Professional theme sample.

So, how do you choose the theme that is going to suit both your needs, and the preferences of your desired audience?

It is important to first take the time to really think about what it is that you want from your WordPress theme. Determine a clear set of requirements and expectations, and then browse the available professional wordpress themes to find one that will meet or exceed every single one.

It is must easier, and affordable, to start with a theme that already delivers everything you need than to try to manipulate and alter the design later.

The first characteristic to consider is the home page display and overall layout of the design. You need to decide which pieces of information, widgets, and graphics you want to have displayed on your home page. Some themes will be able to accommodate what you need, without sacrificing navigation, functionality, or style.

You will want to choose the layout that will naturally direct attention to the most important items and features. Some premium themes will have special features such as slideshows or galleries that will allow you to showcase specific information on your home page.

Next, you will want to choose a WordPress theme that will be easy to navigate for your users. Does the theme have primary and secondary navigation capabilities, and are they intuitive?

It can be helpful to first outline all of the pages and information that you need to incorporate into your site, and then you can better determine where they would fit in any given theme.

Does the theme have the capabilities to adequately support all of your categories and pages?

The most important step when choosing a WordPress theme is to thoroughly examine the demo for each theme. Just scanning through a few screen shots and reading through a list of specifications should not make your decision.

Most themes will allow you to navigate through a full demonstration. Take advantage of this opportunity and try to visualize your content on the pages. This will help you determine if the theme is going to help you deliver your content effectively and provide your readers with an enjoyable user friendly experience.

The post What to Consider When Choosing a WordPress Theme appeared first on .

If you’re a dedicated blogger, you may resist the idea of allowing guest bloggers to write posts. You may even view guest bloggers as intruders attempting to benefit from the hard work you’ve put into building an audience for your blog.

However, you’re missing a wonderful opportunity to improve your blog and your own professional standing by taking such a position.

Rather than posing a threat, high quality guest blog posts from the right guest bloggers can actually improve your blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Expanded Reach

By allowing guest bloggers to post your blog, you increase your network. This is especially true if you encourage posts from subject matter experts or individuals who are not full time bloggers but who hold positions in companies or fields related to your blog.

Additionally, by allowing guest bloggers, you will almost certainly draw some of their readers to your blog. This is because guest bloggers often publicize their guest blog posts in their own blogs. It’s natural that at least some of their readers will read their guest blog posts.

At least some of those readers may find themselves reading your posts and become at least semi regular readers of your blog as a result.

One Hand Washes the Other

One of the best ways of enhancing your credentials as a blogger or as a subject matter expert is by writing guest blog posts for respected blogs.If you have a reputation for being generous in allowing other bloggers to write guest posts on your blog, you may receive a warmer reception when you make a pitch to write your own guest post.

On the other hand, if you never allow other bloggers to post on your blog, you may find it difficult to persuade other bloggers to allow you to write guest posts.

Enhanced Content

Of course you launched your blog to establish your own voice and because you wished to express your own messages and opinion. However, unless you’re on a complete vanity trip, you also intend for your blog to provide meaningful information to your readers.

High quality blog posts provide enhanced content from a different point of view. You can engage your guest bloggers as well as your readers in meaningful discussion about important issues through blog posts, comments and replies.

Guest bloggers can also ensure that your blog retains a consistent high quality by allowing you to take breaks rather than writing when you’re feeling fatigued or suffering from writers’ block.

Dos and Don’ts of Choosing Guest Bloggers

Just because you accept guest bloggers to post on your blog doesn’t mean that you have to accept every guest blog post.

If you intend to accept guest bloggers as a regular practice, post guidelines for guest bloggers to establish standards for what you will and won’t accept. Even if your blog hosts posts from guest bloggers only occasionally, be wary of accepting guest blog posts that are very short or filled with back links to the guest blogger’s own blog or affiliate links – your own blog may be “punished” by search engine administrators as carrying low quality content.

The post Top 3 Reasons to Allow Guest Blogging on your Blog appeared first on .

Thus, you have to aim at ranking for keywords that mean the most to your business. And this is where keywords play a major role. Without taking time to getting the appropriate keywords, your SEO efforts will be useless.

Let’s go over a few but helpful tips in uncovering the most profitable keywords for your business. 

Finding out your business’ most relevant keywords

This may seem easy for those who are doing this for their own business. Perhaps, they know every single speck of their site’s content but finding the business’ most meaningful keywords also take a couple of important considerations such as:

1. Think of the best way to describe your site to others – Being the site’s owner or after learning more about it as an SEO consultant will provide you knowledge of even the most technical aspect of the business. But this kind of knowledge may be too complicated to your target market. It will be best to focus on the business’ aspect that others will find interesting and helpful.
2. Find out how your target audience describe your business – While figuring how you will best describe your site to others, it is equally important to realize how others recognize your business. Try to look at your business from others’ point of view and the keywords that they will likely use to search for your products or service.
3. Focus on your unique and most profitable product – If you have a unique product that gives you an edge over your competitor, it will help to focus on this to drive visitors to your site rather than on your competitor’s.

To avoid consuming too much time on this strategy, there are tools that you can use for this for free such as Google Adwords to figure out the best keywords to use in advertising one’s products or service and Google Trends to figure out how often a term is used throughout time.

Spying on competitors

This could be tantamount to recognition of the competitor’s success or engaging in what some may deem as an unethical deed. The question now is, should one spy on the competitor’s keywords? Certainly.

In the corporate world, spying on competitors and learning about what they are doing successfully is an essential field in strategic research analysis. Same strategy is widely used, or perhaps, even more rampant in the online world. The wide array of free online tools such as Open Site Explorer, Keyword Spy, SpyFu, etc., bears evidence to this.

Having mentioned these free online tools, it should not take any business to waste an extensive amount of time in Google to see which keywords their seemingly almighty competitors rank well. And while doing this, you should always remember to take a couple of considerations such as knowing your competitor’s most important pages in their site, which keywords they used for their ads and how long they’ve used them, do those keywords seem to make them money, which keywords do your competitors rank in top ten, etc.

Being armed with the most valuable keywords where our competitors rank will help you know which keywords to use in order to rank high among your competitors. Better yet, you have the opportunity to even rank higher than them.

Final Words

Indeed, there are a lot of ways in doing keyword research and you should figure out which works well by knowing your business, your target market and your competitors as well. Putting these efforts all together will lead you to getting the most profitable keywords for our business.

The post Uncovering the most Profitable Keywords for your Business appeared first on .

Actually, Internet participation seems to be dominated by two groups of people; those who are careless in their writing and those who think the careless ones should be shot, but I digress.

There is a plugin for WordPress called After the Deadline that can help with spelling, grammer, and context.  It is available as part of the free Jetpack set of plugins from WordPress.

Violence aside, error-free writing is more than a nitpicky thing. Small mistakes can lead to grave consequences. You should ensure your writing is error-free for the following seven reasons.

1. Avoid a Deeply Embarrassing Misunderstanding.

For example, say you want to earn some extra money cleaning houses. You post an ad that reads like this:

“Tired of cleaning yourself? Let me do it.”

If anyone offers you a cleaning gig based on this ad, you may find they have very different expectations of just what you are expected to clean.  

2. One Left-out Letter Can Lead to Dire Economic Consequences.

“For rent: 6-room hated apartment.”

Expect relatively few calls for this one. Anyone who does inquire about renting the apartment may have issues with depression.

3. You May Unnecessarily Alarm People.

You’re looking for a new home for your beloved dog, Fido, maybe because a family member has allergies. So you place an ad which reads,

“Dog for sale: eats anything and is fond of children.”

Let’s hope the neighbors don’t see this ad. If they do, you can bet they won’t be bringing their children over for a visit. Expect a decline in your own kids’ popularity.

4. You May Sexually Harass Someone by Accident.

Suppose you send an email which includes the following sentence:

“I know how busty you are.”

This could prove especially awkward if the person you’re emailing is a man. Presumably this person meant to write, “I know how busy you are.” It’s easy to make mistakes in an email since you’re often in a hurry when you write them. You don’t need to spend a long time proofreading your emails, but you may want to at least read them over before sending them.

5. You May Cause Parents to Scramble for Private School Tuition Money for their Kids.

A digital billboard in South Bend, IN, had the following interesting message:

“15 best things about our pubic schools.”

It’s just wrong that a word like “pubic” should have a spelling so similar to the very commonly-used “public”, but you have to deal with it. A private company made this error, not the district itself, and if you work at a company responsible for billboard content, you probably want to avoid embarrassing your clients. Besides, public schools get enough of a bad rap these days without a billboard calling them “pubic schools.”

6. You May Cause Tension in Your Marriage.

Say you’re a husband texting his wife and you send the following message:

“I love you, my previous wife.”

Not quite the same thing as saying you love your precious wife. But hopefully your wife has a sense of humor. That’s one of the reasons you love her, right?

7. You May Accidentally Start a Religious Pilgrimage.

Okay, this one’s a bit of a stretch, but as many as one in ten Americans do worry that the world will end on December 21st, 2012. These same people may be anticipating a Second Coming, so avoid sending a memo like this one.

“Meet with Christ in Tulsa.”

Sure, the memo’s recipient will probably realize you meant to say, “Meet with Chris in Tulsa,” if for no other reason than that it’s unlikely Christ would choose Tulsa as the venue for his Second Coming. But if you made a mistake like this, you might just as easily send the memo to the entire office by accident.

Your officemates might each forward it to a few other people, and the next thing you know it’s gone viral. And hundreds of doomsday believers show up in Tulsa, only to have their hopes of observing the Second Coming cruelly dashed. I’m just saying it’s not impossible.

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The Good

The benefits of this link shortening is that it compresses and reduces, making sharing content easier. Gone are the lengthy titles which take up most of the characters, and in its place – space.

This leaves room for users to express their own opinion or take on articles, videos, images and everything else out there. It’s also been argued that shortened URLs make an article more readable, simply because clunky wordy titles are replaced with a more succinct version of less than 20 characters.

But aside from the aesthetics and share factors, shortening services are also valuable tools. That’s because some offer a built-in function to track and analyse who is sharing and reading content. Since sharing is the life blood of the internet, and more specifically social media, then for those who work in the industry, this helps with a necessary part of the job – monitoring. 

The Bad

However, link shortening does have its detractors. And those who have expressed concerns over the use of these services tend to talk about the trust element. This is a result of spamming coming from shortened links and, in the early years, this put people off using the tools. After all, if you can’t see the URL, how do you know it’s from a trustworthy source?

Now, thanks to the widespread use via the likes of Twitter, the reputation of shortening tools has changed.

The Evolution

Today’s established URL shorteners offer a plethora of different tools. Most, however, are copies of the granddaddy of URL shorteners – TinyURL, which was launched back in 2002.

Now, though, the company faces stiff competition with newer and more advanced tools such those offered by bit.ly, formerly known as bit.ly. It’s one of the most recognized thanks to the fact that it’s integrated into several big third party tools such as Tweetdeck.

Currently, users of this particular service save about one hundred million links each day with the company reporting some three hundred million clicks on its links each day. And in the past few months, the company has added to its capabilities with an iPhone app and the new bookmarking feature called ‘bitmarks’.

But perhaps bit.ly will be watching its back, not least because of the big names that are joining the field. Take internet giant Google which for the past few years has had its own version called goo.gl. It features automatic spam detection and offers tracking info such as where your traffic is coming from and from which platforms. Then there’s Twitter which, having previously used the likes of bitly and TinyURL, now has its own services called t.co. Only available to use on Twitter, it collects information on links such as how many times a link is clicked on.

And then there’s the smaller firms who are also establishing their reputation in this field with British firm Memset being among them. It has set up two shortening tools – is.gd and v.gd – with the former, is.gd being ranked an impressive third overall by tech crunch back in 2009.

The post URL Shortners: The Good, the Bad, the Evolution appeared first on .

The mobile optimized version of BlogCraving.com.

However the one fact that marketers, and businesses as a whole are facing is get ready for mobile, or be ready to lose – with this article I want to try to help you win by using mobile to generate even more traffic for your website.

Utilize native mobile technologies

Mobile has the inherent benefit of additional communication technologies that the desktop does not have. For instance over 7 billion SMS messages we’re sent in 2011 according to ABI research and it’s an under utilized marketing channel. As such a prominent communication method – especially if your target customers or audience use SMS frequently then it’s a valuable avenue to explore.

If you do run an SMS campaign carefully consider the text used and be sure to include a link to your business for web-enabled smartphones. In addition to SMS consider how your emails are being sent and any signature that you are using is optimized for a mobile device, and when they land on your website it’s optimized for mobile as well. 

Ensure your website is mobile-ready

There are two main considerations to make sure your site is mobile ready, the first is named responsive design and uses cascading style sheets with flexible images to adapt your website to the screen size of the device.

This has turned out to be a great method for websites to easily prepare a mobile-version of their website and optimize for any kind of device that visits their site.

The one downside to responsive design is if your site features many ad’s or relies on ad’s to drive revenue these do not resize well and as a result can’t make your site appear poorly. The second is developing a specific mobile site that is optimized for different screen sizes.

If you run a WordPress.com powered website, you can also look at plugins such as WPTouch which simply make your website mobile ready.

Mobile specific landing pages

The use case for mobile is vastly different, especially if the user is on a smart phone or tablet. As such, target your specific landing pages for these use cases and make them optimized for each screen size so the user can quickly get the information they need, but also provide enough depth so that if a visitor is using a tablet and browsing your site for 1 minute or more they can find all the information they need.

Ad targeting

Ad targeting has improved significantly over the past few years; specifically Facebook and Google allow you to target specific devices. This could be a great way to make a splash that your business now has a mobile ready page and promote a product offering – or simply integrate mobile in with any current ad campaigns in that you are already running.

If you use paid ads for your business, make sure to explore the mobile targeting options available to you. Also depending on your business a mobile content network (ad’s that show up within apps) can be worthwhile to explore.

In addition, content ideas that can drive traffic such as mobile-only giveaways which are available only on a mobile version of your website can be a great way to drive an increased amount of traffic and capture a visitor’s attention so they continually will come back.

In summary becoming mobile focused should be a huge priority for you business. Try some of these tips to get your business ready and let us know in the comments how they work.

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If you are adding a new blog it is recommended to add the blog as a subfolder and not as a subdomain.  A subdomain is considered a new domain and will not carry the weight of your existing page.  Nor will you give your website the added bonus of links and content pages if you use a subdomain.

Subdomain: blog.domain.com

Subfolder: domain.com/blog/  (preferred method)

Tags & Categories

Once you have your blog installed and are ready to go you need to think about duplicate content and how you can prevent that.  The biggest problem with WordPress is the categories and tags it allows you to create.

Tags

If you have a large website with thousands of pages of content most of the time tags will help improve your SEO.  This creates additional pages that have keywords as titles.  The problem is when you have a smaller blog and not enough articles it creates pages with almost identical content.  Duplicate content is bad for SEO and will actually hurt your ranking potential in Google.

Categories

The same thing that happens with tags also happens with category pages.  Category pages can be near identical to tag created pages and can harm your SEO efforts.

To help solve these issues I recommend to all my clients to use the All in One SEO Pack.  This is a powerful plugin that has many features with the most useful is the ability to “no-index” tags or categories.  It is highly (do it) recommended you install this plugin and set up your blog to not allow search engines to index your tag pages.  This feature alone will solve most of your on-site SEO issues with WordPress.

Tip: When you categorize your blog post remember not to select too many categories for each blog post.  I always recommend one category.  If you start selecting several categories for each post then you run the risk of creating more duplicate content.  

Social Media

How is social media important to SEO of WordPress?  In today’s Google algorithm it is estimated that 7-15% of the weight comes from social media signals.   This is why it’s important to help promote your blog post via social media websites.

Social Media Plugins

Before we tell you what websites work the best it’s important you install the right social sharing buttons so readers of your blog can easily share your content.  Again, there are many out there but one of our favorites is Social Discussions. 

Off-Page Optimization

Your off-page optimization should consist of two main factors.  The first is getting as many shares on social media websites as you can.  Tweet your articles, post them on Facebook and hope your followers like the content and share it.  It helps to ask them to share it as well. Although Google says they aren’t currently using the data from Google+ I still recommend to start embracing it now.  There will come a time in the near future when they start using the data.

Depending on the content of the article you might consider submitting it to the following social sharing networks:

Reddit

BizSugar

Blokube

Business Exchange

Digg

What’s great about sharing on the websites is if the article gets popular it will draw in more social shares and even gain some links.  It’s not uncommon for a popular article to receive 15-200 natural links.

The next is manual link building.  If you are new to link building I wrote a long write-up about Google SEO which mainly covers link building.  This is the step where you contact bloggers and see if they might use your blog post as a citation in their blogs.  Another good strategy is to reach out to other bloggers within your niche and see if they need content written for their blogs.  Maintaining a blog is hard work and most bloggers welcome guest to write quality articles as it takes some workload off of them.

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When you need a website, it is very tempting to pick up a free WordPress template, but the truth is that it is always better to invest in a bespoke website, that is, one that is made especially for you.

Unique Look

Here are some examples of bespoke templates available for WordPress in various marketplaces.

Take a look at the other websites that are in your field. Once you start looking around, you’ll find that just about everyone is using the same, rather small set of WordPress templates! Some hide it better than others, but when you get right down to it, there are more and more sites that are simply taking their template from WordPress whole cloth.

Now that you have noticed it, you will also note that this creates a look where their sites all have the same appearance. When you are told that you need to stand out to get your business or cause of the ground, this is the last thing that you want!

Increased Functionality

If you are a unique cause or a unique business, chances are very good that you need some unique functionality.

For example, if you are an artist, you need to have a gallery setup for your work. You need to have a space where people can page through a number of images, and these images need to be set up clearly and simply. WordPress does not offer this kind of functionality. Think about what you need your customers or interested parties to see.

A bespoke website gives you a great deal of freedom when it comes to design.  

Custom Looks

When you choose a bespoke website, you are essentially making sure that your website suits you.

“Bespoke” is a term that originally comes from tailoring; a bespoke suit is one that is cut to fit you personally.

A bespoke website works the same way. You will be working with a programmer who will help you figure out what you need and how you can get it. While it will take a great deal of planning and tailoring to get a site that completely suits you, the truth of the matter is that the result is worth it!

Instead of having to pound the WordPress template into something that suits you, you will be able to get something that is tailored to your needs from the beginning.

Your website is essentially your home on the Internet, so make sure that it is presentable when people drop by. While plenty of people think that using a WordPress template is good enough, a bespoke website will always be better for your needs.

Think of a bespoke website as a chance to present yourself to the world in a professional manner.

The post Benefits of a Bespoke Website over a Standard WordPress Template appeared first on .

Screenshot I took while writing this actual post.

Saying that the early versions of this app were “clunky” would be a nice way of putting it. I would argue that using the WordPress iPhone App to publish or author content was a nightmare.

I, like many urban lifestylers, spend a good part of my day on some form of public transportation.  That used to be a time that I would spend writing blog content on my old Blackberry.  I would at least have time to get a good post started or nearly completed.  Often, I could have an entire post done by the time I got to work.

The dark ages.

At the time, I was using a post-by-email plugin that allowed me to email posts to a secret email account.  Any email sent to that address would automatically be converted to a blog post.

The email subject line became the post subject line, etc.

It worked well enough but the formatting was always a little wonky.  There was no way to insert links or other basic HTML markup.  At the time, there was no such thing as a Blackberry with a camera in it.  That meant no embedded photos in my mobile posts either.

Eventually, WordPress made post-by-email part of the core platform.  During that change over, formatting continued to get even more difficult to manage.  Also, if you changed devices from one phone to whatever was next, there was a good chance that there would be some extra markup in the email that would cause formatting to be a disaster.

Fast forward a few years to the debut of the iPhone.  I immediately could not wait.  Once I saw the potential of apps on this device, I knew that the WordPress community would build a WordPress CMS App for iPhone.

And they did.

Sadly, it sucked.

The first few times I attempted to use the iOS app, I was very disappointed.  Publishing, including links, adding images, tags, content categories, etc. were all difficult to manage or completely impossible.  

Time to suck less.

Fastforward one more time to today, and I think they’ve finally figured it out.  I hope that the project continues to evolve (there’s lots of work left to do).

Once I had honed my iPhone typing skills, I was exited to at least us my commute time to write the plain text copy.  I suppose I could have used any other notepad app or even an email to accomplish the same thing. But there was something about the promise of being able to do it from right within the WordPress “platform” that was appealing, if only in concept.

Until more recently, the app did not perform well if there was not a strong 3G or WiFi connection.  First it seemed that the app wanted to sync all of my old posts down to the handheld client.  That took forever.

The app also failed me a few times when I went to save a post without a good wireless signal.  The app did not really know what to do if it wasnt able to communicate with the cloud.  The app crashed a few times on me, and my post was gone.

Today, pretty much all of my major concerns have been solved.  The app works great if you are in some sort of “offline” mode.  The post content will simply save locally until it can be pushed up to your server.  Now I can continue to work while on the train, underground.

There’s also basic HTML formatting available including Bold, Italics, etc.

The most convenient factor is the overhauled photo publishing feature.  You can finally take a raw iPhone image and embed it appropriately into your content right from your phone.  The app will upload the photo to the cloud where it will get crunched and resized.

Complete post via iPhone app.

This entire post was written on the WordPress App for iPhone.

I find myself publishing directly from the app about half the time.  The other half, I end up saving as a draft and simply giving it a little final polish later on, once I am able to get in front of my laptop.

However, by then, the hard part is done.  Just do some last edits, maybe add a couple of links, and hit publish.

If you’ve got a 20+ minute public transit commute, you have no excuse (nor do I) for not having enough time in your day to write your blog.

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