Web forums may seem like a relic of the early 2000s and earlier, when they were the primary means of creating social groups online. Before every blog had a comment section, before social networks with the Big Thing, there was Usenet. Usenet and other spinoff newsgroups were in many ways the prototype…
A lot of people these days start a site from scratch with a WordPress installation and a blog. However, a lot of older sites run on other architectures, with different back ends, or even on completely custom code. You might have an online storefront running on Joomla or something, and yo…
Installing SSL can be pretty beneficial for your website. You see increased security, increased trust, and even a bit of SEO benefit for adding encryption to your traffic. However, it can seem like a daunting task, especially if you’re not an expert in setting up websites.
What I’ve do…
LinkedIn can be a surprisingly good place to promote your blog posts, but generally only if they’re in the right kind of niche. I wouldn’t go to the business-focused site and try to promote a blog with video game reviews or product recommendations, for example. On the other hand, articl…
Two years ago, Twitter pushed an update to the architecture that ran their servers. Changing from one system to another largely allowed the site to run more smoothly, to handle more advanced features, and got rid of dead code that could potentially have been used for bugs, exploits, or just legacy fe…
In the constant quest to improve search rankings, we bloggers look high and low for any advantage we can find. Yet one constantly debated aspect of blogging lies dormant, abused or neglected by bloggers and readers alike.
Blog comments can be extremely beneficial for your SEO, and in ways you might n…
Hiring writers is one good way to go from a mediocre blog to a great blog. Depending on how you hire them, you might just come across as an expert, or you might have a larger multi-author blog. Or both, really, if you have the budget for it. If nothing else, it’s cheaper than training an employee as a…
Do you ever find yourself having trouble writing blog posts that people actually like? Anyone can pick a topic and write a few thousand words, even if some topics are harder than others. The question is, does anyone care? Does anyone actually read those posts? How can you get people to actually pay att…
For a long time, Disqus was one of the better WordPress comment plugins. They are a large platform with users around the web, so many people who have used Disqus in one place are already registered to comment on your site as well.
Unfortunately, when Disqus added their advertising system, it started t…
In my mind, attention to keywords is a hold-over from the days of SEO long past. However, many marketers still recommend using them, and I’m not going to disagree. It’s a matter of degrees, however. There are very definitely diminishing returns on the work you put into keyword research…