WordPress – Why You Need It
WordPress, a blogging platform, started in 2003 and quickly grew to the largest and most popular Open Source (free) community-driven blogging platform today. I used to hand-code websites, as did many website designers (and some for whatever reason still do) until I discover the power of WordPress many years ago. I’ve never looked back. I believe I’m now over 300 new websites to date using WordPress. Everything form small business to large scale, elaborate websites. Why do I like it and why should you use it? Let me count the ways… Full syndication capabilities with new posts. This is by far the BEST feature of WordPress. Why? It gives the ability to add new content then tell the entire world about it automatically with a ping just by clicking...
Read MoreDo-It-Yourself WordPress SEO – Part 4
Blogging In Part 3, we wrapped up how the meta data can be edited on each and every blog post and pages of the website. By now you should understand the point of doing all of this work: to broaden the search efforts of your website and allow the opportunity to have more than one landing page appear in the search results for many different ket terms of your website. You see, most people have websites that only focus on the home page. The home page is important, but not tweaking the other pages is a missed opportunity. You can have this edge over some of your online competitors! This last tutorial addresses taking the knowledge you’ve gained so far and applying it to the blog on your website. Blogs are very popular in search results, often because their...
Read MoreDo-It-Yourself WordPress SEO – Part 3
More on Meta Data In Part 2, we introduced you to the SEO plug-in. Now we’ll put it into action and see how it affects the page content, and more importantly, how search engines and people will view your changes. We’ll also talk about Heading tags. Heading tags are meta data you control to show the hierarchy of the page’s content. In fact, the title of this page is an H1 title, the “More on Meta Data” is an H2 title. Most people have learned to use it for formatting the size of the font – not what it’s for at all! Title tages like H1, H2, H3 etc. provide information on the structural hierarchy of a document. It facilitates accessibility as well as web code standards. In most cases, using this order of heading...
Read MoreDo-It-Yourself WordPress SEO – Part 2
Meta Data in the Source Code In Part 1 of this tutorial, we did some searches on our example website using key phrases to see how Google ranked the website for that search phrase. We also saw how the title meta tag and meta description are used in the actual search results and how they influence how the page was indexed in the first place. In Part 2, we’ll see how you can make the needed meta adjustments to each and every pages of your website, including blog posts, using a plug-in installed to do just that very thing. It is called the All-In-One SEO Pack plug-in created by Semper Fi Web Design for WordPress. There are several SEO plug-ins for WordPress but I find this one works best for controlling individual page meta content. This tutorial does not cover...
Read MoreDo-It-Yourself WordPress SEO – Part 1
How Do Search Engines See Your Website? This article series is broken into 4 parts, all with videos, and dedicated to all of you who have a website built in WordPress. Why? It’s not just any website. It’s the world’s leading (and open source) blogging platform. The best-of-the-best in this world use and trust WordPress; and now so do you. Getting down to business: you have the ability to enhance the search effort of your website, whether you know it or not! This first video is an introductory to some basic search concepts. I’ll take you through a tour of the resources available to you as well as use a live website to demonstrate search results and how it is seen in the eyes of a search engine. After watching the video and completing...
Read MoreNew Website Start-up Check List
OK, you have a website now. If it’s through me, it’s likely built with WordPress as a Content Management System if done recently, or it’s a static page website built from scratch. Whatever you have, now you would like to see it perform. Here’s a TOP 10 website start-up check list to be sure you’re getting the most of your website: CONTENT! Be sure to complete the content of each page on your website! Try to have at least 200-300 words or more per page and place the most important words (keywords) in the page’s H1 title and within the first paragraph. Make sure you have the correct address and phone number as well. GOOGLE ANALYTICS! If you haven’t done so already, sign up for Google Analytics to track your website...
Read More
Follow John!