wordpress seo | Webenso

How to Change the Font Size in WordPress

July 7, 2016 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

I’ve been thinking about migrating to a new WordPress theme. Definitely webenso.com needs an updated look.

But I get paralyzed by all the choices out there, so I haven’t taken any action yet. In the meantime, I was really getting bothered by the small font size on webenso.com. So here’s how I made some simple tweaks to modernize slightly (at least) this site by making the text more readable with a larger font.

Why a larger font size?

You could do worse than model your blog or site after the leaders in your niche. I started to notice that sites that covered the topic of online marketing were not only using a larger font size than I was, but were also using a bigger line height. If you are not familiar with it, line height is a CSS property that defines the space above and below your lines of text.

When I transitioned from reading other online marketing and SEO blogs to mine, I found the experience jarring. Not only were the letters smaller but the smaller line height made the whole thing feel cramped.

WordPress Ping List for 2016

May 5, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Young man playing ping pong — Letting the world know about your new content!

Three years ago I published “Just Say No to a Big WordPress Ping List“. Up to that point, like many other bloggers, I thought the more the merrier when it came to pinging services. After all, why wouldn’t I want everyone to know about my sparkling new post?

Then I wrote a script to vet many of the services that many bloggers were using and found several returned errors or didn’t respond at all. That was the first red flag. The second red flag showed up when I found out about a Matt Cutts warning that Google looked unfavorably on some of the services that many were using. Essentially some of them are spam magnets and you really don’t want your site associated with them.

So I cut down my ping list down from 31 services to just 3. And published my post, which got a lot of attention due to my contrarian stance.

Do You Need to Worry about SEO with WishList Member?

March 12, 2015 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

At first glance SEO and membership sites seem to be two entirely unrelated things. When Googlebot encounters a login page, that page is a brick wall that stops it cold, since search engine bots don’t have a way to log into your site. So any content behind an authentication wall is essentially invisible to Google and the other search engines. So when you are setting up a membership site do you need to worry about SEO at all?

Up to this point I had just assumed no. But I was wrong; when I started looking at a WordPress site using the WordPress plugin WishList Member, I ran into a number of issues. Some issues are specific to WishList Member – and I cover those below. But there is also some general SEO friendly practices around managing your content that applies to any membership site that I want to cover as well. Let’s start there.

SEO Friendly WordPress Category Pages

May 20, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

WordPress is a great CMS and sitebuilder, but one area it can fall a little short is its interstitial pages that are designed to help you navigate a site’s posts via category, author or even date. WordPress automatically generates archive pages for each of these grouping mechanisms, but from the SEO perspective these pages fall a little short in providing unique content that the search engines love.

Search engines such as Google want to see pages that have content that can’t be found anywhere else on the site (or in fact elsewhere on the internet). But WordPress’s default archive pages just show a list of posts for that given category (or author). If the blogger has used the “more” tag, then the post’s content is shown on the archive page up to the tag, otherwise the post is shown in it’s entirety. Either way there is no new content on the page that isn’t already on on the individual post pages. Today we are going to look at ways to modify your WordPress category page to be more SEO friendly.

Using AuthorSure for Google Authorship on Multiple Author Blogs

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.

Google’s rel=author Authorship feature

January 14, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

This post originally appeared on October 28, 2011, in January 2014, I made several changes to it to bring it up to date. On August 28, 2014, Google ended the Google Authorship program citing low participation and concern over how it was cluttering the search experience, especially for mobile users. Despite this, you may want to still implement it if you are active on Google+. Users who are logged into their Google account and that follow you on Google+ will see the the enhanced snippet. Otherwise it’s not worth the effort.

Ah the old days. The early days when all Google looked at was how many backlinks pointed to your page. These days, trust, creditability and authority signals are a big part of what Google looks for when deciding whether to rank your page in the top ten. In the summer of 2011, leveraging Google profiles, Google released another feature that helps it do just that. You can now tag your articles with rel="author" HTML markup to link your pages to your Google profile – which makes you more “real” in Google’s eyes. The nice thing about this is that then Google will put a pic of you next to the snippet of your article that shows up in the search results as Danny Sullivan appears below.

Danny Sullivan article — Danny's article with SEO advice to Bill Gates

Google’s desire to tie content to “real” people perhaps sheds some light on the 2011 mass removal of non user Google+ accounts.

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