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Weekly Links Roundup – Easy WP Guide, Podcasting, Post Excerpts, Yoast SEO

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

The latest edition of Easy WP Guide, an evolving manual on all things WordPress, is available now. You can read it online (recommended) or download a PDF in English or Spanish. Keep in mind it’s  PDF that gets updated frequently….

Looking to start your own podcast? Here’s a roundup of 7 of the best WordPress podcasting plugins right now. One of my colleagues recommended Blubrry PowerPress for a new project this week.

If you ever wanted to change the length of the blog post excerpt, which is by default 55 words, this post is for you. The excerpt is the first bit of each blog post that’s displayed on the blog archive page. Learn how to change the excerpt length with or without a plugin.

If you’ve installed Yoast SEO and used it a little bit to try to get your pages or posts ranking higher, it may still not be clear exactly how Yoast works. Learn what Yoast SEO actually does for you. You don’t have to be a tech wizard to get the benefits Yoast provides.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Blog Post Length, Online Courses, Gutenberg Addons, Plugins

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

One of my clients is now starting a blog with the goal of getting more traffic from search results. She asked me last week: “How long should my blog posts be?” The answer, like for so many things, is “it depends.” Looks like current trends are pointing to longer blog posts being better for getting more traffic (to the dismay of many!). Really long – like over 1700 words. Here is a post to back that up with research data, along with a number of other opinions and guidelines.

Ever thought about teaching others online? Here’s a thorough and informative post about creating your own online courses using LearnDash, a course plugin one of my clients uses and likes. There is a lot of upfront work involved in creating an online course, but the benefits in passive income can be worth it. Note that the linked post recommends a commercial theme that may or may not suit you or your course idea – you can use any theme with online courseware.

If you’ve made the switch to Gutenberg, you may be wanting more options than what comes in the new editor by default. Here’s a review of 10 of the best Gutenberg add-on plugins. These plugins give you new and different types of blocks to use in your page layouts. One of my current favorites is CoBlocks which includes about 30 layout blocks.

For new WordPress users – confused about the differences between themes and plugins? Here’s a great post explaining what plugins are and why you’d want to use them. One important thing to remember when choosing plugins (free or paid) is to look at the reviews and the compatibility. As a rule it’s better to avoid older plugins that haven’t been updated recently or tested with current or recent WordPress versions.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Food Blogging, Breadcrumbs, SMTP

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Okay, sorry – I know I haven’t been blogging weekly in a few months. It was an intensely crazy summer and fall with a lot of unplanned travel related to family, a broken arm and hand, a vacation, a sinus infection and bronchitis. And no paddle boarding. But things are now beginning to settle into a new routine, and I hope to be blogging more regularly. Onward.

My husband recently started a food blog. Well, not exactly… it was more of a way to get about 150 printed recipes we use a lot out of a ragged folder and into digital format so we can find them easier. He used WP Recipe Maker as the recipe plugin – here’s a review of the best 15 WordPress recipe plugins in case you’re interested in trying a food blog yourself. These recipe plugins make it easy to add SEO-friendly recipes with options and features like printing and Pinterest rich pins built in.

And speaking of food blogs – if you include a recipe that’s been published elsewhere, how does that work? Is that a copyright violation, and if it is, how do you avoid that? This post discusses recipe attribution: “when in doubt, always give attribution.”

Let’s talk about breadcrumbs. No, not the ones from your favorite bread recipe… the helpful little string of text and links at the top of a page that tells you where in the website you are at any given moment. Did you know that those breadcrumbs are important for SEO? Not only are they good for human users; they also help Google and other search engines understand the structure of your site.

Finally… ever had problems getting notifications from your WordPress site, like submitted form entries or completed payment notifications? It’s one of the most common issues my clients report, but thankfully it’s also easy to fix. WordPress by default uses your host server’s PHP mail() function to send notifications, but quite commonly the server either isn’t using it or has problems with its setup. So what do you do? You don’t worry about the server at all. Instead, you use the SMTP (outgoing mail) settings from one of your existing email providers, like Gmail or a domain associated with your site. You could also use a 3rd-party service like SendGrid or Mailgun which will likely improve deliverability of site emails, important as your site and audience get larger. Here are instructions for setting up SMTP; my favorite free plugin for this is currently Post SMTP.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Image Gallery Plugins, Blogging Mistakes, Analytics Tracking Code, Moving Content

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

I’m a big fan of the FooGallery image gallery for WordPress, when I need something pretty simple. It supports albums and a lightbox and has a decent variety of free gallery styles, plus their support for the free version is speedy. But sometimes you need more… or maybe just ‘different.’ Here’s a fresh (2019) review of 9 great WordPress image gallery plugins. Envira Gallery is another I can recommend.

Getting into blogging – or doing it already and not seeing the results you expected? Take a look at this… and make sure you’re not doing any of these 13 steps to failing miserably with blogging. Learn what not to do, and be more effective and efficient with your blogging efforts.

Did you know that there are a lot of different ways to get your Google Analytics tracking code into your WordPress site? You can use a plugin, add the code to your theme manually, use Google Tag Manager… Learn about the different ways of adding Analytics code and why you might want to choose one over another.

Finally… Moving content from one WordPress site to another can be a truly painful experience. This post on how to do that is from 2017 but still valid. And yes, it’s still a pain.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress 5.0, Audio and Video Players, Powerpoint, Internal Links

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Today (Thursday Dec. 6) is supposed to be the (rescheduled) day for the WordPress 5.0/Gutenberg drop. Nothing yet and it’s afternoon… but when it happens, here are some handy links about Gutenberg, the new WordPress editing tool.

  • Should you update to WordPress 5.0 right away? I say no. Personally I would wait until January to give WP and plugin/theme developers time to deal with Gutenberg issues – it is not ready for prime time. I will not be updating client sites until then – I’ll be using Classic Editor instead. Here’s what Yoast says about updating.
  • Do I have to use Gutenberg? No – if you prefer the old editor, install and use the Classic Editor plugin – learn how to do this. You can try Gutenberg when you’re ready, on your terms.
  • What exactly does Gutenberg do? Here’s a guide to everything Gutenberg.

Switching gears, here’s a big review of the 15 best WordPress audio and video players. This is brand new and not super-thorough or in-depth on each plugin, but is a good place to start if you’re looking to add audio or video to your WordPress site and need a quick overview of current options.

If you’re a Powerpoint fan (are there any, still?) then you might have a need for this… I was asked a few weeks ago to embed a client’s Powerpoint in WordPress and I’d never done that before. Here’s a guide to embedding Powerpoint in WordPress; the Embed Any Document plugin they mention worked perfectly. It also embeds Word, Excel, PDF and Illustrator files.

And finally, some SEO stuff. You may not know that internal links (links between pages and posts in your own website) are very important! They help drive users deeper into your site to the places you want them to go. They show search engines what pages are most important (the ones with the most internal links!). And they help ensure that search engine crawlers can reach every page on your site. Learn more about internal links and why you really need to audit them from time to time.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.