Regardless of your stance on Internet censorship, the recent news that Google will ban any Blogger blog containing sexually explicit photos or videos reminds us all that blogs hosted on free platforms like Blogger and WordPress.com are not really ours. At any point, either one of these companies can ban, censor, take down, or eliminate […]
Getting Google’s Attention | How to Get on That First Page of Search
Despite the relatively boring title, I’m going to give beginners a step by step process that will help get your site seen by search engines. Using this post, I’m going to show you the process I went through to design this particular blog post. Don’t let SEO or SERP acronyms scare you. It’s basic common […]
Quick ‘n Dirty – Your Questions, Answered!
As a blog designer and social media consultant, I receive a lot of questions in my email inbox. And you’d be surprised how many are repeats! So I thought I’d start a series where I compile them in a list with no frills answers. Consider it a grab n go resource guide for you to […]
How to Use Google Calendar with Your WordPress Blog or Website
A lot of small businesses come to me with a need for some sort of event calendar on their website. One of the simplest ways to accomplish this is with Google Calendars. Why use that instead of some fancy calendar plugin built for WordPress? Why not use a calendar plugin? If you can do something […]
SEO Tips for Beginning Bloggers
Search Engine Optimization. It sounds so menacing and difficult, but there are some beginner tips that can make a huge difference on your blog. Don’t be intimidated by the concept of SEO or spend a lot of time trying to figure out the Google Keywords tool. Even though there is an entire market of tech […]
Submitting a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
A sitemap is exactly as it sounds…a map of your site. When Google goes around crawling new pages to put in search engine results, sometimes blogs with only a few back links (meaning other sites linking into it) get missed. In other words, if you are a little blogger or a new blogger, Google might need some help finding […]
Learn How to Use Google Plus | A Beginner’s Guide
It’s time. You must pay attention to Google + if you are at all on social media or in the blogging world. I know learning something new is hard. I know Google + isn’t intuitive. Still…we must soldier on. *At the bottom of this post, I’ve included a video tutorial for people who want/need visual […]
Writing Blog Post Summaries to Maximize Searchability
Today’s tip is a short one, but hopefully will positively affect your search engine traffic. Do you write a post excerpt? This is a short two or three sentence summary that hooks the reader in to your post. When someone searches in Google for, “The best Chili recipe ever…” you want the search engine to […]