“Starting soon, your stats page will be on the WordPress.com homepage only”

If you use the wordpress.com blogging service you may have seen this notification already “Starting soon, your stats page will be on the WordPress.com homepage only“, but have you tried the new stats page? I did and it is great. More information, easy to navigate and it looks fantastic. Of course you can still see the “views all-time”, the “views today” and the “views on the busiest day” as well as switching the statistic from “Days” to “Weeks” or to “Months”, but now you can also see for example “Views by Country”, which you can find below the overall statistic.

Before I go into more detail what kind of information you can find below the overall statistic I would like to mention a cool feature. The new WordPress stats page allows you to arrange as well as minimize your extra stats boxes. So you can decide which information are more important to you and need to be directly under the overall statistic and which details can be further below.

The new Facebook Page Timeline

As you may have noticed since the 30th March 2012 Facebook changed all Facebook Pages to the new Timeline format. If this was a good decision is something I don’t know. I personally was excited when I first saw the announcement and changed two pages, I am the administrator for, to the new format, without knowing what I am getting myself into. Soon after the change I did realize some good and also some, in my opinion, bad changes that would effect the Facebook Pages I administrate.

For the better I must say that the overall design is much nicer, well at least that is my opinion. I also like the fact that you can have a big picture on the top and a smaller picture as your profile picture. This is great because now you can create or choose a very nice image for the top and for example your Logo as your profile image. The only downside is that you can not really create a nice Banner which you can also use to advertise your stuff… This made me wonder why Facebook did not allow to do this. I mean it is the Facebook page of your business, isn’t it?

Which brings me to the downside of the new Facebook Page Timeline…

Website Performance – Simok33′s SEO Tip

A great looking website isn’t everything. If your site loads slow you probably loose a potential costumer. Just put yourself in the shoe of your visitor, think how you react if you visit a site that needs ages to load. Right, you probably will close the browser and try to get the item from a different source. That being said, speed is also a ranking factor if you want to see your site on a top position in Google.

So how can you increase the speed of your website?
One important “trick” is to have images in the right format and size. You definitely want to have high quality images for your printed brochure, but a small images for your website. Unfortunately just reducing the dimensions / size of an image isn’t enough. You need to make sure that the image itself isn’t big.

Example: If you have an image in the size 2560×1440, upload this to your website and reduce it to the size you like, your image will still be a couple MegaByte (MB). But an image on a website should be just a few KiloByte (KB).

Higher ranking in search engines – Simok33′s SEO Tips

If you have a website, you want your website to be rank higher in search results. If your site does show up high in the list of Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine, you want people to click on your link. To attract more people you need a good title, meta description and tags.

Here are some tips:

• Use a short, but clever title that is related to the content of your site
• Make sure that your meta description is not to long and more important attractive to your target group
• Support your content / site with Keywords related to the article the visitor will find after clicking on the link
• Try to have at least 10 Keywords for each post
• Do not use to many Keywords, around 20 is more than enough

I hope this tips were useful for you and if they are please leave a comment

Link Exchange (Part 2) – Simok33′s SEO Tips

In my last post about link exchange I mentioned what you shouldn’t do. Today I would like to tell you what you can do.

As mentioned in my last post, bad link exchange isn’t good for your site. In fact, it can even harm your site. But you also have to know that link exchange is very important. This leads us into kind of a dilemma, because how do we know if a link exchange is good or bad?

Well let me try to answer this question with one easy and more or less “general rule”.

Imagine your best friend is visiting you, new in town and would ask you where to go for dinner. You wouldn’t recommend a bad restaurant, right? You would tell him, based on your experience, which restaurant your friend should go to. And because you know your friend very well, so you would even know what kind of restaurant to choose.

Let us try to put that into the online world, because the situation is similar.

Let’s say you come across a website that offers link exchange for free.