Always Prefer Written Communications

When conducting business deals there’s always the possibility to grab the phone and call the other entity directly. It doesn’t involve the trouble of composing an email or a letter, and it will give you the answer or information you are looking for immediately.

So is communicating over the phone a good think? In my opinion, rarely.

Sure, the phone is useful when you just need to discuss details or get a quick piece of information. But when you are dealing with central aspects of the deal (i.e., specifications of the project, discussion about prices and costs, deadlines and so on), it is always a good idea to use written communications, be it email, fax or letters.

Why?

Because the exchanged messages will be permanently stored, and this might be your salvation if down the road there is some disagreement regarding any aspect of the deal.

I forgot this basic rule twice over the past couple of years. Basically I discussed some important project aspects over the phone, and months later when we disagreed I didn’t have anything to prove that conversation had taken place.

This Latin proverb sums it up: Verba volant, scripta manent (Spoken words fly, written words remain).

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Five Crucial HTML Tags Every Blogger Should Know

In today’s post, I’ll go through some simple HTML tags that every blogger should know about.

You can add extra information within some tags, too, as you’ll see in the examples – for instance if you want position an image centrally, or make a link open up in a new tab.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to type these tags when creating posts in WordPress: you can use the buttons in the visual editor instead. (Or you can copy your post in from Word, with formatting already in place.)

<p>

The <p> tag indicates a paragraph. Each paragraph needs to start with <p> and end with </p> so that your browser knows where to put the line breaks.

(HTML code doesn’t recognise spaces, except the space between two words.)

In WordPress, <p> tags are added automatically by your blog’s code and don’t appear in the Text editor. (You can also choose to add them automatically in widgets.)

If you go to a post on your blog and click “View source” in your browser, you’ll see the <p> and </p> wrapped around each paragraph:

<h1>, <h2>, <h3> … and more

HTML has special tags for headers and subheaders, which are:

<h1> — the biggest, “Heading 1”

<h2> — the next biggest (this is what I’m using for subheadings in this post)

… and so on down to <h6>

Normally, you won’t use <h1> in your content as that’s used for the title of your blog post or page.

To use a header tag, simply wrap it around your subheading like this:

<h2>Your Next Steps</h2>

<a href> – Creates a Link

The “a href” tag creates a hyperlink. If a link ever goes awry, it’s useful to know what the code looks like so you can fix it.

Here’s a link and the code for it:

DailyBlogTips

<a href="http://www.dailyblogtips.com">DailyBlogTips</a>

You can add extra features to your link. For instance:

<a href="http://www.dailyblogtips.com" target="_blank" 
title="This link opens in a new window/tab">DailyBlogTips</a>

This produces a link like this (hover your cursor over it to see the title):

DailyBlogTips

If your link doesn’t work…

• Check that you’ve used straight quotes not curly (smart) quotes.
• Check that you haven’t missed one of the quotation marks.
• Check that the URL starts with http://

<img> – shows an image

The “img” tag shows an image, like this one (me and my daughter Kitty on Christmas Eve):

In its simplest form, as for the image above, it looks like this:

<img src="http://www.dailyblogtips.com/wp-content/uploads/
Xmas-Eve.jpg"/>

You can add extras to your image too, e.g. title text (which appears when the user hovers over the image). If you want to center an image in WordPress, use class=aligncenter.

<img src="http://www.dailyblogtips.com/wp-content/uploads/
Xmas-Eve.jpg" class="aligncenter" title="Ali and her daughter 
Kitty on Christmas Eve"/>

Note: This tag is opened and closed in one. The forward slash at the very end of the tag closes it.

<ul>, <ol> and <li> – Creating Lists

Here’s an “unordered list” in HTML:

<ul><li>Bread</li>

<li>Milk</li>

<li>Carrots</li>

<li>Potatoes</li></ul>

This displays as:

• Bread
• Milk
• Carrots
• Potatoes

Note how each list item has <li> at the start and </li> at the end, and the whole list has <ul> at the start and </ul> at the end.

To use numbers instead of bullet points, simply switch the <ul> and </ul> for <ol> and </ol>. You’ll get an “ordered list” like this:

1. Bread
2. Milk
3. Carrots
4. Potatoes

Do you have a sixth essential tag to add – or other HTML tips to share? Let us know in the comments.

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Careful with Guest Blogging for SEO Purposes Only

If you are doing guest blogging solely to acquire links, especially with optimized anchor texts, with the goal of improving your SEO and the search rankings of your pages, well, stop!

It’s has been rumored for a while that Google was starting to frown upon those practices, but now it’s confirmed, straight from the horse’s mouth.

Here’s a quotation from a post Matt Cutts wrote this week, titled The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO:

Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.

Back in the day, guest blogging used to be a respectable thing, much like getting a coveted, respected author to write the introduction of your book. It’s not that way any more.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see some sites actually getting penalized for this type of guest blogging in the future.

The post is quite long and has some videos too, so check it out.

That all being said, legitimate guest blogging where the main goal is to spread the word about your site or product and to reach a new audience is going to be fine according to Matt. Here’s what he wrote:

There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there.

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