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I love Internet for providing us with wealth of resources that help us develop better blogs and as result gain more or achieve our goals faster. But finding tools you can use and understand what exactly they are telling you can be challenging. In this post I want to share 3 webmaster tools that will help you improve your blog performance and do my best to explain what they should be used for. Let’s dig-in… 1. Is My Blog Working? I loved the concept behind this one small, nifty tool – http://ismyblogworking.com . Alone with providing some important details at the very top, such as availability or robots.txt and feed and presented me with list of potential problems. I have shown with arrows that my server is not compiled to do gzip compression of the pages and as result pages are uncompressed with size of 45,044 bytes that takes an average of 469 ms to download. While I’m fully aware of info provided above as gzip disabled for very specific reason on my server – for many of bloggers it might come as surprize and enabling it via plugins will greatly improve your visitor’s experience! 2. Search Engine Optimization Analysis Tool http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html – while might be not most accurate, this tool will still present you with a lot more details on your blog post SEO aspects then you might have bargained for Please remember that this tool is created for web pages analysis and you shouldn’t attempt to match all parameters to blog post. For example – number of outgoing links for blog post with any number of comments will considerably higher than tool can handle without severe panic! As long as you are aware that some things will not be applicable – it can be quite useful for identifying some issues, such as one I show in image below: 3. Who Is Talking – Social Media Search Tool http://www.whostalkin.com/ – this one is great to learn where your name or your blog URL is mentioned. Unless you are using Google Alerts to identify all the mentions of the above or in fact ANY topic of your choosing – this one works fairly nice. Using it I actually found some looser trying to blast me in comments to some other blog. Obviously disregarded as worthless rubbish that doesn’t deserve more attention that I already given to it but interesting what you can learn! Just enter your blog URL, your name or whatever other options you choose and see who is talking about your blog or perhaps even yourself! Just remember – any tool you find is only as good as how you choose to use it! Happy hunting! Related Performance Related Articles SEOmoz | Pagination: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience (seomoz.org) The Critical Mistake that Keeps Bloggers Broke (copyblogger.com) How did you do on the Webmaster Quiz? (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) Turn Your Opinion Into Ca$h! Get Paid For Your HONEST Opinion…While Letting Other People Do The Selling For You.If You Can Talk, You Can Earn! Get Review Blog System Now! Copyright WordPress Guides Blog . All rights reserved. If reading this content on site other then origination blog – it was stolen and publisher is in direct violation of copyrights. Please report violation Related posts Your Blog As A Core Content For Email Marketing (19) Write Blog Headlines To Explode Article Views And Create Stampede Of Targeted Traffic (11) Write Better With After The Deadline (10) WPAffiliate As A Bloggers Weapon For Higher Profits (4) WordPress Wish List (8) Wordpress Web-Design for Web 2.0 (22)

Usage of the WordPress plugins on your blog is highly subjective matter since no blog is the same. In fact I always advocate using as few plugins as possible to achieve the results you want and offer functionality you target market expects. But reality is – sometimes we don’t even realize that functionality we are looking for is already implemented by someone and is available in form of simple plugin. And all you are left to do is make decision – Just How Badly You Need This Functionality? While digging through the latest released WordPress plugins in search for one very specific function I was interested in for one of my Niche Blogs – I have run across 5 Plugins that could be used to HUGELY boost your blog success by providing more functionality, not available otherwise. So here they are in No Specific Order: Links Page – Boost Your SEO Links Page plugin is simple in its design and I think one of the perhaps most useful to bloggers, although too often overlooked. Idea is very simple – instead of having your blogroll seen on each and every page of the blog, which some SEO Experts said can damage your SEO – create a Separate Page designed to do one thing and one thing only – show relevant links. Great option for Manual Link Building effort , which nobody have discontinued yet as effective means of SEO boost. Using it as simple as creating a page dedicated to links exchange, add short-code to it and then just build blogroll as you normally would: WordPress Ultimate Toolkit – Boost Your Relevancy Any time you can somehow present to your readers extra content relevant to what they are currently reading, enhance their engagement and participation with your blog – you have a lot higher chance of them coming back to your blog! WordPress Ultimate Toolkit plugin does just that – allows you to give readers access to relevant content depending on what they are reading now, as well as boost Commenters! And while it has more functionality then what is mentioned above – I think it deserves evaluation just on this merit alone. See image below, as it is self-explanatory: As you can see – relevant posts are shown ONLY on single content pages. Great way to present more reading to your visitors! LiveHelpNow Help Desk – Boost Your Reader Engagement LiveHelpNow Help Desk is actually a full suite of tools that allows you to integrate a full-fledged support system into your blog. I think it can become a major separator from competition if you choose to offer this type of support to your readers and visitors. While it might not be applicable for every type of blog – it should do wonders for people who are into Coaching, Mentoring, Network Marketing to boost authority status and increase number of leads! Static Feed – Boost Your RSS Load Speed Static Feed plugin is not for everyone and will not work on hosts that have mode gzip disabled but if you host support it – you can gain some speed on page load, RSS and XML feed page load that is as unnecessary queries to database are removed. Think of this plugin as WP-Super Cache for your RSS RSS No More – Boost Your RSS Interaction I always prefer to display a Full RSS Feed from my blog, meaning that entire content from each of my blog posts is made available to my readers. I believe that readers who choose to sign up for my feed do so to take advantage of convenience it provides and I don’t mind if they don’t have to visit my blog to read full post. Opinions on this subject split pretty much down the middle and many prominent bloggers don’t allow Full RSS Feed in order to have you coming back to the blog every time. I think RSS No More plugin allows to somewhat bridge the 2 and while providing only partial feed – it cuts off the content display at same place where you placed “MORE” tag, making your RSS Feed similar to your blog home page. It basically gives more content to a person to allow him or her make more educated decision on whether visit to blog is needed to read the rest than “castrated feed” provided by WordPress when you choose to show excerpts. Once again – this is just my opinion but this plugin CAN BE helpful to you. Related articles 9 More Essential WordPress Plugins (kevinworthington.com) -Podcasting Options for WordPress (bloggingministry.com) How To Get More Traffic To Your Blog By Getting Rid Of Bloat (howtospoter.com) FREE DVD! Ultimate Video Guide to a Complete WordPress Security as my gift to you! Secure Your WordPress Blog Now! Absolutely FREE!. Copyright WordPress Guides Blog . All rights reserved. If reading this content on site other then origination blog – it was stolen and publisher is in direct violation of copyrights. Please report violation Readers who read this page, also read: WordPress 2.5 Is Coming Related posts WordPress Plugins You Need To See (16) WordPress Guide – Installing Plugins And Themes (3) WordPress Caching (14) WordPress and Twitter Integration Guide (37) WordPress 2.9 Upgrade And Simple Tags Solution (43) What Is In Your Blog Pantry? (2)