Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

I know, I know, it really sucks! All that effort you put into optimizing your site for search engines might actually come back to bite you in the butt. At SWSW 2012 (South by Southwest conference), Matt Cutts, and several others spoke about search engine optimization in their panel “Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!”

I have been talking about not over-optimizing for some time. So, perhaps I need to first address how people do over-optimize on SEO.

• Heavy Keyword density in articles. You may want to keep your keyword density under 1.4%, which is normally 3 or 4 times within a 400 to 500 word article.
• Too many link exchanges, especially with links not relevant to their site’s content. Blogrolls are fine, but are they all going out to sites that have no relevancy to your site? It is important to make sure that you create a specific relevant list for your sitewide blog roll, and maybe a separate page with links to other sites. Giving all your friends some link juice might not be a great idea.
• Unintelligible heavy keyword density throughout site. The biggest thing I see is writing specifically for the search engine, especially for local optimization. For example, “your keyword, your city” is used constantly throughout each article. Perhaps try “Your keyword in your city.” This makes far more sense grammatically. Write for humans!
• Too many links above the fold that have no strong conversion (weak content). If you are linking to pages that may not have content that you are trying to rank for or that your visitors have no interest in visiting, it might be a good idea to pull the link from the top.
• Too many ads, even if they are relevant to their site above the fold (this includes text links.)
• Too many scripts. Sometimes those extra SEO scripts in those plugins might be slowing your site down. Better yet, maybe you have quite a few plugins installed to your site that are injecting a lot of code to execute and slow your site down. Keep it simple.
• A slow site. It might be your host. It might be a website with heavy graphics. It might be too many plugins loading to make your site work. Site speed is important to a lot of people. 4 seconds or faster is a good rule of thumbs when aiming to have a faster site.

The search engines ARE gearing more toward social search engines where people who are visiting your site, liking, sharing, and recommending your site will rank you better than that site that is over-optimized and not socially connected. While for some, this might suck, it really levels the playing field with people honestly ranking locally or globally and actually engaging with others.

Oh, and as the panel at SXSW 2012 covered- you are NOT guaranteed top ranking just because you optimized. There are many SEO companies that guarantee top ranking and they should not be, especially if your site is usually a very popular and competitive niche.

It is okay to write with keyword density in mind and some optimizing. However, it is better to be natural, keep it simple, and of course, share and engage with your readers.

What do you do when you optimize your site for SEO?

I thought I would start dabbling in some infographics and try it out. I know for me, a big thing that people ask me is how I have so many followers. Now, mind you, I do not have an insane amount of followers, but it is enough for others to ask, especially business owners. Please click to view larger and in a new window. It is important to try to join and connect with your followers on several social networks, instead of one. In fact, it is not unusual to find that a follower might prefer using one social network Read More →

I originally presented WordPress Design and Development With The Client In Mind at WordCamp Philadelphia 2012. I wanted to touch on the fact that as a designer and developer in the WordPress community that we should be more active about making sure our clients are comfortable using their websites. The biggest thing that makes a client change their website despite how nice it looks is usability. Covering your bases and asking your client the right questions helps reduce time and let you know how familiar they are with WordPress. Please listen in on my presentation and feel free to follow Read More →

Running a site takes time and effort. However, it is not hard to do. By simply applying some of the following to your site, you might become a better website host/ hostess as well as a blogger. These suggestions could prevent you from losing valuable traffic. Keep your blog updated regularly. No, this does not mean you have to blog daily, but if that is your norm, you might want to stay consistent, even harnessing the power of scheduling future blog posts if necessary. Visit and comment at other blogs. Visit people you blog roll and people who have commented Read More →

You hear all the time about people talking about how you should have a newsletter to accompany your blog. I have asked Kimberly Castleberry of Just-Ask-Kim.com to guest co-host because she has awesome insight for bloggers still new to email marketing/ newsletters. She will answer a few questions and we will share a few things on some good places to start your own newsletter campaign. We might even have time to maybe touch on some ideas. Please note that this show was originally scheduled for about 30 minutes, and not the normal under 20 minute podcast. This is due to Read More →

Sitemaps are important because they allow the search engines like Google and Yahoo! to index your entire site and leave it available for other internet users to find. A sitemap is defined: A site map (or sitemap) is a representation of the architecture of a web site. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. From Wikipedia. Original definition by Peter Morville, Information Architecture on the World Wide Web, Feb 1998, pp:58 A sitemap Read More →

A lot of people do not realize that even though you have an online presence in several popular social networks that you are going to reel in the traffic, and then sit back and make money. It takes more than your online efforts. All those connections online are great, but what about those in your surrounding community. There are thousands of aspiring small business owners who are looking to get ahead. They are struggling with what few tools that have, and with what little knowledge in business practices. They start a business because: They found a passion they would like Read More →

The definition for a favicon at Wikipedia is: A favicon (short for favorites icon), also known as a website icon, shortcut icon, url icon, or bookmark icon is a 16×16, 32×32 or 64×64 pixel square icon associated with a particular website or webpage. For the rest of us who are not as technical. It is that tiny picture next to the browser URL area that might change when visiting one site to the next. 1. To add one, it is simple. First you at least need to make a 16×16 pixel icon in your graphic editing program. 2. Convert it Read More →