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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AdWords Landing Page Load In Quality Score

The Google AdWords Quality Score just added another criteria for you to be concerned with. Read the full post at Google AdWords: Inside AdWords: Landing page load time now available on the Keyword Analysis Page

This is important for some AdWords sellers who love to have landing pages without end – you’ve seen them the wealth or get rich schemes with the landing page that acts like a website. Who knew you could scroll so much on one page :0)

You can view this important new information to check out your worst offending clients to help them make the changes now, by mousing over the spyglass to the right of the keywords on the ad group summary page, then click the more information and you will be able to see the landing page load information.

AdWords is working to try to provide the best experience for users and actually I appreciate it that very much as an account manager and advertiser both. But now we need to work on transparency on how much clicks cost, not guessing!

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Integrating RSS Auto Sensing

Have you wondered how other websites get that Orange feed icon to light up in IE 7 and Firefox? Here’s how to do it.

In the head section of your source code insert the following code:

link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS Design-World Watch” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/Design-WorldWatch” /

Please note so you can see the code, I have removed the < in front and the > behind the code or it would not show in your browser. Simply replace the URL for my feed Design-World Watch with your own feed address starting with http://.

It’s that simple to turn on the orange feed icon!

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The Web is Atwitter Over Twitter

Twitter is in the news and if you have not tried it, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Twitter is a new social networking site. If you click my post title, you will go to my Twitter home page and there you can see what I am doing and who I am following.

I think Twitter is easy to use and fun. Once I have gotten over the novelty and deleted people who were posting every five minutes drivel on their daily lives, I have actually picked up a few interesting tips and applications that others in my industry are checking out or watching. I have found out about Fire Eagle, Twitter Map, Twitter Feeds, just to name a few.

Although I have now gotten tired of seeing what someone posted for lunch, I am watching Twitter to see what others are watching and looking for. I am also using it to point to interesting articles and also as a platform for my blog. So once you get past the initial thrill, you can put Twitter to work for you as a social media tool.

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Don’t Use Blogger Custom FTP

We used to implement Blogger custom FTP for clients, but now are no longer recommending its use. Blogger custom FTP is where your blogger account is set up to allow your blog posts to be archived back on your own domain server using FTP for search engine benefits.

The problem with Blogger custom FTP is that it is easily crashed, sometimes can take hours for the FTP part to send the posts to your server, and if you have a custom template can be fraught with problems.

If you want the search engine benefits that a blog affords, I strongly recommend that you use WordPress back on your own server. Upload and posting time is very snappy and you won’t end up at the mercy of Blogger when they do updates. We migrated several customers several months ago when Blogger had a reported bug for custom FTP clients as it took two days to publish blogs.

Another issue with Blogger custom FTP is label bloat. If you end of with many labels on your blog, get ready to spend hours deleting them as your publishing time will move to hours from seconds. The best option if you simply cannot use WordPress is to use Blogspot with a custom domain setting. We have found out that you really do not take a hit with the search engines when you are not using custom FTP blogging.