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How to Make Google Sing and Dance with Your Blog

December 19, 2011

More and more small business owners are blogging these days. Which makes sense because it’s such a great tool for your business.

Blogging allows you to do so much more than just sharing news and promoting events. You can use blogging to boost your credibility, create a personal connection with your audience, and answer customer questions and queries more efficiently.

As a small business owner, I love blogging and recommend it for so many reasons.

But, the number one reason I would suggest jumping on the blogging bandwagon is . . . ‘drum roll please’

Search Engine Marketing.

Many small business owners are aware that blogging is good for search engines (and if you didn’t, well, at least you learned something new today). But just publish posts, and go on their merry way, without understanding all the bits and bobs you can use to making your content search friendly.

If you’re not a techie or Internet whiz, no problem. Optimizing your blog isn’t that hard. Keep reading and I’ll teach you all the areas in your blog that you can use to serve juicy bits of content to Google and other search engines.

Categories
Blog categories allow you to organize your posts by topic and let your readers easily find the areas that are the most interesting to them. But category names should not be chosen randomly. Whenever possible use relevant keywords to name your categories.

Keyword Tags
Each blog post can be associated with keywords. Choose keywords that are related to the topic at hand. And, remember to use the same keywords in the content itself.

If you’re using WordPress and your theme does not automatically include an area for keywords and other optimization areas (we’ll be getting in a bit), Laura and I both recommend the free plugin All in One SEO Pack.

Meta Description
This area allows you to include a description of your post. Create the description, using your keywords of course. Are we sensing a theme here, yet?

Title Tag
The title tag area gives you some flexibility to be creative. I often like to create post titles that are fun and interesting. It makes people want to read on, right?

For example, I titled one of my posts – The greedy email collector. What would be the practical, search friendly title for that post? Common email marketing mistakes or something along those lines would do. I can keep my more interesting title on my blog and use the more practical one in the title tag.

For more tips on naming your blog posts and how to blend creativity with practicality, check out this post on writing titles for your blog posts.

Photos
Did you know that search engines can read the file names of your photos? If you’re using a photo or two in a post, use a relevant keyword for the file name when you save it to your computer.

Text Links
Within your each blog post, you have the opportunity to include links to other content in your blog. Whether you’re referencing your product, service, or a topic that you discussed in another blog post, use keyword rich anchor text to create the link. This gives search engines even more information about the content of that page.

Instead of saying: Read more about my services here try a keyword focused text link, such as Read more about my small business accounting services.

Can you see the difference?

Having a blog is an important way to get your business moving up on search rankings. And now you know how to make the most out of search engine optimization.

Martina Iring is an online marketing consultant who works with small business owners and entrepreneurs overwhelmed with all that web stuff. She’s on a mission to help the little guys make sense of Internet marketing, teaching small biz owners how being online is not only profitable, but enjoyable! Her blog, Small Business Bliss, offers up gobs of free marketing info and doses of inspiration just for little biz owners. Get your free website improvement guide here.

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The problem with your web designer: why hiring out your site could be your biggest biz mistake

December 1, 2011

Guest post by Amanda Aitken

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You’re in the shower, lathering up with your fave shampoo, when suddenly, it hits you like a lightning bolt. A brilliant idea. An idea for a business that’s sure to change the world as we know it (or at least your little corner of it), and that you know you must act on NOW, or it will never happen.

Lit up like a Christmas tree, you jump out of the shower with your hair full of suds so you can scrawl down your genius thought before it vanishes into the ether.

As you skid back into the bathroom, your mind goes into overdrive dreaming up your branding for the new pursuit. You can’t remember the last time you were so excited. Fame, fortune, and that splashy trip to Paris are surely just around the corner!

But then you have another thought: “Crap. I’m going to need a website.”

The smile fades from your lips as the water goes cold.

Yep – you’ve got a tall order on your hands. This ain’t your first rodeo, and you know from experience how hard it is to find a talented designer who a) “gets” your vision, b) actually returns your emails, and c) is available sometime before 2014. Oh yeah – and you also need to come up with $2,000 for the project. Stat.

And just like that, the bubble bursts. You can already see the finished site in your mind’s eye (it’s gorgeous! flawless! primed to reel in the clients!), but you’re painfully aware that getting there is going to be a real struggle.

I know you’re trying to outsource the stuff that’s outside your zone of genius. That’s a smart strategy. But if you’re a creative solopreneur (especially one who’s a bit of a design snob), hiring out your website can be a massive mistake.

Let’s get very real here: after months of back-and-forth by email, costs that balloon with every revision you ask for, and a low-level migraine you can’t seem to shake, you could STILL end up with a site you don’t adore.

Does outsourcing still seem like the way to go?

—

So what’s a girl (or guy) to do? Why, DIY, of course!

That’s right – I said it! For visually picky solopreneurs, learning to create your own website – coding and all – is the smartest choice you will make this year.

Here’s why:

Learning to code is easier than you think. There’s this perception that it’s scary and weird, but this is just what “web people” want you to believe. The end result? You end up paying them money to do something they get a real kick out of. Actually, learning HTML and CSS is no different from leaning any other new skill. I taught myself HTML when I was 13, and I’m not even a supernerd.
Building your own sites saves you serious cash. You know the old proverb: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. If you have ten ideas for new businesses or online projects over the next few years, you could be forking out as much as $50,000 for web design and web development work. That’s $50,000 you could be using to start a bold new movement, a charity, or an impressive shoe collection.
Coding is what lets you create amazing, non-template-y visual effects. Putting up a basic WordPress site has its place, but if you care deeply about your branding, you need to know how to code. Paired with graphics (which you can make yourself online, for free), HTML and CSS knowledge is a must-have for getting a gorgeous, customized look for your site. “Cookie-cutter” won’t know what hit it.
Knowing this stuff makes you super business-nimble. Came up with a great new opt-in offer? If you know HTML and CSS, you can throw it up on your site within minutes of envisioning it. No matter how you slice it, that’s pretty darn awesome.
If you’re taught the right way, code and web stuff can be fun. Like, not going out on Friday night because you want to stay in with your computer fun.
Total empowerment. Imagine the feeling of freedom you’d have if you finally knew how to get the ideas out of your head and onto a computer screen – so that your ideal clients and customers can bask in their beauty.

As an entrepreneur, I can’t tell you how valuable it is for me to be able to get a new site online, exactly the way I want it to look, within hours of it popping into my head. You can have that feeling too!

Amanda Aitken is the incurable entrepreneur and longtime web designer behind The Girl’s Guide to Web Design: the online course that teaches design-minded women to create gorgeous, totally unique WordPress blogs and sites – coding, graphics, and all – in a fun, whimsical video format. Find out which learning track would fit you best (First Class or Jetsetter) at http://girlsguidetowebdesign.com, or follow her on Twitter at @amandaaitken.

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How Team Blogging Can Help You Achieve More

December 20, 2010

Guest post by Sarah Arrow

Can you imagine a cheerleader cheering on her own? A great cheerleader knows that the cheering is a team sport alongside football. Team sports, like team blogging means nobody has to be perfect but everybody has a role to play.

Blogging together means you can achieve far more than what you can on your own; it’s like guest blogging on steroids (only without the side affects).

In January 2010 we started a team blog. It became very popular very quickly due to the variety and depth of content. On a solo blog you have one voice and guest voices if you invite them. A team blog, sometimes known as group blogging or multi author blogging, means you get to share many voices on one subject, in our case women in business.

Team blogging means a bigger audience. It also creates a new audience, so you reach readers who may have never discovered your work before. You see it in Hollywood movies all the time; a big name actor hooked up and sharing billing with a younger unknown actor. Both the actors reach new audiences. The big name actor will sell more DVDs and the younger less experienced actor gains more opportunities What’s not to love?

Fancy giving team blogging a go?

As I mentioned above, the chances are you already know the people to contact, you will find them in forums, in blogs that you love and on lists in Twitter. Find your Tribe and make contact. Be prepared to answer their questions and remember if they are asking or objecting it’s because they need reassuring.

As a group lead the discussion as to what platform you will use – we love WordPress and if you are not sure how to use it Laura can help in her Zero to WordPress program. As a team, decide on your blogging frequency but do that after you have decided on what topics to blog on. Over at Birds on the Blog we have a rotating group of 30 ‘permanent’ bloggers, Some blog on similar topics to each other and some on posts that are completely off the wall and beyond their field of experience. Decide the rules in advance such as if you will allow topic cross-over.

As any cheerleader will tell you, it’s OK to have a slightly less than perfect voice. When working together as a team, in both cheering and blogging, any shortfall will be covered by the stronger members. The less skilled parts of the team become stronger, more confident and that eases the pressure on the top performers.

What I am saying is, it’s cool to have a mix of skills on your team blog. No one will think less of you for joining in, many can see how the group grows and improves. The chances are if you are one of the stronger ones you will learn new things and refresh old techniques that you once dismissed. And hey, it feels good to encourage new talent.

Money, let’s talk filthy lucre. A team blog is in a position to monetize more swiftly than a traditional blog. I wasn’t expecting that and it caught me off guard. Our adsense revenue pays for the education of twin girls in Uganda. Sponsorship has enabled us to upgrade the blog’s infrastructure and hosting several times. With one team blog we are looking at all affiliate link advertising with revenue splits between the main editor and the bloggers. On another we allow the bloggers to use their own affiliate links. What works best for you may well change over time, so be clear about that right from the start.

If there is an existing team blog that you like, why not ask to become a reserve? Ask to post a few guest blogs to see if the audience is right for you, and if it will give you the opportunity to become part of something much bigger. A team blog amplifies your voice and increases your reach and as you get better at it, so do your writing skills.

As I said at the beginning a cheerleader doesn’t cheer by herself and neither do bloggers have to go it alone to achieve their goals. I am lucky I have a dream time of brilliant business women bloggers.

Who would be in your blogging dream team?

Sarah Arrow is a multi- author, team blogging advocate. She has 6 team blogs of her own and blogs her thoughts at Blogmistress. She is happy to chat on twitter @SarahArrow

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How to Remove The Post Dates from Your WordPress Blog

May 3, 2010

If you’ve ever wanted to create an “evergreen” WordPress blog by removing post dates, here’s how to do it.

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Hi, this is Laura Roeder and today I’m going to show you how to remove the post dates from your WordPress blog so that your blog posts can stay more evergreen, so that someone doesn’t look at your blog and see that it’s a year old. If you remove the dates they don’t know when you wrote it and it helps blogs seem more timeless.

So, this is going to get much more technical than the information that I usually share. The only way to remove the date is to go into the code and to read a little bit of code. So we are going to be code monkeys today, more technical than I usually get but I’m designing this for people who do not know PHP. So, if you don’t know PHP, if you don’t know HTML, don’t worry, I think you can follow along and do this, I’m going to show you exactly what to look for. So, let’s get started.

The first thing you want to do is sign into your WordPress website. I’ve just created a test site for the purpose of this presentation and you can see that right now there is the date. There is the headline and then right below it is March 29th, 2009. So we want to take that date off, that’s our goal, it’s what we’re doing right now. So, how you’re going to do this is to go to the editor under appearance. So on the left hand side you’ll see appearance and then you’ll see editor and we’re going to need to look for the piece of code that references this date in all of our WordPress template files and we’re going to remove it. So basically this date is created by a piece of code that tells WordPress to recall the date that the post was created so if we take out that piece of code this date will longer show up.

So, I’m going to start with the main and next template because I know it’s there but as you’ll see in a minute I’m going to ask you to go through all the templates because the date can show up in a lot of places. It’s going to show up on archives, it’s going to show up on the regular post page. Without being familiar with the code you don’t really know where it’s going to show up so the safest bet is to search for everything. So again under appearance I went to editor and you can just start with any of these pages. I’m starting with the main index template for the purpose of this presentation because I know it’s in there and then I want you to do a find. You can do this using your browser, just Ctrl F or or apple F will find something in the content. What we’re going to look for is the phrase, the_time. You can see it right here, the_time. That’s a little code snippet that tells you that WordPress is looking for the date.

Once I’ve found the time, it’s highlighted right here and this is the entire bit of code. I’m going to isolate it so that it’s a little easier to read. Just so you know, in code you can move – space stuff out as much as you want. If I put all these spaces before and after it does not affect the code so don’t worry about putting spaces before and after something in order to make it easier to see. So, remember we did a search for the time. Here’s the time right here and then there is other kind of gobbledygook that surrounds the time. This is the PHP WordPress code so what we want to do is isolate just the time. The way you can do that is to look for these little brackets right here, this little less than, greater than signs. That shows you the beginning and end of a piece of code.

So, when you look for the time it’s going to look a different depending on how they have it set up. It might not have this ‘fjsy’ exactly as this one is because there is a few different ways you can do it which is why I’m having you look for the time, that’s universal and to find the whole piece of code you’re going to look for these little carrots outlining it. This one in the beginning and this one in the end that’s how you know you have one solid piece of code because you don’t want to break in the middle of the code or else this won’t work. Basically you can think of it as you need to take out this entire piece not just part of it. So once you’ve found that, one thing you can do is just delete but I’m going to show you a better way.

So, instead of deleting it we’re going to do what’s called commenting it out. So comments are a way to add a line of code that you want for your own reference but that won’t affect what actually happens on a web site. People use comments for notes to other developers and stuff like that but it’s also a way to have your web site not read a piece of code without having to delete entirely. So it’s a good idea to use comments to kill a piece of code so that you’re not deleting it so you can still get it back if you need it. So again the first step is to search for the time, then you want to isolate it by looking for these little characters on the beginning and on the end and then we want to make it a comment. The code to do that is you put this little greater than sign, an exclamation point and then two dashes and then you close it by putting two dashes, and then another little carrot there.

So again the way I told you this marks the beginning and end, this marks the beginning and end of a comment as well. So, it starts with the – I think I said greater than sign but this is actually a less than sign isn’t it. Oh I have to remember my elementary school math. Let’s just say the arrow that’s pointing to the left. It starts with that, then you have an exclamation point and then two dashes, then inside of that you’re putting your little the time code snippet, and then you end it with another two dashes and a little arrow pointing to the right. So this is what the whole thing should look like and then you want to go ahead and update your file to save it.

So, I want to do another find for the time to make sure I got all the instances. Okay, there’s only one, and then I just want to click on all these template files on the right hand side and do that search. Okay, so it’s not in the comments file in this instance but you need to search every file in your theme because it’s different, every theme. Okay, it’s not in footer. Let’s look in the header. It’s not in the header. We already looked in the main index template, let’s look in the search forum, okay it’s not there. Let’s look in the side bar. Not there and let’s look in theme functions. Not there. Okay, so in this one we only had to look in one template. Again this totally depends on your theme. You might find it in more than one template but in our case it was only in the main index template.

I just want to give you another really brief refresher of what I did. I searched for the time. I isolated that little code snippet and then I commented it out using this code right here, I made it disappear. We’re going to check and see if what we did worked. So remember this is the old version. I’m going to refresh this page and see if March 29th, 2009 disappears and it does. All right, that means that it worked and we should be able to click on the individual posts and it should be gone from there as well. So that is how you remove the date from a post in WordPress. Again, the key thing that you want to do, you want to go under appearance, go to the editor, just do a find through each one of these files. You want to look for the_time. You want to isolate that little snippet of code and then you want to comment it out.

You want to make it a comment instead of an actually piece of code by doing this little carrot exclamation point two dashes, another two dashes and then the little carrot going the other way. You can also just go ahead and delete this code but it’s better to do this so that if you ever want to bring it back you still have it there. You hit update file and that’s all you have to do. Then you have your great web site without any kind of date on the post.

Again this is Laura Roeder. You can check out my web site at lauraroeder.com.