Your Site Now Visible to Search Engines

WordPress.com sent an email alert out to WordPress.com users today stating that there was a technical issue with sites set to be hidden from search engines. Unfortunately, they’ve assumed that this is not what someone would want and they’ve turned on the site visibility to ensure search engines will find the site. Hi there, We […]

Winning the Battle Over Comment Spam: Akismet and Search Engines?

Brian Turner asks “Should search engines use Akismet?”, a fascinating question and one that could revolutionize the revolution against spammers. …The aim of the automated form spammers is to increase their search engine rankings – by forcing sites to unwittingly publish links which may be used by search engines to improve a sites ranking on […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Searching and Search Engines

Over the past year, I’ve written a lot about search engines. In many ways, they are the holy grail, the impossible dream, and the unsolved mystery. We are totally dependent upon them. In order to find anything on the web, we must go through a portal of a search engine. It is the epitome of […]

SEO Secret: Exploring How Search Engines Explore

Search Engine Optimization, aka SEO, is the technique of cleaning up your web page code to maximize your “search engine friendliness” and search engine coverage. The core purpose of search engine optimization is: Help search engines search your entire website or blog. Provide key words and phrases to help a search engine determine how to […]

The Changing Face of Search Engines: Try Not Searching Google for a Change

Abhijit Nadgouda has written another awesome article, “The Changing Face Of Search Engines”, explaining why you should consider trying a non-Google search engine for a change. Still, lot of quests end in frustration and dissatisfaction, sometimes because of the user’s mistakes or sometimes because the expected information is either never thrown up or are buried […]

Affiliate Links May Be Penalized By Search Engines

I need to research this more, but I thought I’d give you a heads up. I just got this information from an affiliate (advertiser) I work with on one of my full WordPress sites: If it hasn’t happened already, it appears that some of the search engines may start penalizing affiliate links, categorizing them as […]

See What Search Engines See When They Visit Your Website

As part of your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts, take time to run your website or blog through a few tests to see how a search engine sees your website or blog when they visit. It’s a good learning experience. Things to look for are: What is seen first, second, and third. When the “meat” […]

Beauty is Only Skin Deep: Designing Blogs For Feeds, Search Engines and Audience

Crabby Night Owl’s post, “Substance Not Style is King”, caught my attention: About 20% of the hits CNO gets come via the newsfeeds, and I wanted to see what those feeds looked like when they’re read. What I saw was plain, unformatted text, devoid of any style that I may have imparted to it on […]

Good Instructions for Submissions to Search Engines

Here is another interesting set of instructions for submitting your site or blog to search engines from Rank for Sales. There are still a lot of people that wrongly believe they should submit their website on a regular monthly or weekly basis, in order to “maintainâ€? their site in the search engines! Unless there has […]

How Search Engines See, Search, and Visit Your Website

There are several kinds of search engines. Some collect their own data through “robots” or “spiders”, software that crawls through the web, tracking the various links between pages and sites, gathering data which the search engine filters and adds to its database. These include Google and Yahoo. Some rely upon individuals and businesses to enter […]

New Search Engines Help Users Find Blogs

The Wall Street Journal’s article, “New Search Engines Help Users Find Blogs” tells of blog directories competing directly with major search engines, and in many respects, beating them to the punch when it comes to tracking and helping users find information on blogs. Blogs, compared to websites, are updated faster and contain more gossip, news, […]

The Most Common Tiny Mistakes Made When Setting Up a WordPress Site

I’ve just finished five years of teaching non-stop college and community education workshops and programs on WordPress for beginners, novices, experts, web designers, web developers, web programmers, and those who think they know everything but still realize they have a lot to learn. I love that last group as they are willing to learn and […]

WordPress School: HTML Tags

The last lesson was the HTML and CSS Tutorial, another mini-series on Lorelle’s WordPress School. This is a very basic tutorial on HTML and CSS to prepare you for WordPress site customization and WordPress Themes. This tutorial in the series will help you understand the basics of an HTML tag, the architectural code wrapped around […]

WordPress School: HTML and CSS Tutorial

Over the past week we’ve been learning about the web browser, your gateway to WordPress and the web. This was a precursor to the next mini-series of tutorials in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course. We are going to learn HTML and CSS. Learning WordPress from the inside out means learning the basic fundamentals of […]

WordPress School: Bookmarklets and User Scripts

In the last tutorial in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course covering the web browser, your gateway to the web and WordPress, we covered bookmarks and how to save a web page for later access and reading. In this tutorial, we take bookmarks a little further by exploring browser bookmarklets and user scripts, small but […]