I often receive requests from people I don’t know asking me to exchange links. Exchange means that they’ll put a link on their website to me if I put a link on my website to them. Then we’d become one big happy link family. And the more links to your website, the better, right?
I wrote an article in January ‘07 on my experience with Citysearch click fraud and since then have written articles on a client’s experience with YellowPages.com click fraud as well. Both of these article continue to collect comments from people who find them selves stuck in pay-per-click contracts that aren’t yielding any valid traffic. Many times these readers phone me looking for advice, which prompted me to write yet another article warning small business owners about signing pay-per-click contracts. I wanted to write this article to give readers an update on Citysearch and click fraud.
So you want to start a blog and become a blogger? I recommend you don’t use Blogger or another service that forces you to have a domain like yourblog.blogspot.com or yourblog.wordpress.com - but rather, strongly encourage you to buy your own domain and set up web hosting for your blog. I know this sounds complicated, but in the long run, it’s very affordable, around $10 per month - and you have complete control over your blog. I often get asked to set up blogs on client’s websites - and have run into some issues with different hosting companies - so this article will detail what to look for in a hosting company with blogging in mind.
I had one of my clients tell me she had gone to a workshop held by the “Internet Marketing Center” and that she was glad she went because she gained some knowledge about internet marketing techniques. So I decided to check out the website of the organization to see if it might be of help to my clients. This blog article gives just a brief overview of what I found.
Yesterday the blogging community lost, what in my opinion, is one of the finest examples of what blogging can accomplish: Leroy Sievers, author of the NPR My Cancer blog, passed away. I’ve been reading his blog for around 6 months, following his heroic battle against colon cancer that had spread to his brain, lungs, back, hip - pretty much all over his body. His outlook and conversation style reminded me of a good friend I had when I used to live in Florida - so I felt like I “knew” him, even though I didn’t. In many ways, he introduced me to blogging and is an inspiring example of what good can come of authentic, honest, and brave online writing. If you’ve never read Leroy’s blog, take a look, and maybe leave a comment for his wife Laurie, who was his caretaker.
This is topic covers one of the things that annoys me the most when I’m shopping online. I recently had a particularly frustrating purchasing experience with Ticketmaster that I wanted to share. This example will help explain why I’m so against forcing online shoppers to create a login account before they can purchase something from your online store.
We all hate spam. If you own a WordPress blog, and you have comments enabled (which is recommended), you will get spam in your comments. But there’s good news…there are several easy steps you can take to prevent spam comments in your blog.
If you’ve ever used the Google keyword selection tool, you’ve seen those little green bars that represent how many other folks are searching for specific terms. And maybe like me, you’ve wondered, what the heck do these bars represent in terms of the number of searches? Till now, it was anyone’s guess. But now you can see exactly real numbers!
You may have read my article on artists versus engineers and how poorly Flash websites perform in search engines. Well, Google has been working hard to improve it’s ability to read and index Flash websites and recently published an article in the Official Google Webmaster Central blog called “Improved Flash Indexing“.
If you have a Flash website, the article is worth reading. It appears that Google is improving it’s ability to discern text and follow links, but is still unable to “read” images. So if your website designer is using Flash, make sure they know the difference between text and images, and build your Flash website in the most search engine friendly fashion possible.
Or, you could simply avoid Flash altogether or use with great caution. I’ve chosen the former and some other internet marketing experts like Ian Lurie advise the latter . For most of my clientele, Flash is good for movies, but regular HTML, Javascript and a bit of PHP work just fine for everything else.
I wrote a post in February 2008 about a badly behaving bot (Limelight Networks in Tempe and Kavam in San Jose). This morning, I’ve received a comment on that post about a potential new badly behaving bot. Here’s the information:
I’m not seeing this bot yet on my web stats - but if any of you are seeing it, please leave a comment. I found some information on Wikipedia about the Savvis Communications Corporation, not very flattering stuff.
UPDATE:
After writing this article, I noticed a visit from the Savvis Communications Corporation in my own website statistics - to this very post - but unfortuately, they didn’t leave a comment. Maybe they’ll return.
WordPress 2.6 was just released and they’ve made a lovely little video, which I’ve embedded below to give you an overview of the new features. As always, it’s really important to keep your WordPress version up-to-date to make sure you have the latest and greatest hacking prevention prevention.
Here’s the video:
And if you’re lucky enough to have your blog hosted at DreamHost, you can even do this upgrade all by yourself by following the instructions in my article “How To Upgrade WordPress“. It doesn’t cost you a thing and is super easy to do.
Of course, if you’re a current client of mine and you want me to upgrade your blog, I’m happy to do it as well.
I received a phone call from a very frustrated prospective client the other day that I’d like to share with other people who might be thinking of starting their own website design businesses or shopping for a website designer. Here’s a tip: Hey all you web designers! Take care of your clients AFTER you finish their website design. Sound simple? Apparently not.
I had a client recently forward unsolicited emails she had recently received that claimed to offer SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. I wanted to share these emails with you and to give you my comments on their legitimacy, or lack thereof. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a very short video on the basics of Search Engine Optimization from Matt Cutts, a very famous Google Engineer. Matt gives an brief overview of what’s important, and what’s not important. For those of you who know about SEO already, this won’t be new news, but for those of you who don’t know anything about SEO, it’s a nice introduction.
I’ve had a few clients ask me this question, so I’m posting the answer here - because it wasn’t super easy to find on the internet. When you get to the end of a line and hit “return” on your keyboard - what do you want to happen? Sometimes you want a new paragraph. Sometimes you might just want a line break. This short tutorial shows you how to accomplish this. It works for WebYep and WordPress…and probably for many other text editors that might use TinyMCE or FCKEditor or others.
I’ve found myself explaining this to my clients, with varying degrees of success, so I thought a really well-written blog article might help. This article will attempt to explain the difference between static web pages and dynamic web pages, and why your particular website might have one or the other or even both.
As you’re reading this, it’s probably June 23rd or a bit later.
As I’m writing this, it’s May 11th.
Have I invented a time machine?
Nope! I’m just taking advantage of WordPress’s Scheduling feature, and I’m really loving it.
If you’re like me, you like writing blog articles. But you don’t always have ideas all the time. I keep a little note pad with ideas for future articles. But I don’t always feel like writing, and the bloggers out there say you should blog on a regular basis, like once a week, etc. The scheduling feature of WordPress comes to the rescue!
This article is written for those of you who are in the process of looking for a website designer. One of the good things to do when you’re shopping, is to look through the web designer’s portfolio. Most folks looking through a portfolio of websites will notice the obvious, like what the websites look like. This article was written to hopefully help you notice something a big less obvious: whether the web designer is using “real” domains, creating “sub-domains”, or “directories” for his website clients.
If you’re like me, you do quite of a bit online activities that utilize secure websites. Shopping on online stores, banking, and investing all require a secure connection between your browser and the website you are sending your private information to.
But how often do you notice whether the little padlock in the upper right hand corner of your browser is actually there? This article serves as a reminder to always, always, always check.
A client of mine recently hired a bookkeeper to do her state and local taxes and was surprised to find out that she should be collecting sales tax on shipping and handling.
I wanted to write this article to provide help for other online retailers who may be asking the same question, because the answer was a bit hard to find.
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As you’re reading this, it’s probably June 23rd or a bit later.
If you’re like me, you do quite of a bit online activities that utilize secure websites. Shopping on online stores, banking, and investing all require a secure connection between your browser and the website you are sending your private information to.
A client of mine recently hired a bookkeeper to do her state and local taxes and was surprised to find out that she should be collecting sales tax on shipping and handling.
