Blog

How To Install WordPress Fast

August 21, 2011 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

Well, back to the basics. With so many people and business owners still getting on the bandwagon of WordPress and wanting to know how to get started with the installation process, I decided to write a quick post with the starting steps.

Before we get into it all I want to give you my honest opinion of WordPress if you are wondering if you should use wordpress for your website. Wordpress powers around 25 million website and about 22% of all websites run wordpress for their CRM for their personal blog or business website. With a huge community comes huge community support.

There is WordPress.com and WordPress.org. The difference between the two is that WordPress.com is hosted on their servers and WordPress.org is hosted on your own server. I highly recommend using WordPress.org and hosting all the files on your own server. It is much easier than it sounds.

There are great developers and supporters of WordPress that make the CRM easy to use and also make it easy to customize and integrate with other websites and services. It is kind of like the iPad and iPhone. The actual iPad and iPhone systems are great, but it is the community and apps that make Apple products great. Same goes [Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: wordpress, wordpress installation, wordpress tutorials, wpthink

Perfect Landing Page Conversion

October 27, 2011 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

how to make a landing page

Filed Under: Lead Generation

Steve Jobs Dies – A Visionary Passing

October 5, 2011 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

Steve jobs passed away today at the age of 56 leaving a legacy at apple. See the video and post below for more.

Steve Jobs, the visionary in the black turtleneck who co-founded Apple in a Silicon Valley garage, built it into the world’s leading tech company and led a mobile-computing revolution with wildly popular devices such as the iPhone, died Wednesday. He was 56.

The hard-driving executive pioneered the concept of the personal computer and of navigating them by clicking onscreen images with a mouse. In more recent years, he introduced the iPod portable music player, the iPhone and the iPad tablet — all of which changed how we consume content in the digital age.

Fortune: Ten ways Steve Jobs changed the world

His friends and Apple fans on Wednesday night mourned the passing of a tech titan.

“Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives,” Apple said in a statement. “The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.”

See reactions from Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and many others

More than one pundit, praising Jobs’ ability to transform entire industries with his inventions, called him a modern-day Leonardo Da Vinci.

“Steve Jobs is one of the great innovators in the history of modern capitalism,” New York Times columnist Joe Nocera said in August. “His intuition has been phenomenal over the years.”

via Steve Jobs, Apple founder, dies – CNN.com.

Filed Under: Featured

Google AdWords Puts More Weight on Relevance, Landing Page Quality – Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

October 5, 2011 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

It is happening constantly and will continue to to evolve. Quality of your content when it comes to SEO and PPC will continue to drive success. The user experience is the most important factor in the future of search engine marketing

How does the user like and interact with your page? Check out the article published today by Search Engine Watch.

Google is rolling out updates to how the AdWords quality score is determined and how much impact that score has on the ad’s ranking. These changes were first tested in Brazil, Spain, Portugal, and portions of Latin America.

What’s Changing

The changes, which were first implemented on a limited scale in August, increase the weight given to keyword relevance and landing page quality when it comes to determining the quality score for a page. These two factors will also have a greater impact on how ads are ranked on the Google SERP.

Google stated that, “As the changes roll out, some campaigns will see variation in keyword Quality Scores and typical ad position. Within a couple weeks, things should stabilize and we expect most campaigns will not see a significant change in overall performance.” Google has not released figures for the portion of campaigns that will likely be affected or exact how substantial the AdRank and quality score changes will be.

Google officially announced the impending global spread of the changes on October 3rd, stating that all AdWords users should see the changes “over the coming weeks.” This means that October is the time for making fixes to exact match keyword relevance and landing page quality.

via Google AdWords Puts More Weight on Relevance, Landing Page Quality – Search Engine Watch (#SEW).

Filed Under: Adwords

Google Earth Reaches One Billion Downloads | Search Engine Journal

October 5, 2011 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

Earlier today, Google announced that Google Earth has been downloaded one billion times since it was released in 2005. This number, which includes desktop clients, mobile apps, and the Google Earth plug in, makes Google Earth one of the most downloaded applications of all time. To emphasize the enormity of the number one billion, the post pointed out that a billion hours ago humans were still living in the Stone Age and a billion minutes ago the Roman Empire was the dominant world power.

Google Earth and Maps vice president of engineering Brian McClendon said the following of the one billion downloads achievement:

via Google Earth Reaches One Billion Downloads | Search Engine Journal.

Filed Under: Google

Is SEO Worth The Investment For Your Business?

September 12, 2011 By Ben Janke 2 Comments

First things first. When it comes to SEO, most businesses don’t have a fair expectation of time frames and effort go into search engine optimization. This unfair expectation stems from not only the business but from the SEO specialist not getting accurate time frames for SEO success. Right up front, it is important to know which keywords you are going for and also the keyword difficulty of each keyword seeing get a reasonable expectation of success and time frames for success.

Going After One Keyword

One mistake that I often see with business starting out with their SEO campaignsis the fact that they sometimes just go after one keyword. Going after the one major keyword for your industry or locality and obtaining a [Read more...]

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization

Steve Jobs Resigns Tim Cook New CEO

August 24, 2011 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

A Steve Jobs announced today that he is sitting down as the CEO of Apple. Just turn the reins over to Tim Cook as the new CEO of Apple. Steve Jobs will remain on the Apple team as a chairman who is not leaving completely and will obviously have say in where Apple goes from here.

It is pure speculation this point why Steve Jobs has stepped down and resigned as CEO of Apple, but health concerns from his past may be the reason.

Explain read below for the full text of Steve Jobs letter that he presented to the board which sites that he is unable to fulfill all of his “duties and expectations”.

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple”s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come. I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple”s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

How will Steve Jobs resignation affect Apple stock?

We will see tomorrow what will happen to Apple stock from Steve’s resignation and hopefully business huge drop being that Steve Jobs has been the head and face company so for so many years and is a huge reason why Apple has been since so successful. One thing is for sure, Apple is here to stay and Steve Jobs will continue to play a role in the company thedirection of it’s future.

Filed Under: TapLead Breaking News Tagged With: apple, steve jobs

WordPress vs Tumblr vs Blogger – Favorite Blogging System

August 23, 2011 By Ben Janke 2 Comments

I see it all over Twitter. What should I use for my website. Wordpress, Tumblr, Blogger? I have even seen Weebly thrown in there.

Well, I have an answer for you. Buy maybe not what you are thinking. None of the above. Kind of.

Most people know about WordPress.com, but don’t know what WordPress.org is. They are almost the same thing except, with WordPress.org you install the files onto your own server. It only takes about 30 seconds to install and only about $4 per month.

Why WordPress.org instead of WordPress.com?

When you host the WordPress files on your own server, you pretty much take ownership of your site. You also open up access to a huge variety of premier tools that you can use to get more traffic and build a following. Don’t get me wrong, I do like WordPress.com and even Blogger, Tumblr, and Weebly for that matter, but when you commit to anything besides WordPress.org, you are locking yourself in a box for the future growth of your website.

With “self-hosted” WordPress, you get access to premium theme developers at StudioPress with the Copyblogger team and Brian Gardner and ThemeForest and the ability to change take your site anywhere you want in the future when it comes to time-saving plugins and shortcuts. (StudioPress does a few themes that work on WordPress.com) WordPress is now reported to run 22% of the websites online (.com and .org) and with that many users comes a huge development community eager to make your site easier and more powerful.

WordPress Plugins To Power Up Your Site

Let me give you some examples of what you can use with your new wordpress site that are unavailable with the other options.

You can use wishlist Member, developed by Stu McLaren and team, to turn your website into an easy to run membership website where you can give members or paying members access to premium content. This is great for being able to segment and control your content for different users.

If you want to create landing pages and squeeze pages, you can easily install a plugin called Premise that allows you to control that way your page look on a page by page basis. You can hide the navigation bar, hide the header, change the header, hide the sidebars, add custom graphics and webforms and more with Premise. It was developed by the CopyBlogger team and Brian Clark.

You can set up another installation of wordpress and run an entire theme that is set up for product launches, squeeze pages, and landing pages called OptimizePress.

If you want to automate things on your site a bit (with careful consideration) you can use WProbot to add feeds and videos to your site automatically. (Don’t add duplicate content to your website) . You could use this to initiate content and then add your own unique content to it as well.

These are just a few examples of what you are missing out on when it comes to Tumblr, Blogger, Weebly, and WordPress.com installations.

Verdict of WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger

WordPress wins for sure. I have used all of them and found that anything but a self-hosted site will find most people feeling boxed in after a while and they might not give you the flexibility that you want or need. Just pick up your own hosting pack at Hostgator and you will be off and running quickly. If you need help, check out http://wpthink.com for video tutorials on setting up your own WordPress install.

If you have any other questions on the subject, enter them in the comments section below and we would be happy to help.

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: blogger, hosting, tumblr, weebly, wordpress

Bing SEO Rules of Engagement

August 23, 2011 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

Even SEO’s having been trying to keep up with how to SEO on Bing. If you look at your rankings on Google vs Bing you will see that doing SEO on each it a bit different at this point.

The ultimate goal for both Bing and Google is to have a quality experience for their users. If you are searching for “How to make waffles” then they want to deliver the absolute best information possible to help you with your query. If they don’t deliver, they will lose users when someone does it better.

Bing put out it’s rules of engagement so to speak when it comes to doing SEO on Bing.com. Read and follow carefully when you are adding content to your site and put the most emphasis on uniquness and quality.

How To SEO on Bing

Make sure your site is crawlable by using an XML sitemap, a robots.txt file, and well-structured on-site navigation.
Improve your site structure by using an HTML sitemap and linking to trusted sources both within your site and outside of it.
Create a solid content hierarchy by doing basic keyword research and avoiding placement of your content in rich media such as Silverlight and Flash.
Use a short meta title that has fewer than 65 characters and that’s unique to each page, and try to include the targeted keyword toward the beginning of that title.
Use a unique meta description tag.
Create quality content (following the guidelines Bing provided earlier).
When you build links, focus on keyword-relevant anchor tags that link back to quality content on your page.
Create an RSS feed.
Use schema.org markup.
Create a user interface that prioritizes the user experiences; the search perspective on things like page load time aren’t as important as how the user responds.
Encourage social sharing with the use of social buttons.
Don’t cloak your website.
Don’t use link farms.
Don’t engage in three-way linking.
Don’t duplicate content.
Don’t use auto-following on the social front.
Don’t use thin content.
Don’t buy links