Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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.
Have you ever visited a blog and noticed that every post has the same block of text before and/or after the post content?
For example, some bloggers include a message asking the reader to subscribe to an email newsletter or share the post they are reading on social media sites.
If you have a block of text that you’d like to display before and/or after the content of each blog post, all you have to do is edit your WordPress theme’s functions.php file and add one or both of the following code snippets at the bottom. This post will tell you how to do that. [Read more…]
Question from Brianna L.: I need your help, Rick. And I need it quick.
I woke up this morning to find several messages in my inbox telling me Google is reporting that my blog has been hacked.
I searched Google for my blog’s name and sure enough they’re showing this message with my site’s URLs in the search results:
“This site may be hacked.”
Then I checked my blog stats and found that the page views had dropped to almost nothing, literally overnight. They are usually in the thousands.
I carefully examined every page on my blog but I couldn’t find anything that resembles a hacked page.
After that I did a Google search and saw where someone was recommending a check for strange plugins that could be causing the problem. He said to look for plugins that I didn’t remember installing.
I checked the list of installed plugins but the only ones I found were the ones that I actually installed myself.
I have three questions for you: [Read more…]
Now that Google and other major search engines are taking page load times into consideration when ranking web pages in their search results, it’s more important than ever to make sure your blog pages load as quickly as possible.
There are a number of factors that affect how quickly a web page will load, but figuring out how to make the changes necessary to speed up a blog can be difficult in some cases. [Read more…]
Question from Kim W.: I have a WordPress blog and lots of people are leaving comments on my posts that contain links.
How can I prevent the URLs in those comments from automatically becoming active links?
I really don’t want hackers leaving links to malicious websites via comments on my blog posts!
Thanks for your help.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]