A Good Time is Blog Time

Matt Cutts is the head of anti-spam at Google and knows an awful lot about what Google consider to be spam versus what Google considers to be high quality content that they want to return in search results. Turns out that he is also a big fan of WordPress despite WordPress being a direct competitor to Google’s own Blogger platform.

It just goes to show that class stands out, I have always waxed lyrical about the benefits of WordPress and of having your own domain name and hosting using the WordPress platform. So it is nice to hear that one or two big wigs in the world of the Internet endorse that opinion, or at least the using WordPress part of it. More than that, Matt goes on to discuss in broad terms many of the factors he considers contribute to a decent, high quality website or blog and, perhaps more importantly, where many people make some significant errors in their approach to SEO (search engine optimization). The video gives an overview of important insights into the topic of Google DO’s and Google DON’Ts that I recently wrote about in a book on that subject.

I spent quite a bit of time researching both what Google recommend and also what they condemn so that I could write the book. So I go into what Matt discusses in a lot more detail than he has on this video but it is, all the same, quite a good overview and summary of some of the main points. He also goes on to recommend what actions you can take, through the use of plugins, to make a WordPress blog safe from spammers and hackers. So overall a pretty useful video if you have 45 minutes or so spare.

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What is a Responsive Layout Design?

I would imagine there are quite a lot of people who have no idea what a responsive layout design is? Well in a word, it is a website design that automatically adjusts to suit the screen size it is being viewed on.

This is a new approach to web design that has been developed because of the growing need to support, not just Desktop PC’s and Notebooks, but also a growing array of different Smartphones and Tablets that have come onto the market and are being used more and more to access the Internet. The market for desktops and notebooks is actually on decline as the world seems to be adopting mobile technology in preference.

It can be very frustrating for someone trying to access the Internet with a mobile device and encountering website designs that were clearly done on the basis they would be viewed using a standard PC or Notebook interface. Some steps were taken to try and ease the problem for owners of mobile technology in the form of .mobi websites that were effectively copies of primary websites but with mobile technology in mind. It isn’t actually that long ago that mobile friendly websites were the preferred solution for mobile technology, but that mindset has moved onto websites that are all device friendly. The main differentiation being that the user only needs one address to view the same information on any device. It sort of makes sense when you think about it, both from the site owner and the site visitor perspective.

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The popularity of Twitter has simply been growing at a phenomenal rate. As per Econsultancy’s report, Twitter to date has more than 75 million users all across the world, with more than 15 million active users. You can now see people using it for business networking and promotion purposes. As Google and other search engines are, at their own admission, taking more notice of social site profiles, optimizing your Twitter profile, especially in the context of business promotion and marketing, is important. By optimizing your Twitter profile page, you can build up natural links and thus generate a decent amount of traffic for your site from all the popular search engines. So if you have been considering the potential of these benefits and have planned to optimize your Twitter page to help achieve effective search engine results, you may be interested in some smart optimization tips for your business. Taking these steps could help provide you with quality links that will spread brand awareness among your target audience. So, let’s check out some tips for optimizing your Twitter profile:

It seems that over time spammers can get more prolific at both registering as users on your blog and leaving multiples of spammed comments on various posts that you have published. Typically the comments are highly flattering, they tell you how wonderful you are as a blog writer, what a gorgeous layout your blog has, how wonderful it is that it loads so quickly and so on. Also if you see the word ‘Fastidious’ you may as well interpret that as someone shouting at you, I am a spammer and I have just tried to get a free link to one of my crappy websites that no one has the remotest interest in.

Comment & User Registration Spam

Because that is nearly always what they are trying to do, spam comments that arrive in your spam list by the hundreds or even thousands are simply a quantity over quality attempt to lift the page rank of a website up artificially. Here are a few other reasons why spammers leave comments and why they register on your blog: Read the rest of this entry »

Call it what you want, passive income, residual income or sustainable income. They all essentially mean the same thing, creating an income that continues to provide a revenue stream once you have completed the initial task without you having to put more time or effort into it.

In its purest form it means you do the work once and it pays you forever; something that is pretty much every blogger’s dream. But the big question is whether that scenario actually exists for anyone in reality, are there really people out there that can do a piece of work and then sit back and reap the rewards forever without ever having to lift a finger again?

I can think of a few, but I have to warn you, they are the exception rather than the rule. Here are a couple of examples:

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