If I woke up in the middle of the night 6 weeks ago, needing to go to the bathroom, I could barely walk. The pain in my feet was excruciating. Getting up in the morning was the same: in both cases, just in order to get out of the bedroom I had to lean my… . . . Read more

This is a guest post from Emma J Fox, of Pitstop Media. Most, if not all, SEO companies today include social media marketing in their SEO packages for clients. There’s no doubt that social media is already closely intertwined with Internet marketing and website optimisation. Social media sites have become the playing field where businesses… . . . Read more

This is a guest post from Tim Wilson at HostPapa. Web hosting is essential for anyone who wants to build their own website, and there are many providers that offer hosting services. Some provide a quality service – others, not so much. And, unfortunately, some companies blatantly cheat or mislead customers. This being the case… . . . Read more

I wrote back here about how to create a dual language website if you’re building a static HTML site. This time I’ll go through the process if you’re building your site on WordPress. Multi-Lingual Websites on WordPress With WordPress you have 3 options for creating a dual- or multi-language website: First option – two languages… . . . Read more

Living as an ex-pat in Hong Kong I’m often asked to create websites in dual languages (Chinese and English). Creating dual language functionality if you’re building a static HTML website is very straightforward. If you’re building them on WordPress you have to follow a different process but it’s still not difficult. I’ve covered the process… . . . Read more

For some years I’ve used and recommended the Login Lockdown plugin. It’s designed to protect your WordPress website from brute force attacks by locking out anyone who makes more than a specified number of unsuccessful log in attempts over a given period of time. However, Login Lockdown hasn’t been updated in nearly 3 years, which… . . . Read more

This is a guest post by Matt Carter of Matts Marketing Blog. In business, whether in the real world or the digital world, success requires a certain amount of adaptability when game-changing events occur. This was amply displayed recently in the digital world by the earth shattering effects of Google’s Panda update in the SEO… . . . Read more

Many versions ago Thesis introduced navigation menu controls that enabled us to easily customise the design of the nav menu, and include categories and external links. And then WordPress introduced menu controls that did the same, but did it better. None-the-less, I never bothered to switch to using the WordPress nav menu system because the… . . . Read more

This is a guest post from Christian Arno, of Lingo24. Most of us put a lot of effort into SEO for our content in English, but it’s every bit as important to get this right for your foreign-language content too. The good news is that the basics are the same in every language. Using the… . . . Read more

This is a guest post by Ashlee McCullen, a staff writer on Apron Addicts. I’m sometimes surprised at the sheer number of people I meet who blog or write for the web and yet don’t know HTML. While you don’t need to know web technologies in-depth to make money online, you’ll find that knowing at… . . . Read more

If you’re not able to see the changes you just made to your Thesis theme design and layout, the chances are you’ve forgotten to resume Design Mode. Design Mode was introduced in Thesis 1.8.4. It’s a limited form of minification because it combines the style.css, layout.css and custom.css files into one in order to speed… . . . Read more

I read two articles recently that reminded me of some important lessons. The first one recounts several examples of people who have been the victims of boiler room scams. Internet Marketing websites captured the victims’ contact details by offering eBooks or CD’s on how to make money online, and then turned their details over to… . . . Read more

In an article back here I made the case that not all websites need a mobile version. My point was that the growth of tablets made the requirement for a mobile version less important. Tablets can render the full version of a website as quickly and easily as a laptop or desktop, particularly now with… . . . Read more

With the ever increasing emphasis on quality-of-content in the search engines’ algorithms, making sure you update or clear out articles which are either out of date or of little value is important. So I spent a lot of time recently reviewing and either updating or trashing old articles on this site. I wrote back here… . . . Read more

This post is part of a series on how to promote your website for free. Here are the links to the other articles in the series: Promote your site for free: on-site SEOPromote your site for free: off-site SEOPromote your site for free: forum marketing In the article on off-site SEO I touched on social… . . . Read more

This post is part of a series on how to promote your website for free. Here are the links to the other articles in the series: Promote your site for free: on-site SEO Promote your site for free: off-site SEO Promote your site for free: social media marketing Last time, when I covered off-site SEO… . . . Read more

This post is part of a series on how to promote your website for free. Here are the links to the other articles in the series: Promote your site for free: on-site SEO for WordPress-based sitesPromote your site for free: forum marketingPromote your site for free: social media marketing In the first of the series… . . . Read more

This post is part of a series on how to promote your website for free. Here are the links to the other articles in the series: Promote your site for free: off-site SEOPromote your site for free: forum marketingPromote your site for free: social media marketing This, the first in the series, addresses on-site Search… . . . Read more

If your customers aren’t paying you on time they’re costing you money. Worse, they may never pay you at all. Yet protecting yourself against slow or non-paying customers is not difficult – it just requires that you put a simple, logical process in place. Here’s the process I use: Lay down the ground rules at… . . . Read more

I’ve seen a rash of automated backlinking products being promoted recently, but the way they’re promoted and what they offer makes me angry. Google makes around 500 changes a year to its search algorithms (there were 40 in February alone). Its major focus is on eliminating abuse (particularly automated abuse) of any aspect of the… . . . Read more

I wrote back here about the benefits of using 301 redirects to both pretty-up and more easily manage your affiliate links. This video goes step-by-step through the process of setting up the new folder and creating the index.php file, complete with the redirect code you need. The actual redirect code, that you can grab and… . . . Read more

For some time now Google has taken website (or, rather, page) load-times into account when ranking pages in their search results. The reason is simple: fast page-load speeds give your visitors a better experience, and Google is all about improving web users’ experience. Because of this, I’m not surprised to see questions in the forums… . . . Read more

If you’re one of the millions who travel 2 hours to work each day and the same amount of time back, you’ve doubtless occasionally envied those who work from home. I certainly did. I’ve now worked at home for more than 2 years, and I love it. But it does require some self-imposed discipline that… . . . Read more

I love flying, but I hate travelling by air. The entire process becomes more unpleasant every year. So when I had to travel to the UK recently for a family emergency, I determined to use a different approach: instead of taking a direct flight with mediocre service and uncomfortable seats, I decided to break the… . . . Read more

I see an awful lot of bad advice in some of the forums I visit – advice that, at best, will deliver no benefit and at worst may be harmful. One such is on the question of keyword density, and the advice I see so often is to have a density of anywhere between 2%… . . . Read more

I spent some time analysing my Google Webmaster Tools crawl errors this week and tidied up some of those pesky 404’s that keep showing up. There was a time when I had zero 404 errors on this site, and very proud of it I was too. But my pride was misplaced. As this site has… . . . Read more

Since WordPress 3.3 was released last week I’ve seen an unusually high number of people asking why they should upgrade. The answer is simple, and threefold: To maintain or improve the security of your site To improve the performance of your site To improve the usability of your site Improve site security Hackers target older… . . . Read more

The higher the number of page-views-per-visit, the more engaged your readers are. And the more engaged they are the more easily you’ll be able to sell stuff from your site. But you know that already. The question is: how can you increase the number of page-views-per-visit? Here’s what I did recently: A while ago I… . . . Read more

This video is designed for people new to both WordPress and to working online. It covers the basic SEO details that you should fill in for each new WordPress post and page you write, in order to get more search engine traffic. I use the Thesis theme, so the screenshots are Thesis screens, but the… . . . Read more