Link Referrals – Linking to Site Search Tags

I received notice of an interesting referrer link the other day. Conversations’ Get Started Blogging workshop post, “Whistle Stops”, included a link to Lorelle on WordPress – wordpressdotcom tagged posts. Interesting. Instead of linking to a single post, or even a category, or just to my site in general, he linked to a site search […]

Blog Exercises: Increase Your Thank You Ratio

As a teacher, trainer, social media expert, and advice giver on many blogs, I don’t want to hear your excuses in response to my advice. “Well, if I only had the money…” Really? Since WordPress, the tools I recommend, and the advice I offer is free. What does money have to do with anything I […]

DuckDuckGo: The Search Engine You Need to Meet

Recently, DuckDuckGo has been turning up in my referrers list. Curious about the name, and thinking it was a spam site, DuckDuckGo needed investigation. Seems I’ve been missing out on what could be the major competition to Google as a search engine. Here is a quick summary of what I learned about DuckDuckGo. It is […]

Blogrolls Gone in WordPress. How to Save Your Links.

For the past few months, rumors were flying that WordPress was going to remove the Links/Blogroll feature of WordPress. As of August 2012, it is now gone from many WordPress.com. MacManx, Happiness Engineer at WordPress.com, recently stated: The Links section was removed from the core WordPress.org software, which means that it will probably be removed […]

Prove It: What Makes You Trust a Website?

What makes you trust this site? What makes you trust me? What makes you trust any website you visit? What is it about the site that earns your trust? I’ve asked this question at most of the conferences and keynotes I’ve given over the past seven years: What makes you not trust a website? The […]

Weekly Digest: WordCamp Dallas, Pasadena Education and Blogging, and More On the Road Blogging and Talking

This week’s Weekly Digest is going to be a quick one, which I’m sure many will appreciate. I’m in Texas for WordCamp Dallas all weekend and so thrilled be surrounded by everyone talking about WordPress and blogging. I’m in heaven! Live near Pasadena? I’ll be there April 2 for the Alliance for Distance Education in […]

The Real Hidden Value of Old Post Traffic

Since creating my Weekly Digest, I’m forced to look through my blog stats on a regular basis, something I’ve been loath to do for many years. Most of it doesn’t interest me as I’ve been doing this too long to worry over the micro-statistics, but I’ve been watching an interesting trend that has now turned […]

Caring About the Little Links on Your Blog

Malaysia Can Blog’s Ultimate Guide to Getting Lots of Link Love is a collection of posts about getting links to and from your blog that is a wonderful collection, but I love the point the author makes in the introduction: Quite frankly, there are four compelling reasons to care about “little links”: * Little links […]

WordPress 2.3 Tag News

The implementation of the new WordPress 2.3 built-in tag system has not come without some joy and pain. Here are some bits of news and tips to help you with the new WordPress tags. What is the Difference Between Tags and Categories? A category is a table of contents for your blog posts, segregating your […]

Tags Arrive on WordPress.com Blogs

With the announcement of the built-in tag feature in the upcoming release of WordPress 2.3, I’ve been waiting for WordPress.com to get tags as we are the beta testers of the WordPress World. Well, today they arrived. At the bottom of your Write Post panel’s editing box, you will see a new form for Tags. […]

Is Your Blog Design Holding You Back?

In a guest post on ProBlogger, Wendy Piersall from eMoms at Home wrote Is Your Blog Template Holding You Back? In the first few months of blogging, there was SO much to learn. I figured that SEO was one of those battles I would tackle once I was “more established”. But after 9 months or […]

Are You Abusing and Misusing Tags?

Affilitate Tips Site is one of the many abusers and misusers of tags I’ve found. Among the “tags” listed at the very top of the article are: Tag(s);2007, adsense, american idol, bebo, blog, blogger, blogging, blogging kit, blogging kits, britney spears, bush, current events, digg, foto, galilea montijo, hd dvd, ieia, igoogle, in the news, […]

The Magic and Fun of Incoming Links

On your WordPress blog in the Dashboard, or on your WordPress.com blog on your Blog Stats panel, you will find Incoming Links. If you aren’t using WordPress, you can find your incoming links through Technorati with: http://technorati.com/search/example.wordpress.com And through Google Blog Search with: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=link:http://example.wordpress.com/ So what is so magical and fun about incoming links? Incoming […]

Strange Referrer Links in WordPress.com Stats

Have you noticed strange links in your WordPress.com Referrers list? They tend to look like this: http://example.com/wp-admin/index.php If you do, that means that your blog has been accessed from the WordPress Administration Panels or Dashboard. In other words, a WordPress or WordPress.com user clicked on a link to your blog from inside their WordPress. This […]

The Beauty of a Good 404 Page Not Found Page

On the lighter side of web page design and development, check out this fabulous “pleases everyone” 404 Page Not Found Error from ibiblio.org. Not only is it a fairly good and helpful Page Not Found Error page, it provides information explaining what has happened in tons of different languages, including: 1337/h4x0r – j00 f001, 7|-|47 […]