February 16, 2014 – SEO, Blog, Social Media, Domain Update

Here we are, half of February is gone, and 2014 is going strong. Now is about the time when we start seeing our New Year’s Resolutions not be met, like going to the gym every day: lots of people stop going about now, and so it might be a good time to go get a gym membership. But what about our New Year’s Resolutions for 2014 as a whole? You know, those things as a marketer that you wanted to get done this year? Are you on track? I think I am. My BillHartzer.com blog is going strong, with traffic increasing every day. In fact, there were a few things that I wanted to get done this year on my main blog:

– Redesign the site. Done. I moved up to the Genesis framework for WordPress, and installed a new theme. I hadn’t done that it 10 years, or longer, so it was due for an update. I was reluctant, but finally got that done.

– Clean up the BillHartzer.com site. I wanted to make sure that there weren’t any lagging errors, and going through Google Webmaster Tools’ errors, I think I’ve fixed the majority of those now. There have been some errors that I honestly didn’t understand where they were coming from, like 404s to weird URLs that didn’t make sense. Figured those out and fixed.

– Blog every day. I have had some killer articles and posts that I wrote, and have done fairly well with those. There are some that no one really paid attention to, but were, in fact, awesome tips. Hidden gems. So, you might go read my posts for February. January, too. Just look at titles, I am sure you’ll find a few you’ll want to read.

There are some other resolutions that I have wanted to get done, such as getting a blog post regularly on the Globe Runner blog, which is already off to a great start this year. My best post so far, which has a ton of great tips, is this one that really is a must read.

On the SEO side, I can tell you that there are more and more companies that are finally realizing that they got hit by a Google algorithmic penalty last year, and want it cleaned up. Lots of link cleaning going on, especially due to Google Penguin. I’m doing a lot of Google Penguin Recovery efforts for sites, and it’s working well.

On the social media side, Klout is now allowing you to post and share content from Klout.com, so I’ve been testing that out.

And on the domain name side of things, you really need to start looking into the gTLDs. There are a lot of them, here is a list of the new gTLDs that are coming out. Twitter is not recognizing the new gTLDs, which is a shame. But Google and Facebook are, though. Lots of speculation going on, but also there is a lot of opportunity to make money if you’re willing to invest.