Basic and Specific Quality Guidelines to Help Your Site Get Indexed

Creating a quality website that will stand up to any standard should be any website owner’s goal. The Internet is reaching a point where it will be more and more challenging to “hide” techniques (good or bad) from users particularly digital natives who are growing up in this Internet environment like fish to water. Here are some of Google’s guidelines to consider as you build your quality website.

Basic Principles to guide you as you build your website:

  • Be user friendly – create pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
  • Be credible and don’t deceive your users.
  • Be user helpful – Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
  • Be unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field but offering more than what’s already out there.

Specific Guidelines and Techniques to Avoid:

  • Auto generated content containing keywords but makes no sense
  • Participating in link schemes like buying and selling links to increase Page Rank, Excessive link exchange, and other unnecessary links
  • Cloaking is a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines because it provides users with results other than they expected
  • Sneaky redirects or sending users to a different url is deceptive
  • Hidden text or links (font colors, behind image, etc.) that send users to other urls is also deceptive
  • Doorway pages that funnel users to sites or pages you want to send traffic to.
  • Scraped content copied from other sites without adding any original content or value
  • Websites stuffed with affiliate programs alone without adding sufficient value
  • Loading pages with irrelevant keywords to manipulate pagerank
  • Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware without the user’s consent
  • Abusing rich snippets markup or manipulating code to mislead users
  • Sending automated queries to Google is not allowed
  • Engage in good practices like the following:
  • Monitoring your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears
  • Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site

Adhering to these basic and specific guidelines will help you build a website that will not only be beneficial to the website owner but to the whole Internet community as well.

Useful Resourcse to Help You Understand WordPress Theme Structure

Trying to understand how WordPress works can be overwhelming with the tons of resources available online. Below is a compilation of some great resources we’ve narrowed down to help you get your feet wet as you start practicing your WordPress coding skills:

The Missing Ingredient in Your Content Marketing Strategy

We live in an age of automated scripted responses. Customer service isn’t what it used to be. If you dialed for help nowadays, you’d get more or less an automated cookie cutter response to press 1, press 2, press 3, press the # sign, or dial 0 to talk to a customer service representative. If you are lucky, you get to talk to a real in-house customer service representative. If not, you get redirected to a call center agent from another side of the globe with a ready-made spiel to “answer” all your questions and “help” you with all your concerns. We’ve somehow lost that human touch in the midst of all this great technology.

Even web content can seem cold and clinical – distant, especially when the only end goal is to increase traffic and page rankings. Keyword stuffing. Readers are smart enough to sense whether you are truly serving their needs or you are simply dishing out self-serving, ego-centric content.

Ever read a status, a tweet, an update, or a headline, that made you click the link to read more? Irresistible. Something must have struck a chord – an emotion, a memory, a feeling, an idea, or maybe an experience that resonated with you or even provoked you, that made you connect with whatever you were reading.

This is the kind of response you want from your audience. It’s the first step. Your goal is to take them beyond being engaged. You want your readers to be involved – to be in dialogue with you. To see you as a reliable, relatable persona they can depend on. An authority figure – reachable, available.

What is empathy in relation to content marketing?

A formal definition of Empathy is the ability to identify and understand another’s situation, feelings and motives. It’s our capacity to recognize the concerns other people have. Empathy means: “putting yourself in the other person’s shoes” or “seeing things through someone else’s eyes.”
(source: Mindtools.com)

People need to KNOW they are important. They need to FEEL they are important. They need to know that you are listening to them, and that they are not just merely some page view statistic to help you rank. They need to know that you know how it feels like to walk in their shoes. Once they know that you are listening to them, then they will pay attention. They will listen. They will subscribe. They will buy. Empathy with your audience is the impetus that will determine whether your readers will come back again and again.

Think about how popular brands like Nike, Dove, or Volvo “speak” to their audience through their ads. Nike inspires. Dove boosts self-esteem. Volvo is all about safety. These brands add that human factor in their messages that people can connect to. These brands have successful messages that make their audience feel that they are THE priority.

Seth Godin put it so succinctly in his blog,

The simplest customer service frustration question of all:

“Why isn’t this as important to you as it is to me?”

All brands have a commercial agenda. However, your goal is to make your brand have a “heart”, so to speak. Empathy. It sounds like some amateur psychological runaround BUT it is the missing ingredient you need to add to the whole content strategy. True, content is king, truer still, the audience, is its ever demanding queen.

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

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

Tour Package – WordPress Travel/Tour Theme

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

Iron Bull Restaurant WordPress Theme

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

Royal Gold WordPress Theme

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

Savory Responsive WordPress Theme

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

Sweet Cake Responsive WordPress Theme

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

Soho Hotel Responsive Booking WP Theme

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

30 Different Content Slider Plug-ins for WordPress

When looking at websites, slideshows and carousels are the best way to present images and this is usually achieved using jQuery. To have jQuery slider galleries or other image presentation on your web page you have to code or download a jQuery slider plug-in and integrate it. Those sliders give effective looks and are very attractive to users.

Here you can see 30 Different content slider plug-in for WordPress. Hope these plug-ins help you…Enjoy!!!

(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.

Interesting WordPress Themes April 2013

Academy (Online Education)

Turn your website into a functioning e-learning solution with Academy Learning Management Theme from ThemeForest. This premium wordpress theme takes the elegant form of an ecommerce site and tweaks it to meet the needs of the e-learning market. Share, sell and promote your knowledge online effectively. This powerful theme includes features and functions to help you manage course offerings, rate their popularity, and publish subscription plans aimed to reach your target market. This theme includes a powerful options panel that allows you to create courses and lessons.This theme provides awesome features for creating online courses, such as extended user profiles, rating system, questions system, file attachments, embedding self-hosted media, tracking course progress, WooCommerce integration and more.

Responsive Knowledge Base & FAQ WordPress Theme

For the business or website that exists to help people make the most of their computing experience, Responsive Knowledge Base is the perfect theme to use. This premium WordPress theme was built for support providers as a first line response solution for clients seeking answers to their problems, technical or otherwise. This theme acts as a knowledge base or depository where visitors can search your site for solutions to their issues. Users can browse through Q and A pages, articles and similar material or do a live search (jQuery TypeAhead powered) to help them identify their problems and find solutions.

Rescue – Animal Shelter Theme with Petfinder Support

Animal lovers unite! Rescue Premium WordPress Theme is a theme built with a specific purpose – to get animals adopted. Outstanding pet-related WordPress themes are few and far between that’s why Rescue is a special theme pet lovers can find a home in. What makes it more unique is the built in Petfinder API support that allows you to easily sync your pets from your Petfinder profile to your WordPress install. Petfinder is an online, searchable database of animals who need homes. It is also a directory of more than 13,000 animal shelters and adoption organizations across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

GymBoom (Fitness)

If you are in the fitness business or if you own a gym, a health club, or a wellness center, check out GymBoom, a responsive fitness theme with a built in dynamic calendar to manage training schedules for those serious health buffs and fitness addicts. This responsive theme also sports a unique diagonal slider created with the slider creation tool. It’s got useful shortcodes to post lists, highlight text, create multiple columns and more. You also get two homepage option styles: one with a slider and a page styles option. Gymboom includes a google map shortcode integrated in the widgetized footer section.

Stress-Free Beauty, Health, and Medical WordPress Themes

The beauty, health and wellness industry is a lucrative industry. People will always want to look good and be healthy. Setting up an impressive website for your beauty or health and wellness business is key to getting the type of clients you want. Here are some great WordPress themes to help you create the right aesthetic for your beauty and health business online:

Blush

Blush is a professionally designed salon/spa/health/ beauty theme from Aloha Themes. This premium theme is easy to customize with lots of features to choose from – from using your own logo, changing theme colors, using widgets or built in shortcodes – to create the signature look you want.

Health and Beauty Theme

Health and Beauty Theme from Organic Themes is a beautiful and cleanly designed premium theme that won’t disturb your zen. This calm and soothing theme complemented by the overall classy and professional aesthetics is perfect for promoting health and beauty services that will impress even the pickiest clients.

HairPress

HairPress is a fully responsive premium WordPress theme perfect for hair and beauty salons, wellness centers, and professional medical services. It includes several built-in page templates ready for you to use straight away. Hair concerns are not just for women. Men are just as vain when it comes to hair. HairPress is a theme that’s not too feminine and it has lots of customization features that will help you create a strong online presence that will appeal to both men and women.

The Beauty Salon

The Beauty Salon is a sleek, modern, and professional looking theme that speaks credibility and confidence all over. One of the many obstacles to getting clients to try a new service or a new store is the lack of confidence. It is important for business websites to create the impression that they know what they are doing to allay fears of potential customers. This premium theme does just that and more. It’s packed with advanced features such as a sliding menu card, a tiled gallery, custom page templates, and multiple shortcodes to create that wow factor you need. Give your website a total makeover with The Beauty Salon Premium WordPress Theme.

HealthPress

If you are a health or medical practitioner, a wellness center, or a healthcare or medical service institution wanting to create your own website, check out HealthPress Premium WordPress Theme. This responsive theme is perfect for health and medical professionals, clinics, centers, hospitals, and other related industries. Running a health or medical related business online is tricky because medical consultations are personal and real world connections are important. HealthPress contains features like galleries, bios, credentials, services, testimonials, and other info templates to create that connection between your users and your medical team.

WP-Venus

Named after the Roman goddess of beauty and love, WP-Venus has that soft and pretty aesthetic that will appeal to a more feminine audience. With its soft colors, clean, responsive layout and extreme versatility, WP-Venus is an ideal theme for an online health, wellness, beauty and fashion, and even entertainment magazine that can appeal to a broader audience.

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.