Category Archives: Featured

Featured articles on interesting, subjective or even abstract news on the internet. Features can be latest news or simply something that sparks interest or is a little profound.

Manage your linkedin profile and public profile URL

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If you have read my previous post on getting signed up with linkedin then your now the proud owner of a shiny new linkedin account and its time to look at the options.

Linkedin resembles a CV or resume of sorts. Its a permanent record of you and your experience in the public domain so, make sure its accurate. Don’t be tempted to “fiddle” the information there or tell any little white lies ,its not advised.

The majority of the information is pretty self explanatory on your linkedin profile including standard things such as as summary, experience, education, information, and contact details and one important point to note in regards this information is how it can be displayed on your public profile.

Edit Public Profile Settings

The edit public profile button for Linkedin is available in the edit profile section when you are logged in on the blue bar in the upper right corner:

Manage your linkedin profile and public profile URL

Its important that you edit these settings for maximum effect but of course you can choose what information you wish to display if your uncomfortable with any of it being available publicly but the more transparent you are the better (in my opinion).

The Linkedin Edit Public Settings page has two important points that need to be addressed both shown below.

Manage your linkedin profile and public profile URL

Linkedin Public Profile URL

The first highlighted point is the most important as it relates to the address of URL of your public profile.

Manage your linkedin profile and public profile URLI would suggest you aim to add your name , first name and surname together, if possible, to make an easy to remember address that will also help place your name in a “vanity search” on search engine results.

All Linkedin URLs use the format http://www.linkedin/in/**the customname** and this custom name cannot be duplicated, therefore if someone else has the same name as you and they have set the address then you need to get a little creative to get a clean and simple vanity URL. Try adding in your middle names initials while avoiding the use of numbers. (Good luck with this!)

Linkedin customized buttons

The 2nd point is in regards the displaying of your public profile on your blog, a forum or on a web page.

Manage your linkedin profile and public profile URL

All ready for you to use are a range of different style buttons or badges with the relevant code attached so grab the code, add it to a page or template and its done. The more places you can promote your profile the better to alert other Linkedin users that you are available on the network should they wish to contact you.

These are the first steps in getting your profile working for you.

40 essential tips for wordpress blogs – Joost De Valk

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Although its been a few weeks I had the pleasure of seeing Joost de Valk present at the a4uexpo in Amsterdam on 40 essential tips for wordpress blogs just this April past.

His session focused on optimising your wordpress blogs and a prominent part was ensuring that it was able to load quickly for visitors but also factors such as SOE, maintenance and analytics.

Slow loading sites can serious reduce your visitors experience as patience is definitely not a virtue online and its about time I addressed the points he raised. The other tips are definitely worth reviewing and applying although all the recommendations might not be applicable to your own blog depending on what your coding ability is or what plugins and features you may already have implemented.

If its easier, here’s the list of recommend pages and plugins included on the slide show to help make sure your wordpress blog is running at full capacity.

Making your WordPress Blog FAST

Slide 19: Install WP Super Cache with Gzip enabled

Slide 20: Move .htaccess directives to your server config (if possible) and disable .htaccess parsing. (what the hell is this? dont ask me how to do it, pay someone who knows.)

Slide 21: Combine CSS files into one big CSS file, same goes for Javascript which should be loaded in the footer.

Slide 22: Use CSS Sprites (see your developer if you dont know what this is).

Slide 23: Add a PHP opcode Cahce – pick one, all are better than having none. (see slide 20 for instructions in how to deal with this)

Slide 24: Kill some plugins…and try and replace them with similar ones, some plugins are god awful.

Slide 25: Still slow?  Switch to better hosting: http://www.westhost.com/blog-yoast.html (that’s an affiliate link for Joost, so if your gonna purchase hosting use it, I’m sure he would appreciate it and he kinda deserves it even though he owes me a beer).

Adding SEO to your WordPress Blog

Slide 27: Set Pretty Permalinks – Why do people still forget this?

Slide 28: Switch Blog name and Post Title – the format should be post title – blog name

Slide 29: Give Robots Directions – Noindex wp-admin, login and register pages etc. Try Joosts Meta Robots Plugin.

Slide 30: Write better Titles – Use HeadSpace2 or even All in one SEO.

Slide 31: Write Good Meta Descriptions – If you don’t, do NOT auto generate them.

Slide 32: Create Proper Pagination using wp-pagenavi by Lester Chan, f/i

Slide 33: Diasbale paged Comments… they suck.

Slide 34: Read and Implement everything in my (Joost’s) WordPress SEO Guide

Maintaining your WordPress Blog

Slide 36: Backup your database every few hours. Use Lester Chans WP-DBManager plugin.

Slide 37: Optimise your database every day using the same plugin.

Slide 38: Backup your files every day. Use WordPress Backup.

Slide 39: Check your queries. Use the debug queries plugin to check for plugins gone mad.

Slide 40: Run Askimet. Kill those spam comments.

Slide 41: Check the referrers for comments.  (Click the WP plugins Tab)

Slide 42: Remove those nonsense widgets. Technocrati rank? Well…OK. Blog Value Widget: = Nonsense.

Slide 43: Track your uptime. Use pingdom, or another tool. But be the first to know when your blog is down. (and address it immediately)

Slide 44: Check 404′s. Use the 404 notifier plugin and fix them using the redirection plugin.

Slide 45: Remove unnecessary META info.

eg:

// Remove Really simple discovery link
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘rsd_link’ );
// Remove Windows Live Writer Link
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wlwmanifest_link’ );
// Remove  the version number
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wp-generator’ );

Making your WordPress Blog Social

Slide 47: Allow and encourage people to submit (share) your content. Use socialable, dammit :)

Slide 48: Doing newsletters? Add a refer to a friend button the the Thank You page.

Slide 49: Or use my(Joost’s) Comment Redirect plugin, and add the refer a friend there!  ^^

Slide 50: Use WP Greet Box, even useful on “normal” sites.

Slide 51: Make sure your comments are gravatar enabled.

Slide 52: Do the Twitter thing. Its an absurd traffic driver.

WordPress Blog Analytics

Slide 54: Use Google Analytic’s (and my*Joosts* Google Analytics plugin for it)

Slide 55: Use RSS link tagger

Slide 56: Track Twitter Traffic with Twitter Traffic Plugin

Slide 57: Install Canonical URL’s so your analytics does’nt interfere wiuth your SEO.

Slide 58: Use comment redirect to track first time commenter’s

Slide 59: Track Comments as a goal! Use an onclick Javascript with a minor delay.

Slide 60: Track RSS subscribers the same way.

Slide 61: Start optimising: Which traffic leads to more subscribers? (and yes that means forgetting about Digg).

Slide 62: Use my(Joost’s) blog metrics plugin. Improve yourself each month!

And to round it all of, heres the actual presentation itself.
*Joost, next time, make it 20 tips will you?  This took me bloody ages.
40 essential tips for wordpress blogs Joost De Valk

WordPress Optimisation – A4UExpo

Twitter Follower Count – The real benefit of people on Twitter

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How to really benefit from twitter is a massive question among twitter users at this time with debates  raging on etiquette, forms of communication and regularity, requesting an RT (ReTweet) of your information, spamming, the infamous follower count number, bots and a whole lot more and of course, everyone has an opinion.

When you begin with twitter its a little daunting.  Its empty.  Twitter will suggest some people to follow when you begin but these suggestions are exactly the type of people you DON’T want to follow.  Mostly they are celebrities, or networks already familiar to you such as CNN.  Great for finding out the news or what ferrari they just bought (or crashed) but none will communicate with you directly (except possibly @stephenfry but even he cant keep up with half a million people).

Find People on Twitter

If you don’t have any real life friends to begin with then first of, just do a search by choosing the Find People option. (you will notice it says Find PEOPLE not followers!)

Search for a word that relates to you specifically, a good example is your town or city.

The result you get will show people who are talking about your area at that given moment or who have they town or city in their names.

For the sake of an example I will use Marbella.

Now remember that the results can change every 60 seconds.  Yep, that’s right, this isn’t Google here with a semi permanent list of results, its LIVE, when you look at the results for the search term Marbella you will see a different set from me.  But that’s good.

Click on each persons profile and check them out in their bio description, and certainly take the time to check out their website or blog.

Anything missing?

No Bio?
No Location?
No Website or Blog? Or have they put something silly in one of the fields, such as:
Location: Planet Earth. if so, seriously consider not bothering with them (but some people have a sense of humor as well so bear that in mind!)

Seriously consider the value of each person you follow, a follow doesn’t mean anything in real terms, but a conversation means conversions.

Limit your follower number to something low and manageable (say 50 but if you already know 100 people or friends then lets say 50 NEW people).

Get to know those people.

Consider removing the followers who are not benefiting you, remove spammers or people who are continually trying to sell you something, and be wary of the people who send you an Auto DM (thats a whole other debate but in short it means they auto follow you back, cant be bothered to actually write something specific and are trying to seel you something, but thats my opinion) and try and replace them with new interesting followers, but don’t pass 50 followers.

Give yourself a month to know these 50 PEOPLE on Twitter (the term followers in context is dehumanising) well and develop from there.

Solid foundations make for solid buildings.

Dont let follower count dictate the quality of your account, its an easy trap to fall into and one thing I cannot stress enough. Big numbers mean nothing, big relationships mean big reurns. You may well be tempted by schemes to gain followers quickly and easily, stop and ask your self WHY?

Do you go to a conference or networking event and dash around throwing business cards in peoples faces with no regard for establishing a relationship? If you did, would they take you seriously? If someone did it to you, would you take them seriously?  NO. I think not.

Following people back on Twitter

Also you may well decide to follow people back when they follow you.  Its not a requirement and don’t ever feel that it should be. If people follow you and you do not follow back, they can still send you messages with the @ function but just not Direct or private messages. This helps to see if they are really interested in getting to know you and not just adding you to their artifically infalted follower count.

Alternatively of course you can follow back and then remove them if they prove to be any of the unwanted types mentioned previously.

The Evidence of large follower counts

In my previous article, which I want to draw your attention to, Social Media People and the Twitter Follower Trend it has the perfect example of what can happen when the numbers take on more value than the people behind those numbers. Take the time to read it. Its evidence that the advice im giving above really is the best way to gain real benefit from twitter, for you, your following and ultimately your business.

At the end of the day, you are free to use twitter in whatever method you wish with whatever goal you have in mind but the point here is value, people and long term relationships. Whatever you choose, choose wisely!