One Page WordPress Themes – October 2013

One Page WordPress themes are becoming quite popular lately. Not only do these ultra simplified and straightforward themes look brilliant but they are also faster loading. Some say they also produce higher conversion rates. Here are some of the latest One Page WordPress themes you need to check out:

GoBlack One Page Parallax WordPress Theme

GoBlack Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and modern single-page portfolio styled theme ideal for the promoting services of creatives, design agencies, or creative freelancers in a professional manner. This 100% fully responsive theme was built in HTML5 and CSS3 using Parallax javascript to create the animated parallax image effects that make it engaging and dynamic. GoBlack features include the revolution slider, unique portfolio scroll animation, smooth tabless design, fentancy black color schemes, and so much more.

Prisma One Page Responsive WordPress Theme

Prisma Premium WordPress Theme was developed with a goal to provide a quick solution to create an impressive modern website with an easily editable layout without sacrificing unique aesthetics. This bold, fully responsive one page theme built with Bootstrap 2.3.2 is easy to customize and includes features such as: filterable portfolio with integrated Fancybox, animated retina-ready splash menu, and also single page layout with stand-alone page setup option among others.

Flavor One Page Parallax WordPress Theme

Flavor Premium WordPress Theme is a warm and classic looking one page premium theme that will surely make your portfolio stand out. The generous space dedicated to presenting images (filterable) is readily accessible and gives visitors a very good idea of the quality of your work. Salient features of this theme include: modular homepage – layout sections + layout shortcodes, smooth tabless design, parallax effect, flexible grid system built with Bootstrap, among many.

Webmakers One Page WordPress Theme

Webmakers Premium WordPress Theme is a single page, clean and minimalist style WordPress theme recommended for creatives, freelancers and agencies. This theme comes with 5 pre-made theme skins, powerful theme options with ability to change typography, unlimited style settings for colors, fonts, and other design elements, a custom plugin based shortcode generator to build theme element easily, a built in ajax contact form, to name a few.

Cingle Responsive One Page WordPress Theme

Cingle Premium WordPress Theme is a clean, responsive multi purpose One Page WordPress theme ideal for a range of web uses. This premium theme will work well for business or corporate portfolios, creative agencies, design professionals, or even freelance professionals who want a more flexible theme to meet their various needs. Cingle features an ultra responsive design (enable/disable), sticky navigation, light and dark styles, parallax, Google Analytics tracking code, unlimited theme customization options, etc. to get your website to where you want it to be.

Simple Easy Parallax Retina WordPress Theme

Simple Premium WordPress Theme is an impressive, modern and yet very easy to use flat design WordPress theme with both single page and multiple page layout options. This fully responsive theme inspired by cool metro colors and built with Bootstrap includes features such as: mobile optimized parallax feature, animated contents, retina display optimization, touch optimized responsive layout, filterable expanding portfolio, and fully tested it on iPhone 5, iPad 4, S3 android and Windows Phone.

Visia Responsive One Page Retina WordPress Theme

Visia Premium WordPress Theme is a beautiful, minimalist, fully responsive retina ready single page WordPress theme that will surely impress your visitors. This premium theme includes a separate blog section and is suitable for any kind of creative or business use. Visia is highly optimized for both mobile and desktop platforms and uses a lazy-loading support for images, assets and compression of all required scripts for lightning fast loading time. It also features a built in custom thumbnail cropping tool to help you control images you need to highlight for your posts.

Omni One Page/Multi Page Parallax Flat WordPress Theme

Omni Premium WordPress Theme is a high quality, flat and full responsive WordPress theme for creative businesses or photographers. This Bootstrap built modern theme gives you 5 amazing header options to choose from (portfolio, revolution slider, video, parallax, layer slider).You can add unlimited pages and separators to each page and customize them according to your own preferences.You also have a choice between the One Page and the MultiPage version which can be easily switched in the Admin panel.

Not Your Usual WordPress SEO Plugins To Try

WordPress as a Content Management System, in itself, is already a good platform for SEO goals because of the way it is structured. But you can always make a good thing better if you want to. Check out these fresh SEO plugins that you might not have heard of but might help make your SEO efforts yield even better results.

Premium SEO Pack for WP

This plugin in gives you a whole array of tools to help you optimize your site’s visibility in internet searches. The plugin includes monitoring tools like Google Analytics, SERP tracking, On-Page and Off-Page optimization tools, the premium Mass Optimization feature that allows you to optimize all your posts and pages at once. Another cool on page feature is Local SEO. This allows you to rank your pages based on the geographic locale. Other noteworthy on page features are: title & meta format, sitemap, SEO slug optimizer, SEO feature optimizer and google authorship. The SEO pack also includes Link Builders, Backlink Builder, Social Stats, Page Speed Insights, Smush It, and also an SEO code insert feature.

WordPress SEO Post-Optimizer

WordPress SEO Post-Optimizer plugin assists you in optimizing page rank posts. This plugin checks your posts againsts SEO criteria, checks for keyword density (the right amount of keywords in a post), and autochecks for the SEO score of your post every 15 seconds. The SEO scores are expressed in percentage. A real time check on the amount of words is also done in recognition of the fact that search engines usually prefer content with more than 300 words. The plugin also checks if the post has images or not and also if there are links to older posts on your blog to improve your internal content structure. The Post Optimizer plugin also checks for internal links, the usage of h-tags and alt-tags, and bold, italicized, or underlined keywords in your post.

Rankie

Rankie is a WordPress Rank Checker plugin that helps you keep track of WordPress rankings on Google keeping a close eye on each keyword position. The plugin allows you to track an unlimited number of keywords on Google and keeps updating these ranks daily. You can also check out ranking trends per week, month or all time. The plugin is also a great keyword research tool that helps you generate keyword lists by suggesting possible alternatives to keywords of interest. You can track unlimited number of keywords ranking on Google and keep updating these ranks daily as it works as a WordPress SERP plugin, generate ranking reports per month, per year or by all time letting you know how ranking is going up or down with details on every single position change for each tracked keyword, including many other helpful tracking functions.

Ultimate Video SEO Plugin

Ultimate Video SEO Plugin is an advanced stand alone plugin for WordPress which covers all aspects of Video SEO. It automatically fetches video SEO details from videos of all major video hosting providers and submit it to a video sitemap. What can it do? It supports self hosted videos in all WordPress supported video formats. It notifies search engines whenever a sitemap is updated or generated. It supports video embedded through shortcode or metabox (created by third party plugins or theme). It supports self hosted videos embedded using default WordPress media gallery. It adds schema.org video object markup to all your video posts/pages. It shows snippet preview of video search results within your post editor.

Meta Tags Optimization

Meta Tags are keywords used by search engines to find useful information. A lot of times the title and nature of the content may not be associated with the right meta tags. The Meta Tags Optimization plugin advices the admin whether the page is optimized correctly, by highlighting with green and red colors the Meta Tags that are found on the page. While the plugin will not tell us what tags to add or eliminate, it will highlight with red the incorrect inputs. This plugin gives useful information to the writer by highlighting meta tags on the page that may not be the best suited for the content. This plugin also lets you optimize meta tags for posts/pages by providing you clear instruction to repair your meta tags.

What Features Do Most Commercial WordPress Themes Have in Common?

WordPress users enjoy many benefits not necessarily available in other content management systems. The plethora of high quality WordPress themes that users can choose from is more than enough to dress up any website. Whatever type of website you plan to put up, most likely, there is a WordPress theme for it. Here are some of the most common features present in some of the most popular WordPress themes in the market today.

A Great Slider

An effective theme must help create a steady following for your site. It must be able to captivate casual visitors and convert theme into followers that eventually become clients and customers. A slideshow is a great tool that can deliver quick, dramatic visual impact combining the use of images with taglines, spiels, or memes to hook visitor interest. This billboard-like effect gives casual visitors something to spark their curiosity and encourage them to examine and explore your site further. The short attention span this generation has, a slider is an indispensable feature for any website. Popular plugins like Slider Revolution, Layer Slider, Nivo Slider, and Flexslider make the job a whole lot easier.

Parallax and Animation

Once you’ve gotten the attention of visitors, the challenge shifts towards keeping their interest. Perhaps you’ve attended lectures were you came in with excitement about what you could learn only to be disappointed by a boring, uncharismatic instructor whose droning voice put you to sleep. This is analogous to going through great content in boring or even hard to read content. This actually narrows your followers to those who are actually already sold to your content. If your goal is to convert more people to your product or service, the presentation of your content has to facilitate easy reading and assimilation of information. Corporate presentations are often more effective when stats are represented as animated charts and bullets. These actually help executives focus on the items that need to be considered. Having animated bullets and content sections also give focus on items you want your visitors to remember.

Flexible Layout with Drag and Drop Capability

Presenting your content is important in developing your following. While animation helps your audience focus on key points of your content, a sound content structure is still required for visitors to make sense of your site as a whole. Being able to piece together key points into a cohesive body of knowledge will drive home a stronger message to your visitors that will keep them coming for more. To do this, your content has to be organized in such a way that visitors go through important sections in a natural, stress free manner. The natural flow of content will vary according to your audience. Recognizing this, themes that have been designed and devised to respond to the needs of various audiences will bring a higher conversion in terms of subscribers and followers. A lot of themes now include drag and drop page builder features allowing you to assemble your own pages from scratch. Some themes come with ready made layouts for almost any type of site which can be tweaked to meet specific audience needs. Most, if not all, of these themes have powerful options panels and shortcode generators for maximum customization flexibility.

Mobile Friendly

Mobile is a platform that cannot be ignored. Mobile gadgets are part of today’s lifestyle because of the convenience it provides its users. As such, theme designers and developers are forced to confront the peculiarities one encounters when using a mobile device. A theme has to be responsive. This means it has to be able to adjust to give the best possible display regardless of what device you use to browse your site. Theme pages need to have the capability to reorder and resize according to tablet and smartphone displays without sacrificing the beauty of the theme on desktop. In addition to this, special navigation menus for mobile devices must be able to facilitate the interface differences on these devices from desktop. Usually, the Bootstrap framework is a theme author’s go to option to ensure optimal performance on mobile platforms.

Good SEO

No matter how great your site is in terms of content or aesthetics, it must be found by your target audience. Great themes are coded in such away that is friendly to search engines to help land your site on the first few pages of search results. This is accomplished in a number of ways: meta and links, XML sitemaps, RSS Optimization, and Breadcrumb among others. There are numerous options to ensure your site is covered by good SEO measures. Clean code, SEO optimized images and videos, and installing reliable and tested SEO plugins like SEO by Yoast, etc. are some of the many SEO practices you can integrate on your site.

WordPress Slider Mania

Sliders are staples in websites nowadays. A homepage without a slideshow seems an oddity considering the media intensive content this generation craves for. For all the benefits sliders give website owners, there are indeed some sliders that really standout from the rest. Below is a listing of 5 of the most popular sliders available in the market today:

Slider Revolution

Considered the most popular plugin in the Envato marketplace, Slider Revolution is a slider definitely worth considering. This plugin features tons of unique transition effects, an image preloader, video embedding, autoplay that stops on user interaction and lots of easy to set options to create your own effects. This plugin is one of the few that offers full screen slideshows, it is also noted for enabling almost any type of content that can be put in a slideshow, and, it is quite popular for its responsive feature as well. The plugin also enables easy slider creation using Visual Builder. Using its animation builder, you can conveniently drag and drop captions, and, create your own custom animation easily. Slider Revolution also allows you to integrate SEO optimization measures on your slides thus further improving your page’s performance on search engines.

Royal Slider

This slider plugin was created especially for mobile devices. What makes Royal Slider standout is its affinity toward touch screen interfaces. Create your own custom slideshows and css3 banner rotators with images, videos or HTML content in slides, allow dynamic population of data from Flickr, Instagram, Featured posts and even WooCommerce products, display vertical or horizontal thumbnails with the plugin’s photo gallery. While it doesn’t have much of fancy transition effects, Royal does guarantee a stable, accessible, high performance slider experience on any device. RoyalSlider is tested on Mac, PC, iPad 2, iPhone 4, HTC Desire, Lumia 920, Surface, Blackberry PlayBook and even on Kindle Keyboard

Layer Slider

Layer slider is most noted for its use of cutting edge technology to give you more than 200 preset 2D and 3D slide transitions to give you the smoothest slideshow experience available. At the very heart of this slider is its layered design that enables you to have 3D like slideshows. Easy to use interfaces enable you to create your slideshows in a WYSIWYG manner which include live previews, drag and drop slider builder, etc. The plugin supports responsive layouts, multiple layouts and touch screen gestures to ensure that your slideshow experience is the same regardless of device. Layer slider is SEO friendly allowing you to build semantic markup with custom attributes that search engines can index easily.

Slider PRO

This fully responsive and mobile ready slider plugin in comes with 150+ options to help you set-up your very own slideshow. The plugin allows you to dynamically load content from your content. Slider PRO also enables you to add animated or static layers into your slideshows to create 3D like slides. The plugin uses a user friendly media loader to enable easy population of content into your slideshows. Slider PRO offers 100+ transition effects which can be optimized into hundreds of possible variations.

Touch Carousel

This slider plugin was created with mobile devices in mind. Touch carousel enables touch navigation on iOS, Android and Blackberry devices. Over 20 settings are available to control speed, layout and slideshow. Touch carousel allows you to slide any post type including WooCommerce and Jigoshop content. You can select content based on taxonomy, popularity or date.

Best WordPress Plugins to Boost Your Business Site’s Performance

Most corporate websites are extensions of real-world businesses that want to create an online presence. In the real world, these companies most likely have real-time tools and metrics in place to determine how the business is doing at any given point. Reports and analysis are part and parcel of normal operations as is marketing campaigns and feedback. Does this apply to the company’s online presence?

The online address of a company serves as a virtual business card cum portfolio cum marketing tool which the company can use to expand their reach. It is not unusual for business owners to expect that the same measurables to be derived from their corporate website. The ability to track, measure, and analyze data extracted from online activities is one of the key things a business owner needs to be able to do to be able to asses the effectiveness of the corporate website.

Here are some of the best WordPress plugins and tools you can use to enhance the efficiency of as well as measure the viability your business website.

Site Security and Backup

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day. WordPress sites can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software. iThemes Security works to fix common holes, stop automated attacks and strengthen user credentials. This plugin hides common WordPress security vulnerabilities, preventing attackers from learning too much about your site and away from sensitive areas like your site’s login, admin, etc. iThemes Security works to protect it by blocking bad users and increasing the security of passwords and other vital information. This plugin monitors your site and reports changes to the filesystem and database that might indicate a compromise, works to detect bots and other attempts to search vulnerabilities, and makes regular backups of your WordPress database, allowing you to get back online quickly in the event of an attack.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

WordPress Backup to Dropbox keeps your valuable WordPress website, its media and database backed up to Dropbox in minutes and on a regular basis. Simply choose a day, time and how often you wish your backup to be performed and just wait for your websites files and an SQL dump of its database to be dropped in your Dropbox account.

Wordfence Security

Wordfence Security is a free enterprise class security plugin that includes a firewall, anti-virus scanning, cellphone sign-in (two factor authentication), malicious URL scanning and live traffic including crawlers. Wordfence is the only WordPress security plugin that can verify and repair your core, theme and plugin files, even if you don’t have backups. Key features include: real-time blocking of known attackers, two factor authentication used by banks, government agencies and military world-wide for highest security authentication, includes a firewall to block common security threats like fake Googlebots, malicious scans from hackers and botnets, block entire malicious networks, etc.

Site Statistics and Analytics

Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog. It supports Universal (analytics.js) and traditional analytics (ga.js), includes an admin dashboard widget that displays a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches, supports outbound link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress, and many other features to support Google Analytics on your site.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily with lots of metadata, views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews. This plugin uses the asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, the fastest and most reliable tracking code Google Analytics offers. It features simple installation through integration with Google Analytics API where its as simple as authenticating and selecting the site you want to track. You can also easily connect your Google AdSense and Google Analytics accounts.

Site Content Management

Editorial Calendar

The Editorial Calendar plugin makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog and gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.

Zedity™ The Easiest Way To Create Your Content

Zedity™ is an innovative Editor to create your posts or pages amazingly easily, quickly and hassle-free with no technical skills required. It gives you total flexibility and unprecedented possibilities to create any desired design, as easily as if done on a piece of paper. Key features include: content in posts and pages that scale down accordingly to your responsive layout, additional content boxes (color box, document box, HTML5 box), audio and video embed capabilities, snap and alignment positioning, and so many other features.

WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest Cache plugin creates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. Performance enhancement features include: Generating static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog, Minify HTML (decrease the size of page), Minify Css (decrease the size of CSS files), All cache files are deleted when a post or page is published, Enable/Disable cache option for mobile devices, Leverage browser caching which reduces page load times for repeat visitors, etc.

SEO

WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, designed and developed by WordPress Consultant Joost De Valk, is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

Must Have Features in Choosing a WordPress Theme for your Website

WordPress theme trends come and go. Some popular features a while back have faded away while others went mainstream and have become basic and essential features integral to a WordPress theme. A lot of the WordPress themes in the marketplace today are feature-packed and sometimes it gets overwhelming to choose the perfect one. Website owners need to be able to sort through long menu of features, pull out those that are relevant to their own specific website needs and goals, just to make sure they don’t get an over bloated and slow-loading website. Here are some basic features to look for in selecting a WordPress theme to fit your website needs.

Flexibility and Ease of Use

User experience is a key factor in web design. WordPress themes must be flexible enough to adapt to the user’s needs and provide way for customization to be simple and easy. A popular feature nowadays is the drag and drop feature where layouts can be configured and reconfigured by simply dragging and dropping elements into specific areas. WordPress themes that include this feature already have a fan base as it makes customization convenient and friendly even for WordPress beginners.

Responsive (On or Off feature)

The emergence of mobile platforms in internet usage makes its users a population that shouldn’t be ignored. A lot of people think that mobile might eventually displace desktop as the dominant platform for internet access. In light of this, website owners need to consider WordPress themes that are 100% responsive enabling content to be presented efficiently on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile or handheld devices. Themes that include features such as menus especially designed for mobile devices, responsive sliders, and responsive images are also a plus factor. Some also prefer that they have control over whether they want the responsive feature turned on or off which means that WordPress themes that have this option will appeal to this type of web user.

Search Engine Optimization

It would be a pity for a site with amazing content to be left to obscurity because search engines can’t find it. According to Joost de Valk, creator of the popular SEO plugin Yoast,

“Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there are a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.”

WordPress themes that are built according to best code practices and are integrated with sound SEO measures will do well as far as search engine visibility and ranking are concerned.

Multi Media Handling Capabilities

Gone are the days where people are merely content reading stuff on the web. Today’s generation of internet users seek more interactive and media heavy content. Website users tend to lean towards WordPress themes that are flexible enough to handle all types of media formats (audio, video, images, etc). Support for self-hosted videos, Youtube, Vimeo and SoundCloud, and other third party multi media content hosts is always a plus as internet users today.

Animations, Parallax, Sliders, etc.

Some people detest sliders and other visual eye candy. Some don’t even think that it helps a site at all while some consider these visual effects necessary features in a website. When people get to your site, you want to ensure that they get enough interest to go through your content. The use of all these visual effects can go from cheesy to spectacular depending on how it is presented. Today’s media bombarded user can benefit from well-thought of and creative visual presentations that feed both the eyes and the mind.

Translation or Multi Lingual Ready

WordPress already powers more than 21% of the Internet and will continue to increase even as of this writing. This means that more non-English speaking users will be thrown in the mix of users and will need themes that can be translated into their own languages and with RTL (right to left provision). This segment of WordPress users will be more attracted to themes that are easier to adapt to their local audiences.

These features listed here may or may not be on the top of your list. If you do have some suggestions, feel free to leave us a comment and tell us why you think so. We’d love to hear from you.

Content Auditing – Is Your Content Up To Par?

“High quality content”, “Content is king.” – we often hear these phrases and although we know that content matters a lot, especially to Google, how many of us pay particular attention to what we post online? If you’ve been publishing large volumes of content on your website for how many years, have you ever taken the time to assess the quality of the content you have published? Have you ever conducted a content inventory, or better yet, a content audit on everything that appears on your website? Do you think managing your content will impact your traffic and conversion efforts or is its effect purely cosmetic?

A content inventory is the process and the result of cataloging the entire contents of a website. An allied practice—a content audit—is the process of evaluating that content.(source: Wikipedia)

WHY: Reasons for Conducting Content Audit

There are many reasons why you should consider conducting a content audit on your website especially for legacy content. You could use the collected data to evaluate specific functions and features of your website and its contents and optimize it to its fullest potential. Here are some reasons for conducting a content audit on your website(s):

  • Review your site’s architecture, structure, and navigational systems to make it more efficient and user friendly
  • Redesign, reconstruct, or renovate your website to make it more current or more responsive to the demographics of your current users. Consider the mobile market.
  • Migrate content to-from another site(s), from static pages to content management system (CMS)
  • Manage content quality, the amount of content, relevance, its layout presentation and design
  • Identify orphaned pages, content bloat, redundant pages that do not meet Google’s algorithm standards
  • Gather and analyze statistics as to user behaviour and interactivity on your website
  • Determine and identify popular and unpopular pages that get the most or the least visits – recognize effective content
  • Identify keywords and maximize organic search terms that drive traffic to your website

“Content audits are critical to understanding and evaluating the performance of your content against business goals, user needs, editorial standards, and performance factors such as search engine optimization and content use or web analytics. They bring value to your website project and on-going maintenance tasks by allowing you to carefully catalog and analyze your content structures, patterns, and consistency. Content audits tailored to your organization’?s content goals will reveal the highest quantity of specific opportunities for content improvement”.(source: content-insight.com)

HOW: Content Audit Strategy

Conducting a full-blown Content Audit especially on content heavy websites should be strategic and well-planned because it can be tedious and overwhelming. Strategy is key. Tactics can be modified and adapted. Some companies even choose to “throw out content” and start fresh. You can choose to conduct your content audit according to your needs and specifications in several ways:

  • Full Content Audit – Complete and comprehensive list of every content including all pages and all assets (downloadable or attached files etc.)
  • Partial Content Audit – Top hierarchy and subcategories or subset list
  • Content Sampling – Examine representative samples of content

WHO: Content Auditors:

  • Website designers and managers
  • Information architects and taxonomists
  • Content managers and developers
  • Content strategists and marketers
  • SEO managers

WHAT: Important Content Audit Items

  • Identify and document content volume and types
  • Identify and document the current content structure
  • Assess whether the content is being used
  • Document inconsistent content presentation

TO DO: Simple Content Audit Action Plan Sample

Conduct a Content Inventory

Create a content inventory spreadsheet and catalog. It may or may not include the following items based on your specs or based on the order of the most significant parts of your website:

  • ID, numbering or index
  • Page Title
  • Page Name
  • Page Type (homepage, navigation, ecommerce, blog, etc.)
  • URL
  • Level in the site (hierarchy)
  • Content type (multimedia, image, video, doc, pdf, HTML)
  • Owner/maintainer/author (content rights)
  • Comments
  • Character count or content size
  • Topics, tags, category, keywords, meta data
  • Date created
  • Last updated
  • Related files
  • Broken links (linking practices)
  • Duplicate content
  • Short Description or Notes
  • Alt tags on multimedia (images, video, audio, etc.)
  • PageViews
  • Unique Visitors
  • Bounce Rate
  • Page Authority

Track your content on the Internet, social networking sites, and contributions posted on other websites

Monitor the quality of your content as pertaining to topic, tone, consistency or compliance with your branding or marketing strategies

Assess and evaluate your content: keep, fix, improve, update, redirect, archive, remove, delete or trash

Use content analysis tools to get the job done if necessary (Excel, Content Analysis Tool, etc.)

Make an offline copy

If the job is too daunting, hire a Content Auditing Services Firm or a Content Audit Professional

The initial stages of the whole process can be time consuming and overwhelming but once you have a system in place that’s current and updated, you will be able to glean insight from all the information you’ve gathered and steer your website towards a richer, exceptional, more substantial, Google algorithm friendly content that will keep visitors coming back for more.

Top Free and Premium SEO Tools

Here are some of the most popular SEO tools and platforms on the market to help you monitor and analyze your SEO efforts on link building, keyword research, page analysis, rankings, authority, and tracking:

SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer allows you to analyze a website’s linking profile by providing you with detailed information (link anchor text, page authority, and domain authority) for the first five backlinks of a domain. Open Site Explorer is an extremely overpowered tool that can provide detailed link information such as: Inbound Links, Top Pages, Linking Domains, Anchor Text, Compare Link Metrics, Advanced Reports, and Just-Discovered links. Link data can be used to analyze Page Authority, Domain Authority, Link Equity, Followed/No Followed Links, and so much more.

According to SEO Tools Review,

“SEOmoz Pro is, by far, the best SEO tool suite on the market today, handily winning our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award. With great link building tools, industry-leading on-page analysis, a massive database of links and authority metrics that powers several other tools, and a community that is unsurpassed in the SEO world, SEOmoz pulls far ahead of the competition.”

Free users are limited to three reports per day but you can run unlimited reports, view up to 10,000 backlinks, export backlinks to a CSV, and use the other suite of SEOmoz tools for $99 USD per month. Free and Premium.

Ahrefs Site Explorer

Ahrefs.com is an independent tool for SEO analysis with a wide range of features. It is designed, first of all, for SEO specialists and site owners but may be of interest to other concerned Internet researchers. It has its own crawler and index, collects and arranges all data without any use of third-party services, and has the largest base of actual data on the links. Their crawler can index up to 6 billion pages per 24 hours. They help to find certain issues on your websites. They can provide social metrics like the number of tweets, Facebook likes, Facebook shares, Google +1 for your pages and referring pages (for all paid subscriptions). They also have a tool, Ahrefs Rank, aimed at solving the same tasks as Google PR. Ahrefs Rank measures the impact of all backlinks with different link juice to a given page. Free and Premium Version.

Raven Tools

Raven Tools, founded in 2007, is a one-stop SEO tool that brings all types of SEO tools, social media tools and advertising tools all under one roof. You can manage paid search advertising (AdWords), link building, keyword research, competitive analysis, social media analytics and basic reporting all in the same place. Raven integrates essential data from Majestic SEO, SEOmoz, Google AdWords and more. Raven’s SEO research tools also pull dozens of metrics, analyze thousands of pages and compile reports in minutes. Its Link Manager keeps your outreach organized, efficient and simple to report and it stores, organizes and tracks every detail for fast reference. 30-day trial.

According to SEO Tools Review,

“One unique feature of RavenTools is its integration with Textbroker, an article composition outsourcing service that can help you bulk up your site’s content. While it can be risky delegating your content creation in large part to external contributors, it can be a useful way to supplement your content needs.”

HubSpot

HubSpot Inbound Marketing Software helps customers generate traffic and leads through their websites, and convert more of those leads into customers. HubSpot is an integrated inbound marketing software that includes tools for: tools to attract visitors, tools to convert leads, and tools to close customers using various methods that cover blogging, landing pages, lead nurturing and management, marketing analytics, content management, social media, SEO, CRM integration, email marketing, and more.

According to SEO Tools Review,

“One of the unique and appealing features of HubSpot is its keyword research integration across the board; you can research keywords and compose blog posts focused on those keywords all within their comprehensive platform. It becomes exponentially easier to optimize for the correct keywords when you can focus on writing great content and leaving the keyword optimization to HubSpot’s platform.”

SEMRush

SEMrush is created by SEO/SEM professionals for SEO/SEM professionals with knowledge, expertise, and data to help you take your projects to the next level. They collect massive amounts of SERP data for more than 95 million keywords and 45 million domains, including: AdWords ad copies and positions, organic positions for domains and landing URLs, search volumes, CPC, competition, number of results, and so much more. SEMrush tracks an immense amount of organic data in Google and Bing SERPs. You can therefore see where your competitors are ranking in the top 20 Google and Bing results for the top 95+ million organic keywords. They collect data on both a domain level as well as landing page rankings for all of the keywords that they track, and they can provide you with an in-depth look into how a website really stacks up in search. Premium.

According to SEO Tools Review,

“SEMRush is the industry standard SEO tool for keyword research, giving unparalleled insights into competitors’ PPC keyword targeting, rankings and traffic data. The tool is amazing in its own right, earning it a spot on our lineup of the best SEO tools.

One of the most useful features of SEMRush is its ability to tell you what other major web properties are trying to rank for your keywords. After you drop your URL in the search box and click the button, you’ll be inundated with useful insights about your organic and AdWords competitors. Armed with this information, you can analyze their strategies to see what’s working for them, or even approach some of the big spenders in your niche and pitch a display ad campaign. SEMRush gives you all the tools you need to evaluate pay-per-click advertising competition.”

Google’s Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites on the following: site data, keyword data, sitemaps data, message center messages data, and crawl errors feed. Google Webmaster Tools shows traffic for each keyword separately; it gives more information about website performance according to Google search query. Google Analytics shows total traffic for a website, such as clicks to your site, regardless of where they came from and what search terms were used. It shows whatever search terms brought up your site in the listings. Free.

Authority Labs

AuthorityLabs was built to be easy and simple enough for the average business owner, but scalable enough for those responsible for large organic search efforts. AuthorityLabs helps you gain an understanding of how search engines are displaying your brand over time. Consumers start at search and often experience a brand for the first time within search results. Easily add domains or pages to be tracked from anywhere, track thousands of keywords within each domain and get ranking data every day for Google, Yahoo! and Bing, monitor multiple related sites in mind. 30-day Free Trial.

M-Commerce – The Mobile Market, Web Design and Conversion

The unstoppable invasion of mobile computing and how it has woven itself into our daily routines is undeniable. A life without the Internet, free WiFi, and our handheld devices is almost unimaginable and web designers have heard and heeded this lifestyle change, hence, the birth of responsive, fluid, and liquid design trends. Mashable has even named 2013 “The Year of Responsive Design”. However, we are still in the early stages of understanding this mobile demographic to yet see tangible and consistent conversion results from the marriage of Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce) and Web Design for handheld and mobile devices. Responsive design does not necessarily equate to actual conversion, whether in sales, subscriptions, or networking.

According to a report by Litmus.com,

“More email is read Mobile than on a desktop email client or via webmail. Stats say 36% of email is now opened on a mobile device, with 33% for desktop and 31% for webmail.” – Litmus –”Has your audience gone Mobile” (June 2012)

As of September 2012:

We’ve seen some major changes in mobile email opens in the past year and a half. As of September 2012, 38% of all opens were on a mobile device, compared to only 17% eighteen months ago—that’s a 123% increase in mobile opens!

Diving deeper into specific mobile operating systems, the majority of these opens are being made on iOS (iPhone and iPad – 80.34%) and Android (18. 93%) devices:

The next question is, Does Mobile Traffic Convert into Leads?

Not necessarily so. There are several factors that lead to actual traffic conversion and there is no hard and fast rule on it but website owners can make educated guesses based on actual data and stat results gathered from their own website traffic trends.

Three ways to reach your target mobile traffic:

Run a native mobile app

  • Needs to be downloaded by the user
  • Restricted amount of content and functionality

A mobile website or M-Dot (a dedicated scaled down mobile version of the main website)

  • Advantage – faster loading time and optimization
  • Disadvantage – two bodies of content to manage

Responsive web design

  • Uses responsive, fluid, liquid layouts, media queries, and flexible images to adapt to various devices and resolutions
  • More future friendly
  • One body of content to manage
  • Consistent brand experience
  • Social media friendly

Among all three, responsive web design appears to be the most feasible way of reaching your target market. But is responsive web design enough to address the problem of conversion?

Here are some strategies to consider to maximize your web design and marketing optimization efforts to improve your conversion rates on your website:

Create a mobile optimized landing page

  • Make sure that your landing page is displayed properly on all screen sizes (portrait and landscape)
  • The need for speed – achieve fast loading time (5 seconds or less) by using optimized media content (images, video, and audio) and scripts.
  • User friendly – Prospects don’t have to type anything just click a button. If possible, must be clickable by the thumb.
  • Content must be simple, readable and easily navigable. Call to action buttons must be prominently but strategically located.

Create a mobile optimized order form

  • Redirect users from the landing page to your mobile optimized order form.
  • Form fields should be easy to read and fill out on any mobile device. Longer forms lead to boredom and lower conversion rates.
  • Remove all sidebar content so the form fits perfectly on the viewable window of the mobile device

Create several versions of your landing pages and order forms and test which ones convert the most. Improving User Experience and establishing a User Friendly Interface all contribute to an enjoyable browsing experience for your mobile visitors which will eventually boost your conversion results.