Category: Blogs

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Blogging for the Authority It Builds

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McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

In my world, that of webmasters, blogging is not about chatty comments from readers. In fact for me, blogging is not really about subscribers, rather blogging is all about building new fresh content on your website, garnering inbound links, creating new content for search engines to spider and to build website/keyword authority.

Yes, content of this type of blogging is crucial and not for the faint of heart. Excellent and well-written blog posts capture the attention of a wider market, encourage others to link to your content, and effectively soft sell your products and services. It is less about writing about you and more about writing to answer a question or solve a problem!

If you stay focused on the real reason for a blog and monitor link growth over time in the Google Search Console, you will feel the value of blogging more than if you are monitoring the number of comments from readers.

Add to the mix the ability to garner search placement on blog posts that will then act as a doorway into your website for readers, and blogging has even more value.

If you are looking for the “right” writer and professional tone for your blog, look no further. Visit our website to read blog post samples and check out our prices.

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Site Prominence and Local Organic Placement

Mobile exposure in AdWords is key.
Does your website show up prominently in mobile searches for your location?

Organic placement in the local results is important for many businesses, but the big question is how can you get there other than paying your way onto the page with Google AdWords?

If you are a service provider that looks to sell your services in your hometown, placing with your location is key to growing your business.

Here are my top tips to getting local placement for smartphone and desktop searches.

  1. Make sure that your phone number is in text at the top of your website page and not in an image.

2. Make sure that you have your full address and phone number in the footer of all of your pages.

3. Put your phone number and city location in the meta title tag of your home page.

4. Make sure that you have your city location in your h1 and h2 tags on your page.

5. Start working on great customer service and start building reviews. If you have reviews on your website, make sure they are coded for Google using Rich Snippets.

6. When you blog, blog with purpose and cater to your local market with city or state names positioned prominently.

7. Hire a savvy expert who will assist you in crafting a content strategy to boost local positioning. At McCord Web Services we provide consulting to help you position your website to place in your geographic location.

Don’t flounder around anymore, get the help you need to start placing locally in your city and state.

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What Do Hackers Want with Your WordPress Blog?

Expect the unexpected.
Illustration depicting a roadsign with an ‘expect the unexpected’ concept. Sky background.

The question is always the same, “Why does a hacker want to get into my blog?” The answer is always the same – to drive traffic. But, that traffic is not to your site, but rather to drive traffic to a site they are being paid to promote.

The traffic is either direct or indirect. Direct traffic is where a hacker breaks into your WordPress site and then overwrites your website with their own site or landing pages pointing to their own site, I just saw one today for a webmaster prospect that was taken over by pornography sellers.

Indirect traffic is more sneaky. Here the hackers break in to WordPress and hope that you won’t know. Then they leave self-replicating scripts in various locations of WordPress and even tunnel into your own website. They use these scripts to create “ghost” pages that only search engines can see that are filled with links and keywords all pointing to sites they are hoping to boost in the organic search results.

In many cases if you find what you think is the spam directory (usually they hide it) and you delete it, the replicating scripts simply recreate everything you’ve deleted. You’ve got to do a very thorough  wipe of the server and site files to get rid of this type of hack permanently.

Many business owners ask, “Why me? I’m not Amazon and don’t even have tons of traffic!” Here’s where the hackers are playing a numbers game. The more sites that point to the site they are promoting, the better off they are initially.

Typically sites that these hackers are promoting are trying to garner organic placement temporarily to serve malware installations. Once the search engines figure out which sites they are they shut them down, but by then many people are now infected and the hackers then go on to the next site.

The best way to protect yourself from these kinds of issues is to keep WordPress updated and as secure as possible with plugins that monitor files and then check your WordPress application at least once a week.

If you need help with monitoring WordPress, please check out our webmaster services.

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Where Should You Spend You Money for Online Activities

You can recoveIf your business isn't in recovery yet, where can you trim money?r from a hack.
If your business isn’t in recovery yet, where can you trim money?

If your business is pulling back where can you realistically chop in your marketing plan and not get hurt?

Chop Away

Social Media – if you are paying to update Facebook, Twitter and Google+ you could easily take a break to save money.

Blogging – try not to kill all your writing as the SEO juice you get from well-written blog posts helps you in the long run, but maybe consider moving from three days a week to two or from two days a week to one.  Try to still keep the momentum up but maybe lower the word count or frequency.

Chop Not!

Google AdWords – don’t touch it unless you absolutely have to. AdWords is hands down the best way to generate new leads and start cash pumping back into your business.

e-newsletters – they build loyalty and repeat business. Newsletters are especially important to businesses that have annual renewals for service plans like pest control firms and HVAC firms.  If you chop this, your name is not kept in front of your customers and come time to renew, they may not see the value of renewing; which will hurt your sales even further.

Need some practical sense to make the most of the budget you do have or to get AdWords to work harder for you? We’re the firm to call and chat with first especially if you are looking for honest advice you can trust with no sales pressure.