Coaching For Success
dan
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Posts by dan
Make Your Web Site Come Alive With WordPress Plugins
Nov 12th
The popularity of blogging has practically gone through the roof, with everybody from kids to internet businesses blogging about everything under the sun. In fact, if you have an internet business that you aren’t blogging about, then your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts could be suffering, because having a blog is regarded as one of the major components of a well-rounded search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy.
Many people and companies use blogging for e-commerce purposes, whether through affiliate agreements, digital merchandising, services or actual physical products, but, according to Technorati, very few are actually making money, with a full 72% regarded as hobbyists making no money at all.
Spruce Up Your Blog
If your blog’s conversion numbers aren’t all they could be (and a conversion could be the action of clicking through to your company’s main web site, not just making a purchase), it could be that you need to make your blog a bit more snazzy.
A lot of bloggers use WordPress as their platform of choice due to its flexibility and expandability which comes from the ability to incorporate widgets and plugins into a blog, giving a once boring blog the appearance of the inside of a Las Vegas casino.
Grab These Plugins
Here are some plugins that are a bit more unique and can perform a complete transformation of your current blog into something virtually irresistible.
1. WP-Cumulus
When you first encounter this plugin, you may think you’re dealing with a custom-built widget, but that’s not the case. All the more reason to try it out; it uses Flash video to rotate your site’s categories and tags, all in 3D. So stimulating visually and guaranteed to mesmerise your visitors.
2. Sexy Bookmarks
What a great name for something as mundane sounding as a plugin. And the good news is, it lives up to its billing. It allows visitors to syndicate the content of your site to more than 50 portals and allows sharing via RSS feed and e-mail, all done very elegantly and economically. Another really sexy feature is the massive amount of customisation options available.
3. Explanatory Dictionary
This plugin gets rid of the need for inline text ads by providing explanations of words or phrases that may be hard to understand for the average visitor. You can use this on your site to provide your visitors with more information while avoiding the danger of information overload.
4. Custom Login Page
Make your login page stand out from others with this plugin, which allows you to change the colour and background image of your login form, the background image of your site’s login page, the primary image of your login page and you can even add customised CSS. It all sounds a bit tricky, but the great news is that you’re able to make all the changes using a simple interface, so you don’t have to be a super programmer to take advantage of this plugin.
5. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam
Has your blog been the victim of spammers posting rogue comment blasts? Even if you haven’t, you’ve probably heard the horror stories about the effects of spam on web sites and know that it’s something to be avoided. This plugin helps you do just that by allowing you to add CAPTCHA to any or all forms on your blog, including your comment form, while still allowing trackbacks and pingbacks. It can also be hidden from administrators and users who are logged in.
Whatever the overall goal of your internet business, having a blog that converts visitors to get the results you want is essential, so anything you can do to make your blog stand out from the crowd will be helpful.
To turn your blog into a veritable conversion machine, contact a UK internet business consultant for help implementing the above plugins and more WordPress options.
Don’t Let The Visual Web Revolution Leave You Behind
Oct 30th
Is your internet business in position to take advantage of the forthcoming visual web revolution? “Visual web revolution? What visual web revolution?”, we hear you ask. That’s a reasonable question, but it’s one you’d be advised not to spend too much time pondering, otherwise that self-same revolution may have passed you by, along with all its accompanying financial benefits.
What’s The “Visual Web Revolution”?
According to Google, by 2015, display advertising will be a $5 billion industry. At the same time Yahoo! continues to push display advertising, having experienced an increase of 17 percent in its third quarter, and insists that it continues to be dedicated to the medium, while its merger with Bing will undoubtedly help increase momentum. Sharing photos has been made easy, fun and interactive thanks to social networking and sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.
And let’s not forget online video, which is being watched in record numbers these days. Just look at the numbers – they make for pretty incredible reading. In September 2010, 175 million users in the U.S. alone watched online video, averaging 14.4 hours per user, and accounting for an astounding 83.9 percent of the total internet population of the U.S. This according to comScore, which also reported that, during that same month, viewing sessions topped a staggering 5.3 billion.
On top of that, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported an increase in online video advertising of 65 percent between the second quarter of 2009 and the second quarter of 2010.
Obviously, the consumption of online videos is increasing – and rapidly – as is advertising and related expenditure. But, that’s not all….
Shop Through Interactive Photographs
NPR recently highlighted a story featuring 2 companies that facilitate the ability for businesses to make money from photos. The companies in question, GumGum and Pixazza, have developed systems that analyse items that are found in a photo, such as clothing, and finds related products on the internet. For example, using these systems a user can click on a shirt in a photograph and go shopping for shirts. The future looks bright for interactive imaging, with Google being a firm believer, having invested substantially in Pixazza.
In addition, in a project spearheaded by Brand Affinity Technologies and Pepsico and that’s still in its experimental stages, photographs are being turned into apps, so that, when a user hovers their mouse over a photo, additional content, such as news stories, YouTube videos, tweets, etc., can be accessed through apps that are made available to the user. What makes this even better is that the additional content is displayed on the same screen on which the photo is displayed, keeping the site front and centre in the user’s sight, providing even more monetisation and brand exposure opportunities.
Internet Advertising Becomes Ubiquitous
How about internet advertising on the television in your living room? Yes, it’s coming, and maybe quicker than you think. Amongst others, Samsung is preparing to launch “smart TVs”, which are televisions pre-loaded with apps such as photo sharing apps, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., along with all the content-related advertising. All right there in your living room, in front of a captive audience – a marketer’s dream come true!
Another part of the visual web, and one that’s set to blast off into the stratosphere, is the iPad and all the tablet devices about to be launched by competitors. These devices work through touch screens that are relatively small and that have been designed to optimise the display of videos and photos with amazing clarity.
When all the foregoing is put together, you end up with a web experience that’s becoming more colourful, more entertaining, brighter and full of motion, amounting to an online visual revolution. And the question is, is your internet business prepared to take advantage of this revolution – a revolution that’s not on its way but which is actually taking place right now?
To take full advantage of the visual web revolution, consult a UK internet business coach, who will work with you to make sure your web site is ready to make the most of this amazing window of opportunity.
1 Tip and 3 Steps to Better Business SEO
Jun 23rd
The Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) process starts with choosing the right landing page for your keyword to ensure that you try to rank well for that keyword. Many people get this wrong. What they attempt to do is start with the keyword and then choose the page it should land on after, if they even both to do this at all, worst still is the belief that optimising only the homepage for your site will be enough.
It is important to choose your landing page for a specific keyword first as then you help Google and other search engines find you and rank you in most cases quicker and higher than you would normally be if you had chosen the incorrect landing page. Basically you need to find a way to quickly see what Google sees as relevant, so the tips i am going to give you next will help.
To help you choose the right landing page from your business website for a particular keyword use the Google search engine and type in the follow search term query :site:yourwebsite.com keyword phrase, i.e. Site:theinternetbusinesscoach.co.uk business coaching.
This Example Shows The Results of Site Query Function in Google
You will see results like those in the image on your right, ignore the paid results in yellow. The pages listed from your site are pages that Google considers to be relevant for the keyword you have chosen. Once you have chosen the correct landing page for the keyword you can then begin the task of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Below is a brief guide of the three steps of optimising your business website.
Step One – Optimise your chosen landing page – this is known as on page/site SEO.
Always use your keyword in the Title Tag (no longer than 70 characters), in your Meta Description (end within 156 characters). Also use your keyword in your h1 tag if you have one, in the page’s text-based body content at least twice. On pages with more than 500 words make sure that your keyword density is at least 2% and evenly distributed throughout the landing page.
Step Two – Internal Off-Page SEO
This is where you look for additional pages on your site that can be optimised for the same keyword. Again go back to all the pages you have found in the site query we did early to help you, once you have chosen these pages you need to maximise the link
relevance sent to the landing page by using your keyword in that page’ Title and Meta Description. Next you need to ensure you use the keyword within the non-hyperlinked body content, and then hyperlinking at least one instance of the keyword phrase to the main landing page you have just optimised.
Vary your anchor text going to your main landing page by using small variations in the keyword you have used to maximise the number of internal links to the main landing page i.e. an example of variation in a term is the word coach; you could use coaches or coaching as variations. If you wish you can create more pages to help support your main landing page if you wish.
Step Three – External Off-Page SEO (Link Building)
This is the big one that people chase and many do first rather than last because this way you get the desired effect from your on page optimisation. This step is probably the toughest of the three as you have to determine how to make your content more link fiendly to other sites in order to develop natural links. This is where research of your competition will help you to determine who to link to and how to best get them to link to you, remember however that quantity is not the same as quality,it is far better to have ten high quality links to your site than one hundred poor quality ones, look for sites that deal with the topic for your main landing page’ keyword.
Hopefully this one tip and three steps will help you improve your business’ on and off page Search Engine Optimisation. If you like this article please share or link to us using do follow and put a credit back to http://www.theinternetbusinesscoach.co.uk/blog
