Log into your WordPress blog’s admin area.

Select Options or Settings depending on which version of Wordpress you have installed on your website.
 
Select Permalinks.

Look under Common Options and select Custom Structure. In the Custom Structure empty box add:

/%category%/%postname%/

Now click Save or Update Permalink Structure.

Now you should have a message that says,

If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess file. Click in the field and press CTRL + a to select all.

Select all of the mod-rewrite code that is generated and paste it into a blank text file. Notepad or WordPad will do just fine.

Save the document as .htaccess and upload to your blog’s directory. For example my blog is stored at http://www.hooverwebdesign.com/blog/, so I’ve added the .htaccess file that I created to my /blog/ directory.

Upload this .htaccess file to your web host and that should do it. You should have search engine friendly urls for each of your posts.

 Gina

We’ve been busy adding several new spanish greeting cards to the website.

If you visit our Spanish Greetings page you’ll see greeting card themes for Feliz Cumpleaños (Happy Birthday),  Felicitaciones (Congratulations), Feliz Graduacion (Happy Graduation),
and Feliz dia de las Madres (Happy Mother’s Day). Like our other printable greetings these are free and ready for you to print out using your home printer.

All that is needed is the Adobe PDF Reader software (FREE), your home printer and your Creativity! The inside of the Mother’s Day greeting card is left blank so that you can add any personalized message that you like.

Check back later for more spanish greeting cards with themes for Día feliz de Valentinos (Happy Valentines Day), Lo Siento (I’m Sorry), Mi Pésame (My Condolences), Te Quiero (I Love You), Usted Es Invitado (You Are Invited), Lo siento para su pérdida  (I’m Sorry For Your Loss), Bienvenido A Casa (Welcome Home) and Feliz Navidad (Merry Christmas).

Visit our spanish greetings page.

Mother’s Day is next weekend so I decided to make a few printable Mother’s Day greeting card templates to give away. The free printable greeting cards have graphics that display all kinds of flowers and floral arrangements like sunflowers, roses, cala lilys, azaleas and more.

Your mother or wife is sure to love them and it will be very special because you are making the card yourself. Also kids love printable projects like this that they can create themselves.

All that is needed is the Adobe PDF Reader software (FREE), your home printer and your Creativity! The inside of the Mother’s Day greeting card is left blank so that you can add any personalized message that you like. I’ve also added a few Mother’s Day Poems that you might use on the inside of the greeting cards.

Go check out the Mother’s Day Greeting Cards. There are 18 to choose from.

Gina

If you’ve visited any webmaster forums in the last few days you’ll hear the webmasters talking about the Google Page Rank update. This update takes place about 4 times a year. Google’s Pagerank formula is secret and is designed to allocate authority or weight to individual web pages. The higher your web page’s pagerank the more authorative your website is being seen by the Google Search Engine. A website’s pagerank can be from 0 to 10 based on popularity. You can view a web page pagerank by downloading the Google Toolbar here: toolbar.google.com. Once installed, you’ll be able to see the pagerank of any web page that you visit automatically.

The toolbar also has a pop up blocker, a form filler,  and allows you to search directly from the toolbar and more.

If you don’t want to install the toolbar, you can check a website’s pagerank here: http://www.hooverwebdesign.com/tools/multi-rank-checker/. Just enter the page url like http://www.hooverwebdesign.com/

You may wonder what is the benefit of a high page ranking site. Really the only benefits are bragging rights. It takes a lot of hand work and time to get a high pagerank. A high ranking page is a PR5, PR6, PR7, PR8, or better. The higher the pagerank number the more difficult to achieve the ranking. When you are exchanging links with another website, having a higher page rank will get your site accepted more easily. That being said, you shouldn’t worry too much about pagerank…you should devote your time to getting traffic to your website which will ultimately increase your websites sales which makes you more money.

In case you do want to increase your pagerank, you should continue to exchange links with similar websites, consider giving away something free from your website, start a website awards program, and purchase directory listings. Advertising with Google Adwords wouldn’t hurt either.

Gina

Google bans websites that try to cheat to get better rankings or to deceive it’s users by using SEO blackhat techniques.

To tell if your website has been banned go to Google.com and type in your website name,

i.e. site:www.hooverwebdesign.com (substitute hooverwebdesign.com with your domain name)

If you see ZERO search results, it means you are not listed in Google and very well could be banned. Ouch!

Before you panic, maybe it could be a temporarily glitch. If you try again later and get the same results, you have a problem! 

First check that your website isn’t breaking any of Google’s Webmaster Rules. It’s amazing how this day and time I still see websites who put a bunch of paragraph returns with tiny text that is the same color of the page background at the bottom of the page. Even when your website is in Flash this isn’t ok. Google can read flash files so this really isn’t necessary.

You can submit a “Request reconsideration” through the Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure you’ve fixed the problem and tell Google exactly what you did and that you don’t plan to do it again. Stick with this. If you are planning on cheating again, don’t waste your time with the reconsideration request. You’ll eventually get found out. Reinclusion is very hard to get so if you get back in, thank your lucky stars and don’t mess up again!

 Gina

As well all know, a website can look really plain and boring without photos. Images help you to graphically show website visitors what your website is about and can grab your readers attention.

If you want to revamp your website and need stock photos for your website, following are a list of places to legally grab stock images:

royalty-free images:

www.photos.hooverwebdesign.com

free images:

www.hooverstock.com
www.sxc.hu

Gina

If you use the Google Adsense program to monotonize your website, surely you dread seeing the PSA ads loading on your web page.  PSA ads are public service announcement ads for non-profit organizations that appear on your website. Generally these ads appear until the Google spider has had time to review the content of your web page to determine the subject of the ads that should be shown on your web page.

If your site has already been spidered and public service ads still appear, you need to fix this as you are not paid for clicks on PSA ads.  Here are a few reasons why your web site might be showing PSA ads and how to fix the problem:

1) Your website is new and the Goggle spider hasn’t visited your website yet to determine which subject of ads should be displayed. FIX: Be patient.

2) You don’t have enough text on your web page. FIX: Add more textual content which matches the theme of your website and the PSA ads should disappear.

3) The Google spiders can not determine what your website is about because you don’t have enough content or you have too many subjects. FIX: Break up your content into pages with one particular theme.

4) Google doesn’t have any ad inventory for your website niche or keywords. FIX: Get a new niche.

5) You are using excessive “stop words” like murder, suicide, kill, hack, hacker, or names of illegal drugs. FIX: Get rid of the stop words.

Gina

My husband and I bought a little country cabin in Mississippi last year. We were working hard at updating it but had to put our plans on hold due to the cold weather. Now that the weather’s getting warm again we can get back to work!

It’s about an hour’s drive from the house, so we pack up the kids and drive down there most weekends. What we have left to do is outside painting, wood laminate on the floors, install kitchen cabinets and counter tops, buy appliances and hook up the new shower. It’s going to be really nice when we’re finished.  I’m hoping we’ll be done by July.  We bought the cabin so we could take mini-vacations on the weekend. The cabin’s really close to Sardis Lake and we plan on going fishing a lot on the weekends and when the kids are out of school. So now you know what I do every weekend.

Here’s a picture of the cabin taken last year:

I used a picture of the cabin taken in the summer for one of the free calendar templates. It looks much better when all the trees have leaves on them.

Gina

If you’re like most people, the first thing you do in the morning is check email. Have you ever tried to check email and got the dreaded “host can not be found” message? Normally that means your website can not be reached by the mail server.

There could be one of two reasons: 1) Your website is down; 2) Your internet connection is down. Before you panic, make sure your Internet connection is working. You can test the connection by going to any website; for example google.com. If the page comes up your internet connection is fine. Now try to access your website. If your website does not come up in your web browser, you’ve got a BIG problem.

Anyone that wants to visit your website can’t see it. They’ll get a “page can not be displayed” error page. You’re loosing that valuable website traffic that you’ve worked so hard to get. Besides that you are also loosing revenue from any products that you might sell. If search engine spiders such as the GoogleBot come by and they can’t access your website you may loose your search engine rankings. If the GoogleBot comes by multiple times and your site is still down it might start de-indexing your web pages. Yikes!

With any search engine if your website is down for a long period of time, the search engines can temporarily kick your website out of it’s index as well. Once the search engine spider comes back and see that your website is back up, you’ll more than likely get back into the index. Now the question is, “Where will you get back in?”. If you held a top ranking, it will take time and more hard work with link exchanges to get back to where you were, if at all. I know it’s impossible for a site to be up 100% of the time, but 99% of the time is acceptable. Sometimes things happen, like moving your website from one host to another, server upgrades, etc.  and your website does have to be down. You should always keep your website downtime to a minimum. To not loose and rankings and website traffic, don’t go over 24 hours down. Get your site back up and running as soon as possible.

Gina

If you are looking for printable pet sympathy greeting cards that you can use to console a friend or family member who has lost a beloved family pet, I’ve added several pet loss cards that you can download for free.  The pet loss and pet sympathy cards include printable cards for pet dogs, cats, frogs, spiders, horses, parakeets, goldfish, canary birds, lizards, snakes, bunny rabbits, crickets, monkeys and turtles. I think I got all of the common pets but if I missed one, please let me know.

You just need the Adobe PDF Reader software (FREE), your home printer and your Creativity! The inside is blank so that you can add any personalized message that you like.

Go check out the pet sympathy greeting cards. There are 36 to choose from.

Gina