Link Picks is a selection of posts by bloggers to help grow your small business, blog or non-profit organization. Note on choices: I tend to pick recent links from bloggers with whom I’ve interacted, whether on their blog, this Websites for Small Biz blog, on Twitter, on Google+ or elsewhere in social media. I then might include important news, such as on WordPress permalinks. Enjoy, and please give feedback on what you find useful.

Suggested Posts by Knowledgeable, Friendly Bloggers

Unfollow Twitter Users – The Easy Way
Too many followers on Twitter? Not sure who is following you and who isn’t? Want more followers? Jens Berget teaches us about various tools useful for managing followers on your Twitter account. In particular, he talks about a tool called Tweepi, and he demonstrates in a video how to use Tweepi.

4 SEO Tips to Optimize your WordPress Blog
Much has been written on SEO, search engine optimization. The difference on Sherryl Perry‘s blog is she lays out a few basic tips for you to follow and explains carefully as a teacher would (she has a teaching background) how to set up your post for search engine optimization. For example, she shows how you can put important headers (h1, h2, h3, h4) tags in your post.

Social Media and Your Small Business Website
I was pleased when Don Campbell of Expand2web asked me to write a guest post for his blog. The result is a post on ways to integrate social media with your small business website. What sorts of plugins can you use? Where can you place the social media icons – you may decide to place them in multiple locations on your website or blog. How can you track the success of your social media integration?

Links to help your Small Business Grow – WordPress Permalinks

It used to be that if you use /%postname%/ for WordPress permalinks, there was an issue of a performance problem with sites that have large numbers of pages. This Postname Permalinks issue was solved with WordPress 3.3, and Yoast explains in his post How to change your WordPress Permalinks. He has a button on that page to a tool to Generate Redirects – it will produce a line you can put in your .htaccess file. If you use the Redirect tool, you can put the first part of the redirect in Source URL and the second half in Target URL (and click Regular Expression box). I just tried it for this site, and it worked just fine.

The red arrow points to the Source URL and the green arrow points to the Target URL.

The redirection tool set up for this redirection of old URLs with dates to new URLs with postname only looks like this:

Your Turn, Please

Did you find any posts in the past week that were particularly helpful to your small business? Feel free to leave a link in the comments. Also, please let me know which topics reviewed in this post were helpful.

How to Set Up a Twitter Profile was one of the popular posts on Websites for Small Biz this fall. It is important for those running a small business, a non-profit organization or a blog to spend time carefully setting up a Twitter account in order to get valuable interactions on Twitter.

Ease of a Facebook Business Page introduces the mechanics of setting up a page (as opposed to a profile) on Facebook. Ideas on how to engage one’s readers and keep interest is part of this post.

Responsive Web Design is a new trend in web building that is here to stay, because mobile usage is increasing (people are reading or trying to read your blog posts on their mobile phones) and platforms like iPads are becoming more relevant. Is your website ready for mobile?

Error 404 pages can add fun and increase the message of your brand on your website. Learn how various websites use Error 404 pages.

Display Information Without Being Overly Geeky is a post about slideshows, photo galleries, infographics, friendly photos, interviews and videos. How many different ways can you display information, and are you keeping the readers interested?

10 Ideas for SEO of Your Small Biz Website presents keywords, title tags, alt tags, site maps, commenting and more as ways to search engine optimize your small business website.

Strictly speaking, New Jersey on Twitter by Profession is a page, but it is one of the most popular on Websites for Small Biz. If you are doing business in New Jersey, this might be a valuable way to figure out who to follow in New Jersey and make valuable contacts.

2011 was a good year for building websites and for building the blog Websites for Small Biz. I’ve enjoyed all the guest posts and interviews. May the new year of 2012 bring lots of new, innovative ideas on how to expand small businesses with marketing, well-built websites, networking, and lots of good blog post sharing!

If you read How to Setup a Professional Website you will learn how to setup your blog or website from scratch and produce a search engine optimized site. Many bloggers have tried multiple themes to suit the look and feel of the website, decided on a theme, and have spent hours or days to customize the same. After a while, when you have published several posts and modified the sidebars, added images, customized your blog-rolls, it becomes very tightly coupled with your theme. Every now and then, when you find couple of spare hours, you would go back in thought to re-design your website, but the very thought of it will bring jitters and you may develop cold-feet. It is never enough time to take up such a major project involving long hours of customization for building a new theme or redoing your categories/tags. But there is always this thought at the back of your mind to somehow make your website look better by incorporating those cool new features you would have come across in other sites.

If you find yourself in this tight spot in your blogging life, I would like to suggest these 5 quick makeover ideas for your website or blog, each of which may take no longer an hour. So here are the ways you can improve your site right now:

1. Run a Speed Test – How long does it take for your site to load? What are the pages in your website which is slowing down the whole site? Run your speed test using PingDom Tools and analyze all your pages. Once you get the result, you can get a better picture on the various pages and images your site has and which is the culprit which is slowing down the site load. Once you do this, you should see an immediate improvement in your site load speed, all without having to pay some web design company to run a health check on your site. Note that there might be some images or video files which you may not be able to discard off altogether, so you can consider hosting them on any of the “Cloud Spaces” which have come up recently(eg: Amazon CloudFront). This will drastically improve the download speed.

2. Theme Tweaks – If time doesn’t permit you to overhaul your entire theme, how about tweaking it here and there to make it more friendly to the visitors. There are several websites which has articles on website typography like – The Ten Commandments of Blog Typography. It can be little tidbits like maybe a new logo or new RSS feeds which will make your blog visually better. Though the appearance of a web doesn’t affect how a website is read, but it does matter when it affects readability. Take a few minutes to identify how your site lacks some visual pleasantness and address them to make a huge impact with a little change and minimum effort.

3. Review the Static Pages – You may have noticed that your static pages are responsible for getting your visitors to become regular readers of your blog. But over time, your static pages might have gone unnoticed by you with no regular updates or changes. Maybe it is time to upload a new picture of yours or change your contact details on your About Me page, or even modify the personal information details with latest updates about your new blogs or latest engagements.The static pages acts best in making that human connection with your readers.

4. Add a Feature – If you are long awaiting to add that new widget or a new RSS feed to your blog, now is the right time to do it. Any new additions that stand out on your blog will immediately give it a fresh appearance and thus improve your visual impact of the blog. With WordPress or any other CMS tool, it has become quite an easy task to add a new plug-in or widget and doesn’t take more than a few minutes to get it up and running.

5. Start a Poll – Constructive criticism is very helpful for bloggers. You may want to create a list of what you don’t like on your blog and start a poll asking your readers to give their thoughts on what they think is the most ‘unwanted’ item on your blog. Humans by nature like to criticize, and your readers will not lose this opportunity to point out the bad factors of your blog. This is for your advantage to improve upon those features and make your blog more reader-friendly.

Bottom Line – These are not the only ways to do a complete makeover of your blog, just keeping your eyes and mind open for new ideas and features will help you make small changes that drastically improve the appearance. It doesn’t take a lot of time to improve your blog, but just some will-power and devotion for a couple of hours should do it. Don’t you agree these are simple enough and can be easily achieved in no time?

Praveen Rajarao blogs on his website – http://www.dailymorningcoffee.com. His topics range from life to blogging to technology and how-to guides. Follow Praveen on Twitter: http://twitter.com/brpraveen.

Emily Seuss presents my guest post on blogging and color theory – why you should know some color theory when you are setting up a blog or a website. I like to think of this as the dos and don’ts of color; if you choose some awkward color combination, you may lose some customers. Likewise if your clothes clash at an interview, you may not get the job.

Generating Traffic for Your Blog

Praveen lists more ways to generate traffic for your site, such as write a how-to article or leave comments on other blogs. I warned him that contests may get you traffic temporarily, but after the party is over, did anyone read your “real” posts?

How Google’s +1 Icon Will Change Search

It seems everyone is talking about Google+ these days – what will it mean? To your business, to social media, to marketing, to Facebook? Debra Askanase is one step ahead of the game as she talks about the icon added to websites a few weeks before Google+ was released. She shows how the icon will change how searches look for individuals.

Responsibilities of SEO Have Been Upgraded

On the Daily SEO blog, I appreciated the long list of SEO responsibilities – site accessibility, content strategy, link building, search verticals, social media promotion, reputation tracking, keyword research, content creation, new search protocols, community management, social network outreach and local optimization. How these have grown since the 1999 list! If you are just starting out learning about search engine optimization, read my post Intro to SEO.

What informative posts did you find this week?

Fireworks in Asbury Park 2010, photo by Leora Wenger

1. So really, don’t use just /%postname%/ as your permalink structure.

“I used /%postname%/ as my permalink structure on CSS-Tricks for a long time. I have lots of Pages. My site went down. I changed my permalink structure to begin with a number. Now it’s fine.“

– Please note this was someone who had many *pages.* The article’s commentators seem to recommend in general using a numeric part in your url, such as post_id or year. This post called WordPress Permalinks for SEO and Speed explains even more on the permalinks issue.

2. 5 Best Practices for SEO

Praveen, who writes the blog Daily Morning Coffee, will be a guest on this blog later this week. I hope you will come back and read about search engine submission; Google isn’t the only fish in the sea.

3. GoDaddy got bought. Will life get better for those who own domains via GoDaddy? Stay tuned. Your guess is as good as mine.

Happy 4th of July to all those who celebrate.

Rutgers Jewish Studies has a new look for their website – the home page has a header with a slide show, the News & Events page lists events open to the public, and via the Online Studies section you can learn Israeli Political History, Jews Under Islam, Bible and History and more without paying a penny and in your pajamas (if you choose).

You can see the same template on other department sites, such as these: Political Science, Life Sciences and Women’s Studies. One could play a game of: how are these sites alike? how do they differ?

On the social media front, Rutgers Business School is sponsoring a social media marketing program.

Greg Jarboe, the President of SEO-PR, one of the industry experts in Social Media who will be teaching some of the modules in the Rutgers Online Mini-MBA: Social Media Marketing Program, shared this article:

See previous post: Social Media at Rutgers with Greg Jarboe

I have been getting tons of spam (300 a day at times) on this blog, and I don’t have time to post that often here. As I don’t get nearly as much spam on my other blog, which I post to almost every day, I figure it is time to remove the Do Follow attribute. Bye, bye do follow. You didn’t seem to help much at all.

Why should you care about the code for your site? It looks good, and it says what you need it to say, so who cares how it’s strung together?

Here are 4 reasons to care about the underlying code:

1. Security – There are ways to use code to tighten security on your site. On the other hand, if you don’t know what’s in the code, perhaps someone else will take that opportunity to hack your site. For example, you might decide to add a widget with javascript code. Little do you know that someone else finds that widget easy to hack.
2. Do you want anyone to find your site? Good code means search engine optimized. Or at least it is a key element. Proper title tags, header tags and keyword-rich links can all help search engines rank your site. It’s in the code!
3. Easier to update. And less costly as well. If your site is a jumble, whoever updates your site will have more difficulty doing the updates. And will charge you for the time it takes. If it’s laid out nicely and neatly, it’s easier to update. Even if you are using WordPress, you may want some code changes done to your theme to give your business a unique look. Make sure any web developer who updates your site does it carefully and with comments.
4. Loading time - bloated code can add to loading time. On the other hand, well-crafted code can shorten it.

For more on the topic of clean code:

• Gabriella: Site Speed, Clean Code, User Interface and Gloating

How did I do that? Easy, if you have a single.php file in your theme. Use the code in this WP Recipes post. I added it just below
<div class=“postmetadata”>
- code will vary from theme to theme.

Why the Like button? Folks can Like your post with one click. Easy exposure. No need to comment, just click.

Thanks to Robert Kopacz for his encouragement (who also has the Like button on his Madison, NJ video posts).

Has anyone tried out the new Tweet button from Twitter? I clicked on it on one post and find it created a funny looking shortened url. But that was just one post. Just did another one – it worked fine! Update: I just added the new Tweet button from Twitter and deactivated the BackTweet button.

So why should some companies or organizations go with Drupal? I’m sure Drupal experts will have more answers than these, but at present I have three:

1. Dates: Dates and its various formats are built into the Drupal core. I did a calendar for WordPress, and the only place dates are set up as dates is in the scheduling and publishing function, so at first I used that for the calendar. Later we switched to using custom fields, which I would suggest with WordPress. Will WordPress 3.0 and its new content type functionality help make dates easier to use in WordPress?
2. Fine tuned Roles and Permissions: Also built into Drupal is the capability to put users in certain roles and fine tune the permissions allowed for each user. I am currently using a Drupal module called Taxonomy Access Control to do the fine tuning of permissions.
3. Views: once you learn how to use Views in Drupal, you can display your data in multiple ways and locations on your site.

If you have worked with both WordPress and Drupal, what do you see as the strengths of these two systems? Weaknesses? Looking forward as both grow and continue to compete with each other.

Some links that discuss WordPress and Drupal:

• Comparisons between WordPress and Drupal
• Drupal vs WordPress: Which one is right for you?
• Drupal 7 vs. WordPress 3: Battle of the New Features

(Oh, and that’s not the *real* Drupal icon on the upper right of this post – that’s my dressed up version).