1. Top 10 tips

Come up with a resource post.  Give some advice on a subject you are knowledgeable about.  For example entitle your blog post “10 ways to save money on your weekly shopping” or “7 top tips to losing weight in time for summer”.  Using a number of points and writing that content in listed form makes it simple for your readers to read information on particular subjects.  Bullet points or numbered points with sub headers are easy to read and even easier to skim and let’s be honest, there are many readers who will just skim content.  In addition this type of content can be good conversation starters (or comment starters) e.g. “I don’t agree with No 3″ or  ”You forgot so and so!”

2. Share buttons

Once you have completed your post, share it on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.  Stumble it, Dig it and add it to Delicious.  Ensure you have also installed social sharing buttons for your readers to share the information they have just read and liked.  There is nothing wrong with self-promotion.

3. Comment, comment and comment

Commenting on blogs will greatly help your site.  If bloggers are abiding by Google rules, comment links will be set up as “no-follow”, however if you are leaving good quality comments and interesting ideas, this will fundamentally drive traffic to your site.

4. Write Guest Posts

Guest posts are a wonderful way to showcase your quality content and get some great backlinks.  Some top bloggers offer the chance to guest post, others may also be willing if you write a polite request and showcase your writing.  Writing a good quality post can be beneficial for both sides and will achieve your aim of getting good links to your site.

5. Carnival

Blog carnivals are like a magazine where you link up to a particular subject.  Submit your blog post or article and reap the rewards.  This also gives you a great opportunity to read the other blogs in the Carnival and remember to leave comments if you have something of value to say.

6. Join communities
Blogging communities and forums are great ways to get traffic.  Choose your sector or niche and find a relevant community.  Some communities will run league tables to which you can submit your blog and watch your blog rise as you create better content and receive good quality backlinks.  Blog Engage is a general community allowing you to submit your blog on any subject.  BritMums is a thriving parenting community with a blog of their own for which they accept guest posts and Tots 100 is a huge community of Mum & Dad bloggers and runs a monthly league table of parenting blogs.  Tots 100 also has a blog full of invaluable content.

7. Permalinks

When you are creating your links, remember to properly optimise your links with strong keywords.  Ensure to tweak the settings so that each post you write has a keyword-rich permalink. For example http://spiderspun.co.uk/2012/05/how-to-add-nextgen-gallery-to-wordpress/ as opposed to http://spiderspun.co.uk/blog/p=?12.  Search engine spiders will follow these links and index your pages if your links are relevant to the content of the site on which they were featured.

8. Competition

Offer a great prize, maybe something you have been given from a sponsor, or if you have a business a service, you can offer a free gift.  Promote it on twitter Facebook et al and watch the traffic flow in.

Just a word of warning: Do NOT think that by spending $49 dollars on ‘that’ wonderful offer that gives you 10,000 links will work. In fact, it will have the opposite effect. You want links from unique pages, of reasonable authority and relevant content.

So please share and comment – you’ll be doing your blog a great favour!

The one I have used many times is Nextgen Gallery, it also has many other plugins that extend it and it is so user-friendly (once over the initial hurdle of uploading it and understanding how to implement it).

This video (hopefully) will make the instal process a lot easier for you – well that is the intention with it anyway…

Do share

I decided to start doing small bite sized chunks / lessons using video showing people what to do, without getting too technical so it is easy to see where your Google analytic code goes.

Now if there is any request anybody has that they would like a quick video on then please put something in the comments and I’ll try to get it done…

Then we started discussing what we all did, and when I mentioned SEO to them a couple of people looked at me and gave me lecture on spam, ruining search results, yadda yadda. When I said I only used white hat techniques one of them joked ‘What with, a broomstick?’ Well at that point, after I finished laughing, I said I used a crash helmet and asked a few other people what they were doing, crash avoided

Well Matt Cutts, the head poncho of Google’s Web-spam group, has made it quite clear that SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is not spam. You don’t believe me? Well, hear it from the man himself:

Now I only use white hat techniques, and if you want an explanation as to what I mean when I say white hat then take a look at a blog I wrote way back in April which defines white hat seo and what is it.

Plus, you may want to take a look at all our white hat SEO packages too.

The report also said people liked Twitter because the messages were short. Though more than half the people who started a Twitter account have stopped using it, the ones that stay are very active and they’re ready to engage in conversation.

As I have found out using Twitter needs some dedication and logging in once a day isn’t going to work in the long run. You see, Twitter moves faster than any other social media network so a response that takes a day is really more like a fortnight in social media years.

Moreover, to get involved also doesn’t mean shouting marketing Tweets every hour. Too many repetitive or boring tweets was the number one reason people stopped following a brand on Twitter.

Very few people said they left a brand tweets because their own circumstances and needs had changed.

The lesson here is simple: People will stay connected as long as you hit that magic number range of informational versus entertaining Tweets.

So is Twitter pointless? Well if you are only using Twitter for simple monetary gain then yes it pointless, just stick to spam… If you are using Twitter to join in the greatest Global conversation and are genuinely interested in people then hang around, it’s not pointless.

Judging by what changes have happened throughout the world and what part Twitter played, allowing fast communication on a global level then to say Twitter is pointless is like saying ‘What have the Romans ever done for us…’

The World has lost a creative genius, a visionary, and all-round amazing human being.

Here is Steve Jobs’ thoughts on how to live your life before you die:

Apple didn’t specify the cause of his death. Steve Jobs had battled pancreatic cancer and several years ago received a liver transplant.

During his more than three decade-long career, Mr. Jobs transformed Silicon Valley as he helped turn the once sleepy expanse of fruit orchards into the technology industry’s innovation center.  In addition to laying the groundwork for the modern high-tech industry alongside other pioneers like Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison,  Mr. Jobs proved the appeal of well-designed intuitive products over the sheer power of technology itself and shifted the way consumers interact with technology in an increasingly digital world.

Unlike those men, however, the most productive chapter in Mr. Jobs’ career occurred near the end of his life, when a nearly unbroken string of innovative and wildly successful products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad fundamentally changed the PC, electronics and digital media industries. The way he marketed and sold those products through savvy advertising campaigns and its retail stores, in the meanwhile, helped turn the company into a pop culture icon.

Aww, RIP Steve Jobs: visionary, genius, husband and father; the World will miss you.

More often than not we are hearing from people who already have websites and are looking for some website management and a number of times we find ourselves managing their websites. We weave our seo services into their sites and they get more visitors.

This is when some people notice the site starts getting slower – because of the number of visitors on the site at the same time – and this is when we suggest they get onto a VPS or semi-dedicated server.  We always get asked the question why?

Well, if you put open loads of applications on your pc you will notice that starts getting slower – and this is similar to what is hapening on a server.  A cheap server may have thousands of websites on it and is handling many calls for different pages of many websites.  This is why it is better with bigger sites to know that you have a cerain amount of dedicated resources that are yours.

However I did notice  Linkedin has changed members accounts settings (your too – if you have one) . Why you ask? So that your name and face can be used in advertising messages on the Linkedin platform. Really.

That’s right. You, me, everyone, was automatically opted-into their plan for social network advertising.

Look read this:

Anyway, let me explain in the Spiderspun eight-leg plan on how to un-tangle yourself from their ad-trap:

How to opt-out of Linkedin social advertising program

1. Log in to Linkedin, err yeah right!
2. Choose ‘Settings’.
3. Choose ‘Account’.
4. Under ‘Privacy controls’, select ‘Manage Social Advertising’.
5. Uncheck box ‘LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising’, Phew…!
6. Click ‘Save’.
7. You now receive a notification ‘You have successfully updated your social advertising settings’.
8. Laugh and celebrate.

Hope this helps some people, tootle-pip!

1. Avoid spamming on your Facebook fan page. There is a fine line between promoting what you want to promote and annoying everyone with repetition of links as well as self praising.
2. The best way to promote to your customers is by giving them good quality information for free, which would slightly tease & excite them and make them enquire for more.
3. Don’t clog your fans news feed with your advertisements and links.
4. Avoid mixing anything personal, or related to other businesses of yours at your Facebook fan page. Posting personal status updates are considered unprofessional, and when you start advertising other businesses, products, or any other project you are working on, it would send mixed signals and lead to confusion for your viewers.
5. Avoid speaking highly about yourself, your product, or your business.
6. Encourage your fans to post their experiences with you, and share their thoughts. These became instant testimonials, which are much more reliable & valuable for both yourself & for other potential customers.

Now that you have read this simple guide, if you want a professional Facebook fan page like Spiderspun has  then contact us and we’ll have a chat how we can help you.

Wix, from what I have seen, is a platform that allows pretty much anyone the ability to build a website within the Flash environment. Here at Spiderspun we have no issues with Flash, if used for a snazzy banner, as long as the page it is used on has plenty of relevant HTML that Google’s spiders can read. Flash uses vector graphics and so if the entire site is like this then apart from the header sections there is very little that is usful that the spiders can take away from them.

The other big issue for us with Flash Websites is the amount of time they take to load… ages! Now, I don’t know about you but when I click onto a Website and it takes ages to load I simply get fed-up and zoom off elsewhere.

So although one of these free fan-dangle tools to build your Website might seem like a great idea to begin with it really isn’t. The SEO on them will be next to non-existent and therefore cannot be found – other than by going directly there. Which is really rather pointless if you are trying to get new customers / subscribers to spread your message to.