How To Manage Spam Comments In WordPress

One of the perks of choosing WordPress as your blogging platform is the ability to engage directly with your visitors. WordPress has a built-in commenting feature which allows visitors to share their thoughts on posts/articles. While you can always disable this feature, it's usually best to keep it turned on. Each time a visitor leaves a comment, it creates unique content for your blog -- and search engines love fresh, unique content. Unfortunately, though, WordPress also attracts comment spam. You may notice generic comments like "Great blog, I'll grab your RSS" or "This was a wonderful bl...
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Can You Really Make Money Blogging?

The short answer to this question is yes, you can make money blogging. But it takes more than just throwing up a WordPress site and a couple of short articles to produce any sizable income. Blogging is highly competitive industry, with millions of active blogs currently online. If you want to succeed, you must differentiate yourself from the rest while providing something of real value to your readers. So, how can you make money blogging? Dozens of different opportunities exist, one of which is writing blog posts for high-traffic blogs in exchange for a flat per-post fee. It's not uncommon ...
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Google Publishes SEO Advice For April 21 Deadline

Google is expected to roll out a major change to its search ranking algorithm on April 21, 2015. The update, dubbed "Mobilegeddon" by some, will focus on improving the quality of Google's index by raising the rankings for mobile-friendly websites (hence the name). Google has taken a keen interest in mobile compatibility lately, encouraging websites to update their websites and blogs so they are compatible for smartphone users. To better prepare webmasters for the upcoming Mobilegeddon, Google has published a guide on common mobile mistakes. The Mountain View company first tweeted the guide ...
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Creating a Mobile-Friendly Blog

In case you didn't get the memo, mobile Internet traffic surpassed desktop traffic for the first time ever last year. This means more people use their smartphones, tablets and wearable devices to access the Internet than traditional desktops and laptops. Bloggers who fail to cater to the ever-growing demographic of mobile Internet users are placing themselves at a serious disadvantage. So, how do you create a mobile-friendly blog? There are three different configurations for creating mobile-friendly blogs. The first uses a separate mobile domain. Ever visit a website on your smartphone and ...
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Common Blogging Pitfalls and How To Avoid Them

Thinking about starting a blog? Thousands of people make the decision to launch their first blog every month, but only a small fraction succeed. This week we're going to take a look at some of the common pitfalls of blogging and how to avoid them. Generic Cookie-Cutter Template If you're serious about blogging, you should invest in a custom template (or theme for WordPress sites). Using the same web design as hundreds of other blogs sends the wrong message to your target audience. Readers will view your blog as being unprofessional and generic, and they may even mistake it for another bl...
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Security Vulnerability Spotted In Yoast SEO Plugin

A critical security vulnerability has been identified on one of the most popular and widely used SEO plugins for the WordPress content management system (CMS). Yoast SEO suffers from an exploit which allows hackers to modify the server's database using a method called blind SQL injection. And failure to fix this vulnerability could have disastrous consequences. Yoast SEO features a wide range of tools designed to help webmasters and bloggers optimize their sites, including an XML sitemap generator, RSS enhancements, on-page content analysis, custom titles and meta tags, breadcrumbs, canonic...
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5 Ways To Improve Your Blog’s Readership

#1) Social Media If you aren't publishing links to your new blog posts on social media, you're missing out on one of the easiest ways to attract new readers. Facebook alone boasts more than 1.3 billion monthly active users, making it an excellent source of traffic, and readers, for your blog. Whenever you publish a new blog post, try to get into the habit of immediately publishing a link to the URL on your social media accounts. #2) Syndicate Content Another simple way to improve your blog's readership is to syndicate your content. Syndication basically involves publishing either part...
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Top 3 Chrome Browser Add-Ons For SEO

The right web browser add-ons can make a world of difference in your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Whether you are looking to rank an e-commerce website, content-driven site, blog, etc., the following three ad-ons are bound to help. SEO Quake SEO Quake is a highly versatile add-on that reveals a TON of helpful information about pages that you visit. Using the information provided by this completely free Chrome add-on, you can better identify high-value sources of backlinks. So, what kind of information does SEO Quake provide? Its developers are constantly working to make and ...
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Why Isn’t My Blog Showing Up In Google?

It's disheartening when you spend countless hours building a new blog only to discover that Google has yet to index it. Without your blog showing up in Google's search results, few (if any) people will find it. Granted, you may receive some traffic via direct type-ins, social media, links, etc., but this tiny trickle of visitors isn't enough to create a successful blog. So, why isn't your blog showing up in Google? WordPress Settings One of the first things you should check is your blog's visibility settings. If you are using WordPress, log into your admin panel and select Settings > ...
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5 Ways To Make Your Blog More Trustworthy

Including the right trust signals on your blog will boost your traffic, and subsequently your conversions. Visitors often look for certain elements before purchasing a product or service online. If your blog fails to deliver these elements, the visitor may take their business elsewhere (to a competitor's site). So, how can you make your blog more trustworthy? Professional Web Design Your website's overall design plays a critical role in its trustworthiness. You can't expect visitors to trust your blog if it uses the default, untouched WordPress theme. Granted, building a custom web desig...
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