I’ve written quite a lot about how useful blog commenting is for building links to your own site, and establishing a presence in your niche. But there’s a downside to this too, particularly if you support the dofollow movement. Recently I’ve noticed a big upsurge in the number of spammy comments I’ve been getting. Because I moderate comments they don’t make it onto the site, but even deleting them wastes my time.
Types of junk comments
These junk comments tend to fall into one of three categories:
Continue reading ‘How not to comment’
When writing articles on your website, do you consciously target certain keywords, or just write whatever comes to mind and hope for the best? Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be a daunting prospect, and it’s not hard to get so bogged down in keyword analysis that you end up not writing anything! Because of this, I suspect most bloggers don’t bother to optimise the vast majority of their posts, if any, which creates an opportunity for those who are prepared to do a bit of digging. This can yield big rewards in terms of search engine traffic.
Choosing sensible website keywords needn’t be that complicated, as long as you follow a few simple guidelines. Today I’m going to outline the process I use, which is what I’ve distilled from many different sources - so it’s nothing revolutionary, just what works for me.
Continue reading ‘How to identify website keywords’
One of the nicest new features in WordPress 2.7 for self-hosted sites is the ability to install WordPress plugins directly from within the admin console - no more having to FTP files around (note that this only works with plugins that are listed in the WordPress plugins list - for others that aren’t in the list you still have to use the old method).
No such luck with WordPress Themes however; for self-hosted sites you still have to manually upload the files to your hosting account before you can activate them, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see this change in a future release - watch this space.
In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the steps to find and install a new Theme using the cPanel File Manager:
- Find a new Theme
- Download the Theme to your computer
- Upload the Theme to your hosting account
- Unzip the Theme
- Activate the Theme
Continue reading ‘How to install WordPress themes using cPanel’
The last few weeks I’ve been coming across this “Smart Pricing” term quite a lot - people tend to casually toss it into conversations without seeming to feel the need for any further explanation, other than that it’s a Very Bad Thing. I’m not sure if this is:
- to give the impression they know more than they actually do, or
- because it’s so obvious that everyone knows exactly what it’s all about!
Well, I don’t mind admitting that I don’t (or didn’t) have a clue what they were talking about, so I decided to find out.
Is Smart Pricing still relevent?
The first thing that struck me when I did a search for adsense smart pricing is that a lot of the top results seem to date back to 2005, which led me to wonder if this is even relevent anymore! After all, three to four years is a long time in cyberspace.
However, there are plenty of references to it in Google’s AdWords documentation, so one must assume it’s alive and well.
Continue reading ‘Adsense Smart Pricing’
What’s your blog or website worth? The short answer is: it depends who you ask. And of course, no matter what anyone says, it’s only really worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting question in these days of the Credit Crunch.
Believe it or not, there are plenty of blog value calculators out there, offering to give you the crucial figure. So, just for fun, I plugged in my url to see what they have to say about the old hippo:
Continue reading ‘How much is your blog worth?’
Courtesy of 3nhanced.comYou may or may not have realised there are two different flavours of WordPress, denoted by the TLD extension. WordPress.com is where you can sign up to a free blog, hosted for you courtesy of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. WordPress.org is where you can download the software for use on your own web server - a so-called self-hosted installation.
So why two versions, and what are their different strengths and weaknesses? Essentially it’s a trade-off between flexibility and ease of use. For more detail, check out this WordPress support page that lists some of the main differences between the two.
Continue reading ‘WordPress.com versus WordPress.org’
I’ve recently been invited by the Centre for Lifelong Learning in Newcastle upon Tyne to teach a 10 week blogging course. Over the 10 weeks I’ll be taking the group through the fundamentals of blogging with WordPress, including
- choosing a topic
- registering a domain
- setting up a self-hosted WordPress installation
- generating content
- building web traffic
- monetization
and more.
Continue reading ‘Blogging course - Newcastle upon Tyne’
Having recently doled out some advice on staying safe online I guess it was kind of inevitable that a “security situation” would come my way - one of our computers was infected a few days ago. But in case you’re wondering, the False Prophet I’m referring to is not me!
No, it’s a particularly insidious piece of malware which purports to be looking out for your best interests, in order to con you into installing it. I’m referring to a trojan called “Antivirus 2009″ (also known as AV 2009) which appears to propagate by infecting legitimate websites. Here’s what Google Safe Browsing has to say about it.
Continue reading ‘Beware the False Prophet!’
I always recommend using self-hosted WordPress instead of the free version, as you end up having much more control over your site. However, one area in which I’ve always felt a bit cheated with WordPress.org sites is the lack of built-in stats monitoring. I guess this is why most bloggers end up using sites like Google Analytics to keep track of things - myself included.
There are also third-party WordPress plugins available which provide some of this functionality - I wrote about one such statistics plugin a few months back. But a couple of days ago I stumbled across another plugin - that provides the bona fide WordPress.com stats within a WordPress.org blog! Now, this is not a new plugin - it’s been around for a couple of years already by the looks of it - but it’s the first I’d heard of it.
Continue reading ‘WordPress.com statistics plugin’
A couple of days ago I had the privilege of speaking to a group of writing students about the joys of blogging. Whilst many of them had never previously come across the concept of blogging and were intrigued by it, it didn’t take long for the question of online safety to come up. I must confess I was initially somewhat taken aback by their concerns, as I personally don’t worry much about getting virused, hacked, or falling victim to an online scam.
But as I pondered the question I realised that the reason I’m pretty relaxed about this stuff now is that over the years I’ve learned how to avoid most of the common pitfalls and recognise and deal with potentially threatening situations when they arise. Here are my top tips for staying safe online:
Continue reading ‘How to stay safe online’
