WordPress, Blogging & Tech Tutorials

How To Update Your Readers When You Post A New Blog

If you’re blogging you want readers to be able to keep up with what you’re writing, right? Here’s an overview of some of your options for enabling readers to subscribe, along with pros and cons of both.

Via RSS feed

RSS forms the basis of most updating systems. Every blog has an RSS feed (simply the output of your blog) which automatically updates when you publish new posts. For WordPress blogs, the feed is usually located at: yourdomain.com/feed. Visitors can use a tool like Google Reader to subscribe to many different blog RSS feeds and receive all the updates in one place. Here’s a shot of my overflowing Reader with a few of the sites I subscribe to:

As a publisher you can use Google’s Feedburner service to manage your RSS feed.

Pros – Feedburner is pretty easy to configure and you can implement it with the help of a plugin. Feedburner also provides copy/paste code to place icons on your site to advertise your feed. Feedburner formats your feed cleanly so that it displays nicely in browsers (try looking at a raw RSS feed in Chrome….it’s unreadable) & feed readers and the subscribe options are clearly presented. You’ll also be able to get stats on the number of subscribers you have and the click activity on your feed.

How Do Themes & Plugins Help With SEO?

SEO, WordPress
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I recently wrote about the need for the website owner to take responsibility for SEO and not rely 100% on a theme or a plugin. Themes and plugins do of course have some benefits if you understand what it is they do, and what they cannot do.

The benefit of themes and plugins

‘SEO-friendly’ themes and SEO plugins present your content in such a way that it is easy for search engines to understand, determine the relevancy of, and navigate. So if you’ve targeted your content for specific keywords, the search engine will have no doubt what that piece of content is all about. The content and keyword research is up to you. No theme or plugin alone can make your site rank highly if your content is not valuable and targeted. Also, this all relates to on-site SEO, but ranking is also determined by off-site factors such as incoming links from other websites. Themes and plugins cannot help you with these off-site factors.

Simple WordPress Theme Tweaks – Online Webinar

We’re going to get intimate with your WordPress theme in the next webinar!

Simple WordPress Theme Tweaks
September 29th, 6pm – 7pm PST

to be rescheduled….

cost: $15 (hint, for discounts on future webinars, enter your email at the bottom of this page)

Ever clicked on the “Editor” menu and had the living daylights scared out of you by all that code?! Maybe you’ve come across a plugin that wanted you to insert some code into your theme and you were afraid you’d break your site?

Want to feel more in control of your WordPress theme files?

This is the webinar for you!

We’ll look under the hood of a WordPress theme and learn how to do some simple code manipulation. This will NOT turn you into a programmer!

WordCamp Los Angeles – Sept 11 – Recap

The 2nd WordCamp LA took place this past weekend and it was a blast. There was much to be learned, and lots of friendly WordPress geeks and fans to mingle with. I wrote a recap for WPCandy.com which you can…

Don’t Leave Your SEO To A Theme or a Plugin

SEO

In the WordPress community, especially amongst new users, a lot of emphasis seems to be placed on themes and plugins as crucial factors in SEO. Theme companies compete for bragging rights on whose is the most ‘SEO-friendly’ while website owners are frustrated that they are not getting the search engine traffic they expected despite having such-and-such theme and an SEO plugin.

The reality is that these things are helpful, but only if you have the right content.

Themes and plugins are like well-written directions to a party (your content). They help your guests (search engine bots) find your site’s content, but whether or the not the party rocks depends on what they find when they arrive, and that responsibility lands squarely in your, the website owner’s, lap.

Even the most SEO-tweaked theme and fine-tuned plugin cannot make your site rank highly if your content is not relevant and targeted for your audience.

Social Media and Online Marketing News Roundup – Week of 8/23

Perhaps the biggest news this week in the online world is that Seth Godin announced he is giving up on traditional book publishing and is going all-digital. Seth has the following and the leverage to make this an exciting development for digital publishing. This could be a big step in mainstreaming electronic publishing and changing the consumption of “books.” He has published 12 bestsellers in the traditional manner, so it’s possible he will be the reason some consumers start buying digital products.