Getting Spammed from Your Contact Form Recently?

Are you starting to get spammed through your website contact form again? You are not alone. Literally millions of people have been receiving heavy doses of spam this week. The problem is that Contact Form 7, a form used by millions of people within their WordPress installations, has stopped working with Google ReCaptcha V2. When you log in, you get an alert to change your site keys to reCaptcha V3, a version that is supposed to work in the background. The problem is, spam is still getting through.

I have searched the web and have found many complaints but no answers from WordPress. I suppose the best thing to do to save time/money at this juncture is to wait and see of they sort this out and tighten up the security. Continue reading →

Single Page Optimization

There is not point in having a very optimized page that is within a website which is itself not optimized. Google would not see this page as the “single great apple in a basket of rotten apples”, rather, they would just see it as a basket of rotten apples. With that said, I am going to discuss the proper optimization of a single page.

Industry practices in this matter change all the time as Google itself changes. It is important to stay updated on all the algorithm changes at Google by reading their various blogs. Continue reading →

Be Careful, Even the Unsubscribe Button May be a Phishing Trick

By now you probably have become pretty good at spotting a phishing or “spoof” email. The email looks a bit off right? Those are the easy ones. But phishers and scammers are getting better at their phishing emails.

Lately we have been seeing a new wave of emails where they take an existing email from the actual company and duplicate it with very good effect. A couple tips to remember are: Continue reading →

Mobile vs. Laptop Usage

In the business of designing and optimizing websites, it helps to know who your target audience is. It also helps to know what devices people will be using to look at your websites.

For the purpose of this article, “desktop” and “laptop” will be combined and be simply referred to as “laptop”. The nature of this article is to determine mobile device browsing vs. non-mobile device browsing regarding website design and optimization.

It has long been known that mobile devices would take over as the single most used type of computer device that people use to browse the web. A recent study suggests the number is about half and half. I don’t think this is the relevant statistic though. To me, the relevant question is to ask who uses mobile devices exclusively vs. those people who use a mix of the two. (I will leave out people who use laptops only and don’t use mobile devices because those numbers are so low that they are negligible.) Continue reading →

Importance of Allowing Commenting and Linking on Your Blog

Open Blog Comment Format

All too often these days I will read a nice blog post on someone’s site and go to comment on it and see that “comments have been closed”. This is a big SEO mistake. Interactive web-pages are worth more than non. If a person or company’s reason is that they don’t want to take the time to approve the comments or sift through spam I have only this to say: It’d be the best 15 minutes you spent on your site every month.

“Your post’s comments are also calculated as a part of your post’s content! The number of high quality comments your post receives will also improve the overall ranking of your content.” – Private Links Network

This takes me to my second point. The type of comment area really doesn’t matter. There are Disqus comment plug ins, Facebook comment plug ins.. etc. But having the open comment where a person can leave their name (or keyword) and a link to their website is actually good for your site.

This is because you can approve their comment, go to their page and comment back and expect to be approved. There is a little link swapping there and the fact that both sites have content that are usually related is even better.

This doesn’t mean that you have to approve every comment or every piece of spam that ends up in your Que. Take the time to sift through and find the comments made by a genuine reader. Delete the ones with canned formats. ex “I really liked your blog. Now check out my blog at yada yada yada. ”

In conclusion, think as your page as a relationship with the reader and Google as the ultimate judge. You want to establish report and maybe even a conversation. You don’t want to simply dictate things to the masses. Nobody likes a dictator.

How Much Should I Spend on SEO?

First, let me clarify what SEO is for those who don’t know. Search Engine Optimization is an effort to modify a website so that the search engines will display it more often or in a higher position.

Many companies go about SEO efforts themselves and as long as the have someone on board with experience or training in the field, they can do fairly well. Other companies hire an SEO expert. They pay a person (or company) to make changes and updates to their website which will make a search engine more likely to display their website in a higher search position. Continue reading →

When I Share a Link on Facebook I Get No Preview Image

Facebook is a lot of things. It is probably the best pure social media platform there is in regards to connecting with friends old and new. It helps small businesses grow by connecting them with their customer base. For all of its advantages it does suffer some imperfections and some of them are down right annoying.

One thing that tends to happen to a company as large as Facebook is they create a product so large that it gets beyond their full control. They make changes and just keep rolling forward. Something that may have worked perfectly fine for years, does not work any longer. And with Facebook, there is no real support staff. Their logic is that “hey, its free, why should we care what you think?” Have you ever tried to contact Facebook directly? It is laughable. Continue reading →

Test Your Contact Forms Often

This week I was looking for a new landscaping company to cut and trim my grass. I went to a couple of their websites and filled out the contact form then clicked “send”. What happened next is why I am writing this blog.

The forms (on two different sites) returned an error page which meant that they was broken. It made me think, “how long have these forms been broken and how much business have these companies lost because of this?”. Personally, I try to test the contact forms a few times a month for each one of my clients. But, if you are a business owner, you should test it weekly. Think about if you never got that big client that you currently have. That would be infuriating. Continue reading →

Using Content to Improve Ranking

The basic theory to using content for search engine optimization is that while writing unique and relevant articles for your blog or back pages, you not only provide information to inquisitive readers, but you also give search engines more of your keywords to latch onto.

Writing informative content about your subject matter will automatically fill your site with your coveted keywords for a search engine to gobble up. If you sell fidget spinners for instance, you will be including the word fidget spinner in your content repeatedly whether you want to or not. It is impossible to write an article about your product and not include the main focus word. But you will also be including qualifying words, ie, words that usually go hand in hand with your product. Continue reading →

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