Feed copyrights as protection against sploggers

1202476_peacekeeping_soldiersI’ve talked before about plugins that are supposed to prevent people splogging your WordPress blog, as this one has been splogged oh so many times. But the very best weapon remains setting your feed to excerpts only. Then sploggers can only conveniently grab the excerpt, and sploggers are notoriously lazy, so they just move on in search of an easier target. The problem is that visitors don’t like summary feeds. And ... READ MORE
comment | Posted in » Blogging

The market value of authenticity

I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s latest free PDF book, What Matters Now. It’s a very short read, but it makes you think. What it got me thinking about is authenticity, which is generally the last think you think of as having any place in the marketing world. Marketing is about lies, right? It’s about convincing people your cheaply made crap (that you copied from some poor schmo) is worth tons more ... READ MORE

Test your websites for accessibility

Andy Beal recently talked about making sure websites are accessible to people with vision or hearing difficulty, and gave a very important reason – beyond “it’s the right thing to do” – why webmasters should care: That is 1 in 5 Americans cannot experience the web without the assistance of some form of accessibility enhancement. I had no idea. It’s not just people who are legally blind or deaf. As we age, ... READ MORE

Automatically optimize WordPress images with Smush It

One way to make your sites load faster is to reduce the size of your graphic files as much as you can without losing image quality. SmushIt is a Yahoo service that does this for you. WP-SmushIt is a WordPress plugin that does this automatically for you. As you upload images to your posts, WP-SmushIt sends them to SmushIt for lossless compression – that means, they get compressed as small ... READ MORE

Robots.txt versus .htaccess

The robots.txt file seems so simple, but you can screw things up ever so slightly and end up not getting the results you want. The good news is, once you figure out the problem, the SEs generally pick it up pretty quickly. The .htaccess file is similar, except that it’s more powerful and therefore more confusing to a lot of people. I, and most webmasters, only really use .htaccess for ... READ MORE

Improving a domain is not just about SEO

In recent weeks, I detailed the moves I’d made to improve this domain. Most of those moves had to do with SEO: setting up for better inbounds, setting up for better ranking keywords and recovering page rank – the last of which, of course, is strictly a Google thing. During the first couple of weeks I set out to do this, I saw some improvements in how Google was listing ... READ MORE

Plugins to protect WordPress blogs from sploggers

I’ve tried out a few plugins recently to stop sploggers from stealing my content. My favorite was ©Feed, but unfortunately it causes errors if you use it alongside any Feedburner redirecting plugin.That plugin does everything I want, otherwise – maybe someday it will work. Now I’m using Anti-Feed Scraper Message, which is a simple plugin that allows you to insert any paragraph you want at the bottom of your post, as ... READ MORE

Writing for traffic

If there’s a trick to getting schmillions of visitors without a huge marketing budget, I don’t know it. But I have found that posting worthwhile stuff regularly leads to a steady increase in traffic. By “worthwhile” I mean articles that are worth reading now and will be worth reading a few years from now. You can’t always predict that, but there are certain posts I’ve found just aren’t worth it: What I’m ... READ MORE

Improving your ranking keyphrases

Whether you’re building a new domain or rehabilitating an old one, you need to consider what keyphrases you want to rank well for in search engines. You have only so much control over this, as keyphrases come from the anchor text other webmasters use to link to you. Obviously, you can make clear what the title of your site is, and that shou00ld take care of any sidebar links to ... READ MORE

Pages:«1234567...78»

Don't miss an article!

 Subscribe in a reader or get every article delivered by email