11 Reasons Why WordPress is good for SEO
WordPress is an extremely popular tool for businesses that need a web presence. The figures suggest that 60 million WordPress sites exist, and that’s a whopping one out of six of all sites available on the internet. The chances are, you’ve visited a WordPress site or blog in the past day. But as all good marketers know, having an online facet of your business isn’t enough. If you want to drive traffic to your site, you need to start looking towards SEO. Thankfully, WordPress is the ideal solution. Here, we tell you why. Adding a blog to your site is simple Fresh content is essential for good search engine rankings, and a blog is one of the best ways to do this. With WordPress, regular blogging is extremely easy. It’s just a matter of logging into the backend and writing your post. Of course, any old blog won’t do. You need a strong content strategy, backed up with thorough keyword research. You can update your content as often as you like Many businesses rush into having a website developed by a professional, but then later realise that they can’t update the content themselves. When you have a WordPress site, whether created by yourself or someone else, you’re in control. Whether it’s your latest products or details of an upcoming event, it can be changed by just about anyone who knows how to use the internet. Current information is essential for winning rankings. It’s cheap If you’ve ever had a quote from a web developer, you’ll know how expensive it can be. But with WordPress, the costs are extremely low. You can go for a free site, or if you want great flexibility, you’ll just need to go for the self-hosted option and pay a few pounds per month for hosting. This leaves you with a bigger budget to really drive your SEO campaign. It’s user friendly You don’t have to be a web expert to be able to use WordPress and carry out the tasks you need to for SEO purposes. Once you’ve learned the basics, you’ll realise that it really is quite simple. You can add SEO plugins To give you an added helping hand, there are several plugins out there that can be added to the backend of WordPress and will help you to make sure that you’ve ticked all the necessary boxes. These plugins could save you literally hours of messing about with coding and tags. It’s easy to find professional help If you do come across problems and decide that you need some expert help, you won’t have to look far to find someone who’s good with WordPress. You might use the services of a professional SEO company, for example, who will easily be able to access your site and optimise your pages. It’s super speedy Google has started to use loading times as an indicator of just how good your website is. In short, if it takes ages for your pages to load, your rankings are going to suffer. WordPress is really quick, so this just gives you one less thing to worry about. You can make your site look however you want WordPress is flexible, and the amount of themes and templates out there make it easy for you to create a site that looks exactly as you’d like it to. This is important for SEO purposes because it means that your traffic will have a pleasant browsing experience. If you aren’t converting them into paying customers, your SEO efforts have essentially been wasted. Link building is easy Link building is an essential...
Read MoreHow Infographics Have Changed Marketing Strategies
Infographics are now considered as the fastest growing type of content on the World Wide Web. For this reason, business-to-business (B2B) marketers believe that this format is the best way to influence their target audience. In fact, based on the recent surveys conducted, infographics are now used as a marketing strategy by about 20% of B2B companies. The yearly growth of this communication tool suggests that it will continue to become popular in the coming years. This trend is not really surprising because with today’s digital world, people are more attracted to colorful, eye-catching content than boring, long blog posts. It engages the company’s target audience, allowing them to spread information about their company, brand, and product. In addition, the audience can easily understand and retain information because the data are presented in a simple method using graphs, images, and short texts. Infographics And E-Commerce Infographics are the newest trend in sharing information. This communication tool gives people visual figures of information and facts on a wide variety of subjects. In the past couple of years, a number of companies have tried reaching consumers overseas. These companies used infographics to appeal to an international audience and they have enjoyed great success. Today, infographics play a critical role in overseas sales by informing consumers about the potential of the overseas market. In addition, this communication device helps companies establish their brands and inform new audience about their products and services without spending thousands of dollars. Ways To Use Infographics As A Marketing Strategy Present The “Big Picture”: In can be quite challenging to present and explain information to prospects. An infographic, with its images, graphs, and eye-catching design, is a great way to present pieces of information. For instance, you can show who does what and when; and visually present the interaction of all the contributors. Basically, you can present the “Big Picture” in a single content which prospects can understand and refer to regularly. How-To Presentation: “Internet users are always looking for help and advice; thus, presenting a step-by-step process through visual content is a very effective way of communicating information. You can turn your infographics to a step-by-step instruction guide that can help your potential consumers understand, appreciate, and accept your product and brand. This is very helpful, especially for those products that are quite complicated. Present Brand Superiority: Infographics are also excellent mediums for demonstrating how your product can be beneficial for your potential consumers, and how it is superior over other brands. Traditionally, these pieces of information are presented through lifeless and dull white paper; however, with the use of infographics, you will be able to present the same information in a more interesting and engaging way. Now that you are familiar with how you can use infographics as a marketing strategy, you must then consider why you should include it in your online content marketing. Knowing how you can use this communication device is one thing, but having the motivation to use infographics as a marketing strategy is another thing entirely. Infographics Are Attractive: With the amount of information available online, you have to make your content eye-catching and engaging or else, your target audience won’t even look at your content. Using infographics will help you catch your audience’s attention through images, graphs, and compelling designs. Capacity To Go Viral: The main objective of using this communication tool for marketing is for it to go viral. This means that the infographics is shared and read across various social media and blogging communities. If the infographics go viral, you will be able to reach more prospects....
Read MoreMobile Web Development: Understanding Responsive Design
Androids, iPhones and tablets, oh my! The good old days of 2006 when designers only had to worry about the devices with 1024px x 768px and 800px x 600px that accounted for over 75% of the market are gone. In today’s mobile world, that same market share is split amount eight different screen sizes, and none of them dominate the market by more than 20%. Additionally, that doesn’t even count the difference in viewport sizes on devices that can be used in landscape or portrait mode. Solving that problem is where responsive design comes into play. What is Responsive Design? Responsive design is simply creating a website that looks good on a wide variety of devices. That is the simple answer. The more complex answer lies in making it work. Web designers and developers have to plan their designs carefully and test them using either software that simulates different devices or on the actual devices. Just as designers have to test their sites in various web browsers to check for compatibility issues, they also have to test using different mobile operating systems such as Android and Apple’s iOS. Does My Website Have to Be Responsive? Well, technically, no. You can have a website that only works well on standard personal computers, as long as you are willing to ignore 25% or more of the potential visitors your website could receive. The market for smartphones and tablets has grown every year since 2007 and there are no signs it will slow down anytime soon. As a matter of fact, most analysts predict the number of mobile web surfers will continue to increase for the foreseeable future. Therefore, if you don’t have a responsive website, you are alienating more potential visitors every year. How Do I Make My Website Mobile-Friendly? The answer to this is different for everyone. For example, if you have an existing older website, trying to convert it to a mobile website is typically more expensive and more trouble than simply having the website redesigned. If you are building a new website, then your best option is to start from the ground-up with a responsive design. For a new project, you should find a designer who includes responsive design as part of the project. If you are building your website on WordPress, we highly recommend you to try ElegantThemes as a lot of their themes are responsive. Some of their responsive themes are even built using ThemeMask’s concept that offers design in various topic. Responsive design is more than just a buzzword in the web development industry. For today’s businesses, blogs and other websites, it is a necessity. Responsive design isn’t a trend that will eventually go away. Now that Pandora’s box has been opened, you can be assured that the need for websites that are viewable on a wide variety of devices is only going to become more important as time goes on. If you don’t want your website to get outpaced by your competition, then having a responsive website design is absolutely critical. About the Author Chris Scarborough loves to build ecommerce sites that are targeted to mobile customers. He incorporates responsive design with Bigcommerce checkout platforms and aims to create a stellar user...
Read MoreSEO Steps to take after Installing WordPress Theme
There are a lot of articles on how to optimize WordPress blogs for the search engines. However, I still haven’t seen any articles outlining actual steps you need to take immediately after you install a fresh copy of WordPress theme. The information below will attempt to do just that. Step 1: Change the permalink structure How to do it: Go to Settings>Permalinks and then select “Custom Structure.” Use /%postname%/ and write it in the box. Why do it: For more information about using %postname%, click here. The reason why you want to use this permalink structure is because you increase the probability searchers will click your link in the search results and you gain a slight advantage in the rankings also. Step 2: Install the necessary SEO plugins Install the following SEO plugins for maximum leverage: All in one SEO pack – necessary for optimizing title tags, meta tags Redirection – Many SEO features here, but the most important one is that it manages 301 redirects. It will also change all 302 to 301 redirects, for example if your site is http://example.com and the visitor goes to http://www.example.com, this plugin will 301 redirect the visitor to the non-www version (by the way, WordPress, without this plugin installed will do the same just with 302 redirect instead.) Google XML Sitemaps – makes the job easier for search engines to find the pages on your site. Many people recommend many other ‘essential’ SEO plugins but these are the ones I use on Mix The Net and I really don’t plan to add more in the near future. Step 3: Learn more about SEO from QUALITY resources Honestly, most SEO advice is very, very bad. It is based on untested theories. Fortunately, there are some websites that use research when doing SEO and base their advice on real life observations. Moz (http://moz.com/blog) is one of these rare sites . When you visit them, look right under “Most popular guides” where you’ll see free guides on keyword research and on and off-page optimization. The principles they outline there apply to every website, including your WordPress blog. Learn it and use it. Okay so that’s pretty much all. One more thing…if you’re grateful for this post then please go and implement everything I wrote above. You won’t know the results till you go and implement…and believe me, you’ll be surprised what happens when you do just that. Author Bio Darko is a person interested in web design & finding web tools for getting everyday tasks done. His blog is at Mix The...
Read MoreThemeGrade.com – One of a kind WordPress Theme Review Site
Today, I would like to announce the launch of a wordpress theme directory site that is so different from other theme directories that you have seen! Here, I proudly present ThemeGrade.com that I have been working on for months! In my journey of designing WordPress themes for more than a year, I have downloaded more than 200 WordPress themes to gain insight of how other designers code the themes in order to improve my own skill. During this period, I have found themes using clean coding standard as well as those which are badly designed. It is quite impossible to tell if a theme has clean coding just by looking at the theme itself. You might get some clues from the source code but few people understand the meaning behind the coding. This is when I think, hey, why don’t I create a system to review the WordPress themes? My next task was to find the WordPress theme directories in the industry and see what others do. Not to my surprise, I have found tons of the theme directories from the Google search. Of all the sites, 95% are listing free WordPress themes while the rest are listing premium WordPress themes or the combination of the two. I visited the sites and most of them are quite disappointing. It seems that the site owners published free themes that are also available in other directories without putting any effort to review them. There is only one site (ThemesPreview.com) which provides some review for a theme. I have written about this site and it’s scoring method few months ago. I found the tests used by Themespreview useful and have included some of them in the tests on ThemeGrade. However, there is something about Themespreview’s tests that are missing. Nothing has been told about how well a theme was optimized for search engines. It has a test about W3C compliance but there are more things that could be tested in a theme to see if the theme is well-optimized for SEO purpose. I decided to build a site similar to Themespreview with added tests and features. It is easy to understand how ThemeGrade.com works. Let me explain the layout a bit and some of the key features below: Layout Explained 1. Top Slider This is the section listing the premium WordPress themes from top designers. If you like the theme, you can click on the shopping cart icon to purchase them. 2. Featured WordPress Themes This section features high standard FREE WordPress themes from top designers. 3. WordPress Theme Showcase All the themes, free or premium are listed in the lower part of the site. Features Explained 1. User-friendly Theme Search The themes are grouped into many categories that it would be easy to find the themes of your choice. Are you looking for a 3-column magazine style themes that are free? Simply select “3 columns”, “Magazine Style”, “Free” and click on the search button and the themes will be shown in the result page! 2. Theme General Test Each and every one of the WordPress theme listed on ThemeGrade has undergone comprehensive tests. The general tests of a theme give you an idea of how well the designer coded the theme. When pass, the score will be added to the General test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the general test score of the theme. 3. Theme SEO Test The SEO tests of a theme give you an idea of how well a theme had been optimized for search engines. When pass,...
Read MorePremium WordPress Themes from Top Designers
This post will be constantly edited to show the latest update. #1 WpRemixVisit WpRemix Single License: $75 Multiple Use: $275 Main Features WYSIWYG Page editor, smart drop menu, dynamic code, flexibility, add-on module, support forum, color scheme, grid-based layouts, theme admin options List of a few sites built using the WPRemix theme # of themes: 50+ PSD files not included WP Remix a WordPress powered master theme, is completely customizable, quality coded & comes bundled with many layout options that helps everyone create custom websites in minutes. #2 WooThemesVisit WooThemes Single theme: from $70 All themes: from $150 Main Features Detail theme documentation, WooNinja support forum, grid-based layouts. # of themes: 40+ PSD files included the Developer package Woothemes are all built on a solid code framework which we have fine tuned over time. With a new backend to let you easily control the theme options and multiple theme styles to every theme, it won’t take you long to get up and running. #3 StudiopressVisit StudioPress Single theme: $59.95 All themes: $199.95 Main Features Theme admin options, search engine optimized, auto-sized thumbnail management, developed for localization, # of themes: 10+ PSD files included StudioPress is a place to get professionally designed themes for your business website. If you are a small business or an individual looking to establish your online presence, you are definitely in the right place. ...
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