Why Are You Blogging?

Blogging is exploding and what a great why to express and brand yourself! You spend so much time talking about your product, your service, health and wellness, personal development, and so on but you often forget to talk and share about yourself. Inviting your readers into your world and letting them know about who you are and your life journey is essential to building a relationship with your readers. One of the best ways to do this is by creating your blog’s author page.

WordPress Author Page

WordPress has built in options to add a biography about yourself and some basic contact information however it’s very limited. Users of my Empowered Theme have additional options for syndication and contact information such as Skype, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Depending on what WordPress Theme you are using, it may not support linking to your author page. I am sure most Premiere WordPress Themes will have this capability but it’s hard to say if the free themes will.

SEO For Author Pages

There are several great reasons why having your author page set up is important. The obvious ones are that it gives your readers more information about the blogger. So if you have several guest bloggers writing articles on your blog, you may want to display a brief bio about each of them on their own author page.

The less obvious is that having an SEO will help increase your search engine optimization. As a blogger, you are often branding yourself and targeting search engines like Google to index your blog and all of its pages and posts. As it’s indexing your pages, you want to be sure it has the resources to connect the blog post to its author. If you do not have an author page setup or your theme doesn’t support it, how will search engines know more about the author? Consider taking a few minutes to watch the video below and learn where to set up your WordPress Profile/Author Page and listen to me talk about the importance of having it.

Please share this with your Friends on Facebook and Followers on Twitter.

Apple iphone

Don’t like your cell phone service provider but love your phone? (iPhone for Verizon?)

Ok, so an iPhone on Verizon’s network is going to need a little more love than just jailbreaking it but at least this is a step in the right direction. For those of us who want the ability to choose a service provider by their network and not worry about having a phone to fit ours need, has just received a nice gift from the FCC. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has ruled jailbreaking an iPhone or rooting any phone for that matter is completely legal. Jailbroken iPhones are often used to operate on different cell phone service providers or install and run unauthorized third party applications. Although it was previously and technically illegal to jailbreak an iPhone, it’s estimated that over a million iPhone have been jailbroken and no charges have been filed or charges pressed.

What is Jailbreaking a cell phone?

Jailbreaking is a process that allows iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch users to run third-party unsigned code on their devices by unlocking the operating system and allowing the user root access. Although iPhones are the most popular, cell phones in general can be rooted.

How to jailbreak an iPhone?

If you are interested in jailbreaking your iPhone, there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube to help get you going. Just remember that this will absolutely void your warranty.

Most of my subscribers and readers are fellow bloggers running a WordPress blog. If you are using the Empowered Theme by Empowered Blogs then here is another video tutorial to help guide you in utilizing all the features built into your Empowered Blog.

Why do you want to share your social media accounts?

Blogs are often used to build a brand or market a product or service. People are also using blogs to promote themselves and brand themselves as a leader in their industry and niche.  Anyone who does through the time and money to build a blog and fill it with content to brand themselves need to connect their blog with their social media accounts to create that avenue to guide your blog’s visitor onto social networking sites they can connect with you on a level they frequent, like Facebook.com.

Video Tutorial

Below is a video tutorial on how to set up and use the social icons widget with your Empowered Blog. You can find the syndication page in the left side bar of your blog’s back office under Empowered > Syndication.

From Beta to Stable

If you remember on May 10, 2010 I wrote a blog post titled ‘New for WordPress 3.0 – Menu Management‘ that featured a hot new feature added to WordPress version 3.0, Menu Management. This is definitely one of my favorite improvements in a while so I am really excited to shoot another video tutorial for it. The first video I shot was on a blog running version 3.0 beta. So although the menu management page didn’t change much, I decided to shot a second video tutorial on a my personal blog that is running the stable version of WordPress 3.0.

What’s New In WordPress Menu Management

There are several features to this new addition for WordPress. I will quickly list them below but you can find out the most information by watching the video below.

1. Pages and Categories – Pages and categories can now be easily mixed and matched within the same menu. You can even add categories child of pages and vice versa.
2. Custom Links – Have an affiliate link you want to place in your menu or maybe a direct link to your Facebook Page? Now you can easily create custom links and place them anywhere within your menus.
3. Theme Locations – Depending on the theme you are using, it will determine how many and where your menus are located. You can create menus and place them into any location you want.
4. Custom Title Attribute & Navigation Label – Are your page titles really long and make your menus look terrible? Now you can change how they appear in the menu by adding a navigation label. This will also help with your SEO. You can also add custom title attributes for your WordPress menu links.
5. Disable top level pages – Now you can easily manage which pages are automatically added to the menus by unchecking the ‘Automatically add new top-level pages’. This will prevent any new pages you create from automatically being added to your menus.
6. Custom Menu Widget – Place certain pages and/or categories in the sidebar and level the rest at the top of the page using the custom menu widget. First, create a menu and add the links you want in the side bar. Then do to your Widgets page and drag and drop the Custom Menu to the sidebar and select the side bar menu you created.

Don’t be a lazy blogger

If you are a blogger then you know the importance of writing blog posts. You probably also know that you need to do some sort of SEO tactics to help people find your blog using search engines like Google and Yahoo!. But are you doing the right things? Are you doing enough? Don’t be lazy about your blogging because if you are going to do it, make it worth your time.

Let me give you a few pointers on some of the things you should be doing when writing a blog post that will increase your search engine optimization, organization, and reader friendliness. These aren’t things I read out of a book or wrote down in a seminar. These are things that I have collected over my last 6 years as a web developer.

Warning: Do not install the All-in-one SEO WordPress Plugin and think that you are done and no longer need to worry about search engine optimization. SEO needs to be constantly nurtured and detailed. Remember that if you don’t take advantage of all SEO opportunities then another blogger will and most likely rank better.

Blog Post Headings

When you begin writing your blog post, how much time do you spend thinking of the title? Do you share any of that time thinking of secondary titles? The secondary titles are used to better describe each part of your blog articles. These titles hold several purposes in SEO, organization, and helping your readers find what they are looking for.

First I am going to tell you how to set your secondary titles using the Heading Tags and tell you what these tags are used for. If you are using the standard TinyMCE WordPress WYSIWYG or the TinyMCE Advanced Plugin then you should see the Format drop down menu that contains different options such as Paragraph, Address, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and so on. This menu is used to change the format of the selected text. By default, an Empowered Blog is built to cater to the proper hierarchy for HTML Headings on each page.  This means that your Site Title is going to be the most important so it is formatted as Heading 1. The blog post and page titles are formatted as Heading 2 and logically the secondary post titles will be Heading 3. This helps browsers crawling your blog to determine the importance of each of your three titles and index them accordingly.

So using this blog post for example, my site title is CliftonHatfield.com which is a Heading 1. Writing A Blog Post? Make sure it’s worth it : Part 1 is the post title and formatted as Heading 2. And my secondary titles are Don’t be a lazy blogger which are formatted as Heading 3. Remember the site title and blog post/page title are automatically generated as Headings.

Note: The microphone is failing so the sound quality is very poor so you may need to increase your volume. The video will be rerecorded soon with better quality.

In Part 1 on managing your blog categories, I showed you a video on how to add and delete your blog’s categories. What if you decide you need to edit them later. In the video below, learn how to quickly edit the categories per post or several categories all at once.

Managing Your WordPress Categories : Part 1

Resource: http://cliftonhatfield.com/managing-your-wordpress-categories-part-1/

Keeping your blog organized is absolutely essential for successful blogging. One way to ensure your blog’s success and keep your visitors on your blog and returning often is to keep your posts neatly organized into categories. Below is video tutorial on adding and deleting post categories. Take a couple of minutes that will really help optimize your blog’s organization.

Managing Your WordPress Categories : Part 2

Resource: http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/categories-vs-tags/

Although there is no such thing as an SEO software that completely dominates the SERPs of Google or any search engine for that matter, they do offer the means to make the processes of competitor research, keyword analysis, link building, and rank tracking simpler and less time consuming. I have not used all that I list below but recent reviews from their users validate their helpfulness. Finding an SEO software that you are comfortable using makes a great addition to your online marketing toolbox giving you a step up from other marketers lacking one. Below, I list 16 noteworthy solutions on the SEO market today.

1. SEOMoz.com
2. DIYSEO.com
3. Conductor.com
   
4. SEOelite.com
5. Trendmx.com
6. WebPosition.com
7. BruteForceSEO.com
8. SEOadministrator.com
9. WebCEO.com
10. LotusJump.com
11. SheerSEO.com
12. SEOSuite.com
13. TrafficTravis.com
14. RankSense.com
15. Link-Assistant.com
16. SEOSamba.com

If you want to be greedy read this and don’t Retweet it or Facebook Share but I encourage you to share the love! ♥

Have you ever glanced through all those icons and buttons above the text box where you write your awesome blog posts and articles? Ever wonder what they all do? Feel a little intimated to give them a click? Well, let me tell you about one of my favorite little icons up there called the More Tag.

This button looks like a page with about the top third of it cut off and someone slide a dotted line between the pieces. This is the More Tag and should become a very good friend of yours. Why? Because of its benefits for search engine optimization, blog organization, and overall giving your visitors a better experiences.

Using the More Tag in WordPress

The  More Tag lets you choose where to limit the text that is displayed on the home page and post feed pages such as Search, Archive, Category Pages and so on. Everyone’s method of using the More Tag may be different but I will tell you how I use it.

Once I have written and proofread (the best I can) my blog post, I decide how much text I want to display on the homepage. Typically, I want to offer enough information to interest the reader but I still want to encourage them to read the rest of the article by clicking on the ‘Continue Reading’ link to display the entire blog post and comments.

More Tag Benefits and Reasons To Use

This tag has many great benefits and my favorite is that it reduces the amount of text that is displayed on the homepage at one time. With less text, it becomes visually attractive and encourages your visitors to scroll farther down your homepage scanning your latest blog posts looking for one the sparks their interest. The last thing you want to do is drive your visitors away because they have become lost in so much text.

More Tag will improve with your search engine optimization (SEO). This benefit alone is more than worth a valid reason to use this feature. This is something I could talk all day about so I decided to write a short summary list of reason WHY to use the More Tag.

1. Prevent Duplicate Content: Search Engines like Google don’t particularly like duplicate information within the same blog. If you have 10 full blog posts listed on your homepage then each of those posts have their own page, it will appear to have several duplicate pages. If you have 10 excerpts lined down your page, Google will not confuse two pages for having the same content.
2. No Long Homepage: A homepage with 10 full blog posts can really produce a lot of text on a single page which is something search engines do not like. For a blog post with a single topic wouldn’t be  problem but squeezing 10 long posts is total over kill.
3. Help Google: This is a similar issue to duplicate content. Google will crawl your blog and index your posts into there virtual world of searching awesomeness. It’s your goal to make that as easy as possible by clearly defining which pages you want indexed for which keywords and phrases. If your homepage has all of the same content and keywords as your post pages, you may miss out on the opportunity to have more pages indexed by Google. Since your homepage changes with each new post, you do not want your homepage indexed for a specific keyword in a post that will eventually be moved off your homepage and placed into your archive.

Please share this post with your Facebook Friends and Twitter Followers

WordPress Excerpt Plugins

There are WordPress plugins that can generate excerpts for your posts automatically. There are also some themes that support excerpts by default. However, I strongly suggest manually using the More Tag you specifically choose exactly where to limit your excerpt rather than picking a character limit that will never seem to be just right for your readers.

Video Tutorial for the More Tag