Vladimir Prelovac

Presenting SEO Super Comments Concept

Vladimir — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:08:27 +0000

For past couple of months I have been working on a new WordPress SEO plugin, trying to continue the long tradition of my SEO plugins like SEO Friendly Images and SEO Smart Links.

The plugin works around the idea of putting blog comments on "steroids", and basically using them to super charge your blog's SEO. And with the recently announced change in Google's way of treating nofollow links and the intrigue it brought up, the whole concept just got a new kick.

And the actual idea is quite simple. Bear with me.

Concept behind SEO Super Comments

For each user comment we will create a new dynamic page on the blog, holding the actual comment information. This page will not actually exist in WordPress database, but we will create it dynamically using a WordPress plugin.

What we instantly get in this way is big jump in site's index visible to search engines. This is possible because blog comments are crawl-able, index-able and most importantly rank-able content. Also meaning you will start to get search engine traffic for the context of the comment.

The old author link in the comments will now lead to the newly generated page. Author's URL will still be displayed (and we can do-follow it now as it will be only one external link on the page).

The concept relies around optimizing the target page using title and H1 tag using the context of the comment. So basically we will take the excerpt of the comment and use it to create the page title and H1 tag and in the body we will old the content of the comment (plus some more goodies, read on).

Since now all comments normally drain page rank even when nofollowed (bad for your site) the whole idea of using them to generate links back to your site instead and get free indexable content along the way, looks just much more appealing.

To spice things up, the dynamic comment page concept additionally features:

List of author's other comments on the post are presented (good value for the visitor, more content)
List of author's other comments on the blog (even more content, chance to interlink to your other posts, more value to the visitor)
Author url links are do-followed (option, but why not?)
Extra few clicks generated will increase your pageviews, lower the bounce rate and increase any CPM advertsing revenue
I have also created a mod for hugely popular XML sitemaps plugin to include all the new dynamic comment pages into your sitemap, so that the search engines can index the pages more quickly.

Preliminary results of the SEO Super Comments concept testing

In best tradition of 'eating one's own dog food' I have decided to test the concept and the plugin on my own site.

Two days ago I installed the plugin (no other changes are necessary to the blog, everything is automatic).

There were couple of things that I noticed:

Google seems to have liked it very much. It 'swallowed' around 1,500 comment pages in the first day (gulp!)
Search engine traffic to the new pages started coming the very first day as the graph below shows (I created a segment in Google Analytics to filter out traffic to comment pages; learn how to do that here)

Google Analytics Segment for Super Comments pages

The gain in index size for the site is massive. Although my site has only 290 posts, I do have over 6,000 comments which all are indexable separately now as pages.

The user experience is enhanced because I am able to see other comments by the same user across the topic or the entire site by clicking their name. Here is an example.

All users can get dofollow links back to their site as well as there is now only one external link on the page (this is of course at the discretion of webmaster).

The best of all, this new traffic is primarily for long tail phrases.

The users of search engines are getting more savvy and increasingly using long tail searches (I've seen a Google's chart showing 45% of all search is long tail currently).

The comment pages immediately started ranking on page 1 of search results for a huge number of phrases as the landing keywords from my test illustrate below.

SEO Super Comments is great source of long tail traffic

For a better illustration of benefits of long tail search you can quickly refer to the graph below.

Conclusion

If your site has a lot of comments, think of them about one big resource capable of generating free search traffic. This is what SEO Super Comments concept is about. Oh, and it deals with the recently announced nofollow behavior quite well.

I hope to tweak and finish the plugin in next few days, incorporating few more ideas I have. I acknowledge that usability can still be improved, remember this is just an SEO concept.

Loan to people in need, Kiva.org

Vladimir — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:42:04 +0000

I recently found about a non-profit website called Kiva.org where you can easily in a matter of minutes loan money (through paypal) to those who need it.

Turns out Kiva is big success and thousands of entrepreneurs from around the globe manage to start their business through loans and donations from Kiva. You can lend as little as $25 to people who really need this money to start their business. I lent money to help open a bar in Uganda and a family to manage their estate in Peru.

Of course if you are on the other end of the stick, you can use Kiva to gather funds for your own business idea.

Low Bounce Rate WordPress Themes

Vladimir — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:18:16 +0000

I'd like to do an experiment with WordPress themes to determine which have a low bounce rate (or generate more pageviews - making the user stay longer on the site).

Often overlooked this is one the most important metric for a site. I don't know of anyone conducting this kind of an experiment before.

Let me know your suggestions for themes to include in the test.

Also send page views/visitor that you are getting with your current theme.

To start with my stats are not to shabby: high bounce rate of 75% and 1.8 pages per visitor (google analytics data). If I put aside sometimes my boring content, it has to be due to the current theme (modified Hemingway). The last theme (my own Blue Grace) featured much better bounce rate of 55%.

I intend to gather a list of potential themes and place them on a test site with minimum of 1,000 visitors per day to get actual measurable results.

Need more info on bounce rates before you engage? Check "Fight for Second Click"

Thing of beauty: IWC Schaffhausen Portuguese Chrono Automatic – Edition Laureus Sport for Good Foundation Watch

Vladimir — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:32:24 +0000

Pilot Training: Day 08 – First solo airplane flight

Vladimir — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:25:58 +0000

Finally my first solo flight in Utva 75 aircraft happened today. After 9 hours of flight time in 8 days of training my instructor thought I was capable of flying solo and today stepped out of the airplane for the first time.

I already had a first solo flight when I was in the glider training so this did not hit me with excitement as that one did but it was still incredible. Incredibly good feeling. Piloting that sturdy machine and landing it back safely is such fun.

I did not imagine it will take me only 8 days to fly an airplane, but still I have covered only about 20% of the training. I still have to do a lot of learning, flying routes, navigation, communication. Again it seems overwhelming but at least I am a step closer.

Here is the video of my first solo landing.

And here is the face of the happy man.

Pilot training: Day 07 – It finally clicked

Vladimir — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:33:17 +0000

I was finally able to relax in the airplance and perform takeoff and landings without assistance. Today actually I started enjoying it - maybe too much :)

I have 8 and a half hours by now, I think tomorrow might be the day I go solo. I love my flying machine it's great piece of kit. Looking forward tomorrow with curious anxiety.

And here is a beautiful flying video to relax.

Pilot Training: Day 03 – Big thunderstorm and some cool photos

Vladimir — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:12:14 +0000

Last night we had a big thunderstorm over the airport. We lost electricity and could do nothing but go to sleep at 21h. Marko's alarm went up at 6:20.

The day was beautiful and promised some great photos. Here they are.

I now have 155 minutes of flight time. Of all problems I have, taxing around the runway is the funniest. I can't seem to drive the plane on the ground! In the air it is better story but I'm still somewhat stiff with the controls.

Made 10 landings today and my confidence is improving.

Pilot Training: Day 02 – Every beginning is difficult

Vladimir — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:30:03 +0000

Weather is very hot, and I am toasted. Second day has passed and I have accumulated 73 minutes of flight time in Utva-75 two seater airplane.

It's a quite sturdy plane but also very sensitive. I am still getting used to flying which is very different to gliders I am used to. And the preflight and inflight procedures seem to be overwhelming at this point. There is so much to learn about the plane exploitation.

My first few flights were simple exercises, circling around the airport and turning with different angles of bank - 30, 45 and 60 degrees.

I am in a group with three more guys, Marko, Milos and Stefan who are young aspiring pilots. They all started before me and already flight solo (Milos had a first solo flight today).

After the classes we gather on the laptops and play flight sims, MS Flight sim, Condor and IL2.

The skies await again

Vladimir — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:28:26 +0000

Tomorrow I am going on a 'leave' again as I made a decision, yesterday actually, to finish the training for sport pilot license.

I'll be spending nearly a month in a pilot camp on the airfield flying one of these, Utva 76.

I am looking forward to the opportunity to get out of the city, and go back to the roots and my flying dreams.

Alternative to YSlow – Page Speed

Vladimir — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:21:00 +0000

For a long time all website optimization gurus used YSlow, a tool developed by Yahoo, for purpose of real time performance analysis of websites.

And while YSlow is an excellent tool, another contender decided to enter the game - Page Speed.

What I immediately liked about it is the speed and the wealth of information it was giving. There is also a Page Speed Activity panel, very similar to Firebug's NET giving even more valuable info.

Perhaps a score like YSlow does would be in order to give a relative idea on the site's performance index.

Solution to Flash accessability problems for blind people

Vladimir — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:23:18 +0000

Couple of days after I published a story on Steve, I got contacted totally unrelated by another blind person regarding one of my plugins, Smart Youtube.

It turns out that after you use wmode='transparent' in the embed code (which is necessary so that videos do not overlap your images or other parts of design in some cases), the video player controls become inaccessible to screen readers (like JAWS) that blind people use to browse the Internet.

And this is basically technological limitation of Flash as transparent Flash objects can't expose accessibility data to outside software.

Since Smart Youtube is so popular and used on probably 100,000 blogs or more I am now in dilemma how to solve this problem. Removing wmode transparent by default so that screen readers work, will hinder the usability of the plugin and in some cases render videos over images and other neighboring content.

I can add an option to enable wmode transparent for those who want it with a text that it will hinder the browsing experience of blind people but that really sounds bad, and I wouldn't want anyone to feel bad about it.

I hope there is someone with an idea out there.

Plugin updates, SEO Smart Links, Smart Youtube, Wp Wall

Vladimir — Fri, 29 May 2009 12:04:37 +0000

I made updates to some popular plugins.

Seo Smart Links 2.1

- Performance optimization and new option to link to cats and tags with used at least n times (thanks Dominik Deobald!)
Smart Youtube 3.2

- Added title to widget, fixed HTML code issue with widget

Wp Wall 1.5

- Fixed bug with if the blog was not in root directory (thanks Enrico Rossomando)
- Added a special recent comments widget which will not display Wall comments (thanks Enrico Rossomando!)
- Tested in 2.8

All my wordpress plugins work under 2.8 as far as I know.

Good Advice about Time Management

Vladimir — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:05:21 +0000

It's a really quick one but worth a ton of gold (at least).

Whenever you can trade money for time - do it, it's worth it.

You may accumulate great wealth in your life but you have only so much time. And money becomes kind of obsolete when you run out of time.

Give a hand to Steve Rogers

Vladimir — Thu, 21 May 2009 11:17:26 +0000

Recently I had the pleasure to meet the gentleman by the name of Steve Rogers.

Steve is passionate about cars and has recently started a business where he uses his great knowledge of automobile industry to help people find a good car and a good deal. Basically you tell Steve your budget and what type of car you are after and Steve will look through all car advertisements and find the one best suited for you.

While certainly an interesting service, what makes it really interesting is that Steve is blind. I met him in front of one of the stores in the Oxford street, London, asking if anyone could help him. We jumped in (Ervin was with me) and walked him to his destination while the most amazing story unfolded.

First thing Steve asks me as he grabs hold of my arm is 'Are you a Finnish rally driver?'.

I reply I am not, but actually I have just recently sent an email to a Finnish rally school to see if they would accept me. Coincidence is big especially as it proves that Steve and I share the same passion for old rally cars. Steve owns several of them and his friends drive him.

Steve worked for 30 years when the economic crisis took it's toll and they laid him off. So he had to find another business and he got the idea to help other people find the best car. He uses text to speech software to read the web and apparently his biggest problem is that one of the UK's leading car websites, Autotrader, recently included some javascript code that makes his software useless (is that breach of disability act anyone?).

Steve got his site up just today, and I thought it would be really nice if we can help Steve. Blog about him, write a comment or simple call him (especially if you are in the UK and really need to buy a car). Steve is real expert, I can tell you that.

Steve Rogers's Website: Alfa Rogers