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April 11th, 2012
Often overlooked, having a privacy policy on your site is vital if you want to display Adsense on your website. In fact, having a privacy policy easily accessible on your site is one of the requirements in the Adsense Terms and Conditions (you know, those things that you didn’t read). All joking aside, if you do not have a a privacy policy that meets Google’s specifications, your Adsense could be suspended.
Thankfully, resources are available that mean you won’t have to be penning the legalese of the policy from scratch. Several boilerplate policies are already available online and can be adjusted to fit your website. If you grab one from online though, make sure that it has been updated as recently as possible so that it is up-to-date with Google’s latest policies (As of April 2012, the last update to the Privacy Policy requirements was in April 2009). Specifically make sure that your policy contains a section regarding the use of DoubleClick DART cookies to adhere to Google’s policies.
A popular boilerplate Privacy Policy can be found and copied from HERE.
And while you’re at it, why not give those Google Adsense Terms and Conditions a quick read-through?
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April 3rd, 2012
Still need an invite to Pinterest? Send me an email at
admin@invenioblog.com or Tweet me at @InvenioBlog and I will send you one!
Taking a break in my Make Your Website Better series to talk to you about Pinterest. The latest social network craze, you’ve probably heard something about it already.
Basically an image sharing social network, Pinterest is a little different in that it helps you to share other people’s images that you like. You do this by “Pinning” them to your virtual bulletin boards which appear on your profile. Other people can “follow” you or your boards, and then your Pins will show up in their Pinterest stream of images. To make it easier for you to “Pin” images you find on websites, Pinterest gives you a little “Pin It!” button in your toolbar. Click it, and it displays a visual list of all the images on that webpage, which you can then select, add details to, and pin onto your boards.
Pinterest Home Page
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April 2nd, 2012
Moving forward with my plan to make my WordPress sites better I again looked for another way to keep my site speed up. This, I figured, was a very important step, as reports have shown that if your site does not load in 10 seconds, visitors will move on, and I definitely don’t want that.
Adding a cache plugin was something I knew was a significant step in bringing up site speed. A cache plugin will put together and store (cache) each page as a static page to serve to the visitor, rather than serving the dynamic pages that WordPress creates. This makes a big difference in speed because dynamic pages are pages that are generated each time a visitor opens them. In the background, the page needs to get the content information from the database, get information from the theme files for how the page should look, and generate an HTML page from the PHP code. This all takes time. The cache plugin simply stores a copy of the HTML page and serves it to the visitor. Much simpler, much faster. And of course, when you make updates or someone comments on your site, the cached page is simply updated to show the new information (if you update some things such as a plugin, WordPress will prompt you to manually update the cache and provide you with a Cache update button at the top of the WordPress admin area). Read more... (506 words, 1 image, estimated 2:01 mins reading time)
This is a preview of
Speeding Up WordPress With the W3 Total Cache Plugin
.
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April 1st, 2012
My second step in making my WordPress sites into better sites was to look into Image optimization. Because I had one site in particular that was very image-heavy and images are one of the site components that take the longest to load, I was looking forward to the results of this step.
I used the Smush.it service provided by the Yahoo Developer Network via the WP Smush.it plugin. You can also use this service for non-WordPress sites by going to their page and using either the Uploader or URL tab to optimize images. This process is loss-less, so it will not affect the quality/size of your images, just make them lighter to load.
In the case of my WordPress site, I simply added and activated the plugin. It will now automatically optimize any new images I add to the site. To optimize images I already have on the site, I can go to my WordPress “Media Library” page and click on the “Smush.it now!” option in the far right column to optimize each image. Once done, this column will show how much the photo’s file size was able to be reduced by. (There is also the option to do a Bulk Smush.it to optimize all images at once, though it can take a long time and is an experimental feature). Read more... (252 words, 1 image, estimated 1:00 mins reading time)
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March 31st, 2012
My first step in making my site better was to see how I could boost its speed a bit. I had started the day by reading an article by Google that ominously announced that 99 years of human life are wasted everyday by websites with uncompressed content. Now plagued by page load time guilt, I looked for how to go about doing a gzip compression on my websites.
Luckily, the solution is no farther away than the cPanel, and takes less than 15 minutes to do. (And with Google reporting that it can boost page load times to a third of what they are uncompressed, this one is worth it.)
Log into your cPanel (login page is usually cpanel.yoursite.com) with your username and password and scroll down the main page until you see the”Software/Service” section. Click on the “Optimize Website” icon.
Click on the "Optimize Website" icon.
When the page opens, you can use the radio buttons provided to switch the compression settings from disabled to either compress all of the website’s content, or only compress the specified MIME types, which you can define in the text box provided below. When you are done, just click on the “Save Settings” button to compress your website and speed up your load times! Read more... (217 words, 2 images, estimated 52 secs reading time)
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March 30th, 2012
Today I spent the day doing maintenance on various WordPress sites, trying to make them better.
The day began with searching for ways to speed up one of my WP sites that loads embarrassingly slow. While it largely has to do with a very heavy theme, my discoveries of the day were great, I learned some new things, and it really did have a good impact when I experimented with them (My Google PageSpeed rank rose by 30 points, and the site is definitely loading faster).
I then dug into improving the SEO of my sites (the traffic won’t come if it can’t find you, right?)
I updated my plugins and WordPress versions (after doing backups of course, just in case!)
And finally finished by adding Analytics to my sites, and looking at ways to find out more information about my traffic (where it’s coming from, when, how much, etc.)
By the end of the day I felt as though I had succeeded not only in making each site better, but I had learned a good deal of new and valuable information and found some very useful tools. Read more... (242 words, estimated 58 secs reading time)
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Posted by
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March 29th, 2012
By Ana Thorne – If you have a blog using the WordPress CMS system, you know how wonderfully handy it can be. It lets you skip over using the WYSIWYG editors, generate those pretty pages using PHP, and just makes the whole website process easier. But WordPress needs some maintenance too! Once every two weeks (or even once a month if you are pressed for time) if you can go through some basic steps, you can make sure that you keep your WordPress site updated and stable. Read more... (361 words, 1 image, estimated 1:27 mins reading time)
- Check that your version of WordPress is current on the Updates page in your WordPress admin area. If it is not, do a backup of your files and database and upgrade the version to keep it current and stable (you may want to wait for a month or so before doing the upgrade, as then the upgrade will have been “test driven” and will be more stable by then and more likely to support your plugins.)
- Check your plugins to see that they are updated. Update any that are outdated.
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Posted by
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March 23rd, 2012
I have spent the past three days trying to optimize my Adsense on various sites, experimenting to see how to get the most out of these little ads. I absolutely believe that every minute of those 3 days was very well spent. The work is done and now I get to sit back (well, not really, time to focus on creating content!), and watch to see how the passive income grows. (If it does not grow, time to re-work those ads, or focus on building traffic…) While every site is different, there are basic Adsense tips that will work for pretty much everyone, and if you’re not using them, you’re losing money. So here we go:
1. Adsense allows you to display 3 ads on each page. Do this. People won’t click on your ads if they’re not there. That said, don’t try cram ads into a page with only a few lines of content, this looks overwhelming. Keep in mind that you can display 3 ads while creating your content if you find that you are creating a lot of pages/posts where 3 ads look out of place. Read more... (775 words, 1 image, estimated 3:06 mins reading time)
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