Don’t be afraid of search engine optimization
Three little words – search engine optimization (or SEO) – may strike fear into the hearts of many a blogger intent on writing and nothing more, but understanding the basics of SEO can go a long way to getting traffic to your blog for years and years.
I can totally understand why bloggers are “afraid” of SEO. There is a lot of mystery surrounding the subject, but if you learn the principles of how search engine optimization works and apply them to every blog post you write, you could be the owner of a blog that attracts traffic like crazy. Every single day. Forever.
Before running my own sites full-time I worked in the SEO industry. Over the years I have learned a lot of the techniques used by search engine optimization experts, but when I read blog posts by true experts like Rand Fishkin or Danny Sullivan, I realise there will always be something to learn.
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Maintenance Mode plugin – an unknown gem?
There are times when you may need to take your blog temporarily offline. You may have made some slight changes to the CSS file and everything has gone horribly wrong, or perhaps a newly installed plugin has broken your site. There may be other reasons too…
One of the better ways to stop people accessing your site at such times is through the use of the Maintenance Mode plugin.
The Maintenance Mode plugin is very simple and very useful. You might not use it often, but it is a good plugin to know about and I recommend you have it pre-installed on your blog in the hope that you never need to use it in an emergency.
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A review of Daniel Scocco’s Online Profits training course.
A couple of months ago Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips.com re-launched his Online Profits training course. The program is aimed at people who would like to develop a new or exisiting online business, create a blog or just earn themselves some weekend beer money.
When the Online Profits training course first launched it cost the best part of $400 to join. This time, Daniel allowed anyone to join free of charge (almost).
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Test your blog on a virtual iPad
The iPad is an Apple product that has taken the world by storm. I haven’t got one and it’s not high up on my current wishlist either, but I have tried one in a local shop. It was a quick go – I didn’t want to get drawn into the touch it, try it, buy it scenario (those salesmen know all the tricks of the trade).
My use of an iPad was so short I didn’t get a chance to see what any of my sites look like on one. However, that is now possible, using a neat little virtual ipad at iPadPeek. The principle is simple, type in the address of the blog you want to check and hit the return key. The page should instantly appear inside the iPad simulator.
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You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but you shouldn’t trust everything you read on the internet, especially when you are researching a product or service you are interested in buying or using.
IMReportcard.com review
During the past few weeks I have made it a priority to evaluate my online business and the direction it’s taking. Part of my plan for the future is to delve deeper into affiliate marketing. As a result of this slight change in direction (AdSense is currently my main source of income) I’ve spent some time researching products that will help me on the way to achieving my goals.
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In this post I would like to talk about a simple change I made to an ad unit and doubled the amount of income it generated. Now, don’t get too excited, the income has only increased by $6.00 a day, but the fact remains, that the new figure is double what it once was.
The site in question is my most popular. It offers desktop wallpapers to download for free, it’s been around for many years and gets a fair amount of daily traffic.
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There are certain things you should check before you publish a new blog post and certain things you should do after you publish a new blog post.
Before you publish you should make sure you have done as much as you can to produce the best quality article possible – proofreading, spell checking and coming up with a blinding title are important aspects of the pre-publication process.
After you publish you should do as much as you feel necessary to market it; tweet it, Facebook it, social bookmark it etc.
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One of the most powerful Google Analytics tools is search analysis. It provides data on the keywords people enter into search engines to find your blog and the actions they take after they arrive.
This information includes the number of visits, the number of pages visited and the bounce rate for any particular keyword. Knowing the bounce rate for a particular keyword (rather than the overall figure) gives you a better indication of how sticky your blog is. If your blog ranks well for a keyword phrase you haven’t deliberately targeted and your blog gets traffic for that keyword phrase, people are more likely to leave your site without visiting any other page. Thus increasing the bounce rate.
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There are a couple of ways to add a Facebook Like button to your WordPress blog. You can use a plugin, or you can use the code available on the Facebook Like Button developer page.
With the second option you will have to know how to edit the single.php file to get it to work. Editing that file can be a bit tricky if you don’t know your way around it.
I have tried both methods and preferred the plugin option. It is much easier to implement.
There are a number of Facebook Like plugins around that will do the job. If you search the WordPress plugin database you will find at least 20 to choose from. I tried two of them. The second one I tried does the job perfectly.
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How to enable threaded comments on a WordPress blog
How to enable threaded comments on a WordPress blog
Threaded comments (aka nested comments) has been a feature of WordPress since the release of Version 2.7 in December 2008. Prior to this release, threaded comments could only be created using a plugin.
However, it is not enabled by default. It needs activating.
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