Hey everyone! I wanted to write a quick post to let you know that I just found quite a few valid comments that were automatically marked as SPAM by Akismet. In the past I haven’t really paid much attention to the SPAM folder because there were so many. I would just delete them all. If your valid comment never made it on here, then I apologize. I don’t filter the comments left here for anything other than SPAM. Meaning, if you strongly disagree with anything I write about, then I appreciate your feedback too. So don’t hesitate to sharing your thoughts either way.
Anyway, I just approved the valid comments that hadn’t been deleted from the SPAM folder yet, and apologize if I don’t get a chance to respond to all of those comments.
Ironically, my last blog post was a recommendation to post to your blog regularly – at least once a week – and yet it has been over a week since my last blog post. What’s up with not taking my own advice?! I’m just glad I called myself out before someone else did.
I’m primarily a one person business, and when I get busy, blogging is the first thing to go. Not that I think it is very wise to let it slip, but writing was never my strong point, so it is so easy to. Plus this website doesn’t make me any money.
My experience makes me extremely suspicious of other one-man businesses who claim to be the best in their industry, while blogging ever single day about how smart they are. Do these people actually have any clients, or do they just have a bit book smarts and a whole bunch of time to blog?
Or.. is it actually a lot easier than I’m making it out to be?
Lately I’ve been rather busy with appointments, proposals and client work. So I’ve had a difficult time finding time to post to this blog regularly. Which is a good thing actually. However, I was really starting to see some momentum here, and it’s kind of a bummer to watch both Google traffic and return visitors drop off so quickly.
I have found you need to post to your blog at least once a week to gain some momentum in the right direction, and twice a week is almost twice as good. For some blogs posting daily works, but I don’t particularly like to subscribe to blogs that post daily because I like reading from several different sources throughout the week, and only like to read one 3rd-party blog post daily. When one blog takes up my entire RSS feedreader inbox I end up deleting them. But that is just my preference. With that in mind however, I don’t want to want to post to this blog more than I’d want to read it.
The bottom line: If you are trying to grow a blog quickly, then I recommend you post to it a minimum of twice a week. This helps feed the googlebot and keeping it coming back for more, as well and delivering frequently updated content to your readers. I.E., more search traffic and more return visitors.
Have you ever wondered how to limit the number of tags displayed in the sidebar when using the default tag cloud widget in WordPress?
The default tag limit is fairly large; 45 tags in the latest version of WordPress. That can definitely affect your PageRank flow and link-to-text ratio some. A bit more useful on smaller blogs with less PageRank to spread around, however the net affect can still be helpful on high authority blogs.
I don’t actually use post tags on this blog (for no specific reason), but when I was trying to figure it out for another one of my blogs I thought for sure there would be a ton of how-tos on this issue considering Google Suggest displayed limit tag cloud wordpress in the search box as I typed it in. Nevertheless, I didn’t find good information.
I ended up having to figure it out by testing the code myself since I already new where to limit the font-size in the tag cloud, I figured it had to be close. Close it was, actually on the same line of code.
Find this file yourdomain.com/wp-includes/category-template.php and download it to your local machine using ftp or a similar protocol.
Change the 45 to equal the desired number of tags. As of this post I am using the most recent version of WordPress which is WordPress version 2.8.6.
After backing up your live file, just upload the modified category-template.php file back to your web server. Now the desired number of tags should be displayed.
Unfortunately, It appears you have to fix this every time you update WordPress, that is, unless anyone knows of a better way to do it?
Have you ever wondered why your blog posts immediately show up in Google then go away the very next day or shortly afterward, and then reappears on some random day? I did too, until I figured out what was going on.
Each time I posted to my blog, the new blog post would show up in Google right away, disappear shortly afterward, then later appear again. After watching this closely for several months I noticed it always seemed to reappear shortly after I made a newer blog post. Unable to explain the phenomena with any certainty, I decided to try a few tests.
One thing that immediately popped into my mind was the fact that the WordPress template I was using had enclosed all of the blog post titles in <H1> tags on my home page. Since I have my blog set to show a summary of the ten most recent blog posts, that meant there were ten H1 tags on my blog’s home page. Well any SEO will surely tell you that’s bad optimizing, and that you should use only one H1 tag per page. That’s SEO 101! Yes, yes, it was already on my to-do list so don’t ask.
Anyway, in my case the most recent blog post is at the top, and that is also my very first H1 tag. So, I had identically phrased and prominent H1 tags on two separate pages along with most of the page text before and some of the text immediately afterward. I thought maybe once Google identified the matching H1 tags on multiple pages, perhaps Google was marking them as identical, dropping the newer page and keeping the more popular, established one, i.e., the one with more PageRank.
Sure enough, after I enclosed all of the post titles on my home page with an H2 tag rather than H1 tags, but still leaving the H1 tags on the single blog post pages, my blog post disappearing trick quickly went away.
Now my blog posts show up in Google’s index and they never go away. At least not like this anyway…
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Did you know, by default, your new WordPress installation is not visible to the search engines? Yep it’s true!
Ironically, 
