Searchable, Crawlable, Optimized Content – The SEO Fix You Are Looking For?

Website owners are constantly looking for that one SEO formula or template that will assure them of that coveted top spot on the search engine pages. Many webmasters have retracted from their black hat ways and are cleaning up their acts – deleting link building campaigns, url redirects, keyword stuffing, etc. – and are turning to more Google-friendly methods to avoid being penalized. One of the many SEO strategies that people are investing in is CONTENT – good, relevant, easily crawlable content. But is it THE magic SEO formula that people are looking for?

Imagine ordering a decadent looking 3-tier specialty cake baked by Cake Boss Buddy Valastro himself – intricately designed and made with absolutely the finest ingredients. It’s got everything in it to definitely make it a conversation piece among the guests. But, what if someone forgets to display this wonderfully made cake and it stays in the kitchen where no one gets to see it except the kitchen staff. No doubt it’s a wonderful and probably the best tasting cake your guests will ever taste but unless they see it, admire it, slice it, taste it – they will never know what they are missing. Same thing goes with your wonderful, relevant, crawlable, well-written content. Out of sight, out of mind.

But hey, you can have your cake and probably eat it too if you take a wholistic approach to SEO. Yes, by all means, go ahead and build relevant, optimized, searchable great content. But don’t stop there. Make sure that you get it out there and give your audience a taste of it. Get people engaged enough to share it, link to it, and make them want to come back for more. Use and maximize social media. Add that tested and reliable SEO plugin. Market your brand. Plan your public relations campaign. Grow your audience. Junk those outdated SEO concepts. Analyze and study your statistics. Realize that it’s not a one-time event but it’s something that needs to be maintained constantly. SEO is not a one-template fits all type of thing. It is anything and everything that contributes to your website’s visibility and helps you land on that top page in the SERPS.

For more on this topic, check out this helpful article on Moz.com.

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.

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.

Understanding 401, 301 and 302 Redirects and How It Affects Your SEO

Google Panda now includes improving user experience as one of the key factors in attaining a high website quality score. This means that website owners now need to conduct regular site wide audits to see if their website contains any broken or dead links that could affect user feedback. Broken or dead links frustrate and annoy users and if this happens often enough on your website, these users will leave, resulting in a higher bounce rate on your site. Links that lead to nowhere are one of the most common complaints on the Internet. Not good for user experience and definitely bad for SEO.

To redirect is to direct someone to a different location or by a different route. Your web server returns several error messages when encountering a problem such as broken urls, inactive web pages, new website, new web page, or probably site under construction. When this happens, users get redirected knowing or unknowingly.

Here are the most common ones you need to pay attention to:

The 301 Redirect

301 Redirect, also known as a permanent redirect, means you are permanently moving content previously existing on a page or an entire site, including all the attributes, qualities, links, PageRank, Page Authority, and SEO juice that belong to it, to a new url of your choice. It is the most efficient and most SEO friendly way of redirecting your traffic after a change in permalinks. 301 redirect maintains your search engine rank and re-indexes your pages, posts and everything else on the basis of your new permalinks.

The 302 Redirect

302 Redirect, also known as a temporary redirect, means you are temporarily moving content previously existing on a page or an entire site, to a temporary location. This also means that you may bring back the old url in the future. This type of redirect does not transfer any of the SEO juice and value of the original page. 301 Redirect is often used specifically when testing a new page for client feedback or when your site or page is undergoing maintenance.

The 404 Error Page

404 Redirect occurs when a customer on your site tries to access a pagename that doesn’t exist. These are dead pages that link nowhere and gives users a bad experience. If these pages remain unfixed, Google will de-index these pages and all the valuable links, rank, SEO juice, and authority attributed to these pages will be wasted. 404 Error pages that are not redirected will annoy users and make them leave your site immediately. You can, however, always add 301 redirect it to homepage, to take advantage of link juice or even create a custom 404 page to redirect them to another page you like.

Errors are unavoidable and links do get broken that is why it is always a good practice to do site maintenance regularly and check and double check all your links on your website to see if they are active.

Pandas and Penguins – SEOlogy According to Google

You either love them or hate them. Who would have thought that these cute and cuddly creatures would be the object of so much debate and controversy and even dread in the land of SEO. Because of Google’s recent and ongoing algorithm updates, it has given the gentle panda and the prim penguin new personas. These powerful updates have sent SEO heads spinning and scrambling to regain lost rankings, search engine visibility, web traffic and revenue. But what’s the buzz really all about? Let’s go back to the source.

The Goal and Philosophy Behind the Panda / Penguin Updates

According to Google,

Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. We also want the “good guys” making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded. To that end we’ve launched Panda changes that successfully returned higher-quality sites in search results. And earlier this year we launched a page layout algorithm that reduces rankings for sites that don’t make much content available “above the fold.”

What animal is that?

The Panda Update – It’s all about your content

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on. (Note: Panda Update 24 – Jan 2013)

The Penguin Update – It’s all about your credibility

This update is an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. (Note: Penguin Update 3 – Oct 2012)

What should you avoid?

  • Unnatural links – spammy links
  • Using techniques outside of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
  • Thin, duplicate content
  • Overuse and abuse of keywords (keyword density)
  • Spelling, stylistic, or factual errors
  • Sloppy, overspun, unhelpful, poor quality or nonsensical content
  • Dubious link building and black hat SEO strategies
  • Over optimization of content, internal links, backlinks, and anchor texts

What’s the Penalty? the Reward?

Of course nothing escapes the eyes of big brother, Google, and people who have been gaming the system have been severely hit. On the other hand, legitimate quality sites and small businesses have not been spared either.

It only takes a few poor quality, or duplicate content, pages to hold down traffic on an otherwise solid site. Google recommends either removing those pages, blocking them from being indexed by Google, or re-writing them.

However, Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer (that’s the head of the Webspam team for Google, warns that re-writing duplicate content so that it is original may not be enough to recover from Panda — the re-writes must be of sufficient high quality. High quality content brings “additional value” to the web. Content that is general, non-specific, and not substantially different from what is already out there should not be expected to rank well: “Those other sites are not bringing additional value. While they’re not duplicates they bring nothing new to the table.”

Theoretically, these updates reward well-designed and carefully thought of websites that provide an optimal user experience with high rankings. Failing to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and best practices for content creation, site design, and link development will definitely affect a site’s ranking and SEO chances. Conventional SEO tactics will no longer cut it. Efforts should be directed towards using clean Code, publishing quality Content, and establishing site Credibility instead of black hat or grey hat techniques. The marriage of white hat search engine optimization techniques, exceptional web design, coupled with effective marketing practices won’t hurt any company wanting to be on Google’s good side. But more Google updates are still anticipated so the results remains to be seen.

More on this next week.

Simple SEO Tips for Startups

Hello World! That’s the first thing that greets you see when you start a new website. You’ve successfully created your first post and you’re ready to fill it up with more content but you are probably wondering if anyone at all will get to read what you have written.

Here are some simple Google-approved SEO tips for Startups:

To WWW or not

  • use a 301 to consolidate indexing signals because it is a permanent redirect and signals to search engines to transfer all the indexed properties from your non-preferred (www) to your preferred version (non-www) or vice-versa

Verify ownership in Google’s Webmaster tools

  • enable email forwarding to receive critical messages from Google in case of hacking, malware, or crawling issues

Domain background check

  • check for previous ownership (spammers), unwanted keywords and index results – inform Google for any penalties or reconsideration requests

Use the Fetch as Googlebot Webmaster Tool

  • to tell Google to crawl and submit the url to index making it available to searchers even faster.

Include Analytics Code to gather data

  • see which pages are popular and which are not

Site Design Strategy and ideas

  • utility
  • navigation
  • focus

Define your conversion or call to action

  • what you want your visitors to do
  • newsletter signup
  • contact you for a business lead
  • buy
  • try
  • share

Smart copy

  • Include query terms normally or commonly used to find your products.

Every page should be unique

  • unique topic
  • unique title
  • unique meta description
  • for non-dynamic sites – keywords in the filename (lowercase and hyphen separated)
  • descriptive anchor text for every link

Page load time or speed

  • the longer the page loads the more likely the user will leave the site
  • customer acceptability for ecommerce sites = 2 seconds
  • Google = under half a second
  • Ranking – find your audiences and interact with them
  • provide an awesome product or service
  • natural links
  • +1s
  • likes
  • follows
  • shares

Social Media Marketing

For more information and tips, check out the GoogleWebmasterhelp video on YouTube. For those who want to know how to do this, WPMU.org has a quick and easy tutorial on how get started using Google Webmaster Tools for WordPress.

Friendly, Optimized, Ready – Really? SEO and your WordPress Theme

A lot of premium WordPress themes claim to be SEO friendly, SEO optimized, or SEO ready. Did you know that WordPress is one of the most SEO friendly CMS (content management systems) publishing platforms on the internet? SEO is actually a built in feature within WordPress, ready to embrace search engines straight out of the box. But what is SEO really all about? Is it enough to just have a pretty WordPress theme to boost your site’s traffic? Why the need for 3rd party plugins if WordPress is SEO friendly from the beginning?

Search Engine Optimization

There are many ways to define SEO and here are a few:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results.[jargon] In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
(source: Wikipedia)

SEO is the practice of improving and promoting a web site in order to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engines. There are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand.
Search Engine Optimization isn’t just about “engines.” It’s about making your site better for people too.
(source: seomoz.org)

Simply put, SEO helps you connect with your target market. It boils down to being “ find-able” to those who are already looking for you. Unfortunately, it is also true that if your website is “out of sight” it is definitely “out of the mind” of these seekers and potential customers. Even if you do “build” a beautiful website, they won’t necessarily “come” unless they are family and friends who just want to be supportive of you. Bottom line, no matter how pretty your website is, you need SEO to make sure that your beautiful website can be found and appreciated.

Another culprit to your WordPress site being “out of sight, out of mind” of the search engines is the WordPress theme you use. Not all premium themes are SEO optimized, friendly, or ready even if they claim to be so. Yes, WordPress is SEO friendly by default but if you install, customize and use various theme to meet your own needs, your “premium” theme might actually break some of those useful search engine features and do more harm than good to your rankings.

Here are some SEO basics straight from Google’s mouth to make sure your WordPress theme is truly SEO friendly, optimized and ready:

Create unique, accurate page titles

Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content. Each of your pages should ideally have a unique title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site. Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too long, Google will show only a portion of it in the search result.

Make use of the “description” meta tag

Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.

Improve the structure of your URLs

URLs with words that are relevant to your site’s content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them. Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and makes it easy for visitors to know where they’re at on your site.

Make your site easier to navigate

Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link structure. Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site.

Offer quality content and services

Users enjoy content that is well written and easy to follow. It’s always beneficial to organize your content so that visitors have a good sense of where one content topic begins and another ends. Breaking your content up into logical chunks or divisions helps users find the content they want faster. New content will not only keep your existing visitor base coming back, but also bring in new visitors.

Write better anchor text

The anchor text you use for a link should provide at least a basic idea of what the page linked to is about. Aim for short but descriptive text-usually a few words or a short phrase. Make it easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text of your links. Your content becomes less useful if users miss the links or accidentally click them.

Optimize your use of images

Like many of the other parts of the page targeted for optimization, filenames and alt text (for ASCII languages) are best when they’re short, but descriptive. If you do decide to use an image as a link, filling out its alt text helps Google understand more about the page you’re linking to. Imagine that you’re writing anchor text for a text link. An Image Sitemap file can provide Googlebot with more information about the images found on your site. Its structure is similar to the XML Sitemap file for your web pages.

Use heading tags appropriately

Heading tags (not to be confused with the HTML tag or HTTP headers) are used to present structure on the page to users. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with h1, the most important, and ending with h6, the least important (1).

Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and subpoints of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately. Use heading tags where it makes sense. Too many heading tags on a page can make it hard for users to scan the content and determine where one topic ends and another begins.

Make effective use of robots.txt

Restrict crawling where it’s not needed with robots.txt. A “robots.txt” file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site.

Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links

Setting the value of the “rel” attribute of a link to “nofollow” will
tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn’t be followed
or pass your page’s reputation to the pages linked to.
Nofollowing a link is adding rel=”nofollow” inside of the link’s anchor tag.

Notify Google of mobile sites

Configure mobile sites so that they can be indexed accurately. Verify that your mobile site is indexed by Google. A Mobile Sitemap can be submitted using Google Webmaster Tools, just like a standard Sitemap.

Guide mobile users accurately

When a mobile user or crawler (like Googlebot-Mobile) accesses the desktop version of a URL, you can redirect them to the corresponding mobile version of the same page. If you redirect users, please make sure that the content on the corresponding mobile/desktop URL matches as closely as possible.

Promote your website in the right ways

Sites built around user interaction and sharing have made it easier to match interested groups of people up with relevant content. As people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it, Google understands that you’d like to let others know about the hard work you’ve put into your content

Make use of free webmaster tools

Improve the crawling and indexing of your site using Google’s free Webmasters Tools or other services. Google offers a variety of tools to help you analyze traffic on your site.

These are the SEO basics that you can use to assess whether your WordPress theme or your website is optimized or not. If you would like to read more on these SEO basics, check out Google’s free pdf resource “Search Engine Optimizer Guide”.

Best WordPress Themes 2021

UPDATED April 12, 2021: 2021 is sure to be another great year for WordPress Theme development. Like the millions and millions of people using WordPress, we eagerly await the Themes and Plugins to be released this year, and you can …

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.