9 Steps to Conduct an SEO Interview

Previously SEO was like Greek or Latin. But today SEO has become a household terminology even for IT novices. There are so many SEO Professionals popping up too. The challenge is to identify the right SEO professional for your requirement.

Based on your organizational requirement, the hiring policy may also vary. Firstly you need to set the objectives for which you need the requirement. Consequently you will derive the solution as to what will be the interview pattern.

Here is a generic step-by-step guidance for zeroing in on the right professional.

Step 1 to Conduct an SEO Interview

1Be sure that they have Search engine algorithm awareness.

To understand or outwit the search engine you need to analyze their algorithm first. Before that you need to develop a passion for search. Thus you need to ensure that the professional has good search expertise. For example, the professional should be aware of various search options

Step 2 to Conduct an SEO Interview

2Be sure that they know how to use Search options.

Most prominent search engines have enhanced search features. As far as Google, the leader in this domain, they offer features like Advanced search, trends, wagon wheel, instant, related search. The professional should be well versed with these offerings.

Step 3 to Conduct-an-SEO-Interview

3Check on their Exposure to SEO tools.

There are various SEO tools like Raven SEO, SEO powersuite, SEOmoz. The professional should have worked in at least one of these extensively. The reason being, if you are well versed to one of these you can easily play around with other tools too.

Step 4 to Conduct an SEO Interview

4Know about their knowledge of Analytics usage.

There are tools like Adobe Site catalyst, google analytics. These tools provide value added analysis of various parameters of your website performance like unique visit count, landing page data, navigation summary, entrance keywords and so on.

Step 5 to Conduct an SEO Interview

5Determine what type of tools they know how to use.

There lots and lots of free and paid seo tools that are of high value. To quote a few:Google keyword position checker – Determines the position of your website in search engines for a specific keyword. Page rank checker – Shows the Search engine ranking of your webpages.

Step 6 to Conduct an SEO Interview

6See if they can help you with Competitor analysis.

Unless you exactly know where you stand now, you can’t reach the top. So you need to analyze your competitor web page to track their keywords and backlinks and derive some calculated insights and plan your SEO procedure accordingly.

Step 7 to Conduct an SEO Interview

7Be sure that they can use Webmaster tools.

Most search engines provide unique and customized data to the webmasters of the websites that integrate with them. For example, google alerts its webmasters about crawl errors, malwares, updates.

Step 8 to Conduct an SEO Interview

 

8See if they have Knowledge about recent developments.

An ideal webmaster or SEO pro should know to read and interpret mails or signals from the corresponding search engines. Unless this procedure is done on a daily basis your growth is at stake. Google announced webmasters about their Panda and Penguin updates well in advance.

Step 8 to Conduct an SEO Interview

9Patience.

Last but not the least, you need to wait and make calculated SEO attempts in order to avoid being blacklisted by Search Engines. You should know that the saying, “Build your castle and people will visit”, is not applicable to SEO procedure. You need to perform White Hat SEO and wait for results. You wont show up for all your target keywords suddenly. It takes some time for your website to get indexed, crawled and get noticed. While there are lot more info that could be shared, this article ends here, for the purpose is to trigger your further thought process. Keep all these factors in mind while hiring your SEO expert.

9 Steps to Conduct an SEO Interview

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9 Tips To Getting Repeat Customers by SEO.

Tips To Getting Repeat Customers

SEO Tips – Here are my top 9 tips to getting repeat customers:

 

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.

4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.

5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.

8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

8. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.

9. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.

9 Tips To Getting Repeat Customers by SEO.

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How to Change the Number of Posts Displayed On Your WordPress Blog Page?

Have you ever wanted to change the number of posts displayed on your blog page? By default all blog archive pages show a maximum of 10 posts per page. Recently one of our readers asked us if there was an easy way to change that. In this article, we will show you how to change the number of posts displayed on your blog page.

If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.

First thing you need to do is login to your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings » Reading. Next change the “Blog pages show at most” number from 10 to anything else that you like.

How to Change the Number of Posts Displayed On Your WordPress Blog Page

Save Changes and that’s all.

Now your WordPress blog pages will display the amount of posts that you want to display.

It is important that you do not choose a number higher than 10 specially when you’re not showing excerpts. Mainly because the more posts you display on a page, the bigger the page size which means the slower it loads.

In the past, we changed our blog post count to 5, but we reverted back to showing 10 posts per archive page. We made this change because our users wanted to see more than 5 posts per page while they were browsing through our archives.

How many posts are you showing on your blog and other archive pages? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

We hope this post helped you change the number of posts displayed on your blog page.

How to Change the Number of Posts Displayed On Your WordPress Blog Page?

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How to Disable Gravatars in WordPress

WordPress Tips - Avatar allow users to give their online profiles an instantly identifiable persona. WordPress uses Gravatars as the default avatar platform. It allows WordPress users to have the same avatar displayed on any gravatar enabled website. However, in some cases you may not want to display gravatars on your WordPress site. In this article, we will show you how to disable gravatars in WordPress.

First thing you need to do is log in to your WordPress site and go to Settings » Discussion. Scroll down to the Avatars section and uncheck the box next to ‘Show Avatars’ option. You will need to click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.

That’s all you have successfully disabled Gravatar on your WordPress site. Your comments will not show user gravatars. You will also not see gravatars anywhere in WordPress admin area. User gravatars will not appear on Comments and Users screen, your gravatar from WordPress admin bar will also disappear.

Even though you have disabled gravatar on your WordPress site, you can still show them selectively if you need. For example, you can display gravatar in author info box, or display gravatar from user email anywhere on your site.

We hope this article helped you disable gravatar on your site.

If you liked this article, then subscribe to our YouTube Channel or catch us onTwitter.

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How to Disable Gravatars in WordPress

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How to Add Single / Double Line Spacing in WordPress

In most Word processors, you can easily add extra blank line spaces. All you have to do is press the ENTER key a few times. If you’re a bit more savvy, then you can change the formatting to create double spaced line after paragraphs, increase line spacing, etc. Now this becomes really frustrating for beginners when they start using the WordPress visual editor. Why? because there is no formatting button like MS Word. In this article, we will show you how to add single / double line spacing in WordPress.

Before we start, it’s important to know that line spacing is controlled by the WordPress theme you use. We will show you how to add line spacing in the visual editor, and then we will cover how to change the line spacing in your theme if you’re not happy with the results.

Adding Double Line Space

When you press Enter to add a line break, WordPress visual editor considers it as a new paragraph. This means that it will automatically add double line space granted that your theme has the styling for it (most good themes do).

So simply go in and press Enter after the line and then type something else in the next line.

By simply doing that, based on your theme styling, you should see a clear distinction between paragraphs (i.e double line spacing).

Adding Single Line Space

Now if you are writing something like an address, then you probably want it to be single spaced instead of double spaced.

In this case, you need to press SHIFT + ENTER key.

This will tell WordPress that you want to start a new line inside an existing paragraph thus it needs single line spacing vs double line spacing.

Modifying the Line height and Spacing

Sometimes even when you add the proper line spacing in the editor, it doesn’t display the way you want it to in your theme. This is when you need to make CSS changes. CSS is basically like the formatting feature in Microsoft Word.

Yes you will tweak a little bit of CSS code, but it’s not as scary as you think it is.

Open your theme’s CSS file. You can find it by going to Appearance » Editor in your WordPress admin area. You can also use FTP as well if you like.

In your CSS file, you want to look for .post p

This basically controls the display of paragraphs in your post content. Once you find it, you need to add or modify the line-height value. If you do not find the .post p tag, then simply create one.

.post pline-height: 1.5em;

The CSS rule shown above will change the line spacing of paragraph content to 1.5em. Em is a unit of width for typography. We are using .post class which WordPress automatically adds to the content area of all posts to make sure it only affects posts and not paragraphs used elsewhere.

Now this only changes the spacing of single spacing. If you want to change the spacing between each paragraph (i.e double spacing), then you would need to add padding.

.post p 
line-height: 1.5em;
padding-bottom: 15px;
 

Feel free to adjust the numbers to meet your needs.

We hope this article helped you add single / double line spacing in WordPress. If you liked this article, then consider subscribing to our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter.

How to Add Single / Double Line Spacing in WordPress

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How to Rearrange Post Edit Screen in WordPress

After using WordPress for a while, you may notice that there are some areas of the post edit screen that you do not use at all. Similarly, you will notice certain sections that you use more often, but they are not ideally placed on the screen. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could re-arrange your post edit screen to the way that helps improve your writing experience? Well you can. In this article, we will show you how to rearrange post edit screen in WordPress and improve your writing experience.

By default, when you install WordPress your post edit screen looks something like this:

It may look different depending on your theme and plugins. You may have extra meta boxes on the screen and additional buttons inside the Visual post editor.

All the default and custom metaboxes on the post edit screen can be minimized, hidden, rearranged. To minimize a meta box you need to click on the upward arrow icon next to the title of the meta box. To maximize it, click on the downward arrow next to the title of the meta box.

You can click and hold on a meta box title and then drag it to rearrange its position on the post edit screen. You can move it down and upwards. There are two areas where you can move a meta box. The right hand column or at the bottom of the post editor.

To hide additional meta boxes from your post edit screen, you need to click on the screen options button on the top right corner of the screen. A flydown menu would appear with the check boxes to hide or display the meta boxes on the screen. You can also choose to have a single or double column layout.

For an even cleaner experience, you can try the full screen editor. Simply click on the full screen button on the post editor or press ALT+Shift+W keys on your keyboard.

In full screen writing mode, all metaboxes are hidden and you have just basic formatting buttons at the top, your post title, and the post editor. Even the toolbar at top only appears when you move your mouse outside post editor. This is called distraction-free writing mode.

Play around with the arrangement and improve your writing experience. What’s even cooler is that each person can have their own arrangement without affecting the other author’s on the site. After all, we all work in different ways.

We hope this article helped you rearrange your post edit screen in WordPress to improve your writing experience. If you liked this article, then join us on Twitter and consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.

How to Rearrange Post Edit Screen in WordPress

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How to Add Caption to Images in WordPress?

WordPress Tips – Ever wonder how some sites add small texts below their images? Well that’s a caption. It comes in handy if you want to provide additional details about your image. WordPress comes with a built-in functionality to add captions to your photos. In this article, we will cover how to add caption to images in WordPress.

First thing you need to do is to upload an image. You can add images to WordPress by clicking on the Add Media button while writing a post/page. Once you have uploaded an image, you will see a form where you can provide the image information such as title, caption, alternate text, and description for your image.

The title and description boxes are not visible to your users. However, caption will appear with the image when you insert it into your post. Depending on how your theme handles captions, you will see something like this:

You can also add caption to images when creating an image gallery in WordPress. Once you have uploaded your photos, you can enter captions directly below an image, like this:

The captions will appear with your gallery images. The appearance of captions may vary depending on how your theme styling. This is how gallery captions appear in the default Twenty Fourteen theme:

Adding Captions to Multiple Images in Multiple Posts

If you post a lot of photographs on your site, then perhaps you would like to revisit your photos and add captions to photos in different posts. You don’t need to open each post in the post editor just to add captions to images. You can add captions by editing an image directly.

To do that, go to Media » Library. There you will see all your photos and images. Take your mouse over to an image you want to edit, and you will notice that a few links would appear below it. You need to click on Edit Image link.

This will open image in the WordPress image editor screen. You can add caption to your image here. You can also crop, rotate, and resize your images from edit image screen.

We hope this article helped you add caption text to your images in WordPress. If you liked this article, then please join us on Twitter or subscribe to our YouTube Channel

How to Add Caption to Images in WordPress?

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