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Archive for category: WordPress

Build A Loyal Readership To Ensure Your Blog’s Success

June 5, 2014/in WordPress /by admingeorge

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.

On Page SEO tips and WordPress Plugins

August 27, 2013/in SEO, WordPress /by admingeorge

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

August 15, 2013/in WordPress /by admingeorge

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

August 15, 2013/3,211 Comments/in WordPress /by admingeorge

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.

Hello world!

August 1, 2013/in E-Commerce, SEO, Uncategorized, WordPress /by admingeorge

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

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