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Learn How to Select the Best WordPress Theme For Your Blog

By on October 7, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Learn How to Select the Best WordPress Theme For Your Blog

Lets face it, there are an over abundance of WordPress themes available on the internet, and with so many out there, fitting magazine style, CMS style, and personal style blogs, how can you tell which one is suitable for your needs? Choosing the right themes can be tough at the best of times, however by making sure that you follow the following guidelines, you should be able to easily shortlist to your ideal theme in no time.

Is The Theme Search Engine Optimized?

For most webmasters, this is going to be a priority, and for those who don’t know what they are looking for, it can be a hard task in itself. First and foremost, the theme will need to load in a reasonable time. As Google has made it public that they will include a measure in their algorithm that incorporates load time into their ranking system, a theme that is so jam packed full of features will most definitely slow down your load times, and may impact your rankings.

For example, the Boardwalk WordPress Theme from WPnow is one of my favorite themes, it’s bursting with color and life, which suits my needs perfect, however, the theme is painfully slow to load. In cases such as these, you can simply use the Super Cache plugin, which will create a static set of HTML files, to allow for fast loading, every time, thus keeping you safe when Google incorporates page speed into their algorithm.

Of course, you are also going to want to be completely certain that keywords are emphasized in headings using the correct tags. The standard use involves H1 and H2 tags in both the header, and in the blog post title. Some other themes, such as the Vigilance Theme from the Theme Foundry use a special piece of code which renders an image from text, and whilst this may come across as a bad thing, the script itself renders clear HTML coding which the search engine spiders can read easily. Bells and whistles are fine, only if the result is a clean and clear coding structure that can be read by the search engine crawlers.

Does The Theme Support My Version Of WordPress?

WordPress is booming at the moment, and as such, the demand for improvements is higher than ever. It only seems like yesterday when version 2.9 was launched, and we are already on the verge of seeing version 3.0 arriving. As such, if you are looking to shortlist your theme selections, making sure that your theme is by a reputable designer that regularly updates their themes is going to be of huge importance.

One of the most renowned theme designers, WooThemes, are currently working with WordPress on their version 3.0, and as such, they work consistently to ensure that all of their themes are compatible with all versions of WordPress.

What I suggest in all cases is to install WordPress on a test domain, just to ensure that themes are compatible, and most importantly, that they work and are customizable for your blog.

Is The Theme Easy To Customize?

If everyone downloaded or purchased the same theme, the blogosphere would be a very repetitive place indeed, and would most certainly lack the excitement that it currently has. Although I do recommend all webmasters to find a good theme to purchase (more people download free themes than purchasing, instantly making your blog more unique!), it is always advisable to look into making some customizations to your theme.

Some themes make customisation very easy, in the case of the Theme Foundry, their coding structure is very clearly labeled, which is most certainly something that I believe a lot of designers should be taking note of. Knowing where the search box is in the header can save a lot of trouble locating it, especially if you only know basic HTML, as such, a clearly labeled theme is always going to be something that deserves a second look.

Where Can I Get A Good Theme?

There are many places online that will offer themes for free, and various others that will charge a fee for their high quality premium themes. Whilst I do recommend investing in a good unique theme, this is a personal choice, some free themes can be very easy to customize just so long as you know HTML and PHP. The choice is entirely yours!

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WordPress Website Setup – 5 Overlooked Settings That Could Be Hurting You and Your Readers1

By on October 5, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress Website Setup – 5 Overlooked Settings That Could Be Hurting You and Your Readers

WordPress is an open source web publishing platform used by millions of people around the world. It’s known to be relatively easy for a beginner to learn and start creating content for their blogs or websites.

However, there are few features that if not setup correctly, can do your site more harm than good. All the steps below assume that you are logged into your WordPress Dashboard (administration area).

The WordPress Tagline

The default WordPress tagline is “”Just another WordPress blog””. This acts as a subtitle for your blog or website and is meant to be descriptive of your content. Leaving this default text in the tagline text box means that your visitors and search engines will see this. It sure isn’t descriptive of what your site is really about is it?

You can easily replace this tagline with your own by going to:

Settings–>General–>Tagline

(make sure to save your changes)

Membership and User Role Rules

You have the ability to add additional users to your blog or website for the purpose of adding content or submitting articles for review. There two settings here:

Settings–>General–>Membership

Settings–>General–>New User Default Role

Be careful if you decide to let anyone register for your site. Spammers love it when this option is ticked without having hardened security measures in place first.

You will also want to choose the default role for new users wisely. WordPress allows five user roles:

Administrator
Editor
Contributor
Author
Subscriber

Each user role is allowed to access different administration areas of your WordPress installation. This can be a powerful way to organize your users but can also be potentially disasterous if one of those users accidentally deactivates a plugin or theme that your site depends on.

You can always add additional users manually without the need to open registration to the public by going to:

Users–>Add New

Set the Correct Timezone

99% of WordPress websites I’m brought in to help with do not have the timezone correctly set to match the location of the owner. The time is detected automatically, and you would think this would be OK, but it can cause a usability issue with your users.

Why? Imagine I live in California and my site offers news and updates about the Stock Market or Wall Street. Further imagine that I schedule an article to post at a specific time in order to target either my night owl readers or the early risers about a specific stock tip.

Well, if I’m in California and I schedule my article to post at 5:00am what happens if I didn’t set my timezone to match my location? You guessed it, that article would be published based on whatever timezone is set by default. This would not position my site as having “”breaking news”” for my target market.

What timezone is set by default? The timezone that gets chosen is directly based upon the timezone that is set on the server computer at your hosting company. I host some of my websites with West Coast based hosting companies but I live on the East Coast…therefore I need to make sure to set my timezone to Eastern Standard Time instead Pacific Standard Time.

(scheduling your article post times is a built-in feature of WordPress by the way)

Set Update Services

When you publish a new content WordPress provides a way for you to let other people now you’ve updated your site. Go here:

Writing–>Update Services

You’ll see that there is an text input box with one web address inside it. That address connects your website with the Ping-O-Matic search engine update service. Every time you add something new, your site tells Ping-O-Matic and Ping-O-Matic tells various search services.

You can add more update services to this list so you can be assured that any new content you create is automatically being distributed and indexed by a variety of update services. You can view a long list here.

Creating Human Readable URLs

When you create a page or blog post in WordPress, it is given a unique ID for use in the programming code and database. Because of this, when you view a page or post url in your browser address bar, you see something similar to this on the end of your web address:?p=123

The code at the end of that url address above is referencing the page/post ID of 123. That’s not very readable or descriptive to a person is it? Additionally that address contains absolutely no keywords that could be utilized by search engines to help them return relevant results to your content. Luckily, you can change how these look and make them much better.

Go to: Settings–>Permalinks

You will see that you have four choices of different url structures to choose from:

Default
Day and name
Month and name
Numeric
Custom Structure

I use different Custom Structures based on the needs of particular websites and I would recommend doing the same. You can learn more about Custom Permalink Structures here.

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Interested In ElegantThemes Premium WordPress Themes-Discover ElegantThemes Here

By on October 3, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Interested In ElegantThemes Premium WordPress Themes? Discover ElegantThemes Here

Overview of ElegantThemes

When you start learning about ElegantThemes, a premium WordPress theme developer, there are two things that really grab your attention.

This is one of the most affordable premium theme developers out there today, yet their quality and attention to detail remains very high.
Their customer service and dedication to pleasing clients is exceptional. You won’t find that combination in many theme developing services today.

You have a sense that you are in good hands when you take up your ElegantThemes membership. All themes are guaranteed to function properly in the dominant browsers and have been tested to ensure that. It is also noteworthy that all sidebars on these themes are ready for widgets and some are ready for AdSense ads right out of the box.

Easy Theme Customization with ElegantThemes WordPress Themes

One of the nicest features of a WordPress theme from ElegantThemes is the easy customization using the famed ElegantThemes ePanel.

The ePanel is the mechanism in their themes where you customize and set your website layout. You can dictate the navigation, home page, color scheme (if more than one color scheme is offered by a particular theme), search engine optimization, blog settings, and more. The best part is you can do all this customization in the ePanel without knowing any coding at all.

Pricing & License Model

This is one of the most interesting points about ElegantThemes. As a premium WordPress theme developer, the service is definitely one of the more affordable options. Everything operates off a membership system and there are two licensing options.

The basic license after joining gives unlimited access to all themes for a full year and you are allowed to make any changes to customize the theme to your personal needs without giving credit or stating anything about ElegantThemes on the site. The only restriction is that you can only use the themes on sites that you personally own. No redistribution is allowed.

The cost for a personal membership with the basic license is $39 a year (as of the time this article was published). This is definitely one of the best membership pricing models on the market today for an all-theme access premium WordPress themes developer. Yes, for $39 you get access to ALL the themes created – including future themes for the duration of your membership.

If you want to use one of these themes as a part of a professional web design or development service, you need to pay the one time distributor fee of $89 when you sign up (at the time this article was published). This gives a more advanced license to use all themes on as many domains as you like, with any modifications that you like, and this includes putting them on sites that will be sold to others.

The distributor license does not include selling the actual theme itself. It must be packaged with a domain name that is sold as a complete project to your clients.

PSD Files Included

Every theme offered from ElegantThemes comes with the PSD files that makes editing the graphics fast and easy within Photoshop. Also, each theme comes with blank logo images so you can do some customizations even if you don’t have access to Photoshop. Often PSD file inclusion is a premium cost with other theme developers.

Technical Support

Technical support is one area where other theme developers could learn something from ElegantThemes. They stand behind their themes and openly offer to fix any problems with installation or functioning. There is an active support forum open to members and an FAQ file that answers practically any question you could have, including defining basic terminology and concepts for beginners.

The catch here is that they are willing to keep their themes compatible with future WordPress releases as long as you are a member of the service. Once you cancel your membership and a new version is released, they may not be as willing to get it up to date without a restored membership.

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10 Best WordPress Theme Editor Plugins

By on October 1, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

10 Best WordPress Theme Editor Plugins

WordPress does a very good job, especially for moderately-sized websites. This is because of the WordPress theme editor plugins, making it easy and simple to maintain a site and update its content. Here are the ten best WordPress theme editor plugins that you can use in your WordPress site.

1. Cforms II

This is the best in terms of configurability. It allows you to build literally anything in the site.

2. WP e-Commerce

This doesn’t have any competition. It provides an easy and simple to manage shopping cart and storefront as an integral part of the WordPress installation. It also includes the feature of selling digital downloads.

3. Search Everything

This is ideal for websites with static content since it allows users to search the entre site without relying on Google or leaving the site.

4. Google Sitemap Generator

The biggest benefit of using this is that it allows you to save from manual labor because the software already can locate your content. This editor plugin submits a complete index of your WordPress site to Yahoo, Google, Ask.com, and MSN Live every time the site is updated.

5. CKeditor

This is an open source WordPress text editor that brings the power of different desktop editors to the Web. It is compatible with different Internet browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Netscape.

6. Event Calendar 3

This is one of the best and most integrated WordPress theme editor plugin. It provides you with an iCal feed aside from the standard RSS feed.

7. Page Links To

This is by far the simplest in the list since it allows you to create Web pages that link to another site. It is the easiest way to add different links to the main menu without the need for codes.

8. TinyMCE Advanced

This WordPress theme editor plugin allows you to easily add classes to tables, images, and block quotes.

9. XSPF Player

This allows you to play music on your WordPress site. This MP3 player allows you to manage cover art, playlists, and artist links.

10. pageMash

This theme editor plugin makes it very simple to put pages on the site in order without the need to edit every Web page individually.

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How WordPress Themes Increase Your Chance of Earning Visitors

By on September 29, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How WordPress Themes Increase Your Chance of Earning Visitors

Modernization has brought several changes in the lives of the people all over the world. It has greatly influenced their perceptions and standards towards a certain issue. It is has opened several effective ways on how people can make use of their own talents and expertise. Internet plays the most important role in improving the lives of the people. At first it was the online library of information. The birth of numerous varieties of networking sites has deeply enticed the sympathy of most users. Later on it became the source of income for intelligent web developers. Internet later on becomes a necessity of the modern world.

Even though the internet has indeed brought a dynamic change towards the lives of the people, their hobbies remained the same. Keeping a diary is one of the most common ways of how individuals unload their emotions. Writing a journal is also part of how they value and cherish their experiences during their ups and downs in life.

Blogging is the modern form of writing a diary or a journal. Although, both are products of the vivid imaginations and unforgettable experiences of its authors, they differ most in terms of privacy. A diary is owned by a single person only. The information it contains is limited to the author only. The author takes the responsibility of restricting anyone to read his or her diary.

Meanwhile, blogging is the exact opposite of writing a diary. The public can immediately view and read the information that the author has uploaded through the internet. Readers are even encouraged to leave a comment once they have finished reading the whole text. The readers are not restricted to read the articles being posted by the author.

Pioneers of blogging have discovered the benefits of this kind of activity. They have later on learned that they can earn money just by writing a blog and inviting their friends to leave them a comment. It even became the main significance of internet nowadays. It will take long before you can establish your own blogging site. Its progress will depend on how readers value the information you gave them.

An updated blog that contains efficient information about a certain topic is not enough to promote your blog. You also need to consider the appearance of your web page. It should be appealing and enticing to your readers. Your webpage should not contain unnecessary objects that might confuse them.

WordPress themes allow you to customize your own site. The basic structure of your site depends on the type of WordPress theme you choose. You can trace the effects of WordPress themes by using the preview tool. You must not forget to match the content of your blog to your WordPress theme. Your WordPress theme must also have the qualities to attract readers. Your WordPress theme and blog must linger within their minds. They will remember you and visit your site more often because they find your WordPress theme and the content of your blog interesting. It will eventually increase your chance of having daily visitors.

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WordPress Plugins! How to Optimize

By on September 27, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress Plugins! How to Optimize

WordPress plugins can make or break your blogging experience. Being fairly new to blogging has been a real learning experience, not so much writing articles and sending them out to all my social sites, but in trying to optimize the WordPress site so that it’s hitting on all eight cylinders, so to speak. As I read other bloggers articles I pick up bits and pieces of what they have experienced so far, and I’ve decided that having the right WordPress plugins working for you can make life a lot easier. I’ve got a list of 11 plugins, that I’m going to recommend and hopefully shorten your learning curve, and make your blogging a more enjoyable experience.

No 1. Do Follow…This removes the evil nofollow attribute that WordPress adds in comments. You need this to keep visitors coming back for more.

No 2. AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget…Help your visitors promote your site! The widget allows any visitor to bookmark your site easily with many popular services.

No 3. All in One SEO Pack-Pro Version…It’s setup and ready to go right out of the box. It will optimize your site for search engine rankings, plus shorten your url’s by adding a number at the end, versus having a url that winds up being a mile long.

No 4. CommentLuv….Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. It’s rewards your readers and encourages them to return and make more comments.

No 5. Commissions Automator…..This plugin is really needed but if you’re interested in making money on line, it’s helpful. It automatically post instant commission promotions to your blog, with your affiliate ID included, so when someone buys the product, you get the commission. Sweet!

No 6. FD Feedburner Plugin….Redirects all feeds to a Feedburner feed which then sends your blog post out across the entire internet.

No. 7. Onlywire… This is a social bookmarker that will send your blog post out to millions of sites, with only one push of the button.

No 8. PostSwapper.com Plugin…..You can swap links with other bloggers to posts that are related to yours. Build link popularity automatically and easily. Backlinks are one item that is considered when webcrawlers and search engines are looking at ranking your site.

No. 9…Scribe….This plugin quickly checks your new blog post content against SEO best practices, utilizing the Scribe Content Optimizer. You get a readability score, plus see what your keyword density is so you can add more or remove some. This tool makes a huge difference when it comes to SEO Optimization.

No. 10….Tweetmeme….This plugin simply adds a button to your blog which allows your guest to retweet your blog post out to their list of tweeter followers. Nice way to take advantage of someone Else’s list.

No 11….What Would Seth Godin Do….This plugin allows you to display a custom welcome message to a new visitor and a different custom message to a returning visitor. Pretty neat. People like to be treated special so what better way to do that.

To find more information about the plugins just do a Google search, download the plugin into a temp directory and then go to plugins in your WordPress blog, click new and upload the zip file and then install. Pretty simple process and now you have an optimized blog that should bring you hundreds of visitors thanks to your new WordPress plugins.

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How to Protect Your WordPress Website From Hackers

By on September 25, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Protect Your WordPress Website From Hackers

It’s a nightmare scenario. You go to your website only to find a nasty message from a hacker bragging about hacking your site. And nothing else. As far as you can tell your content is gone and you can’t even find a way to log into your WordPress dashboard.

Would your business survive your website being shut down, even temporarily?

It Happens

That’s exactly the situation that my friend of mine found herself in recently.

Fortunately we were able to help her out, rescue (most of) her files and get her back up and running relatively quickly. But that isn’t always the case.

Turns out she could have done some things to better protect herself. Fortunately she learned her lesson well and she’s in much better shape today than she was before the attack.

Have You Really Been Hacked?

A lot of times people come to me saying, “”My site’s been hacked,”” when it really hasn’t. With WordPress sometimes plugin conflicts can cause issues that seem to the user like a hacker has messed with something. This is most common when upgrading to a new version of WordPress if a plugin hasn’t been made compatible with the new version yet.

While that can cause your site to crash, it’s not caused by hackers.

Not only that, but most of the sites I’ve seen that have been hacked weren’t just taken down by them. Most of the malicious hacks I’ve seen involved injecting some code into the site, usually with the end goal to redirect site traffic to some other website.

The Symptoms

Without going into the gory details, my friend’s case was a little different. Her site actually showed an all white screen with an error message along the lines that a plugin conflict might produce and the hacker just wanted to crash her site. Turns out he was into stealing something else.

When I did some troubleshooting I was able to get her site back up and running in fairly short order. In her words:

I must add here, that it only took Chris 45 minutes to decipher and fix what was a rather sophisticated hack!

While I’d never promise to be able to recover a hacked site that quickly, I do have a good track record recovering hacked WordPress sites.

Protecting Yourself

Here are some things you can do to minimize the chances you’ll end up getting hacked and maximize the chances to fully recover quickly should your site crash (for whatever reason).

1. Use Strong Passwords.

I honestly think this was my friend’s biggest mistake. Again in her words,

This is what got me – I just used numbers and letters and the password was – well – kinda obvious.

Make your passwords not only hard to guess, but make them more difficult for sophisticated hackers to break as well. Randomly mix in special characters (found on the number keys with the shift button) as well as numbers and upper and lower case letters. Strong passwords make a huge difference.

Both WordPress and cPanel will tell you how strong your password is. Stronger passwords offer better protection.

The trouble is, having strong passwords also makes them harder to type in. That’s why I use 1Password to manage my passwords on my Macs. I can use really strong passwords and I don’t have to remember them or type them in. 1Password will auto fill web forms for me. It’s the best of both worlds: good security & user friendly.

2. Keep Your WordPress Updated.

One of the most common ways WordPress websites get hacked is because their owners don’t keep their software up to date. What happens is that older versions of WordPress can have known security weaknesses. These weaknesses are fixed by newer releases of the software.

But if you don’t update your software, you leave yourself exposed.

This also holds true with plugins and themes. Besides, the newer versions of WordPress make keeping everything up to date remarkably easy. There’s not much of an excuse to keep you from updating things.

3. Backup Regularly and Often.

A good backup can cover for a ton of other issues by making it possible to revert back to how things were before your site crashed. When it comes to WordPress you need to back up your

Database
Theme Files
Plugins
Media Uploads

There are several different plugins and services to handle backups of your WordPress site.

But the point is backup early and backup often!

Bottom Line

I don’t believe any site is completely “”hack proof.”” A determined hacker with enough resources can break into most anything. Just watch an episode of NCIS!

But if you do these three things you will greatly reduce your risk of being hacked and make it much easier to recover if you do run into a problem.

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10 Best WordPress Plugins That Will Increase Your SERPs

By on September 23, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

10 Best WordPress Plugins That Will Increase Your SERPs

Doing SEO is a complicated process. However, if we understand well the technique, we can achieve the goal. In order to get better search engine ranking, we can use some useful plugins for our websites. 10 best WordPress Plugins are the important things that we can use in order to increase our serps in google. We can easily narrow the gap between success and failure in SEO by installing these plugins into our websites.

The following plugins are tested and used widely by SEOers:

1. All in One SEO Pack

This is the first important plugin that can help you customize the post title, post description, and post tags for individual page. In addition, this also can help you to customize the Cononical URLs for the entire WordPress site. By using this plugin, you can have a good chance to be listed with high SERPs.

2. Broken Link Checker

This plugin is very important and essential to your website because it can control and monitor all links in your site. Once your site has broken links, it will list out and and give you reports about dead links. This will help you control easily all links in your website. By using this plugin, you can update information regularly, and keep your site free from dead links.

3. Google XML Sitemaps Generator

Sitemap is very important to a website. This plugin plays an important role in your site because it can generate an XML-Sitemap of your WordPress site. Since then, the content in your site will be crawled easily by SES ( search engine spiders). This plugin can support for other search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, Ask and others.

4. SEO Friendly Images

This plugin will help you gain 1 point for SERPs because you have SEO friendly images in your website. A website with proper alt and title attributes in images will help you gain more traffic from Google image search.

5. No Self Pings

The internal links in your website are very important to help visitors navigate easily information. However, your page rank will be down due to the sefl pings effect. By using this plugin, you can remove all pingbacks from your own site. This plugin will eliminate the bad effect and enhance your SERPs.

6. Enforce www. Preference

Canoical issue is very important to decide your backlinks and ranking. You will have two options to think about. www(dot)domain(dot)com and domain(dot)com are two different sites when you do backlinks for your site. So in order to avoid losing backlinks, you must use this plugin that can overcome this problem. It will redirect from www(dot)domain(dot)com to domain(dot)com and vice versa. So you are again free from trouble.

7. Platinum SEO Pack

This SEO Pack is as good as All in One SEO Pack, but it has more futures when you compare to All in One SEO Pack ( index, noindex, noarchive, nosnippet…etc..). However, the usage of those two packs are the same. So it depends on the users’ decision.

8. SEO Smart Links

This is very important for SEO because it can help users and spiders navigate your site easily. This plugin can gather keywords, tags, phrases and links with your related posts in your website properly. This process will be done automatically, but you need to configure it appropriately in Control Panel.

9. SEO Slugs

This is very useful for your website to be ranked well once you install this plugin. You will have a better chance to be ranked well with many keywords in your long URL. However, some common words such as “”a””, “”the””, “”and””….are redundant to SERPs. That is why this plugin can help you get rid of these unused common keywords. This process will be done automatically once you install this plugin.

10. Robots Meta

The last but not least. Robots Meta is one of the most important plugins that can help your website to be indexed or not. It can help you to decide to prevent search engines from indexing your website or not. This will help you eliminate some pages with duplicate content. Since then search engines will not decrease your page rank.

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