Wordpress Archives - My Multiple Streams

Hostgator Officially Sucks

May 1, 2015 by Jeff Davidson 3 Comments

One of my first posts on this blog was in praise of Hostgator and their services. Many Many moons ago I had switched my hosting over to Hostgator and I was in love with them. They were helpful and and support request was resolved in hours.

Well I hate to say the honeymoon has ended. Now this hasn’t happened over night. Their support had steadily declined for the past few years with support requests taking longer and longer. Response times to questions could be measured in days. Then came the nickel and diming of simple tasks that in my mind should be part of the service, and used to be so. Then came this latest incident that was the final straw that has broken this camels back.

I have a site ( or should I say had, but don’t want to spoil the ending) that was doing quite well. Even though I haven’t done a new post in a year it had great traffic and was earning me a nice income from ads. Well a little Over 2 weeks ago one if my posts got picked up and linked to by a much larger site and the post went viral,for a bit. I was jazzed, but with great traffic comes trolls and the site was hacked.

I noticed because like shutting of a faucet my ad revenue dropped big time. I immediately noticed Hostgator that the site had been compromised and requested a restoral from back up. This was most likely with in 6 hours of the hack. After a few hour of no response yet I went to live chat and he escalated the support request to some other team. I got an email at that point that they were investigating and to not touch any of the files.

Two days later a get an email stating their scans were complete and malicious files have been removed, thanks and have a nice day. But wait the site is still missing and showing the hack message?? So I respond that what about restoring my site ( I happen to know that they are backing the space up weekly as it is and they re-write over it each time). I also explain how I’m losing revenue and followers every hour the site is down. No response.

I would send a new reply every day and not get a response. I even went back on live chat and that dude said it is still under investigation and that these types can take weeks. Weeks? Mean while my SEO juice is going to hell and I’m not making my money. So time goes on and each day I sen a “what the hell is going on id like a status update” message, in nicer terms of course, and still no replies.

Till today

Thank you for contacting Hostgator Security and I do apologize for the delay in our response to this issue. I also apologize for any misunderstanding or misinformation regarding our cleaning policy. At this time I have reviewed the account and I am not seeing any backups we may use to restore the site with. Our current backups of the account only contain the defaced content. The attackers appear to have replaced all of the files so it is simply not a case of removing the defacement and the whole site will need to be restored from a backup. If you do have a backup of the account you wish for us to restore we can do so without a restore fee.

Oh thank you for waiving the restore fee and if you would have done this at the time I made the request I know you would have had a good back up. Now site is gone unless I can find one of my older backups.

Yes I take responsibility for not doing my own back ups (practice what I preach) but it does not excuse Hostgator for providing, excuse my language, very piss poor support.

UPDATE 1: I got ahold of their ‘restore dept’ and so far was able to get the database restored. So with a clean install of wordpress I now at least have all my posts, just without the plugins and all the images. Its a start.

Want to see me ranting? Watch the video

Better Related Content

December 13, 2012 by Jeff Davidson Leave a Comment

What is Related Content? I’m sure you’ve seen them on many blogs, at the bottom of the post you would see a few links to more of the blogs post with a nice caption “Other posts you may like” or something along those lines. Related content is a great way to give your viewers a link to other posts that they may enjoy and keep them interested on your site. It also provides an easy way to have internal links on your posts which is great for SEO!

There are many plugins that will provide this for you, most perform the task by comparing categories or tags but I have a better one for you!

nRelate is a plugin that takes related content a step further in a 3 distinct ways

Better Related Content

nRelate actually spiders your cites content, indexing all your posts and keeping it in a database on their servers. This allows them to use the actual content of your posts to find other related posts rather than just same category or tag. All this is done on their server as well which means faster delivery and freeing up your server for other content delivery, making your site just a wee bit faster.

The set up is very easy as well allowing much of the editing from the dashboard rather than tweaking the CSS. You can have as few or as many links as you wish as well as changing the size of the thumbnails. Some other features that you can adjust in the dashboard:

Post titles and length
Excerpts
Exclude categories
How far back to go
Several built in styles or use your own css
Location of related posts
Thumbnails or plain text

I have used many related posts widgets and most of the time I had to fidget with css and code to get it the way I wanted. This plugin has I’d say 95% of what you would want to change in the dashboard for quick changes.

Add a Little Revenue to Your Site

nRelate also gives you the ability to earn a little money with the plugin. You can simply sign up for ads through the plugin and it will then show one of the related links as an ad which you will earn revenue each time its clicked. gain using the indexing of your site it will show related ads that should be of interest to your viewers. You have control of course on how many ads you wish to show in your related content from 1 to 10, as well as postion of the add (either first, last or random).

You dont have to worry about black hat tactics as it will clearly have a “sponsored” overlay letting your viewers know it is an add

Your Own Blog Network

Another cool feature of nRelate is networking with other bloggers in your niche. By adding other blogs to your blogroll (or any other category in your links) you can have nRelate show related content from other blogs. nRelate server will spider and index the other blogs you choose and serve up related posts. You again can choose how many of your related posts links are from other blogs and it will let your viewers know, like the ads, that the link is from another blog.

This feature is great for SEO providing links to fellow bloggers and hopefully they will do the same for you and provides a benefit to your viewers giving them more related content to follow.

Putting it all together

All of this is easily tracked from your nRelate account on their website. You can track information from all your blogs from one account, seeing how many clicks you get for your own related content as well as click to your networked blogs. Of course it als tracks the ad clicks and revenue you earn.

I think if you try it out you will like it over any related post plugin you are using now. To get the plugin just go to plugins and search for nRelate. They do have 3 plugins so be sure to get the related content one.

If you do decide to use it and want to use the network feature, let me know and I’ll add you!

Link with yourself: SEO Tip of the Week

November 18, 2012 by Jeff Davidson Leave a Comment

No you won’t go blind linking with yourself but it could be fun. If you have been blogging or involved with the SEO of your own site for any length of time Im sure you have come across the term “Back Linking”. If you havenet it is simply getting links to your site from other sites out there in the intrawebs. Good quality links from good sites are good for your SEO mojo (more on that on another post) but did you know that liking within can be just as helpful and as important.

internal linking is just as you suspect it is, linking to content within your own site and is often missed as a tool to boost your SEO as well as some other benefits:

Provide additional links to buried posts. Google likes links internal and external!
Provide paths to some lesser trafficked posts, hopefully bringing them up in stature.
Providing paths to other material you readers may wish to see, keeping them on your site longer. Google likes lower bounce rates!
Links to other posts provides search engines more paths to content and helps with indexing. Tells google what you think is important.

Of course just like external linking there is the good side and the dark side, avoid the dark side.

Good Ways to Link Within Your Site

Avoid linking to the same content more than once if you can. Google is going to place the most importance to the first time it is linked, more is not necessarily better in this case. Even to your readers, linking to the same content several times can get repetitive and seem needy. They’ll most likely decide to move on.

Avoid linking to to much content in the same post as well. Just like linking to the same content is a no-no, linking to a dozen older posts is just as bad. You;ll have your reader hoping all over the place and lose them very quickly. One or two internal links from a post is more than enough. Personally I would shot for one or two internal and one external link in your post if you could.

Make one of the internal links in the first paragraph, first sentence even if it fits. be sure it makes sense but any link that is visible when your vistor first hits your page (with out scrolling) will give you maximum SEO juice.

Above all make sure you are linking to content that is relevant to your current post. If you are writing about latest twilight release (and if you are maybe you should stop) you dont want to link to posts about your new puppy, unless you named it bella… well maybe. Goggle is pretty smart and can look at the two and see if they are relevant to each other. Not to mention your readers will for sure ba bale to tell if you are just linking for linking sake

Anchor text, that is the text that will be linking to the old post, should be relevant and make sense in the posts context. Dont just through a link in that dosent read naturally to your visitors. The anchor text should be word(s) that are relevant to both the context of the current post and the one you are linking to.

The Darkside of Linking Within Your Site

You kind of got the idea above I hope of what not to do as well but just in case heres a quick list of what to avoid.

A dozen links in one post all linking back to the same older post.
a dozen links in general are to many. Just 2-4 max
placing all your links at the bottom of your post.
Anchor text like CLICK HERE
Linking for the sake of linking. Make your links relavant to your post

Random concluding thoughts

Linking within your own site can be one of the easiest SEO techniques for those that blog and yet it also the most under utilized. I’m guilty of it myself, I often to forget to see if there is a way for me to link back to an old post or even a page if I cant find a post. Really simple to include at least one link to yourself and the benefits over time

Moving Your WordPress Site to Hostgator

May 29, 2012 by Jeff Davidson Leave a Comment

Part 3 of How To’s with Hostgator

So you are looking for a new host cause lets face it your current one sucks, and you have decided that Hostgator is where you want to go. Now you are wondering how you get your site moved on over. Well the easy answer is if you only are moving one site, let Hostgator do it for you 🙂 If you have more than one then you are on your own, but relax it is pretty easy. First what is involved with moving a site? Well a regular ole html site it would be just a matter of downloading you files from the old server and uploading to the new server. With wordpress though it takes a little more work. The way wordpress works is it has regular files on the server as well which you will do the old fashion way, but it also stores most of the information about the site in a database which also needs to be moved. What we will cover here is if you are moving your site as is from your old host to hostgator, i.e. from your root directory of the old host to the root directory of the new. Not moving it to a new directory as well, that gets a little tricker.

Moving Your Files

This is perhaps the easiest part. If you have moved files around your computer you can do this. Now before you do this you must first set up the domain in your new hostgator account. To review how to do this please see the previous post Setting up your WordPress Site on Hostgator. Ok for this process you will need a ftp program, if you are on a Mac (why wouldn’t you be) I can recommend Transmit (not an affiliate link). We will not go into how to set up your ftp program I’m going have to assume that you know or can learn to keep this post from being a novel. With your ftp program its as simple as logging it into your existing host and finding the root folder of your site. If its a straight wordpress install you should see about 35 or so files and folders with the majority of them beginning with wp-. You are going to download all of these to your computer, best idea is create a folder with the name of your site on your computer and put them all in there.

After that is complete you will log out then log into your hostgator domain that you set up. Now since you most likely havent moved your domain name yet (or you wouldnt be able to log into your current host) you will be logging in using your hostgator ip address and log in you created when you set up your domain. You can find the ip address in your hostgator cpanel in the bottom left ‘account information’ box. Log in and now you will upload all those files to the server. Once there you are done with phase one.

Exporting Your Database

As mentioned you first need to move your database and for that you do need access to mySQL at your current host with a tool called phpMyAdmin. This allows you to get down and dirty with your databases. When you run it you should see something like the screen shot below showing you your databases on the right and menu across the top.

You next would want to click on the database you are looking to move. If yo do not know the name of the database your site is using you can look in the config file. You should have it on your computer now after the download above, look for wp-config.php and open it with a text editor. Scan down a few lines and look for the line:

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘######_#####’);

The _##### is your database name, the prefix is assigned by the new host when you create the new database so ignore it for now. You may also want to take note of the DB_USER and the DB_PASSWORD so you can duplicate it if you wish in the new databas but chances are you will have to edit these in the config file anyway as your prefix will be different.

After you have clicked your database the next screen is going to show you all the tables and data in there, can be intimidating but just ignore it all. On the menu above you will just click export. On the next screen you may have to click Custom – display all possible options so you can see all the options, you only need to find one. You will want to find the option add drop table and check it off

then click go or download. You now have your database on your computer, time for phase 3!

Creating and Importing New Database

Ok login to your hostgator cpanel and find the databas section on the right side and click the first icon mySQLdatabases. The very first thing you see on the screen is Create New Database with a text field for the name. Notice how it shoes the prefix that will be attached to the database name. You can make it the same it was before or a new name. Just take note of it for when we do the config file. After you click Create Database the next screen should show that it was created then click go back. Once back scroll down till you see mySQL Users, here you will enter a new user name. It can be the same as before or again you can enter a new one. Notice again the prefix, you will need it for the config file. Also enter and re-enter a password (no prefix here) then click Create User. Again once created click Go Back and scroll down. Last step here is to assign the user you created to the database. Using the two drop downs select the database and user you cread and click Add. In the next screen click the box for All Privileges then click on Make Changes. Your database is now created and you can now click the home button at the top.

Next we need to import the data from your old database up to this new one. In the database area you now click the icon for phpMyAdmin and once you see that screen again click on your new database on the left. Next screen is not so scary now because its an empty database, click on import so we can fill it. This is perhaps the easiest task, find the choose file button under file to import and use it to find the database you exported to your computer. Once selected just click go and wait. You are done!

Final Steps

If everything went smoothly then the next step is to edit your config file, the same one you peeked at above. You can do this on your computer using a text editor then upload it replacing the one up on the server, or if your ftp program allows it you can edit it on the server using your ftp program. You want to edit the following 3 lines with your information you created when creating the database. Dont forget the prefix on the first two, forgetting is often the cause of most errors

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘prefix_databasename‘);
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘prefix_user‘);
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘########’);

After this you can go to your domain registar and update the new name servers and wait for the change. You can check the site until by using a temp url of http://yourIPaddress/~cpanelusername/siteneame/. No there will be errors and missing content, dont let this scare you. Its because wordpress is using your domain name looking for things and its not there yet. As long as you see the structure of your site everything should be good once the domain name changes are updated and take effect.

Some may like to get all the info down from their current host, change the name servers then once the change is set then upload the files using just their domain name in the ftp instead of the ip address. This is ok if you are more comfortable this way but just know that your site will be down for a bit for visitors until it is up loaded.

See not that scary 🙂 I have moved dozens of sites this way, when I moved to Hostgator and when I buy sites. Yes when you buy a site this is often how you get it. You will get a zip file with all the sites files and a database export. You would then go through the same process uploading it to your Hostgator account.

Hope this helps some of you and if you have questions let me know. I’m also available for a small fee to do the move for you if need be 🙂 If this persuades you to finally open a hostgator account you can do so by clicking http://mymultiplestreams.com/hostgator This an affiliate link and I do earn a small commission if you do use it. I thank you in advance if you do!

Setting up your WordPress Site on Hostgator

May 22, 2012 by Jeff Davidson 1 Comment

In our last post I introduced you to hostgator for those looking to start up their first website (or move a site). If you are starting a blog or website, WordPress is the best and easiest way to go. You can use WordPress.com for free but that comes with some limitations. Such as your web address containing .wordpress.com in there, very unprofessional. It also limits you in customization of your site as well. I will always try to encourage you to go with self hosted WordPress instead, and with the ease of set up with Hostgator and the low cost why would you do anything else.

Domain Names

Wanted to speak for a moment on domain names. This is your website address which visitors type in their browser to find you. Before you can set up your website you need to register your domain name somewhere. You can do this through hostgator if you wish but at $15 a year their are cheaper options such as namecheap.com, godady.com or hell I can even register it for you 🙂

When you register your domain name with whoever you choose you will need one bit of info from your hostgator account. Name server addresses. This is how the interwebs will find your site at hostgator’s servers. When you log into your c-panel account at hostgator scroll way down to the bottom and on the left side there will be an account information box and you will see a box labeled ‘name servers’ these are what you will put in your domain’s registration when it asks for name servers. Every registar is different so I cant really tell you where to input it for your (but if you email me I might be able to help out) If you forgot to do this you can change it any time.

Lets Set Up Your Website

I told you in the last post that you can have your WordPress site up and ready to go on hostgator in less than 5 mins and this is where we are going to start that. I wanted to exclude the Domain as part of the process above because when you first register your domain it can take up to 24 hours for it to take effect and be ready to go. It has happened in less than an hour before for me but your millage may vary. This process is also with the baby plan where you can do ‘unlimited’ domains.

So now to set up your site log into your c-panel and scroll down watching the right side till you find the area label ‘domains’ just like pictured below.

Yep you most likely have figured out the next part, click ‘addon domain’. The next screen may look daunting but relax you only have to fill in 3 of the boxes (and two of them are the same). First box enter your domain name, no www or http just the name with the extension (.com .net .org) then hit enter. It fills in the next to boxes for you so just leave what they put in. Skip to password and enter a password for the site and the confirm it in the next box.

Click add domain and thats it your webspace for the new domain is done and if you go there in your browser you will see some hostgator holding page. If you wanted to you could just start ftp’ing files to you space now, but we wanted a wordpress site.

Installing WordPress to your Hostgator Site

That took what all of 1 min? If you are still on the page after adding your domain then click the little home button upper left and you will be back at your main control panel. Scroll on down till you see the section ‘software/services’ and find the funny little icon ‘Fantastico De Lux’ go ahead click it, wont hurt.

You will see a new screen with a butt load of software scripts that you can install to your site, like Christmas huh. We are only concerned with one though so go ahead and find the WordPress one, near the top under blogs 🙂 yep go ahead and click it. The right hand panel changed now right? Find the link ‘New Installation’ and click it.

First section is location and you have two questions. First is the domain, if you have more than one on this account choose the correct one in the drop down. Next is the directory, you can use this to create and install in a different directory other than your root. I don it on occasions to develop a site then move it to the root later (this can be a daunting task though) for most just go ahead and leave it blank and Word press will be installed in the root directory.

Next section you’ll enter an admin username and password. This is what you use to log in to the admin area to do all your do all your customizing with plugins and themes as well as posting pages and posts!

Next give your self a nickname, what shows as author of your posts.

Last fill in your email (for notifications) your site’s name and a description (can be changed later).

Okay moment of truth, click install. Ok tricked you one more screen telling you what you entered, everything good? Ok click finish installation.

Your Done!

Thats it your WordPress site is up and ready to use, and I bet it would actually take you only 3 mins. Yes you now need to log in and install your plugins, a theme you like and set up your pages and start posting but you saved so much time with Hostgators one click (almost) WordPress set up. I have seen other hosts have this as well but they have been slow to keep the current version available. If you were to do this the old fashion way here what you would have to look forward to.

Set up your domain (ok that’s still easy)
Download WordPress zip file from WordPress.org
Unzip files then FTP it to your webspace
While that is happening you then need to set up a database on your server and a user name/password for it (write those down)
When the files are done uploading then run the install script

If all your files load up correctly the first time this process can take 30 mins or more. So use the one click option whenever you can!

If you are ready to sign up you can click or enter http://mymultiplestreams.com/hostgator into your browser and sign up. Yes this is an affiliate link and I thnak you in advance if you use it to sign up for hostgator. If you need a hand or have any question let me know and Id be happy to help.

Already have a wordpress site or two and would like to move your sites to hostgator? Well stay tuned for the next post where I will go over how to do this (not as bad as you think).

WordPress Fun #5: Adsense

January 9, 2012 by Jeff Davidson 5 Comments

With my recent posts on Adsense I though Id share my favorite plug-in for adding Adsense to your wordpress site. Adsense provides you with code snippets that you would normally add to your html of your page, but doing this each and every time can get tedious. What you need is an easy way to do it once and be done with it!

Quick Adsense

Quick Adsense is an easy to use plug-in for inserting ads into your posts automatically. It also creates widgets on the fly to drag to your sidebar or where ever else you have widgets located. The way they have it set up in settings seems a little backwards to me as they ask about ad placement first then asks you to input your ad codes. So Im going to show you in the order I think it should go.

Insert ads for posts and pages

Skip the begin gin section on go down to the adsense ads area you see here. This is where you paste in your different adsense ad codes, set its alignment and and margin you think you need. Now I keep saying adsense code but in reality you can enter any ad code that you wish. This is handy especially since adsense limits you to 3 of any type of ad on any given page.

Choose Locations

Now that you have all your ads entered you need to set where they will appear so scroll back up to the top of the page and you will see a list of ‘postitions’ for your ads. Its as simple as check which positions you want an ad to show then select which ad you wish to show there. You can even select random and let the plug in choose. I typically have a block add at the beginning of a post followed by a banner ad mid content or at the end.

The next section ‘appearance’ allows you to choose what type of content the ads will show on. I typically keep it to just posts, mainly as adsense does not like to see ads on pages like your privacy policy and contact page. You will also see after that section all the quick tags you can use to manually insert tags, but more important a quick tag to insert if you wish no ads to appear in a particular post.

Oh you will also notice a check box that will hide the ads from you in case you are prone to clicking your own ads!

Widgets and Sidebar

The plugin also creates widgets for you to drag to your sidebar for ad placement. Just like the first step above the last section provides you with 10 boxes to place ads into. Once you hit save you can then go to your widget panel and you will see the new ‘AdsWidget1’ (or whatever number you created) and you can simply drag it over to your sidebar location.

Now Im sure there are other plugins out there that do similar functions. I have a couple of them myself, but for what I need on my niche sites this has been by far the easiest to use and set up for me so far

If you do use another let me know about it, always looking to try new plugins to make my life easier 🙂

WordPress Fun #4: Spread the Love

November 28, 2011 by Jeff Davidson 2 Comments

Ok we are going to start this wordpress fun post with a little lesson that some of may already know but bear with me please for those that are just starting.

One of the better was to improve your sites ranking is to have other sites link to you and one of the easiest ways to get links is by blog commenting. When you make your comments the blog typically asks for your name email and website. Your name will be used as your anchor text for the link to your website. The best link is if you can use your keywords or site name as your anchor text, but sometimes this isn’t appropriate and can be considered spammy. Be sure your comment also pertains to the topic of the post or you may not get it approved. If you are new to blogging Im sure you have been getting some confusing comments now and then. Those people are trying to get links to their site but most of it is coming from software and they never even read your post, don’t be one of those tools.

Another thing to look at is the PR ranking of the blog you comment on. Higher PR ranked sites can give you more juice for your rankings in google. Like So Over Debt who is such a good writer she is currently a PR3! So be sure to make friends with her and make relevant comments on her wonderful posts 🙂 To be honest though most of those automatic links are no follow and supposedly no follow does not share the juice.

You also want to get some variety in your back links. You don’t want all of them to go to your home page but spread some out to some of your posts. It helps your overall site PR and search rankings. Thats were todays plugin in comes along, at least for you to help commenters (and thus get more comments on your blog)

Comment Luv

Comment Luv allows your commenters to have 2 links back to their site for the price of one. First of course is the link back to their site (typically the home page) that is standard on all blogs. If you have Comment Luv installed it will then go to that site and grab their latest post and automatically provide a link to it.

In the settings you can also give the option for your commenter to be able to choose from their last 10 posts if you wish. If you allow visitors to register to your site for whatever reason this can also be set as a bonus only to those that register.

Another setting is the follow/no follow. Mentioned above about nofollow links not being fully effective as they can be. Well if you want to reward your commenters you can set this second link to be a do-follow for everyone or again like the last setting, a bonus for those that register for your site.

There is a premium paid version as well with other features. Im not here to sell you on that version, haven’t used it so not gonna throw up an affiliate link to it. It is there on their site if you want to check it out

So whats in it for your blog?

Well you are rewarding your comenters with a bonus second link that some other blogs don’t have, in a non spamming way. As serious bloggers go looking for blogs to comment on they will want to comment on yours for that extra link. More comments on your blog shows more activity to google and can help you in search rankings, as well as comments being indexed as well. So its a win win for everybody.

You can do a search in your plug-ins install or download the plug-in off the site here

Comment Luv WordPress Plug-in

So next time you are commenting be sure to look for the luv for some extra back link juice 🙂

WordPress Fun #3: If you Monetize…

October 17, 2011 by Jeff Davidson 7 Comments

If you either blog or are creating niche sites, when you decide to monetize your site there are a few pages you need to have on your site to stay legal.

Privacy Policy

Most popular way to monetize is using Google’s Adsense. If you place any adsense blocks on your site you must have a privacy policy page within Google’s guidelines. Without it Google can and will cancel your account. Many people have complained that once they have started making money that their account gets canceled, while 9 out of 10 times its because they did not include this page. This page should contain information about google’s cookies and a way to opt out (you can see mine on the bottom)

Disclosure

If you have any type of affiliate adds on your site the FTC requires that you disclose that links and ads on the site will benefit you financially. The FTC does not come out and say how you have to disclose or what happens if you don’t but better safe to include something along the lines of:

This blog uses affiliate programs for monetization, which means when you click on links to various sites that I recommend in my posts and make a purchase, this can result in a commission that is credited to this site.

Disclaimer

Disclaimer is not really required but would be a good idea if your blog or niche gives out advice. If you have a niche site that is in the medical field you may wish to disclaim that you are not a doctor and any advice is based on opinion, that they really should seek a doctors opinion. Or if you are a personal finance you may want to disclaim that you are not a financial expert, etc… Such as mine here:

I am not a financial expert. All information on this site is documentation of my opinions, experiments and stupid mistakes and should not be taken as professional financial advice. Should you need that level of expertise, please contact a financial professional.

Contact

Your site needs to have a contact page or other means to easily contact you if your site visitors have a problem. This is also a good idea if you want to attract advertisers or even someone interested in buying your niche site. Why make them struggle to get a hold of you.

The Plugin

If your site is a wordpress site there is a plugin that will make some of this very easy for you, Easy Privacy Policy. Simple plugin to use, once installed you goto the settings and you will see 6 text sections already filled out for your privacy policy. You just check or un-check sections you wish to include (you can also edit these sections if you wish but they are good out of the box). At the top you’ll see the following for boxes where the plugin filled in based on your blogs info.

These are then populated through out the privacy policy where needed. You can of course edit these here and the changes will be made on the site. Next at the very bottom will be 2 more options, one to give the creator credit if you wish, the next to put a time stamp on the page that it was last edited. I typically do the last and uncheck the credit. Finally you click create or update page and the plug in automatically creates the page for you.

It does not put it into your menu though so you will have to add it to a menu somewhere. Google policy is that a link to it must appear on any page that has adsense on it. Another thing that is highly recommended (as I have not found a policy on it yet) is to not have any adsense on your privacy policy page or any any of the pages noted above. The idea is advertisers are paying for their ads to be displayed on your content pages not your policies.

Now the link to the creator of the plug in does not work any more and it is no longer in the wordpress plugins library so Im putting it up here for you to download if you wish as its a great and easy plugin for its purpose.

Download Plugin

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WordPress Fun #2 – Images Worth 1000 Words

September 20, 2011 by Jeff Davidson 2 Comments

The best thing you can do to your blog post is to add at least one image related to your topic. Of course a couple more couldnt hurt, just dont over do it. Make sure your images flow with your topic in size and subject mater. WordPress makes it so easy to add photos to your blog post. When you are in your blog post writing away you just click the little picture icon.

Next you will get a pop up window with all the goodies. first you just click select files and browse to your image and click ok. After that the fun begins an here are a couple things to remember when setting up your image. First is the title and alternative text, dont just leave what wordpress puts in there (typically the image name). Search engines pick up on this text so be descriptive to the image and include keywords. I typically make both these fields the same. Caption I only use if it benefits the article, this is not always the case, and description I typically leave blank. The next biggie here (at least for me) is the link URL. It will default to the image location. Personally I dont want visitors to click to my image (ceppt on some occasions like below where I’ll allow them to view a larger version). So I will remove all of the link except the root home page, that way if they click on it they still remain on my page and I have some internal links as well. When done with that choose your alignment and size (more on that later), insert into post and your done right? Well in my book not really.

You see after all that if you look at your post (and I see a lot of this out there) all your text is crammed up all in your images space, dosent look very nice. Well you can easily fix that (I hope someday wordpress will put it into the insert image menu). Just go back to your image and click on it, you will see another picture insert square and a red circle appear in the upper right of the image, click the picture. you will get another dialog box where I want you to click on ‘Advanced Settings’. Should look like the image below now. See the two boxes I have highlighted well this will give you pixel space around your images and give them room to breath, I typically put in 5-10 in each box. Oh and to the left of those is the border box. If you are not using image caption you can put a number here to give your image a border (1 will work)

Image Hint #1: you should pre-size your images to the size and dimensions you wish it to be in your post. If you load up your full size image to the post and then use wordpress to ‘size’ it to fit, your visitors browsers are still trying to download the original large image then resize. Causing slow load speeds! So always crop to the size you wish and then make sure the resolution is at 72dpi (max a monitor can show, all else is wasted and slows download times). There is a plugin for wordpress called WP Smush it that is supposed to help with the squishing of image file sizes. Seems to do ok, but the more you do before you load the image the better.

Image Hint #2: To improve SEO for your post and site name/rename your image using your keywords describing your post. Especially if you are getting your images from a stock account, dont just leave the default name there. Like for my smoothie sites I may have an image of a peach. The default image name from the stock site may be ‘dreamstime001.jpg’ so I would rename it to ‘peach_smoothie.jpg’. These names are searchable in the search engines and will help you rank. Funny thing is one of my top search terms for this site is now ‘RSS icon’ after my post on RSS feeds 🙂

Do you make a point to put at least one image in your post?

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WordPress Fun #1 – Favorite Plugins for Sharing

September 17, 2011 by Jeff Davidson 4 Comments

Doesn’t matter if you are creating micro-niche sites or you blog on a daily basis the one thing that fuels the growth of our sites is referrals and sharing of your posts. So why not make it easy on your visitors and give them all the tools to do so. With wordpress its so easy with plugins, no messy coding to deal with. For the start of my WordPress series Im going to start with a couple of my favorite sharing plug-ins that I use on almost all my sites.

Sexy Bookmarks

Just the name should make you want it. It will make your site sexy 🙂 Ok all kidding aside this is one of my all time favorite plugins and have been using it for quite awhile. When configured it will give you little icons for various social media sites that all your visitors have to do is click on one to share your post. It will also give a count by each icon. On the back end you have many many social sites to choose from, just click each one you want then you can click and drag to order them the way you wish them to appear. I keep it just to the main ones, dont want to overwhelm your visitors. It also the option to add a Facebook like button and a google +1 button as well. You can also choose the location, before or after your post as well as left or right (like buttons can be located independently from the sexy bookmarks), Most of the settings are self explanatory and you can just activate and away you go.

Hint: In the settings be sure to scroll down to the twitter options. You will see a text box ‘Configure Custom Tweet Template’ be share to replace the ‘via@shareaholic’ with your own twitter username. I mean thanks shareaholic for the plugin but you want to advertise yourself as much as you can and this way you can see in your mentions feed who is tweeting you 🙂

Change the twitter username in Sexy Bookmarks

Thats the plugin on the bottom of this post, ya you can go ahead and test it out, maybe tweet this post?

Share Bar for WordPress

Sharebar

Share bar is another great share plugin. Instead of at the end of the post it puts the share bar on the side of your post, and it slides with it as your visitor scrolls down the length of your long winded rants. Thats what I like most of this plugin is that it puts the share buttons always there in the visitors face saying ‘please share me’.

It comes with a few basic buttons already set up but you are able to add others if you wish. That is how I got the new Google +1 button on mine. Another cool feature is if the visitors window is less than 1000px wide it will automatically stick smaller buttons under your post title (this can be turned off and min width adjusted). You can also adjust position of the bar as well as border and background colors to blend in with your site.

Same thing for this one, in the plug in settings click settings at the top right then scroll down to twitter settings. Be sure to enter your own twitter name so you get the promotion.

I only use 3 or 4 of the big ones in this plug in (facebook, twitter, stumble and google +) and use sexy for all of them at the bottom.

Others?

Im know there are many others and one of them may be your favorite. I have used many of them and have found these two to be the best in my humble opinion. If you do use another, just like these be sure to change the twitter id from the plugins to your own so you dont lose out on the self promotion. If it dosent allow you to then thats a reason right there to try another.

If you need help with these or anything hosting or wordpress related let me know. I do wordpress installs and hosting and Im pretty damn cheap 🙂

What plugin do you use to help your visitors share your posts?

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Make it simple and easy for your readers to return to your blog – RSS

August 29, 2011 by Jeff Davidson 2 Comments

I have been doing a lot of blog reading lately and have found some great ones to add to my Reader. The one thing that frustrates me the most when I find a good blog is hunting for the subscription feed or not finding one at all. You are losing so much in return visitors if you make it difficult for your readers to connect with you.

OK, let’s start at the beginning. For those that do not know what RSS is, it stands for Really Simple Syndication and is basically like a subscription service for your blog. There are many RSS Reader programs out there that allow you to subscribe to your favorite blogs this way, giving you an automatic update whenever your favorite blogs put up a new post and the ability to read it without going to their page. I use Google Reader and an app on my ipad called Feedler to read all my saved blogs. They allow me to organize the blogs by subject (photography, internet marketing, food, etc) and I’m able to read in bed or relaxing somewhere.

For those that use WordPress, you have the feed built into the site and those savvy enough know where to find it at yoursite.com/feed. What about the common visitor who is not too tech smart, but likes your blog and would like to know about your updates? For these people it is good to put a link or an RSS icon (it has been universal and most know what it is) on your blog so visitors can click and subscribe. Put it ‘above the fold’ on the site where it can be found when they first come on your site; don’t make them hunt for it. Somewhere in the upper right is the common place and where most look.

There are many plugins that will do this for you and use the default feed link. While this is great and a start, I have found that it still may be difficult for some to add to their reader and why not make it as easy as you can for your visitors? After all, the easier it is the better chance you have at retaining them as a future visitor. I have noticed in some browsers (mainly Safari) when you click on the feed link you just get a page showing the feed. If you want to subscribe you have to copy/paste the address into your reader.

Enter Feed Burner! FeedBurner is a free service that puts your feed on steroids. This allows you to track how many subscribers you have, analyze, and best of all monetize your feed with adsense (yes, Google owns this, too). But for this article what we are focusing on is making it easy for your visitors to add your feed. Once you add your blog you will get a new feed address and you then substitute this for your RSS link for your icon and subscribe link. You would also download the FeedBurner plugin for WordPress and once it’s set up and activated it will move all your feed data and old subscribers to the new feed. What this ultimately does is give your reader a look at your feed and a selection of readers to add it to in the upper right. If they use a reader often FeedBurner recognizes this and will eventually just show them their favorite reader.

The key is to make it as easy as you can for your visitor to follow you and your blog. If they have to hunt for your feed or it is just difficult they will move on, perhaps to never be seen again. That would make us sad as we would like to retain as many visitors we can and create a following that we can interact with.

Do you use RSS feeds to retain visitors? How is is it for them to subscribe?

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