Interesting development with Yelp — and other sites that allow public review. The “authenticity engine” and the consumer win again!
Last week, Congress passed a law that will make it illegal for companies to retaliate against U.S. consumers who post negative reviews online. Yes, soon you’ll be able to give a bad business one star without having to worry about being bullied or sued.
Source: This New Law Will Protect Your Negative Yelp Reviews
View my other posts about Yelp and negative reviews
The psychology of search – And defining the perfect keywords for AdWords
There are countless questions arising each time one starts a new AdWords campaign – “How do I best reach my customers?”, ”What is my target audience looking for?” and many more. Finding answers to these questions is the major challenge when planning a new campaign and often decides its success or failure.
Who uses Search Engines?
In general internet users can be roughly divided in 2 groups:
While the first group just browses the web to consume content, the latter has a question, a problem or an interest in something in particular. They then put it in a question that they hope the search engine will deliver the right answer to.
How do people use Search Engines?
Unfortunately, there is no standard format searchers use for their queries. This is because the human mind works in a totally different way than a search engine’s algorithm. Humans merge everything into concepts and ideas – concepts like flowers, colors, etc. – while search engines still heavily rely on categorization and classification through keywords.
When using a search engine, the user must first transfer his or her own conceptual thinking into a keyword based search query. And there is no way to exactly predict the outcome of that.
Here are some examples of possible queries, or outcomes of the above described process:
– An actual question: Where do I find a plumber?
With each of these queries the user has certain expectations of the results. Is the search engine result page going to deliver?
That’s exactly where an AdWords campaign should be positioned. The ad has to be designed to meet the searcher’s expectations. For help with writing good ad copy, check out The six tips how to write successful AdWords ads.
And the landing page should of course be able to actually answer the searcher’s original question.
When creating a new AdWords ad it helps to answer the following questions up front:
Apart from the benefit of being able to answer multiple questions with different ads and landing pages, you also gain insight into what queries to ignore and not to advertise for, as they are likely to mount costs with no profit.
When you follow these steps and make both your ads and landing pages as relevant to the searchers intent as possible, chances are your ad won’t be seen as disturbing advertisement, but as helpful information. When that happens, you’ve won.
Because Advertising Isn’t Advertising When It’s Information!
Brad Geddes, Certified Knowledge
Important features to note for WordPress events plugins:
The best WordPress event plug-in is: The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe
Modern Tribe is a small Santa Cruz-based WordPress company that’s been growing in popularity. With contributions by several WordPress expert developers, including core developer Mark Jaquith). To create an event, go to Events / Add New. Add your copy in the editor, add all relevant info in the detail widget below. You can ignore any of the fields checkboxes below so don’t be intimidated. Anything you leave blank will not show up.
I have also used All-In-One Events Calendar by Time.ly on many sites including The Roxie. Over the years that plugin has become more bloated and I don’t think it’s as robust as “The Events Calendar” but it offers more features for free out-of-the-box.
See also:
A big list of WordPress event plug-ins is: http://wordpress.org/
One feature I miss is the ability to add ‘event time’ to any blog post. So the blog post becomes the ‘more info’ listing and then can be viewed in various calendar formats. That is a different approach than making a new custom content type and is preferable if you want every event post to be part of the bigger blog feed.
There is one that is focused on the needs of a touring performance group:
http://gigpress.com/shows/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gigpress/
Or try this super simple option:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-event-list/
It just builds a widget showing blog entries with a custom field that give a time-out date.
Lots of options these days for Credit Card processing—you can see their pricing is virtually identical. PayPal used to have per-item fixed fees and that adds alot for small transactions but now they both offer percentage-only fees.
2016 Square: 2.75% Per swipe (or paid Square Invoice)
Card readers for Stripe: If you use Stripe or other payment gateways
Zoho provides a combination of clean, ad-free, minimalist interface and power features geared for business and professional use. Zoho also offers several free services, including 25 free mailboxes. But if you want more there are three other plans available:
If you are interested in creating a free account, here it is what you need to do:
After following all those steps, you’ll be ready to go.
You can see all the features Zoho offers by clicking here: www.zoho.com/mail/features.html
I wanted to share my research about inexpensive sign cutting software for plotter for the Mac since it was not easy to find online. I’ve had a few plotters over the years (including USCutter and Summagraphics) and the software was always painful to use – never as sophisticated as Illustrator. Recently I was looking to update my software and came across these options – I really wanted a simple – even free – “driver” to just export my file from Illustrator but could not find one.
Sure Cuts A Lot 4 by CraftEdge
SignCut
MacSign by softeamweb
V10 Lite, Win and Mac
Let me know what you find for:
Fortunately, the over-emphasis on keywords is a thing of the past. But a lot of people still think about where to place their keywords in order to get the biggest SEO benefit.
My first impulse would be to answer:
Forget about the keywords. Just focus on writing good content with your target audience in mind.
However, keywords are still very important when it comes to SEO. Search is primarily keyword-based and search engines have to use keywords in order to understand, evaluate and rank documents.
The golden rule – applicable to 95% of all websites:
The keyword should appear:
1 x in the title tag:
The keyword that a page is supposed to rank for must appear in the title tag. One time. Not twice, and not in variations.
It’s also recommended to put the brand name at the end of the title tag. This will improve the trustworthiness of the page (for Google) as well as enhance the snippet in the search engine results (for users).
1 x in the headline (h1):
The keyword must appear in the headline to immediately show the searcher, that the page is exactly what they were looking for. Ideally, the main headline is defined as <h1>. If that is not possible, for whatever reason, it’s ok to define it as something else, as long it’s the big headline on top of the page.
2-3 x in the content:
The keyword must be mentioned in the copy. If it doesn’t, the content is most probably not very relevant to the search query. Additionally, it’s good to use words that are topically related to the main keyword. Google will understand that your text is not only focusing on a keyword, but also covering a topic from many angles, which will give you an advantage.
2-3 times is enough. Now, it’s not terrible if your keyword appears more often than that, if the text requires it. But it’s counterproductive to use it unnaturally or to use close variants of your keyword. Google uses only the word-stem, so any grammatical variations that you may try to target by using them as often as possible will just look like keyword-stuffing to Google.
1 x in the meta description:
You don’t do this for better rankings (the meta description is not a ranking factor), but to achieve a higher CTR on the search results pages. Do this only if it makes sense.
That’s it! With this, you’ve covered most of it. Anything else you do after that will be fine-tuning and has only small effect. However, since we want to get as much out of on-page SEO as possible, here are 3 more points:
1 x in image alt-attributes and file names:
This helps to rank in image search. For websites that rely very heavily on images and have little text, the alt-attribute is a good place to get some additional content on the page.
1 x in the URL:
I’m not talking about the homepage! But on sub-pages, it is absolutely reasonable to use the keyword in the URL – for usability, for better understanding of the URL and for good rankings.
Domain.com/category/keyword : great.
Domain.com/keyword1-keyword2/keyword1-keyword3 : no! Just don’t do that.
1-2 x in sub-headings:
Use the keyword in sub-headings (h2, h3, …). This is useful and helps users and search engines to better understand what your page is about.
And once you’ve covered these points, it’s time to stop thinking about keywords on a page and move on to other more important things.
Author: Thomas Kloos is head of an SEO agency in Vienna. He’s been in the business for 15 years, speaks at conferences, gives workshops on SEO, AdWords and online reputation management and consults clients worldwide.
Jetpack
| Monthly plan price | # of WordPress core videos | # of WordPress plugin videos | # of other videos | |
 Video User Manuals |
$24.00 | 41 | 18 | 26 |
 |
$49.50 | 42 | 0 | 0 |
 |
$24.00 | 25 | 8 | 2 |
 |
$24.75 | 43 | 16 | 42 |
The team at Video User Manuals have been around since early 2008. They are the original and first plugin to put video tutorials in the WordPress dashboard for clients. All the videos use a non-technical language and clear graphics, making them quite easy to understand. The videos can be watched in English (American, British and Australian accents available) or Spanish and they are categorized into the following sections:
| Section | # of Videos | Section | # of Videos |
| Dashboard | 2 | Widgets | 1 |
| Editor | 11 | Menus | 3 |
| Images | 10 | Yoast SEO (a free plugin) | 4 |
| Pages | 3 | WooCommerce (a free plugin) | 7 |
| Media | 2 | WooCommerce Products | 7 |
| Posts | 7 | Google Analytics Setup (not a WordPress feature) | 11 |
| Comments | 1 | Google Analytics Reports | 10 |
| Profile | 1 | Gravity Forms (a paid plugin) | 5 |
The plugin is fully brandable and customizable. It is possible to turn off individual videos or entire sections of videos and add your own videos.
The videos are always opened in a new tab and the user has to come back to the previous tab to have access to the other videos—not very efficient.
It is also provides a Word and PDF document with every subscription that you can customize and rebrand as your own—but it’s not part of the WordPress plugin. And also there is the option to hide the settings from Admins.
Note there is no button to watch the video in full screen mode but if you increase the width of the popup window
There are three plans available:
Complete list of videos:
Founded in 2005, WPMU DEV offers more than 350 WordPress plugins, themes and unlimited support. The WordPress tutorial videos are very detailed and straightforward, with a clean and clear interface, making them suitable for entry level users. The videos available are categorized into the following sections:
| Section | # of Videos | ||
| The Dashboard | 4 | Media Library | 3 |
| Posts | 4 | Appearance | 4 |
| Pages | 4 | Organizing Content | 2 |
| The Visual Editor | 9 | Managing Comments | 1 |
| Working with Images | 8 | Users, Tools and Settings | 3 |
This is basically the only page of this plugin. Its interface is more efficient, the list of videos are always displayed below the video that is currently playing and the tutorials are not opened in a new tab.
The only language available is English and there is no written documentation available. All the videos will always be displayed to the admin and they can be watched in full screen mode. Even though the videos do not cover all the content covered by Video User Manuals, they covered most of the content in fewer and more dynamic videos.
There are three plans available:
WP101 was launched back in 2008 by Shawn Hesketh, a freelance designer and WordPress consultant who has been creating websites since 1994. Over at Shawn’s website, he gives advice and shares his experience of running a membership site with 20,000 members, as well as offering his custom WordPress video service.
This is how the videos are displayed.
Some characteristics of this tool are:
The tutorial available are:
The plans available are:
WPSessions was launched in 2013 and provides high quality content to help train the greater WordPress community.
WPSessions is specialized in training WordPress developers and business owners in a simple way and the content is created and supported by WordPress experts, so the tutorials are always updated.
The videos available are categorized into the following sections:
| Section | # of Videos |
| Your First WordPress Plugin | 43 Lessons |
| Mastering Sass: From Beginner to Expert | 17 Lessons |
| Using the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate | 16 Lessons |
| How to Optimize WordPress Performance | 25 Lessons |
| How to Build a Membership Site | In Production! |
| Bashing Your Way with WP-CLI | In Production! |
| BuddyPress Mastery: For Users and Developers | In Production! |
| Up and Running with Unit Tests | In Production! |
The plans available are:
On WordPress TV you can access screencasts, video presentations and WordCamp videos, and you can post your own videos as well. Their number one objective is to share quality content and show the users how to use WordPress and do awesome things with it.
The website is a moderated community and the videos they publish are for the benefit of all users of WordPress. As such, their content is meant to be a reflection of the values of the WordPress project.
They also have a blog, so the users can keep it up with all the WordPress news and events.
Finally, to choose which is best for your customers, you should know how much they know about WordPress and what are the features they use, because even though Video User Manuals covers extra content like Gravity Forms, WooCommerce and SEO, the videos explain the content more slowly compared to WPMU DEV, but it still explains the content thoroughly.
Visit the official websites:
Facebook is changing the way users can employ the “Like Box Widget”. I have no idea why – it’s yet another change to their code that makes us developers and website owners jump through extra hoops. The Like Box is deprecated and will stop working on June 23rd, 2015.
The bad news was that this new “Page Plugin” version was going to require a minimum width of 280 pixels but thankfully Facebook changed it’s mind and will continue to allow narrower widths. Currently the allowed range is 180 to 500 pixels wide.
Facebook provides a “Like Box” or “Page Plugin” that lets you easily embed and promote any Facebook Page on your website. The key advantage is that your visitors can like and share the Page without having to leave your site. The code you put on your page talks to Facebook and Facebook can tell if a user is logged into Facebook and then find connections between their friends and your page – and then show only the relevant faces. That’s a great way to add authority to your site.
So, this widget has:
There are two plugins I like to use: The Facebook Like Box Plugin lets you easily embed and promote any Facebook Page on your WordPress website without having to grab the code from facebook.com. This plugin was updated and will automatically move over to using the new “Page Plugin” – but you will want to review the new options to make sure they match your site – especially the “cover” photo.
TIP: there is a little typo in this plugin – the “hide cover photo” option appears twice. The 2nd time that option appears it actual should say “hide faces”, so if you set it to ‘false’ then it will show faces.
The other plugin is part of Jetpack. They are aware of this issue and also make note that: Apparently If you do not manually upgrade the Page Plugin (which this PR does), the Like Box plugin implementation will automatically fall back to the Page Plugin on June 23rd 2015.
Here is the warning about the update that will make the old version stop working:
There a few improvements in this new version, such as:
It’s quite easy to customize your plugin and you can see how it looks like right away, in the box down below.
The first and last images show how the widget looks like with the maximum and minimum width, respectively. Notice that the share button is removed when the width is lower than 280px, avoiding design issues.
Official page: Page Plugin
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results. If your site is higher ranked on the SERP (search engine results page) it will generally get more visitors, more ad views, more sales etc.
Many businesses target a lot of keywords to track and know how hard it is to keep it all straight. It’s good to start tracking now so you can see how your target keywords are performing over time. I have been focused on tools that are web-based. Ideally the tools would be simple — most small businesses don’t really want the geeky interface some tools offer — info overload that is only appropriate to an SEO professional. Some find it useful to track their competition also.
Tracking links to your web pages is a major part of any SEO strategy. Fortunately, there are many tools to provide a comprehensive view of where your web pages stand. Here I will talk about four of those tools: AuthorityLabs SEO, Microsite Masters Rank Tracker, Wincher, and TinyRocketLab.
AuthorityLabs started in 2008 and gained a strong reputation in delivering search engine ranking monitoring services. AuthorityLabs has three plans available, and it is the only one that does not offer a free plan, but it offers a free 30 days trial and it is the most complete tool.
Some of its special features are:
AuthorityLabs tracks Google, Yahoo and Bing, you can generate the graph selecting the time range, and you can also see how the graph was in a specific date in the past, this way you have total access to the keywords history.
Visit the official website: www.authoritylabs.com
This tool was launched in 2009 and offers comprehensive rank tracking services. The first thing that you should know about Microsite Masters is that you can join for free and track up to 10 keywords, then you can update your account anytime toward one of the following plans:
This tool tracks Google, Yahoo and Bing. It is the most complete free tool and the most similar to AuthorityLabs.
The dashboard of rankings (and the interface in general) is very user friendly and all features available are well organized on the left sidebar.
One other cool feature is the Customized Report, which allows you to easily export the report into Excel or PSD Files and share with clients and partners. There are advanced tracking metrics to determine campaign efficiency and there is the possibility to generate graphs of each keyword to view the site’s rankings, and also where other sites rank for each keyword you track.
In this tool you can also generate graphs within a specific time range, but it differs from the AuthorityLabs graphs because AuthorityLabs compares all the keywords and the Microsite Masters compares each keyword by search engine.
Visit the official website: www.micrositemasters.com
This tool offers two plans, both with unlimited numbers of keywords, but the free one has weekly updates, while the paid one has daily updates and costs €6.
Wincher is a simpler tool when compared to the previous ones and it just tracks Google, but it does everything it should and has the most user friendly interface, with all the rankings, graphs, keywords information, etc.
The main features are:
Visit the official website: www.wincher.com
This is the newest contender to join the market — in 2013. The plans available are:
Key information such as keyword progress and visibility is shown in the Dashboard, and a graph is available as well. TinyRocketLab is even simpler than Wincher and offer a little less information about the keywords, but it’s not a bad tool, it’s just less detailed-oriented.
However, there is the Task management feature, that allows you to work with your team, create tasks and experiments. This is something unique among the rank trackers.
Visit the official website: www.tinyrocketlab.com
MORE SEO RESOURCES
