Social Media Advisors
We are Social Media Advisors, a Social Media Speaker, & Custom WordPress Site design.
Yesterday I shared the value in adding an image gallery to your Custom WordPress site. However, one of the issues I ran into when setting up a gallery was when you had an image already included on the page but didn’t want it to show up in the gallery as well.
I had this issue recently with a client of mine so I made this simple tutorial to help her and figured that it might be helpful to others:
If you need any other help, do not hesitate to contact me.
Sharing photos on your Custom WordPress site are crucial to the success your business has online. Just like when a consumer receives their meal at a restaurant, they eat with their eyes first. If the food on the plate does not look attractive, their expectations drop immensely and the likelihood of their experience being so amazing they want to come back goes down exponentially.
The same type of thing holds true for your WordPress site. If you are not sharing images in an appealing way, the time a consumer will stay on your site begins to drop dramatically. Sometimes however, you may have more than just one or two images that you want to share on your site.
Instead of slowing down the load speed of your site a bunch ar make consumers have to scroll a whole bunch, a gallery of thumbnails may be a better alternative. In this case, you may want to look into installing the Lightbox Gallery Plugin. It is very versatile and looks rather nice. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to use it on your Custom WordPress Site:
So, if you are looking for a great way to create beautiful galleries on your Custom WordPress Site, I would recommend trying out this plugin!
While search engine optimization plays such a crucial role in how well your business does online, one of the ever increasing issues I see from various SEO companies is the over optimization on customers websites. While there is great importance in having the SEO information done properly on your website, it is even more important that things do not go overboard. Going overboard can result in a website being either penalized greatly or possibly even banned from search results.
Also, search engine optimization is not a quick fix for any website. If your results come that quick, more than likely you are doing something in a way you shouldn’t, and that will catch up to you in just a matter of time. So, be careful in who you hire to do your SEO work. Don’t trust those that promise the world for just some dollars. Get involved and be a part of making your website effective. Ask specific questions as to what they are going to do to make your rank better. Don’t let them just decide on some random keywords, but ask what type of traffic those keywords get each month.
Whenever I do SEO work for a client, I provide them with a spreadsheet showing them the monthly search of many of the keywords related to their business. Not only is this helpful for the initial setup, but this list is also very handy when you are trying to find topics to blog about or just know what keyword phrase to use in the post. I once had a client that by changing one word in the keyword phrase increased the popularity of searches from 180/month to 8,800/month.
When I hear someone say a site is over optimized, I immediately think either someone doesn’t know what they are doing, or they are trying to use some less than honorable black/grey SEO tricks to push a site up the search engines. While this might do what they are looking for and push that website to page 1 of Google quickly, the site will inevitably be found by Google and penalized. If you remember back a few months ago, I shared about the JC Penney debacle and how when they were caught by Google, the penalties took them from #1 in the results to not even being found on the first 5+ pages.
Whenever I build a custom WordPress Site for a client, I make sure to try and follow all of these guidelines as close as possible to keep my clients from danger. Does it make the process of reaching page one results take longer? Yes, but I’d rather it take more time of them writing good quality blog posts and sharing valuable content that lasts for years than get instant results that end up being banned in just a few months. Post that I wrote over four years ago on an old blog of mine still bring business to me today.
My main site 210 Consulting ranks well in the search engines for several keywords and I’ve never once paid for SEO work. Instead, I’ve simply taken the time to write blog posts that are search engine friendly, and done the work on my own of building good quality backlinks through guest blogging, commenting on other sites, and other good SEO tactics.
If you would like more information on how to write blogs for search engines feel free to contact me and we can schedule a coaching session to get your site started in the direction of page one of the search engines to stay.
Building a list of subscribers to your blog is one of the best ways to increase the overall traffic to your site. While there are several ways you could do this, one of my preferred methods is by giving my readers the ability to subscribe to my content either via email or an RSS feed.
Thanks to Google, there is a wonderful tool to do this called Feedburner. I’ve actually done tutorials before on how to install Feedburner on your WordPress site. It’s pretty easy to set up and can prove to be rather rewarding as you can see by Feedburner showing up twice in my top 10 sources of traffic to my website according to Google Analytics.
Also, what I have noticed is a steady climb in overall traffic to my site on a daily basis. I truly believe that one of the main reasons for this increase is attributed to the increase in numbers of subscribers to my website via email or RSS.
Getting a large group of subscribers is not always the easiest thing to do. It definitely isn’t something that can happen overnight. Here are a few simple tips to building your subscriber list.
1. Make it simple to subscribe. Feedburner does this very well by making the opt-in form as simple as can be. Readers simply add their email address to the Feedburner widget on the right side of my page. Feedburner will then send an email to confirm and they are now subscribed via email. From that point forward, whenever I write a new blog post, readers will receive it directly in your inbox.
If the subscription process asks for their name, email, phone number, and name of their first child, the chances of someone filling out the form will go down exponentially. Remember, this isn’t gathering contacts for your database, this is simply growing the readership of your blog by giving readers an easier way to get your content.
2. Ask people more than once without being annoying. When I first added Feedburner to my site, I only had it on the sidebar of my site in the widget section. I’d get a few people who would sign up for it each month, but it never seemed to pick up that many.
Then, one day I added a simple link into the footer of my blog posts that gives readers the ability to subscribe again. The moment I did that, my subscribers started increasing at a much more rapid pace. So, offering the ability to subscribe more than once can be rather beneficial.
What you do not want to do though is become spammy with it and turn into a total annoyance. Skip the pop-ups, and don’t put the link every other paragraph of your post.
3. Say it in a way that makes sense. When I first set up subscriptions to my blog, I had it simply set as an RSS feed and posted it as such. It said “subscribe via RSS.” Then one day as I was thinking about ways to make my site more user friendly I realized that probably 80% of consumers have no clue what an RSS feed is or what it does. So, I changed the text & option over to something that would make more sense. Once I changed everything to say, “subscribe via email” more readers began subscribing to my blog.
So, if you do not have a simple way for readers to subscribe to your blog, you may want to set up Feedburner now. The benefits of having a large group of subscribers to your blog is tremendous.
Let’s face, not everyone learned the lesson back in third grade that stealing someone else’s work and calling it your own is wrong. Either that, or people have forgotten it over the past few years. Plagiarism of your content is something that happens every day. Personally, I don’t have that much of a problem with someone sharing my content, as long as they give me credit for it and ask permission.
Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to give credit or even ask permission. For the longest of times I’ve tried setting up ways to track things to find those violators, but have had somewhat a difficult time doing so. I set up all types of Google Alerts, closely monitored my analytics and more, to try and monitor my online presence. The problem that I ran into though is that these didn’t always pick up every occurrence and some wouldn’t remove the content without legal action which can be exhausting and expensive.
I’ve recently implement two different tools into my WordPress site to track my site & make sure that my content receives the proper attribution it deserves. I feel it is only appropriate that if someone is going to use content that I have take time to create, I should at least be given credit. There are two ways that most people will steal your content, so lets discuss solutions for each.
The first way, is some will simply push your RSS feed of content into some sort of content farm/aggregator. These have also been called scraper sites. People do this to constantly feed content to their site without having to do any work. What I found to combat this type of theft is a WordPress plugin thanks to my friend Eric called Anti Feed-Scraper Message. This plugin prevents your RSS feed from being copied elsewhere without attribution by adding a message and link to your original post that you can also customize. Here’s what it looks like in my Feedburner Feed:
This automatically shows at the bottom of all my posts that are being fed somewhere via RSS. So while it doesn’t prevent scrapers from taking my content, it at least gives me credit and a backlink.
The second way that your content is normally stolen is by someone who comes and reads one of your posts and decides to copy/paste over to their site word for word. Or, maybe they read a line in your post that they want to just use in a post they are writing. These kinds of things happen every day, and unfortunately most the time we are never even aware of it happening.
A great new tool I just recently implemented onto my WordPress site here called Tynt, addresses this completed and provides you with some awesome analytics in addition to an automatic backlink to the original post or page of content on your site. What is really cool with tynt, is that it allows you to set it down to a minimum of only 8 words copied to insert the tracking and backlink. What I like even more, is that it doesn’t matter if the content is copy/pasted to another site, Facebook, or an email, it will place the backlink to the original content here on my site.
Test this one out. I dare you to copy/paste any paragraph from anywhere on my site. It will automatically add a backlink to here no matter where you share it.
Tynt also provides you with some really great analytics of your site and content that is shared. It will show you how many times it’s happened, number of pageviews that resulted from it and more. They also have tracking tools for social media that will show you how many times your content is shared via E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. This data can be very valuable in helping you determine which networks are the most beneficial to your business and are working the most effective.
So if you are like me and want to make sure you get the proper credit for the hard work you put into your site writing new content, check out these two options and install them today. As a side benefit of the proper attribution, you also will start to build some backlinks to your site that can really help with the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your Custom WordPress site.
Installing Tynt on your website does take a slight bit of technical skills, so if you need help with setting it up and installing on your Custom WordPress Site, feel free to contact me and we can take care of it for you.
I’ve found over the past few months of building Custom WordPress Sites that more and more people do not realize that a WordPress site is more than just a blog. I also get asked many times each week how to add a home page to a WordPress site.
By home page, I don’t mean a page that says home at the top and runs all your blog posts on it, I mean a static home page like the one I built here.
I remember when I first tried to figure out how to do this it took me a good amount of time to figure out the settings and make a static home page. Surprisingly, to create a home page in WordPress is not that difficult of a task. To show just how easy it is, here’s a simple tutorial showing you how to create a home page in WordPress:
