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By Merle in Featured

TwitterSince Twitter’s launch in 2007, it has seen huge growth and has become one of the dominant players when it comes to social media. If you’re trying to establish an online presence, and have no idea what Twitter is – or aren’t

using it in some way to promote your brand – you haven’t been paying attention. Shame on you.

“Twittering” has become a national phenomenon with its use trailing slightly behind Facebook’s. Recently Twitter shared some interesting statistics at “Chirp”, the Twitter developer conference.

By Philip Light in Featured

My new WordPress clients are often confused about some of the terminology of WordPress. This makes it more difficult to communicate effectively with them about what they want from their WordPress sites and blog. So, I’ve decided to list the top 10 WordPress related terms everyone who uses WordPress should know.

Term 1: Themes

A Theme is a collection of files that create the visual look of your WordPress website or blog. Themes are kinda like ‘skins’ that you can easily download, install and start using on your site. Themes also can include some custom features to give you greater control over the presentation and functionality of your site. In general, only one Theme can be used at a time.

Term 2: Templates

In WordPress, templates are one of several specific files that control how a particular page on your site is displayed. For instance, your theme may have multiple page layouts, perhaps one with a sidebar and one without. There are also templates that control the top of all your pages including navigation, called a “header”, the bottom of all your pages, called a “footer”, and “sidebars” (see below). Templates can also be created for a specific page or post, category, and much more.

Term 3: Plugins

Plugins are a collection of files that you can download and install to add some certain functionality to your site. For instance, there are plugins for e-commerce, Search Engine Optimization, to create specific features like a calendar, or to modify how you control and operate your website. There are 1,000′s of plugins, most of which are free.

Term 4: Sidebar

A sidebar is a section of your website that generally displays the along the left or right side of your pages, but can also appear in other places, such as the footer. You can also have multiple sidebars in your site based on the templates you have.

Term 5: Widgets

Widgets are the individual blocks of content that go into a sidebar. You can easily add, delete or rearrange Widgets in your sidebars by dragging and dropping in the WordPress admin center. Many Widgets can also be edited to give you extra control over how the Widgets appear on your site. Some common examples of Widgets are simple text, recent posts, advertising such as AdSense, etc.

Term 6: Pages & Posts

Pages vs. Posts are a bit confusing and could have its own article. In general though, you want to use Pages for any single pages of content that remain in the same place on your site. Pages generally have their own navigation in WordPress and are good for pages like ‘About Us’, ‘Contact Us’, etc. You can easily select different templates for pages and they are not categorized.

Posts on the other hand are used when you will be creating multiple entries about a particular topic. You can put Posts into various Categories. WordPress will then automatically handle creating various Category pages, which will list all of the Posts in that Category, generally showing only an Excerpt of the Post and putting the Posts in chronological order. For instance, if you had a blog on Hollywood happenings, you would use Posts each time you write a new entry about some celebrity doing something stupid.

Term 7: Admin Center

The Admin Center is where you control everything about your WordPress site. To access the Admin Center you will go to a specific URL on the internet and enter your username and password. From there, you will be able to add/edit/delete Pages and Posts, control Plugins and Widgets, manage your users, and much more.

Term 8: Permalinks

How your URL’s are formed is very important to Search Engine Optimization and making your pages more memorable and understandable to your visitors. In WordPress, you can easily create Permalinks, which are a particular structure to your site. Instead of using meaningless URL’s like yourdomain.com/?p=8, you could have yourdomain.com/my-page/. You can control the permalinks for each Page and Post in WordPress.

Term 9: Tags

Tags are similar to Categories, only they are less structured. For instance, you may have a Post about your favorite Football team, which perhaps you are putting in a “Sports” category. You could also use some tags like ‘Football’, ‘Cincinnati Bengals’, and ‘Carson Palmer’. Using the tags makes it possible to have a list of Tags in your sidebar where people can click the different Tags to bring up all the Pages and Posts that have those particular tags. If you have a Search box, then the Tags are also used to retrieve results for the users specific search.

Term 10: Custom Fields

WordPress includes a way to create custom values that you assign to a particular Page or Post. Your Theme, or WordPress developer can then use those fields and values to create custom functionality on your site. For instance, you may want to be able to have a rating system for whatever you are writing about. A developer could set-up a custom field where you just enter your rating and then the system takes that information and makes a pretty display feature based on the rating you assigned. The possibilities are endless with Custom Fields and are a powerful feature of WordPress.

I hope these terms help you to better understand WordPress and how it operates. Even if you have a professional helping you with your WordPress site, you’ll be better off understanding some of the basic principles so you can be on the same page when communicating with your developer.

Best of luck!

Philip Light is the founder of the WordPress WebKit – which provides Professional WordPress Services and Educational Materials including Video Tutorials, Guides, and Resources. It’s a one-stop place for everything you need to have a great WordPress website or blog.

By Julie Ann Ross in Featured

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is crucial for any nonprofit that wants to have an online presence. This is not just limited to for profit companies that are trying to market themselves. It means more than just building a website and assuming your organization will win search rankings. You need to practice SEO in order to place higher than other nonprofits with the same name or in the same arena.

Take a quick test: Google these three search terms: your organization’s name, your organization’s name and city, and your organization’s field and city. For example, “Tampa Humane Society,” “Humane Society, Tampa FL,” and “animal welfare Tampa FL.”

Where did your organization rank? If you do some proper SEO, your site should appear at the very top of the search rankings, or at least the top 5. If your SEO efforts are lacking, your site may not have even appeared on the first page. We have seen several nonprofits whose websites are outranked rather severely, even by newspapers that wrote a single article about the organization. Obviously this will not do for nonprofits that are trying to increase donations through their online efforts.

One SEO technique for nonprofits is to publish your newsletter on your website. The easiest (and best) way to do it is to publish each individual article as a blog post. This helps your SEO by giving additional content for the search engines to find. The more content you create, the better your search engine performance. You can still publish your newsletter, but recycle the content and use it in more than one location.

Another option is to publish the entire month’s newsletter on an a separate web page. This will keep each article on one page, which will make it easier for your web programmer, but will not give you as many SEO benefits as the blog option. Remember, good SEO is based on frequency and recency, meaning update a lot, update often. If you can republish your articles as blog posts, you will have better SEO results than if you publish a single page newsletter.

Another SEO technique is to purchase a domain name that includes your field and city. This is one of the best ways to improve SEO rankings. Get a unique, local domain name — “TampaAnimalWelfare” or “TampaFloridaAnimalWelfare” — and create a single page with basic information about your organization, with links back to your main website. Be sure to use keyword-rich content in order to win the searches for that particular term. By creating a microsite like this, you can have a powerful backlink to your main website, which improves its rankings.

If you have offices in more than one city, use this technique for each city, county, and state. Or if your field can be defined by many different terms — animal welfare, animal protection, animal care, animal shelter — then use each term with your city. The more pages you can do this with, the better your search engine placement. You can purchase inexpensive domain names from sites like GoDaddy.com, and they will often provide you with a single page for free.

A final SEO technique is to use videos as part of your marketing. Messages from the CEO, videos of special events, speeches, and fund raising events. Host your videos on YouTube, create your own YouTube channel, and embed the videos in blog posts or web pages. Not only are videos some popular content for search engines, but it is another way to get your audience and donors engaged with your organization, and to deepen the relationship.

While many nonprofits do not like to think of themselves as a business, they need to remember that they are competing for discretionary dollars, not only with other nonprofits, but with restaurants, movie theaters, bookstores, and TV. The sooner nonprofits start approaching their fund raising and development as a real sales and marketing effort, they will begin to see dividends from their SEO efforts.

With 20 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, Rostin Ventures has refined the SEM SEO Expert Formula. Rostin Ventures offers local online marketing and SEO services that are affordable and easy to access and are combined to build the formula that drives search engine ranking through Social Media Optimization, Online Reputation Management, Social Marketing and web 2.0 communities and resources.

By Koz Khosravani in Featured

Cutting Rank: Improper Domain Name Redirects

The internet seems to be abuzz with new buzzwords and catch phrases every day. Initially, it was all about chat, IRC and newsgroups; then came Google; and now, we hear of the term Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) almost everywhere. To the uninitiated, this seems to be a mere online epidemic. Magazines talk of websites using the best SEO techniques, and so many businesses have sprung up to offer professional SEO. It is generally agreed that without SEO, your website has far less chance of being discovered.

But what does all this mean? What is SEO, and why should it affect anyone in any way at all? How can it benefit real estate investors and small business owners? And if it works, how can it benefit you, even if you have very little technical knowledge?

By B Hopkins in Featured

WordPress themes are also known as layouts or templates. These are files that create the look and feel of your blog content. WordPress themes can be very simple, like the one that comes standard with every install, to the complex. Bloggers can choose from free and paid versions of templates. When choosing a template, you should choose one that will give you a lot of ability to easily customize the template to fit your branding needs. This article discusses 2 templates (or themes) that have a lot of customization features which are relatively easy to a create unique brand.

All WordPress templates allow you to customize them by going into the Edit page of the Appearance tab. If you are not comfortable with PHP and HTML code, then you may have some trouble in customizing your appearance. One benefit of the themes mentioned in this article is they are customizable through a special theme options page, which means you can get your WordPress site up and running much more quickly.

1) Atahualpa Theme

This theme is a free theme that was created by ‘Bytes for All’ and can be found at http://bytesforall.com/ where you can ask questions and get community support for this theme. Once this theme is installed, you can customize the theme in the Appearance >> Atahualpa Theme Options page. Once here, you will find a host of options to highly customize your theme. Webmasters can configure special CSS styles for things such as the header, the layout, and page features such as headings, links and menu bars. Users can easily upload header graphics that can rotate through the header graphic. Other options that can be customized include the number of columns you want on your blog (technically you can have from 1 to 5 columns), which side you want you sidebars to be on, or what you want your widget boxes to look like. The look and feel is highly customizable and is a great start to quickly getting a professional look to your blog.

2) News Magazine Theme

The free News Magazine theme was created by http://antisocialmediallc.com. This theme gives you several easily customizable options that can be set in the Appearance >> News Magazine Theme 640 Options page. The News Magazine theme doesn’t have quite as many options to set up as the Atahualpa theme, but you can add code for site tracking (can be done through the use of plugins), ad rotating and just adding text or java script code to parts of your template.

One nice feature of this template is that you can easily take featured categories and spotlight them on your blog through simple drop-down selections. One very nice feature is that you can control the excerpt length of your blog postings on the index page. On 99.9% of the WordPress blogs out there, the home (or index) page prints the entire text of the blog post. A better format for visitors is to have a post excerpt and they can click a link to read the entire blog. Currently there is no function in WordPress that allows you to display excerpts of your blog postings. This blog theme allows you to display excerpts with their ‘Blog Mode Excerpt Length’ setting.

These two WordPress themes are varied enough to get you started and well on your way with your first (or second) WordPress blog. The ease of these customizable settings should greatly reduce your setup time while creating a fairly well customized blog. To make the most advantage of setting up your blog for more traffic and more automation, taking a WordPress training class will speed up creating a decent blog following.

New to blogging and want to get the most out of your WordPress blog? B. Hopkins, an expert in the Internet industry for over 10 years, and has been working with blog technology for the last 6 years is offering WordPress training classes for beginners and intermediate level bloggers.

By Kenji Sakamoto in Featured

Internet business owners have found online article directories to be positive for their business. Here are five ways you can benefit from using article directories on the Internet to promote your business.

Before we get into the directories understand that article marketing is effective when you write keyword rich articles and include a resource box at the end of them. Think of the resource box as your classified ad and the more opportunities you give people to find you the better off you will be. That is the real power of online article directories.

  1. Submit your articles to the top article directories only and concentrate on the quality of the article. This is one strategy you can use and it certainly takes some of the pressure off of writing high number of articles. The key to making this work is to develop unique versions of your article and submit them to only the top directories online.
  2. Once you have submitted it to the top directories ezine publishers may find your article. This can lead to your article being published in newsletters on the Internet. It can also end up in the inbox of prospective customers. Many online ezines have a huge customer base you might not otherwise we reach. If the ezine is archived online this can give you long term exposure and backlinks.
  3. Go for volume of articles and to submit to multiple directories by the hundreds or even thousands. Unless you use article rewriting software to make each article unique this is not a very effective strategy. Some Internet marketers prefer to play the numbers game and just get their articles out where they can be found.
  4. Printed publications might pick up your articles from an online directory. These can be picked up by magazines giving you additional exposure. Again the point is to have a link in your resource box to get traffic from an off line reader to your online website.
  5. Many online directories have links back to them placed on other Internet marketers websites and blogs. You see this in the form of text links or banner ads. Any directory that is getting traffic coming to it can potentially benefit you if your articles are being published by them.

There certainly are more ways you can benefit from online article directories. This is just a handful of them, but really shows the power of marketing with articles in directories on the Internet today.

Kenji Sakamoto is the owner of Article Directory Online one of the most visited online article directories on the internet. If you are looking for a high traffic article directory to publish your own articles, or content for your own website or newsletter visit it today.

By John Sylvester in Featured

A recent report issued by the OECD paints a gloomy picture for the future of newspapers. However, according to The Economist, the publisher of Bild and Die Welt “recently recorded the most profitable first quarter in its history”, with a profit margin showing a startling 27%.

Maybe that’s good news for the German publisher but it is an exception as declining readership, especially amongst the young, can be attributed to gathering news from the internet, especially in the US, the UK, Greece, Italy, Canada and Spain.

In the US, after disastrous results, the New York Times reported a first-quarter profit of US$83.3 million, up from US16.4 million year-on-year, but total revenues were down 3.2 percent year-on-year, and job losses in the industry have been especially severe in the US, the UK, the Netherlands and Spain.

The Newspaper Association of America reported that print and online advertising has fallen by 35% since the first quarter of 2008 and that circulation had dropped alarmingly, yet almost all newspapers have survived.

Primarily, newspapers have needed to cut costs so as to find a way out of the financial crisis by reducing payroll costs by up to 25%. There have also been adaptations, such as for example a group of New Jersey newspapers jointly producing features and editorials.

After staff pay, the second-biggest expense is paper, the price of which has plummeted by as much as 40% due to a global commodities slump. And with newspapers printing fewer words on smaller pages, most have survived.

But whilst the cost-cutting has been severe, it doesn’t necessarily follow that their balance sheets are particularly healthy. As The Economist points out: “While the bottom line for most papers appears to be stabilising, the top line is continuing to shrink as newspaper corporations continue their cutbacks.

Some of the key findings in the OECD report are:

* After very profitable years, newspaper publishers in most OECD countries face increased competition (free dailies, internet, multiple TV and radio sources) and often declining advertising revenues, titles and circulation as well as declining readership. The economic crisis has amplified this downward development. About 20 out of 30 OECD countries face declining readership, with significant decreases in some OECD countries.

* The share of advertising going to print newspapers has been declining for the last decade in most OECD countries, and the newspaper advertising market has more recently experienced large falls in offline and online advertising growth. On the cost side, costs unrelated to editorial work such as production, maintenance, administration, promotion and advertising, and distribution dominate newspaper costs. These large fixed costs make newspaper organisations more vulnerable to the downturns and less agile in reacting to the online news environment.

* “Reading news online” is an increasingly important internet activity. In some OECD countries, more than half of the population read newspapers online (up to 77 per cent in Korea) but at the minimum 20 per cent of the population read newspapers online. The willingness to pay for online news is low but increasing. In many OECD countries, TV and newspapers are still the most important sources of news but this is shifting with newspapers losing ground more quickly to the internet than TV. In countries such as Korea, the internet has already overtaken other forms of news.

* In many Western OECD countries the internet web pages of broadcasters and online newspaper sites play a large role in attracting news-related visits. More recently newspaper websites have seen strong growth in their own pages, with large newspapers reporting several million of unique visitors to their pages per month, including increasingly readers from abroad, a radical shift for newspapers.

* The impacts of the changing media landscape on news are pulling in two opposite directions. One extreme is that online and other new forms of more decentralised news will liberate readers from partisan news monopolies which have tended to become more concentrated and to dominate the production and access to news. The other extreme is that the demise of the traditional news media is with us (partially caused by the rise of the Internet), and with it an important foundation for democratic societies is at risk.

Newspaper publishers hope that the emphasis on distinctive content, as recommended last year by the BBC, as the best way forward, whether delivered to smart-phones, tablet computers or the internet.

The Economist thinks: “So far the few that have persuaded readers to pay for news online tend to have a reputation for distinctive coverage. The Financial Times … and the Wall Street Journal have leading positions in business and financial news, and successful pay-walls.

“Newspapers still face big structural obstacles: it remains unclear, for example, whether the young will pay for news in any form. But the recession brought out an impressive and unexpected ability to adapt. If newspapers can keep that up in better times, they may be able to contemplate more than mere survival.”

——————-

V9 Design and Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores.

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

QuestionHi Kalena

My husband runs his own business. He is an electrician working in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney, Australia, doing mostly domestic electrical work.

We employ a pay per click agency as well as a web page optimiser until such time as I am confident to do it my self. We monitor each very carefully to try and find out what works for us.

I am running key word research and incorporating suitable keywords into my husband’s site. And now that I am actually going through the motions of putting this into practice, I am having trouble justifying these words, as I know his clients don’t use these words to find our service.

Both the optimiser and the PPC agency have come up with the same keywords I have, and when I typed these words into Google to see whom or what popped up, the results were mostly irrelevant to our products. Although I could see these words used in our sub pages e.g. “Install ceiling fan”, “down lights”, “switch board upgrade” etc, I don’t feel these keyword phrases are strong enough for our home page. We are not competing for these keywords, we are competing for the local area and the electrician service within our local area.

Our business is usually found by people typing in the word “electrician”, then the suburb or CBD, inner city etc. These are the words I would like to target. So my question is, how do you target specific suburbs in your city?

Thanks
Kim

————————————–

Hi Kim

Regarding the search terms such as “install ceiling fan”, “down lights”, “switch board upgrade”, these are excellent choices to target with SEO because they are likely to be less competitive and provided you optimize your pages carefully enough, you should be able to rank well for them, provided they are relevant to the service your husband offers. If they aren’t, there’s no point targeting them.

Regarding targeting terms such as “electrician [suburb]“ – it’s going to be difficult to rank highly for such generic terms using SEO alone, so you might need PPC to win that war. Thankfully, Google AdWords enables you to set up location based advertising.

You can choose a particular geographic area, a range of suburbs, a particular city etc. You can even have your ads shown only to persons located in a specific number of city blocks – via customized (latitude and longitude) targeting! You can specify this when you create a new AdWords account. With location-based targeting, the suburb name appears below your ad to make it more relevant.

Another great way to target a specific market is to use dynamic keyword insertion, where a particular keyword is inserted into your ads automatically based on a search query or searcher location.

So you could have your AdGroup target individual suburbs such as “electrician North Sydney”, or the city as a whole such as “electrician Sydney” etc. Your ad could say something like:

Electrician {Keyword: Suburb}
Emergency electrician available
24 hours / 7 days a week.

Then if a searcher enters “electrician North Ryde” or “electrician Strathfield”, your ad will come up and show the relevant suburb in the headline. Powerful stuff!

I recommend you read up on dynamic keyword insertion and give it a whirl in your AdWords account.

Kalena

————————————–

Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

By Doug Firebaugh in Featured

Web-2.0Build it and they will come” the saying goes.

Not.

You can build a blog or video site and you can still be lacking connections.

Connection is the nuclear core of social media. But you must make an effort in order for that to happen.

Whether you have a social media home business, traditional brick and mortar business, or an online business, you must get into the social trenches and connect and converse. It is that simple and that plain.

It is all about connecting and creating a magnetic conversation with people that draws them towards you.

By Steve Shaw in Featured

Coming up with a steady stream of article ideas on your topic is always a challenge. It doesn’t matter if you’re an article marketing newbie or a veteran with hundreds of articles under your belt–sooner or later you will think:

“I’ve written about everything I can possibly write about on my topic. What now?”

If you’re wondering how to submit articles when you think you’ve said it all, I’ve got 7 helpful tips for you.

1 – Use an automatic article submission service so that you can accomplish your article marketing goals while submitting fewer articles.

Everyone has creative dry spells now and then, but if you are submitting manually and are trying to write an article a day or more, you will run into that obstacle sooner than you have to.

There is no need to write dozens of articles a month. When you use an automatic article distribution service to have your article sent out to tons of publishers with the click of a button, each article works harder for you. Each article is republished on many sites instead of just a few, which means that you can see the results you’re looking for while submitting fewer articles.

This is the easy way to do article marketing–I’ve been submitting my articles automatically for several years now, and I find this method infinitely more effective and doable than submitting articles manually. I usually submit 8 articles a month. It’s much easier to come up with 8 article ideas than 30 plus!

Article marketing is a long term marketing tool which you will ideally use for the lifetime of your website. By submitting fewer articles, you stand a much better chance of being able to market your site with articles over the long term.

2 – Use a free article writing template. I have created several of these that I use on a regular basis. When I say “template”, I mean a step-by-step method for coming up with a unique quality article.

Here’s one of my favorites:

  • The Beginner’s Guide Article Template
  • Write an article for a person who is absolutely new to your niche. Avoid niche specific words that might be confusing to a newcomer. Go with the assumption that your reader has no knowledge about any part of your niche (other than to have a budding curiosity about it).

Title ideas:

  • The Beginner’s Guide to [your subject]
  • [Your subject] 101
  • Intro to [Your subject]
  • Cover these points:
  • What are the advantages of your niche?
  • Why are people usually interested in it?
  • What are the challenges?
  • Are there any action steps that a newbie could take to get started?

3 – Do you get any frequently asked questions from your customers?

If a question is being asked more than once, it is likely that many people are wondering the same questions. You can address common questions in your articles. Writing one article per question should give you enough ammunition to generate several articles.

4 – Do keyword research to see what types of topics your target readers are typing into Google. Write articles that answer/address those searches.

5 – Get ideas from your own blog or other blogs in your niche. Look at the comments that people leave for common questions and challenges that you can address your articles.

6 – Write a “How To” article that teaches your reader how to do something specific related to your niche.

7 – Solicit questions from your customers, your list subscribers, and your blog readers.

These are just a few ideas to help jump start your creativity and get the quantity of your article submissions down to a manageable level. We all experience periods when our minds draw a blank when we sit down to write. You have not run out of article ideas though!

Use these tips I’ve provided here and above all stick with your article marketing campaign.

For more info on how you can use article marketing to reach thousands of potential prospects for your website, go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/report . Steve Shaw is an article marketing expert and founder of the popular article distribution service http://www.submityourarticle.com used by thousands of business owners.

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