Month: June 2011

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Trouble with White Space for Paragraphs in WordPress

We’ve recently had one of our writers upgrade his computer and move to IE9 and then nearly go bald pulling his hair out with blog control panels not holding his line breaks or white space between paragraphs. When he clicks save for the blog post, WordPress is removing all paragraph white space.

Here’s what we found and then recommended to him to fix the problem. This may help you with your problem too.

First I see tags in the code and some have a tinymc paste reference. This may be from copying and pasting your blog post directly from Word.

This is what I recommend that you do as we need to get a handle on this.

1. Write in Word so you can spell check and do grammar check. Copy your post and then paste it into Notepad. Copy from Notepad and then paste into the “Visual” tab view.

2. Do not flip back and forth between Visual and HTML view as this can cause a problem.

3. Add your links while in visual view. Do your publishing.

Although you may have been able to paste directly from Word to the control panel, something has changed and you should no longer do this.

To correct the problem, I went to HTML view, then I deleted all tags. Added the proper white space by clicking enter. Then saved the post, then previewed the post. All were corrected.

If you continue to have trouble, I would recommend that you work in Microsoft’s Live Writer. I use it sometimes and like it. You just add your blog login to the application and you can set up multiple blogs. Just make sure you post to the correct blog when you click publish. You can change the date at the top right corner.

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Google Add the +1 Button to AdWords Ads

Google is really pulling out all the stops when it comes to pushing the new +1 button. Now Google will be +1’ing AdWords ads. In fact I am seeing them already.

“The +1 button itself will appear next to your headline on search ads. Personalized annotations will appear beneath your Display URL. For example, Maria +1’s a page selling a neat laptop holder on a website. When a search ad
with that same URL appears, her friend Sam might see the ad with the note “Maria and 28 other people +1’d this.”

With the +1 button Google is banking on increased growth in the social sector. With your connections and friends now able to personally, via the +1 button, recommend sites and products ads are now instantly more relevant and personal.

Make sure as you allow the +1 button results to show up in your Google.com search results that you understand that others can see sites that you +1 and that this results can be tied to your name.

For AdWords, I would imagine that +1 button votes will count heavily into the hidden quality score factors in the months to come. Google may never tell us about this, but with relevancy being the code word for all Google does, I expect +1 to be SERP and ad changing pretty quickly.

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Google Rolls Out the +1 Button

This past week Google released access to the +1 Button. If you have not added it to your website or blog yet, here’s a link to the code generator. If you don’t know, Google has said that +1 button votes will be used to raise your position in organic results. Here’s what Google specifically says about that issue:

“Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For  example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1’s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search
quality. For +1’s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.”

That’s pretty big news! If you want to read all the FAQs here is a link to the help section on Google. Right now you have to sign u in Google Labs to have the +1 results be shown in your own personal Google.com search results. What is great is that you can +1 something right from Google.com or if the website has the +1 button installed, you can +1 it right from their website page.

We are encouraging all of our clients to get the +1 on their website and blog. We’ve only run into one problem with installation. In only one case it appears that there is an onLoad issue with other scripts that are showing on the page, but that is just one website out of several we’ve installed so far.

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New Facebook and Twitter Services

Facebook is so popular that our clients are asking us for more service options. Just this past week we have added some new levels of engagement to our Facebook and Twitter program. For all the details on Facebook visit our pricing page. For all the details on Twitter visit our pricing page.

We’ve also created a new special program for clients that want Twitter AND Facebook done together. Here are the details.

Facebook & Twitter Program – $530  per 4 Week Month ($26.50 per day)

In our Facebook  & Twitter Program we provide:

  • For Twitter: Four tweets a day Monday through Friday. Tweets will consist of comments, links to articles, tweets pointing to items on your website you sell as products or services, and interesting informational content that builds value for readers.
  • For Facebook: We provide Facebook profile or Facebook Fan Page updates,    interaction, posting of links and videos as well as interaction with your  Fans on a regular basis. We perform the following actions on your Facebook  Business page.
    • Seek to interact with fans every Tuesday and Thursday spending about .2 hours of time each day to comment on your fan’s comments and look for other areas to enrich the interactivity on your Fan Page.
    • Update your Facebook Fan Page status twice a day five days a week.
    • Add a special link or video from YouTube or your website once a week.

Our strategy at this level is to grow your Facebook activity while providing  additional Twitter benefits for clients who feel that they really want to be  involved in both platforms.