Category Archives: WordPress

7 Tips to Get People to Read Your Blog

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Everyone wants Google rank their blog high in searches. Another important key is to get people to read your blog repeatedly.  Here are 7 tips to writing effective blogs.

  1. Provide Value
    Don’t write just to write.  Have a purpose and give people what they are looking for.
  2. Be Consistent (Reliable)
    Write regularly. Keep to a schedule so people know when to come back.  Seth Godin is the master at this.  I find that the more I am consistent, the more people read my blog.  If I get to busy and break a schedule then my numbers in Google Analytics drop.  Schedule a time to write your blog every day or week, let your users know about that time, and then consistently post to your blog at that time.
  3. Keep It Short
    Don’t write a diatribe.  In today’s lightning fast world people want a quick peek at something of value.
  4. Answer a Specific Question
    Use Google to find what keywords are most popular.  One very easy way is to just start typing in the Google search box the term you want to focus on.  This field will auto-populate with the most popular terms.  See the screen-shot below.

    Search Engine Optimization Terms

    Search Engine Optimization Terms

  5. Get Creative in Your Titles
    One of the most attention getting headlines I saw recently was from an associate at work who wrote, “My Dog ate my Blog”.  Make it catchy, relate-able, and you can even use things like lists in your title. Something like “7 Tips to Get Humans to Read Your Blog”
  6. Stick To a Theme
    Become the expert in an area and write about that.  Do this for several months before changing topics. You may notice that my blog comes up for the search terms “Flash Errors”, “Flex Errors”, and “ActionScript Errors” as well as Marketing, photography, and technology.
  7. Let People Find Your Blog
    Follow the 7 Tips for Getting Google to Read Your Blog so that people actually can find the great stuff you have to write.

Thanks and Happy Blogging

Curtis J. Morley

7 Tips to Get Google To Read Your Blog

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  1. Determine Beforehand the 1-3 Keywords You Want Google to Find.
    Before you type a single line, determine which keywords you will target with your post.  In other words, what do you want people to type into Google to find your blog post.  Once you have these keywords put them all over in your post in different variations.  You will notice that throughout this post I will include the terms; “Google Food”, “Search Engine Indexing”, “Google to Index your Site”, “High Rankings in Google”, “SEO and Google Ranking”, etc… (Oh look I just added them again)

  2. Put at Least One of the Three Keywords in the Title.
    If you want Google to list you with a high search ranking for the word “Leadership”, an appropriate title would be, “Leadership for the Next Century.“ For Google to index your site, the way you want it indexed, you must have a title that contains at least one of these keywords. Because of the font size of the Header it will increase in importance according to Google’s algorithm.

  3. Make Sure that WordPress (or whichever blogging software you use) is Setup to Create Each New Page URL the Same as the Title.
    In WordPress (the most common blogging tool which this site is based off of) Go to Settings >> Permalinks >> Select  >> and choose either “Day and Name” or “Month and Name”. The URL is critical to search engine indexing.  If the link says www.myblog.com/leadership vs. www.myblog.com/?p=123  it will be Google Food.

    One way to get Google to Read Your Blog

    One way to get Google to Read Your Blog

  4. Caption all Images with the Keywords Chosen.
    If your term is “Leadership” then insert an image that portrays leadership and then give it a title and caption that has the word leadership in it. Notice the caption of the image above.  The caption and title of this post reads nearly identical.

  5. Match Your Categories, Tags, Excerpt and Metadata to Your Keywords.
    Include several variations of the keyword terms in the tags, categories, and excerpts.  For example – Leadership in Action, Corporate Leadership, Leadership Consulting, Leadership Solutions, Organizational Leadership, etc…  This is an easy way to get high rankings in Google.

  6. Keep to a Theme
    Give your blog a theme and keep things organized within that theme.  Don’t write about your dog one day and U.N. Diplomacy another day.  Make sure that you are consistent in what you post. Google loves reading blogs that not only have appropriate keyword density on a page but keyword density across your whole site.

  7. Link to and From at Least Three Other Sites
    Do a Google search on the keyword that you are trying to target and start clicking on the most popular.  Find a way to comment on each of the top sites and make sure to include a link back to your blog.  Also, throw an update (with link) on Twitter.  Within your blog link over to other sites (including within your own site and other domains you own or use)  that will most likely link back to you.  The more links you can get the higher your “popularity” and Google is like a teenager the way it cares about popularity.  Another great site that has a lot of great info on SEO and Google ranking is my friend’s site called Nick’s Traffic Tricks

Thanks and Happy blogging.

Curtis J. Morley

No WordPress Sidebar in IE

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So I am an avid user of FireFox and rarely use IE for any of my regular browsing.  Today I had IE open for testing some things and went to my site to lookup an error.  When I went to the page it had no sidebar and no navigation what-so-ever.  I tried many things to remedy the problem.  I tried changing themes, disabling widgets, etc…

After some searching I went into the code of each of posts to see what could be causing IE to look so bad.  Well it turns out that during the last Adobe Max I had copied and pasted a post from Microsoft Word into the post on Robert Burdick’s presentation.

Keep reading to see how I fixed the missing WordPress sidebar for IE. Continue reading →