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WordPress Apps for Smartphones and Tablets Allow for Easy Website/Blog Posting and Management

Marc — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 20:41:58 +0000

For us here in the northern hemisphere, it’s Spring and travel and vacation time will be increasing. And the time spent on your website for business or fun will be more difficult to manage.

Fortunately if your site or blog is based on the WordPress CMS there is help. WordPress provides apps for your mobile device that provides an easy to use interface and allows you to add content and images from your phone/tablet. And to more easily manage other aspects of your website and blog.

So you can put up information as easy as can be. It can be your latest vacation photos, a destination wedding images or events related to your company or products/service. Items for sale in your WordPress based shopping cart. Or even an open house.

Here are links for more information and to download the WordPress mobile device apps.

Apple iPnones and iPads – http://ios.wordpress.org/
Android smartphones and tablets – http://android.wordpress.org/
Windows phones – http://windowsphone.wordpress.org/
Blackberry smartphones and tablets – http://blackberry.wordpress.org/
Nokia spartphones – http://nokia.wordpress.org/
HP (WebOS) smartphones and tablets – http://webos.wordpress.org/

It is advantages like this which are just part of the reason that all sites we create use WordPress. WordPress websites provide the best, affordable internet marketing tools for small business.

BluDomain Mini Blog SEO and functionality review

Marc — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:10:59 +0000

A couple of years ago BluDomain introduced a unique HTML blog offering that BluDomain named “Mini Blog”. The BluDomain Mini Blog can stand alone or be part of one of BluDomain’s other templates. Like WordPress the BluDomain Mini Blog produces HTML blog and posts and is driven by a MySQL database. And that is pretty much the end of any substantive similarity between BluDomain’s blog offering and a typical self-hosted WordPress blog. They are entirely different in setup, administration and output.

Shortly after the release of BluDomain’s blog offering Mark Haynes did an excellent post describing its features and functionality. Mark’s inclusion of screen captures together with step-by-step administration and post creation discussion provides a good insight into the BluDomain Mini Blog. But his summation includes a potential caveat “If you’re running a word press blog and using all the features for solid SEO then this blog is a big step backwards.” So it is useful to add a comparison of BluDomain Mini blog and a standard WordPress blog features.

When Mark published his review WordPress was at version 2.8.4. In the intervening 2+ years BluDomain’s Mini Blog has not been updated, yet WordPress has had five (5) major update revisions and is now up to version 3.3. So let’s compare BluDomain Mini Blog to WordPress Blog with current versions.

BluDomain Mini Blog comparison to a WordPress Blog

Feature/Function	BluDomain Mini Blog	WordPress Blog
Maximum width	800 pixels	Unlimited
Upload background	Yes	Yes
Choose your own colors	Yes	Yes
RSS	Posts	Posts and Comments
External links	3	Unlimited
Social Media icons/links	Facebook, Twitter	All, Any, unlimited
Pages	Just 1 for Contact	Unlimited
Image tags	Alt	Alt, Title, Description, Caption
Video support	Yes	Yes
Custom navigation	No	Yes
SEO	Description, Page title	Description, Page title, Custom title, Optimized URL links, H1, H2, Canonical options
Comments discussion	No	Yes, nested comments
Hierarchy	None	Yes, Categories and Tags
Themes	None	1,400+ Free to download
Extensions	None	17,000+ Free to plugins
Cost	$50, installed	Free to download
End user license	Proprietary	Open source GPL2

Comparing the features and functionality it is difficult not to reach for the advantages of WordPress. Even if you decide to use our optimized WordPress for BluDomain setup service with an included custom premium theme utilizing all the advantage WordPress offeres in SEO and visitor engagement, the total cost is still very competitive. And, WordPress can work on the same hosting that you would use for almost any BluDomain site.

If you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment, call or email.

Our Bludomain SEO package provides a 300% plus increase in website traffic for Jen Carver Photography

Marc — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:13:59 +0000

A few months ago Jen Carver, an amazing children’s photographer from Pittsburgh, engaged us to do provide the full restructure and SEO for her website. There were only two restrictions, we needed to keep the Bludomain core and a splash page similar to the typical Bludomain splash page. As you can see the splash page appears much like a Bludomain splash page, but it is all WordPress, with all the possible WordPress SEO juice, and is fully part of her WordPress custom blog and related pages.

With Jen’s help in design we were able to put together a smashing site that has almost perfect SEO attributes, and is easy to use and modify. And best of all it has great organic search results for her keywords.

In general we created the new splash page with a special template WordPress page and we were able to easily include sufficient content, links and attributes to work much better than the possibilities using the standard Bludomain splash page. From there we designed and styled the blog and other pages with templates that best suited their respective purposes.

Additionally we imported Jen’s existing blogs from WrodPress.com and Blogger. Configured needed 301 redirects. Copied her contact information and such from the Bludomain site where it is difficult for search engines and mobile devices to access. Polished all the content for greater use of her search marketing keywords. And integrated her Facebook business page and Twitter account into the WordPress functions.

In the future Jen can easily modify the blog and other pages using the point and click design settings which allow her to change the style and appearance of almost every element of the site with just a mouse click or two. We also provided hosting for her new site, both the BluDomain and WordPress with OptimalHosting so that the site would be faster and more reliable.

But what really counts is the results, right. Since April when the new site first went live, the number of visits per day has now climbed to well over a 300% increase in less than 90 days.. For more read Jen’s recent comments on the new site and our work.

If you would like to know if we can do the same for you, please leave a comment or send an email.

“Socializing” with your website visitors works! A Bottom Line Income Increase from using Social Media

Marc — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:49:31 +0000

The words “conversion” and “conversation” seem very similar to me. Plus I have never experienced converting anyone from a lead to a client without having a conversation. So if you can give your website the ability to engage in “conversation” or a dialog with site visitors you should have more conversions and increased business, right? Yes, it is true and here is a study with the proof!

The new research from social media platform Wetpaint and digital consulting firm Altimeter Group found that companies with the highest levels of social media activity on average increased revenues by 18% in the last 12 months, while the least active saw sales drop 6% over that period.

Among the top 100 brands reviewed, Starbucks came out on top with a score of 127, followed by Dell (123), eBay (115), Google (105), and Microsoft (103). Companies were scored based on the level of interaction across 10 social media channels including blogs, Facebook, Twitter and wikis.

Which is why I build websites using WordPress as the underlying site platform! It not only provides the most effective, best blog format, it is also the best for being a central hub managing Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and even MySpace. So instead of frantically keeping all your your social media appearing with fresh information you can just use your WordPress based website to manage it all.

No need to be a “mad plate spinner” constantly going from one social media site to another every day to post new information to have a wide social media presence.

A WordPress based “dialog website” with the other social media channels integrated will allow you to have a smooth relaxed but constantly current social media presence, with less time involved. Like a gear driven clock-work, except with Twitter, Facebook and the others driven by a WordPress based dialog website.

And it gives you a competitive advantage helping to increase your bottom line. To learn more about how I may help you increase your business and social media presence with a WordPress based dialog site, just send me an email through the form on the right.

Free Blog Websites Cost You a Lot

Marc — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:25:57 +0000

Well over half the websites I come across can host their own free blog, but instead chose to use a different website like Blogspot, putting their best marketing content on a different business’ website. Be kind to yourself and your business, keep your best content on your own site. (Photographers particularly need to consider text content as carefully as they do their images.)

For all types of business, I see it many times everyday. In an effort to build traffic to their website, increase their online marketing and client base, website owners including photographers, real estate brokers, jewelers, restaurants, personal coaches, consultants, wedding planners, florists, believe that the best solution to expand their internet marketing is to have a Blogger Blogspot blog or the like.

It is a ridiculous strategy (except for the “free” blog website service). Sending people to another website to increase the traffic to your website is crazy. Then hoping that a visitor then might read something that you wrote on Blogspot, Xanga, Live Journal, etc. and then click over to your website is in reality a dispiriting leaky system. People are resistant to clicking to other domains and blogs typically have a high bounce rate. (yourdomain.blogspot.com is very different than yourdomain.com)

“But it is free!”, you say. Well not so much. As you can see above the opportunity cast can be high. Plus your content is building business for the “free” blog service and they can make it very difficult to ever move your content to your own site or benefit from the search engine indexing of your content on their “free” blogging site.

Still have doubts? Here’s another view by Hubspot of the same problems and business cost of using Blogger, and other so-called free blog websites.

The best solution is to have blog content, but to have it on your site building your visits, conversions and clients. Which you can do in most cases for very little or no cost by adding WordPress open source software on your current hosting. Well over half the websites I come across can support WordPress at no additional cost.

TANSTAAFL even holds true for Blogspot. Know the true cost before placing your content into the websites of others.

Measuring and Improving your Social Media Impact

Marc — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:01:13 +0000

As Web 2.0 evolves to returns the internet to its social media roots, albeit with great advancements, interconnectedness and opportunity, it is useful to try to get an idea how well you are doing. After all, the first step towards improving is measurement.

Fortunately Google has a tool, wouldn’t you know it . Let’s begin reviewing what is called the Social Graph and how it tracks social media links. A Social Graph is a representation of internet based “relationships”. These relationships can be of any nature being presented through blogs and social networking websites presenting our information and presence. A social graph can then define your combined social networking “community” from the different social networking sites and blog you participate in. (This last part is why I am strong proponent of using a WordPress web/blogsite to act as a hub to help manage and improve the effectiveness of your Social Graph.)

Now to how Google can help. The Google Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people more easily available Google engineer Brad Fitzpatrick gives an introduction to has an excellent short video over view explaining the workings of the Social Graph API.

Now lets use two simple forms provided by Google get some personal Social Graph measurements!

The first for site connectivity we will measure how your URLs for your websites and social network pages are connected. How many of your sites can be reached from each of your URLs?

And second, who are you connected to? The contacts you link to and the contacts that link to you.

Keep score, work to increase your social medial connections. It has been a constant for as long as we have had civilization … the more connections you have, the better opportunity you have for success.

Google to add Twitter search engine service

Marc — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:37:58 +0000

Twitter posts indexed and ranked by search term relevancy. This is pretty strong and will make your micro-blogging activity on Twitter even more valuable.

From the ” Google Operating System” blog -

“Google prepares to launch a service that indexes and ranks content from microblogging services like Twitter. Since it’s very easy to post updates and the posts are usually very short, micro-blogging services are great for live blogging, posting real-time information about an event. …

Much like Google Blog Search, Google’s microblogging search service will sort the results by relevancy and it also be integrated with Google’s web search engine: the keywords that are frequently used in recent posts will trigger a MicroBlogsearch universal search group.”

This new Google Twitter search service will really make up for the current weakness in Twitter’s search, assuming Google does its typical superior implementation. Hope they launch soon

Contrast of a wedding photographer’s website changing from Flash to WordPress

Marc — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:37:45 +0000

This is just a simple comparison of a professional photographer client’s WordPress web/blog site that went live over the weekend, replacing their old Flash website.

Photographer – Lyrical Lens Photography

OLD SITE

The prior website platform was Flash, Big Black Bag, hosted on 1 and 1.
The cost of the site was $50 initial setup fee and then $200/annually
Website grader ending site search marketing score – 20 (higher is better)

NEW SITE

New website platform, WordPress, premium professional photographer’s theme Kertesz self hosted on Bluehost
The cost of the site was a one time expense of $350 and then $7/monthly for hosting
Website grader initial site search marketing score – 59 (higher is better)

Appearance of new site, I think Connie did a beautiful job -

Links are now the votes of confidence in your website

Marc — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:10:54 +0000

My advice to people seeking to increase search page rank is to reduce focusing on the search engine and focus more on what your prospective clients would want. All the search engine tries to do is provide the pages with the greatest likelihood of what the searcher is seeking. If your site has lots of relevant search accessible content you will place high.

In the distant past (internet time) having lots of links was a successful strategy. But the search engines have become sophisticated and now just having lots of raw or weak links is not a good indicator of site info usefulness or the state of search engine sophistication at this time.

In this thought, would you place a higher rank on a website being useful because there were a large number of MySpace of Facebook links to it? (plus many social network links are no-follow) Probably not, there is no peer expertise behind it, probably just a bunch of friends swapping links. And I think that is likely the way that Google interprets it and therefor would not put much value on social network links that it could follow.

Links are also valued by the content of the pages linking. Meaning if a good page links to your page because of specific relevant content, that can be a highly weighted link. This means that you want a link to reflect the content and context of your site. There is some speculation that linking authoritatively with contextual links to other sites may be helpful for your site. The thinking behind this is that if your site offers additional links that may be helpful to your site visitors, then the search engine might may view your site as more useful and favor it with a higher ranking … who knows. But it can’t hurt to always try to focus on meeting the needs for your target market.

Here are some links to good resources for more info -

This is a good, recent SEO forum discussion regarding which types of links Google appears to have devalued or no longer gives any value. Also has some useful discussion of what links have the most value and how to optimize links.

Similar information with a little more detail as to link value, weight and succesful link management is in this article. Well worth reading. This excerpt points out something that many non-SEO link experts are probably not aware of::

“The biggest way in my opinion to lose link value … is by reciprocal link exchanges. Probably the easiest and worst way to leak link value is by reciprocating with un-related, low quality sites. This can hurt your site and you are likely to lose positions randomly over time… the days of link exchanging for rankings are gone… Only reciprocate with sites who give you a link on a content page and which are relevant, others will greatly dis valued.

The second worst way is site-wide links. These draw value from all your pages and are not a good idea… I would nofollow all sitedwide links or give the webmaster only one link. Sitewide links are also disvalued, I believe how many pages the link is on may play a big role but just the fact that it is a site-wide link seems to be grounds for disvaluing.”

And finally a little more clarification between the old concept of page rank from the number of raw links to the more current concept of link value. It is a short article and also worth a quick read.

Fundamentally, it is all about providing more useful information to you targeted website visitor. Which means you really may pay less attention to the peculiarities of SEO. Just get the structure “right” and then build relevant content. At this time the best way to present sufficient useful content for SEO and your prospective clients is to add a blog (and using it) within your website. Self hosted WordPress works best.

(h/t to Jane Hullick Hart of Sydney Wedding Music for suggesting this post)

Are you suffering from blogging fatigue

Marc — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:12:09 +0000

Do feel almost totally unmotivated to make another post to your blog? Does it seem like anything is better than blogging? Did you start blogging with enthusiasm and are now afraid that your blog is dieing?

There are a lot of thoughts about this and some time we all experience it to some degree. Robert Scoble wrote an extensive post (for him) about blogging fatigue. Problogger offers us an 8 step method to combat it, even suggesting that you exercise more. But all of this assumes that you are the problem. What if the problem is not you, but your blog? Maybe your blog just sucks.

Remember the reasons why you started your business related blog? I’ll bet the major reasons included; enhance your web presence, increase your search page rankings, build site traffic and expand your professional credibility. Is it possible you are not now so enthusiastic about blogging because you didn’t see these results? A person can easily work with continued enthusiasm and effort if they get to see results from their work. Are you seeing good results for your blog?

This week I have talked with two individuals who are suffering from blogging fatigue. In both circumstances the problem is not with them, but with their blog. Their blogs are dysfunctional. They began their blogs with the major goals I listed above and have blogged consistently for almost a year. But because of the way their blogs are hosted and configured, there is no way for the blog to meet those goals. One person related that her blog provided less than 50 referrals to her website in over six months. Another person’s blog who I have open right now has no links at all to her photography website. In both cases the blogs are also hosted as subdomains on other websites (eg. blogspot, bigfolio, etc) with a different name and url than their website. No wonder they feel unenthusiastic about blogging. They put forth good efforts and get no results.

It is time to quit blaming the victims of blogging fatigue, stop treating the symptoms and start curing the cause. At minimum, to see the results that will restore your enthusiasm your blog must be using the same domain name URL as your website and need to have plentiful, obvious cross linking with your website. There are lots of other things that can be done to produce even better results from your blogging effort, but these are the must haves. If you have any questions or thoughts please send me an email (marc at marcfuller.com) or leave comment. (and i am available for scheduled intensive blog therapy/treatment )