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 Junk those outdated SEO concepts.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.

‘Tis The Season To Be Jolly With These Christmas WordPress Plugins

It’s the most wonderful time of the year indeed and what better way to spread the holiday cheer than to give your visitors a taste of Christmas on your website with these fun and cheery Christmas WordPress plugins.

Advent Calendar

Advent Calendar is a simple calendar plugin to show off a list of 24 days before Christmas. Each day can be viewed automatically once published. A preview of the featured image for that day is also displayed with a link to the actual page.

WP Super Snow

WP Super Snow is an awesome, customizable, and very lightweight free Christmas snow falling plugin that uses jQuery and CSS3. Create your own winter scene and add falling snow flakes to your website. You can also customize these snow flakes using various configuration options in your WordPress Dashboard.

Snow Storm

Snow Storm is a simple and festive Christmas plugin that displays falling snow flakes on the front page of your WordPress website. Give your visitors a glimpse of winter wonderland and let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Christmas Countdown Clock

Christmas Countdown Clock is a countdown plugin that displays days and hours until Christmas day. Select from a range of designs, sizes, background colours, pictures, and animations to build up excitement for the big day.

Christmas Snow – Snow Fall WordPress Plugin

Christmas Snow will turn your WordPress site into a snowy WordPress site – a great marketing move especially if you are targeting the Christmas Season Sales. This plugin has around 25 different types of snow flakes to choose from. You can create multiple types of snow flakes, control the number, speed, rotation speed, snow flake size, wind direction, and opt enable or disable for mobile devices.

Christmas Animation – Pro WordPress Plugin

Christmas Animation – Pro WordPress Plugin can be used to add fun, quirky animation Effects to welcome your visitors. You get 30 Christmas images to create multiple animations you can show on posts or pages. You can control image speed, size, rotation speed, and the slide in and slide out effects.

Have fun with these plugins and give your visitors something to smile about this Christmas.

eCommerce WordPress Themes for the Shopping Season

It’s almost that time of the year where people are just willing to spend, spend, spend. What better time than now to set up your own eCommerce site or simply update your existing one and get your visitors into the shopping season groove – all within the comforts of their own homes. Check out these cool eCommerce WordPress themes to help usher in that holiday cheer.

Barberry Responsive WooCommerce Theme

Barberry Premium WordPress Theme is a modern, fully responsive, retina ready Woocommerce theme built on Twitter Bootstrap. This slick eCommerce theme features dynamic animations that will set your eStore apart from the competition. This premium WPML ready theme is also equipped with MegaMenu, Revolution Slider, Sticky Header, Catalog Mode option, CloudZoom, a powerful Store Management and Reports feature, a filterable Portfolio, preset Shop page templates, Shopping Cart, and so many other features to help you start your store right away.

Roe | Dok WooCommerce WordPress Theme

RoeDok Premium WordPress Theme is an ultra modern WordPress fashion template especially designed for fashion stores carrying clothing, accessories, shoes, jewelry and other fashion related items. Its modern design style is clean, streamlined, and organized as to highlight each product without looking cluttered. This responsive theme has powerful built-in features such as: Mega Menu for categorizing huge amount of products with multi-column (add up to 6 columns), several sliders (Flex Slider, Revolution Slider, Nivo Slider), custom widgets, ad space for promotion and featuring important announcements, boxed and wide layout styles, predefined page layouts, a drop down shopping cart, and many other awesome features.

Retail Therapy – Multipurpose eCommerce Theme

Retail Therapy Premium WordPress Theme is a bold and elegant ecommerce WordPress theme that features the Hero Widget aimed at being able to list items on sale, categories, featured products and recent products or collections. You can also feature specific categories in a three block layout and add a call to action button in your footer. The
typography is beautiful and easy on the eye. It comes packed with 12 page templates including: a portfolio template which can show your portfolio in a two, three or four column view, a services template including service icons to visually describe your services, a shop template to display your products beautifully, a team page template and share their social links, and a features template for a product or service company

Cosmetico Responsive eCommerce WordPress Theme

Cosmetico Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and beautiful ecommerce theme that looks sleek, professional, and very high end. This retina ready responsive multi purpose theme includes features like: Page Builder with 34 web elements, animated floating menu option, Slider Revolution, CloudZoom, WooCommerce, full or boxed layout options, 300+ vector icons, portfolio variations (full screen, ajax, pretty photo), custom widgets, grid gallery with black and white effect, and many other features that will surely make your online store look amazing.

Shirtbox Flat WooCommerce Multi Purpose Theme

ShirtBox Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive multi purpose WooCommerce theme with a unique square look applying the latest flat-design style trend. It is perfect either for an ecommerce site, an online boutique, or creative business website. Outstanding features include Revolution Slider, FlexSlider, and Camera Slider, Live Chat, WooCommerce Catalog mode and compatible with WooCommerce extensions (zoom magnifier, ajax search, wishlist), advanced top menu type, and many other features to help you get your eCommerce site up and running.

Bistro Store eCommerce WordPress Theme

The Bistro Store Premium WordPress theme is a clean, stylish, custom-designed, modern eCommerce WordPress theme built using the latest technologies in HTML5, CSS3 and Bootstrap 2.3.2. This flexible premium theme comes with custom page templates, unlimited sidebar and color customization combinations, is fully responsive (compatible all mobile devices like: tablet, mobile phone, laptops etc.), with an advanced theme option panel, built-in Revolution Slider, custom product sliders, custom single product and portfolio pages, is social media and search engine optimized, has a special offers module (daily deals), 10+ custom widgets, special footer modules, and even a social media friendly newsletter module.

An Easy Way To Find Free WordPress Themes

Did you every go through hundreds of google page results in the search for a fitting WordPress theme and got frustrated that there is no place where you can find hundreds of themes at one glimpse and just find what you’re looking for without wasting time?

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We’ve come across a site that is exactly filling this niche and makes it easy to filter and browse through themes and download them with one click.

Themes Town is a project that basically is providing you with an overview of hundreds of free WordPress themes you can demo and if you like them download all on one single site. If you want to narrow your results down you can use the multi select filter to find exactly what you need. If you only want to find responsive themes no problem! Simply filter by “Responsive” or if you would like to know which ones are the most popular themes you can see a list of how many times a certain theme got downloaded.

Download 177 WordPress Themes For Free Now!

Wearable Technology and Its Impact on WordPress

Believe it or not, wearable technology has been around longer than you think. Think about all those old James Bond movies, the Mission Impossible series, or the Get Smart series. We all marveled at those nifty gadgets – pens that become bomb detonators, shoes that turn into phones, virtual reality or augmented reality gadgets, etc. The novelty of ordinary items turning into high tech gadgets that do more than what is expected of them is always a crowd drawer. And if they are all that they claim to be you’ll probably want one too.

But not all wearable technology survive the acid test of customer approval. In the past, some have, although a lot more turned out to be duds that have long faded away. Hence, the wary and lukewarm response to these types of products. That is until recently. Times are changing. Technology is way better than it ever was. People are more interested in wearable technology today more than ever. Companies are putting out wearable gadgets focusing on health and lifestyle, content, and even education.

Google Glass, Apple Watch, Pebble, OpenGo, etc. – Is Wearable Tech The New Frontier?

It’s daring. It’s risky. It’s experimental. But that’s what trailblazers are made of. You’ll never know if you don’t dare. Wearable tech is interesting but it’s still early stages. People are definitely interested but not necessarily buying, yet. However, if we are to consider the future of the “internet of things”, it’s just a matter of time before people get warmed up to it.

On Wearables — According to analysts at ABI Research, over the next five years businesses will integrate into their wellness plans more than 13 million wearable devices with embedded wireless connectivity. Wearable tech also ties into the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT), which refers to a future world where all types of electronic devices link to each other via the Internet. Today, it’s estimated there are nearly 10 billion devices in the world connected to the Internet, a figure expected to triple to nearly 30 billion devices by 2020. The inherent versatility of Atmel’s microcontrollers and radio chips have made our silicon a favorite of Makers and engineers . Atmel is right in the middle of the wearable tech revolution, with a comprehensive portfolio of versatile microcontrollers (MCUs) that power a wide range of platforms and devices.

source: Atmel and the Internet of Things

Wearable WordPress?

Did you know that there are WordPress plugins that allow you to publish using Google Glass? True! Who would have thought that you could manage your content using a pair of glasses? But it does exist. You can actually take a picture or a video using Google Glass and upload it on your WordPress site straight away. Some notable Google Glass WordPress tools, apps, and plugins include:

  • wpForGlass is the first plugin that allows you to post to your WordPress blog from Google Glass.
  • Umano for Google Glass allows you to read your posts from your favorite sources to you. You can also get in touch with Umano to have your content included on Glass.

The recent release of the Apple Watch received mixed responses. Nevertheless, for a company like Apple to invest in such a product means that they will provide the support and infrastructure to make it succeed. How it will affect the way content providers and publishers (WordPress users included) deliver to their audiences remains to be seen. It is however, worth taking note of.

As in the early stages of Cloud Computing and everything being stored “above our heads”, so is wearable tech at this point. Developers need to be able to show consumers how they can integrate daily activities seamlessly using these wearable gadgets. The novelty is good for a while. It is, however, the long-term benefits of these gadgets that will determine whether it will once more get buried in the gadget graveyard.

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 Themes Featured on Theme Forest

Every week, Themeforest features promising WordPress themes that are worth noticing. Here are some of the latest themes that have been featured on Themeforest you need to see. Check these out.

Forgiven – A Powerful WordPress Theme for Churches

Forgiven Premium WordPress Theme is a powerful parallax enabled church theme that includes major features such as: Visual Composer plugin, Slider Revolution, Envira Gallery, the unique and exclusive Blur Slider, support for Church Theme Content, WooCommerce support, Page customizer, Gravity Forms and Contact Form 7 support, Sermon functionality, The Events Calendar and the Events Calendar Pro plugin integration and support, and so much more.

FlatAds – Classified AdsWordPress Theme

FlatAds Classified Ads WordPress Theme is a super flexible and fully responsive Premium Directory/Listing WordPress themebuilt with HTML5 and CSS3. FlatAds is compatible with WooCommerce 2.1, bbPress, and MailChimp for WP plugin. Other key features include custom fields for categories and subcategories, interactive Google maps Geolocation support, integrated PayPal payments support, and WPML (multilingual) support.

Faculty – Responsive Academic WordPress Theme

Faculty Responsive Academic WordPress Theme is a magazine or personal blog styled page that can be used to build personal or professional websites specifically for academic people. This simple and yet well structured responsive theme is especially designed as an online cv of professors and PHD students. Key features include publications management, option to present research, teaching and blog pages, and provision for downloadable CVs for interested visitors.

KLEO – Next level Premium WordPress Theme

KLEO – Next level Premium WordPress Theme is an extremely flexible, fully customizable BuddyPress and bbPress compatible WordPress multipurpose theme to help you create a community, a corporate portfolio, or a membership website. This membership ready theme allows you to create membership levels and restrict content based on member access quite easily. key features include: WPML and Translation Ready, WooCommerce Ready, Google Maps integration, Contact Form 7 compatible, among others.

Time Travel – Timeline WordPress Theme

Time Travel – Timeline WordPress Theme is an ultra modern next generation premium theme developed with cutting edge technology and design. The built-in voice control makes it both revolutionary and at the same time super intuitive to use. You can set up your own language to be used in the voice commands control, so it is as easy as possible for your visitors. The design of the site is a 3D time travel path, ideal for displaying chronology data, posts flow by date, history info or just any type of timeline content in a modern and futuristic way.

It is ideal as a blog, a portfolio site, a corporate site aiming to display the history of company or brand, an artist’s portfolio to display albums / films / books in a chronological way, an agency website to showreel projects and team by date, etc.

Hooray – Premium WordPress Blog Theme

Hooray Premium WordPress Blog Theme is one of the most colorful and user friendly personal blog themes. Key features include: easy to use powerful Admin Panel, full Arabic RTL support, social counter integration, translation and multi language ready, page templates, review and rating system, unlimited colors and sidebars, and so much more.

Moustachey: A Blog theme with extra gusto

Moustachey Premium WordPress Theme is a fun, quirky WordPress blog theme playing on the moustache design. Key features include: Author support, social share enabled, typekit web fonts integration, adobe edge web fonts integration, Google analytics support, Google API v3 integration, configurable donate/message block at the top of the page, localization support, and so much more.

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.