Greetings and Salutations!

I'm still not quite caught up on email, but I am working through it! I appreciate your patience.

A quick first alert. LinkedIn's password database was hacked. If you have an account there, it would be wise to change that password quickly. If you were using that password elsewhere, change that too. It's best to keep a different password for each site so that a compromise at one doesn't risk your other accounts.

Many editors are asking about the most efficient way to use social networking. Some editors adore Pinterest, some love Facebook, some love Twitter. All systems shine in different situations! We'll do a Social Networking Boot Camp this coming Monday, June 11th, at 9pm EST. Come on by to get specific help on getting your social networking set up for any and all sites you run (both in BellaOnline and out).

Social networking, when done well, shouldn't take much time at all - and the increase in traffic can be huge. Thirty seconds could double your traffic. So the key is figuring out what works best for your aims, and to focus on those areas.


DUPLICATE CONTENT
We had several instances recently where editors were using duplicate content or cut-and-paste content on BellaOnline. This causes huge penalties from Google and other search engines. It severely harms not only your own traffic but also all other editors' sites, because it causes BellaOnline to be tagged as a cut-and-paster at best and a thief at worst. Google's programs don't know that it's "legitimate" or "thievery" - they simply penalize you.

So please, make sure that no content on your site is cut and paste from any other site. All content on BellaOnline needs to be 100% unique. The sole exception is that you can also post reviews on Amazon. It is fine for your review to be both on BellaOnline and on Amazon. Beyond that, though, no part of an article should ever be findable on any other website. Google's robots spot that instantly, and damage our ranking as a result.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this!


HIGH BANDWIDTH CONTENT
We receive oodles of praise daily from our millions of visitors from non-US countries who adore us because our site is low bandwidth. That is, it downloads quickly even on their slow and dial-up lines. A key reason we get the traffic we do is that we have captured this market.

This optimization has served us enormously well as people convert to smart phones and tablets. Our fast loading pages with small images work extremely well on phone networks.

If you do choose to use an image in your content, it is absolutely critical that it be vital to the article and not just filler. Make sure you optimize the image so it's as small as possible. Right justify it so the reader's eye flows down past the image without hitting a road block.

Here's an amazing stat for you. Amazon found that for every 0.1 second - that's a TENTH of a second - that a website took to draw, they lost 1% of their sales. So if their website was a full second slower than normal, they would lose 10% of their sales. That's a phenomenal amount of lost traffic. Readers are *extremely* sensitive to speed.

Images can cause enormous drain on a browser's drawing speed. So can videos. So again, if you must show an image, make sure it's critical to the article's task and that it's as optimized as possible. If you want to link to a video for more information, it's best not to embed it. It's best to link to the URL. That way the article draws as quickly as possible. If the user hits BACK before the page finishes loading, because it was too slow, then it won't matter at all what was in that video or image. The user will never see it.

Again as always let me know if you have questions!


Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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