Pennies for Wink Publishing

I had advised against updating to WP 3.1 because I thought that All-in-One-SEO had been broken with the update. I checked faithfully for an update to AiO, but none was forthcoming. I had gone to their forum to see if there was any further information. There was a post that seemed to deal with the situation, but it had not been approved for publication by the forum Admin. I thought that they must all be off on a Ski Vacation and that no one was minding the store.

What had caused me to think that there was a problem was the sudden appearance of an editor box for AiO-SEO that I had not noticed in the past. It has space for post title, description, and keywords, all of which are blank. I did not realize that this was an editor box and thought that it indicated a problem.

This evening I made a post on a blog that I had updated. Everything went smooth. I checked the source code finally and found that the title, description, and keywords were there in the head section as they should be. I then went to other blogs and checked source code and again found no problems. But whenever I updated to 3.1 the editor box showed up.

I went to a blog that had not been updated and noticed that the layout was different. I looked further and found that the editor box was there, it was just so far below the fold that I had not noticed it in the past. With the update WP cleaned up the UI and moved the default position for the AiO editor above the fold on my monitor. All-in-One-SEO was not broken by the WP update, so there was no need for an update at this time.

I am now sounding the ‘All Clear’ as far as the WP update is concerned. I am about half way through the process (I have lots of blogs). As soon as I finish this post I will go and complete that task. Then I may come back and write up the saga of the scrambled database.

I checked and at the time there was still no update from All-in-One-SEO. I still expect an update shortly.

Last evening I stopped by their forum. There was a post about the problem, but it was marked as still waiting admin moderation. This could mean that the team is very busy scratching their heads and trying to figure out how to fix what WordPress broke. Of course, it could also mean that they are on a skiing holiday.

If you don’t post more than once or twice a day to your WP blog you should probably go ahead with the update. WordPress updates generally have some security enhancements as well as bug fixes. If you use AiO-SEO expect a few minutes extra per post to handle the work that is usually automated.

I had done the update on two of the blogs to which I post a good bit of content. Actually only one of those is very active, the other only draws one or two articles a day on average. It takes three to five minutes extra per post for me to prepare these articles for publication. With a higher post count this extra time can add up. I am glad that I caught this before I updated some blogs that are even busier.

I will keep you informed of the situation through this blog, so check back for the latest information.

There is a new update available for WordPress! This brings the version number to 3.1.

The update appears to break the popular AllInOneSEO plugin. All in one is not able to pull the title, description, or keywords from the new update. I am sure that there will be an update from All in One soon.

My advice is to hold off on this WP update until the All in One update is available if you use that plugin. All in One typically produces an update within 24 hours if there are problems. Just check to be sure that there is an AiO update available before doing the WP update. I will post a quick note when it is published.

To bookmark your article at I Found It! you do need to register on the site. When you open the page in the upper right corner there is an option to login or register. When you fill in the registration form a verification email will be sent to you.

Click on the link in the verification email and you will be taken to your profile page on the site. There is probably a space for a website address there. Fill in any information that you want.

In the nav bar there is a submit new story link. Copy the link to your article from the article accepted email and paste it into the box on the submit new story page and click the continue button.

The script will pull some information from the site. You can edit the title or description. You should add some keywords in the tags box and select a category. Then continue with the preview and submit buttons.

Once you have registered it will only take a minute to submit your bookmarks in the future. Please consider checking the upcoming stories and vote by clicking on a star for any titles that you find interesting. The script counts the votes and moves the stories to the front page when they get a few votes.

Bonus Tip: If you add the I Found It! site to your favorites once registered it will only take a minute to bookmark your articles. A bookmark is a second tier link that can help your article, and your links,  get indexed.

I am declaring the new Social Bookmarking site open for business. There are still some tweaks that I need to do as soon as I find my way around the template a bit better, but I have achieved most of my design objectives and need to start adding some content.

As soon as there are a few members and some content to show I will begin to promote the site to help it get indexed. I will be adding links to some of my other sites and pages, but some article bookmarks and some members voting on the listings would help. I am including a link in my ‘article approved’ emails to facilitate bookmarking your articles directly.

Copy the article url from your email and click on the link to I Found It – Here’sTheSite. Just login or register for your account. (Note to Self: Register an user account so that I know about the registration process.) When you are logged in paste the article url in the box on the first screen. The software will pull your page title and description from your site, but you may edit those if you wish. For your articles you may want to use something similar to your article summary. Fill in the reCaptcha code and click  the ‘Preview and Submit’ button. You will be taken to a page with your formatted submission and a ‘Submit’ button. Click the submit button and that job is finished.

Your submission will appear on the ‘Upcoming News’ page. While you are on the site please check the upcoming stories page. If any of the articles catch your eye please enter a vote for them. When an article receives a few votes it is moved to the ‘Published News’ page, the home page of the site. The links on the upcoming stories page are NoFollow but the links on the published news page should be DoFollow links. According to the developer it is set up this way to discourage spammers. I will be checking as soon as stories begin to hit the front page and make adjustments as necessary to insure that your links can become do follow. (Don’t tell anybody, but I may vote up a couple of my submissions so that there is something on the home page. I would rather that you take care of that, though.)

As I write this the only category is ‘News’. I will add categories for articles, blog posts, and an I Found It category for other pages. These may or may not be done by the time that you read this  post. If you have any suggestions for other good categories please leave a comment to this post. (Right now comments are open for two weeks from the post date, if it seems important I will relax that rule.)

One other suggestion that I would like to advance is that you send a link to your lists or publish a link to the site somewhere. Traffic to the site (and links) will help everybody! If you have loyal followers you could suggest that they register and vote on your submissions. The site link is: http://www.heresthesite.com/

As I have threatened I have added a share button to the pages of my article directories. I placed the buttons in the nav bar at the top of the page.

The buttons look like this:

They are displayed in the nav bar at the top of the page after the RSS link. I  had originally thought to put them on the article pages, but a forum I visit has them in the nav bar and so I thought, why not? If a visitor arrives at the home page they should see the buttons on their initial scan of the page and know where to find them. If they arrive directly to an article I think that they should also see them.

There are four direct access buttons that appear to be somewhat random, but FaceBook and Myspace have shown up in all cases that I have noticed. If you mouse over the + button or the word share a dropdown box opens with the most popular options directly available. If you click on the more button a pop-up opens with a full list of bookmarking sites, over 300 choices. This is the service from AddThis.com. If you have a site and would like to add a share button they have several options from which to choose.

The buttons make it very easy to social bookmark a page. The social bookmarking sites get crawled very often. Bookmarking an article is a good way to improve the chances that the article (and your links) get indexed. When you get an ‘article approved’ email I suggest that you take a minute to visit the article and place a bookmark or two.

PS: I use this article script in places on several of my sites. I have set the bookmark buttons at the top of the left nav column on some of those sites. If you have a minute check out the page on the PC App Store site and tell me if you think that location is better or if you like the way it is done in the nav bar better. Thanks!!

What are second tier backlinks?

These are links pointing to your backlinks. The RSS feeds that I have recommended provide second tier backlinks.

Why should I have second tier backlinks?

A backlink is only of value to you if it is indexed. You produce articles and have them distributed to get backlinks. This is great in theory and does work, but not all content on all sites is indexed. A second tier backlink can improve the chance that your content is indexed and provide you with the backlink that you have worked to get.

How can I get second tier backlinks?

There are many ways to get second tier backlinks both by manual means and by using various tools. Social bookmarking is a good way to get a second tier backlink. You can do this manually or you can use a social submitter tool. I am looking into putting a bookmarking button on your article pages that will help you or your readers to bookmark the page. I will probably set up a social bookmarking site in the near future, watch for an announcement.

You have an author RSS feed available through your profile page. Pinging the RSS feed whenever you get an article acceptance email is quick and easy. You can also submit your feed to RSS aggregator sites. The quick and easy way to do this is by using the RSS submitter tool available as a free service to members of the IMTalk SEO Forum. The tool will build pages on 5 RSS aggregator sites. These pages will pull your RSS feed so any time that a new article is published it will show up on these pages. This is a set and forget operation and is worth the few minutes that it will take to set it up.

The Admin at the IMTalk forum has just released a new service. This is available to members through a credit system. It is not a free tool, but the design and implementation make it a good value in my opinion. There is an introductory price offered at the present time. I suggest that you look over the offer page at:  http://www.imtalk.org/cmps_index.php?pageid=IMT-Supercharged-Bookmarks This is not a long sales letter filled with hype. It is a description of the tool and what it can do for you.

I have been a member of this forum for several months and have used all of the available tools. I was invited to beta test the SuperCharged BookMarks tool. While there has not been enough time to fully evaluate the results, the early information looks very promising. I submitted a site on the fast track 24 hour submission schedule. Two days later I did a search for the site url in Google. I found listings of three of the submission sites in positions 21, 22, and 23 out of over 39,000 results. This proves that the sites are getting crawled and indexed rapidly.

There is a rapidly growing thread in the forum announcing the tool. The reviews by those who participated in the beta testing are listed there as well as general questions and comments. If you are interested in further information the thread would be a good read:  http://www.imtalk.org/f42/1589-imt-supercharged-bookmarks-boost-your-backlinks-rankings-sales-|-low-%240-01-per-backlink.html

Do you have any other suggestions or comments on the topic of second tier backlinks? Leave a comment!

There was a second quick update to Akismet, and now All-In-One-SEO has been updated. I have too many WP blogs!! I need to visit many of them anyway, so this will only take an extra few minutes of my time.

I am also doing beta testing of a new bookmarking solution. I will let you know the results. If it lives up to its expectations I will feel confident in recommending it to you.

Update: This is the first time that I recall that AIOS has pushed out an update that did not require that you re-enable the plugin after the update. I suspect that the reason for that was to walk you past the donate button one more time. I did not think that it was a particularly friendly approach, but I do believe that developers should get paid.

Do you have a WordPress blog? WordPress pushed out their latest update last night. Following close on its heels is an update for Akismet, the useful anti-spam plugin that comes bundled with WP.

It is always a good idea to update to the latest version whenever there is an update available. The new version number for WordPress is 3.0.5. If you are running an earlier version you really should update. WordPress updates often offer improved security as well as any bug fixes that are needed.

It is not uncommon for updates to your plugins to be released when there is a WP update. If you have not updated WP already, after you do the update click on your plugins icon and check for updates. Either the update will be listed under Akismet or there will be a notification that an update is available in the line at the top of the page. Other plugins may be updated soon, but I feel that it is important to do the update to WP and then update the plugins if necessary, rather than waiting for the dust to clear.

Have you done the update, yet??

There is a new tool available from the IMTalk forum. I discussed this in my previous post, but now I have implemented this for my feeds and suggest that you submit your author feed using this tool.

This can greatly enhance your article marketing efforts. You are paying for article submission services one way or another. Article marketing is a proven way to produce quality backlinks to your sites. But getting your articles published is not enough. Your articles must be indexed in order for those backlinks to count. To be sure that your articles are indexed they need some backlinks as well. The RSS Submitter is a painless way to get some backlinks to your articles.

IMT RSS Submitter
This tool will submit your RSS Feed to my private network of RSS Directories/Aggregators, then it will ping each created page to 33 ping services*, which will result in many backlinks towards your URLs (web pages, blog posts, backlinks, etc.).

How To Use the Tool

This tool is provided free of charge to Nemanja’s forum members, so you will need to register for the forum to use the tool. Once registered the tool is very easy to use. You will need your RSS feed to submit. Provide a title for your feed and select an appropriate category, then hit the submit button. There is a button to test your feed, use that before you submit your feed to be sure that there are no problems with your feed.

To get your feed URL go to your author profile page on the directory. An easy way to get there is to click on your Author name on any of your articles on the site (links to your articles are included with the article accepted emails). On your profile page is a listing of your articles and an RSS feed icon and link to subscribe to your feed. Click on the icon or link and your feed page will open. Copy the URL from your browser address bar.

You can submit any feed that you have. I went through my article sites and blogs and picked up the RSS feed links. I then copied them to a notepad page. Then I went to the submitter and submitted each of them. If you have a blog or forum they will have an RSS feed available. I suggest collecting all of your RSS feeds and submitting them.

Why Should I Do This?

This tool establishes a feed page on up to 5 RSS aggregators or directories around the Internet. It then pings the existence of these pages to 33 services to be sure that they are noticed. On the created pages your articles will be listed with their URLs from your RSS feed. The search engines spider these sites regularly. This exponentially increases the chance that your article will be indexed and your backlink will be noted. The pages contain your RSS feed, so any time that an article is added to your feed it is listed on these sites. You only need to submit your feeds one time and the pages will continue to work for you as you submit new content for distribution.

This Internet Marketing and SEO Forum is relatively young, but already there is much good information available there. There are also a couple of other tools available and more to come. Membership may be of value to you in your Internet Marketing efforts. Getting full value from your Article Marketing efforts is certainly worth a few minutes of your time.