Blogs vs Standard Website: What’s the Difference?

Posted on November 4, 2015November 8, 2015 by sitemanager

We all know the importance of having a blog: it instills greater trust in your audience while allowing for a deeper, more personal connection. But what is the difference between a blog and standard website? They are both essentially "websites" with their own domain name, so what distinguishes one from the other? Navigation Structure While there are always exceptions to this rule, most blogs are designed with a special navigation structure consisting of categories, tags and/or archives. When a user first lands on the blog's homepage, he or she can choose a category in which posts, pages, or b...

WordPress to Develop Accelerated Mobile Pages Plugin

Posted on November 4, 2015November 8, 2015 by sitemanager

As more and more Internet users toss out their clunky desktops in favor of smaller and more convenient mobile devices, there's a greater emphasis placed on creating mobile-friendly websites. But just because your website looks fine on a smartphone or tablet doesn't necessarily mean that it's properly optimized for mobile compatibility. Mobile devices often render pages more slowly than desktops, which may cause some users to click the back button in their browser before waiting for the site to load. Accelerated Mobile Pages Project This has prompted Google to launch its Accelerated Mobile...

Best Title and Description Length for Blog Posts?

Posted on October 30, 2015November 7, 2015 by sitemanager

best title and description length, tape measurer

Title and meta descriptions are an essential component of on-site SEO. When optimizing your blog for higher search rankings, you should create unique titles and meta descriptions for each page. The meta description is used to describe the content of a webpage to search engines -- and it's also used when creating search listings -- whereas the title tag is generally used by search engines to create a snippet of the page as part of its search listing. But how long should you make the title and meta descriptions for your blog posts and pages? Why Title and Description Length is Impor...

The Hidden Costs of Starting a Blog

Posted on October 30, 2015November 1, 2015 by sitemanager

coin dropping into piggy bank, blog costs

One of the reason why so many bloggers choose WordPress is because it's free. Other blogging platforms may cost hundreds of dollars per year, but WordPress is completely free to download and use with no strings attached. However, there are other, more discreet costs to blogging that shouldn't go unnoticed. Blog Images There's a reason why every blog post we publish has at least one image: because images improve user engagement while boosting traffic in the process. If you plan on starting a blog, you'll need to find a suitable source from which to acquire images. Copyright laws prohibi...

Free vs Paid WordPress Themes: Which Should I Choose?

Posted on October 28, 2015November 1, 2015 by sitemanager

screenshot of wordpress themess and templates

One of the reasons why WordPress is such a popular blogging platform is because it supports the use of interchangeable templates known as themes. Rather than coding a new blog design from scratch, you can simply download and activate a theme. Within seconds, your blog will have a new appearance while still retaining all of its existing content. But should you choose a free or paid/premium theme for your WordPress theme? Attribution Links It's not uncommon for free themes to contain attribution links in the footer. These are classified as site-wide links, meaning they show up on ever...

How Many Pages Should My Blog Have?

Posted on October 24, 2015November 1, 2015 by sitemanager

Frequently Asked Questions, number of blog pages

This is a question that many first-time bloggers ask. Conventional wisdom should lead you to believe that bigger blogs are better than smaller ones. However, you must also consider the work and time requirements that go into creating a blog. So, how many pages should your blog have? Let me first start off by saying that there's no easy answer to this question. Because every blog is unique, lengths are going to vary depending on a number of different factors. If your blog is new, for instance, it may only have a half a dozen pages, which is perfectly fine as long as you continue to build n...

Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting My First Blog

Posted on October 23, 2015October 25, 2015 by sitemanager

You Can Schedule Posts for Future Publishing We all know the importance of publishing new blog posts on a regular basis -- well, most people know this, at least. But what if you are unable to log into your blog to create a new post every couple of days? Thankfully, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and other popular blogging platforms have a post scheduling feature. Using this feature, you can schedule your posts to be published at a later date, eliminating the need to manually log into your blog to publish them. Visitor Comments Matter Blogs are unique in the sense that they place an emphasis on...

How to Keep Your Blog ‘Fresh’

Posted on October 22, 2015October 25, 2015 by sitemanager

While the exact number remains unknown, some sources claim there to be more than 152 million blogs on the Internet. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these blogs fall into the abyss where countless others have gone before it. When bloggers fail to update their blogs with new content on a regular basis, their traffic dies down and so does their search rankings. So, how can you maintain a fresh blog that people actually want to visit? Mix Evergreen with News-Style Posts Regardless of niche, blog content can be broken down into one of two different categories: evergreen content, which consis...

What are Sitelinks and How do I Create Them?

Posted on October 20, 2015October 25, 2015 by sitemanager

This is a question that many bloggers and webmasters ask. Sitelinks are often touted as a useful tool for increasing a website's search engine visibility while subsequently attracting more visitors to it. But what exactly are sitelinks and how do they work? Sitelinks Defined Sitelinks are essentially nothing more than internal links that are displayed underneath a Google search listing. If you search for the keyword "Amazon," for instance, you'll notice several different sitelinks, including "Books," "Your Account," "Amazon Prime," etc. Each of these sitelinks takes the user to its respec...

The 10 Commandments of Blogging

Posted on October 19, 2015October 25, 2015 by sitemanager

stained glass depiction of 10 commandments

#1) Thou Shall Not Use Duplicate Content While Google has said that small amounts of duplicate content won't cause any major problems, blogs that contain mostly duplicate content may suffer from lower search rankings. There's nothing wrong with using quotes or legal jargon that's found elsewhere on the web, but the bulk of your blog's content should be unique. #2) Thou Shall Not Engage in Link Schemes What exactly is a link scheme? Basically, it's any link that was created outside of the boundaries of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. This includes paid links, excessive reciprocal links, links...

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