Red Kite Creative

Blogging

Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress and SEO, Google or Facebook Ads, Blogging, Getting Testimonials

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

It’s true that WordPress is my favorite CMS (content management system). That doesn’t mean it’s the right CMS for every business. However, WordPress may be one of the best CMS platforms for SEO. Learn what makes WordPress so SEO-friendly and why it may be a good fit for your business if search engine optimization is important to you.

If you’re considering advertising your business on social media, you have some big questions to answer. One of them may be where to advertise. Are Google Ads or Facebook Ads better for your business? This is a big article with a lot of info and it may provide the answers you need to move forward with your ad buys.

Here is yet another ultimate guide to blogging, but this one from Yoast is an easy read. It covers everything from how to get started and what to write about to marketing and maintaining your blog.

Finally… I always encourage clients to collect and share customer testimonials on their websites. Whether they are within your site (my favorite plugin for managing them is Strong Testimonials) or on a third-party site like Google Reviews, it’s easy to display them on your site and gain the credibility and trust benefits. Learn how to get good testimonials from your customers.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Banner Ads, Blogging Ideas, VPN, Favicons

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Don’t know if you noticed, but if you logged in to your WordPress site in the last day or two and are using Yoast SEO, you would have seen a great big irritating animated banner advertising Yoast’s black Friday sale. There were so many complaints and so much pushback, they actually apologized and released a new version of Yoast SEO minus the ad. (WP Minder users, you’ll get this update on Monday!). Please think about the impact banners and popups have on your users, this one is a good example of being pushy.

Next… Do you ever draw a blank when trying to come up with something to blog about? It can be hard sometimes… Here’s one of those posts that might help: 25 blog post ideas for when you’re stuck. This tool looks interesting, I’ll be trying it myself: Answer the Public.

Do you work on your website in public – at coffee shops or other locations with free wifi? If you do, you really should be protecting yourself by using a VPN (virtual private network). If your site uses SSL (it has an https address) that’s great, because it means your connection to the site is encrypted. But if not, a VPN is in order. It will act as a middleman to protect you from security problems on the free wifi network, where it’s frighteningly easy for hackers to watch your activity and gain access to your site. Learn about three VPN options for WordPress users.

Finally – all about favicons. What they are, why they matter so much. What’s the easiest way to get your favicon into your WordPress site? This plugin by RealFaviconGenerator.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress Resources for Beginners

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Are you brand new to WordPress? Or considering moving to WordPress but not sure if you’ll be able to get the hang of using it? Don’t worry! Today’s post is all about resources for WordPress newbies.

First is the user manual – WordPress doesn’t come with one, but there’s a great alternative in Easy WP Guide. It’s free, it gets updated frequently (unlike a real book) and is easy to read and use. Just don’t print it – it’s big and it updates too often to make that worth your while.

Next is a post about common mistakes made by WordPress beginners (and plenty of experienced users too). The biggest two: forgetting to update, which opens your site up to all kinds of security and functionality problems, and not using a child theme. If you ever decide to edit the theme, always always always make a child theme. Never make changes to an original theme.

Just because your new site may be starting small doesn’t mean it won’t be a target for hackers and other malicious threats. Adding a security plugin is a smart (and necessary) move to help keep your site safe. Here’s a review of some of the top WordPress security plugins out there right now. I’m currently using iThemes Security Pro on my clients’ sites, but other good choices are Sucuri and Wordfence. I would stay away from the SiteLock service from painful personal experience.

If yours is a business website, you will most likely be doing SEO (search engine optimization) for it. I recommend using the extremely popular and useful Yoast SEO plugin and referring to this thorough guide to WordPress SEO.

Last but not least, if you want your site to grow and become more easily findable in search, you’ll want to start a blog. That can be a big undertaking. Fortunately, the excellent website ProBlogger has a handy collection of many tips on how to blog that can be a great resource for bloggers (at any level).

That concludes our collection of resources for WordPress beginners. As always, please feel free to contact me about any of these topics if you need help, or just post a comment below.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Lazy Loading, Tracking Downloads, Page Speed, Email Marketing for Bloggers

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Here’s an easy performance win – implement lazy loading on your site. Lazy loading means not loading images that are off-screen; they eventually load when the user scrolls down to them. Learn more about lazy loading and here’s the plugin I like for this task in WordPress sites.

If you offer white papers or other kinds of downloads on your site, did you know that you can use Google Analytics, which you’re most likely already using, to track downloads? Though GA doesn’t natively track this kind of interaction, you can set up this tracking in either Google Tag Manager (easier) or a plugin like Monster Insights, or you can add tracking code manually to your download links (harder and not recommended unless you only have a couple of downloads). Learn more in this thorough post on how to track downloads with Google Analytics.

This is cool… since Google made page speed a search engine ranking factor last year, websites in 95% of the world’s countries have become faster. In addition, we all know that a slower site tends to get abandoned more often. Turns out the opposite is also true – faster sites mean lower abandonment rates! If your WordPress site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, try our WordPress Performance Optimization service.

Do you have a brand new blog, and are you out to change the world? While you’re working on gaining loyal subscribers, learn how to build trust by using the 5 types of emails new bloggers should send to their subscribers.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Business Blogging, Scannable Content, Testimonials Slider, Video Galleries

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Think blogging is a waste of time? (Hint: it’s not, if you do it with a focus on quality and consistency). Here’s a quick guide on starting a blog for business and why it really does matter if you’re trying to make your website the strong online base for your marketing efforts that it should be.

And if you’re taking the time to write well and frequently, make sure your content is also very easy to read. Most people today scan instead of reading – so you need to focus on great headlines, short paragraphs, lists and subheadings to break up your content. Here’s a guide to making your posts more scannable.

One of the most important types of content you should include in your business site is testimonials. Comments from your customers often have a big impact on potential new customers wondering if your product or service is a good fit for them. They increase your credibility. Learn how to use one of my favorite plugins, Strong Testimonials, to build a testimonial slider in WordPress.

Finally… recently I needed a video gallery plugin for a client site. Here’s one of the reviews I found for the best WordPress video gallery plugins. I actually wound up using GridKit, which was perfect for our particular project.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Product Photos, Current Content, Google My Business, Blogging Lessons

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Sometimes, convincing clients (especially new ecommerce site owners) that they need to invest in high-quality photography for their site falls on deaf ears. And that’s a shame, because great photos are critical for ecommerce sites; the quality of your images reflects the quality of your products. And displaying poor-quality images speaks volumes about your business; if you don’t care about the photos, do you actually care about the products themselves? Learn more about why it’s so important to have high-quality imagery.

New research on customer satisfaction with websites shows that 39% of users will think twice about using an outdated website. Do you update your site content on a regular basis? Does your site look fresh and provide the latest info about your business? If not, you may want to take a look at this.

If you don’t have a brick-and-mortar store but instead run a service-area business (like a web design studio!) this is just for you: Google My Business is rolling out a new setup process that’s more friendly to us service-area companies.

If you’re a veteran blogger, trying to be a better blogger, or even just getting started in blogging, this post might be helpful. It’s the result of a survey of 1,000 other bloggers and might teach you some new tricks to make your own efforts more effective and efficient. Check out 5 lessons you can learn from 1,000 bloggers.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.