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2017 Jun 16

Keyword Research Using Python, RAKE, and Support Chat Transcripts

By 0 Comments Data Science, Keyword Research, SEO, WordPress.com

Over at WordPress.com, our main avenue of customer support is live chat. We previously were on Olark, but has since built out a chat system that we call HappyChat (support folks are referred to as Happiness Engineers). There are a number of excellent features that the development team has built in, but an often underutilized one is chat tagging. If a user joins a chat, and asks about a domain renewal, that chat might be tagged with “domains” or “domain-renewal”; we aren’t very strict on tagging, except in certain circumstances. We can pull out the data we need even if the tagging is a little fuzzy.

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2017 Jun 16

By 0 Comments Analytics, Google Analytics, Reposts, Uncategorized

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2016 Jul 07

Grow Your Traffic with Keyword Research

By 0 Comments Keyword Research, SEO, WordPress.com

Grow Your Traffic with Keyword Research

This post is an introduction for WordPress.com bloggers to the concept of keyword research, with some real-world examples, tools, and step-by-step guidance.

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2016 Jan 28

Bing Webmaster Tools: Three Steps To Search Engine Domination

By 0 Comments Bing, Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools: Three Steps To Search Engine Domination

Bing is an often-ignored and forgotten search engine, but for certain demographics, it’s a valuable source of traffic.

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2015 Dec 16

Three Google Search Console Tips for Better SEO

By 0 Comments Google, Google Search Console, SEO, WordPress.com

Three Google Search Console Tips for Better SEO

This is a post I wrote geared towards WordPress.com users. However, the tips are great for any site, no matter the platform, and are the very first things I do after verifying a site on Google Search Console.

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2015 Jul 28

Help! Googlebot Cannot Access CSS And JS files On My WordPress Site!

By 0 Comments Google, SEO, WordPress

Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files on...

If you received this message this morning from Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools), you’re not alone. Google has recently been pushing harder for webmasters to allow crawlers full access to all Javascript and CSS so that they can render a site to determine whether or not it meets mobile standards (among other things). Many WordPress sites (along with the other major CMSs) received an ominous warning that their site was blocking assets, and it could affect rankings. While technically true, many of the sites were only blocking /wp-admin/, where absolutely no public-facing assets should live. For those of you that are in that situation, relax.

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2015 Jul 24

WooCommerce HTTPS Fix For Chrome

By 0 Comments WooCommerce, WordPress

In response to the Chrome 44 issue that’s been plaguing some sites, someone was kind enough to roll the fix into a plugin for folks who may not want to poke around their woocommerce.php file.

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2015 Feb 11

Improving WordPress Site Speed

By 0 Comments SEO, Speed, Web Development

(originally posted on Bring Your Own Design)

Most of us don’t need to serve up millions (or even hundreds) of pageviews a day, but, eventually you’ll run into a situation where your site is running slow. While the reasons for a slow-loading site are countless, there are a few things you can do to help increase your WordPress site speed.

Hosting

It’s easy to get tempted by cheap hosting. You can even find free WordPress hosting if you look hard enough! But, the old adage of “you get what you pay for” definitely applies to the web hosting world. Cheap hosts tend to overcrowd their servers, and one badly-behaving site can take down multiple others! For mission-critical sites, we recommend using a managed hosting provider like WPEngine or Synthesis (if you’re on StudioPress Genesis). If you’re handy with a command line, a managed VPS like A Small Orange offers is probably your best bet.

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2015 Feb 05

WordPress Theme Bloat: Premium Themes and Layout Builders

By 0 Comments Speed, Themes, Web Development, WordPress

(originally posted on Bring Your Own Design)

Inspired by a thread on Reddit, let’s look at one of the main complaints about WordPress these days: bloated installations that run slow.

One of WordPress’s greatest strengths is the fact that anyone can purchase or download a premade theme and have a “custom” website up in a short span of time. It’s also one of the things that can cause the most headache for more experienced users. Many theme developers are obsessed with cramming as much functionality into a theme as possible in order to attract the greatest number of potential users. The byproduct of that is a theme that causes the site to load slowly, causes conflicts with plugins, or is simply difficult to arrange the content the way you want.

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2015 Feb 02

WordPress Security: 4 Easy Things You Can Do To Avoid Disaster

By 0 Comments Security, WordPress

(originally posted on Bring Your Own Design)

If you have a WordPress site, eventually you’ll become the target of a hacking attack. Whether it’s brute force, SQL injection, or something even more sinister, no one is safe. However, you don’t have to end up becoming a casualty as well. We’ve recovered more sites from attacks than we care to count, and more often than not, the initial intrusion was 100% preventable. It’s time to stop being lazy, and start being proactive about WordPress security! We’ve compiled a list of three things you need to do right now to help prevent becoming the next on the list of victims.

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