Archive | wordpress

How Bloggers Benefit From Premium WordPress Themes1

How Bloggers Benefit From Premium WordPress Themes

WordPress has gained worldwide popularity since it started in 2003. Millions of people take advantage of this open-source, self-hosted blogging platform because it is free, very easy to use, and has a large community. With the growth of blogging came the demand for modern, appealing, and functional blog interface so that companies and individuals can attract more site visitors. That is why more and more people get Premium WordPress Themes.

Premium-designed WordPress themes are popular and increasing these days, with many design agencies and freelance web designers making various themes that suit different needs. Most premium themes are offered at low costs, while others are available for free.

A lot of web designers and design companies make a steady living out of creating WordPress themes, which are purchased for commercial sites and blogs. Sometimes, they earn more from creating custom themes for their clients. Even free premium WordPress themes are useful for designers because these themes help boost their search engine rankings and give them a good online standing. Both paid and free premium themes enable web designers to quickly create quality websites without spending much money.

Premium WordPress Themes do a lot of good for bloggers and site owners. First, premium themes provide WordPress users with a unique personality for their blogs or sites. If a blog stands out from the rest of the pack, it can keep its readers coming back and attract more readers. One will not get that advantage from free regular WordPress themes. A blog with a common theme or layout cannot make a good impression on its readers, as they may think there is nothing special or interesting about the blog. Instead, they will leave the blog and browse again to find more interesting blogs.

Moreover, bloggers do not need to hire web designers to create layouts for their blogs because they can easily get Premium WordPress Themes from the Internet. What’s more, bloggers can choose from a lot of themes available online. Bloggers can even view what they are going to get before purchasing a WordPress theme.

Premium themes are ideal for large online projects whose success is measured by the number of people who visit their blogs or sites. Many blogs for big corporations and online magazines invest in Premium WordPress Themes because these themes boost their credibility and help sustain the interest of their readers. Blogs that use premium themes fare better than others when it comes to product placement and promotion. With the help of premium themes, blogs carry the image that they offer their customers something different from others. This leads to more sales and more satisfied customers.

Some companies use premium-designed WordPress themes for their Content Management System (CMS). Nowadays, CMS is commonly used by online news, magazine, and sports sites.

Available in a wide variety of colors, designs, and formats, premium themes provide more value for money. Premium WordPress Themes are a small investment that can lead to big profits and numerous advantages for businesses and individuals who depend so much on their blogs for survival.

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Help With WordPress

Help With WordPress

Depending on the type of help with WordPress you’re looking for, there are many different options. Let’s take a look at the various options, based on the situation.

If you’re having specific problems with plugins, templates or errors with your WordPress installation itself, then the first stop should be the forums at WordPress.org. Hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of other users are constantly posting and sharing tips, helping each other solve similar problems.

Searching the forums can sometimes be a daunting task, but there are some ways of doing a more effective search. If you’re experiencing trouble with a plugin, try going to the plugin directory FIRST, then look for a link in the sidebar (under the big download button) called “”Forum posts”” — clicking this will take you directly to a list of posts regarding that plugin. Do this
before trying a general search on the Forums homepage. The reason is that doing a search there will give you results from ALL of the forums which can be very distracting as you will have to sort through a lot of posts that don’t match your issue.

The same procedure can also be done when looking at a template listing inside the template directory. It’s a much faster way of finding the help you need. Sometimes template developers have their own sites with forums for troubleshooting issues with their themes, so try looking in Appearances > Themes for a link to the developer’s site for help. This is usually the best approach so that you don’t have to wade through forum posts that don’t match your topic exactly.

Additionally, when making a post in the forums (only after you can’t find someone else with the same problem) make sure you write an appropriate tag such as the plugin or template name, or the specific section inside the WordPress administration. This can make a big difference whether or not other users find your post or not.

In addition to searching at WordPress.org for solutions, you can also find help with WordPress in the form of tutorials on sites like YouTube or HubPages.com. These sites are full of video and text tutorials that can train you on virtually every aspect of using the WordPress CMS. Chances are someone has written a tutorial on the exact topic you’re looking for, so search those sites and you’ll become a WordPress pro in no time!

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An Introduction To WordPress Plugins

An Introduction To WordPress Plugins

WordPress is an amazing CMS system that is renowned for its flexibility as not only a blogging platform, but a platform for those who are simply seeking to publish content based websites to the Internet. It is for this reason that usage of WordPress has skyrocketed over the fast few years, as such, a very active community has given the platform support by developing what would have to be the largest directory of plugins for a single platform in history. So, what is a plugin?

A WordPress plugin is a simple script or software package that extends the functionality of the WordPress platform further than what the original developers of the platform have decided upon. It is for this reason that the CMS is quite raw, and offers only basic functionality such as creating posts, pages, and editing basic code. A plugin is generally installed via the plugin administration area in WordPress, and can either be done automatically from the plugins directory hosted by WordPress, or can also be done manually via FTP, or via an upload in the back end of WordPress.

In most cases, you will never need to install a plugin manually, however, as the availability of premium plugins is rising significantly, this is happening more and more. There are two plugin types that you will more than likely find. Freely available plugins, and premium plugins.

Free plugins are usually available en-masse in the WordPress plugins directory, and are searchable based on set keywords and criteria, however premium plugins are usually available via their own marketplace or shopping cart. Needless to say, the need to pay for a plugin generally warrants extra functionality such as code tweaks, creation of clone WordPress installations, and so on, more often than not, functionality that exceeds its own monetary value significantly.

Plugins can transform WordPress almost into its own separate systems. For example, there are many premium shopping cart and membership site plugins that will transform WordPress from a blog to a paid of free membership site. Some will also transform the installation into a sales letter with a payment portal, and other plugins will offer much more simple functionality such as admin extension, social media links, and clone wordpress backup files for your own security. To get started, simply enter the plugins area within your WordPress admin area, and select ""add new"". In this area, you will be able to explore plugins, and their functionality further, and most importantly, you will be able to experiment with different plugins and get a grasp of this brilliant functionality that lies within WordPress.

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Guaranteed SEO Benefits With WordPress Plugins

Guaranteed SEO Benefits With WordPress Plugins

There are many ways to gain guaranteed SEO benefits for your website if you are using the WordPress CMS, some more effective than others. Most of your benefits will be with off site SEO but there can be some on site SEO advantages. People reading this article may or may not be aware that the majority of your SEO benefits will come from off site SEO, back linking is a huge one, especially if you are anchoring your back links with the correct text. Here I will not go into this aspect of SEO however, this article is more concerned with how you can improve on site SEO via WordPress plugins.

As you are probably already aware there are thousands upon thousands of WP plugins that all claim to benefit you in some way, not all are made equally however and sorting through all the garbage to actually find something of real use is extremely hard work, especially if you are new to WordPress and all the plugins that are available. I cannot claim to be an expert on every single plugin available, the number to be tested is just too many and would take a lifetime to test individually but the following list shows a few of the plugins that I find are most useful for my personal needs and do give me guaranteed SEO advantages of one description or another.

Your list may vary depending on the reason why you are building a WP site but I think most people will find the list to be of use for the basics plus a few added extra bonuses. While some of these plugins are not directly related to SEO they may help you to avoid disasters that will ruin your sites credibility with both search engines and visitors alike so do not be fooled by the simplicity of what some of them do. While on site and off site SEO are very, very important the integrity of your site as a whole does come into play. If your site goes down or is slow or littered with links that go nowhere these problems will all add up to a bad site that both man and machine will dislike and avoid. One more point that you should bear in mind when installing plugins: Do not over do it! I bring up page speed further into this article, one of the things that will slow your site down is a lot of plugins.

Certain plugins are non optional, a sitemap and a database backup are for example 2 things that you absolutely need but if others are going to be of little use to you, forget them! Use your head in regard to what you need for the function of your site. Never install a plugin just for the sake of it, only use them to improve functionality! WordPress plugins with guaranteed SEO benefits The first thing that any site needs is a sitemap, you don’t need to be a coding expert and create your own thankfully with ‘Google XML sitemaps’. There are other sitemap plugins out there but this is one of the most trusted out there and something that no WordPress site should be without. ‘Yoast breadcrumbs’ is a great breadcrumb plugin that will leave a trail for your readers to be able to find their way around with greater ease. If set up correctly it will also help with internal SEO as it makes the text bold for the current page in the breadcrumb trail and also allows to set your own anchor text for both the homepage and blog page. The ‘official Statcounter plugin’ is another great piece of kit for your website, while it does not offer any immediate guaranteed SEO benefits the information that can be garnered from Statcounter.com is invaluable in your future SEO decisions.

Where are your visitors coming from? Where do your visitors go from your site? What keywords are attracting visitors? With this information and more you can start to make future plans, see what is working and see what is a wasting your time. It is well documented that Google now takes into account the speed that your website loads, feeding cached versions of your sites web pages is a no brainer when you take also consider that visitors may also click away if your page takes too long to load.

Help to improve page speed by using the ‘W3 total cache’ plugin. If you also have a lot of things going on in your sidebars you may also consider ‘WP widget cache’. Something that every WordPress site needs is a backup system of some kind. I recommend ‘WordPress Database Backup’. Depending on how active your site is you can set the plugin to Email you a complete backup of your site anywhere from every 900 seconds to bi monthly. Guaranteed SEO benefits? Well… How good is it for your SEO if your site crashes and you have to start from scratch? Ever had your content stolen from your site via your RSS feed?

Then you will like the next plugin. It’s called ‘RSS footer‘, a simple yet effective plugin that shows a link on the post that they stole which leads right back to your site, if anybody scrapes your feed content the guaranteed SEO benefit is that you get free keyword optimized back links and maybe a few visitors from the thieving gits site.:-D Bonus! ‘Broken link checker’ Ever been in a rush and put a link into a post or page that is not correct only to find out days or weeks later? (Do you have some that you didn’t find at all come to think of it!?) This plugin will monitor your site and report any links that are not working so you can correct them immediately. Google hates broken links and your visitors won’t like them too much either, neither should you if you want your site to do what you want it to do and direct visitors where you want them to go. How often do you finish off a page or post and notice mistakes?

You go back and correct them and then you make a couple of improvements and tweaks to the page, hitting the update button every few minutes to put it right… Bad!! Every time you post or update one of your pages WordPress automatically pings the Pingomatic site, if you are repeatedly pinging all the time your blog can get banned from the update sites for ping spam. Cure this with ‘cbnet Ping Optimizer’ which will only allow pinging when you actually publish for the first time. Pinging on an update will be disabled hence protecting you from being labelled as a ping spammer. Best of luck with your WordPress site, I hope this information was of use to you.

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My Top 7 WordPress Plugins

My Top 7 WordPress Plugins

WordPress is just so popular not because it’s free (sure, that’s one reason) but because it is so robust and has so much functionality. WordPress plugins allow you to do just about anything with your blog! Below is a list of my 7 top WordPress plugins, what they do, and why you need them. While there are some plugins you need to pay for, all of these plugins are totally free.

1. Advertising Manager Advertising Manager allows you to easily monetize your blog by placing contextual ads from different advertising networks. Some of these networks include Google AdSense, Yahoo!PN, adBrite and Commission Junction.

2. Akismet Spam comments are a BIG problem. The reason for this is because there are clever people that misuse their programming skills to come up with ways to spider the Internet for blogs and leave comments on them automatically. One of my blogs gets over 50 spam comments every single day! Having to wade through these spam comments in search for the good ones would be a huge waste of time. Fortunately, Akismet will automatically trash the spam comments for you.

3. All in One SEO Pack If you could only have one plugin, this would be it. All in One SEO Pack helps you to make your blog SEO-friendly. Why would you want to do that? The more the search engines (e.g. Google) like your blog, the better you’ll rank and the more free, targeted traffic you’ll get.

4. DoFollow There are two types of links; dofollow and nofollow. Google will not credit nofollow backlinks when ranking a website. WordPress comments links are, by default, set up as nofollow links. The DoFollow plugin changes the comments links attribute to dofollow thus encouraging more visitors to leave comments on your blog.

5. Facebook Like The more you can integrate your blog with Facebook, the better. This plugin puts a Facebook ‘like’ button on every post and when visitors ‘like’ your posts, their Facebook friends will see it and you’ll get more, free traffic! Facebook traffic can be very viral. This is a powerful plugin that you definitely want to have on your blog.

6. Google XML Sitemaps This plugin auto-generates a sitemap for your blog and keeps it up to date. Google loves sitemaps.

7. Pretty Link Lite If you need to shorten a long link (to make it look prettier) or if you have an affiliate link you want to hide, this is the plugin for you.

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Monetize Your WordPress With Ecommerce Plugins

Monetize Your WordPress Website Or Blog With Ecommerce Plugins

If you’re not generating money from your website or blog, you should be. Numerous shopping cart plugins allow you to sell your products and services online through your WordPress account, and below we outline the features of several of them for you to consider.

Browse through them to consider which plugin might be right for your site. WP AuctionsNo more listing, seller or final value fees when you use this handy plugin. Host auctions and sell items for free. Don’t forget to register your plugin with WP Auctions Live.

It will help generate traffic to your site. One item at a time in the cart is your only drawback to this plugin. FatFreeCartNo generating or pasting code using this plugin because it works within the post editor. Incorporate the add-to-cart feature within your blog posts. Note also that it integrates with PayPal and Google Checkout. eStoreThis plugin gives you fully-automated selling capability of your digital products. Deliver products without directing buyers to a webpage to download; they’ll receive an encrypted download link in their email.

The great news? It’s integrated with WordPress’ Affiliate software. WP e-CommerceThis is a Web 2.0 application that provides full-feature shopping cart functionality and allows for one-page checkout. Don’t make site visitors move from page to page in order to purchase a product. Give them a simple, easy-to-use site that they’ll gladly return to. MiniCartEmbed your shopping cart into your blog posts and use the plugin to ask for donations to your favorite cause in the process. eShopUse your pages or posts to create new products. Features include the ability to list multiple products, create an add-to-cart function, offer downloadable products and more.

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