Can Facebook Build Your Brand?

April 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

In recent years, Facebook has exploded in popularity. Millions of people now use the social media website for everything from catching up with long-lost relatives to advertising their business. While many business owners would love to leverage the power of Facebook to help get the word out about their companies, some are unsure of they should use a Facebook business page to build their brand.

Online Reputations

Before creating a Facebook page for your company, you may wish to run a search for your business name on a major search engine like Google and see what comes up. You might be either pleasantly surprised or unexpectedly bothered by what you see. [Read more...]

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What to Consider When Choosing a WordPress Theme

April 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Choosing a WordPress theme can be very difficult considering how many different designs and styles are available. Every conceivable layout, navigation style, and design is out there waiting to be the platform you utilize for your blog or site.

Professional theme sample.

So, how do you choose the theme that is going to suit both your needs, and the preferences of your desired audience?

It is important to first take the time to really think about what it is that you want from your WordPress theme. Determine a clear set of requirements and expectations, and then browse the available professional wordpress themes to find one that will meet or exceed every single one. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Layout, Wordpress Tagged With:

Top 3 Reasons to Allow Guest Blogging on your Blog

March 27, 2013 by 1 Comment

 The 3 top reasons to Allow Guest Blogging on your Blog

If you’re a dedicated blogger, you may resist the idea of allowing guest bloggers to write posts. You may even view guest bloggers as intruders attempting to benefit from the hard work you’ve put into building an audience for your blog.

However, you’re missing a wonderful opportunity to improve your blog and your own professional standing by taking such a position.

Rather than posing a threat, high quality guest blog posts from the right guest bloggers can actually improve your blog.
0 Top 3 Reasons to Allow Guest Blogging on your Blog

Expanded Reach

By allowing guest bloggers to post your blog, you increase your network. This is especially true if you encourage posts from subject matter experts or individuals who are not full time bloggers but who hold positions in companies or fields related to your blog. [Read more...]

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Uncovering the most Profitable Keywords for your Business

February 23, 2013 by 1 Comment

In the fierce competition laden world of the internet, a webmaster would always aim at getting as much number of visitors as possible. But getting traffic isn’t just about quantity. You have to consider the conversion rates of your site’s visitors.

Thus, you have to aim at ranking for keywords that mean the most to your business. And this is where keywords play a major role. Without taking time to getting the appropriate keywords, your SEO efforts will be useless.

Let’s go over a few but helpful tips in uncovering the most profitable keywords for your business.  [Read more...]

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7 Reasons to Check Your Copy

November 14, 2012 by 1 Comment

Even if you’re not a writer by profession, most jobs and many other daily activities require at least some writing. A brief perusal of online articles suggests that large numbers of people don’t edit their writing as well as they should.

Actually, Internet participation seems to be dominated by two groups of people; those who are careless in their writing and those who think the careless ones should be shot, but I digress.

There is a plugin for WordPress called After the Deadline that can help with spelling, grammer, and context.  It is available as part of the free Jetpack set of plugins from WordPress.

Violence aside, error-free writing is more than a nitpicky thing. Small mistakes can lead to grave consequences. You should ensure your writing is error-free for the following seven reasons.

1. Avoid a Deeply Embarrassing Misunderstanding.

For example, say you want to earn some extra money cleaning houses. You post an ad that reads like this:

“Tired of cleaning yourself? Let me do it.”

If anyone offers you a cleaning gig based on this ad, you may find they have very different expectations of just what you are expected to clean.   [Read more...]

Filed Under: Don't Do It

URL Shortners: The Good, the Bad, the Evolution

November 9, 2012 by 1 Comment

With our love of condensing, speeding up and simplifying things, URL shorteners are now part of online mechanics and never more so than with social media sites such as Twitter. We’ve honed how we get our point across in 140 characters or less, and now, thanks to URL shorteners, we can add links into our conversations too.

The Good

The benefits of this link shortening is that it compresses and reduces, making sharing content easier. Gone are the lengthy titles which take up most of the characters, and in its place – space.

This leaves room for users to express their own opinion or take on articles, videos, images and everything else out there. It’s also been argued that shortened URLs make an article more readable, simply because clunky wordy titles are replaced with a more succinct version of less than 20 characters.

But aside from the aesthetics and share factors, shortening services are also valuable tools. That’s because some offer a built-in function to track and analyse who is sharing and reading content. Since sharing is the life blood of the internet, and more specifically social media, then for those who work in the industry, this helps with a necessary part of the job – monitoring.  [Read more...]

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How To: Use Mobile To Generate More Traffic

September 4, 2012 by 1 Comment

Mobile has become a phenomenon; between the explosive device sales and increase in attention towards monetization of mobile, companies are trying to figure out exactly what to do with it.

The mobile optimized version of BlogCraving.com.

However the one fact that marketers, and businesses as a whole are facing is get ready for mobile, or be ready to lose – with this article I want to try to help you win by using mobile to generate even more traffic for your website.

Utilize native mobile technologies

Mobile has the inherent benefit of additional communication technologies that the desktop does not have. For instance over 7 billion SMS messages we’re sent in 2011 according to ABI research and it’s an under utilized marketing channel. As such a prominent communication method – especially if your target customers or audience use SMS frequently then it’s a valuable avenue to explore.

If you do run an SMS campaign carefully consider the text used and be sure to include a link to your business for web-enabled smartphones. In addition to SMS consider how your emails are being sent and any signature that you are using is optimized for a mobile device, and when they land on your website it’s optimized for mobile as well.  [Read more...]

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The WordPress SEO Guide

July 16, 2012 by 5 Comments

Using WordPress for your content management system is not only smart it’s recommended by most SEO Experts.  In order to rank well today in Google you need to have a blog and a powerful way to manage that content.  WordPress is close to prefect out of the box but there are still things you need to do.

If you are adding a new blog it is recommended to add the blog as a subfolder and not as a subdomain.  A subdomain is considered a new domain and will not carry the weight of your existing page.  Nor will you give your website the added bonus of links and content pages if you use a subdomain.

Subdomain: blog.domain.com

Subfolder: domain.com/blog/  (preferred method)

Tags & Categories

Once you have your blog installed and are ready to go you need to think about duplicate content and how you can prevent that.  The biggest problem with WordPress is the categories and tags it allows you to create.

Tags

If you have a large website with thousands of pages of content most of the time tags will help improve your SEO.  This creates additional pages that have keywords as titles.  The problem is when you have a smaller blog and not enough articles it creates pages with almost identical content.  Duplicate content is bad for SEO and will actually hurt your ranking potential in Google.

Categories

The same thing that happens with tags also happens with category pages.  Category pages can be near identical to tag created pages and can harm your SEO efforts.

To help solve these issues I recommend to all my clients to use the All in One SEO Pack.  This is a powerful plugin that has many features with the most useful is the ability to “no-index” tags or categories.  It is highly (do it) recommended you install this plugin and set up your blog to not allow search engines to index your tag pages.  This feature alone will solve most of your on-site SEO issues with WordPress.

Tip: When you categorize your blog post remember not to select too many categories for each blog post.  I always recommend one category.  If you start selecting several categories for each post then you run the risk of creating more duplicate content.   [Read more...]

Filed Under: Guest Post, Guides, How to..., Site Traffic, Wordpress Tagged With: ,