The Round-Up

SEO Basics (Search Engine Optimization) and Why Webcomickers Should Care

Posted on by Timothy Dempsey

SEO Basics: Not My Problem

If you are a fellow webcomics creator and believe that SEO is not your problem, think again. Here are a few myths, guidelines and  SEO Basics. You’ll see how easy it is to get started optimizing your content for search engines in the WordPress world.

Why Should I Care?

A recent switch to the great WordPress SEO Plug-In by Yoast, has roughly doubled the traffic to this site on weekends. If that doesn’t grab you, nothing will.

Not only is there a great tutorial, but the plug-in is fundamentally simple – and even fun – to use.

It’s Too Late

Conventional wisdom dictates that in an ideal world, SEO is part of our planning process prior to launch. Last time I looked, we don’t live in an ideal world. If you do, please send me an invite!

If you feel that your site is not getting you the traffic from Google it should get organically, the difference is compelling enough. It is far better to retroactively tweak some of your text content than to ignore SEO optimization.

What Should I Do Differently?

Write more. Write more text. The images we use in our comics are not indexable to search engines. While we can try the Excerpts features, that doesn’t work well at describing the content since the dialogue we write is not the likely keywords searchers are choosing, We have to write more descriptively in our blog posts. Some of my favorite comics (and I’m guilty of this) put nothing in the accomanying posts since we likely feel the comic says it all – that’s the fundamental problem.

Spend the time to blog along with your comics, and be disciplined about it. I am a little too immersed in this and re-writing history by going through my Archive. I’m not suggesting that, but we can correct our SEO habits going forward.

The Round-up: In Review II Spotlight on Lynda.com

Posted on by Timothy Dempsey

Is it wrong to fall in love with a dot com? I suppose that depends on the dot com.

I mentioned casually in the last Round-up how I was looking at a course on Lynda.com. This week I decided to prove my devotion by splurging on a paid membership.

There is an old quote that I’m paraphrasing here that goes something to the effect of:

“The more you learn, the more you find there is – to learn” – Unknown

I’ll go off and do a proper search for the attribution later.

I have always had an insatiable appetite to learn as much as I can, particularly about my job. When you come to be known at a smaller firm as something of a technical expert at something, an unfortunate by-product is that you are expected to be an expert – at everything.

Coupled with a noisy environment that makes it impossible to think – let alone learn new skills – I have to ratchet up my knowledge on my own time. This is a fundamental concept I read about recently in a book (that I’ll link to, also later) on the programmer’s life. The theory is that one should not be learning anything at a job site; one should be producing and carving out a schedule for learning on your own time.

Yesterday I made a major breakthrough in a dynamically generated list for a form driven by a database – (a back-end task, not my strength) while getting clarity about CSS page layout (the front-end, where I “live”). Both thanks to my membership. My Life will be simpler.

I can’t recommend Lynda.com more highly. I wish I had pulled the trigger sooner.

Best,
Tim
P.S. I know this sounds sponsored. Trust me, it is not. Is there a course on that?

Put It In Your Pocket (Read It Later)

Posted on by Timothy Dempsey

Hey, have you heard about this? In all my years of browsing the web day and night I was becoming increasing frustrated with bookmarking something on Device A for reading later, then at some other time trying to recall it on Device B.

It’s not as meaningful for reading webcomics, as we all probably have ways to quickly consume our favorites, but more appropriate for longer articles that raise a red flag in our brains inscribed “important, but cannot read right now”.

I went the route of delicious for a little while to keep bookmarks in the cloud but that seemed high maintenance.

Enter Pocket, formerly known as Read It Later; the old name says it all. It works much like Pinterest’s bookmarklet where you add a tool to your browser toolbar and when you see a longer article you want to read later, simply click the icon. Put it in your pocket!

I highly recommend it and you may tell me “duh, that’s been around for x” (I mean go ahead, don’t sugarcoat it), but seriously it has made my web-surfing more pleasurable.

Naturally there are apps for iPhone and iPad, likely for Android.

Best,
T.

The Round-up: In Review

Posted on by Timothy Dempsey

I’m on a staycation and while I previously detested that option as a scam because I wind up doing more back-breaking chores at home than no vacation at all – I must admit I’m being permitted to decompress more thoroughly than ever. That’s no small feat, after a tough year back to work doing what I love with people that I like for a firm that does good work via a visionary, charitable CEO – the noisy environment takes a toll. Because all I want is some quiet.

Switching gears, I’ll probably morph this into another sub-category of the blog when nothing is new with The Weekend Warrior. I’ll tweak the working title but here’s a re-cap of Tim’s Week in Technology (because obviously TWiT is taken). For now, “The Round-up” should suffice.

After listening to a lynda.com course on Responsive Design, I decided to shoot the works and spent fifty bucks for a paid solution to display this comic website optimally on iPad. A plug-in from WPTouch Pro promised to do that but after seven days of email “tag” with an amiable enough support person (including divulging temporary ftp credentials and making a WP User) the result was: fail.

Apparently marrying the ComicPress templates to their product was “no trivial matter”. I’m still using it (obvious if you are reading on an iPhone), but it doesn’t display the comic without adding shortcodes – which I could probably automate with my growing PHP knowledge. I hear the words “Premium Plug-in” and I interpret that as a shortcut. Beware, ComicPressers.

Conversely, tech that I am happy with is the HP OfficeJet color printer, I’m reminded of how much I like it since I had to re-install the printer drivers to get it back on our wireless newtwork. I can’t fault the printer for that, clearly my intermittent router gets touchy when we have power spikes. One of my kids informed us he couldn’t do his chores, since the printer wasn’t working to print out the chores’ check-list we authored. Teenagers.

Seriously a good printer at a good price. I kill more “all-in-one’s” than “cholesterol kills cops” (Max Payne 3). This one includes AirPrint, so you can print from iPhone and iPad, which solves a problem I didn’t know I had!

Here’s an unboxing video on my YouTube Channel (why not subscribe?) if you are in the market.

Best,
-T.A.D.