzing content that search engine developers will never reveal – many of us interested in article marketing seo have at least got the basics down. So far we know that the content whose keywords are found in the domain name rank well. We discussed that in detail in part 1 of this series. We also understand that article titles are extremely critical to ranking high in the search engines as well. Okay we’ve got that down. Now I want to talk to you about another often overlooked element of an article that ranks well and that’s your first paragraph.

There are some marketers who already know that the first paragraph is pretty important but do some janky stuff like stuff those first paragraphs with keywords. That’s a big no-no and very obvious to the search engines. Yet it’s critical that the search engines see that your title reflects what you are going to discuss in the article. So…

1. Unlike articles for print media, you cannot waste 100 words creating “build up” to your topic. Online media is different. You need to get straight to the point, and you do that in the first paragraph.

2. Your main keyword needs to be naturally placed in your first paragraph.  You really only need to write it once there though because you will also naturally mention it again throughout the body of your article.

3. If you have a related keyword or keyword phrase then you can add it to the first paragraph as well.

4. The search engines like when you link out to a resource related to your article’s topic. While many article directories prohibit this because they do not want directory visitors to click off their websites — it is actually a best kept SEO secret that one-way linking (in and out) is quite favored by the search engines. One link in the first paragraph is a great start. Especially if it is linked with keyword rich anchor text.

Need to catch up on the Article Marketing SEO Series? Read the series in order:

Article Marketing SEO: Introduction
Article Marketing SEO: Part I
Article Marketing SEO: Part II

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