3 Website Maintenance Tasks
that are Commonly Overlooked

It’s a fact, most people don’t like doing maintenance on anything they own – be it a car, their office building, lawnmower, yard, or their website. When we first get something new, we’re all about keeping it pristine, making sure it’s operating smoothly and taking extra precaution to protect our investment. Over time we lose motivation, interest and tend to let things go; it’s just human nature! Life takes over and priorities change, however not maintaining a website can have dire long term consequences on its traffic, appearance and functionality.

I like to use the example of a website being compared to a physical office building for many reasons. The most important connection in this example is that you wouldn’t allow the grass and weeds to become overgrown or fail to fix a main door that wasn’t allowing customers to enter would you? So why, I ask, should a website be treated any differently? I understand that a website is the victim of “out of sight, out of mind” however it is that mentality that can cause a lot of stress later on. Below you’ll find three website maintenance and management areas that are easy to take care of; however are often never done or forgot about over time.

Optimizing Images for the Web

Nothing is worse to visitors than a slow loading website; it’s the quickest ticket to clicking back and finding another source for their information. High quality images are a must have on any website, however if they are implemented at their full size, pages may load slowly and over time the entire website will begin to come to a slow drag; especially if you’re on shared hosting.

This is true for blog owners, businesses and others who have image heavy websites. You need to be optimizing your images for the web, which can be done on some preloaded OS editors and of course a photo editing program like Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop has a ‘save for web’ function under the file drop down menu when going to save. User experience is everything and you must consider mobile device visitors as well. If you’re not optimizing your images for the web, you better start, and I recommend you go back in and inspect any images that you currently have.

Making Sure Your Website is Backed Up

This should be one maintenance task that doesn’t even need to be said, but because so many website owners become the victim of hacking attempts and other lost data troubles, it still ranks as one of the most important and overlooked areas. It is often assumed that your website will be safe no matter what and that your hosting company will be able to fix any problems that arise, but that’s not always the case. Hosting companies get hacked all the time, especially if they are not one of the leading providers who are constantly monitoring for security threats.

I’ve come across business owners and bloggers who have lost everything overnight, all content, images and design work; and it’s a shame because it could have easily been prevented. You’ll never get the time you invested back, or the money, because your investment wasn’t fully protected. Taking backups is easy, whether you use a plugin on your CMS to do it, or you manually login to the backend of your website and download one yourself. Having an up-to-date backup in a safe place is like having an emergency fund in the event that you lose your job. Plan for the worst, and hope for the best!

Proofreading for Grammatical Errors

You really don’t want to get arrested by the Grammar Police, but you also don’t want to look unprofessional. I can spot blatant grammar mistakes faster than finding Waldo in a snow covered scene with everyone else wearing white. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big well known brand, or a local restaurant blog, it happens all the time and it drives me nuts. Proofreading is mandatory on all information that will hit the eyes of the public, and if it’s not your forte’ then find someone else who can review it for you.

Having grammar and structure errors is the easiest way to look unprofessional and it can also be attributed to a lack of attention to detail; two things you don’t want to project online. Don’t ever assume that just because you paid extra special attention during the content generation process that you shouldn’t go back and take a second and more thorough look. We all make mistakes from time to time, and so do I, but limiting those mistakes is what’s important. Your extra time and effort will pay off in the long run, I promise you that.

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Why Maintaining Your
eCommerce Website is NOT Optional

I’m going to start this blog post off with something that I repeat constantly, and I think it will set the tone for the rest of the information that follows.  Have you ever shopped online? I’m 100 percent positive that you just answered ‘yes’ to that question.  Now think about your experiences shopping online, what you liked, what you aren’t so fond of and ways that you could make the process better.  You see, these very thoughts occur constantly inside our minds, yet for some reason they often don’t ever reach the surface for our own websites, and in this case eCommerce or online stores.  For some reason we as human beings think we’re immune to the same issues or drawbacks on our own website that we don’t like elsewhere as if your customer base isn’t thinking the exact same things you are.  I’ll admit, it’s hard to sit there and be judgmental about something you own or created, but it is imperative that you do this or else you are without a doubt losing new customers and likely repeat customers.

Maintaining an eCommerce website is not an option, it is a requirement to owning one.  More trust and reassurance is necessary in order to increase sales conversions online.  Why do so many people tend to shop at Amazon, or eBay?  It’s because there is constant updates to stock quantities, products and user experiences, and the most important reason; because they carry a reputation for being trustworthy places to shop online.  Trust is hard to achieve overnight, but there are lots of ways you can increase trust within the first few seconds of a visitor entering your eCommerce store.  Some are subtle, while others are blatant ways that will help increase your professionalism in the minds of a new visitor that has not purchased something from you before.  It is also important to not forget about repeat buyers either, because if a competitor is offering a better environment on ship times, product quantities or other factors, you could easily lose a previously loyal customer.

eCommerce Areas that Require Maintenance

There are certain areas that will require ongoing maintenance for eCommerce stores in order to be successful.  You cannot expect to setup a store and then not have to maintain it, an online store should be treated the same as a physical store.  Physical stores need to rotate stock, place certain products in the front of aisles to push their sales and change pricing, descriptions and displays.  The following areas should be continually maintained:

• Product Photos (new and existing products)
• Titles and Descriptions (titles, descriptions and sales copy help conversions)
• Trust Factors (clear return policies, warranties and guarantees)
• Quantity Updates (updating quantities; limiting out of stock or backorders)
• Marketing (SEO for eCommerce, PPC, banners, sales & promotions)
• Emails (promptly respond to inquiries and concerns)
• Live Chat (live chats instantly connect with a buyer)
• Pricing (changes to prices, or limited time pricing sales)
• Newsletter (capture buyers into a newsletter subscription)
• Support (professional and prompt customer service)
• Policies (always update store policies immediately)
• Returns (returns should be completed as quickly as possible)
• Payments (payments through PayPal and major credit cards)
• Analysis (eCommerce analysis for website traffic, sales and more)
• A/B Tests (testing new products, titles, descriptions and offers)

There are likely many other areas that require ongoing maintenance and monitoring for specific eCommerce stores and solutions as well.  These are the common and top areas however that result in a successful online store versus those that become stale and lose sales and customers over time because of inactivity and lack of attention.  You need to answer the question, why should a potential buyer shop with you? What’s in it for them, and why should they not go to your competition or other major online store?

The Right Maintenance Approach for Online Stores

If you can prove this and answer a new customer’s subconscious questions, you will likely receive a lot more revenue and conversions.  Maintaining an online store and offering incentives and rewards is a recipe for success that many small businesses have a problem understanding.  If they do understand it, they think it is too much work and fail to coordinate it, or hire a website maintenance company (like =) Webdigia) to take care of the odds and ends in a hands free approach.  Online eCommerce stores don’t have to be stressful with the right approach.  Opening up an additional stream of revenue, customers, and maintaining it, can prove to be extremely rewarding both financially and in exposure of your brand.

Take a moment if you own or are responsible for an eCommerce store and list what areas would be the most important to be maintained on an ongoing basis.  Brainstorm the ways you are going to instill trust in the visitor, and even have an outsider visit the store and provide feedback on the sales process and overall professionalism of the store.  Then, armed with this information start to implement changes to improve the user experience and provide ongoing maintenance to areas that are crucial to the store’s success.

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2 Tips for Local SEO Marketing in 2013
with Knowledge Graph

With the release of Google’s Knowledge Graph opened the search world to a new world of possibilities. Knowledge Graph changed the search engines from a simple question and answer system, to a system that “understood” what you were looking for.

Knowledge Graph uses semantic-search or information gathered from the websites that Google crawls. Websites like your’s and mine. Semantics is based on meaning; semantic-search focuses on the meaning between words, phrases (sentences), and pixel data (Image search – for example you can search for images by color).

Okay, Knowledge Graph is powerful and all but what does it mean for your local SEO campaign?

Simply put, search engines today can “read” your website’s content and “guess” with great accuracy where you are located.

When your website is being analyzed by the search engines, they will compare your content with other websites using semantic-search data. If your website’s content is relative in meaning to other local website’s, then your value for that local search result will potentially increase.

Here are 2 tips to help get you started with local SEO.

Tip 1: Create content that includes local events, places, and businesses

One element you can implement right away is to start mentioning local events, places, and businesses. This doesn’t mean go revamp your content to mention as many local elements as you can, it simply means – if it benefits your reader to know about a specific location, business, or event then mention it!

Examples for Tip 1

Locations: When you are writing a blog post (I hope your taking advantage of the power a blog offers for your website, but that is a different discussion) try to use local cities as examples.

“Michigan is known for being the Motor City, or the birthplace of the auto industry. With a major industry comes supporting businesses, Troy’s, Farmington’s, and Detroit’s economy were mostly built from the manufacturing that supported the auto companies (Ford & General Motors). Because of that, today we find that a lot of local clients require unique approaches to their internet marketing needs.”

Tip 2: Get Backlinks from Local websites

Backlinks are still a very important aspect of SEO! Don’t think that backlink quality isn’t being examined by Google’s semantic-search system. Matt Cutt’s has expressed several times that backlinks from related, quality sites provide the best “link juice.”

Apply the same principles on content that includes local elements (See Tip 1) to building backlinks and now you’re building authoritative weight. Work to get backlinks from local businesses, local non-profits and local blogs for example.

Local Backlink Tip: Support a local event. Most events launch websites and are more than happy to link to your website when you offer your support. Whether that is by sponsoring, donating, or providing staff to help. Obviously a temporary backlink is not what you are aiming for, but rather a blog post on your sponsorship or another related article on their site would be ideal as it would be listed forever. Permanency and longevity of backlinks are important.

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It’s 2013, Stop Worrying
about Article Keyword Density

Chances are if you write content or copy for your website or a client’s website, that you are focusing on providing value to readers but also writing with the hopes that the article will be found online for various reasons.  What good is amazing content if no one ever sees it right?  The primary method of organic exposure is through search engines via search engine optimization or SEO for short.  The web is full of information about SEO, and quite frankly some is great while other tips are either outdated or completely off-base and could do more harm than good.  One of those is the old notion of stuffing keywords repetitively into an article at a certain percent per amount of words in order for that page to rank favorably.  Let me tell you, it’s 2013 and you should not be focusing on keyword density inside your articles; Google is smarter now and there are several areas you should be shifting your attention to versus repetition of keywords.

I will confidently say that some people can effectively mesh keywords into an article favorably and unnoticeably, but most cannot and fail miserably at doing so, especially when it becomes a game of numbers versus just writing naturally and with quality.  A sentence that reads “This is advantageous for Pennsylvania dog grooming because of how…” is one example where the author is clearly forcing the keywords versus having them occur naturally.  This is easily sniffed out by both the reader which detracts from your credibility and search engine algorithms.

How You Should be Writing

Each piece of content or copy that you write should be focused on the visitor and providing quality and you can’t effectively do that when you are worrying about keyword density while you are writing, or trying to stuff it back in there once you are done.  You should be writing with a mindfulness of your chosen keywords to target, but in a natural way.  How do you do that?  Well it’s not particularly easy and usually the articles that receive the most exposure are the ones we didn’t stuff full of keywords or even try to optimize; so why is that?  It’s because when you take your attention away from word counts, or keyword density counts, you are able to put your knowledge on the page in words automatically.  Without knowing it you are including keywords in the article in a localized way but likely not verbatim and you are also including synonyms to exact match keywords which is also extremely beneficial when it comes to SEO content generation.

Produce Content with a Purpose

I know it’s difficult to sit down for every piece of content that you write and make an outline and goal but it will improve the effectiveness of your content and how well they perform and rank.  You need to have a desired goal from your article whether it’s to promote a product, a service or just to provide useful information to a potential visitor.  Once you have your goal and outline of topics to cover you need to research the competition and the keywords surrounding the topic of the article.  If you follow these steps and write with a purpose your efforts will be worthwhile in the long run from the extra effort.  With the keywords fresh in your mind, but without constantly looking at them you will be able to naturally produce content that contains keywords and synonyms of the keywords inside your text.  When I say produce content with a purpose, you are now effectively shifting your purpose from “I need to have 2.4% keyword density out of my ‘x’ amount of words” to “I’m creating content that visitors will find engaging, natural and useful.”

Where it’s Acceptable to Focus on Keywords

If you’re totally confused and throwing your fists in the air saying SEO is all about keywords, you need to understand that while SEO is traditionally all about keywords, that onsite SEO has evolved and you need to steer far away from spam-type tactics such as keyword stuffing and density focus.  It’s acceptable to place keywords in your titles; URL’s and header tags (H1, H2, etc.) and I’d even suggest using synonyms and spacing your keywords out in order to ensure a more natural approach.  What do I mean by spacing them out or using synonyms?  Well using our example above for the keyword “Pennsylvania dog grooming,” spacing this keyword out in a title may look something like this, “Pet owners in Pennsylvania love ABC dog grooming.”  This is more natural and easier read than say “Pennsylvania dog grooming has happy customers.”

It’s still acceptable to focus on keywords in your article body as well, but I’d recommend only including keywords verbatim a couple of times throughout the article (don’t go overboard!) and only if they flow naturally.  If they do not, then don’t do it and utilize my tips and techniques above.  You will also find tremendous value in using synonyms as well as other variations throughout your content because this is where long-tail traffic is harnessed.  For example, instead of always using ‘dog grooming’ you could use large dog grooming, grooming for small dogs, dog haircuts and so on.  Not everyone searches the exact keyword you are targeting and if you can include variations it will significantly improve the SEO value of your content, appear more natural and you’ll likely rank easily for these long tail variations as well.

Conclusion

Keep your focus on the content and not on how many words you are using (you can count words at the end) or how many times you included your keyword(s).  Approach each piece of content with a clear and specific goal and make sure you write for the visitor by placing yourself in their shoes and what you’d want to read if you were searching for the same topic.  Only use keywords verbatim if it’s natural; if not then use them spaced out in both content and titles in natural way.  Include synonyms wherever possible as these will improve the overall SEO value for the main keywords and bring additional long tail traffic.  And finally, if you’ve had enough and simply don’t want to be bothered with all this technical mumbo jumbo anymore, Webdigia offers professional copywriting services for any industry, project or vertical.

Getting Started in 2013:
Is SEO The Right Marketing Choice?

From small businesses to enterprises. Mom blogger to power blogger. Almost everyone who owns a website has heard of SEO and the benefits it can bring to your website. If you haven’t that’s okay, search engine optimization (SEO) is a form of online marketing that uses the search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to bring traffic to your site. Google reports over 1 Billion search queries a month alone! Let’s put that into a daily perspective 1,000,000,000 a month results in 33,000,000 (rounded) searches a day! With that many searches from a single search engine, you can be assured your target audience is searching for your services, products and information.

Clearly SEO is a powerful marketing tool, but is it the right path if you are just getting started with internet marketing?

Let’s take a brief look at SEO and in particular the methods used for improving your rankings. As of 2013 Google is the biggest and most used search engine, and because of that Google will be our primary focus. One of the biggest aspects we have to remember about Google is that Google is a business. One of their services is providing visitors with information (Google Search). If searchers didn’t finding the information they were looking for, do you think they would continue to use Google? Probably not.

BRIEF HISTORY ON SEO

Up To Late 2010′ish -
Prior to the major Panda algorithm update (we will cover in a moment) increasing your rankings was primarily focused on building backlinks. In short backlinks are links from another website that act like popularity votes. Example: If webdigia.com was to link to Google.com, that would count as a backlink from Webdigia to Google. The more backlinks generally meant a higher ranking. Though this tactic was often abused using backlink bots, as their main focus was to build as many links as possible using spammy or black-hat tactics.

Panda Algorithm Released (February 2011) -
Google’s Panda algorithm is a machine learning algorithm used to weed out the spammy low quality sites and improve the ranking of quality websites. Google’s vision became quite clear with the Panda update. Websites filled with original, vertical related (industry) topics provided a higher quality user experience for visitors. This was Google’s major step towards a content focused algorithm and ranking system.

Typical backlink bots that produced low quality links were no longer as effective as they used to be. Just building links was no longer the main focus in SEO services, instead focus shifted towards unique content writing and outreach.

Penguin Algorithm Released (April 2012) -
Google Penguin was the next step towards weeding out the spam. Penguin was an algorithm developed to decrease the rankings of websites breaking Google’s webmaster guidelines. The guidelines cover spam and Black-hat SEO (bots, keyword stuffing, cloaking, link schemes, link farms, etc.) which were used by most to quickly increase their rankings. Penguin had a lot of hidden features to it, one of the biggest was to weed out websites that were over optimized. It became quite clear which websites were using SEO by looking at the anchor text in their backlinks. Over optimization of anchor text with exact match keywords now implemented a negative effect on your rankings if it was being abused. Anchor text is the text used for hyperlinks that you can click on.

SEO TODAY

Panda and Penguin wreaked havoc on services offered by SEO companies who were using quick shortcut methods; the typical link building services were no longer as effective as they used to be and sometimes hurt their clients websites. The do-it-yourself people also found they were in a world of hurt when they realized they hadn’t put enough focus on their websites content and that they built too many optimized links. A lot of people saw a huge drop in their rankings as well as their income overnight and some disappeared forever.

Future of SEO
The emphasis on quality content has generated buzz on whats being referred to as “Author Rank.” Just as it sounds, Author Rank would essentially put a value on the author of an article. Author Rank hasn’t been confirmed by Google, but looking at the path Google seems to be taking with Google Plus and their algorithms it would make sense, that future authors of an article will have an effect on the value of that same article.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOU?

SEO today is not easy, and actually many may try and argue that it doesn’t exist anymore. Instead you should think of SEO as content marketing and creating usability. Create quality content that your vertical (industry) needs or wants, and you will find that your traffic will increase and so will your natural and diverse backlinks. By focusing on your websites quality, you are increasing the value of your site to the search engines. This will lead to higher rankings for your focus keywords and for those “ready to buy” long tail keywords.

SEO Services -
Content marketing has increased the workload required and thus has increased the price of SEO services. In regards to our own services, we have applied a large emphasis on building up our clients websites before we focus on link building. This perspective swap does result in a slow ranking period, but the traffic audience has proved to be much more profitable and rankings are reliable and withstand Google’s algorithm updates.  Slow and steady always wins the SEO race for the long-term and stable rankings.

Assuring a successful and reliable SEO campaign today comes from focusing on building quality content. If you are looking to hire an SEO company, make sure you inquire about their SEO tactics. The last thing you want to do is pay for a spammy link building service that is doing your site no good.

OTHER OPTIONS

The beauty of the internet is that there are a plethora of marketing options, SEO is a very small area of the marketing world online.

PPC Marketing -
PPC or Pay-Per-Click is an excellent way to get started with internet marketing and can be great for keyword discovery as well. With PPC marketing you target specific keywords and pay once you receive a click or set number of views. For start-ups or new websites we usually suggest a synergy between PPC and SEO. PPC will provide the instant targeted traffic and content marketing SEO will provide the long tail organic traffic.

Social Ads -
Social platforms like Facebook have an advertising platform that you can use to place ads on Facebook.com. Social media offers a powerful source of traffic with their “interest” based targeting system. With social media you can target people based on their interests, geographic location, age, sex and more.

Media Buying -
Media buying is a broad term and tends to be confusing to most. Media buying could be summarized with “buying X from a websites who’s traffic is also your target audience.” Media buying can come in many different forms, from renting banner space to buying a mention in their next blog post. Media buying usually doesn’t have a platform like Facebook ads or Google Adwords, instead try reaching out to the website via email and asking if they offer advertising.

TOO LONG DIDN’T READ (tl:td)

SEO is a powerful source for target traffic online. Though a lot has changed in the SEO world and these changes have resulted in more content focus. Think of SEO as content marketing: creating quality, unique content that your audience wants or needs and remaining active. The downfall of content marketing is the amount of work and time it takes for your rankings to improve. SEO is still a great marketing method online, but be ready for a slow and steady type of strategy. If you are a start up or just launched your website (and are looking for immediate results) you may want to look into a mix of methods, such as PPC (instant traffic from targeted Keywords) and SEO (organic traffic from long tail keywords).

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Website Optimization Tip:
Keep It Incredibly Simple For Your Visitors

Working at an internet marketing company I tend to run into the same conversations daily. Some of my favorite lines – “Our site is great, we just need traffic,” “My friends nephew (insert any 2nd tier relationship) designed our site,” “I know how to navigate my site.” The beauty of these lines is that once these are mentioned, It’s usually pretty clear what needs to be improved upon. You need to optimize/simplify/update/ your website for your visitors. Much like you optimize your service or product for your target audience, your website needs to reflect what your visitors are looking for. And you need to do this in the simplest way possible and immediately.

As the internet continues to evolve so does the expectations of our visitors. Trust is granted or dismissed within seconds, purchases are made or lost with a few words or images, and their perspective of your business is made instantly upon landing on your site. Today we must design our websites to be stupid simple. Simple/Minimalistic & functional trump fancy/impressive design! It’s true, less is more when done properly. When optimizing or starting your website one of the first thoughts should be “How can I simplify this?”

Unfortunately one aspect they don’t teach in business school is how to optimize a website for conversions. Don’t worry there are plenty of blogs that have some exceptional articles on how to optimize your website for conversions. I will also touch on a few principles and tips that you can implement today.

Principles

Conversion Funnel:

The path a visitor takes on your site that leads to them becoming a client/customer. Or in other words, holding your visitors hands all the way to the end, figuratively of course. When a visitor lands on your site you need to funnel them into a “call to action.” CTA’s (call to action) can range from purchasing a product to subscribing to your email newsletter (Tip: great CTA for blogs, “don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter” inserted at the end of your posts.); CTA is simply just the end goal for your visitor.  You want as little friction and confusion as possible to enhance action on the CTA area.

A conversion funnel is a path. Along that path you are capturing their attention, spiking their interesting, building trust, and breaking down those figurative walls and questions that may or may not be holding them back.  Don’t let a visitor leave your site to continue researching and make a purchase elsewhere, give them everything they need to go from a slight interest to becoming a warm lead or full on client or customer.

Organize:

We all love a well organized room (well all of us OCD types do). Organization is one of those areas we should learn how to optimize and use in our everyday lives, but that’s a discussion for a later date. Organization applies to your website as well. Keeping your website organized will actually have a 2-fold effect, 1) Your visitors will be able to navigate your site easier and 2) you will be improving your SEO value (A topic that desires a full post, but here is a great post by Bruce Clay on Silo’s).

Think of your website as a filing cabinet. You have your main folder, the domain – webdigia.com. You have the sub folders, which are your main inner pages – webdigia.com/about, webdigia.com/contact, webdigia.com/landing-page-optimization. Then we organize deeper, our landing page silo/vertical has information on the benefits of landing page optimization – webdigia.com/landing-page-optimization/benefits. As you can see the benefits page falls under the parent permalink of the main /landing-page-optimization page. Now this is a very broad example of silo’s and barely scratches the surface, but the point is to keep your website organized much like you would a folder on your desktop. If I am looking for the benefits of landing pages, I shouldn’t be looking under the about section.

A simple technique is to put yourself in the visitors shoes. Where would I look to find “X” page?

Simplify Your Navigation:

Website design is still the wild west, there are no set rules on how to layout your site, title your pages, or where to put your navigation. I love a creative layout as much as the next design nerd, but there are some aspects of a website that you should try to stick with the norm.

It becomes habit to look in specific areas and scan for certain text when we are trying to find a page. Looking for the contact page you scan the right side of the nav bar looking for the word “contact.” If your looking for the store you tend to scan the nav bar for the word “store” or “shop” (Though you’ll find store is a lot more popular). When it comes to pages in the navigation bar stick with the norms. You can get creative with the name elsewhere on the page. If you really want the contact page to be called “Get in touch” then put it in the bottom navigation or elsewhere on the page, I suggest trying to have at least one normal name on the page.

Simplify Your Products:

When writing descriptions for our own products or services we tend to blab because we’re excited and proud of them! Everyone is in a hurry and no one has time. Having long drawn out explanations are actually hurting you. There is a place for sales copy and in-depth explanations. Going back to the conversion funnel technique, you need to first capture the attention of your visitor before you can read them the service manual. When you first introduce your product keep everything short but clear. You can have more indepth paragraphs farther down the page, or on another page completely.  Put your sales cap on and think about what’s in it for them. Why would this visitor be interested in this product? What are some sales points you mention when you are speaking with a customer? What are the key features of this product?

As the visitor works their way down the page, you are safe to assume they have an understanding of your product/service and are looking for more details. Again, this is when you can start explaining the details!

I hope you learned something from my thought / rant. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more random thoughts . And as always, the Webdigia Team is here to help you with all of your website needs.

[Video]How to Add Google Analytics Code to WordPress Website (Dashboard & FTP Method)

Jonathon Moore

7minutes 39seconds

FileZilla

Jonathon Moore – with Webdigia here. We have another WordPress Tutorial. This one is going to be on how to add your Google Analytics code to your WordPress installation. There are several ways to do this (tip: sometimes themes include an area in the theme options panel too!) and what we’re going to do is walk you through two ways. We’re going to walk you through how to do it in the dashboard and the more advanced way on how to do it using your FTP client and editing the file directly.

So, before we get started we need to have your Google Analytics code – so let’s jump over there and get one. Go ahead and if you don’t have a Google account, create one. If you do have a Google account, go ahead and sign in. As you can see, I’m already signed in. What I like to emphasize here, is to make sure you are signed in under the right Google account. We have a lot of clients who sign in under their personal accounts and then it causes a lot of confusion later; so just make sure you’re under the right Google account.

After we hit sign up here, it’s going to walk us through adding our first website to the Google dashboard. Go ahead and hit sign up (unless you’ve already done this step) and here we can start adding our website. What the website name is, is more-so for your reference in the Google Analytics dashboard. What we’re going to do here is add the name that we can refer to, we’re going to add the website URL, industry (the one specific to your website), and your time zone. Now this is also just for cosmetic issues or organizational issues in this case. In the dashboard you can have multiple sites, so you can organize those under certain categories and for this case since I’m only using one I’m going to use ‘main.’

Now for these additional, make sure you read over them and decide if you like them or not. For this case, I’m going to leave them both checked; it doesn’t bother me at all. Get the tracking code and go ahead and read over the terms and accept it. Now here we have our page added and we can tell because it’s giving us all the data for it and there are no errors. Don’t worry about any of this extra stuff; all you need is what’s in this box. You need from this script tag, to this script tag. Go ahead and right click and copy that or cmd copy or control copy; whatever platform you are on. Now keep track of that. You can log back into your Google Analytics account and retrieve that information again, but I always like to make a text file and to save it in there so I can refer to it if I ever need to.

Let’s go ahead and let’s do the WordPress installation using the WP dashboard. Here we are, this is a fresh install of WordPress. I’m using the very basic theme, but make sure you choose the right theme when you’re editing. Go ahead after you log into your WordPress, go to the appearance and we want the editor. Now over here on the right-hand side this is all the files. We want the footer file and the reason behind that is the footer file is one of the last files to load and that helps us to make sure we actually get someone who loaded the full website and not someone who accidentally clicked in and instantly clicked back.

This won’t run the analytics script until they fully load the website, so using the footer is just a good method to make sure you’re getting the best results. Go ahead and click on the “footer;” you’ll pull up the file; this is the actual file content. Now what were looking for is you should have these two ending codes, or at least this body code right here and what we want to do is we want to put the code right before that. All I did was command+v or control+v to paste that code in there. What we want to do is confirm that we have the ending script, the beginning script, and make sure nothing is messed up in-between; that’s exactly what Google gave us – perfect. Now that’s it, that’s literally all it is to add it to your WordPress installation.

Some things to look for: make sure you didn’t add it to this, inside of this right here. If we added it there, that would actually break the code and cause an error. What we want to do is make sure we’re not inside of any ending codes. We don’t want to be inside of any comments or any of these tags. We simply want a fresh line to paste it onto. We’re done; go ahead and click the “update file” and it will tell you that it was done by giving you this notification here. You are done; let’s go make sure that our WordPress installation actually has it, so what I did was I clicked up here which will take us to our homepage.

Now we want to view the page source, depending on which browser you are on you can right click and show page source or view page source as it might be called, and let’s scroll down all the way to the bottom (this is Safari for reference) and what we’re looking for is this script code that we just pasted in. We can see its right there; perfect! We’re done, that’s all it is.

Now, I’ll go ahead and show you how to do it using the FTP client and we’re going to use the client FileZilla. If you don’t have FileZilla, it’s a free download for both Windows and Macintosh; so go ahead and Google FileZilla and you can download it. Let’s jump right into that. So we have FileZilla here open and as you can see I’m logged in. If you’re using this method I’m going to just assume that you know how to login to an FTP client and you should have this information from your host. Now what we did here is we navigated (here’s our home directory) and we’ve navigated into our wp-content > themes (make sure you choose your right theme).

Now a tip to make sure that you’re choosing the right folder with your theme; go back to your WordPress website here, view that page source again and within the header you should be able to see where the CSS file is being pulled from. In this case, we actually have an image down here being pulled from our website inside the wp-content folder, inside the themes folder and then here is our selected theme. That’s one way that you can confirm what the actual folder for your theme is. So, within the twenty-eleven theme we’re going to go inside and we’re going to look for that footer.php file.

There are several ways you can edit this file in FileZilla and this isn’t a FileZilla tutorial so I’m just going to show you the easiest way that I use. Go ahead and right click on it and then click view/edit and I’ve already opened this so you won’t get this box unless you’ve already opened it; but let’s just discard and open a new one. Okay, this is the same thing that we saw inside the WordPress dashboard, it’s just in our own editor. This particular editor is Sublime; you may have just a plain text editor.

Once again, we’re going to scroll down and look for that body tag and we’re going to paste that script (Google Analytics code) right before it. Okay we’re going to confirm script start, script ends and everything between it. We’re going to save it; in this case command+s (Mac) or control+s (Windows) and we can simply close out of our application. Once we click back into FileZilla it’s going to check if that file had been changed or updated in any way. This box will pop-up for you and we want to say “yes” let’s upload the new one so that it overwrites the old one.

Now let’s jump back into our browser to check, okay has this been added to our website. View the page source and as you can see once again it’s down here. All I did, was I’ll repeat that once more. I refreshed the page to make sure it was there. I showed the page source and I scrolled down to the bottom to confirm that it had loaded. That’s all it is, you’re done now; your Google Analytics is on your WordPress installation. Of course, as always Webdigia does offer website maintenance which would cover such things as adding this analytic code to your website if you don’t have time or if you just don’t want to mess with it. Go ahead and contact us at webdigia.com.

[Video] How to Upload Media to WordPress

Our website maintenance service provides a powerful resource for any website. Though a lot of times we receive requests that we almost feel bad charging for. One of the most popular requests is “can you upload x file to my website?” Of course we can, but we would also like to provide the knowledge of how you can do it as well for FREE.

This lead to the start of our video tutorials or how to’s for WordPress blogs / websites.

This is the first of many videos on WordPress, so make sure to stop back soon.

Learn how to upload media to WordPress and how to use that media once you’ve uploaded it.

Jonathon Moore

4minutes 26seconds

This is a quick WordPress tutorial video on how to walk you through uploading media to your WordPress blog or website.  Here I have a fresh install of WordPress on my local machine, and in this tutorial I’m going to assume that you know how to log in to WordPress and you know how to access your admin area.  I’m already logged in as you can see; so let’s just jump right into this!

I’m going to go over to my admin area and since I’m logged in, it loads right up – my dashboard.  We’re going to go over to the media.. right here – click on the ‘media’ and then what this is, is actually your library.  If you have media loaded into your WordPress installation it will show right here.  As you can see I don’t have anything on this fresh installation.  SO, this button up here; you can click “add new.”  You can also use this “add new” over here, either way it doesn’t matter; I always use this one up here just from habit.

Go ahead and click on the “add new.”  It will load the ‘upload new media’ page.  Now on this page, there are several ways you can upload; they (WordPress) continue to make this easier and easier for you.  So, you can either grab an image; drag and drop it on here, or you can select a file.  Here I have the Webdigia logo on my desktop – just a simple .png file.  Go ahead and click it if you’re using the ‘select file’ uploader, hit open and as you can see it uploads really quick because it is on my local machine.

This is an example of no issues, everything happened perfectly.  Sometimes you will get an error the first time that you are uploading something.  I will have a screencast that will show you how to fix that error as well as, (but for now) you will see a quick screen snippet of what that will look like so you will know to go view that if you get this (error).  If you got past that, then perfect; you can ignore everything I just said regarding that.

What this is, is it’s showing you that the file uploaded, it’s showing the file name, the file type (.png), the date and how big it is; perfect!  From this area you can change the title of it; you can add that SEO alternate text for when people (visitors) don’t have their images turned on – it will show that alternate text.  You can also add a caption and a description for it (your image).  Then it also shows you the location that it has it uploaded on your server.  Everything is fine here; you don’t actually have to change anything here.  Once it’s uploaded, it’s uploaded.  You can grab this URL, take it to any page that you’re working on; if you’re emailing it, you can grab that URL and give them to them – it doesn’t matter.

Using this upload feature you can upload anything as you can see here within a 32MB size.  Now you can change that, but that’s the default size.  You can upload a quick video, if it’s a tutorial; you can upload your PDF files, images, whatever it is; even .SWF files you can upload in here, it’s just going to store it in your uploads section on your website.  Now I have a file uploaded, what can I do to it?

Okay, I already said you can email the link; you can use this link here but let’s make this a little bit simpler.  If you’re working on a page or a post on your website; let’s go look at something real quick.  Jump over here to the pages as I just did, and here since it is a fresh install, I added a contact page, but let’s just go to our homepage real quick.  Here’s an example of a homepage.  This is just a simple page.  If we want to add, say that image, right here – we can go to that page we’re editing and click on this little icon right here that says “add media” (when hovering over the icon).  It’s going to open up the add media panel.

You can also upload media right from here.  You don’t have to go through all those steps we just went through.  You can (also) upload while you’re editing OR if you want to pull a file that you already have uploaded, go over here to the “media library” tab up at the top.  In the media library tab, if you have a bunch of things here it won’t open like this, but since we have only one thing, it’s going to open in an expanded view.  So this is what it will normally look like when you land on this page.

Go ahead if you want, whatever media you want find it, then go over here and click the “show.”  And then it will come down here and give you some more information.  As you can see this is the same thing we saw when we uploaded it the first time, but it has a couple more things.  It has alignment: none, left, center and right; and it also has the size change.  We want this image in here to be to the left of the text and we want it to be the full size.  Once we’ve selected our configuration, click the button that says “insert into post.”  You can see right there, it inserted it (flawlessly) into the post.  If we go over here and say (click) “update” and we go view the page.  You can see that it inserted it right into the post, to the left of the text.