10 Common SEO Mistakes that can Destroy Your Website [Part I] For many reasons, the last decade has been both very difficult to me and also very kind to me in a variety of conflicting ways. I’ve had personal tragedies in my life that have brought me to my knees, while at the same time (and in some cases because of those tragedies) I’ve stumbled upon one opportunity after another. One of those opportunities was entering the Search Engine Optimization industry almost half a decade ago. I initially stumbled upon the industry while I was struggling to win contract bids at freelance project bidding sites in order to earn extra income for my family.
I took on a very underpaid role with the owner of a small interior design business who wanted to use a blog attached to his business website in order to draw in potential customers. He wanted what just about every blog owner out there today wants – highly optimized content that would draw in crowds from the search engines. The SEO Learning Process I pity the folks that make the hit list of a blog like that! CSS Basics. CSS, or Cascading Styles Sheets, is a way to apply style rules to HTML content. This help page will cover a few basics about CSS such as selectors and ordering. You can add custom CSS to the Appearance → Custom Design → CSS page in your WordPress.com blog dashboard once you have purchased the Custom Design upgrade. Selectors Selectors are used to target which HTML to style. Properties and values are used to set the style rules. There are three kinds of selectors: Here are some examples. HTML tag selector: <p>Sample paragraph.
HTML tag selector CSS: HTML tag selector in action: Sample paragraph. Class selector HTML: <p class="warning">This is a paragraph with a class="warning". Class selector CSS: Class selector in action: This is a paragraph with a class=”warning”. This is a paragraph with id=”danger”. ID selector HTML: <div id="header"><h1 id="site-title">Sample Blog Title</h1><h2 id="site-description">Just another WordPress.com blog</h2></div> ID selector CSS: ID selector in action: ↑ Table of Contents ↑ Editing CSS. The Custom Design upgrade comes with a CSS editor that you can use to customize the appearance of any WordPress.com theme.
It works by allowing you to add CSS to override parts of the theme’s stylesheet bit by bit or start fresh by turning off the theme’s CSS completely and building a new design from scratch. You may not edit HTML or PHP code, but there is an amazing potential to what you can do with CSS-only edits. To access the CSS editor, go to Appearance → Customize → CSS in your blog dashboard. If you have never added CSS before or if you have recently changed themes, you will see a placeholder comment in the editor enclosed in /* and */ with a welcome message. The placeholder comment can be deleted and replaced with your custom CSS. /* This is a CSS comment, and anything inside the asterisks will be ignored ↑ Table of Contents ↑ Content Width This option should be used if you have modified the width of the primary content area using custom CSS. Theme’s Original CSS Preprocessor CSS Help. How to Find Your Theme’s CSS.
You can add CSS to customize any theme if you have purchased the Custom Design upgrade. The theme’s original CSS can be found by using your browser’s web inspector tools. This the preferred way to view CSS because it’s more comprehensive and will show you all the CSS that applies rather than just a subset of it. Web Inspector Basics These three basic steps will work in most current browsers to open the web inspector: Right-click on a web page elementIn Safari, go to Preferences > Advanced and enable the Develop menu first.
The panel will show the HTML for the element you clicked as well as all the CSS that applies to it. Here are some video walkthroughs showing how the web inspector works for each major browser: ↑ Table of Contents ↑ Chrome Chrome Web Inspector <p>JavaScript required to play <a hreflang="en" type="video/mp4" href=" Web Inspector</a>. Firefox Firefox Web Inspector Safari Safari Web Inspector Internet Explorer. Custom CSS. You can add custom CSS to your WordPress.com blog using the CSS Editor in the Appearance → Customize → CSS panel in your blog dashboard. Anyone can save and preview custom CSS on a WordPress.com blog even if they have not yet purchased the upgrade.
In order to make those changes viewable on the blog’s front-end for everyone, however, you must purchase the Custom Design upgrade which costs $30.00 per blog, per year. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It is a markup language that controls the appearance of HTML elements on a web page. There is almost endless potential to what you can do with CSS to modify the design of a website, as evidenced by the very popular CSS Zen Garden project which is a showcase of what can be done with only CSS to change the appearance of one single HTML file. You can see a few examples of WordPress.com sites using the Custom Design upgrade in a the WordPress.com blog post: Infinite Theme Styles with Custom CSS. Frequently Asked Questions I messed up. Wordpress tips | tips & advice on wordpress.com blogs.