Don’t Leave Drafts on Your Site Too Long
The recent WordPress 3.2 release came with a much anticipated upgrade known as Distraction-Free Writing. It allows you to easily configure the text editor to be full screen – emulating the look and feel of working in a word processor. But, it may have a serious drawback by encouraging folks to write partial posts and pages and then saving them as drafts. Read on to find out how this can negatively impact your SEO and let the cat out of the bag on your upcoming posts too early.
What is a Draft?
When you create a new page or post, you have the option to save it as a draft instead of publishing it. This is great for folks who need to get their inspiration down while it’s fresh and then come back to finish it later.
What Happens if it Stays There?
Google has little automated applications called robots (bots for short), or affectionately known as spiders, that crawl the web in search of new posts or pages. Just because your draft isn’t published, it can still be indexed by Google. Within a few months, Google will find and index a new page or post on your site, even if it’s saved as a draft.
How Can I Check What Google has Indexed?
There’s a very easy way to see if Google has indexed one of your drafts. Simple go to Google.com and type in the title. Be sure to put quotation marks around it so you search for that exact phrase. If your post or page comes up in the results, it has been indexed. If not, then Google hasn’t found it yet.
If you want to see all of the pages and posts Google has indexed on your site, go to Google.com, and this time in the search field, type the following.
site:www.BlogAid.net
Be sure to include the colon between the word site and your domain name. And change BlogAid.net to your domain.
How Can I Stop a Draft from Being Indexed?
There are only two easy ways to stop Google’s bots from finding everything but your drafts.
Tips Tuesday and Measuring Your Site Performance
Hello Happy Site Owners! This week’s Tech Tips section features plugins and plugins. Oh, and did I mention plugins? Blog Tips features a follow up to a tip I mentioned last week about StumbleUpon. Plus, the Social Media section features two of my fave Facebook folks. Enjoy!
Featured
Sarah Gooding writes some of my fave posts on WPMU.org. Recently she posted Googlyzer For WordPress Puts the Power of Google Analytics In Your Admin Dashboard. It’s a plugin and I tried it.
It has some nice charts (see her post for a screenshot), but it doesn’t actually put them in the main WP admin Dashboard. I’ve been using the Google Analyticator plugin because it does have a little module for the Dashboard, and it tells me much the same info as Googlyzer. However, Googlyzer updates more often, instead of reporting data that’s delayed 24 hours.
Do you use a plugin to get a quick view of your site metrics and see what’s hot? What do you use?
And, if want even more on metrics, here’s everything you could possibly want to know about Google Analytics. It’s the updated Google Analytics Resources Guide for 2011 from the nice folks at Kissmetrics.
Tech Tips
If you read my post on using the More tag and agree that it’s a good idea but want an automated way to achieve it, check out this recently updated plugin called the Auto Read More Generator.
Do you offer download files on your site? Then you’ll want to check out this excellent how-to on a plugin to manage your WordPress downloads.
Do you need to make a mobile version of your blog? The WP Touch plugin does it for you and it has just been updated. If you’re already using this plugin, tell us what you like most about it and about having a mobile version of your blog.
Katherine Meyer has a very nice post on the V3 Integrated Marketing blog about tools to check your page load time. As we all know, load time affects your SEO ranking. And, if you want to see something else really cool on their site, highlight the author’s name (just under the title). A little Learn More bubble pops up. Click it to see web results for her.
Blog Tips
In a previous Tips Tuesday post I included a couple of posts about using StumbleUpon to get traffic to your site. Here is the flipside of that coin. It’s a post by Francisco Rosales on Social Mouths titled Should You Focus On StumbleUpon Now That It Passed Facebook As A Traffic Generator?
Tips Tuesday and Great Site Headers
Hello Happy Site Owners! What does your site say? After all, your site is not about you, it’s about your visitors. (Read Is Your Home Page About You or Your Customer?) Everybody has good reasons for why their site looks like it does. But, is that working for or against you? I do site reviews to help folks freshen up their look with an eye toward effective marketing practices. So, go look at your site and if you need a pair of qualified eyes that will keep your target audience and goals in mind, let me know.
Featured
The header of your site really defines what you’re all about. Here’s a list from Marcus Sheridan of The Sales Lion for The 13 Best and Most Powerful Blog Header Designs on the Internet. And he tells you what he looks for in headers and why some speak to him more than others.
Tech Tips
Can you loose clients from too much advertising? You betcha! Users of the Sexy Bookmarks plugin are burning down the tech support house right now. You see, the plugin folks decided they would include a little ad in the form of a bar that popped up at the top of every user’s admin page when they logged into their WordPress site. I wrote tech support, as did many, and asked how to remove it, which requires going into the code. Not many folks are going to do that. I did, but it was wiped out the next time the plugin was updated, which was the next week. Not cool. They just issued an update last night, but not before a bunch of angry users dropped them forever and put out a lot of bad PR. For now I’m sticking with the plugin because it’s a good fit for my site. (I did a video review and how-to on Sexy Bookmarks plugin, if you want to see what it does.)
I’m excited about this development. A browser will be integrated into a pdf viewer. This may be the first step toward interactive ebooks and I’ve been sitting on a few things to publish the minute that happens.
Online marketing success is built on trust – not only from your clients, but from Google too. Search engines become popular by showing trusted links that meet the search criteria. Let Google know that you are really the author of your page and can be trusted by including what is known as a rel link in your author page. In return, Google will show your happy face next to the search result.
Got video? Kevin Muldoon has put together a master list of 50 Free WordPress Video Plugins over on WP Mods. It includes some nice players too.
Blog Tips
How reviews, even humorous ones, are driving sales on a 20 year old book. Fun and informative article from Dana Lynn Smith on The Savvy Book Marketer.
Tips Tuesday and Get Your Facebook Fan Page Squared Away
Hello Happy Site Owners! Hope you had a wonderful end of summer weekend holiday. Things have been cranking up at BlogAid with the new WordPress Video Tutorials. Guess everyone is in the mood for back-to-school and learning how to make their site better. It’s inexpensive and you learn on your schedule.
I cull the best tips from all over the ‘net for Tips Tuesday. And, if you’re an author, or if you want to self-publish an ebook for your business, you’ll be delighted with all the tips just for you this week. If you know an author or pro writer, be sure to share this post with them.
Featured
Facebook announces October 1st deadline for having all of your fan page embedded content stored on a site that has an SSL Certificate. Here’s my post about Facebook iFrames and SSL Certificates Explained without all of the geek-speak.
Tech Tips
If you use the popular TimThumb plugin to manipulate your site images, you probably know about the hacker attack last month. Here’s a nice follow-up from Phillip John on WPMU.org on How to Protect Your WordPress Site as Hackers Exploit TimThumb Security Hole.
Part of your site’s Google ranking has to do with your page load time. Faster loading means better SEO. But, the really important stat is that most viewers expect a page to load in three seconds or less. If it takes longer than that, they bounce without ever seeing your site. Here’s a handy online page load time checker from Pingdom.com Scroll below the chart and look on the right for the How it Works section to see an explanation of the bar colors. Keep in mind that everything you’re seeing in the chart is for the one page you are checking. You may be amazed at all of the objects that have to be loaded just to display a single page.
This is good news. Plugins that have not been updated in two years will be hidden in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Now we won’t have to filter through dead plugins to find the currently supported ones.
Got Gmail? Now you can use Google Docs with Gmail as a Mail Merge program with HTML templates for sending personalized mass mailings on the go.
Shelley Hitz has gone and done it! What a great list of tools she’s made. In fact, she’s made two – one for PC tools and one for Mac tools. She made them to help authors who want to self-publish, but if you run an online business, you’ll find all of them helpful too.
Blog Tips
Make a Point with Blockquote
One of the most underused icons in the WordPress text editor is blockquote. And, it’s not just for citing another’s quotation. You can use it to highlight a main take-away point for your readers or bring attention to your most important point. Here’s how.
Make a Blockquote
The easiest way to apply formatting in WordPress is to already have the content created, highlight it, then click the formatting icon.
You’ll want to try this on a draft page to see how it looks and play with alignment.
Simply create a line or two of text, highlight it, then click the blockquote icon. It’s probably located in the top row of your text editor.
How Does it Look?
How the blockquote content appears on your site is under the control of your theme. So, be sure to see a preview of your page before publishing. Here’s what you want to look for:
- Font size, color, and format, meaning that it may be italics.
- Margins left and right. They may not be the same on both sides.
- Image on the left. Some will have a big quotation mark to the left of the text.
- Background color. Blockquotes can appear in a colored box that may have a different shading or border.
This is how a blockquote appears on BlogAid. As you can see, I use a background, slightly different font and have the margins centered. Plus, I center aligned the text.
Modify the Appearance
The only way to modify the appearance of the blockquote is to change your theme’s style sheet (CSS file). If you’re not accustomed to doing such things, hire a geek or designer. It’s a rather inexpensive thing to outsource.
Wrap Up
A blockquote can help break up long paragraphs of text and make your content easier to scan, while highlighting important points. It can be a good alternative to bullet points and colored text.
What creative ways can you use a blockquote on your site?
BlogAid offers classes and video tutorials on ways to use features of the Standard Text Editor
to make your posts better and keep readers on your site longer.
MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.
Tips Tuesday and Good News for Pretty Permalinks
Hello Happy Site Owners! I’m delighted to share links to helpful posts with you. And, I’m also tickled pink to tell that three new videos were just added to the WordPress Basics Video Tutorials class, bringing the total to 16. They are: Site Settings, Permalink Structure, and using the Media Library. There are already several videos in the Advanced class, with plenty more on the way!
Featured
Thrilled to read that WP 3.3 will finally eliminate the performance penalty for using the %/postname% permalink structure. This is the structure that makes for pretty permalinks and is very popular with site owners.
Tech Tips
One of the factors that ranks toward your SEO is page load time. By default, WordPress auto-saves multiple revisions of your posts and pages as you update. That can really slow down your load time. Here’s a nice post from the folks at WP Beginner on the Better Delete Revision plugin, which will remove the extreme redundancy of all those revisions. I’ve been using the WP-Cleanup plugin and have noticed a significant difference in page load time, but I think this new plugin may be a little better. Are you using it or a similar plugin? Leave a comment and let everyone know how it’s working for you.
BlogAid News
What Every Site Owner Should Know is yours free with BlogAid News. This one book could save you hundreds of dollars and months of frustration.
BlogAid News
What Every Site Owner Should Know is yours free with BlogAid News. This one book could save you hundreds of dollars and months of frustration.
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