Blog Improving Tools

There are a ton of tools for getting things done and improving our blogs. If you have a tool you like to use and you think others will enjoy, post it here to help others.

To kick things off, here is a tool I came across today:

Free Website Performance Tool and Web Page Speed Analysis

If you put your blog address into the form you can get a report of how fast your blog would load for given connection speeds.

I don't take it as 100% accurate, but it will give you a good reference for how long it takes your blog to load on slower connections.

It is also a good look at how many things are loading in the background before your blog finally displays.

It can help you understand which widgets and things might be dragging down your blog and potentially losing you blog readers.

Tags: blogging-tools

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Permalink Reply by Charles McKeever on July 29, 2008 at 8:57am

Another great resource for optimizing your site is Google's Website Optimizer.

Watch the 5 minute video on how it works.

This is a different type of optimization than speeding up your blog. It has more to do with testing for the best placement of things like menus, ads, mailing list sign up forms, and other important parts of your blog.

Have you used this tool before? What kind of results did you get?

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Permalink Reply by Lori on August 7, 2008 at 8:19am

I highly recommend the All in One SEO plugin. It can be extremely beneficial in bringing in traffic via search engines. It has made a HUGE difference for my food blog.

You could also use MaxBlogPress's plugin SEO Post Link.

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Permalink Reply by Charles McKeever on August 20, 2008 at 8:58am

Lori,

Great tip. I love MaxBlogPress. I hadn't seen it before, but now the blog is my new best friend. In fact, Aaron Wall confirms the need for short keyword focused urls in his interview on The Black Ink Project with Jeremy Palmer. The WordPress SEO Post Link plugin snaps this onto WordPress without any programming, which is great for people who are put off by coding.

Attachments:

BIPSession12.mov, 53.3 MB

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Permalink Reply by Charles McKeever on August 18, 2008 at 7:50pm

Information overload is a very real thing. In fact it can be debilitating when too much information drives us to do nothing at all. So to cut down on some of the noise, I've been using AideRSS to help me highlight the more important information in the blogosphere. I thought I was being pretty slick until I watch this short video by Darren Rowse at Problogger.net where he shows how to use AideRSS to highlight which post on your own blog perform the best.