Panda Proofing Your Website

If your website has been hit by Panda and like most, you’ve began making improvements and implementing changes to your website immediately after, you might not be able to see the effects right away. It might take a while but it is possible to reverse the fall and recover from Panda.

Eric Lancheres, SEO Guru and sought after speaker, shared, in the recently held Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013, a few tips and tricks on how to Panda Proof your website.

Here are some of them:

  • Include Date Posted and Last Updated when posting articles/content.
  • Have pictures cut right at the fold. Try to tweak landing page pictures at the fold.
  • Plant 2-3 comments to get the ball rolling. Encourage comments from users.
  • Add social media buttons and ask friends to add comments votes and likes.
  • Manually add relevant or recent articles in the sidebars.
  • Improve bounce rate by using Pagination + Table of Contents. More pages lead to more pageviews. Easy to read pages encourage user engagement and interactivity which translates to spending more time on your website. More activity and more action from users translates into high quality perception for Google.
  • Increase visitor engagement by interlinking your articles. A good example of proper internal links execution is Wikipedia.
  • An intuitive dynamic navigation is key to having a high quality score. If supplementary content is not available, you CANNOT have a high quality ranking Sidebar navigation is your supplementary content.
  • Speed improves everything. Site load under 4 seconds load time is acceptable. Server load speed will increase all your metrics by about 1%-5%. Check your page load speed. If it too slow, you need to start optimizing your site. Try resizing your images, or, if necessary, consider moving to a better server.

Implementing all these changes plus improving the quality of your content will help you recover whatever lost ground your website experienced because of Panda. Of course, there will always be a lag in seeing the results of these changes between the time you implement them and the next Google update. Panda is here to stay so you need to work on improving your site including your business model. Keep working at it. Eventually, your traffic will improve, visitors will have a better experience on your website, and you should be able to earn more money than when you started.

ThemeGrade Gets A Facelift

ThemeGrade loyal subscribers will be delighted to hear the great news about their favorite review site. This great WordPress resource that started in 2009 just went through a design overhaul and what was already a great website has now become even better. In our previous article about ThemeGrade, we touched on the unique services this website offers the WordPress community. The information and reviews of different WordPress themes and WordPress providers have helped guide hundreds if not thousands of WordPress buyers and users in making informed WordPress purchase decisions saving them time and money in the process.

What’s great about the upgraded and updated ThemeGrade?

Overall Design

ThemeGrade has switched from a dark theme design and opted for a more minimalist, white spaced design making it easier for users to find reviews of different WordPress Providers and WordPress Themes. Below are some of the design improvements implemented in ThemeGrade’s new look:

  • Clean and Minimalist Design
  • Simple, Easy, and User-Friendly Navigation
  • Streamlined, Organized, and Easy to Access Information
  • Easy to See Ratings
  • Improved Readability

Grading System

ThemeGrade provides an easy to understand grading system for both WordPress Themes and WordPress providers. WordPress themes are graded in 2 categories and are awarded a Bronze, Silver, or Gold award based on the combined score of both tests:

General Test – these tests focus more on coding and W3C compliance(HTML & CSS), browser compatibility, support from designer, post area tests, nested/threaded comments, sidebar link hierarchy, and other special effects.

SEO Test – these tests give you an idea how well a theme has been optimized for search engines. Tests are done for off-page and on-page optimization. Review scope includes coding and W3C compliance for SEO. SEO testing for home page heading, post and page heading, post and page title tag, and content code position.

WordPress Providers, on the other hand, are graded and are awarded Gold, Silver, or Bronze Awards based on the following:

Functionality and Usability – these tests focus more on the user’s experience regarding features of themes offered by the WordPress provider usually targeting usability, ease of use, and seamless integration to a theme design.

Graphic Design – these tests focus on the overall look and design of themes offered by the WordPress provider. Page design on header image, color, contrast, font and readability, and element placement are all taken into consideration in the review.

Coding – the General Test and SEO Test are also applied to the themes offered by the WordPress Provider. Test results are then added and averaged to arrive at an overall coding score of the theme provider.

Overall Best Score – The overall score of each developer is based on the sum of the providers’ score in each category. Theme providers with the highest overall score will be rated as the TOP WordPress Theme providers.

Search Functionality

ThemeGrade has made searching for WordPress reviews and ratings so much easier. These search filters are simple, easy to use and are categorized as follows:

Efficient Search Filters are grouped according to:

  • Theme Price
  • Theme Structure
  • Theme Category
  • Theme Ranking
  • Tags

ThemeGrade’s current facelift removes all the unnecessary clutter and information overload that distract from the more important information contained in the reviews. Finding the information users need is now more pleasant and user-friendly. With all these improvements implemented both on the design front and the functionality side, we give ThemeGrade an overall score of A+.

Check out the new look of ThemeGrade.

WordPress Themes 2013: The Must-Have List

WordPress Themes are here to stay. Throughout the years, we’ve seen many different design styles and trends – some good, some not so good. With WordPress powering a colossal 1/5 of the entire Internet, WordPress Themes have become big business with many individual theme shops and developers pulling in millions every year.

Any way you slice it, WordPress is here to stay, and for that reason so are the free and premium themes we’ve all come to know and love. If you have spent any amount of time searching for the top WordPress Themes, you’ll notice that several names continue to appear at or close to the top of the list. Elegant Themes, Themeforest, and StudioPress to name some of the more popular ones.

In this article, we’d like to introduce you to some very creative and compelling WordPress Themes of 2013. Each and every one of these themes was released in 2013 so you can rest assured these are among the latest and greatest that WordPress has to offer.

Stay in the know with our list of the top overall WordPress Themes as well. Updated at least once per month, this article covers the best WordPress Themes in all the different categories including responsive, portfolio, magazine, business, and E-commerce just to name a few.

For the time being, here are a few of our absolute FAVORITE WordPress Themes for 2013.

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Turbo Charge your Website with WordPress Widgets

WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems around. Not only is it powerful and feature laden, it is also has some of the most beautifully designed themes available out there. Even if you do compare other platforms, you can tell a WordPress site apart. The great part about building your site using WordPress is that you can make a great product even better. One way to do that is by adding widgets to your theme.

Widgets are a quick and easy solution to add a little more “oomph” to your website. These small pieces of content or tools can be placed in any of the widgetized areas of your WordPress theme. Widget areas are the predefined blocks or sections of your theme where you place widgets. These widgets can be added, removed, arranged, reordered any way you want in areas such as your sidebar, header, footer, the homepage, or any other defined area in the WordPress theme’s design.

Widgets can either be static or dynamic. Some of the default WordPress widgets include “meta” data, categories, popular posts, archives, and so many others. You can also add 3rd party widgets like subscriptions forms, advertisements, dynamic content such as RSS feeds and social networking feeds, custom code, Javascript, etc. to boost the functionalities and features of your theme. Some of these widgets may also come built-in with the theme you choose to install. Below is a sample of how the Widgets section appears in the admin panel of your WordPress theme.

The left side of the screen is where you have a listing of your available widgets. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping any widget you like into the sections on the right. These widgets will appear live on your site in as soon as you drop them in place. You can access your widgets from the Appearance ? Widgets screen in your Dashboard. From here you can: add, configure, remove, delete, enable accessibility mode, or troubleshoot your widgets if necessary.

Adding widgets require no coding skills at all. Even a WordPress beginner can do it. You don’t need to be an expert to install a widget. Sometimes, you may need to copy and paste scripts or codes from 3rd parties if you find a widget you really like. Otherwise it’s a very simple and easy way to improve user experience and the overall aesthetics of your WordPress theme.

Top 5 Widgets to Supercharge your WordPress Theme

Widgets are always plugins but not all plugins have widgets. Do you agree? Whether you agree or not, here are some great widgets you can use to supercharge your WordPress theme.

Freelancer Widgets Bundle

Freelancers will rejoice with this bundle. It’s got 7 great widgets: advertisement, biography, buy me a beer/coffee, contact widget, contact form widget, opening hours widget, and social links widget all in one big bundle. These widgets are highly customizable & can be modified easily. Freelancers like musicians, artists, designers, developers, creative professionals,etc. will find this widget a useful addition to their website.

Posts By Author Widget Pro for WordPress

If you’d like to provide your readers with an easy way to compile posts by a favorite author on your website, this powerful widget is what you need. Posts by author allows you to: compile, sort, show post excerpts, control number of posts to display, display thumbnails, in 15 configurable ways. This widget is especially useful for multi-author websites to help readers sort posts by their favorite authors.

Smart Navigation Widgets

User experience is key to getting repeat visits and one way to ensure that is to keep your navigation user friendly. Smart Navigation Widgets is a powerful widget ideal for websites with large archives. This Ajax-powered widgets allows the user to navigate deeper only when he needs to. Scouring and clicking thru long lists can get boring and make users bored waiting for content to load. This widget allows you to control the number of links displayed and speed up websites in the process.

M7 Easy Accordion Menus Widget for WordPress

This cool widget makes adding an accordion menu to your sidebar as easy as dragging and dropping. It’s a fresh way to combine menus on your sidebar. You can define: general settings, design and layout settings, thumb settings, excerpt settings, post settings, and the read more text settings to display the widgets you want to feature. Super cool and elegant space saving feature. It’s responsive too!

Announcements!

How would you like to manage your announcements and schedule them way, way, ahead of time? If you are handling an events website, an eCommerce site, or a business site that holds regular events, keep your users informed by scheduling your announcements automatically with this handy widget. Whether it’s a big sale, an important event, a greeting or any type of announcement you need, simply set it and forget it. This widget gives you 4 options for scheduling your announcements: weekly, annual, monthly, or using custom start and end dates.

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.

WooThemes Shuts Down Their Affiliate Program

It’s true. Disappointing but unfortunately true. For what reason? Here’s what WooThemes posted on their website:

We’re sorry to say that we are discontinuing our referral program because of lack of traction for the program. Access to signup and login has been removed for the time being. We will be in touch with all existing affiliates prior to discontinuing the program with further details. Thank you for your patience in this regard.

In a newsletter addressed to Woo affiliates, Adii wrote:

I’m in the unfortunate position to let you know that we will be closing our referral program on Friday, 8 February 2013. In the last couple of months, the costs to maintain the referral program have exceeded the benefit of keeping it around. We have also experienced so much fraud & abuse on the referral program, which means it is currently losing money for us.

This seemingly drastic decision has left hundreds and thousands of affiliates hanging in mid-air wondering what hit them. For long-time affiliates, all the years of plowing and link building efforts have gone down the drain and all for naught. For whatever internal reasons WooThemes might have for shutting down their affiliate program, the “lack of traction” reason for public consumption seems rather lame and lacking in substance.

Many of their affiliates, especially those who have been around for quite some time, understand business cycles, seasonality, and the normal ups and downs of business operations. To say that it was mainly because of prevalent fraud and abuse of the referral program that has caused them to lose money more than generate income puts a shadow on their management policies and practices. Even if it were so, legitimate affiliates should not be punished for that. In the broader picture of all that has happened, this incident also casts a longer shadow and raises doubts even on the way they handle their WordPress themes program.

Of course, everyone is entitled to benefit of the doubt but the way that WooThemes has been handling it so far has been wanting. What is to happen to all those who have already put in the work and are waiting to receive their commissions? The work is already done and the service has been rendered but what remuneration can these affiliates expect? Not to mention all the admin work and backend hassle. Affiliates are still sending traffic to WooThemes through their affiliate links but now they are simply not getting paid. Online business relationships are based heavily on trust and unless the issues at hand are addressed head on, the consequences could cost WooThemes more than the loss they incurred from their affiliate program. We hope not.

WordPress Admin Panel

Navigating your way around in the backend area of your WordPress website need not be complicated even if you are a beginner. The WordPress Admin Panel area found in the backend is a powerful and flexible area where you can manage your website content and other WordPress functions. It has continually evolved since 2003 and with the help of and contributions from the WordPress community has improved and become more and more beautiful and user friendly.

The Administration Panel provides access to the control features of your WordPress installation. Each Administration Panel is presented in sections:

The Header

The top portion of all Panels, the header, is featured in dark shading. The header shows the name of your blog as a link to your blog’s main page, comments awaiting moderation, +New to add new posts, pages, media, or users, a Search Engines Blocked message if you Privacy settings block search engines, a favorites menu, and links to your profile (shown as your user name), and Log Out. Just below the top shaded area are two hanging tabs, Screen Options and contextual Help, that can be clicked to expand them.

The Main Navigation

On the left side of the screen is the main navigation menu detailing each of the administrative functions you can perform. Two expand/collapse arrows just below the Dashboard and Comments allow the navigation menu to collapse to a set of icons, or expand (fly-out) to show an icon and description for each major administrative function. Within each major function, such as Posts, a pull-down arrow is presented upon hovering mouse hovers over the title area. A click of that arrow expands the menu to display each of the sub-menu choices. Clicking that arrow again collapses the sub-menu.

The Work Area

The large area in the middle of the screen is the work area. It is here where specific information relating to a particular navigation choice, such as adding a new post, is presented and collected.

The Footer

Finally, in the footer, at the bottom of each Administration Panel in dark shading, are links to WordPress, Documentation, and Feedback. In addition, the version of WordPress you have installed is shown. Just below the menu tab section, if your version is NOT the latest version, you will see the message An updated version of WordPress is available. Please update now. Click on the provided link to navigate to the Updates SubPanel.

Below is a list of the submenu items you will find in your default WordPress Admin Panel main navigation menu. Some of them may or may not be included depending on the WordPress version you have installed.

Dashboard

The Dashboard tells you about recent activity both at your site and in the WordPress community at large and provide access to updating WordPress, plugins, and themes.

WordPress Updates

This sub panel gives you an easy method to update WordPress, plugins, and themes. Note not all hosts will allow the automatic update process to work successfully and will require you to manually upgrade by following the Upgrading WordPress instructions.

Posts

This sub panel is where you can publish writings, compositions, discussions, discourses, musings, and, yes, even rantings, of a blog owner and contributors. Here you can write new Posts, create new Categories, new Tags, and new Custom Fields. In addition, any Media (pictures, video, recordings, files) can be uploaded and inserted into the Posts.

Media

This sub panel allows you to upload new media to later use with posts and pages. A Flash Uploader is provided and the ability to use a Browser Uploader is supplied if the Flash Uploader does not work.

Pages

A good example of a Page is the information contained in About or Contact Pages. A Page should not be confused with the time-oriented objects called Posts, nor should a WordPress Page be confused with the word page referring to any web page or HTML document on the Web. In this Sub Panel you can select the Page to edit or delete. Multiple Pages can be selected for deletion and for editing. As with Posts, a powerful bulk edit tool allows certain fields to be edited for a whole group of Pages. A handy in-line edit tool, called Quick Edit, allows you to update many fields for an individual Page. Various search and filtering options allow you to find the Pages you want to edit or delete.

Comments/Reader Feedbacks

Comments are a feature of blogs which allow readers to respond to Posts. In this sub panel you can edit and delete as well as mark comments as spam. Comments that are awaiting moderation can be marked as approved or previously approved comments can be unapproved. Multiple comments can be selected and approved, marked as spam, unapproved, or deleted. A section at the top of the Comments SubPanel displays the number of comments awaiting moderation and the number of approved comments. A search box allows you to find specific comments.

Appearance

From the Presentation Administration Panel you can control how the content of your blog is displayed. WordPress allows you to easily style your site by either installing and activating new Themes or changing existing Themes. This sub panel includes customization controls for Themes, Widgets, Menus, Background, Header, and Theme Editor.

Plugins

Plugins allow you to add new features to your WordPress blog that don’t come standard with the default installation. This sub panel allows you to view the plugins you’ve downloaded, add new plugins, modify the plugins and choose which plugins you want activated on your site.

Users

Every WordPress site probably has at least two users: the admin, the account initially set up by WordPress, and the user account you, as the author/owner of the blog. This sub panel allows you to set up all of the user accounts you need, change user information, assign roles, or delete users.

Tools

WordPress Tools provide you the ability to speed up WordPress for your local machine, import content from other sources, export your content, or to upgrade your WordPress software to a new release. This includes the Import, Export, and Press This functions.

Settings

The Settings Administration Panel contains all of the settings that define your website as a whole: settings which determine how your site behaves, how you interact with your site, and how the rest of the world interacts with your site. This sub panel includes control settings for: General (basic configuration settings), Writing, Reading, Discussion, Media, Privacy, and Permalinks
(source: WordPress codex)

The backend or Admin Panel may vary from theme to theme. The look and appearance may vary depending on the customizations and tweaks done by authors and developers. Nevertheless, no matter how Admin Panel is tweaked, these basic functions are standard and generally remain the same no matter what WordPress theme you install.

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.