Search engine results are an important key to success for your blog, and we can help optimize your blog to improve how prominently it appears when readers search for your blog or topic. We employ industry standards and our own experience to make sure your blog is as search-friendly as possible.

With our monthly subscription we’ll optimise your blog and submit it to search engines every month.

Ab Fab Web and Blog Design
SEO | Google adWords

Plymouth, Devon

t: (01752) 784262

m: (07538) 199694

e: david@abfabmedia.com

The solution is simple, cheap, and 100% effective — invest £10 and buy your own domain name! Then map your domain name to your blog and start promoting your name instead of me.someone.com. Now you are fully independent from your free blog provider. You can use any service you wish; you can grow you blog without worrying about the stability of the free service you’re on; you can just pickup and go wherever your heart desires; it makes you look professional, and easy for others to remember the address of your blog.

Having choices in great! When there’s competition between companies, consumers will always benefit by getting better and cheaper products.

This post however is not about consumer products and cheap cell phone plans, don’t worry. It is about taking payments online. If you have a personal website or a blog, you’ve probably heard about PayPal. If not, PayPal is the faster, safer way to pay and get paid online. The service allows members to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards or promotional financing. Up until a year or so ago PayPal was pretty much the only choice for someone who wanted to accept payments online in a matter of minutes, without dealing with merchant banks, payment gateways etc.

Today, PayPal has a competition from Google with their Google Checkout service. It is just as easy to setup, and even faster (based on my experience) to pay for a product or a service. In fact, one of Google’s requirements is to let your visitors buy something on your site or pay for a service with one click of a button! We all know Google makes great, solid products and services, and you can rest assured Google Checkout is just as good as any other Google product. Again it’s all about choices, so if you’re already accepting PayPal on your site, why not add Google Checkout and present your visitors with a choice? Who knows, maybe you’ll increase your sales by gaining a share of Google Checkout fans.

Another benefit of Google Checkout is the ability to link it to your AdWords account, and any time you run your AdWords it will display Google Checkout logo making your Ad stand out from other sites that don’t accept Google payments on their website or a blog. It also adds trust and recognition to your site, which is a must for any e-commerce site.

If you want to begin building websites for your internet marketing business, you might be wondering whether you should build HTML sites or blogs. Both of these types serve a purpose, HTML is better for some, while blogs are better for others. However, with everything being equal, building WordPress blogs are most certainly my recommendation to you.

WordPress blogs are ideal for those just starting out because it requires no understanding of HTML coding. The only requirement is for the blog owner to have content to constantly update their site with. You can provide updated content with a few simple steps of pointing and clicking.

One other huge advantage that blogs have over traditional HTML websites is the fact that Google favours blogs. Your site will get indexed very quickly and begin receiving traffic within the first day it’s up. You have the ability to customize the blog as you choose, by easily being able to create a unique appearance in a matter of clicks.

Moreover, blogs have the ability to interact with your visitors and create a community. Visitors can place comments on posts in the form and participate in the discussion. This allows you to build a trust with your followers, plus your blog is getting free content from the comments as well.

So, if you are uncertain as to whether to build an HTML site or a blog, the answer most of the time is a blog, especially if you are a beginner. While there are a variety of blog platforms available, WordPress offers the most to users.

David Saunders
(01752) 784262
david@abfabmedia.com

We customise your new blog – website with a superb CMS system that you OWN!

Ab Fab Media is based in Plymouth, Devon. We offer organic seo – search engine optimisation – sem tips, tools and a blueprint for your business success.

David and Elizabeth Saunders are (happily married) working partners of Ab Fab Media and work with you offering you real 2010 solutions to gaining more customers on the web.

We offer no tech speak (well maybe a bit!) and do it all for you!

David is a South Hams born local (Flete House, near Ermington) plus a Plymouth Argyle fan!  Elizabeth is a native of the United States having grown up in Detroit, Michigan and thence San Francisco, California

Ab Fab Media Plymouth
WordPress Design | SEO
Internet Marketing | Google adWords
Social Media Marketing | Online PR

(01752) 784262

(07538) 199694

To identify all the issues, we had to pay a website development company thousands of pounds so I could just LOOK at the back-end of a content management system because the client “didn’t own the code”. The web company did.

After a golden handsake, I got access, and the result is we’re dumping a brand new content management system costing over £15k because the thing can’t even produce unique page titles on single pages. The CMS didn’t even have a function to delete pages.

At the moment, I can’t access another client’s analytics data because it’s not the client’s – it’s the web development company who installed it (yeah, that free thing you get from Google).
The same company added a 60 page blog to the client site as part of a seo campaign – now that’s over, they’ve deleted the blog and it’s content because it was, in simple terms, “theirs”.

I’ll not comment further, just to say if you are paying money for a website, ENSURE:

You own the website
You own the domain
You own the copyright and code (if copyright is applicable)
You own the analytics data
You own all data, logins and subscriptions (like Google local business) and can access them via a email account YOU CONTROL
You own the content
You can safely move the contents to the website to another host

…in fact, just make sure you own everything and can access everything and can indeed transfer everything easily, and at no further cost to you, or you could end up thousands of pounds out of pocket for something you thought you owned… and don’t.
Just ask your web dev company – find out what you own – and get them to sign something saying so, too. Any reasonabe company (like Hobo) agrees to this.

Remember if it all goes belly up, you as the client will be held accountable for not getting these basic things agreed in the first place – leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, believe me.

PS – Everything set up to do with your website should be in your name. Give the web company strict instructions it’s YOU who are giving THEM access to this data, and you are paying them to do this for you.

Call Ab Fab Media Blog and Website Design
(01752) 784262 or Google Phone (07538) 199694

Perhaps the better question is, why shouldn’t you? Yes, it’s true, there are already a million blogs out there. But there isn’t one with your unique voice – until you create it. Blogging has plenty of benefits:

Personal expression – Say what you really think, in your own personal forum.
Community involvement – Writing about your passions can help you meet like-minded people online, and even become an authority within your community of interest.
Learning – Blogging about a topic, interest or industry can help you learn more about it, through research and reader feedback.

Professional development – Blogging can be a cv -builder, as maintaining a career-related blog shows off your knowledge and expertise.

Fun – What more do we need to say? You’ll love it.

Take the leap. Become a blogger today.

Call Ab Fab Media Blog and Website Design
(01752) 784262
david@abfabmedia.com

Well now you can with ECHO by js-kit.com. It’s a plugin that replaces your WordPress blog’s comment form with a new, much improved and advanced comment form. Not much of an explanation, I know, but just look below on our blog — as you can see it looks great, it’s very easy to use, it’s fast, and most importantly it crawls Facebook, Twitter and other social networks looking for conversations mentioning your blog posts, and if it finds something, it places them right on your blog comments where they belong. Many popular blogs like Technorati.com are already using it on their blog.

So I don’t blame you if you are using (or wanting to use) Gmail as your business email — I do and I’m loving it. But my absolute pet peeve is when I get business cards that have someone@gmail.com or someone@freeservice.com — it doesn’t look professional, in fact, it kind of looks cheesy. Well you are in luck. Not too long ago Google started offering a service called Hosted Gmail. It’s now called Google Apps. It allows you to map your own domain name to a set of Google tools like Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Videos and more.

By mapping your domain name to Gmail you can use you@yourdomain.com instead of you@gmail.com and you will be able to send and receive email using the familiar Gmail interface. The service is free, it comes with a web based control panel where you can create additional email accounts, adjust various email settings, and more. Each email account you create comes with a little over 7 GB of disk space. So if you’re hosting your blog on a shared hosting account with a limited amount of disk space, you can configure your domain name to use Gmail for your email, and get so much more disk space at no additional cost. In fact, if you need more disk space Gmail has a Premier Edition (for a fee) which gives you 25 GB of space and 99% SLA (reliability). The service is also redundant, which means if your hosting account is having some issues and your blog stops working — your email continues to work!

I’ve helped many customers with that kind of configuration, so if you have any questions post them below and I’ll do my best to answer them