April 11, 2010
Search Engine Optimization, Web Development
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I saw a blog post on when to use microsites vs. multiple domains. The blog post wasn’t that helpful, but reminded me that I wanted to sharpen my understanding of when:
- use of subdomain is called for versus a sub-directory
- when it makes sense to create a whole separate domain altogether
In my corporate web job, we often used subdomains because we were hosting the new website (usually an application rather than a pure HTML site) on separate servers. But then we would often create a “vanity URL” on the main site that redirected to the sub site. Interesting, but not necessarily helpful to answering the question or when, from the marketing or SEO perspective multiple domains is called for.
I was confused on what the term “microsite” meant. The wikipedia definition: “cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website … most likely has its own domain name or subdomain” helped quite a bit. From both the technical and user experience perspective, it makes sense to install something like a forums, catalog or other separate feature on a subdomain, like maps.google.com .. or even on a completely separate domain. And if it will have a distinct brand identity, a separate domain is called for. One more reason, mentioned by the wikipedia entry, is that it can help target your PPC keywords more accurately.
Subdomains appear to be treated similarly to sub-directories by search engines per Matt Cutts, which means you may not get much SEO benefit for the added complexity.
So microsites usually mean additional domains. However just because you want to expand your web presence into a related but different topic than your web site already covers, doesn’t necessary mean a new domain. A new domain adds management and other costs, and you might have to start from scratch to get it indexed by the search engines. You are also missing out on the opportunity to get your original site to rank for more searches because it has more content.
However, I’ve seen creation of a blog on wordpress.com or blogspot.com with links to a main site be quite helpful for ranking for desirable keywords. A specific tactic to keep in mind.
April 6, 2010
Social Media, wordpress
1 Comment
Share Your Blog
Make it easy for your blog readers to tweet, digg, facebook your posts:
More Auto Tweeters
Feed your twitter, or get more enhanced with URL shorteners
Soon, follow mes and embedded tweets.
March 30, 2010
Social Media
1 Comment
There are far too many ways to add social media links and icons to your blog. However, if you are playing the social media PR game, it’s a necessary part of your web presence plumbing, those share, tweet this, facebook icons on your site and your blog.
Up to now, I had been happy with my socialable plugin, resisting the siren call of adding bolder and bigger social media icons to my sidebar. Then I looked at AddThis.
AddThis button bar is simple to add to your blog
It’s so dead simple, you can’t help but to just do it. As long as your wordpress theme is widget aware, all you have to do is cut and paste HTML code into a Text Widget that you drag and drop to your sidebar. The step by step instructions are right there on the AddThis web page. The simplicity of the user experience is something that should be strived for by all webdesigners.
You can see it in my sidebar to the right. I still have sociable but I updated the settings to show it only on individual blog posts so I didn’t have dueling social media button bars on my home page.
AddThis also generates cut and paste code for your website, blogger.com and myspace for four different types of buttons.
October 25, 2009
affiliate internet marketing
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I recently blogged about the new FTC Guidelines, which “address endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, as well as the disclosure of important connections between advertisers and endorsers”. The revised guides require “disclosure of material connections between advertisers and endorsers”. While the intent of new guides appear to be more focused on bloggers who get free products and get paid to endorse a product, the language is sufficiently broad enough that it applies to bloggers that embed affiliate links, even if your review of the product is neutrally biased and not really a testimonial.
Prominent internet marketers seem to agree. Ken MacArthur and SiteFling, both have posted a notice on their blogs disclosing of their affiliate relationships.
October 13, 2009
HTML, Social Media, Web Development
1 Comment
As I begin to wrap up my first child theme using the Thematic framework, I must admit that I’m beginning to really appreciate the power of theme hooks. At first I was modifying the css to get where I wanted to be, for example altering margins, using the background url directive to add my custom header image. But when I got to the point where I wanted to suppress the display of the blog title and description, that is when I first found out about Thematic add and remove actions.
Oh sure I could have just used “display: none” in the css blog title class/ids so that the blog title didn’t display over my custom image, but that’s kind of ugly. Using remove_action in my functions.php file is much more elegant.
function suppress_header_elements() {
remove_action('thematic_header','thematic_blogtitle',3);
remove_action('thematic_header','thematic_blogdescription',5);
}
add_action('init','suppress_header_elements');
And the bonus is that the blog title description value still populate my title and meta description tags as desired for SEO optimization.
Theme hooks is not a concept unique to Thematic but embedded in Wordpress itself. Using theme hooks in your child theme, the idea is that you can isolate your customizations in a single file in a functions.php file (it may be called something different such as custom_functions.php with other frameworks).
Although I had altered the css to add my image, I wanted to additionally add clickable button images as well that I already had defined in a css file. No problem, I just created a new function called add_buttons in my functions.php file, echo’ed out the HTML and then added the add_action line:
function add_buttons() {
echo ....
}
add_action('thematic_header', 'add_buttons');
It wasn’t completely smooth sailing as I ran into this error when I tried to use the admin (error text modified to remove site identifying info)
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/mysite/public_html/blog/wp-content/themes/childtheme/functions.php:43) in /home/mysite/public_html/mysite.com/blog/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 865
Most of the information you get googling this error suggests there is extra spaces prior to the php start tag in the wpconfig.php file. That wasn’t the case here, but it was a good clue. Turns out I had an extra blank line after the closing php tag in my functions.php file. When I finally figured out to remove that, the errors went away.
October 6, 2009
Social Media
No Comments
This just in. I just heard on NPR that the FTC has released new guidelines regarding blogs that “endorse” products. Product reviews is a common blog post, popular with searchers who are researching a potential purchase, and yes bloggers sometimes get paid for the reviews or at least get free stuff. The FTC thinks these relationships the bloggers have with companies, need to be fully disclosed. Fines can be pretty hefty, up to $11,000 per infraction.
Not surprisingly, the twittersphere has picked up on it quickly. I found a tweet pointing to a cnet article discussing the impact on twitter and facebook users.
Seems that affiliate links is outside the scope of these new guidelines, but more careful reading is needed.
September 3, 2009
Web Development
1 Comment
After poking around at both Hybrid and Thematic, wordpress frameworks, I went with Thematic. The reason? Better documentation. I followed Hybrid’s instructions on installing a child theme and and got a broken theme. I was more successful with Skelton, but felt overwhelmed by the amount of work I need to do in css land to get to a reasonable looking theme. So in the end I installed Thematic which has some basic layout css files prepackaged to get you started with your child theme. Of course my decision to go with Thematic may reflect some learning challenges on my part, but in the end, Thematic got me quicker to where I needed to be.
Note this project is for a separate blog, not this one. The cobbler’s children makes do with last year’s shoes.
A bit more on frameworks and why you should care. Using a WP framework gives you some separation between functionality and presentation, always a worthy goal. And it allows you to subclass (well kind or) distinct functional components while preserving the ability to upgrade the originals. What I mean by this, is that you can copy a php file (say header.php) from the parent theme to your child theme directory and alter the copy. Wordpress, in it’s later versions, knows to look first for the php files in the child theme. The idea here is that when wordpress and the parent theme is upgraded, there is some insulation … I’ll let you know how that goes when I get there.
I mentioned that I went with Thematic because of the better documentation. It took a little digging, but this tutorial series of blog posts are really helpful to get you started. I particularly appreciated the pointer to a sample xml file you can import into your theme to help QA it and review all the little styles you might want to customize. That in itself was a nice find.
August 14, 2009
Web Development
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Ok, I must have done this wrong. Or maybe I was on too old of a version of wordpress.
I wanted to install sociable, a popular wordpress plugin that makes it easy for your visitors to digg, facebook, etc.. your blog posts. However the most recent sociable version did not work with my current version of wordpress 2.3.3, which is quite old. It was obviously time for me to upgrade wordpress.
Installing wordpress is a snap, but it seemed less clear how to upgrade. The wordpress codex seemed indicate I should download the latest version .. but I was a little concerned about overwriting all my customizations, it also mentioned that my hosting provider might provide some point and click support for what I wanted to do.
Excellent! I thought (I can be really lazy about this stuff)
I use bluehost. Since I have installed wordpress they have started using simple scripts in place of fantastico (yes the install was a while ago). I followed the prompts and then got the dreaded error about finding some incompatibilities and asking permission to overwrite. I of course said no, but that stopped the process cold. I apparently had no option but to say yes.
But before I said yes (yes please overwrite files you aren’t telling me anything about …) I used filezilla to pull down a backup of all my files. Then, with some trepidation, I clicked yes to the overwrite prompt.
The first sign of trouble was that it gave me a new password for my admin account. Umm, I don’t use “admin” for my admin account. I then went to my blog and what was staring at me was the default wordpress theme with the single hello world post. Insert your favorite expletive here.
The lost of the theme wasn’t hugely concerning, that was easy to fix. And in fact I just went into the admin, switched themes to greyidea (the theme I’m using), with all my extensive customizations to it intact.
But none of the 100 or so blog posts. That seemed like a major problem, I hadn’t thought to back up the database (wordpress keeps a lot of stuff in a mySQL database). I would have rather rebuilt the theme.
But was all my posts gone? phpadmin is a most handy tool. And sure enough there were two databases. A peek at my saved wpconfig file showed I was pointing a different database. A quick fix (glad I saved the original config file so I had the username and password!) to wpconfig, upload, and I was back in business. Everything, even my original admin account started working again.
Installing sociable was easy compared to the “upgrade”.
So the question is, is there a easier way to upgrade wordpress to the latest version?
April 3, 2009
Social Media
No Comments
If you have already taken the leap into the blogwagon, you have probably already discovered that creating free blog can only take just a few clicks. The frustrating part is you put a lot of time and energy into writing posts only to find that it seems as though no one is paying attention. If you are interested in learning to blog better, review these six helpful encouragements.
1. You should always check your spelling before you submit your post. If your posts are sloppy and full of misspelled words, people will think that you are not educated and probably won’t take anything you say seriously. Some blogging software sa comes with a spell check
options. If your blogging software does not come with any spell check feature, simply create your post in a word processing software and use the spell check there. edited work into the blogging software text area. This will allow you to post without spelling errors, which is highly recommended.
2. Keeping your free blog sites brief will help you retain any interested viewers. People don’t want to spend massive amounts of time reading text on. Try to stick to your point and keep it nice and short. A blog that is more than 500 or 700 words is just too much. If you need to carry on with the topic, consider creating another post that finishes your point.
3. If you want your free blog to be well-known and a success overall, consider writing in a more casual tone.Think of the writing as being a conversation you are having with a friend. Using humor and other personality characteristics in your writing will make people want to keep coming back to read your newest entries.
4. If you need to advertise on your internet marketing blog, consider doing so in a more subtle manner. Don’t take up your entire blog space with the advertisement. This can be a cheap way to get your work out there. It is noted however that blog readers can get annoyed quickly at advertisements on blogs.
5. You simply must be flexible with your post topics. Those blogs that cover only one type of thing may be popular with one specific targeted group of people. That is fine, if it is what you want. If you want to reach everyone however, you need to post on everything. Consider posting on current affairs, music, books, and other hot issues. When you post about popular things in the news, it will draw people to your site when they do a search on the web.
6. People who become fans of your free blog will likely be looking for a new post every few days. If you want to keep your free blog sites fresh and interesting, you should post often. They will be waiting for your new posts and will continue logging on as long as you provide them with new information.
Setup your own free blogs with revenue sharing and read more internet marketing articles at Henry Zeng’s internet marketing blogs.
Find out how to build website traffic to your blogs.
February 4, 2009
Online Business, Promotion and Marketing, Social Media
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People will always have their own opinions about something. The great thing about self-expression these days is that anyone can be able to get themselves published through the Internet. Just start blogging and you have your own place in the World Wide Web, which can help you rant all you can, share your knowledge, share your life, or just simply to share your thoughts. People trying to make a living off internet marketing also tend to try blogging to gain an audience and make money.
A blog is a short reference to web log, which can be likened to a diary or journal. The major difference is that this one is for the public’s eye. If you have something in mind that you want to share to the whole world, you can do so through your own blog.
There are a host of media one blogger can use like articles, images, video clips, or digital photos in making one’s blog more interesting. The blog can be about certain topics on which the blogger has a lot of brilliant ideas about. Any one blog can be a host to many links to whatever the author of the blog finds useful or interesting online.
Blogs can be about some mom’s adventures with taking care of her baby and other kids. Others may be about travel adventures, gadgets, movies, shopping, or tutorials of sorts. There are many ways one can make use of blogging. What’s best about this is that one can sign up anytime for an account for free.
Blogging has become very popular that there may be thousands upon thousands (or even millions!) already floating around the Internet now. Many of those that have become popular have visitors that regularly go to their sites for updates. These sites often have very good site traffic that could earn them some income off internet marketing.
Blogs have already existed as early as the mid 1990s but it is only recently that people have begun to embrace its potential. These days, blogs are considered mainstream media, which business-minded people use to do marketing, and which many people use for spreading informative articles like news.
Since people have found blogs, people have found ways to monetize them. If you are already established as a blogger and your site is fetching really good traffic regularly, then you may have already started to employ Internet advertisements to your web pages.
During the earlier days of doing ads online, probably the most popular forms of advertising were in the form of banners and pop-ups. But since so many sites are now online, and people have grown tired of being disturbed when they are reading or browsing, the way businesses advertise through blogs or websites has changed, evolved, or adapted.
When you have ads in your blog, you will be able to get some commission from the providers whenever your visitors click on the links. This can be tracked and you get paid depending on the policies set by the merchant or ad provider.
Blogging will continue to be that great medium for people to express themselves, but it will most likely grow even more into this medium for people to promote products or services, for free.