Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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Top Blog Mistakes

Here’s our short list of errors and common mistakes that blog owners make. Take a quick look to make sure that you are part of the “club”.

1. Forgot to integrate the blog site into the main website. You can’t get cross site traffic if you don’t link! Make it easy for website visitors to read your blog and make it easy for blog visitors to find out more about you.

2. Don’t forget to add the one click easy subscribe chicklets. You know the little icons that say “Add to My Yahoo” or “Add to My Google”. Many blog readers do not understand the world of XML or RSS news feeds or even that the news portal that they are already using is feed enabled. Make it easy with a one click solution.

3. Make sure to add a Feedburner “get posts by email”. This is the same issue as above, to syndicate your content and get readers, you need to make it easy. Some people want to get posts the old way by email. Feedburner makes it easy by setting up a subscription service that allows your reader to get your posts in their email box complete with pictures. It is very easy to use and another way that you can encourage regular readership.

4. Keep your posts on topic! Keep your readers interested by offering something helpful or newsworthy based on your industry. People do not go to a GPS blog to read about teen angst or about their Daddy buying them a car! Social blogging should stay in the social arena on forums and on personal websites, these type of posts simply do not have a place in the professional business blog.

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Top Web Design Mistakes

In my experience in working with clients, reviewing and replacing older websites, and search engine optimization work and practice, I have found some common mistakes in websites that affect consumer confidence and performance. Here is my short list:

1. Poor use of navigation. The best place for navigation is the left side bar and then at the top under the banner. This is where research shows that clients will look to find site navigation. It is best to utilize this research when setting up a new site to make it easy for clients to find your pages.

2. Poor use of prime real estate. Eye tracking research shows that a prime spot for attention is the top right of the content block. This is an excellent place for a feature or highlight box. After viewing navigation scanning from the left column down and then across the page horizontally from left to right, the eye lingers in this prime spot. Make sure you are using it for your site’s benefit.

3. No address or phone number on the website. Ouch, are you trying to hide from customers? Make sure your address is on your website, you want people to have confidence that you are a real business. I recommend putting your phone number at the bottom of your page in the footer. More often than not, I will have someone on my site who picks up the phone to call and chat with me right then with my site open in front of them. In fact typically even my clients who find me by pay per click ads like to pick up the phone for the immediacy of response. Make sure you understand that this is how many prospects and clients will contact you and don’t make it hard for them to phone right when they want to.

4. No privacy policy on the website. Google is looking for this! If you are doing pay per click advertising, make sure you have one. If you are doing any kind of email marketing now or think that you will in the future, make sure that you have a privacy policy in place. You need to give visitors information on what you do with the information that they share with you either through a website contact or if they contact you directly by email.

5. No about page on the website. You may think that this information may be superfluous, but put yourself in the reader’s shoes. You really should take time to identify yourself, explain who you are and what your background is, who is on your team, and about the products and services you sell or offer. All this is a part of creating confidence and trust which are cornerstones to closing a sale.

All of the items on the above list are easy to implement and easy to correct. Now’s the time to take a very candid look at your own website through your customers’ and prospects’ eyes to see where you have areas of improvement.

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Blog Piracy and Hostage Holding

Well now I have seen it all. I have a client for whom we do ghost blogging and he sent me a note yesterday asking if we could host his blog. It appears that his current blog host had charged $1,500 for blog set up, owned his domain name and blog template, and was charging a whopping $500 a month maintenance fee. On top of that he paid us ghost blogging charges.

It just does not have to cost this much to blog! Hosting for a WordPress blog with auto-publish features and full SEO fields (which I like very much) can be had for $3.39 a month at Go Daddy, blog set up and configuration with a nice free WordPress template can be done for under $199, and you can buy your domain name when you set up hosting with Go Daddy and even own it yourself for $1.99. Scary isn’t it the difference!

To be 100% truthful his original blog allowed new authors to create their own blog, but only two people on his blog was using that the rest were just publishing to the main blog. We have been able to set up a plain vanilla WordPress blog at the prices above and allow all of his previous authors to continue to write and categorize their blogs by their business name for easy navigation to their posts.

Blogging and blog set up simply does not have to be expensive and maintenance should never cost this much. If you are paying this much for YOUR blog, you need to contact us to find out how we can save you money and still get the search engine benefits you want.

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Links broken in Outlook

There is a very simple fix for this pesky problem when links for some reason stop being clickable in Outlook. Here are two things to try to resolve the problem when this happens to you.

1. Go to your start menu and select default programs. Set Internet Explorer as your default browser. You can do this by either clicking Microsoft or open up custom and then checking make Internet Explorer my default browser. Simple enough, but why do that to turn on links in OUTLOOK? It is simple Outlook is a Microsoft application and when a link is clicked in Outlook, Outlook cannot seem to find the connection of what application to open to use to view the link. Personally I have had this intermittent link problem when I have been using or updating Firefox on my computer. Microsoft just does not play nice with other applications.

2. In Outlook try right clicking on the message and then select Junk Mail and then click add sender to safe sender’s list. This will turn on links and images for that sender.

Both of these options may help you to get back in business when it comes to clicking links in Outlook. For those of you who just really want to use Firefox and not Outlook, well you can try making Firefox the default browser and see if you can click links in Outlook, but you may be using Thunderbird as your default mail program in that case.

Good luck and leave me a comment if you’ve found another way that you like better than mine to turn on links.