Google disavow tool – Do you need it?

October 29, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

GoogleIt’s never boring in SEO land. Last week the SEOsphere was all abuzz with the October 16th release of the Google disavow links tool. This past summer I, like many other SEOs, have been quite busy doing “Penguin recoveries”. This name, although convenient, is actually misleading, most sites I’ve been helping aren’t recovering from Penguin itself, but rather from manual penalties imposed by Google. The difference? Penguin is an algorithmic change that that focuses on the quality of the backlinks to your site, and lowers your ranking if much of your backlink profile quality is low and spammy, while a manual penalty is an action taken by a human and usually accompanied by a “unnatural links warning” message in GWMT (google webmaster tools). With Penguin, if you clean up the problem, your site should recover in time, with a manual penalty you have to submit a reconsideration request to get your traffic back.

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Determining Google indexation of your Site

October 15, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

What is Google indexation?

What we mean by indexation is the pages that Google has crawled of your site and put into its index. When you type in a search term into Google, it then uses the index as a repository to retrieve pages to show in the search engine results pages. Just because a search engine has crawled a page on your site doesn’t mean that it puts it into the index. For one thing you might have told it not to index it. Or Google might have decided it’s not worthy of being indexed.

What has Google indexed from your site?

To see whether Google has indexed your site at all, type the following query into Google, replacing your domain name for “foo.com” below.

site:www.foo.com

If you get a list of URLs you are in business, if you don’t then the simplest way to get your site indexed is to add a link back to your site from a social media network such as Twitter or LinkedIn. Assuming your site is indexed, the next step is click through the pages (at the bottom of the search result page) to see what Google has indexed. You might be surprised.

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How to create embed code for your infographic in WordPress

October 6, 2012 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Stacking up to a Hoarder – storage.com
Got infographic? Although the linkbaiting with an infographic tactic has been around for while, it’s popularity shows no sign of abating. Infographics also seem tailor made to share on pinterest, a visual pin up board.

But of course we don’t want sharing limited to pinterest, our ultimate goal is to have other bloggers embed the infographic so that we build backlinks to our site. So that is where creating an embed code box comes in. Just an aside, I’m surprised to see infographics posted without these – putting the onus on me as a blogger to figure out how to embed it in my post. So why not make easy? It might get you a few more links.

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Does the meta description tag help SEO?

October 1, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

SEO: Search Engine OptimizationIt doesn’t help. At least not directly. Does that surprise you? Why then, you might be asking, does each SEO article you read about meta tags strongly recommend that you have meta description tags on each page of your website? Because SEO shouldn’t be your only focus when improving your website. And it is true that meta description tags may help your site perform better in the search engine results, albeit indirectly.

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I need to improve my WordPress performance!

September 24, 2012 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

I’m starting to dig into improving my WordPress site performance, as it is not where I want to be. On average it takes 3 seconds before it starts rendering and up to 6 or 7 seconds to finish. So I need to improve my WordPress site, so where do I begin? You can start with throwing solutions, such as caching, at the problem, which may or may not help, or you can first diagnose the problem

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What is a WordPress theme?

September 17, 2012 / Basic Web Concepts, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

WordPress basicsSometimes those of us who are immersed everyday in WordPress, SEO and Online Marketing topics forget there is a whole world out there that has barely heard of WordPress. Or if they have heard of it, they think it is only used for blogs. So today I’m going to talk about WordPress themes and what they are.

Anatomy of WordPress

To understand WordPress themes, it helps to have a basic understanding of WordPress itself. I like to think about WordPress as different components working together that not only brings you an awesome website, but one that comes with an administrative interface you can use to create new pages on your site without needing any technical know-how. If you can do Word documents, you can write pages on a WordPress web site.

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