Categories
Product Review

Squirrly Review – WordPress SEO Plugin

Updated on 23/Jun/2021: the current product is very different from what I reviewed below. It has more features, but now is a monthly subscription (the old plan still works, but in a limited capacity). Also, I have tried the keyword features and they failed to work at all, just lost connection after quite a while.

Squirrly is another SEO plugin for WordPress. Yes, I do realize how many of those exists, but there was a sale on DealFuel.com with no monthly fees and the Squirrly reviews seemed convincing. There are 3 major features on the plugin – a keyword research module, a sidebar with details on SEO for your post, and content that can be added to your post that is related to your keyword.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is pretty fast, and it is easy to find the information, which includes competition. No idea on the source of the data, though – or if it is any good. At least I don't have to start a separate program and wait for it to run. I do wish the extra information was on a proper grid, though – it actually is on a pop-up per keyword.

My plan has a limit of 300 keyword searches per month. I imagine that will be quite enough for me. Naturally you will need to choose a keyword (or several) for the next features to work. Squirrly - Keyword Research

SEO Sidebar

The sidebar didn't work at first, but after using Save Draft it worked fine. There is plenty of useful information in the sidebar, including most of the little stuff (keyword density, use keyword on H2, use Image with Alt for the keyword) that has been in similar plugins for years.

Squirrly - SEO Sidebar

Content

You have a bunch of choices here: Image, Wiki, Wiki, News, Blogs, My Articles. Images worked very fast and got me a bunch of relevant images. With a single click it is added to your article, with the Alt attribute already set for your keyword. I got some relevant stuff from the other searches, too.

Squirrly - ContentSquirrly - Articles

Audit/Monitor

There is some kind of audit of my blog that will take place in 2 to 3 days according to their site. I will update this review when it does.

The Squirrly site also says that I will get an e-mail with weekly tracking for articles, including “social signals”. Looks interesting. I already use Rank Tracker for some keywords on my sites, but I don't bother with the setup for individual articles. Again, I will update this article when I learn more.

Extra SEO Stuff

On settings, there are a bunch of stuff, including – add canonical link kin home page – add sitemap – add Facebook Meta objects – connect site with Facebook Insight, Bing Webmaster Tools, etc I have kept most of it off, as I already have another SEO plugin covering  this area.

Conclusion

Overall, I really like Squirrly, and it seems to work fine. Naturally, it is hard to tell if its suggestions are actually good for the article SEO or not., but these seem to make sense.

The tracking stuff looks wonderful, but I haven't seen it working yet.

 

Categories
Articles

WordPress and SSL

Yoast has a nice article with important details when settings WordPress on SSL. It details how to force SSL on specific pages, using Cache and CDN and fixing links in theme files.

Categories
Product Review

Definition – WordPress Theme Review

I just started using Definition – a WooThemes theme which looks nicer than my current theme (Inspire, also by WooThemes). Not only that, but it uses Responsive design, so it looks great on tablets and smartphones.

Definition on my iPad
Definition on my iPad

Currently it is only on Disk Usage, one of my microsites, but I intend to use it on this blog (and possibly my main site) soon.

Definition options
Definition Options

There are two things I really like about WooThemes:

  1. Their themes are solid (every one of the PAID themes I tried had some major problem or another, sometimes several).
  2. Their themes have plenty of options, so it is unusual that you have to go down to editing theme files – which easily happened with other themes I have used. Check out the screenshot and note the side tabs – and  most of these have more than one item!

Definition has not disappointed in these aspects, expect for a couple of minor things (a blue bar on the side of the title and Comment buttons when comments are disabled). I have contacted their support, let's see how they respond.

Update: a few hours after my support request they answered both my questions. I had an empty page that for some reason didn't show up on the other theme (so I just added a menu without it), and they sent the CSS to remove the button and divider:

.comments.button {
display: none;
}
.home .post-more-sep {
display: none;
}

Categories
Articles

10 Awesome Shortcodes For Your WordPress Blog

Wordpress Logo10 Awesome Shortcodes For Your WordPress Blog has a nice collection of code snippets that can be useful on your WP site.

My favorites are related posts , content for Registered Visitors Only and Disable auto-formatting .

Categories
Software

Analytics360

Analytics360 Screenshot
Just added a new plugin to my main WordPress Install – Analytics360. It allows getting data from both Google Analytics
and MailChimp (where my mail lists are now).

It gives you Analytics data, complete with graphs, referrers and top content. The graphs show when you list campaigns were sent, so you can easily see their effect. It also has filters so you see distinct graphs, such as Total, CPC, Organic, Referral or e-mail list.

Further on the MailChimp side, it also displays subscriber graphs for any of your e-mail lists.

You can also set GA to show only the blog stats.

If you use both MailChimp and GA, it is pretty neat.

Categories
Articles

Improved WordPress performance with WP-Minify

I just installed WP-Minify and I just had to comment on it. Looking at my site speed graphs (which are now a factor for Google), I noticed that some of the worst performance comes in the blog section. Reading Web Performant WordPress I read about WP-Minify and decided to try it. The performance improvement is absurd. Testing on YSlow, it gets from a Grade F (41 HTTP Requests, 412K) to Grade A (4 HTTP Requests, 107K)! That's pretty impressive for a simple plugin install. Very recommended to anyone using WordPress.

5 out of 5 stars
Update: 26/Apr/2011
The current version of WP-Minify is 1.1.3. According to many reports, this version no longer compress JS files, and the latest that works properly is 1.04. What I have noticed here is even worse – if I try either version with the latest WordPress 3.1.1, I have to turn off CSS Minify on WP-Minify configuration page, or the blog gets completely messed up…


WPMU DEV - The WordPress Experts