Blogging Tips Archives - Page 3 of 29

How to quickly change a block of text (or code) that appears on every post and page of your WordPress blog

Posted on August 23, 2019

If you have a blog there will likely come a time when you need to change some block of text or PHP code that’s contained on every post and page.

A while back I enabled TLS encryption on this very blog, and one very important step in that process was changing all the URL references in the database from http:// to https:// to force WordPress to display the secure version of each post/page.

I could have made those changes manually but it would have been a long, drawn-out process and chances are I would have made a serious mistake along the way.

And as you probably know, ANY mistake can be serious when you’re dealing with your WordPress database.

Luckily, I found an easy way to quickly make that critical global change (plus a couple of other minor changes) on over 3,000 posts/pages in one fell swoop! [Read more…]

How well is your blog ranking in Google’s search results? Find out right now!

Posted on August 20, 2019

If you’re a blogger you surely know how important it is for your blog posts to rank well in Google.

After all, traffic is the engine that drives all success in blogging, and there’s simply no better source of traffic than Google’s organic search results.

Most bloggers check their Google rankings by typing the keywords and key phrases they’re trying to rank for into Google’s search box and then scanning the list of search results to see where their blog posts show up.

If all is well they’ll find one of their blog’s posts listed on the first page. And if all is REALLY well their post will be in the number one position!

That’s indeed a tried-and-true method for discovering your blog’s Google rankings, but it can be quite tedious and time-consuming if you have a lot of search terms you want to check.

And it’s even worse if very few of your target search terms are showing up on page one of the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) since you’ll have to slog through page after page of the SERPS until you find where your URL is ranked.

[Read more…]

How to give any WordPress post or page an expiration date

Posted on August 3, 2019

If you write a blog, there are probably times when it would be nice to be able to give a blog post or page an expiration date.

For example, lets say you write a post featuring a special you’ll be running for a limited time. Wouldn’t it be rather handy to be able to have the post automatically expire at the same time the offer does?

All of my blogs run on the WordPress platform, and while WordPress doesn’t have a post/page expiration feature built in, a wonderful plugin called Post Expirator that adds that option to both the “Add New Post” and “Edit Post” admin pages. [Read more…]

How to quickly change all your WordPress blog’s URLS from ‘http’ to ‘https’ after enabling SSL encryption

Posted on July 28, 2019

If you’re a blogger you probably know that securing your blog with SSL encryption is now a must if you want your blog to succeed, for these reasons:

1 – Google has now started giving preference to SSL secure https pages in their search results.

That means all other things being equal, pages that have URLs that begin with https will rank higher than pages that begin with http.

Google has also begun displaying the URL’s of encrypted pages in their search results. That means it won’t be long before many searchers will simply skip over non-secure pages and visit the next available secure page instead. [Read more…]

Two easy ways to make your WordPress blog mobile friendly (and why you should do it)

Posted on July 25, 2019

Are you a blogger who uses WordPress to power your blog?

If so, you should know that it’s now more important than ever for your blog to be mobile friendly if you want to attract visitors to it and keep them there after they arrive.

According to Google, there are now more people accessing the Internet via mobile devices than with traditional laptop and desktop computers.

For this reason Google is now using a mobile-first indexing scheme, which basically means they’ll use the mobile versions of your blog’s pages as the primary pages when determining where those pages will fall within the search engine results pages (SERPS) for any relevant search terms.

If your blog doesn’t yet have mobile pages (i.e. it isn’t mobile friendly), pages from other blogs and websites will be given preference over yours in the SERPS if all other ranking factors are more or less equal. [Read more…]