The Definitive Guide to Optimizing Your Site
Semester 2, Online Class (13 Credits)
Self Paced
The Business Blogging Course is for any business looking to add blogging to their overall marketing strategy. The course discusses the role of blogging, time requirements, methods of monetization, purpose and platforms. It also covers the strategies required to achieve search engine leverage.
BZB201 Module 9: Optimizing Your Site
BZB201 9-0 The Importance of the Navigation BarMapping day is really fun. Time to look at your site from a new angle. As we said in the beginning, you don’t have to SEO everything. But we don’t know what to SEO until we know what we’re doing.
- Is your site a mirror for what you want to be?
- Is your site relevant to the visitor for that topic?
- Do they feel like they are at “home”?
- Take your goal and look at your website. Pretend you are your target market. After reading the post…. now what?
- What should they be able to do?
- What should they be able to see?
- Is it clear where you’re taking them?
BZB201 9-1 Using Custom Sidebars
In this call you're going to learn how to install custom sidebars how you can really supercharge your Christmas income with them what to put in your sidebars and when to put it there And we talk a bit about when to use no sidebar at all
[s3bubbleVideoSingle bucket="BloggingConcentrated" track="custom-sidebar-new.mp4" cloudfront="" autoplay="false" download="false"/] BZB201 9-2 Setting up a Read More Button
The "Read more" button insures that your content doesn't get indexed on your homepage AND makes sure your audience reads the post on the post itself.
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BZB201 9-3 Stopping Spammers
A client of mine, has a very popular blog which he requires users to register to post comments. Lately, he has been inundated with spam users and was asking for a fix.
If you are requiring users to register to post comments, and not using a plugin like Disqus or IntenseDebate then take a look at this plugin.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/
It uses a couple different places like stopforumspam.com and Project Honeypot to weed out the bad guys. So far it seems to be working as the registered user requests from spam bots is eliminated. The human spammers ones are down too since it can recognize their IP address from the databases.
As always, make sure you back up the site before deploying. Installing an Anti-Spammer Plugin
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BZB201 9-4 Creating a Related Post HTML Table
We don’t like the related posts plugin, per se, mainly because you can’t control what’s in it. We’d much rather you drive traffic to posts that you want the audience to read. Sales pages, highest paying Adsense pages, ebooks, top posts. . . the things that make a difference for your business.
So we’re giving you a piece of code you can copy and paste at the bottom of your blog posts to make this happen. This particular code doesn’t have words or captions. So you’d use this with Pinterest like pins that speak for themselves. Click here to go to that page
BZB201 9-5 Measuring Spaces for Better Design
How to measure spaces online so you can make things look good.
BZB201 9-6 Basics of Image Design [EBOOK]
BZB201 9-7 Text Spacing in Design
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BZB201 9-8 What Color is That?
BZB201 9-9 Reorganizing, moving, changing and deleting Categories and Tags
BZB201 9-10 What to do when your blog post goes viral? 24 things to do now!
BZB201 9-11 20 Things to Change on Your Blog
BZB201 9-12 How to Write an Effective Blog Post Series
BZB201 9-13 53 Tweaks to Make In Your Business, Now!
BZB201 9-14 Blog Post Publishing Checklist
Looking for a good blog post publishing checklist? As part of the 21 Day SEO Challenge we put together this checklist to help you remember what you should be doing. This is part of a series of printable checklists that are part of the Challenge.
1. What is the goal of the blog post? Is it clear what the reader should do?
- Comment
- Click Ad
- Like, Pin, Plus, Tweet, Share
- Go to another post
- Buy, Join, Register, Optin
- Facebook display standards
- Pinterest display standards
- Twitter display standards
- Social share buttons above and below the post?
- Pin it button on photo (hover or in caption)?
- "Tweet this" button with a shareable tweet highlighted?
- Is it scannable with subheadings? Bullets?
- Is it linked from or does it to link to a supporting article?
- Is it categorized and tagged within it's silo correctly?
- Does the title include keywords that support the silo?
- Does the main keyword appear in the title?
- Does the main keyword appear in the first paragraph?
- Does the main keyword appear in the meta description?
- Does the main keyword appear in the post meta title?
- Does the main keyword appear naturally throughout the content?
- Does the post include supporting keywords (like toilet for bathroom)?
- Does the post include sub headings that include supporting keywords?
- Does the post include the keyword bolded, italicized, or as a text link?
- Did you add the keyword to the list of keywords you're tracking in Webmaster Tools?
- Does it need incoming links? Did you go to old posts and link back to this one?
- Have dates been removed?
- Have hashtags been removed?
- Has weird punctuation been removed?
9. If using Adsense to monetize, are the ads put in the best positions possible? Are the maximum allowed including link units on page?
10. If the sidebar has an optin form or your own product ads? If so are you using the Sidebar Ladder plugin to make sure you're maximizing pixel space for those that optin and buy?
11. Is the post optimized for eyeballs?
- Are faces, book covers, scenes facing toward the middle of the page?
- Do any images sabotage your monetization efforts? (Example do you have an ad at the top of the sidebar but an image that draws the reader past the ad)?
- Is it easy to find the goal of the page ie. the button, the ad, the link?
- Does the post expire and therefore need the expiration shortcode?
- Does the post need a light box plugin?
- Got a relevant YouTube video to embed? Slideshare presentation?
- Commercial or Non-Commercial keywords?
- Long or short post?
- Ads or email optin?