Category Archives for Kathy Alice
April 22, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
Guest posting can broaden your blog’s reach and build quality backlinks to your site. But as with any popular technique, abuse is on the rise. I manage guest posting campaigns for clients and have written a few guest posts myself. And even though I don’t provide a contact us form on this blog and I don’t solicit them, I get a number emails pitching me on guest posts for WebEnso, which I usually don’t accept.
April 8, 2013 / Digital Marketing / by Kathy Alice
I’ve just started reading Avinash Kaushik’s book: Web Analytics 2.0. Avinash is well known for his insights into the complex world of Web Analytics and his ability to distill complex topics into simple concepts. At the end of Chapter 3 of his book, Avinash lists a couple of questions that all businesses should be able to answer about their web site. The first question “How many visitors are coming to my website?” is pretty straightforward so I won’t spend much time on that one. Investigation into the second question “Where are your visitors coming from?” yielded some cool insights that I will share below.
April 1, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
As a SEO consultant you develop certain filters, some might even say blinders. You look at websites differently than other people. Some aspects of a website you ignore, but others, like the user experience and the content you pay close attention to. A good example of this is site search, the search functionality you find on many sites.
A routine technical SEO recommendation is to noindex any search pages that are crawlable on a site.
If you are not sure what I mean by search pages: go to the search box on this site, webenso.com and type in “wordpress seo” you’ll get a page that looks like the below and has a URL that has a ?s=wordpress+seo query string in it.
Either you don’t want Google to find those URLs or the pages should have the meta robots tag on it set to noindex.
But I’m not here to dive into the details of noindex and technical SEO. My point is that as a SEO you disregard the search pages once addressed and forget about them. This is what I mean by blinders. We SEOs are so focused on Google search, with an occasional journey into Bing search, that we don’t always see the potential that the other search engines have to disrupt the search industry.
March 19, 2013 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice
I was asked to take a look at the AuthorSure WordPress plugin as a possible solution for Multiple Author blogs. I’ve previously posted about Google Authorship, which is a special tag (rel=author) that you add to your blog so that Google will use information from your Google+ profile, most notably your picture, in the snippets that show up in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
AuthorSure is a relatively new WordPress plugin, however it is in the WordPress repository (always reassuring) and best of all it’s free! The supporting site has a couple of good articles and if you become a member (also free) you get access to a video tutorial. Aside from running into a conflict with WPMinify. I found the setup straightforward and quick. The author also has a Google+ business page for the plugin where he will answer questions.
March 11, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
When you create a video for your online marketing you have two distinct strategies available to you:
By embedding video on your site, I’m not talking about copying and pasting the YouTube video embed code on your site. Yes that might help your visitor stick around longer which indirectly helps your site’s SEO. However unless you have a really powerful site, your page is almost never going to outrank the video you have uploaded onto YouTube. Especially if the video is well tagged in YouTube.
February 11, 2013 / Self Publishing / by Kathy Alice
I’m finishing up a book that I intend to publish on the Kindle store in Amazon. Last year I came up with a diet that I successfully used to lose over 10 pounds and decided to write about it. The weight loss world is full of confusing information, and it’s been an interesting journey to look at the food we eat and the entrenched problems with the food industry and the struggles many have with obesity.
Since I knew nothing about self publishing on Kindle it has been a learning curve. However it’s not rocket science and below are some of the useful resources and guides I have found for publishing on Kindle on Amazon
While this post just focuses on Kindle, which is the biggest marketplace for self published digital books, the Kindle Store is not the only market. However Amazon offers the KDP Select program, where in exchange for listing your book exclusively in the Kindle store you get the ability to offer your book for free which can be a great marketing tool to get your book noticed. So I will start with that and then decide after the 90 days whether the lock in is worth it.
