Tips For Designing Amazing WordPress Themes

Have you ever created a website on WordPress? If yes, Here are some great Tips For Designing Amazing WordPress Themes. I bet you know the order of actions: first, you choose a domain name and set up WordPress hosting, and after that choose a visual design. The installation of WP template takes no longer than a minute while the choice of appropriate options may last for days and require a lot of work since you have to pick the best one out of thousands of themes, each of which with its unique features.

Tips For Designing Amazing WordPress Themes-1
Tips For Designing Amazing WordPress Themes

Properly selected high-quality theme improves the appearance of a website, makes it unique and helps to create the required functionality. Standard templates included in the installation WP package are good enough for a small blog or website, but what if you need a large, complete, and versatile business?

Tips For Designing Amazing WordPress Themes

For the time I’ve been working at DesignContest, I selected and installed WP themes a lot of time. In the paper, I’m going to share the essential advice on this matter. So, let’s start!

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#1 Choose Between Free and Premium Themes

Free

You can find over 2000 free templates for WordPress, but all of them have some drawbacks. The main inconvenience is that the majority of the free themes just stop being updated at some point. The reason for this is quite simple: since the producer earns nothing, he’s not interested in maintaining and adapting them up to advanced technologies.

If the theme ceases to be updated, you will likely have problems with the functionality of the website: for example, the pattern may begin falter after WordPress update, which may cause incorrect display of website pages.

If you take a free topic, please choose from the most popular ones on the WordPress website. At least, they are often updated and supported, which guarantees you the safe operation of the website for a long time. However, this approach has a significant disadvantage: about million of websites are already used these themes. Free-to-use templates are never unique.

Premium

Premium themes have many benefits, including regular updates, unique design, reliable support service, and more. As a rule, the price for a premium template is less than $ 60 – that’s a relatively small investment for a project with serious ambitions.

Tips For Designing Amazing WordPress Themes-3

#2 Make Sure the Topic of the Theme Comply with Your Business

Be sure to choose a template that is suitable for a category of the website. For example, business themes perfectly fit entrepreneurs’ websites while themes for kids are suitable for children’s stores. By the way, if you’re going to open an online store, make sure that the chosen template supports the use of plug-ins for eCommerce. Note that platforms for selecting and buying WP templates have an internal search on the subject: for example, by the “eCommerce” request you’ll get more than 200 ready-made templates for eCommerce. For more advanced search, you can use keywords like “business”, “music”, “kids” and so on.

#3 Check whether the Chosen Template is Compatible with Browsers and Mobile Devices

Since users come to the website from different browsers, the chosen theme should support at least the most popular ones: Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, and Safari. Read the template description to find out whether it supports the browsers mentioned above, or check it by yourself.

The more browsers are supported, the wider the audience of your website. Give priority to the themes which support old versions of Internet Explorer. The prices for WordPress templates are almost equal, so there’s no reason to buy less functional at the same price and lose potential customers.

Of course, the template must be displayed correctly on all possible devices – from PCs to mobile phones. The share of mobile traffic is constantly growing and will grow even faster in the foreseeable future, so before buying the template, make sure it’s scalable, that is, automatically resized to full-screen mode when opened on a smartphone/PC/tablet.

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#4 Choose the Theme that is Easy to Customize

The more features the theme contains, the better. Ideally, it should contain enough features to ensure any color, font, and other changes you may desire.

If the topic does not include the necessary functionality, then you’ll have to install additional plug-ins, edit it manually, or ask for the help of a programmer.

#5 Check the Frequency of Updates and the Availability of Technical Support

I’ve already said about it above, but I want to emphasize one more time: if the topic is constantly updated, it means that the developers track the latest design/market changes and respond to them adequately. The regularity of updates, as well as the availability of free technical support, indicate the seriousness of the approach to the theme. Almost all premium WP themes are regularly updated and have free technical support.

List of SEO Plugins Alternative to Yoast

WP SEO plugins are most important these days. In this article, We collected List of SEO Plugins Alternative to Yoast. “Good SEO work only gets better over time. It is only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change” –Jill Whalen

Without a doubt, search engine optimization (SEO for brevity) remains to be one of the digital marketer’s ingenious techniques in getting a page seen, making a particular content relevant and having people discover that particular content. As SEO remains to be a vast field, the logistics regarding it are not as forthcoming and more often than not, would require years of continuous and consistent practice in order to master it.

list-of-seo-plugins-alternative-to-yoast
list-of-seo-plugins-alternative-to-yoast

This would require a deep commitment from SEO specialists to know more about the field. However, if you are committed to developing your content and are serious about your blogging, business or portfolio then it is highly imperative that you would enhance your authorship and brand presence. One of these ways is through SEO which would enable you to drive more organic traffic, customers and leads towards your website.

Apart from this, you need to have a deep understanding of the optimization of your website and have the essential tools and accessories necessary for it. As it is, most of you have probably chosen WordPress as your blog’s platform and you may have noticed Yoast as an effective tool assisting you in SEO on all essentials aspects. As a bonus, it would help you write better and riveting content as well. That is as far as it goes superficially, however in a technical sense, the Yoast plugin would compel you to choose a sole focus keyword when you are writing your articles and use that same focus keyword everywhere. However, Yoast is only one plugin and if you truly are committed to your craft, you know you would not want to put all of your eggs in one basket. Of course, you would want to diversify and seek other platforms alternative to Yoast as well and luckily for you, we have noted some of the best down below. They are all functional and have various options which you would soon find out as you read on below.

List of SEO plugins

1. Smart WordPress SEO

Boost your wordpress SEO: Full SEO features Meta Tags, webmaster tools settings, Social AuthorShip for Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and XML sitemap
You do not need to do anything extra anything for wordpress SEO. Just setup properly smart wordpress SEO. This plugin will take care of all SEO properties.Super Fast
This plugin is really fast. Do not use any other SEO plugin with this because it will give all type of SEO.

You can enter your meta keywords and description for your homepage and each post and pages.

This plugin will add different Meta description for each individual post as your excerpt of your post.

This will help your blog to rank better in google. You can easily increase your blog traffic using this plugin.

2.) RANK REVEAL

Rank Reveal is an SEO tool with a premium service. It has a special feature which would allow you to discover the keywords for which you are currently ranking, which you could possibly rank higher in the future and the ones which were virtually nonexistent to you. Additionally, Rank Reveal would assist you in finding long tail keywords with high conversion minus the competition. Rank Reveal is one of the SEO plugins with the largest collection of ranking data which routinely oversees search engines for their website rankings and it also uses proprietary graph data.

This is a service which allows you to not only know regarding all the keywords for which you are ranking for on SERP but would also allow you to keep track on your competitor’s choice of keywords and their rankings.

3.) All in ONE SEO Pack

This is probably that one SEO plugin that is easily recognizable as it is famous worldwide and is predominantly one of the world’s most advanced SEO plugin that would encompass features built for bloggers, online business, magazines, and ecommerce. This SEO plugin comes in two versions: Free and a pro. The pro version would naturally offer you a multitude of other advanced features that are otherwise unavailable in its free counterpart. This includes premium support and installation.

All in ONE SEO Pack is perfect among bloggers who have little to no idea about SEO and who could not be bothered to perform any on page optimization. This plugin will automatically do it for you such as generating meta descriptions and meta keywords for your blog posts. Apart from that, it can even add alternate tags to all your images found within any of your posts. Lastly, this is the only SEO plugin which offers support for ecommerce websites making this that one catchall plugin ideal for advanced users and novices.

4.) SEOPressor

Another powerful WordPress-built SEO plugin that has the all-encompassing ability to manage all your posts, pages, custom post formats. Simply put, SEOPressor is a powerful plugin that would manage your complete website. Some of its features would include an inbuilt keyword research tool that would allow you to find long tail keywords and it allows you to use the drag and drop functionality which would insert the keyword into your content in just a click saving you fifteen to twenty minutes per post basis. Additionally, SEOPressor utilizes a powerful page and post analysis algorithm which would calculate the SEO stats of your content and would then give you a rating.

SEOPressor is also advantageous to bloggers trying to make their websites more social friendly as it adds a Facebook open graph and Twitter mediadata tags. Overall, SEOPressor is a powerful as well as a versatile alternative to the Yoast plugin.

5.) Google Sitemap

Another alternative SEO plugin that is easy to use but incredibly powerful is Google Sitemap which is developed by bestwebsoft. This plugin’s features would allow you to quickly create and submit your sitemaps to the Bing Webmaster or Google Webmaster tool and would generate the .gzip file which Google usually uses and considers. This SEO plugin is perfect for those who value simplicity yet maximum functionality as well as its support for many post formats.

6.) SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images is a plugin that allows you to rapidly increase your website visitors as you can divert traffic to your website from Google Image search. Statistics has shown that almost ten to fifteen percent of searches made on Google have something to do with pictures and graphics. Consider that even for only keywords such as SEO and blogging, even if your ranking is positioned in the third or fourth position in the image search, you are still able to drive hundreds of extra visitors to your website depending of course as to how attractive your particular photo or snapshot is.

This plugin would allow you to automatically add the alternate and title tags for every image on your individual posts.

Considering there is an abundance of diverse plugins available online, choosing one can be a bit overwhelming—especially for those of you who are still newbies to WordPress. However, this article has considerably narrowed your search by providing you five of the best alternatives to Yoast, but do consider that for every blogger and SEO specialist enthusiast out there, a certain alternative plugin would appeal to them. The same would apply to you whether your choice largely depends on which ones would align most to the needs of your website or which ones are easiest and most straightforward to use, just be sure you are well comfortable with the features and it would guarantee you maximum and optimal results.

When you have chosen one, do not just stop there, take a moment to get the general feel of the plugin and of course, do not be afraid to try some new others too. Remember, as the world of SEO is evolving so will the needs of your website and if you would want to keep up, you would have to be flexible and adaptable to these.

Optimize Your WordPress Blog for Speed and Performance

Out of all the websites in the world, only 39.8% websites use a Content Management System (CMS), although this percentage is constantly improving, but out of those 39.8% websites which use CMS, WordPress (WP) constitutes of 60.3% market. In short, WP dominates the CMS world. Since its inception in the year 2003, WordPress has come a long way. And companies providing CMS web development services understand the powerful capabilities of the WordPress. It started just as a blogging platform which is unarguably the biggest CMS platform today and has been the most popular CMS platform from past 5 years.

More than 60 million websites are powered by WP today, but not all perform equally, and in today’s fast paced world where every second counts, your blog must be optimized for speed and performance, and here’s why:

  • The longer it takes for your website to load, it’s more likely that the visitor will leave.
  • The percentage of page abandonment increases with every second it takes more to load the page.

change-in-response-time

  • Conversions are reduced by 7% rate by every 1 second it takes to load the page.
  • 47% users expect the page to load within 2 seconds.
  • If an e-commerce site is making $400,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $10 million in lost sales every year.

 

How to check the Page speed

Before rectifying the problem, you must know the problem, and you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to check that. There are many websites on which you can check the performance of your website:

pingdom

 

As you can see, the test result from Pingdom of blog from Xicom Technologies.

 

Page Load Time

Page load time should should be minimum as possible. So, try to aim for less than 2 seconds. I know it’s a tough task to optimize a blog, optimizing images, minimizing CSS, HTML, and Java coding, etc., but it’s possible.

 

How to Boost the speed and performance

80% speed of the blog depends upon:

  • Size of the Image
  • Hosting
  • Plugins
  • Caching
  • Embeds

So optimizing these above factors means, optimizing your blog for faster and better performance.

 

Optimizing Images

I won’t recommend removing images because they give a website an attractive look, but the size of the images needs to be optimized for best performance and you can do that by :

  • Install the WP smushit plugin; this plugin compresses all the images without any considerable loss in quality. It’s called smush it because it smushes all the data from the images like camera used, date, location, etc.
  • Upload images of smaller size in the first place itself.
  • Image Spirite: This is a technique used to combine all images into one. A web page with multiple images generates server request every time to load an image and that add additional time. Using this technique will reduce the server requests and save bandwidth.

 

Enable Dynamic Caching

Configure a good caching plugin into the WP, as caching will deliver static HTML files instead to make your pages load faster. You can use services like APC, Varnish, or Supercacher as well as install WP plugins like W3 Total Cache.

wp-cachce

Browser Caching

Leveraging the browser cache means how long the user’s browser will cache your images, JS, and CSS files. It’s really effective when a user visits your site again. To enable browser caching you have to edit your HTTP headers to set expiry dates on certain files. For more on leveraging browser cache, click here.

apache-cache-setting

Minify your CSS and JavaScript files

It means removing all the unnecessary data like from them like empty new lines, double spaces, comments, etc. If you use W3 Total cache plugin, it has an option to automatically minimizing the JavaScript and CSS files.

Enable gZIP Compression

gZIP reduces the size of the files transferred between the server and the visitor, and as a result reduces the size of the page upto 70%.

Hosting

Often it is the most overlooked component of a successful website, most of the focus goes into the design, the layout, the coding, that web hosting is often overlooked and the owner goes for the cheap hosting plan which affect the ranking of the website on search engine to its load-time, increase bounce-rate of the website as result. On the contrary a good hosting plan can help boost the search engine ranking and increase sales.

 

Other Performance Improvements

Remove query strings from static resources.

Add this code to your theme’s functions.php:

function ewp_remove_script_version( $src ){

if ( stripos( $src, ‘?ver=’ ) ) {

$parts = explode( ‘?’, $src );

return $parts[0];

}

elseif ( stripos( $src, ‘ver=’ ) ) {

$position = strripos( $src, ‘&’ );

return substr( $src, 0, $position );

}

else {

return $src;

}

}

add_flter( ‘script_loader_src’, ‘ewp_remove_script_version’, 15

 

Conclusion:

Optimizing your blog will not only lead to a faster blog but eventually lead to more business conversions.

Tips about marketing through wordpress you should know

WordPress is a synonymous tool for the avid bloggers. Whether you are a newbie or a seasoned blogger acquaint with the nitty gritties of blogging, this is one platform which is most preferred. Armed with some of the major high-utility plug-ins and user friendly interface make it any search engines’ pet. And as a blogger, there’s nothing better sounding than having complete control over your blog and exercising its functionality to the optimum level and customizing it according to your whims and needs.

tips about marketing through wordpress

TIPS ABOUT MARKETING THROUGH WORDPRESS YOU SHOULD KNOW
TIPS ABOUT MARKETING THROUGH WORDPRESS YOU SHOULD KNOW

All in all, WordPress needs no introduction in order to win hearts. But one trend which is seemingly catching up is the use of this platform as a marketing tool. Surprised? Today, the consumer market is more updated than you estimate. They browse, thoroughly research, enquire and whatnot before finally coming down to a concrete decision. Here’s where your WordPress website comes in the picture. With proper optimization and use of value adding plug-ins, you can give your business the necessary push.

What honey is to a bee, attractive web-page is to the web traffic. For example, in order to make the people more aware of the various services they can avail, promoting it on social networking sites is a definite winner. What’s the point of harboring an idea when you can’t share it and make use of it for the greater good? Using plug-ins as the bridge between the highly popular social media and WordPress, one can spread the word at lightning speed.

TIPS ABOUT MARKETING THROUGH WORDPRESS YOU SHOULD KNOW-1

Some of the highly recommendable plug-ins for content marketing include:

  1. Edit flow for better work fluidity
  2. Better Click to Tweet because let’s face it Twitter marketing is a game changer.
  3. To broaden your approach and reach out to bigger audience, CoSchedule is the answer to your prayers.
  4. Simple Share Buttons enable you to make sharing your content with existing social media platforms a cake walk.

TIPS ABOUT MARKETING THROUGH WORDPRESS YOU SHOULD KNOW-3

Paytm, the shopping website garnering immense popularity due to its extremely helpful services has a plug-in for WordPress. It was never the one to disappoint us with its services, now, was it? You can use Paytm coupons to save several pennies of your own. There are coupons for health and lifestyle available too such as Healthkart, etc.

So, get started. Use this highly integrated and dynamically simplified blogging platform as your marketing tool. With engaging and attention grabbing content, you can turn the crowd in your favor and watch them get hooked to your page!

Don’t Fall For This Common WordPress Scam

WordPress is extremely popular. It powers over a fifth of the tens of millions of sites on the web. One of the reasons it’s so popular is the ease with which inexperienced people can build a site with WordPress. The ability of WordPress to empower millions by giving them a voice on the web is awe-inspiring. But there are those who would prey on the less-informed and take advantage of their lack of experience.

Don't Fall For This Common WordPress Scam
Don’t Fall For This Common WordPress Scam

WordPress is a modular system: much of its functionality is contained in third-party plugins and themes. For the most part, the plugin and theme ecosystem is at worst benign and at best incredibly useful. Unfortunately, parasitic “hackers” use plugins and themes as a vector for malware.

It usually works something like this. An individual who lacks to the skill to contribute something useful to the world will buy a premium WordPress plugin. The PHP code for plugins is easily modified. The malefactor will change the plugin’s code; they will add malware payloads and code to exploit the vulnerabilities in people’s browsers. The modified plugin will then be sold on a seemingly legitimate marketplace for a fraction of the original cost. To the inexperienced, it just looks like a great bargain.

The WordPress user suckered by the offer will install the plugin on their site, and it will work just as it’s supposed to. From the perspective of the site owner, they got what they needed. But the extra code in the plugin will infect the site’s users with malware, redirect them to dangerous sites, create thousands of additional pages for SEO poisoning, and any number of other unpleasant strategies that benefit the hackers.

The first thing a site owner is likely to know about the problem is when they get an email from Google informing them that their site is infected and has been blocked by browsers and dropped from the search index.

How To Avoid Being The Sucker

The advice here is quite simple. Don’t buy discounted themes and plugins you find on Google. Don’t download premium themes and plugins when they are offered for free. Always make sure that you are downloading from a recognized or reputable repository or developer.

Unless you really know what you are doing, for free themes and plugins stick to WordPress’ official repositories. Almost every free theme and plugin is there, and unless you have the expertise to check the code yourself or trust someone who does, it’s not worth the risk of downloading them elsewhere.

For premium plugins and themes, the situation is a little more complex. They are often sold via the developer’s site and theme marketplaces, and it can be tricky to assess the legitimacy of the source. Use your common sense: if it’s too good an offer to be true, avoid it. Research to find out who the developer of the plugin is, and make sure you are downloading from their site or from a reputable marketplace like ThemeForest.

Blog Optimization Tips Every Blogger Must Know About

WordPress has proven a resourceful tool for bloggers, helping them build blogs that can be easily customized based on their preferences. With WordPress, you can set up your online blog for free. And, the best part is that you don’t even need to spend time in designing the layout for your blogging site or page, as you get access to plenty of pre-built WordPress themes – that enables to build a WordPress blog in no time. In addition, there are several great plugins that helps in adding advanced features to your blog design.

 WordPress Blog Optimization Tips Every Blogger Must Know About

But remember that, no matter how great your blog may look, it will still drive away your visitors if it is slow. In fact, your blog readers won’t take a second and will click the exit button, even if your blog takes 3 seconds to load. Through this post, I will share some easy-to-follow tips on WordPress blog optimization that you must know about.

#Tip 1: Choose a Lightweight Theme

Most of the bloggers, especially the ones tied to a low-development budget generally prefers using a free WordPress theme for their blog design. While this may help you setup a blog in just a matter of a few minutes, but the theme you’ve chosen might slow your blog down. That’s because, free to download themes usually contains unnecessary bloat that causes the blog to load slowly. But, carefully choosing a theme that contains only the essential design elements and components is the way to have a speedy WordPress blog.

#Tip 2: Post Original and Quality Content

Blog Optimization Tips Every Blogger
Blog Optimization Tips Every Blogger

Time and again, Google has introduced updates to prevent use of duplicate content. Also, the search engine giant pays special attention to blog posts featuring quality content. The Google’s Panda update fuelled the need to write “original and high-quality content”. Of course, you wouldn’t have been affected by the Panda effect if you were using meaningful content in your blog. But, many people publishing crappy content onto their blogs and websites were slapped hard. Though, this isn’t something new but newbie bloggers might not be aware of the same. So, make sure to read Google’s guidelines first before writing and publishing your blog content.

#Tip3: Install the W3 Total Cache Plugin Onto Your Blog

Well, there couldn’t be a better way to boost your blog speed, then installing the W3 Total Cache plugin. A caching plugin loads the static HTML files rather than dynamic ones; since this does not require the execution of any PHP or MySQL commands, it reduces the web page’s load time.

W3 Total Cache Plugin
W3 Total Cache Plugin

The W3 Total Cache plugin automatically optimizes the code of your blog, so as to make it load faster. Additionally, the W3 Total Cache helps optimize the server performance, reduces the download times drastically, and also offers integration with content delivery network (CDN). All these factors help in deploying enhanced user experience, which results in high conversion rates.

#Tip4: Create the Right Permalink Structure

Right Permalink Structure
Right Permalink Structure

Your blog’s URL that people enter in their browser to view your blog posts are called as permalinks. In fact, search engines use them for linking to your blog. You can find different variations of permalink structures, however, the most important ones to consider are:

yoursitedomain.com/post-name/

yoursitedomain.com/2015/7/12/post-name/

yoursitedomain.com/post-name/POSTID

From all of the above listed options, many argue that the first one is the best choice because of the following reasons:

  • It lets you make modifications to the “post-name”, in order to add a set of keywords to serve SEO need.
  • Avoiding to write date, helps in presenting the content in a new and relevant manner to the user.
  • It proves an effective way to remember lengthy post titles in the form of shared links.

#Tip5: Optimize The Images Of Your Blog For the Web

Images prove a viable means for increasing the engagement rate of the posts, and also help in getting your posts shared quite frequently across social channels. But, adding images take up plenty of storage space. And so, posts containing images may take more time to load. This is why it becomes important that the images, you’re including in your blog posts are optimized before uploading them to your blog or website.

Optimize The Images Of Your Blog
Optimize The Images Of Your Blog

One best way to optimize images is to make use of the WP Smush.it – that make use of the Smush.it API for optimizing images saved in the JPEG format. Another great solution is to utilize the Lazy Load plugin – that loads the images only when a user clicks on the desired location.

#Tip6: Get Rid of the Unwanted Pingbacks and Trackbacks

WordPress comes loaded with a very useful feature that allows sites to send a notification (or trackback) when they link to any of your posts. But, in case you’re not careful, chances are that spammers may use this feature to gain links from your blog. And, in case you’ve chosen to display “pingbacks” and “trackbacks” in your blog theme, then spam users will continue to send “trackback” or “pingback” links that will get displayed in your theme.

As a result, your blog will have a dozen of unnecessary pingbacks which will increase the size of your database files. And so, it is better to turn off the option that allows to receive notifications from other blogs in the form of trackbacks and pingbacks. To do so, head over to your WordPress admin dashboard screen and move to Settings → Discussion. This will open up the Default Settings dialog box, under which you’ll find the “Default article settings”. Corresponding to this setting, uncheck the option “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” as shown in the image below:

Unwanted Pingbacks and Trackbacks
Unwanted Pingbacks and Trackbacks

And finally, click on the “Save changes” button provided at the bottom of your blog page.

#Tip7: Make Appropriate Use of “Social Media Buttons”

Social media buttons hold a significant value as they allow site visitors to share your content on social media networks. However, these buttons need to make calls to external links, which results in slowing down your website. You can make the blog pages load quickly, by adding social media buttons only for those social networks that is commonly accessed by your audience. For instance, if your users rarely access your LinkedIn account, and instead spend their time on Twitter, then its better to avoid including a LinkedIn button onto your blog pages.

Wrapping Up

Are you unable to drive enormous traffic to your WordPress powered blog? This could be because of the slow loading speed of your blog. But, reading the above mentioned tips will definitely help you find the right solution to tackle such an issue in the most efficient manner possible.

Did You Forget These Things In Your Brand New WordPress Website

Okay, so you’re excited. You’ve just launched your sparkling new WordPress driven website on the Internet. You have spent a great amount of time choosing the prefect, flat, load like lightening theme, added a set of cool and so very useful plugins, and awesome content. Terrific.

Tips for Brand New WordPress Website

wordpress-logo-cristal_thumbnail-300x300
Brand New WordPress Website

But, there is a niggling sense of having forgotten something. In the tearing hurry to get the website ready for prime time there maybe some small but pertinent details you’ve forgotten about.

Here is my brand new WordPress site checklist, of things you absolutely must take care of with a brand new WP website.

Let’s kick off with what must be done in the WordPress Settings Menu.

Setting The Site Title And Site Tagline

Here is how to change your site title in wordpress and. Log in to your WordPress Admin Dashboard as usual, then hover your mouse cursor on the left hand side menu item Settings.

NOTE: To change your site tagline in wordpress please follow the same steps.

Check and ensure that under Settings  General that the Site Title and Tagline fields are filled out with the exact information you want displayed on your WP site as its Site Title and Tagline.

Nothing indicates your WordPress website is built by a novice like seeing the Tagline Just Another WordPress Site appear as the Browser title or worse in search engine result pages.

Setting The Correct Timezone and Date/Time Format

Check that the correct Timezone and Date/Time formats have been set. It’s really sad to notice a beautifully scripted Blog post with a wrong date and time being shown on your WordPress driven website.

Settings Discussion

85% of WordPress driven web sites do not use the WordPress commenting capabilities. Hence make sure that visit the Discussion page check that the settings there reflect exactly what you want for your WordPress driven website.

Settings Permalinks

WordPress creates and uses some pretty strange looking URLs with which it identifies all the Posts and Pages created on the website. These URLs use question marks and numbers and so on and are definitely not human friendly.

The Permalink setting empowers you to use and display human friendly URLs. Truthfully, almost any other setting other than the default setting should do just fine.

Don’t Forget SEO Techniques For WordPress Pages Or Posts

WordPress, like all CMS has a specific weakness when delivering Keywords, Description, and a few other key webpage attribute values that search engines require. This is because CMS use a single template (or a small group of templates) to deliver all pages and posts associated with the website.

Since these attributes are always delivered within the <head></head> section of the template it’s obvious that a unique set of keywords, descriptions (and more) for individual pages or post on the website just cannot be delivered using single template or theme technique of a CMS.

Hence, (just like any other CMS) WordPress encourages the use of seo plugins for wordpress, which ensures that while a single template is used to display page and post content, a unique set of keywords, Descriptions (and more) can be delivered for each web page or post via the plugin.

An SEO plugin used with WordPress exposes the Title, Keywords, Description, Blog post Tags (and more) for each page or post within the WordPress editor itself.

Hence, when the page or post content is stored in the WordPress database, along with its content, a unique Title, set of Keywords, Description, set of Tags and so on are bound to the web page or post and stored in the WordPress database as well.

When the page or post is being displayed in a site visitors Browser, the plugin ensures that the Title, unique set of Keywords, Description, Tags are appropriately, and dynamically, inserted within the <head></head> of the WordPress template.

Additionally, if your site has any particular content that you don’t want indexed, SEO plugins can help with that as well.

Google Analytics and Google Web Master Tools

If you’ve not done so yet, please sign up your website for both Google Analytics and Google Web Master tools. These free to use, tools are essential for learning just how well your website SEO efforts are doing.

Have An Emergency Plan In Place

You could lose your website anytime. Hackers can deface it, the web host can crash for one reason or another corrupting your website files, whatever the reason, you can suddenly find yourself starting all over again without a useable website.

Hence, be proactive. Have a regular backup plan in place. Back up the WordPress website database regularly and completely.

There are a lot of great plugins available some free, (some paid for but modestly priced) that will help you backup your database. Some plugins allow you to schedule backups to a 3rd party cloud service. Just do not rely solely on your web host to take care of this.

Having your own ability to restore your site database in the event of serious crash and burn of your website is absolutely priceless.

Using your cPanel Setup FTP for your WordPress site and at regular intervals do a complete backup of all the WordPress related folders and files. Backing up your /wp-content/ folder is especially important as this folder contains all the assets of your website, such as plugins used, images and/or videos uploaded, the WordPress theme and other crucial website data.

Secure Your Website

While the WordPress core has really pretty much secure, and the WordPress core developers really do a great job of patching security holes as they are identified, all too often it’s the plugins used that make a WordPress driven website vulnerable. Hence, do not ignore WordPress security altogether.

Today there are some awesome WordPress related, security plugins, available for use. The use of these plugin make it harder to hack into and deface (or worse) your website. Look out for plugins that will lock out a user after a number of failed login attempts. This seriously slows down the bots that attempt to brute-force their way into your website Admin section and from there take over your website.

The sad thing is that these attacks will happen. It’s only a matter of time. The good news is that you can help protect your site from them. And, don’t forget, use really complicated Admin passwords, a minimum 12 characters in length with a mix of Upper and Lower case characters, numbers and special symbols. Such passwords make a bot’s life miserable and definitely protect your WordPress driven website.

Use a Child Theme

A child theme normally resides in a separate folder within the /wp-content/themes/ directory. Think of it as a sort-of extension of the parent theme currently active on your website. Child themes are used to customize the look / feel and functionality of a website.

The benefit of having a child theme is that when theme developers release updates (much like plugins are updated), the child theme ensures that you will not lose any customization you made to your active WordPress theme when these updates are made.

Depending upon your technical (coding) capability levels, a child theme can be pretty easy to setup. If you’ve hired a web designer/developer to create your site, then ask them if you should be using one.

In Conclusion

At the time of launching your brand new WordPress driven website if you’ve taken care of all the above (none really are optional) your website will be up and running smoothly and safely for a long time.

If you liked this Blog post, I’d love to read your comments. If you thought that this Blog post was not upto your expectations, I’d love to read your comments.

It’s your comments that help me get better each day. Please pass on your bouquets or brickbats in the comments section right below.

How to configure Smart wordpress SEO plugin

There are many wordpress plugins which provides wordpress SEO. But every body has premium version and in free version they only provide 20% of SEO to your wodpress website out of 100%. We used many wordpress plugins for achieving wordpress seo.

Why created Smart wordpress SEO plugin

For SEO we need to think about Meta tags , XML site-map, Social Authorship, Image SEO and webmaster authorship and many factors. we need to use separate wordpress plugin for each functionality. We tried many SEO plugins but we found many plugins are really making fool. They are not giving 100% SEO from free plugin. So We decided to create Full proof wordpress SEO plugin which will give you all brunch of functionality in one package.

How to install Smart wordpress SEO?

Follow the usual routine;

  1. Open WP admin – Plugins – Add New
  2. Enter “Smart wordpress SEO” under search and hit Enter
  3. Plugin will show up as the first on the list, click “Install Now”

Download Smart wordpress SEO plugin from here

Or if needed, upload manually. Follow the steps below to install the plugin.

  1. Upload the smart-wordpress-seo directory to the /wp-content/plugins/directory
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in wp
  3. Go to “Seo Meta Tags” option to configure the button

What Features has Smart wordpress SEO plugin

smart wordpress seo plugin
smart wordpress seo plugin

This plugin will add different Meta description for each individual post as your excerpt of your post. This will help your blog to rank better in google. You can easily increase your blog traffic using this plugin.

Following are the features:

  1. Preview of Smart wordpress SEO – Home page Keywords and description
  2. WebMaster Tool Verification Setting
  3. Social Authorship for Google, Twitter and Facebook
  4. XML sitemap  with preference with google, yahoo, Ask, Bing, Yandex
  5. Image SEO – Automatically image SEO tags
  6. Eash Post or Page SEO title, Description and Keywords setting

Configure Smart wordpress SEO plugin

After Installation of plugin on right ride you will find “Smart SEO” section. There five more subsection of this plugin. Go to “Smart SEO Dashboard section

smart wordpress seo configure meta tags
smart wordpress seo configure meta tags

In above section you need to add your site meta description and keywords for home page.

Setting for “Web Master Tool“. Using this section you can add Alexa, Bing, Google, Pinterest and yandex verification id for your site. If you do not have verification if yet than you can click on link which we provided in plugin page (web master tool) and get verification id.

smart-wordpress-seo-configure-webmaster-tool

In above social verification ids are very important for SEO. Above verification will be added in your wordpress site through meta tags.

Setting for “Social Info” section, Using following Social Authorship section you can add your Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus page URLs.

smart-wordpress-seo-configure-Social-authorship

Using social Info section, we will add social authorship to your wordpress website. For SEO above setting is important.

Setting for “XML Sitemap“. By default we have best setting for creating xml sitemap. So do not need to worry about following setting.

smart-wordpress-seo-configure-XML-sitemap

Still you want to customize setting as per your need than check all setting and save the setting. After New post or update XML sitemap will be automatically generated. Default sitemap file name will be sitemap.xml. This file-name is known by all search engines by default.

Setting for “SEO Images” section. By default we managed image seo for your wordpress website. If you have old posts than do not worry about image SEO. It is handled by this plugin.

smart-wordpress-seo-configure-image-SEO

Still you want to change Image alt, tittle setting than change as per your site requirement and save it.

Config for “SEO Post SEO setting” section , Eash Post or Page SEO title, Description and Keywords setting

smart-wordpress-seo-configure-Post-page-SEO

In every new Post and page, You will find Smart SEO setting. We recommend to fill above setting for you best SEO. For older post Do not change anything. Through script we already managed to add title, keywords and description.

Download Smart wordpress SEO plugin from here

Coming Soon Features

Automated SEO title

Automated SEO description (which will best suited your post)

wordpress gravatar webmaster tool error fixed

We were testing our website with Structured Data Testing Tool and we got wordpress gravatar webmaster tool error. We found way to fix issue.

We tried to test following page.

https://purabtech.in/how-to-use-smart-posts-widget-wordpress-plugin/

But we got following Error in Extracted structured data section.

Extracted structured data
hcard
photo:
http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/adf2b1e1441486ca8a165815d87c598e?s=50&d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D50&r=G
Error: This information will not appear as a rich snippet in search results, because it seems to describe an organization. Google does not currently display organization information in rich snippets
Error: Missing required field “name (fn)”.

Error will look like as follows:

wordpress gravatar webmaster tool error
wordpress gravatar webmaster tool error

How to fix wordpress gravatar webmaster tool error?

Open comments.php file which you can find in your theme folder. If you are using custom function for comments than check functions.php file. above error coming due to “hcard” tag which will in your comments.php. hcard used in gravatar image tag.

Find following code in your theme files


<div class="comment-author hcard">
<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 50 ); ?>
</div>
<!-- .comment-author -->

Replace with following code.


<div class="comment-author">
<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 50 ); ?>
</div>
<!-- .comment-author -->

As per webmaster tool, we need to use hcard tag for only author. So for commenter remove hcard tag. There are many types of error can triggered on webmaster tool. If you want to solve errors than use seo meta tags wordpress plugin. This plugin will add most useful and seo friendly meta tags to you wordpress site.

In next article we will tell you about more webmaster errors which are as follows:

Error: rel attribute in a non-anchor/non-link tag.
Error: rel missing href attribute.
Error: Missing required field “entry-title”.
Error: Missing required field “updated”.
Error: Missing required hCard “author”.

We solved all above errors. In next article we will give you detailed information about solving above errors.

Google, Bing Verify ownership with wordpress website

Webmaster verification is process which will enables some site management tools by provided by google, Bing and Yandex. Here we given full steps for Google, Bing Verify ownership with wordpress website.

Why website verification is important?

Site Verification will not increase your page rank or search results of your website, It will help you to optimize your website with SEO tools.

Verify your website

If you have custom sitemap XML then you should open webmaster account and tell search engine about your sitemap file. If you have sitemap.xml file in webroot still we recommend to submit your sitemap file to search engine.

Google, Bing Verify ownership with wordpress Website

Manual Process for Verify ownership with wordpress website

Google

  1. Login to your Google Webmaster Account (if your website has Google Analytics, Google Adsense or Google Search, you can use the same Google account). If you don’t have one, you can create one for free on www.google.com/accounts.
  2. On Google Webmaster Tools click ‘Verify this site’.
  3. In the Verification method list, select ‘Meta tag’ and copy the part of the Meta tag code provided by Google that is inside content=”…”.

Google+ (the social network)

  1. Make sure you have a link from your Google+ Page to your website. Easiest place to do this is in the “Recommended Links” section of your Google+ Page’s “About” tab.
  2. Paste your Goggle+ Page ID number, which is part of the URL for your Page. For example, the URL for YWDs’s Page is https://plus.google.com/u/0/purabkharat/posts so our ID number is purabkharat.

Bing

  1. Create a Bing Webmaster Tool account (Windows Live ID required) or login if you already have one.
  2. Add your website
  3. In ‘Option 2 (Meta Tag Authentication)’ select copy the part of the Meta tag code provided by Bing that is inside content=”…”.

Pinterest

  1. Go to your Pinterest page select “Settings”.
  2. Scroll down to “Website”. Enter your website URL iinto the filed. Click the “Verify Website” button.
  3. Click the link “Verify with a meta tag”. Copy the part of the Meta tag code provided by Pinterest that is inside content=”…”.

Automated Process for Verify ownership with wordpress website

Seo Meta Tags (https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-meta-tags/)

This wordpress plugin gives facility to add Google, Bing Verify ownership with wordpress using WebMaster tool and meta tag added Social AuthorShip meta Tags added for Facebook, Twitter. You do not need to install too many plugin for wordpress SEO. You can just install SEO Meta tags plugin. It will handle all SEO aspects of your wordpress website.

Google Bing Verify ownership with wordpress website
Google, Bing Verify ownership with wordpress

 

First install SEO Meta Tags wordpress plugin. On right side menu you will find “Webmaster Tools” page. Add your meta tags here. It will add best of meta tags to you wordpress site. This plugin will add best of SEO meta tags to your wordpress website. It will boost your wordpress website SEO in two weeks.