WordPress, Blogging & Tech Tutorials

Learn SEO Class – Los Angeles

Practical Search Engine Optimization For Your Blog/Website

You’ve set up your blog, now what? How will anyone find you? How will you attract the targeted traffic you need for your business? Search engines are one of the most powerful sources of traffic if you know the basic principles. This class will teach you the fundamentals of search engine optimization so that you can develop a thriving and effective business website or blog.

This class is designed for those with little or no understanding of search engine optimization, or anyone who is not getting the results they expect from their SEO. The examples will skew toward self-hosted WordPress users in terms of implementation, but the principles and techniques apply to all types of sites.

Saturday April 9th, 1:30pm – 3:30pm, $40

Food Bloggers Take Note – Google Rolls Out Recipe View

SEO, WordPress
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Google Recipe View

If you’ve Google-d for a recipe lately you may have noticed a new feature Google has launched, which is a recipe-specific search – they call it Recipe View. It allows the user to search results specifically designated as recipes, and also to narrow searches by ingredients, prep time and even calorie count. You access it via the “Recipes” option in the left menu bar on search pages.

What About Food Bloggers? Another Reason You’re Better Off With WordPress

It seems pretty useful for web searchers, but what does this mean for food bloggers? Well in order for your recipes to show up in this special search, Google is looking for you to use special markup i.e. code, to designate your content to be recipes. It’s called a microformat, which is a specific set of code tags used to designated content as recipes, with special parameters such as prep time, ingredients, reviews and more. Click here to see all the gory details

Learn WordPress – Los Angeles Workshop March 27th

Getting Started With WordPress For Business (and Serious Bloggers!)

UPDATE: This workshop is now SOLD OUT. Sign up to be notified of future workshops and for discount pricing.

The next WordPress workshop has been scheduled! If you would like to learn how to use WordPress to create your business site or blog, but prefer to learn in-person rather than via online tutorials, this is your chance!

Have an idea for a business or blog and need to get a website up and running at minimal expense? This hands-on workshop will provide step-by-step instruction for using self-hosted WordPress and plenty of hand-holding where necessary! Get all your questions answered in a friendly,comfortable environment.

Sunday, March 27th – 1:30pm – 5:30pm – $75

WordPress 3.1 Released – New Features

WordPress 3.1 was just released. Here are the highlights according to the WordPress site, along with some commentary by your truly ;)

Highlights

Internal Linking – click a button for an internal link and it allows you to search for a post or browse a list of existing content and select it for inclusion.

Here’s how the new ‘add link’ box looks:

This is a really handy feature – it makes internal linking to your other posts and content much easier. Internal linking is helpful to guide your readers to more of your content, and good for SEO!

Image Editing Tools For Web and WordPress

Although WordPress allows for some image editing capabilities, it’s not ideal to upload large images into your WordPress admin and use that for re-sizing or cropping images. You’ll end up storing a lot of extra images on your server and over time it could affect the performance of your site.

It’s much cleaner to do your image editing outside of WordPress and upload images at the size you need them. This is especially true if your theme features a slider, or uses featured images that need to be very specific dimensions.

Image-related terminology

When dealing with images for the web there’s a few concepts you should become familiar with.

How To Provide RSS Blog Updates Via Email With Mailchimp

Offering blog updates via email is a must-have feature for most blogs, since many real, non-geek people are not familiar with RSS, but are very comfortable with email.

I mentioned this possibility in my post on updating readers when you post a blog, but since this wonderful feature of MailChimp seems to remain largely undiscovered, I thought I’d dig into it a little further.

You’re probably already using Feedburner to manage your RSS feed, and while it does offer email subscriptions as an option, it’s not the best solution if you want to build an email list for marketing purposes.

Here’s how you can integrate RSS-via-email into your WordPress blog using MailChimp. You will of course need a MailChimp account which is free for up to 2000 subscribers.