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How to Update Your Website During the 2014 Google Updates

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As Google makes the rules more complex, website owners, marketers, and SEO professionals need get to work cleaning up their tactics. Everything we have seen in the 2011, 2012, and especially the 2013 updates is still relevant in the Google 2014 Updates. Google is further refining their algorithm in an effort to remove useless results and spammy content from searches. As we see the updated versions of Hummingbird, Panda, Payday, Penguin, and Spam carried out we can expect further micro-adjustments that target both content and link quality.

Google 2014 Updates:

Lets look at how the Google 2014 Updates affect content marketing, content type and length, Google business tools, guest blogging, and social media marketing.

 

Content Marketing

Google is in the business of supplying searchers with relevant information. People who supply Google with high-quality knowledgeable information will stay ahead of this marketing game. Regular unique content provides Google with:

  • A Targeted Audience.
  • Shareable, readable, relevant online engagement.
  • Regularly updated information.
  • Authority of subject matter.

Online professionals who take their content seriously avoid factory farm or spun content with keyword counts. Online articles with an encyclopedia-like level of knowledge will be at an advantage with Google. Current acceptable content types include Google News, Website content, and Guest articles. However, press releases, article farms, and article databases are taking a major hit. All farmed and spun content should be eliminated from all marketing strategies and the internet. The 2014 updates are further refined to cut out keyword idolizers. Additionally, Google will be seeing those with mobile apps for their content as committed to supporting Google’s efforts in relevant and knowledgeable content.

 

Content Type and Length

Content length, and its likeability by Google’s search engines, depends greatly on what it is about, how it is being shared, and who is reading it. Length is wholly dependent on the breadth of the context of that content, what its purposes are for, and the patience of its readership. Website owners and content marketers need to strike a firm balance between expertise, value, conciseness, and uniqueness. As with the 2013 updates, content is valued by Google ONLY IF it provides value and service to Google’s readership.

Content is still regarded as desirable when word counts range from 500 to 1,000 words and content is still marketable up to 2,000 words. Though mobile searchers are likely to shy away from moderately engaging content of those lengths. Therefore, concise, in-depth, and highly engaging content is still king. For now, the differences between mobile searches and computer searches is still evolving and future updates may account for differences in mobile search availability.

 

Google Business Tools

Tying your website in with Google+ and Google Analytics gives you authorship with Google and helps the search algorithms tie all of your content together. Giving and receiving relevant and authentic +1’s on content and posts is a major factor in your websites accountability with Google.

Pay Per Click, and other forms of advertising, have vastly shifted roles among Google’s services. While AdSense is still in service, keyword data for advertisers is restricted and only available for people using Google’s advertising platforms. As Google shifts away from keyword relevancy in searches, so too does access to that data and its viability.

 

Guest Blogging is Effective

Thankfully, guest blogging remains one of the most effective marketing tools for online professionals. However, it is critical that those who do choose to utilize guest blogging do so with strict standards. Applying the same standards of ethics to guest blogging as your own website content is the only way to avoid any future penalization in search results. It is critical to create high-quality content and place it on websites with high-content standards and strict adherence to Google’s guidelines.

 

Social Media Marketing

Although Google+ was mentioned before, it is crucial that it remains a strategic part of the social marketing process. Social marketing is the new viral marketing as long as it adheres to Google’s guidelines. There are a minimum of seven main social markets for all online professionals to remain active in, these include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, Google+, and LinkedIn. However, there is a plethora of also highly relevant visual content networks which marketers would be wise to keep active in. Keep active in networks which are relevant to your chosen niche and then keep a personal active presence, not auto-posting and ignoring it.

Setting your company up for serious social media engagement includes setting up strong profiles, posting and sharing good content, engaging in reciprocity, and personally engaging your readership. Making our content shareable, likeable, engaging, and active enables growth within social networks. Keeping active daily in social networks that matter to our target audience, chosen industry, and search engines is what will keep search rank high. Google updates will increasingly rely on social networks for cues to how relevant good content is for search results.

 

Google’s Updates of 2014 and SEO

SEO isn’t dead if it is defined as website Search Engine Optimization instead of manipulating data to unnaturally rank on search engines. The old and painfully wrong definition of SEO is dying as Google’s 2014 Updates further poisoned the algorithm against manipulative black- and gray-hat tactics. Real SEO is better defined as the process of making websites more accessible, understandable, and useful to search engines and web searchers. Real SEO tactics should never be manipulative to search engines, and this is what the core 2014 Google Updates are all about. It is time for online professionals to embrace a cleaner perspective and expert vision of online marketing.

Steps To Protect Against Russian Hacker’s

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If the reports are accurate, a Russian gang may have pulled off the largest known hack of private internet information ever.

Hold Security of Milwaukee claims to have discovered a global compromise of over 1.2 billion usernames and passwords from roughly 420,000 websites, including 500 million email addresses.

The websites range from Fortune 500 companies, to household names and lots of very small sites, so you should assume that your credentials have been sold to other hackers already.

The good news is that with that many accounts being stolen, the chances of your accounts being the first to be exploited are pretty low.  That means you have time to change all your passwords before a criminal attempts to use the stolen credentials.

This, once again, underscores the importance of not using the same password on all your online accounts.  Hackers will automatically try using your username and password on every major website because they know that so many of you still make this huge mistake.

Since at this point, there is no way to know for sure if your credentials have been stolen, you should assume that they have and act accordingly.

In any case, this is a great wake-up call that you should use to strengthen your password protection by doing the following:

1. Change all your passwords and make sure that every online account has its own password – To make this more manageable, consider using a password manager. Here is some advice on easy to use password managers:  http://virtualgeorge.com/easy-use-password-management

2. Longer, easy to remember passwords are more secure than short complicated passwords – aim for at least 15 characters, but make it easy to remember. Example: I Hate Passwords! is much more secure than A8y@q7P1 and much easier to remember.

3. Make sure your e-mail account has a very strong password – your e-mail account is the gateway to all your other accounts.  Remember, that when you forget a password, the reset message gets sent to your e-mail account making it really easy for the bad guys to take over if they get in.

4. Make sure you have a passcode setup on your mobile devices – mobile devices are more easily lost or stolen and if you don’t have a passcode to keep strangers out, they have direct access to your e-mail account.

5. Do a search of all your old e-mails for the word ‘password’ and delete any messages that provide information on what accounts you do have.  If a hacker does gain access to your e-mail account, they will immediately search for clues of the accounts you do have so they can quickly exploit them.

6. Turn on 2-factor or 2-step authentication – virtually every sensitive online account you have has this feature, but you must turn it on (go to Settings).  When activated, your smartphone becomes part of your security fence.  Whenever a site detects that you’re signing in from a new computer or device, it sends a special code via text message to your phone to verify that it’s you.  This way, even if a hacker acquires your username and password, they won’t be able to get in without your phone in their hands.

Passwords are the gateway to your digital life and with every breach they become more vulnerable, so don’t take this lightly.

Design An Awesome And Powerful Business Website

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Do you want to know some best secrets of creating a responsive and effective business website that can instantly attract your visitors?

A good website must be easily accessible and needs to be user-friendly, provide excellent navigation capabilities and most importantly, make it easy for visitors to find the information that they want.

Creating a high quality website requires striking a fine balance between different elements including the visuals, layout, design, SEO with an attractive landing page and great content that provides valuable information.

Let’s look at some of these elements in more detail to see how you can use them effectively to get the best results:

 

# Have a clear and uncluttered layout

If you want to boost the credibility of your website and enhance its value, make sure to have a clean and clutter free design that makes website navigation simple and smooth for your visitors.

The navigation structure must make logical sense and include different products and services that can be grouped based on their categories. If you have similar pages, use drop down menus to make navigation easy for your customers. Remember that every business page must include-About Us page, Services that you offer, location pages, contact page along with a blog page.

 

# Make your website accessible

If potential customers want to get in touch with you, then it’s important to provide them the right map and directions to avoid any confusion. Provide different ways for customers to get in touch with you and let them choose how they would like to contact you. It’s crucial to include a map, driving directions, phone number, fax, email and links to any of your social media profiles through the contact page.

 

#Include calls to action statement

It’s important to have a clear call to action on your website so that your visitors know what you want them to do once they reach your website. You may include options for booking an appointment, download voucher, menu, sign up a mailing list or even place a order as call to action statements.

If your business has several locations, then it makes sense to create a custom landing page for each of the options.

 

# Use social sharing opportunities

You can include social sharing functionalities on your website to make it easy to share blog posts or information through social networks. This way you can encourage visitors to share vital piece of news or recent articles among their contacts and boost the visibility of your website. Social sharing and engagement are core to any business and can help in improving your contacts by providing huge networking opportunities.

 

#Mobile friendly and responsive website design

It’s very common for people nowadays to access information using mobile and ipad devices for browsing any website. Make sure your website can automatically resize based on the technology that your customers are using. At the same time, it’s important to ensure fast loading times for your website to ensure that your visitors don’t get distracted easily and leave your website.

A responsive design approach is the best way to encourage more number of visitors to your website so they can easily find your website using their mobile or tablet devices.

Build A Loyal Readership To Ensure Your Blog’s Success

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Do you want to know how to build a steady readership for your blog and ensure high amounts of traffic to your website?

Perhaps, it’s time to pick up some useful tips that can get you started on attracting more number of quality visitors by engaging them through your valuable content. Remember, no matter how excellent your blog content maybe, it’s of no use until you are able to get readers coming back to your site for more information.

You may be able to boost your publicity efforts and improve the SEO of your website but having a loyal base of regular readers is a huge challenge, which requires sustained and conscious effort from your side.

 

Let’s look at some interesting ways that you can use to boost your blog readership:

–Learn more about your target audience

Most of the marketers do not have good information about their target audience, their interests, likes, dislikes, preferences etc. Without this, it’s not possible to cater to the specific needs of their target audience and marketing fails miserably. To ensure your blog is able to communicate directly with the audience, focus on specific subjects that may be of interest to your blog followers.

Know what you are trying to achieve and who is your target audience to address issues related to them. This may be also useful for targeting your products and services to your customers based on their interests that can guarantee better sales as well.

 

–Create trust among your customers

Customers are fully aware of marketing companies trying to sell their products to make fast bucks. Hence, don’t simply make selling your main focus and this is unlikely to yield any positive response from your customers. Instead, your main motive must be to educate your readers by sharing valuable and useful information with them.

Allow them to make their own decisions, without influencing them at any cost which is likely to build more trust among them for your products. Provide them with different options, but never try to convince them to purchase your products.

 

–Provide immense value to readers

Always share something valuable with your readers that can provide them with some new insight on a particular issue or topic of their interest. Offer them with useful tips, ideas and suggestions, how-to guides, tricks that are likely to catch their attention and help them solve their problems.

They are more likely to appreciate that and come back to your blog for more information in the future in this manner. Try to be as specific as possible, while addressing their needs, issues or answering their questions. This can help in boosting the confidence of your customers and even encourage them to buy your products in the future.

 

–Link to high authority and popular websites

On one hand, linking can invite penalties from Google but it’s definitely not detrimental to provide links to high authoritative sites that contain useful information for your readers. Research papers, case studies, posts from experts or other popular bloggers have plenty of valuable and interesting information. This is also one of the best ways of building relationships with your readers and engaging with them.

Easy To Use Password Management

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The ongoing challenge of balancing security with ease of use continues to get more complex with each new online account you sign up for and too many of us gravitate to the ease of use side.

Using the same password for all of your online accounts makes it easy for you but is extremely unsecure because a single breach can expose all your accounts.

Most of us have been trained to create complex passwords using capital letters, special characters and numbers which tend to be secure but really hard to remember.

As a quick primer on the basics of online security, creating long passwords of 15 characters or more for each account and turning on 2-factor authentication when it’s available are essential steps for protecting yourself these days.

The answer to the question “How can I remember all of those complicated passwords” is you can’t unless you have an extraordinary memory.

The best way to have a complex but different password for each online account is use one of the many password management tools on the market so you only need to remember one complex password.

Most of the powerful options are pay services, but one called LastPass offers a pretty comprehensive system for free.

LastPass is a browser-based password management system that‘s both powerful and pretty easy to use and it’s compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

Once you install the primary program and created an account with LastPass, an add-on is installed in all of your browsers so it’s easy to use the system.

As you log into your various accounts, LastPass will ask you if you want to save it to your vault for future use.

Once it’s been saved in your secured vault, you can simply click the link to open a browser window that will take you to your desired site and login for you from any computer or device that has Internet access.

This means a slight adjustment to your online behavior as the vault essentially becomes your starting point for all your online accounts (setting the LastPass sign in screen as your start page helps).

To be clear, LastPass is an encrypted cloud-based service, which means that all your passwords are stored on their servers and they did have a data breach back in 2011.

The breach was limited and the small amount of data that was stolen was fully encrypted, meaning that whoever ended up with the information would have had to spend an enormous amount of time to actually make use of it.

As a result of the breach, LastPass incorporated many new layers of security that I’m personally comfortable with enough to trust them with my passwords, but you have to make that decision for yourself.

One downside to LastPass: if you want to use it on an iPhone or Android smartphone, you’ll have to pay $12 per year as the browser on the phones won’t work (iPad and Microsoft Surface RT apps are free).

There are a number of additional features such as password generators, form fillers, a virtual on-screen keyboard to thwart hidden ‘key loggers’ and support for installing it on a USB drive if you use a lot of public computers that are untrustworthy.

If LastPass doesn’t fit your needs, some alternatives include Google Chrome’s password manager, the open source KeePass and RoboForm.

Create A Dynamic Social Media Marketing Strategy For Your Business

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Do you want to know how to build a solid social media strategy that can represent your brand effectively in the market?

Every business needs to have maximum exposure to promote their products and services to their target customers. In the absence of a well-planned social media strategy, it may be a bit challenging to get the best results in the long term.

 

Here we discuss a few core social media strategies that can help you get started with this essential task:

–Set realistic goals and objectives

It’s important to carefully assess your company’s overall needs and find out how to use social media channels effectively to reach your goals. There may be plenty of personalized goals that you would have in your mind for your business. However, the most important ones much include improving brand awareness, retaining your customers and reducing your overall promotional costs.

Remember, having too many goals can prove to be distraction so it’s good to have 2-3 primary and secondary goals. At the same time, you need to have well-defined objectives with clear parameters for every specific goal in mind to be attained within a certain time-frame. Make sure your goals are SMART Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time bound.

 

–Identify your customer profile

It helps to have buyer personas that can define and target specific audience at the right place, right time and using the right messages. Most businesses lack awareness of their ideal customer profiles, which often results in low social engagement levels. Learn about your target customer’s age, income, occupation, interests, likes, dislikes and habits to reach across to them more easily across social media.

The more you know about them, the better it is to target them for promoting your business and boosting your conversion rates.

 

–Keep a close watch on your competitors

It’s definitely helpful to monitor and keep track of the social media activities of your key competitors so that you can integrate some of them successfully into your overall social media marketing strategy. Pay attention to the types of network they are using, kind of content they share and how they respond to their followers.

The most essential thing is to check their engagement levels to get a general idea about the number of likes, dislikes, shares that their posts are getting to judge the popularity and ranking. This is just effective in providing you with a brief know-how of whose social engagement levels are performing better as compared to the others.

 

–Target the right social networks

It’s common for most companies to create accounts on every other social network, without judging its overall effectiveness in brand promotion. Instead, use information from your buyer personas to know what social platforms can work the best for your business. Learn from your prospects where they spend the maximum time and target those specific social media channels.

Choose the best tactics suitable for each platform based on your goals and objectives that you want to achieve. At the same time, make sure to have a realistic content strategy in place and combine them with your social media marketing efforts to get the best results for your business.

WH Official Blames Republicans for Obamacare Website Problems

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obama_dusting_off_shoulder_APAn unnamed Obama administration official claimed that the White House feared GOP subpoenas would slow their work on the Obamacare website, leading to keeping its design in-house with “trusted campaign tech experts” that seemed to have spectacularly failed at creating a successful commerce website.

In a Politico article lamenting the second week of failed performance of Healthcare.gov, the Obamacare insurance website, the unnamed official attempts to explain why the whole thing has been such a dismal failure: it’s the Republican’s fault.

“Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans,” Politico wrote, “the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.”

This is not a very satisfactory explanation, though. There are many questions regarding the Obamacare website that have yet to be answered.

Firstly, this quote tends to prove that the President wanted to make sure there was no transparency for his healthcare website; this from the President that promised the most open administration in history.

But it also raises another series of questions. Why, for instance, did the administration give this project to their buddies instead of opening it to competitive bidding? Isn’t this the sort of thing Obama and his cohorts always accused George W. Bush and Dick Cheney of with Haliburton contracts?

Secondly, who are these “trusted campaign tech experts”? Is this official talking about Obama’s campaign Internet team? And if so, are these individuals part of Organizing for Action (OFA), which is supposed to be legally separate from the White House?

So, is the White House still working hand-in-hand with OFA?

Finally, it is interesting to note that the Weekly Standard found that Healthcare.gov is violating copyrighted software licensing agreements.

“The latest indication of the haphazard way in which Healthcare.gov was developed is the uncredited use of a copyrighted web script for a data function used by the site, a violation of the licensing agreement for the software,” wrote Jeryl Bier on October 17.

It appears that Democrat Max Baucus didn’t know the half of it when he described Obamacare as a “trainwreck.”

On Page SEO tips and WordPress Plugins

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WordPress is loved by many webmasters and SEO guys around the world for it’s flexibility, usability and awesomeness when it comes to SEO and optimizing your website for the search engines. When launching a new website or starting out with a new client, I spend a lot of time looking at the on-page SEO side of things and website structure as this is the foundation of any good SEO campaign. Below are some of the plugins that I often install as soon as I get under the hood of any WordPress site to enhance the on-page SEO and boost the performance of the website not only for search engines but for the all important visitors as well. Have a read, test some of the plugins for yourself if you haven’t used them already and feel free to give me some extra suggestions in the comments section at the bottom of the post if you feel like I have left your favorites out of the list.

 

WordPress SEO

The be-all and end-all of WordPress SEO plugins. This plugin just about does it all when it comes to creating or editing title tags, meta descriptions, meta robots tags, XML sitemaps and also allows you to analyze the on-page factors of each of your websites pages. For me, this is one plugin you CANNOT do without and it I were a WordPress bigwig, I would have it installed by default on every WordPress blog or website instead of the Hello Dolly and Askimet plugins.

Plugin Description & Download

SEO Extended

SEO Extended is essentially a drop-in plugin for WordPress SEO and allows you to bulk edit your post and page titles, descriptions and more. Whilst there is not too much more than the ability to edit meta-data, this plugin has personally saved me oodles of time on going into each individual page and editing titles and descriptions for websites that I have worked on.

Plugin Description & Download

WP Nav Menu Breadcrumbs / Breadcrumb NavXT

Google has recently introduced rich snippets for breadcrumbs and started showing them in this structured data within their search results. Both of these cool plugins create locational breadcrumbs and trails to help website visitors and search engines to better read, navigate and also to get a better understanding the structure of your web pages or website in general.

WP Nav Menu Breadcrumbs Page
Breadcrumb NavXT Page

W3 Total Cache

Do you want your website to load like Speedy Gonzales? I HIGHLY recommend that you install the W3 Total Cache plugin on your site. I run most of my sites on my own personal dedicated server so they run quite quick normally but with this little bad boy, your sites will load like lightning and Google will love you because your site is easy to load and accessible.

Plugin Description & Download

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

Stops your website from sending out excessive pings after updates on your WordPress blog or website and allows your blog or posts within your blog to get indexed much faster, which is always a good thing if you’re impatient like me. I believe this plugin has been banned or removed from the WP Plugin repository for processing updates via its own methods and for making it mandatory for people to signup to it’s newsletter upon install but heck, you can unsubscribe at anytime and it is still a very useful tool.

Plugin Description & Download

Simple Sitemap

I always like to have a text-link within my footer to both my XML Sitemap and my HTML Sitemap, don’t know why, I just like to. One works well for search engines and the other is useful for users and visitors to your website. The easier spiders and humanoids can browse your website, the better!

Plugin Description & Download

Display Widgets

Many people may not consider this plugin to have any SEO value but having the ability to change the content in the sidebar of pages can make a massive difference and allow you to place more relevant sidebars on specific pages. Display Widgets is much like Widget Login but gives you a little more flexibility and doesn’t require you to do any coding or remember page IDs.

Plugin Description & Download

New Google Plus Badge Widget

Not a massive one but this plugin is something that I stumbled across whilst searching the new WordPress plugins on WordPress.org. It is a sidebar widget plugin that allows you to place a stylish Google Plus profile widget in the sidebar of your WordPress blog or website. It got one in the sidebar of my website and blog pages, do you?

Plugin Description & Download

Ultimate Nofollow

The Ultimate Nofollow plugin allows you to nofollow links, obviously. Rather than creating a hyperlink using the standard procedure via the text editor in WordPress and then having to go back into your code, the Ultimate Nofollow plugin inserts a checkbox that you can check to nofollow a particular link. Simple idea but definitely a good one.

Plugin Description & Download

This is all I can think of off the top of my head for now but feel free to go ahead and leave a comment below with your favorite WordPress plugin if I haven’t listed it above. If you have any questions about on-page SEO or WordPress or anything else web development or SEO related, you can leave a response or contact me via my contact page at anytime.

Why WordPress is Such an Important Small Business Marketing Tool

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If your business website or blog is using WordPress as its content management system (CMS), you’re in good company. The majority of  the top 100 blogs are using WordPress, says a new study from Pingdom.

Understanding that a website essentially acts as a virtual storefront, the majority of small to medium sized businesses in the U.S. have created some type of website in an effort to reach more customers. Unfortunately, due to the time and expense that it takes to create and manage a website, some small business owners have decided not to spend their resources in this area at all, therefore missing out on a huge opportunity.

For those budget minded business owners, WordPress is the ideal small business marketing tool that can be used to create a professional looking website and business blog. WordPress is a free content management system that is extremely user friendly and allows you to edit and manage your site without having to know the HTML or coding. This means that you can still have a great website for your business without spending the money on an expensive web developer to create and maintain your site.

We use WordPress for not only our blog, but all of our clients’ blogs that we host and manage!   Outlined below is a brief overview of the features that WordPress offers users:

  • Themes: You can select from a wide variety of free themes to give your website a distinctive look. In the event that you wanted to custom design something, you can refer to the massive WordPress development and designer community for assistance.
  • Plugins: Plugins add functionality to your website, such as creating a forum for discussions or a customer only area. Basically, if you can think it up, there is probably already a plugin that is available to meet your needs.
  • Blog: We hear so much these days that content is king, and an easy way to produce more content to boost SEO is to create a business blog. With WordPress, you can easily create a blog to help drive more traffic to your website.

While many people often think of WordPress as a blogging platform, it really is a much more powerful small business marketing tool that can also be used to create and maintain a website. WordPress is also extremely SEO friendly and makes it easy to share your content through your various social media channels as well, making it a valuable social media marketing tool as well.

Fifty-two percent of the top 100 blogs are currently using WordPress, either hosted or self-hosted, according to an annual study conducted by Pingdom.com. Pingdom gets the top 100 list of blogs from Technorati.

The study notes that the Web and blogging sites, specifically, have changed considerably in the last few years. Pingdom says:

“For many of us, what we used to blog about we now publish to social networks. But there’s also no denying that blogging is not gone. It has, however, changed as has the tools used to publish blogs with. Some, like WordPress, started out as blogging platforms and has taken on more general content management functionality. Others have developed in the opposite direction.”

The 2013 study from Pingdom shows that 4 more of the top 100 are now using WordPress compared with last year. No other single CMS provider even comes close to matching WordPress’ dominance among the top Technorati blogs.

Interestingly, 12 of the top 100 have custom systems created specifically for them. Drupal is the second-most popular blog platform, with 7 of the 100 using it.

But some of the old stalwarts are no longer as popular as in years past, specifically Movable Type, Typepad and Blogger.

Two of the top five blog sites, including the most popular (The Huffington Post), are using Movable Type for their CMS system.

And while TypePad added two spots in the top 100 and and Google’s Blogger added one, they are still mere shadows of their former place in the lives of bloggers.

Not only is WordPress popular for blogs, but as the report points out, WordPress has taken on a much larger role as a general CMS system. It’s become very popular with small businesses that use WordPress to build their entire websites, not just their blogs. WordPress keeps a running counter of the number of WordPress sites, and reports the total is over 65 million worldwide.

5 Tips for using WordPress

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WordPress is a highly popular platform that many businesses are using to quickly and easily design their websites. The platform allows you to easily organize and add your content, get more return users and offers a number of other benefits. Regardless of how you implement your design, here are a few tips that will help you to make the most of WordPress.

Consider Your Layout Carefully

It is important that you think like a user when designing your layout. Don’t think like a website owner, think like a visitor to your site. You want your design to be user friendly.

Ask yourself who will be using your site and what they would like to see when they get there. Your site layout is how your WordPress site will be organized. You should determine how many side bars you will have and whether you will have vertical or horizontal site navigation.

If you are going to place advertising on the site, determine where it will go before you begin designing the theme.

Choose Your Color Scheme

There are a number of things to think about when designing a website and your color scheme is an important one. Consider what your site is about.

For instance, if your website is about baby clothing then you probably do not want your main colors to be black and red. Once you have decided on the mood for your site you will need to ensure that the colors you choose will work well together.

Consider Post Layout

You will likely have layout posts unless of course your site is 100% CMS without a blog. You need to ensure that your index, single and archive pages all lay posts out similarly.

Meta information about a post is important but never let your meta information take precedence over content. The title should be larger and a bit different from other posts and offer a clear division between posts so that your visitors will know when they begin reading about a new subject.

Think About Sidebar Design

Your sidebar should be designed carefully to ensure that your visitors are not overwhelmed when they see it. You do not have to use all of the widget ready sidebars on your site. In fact, less really is more.

Before adding any widgets to your site think about how it will add value to the site. If there is not value to you, leave the widget off.

Consider Your Form Layout

Good form will equal better conversion rates. Laying out forms in a simple manner will help you to increase your conversions and will increase the number of visitors who actually interact with your site. It will also help you to see more repeat visitors, which is something that all site owners are looking to accomplish. Think carefully about your form layout and ensure that all of your forms offer user friendly appeal.

WordPress does not have to be difficult to understand. In fact, this is one of the easiest platforms for website design on the market today. You simply have to take your time when designing your site to ensure that you are giving your visitors the best possible experience.