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WordPress SEO: How to Optimize Your WordPress Site
WordPress has made it very easy for small businesses to have a website that is easy to update and maintain, but do you know how to optimize your WordPress site so that it has the best chance of appearing at the top of your customers' search results? The process is similar to optimizing any website, but with a WordPress installation you can customize many of your pages' SEO elements, as well as automating them to cut down on the time it takes to post a new item to your site. WordPress vs. WordPress.com Templates Having your blog hosted at WordPress.com limits the changes you can make to your page template. But more importantly, it restricts your SEO. Having your site hosted on WordPress.com only benefits WordPress.com in terms of backlinks generated. Make sure that from day one you're in control by hosting your blog on your own domain. That way...
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The 4 Ps of Search Engine Optimization
If there is any one reality to SEO, it's that there are winners and losers. There are certain qualities that are necessary for any winning SEO strategy that can be broken down into the 4 Ps of SEO: proactive, persistence, perseverance, and patience. Proactive Being proactive is fundamental to being a good SEO for a couple of key reasons: Latency Effect Between Work and Results Any SEO work done today likely won't affect traffic or revenue today. When it comes to SEO there is a latency effect as new changes to your website or your off-site profile (backlinks, social activities, etc.) get indexed by the search engines and filter into the SERPs. How long the latency period is depends on the situation. If you put up a new targeted page on your site that gets indexed quickly, you could indeed start to see some new traffic from new keywords within...
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15+ Inspirational Examples of Website Redesign
One of the best ways to survey the evolution of Web design over a number of years is to compare different versions of websites. In other words, by comparing redesigned websites to their earlier incarnations, we become informed about new technologies, design trends and other things that emerged in the time between the two designs and the impact of these things on Web design. In fact, the redesign process can do more than improve a website's look and feel; it might be intended to enhance functionality, make the website more user-friendly, remove deficiencies or even change underlying concepts. Redesigning websites isn't a frequently occurring process; designers usually do it when it's necessary, which is usually every two or three years. In this article I'll showcase some examples of redesigned websites that might inspire you as you work on your own redesign projects. Crazy Egg Old Design New Design Both the...
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Basic SEO for Facebook Fan Pages
Many have tried, and failed, to write a good post about how to SEO a Facebook fan page. For example, optimizing the filename of your profile picture is one popular piece of advice that doesn't really matter, considering Facebook just renames the file something like 198135_10150109366....jpg. Another popular tip: you should link to your main website from your Facebook page. Yes, you should for visitors. But this doesn't optimize your fan page because Facebook just nofollows, redirects, and clusters your URL in a mess of code anyway. So let's take a different approach to Facebook SEO today. I want you to imagine that your Facebook fan page is your website - or another website for your brand at least. While it may not ever rank first for a keyword, you still want it to be optimized. If you want to keyword optimize your Facebook fan page, these are the areas...
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5 Reasons Most Bloggers Are Broke
Blogs are the oldest and perhaps the most mature form of social media. They've been around since ages, well before any of the modern social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and newer players such as Google+ were born. Several bloggers who started on a shoestring budget have since become household names in the technology and social media world. Most bloggers started broke but those who played it right have become millionaires. Blogging isn't a short cut to success in the social media world. In fact, it demands more perseverance and hard work as compared to other social media channels. I've come across a number of bloggers who've gone broke simply because they couldn't get things right. They claim that traffic is good and so is reader engagement, then why is it that they go broke? In this post, I walk through the top 5 reasons why bloggers go broke. Quality...
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The First 7 Items On Your SEO Audit To-Do List
You've just been given one day to do an SEO audit for a site, and you're asking yourself what to do with so little time. Instead of following your instinct to yell at the person who made the request, today's column will outline a practical approach to doing the best job possible in one day. The focus of this rapid audit is to identify issues at a strategic level - either because they are big impact items or may require large development team efforts to address. Given the one day restriction, we'll focus on identifying problems, not fixing them. This plan is not thorough, because you can't be in a day. The major elements are: 1. Look at Google Webmaster Tools For the Site If Google Webmaster Tools isn't currently set up, then get it put in place. The list of great data you can get from this is long,...
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