The Thesis Theme was built with one goal in mind: “To allow for simple, powerful customization, even if you only have a limited knowledge of CSS and HTML.”

Thesis Theme Overview

To date, over 42,700 people have used Thesis making it arguably the most popular (and most successful) premium wordpress theme of all time. With everyone from Tony Hsieh (founder of Zappos) to Dave Navarro (musician) using Thesis for their own web properties, the question begs to be answered…what is so great about the Thesis WordPress Theme?

Thesis WordPres Theme: The Details

Thesis was built from the ground up with the “details” in mind. Now many developers will tell you that they care about the details when in fact many of the “details” they care about are nothing more than bells and whistles that make absolutely no difference on things like search engine friendliness (out of the box), intuitive customization, and a site that converts your hard earned traffic into leads, buyers, etc.

Most entrepreneurs get so caught up in the aesthetics of their website (the background color, the size of the logo, the placement of the logo, should it be 100px or 101px) that they fail to remember that the average consumer could care less about your design. They want your product. Put another way, they want to quickly be able to learn about your product, not debate in their head whether or not they like the hot pink background to your site.

Thesis helps address many of these normal concerns by creating a design that is both functional, professional, and appealing to the eyes. Even greater, they realize that many people who use the Thesis Theme DO care about design and DO want something creative and unique…not just a standard premium theme that resembles every other site using the same theme. Take a look at how varied sites can look that run on Thesis with many times just very basic customization.

• Network Solutions Blog uses Thesis
• MoneyNing uses Thesis
• Montrail Blog uses Thesis
• Think Dave uses Thesis
• For more examples, check out these other 50+ sites using the Thesis Theme.

Thesis WordPress Theme: The Difference

OK, so a lot of high profile people and big companies like eBay use them. Does that mean that YOU should too? While I would never recommend you do something just because everyone else does (we all remember that conversation when we were younger), in this case, it’s important to ask the question, “Why would so many successful companies and individuals use a premium theme like Thesis?”

Because it works. Great.

While so much of the focus in recent years has been on shortcodes and customization options that can grind the site to a screeching halt due to “code bloat,” Thesis has remained committed to making an incredibly simple interface that is both highly functional, search engine friendly, AND highly customizable if need be without all the garbage that comes with most premium themes.

It is for this reason (and many more that you’ll discover when you get it) that the Thesis WordPress Theme is our top pick in Premium WordPress Themes.

Get Thesis Today.

Cosmopolitan premium WordPress theme is the perfect choice for anybody looking to promote their spa, salon, health or beauty center online. Cosmopolitan’s styling is rich and inviting and sure to make an incredible first impression on your visitors as they learn more about your business. Make sure to check out the live demo of Cosmopolitan at the end of the post!

Cosmopolitan Theme Features

• Professionally designed salon / spa / health / beauty theme — saves you thousands on design costs
• Sexy homepage image slider with over 15 transitions to choose from
• Easy-to-use theme options make customizing your site a breeze
• Tons of fonts to choose from that automatically apply to your site’s headings (uses Google Fonts)
• Includes 5 widget friendly zones (4 footer columns and 1 sidebar)
• Installs using the WordPress installer
• Menus use WordPress’ custom menu tool
• Comprehensive user guide (over 20 pages with samples and screenshots)
• Built-in shortcodes provide easy to use styling elements for pages and posts, giving you greater control over your content
• Requires WordPress 3.0 or greater
• Compatible with all major browsers
• Pre-sliced PSD files for logo, homepage slider images, background image, staff featured image, and even the coupon template Aloha Themes used for the demo
• Blog is integrated into site
• Installation support included

Advanced Cosmopolitan Theme Features

The Aloha Panel

Theme options are extremely easy to alter and setting up your site is a breeze with the Aloha Admin Panel. The Aloha Admin Panel gives you full control over every element of your site you could ever wish to change.

Cosmopolitan Theme Showcase

Come back and check out the showcase as we find more sites from around the web using Cosmopolitan.

Includes a 3 day money-back guarantee, no questions asked — absolutely zero risk!

Matt Cutts can’t stand it when webmasters DON’T take full advantage of ALL the features WordPress affords its users.

HE HATES IT!

But don’t worry…He did recently share several tips and strategies for maximizing your WordPress site’s presence on Google so you can take full advantage of all that WordPress has to offer.

I’m going to outline them for you here (and I’d like to point out that I started this article by using one of Matt’s tips for successful blogging: create a controversy – more on that a little later).

First off, did you know that Google looks at over 200 characteristics when ranking sites? Most of us get caught up in the big three: keyword density, inbound links, and pagerank – when in reality there are many other features Google takes into account when ranking sites.

Throughout this article we will briefly cover just a few of the topics that Cutts touched on when speaking about WordPress a few months back.

Permalinks Matter

We all know the standard link structure for a fresh WordPress install where the end of your pages look something like this in your browser: http://mysite.com/?p=123. Matt contends that this is a complete waste of an opportunity to use relevant keywords.

Since keyword density in your title tag, meta description, and body are so important, it lends us to believe (and confirmed by Matt) that actually adding the keyword to your URL so that instead your site reads: http://mysite.com/my-keyword-article-here will be much more beneficial than NOT having it listed there. Again, so much of what ranking well online is about is doing more than the next guy, and surprisingly enough, many people don’t take advantage of the permalink settings in WordPress.

Thankfully, this is an easy fix. Go to Settings > Permalinks and do the following:

Use Different Verb Tenses In Title & URL

Instead of putting your article titled Setting WordPress Homepage at the link: http://mysite.com/setting-wordpress-homepage consider changing the verb tense for the link to: http://mysite.com/set-wordpress-homepage.

Notice the use of the word SET in place of SETTING. This shows Google something I’m sure they are already smart enough to figure out, but YOU are taking the initiative in doing it which is an important point to remember in SEO.

This is not a game of sit back and wait, it’s a game of take charge and go. It’s a guarantee that some potential visitors will use a different verb tense when searching Google, and this way you show Google your interested in THAT keyword as well. It’s a small change, but small adds up.

Use Good Keywords As Categories

Again, don’t waste an opportunity to TELL Google what you are trying to rank for by giving your category some obscure names.

Also, keep in mind that dashes are best (my-keyword), underscores are second best (my_keyword), and no spaces is the worst (mykeyword).

If I’ve messed up and not used dashes or even underscores, should I go back and reformat each post?

Matt emphatically replies…

“No. Focus on creating better content. The search engines do a relatively good job of doing separators.”

For the last half of this article, I’d simply like to share some important quotes from Matt Cutts’ discussion on WordPress, and where appropriate, share some of my own thoughts and feedback.

MATT: “Find something you’re passionate about, write often, pay attention to the mechanics, and don’t overdo it.

MATT: “Start in a small niche then build up, build up, build up, build up.”

Matt then went on to reference Katamari. I assume the takeaway is that here was a game developed with a relatively small budget by gaming standards that went on to achieve huge success and spawn the creation of subsequent games because they focused on simple fundamentals not hype, cutting edge graphics, etc (things that other game developers probably thought were MUST HAVES).

We all know how that line of reasoning can carry over to the web. In the end it always comes back to quality over quantity.

MATT: “If someone tells you there’s a shortcut and you can be the number 1 gadget blogger in 3 days and you can beat engadget and gizmodo, laugh in their face and send them packing because it doesn’t work that way. If you want to be the best gadget blogger, start off by writing about a particular type of phone.

Matt goes on to say…

Provide a useful service, do original research, give great information, find a creative niche, write some code, live blogging, make lists, create controversy.

If I had to sum up what it takes to become a successful web entrepreneur or blogger that last quote would be it.

Matt touched on so many of the characteristics of those who are successful online in that one little sentence. Read it, then re-read it, then read it one more time!

MATT CUTTS ON VIDEO: While discussing another topic, Matt slid this comment in that I thought was important to share: “Videos tend to rank really well on Google.” Take that as you may, but it comes straight from the horses’ mouth.

MATT CUTTS ON ADSENSE: Matt shared the following code for Adsense users.

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

He went on to say that, “This will target Adsense ads to the meat of your posts. Ads will be more relevant to your visitors. You’ll get more clicks, and you’ll make more money.”

MATT CUTTS ON ERROR PAGES: Google.com/webmasters will show you the 404s on your site. If you notice a link coming from a reputable source, email them and ask them to update the link to the correct page (and you now have another link you didn’t have before or you THOUGHT you had before)

MATT CUTTS ON WORDPRESS HACKS: To protect your /wp-admin folder, Matt shared the following code. I will caution you that I am not a doctor and this should not be taken as serious medical advice. Seek a professional’s opinion.

He said to add a .htaccess file in /wp-admin and insert the following:

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Access Control"
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist ohm IP address
allow from 123.45.67.89
# whitelist work IP address
allow from 123.45.67.98
</LIMIT>

Remember that you have to change the allow IP address to your IP and one major point of caution is that if your IP changes this could potentially create a problem. Done correctly, this makes it so that only YOU can access your /wp-admin folder.

So there you have it…a little bit of controversy mixed in with what I hope was helpful information that you can act on today to get your WordPress site ranking better on Google. Feel free to share your thoughts and feedback below especially related to some of the code segments as I by no means am a programmer

 

Things in the SEO world are constantly changing – but the folks over at StomperNet make it a point to stay on the cutting edge of SEO. Which is why I want you to watch this important free video.

This new video is from Leslie Rohde. If you don’t know who Leslie is, let me just give you the quick description: In 2002, Leslie was the very first person to advance the idea that Search Rankings could be affected by using the text in links that point to a page.

…Yeah, THAT Leslie Rohde.

Since he’s an SEO Engineer, and a StomperNet Faculty Member, I know this video is going to cause trouble. Lots of trouble. LSI has been the “buzz” word for years, and in one fell swoop, Leslie basically shows you why that notion is garbage and how 80+% of the so-called experts have gotten it wrong.

LSI stands for “Latent Semantic Indexing,” and in 2006, Google filed a whole bunch of patents that led a LOT of SEO folks to believe that LSI was in FULL FORCE and EFFECT at Google.

(Too bad NONE of those patents were actually about LSI – they just LOOKED like they were.)

No matter.

In this video, Leslie will PROVE to you that LSI is NOT having any effect on your Search Rankings. Which means, if you’ve been struggling to get Rankings on Google because you’ve been chasing LSI – STOP.

Do this instead. Leslie is going to talk about an SEO Strategy that you ARE going to want to know about…

…It’s called “Referential Integrity”, or “RI” for short.

Yes, this New Video marks the beginning of the SIXTH series of StomperNet’s famous Going Natural Videos. (I heard a rumor they’re re-opening their awesome Stomping the Search Engines 2 and Net Effect Journal for just $1!)

If you want to stop wasting time on SEO and only getting mediocre rankings, then you need to watch this video – more SEO Video Goodness from StomperNet.

P.S. You’re not gonna like the ending. But you really should opt in and see the 2nd part of the video. And if you opt-in, they’ll also send you a 7-part report from Jerry West called The 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes. As an affiliate myself, this targeted report for affiliate marketers looking to rank their sites organically is incredibly helpful!

StomperNet KNOWS SEO. I think they want to prove it to you.

Personal Experience: I am currently one of Clickbank’s top 100 clients (as an affiliate) thanks in part to the training I received from StomperNet (I’m a proud Stomper alumni). You need to at least watch their free content because it’s better than almost any paid SEO training you can find today. It’s beyond current, it’s the techniques SEO experts will be talking about in 2010 as “ground breaking.”

Every time I watch one of their free videos I learn something, and that’s what they want. Watch the video, and let me know what you think. I, for one, am going to completely shift my SEO focus thanks to this free video series.

For the most part, bloggers are scatterbrained.

This is O.K. if it’s your personal blog covering things relevant to you and your life. But if your goal is to build a website or blog that can generate income, let me provide you with a framework that successful bloggers follow.

Focus On One Thing

Every time I create a new site, I make sure the focus of that site: the content, the videos, the comments, everything is related to one topic. Instead of trying to make your site all things to all people (or worse yet, what you “think” people want to know about) find something that people are interested in (one topic) and build a website around it.

The internet affords people the luxury of finding specific groups of people who share common interests. People like to find specific answers to specific problems, and for this reason, your focus should be on creating tightly themed websites that are centered around one topic.

Example: To employ this “tightly themed” technique, it’s important that you make sure the topic in which your covering is not too broad. For example, don’t create a site centered around the general theme of “weight loss.” Instead, focus on one popular diet: South Beach, for instance. Become the expert for all things related to the South Beach Diet, and you (1) have an easier time writing content (2) attract a very targeted visitor that is first interested in information on the South Beach Diet but is ALSO interested in weight loss in general (the original much broader niche). If you want to create a site about “weight loss” don’t make it about the broad niche, find a specific subset within that niche and build a site (or sites) around that. Subsequently, you also get a backdoor into the broader niche (weight loss) but you do it in a very targeted way.

Have A Revenue Source Before You Create The Site

Continuing with the South Beach Diet example, before I would ever create a site around this topic, I would make sure I could first earn a commission for getting someone to:

1. Sign up for the diet
2. Do a desired action that generates revenue for me and is directly related to the South Beach Diet.

If you take away one thing from this article, get this: don’t create a site without first having a revenue generating action your future visitors can complete in place before you build the site. This may be earning a commission for selling a product, getting someone to signup for a trial, it could be anything. Just make sure it generates revenue for you, and it’s either selling the product your the “expert” about or is directly related to the topic.

This is the best way to build a website or blog that can make real money. Furthermore, you won’t start with the notion of, ‘I’m going to just start writing about [BLANK] and see where it takes me.’ Don’t waste your time going down that road.

Find a way to make a commission for selling a product or generating a lead, then build a niche site centered around this ONE thing. Like my economics teacher used to say, “Prior planning prevents poor performance.” Start with the end goal in mind, focus on one topic, then build your site.

<blatant pitch> In Buying & Selling Websites we cover many other techniques related to what makes successful websites, what types of sites are best to buy, and how you can get the most money for a site you want to sell. If you want to learn about any of those topics in greater detail, we’d love to have you as a customer! We’ll take good care of you. </blatant pitch>

In this series of posts I’ll be covering several strategies to maximize your blogs potential with proper optimization. How can you be both search engine and user friendly at the same time? It’s a tough balancing act at times, but if you really want to make money blogging, you must start with a properly optimized blog.

Display Your Keywords First And Often

Let’s use Blogging Experiment as an example. For almost 2 years now, BE has been a content driven resource teaching people how to make money. The topics include blogging, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, and how to buy and sell websites. While the topics are varied, the general theme is consistent: how to make money online.

For this reason, a list of popular keywords that BE wants to rank well for (and subsequently write content for) must be related to these keywords.

Currently, our site ranks well for a number of keywords related to the topics listed above, but as I started browsing through the site, I noticed a couple key areas where further optimization would help even more.

Starting with the navigation bar, I changed “Home” to “Make Money.” For those who don’t know, the anchor text (the phrase used to describe the link – in our example “Make Money”) is very important in search engine rankings. By keeping the word “Home” as the anchor text pointing back to your home page you are inadvertently telling the search engines that your home page is trying to rank for the phrase “Home.”

Because 99.9% of other websites just leave the word “Home” as the anchor text to your home page, you are now competing with virtually every other website online for the keyword “Home.”

Furthermore, in our example, the navigation bar is the first text our site displays. Not all sites have the navigation set up like this, but this makes it even more critical in our situation.

Those top links are the first introductions search engines have to our site after going through the title tag and meta description. For this reason, we want to make sure that they (the search engines) quickly realize what this site is about. By making “Make Money” our anchor text with the link back to our home page, we let the first on-site text be a very keyword rich phrase in which we want to rank.

If you want to use the word “Home,” at least try to fit in one of your targeted keywords somewhere close to the top.

The second part is to display your keywords often.

Remember, often doesn’t mean trying to keyword stuff every article or page with your targeted keywords. Instead, it simply means to be aware of the keywords in which you want to rank and use them strategically throughout your site. Consistency is the key here. Be aware of your targeted phrases and use them wisely.

Don’t Forget The Footer

Just as important as it is to have the search engine see your keyword phrase somewhere close to the top of your site, it’s equally important to include that same phrase, or even a little different variation of that phrase (what I recommend) at the bottom in your footer.

As you can see, instead of using the phrase “Make Money” like we used in the navigation bar, this time we used another target keyword: “Make Money Online.”

We want the search engines to see that our site, more specifically our home page since that’s where the links point, are directly related to each other. The next step is to make sure that your content actually reflects information related to those key phrases. Meaning: don’t just pick your best two keywords, put them in your header and footer then talk about completely unrelated topics on your site.

That’s not what this is about.

Optimization by it’s definition is to modify a system to make some aspect of it work more efficiently or use fewer resources. Taking the time to do these little “detail” things are what separate the mediocre sites from the ones who actually make money. Granted, optimization will not necessarily put money in your pockets directly, but a better optimized site means more traffic which ultimately means more money.

These tips work great with optimizing wordpress, other blog platforms, or any website in general.

-Kyle

Nobody has the attention span to work on ANYTHING for 8 hours straight in a day. I read a stat somewhere that on an average work day, most people only actually do 2 hours of “real work”. The rest of the time is spent browsing the web, checking emails, chatting on instant messenger, talking with co-workers, spent “in meetings” and other non productive work just to fill up an 8 hour shift.

I wonder who came up with this schedule for employees?

Even though I haven’t worked a 9-5 job in many years due to my internet business success, I still carry on the same values I’ve always held about how much work time is optimal. Personally, I can get more work done in 3 hours than almost anyone who works an 8 hour shift. So, that’s what I try to do with my internet businesses as well. Here’s how I do it…

Think about what goal you need to achieve for any given day. Make a quick bullet point listing of each task you must get done. Next, turn off your cell phone, your instant messenger system, close your door and do not allow any distractions whatsoever. Then, you just dive right in.

When you are 100% fully focused on a particular task, you can get it done so much faster than if you have distractions around you. This technique is what I call my 3 hour work block and it works amazingly well.

In many cases, by blocking out a certain amount of time like this, I’m able to get ALL of my work done for the day in just three hours. And I still get more done than I would in a typical 8 hour workday without this extreme focus.

I don’t care if you work a job or if you have a full time internet business, try this and see what happens. It’s very refreshing when you start at 9am, plow through all of your tasks and by noon, you are basically DONE working for the day.

I don’t recommend working this hard for more than 3 hours at a time because you will get burned out. If I’m a little behind or want to accomplish more and get ahead, I simply work a 3 hour block, take 3 or 4 hours off to relax and then do another 3 hour block.

Still only working a total of 6 hours, but the amount of work I get done is incredible.

Analyze Your Competitor’s Backlinks

One of the best tried-and-tested recommendations is to analyze your competitor’s backlinks. You can make this the starting point of your link building campaign. Remember though that you need to keep track of all information you get in excel or word file; this will not only make you organized, you will also discover the link map of the whole industry as you progress along. Soon, you will have an impressive list of link prospects.

When you visit the sites that your competitors are linked from, look for the “recommend as site” and “add URL” links. There are times when it would be easy to just fill out the form and submit your link but there will also be times when you need to dig a little before you find the “add URL” link or even find their contact info.

Stay Organized

Once you have a healthy list, stay focused and organized by grouping your prospects into different sections including authority links, blog links, directory links, social media links, newsgroup links, and forum links among others. And depending on your industry, you can further categorize your list. For example, if you have a “make money online” site, you can categorize your links into:

• Sites about Blogging
• E-commerce Sites
• Auction Sites
• Search Engine Optimization Sites
• Web Development
• Business Information Websites

Having an organized list will also help you determine the anchor text you should use. Once you’re organized, you’re ready to start your successful link building campaign.

BUT, every once in a while I come across a story of an entrepreneur who takes an unlikely idea and turns it into a huge money maker.

Here’s one of these examples I just came across…

As you know, gas prices are out of control right now. It’s a super hot topic that is on the news pretty much everyday. Most people sit around and complain about it because they think there is nothing they can do.

Here is one guy who is not complaining one bit!

Basically this guy found a way to run a car using WATER. It sounds crazy to me, but after watching the video on the middle of this page, it’s pretty impressive. He says in the video that his car was about to drive about 100 miles or so on 4 OUNCES of water.

I’m not trying to start an argument over whether or not you can run your can on water or not. I don’t know anything about cars or how they work and I don’t see myself converting my car into a water burning machine anytime soon.

But it’s a great lesson of taking a huge problem in the world and coming up with a possible solution to the problem. I’m sure this guy will make millions if not BILLIONS of dollars if this thing actually works. Anytime it feels like everything is going wrong, the economy is crashing and the sky is falling, a few smart people always find a way to capitalize on the situation and become wealthy…

I wonder what other kinds of solutions we can come up with like this guy just did?

1. New Website – when your site is new, you should expect that it will not perform that well with search engines. Take note that there are over 30 billion pages on the internet and a lot of these can be categorized as “spam”. Before search engines start to give your site a good ranking, they need to achieve a certain level of trust with you and this will grow over time as you build your content, traffic, and one way links.
2. Black Hat SEO Techniques – very few people want to be called a black hat marketer; or in layman’s term, a spammer. But no one can deny that being a black hat marketer does have its own appeal because of its immediate results. If you decide to take this route, you should realize that you can be hit by a penalty or in some cases, banned altogether.
3. Useless Content – even if you invest a lot in creating your website, it would not matter if you don’t have good content. Searchers are exactly that, they search for information that is relevant to their needs over the internet. In addition, good content will generate a lot of links which are “votes” for your website.
4. Duplicate Content – some people debate on the impact of using duplicate content on their websites. But as far as I’m concerned, search engines love fresh content and it will reward websites and blogs that frequently posts new and original articles.