The Blogging category on BillHartzer.com focuses on practical insights, tips, and real-world strategies for creating content that performs. This section covers everything from writing techniques and audience engagement to SEO best practices, platform updates, and tools that make publishing easier. Posts blend actionable advice with Bill Hartzer’s decades of experience in content creation and digital marketing, giving readers a clear roadmap for building, improving, and growing their own blogs. Whether you're fine-tuning a content strategy or looking for ways to boost traffic, this category delivers straightforward guidance shaped by industry expertise.
Google Penguin Refresh last weekend, and Google adds Inbox by Gmail, which is useful for reading email on your phone.
We have a few updates this week, and the major one was the Penguin refresh (a refresh, not an update. We also had the launch of Inbox by Gmail, which is pretty good, as I’ve tested it out already. And oh yeah, there’s a new Share button added this week to Google’s header.
Google Penguin Refresh this weekend, and a pricing bug found in GoDaddy’s domain registration.
This weekend, there appears to finally be a Google Penguin refresh, which is affecting a lot of website traffic from Google organic search. There are plenty of sites now reporting that they are seeing increases in search engine rankings, some as high as 30 of 40 places from where their site was previously ranking. I also was shown an interesting price bug at GoDaddy, where they were offering a domain name for $5,000. But if you searched for it in another way, the price was only $29. And in case you’ve missed it, you might want to check out SocialCentiv, a really cool new Twitter marketing tool. [Read more…]
This past week, there was a major change this week: Google removed Google Authorship completely from their search results, which I have to say was unexpected. They claim that Google Authorship was just a test–but I honestly thought that it was more permanent then they now lead us to believe. I chose not to write a blog post on BillHartzer.com about this change. Instead, this week I wrote the post on Globe Runner’s blog. Here’s the post, it’s worth a read:
http://globerunner.com/google-officially-removes-google-authorship-claims-test/ [Read more…]
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Screen capture of my WP Dashboard before my 1,000th post.
Wow, what an amazing ride it’s been. I’m happy to say that this blog post is my 1,000th blog post that I’ve posted on BillHartzer.com. It has certainly taken quite a few years to get to this point. But I honestly can say that I’m quite surprised that I’ve been able to write 1,000 blog posts just on this blog. If you count up all of the other blog posts that I’ve written over the years and contributed to other blogs (not including other blogs I own) it’s a lot more than 1,000, I bet it is well into several thousand blog posts. [Read more…]
Image courtesy of hywards / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Working with clients’ online marketing plans, SEO, and their websites, I often recommend during an SEO audit that a website should have a blog. A blog is a good way to regular add content on your website and start engaging with your website visitors. Both are key to your site’s online visibility and success, especially when it comes to search engine rankings. [Read more…]
MyBlogGuest, a popular guest blogging network, has been penalized by Google. In at Tweet posted by Matt Cutts of Google last night at one o’clock in the morning, Matt posted: [Read more…]
Link audits are essential for bloggers who wish to optimize their sites for search engines. They are now just as important as developing the right content and getting people to link to your site.
Ever since Google rolled out the first version of Penguin, negative SEO has become a serious concern. Penguin’s algorithm penalizes websites that used manipulative methods of link building to attain high rankings, such as spamming the comment sections of other websites. That legacy spam could now damage the rankings of those websites. However, many legitimate websites have also been affected by the algorithm change. [Read more…]
No, guest blogging is not dead. In fact, it’s alive and well, and it’s a great marketing tactic to open up your business and personal brand to opportunities and audiences that you normally would not have a chance to reach. Recently, Matt Cutts, the head of web spam for Google, declared that guest blogging for SEO was dead. And there has been a lot of publicity lately because of his statements about guest blogging. [Read more…]
Well, here it is, December 31st, 2013, the evening is drawing to a close. Still a few hours until the ball drops in New York City’s Times Square. Around this time I am always thinking of Times Square, the original(?) place where it all happens. But, maybe because I’m from the New York area, and am used to always staying up to watch the ball drop. [Read more…]