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The availability of thousands of free themes is one of the most beautiful things about using WordPress as your Content Management System. Incredible as it may seem, you will probably never find a theme that is exactly what you want. Not to worry though, personalizing a theme to look and behave like you want is pretty easy to do.

Some reasons why you might want to hack your theme:

• Remove the developers Adsense code (that’s right, they do that sometimes)
• Include your Adsense code just where you want it
• Insert Google analytics code
• Remove unwanted items from your sidebar [Read more →]

  Tags: Setting up Shop // 1 Comment »

Once again Lorelle VanFossen writing for the Blog Herald has inspired me to post. Thanks Lorelle. She says that saying your blog is a personal resource is somehow wrong. I think she misunderstands. [Read more →]

Tags: Community // 4 Comments »

Lorelle VanFossen writing for the Blog Herald posted an article today which advises that new metablogs are doomed to failure by a market which is not only saturated, but also cram packed with highly respected veterans and outstanding writers. She then goes on to recommend that if you must metablog in 2008 to at least bring something new to the venue. It’s a good article, and I agree with it.

However, I bet that in three to five years there will be a new crop of A-list metabloggers that will all have one thing in common – they started their blog in 2008 despite the high probability of failure. Beside which, there are some pretty good reasons why starting a metablog might be a good idea. [Read more →]

Tags: Filthy Lucre // Add Comment »

Ranking in the SERPs for broad competitive terms is hard and requires that several factors all come together to convince the Search engines that your page is the best result for that term. One thing that you need in order to rank for a competitive term is several high quality links from other sites.

An ideal link would have these properties:

• It would come from a page that ranks for your keyword
• The anchor text would contain your keyword
• The linking page would have few if any other out going links
• The link would not be “no followed”

Unfortunately these are all things that you have no control over unless you own the linking website. Which brings me to leveraging the long tail… [Read more →]

Tags: Search Engine Optimization // 1 Comment »

If we bloggers are able to present ideas in ways that inspire people to think, participate, and learn, then that is a great deal of the value which we can offer.

Everyone has had the experience of being taught by a mediocre teacher, and probably most of us have also had the privilege of being inspired by some excellent teachers as well. It has struck me that what happens on some of the best blogs is very like what my best teachers were able to achieve. Excellent teachers don’t just teach but rather inspire the students by creating an intellectual environment conducive to interactive learning. [Read more →]

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If you ever get serious about selling anything on your site you will probably want to accept credit cards. Of course you could use pay pal or some other third party solution, but if you want to project a confidence inspiring professional image you need to go for the real deal. The way the system works is pretty convoluted, and dealing with the individual players can be extremely frustrating. If you ever have an issue you might find that everyone you talk to claims that it isn’t their fault, and may pass you off in an infinite loop of tech support line hold. However, by having a basic understanding of how the system works, and who the players are you can be one up on the game from the beginning. Also, when you’re shopping for service you will at least have a better idea of what questions to ask, and what kind of answers to expect.

Here’s the sequence of events that happen from the customer placing their order to you getting paid:

[Read more →]

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A few days ago I was blog tagged by Steven Bradley who was tagged by Yuri Filimonov who was tagged by Elizabeth Able who was tagged by Kim Krause Berg who was tagged by Barry Schwartz who was tagged by Shimon Sandler who started the whole thing.

The theme of this game of blog tag started as “What I do when I’m not doing SEO”, but Steven broadened it to what I’m doing when I’m not working since he’s not primarily an SEO. Which is good because neither am I.

One thing I do when I’m not working is cook, which I noticed several other of the “tagged ones” also enjoy. My Specialty is barbecued ribs. I also enjoy woodworking in my garage shop - where I designed and built this cherry sleigh bed as a Christmas present for my lovely (sleeping) wife a couple of years ago. [Read more →]

Tags: Something Completely Different // 5 Comments »

This was so cool that I just had to pass it along. If you want to rank well in the search engines you need other websites to link to yours. Link building is the difficult process of getting those inlinks. One of the problems that you might come across during a link building campaign is that once you find a site that you would really like to get a link from sometimes you can’t find any contact info for the webmaster.

This tip was presented in a comment by Brent David Payne to a fine article about link building by Melanie Nathan on the SEOmoz.org blog:

…Go to: https://www.networksolutions.com/manage-it/forget-login.jsp

Type in a domain name that you know is registered with NetSol (i.e. Amazon.com). Click GO. [Read more →]

Tags: Search Engine Optimization // 1 Comment »

Because of passive income accumulation you can make hundreds of dollars per hour on the internet.

Several years ago I typed out a few notes for myself about construction codes requirements - my day job is contracting. Some time after that I reformatted those notes to serve as a cheat sheet for my employees to use, and eventually I posted them on my company website. At the time (almost 10 years ago) I didn’t use any kind of analytics nor did I know how to use server logs, so I had no idea how often users landed on my website or what they looked at once they did. When Google came out with Adsense, being fairly mercenary, I signed up and started making a few bucks a month in add clicks. [Read more →]

Tags: Filthy Lucre // 2 Comments »

Your choice of web host can have long term implications for your web site. Hosting solutions range in price from free to hundreds of dollars per month.

Free Hosting
You can get free hosting from several places like Blogger or Wordpress, and for some blogs free hosting may be a good or even great idea. However, free hosting always has some strings attached, because after all someone has to pay for it. Often your use of bandwidth, storage or your ability to monetize will be limited in some way. [Read more →]

Tags: Setting up Shop // Add Comment »