To Ad or Not to Ad?

I have made a choice to not include ads on this blog. Not that I think blogs should not have them, but I just do not want to put them on mine at this time.

Why would I not want to try and get some sort of revenue through my site? I have this belief (right or wrong) that if you put ads on your blog it makes the advice you give out not worth as much.

Also I feel that if I include ad’s that this is no longer about me wanting to make this a blog for you the WordPress users but a blog about me wanting to make money.

Am I just being stupid about all of this? I am looking at redoing the template for the site. Should I add a section that will display ads of some kind?

Now, I go to a lot of blogs that have ads,  and they have great information and great advice. So am I just being stupid, and I should use ads or am I right in the fact that readers think this belittles the content on the site?

What do you all think? Drop a comment and let me know what you think and what way you think I should go.

Who do you Write for? Should you Care?

I was having a conversation at work recently about the age to which we cater our writing on the web site. 

What that means for us is that we write the content for someone with a 9th grade reading level.

My question for you all is this.  When you write your WordPress blog do you give any thought to the reading level of your content? Should you? Do you even care?

Part of me (a very small part) says that I should not care at all and just write what I want without worrying if I am writing over the readers’ head. That said, the reason I write this blog is to help you all to make your WordPress blog  have the best Findability it can.

With that in mind, part of good Findability is to have the content of the site  be as accessible to the largest audience as it can be. I think you should write your content in a way that allows everyone to understand and use the information you are writing about. This is easier said then done.

My plan? Just write what I know in the way that I would  explain it to my Mother. She is a smart woman but does not know much about my topic.  Therefore,  if I can get her to understand what I am writing about then there is a good chance that the people that I am writing for will understand it also.

But it needs to be said that unless the subject matter you are writing about is geared to an entry level group, you need to be careful to not dumb it down so much that the more advanced users will feel insulted and walk away from your blog and then you have lost a reader.

So the question is does the readers’ reading level matter at all? Do you even think about it at all? Drop me a comment and let me know your thoughts on all of this.

Subscribe to Comments 2.1 and Comments in general

I found this great little plug-in for Wordpress Subscribe to Comments 2.1 [ Tempus Fugit | TxFx.net ] and I took the time to install it.

It installed easily and worked right out of the box with little to no problems at all. What it does is add a little check box that
sends readers an email when the comments have been updated.

They can do this if they have made a comment or even if they haven’t, and they just want to be notified when others have posted a comment. The plugin also remembers if you have already signed up and clicked to be informed, and it displays a different screen asking them if they want to manage their subscriptions.

After I installed the plug-in I went to go and test it. I took a look at my comment section. I highly recommend that if you have not taken the time to do this, you should go and do it right now. I found it hard to understand and some errors in the way it asks for information.

This is an often overlooked section of your blog, one that should be important to you. We are trying to build a community and the best way to do this is with comments. If your readers come to make a comment and find problems, then there is a good chance that they will not make one and possibly just leave the site.

So what do you all think? Is it important to get comments, or is it just ok for people to come to the site and read and go away?

Feed Analysis v1.1 - A Feed Analysis Application

On one of my new favorite blogs, Blog Perfume, I found a post about a new online feed analysis application

Feed Analysis v1.1 - No CSV File Upload Required

The application takes your FeedBurner feed information and gives you a set of dynamic and easy to understand data.

I find this a much easier way to get the information and to find out what the data is saying to me about the people that are subscribing to my feeds.

This is a free application that works fast. No sign up. All you need to do is to give it your feed information (they hold your hand on what information they need), and they give you a wonderful amount of information.

If you are using RSS on your Wordpress blog, and why would you not, then this is a great way to get your FeedBurner information.

If you are not using FeedBurner to track your feeds you should be. Check out this post on how they have a great plugin that makes using them very easy.

What kind of Feed information do you look at, or any at all? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Meta Tags and Web Search the Word from Google

Over at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog there is a new post that talks about Meta tags. It discusses what we should be using and what does us no good in SEO / Findability.> Answering more popular picks: meta tags and web search

Meta data is one of the things that have a level of voodoo involved with it. There was a time in the web when loading up the meta information was a sure fire way to get your site ranked higher, and to get it included on as many search results as possible.

With this in mind it was ripe for abuse. Google saw that and let us know a while ago that they where putting less weight to meta data on a web page.

This post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog lets us in on which meta data Google looks at and puts weight in when they crawl the page.

If you are using a template for your Wordpress blog that you did not create yourself, there is more than a likely chance that there is just the default meta data in the header. This does not mean that you cannot dive into the header.php file (located under Dashboard > Presentaion > Theme Editor) and add the data in that you think works best for your blog.

But please do not delete anything you do not understand. This can really mess up how your blog looks or even if it will work at all. If you feel like you want to do this but are scared, please contact someone that works with SEO / Findability and Wordpress (some one like me!).

One more thing. Whether you add the information in yourself or get someone else to do it, please remember to make the data relevant to your blog. If you do not, there is a good chance that in the long run you will get penalized for trying to cheat the system

Do you have the meta data in your blog? If not do you think you will add it yourself or get someone to help? Drop a comment and let me know.

RSS Feeds and how to use them

If you take the time to look at your blog’s stats (you are right?), you might be noticing that more and more of your readers are not coming to your blog at all but reading it through your RSS feed. At least that is what I have been noticing.

Don’t know what RSS is? RSS is a type of XML file which includes content from a variety of websites and web services. It allows people to easily track new content being added on sites. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0).

Setting it up in Wordpress is a snap. It is built in and most of the themes that are approved for Wordpress 2.3 have it built in.

You should promote it on your site by using a well placed icon on the page as well as continuing to write good content (something you should be doing anyway).

I have seen sites that will add a header on a page or an article that will welcome you to the site if it is the first time you have been to it. I am not a fan of that. The times I have seen it done, it always looks intrusive to me.

For more information (and the site that gave me the idea to write this) go read Devlounge | How to Increase RSS Feed Subscribers

I hope this helps. Drop me a comment to let me know how your RSS feeds are doing, and if you do anything to help them.

Protecting Your Content From the Spinning Spammers

After following a link or two, I came across this article on Blog Herald by Jonathan Bailey Protecting Your Content From the Spinning Spammers

 Spinning Spammers are described as people who are taking posts from real bloggers and then running them through some type of algorithm. This may involve using a thesaurus to find synonyms for the words in questions or an automatic translation program to convert the work into another language and perhaps converting it back to English.

 There is a good explanation of it in this article also on Blog Herald

They then post it on a site, and you get a notice of a track back. If you are good and want to know who is linking to you (and you should), you can go and hand trace the link back to the page it came from. When you get there you will find a post that may kind of look like yours, but at the bottom it has a link that says something like “Go read the rest of the article at:” and it links back to your blog.

So why is this bad? You are getting an incoming link and that is what we all want, right? As the owner of the blog and the post, you did nothing wrong, and there is a good chance that you will see no repercussions from this at all. But there is a small chance that you could get flagged for posting duplicate content or some unkown penalty that Google has yet to come up with.

Besides that, they are stealing the work you have created and that is never good. You took the time to sit down and come up with an idea and write it down. In theory, you also spent time crafting it and changing it until it was just right. All they want is new content to up their AdSense rating and make more money.

How to stop it? Well there are some ways that Jonathan talks about. All of them are good, and I am sure they will work. The one I am trying out is the first one on his list which is the Digital Fingerprint plugin for Wordpress. I have installed it and am running it now, and it looks like it works. You can set your fingerprint to anything you want, and they even give you an option to trace the prints right from your dashboard in Wordpress.

 After it has been running a little longer I will give you all an update of how it is working for me. In the mean time what do you all think? Should we be worried about this kind of Spam / Content stealing? Are we wasting time trying to stop them? Let me know in the comments.

Google Analytics Videos On YouTube

I saw this great article a while back, and I am just now getting around to posting this. I found the article on Google Analytics Blog: Google Analytics Videos On YouTube,and it is about the videos that have been posted on YouTube (they own it you know).The videos are from sessions at the Google Conversion University event held in August.

To start with, we have a solid lineup of videos taken on August 1st from our first ever Google Conversion University event. It was attended by 100+ representatives from major companies across all major verticals. Attendees got the chance to share ideas, meet with our team, and listen to some great presentations on optimizing their web analytics experiences. You will find those presentations, filmed live in August, now on YouTube. 

The list of subjects that are posted is impressive, and they say there will be more added as they continue to have more events.If you are an owner of a blog (Wordpress or not), there is no better place to find out about who is coming to your blog. You not only know who is coming, but also what they are doing while they are there.The information in the videos is mostly for people that use Google’s Analytics product, however even if you do not use them you should check out the videos. It is free and easy to set up, and most of the information can be used with almost any analytic package.

Happy Thanksgiving

I would like to wish all of the readers in the U.S. a wonderful and happy Thanksgiving.I hope everyone has a safe and fun filled day eating, spending time with your family, watching football, or doing whatever you have planed for this day.I would also like to welcome all of the readers that are coming to the blog from Interface-Reaserch and those that came to us through the post about Interface-Reaserach on CSS Beauty. You have come to Findability Today during the holidays, but I hope that you will keep coming back and sign up for the rss and read all of the new and wonderful posts that will be coming next week.

Interface Research

Hello everyone. This is not a Wordpress, or really a Findability post, but I thought I would send it out to the small group of people that read the blog anyway.

I am working on a research project with a small group, and we have an online test up and running right now atInterface Research

If any of you, as my readers, could please take some time (it will not take more that 10 minutes) and go take the test, that would be great. After you take it, if you could pass it on that would be a wonderful thing also.

Now, if you really want to help our world you could go and Digg it, that would rock!

I would love to hear what you all think of the survey. So, if you feel like it stop back by and drop a comment off and let me know.