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Are You Killing Your Own WordPress SEO?
On a WordPress site of mine, I was perplexed as to why it was not getting indexed in Google or other search engines.
I verified my site in Google Webmaster Tools and tried to submit a sitemap. In the webmaster tools panel, it informed me that my robots.txt file was blocking Google from grabbing my sitemap.
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8 Useful Tips for Effective Web Design
Here are some essential web design tips that every web site should follow. Design your web site by following these tips and I guarantee that visitors will have a great first impression of your site.
1. Fast Loading web site designs – This is the number 1 tip that every web designer should follow. You might design a web site that looks fantastic but few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. Your designs should be optimized for the web and should not take more than 15 seconds to load. Remember, you might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load.
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5 Keys To a Successful Online Business or Website
After years of working on scores of online projects, I sat back and analyzed what the most successful ones all had in common. Whether you’re a seasoned pro who need to get back on track or a new comer just starting out, these five key are crucial to the success of any online endeavor.
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Website Walkthrough – 5 Ways to Make Your WordPress Hack-Proof
Having your blog hacked or worse, stolen right under your nose, is a nightmare. Sure, WordPress improves its standard installation security with every new version it comes out with, but new versions are not invincible and they’re not impermeable. Bottom line – you need to do what you can to help make your WordPress hack-proof.
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Use Wordpress for Flawless Affiliate Marketing CMS
WordPress is best known as blogging software, but it has amazing potential as a full-fledged content management system (CMS). For affiliate marketers, it means increased productivity and less site maintenance over time. If you were on the fence about which content management system to use, then take the following facts into account before making your decision:
WordPress is flexible: With WordPress you can choose whether to use a post or a page to promote a product. You can also choose to enable comments on your product pages in order to solicit user-generated content on your website in the form of reader reviews. It also allows further customization by choosing whether to have a static front page (rather than a long page of posts) so you can highlight particular products or your mailing list.
WordPress supports themes: There’s a saying that you only have once chance to make a good first impression. Designing and testing a new look every other week for a traditional site is time-consuming, but with WordPress, it’s as simple as picking out a theme you like, uploading it, and clicking a button. WordPress’ theme capabilities make modifying the look of a site based on whether someone is looking at the homepage, a category page, or a single entry page a reality. That means you can better optimize each area of your website for higher conversion rates.
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9 SEO Plugins Every Wordpress Blog Should Have
The importance of search engine traffic cannot be over emphasized. The results in engines are taken to be more authentic than paid listings, and hence it is the key to build a brand, to have more traffic and more revenue. The following are the 9 most important SEO Wordpress pluggins that wordpress blogs might do with:
1. All in One SEO Pack
This wordpress plugin helps you to prepare the basics of SEO for your blog. You can have metatags for your entire blog or different sets for each different page.
2. Redirection
There may be changes to your permalink URL of a particular page of a blog. You may have updated it, may have shifted hosts, or have renamed the link URL. What happens is the user comes to the URL which was there before, but doesn’t find it, resulting in loss of traffic and goodwill. Redirection takes care of this and automatically redirects the user to the
Updated page resulting in lower loss of traffic, it is a very useful wordpress plugin for SEO.
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Post Pic How to Accurately and Effectively Research a Web Design Style
As we grow and learn as web designers, we all tend to lean to one style in particular, and it helps define us, and our work, as individuals. However, to grow, we need to learn new things.
Sometimes a client wants something else, so we need to abide — though we can (and should) learn to design in new styles for our own personal benefit as well. With that, we can discover and perfect our understanding of alternative design principles, learn how to work with new design elements, and overall broaden our skill set.
When venturing into a new style we’re not familiar with, we can’t just open up Photoshop, expecting our design to come out as spectacularly as the style we’re more familiar with. Just as we grew to know our niche design style, we must, in a sense, re-teach ourselves design for each particular style.
Here is how to define, what to look for, and what to research when venturing into a new style of web design. Many of these features are better defined in our previous article, 5 Ways to Become a Better Designer, Right Now. Be sure to check that out in addition to this.
4 Small Web 2.0 Design Tricks that Make a Big Difference
There are hundreds of tiny things one can do to improve a web design in a big way, and designers can improve by picking up various techniques. Here are four of the many techniques that are used in Web 2.0 style web design, and how to implement them yourself.
1. Lines and Borders with Depth
This feature is often used in amazing sleek web designs, but overlooked by beginners trying to create a similar feel. An example of this effect is below. On the left are two lines, that could possibly be used as a line or border in a web design, and on the right is the same, but with a bit more depth.
As anyone can see, the line with depth is a lot more visually appealing.
How to Create a Line with Depth
- Create a new layer on top of the background color.
- Instead of a 1-pixel solid color line, create two lines: A 1px black line on top of another 1px white line.
(For a horizontal line, as one can guess, just put a 1px wide black line next to a 1px wide white line.) - Set this new layer to overlay, then merge the new layer on top of any bottom layers as necessary.
Examples Used in Web Design
2. Reflective/Gradient Shine
Anything that looks glossy can just about be considered Web 2.0. The use of a few short techniques to add gradient and gloss can spice things up. The example below is what it looks like in action, just applied to a rectangle of solid color. The same effect can be used on logos, the background for content areas, text, images, and more.
How to Create a Reflective/Gradient Shine
- Create a new layer over the original image. (In this case, the plain green rectangle.)
- Using the Elliptical Marquee tool, create a portion of an ellipse on the top part of the rectangle.
- Create a white to transparent gradient vertically upwards. Make sure the white is on the bottom. (To create a completely vertical gradient, hold down the shift key.)
- Change the layer’s blending mode to Soft Light.
- Press “Ctrl [Cmd], Shift, I” to invert the current selection. Then, create another new layer.
- Create a black to transparent gradient in this selection, with black on the bottom.
- Change this layer’s blending mode to Overlay.
- Put the opacity of both gradient layers down by about 50%. Alter the opacity of both until the image looks right.
3. Drop Shadows
Drop shadows are used surprisingly often in Web 2.0 design, despite their bad reputation for being old-fashioned and cheesy in the web design world. This is because they are great for adding a sense of realism to a design, like a realistic sense of a flat piece of paper (or other material) setting on another flat surface. That’s the effect we get on the right.
However, on the left, it’s easy to see the effect is cheesy, old-fashioned, and should never be used. On the left, the dropshadow gradient is so large that it seems as though the green block is unnaturally floating above the flat background.
The trick is to use dropshadows to make things realistic. Don’t use dropshadows just for the sake of using them.
4. Rounded Corners
They’re not included in the new CSS3 for nothing. Rounded corners are often times a great way to add a bit more appeal to a design, especially a modern design. Many sleek and modern product designs often feature smooth curves and edges. Blocky feels old and clunky — smooth is new and modern.
Wrapping Up
Not all of these have to be used simultaneously for a great Web 2.0 design, but they are a closer look at some simple tricks one can try to see if the effect will improve a sleek web design. In the end, though, good design comes from experience and a good eye for design.
These are, of course, very basic principles and are meant for beginners in web design. Anyone looking for the next step, or for anyone looking for more advanced techniques, should check out How to Accurately and Effectively Research a Web Design Style. The article goes over how to discover your own techniques when learning Web 2.0, or any other design style for that matter.
SEO Tips From Google Latest Patent!
You may have read other webmasters comments saying that chasing the latest Google algorithms is a waste of time, simply provide good content and you will do fine.
To a large degree this is true, and is emphasized in the latest patent. If you provide fresh, unique content on a regular basis, and do nothing that Google or the other search engines consider as spam, then likely you will eventually start rating well in the search engine SERPS.
