How to Get a Google Maps Business Panorama, a Step-by-Step Guide

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Awesome New Google Business Panoramas Extend Street View Technology

We recently noticed business panoramas appearing on Google Places/Maps pages for a number of businesses in Austin, TX. These business panoramas operate just like Google Street View, and in fact, in some cases you can follow the street view right through the doors of a business and into the inside. You can try it by visiting local restaurant J. Blacks Google Places Page (just follow the arrows out the door!).

Here’s a screenshot of our new panorama, and it links to the panorama itself:

Google Maps Panorama

 

How to Get Google Business Panoramas for Your Places Listing

We got our panorama up in about 8 days from start to finish–you’ll need an outside vendor to do it. Here are the steps you’ll need to follow:

  • Start with a Google Places page. You’ll need a verified Google+ Local/Google Places/Maps listing. If you’ve got duplicate listings, you’ll want to clean that up first. Also, if you have multiple locations, you will need to secure (and pay for) separate panoramas.
  • Find a Google-authorized provider. You can’t shoot these panoramas yourself. You need to select from a list of authorized providers (“Trusted Photographer”) and make your own deal with them. You can go here to find a Google Trusted Photographer in your area.
  • Arrange your photo shoot. You’ll arrange a time and price with the Trusted Photographer. We got an appointment the next day from Olive Tree Photography in Austin (sadly, as of 2015, Olive is no longer offering this service), and they came out the next day.
  • Your Photographer does the rest. Your Trusted Photographer has a special camera, special software, and back-door access to your Google+ Local page, so they’ll make the upload to your page on their own. Ours was posted in 6 or 7 days after the shoot. We also got about 20 high-quality still shots for our local page. Check with your provider, this service might be optional, but ours was included in our price of about $270, we opted for a bare-bones service. The range will generally be $250 to $650.

About the Photo Shoot

We were obviously interested in the technology involved, and were expecting a camera more like the spaceship-shaped cameras used on Google’s mapping vehicles, but the camera setup was surprisingly compact and ordinary looking:

 

Google-Photo-Shoot

 

Pictured above is the Olive Tree team at work. The entire shoot took about 25 minutes.

The SEO and Marketing Benefits

We see the business photos as obviously beneficial to a company’s marketing program. Google Maps is still the king within the world of local listings, at least for the time being, and having a view of your business available to new customers is a great way to introduce yourself.

Furthermore, we surmise that adding this feature to a Google+ Local page serves to enhance the listing, which is always beneficial for ranking within the local system. It may also serve to give the listing further verification and authority.

In short: it’s a no-brainer.

Embedding the Panorama

More good news: you can embed the panorama just as you would embed a map. You simply browse to your panorama and play with it until you have the exact orientation you want and then click the link icon at the upper left of the panorama window. You’ll see the familiar link menu pop up. You can see our panorama embedded on our TastyPlacement team page.

If you do choose to go forward with a panorama, good luck with your photo shoot!

 

Setting Up a Stripe.com Single Payment Page for WordPress

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Stripe.com handles credit card payments at 2.9% (the same as PayPal) and let’s you integrate a single payment page or popup page within your WordPress site. Stripe is setup not as a total ecommerce solution, but rather is a better fit for single payments or donations. It has the advantage over PayPal in that customers aren’t required to sign up for an acount and aren’t taken to a separate gateway to make a payment.

Another option for payment solutions for those willing to attempt to gsayPal and Stripe in terms of price, as it’s only 25 cents per transaction. Dwolla offers the simple integration of a button and a WordPress plugin as well, but it does require that customers go through a signup process.

Stripe works well and is very easy to integrate with the WP-Stripe plugin which allows for installation vis shortcode or template insert.

Stripe.com Installation for WordPress

Here we’ll cover the installation of the plugin and how to set up Stripe.com for WordPress.

Lets start within WordPress. Login to your site and navigate to Plugins. Click Add New and Search for “WP Stripe.”

Click Install > Okay > Activate Plugin

Install-WP-Stripe

Then under the Settings tab of your WordPress admin, select WP Stripe.

Then select the WP Stripe Settings Tab.

WP-Stripe-Settings

In order to start taking payments and test payments, you need to go register an account at Stripe.com.

Register-Stripe.com

Once you’ve registered and logged in. You’ll be able to grab your API keys at this link: Stripe API Keys.

Take those API Keys (both the live and test keys) and copy/paste them into your WP Stripe settings area within your WordPress Dashboard. Then click Save Changes.

stripe-API-keys

Then you want to create a new page and enter the WP Stripe short code [wp-stripe]

Publish the page and it will look something like this:

stripe-button

One neat thing about Stripe is that it includes a popup form so that you really don’t have to modify any CSS if you’d rather not. Unlike a heavy eCommerce cart, Stripe is a fairly lightweight solution, so other than the plugin, with this particular type of integration, all the heavy lifting is done through Stripe.com which also means better security.

To test Stripe, (highly recommended) before sending clients to the newly created payments page, use the following dummy info.

Card Number 4242424242424242
Card Month 05
Card Year 2015
CVC Number 123

After you run the test, you should see the amount of test money you sent show up both in your WP Stripe area of the WordPress admin and in the Stripe dashboard as well.

Pro tip: If you want to eliminate the optional check box that asks to display recent donations or payments in the payment popup window, simply uncheck “Enable Recent Widget?” in the WP Stripe admin area.

That covers basic setup of WP-Stripe for a WordPress website. For more advanced tutorials and documentation Stripe has a well organized Developers portal. You can find an archive of our WordPress tutorials here.

Author: Ryan Howard is a TastyPlacement alumnus who now runs a digital refinery offering WordPress designs, local search marketing, ecommerce SEO services, and social media strategy.

Monitor Size Statistics for Web Design & HTML

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Updated for 2012

Have you ever wondered how many 800 x 600 website viewers are still roaming the internet? More than you might think. More importantly, have you ever wondered about the monitor sizes of the viewers of your own site? The capability to discern your own user statistics (monitor sizes, and a lot more) is well within your grasp–in fact, you may already be missing it.

Browser/Monitor Sizes on the Internet Generally

It’s helpful to know the monitor dimensions of internet users generally; this lets you plan your designs to deliver a good experience to website visitors. W3Schools keeps a running tally of monitor sizes that visit its website but the statistics do not appear to account for mobile websites, so just remember that you need to account for mobile website visitors separately.

For 2012 (January through November) we see the following statistics on about 73,000 visitors:

Monitor Size Statistics

A few details are worthy of mention. First, recent years have seen a proliferation of browser/monitor sizes. We see a nearly endless “long-tail” of single instances of very unusual browser sizes like 1795×1011 and 1540×963, just to name a few. These odd sizes make statistical analysis a little foggy. Generally though your top 10 or 15 monitor sizes are going to give you a fair sense of who’s visiting.

Now, just for reference, the statistics above are a far cry from what we reported in 2008:

Screen Resolution Visits
1.

1024×768

 383 37.73%
2.

1280×800

 147 14.48%
3.

1280×1024

 114 11.23%
4.

1440×900

 82 8.08%
5.

1680×1050

 59 5.81%
6.

1280×768

 50 4.93%
7.

1920×1200

 42 4.14%
8.

800×600

 38 3.74%
9.

1152×864

 35 3.45%
10.

1280×720

 11 1.08%

Browser/Monitor Sizes of YOUR Website Visitors

Since we first wrote this post in 2008, Google Analytics has gone through a few redesigns–GA still offers the capability of showing your website visitors’ browser size, it’s just a little harder to find.

Instructions:

[icon_list style=”check”]

  • Sign in to Google Analytics and click the “Standard Reporting” button on the top bar.
  • On the left navigation, click “Audience” to expand sub-menu and then click “Technology” to expand sub-menu
  • Click “Browser & OS”; the main window will now display a table showing browser statistics
  • Click on “Secondary Dimension” at the top of the table as shown in the screenshot and scroll down to select “Screen Resolution”
  • The table will then display your visitors’ monitor sizes.

[/icon_list]

Analytics

Handy, huh? And don’t be surprised if you see a few 800 x 600 viewers still kicking around.

Pubcon Austin 2013

Tutorial: Block Bad Bots with .htaccess

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In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to block bad bots and spiders from your website. This is a standard safety measure we implement with our WordPress SEO service. We can save bandwidth and performance for customers, increase security, and prevent scrapers from putting duplicate content around the web.

Quick Start Instructions/Roadmap

For those looking to get started right away (without a lot of chit-chat), here are the steps to blocking bad bots with .htaccess:

  • FTP to your website and find your .htaccess file in your root directory
  • Create a page in your root directory called 403.html, the content of the page doesn’t matter, our is a text file with just the characters “403”
  • Browse to this page on AskApache that has a sample .htaccess snippet complete with bad bots already coded in
  • You can add any bots to the sample .htaccess file as long as you follow the .htaccess syntax rules
  • Test your .htaccess file with a bot spoofing site like wannabrowser.com

Check Your Server Logs for Bad Bots

Bad Bots Server Log

If you read your website server logs, you’ll see that bots and crawlers regularly visit your site–these visits can ultimately amount to hundreds of visits a day and plenty of bandwidth. The server log pasted above is from TastyPlacement, and the bot identified in red is discoverybot. This bot was nice enough to identify its website for me, but DiscoveryEngine.com touts itself as the next great search engine, but presently offers nothing except stolen bandwidth. It’s not a bot I want visiting my site. If you check your server logs, you might see bad bots like sitesnagger, reaper, harvest, and others.  Make a note of any suspicious bots you see in your logs.

AskApache’s Bad Bot RewriteRules

AskApache maintains a very brief tutorial but a very comprehensive .htaccess code snippet here. What’ makes that page so great is that the .htaccess snippet already has dozens of bad bots blocked (like reaper, blackwidow, sitesnagger) and you can simply add any new bots you identify.

If we want to block a bot not covered by AskApache’s default text, we just add a line to the “RewriteCond” section, separating each bot with a “|” pipe character. We’ve put “discoverybot” in our file because that’s a visitor we know we don’t want :

# IF THE UA STARTS WITH THESE
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(verybadbot|discoverybot) [NC,OR]

If you are on the WordPress platform be careful not to disrupt existing entries in your .htaccess file. As always, keep a backup of your .htaccess file, it’s quite easy to break your site with one coding error. Also, it’s probably better to put these rewrite rules at the beginning of your .htaccess file so no pages are served before the bots read the rewrite directives. Here’s a simplified version of the complete .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 403 /403.html

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# IF THE UA STARTS WITH THESE
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(black.?hole|blackwidow|discoverybot) [NC,OR]

# ISSUE 403 / SERVE ERRORDOCUMENT
RewriteRule . - [F,L]

Here’s a translation of the .htaccess file above:

  • ErrorDocument sets a webpage titled 403.html to serve as our error document when bad bots are encountered; you want to create a page in your root directory called 403.html, the content of the page doesn’t matter, our is a text file with just the characters “403”
  • RewriteEngine and RewriteBase simple mean “ready to enforce rewrite rules, and set the base URL to the website root”
  • RewriteCond directs the server “if you encounter any of these bot names, enforce the RewriteRule that follows”
  • RewriteRule directs all bad bots identified in the text to our ErrorDocument, 403.html

 Testing Our .htaccess File

Once you upload your .htaccess file, you can test it by browsing to your site and pretending to be a bad bot. You do this by going to wannabrowser.com and spoofing a User Agent, in this case, we spoofed “SiteSnagger”:

If you installed properly, you should be directed to your 403 page, and you have successfully blocked most bad bots.

Some Limitations

Now, why don’t we do this with Robots.txt and simply tell bots not to index? Simple: because bots might simply ignore our directive, or they’ll crawl anyway and just not index the content–that’s not a fix. Even with this .htaccess fix, it’ll only block bots that identify themselves. If a bot is spoofing itself as a legitimate User Agent, then this technique won’t work. We’ll post a tutorial soon about how to block traffic based on IP address. But, that said, you’ll block 90% of bad bot traffic with this technique.

Enjoy!

Google Announces New Link Disavowal Tool

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Google’s Matt Cutts announced at the PubCon marketing conference that Google is rolling out a new much-anticipated link disavowal tool. Bad links from poor quality sites can harm a site’s rankings in Google, and Google has implemented this tool to let webmasters remove bad links from their link profile. TastyPlacement has been able to use this tool for clients at risk of being associated with spammy or shady sites. This feature can be extremely helpful in our WordPress SEO Service when we are identifying specific client issues.

The tool will operate by uploading a txt file that contains a list of domains that a webmaster wishes to disavow. There will also be a domain: operator that will let a webmaster disavow all links from a domain.

Here’s a sample of what a disavowal tool text file would look like:

http://www.shadysites.com/bad-post
http://www.shadysites.com/another-bad-post
domain: http://wwww.reallyshadysite.com

The tool is ostensibly live at the following domain:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

Cutts warns that it’s always better to have bad links removed rather than disavow links with the tool, but recognizes that’s not always possible.

Infographic: Testing Negative SEO

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Does Negative SEO Really Work?

Negative SEO is an undertaking whereby a business competitor attempts to harm the search ranking position of a competing website through the procurement of junk and spam links. Our study shows that Negative SEO is very real, and can be accomplished for very little money.

Infographic: Testing Negative SEO

Use This Graphic for FREE on Your Site!

You may use the infographic above on your website, however, the license we grant to you requires that you properly and correctly attribute the work to us with a link back to our website by using the following embed code.

Embed Code

<div style="width: 420px">
<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/testing-negative-seo.jpg" />
<img src="https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/testing-negative-seo-thumbnail.jpg"
alt="Infographic: Testing Social Signals" /></a><br/>
Infographic authored by TastyPlacement, an <a href="https://tastyplacement.com/">
Austin-based search marketing firm.</a> To view the original post, see the original
<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/infographic-testing-negative-seo">
Negative SEO Study</a> and infographic.</div>

About the Study: The Details

After the webmaster warnings of March 2012 and the Penguin update of April, like many in the SEO community, we wondered if negative SEO (NSEO) was now a possibility. For years Google had abided by the principle that nothing external to a site could harm it directly, ensuring that sites would be safe from the malice of competitors. Evidence for NSEO had been initially unreliable and anecdotal, so we decided to try it ourselves.

The Experiment:

For ethical reasons we didn’t use a competitor’s site, but chose an internal property, Pool-Cleaning-Houston.com, for the experiment. This site ranked well for its domain name keyword match and a number of lesser terms, and has enjoyed a stable position in its market for years. This site because it is the SEO equivalent of the proverbial “Los Angeles dog walker.” It is not a particularly powerful site, but it is positioned in a market where it could easily provide a small business owner with a comfortable living.

The NSEO:

We chose the following negative SEO techniques for our study:

  • 45,000 Comment links. Anchor text “Pool Cleaning Houston.” Cost: $15
  • 7000 double-tiered forum profile links. Anchor text “Pool Cleaning Houston.” Cost: $5
  • Sidebar blog links on four trashy blogs, yielding nearly 4000 links (although it appears that only 100 of those links have been indexed to date). Anchor text “Pool Cleaning Houston.” Cost: $20

The Execution:

The initial purchase of 45,000 comment links was a disappointment. The seller of the service had marketed the links as NSEO, but it soon became evident that few of the comments were being accepted by moderators, and even fewer were dofollow. The followup purchase of 7000 forum profile links seemed more promising. This was not billed as NSEO, but as a positive, albeit black hat, Scrapebox service. Then a week went by and our site failed to be destroyed.

We had built a relationship with the webmaster of the trashy blogs when we asked him to remove the sidebar links he had sent to one of our clients. He removed the links for a fee, and when we asked, he put on new links to Pool-Cleaning-Houston.com for a similar fee. Within a few days the links delivered a killing blow.

The Results:

The bulk of the traffic for the site comes from the search “Pool Cleaning Houston.” For a week after the blast of thousands of NSEO links, the ranking actually went up from position #3 to #2. Then we followed up with the blog sidebar links. By the next day Pool-Cleaning-Houston.com was off the front page and essentially invisible to potential customers.

Besides the primary keyword, there were another 51 minor keywords tracked during the study. 26 went down noticeably, 21 stayed the same throughout, and 5 keywords improved slightly. Taken on average, the keywords dropped about 2.5 spots (among the keywords that did drop, the average decline was closer to 9 positions).

The total rankings of all the keywords clearly shows the effects of NSEO not just on selected searches, but on the overall ranking power of the site. For a period of three days following each NSEO burst the site improved slightly in the SERPs, and then abruptly lost the ground it had gained and then some.

Conclusion:

It is now cheap and effective to destroy the livelihood of a small business. In a local market it could cost as little as $20 a month to knock a competitor off the first page of search returns. This low cost makes NSEO accessible to virtually anyone, from unscrupulous companies, to disgruntled employees, spiteful customers, or even idle pranksters. It’s too early to make a definitive claim about the exact causes of the Google algorithm penalty, but an effective NSEO campaign may include the creation of a backlinks profile with artificially repetitive anchor text, as well as links from a bad neighborhood.

Want an Infographic for Your Site?

Check out our Infographic Development services and see what TastyPlacement can do for you!

…and the thumbnail!:

Negative SEO

Freddie Mercury’s Guide to SEO

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Want to be an awesome SEO or digital marketer? Seek out Those of Epic Awesomeness and learn from them. If you think like a legend in your work life, your work will be legendary. And, after what must be my 5000th listening of A Night at the Opera, I started thinking about what lessons Freddie Mercury can teach internet marketers.

Surround Yourself With Great People

Freddie Mercury had great co-workers. Guitarist Brian May played for a decade on a guitar he built with his father in the family tool shed. The guitar had an advanced tremolo system that wasn’t available at the time. Brian’s guitar fueled millions in record sales for Queen. Today, Brian owns his own guitar company that produces a commercial replica of his homemade guitar.

Queen’s bassist John Deacon began tinkering with piano in the mid-70s. Almost immediately after beginning to learn the new instrument, he crafted the now-iconic song “You’re My Best Friend.” John has said, casually, “basically that’s the song that came out you know when I was learning to play piano.” The song was a major hit, and helped push Queen’s “A Night at the Opera” album to triple-platinum sales.

Great people produce great things. You can’t do everything alone, so partner up or populate a staff with people of great talent and your work product will be great.

Appreciate Your Clients, They’ll Bring You Fame and Fortune

You are nothing without your clients (or your readers and buyers as the case may be). Freddie honored and loved his fans. “You brought me fame and fortune and everything that goes with it; I thank you all,” he insists in “We Are the Champions.” Your clients are gold. Treat them that way and you’ll enjoy riches and be a champion for years to come.

Build on the Past, but Be Original

Queen regularly employed elements of the past in their music. They drew heavily upon the growing heavy metal movement (at the time pioneered by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath) but also included less-expected elements like classical and opera. “It’s unheard of to combine opera with a rock theme, my dear,” Freddie once remarked. He also once said that “the whole point of Queen was to be original.” Queen knew where to ground themselves and where to branch out and be original. The resulting effect was a supernatural but radio-ready rock sound.

You can do the same. Web marketing draws on a foundation of concepts that originate with traditional advertising. Web marketers must honor well-settled advertising concepts like calls to action, customer conversion, branding, etc. After all, the psychology of the buyer hasn’t changed much since the beginning of time. But web marketing presents infinite opportunities to be original. When you blend a solid marketing foundation with creative and innovative ideas, you will excel, and you will succeed. Don’t simply imitate the successes of others, build on the successes of others with your own spin.

Be Fabulous and Think Big

“I always knew I was star, and now, the rest of the world seems to agree with me,” Freddie once mused. No one ever accused Queen or Freddie of thinking small — even before they were famous. In marketing as in rock music, it’s the big ideas that get the most attention. If you are building a website for a client or for one of your own properties, make it the best-in-class for that space. Queen wasn’t done with a song until they had lavished it with operatic 4-part harmonies. Aim high and people will love your product.

If you have an idea for a blog post article, why not go for broke and develop it into a full-scale infographic? We re-learned this lesson recently when our infographic study of social media impact on search signals went viral, earning us thousands of social media mentions and hundreds of links from the SEO and entrepreneurial community. Had we issued that material as a blog post, it might have been lost in the shuffle of thousands of other blog posts. We took the route a champion would take and it paid off.

When web content goes viral, it’s the same as when a band gets famous: when people love something, they tell their friends.

Negative SEO

Infographic: Testing Social Media Signals in Search

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How Social Media Activity Impacts Organic Search Rankings

Can social media activity impact organic search rankings? Popular wisdom says yes, but we set out to prove it with a simple test. We’ve compiled our findings into an easy-to-follow infographic.

Use This Graphic for FREE on Your Site!

You may use the infographic above on your website, however, the license we grant to you requires that you properly and correctly attribute the work to us with a link back to our website by using the following embed code.

Embed Code

<div style="width: 420px">
<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/testing-social-signals.jpg" />
<img src="https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/testing-social-signals-thumbnail.jpg"
alt="Infographic: Testing Social Signals" /></a><br/>
Infographic authored by TastyPlacement, an <a href="https://tastyplacement.com/">
Austin digital marketing, SEO & PPC agency</a>. To view the original post, see the original
<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/infographic-testing-social-media-signals-in-search">
Social Media Infographic</a>. </div>

Want an Infographic for Your Site?

Check out our Infographic Development services and see what TastyPlacement can do for you!

…and the thumbnail!:

Infographic Thumbnail

How to Promote an Infographic

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Infographics have emerged as a sound, white-hat way to generate high-quality natural backlinks. Even a moderately successful infographic can go viral and bring a few dozen high-quality backlinks. But creating an infographic—as much work as that is—only gets you halfway there.

If you cleverly promote your infographic, you can greatly increase your chances of going viral and generating higher numbers of backlinks. We know because we’ve done a fair amount of infographic development here at TastyPlacement.

The Quid Pro Quo of Infographics

The name of the game in infographic promotion is that a webmaster gets to display your hard-earned content (the infographic) and in return, you earn a backlink from the website displaying the infographic. A preliminary task in promoting your infographic is to place your infographic where it is easy to find and in a manner which is easy for webmasters to employ.

Set Up Your Infographic “Home”

First, pick a “home” for your infographic—this ideally should be the same site where you want to send your backllinks. Your home location will house the infographic itself (1000 pixels wide is fairly standard), and ideally an “on-page display” version for the page itself for faster loading and easier visibility on a typical webpage (about 540 or 600 pixels wide), a mini-thumbnail for Facebook shares (more on this in a minute) and of course, your recommended embed code.

Your embed code should be dead easy for any webmaster to simply grab in a block. The embed code should be simple html, and should contain the entire “package” for the infographic: the on page display version, a link to the full infographic as well as author attribution and your desired links.

When we promote infographics, we host the preview image and the full infographic—it’s just too complicated to ask webmasters to download the infographic, install it on their site, then update all the links. By hosting the images, you make it easy and idiot proof. Because we are hosting the infographic, and the files are large, we create our infographics in jpeg format: that allows us to compress the file down for faster loading and less bandwidth usage.

To see all these elements coming together on a proper infographic “home.” see the page we’ve set up for our “Austin Startup Scene” infographic here:

https://tastyplacement.com/start-up-infographic

Include a Facebook-Ready Thumbnail

You will also notice another element on that page: a square thumbnail of the infographic at the bottom of the page. We added that thumbnail to our infographic page after we learned that when someone posts a share link on Facebook, Facebook will search the page for roughly square-shaped images to offer as a thumbnail choice to represent the share. Because infographics tend to be very tall images, Facebook won’t generate a thumbnail from the full infographic. You have to hand-feed an agreeably-sized thumbnail.

Now Let’s Promote: Make it Searchable

With our infographic set up and set to share, you want to make sure your infographic can be easily found in search engines. Make sure you’ve got the terms “free” and “infographic” in your title tag and body copy. “Free infographic” is searched 2900 times a month in Google, as reported by the Adwords keyword tool.

Finding Webmasters With MyBlogGuest

[update] When we originally posted this thread, we recommended MyBlogGuest as a means of reaching promotion-minded webmasters. We no longer recommend MyBlogGuest as a responsible means of promotion.

Promote Through Social

Promote your infographic through your Twitter account with #free #infographic hash tags. Include a shortened URL with a link to your infographic home. You should also post a link to your personal and business Facebook pages. We think it’s ok to re-post an infographic every few weeks.

Promote through Infographic/Visual Graphic Directories

We promote our infographics through infographic and visual graphic directories. These diretories exist for the purpose of displaying and housing infographics. You’ll get a mix of dofollow and nofollow links from these directories, and you’ll get the chance for webmasters to find you there. Below is the list of sites we employ (Visual.ly is easily the most popular and authoritative of this group):

  • http://www.infographicsarchive.com/submit-infographics/
  • http://submitinfographics.com/
  • http://infographicsite.com/submit-infographic/
  • http://visual.ly
  • Reddit.com/r/infographics/
  • http://www.nerdgraph.com/submit-infographic/
  • http://www.infographicfile.com/
  • http://www.infographiclove.com (this is a paid submission)

To find more locations for submission, try a Google search for (keep the quotes) “Submit Your Infographic”. That query will yield sites with infographic submission forms.

Use Specialized Searches to Find Bloggers and Webmasters

If you really want to take your infographic promotion to the next level, you can do a little curation of specific websites. This technique is going to take a bit more time, but will generate the highest value links.

First, let’s search for existing sites that display infographics. It makes sense that a webmaster that already displays infographics would probably post another in the same topic area. For our sleep infographic, we think our content would be valuable to sleep doctors. So we enter a Google query as follows: “sleep doctor” infographic. This query led us to a few sleep doctors and mattress and pillow manufacturers that already display infographics. One mattress manufacturer has an active blog with a PageRank of 4. We’d like to get a link on that site, so the next step is to write an email to that webmaster. So, we wrote the following message:

“Hi, we were browsing the site __________.org, and we notice 
you display Infographics for your readers. We have a useful
Infographic on sleep science that you can display for free
on your site. We've already coded the HTML so all you would
need to do is paste in the code to your website. You can
find the Infographic here: [link to infographic page/embed
code]. 

If you have any questions about how to post the Infographic
on your site, please let me know. “

Good luck using these tips in promoting your infographic. If your infographic is attractive and useful to readers, you should have have no trouble in ultimately generating 100s of links.

WordPress Tutorial: Display All Posts on a Page

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How to Create an Interior /blog/ Page That Mimics a Traditional WordPress Front Page

We got hung up recently trying to create an interior blog page (i.e., www.agreatsite.com/blog)  for a client’s design. This problem is more common now with full-featured templates and frameworks that employ sliders and carousels on the front page that are triggered by a template’s index.php file.

First, Create a Custom WordPress Page Template

First, you’ll need to create a custom WordPress page template. All WordPress templates have a page.php file as part of the default template–we simply want to vary that file a little bit. Make a copy of your page.php file and name it page-blog.php.

Next, you need to enter a few lines of code at the very top of your new php file:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Blog
*/
?>

The code above is a naming tag–the template name, in this case “Blog” will be the name that appears in the template selection box at the WordPress page edit window, which we’ll screenshot below.

The Code

Now, you can’t simply run the regular WordPress loop on our custom interior page, we are going to use the WordPress template tag get_posts to query our WordPress database and grab our posts. The following code accomplishes this:

$myposts = get_posts('');
foreach($myposts as $post) :
setup_postdata($post);
?>
  <div class="post-item">
    <div class="post-info">
      <h2 class="post-title">
      <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>">
      <?php the_title(); ?>
      </a>
      </h2>
      <p class="post-meta">Posted by <?php the_author(); ?></p>
    </div>
    <div class="post-content">
    <?php the_content(); ?>
    </div>
  </div>
<?php comments_template(); ?>
<?php endforeach; wp_reset_postdata(); ?>

For the purposes of illustration, a greatly simplified version of the preceding code, without any html markup, hrefs, author information, post date data, or comment section would be as follows:

$myposts = get_posts('');
foreach($myposts as $post) :
setup_postdata($post);
?>
 <?php the_title(); ?>
 <?php the_content(); ?>
<?php endforeach; wp_reset_postdata(); ?>

How it Works

So what’s happening here? Well, the heart of the whole process is get_posts–this template tag queries the WP database and gets our posts.

Next, the foreach construct processes each post in turn–thus we’ll have all our posts on our blog page.  The setup_postdata WordPress function, well, sets up our data so it’ll display properly (otherwise the_content may not display the text of our posts. Finally, the wp_reset_postdata restores the $post global variable.

Once you’ve created the file, you’ll obviously want to upload it to your template (theme) directory.

Setting Your Blog Page

Your next step is to simply set up your blog page within the WordPress dashboard. From the WP dashboard, go to Pages, then Add New and create a page with a title “Blog” (or whatever is suitable). Remember the custom template we created above under the heading First, Create a Custom WordPress Page Template? You should now see your custom template name appear under the “Template” pull-down in the Page Edit screen, as indicated in the pic below by the green arrow.

Set the blog page by selecting the “blog” template

You don’t need to put any text in the text edit window, you just need a title–you won’t be displaying any page text here, you’ll be bypassing the specific text of this post and grabbing posts from the database.

Some Background on Why This Was Needed

Incidentally, framework and template designers that hijack WordPress’ index.php file to display a homepage slider, while requiring WordPress’ reading settings to be set to “Your latest posts” as shown in the screenshot below are doing a disservice to users (hence mandating this tutorial). The sounder practice is to code sliders and homepage features into a custom WordPress template.