What is SEO Smart Links Business?

Briefly, SEO Smart Links Business aims to help WordPress blog owners improve their blog’s onsite SEO by automatically interlinking posts to each other. The goal of this plugin is to alleviate the pain of having to manage internal content linking. The plugin also comes with a bunch of other tools that you may need to help improve your onsite SEO. If you want to know more, I think it’s best if I let you read the detailed list of features on the official product page.

What I Like About It?

Dead simple for anybody to use. All you have to do to link to another post on your site is write the full name of the other post, save, and wha-bam, your link is generated.

Powerful enough for SEO educated individuals. If the custom keywords feature was missing, I would’ve thrown this plugin back in Vladimir’s face and would’ve told him to make it better. I’m glad that he still continues to impress me. This feature is crucial for when you just want to link to your target content using a particular phrase (not the post title of the target content). I use this type of linking a lot on my fitness blog where I would only want to link to a particular post using the phrase “bicep workout” instead of “30 Minute Bicep Workout”.

Limits & Exclusions. I love the limits feature so that way you won’t end up with too many links in one post (making your article look spammy). Also, it would be lame is exclusions didn’t exist. I would hate to link to my about page every time I type the word “about” in a post.

Nofollow & Nofollow white list. Automatically nofollow all external links. Also “nofollow whitelist”, I’ve never seen this feature anywhere else before. Pretty awesome stuff.

Caching. This feature is absolute crucial for large sites.

Redirection Support. This is a nice little redirection tool that you can use to help cloak affiliate links if needed.

The pricing is fair. The Business version of the plugin is really designed for people with extremely large sites, for which the extra caching is crucial for smooth operation.

One Thing I’m Still Iffy About

How the plugin works is that it automatically parses your post for key phrases and then dynamically turn the right key phrases into links (cache it if necessary) and then deliver the linkified content to the user. From what I understand, the original post does not get modified at all. Maybe I am just a control freak, but I am a bit uncomfortable with key phrases being dynamically linkified on my posts. This is because if I were to disable the plugin, all of the links I was counting on to be there will suddenly disappear. I would love it if Vladimir added a feature that automatically linkify your posts as you write them (or even on save). That way automatically generated links will be saved along with the content and the link will persist even if the plugin is disabled.

Verditct

Try out the free version! If you like it and your feel that the premium version has features that will benefit you then make the purchase. Do you use any version of SEO Smart Links? I would love it if you can share your insights and experiences in the comments below.

photo credit: David Locke1

Ajay D’Souza has done it again and brought fellow WordPress users another much needed plugin called Top 10. This plugin counts daily/total visits per post and displays the most popular posts based on the number of views. Now you might just smirk and say that this is just another popular post plugin, but if you continue reading, I will go over how this plugin is different from many other popular posts plugins.

What’s special about Top 10?

If you use WP Super Cache, you have probably figured out that you cannot use many statistics plugins because they will not count or display statistics properly. Luckily Top 10 plugin utilizes Javascript to perform all post counting and statistics displaying. Some other WP Super Cache compatible plugins only count statistics correctly, but do not display them correctly.

Why not use WP-PostViews to count posts views?

In the past, I had a hand in making WP-PostViews work with WP Super Cache. It was one of the first statistics plugins that were compatible with WP Super Cache. Since then, I believe that the plugin has become a bit dated, and I highly recommend Top 10 as a suitable replacement. Here are my reasons why:

1. WP-PostViews counts views using Javascript, but does not display them using Javascript. Because of that, your view count will remain static to the visitor until your cache files expire
2. Top 10 displays view counts in the admin edit posts section.
3. Top 10 includes popular posts widgets for your sidebar

Feature request

Of course no software is perfect (my day job is a Test Engineer), so I have only a couple of minor suggestions for Ajay (you probably already have these on your to-do list).

1. The popular posts list displays the number of views for each posts. It would be nice to be able to turn that off
2. Right now, the plugin uses Javascript to display the number of views, but it does not use Javascript to display the top daily posts list. It would also be nice to retrieve this list via Javascript because the daily popular list can change often within one day. This isn’t really needed for the all-time popular posts widget though since that list shouldn’t change very much.
3. On the WordPress admin “Edit Posts” page, it would be nice to be able to sort posts by view counts there, so you can navigate through pages to figure out how all of your posts rank among themselves.

Bottom line

This plugin is perfect for you if you use WP Super Cache and want to track page view and display a list of popular posts. If you use WP-PostViews, I recommend moving over to Top 10 instead because of better WP Super Cache compatibility and extra features.

photo credit: duplamox

Ajay D’Souza who regularly writes on Weblog Tools Collection had recently updated a plugin called ‘Where did they go from here?‘.  Originally developed by Mark Ghosh, this plugin keeps track of where your readers go after reading a post and displays this list at the end of your post.  This works just like Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” feature on their product page.

I never noticed this plugin before and I’m quite surprised that I have missed it considering how useful it is.

What makes it special?

Now you might think that this is just another related posts plugin, but actually it is not.  With related posts, you are using predetermined algorithms to pick related posts.  With this plugin, you let your visitors’ behavior decide which posts are related.

Having a combination of both a related posts plugin and this “Where did they go from here?” plugin can go a long way towards reducing your visitor bounce rate.  I have taken the dive and installed it on my blog.  Installation and setup was extremely easy (most likely because of Ajay’s admin facelift).  You can see in action it at the end of this post.

Minor drawback

Of course no software is perfect.  The only thing I don’t like about the plugin is that upon initial activation, you will see something like “Readers who viewed this post also viewed: -N/A” for all of your posts.  For a not so heavy traffic blog like mine, this will probably stay on some my post pages for a week or so depending on how popular they are.  It would be a bit cleaner to not display the plugin text at all if there are no records of visitors from that post page.

Bottom line

Overall I am quite impressed with the plugin for its usefulness and ease of installation.  I give it 5 stars and encourage you to check it out for yourself.  The 5-minute installation can help you reduce your bounce rate dramatically.