Google Author Rank – Does Google Know You?

Building an authority site is much like pursuing a traditional career. The only difference is the arena. For the web professional, the career path is via the digital workplace. In the not so distant past, Google’s ranking results came from SEO tactics that were not always reflective of the quality and the value of the websites that managed to achieve the #1 SERP spot. Keyword stuffing, thin content, excessive backlinking, and other techniques pushed websites to the top while other legitimate, high quality, killer content websites suffered in obscurity several Gooooooogle pages away. False authority.

Fast forward to today, after numerous pagerank casualties from several algorithm updates – the Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird – Google has managed to steer the internet bull by its horns and is slowly making it ‘behave’. Generally, websites that employ black hat SEO tactics and other non-Google approved techniques get ‘slapped’, while on the other hand, legitimate websites get rewarded. The playing field is slowly being leveled. The name of the game today is author rank. Google has been slowly implementing it and so should you.

Author Rank, Google Authorship, Google+, and rel=author

Othar Hansson describes the rel=author markup as an HTML5 link attribute saying that the other side of this link represents the author of that page where the link is coming from. What will you get when you implement rel=author ? Your photo may show up next to the search engine results. Hansson says that Google uses it to provide authorship information and that it also hopes to use this markup information as a ranking signal. This markup will also provide information regarding credibility and knowledgeability of authors – hopefully creating a feeling of trustworthiness regarding their posts & sites.

Tips on how to implement rel=author on WordPress:

  • Make sure you’re using the latest version. If your template allows a byline with an author URL, this will let you add rel=”author” to your post byline.
  • If your blog has an About page, you can modify its link to include rel=”author”.
  • If rel=”author” is disappearing from your profile page, you can enable rel=”author” in author bios.

(source: Google Webmaster)

You can also choose to install a WordPress authorship plugin like Google Author Link to make it easier and simpler to manage your Google Authorship links.

Google’s webmasters blog states,

Google is piloting the display of author information in search results to help users discover great content. This feature is being rolled out gradually and will be implemented algorithmically, so author information will not always display in search results.

To identify the author of a blog or article, Google checks for a connection between the content page (such as an article), an author page, and a Google Profile. Authorship markup uses the rel attribute (part of the open HTML5 standard) in links to indicate the relationship between a content page and an author page.

A rich profile is not only a great way to share information with users, but it also gives Google information we need to better identify you as the author of web content.

You can setup your Google author profile using Google Plus. This will help you build your reputation as an established author and will help put your site on the map. Once you establish your credibility, anything associated with you will be considered trustworthy and worth paying attention to. This will trigger Google to notice you and it tells them you are someone who knows and writes quality content – an authority or expert – on a particular subject and will eventually result in better SERP ranking results and higher CTR for you and your website.

Check out this interesting article – Author Rank by AJ Kohn.

Take it Nice and Easy With These Business and Leisure WordPress Themes

Good food and exotic travel destinations – the stuff that we plan for and dream about. Trying out new dining places and taking on new travel adventures will always be a favorite activity to do after work or during vacations. The good news is your restaurant or your boutique hotel need not be so obscure anymore with the help of the internet. Creating your own website not only to advertise your business but also to process business transactions has never been more convenient. If you are in the food or travel industry, check out these awesome WordPress themes to showcase your gourmet creations or your luxurious travel and tour packages:

Tour Package – WordPress Travel/Tour Theme

Tour Package Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and organized premium theme especially designed for those in the travel industry. This theme is equipped with a custom package post type that allows you to feature different travel and tour packages your customers can easily browse and choose from. This theme also comes with a booking form (Contact form 7 required) and a package filtering system to help customers find packages by location, price, available dates, etc. Tour Package also includes Page Builder, Layer Slider, Drag and Drop manager, WPML Support, WooCommerce support and many other features. It includes several page templates like gallery, sitemap, portfolio, pricing, etc. It is responsive, retina ready, and SEO optimized as well.

Iron Bull Restaurant WordPress Theme

Show off your gastronomic delights and mouth watering dishes with Iron Bull Premium WordPress Theme – a responsive WordPress restaurant theme that will surely make your visitors hungry for more. This bold and modern theme is the perfect theme to showcase your signature dishes and unique cuisine to stand out from the rest. You can customize this interactive theme anyway you like or choose from two predefined schemes (Sunfire or Victory Blue) to get started right away. Features included are: google maps, a sticky navigation with scrollspy, menus that have prices and calorie counts, food menu treatment, page templates (careers, polaroid inspired image gallery), and so much more. This premium WordPress theme is also available in HTML version.

Royal Gold WordPress Theme

Give your visitors that luxurious experience on your website with Royal Gold WordPress Theme – a unique WordPress theme especially designed for luxury hotels, exclusive resorts, posh restaurants, and spa/beauty centers. This premium theme features the easyReservations plugin, Contact Form 7, and Responsive Lightbox plugin to give your clientele the comfort and convenience of booking or making an online reservation with you. This mobile first premium theme is capable of optimizing bandwidth for smaller screens. This theme also features the 360º Panoramic viewer plugin which is quite useful for showcasing a panoramic view of rooms and accommodations.

Savory Responsive WordPress Theme

Savory Premium WordPress Theme is a clean, responsive WordPress theme for restaurants, diners, bars, pizzerias, coffee shops, etc. This no-frills theme comes in three skin types (Modern, Rustic, Classic), 4 custom widgets, a shortcode generator, a Retail Menu Cards plugin, all bundled in a simple, straightforward designed theme. You also get everything you need like: menu, contact information, map, opening hours, daily specials and other design elements necessary in setting up your restaurant’s online home.

Sweet Cake Responsive WordPress Theme

Sweet Cake Premium WordPress Theme is a one page Responsive HTML5 CSS3 Theme for WordPress perfect for your business. The graphic is very sweet and creative – ideal for bakeries, ice cream shops, restaurants and cake designers but if you want you can change the colors to adapt the theme for all activities. In the package you will also find sweet icons in vector format. The theme has been designed using the 1200 px grid system with 12 columns.

Soho Hotel Responsive Booking WP Theme

Soho Hotel Premium WordPress Theme is an organized and easy to navigate WordPress theme designed for hotels, hostels, service apartments and any other kind of accommodation which requires a booking system. This theme includes 4 preset and ready to use colour schemes that you can choose from or you can also choose to create your own colour palette using the colour picker in the theme options panel. This premium theme also includes a fully functional booking system and room availability plugin allowing visitors to conveniently book and make reservations without the hassle of overlapped or double booking. This fully responsive and translation ready premium theme currently supports PayPal.

25 Basic Adobe Lightroom Tutorials for Learners

The phrase “photo editing” has become synonymous with “Adobe Photoshop”. Photoshop is the industry leader when it comes to editing images. But one drawback of Photoshop is that a designer needs a good amount of coaching before he can use Photoshop properly. A coaching center near my house promises to teach Photoshop in 2 months to the layman. Not everybody will be willing to invest two months to learn a photo editing software, especially when one does not intend to choose photo designing as a career.

Understanding this problem, Adobe has designed another software named Adobe Lightroom to help even the general public to easily edit images. To quote Adobe’s website – “Lightroom includes all the tools you need for most digital photography tasks in one intuitive solution. Lightroom helps photographers work faster and more efficiently with one image, a set of images, or a large image library.”

When I stated that Lightroom can be used for the general public I don’t mean that one can begin using it merely after installing it. Obviously you need to have some guidance to use the software properly. Therefore, in this blog post, I have collected a list of 25 excellent tutorials on how to use Lightroom properly and get desired results.

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5 Excellent Resources for Free PSD Web Templates


The Internet is such a great resource for learning almost anything. You can practically start a whole new career based on all the free available information that can be downloaded online. Thanks to very generous people who don’t mind sharing their talent and resources for others to learn from. For those who want to try their hand at designing web templates, one of the best ways to learn is to mimic the good ones that are out there. Thankfully, there are excellent resources out there if you know where to look. Here are some of the best that’s out there today and the great thing about it is that these resources are absolutely free. Check them out:

Blaz Robar

Blaz Robar is a graphic designer from Melbourne, Australia and is part of a web design studio, Eleven Media that specialises in creating unique WordPress themes. Below is one of the many PSD templates available on his site Blazrobar.com and you can also find his work on www.thelayoutlab.com.

Luis Zuno

Luis Zuno is a full time web designer & developer spends his time creating themes and templates. Below is a sample of one of the free PSD files on this site were created by him. According to him, you are free to download, and use them in both your commercial and personal projects. Luis Zuno’s work can also be found at ThemeForest.

Martin Fabricius

Martin Fabricius is a young and talented web designer from Vejle Denmark and has won several awards in his homeland. According to him:

My big passion is usability and web and app design. I make web and app design on a freelance basis apart from my job as CTO to Ungarbejde.dk

Below is a sample of the kind of work that is available on his website:

Elemis Freebies

Cemile and Volkan are two graduate students at VCD in Istanbul and work as freelance web designer/developers. Currently they are working on creating user-friendly and clean website templates on Themeforest.
Below is a sample of their work which can be downloaded for free on their website:

Premium Coding

Premium Coding is an interactive multimedia design website that provides tons of resources for web developers, designers, and the web community. Below is a sample of one of the many free resources you can download from their site.

With all the free tutorials, templates, and design resources available out there, you can jump start your web design skills in no time. So bring out your text editor, your editing software and get started. All you need to add to the equation is your time.

On Becoming a WordPress Professional

How does one become a certified WordPress professional indeed? Earning your stripes as a WordPress professional does not come from a course you enroll in and study for X number of years in your regular university. Neither do you get a degree or a diploma for the numerous WordPress conferences, seminars or webinars you attend. In truth, becoming a WordPress professional is not age bound, race bound, location bound, language bound or educational background bound. One key ingredient is the willingness to learn, make mistakes, and learn all over again.

Many current WordPress professionals and practitioners did not start out as such. Perhaps some have come out from the corporate world and taken a radical sabbatical from their daily grind while others probably started out in their dorm room or garage. Maybe others began tinkering with WordPress while they were in their teens while some are going through a second wind in their careers. The Internet has this built-in democratic leveling quality where anyone can make it regardless. Since the year is about to end, maybe some of you are considering a quiet change or transition into something else – a new career path of sorts. You don’t necessarily have to be a developer or a designer to be a WordPress professional. Here are a few options for you to think of if you are considering a shift into the exciting world of WordPress:

Developer

Web development is the back-end of the website, the programming and interactions on the pages. A web developer focuses on how a site works and how the customers get things done on it. Good web developers know how to program CGI and scripts like PHP. They understand about how web forms work and can keep a site running effectively.A good web developer will have excellent programming skills and be able to use a range of programming tools. He or she will be able to provide solutions to give a website the functions required. Web developers will use a range of programming tools such as ASP, Javascript, XML and SQL. The focus is more on the backend and the functionality of the site.

Designer (Themes)

Web design determines the look and feel of a website. It covers the layout, navigation and colors of a website. Web design is more concerned with aesthetics and user experience than functions. A web designer will make a website easy to use and fit for purpose. A good web designer will have graphic design skills and a good understanding of marketing. He or she will know how to grab the attention of visitors and encourage them to explore a website. A web designer is concerned with how a site looks and how the customers interact with it. Good web designers know how to put together the principles of design to create a site that looks great. They also understand about usability and how to create a site that customers want to navigate around in.

Developer (Plugins and Widgets)

Plug-ins and widgets are a great way to enhance the functionality of your site by adding in extra features. These can be placed anywhere inside your template by function hooks. You can start creating and eventually selling stand-alone plugins that add value to existing or new themes.

Support Professional

One of the most common deficiencies in the WordPress themes marketplace is the lack of or absence of theme support. You can start a career by being part of a support team that is responsible for providing after-sales support to customers who have purchased specific themes.

Consultant/Marketing

Providing consultancy services, networking, and hooking up clients with designers and developers is another option to becoming a WordPress Professional. Many times, a lot of great designers do poorly sales-wise because of a lack of marketing skills. You can offer your services to acts as a marketing consultant to WordPress designers and developers who have little or no time to do the marketing themselves.

Blogger/ Theme Description Writer

With the explosion of WordPress themes in the marketplace, there is very little difference between one theme to the next and a lot of them look like clones. You can offer your services as a writer to create a marketing hook for designers and developers who would rather write code than a marketing spiel.

Documentation Writer

Providing appropriate and useful detailed documentation that is easy to understand even by WordPress beginners is another option. Transcribing the installation and setting up process in easy to follow steps adds value to the theme and a well written piece will mean less resources spent on support.

WordPress Trainor

If you have acquired a certain level of proficiency in WordPress and you are confident enough about what you know, you can also try going into teaching and training.

These are just a few ideas to think of as you consider starting or shifting to a career as a WordPress professional.