Blog Exercises: Fools, Pranks, and Jokers

April 1st is April Fool’s Day in many countries. Also called “All Fools’ Day,” it is a chance to pick on people, to play pranks, jokes, and hoaxes on friends and family. Historians say that the concept of a Fool’s Day has been a part of European History and other cultures for hundreds, possibly over […]

Testing Search Engine Page Ranking Techniques

I’ve talked a lot about how Google ranks websites with their patented Page Rank program, analyzing the process from a variety of sources, with some hearsay evidence as well as facts. There is still a lot that we don’t know about how Google ranks web pages and how search engines read your web pages, but […]

Google Page Rank Uses Domain Age to Score

As reported in my post on how Google ranks websites, Link Building Blog reports that Google does indeed pay close attention to the age of the domain. It seems Google has intensified the ranking factor of one key data point that is very tough to manipulate: the age of your domain name. I have been […]

Exploding Blog Page Rank Misconceptions by Recommending a New Page Ranking System

Link Love Lost or How Social Gestures within Topic Groups are More Interesting Than Link Counts by Mary Hodder is a must read for serious bloggers. Bloggers should have input about the importance of one social gesture over another, one metric over another, and know what it is that is included because it will be […]

Google Page Ranks, Google News, Google Gossip, Google Blues

As mentioned, Google is becoming a one-stop shop for searching, advertising, Internet, and webbing. So I thought I’d check out all the Google Page Ranks, Google News, Google Gossip, Google Blues, and information you can use about Google. We recently wrote about how Google ranks websites, Google Blogsearch, and how to submit your sitemap and […]

Secret Out – How Google Ranks Websites

You might have heard about it this June, but I thought it bore repeating. The secret is out on much of what Google uses to rank your website on their search engine. To read the actual patent information released to the public, see Google’s patent for their search engine ranking technique from 2005 on evaluating […]

WordPress School: Links

I’ve dreamed of teaching a class or workshop on nothing but links. Web links fascinate me. They are the connective tissue of the web, the glue that binds us all together in the virtual space, an economy in and of themselves, and links can save lives, they are that powerful. In Lorelle’s WordPress School free […]

WordPress School: Image Preparation

In the assignment for Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course today and over the weekend, you are to work on preparing images for uploading to WordPress. You will be adding a variety of images to your WordPress test site such as images to accompany your posts and Pages, portraits, images for galleries, design elements, sidebar […]

WordPress School: Headings

Many people will tell you that the images you use in a published post are the most important visual elements on a web page. Don’t believe them. It is an HTML content tag that is often overlooked that is the most powerful visual element on a web page: the heading. At this point in Lorelle’s […]

Welcome to Lorelle’s WordPress School

I was one of the first asked to write and publish a text book on WordPress. I worked with the BIG NAME text book publishing company for months to create a structure and outline for WordPress users. As a long-time WordPress user, WordPress Codex contributor and editor, WordPress support forums volunteer, developer, designer, and WordPress […]

The Web is All About The Writing

Reading “7 Things You Need to Know about SEO in 2014” from Compete Pulse, I was fascinating to read that “size matters:” Most blog posts range between 400 and 600 words, but the ideal length for highest ranking is actually around 1,500. Many still believe that a successful website is one that offers the information […]

Robin Williams Starts Our Conversation on Depression, Suicide, and Mental Health

The world is grieving the loss of one of our favorite comedic and dramatic geniuses, Robin Williams, and the conversation begins about mental illness, depression, and suicide. The Facts As We Know It: The news arrived about 3:30PM PST that the actor had died due to suspected suicide. CNN reported that according to the Marin […]

It’s About Access

If you have a few minutes today, watch this. Oh, watch it anyway. And share it. It won a Webby, the equivalent of the Oscar for the web world. And I have to admit that at the end, I cried. Seriously. Like those in the satirical episode, I don’t live in the wildest woolliest of […]

Blog Exercises: 5,127 Tries

In his native UK, Sir James Dyson is known as much for his quirky looking, superior-functioning vacuum cleaners as for his long embattled path to commercial success. He gave Brits their first bagless vacuum in 1993 after 13 tough years tinkering in the tool shed. He slogged through 5,127 prototypes, a couple of lawsuits and […]

The Giant Blog Exercise Check List Part 1

July is the midway point of these Blog Exercises and time for a Giant Blog Exercise Checklist to help you keep score of the exercises you’ve done, and what’s left undone. I’ve arranged the blog exercises by similarity, tasks related to each other, rather than chronologically. If you are playing catch up, you might wish […]