You’ve built a beautiful, custom site for your client leveraging WordPress’ unique capabilities. The client is ecstatic about their new site and the feedback they’re receiving from customers is positive. But what happens when your client looks to you to help boost their organic search rank? It’s important to be equipped with the top WordPress SEO skills and knowledge to build sustainable relationships with your clients. Out-of-the-box WordPress SEO functionality is definitely a debatable topic, so use these fundamental tips to help your clients rank higher in search engine results pages: Opti ..read more

You’re steadily publishing content on your business blog that you think is pretty great, and yet, no one other than your mom seems to be reading your articles. What gives? If you’re not seeing the traffic you think you ought to on your blog, there’s a good chance you’re making a few of the following errors. Not to worry; plenty of WordPress publishers make these mistakes, and they’re all completely remediable. You just need the cure. 1. Not Publishing a Steady Cadence of Content People are creatures of habit. They like it when a blog has a regular schedule of content they can check out. So if ..read more

You’re ready to kick off a year of fantastic content marketing in 2018… only the thought of the sheer number of blog posts, ebooks, and whitepapers you’re planning to create is making your eyes cross. Personally, I’m a fan of letting my content work for me rather than the other way around, which is why I love this content marketing strategy: Take a single blog post and leverage it to create multiple pieces of content. It’s that simple. You were expecting some sort of sleight of hand or magic? Sorry to disappoint. But if you apply this strategy to your content, you’ll waste less brainpower try ..read more

Introduction to Remarketing for Colleges and Universities “We all know the drill: Prospective students spend months painstakingly deliberating over which college they want to go to, visiting the websites of potential schools, and weighing up the pros and cons. For prospective students, college websites are a fantastic resource packed with information about everything from course information to financial aid. But if you’re a school trying to attract new students, the vast majority of people who visit your website are “drive-bys,” i.e., the 98% of people who visit a website for the first time an ..read more

Understanding the True Cost of Website Downtime Website downtime can be truly frustrating for both your business and customers. It can break a line of communication, leave both parties in the dark, and has the potential to impact your brand and your business in a variety of ways. If you’re unsure of the true cost of website downtime, we published an interesting post last year that discussed some of the various risks associated with a website that goes offline and downtime in general. Included in this list of potential risks are opportunity cost, lost productivity, damage to brand perception, a ..read more

WordPress category pages are the pages that list all the posts on your blog from a particular category. These pages give your readers a way to view all the posts on a certain topic or category in one place. However, depending on your chosen WordPress theme, these category pages don’t often include any original or useful information about the posts they contain. While it’s possible to edit the theme files in use on your website to create your own custom category pages, the free Enhanced Category Pages plugin gives you an easier way to customize and add your own content to these pages, effectiv ..read more

The benefits of expanding the scope of your blog are pretty self-explanatory: you expand the scope of your content, add new perspectives for your readers, build relationships with key influencers, build backlinks, and bring a wider audience to your blog through the writer’s existing followers. Keep your expectations reasonable One of the key mistakes many make when starting their guest post outreach is only looking at the biggest names in their industry. It is a great idea to follow and interact with them. However, your outreach efforts are better served by maintaining realistic expectations ..read more

I’ve talked a lot about security over the last few weeks. This week, though, I want to talk about another important website attribute: speed. For anyone who experienced 56k dial-up, you could be forgiven for thinking today’s super-fast broadband connections have solved the problem of website speed. After all, most websites load within a few seconds. We’ve become accustomed to lightning-quick websites, though, and this has made us more demanding than ever before. So let’s make this clear: speed matters. Why is it so important? Because Google loves fast websites. On more than a few occasions, t ..read more

If you work with WordPress regularly, the WordPress admin will feel like a second home — I know it does for me, at least. Although the default design, layout, and settings work exceptionally well, it’s possible to make small tweaks to the WordPress admin to help you work more efficiently. Today, I want to share four simple tips for customizing the WordPress admin. Admin Color Scheme Personally, I’m a big fan of the WordPress admin’s appearance. In WordPress 3.8, the admin interface was given a significant overhaul, and much of what we see today still remains — though a slightly different colo ..read more

While explaining how it works is a little more difficult, the essence of what a WordPress Reverse Proxy does is simple. It allows your WordPress site to be viewed through another domain, so that your visitors have no idea they’re on a different site or system. For example, let’s say you have a WordPress blog at MyAwesomeBlog.com. But you want to consolidate your blog with your main site, MegaSite.com. A WordPress Reverse Proxy will allow your blog to show up as something like MegaSite.com/Blog. To put it in more technical terms, a reverse proxy serves as a middleman that forwards requests fro ..read more