Social Media Advisors

We are Social Media Advisors, a Social Media Speaker, & Custom WordPress Site design.

custom wordpress site

Adding Links to a WordPress Site Using TablePress

Custom WordPress Sites

TablesI recently was working on a client site in which they used TablePress to create a three column table for one of the pages inside their Custom WordPress Site.  She was a real estate agent and had made a table with various cities within her area.

After she created the table though, she was having figuring out how to transform her cells into hyperlinks.  She wanted to link each city to a custom search she created within her home search function of her site.

So, I created this quick video to walk her through.  I hope it helps others as well.

If you need help with your Custom WordPress Site, feel free to contact me for assistance.

Ask A Social Media Advisor- Generating Good Quality Backlinks For SEO

Custom WordPress Sites, SEO, Social Media Advisors

LinkToday’s Ask A Social Media Advisor question came from Pam Graham, and it relates to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how to generate good quality backlinks to her custom wordpress site.

Here are a few simple ways you can start to generate good quality backlinks to your site while only using white hat SEO techniques.  These are safe strategies you can implement today and keep you out of trouble with the various search engines.

The first thing I’d suggest is to make sure you have your bios up to date everywhere. Each one should have your photo, name, description, and also a link to your website whenever they allow it.

While some services like Facebook might add a <nofollow> tag, not all services do that and you can really gain some good links from that alone.  Go back through all those various social networks you signed up for but never even completed your profile and make sure to get your links in to your website and everything else completed.

In the video I mention a few good places to get some nice backlinks to your site.  Here are a few of those that take no time to set up:

In addition to services like the ones listed above, some blogs allow comments to be followed by search engines, so leaving comments that are valuable to the conversation and are not spammy can be a good source of links as well.

The final way to build powerful backlinks are by requesting to write a guest post on someone else’s site. I’ve been able to build some really good links by doing this for my site over the past few years.  Not only do I write guest posts for others, I also LOVE having them from time to time on my site.  In fact, I’ve had several guest bloggers here on this site over the past several years.  If you would like to contribute, contact me about the possibility of being a guest blogger.

*Bonus Tip For Generating Backlinks: One simple way to generate good quality backlinks is by creating content on your site that others would want to link to.  If you are a real estate agent and you are sharing valuable information about the current state of the market, there’s a good possibility a news source like the local newspaper or station might link to your blog post when covering the story on their site.  Or, a business might link to your post if you share a nice review of their product or service.

If you begin to implement some of these different strategies above into your daily routine, it won’t be long till you are seeing the SEO benefits of backlinks into your site.

See other Ask A Social Media Advisor answers in this series:

Handling 151,000 Spam Comments On Your Custom WordPress Site

Custom WordPress Sites, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

Spam Comments in WordPressWhen you build a Custom WordPress Site, one of your hopes is to make that site rank well in search engines and generate a good steady stream of traffic.  As your site matures and the amount of content continues to grow, your visitor traffic should also see increase.

While you may be excited about this increase in traffic, one of the negative side effects that can happen is an increase in spam comments.  Unfortunately popularity doesn’t just bring in potential business, but it can also bring along those annoying spammers.

Why do they bother with your site you may ask? Well, it’s pretty simple: Spammers comment on your site hoping to build quality backlinks to build up their own search engine optimization.

How To Recognize WordPress Spam Comments

Comment Spam in your WordPress Site

Here are three easy ways to spot spam comments in WordPress:

  1. Fake names- If your name really is Medicaid Doctors, I want to see your birth certificate.  Since most WordPress comment systems use the name field in comments for anchor text on the backlink, a common practice by spammers is to make their name whatever their keyword is.  So if you see something other than an actual name in the name field, it is more than likely spam.
  2. Weird punctuation and typos-  As you can see in my image above, another common practice used by spammers is strange punctuation and typos.   It is not normal for someone to type “That’s the great article! I just pass ‘n read it, two thumbs up! ;)”  Now this practice is a little sneakier than the other two spam signals because it looks like a normal person that just has some issues with spelling and grammar.  The reason spammers use this practice is so that they can quickly and easily scan search engines and find where their comments have been accepted and indexed.  They go to google and type in something like: That’s the great article! I just pass ‘n read.  Because it is a unique phrasing and spelling, it is easily to find in search engines. Every link they find with those results then become an instant breeding ground for spam.

    They realize either the owner of the WordPress site does not realize it is spam or they don’t really pay attention to their site anymore.  Allow a few of these spam comments to index on your site and within no time you will get hit with thousands of spam comments.

  3. Excessive links-  Some of the less than honorable SEO companies out there realize the value in backlinks to a domain and will try to get as many as they can to their clients sites.  So, they will come and drop 30+ links in one comment on your site.  This should be a pretty obvious indication of spam on your site and should be marked as spam right away.

Blocking Spam Comments On Your WordPress Site

So now that you know how to recognize spam comments, what do you do to block the spam and stop the influx of spam comments?  The first thing that everyone should do when setting up a new WordPress site is install Akismet and get it activated.  This is the default spam plugin that WordPress installs whenever you start a new site.  Unfortunately, because of it’s strange name, most people don’t know what it is and never activate the plugin.

Then after their site is live for a few months and the comments start coming in and they are receiving so many a day they contact me and beg for help.  Take a look at one of my recent clients WordPress comment spam problem:

Yes, 151,000+ spam comments attacked his WordPress site in just a few months.  He was averaging around 3,000 a day before I fixed his problem.  Now after configuring Akismet that problem has been resolved.

Once you have Akismet installed and configured correctly, the next important thing to remember is that when a comment shows up on your blog that looks like it could be spam, don’t approve the comment.  Also, don’t just hit the delete button.  I know some clients that do this and they cannot figure out why they keep coming back.  You must mark spam comments as spam instead of just deleting them.  When you just delete comments the Akismet filter cannot learn who the spammers are.  When you mark it as spam it notifies Akismet and you are doing your part to help the entire WordPress community against future spam comments from that person.

Another important step to stopping comment spam is to make sure your Akismet plugin is kept up to date.  If you are running older versions of the plugin, you are leaving a door open for the spammers to get in.  This is important to do with all plugins on your site for security, but especially important for fighting against comment spam.

An extra step that you can take to fight spam is to install one of the additional spam blockers in the WordPress plugin directory.  I currently don’t run one, so I can’t give you any good suggestions on those.  Instead I prefer to use the Disqus Comment System on my personal WordPress sites.  When you use something like Disqus, Livefyre, Commentluv, or other comment systems it will also help to lower the amount of spam as they normally require a different type of login like a Facebook account, Twitter account, etc from the default name, website, comment fields.  Spammers don’t like giving away their true identity and are usually too lazy to make another account, so they will just move on.

On a side note, one idea that has been asked to me by many of my WordPress clients is whether or not they should change their discussion settings so that they must approve all comments before they go live.  To me, this is a very bad idea.  Nothing is worse than a good conversation happening on a blog post and I want to jump in, so I write a thoughtful comment to be greeted by: Your Comment is awaiting moderation.  That is like a punch to the gut and takes all the wind out of my sails.  That being said, I wouldn’t use moderation.

Wrap-up

So, in closing here’s the steps to deal with WordPress spam:

  1. Recognize spam comments and mark them as spam.
  2. Make sure akismet is installed and configured properly.
  3. Mark spam comments as spam and don’t just delete.
  4. Install additional levels of spam filters if needed.

Hopefully after reading this post you have a better understanding on how to deal with WordPress spam comments.  If spam comments on your custom WordPress site are out of control, and the things above do not seem to resolve your problems, feel free to contact me for help with a WordPress Site.

*Bonus*- Deleting 151,0oo Spam Comments In Under 30 Seconds

So I teased you in the title on how to handle your Custom WordPress site if spam comments get out of hand and reach 151,000+.  I’ve had many clients that have several hundred spam comments in their WordPress site, but never one with over 150,000 till just a few weeks ago.  When I saw this I figured it was time to make a quick video on how to delete spam comments in bulk from your site.  You could go into the comments section and remove them manually, but that can become very time consuming when you have thousands to remove and can only do it 50 at a time.

So here’s a quick easy way to remove 151,000 comments at once:


The code that you need to enter is:  DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 0

As you saw in my example, this removed over 151,000 WordPress spam comments in under thirty seconds.  It is a quick easy way to clean up your spam box and save you hours of time.

Happy Spam Fighting!

 

What Is Your Online Shelf Life?

Social Media Advisors

Expiration Social media is beginning to play more of a role in the online marketing of your business if done correctly.  Unfortunately though, too many times we get distracted by social media tools that end up becoming our main focus for our business online.    Which is why one of the topics I love to speak on the most is the importance of your website, or online home base.

What’s Does The Expiration Label Say?

A study done by URL shortening service bit.ly shared that on average, the shelf life for most links shared on either Twitter or Facebook is around 3 hours.  That means that most content you would share on social networks will only survive around 3 hours before it loses it’s power.

So, before you begin building a strategy of using a Facebook page as the hub for your business, consider the fact that if you aren’t constantly updating this page every few hours, you are not getting your message, your product or service out in front of consumers.  Sure, you could set up a bunch of scheduled post updates and monitor things all day long, but is that the most effective way to run your business? Personally I’m not a fan of things with such a short expiration date.

Push Versus Pull

While Social Networks have the ability to grow a huge community of followers, the only source of traffic is that social network.  So, if you have 2,000 followers on Twitter, your audience is just those 2,000 people unless you get lucky enough for someone to re-tweet you.  Facebook, is pretty much the same way, your content getting shared beyond your sphere is dependent on a viewer sharing it for you.  So, you must keep pushing the content in hopes your sphere will also push it beyond your page to others.

While some think this may be the absolute best way to run your online presence, I prefer going with a pull process instead of pushing.  What I mean, is that I prefer focusing my time and effort on creating content on my actual website that I own.  That way, I can drive my Twitter followers, my Facebook Fans, LinkedIn connections, G+ Circles and other social connections to my site.  But, in addition to pushing that traffic to a site, I also can pull in traffic, a new sphere of potential clients and more all through the search engines.

Take a look at this chart showing traffic sources driving visitors to my site:

Site Traffic Sources

  As you can see in comparison to all other sources of site traffic, Google alone is sending over 68% of the traffic to my site.  This traffic are visitors who are typing phrases into the search engine looking for answers and finding my site in the results.  You can see Facebook, Twitter and YouTube do a good job of driving traffic to my site, but they are not anywhere near the amount of traffic that comes from search engines.  This traffic is being pulled in by me writing content they find instead of me pushing something down their social streams.

To make sure it wasn’t just my site that had these types of proportions of traffic, I then decided to look at the data for a few of my clients that I work with closely as their social media advisor to see what their traffic source breakdown looked like.

Take a look at the charts below that represents sources of traffic to two of my clients sites:

Site Stats

Site Stats

As you can see, both of these clients had almost the same identical percentage breakdown of traffic sources into their site.  While social networks push a good amount of traffic to their site, they cannot compete with the amount that is pulled in from Google and other search engines.

Creating A Lifetime Warranty

When you focus your online marketing efforts on creating good content on your own site and not hours on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking strategies you can create content that can last a lifetime.  When you begin to blog or create pages of content, you need to make sure you are answering the questions that your readers want answered.  For example, a post I wrote in June 2011 on Tracking Your Images Through Google has consistently remained one of the top viewed posts on my site.

In fact, this past month it received more traffic than even the home page of my site.  Other posts that I wrote on another site back when selling real estate over four years ago still to this day generate leads and make my phone ring.  This work is the kinds of work that you only need to do once and you can reap the rewards from it for years to come.  The beautiful part is that if I begin to notice a slip in my rankins, I simply write another post on that subject, link back to the well ranking post and it will start to climb back up.

Custom WordPress Site Results

I don’t spend buckets of money each month on Google Sponsored Ad Placements, or on other Pay-Per-Click campaigns.  I simply find terms applicable to my business and then generate content that helps my site to rank on page one of Google for those terms.  While it may take my site a little longer to garner the results I want, the big difference between ranking organically and with PPC is that the minute I stop paying for an ad campaign (PPC), I also lose any source of traffic and leads as my site will disappear off of the first page of SERPS.  If you start paying again, you come back up and the minute you stop, you drop again.  Personally, I’m not a fan of my site acting like a yo-yo.

If you rank organically for a term and don’t do it through shortcuts, you shouldn’t ever see a sudden dip in how your site ranks on certain keywords.  You may from time to time see things drop maybe one or two places.  This is more than likely caused by your site sitting dormant or a change in Google’s algorithm that determines how things should be ranked.

When this happens,  if you simply go back, write some new content, link to the page that was ranking well and possibly give that well ranking page a slight content refresh, you should be able to climb right back up the search engine ladder.  In essence what I have done is created content that can generate leads for a lifetime versus a social network in which you must continuously feed new material to reach that audience.

What Is Your Online Shelf Life?

In closing I want to leave you with this question:  What is the shelf life of your online presence?  Is it something you are building to last forever, or is it something that spoils faster than a loaf of bread?

Feel free to contact me if your website has been lacking and we can discuss strategies to turn it into a long time source of revenue to your business.

How To Get Custom WordPress Menu Links To Open In New Window

WordPress Tutorials

WordPress Site MenuThere are times when you may want to add a link into your WordPress menu that is not a page in your site.  Since I build a bunch of Custom WordPress Sites for those in the real estate industry, they sometimes want to link to a home search function that they already own on a different domain.  But, when someone clicks on the link, they end up leaving their site and going some other place.

However, if the custom menu link opens in a new window/tab, then your site is still there on another tab.  On the normal links you place in a page or post, you would simply add a short piece of HTML of target=_blank into your link.  The only problem is that inside WordPress menus, you cannot add any HTML.  So how do you accomplish this? I’m glad you asked.

Here’s a quick tutorial to walk you through it quickly & easily.

I hope this helps.  Make sure to check some of my other WordPress tutorials to help you customize your WordPress site even more.  And as always, if you need help creating or designing your own Custom WordPress site, do not hesitate to contact me.