Category Archives: Blogging Tips

worpress web development

10 Reasons Why You Should Consider WordPress Web Development

Blogging Tips, Wordpress Guide

In the blogging world, WordPress is one of the most popular platforms to reckon with. This CMS – Content management system – which was primarily designed for blogging now, powers millions of large and small websites around the globe. Even enterprise level sites are not left out, as it also holds to capacity to power them.

Most Content Management Systems available today are highly becoming flexible and customizable, of which WordPress is chief. Due to its overwhelming flexibility, extensibility and outstanding ability to support businesses with adequate opportunities to scale, WordPress has risen to become very much popular. With its ability to support eCommerce, WordPress has experienced tremendous transformation over time.

Introduced as a simple blogging site in 2003, WordPress has risen to become a dominant open source web development platform. It has gone from being a mere ubiquitous blogging site to the world’s most popular content management system. WordPress web development has been sought after by Fortune 500 companies such as eBay and UPS, notable music icons such as Katy Perry and Jay-Z, and Topnotch publications such as CNN and The New York Times.

If you are looking to build a new website, here are some undeniable reasons why you should consider WordPress web development.

Easy to Use

WordPress is very easy to understand and easy to use. Even if you don’t have a web development company or a programmer on staff to assist you and you are unfamiliar with content management systems, it’s interesting to know that you can still build a professional looking website with WordPress.

Unlike its competitors, WordPress is renowned for its significant ease of use particularly in terms of administration. It has a much more intuitive administrative interface. With just a little effort you can install plugins and add content. Generally, using WordPress is both quick and simple.

As a matter of fact, you don’t have to rely on a web development company or be dependent on a web programmer to build a website on WordPress. Adding, editing, or removing content, images, and videos can be easily done with just a few clicks. All you simply need to do is to log in to your dashboard and carry on from there.

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

 

seo concept with bulb and gears

Inherently, WordPress is not built to be SEO-friendly, but you can fix this yourself through various ways. The WordPress platform is enhanced with a good number of efficient SEO plugins and extensions that can be used to enhance SEO on any site without much stress. Apart from being very effective, these tools are also very easy to configure.

Many WordPress websites are designed to be SEO friendly, thanks to the availability of simple and constant codes that make them suitable for Google indexing. Also, these components help to enhance customizability for pages that may require high ranking in search engines.

Customizable Themes

Themes allow you to make quick changes on your website design. Make your site look fresh and dynamic with attractive WordPress themes. In a bid to make the platform look more robust and highly useful, several web development companies and enthusiasts have worked together to provide users with an ample supply of customizable themes. Depending on your choice and convenience, there are several options of ready WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Apart from helping to give your website a fresh look, you are bound to create a highly functional site through this simple process.

Strong Community Support

Worpress Community

One of the most apparent reasons for using WordPress is its strong level of community support. When compared to other platforms, this platform tends to be overwhelmingly supported by a thriving, engaged community. According to a recent survey, about 27 percent of the websites on the internet is managed by WordPress. A large community has been thriving on WordPress due to the large about of users. As a matter of fact, there are thousands of enthusiasts, developers, and designers out there to help if you get stuck.

Extend Your Site’s Functionality with Plugins

Just so you know, WordPress has millions of plugins that can effectively extend the functionality of any site. Whether you are looking to turn your site into an online store, track metrics for your site, do a podcast or integrate social media, there are pretty good chances that you find a plugin for any task you want to perform on WordPress. With these options, you can easily customize your site however you want to and this can be done with just a few clicks of a button.

Built-in and Ready to Go Blog

wordpress post dashboard

Blogging capabilities on WordPress are built-in and very easy to integrate as this is what the platform was originally created for. As a matter of fact, you can easily add the most recent blog posts to other of your site’s pages, set up comment capabilities and RSS/email subscriptions to your blog. This can go a long way in making your site highly interactive and even more dynamic.

Regular Updates

As an open source web development platform, WordPress provides ample opportunities for modification. Unlike websites created on sophisticated platforms, you can easily add new features and functionalities on your WordPress-based site without having to pass through any stress. In just 3 easy steps you can easily install the relevant plugins. Furthermore, the design and development community constantly provide users with credible feedback, improvements, and updates on new features and functionality.

Gain Full Control of Your Site

You stand to have full control of your site when you build it on WordPress. In fact, you need little or no support from a web development company to run your WordPress-based site. You can easily make simple updates to your site without having to wait for your web designer. Almost every aspect of your site can be controlled on WordPress.

Search Engines Love WordPress Sites

wordpress-seo-friendly

Most WordPress-based sites tend to have well-structured content and they’re also frequently updated. To this end, they often get meaningful ranking on search engines like Google. When compared to a static website, a WordPress site tends to rank very quickly on Google. In case you do not know, this can give you an edge over your competitors. As a matter of fact, Google even recommends WordPress for business sites.

No Code Required

wordpress code

As a self-contained system, managing WordPress does not require the knowledge of any HTML editing or FTP software, such as Dreamweaver or Adobe Contribute. You can easily upload image galleries, video files, documents, images, format text, create new blog posts or pages and even edit them without having the need for additional FTP or HTML software.

ideas for new blog

5 Ideas For Your New Blog

Blogging Tips, ,

If you want to start a blog, you have a lot of things to consider. You’ll have to choose a platform, figure out how to get started, compile content, and work on design, and each of those steps usually takes a little longer than you might expect! But before you even get to any of that, you have to make the most crucial decision of all: what are you actually going to be blogging about?

You may already know the answer to this question, if the idea was what inspired you to start a site in the first place. But if you’re merely curious about the idea of running a blog, or you’re looking to practice your writing or design skills, or even if you’re looking for a little bit of side income, you might be in need of an idea. There are innumerable options, but here are a few specific concepts that might get your wheels turning.

Just Start Writing

wordpress post dashboard

Sometimes the material comes before a concrete idea. That might make your blog a little bit disorganized at first, but you may ultimately discover that you stumble on a regular subject, or find your niche. A lot of blogs start off almost like personal journals and wind up settling into more specific focal points, either because an audience responded to a given idea or opinion, or because the writer just happens to zero in on something. It’s not the most concrete idea, but sometimes you really are best off if you just start writing.

Review What You Know

Some of the best blogs out there are those that turn writers’ personal opinions into expert takes for audiences. Film is one common example that comes to mind. There are lots of film blogs out there, run by everyone from freelance contributors to professional critics. And if you feel like you know movies well enough to comment on them, there may be room for you in this genre. The same can be said of books, music, comic books, or even political speeches. The trick here is finding an angle that isn’t being done yet. For instance, you could see if anyone out there is reviewing movies in 300 words or less, or gear each review toward answering a specific question like “is it a date movie?” or “is this how you should spend your Friday night?”

Review What You Try

You can also start a blog simply commenting on things you try, like products, businesses, professional services, etc. We live in a time in which consumers actually depend quite heavily on the opinions of others when making purchases. Just think of all the Yelp and Amazon reviews you’ve probably sifted through in your time. It can be a little difficult to gain a following as a reliable critical voice, but reviewing things you try can be surprisingly fun, and can definitely keep you busy. If you go about it in a professional manner (but with some personal touch) and grow your blog strategically, you may just gain a following.

Latch Onto A Booming Business

If you have the knowledge and capability to write about a new or popular business that’s already capturing people’s attention, it can be a great way to start a blog. One that comes to mind from recent years is daily fantasy sports, or “DFS” sites. The DFS industry has undergone scrutiny from government and lawmakers regarding its legality, but it’s persevered to the point that it now appears ready to last. And everyone wants DFS advice. If you can comment regularly and intelligently, you can have a successful blog on your hands. The same holds true for any number of other new businesses. Think Bitcoin exchanges, virtual reality headsets, mobile game developers, and anything else trendy these days.

Document A Journey

In one very thorough write-up of different types of popular blogs, it was suggested that “The Guide” is among the better options. The idea here is to guide readers through an aspect of their lives, be it a fitness routine, spiritual journey, or whatever else may come to mind. People enjoy reading about progress, and in many cases use it for inspiration. Documenting anything from a weight loss effort to a quest to travel around the world can capture people’s interest and earn you a following that few other subjects are worthy of.

how speed affects website

How Speed Affects Website & Search Rankings [Infographic]

Blogging Tips, , ,

When was the last time you bought something online? Or at least window shopped? There are many advantages in browsing items on your laptop instead of going from store to store searching for what you need. Moreover, you can have the goods delivered to your door, and this means lots of precious time and energy saved.

But how many times have you bought from a website that took more than 5 seconds to load? If you’re a typical customer, not even once. If you did buy, it means your tolerance levels are a lot higher than the usual online shopper.

Leaving kidding aside, 79% of customers who were discontent with the speed of a website never bought it again. In other terms, the number of sales closed by a website is proportional to its loading time. For example, after Bing has dealt with a 2 seconds’ increase in its waiting time, the revenue loss per visitor was 4.3%, and there were 3.75% fewer clicks on the page.

In case these percentages are a bit foggy, here’s another example, in financial terms: if Amazon loaded 1 second more slowly, it could lose $1.6 billion every year. Thinking of what can happen in a second…

On the same note, after Smart Furniture improved its speed, the organic traffic has increased by 20%, and the pageviews by 14%.

But your website’s speed also has a major impact on the search engine rankings. Whether you’re using SEO tools or not, if the visitors have to wait more than 4 seconds for a page to load, you’re more likely to be on the bottom of the list at a Google search. And this applies to the mobile version of a site. If we’re talking about the desktop version, the loading time cuts to 2 seconds.

Basically, To improve your SEO score in search ranking you need to work on your page speed, and here’s how you can optimize your WordPress website/blog for speed and performance, other than that you can more improve using these on-page optimization SEO tools.

So how about you? How many seconds do you usually wait for a page to load until you click away from a website?

How Speed Affects Website & Search Rankings [Infographic]


Presented by Skilled.co

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wordpress or blogger

Which CMS is better WordPress or Blogger?

Blogging Tips, Wordpress Guide, , ,

In today’s world, there is no business that can survive without its official website. Especially talking about the newer or the small scale businesses. A website will act as a medium for creating awareness about the different products and services among the visitors.

There are a number of web building platforms that are available for creating a website. These platforms will offer you a number of tools that will enable you to edit, modify and publish the content of a website. Two of the most common CMSs that are widely in use nowadays are WordPress and the Blogger.

Which CMS is better WordPress or Blogger?

Uncomplicated and Intriguing Interface

wordpress dashboard

If you are well versed with WordPress, then you would have read enough blogs about the ease of usage that the platform provides to its users. Any user can quickly familiarize himself to WordPress and start using it as compared to Blogger. Talking about the interface WordPress’s dashboard is much better than that of the Blogger.

Where Blogger is a mere blog posting platform, WordPress is an all in one solution for publishing a blog and developing websites. Among all the CMSs that are available for building a website, WordPress stands apart from all of them.

You Own Your Website, not Google

6 Reasons WordPress Is the Best Platform for Your Website

As WordPress is a third party application, you get to have a complete authority over your website. But with Blogger this is not the case. As Blogger is owned by Google, your website can be suspended in a situation where you do not follow or violate any of the policies drafted by Google.

You will receive a mail regarding the suspension of your website from Google. Usage of any kind of content that is duplicate is also against the policies of Google and will result in your website getting shut down.

Plethora of Design Options

In the WordPress Vs Blogger battle, one aspect where no other CMS, be it Blogger or any other can defeat WordPress, is the wide range of design options that it has on offer. With WordPress, you will get thousands of themes that will help you in designing your website and fulfil your requirements. Some of the themes will fit perfectly in the design of your website. This will save a lot of your time that you would have otherwise invested on customizing it.

However, with Blogger you only get a few number of themes and customization options. In terms of the overall look and feel the themes offered by Blogger are no way near with that offered by WordPress.

Better Search Engine Optimized

wordpress-seo-friendly

With respect to SEO, the websites that are built using WordPress are better optimized when compared with that of Blogger. WordPress will enable you to make use of the numerous plugins like W3 cache, Yoast SEO for keeping a track on the SEO status of a website.

With Blogger, you are all by your own while managing the SEO of your website. You don’t have the ease of using any plugins that will do the analysis for you. Therefore, optimizing your Blogger website is not that easy as it is in the case of WP.

Extend The Functionality of Website

wordpress post dashboard

In WordPress, you will get a plugin for basically any feature or enhancement that you want to add to your website. There are plugins for sharing your content over the social media, translate the language of the content, enhance the security of your website and much more.

You get to choose from a wide range of more than 40k plugins in WordPress. With plugins, you will be able to develop your website even if you are poor in coding. There are some simple copy paste functions that you need to do for designing your website.

Self-Host Your Website

WordPress gives you an option to self-host your blogs and websites. You don’t have to pay additional money for this. You have to pay the fees only for the hosting services. WordPress, when compared with Blogger, provides a much better option for long term purposes.

At an initial level Blogger is a good option but not in the long run. However, the lack of features and the urge to make your website stand apart from your competitors will persuade you to migrate your Blogger website to WP. Due to the number of options and features available in WordPress, it proves to be the best CMS platform.

WordPress Website Loads Faster

wordpress speed

A website developed in WordPress will tend to load much faster when compared with that of Blogger. There are certain plugins in WordPress like WP Super Cache which make sure that the factors that reduce loading speed like images are compressed that will allow your website to load quickly and smoothly.

A Blogger website makes use of a single HTML template for making any kind of desired changes. Due to this, there is a significant increase in the load times of a website. It also has a negative impact from the point of view of SEO.

Sell Your Website Easily

One of the major drawbacks of using a Blogger website is that you won’t be able to sell it. As such, there is no option for selling and Google will penalize you if you try to do so. So, down the line, if you feel that you would sell your website then WordPress would be the better choice. Blogger is a product of Google, you will have no control over it.

Google strictly follows its policies and will directly suspend your website or blog if you don’t adhere to them. However, WordPress is a self-hosted platform so you can easily sell your website whenever you want to do so.

In The End

Above points highlight the benefits of using WordPress as a CMS platform. Apart from these points, there are many other benefits that WordPress will offer you. Due to its ever growing list of features and attributes, most of the people are converting their existing website created in other CMSs to WordPress.

wordpress widgets to boost blog visibility

7 Free Widgets to Boost your Startup WordPress Blog’s Visibility

Blogging Tips, Wordpress Guide, , ,

WordPress widget is basically a small block which is designed to perform a unique function. You can easily add such widgets in sidebars of your web page. These areas are available for widgets.

The widgets on WordPress were designed basically to provide a user-friendly and interactive way of giving total control to structure and design of your WordPress theme. You can easily drag and drop the widgets in a specific area. All you need to go to Appearance > Widgets section to check the list of widgets available and widget area in WordPress dashboard.

With the help of widgets in WordPress, you can easily add features and content in the widget areas of the theme that is generally sidebar. But these widget areas can be found in the footer, header, sidebar, or below the content, or any area in the theme. The widget areas available in your theme may vary according to the specific theme.

Most of the wordpress themes are widget ready and they are likely to have several widget areas. Themes are generally not needed to have areas for the widget. If widget areas are not found in your theme, it is sure that the theme doesn’t support widgets.

You can find several kinds of widgets available. By default, WordPress has several widgets, such as tag cloud, categories, calendar, navigation menu, recent posts, search etc. If recent post widget is dragged into the widget area, it can have the recent posts listed.

Generally, widgets are separate areas which contain codes to perform a specific and predefined function. Plugins also add their signature widgets to provide added the control to the user over the display of its functions. For example, OIO Publisher is a plugin widget which lets users add a separate banner ad area in the widget areas.

In this guide, I am going to introduce you to seven WordPress widgets that are quite useful and can help increase the visibility of your site in different ways.

1. Recent Posts Widget with Thumbnails

Recent Posts Widget with Thumbnails

WordPress features a recent posts widget by default. It showcases a simple list of recent posts. With the help of Recent Posts Widget with Thumbnails, you can easily show recent posts in your blog with thumbnails. For a thumbnail, it adds the first image in your post or a featured image. From the settings screen of widget, you can easily adjust the width and height of the image.

It is a simple and light widget that comes with plenty of options. It is based on the widely used default widget on WordPress “Recent Posts”. But it is extended to show more details on the posts like excerpts, thumbnails, and assigned categories.

It will add thumbnails from featured image or from the first image of the content on WordPress blog. If you don’t have a content image or featured image, it can let you show a default thumbnail. You can easily set its alignment. The thumbnail basically is aligned left to the post titles if they are featured in left-to-right languages. Otherwise, it will be aligned on right side.

2. Category Posts

Category Posts wordpress widget

As the name implies, this widget does nothing but simply shows recent posts from the category you select. It can also let you show post titles in the list or show thumbnail and excerpt. When it is used with Display Widgets, you can easily see the hidden widgets on specific WordPress pages.

With the help of Category Posts widget, you can easily place the list of posts linked from the same category in widget area or sidebar. You should activate “Williams Category Post Widgets” to use Category Posts widget.

Here are some of the most common uses of Category Posts widget –

  • You can make a menu-like widget in the sidebar in which posts are linked in a category.
  • Add thumbnail images and display a random post from any category you choose.
  • Show dates on time-based elements like News & Latest Announcements.

Here are some of the Common Features –

  • Change all Short Code options easily in customizer
  • Supports several short codes
  • Added option to use multiple widgets one after another for post offset
  • In order to edit shortcode, it can add customizer link on admin bar with just one click
  • Insert Shortcode buttons added to editor
  • Lets users to set dimensions and show post thumbnail by height and width.
  • Responsive Layouts with fluid images
  • Set hover effects for thumbnail
  • Enable excerpt filters from plugins and themes
  • Supports “Social Buttons on Posts” of Jetpack
  • Added option to activate excerpt filters from plugins and themes
  • Thumbnail can be set as default thumbnail
  • Change posts ordering.
  • Disable banner, social buttons in excerpt.

3. Simple Social Icons

Simple Social Icons

This widget is really very easy to add social icons to the sidebars. The widget’s settings include all the configuration options. You can pick the social media icon to link and add URLs of your profile. The icon can also be modified by choosing icon font color and background. By far, it is the best widget to add social icons. It is a customizable, user-friendly way to show icons with which visitors can be linked to several social profiles. By using it, one can easily customize size and color of icons, profiles to link to, and you can also align them to center, left or right from the widget form.

4. Google Maps Widget

Google Maps Widget

Fed up of slow and lagging Google Maps default plugins that take forever to install? The Google Maps widget gives the ideal map with a light-box and thumbnail that can be set up in minutes.

Google Maps Widget is the shortest and easiest way to integrate a map on the sidebar of your WordPress site. You can easily display Google Map in the empty area with this simple widget. So, when someone clicks on the map, it will open a lightbox popup to display a larger view of the map. To display location and address of your business, it is the best WordPress widget.

5. Testimonials Widget

Testimonials Widget

With the help of Testimonials Widget, you can randomly list or slide selected quotes, portfolios, texts, or reviews with videos or images on your blog. You can simply add testimonials through theme functions, shortcode, or widgets with tag and category selections and have several options to display, including specific or random ordering. For improved search results, Review Schema is also inbuilt.

The Testimonials Widget can easily add social proofing to the website. It can help you slide or list reviews through short-codes, functions or widgets. All in all, it is more than a typical Testimonials slider.

Key Features

  • Fade, carousel and slide transitions
  • Random display
  • Filter slideshow content through tags, categories or post ID of WordPress
  • Responsive Image Slideshow
  • Styled well for adapting easy theme
  • Slide content which is rendered with short-codes and compatible with shortcodes, such as Gravity Forms and WordPress galleries.
  • Slide text which is vital to rotate testimonials
  • Slide images which conduct responsive slideshow
  • Shortcode and widget ready
  • Performs video slideshows

 

6. Image Widget

Image Widget

Without writing HTML in a text widget, you cannot add an image to the sidebar. But it causes issues for the beginners who don’t know HTML and are unable to style image. But this problem is fixed with Image Widget. Users can easily add an image with WordPress media uploader. It also provides a user interface to add alt text, caption, and choose the image size. It is a simple widget which uses the default media manager of WordPress to add an image to your site.

Key Features

  • Manages image alignment and resizing
  • MU supported
  • Description & Title
  • Link image
  • It has given all fields optional.
  • Link to External Image, upload, or choose an image from media storage with the in-built Thickbox browser.
  • Responsive
  • You can override template for the theme

7. YouTube Channel Gallery

YouTube Channel Gallery

With the help of this widget, you can easily show latest videos on your blog from your YouTube channel directly. All the videos will be arranged perfectly in a grid layout which is also space efficient and makes it look more appealing. First of all, you have to setup and activate YouTube Channel Gallery plugin. Once the plugin is activated, display latest videos through “Appearance> Widgets” in a sidebar widget. Just drag and drop this widget to the sidebar.

This widget is very configurable. So, you have to install it. First of all, you have to provide a playlist ID or user ID in widget’s feed tab. To set thumbnail and player sizes, click on thumbnails and player tabs. Save changes once everything is done. YouTube can also work as HTML5 Player for mobile devices by using IFrame Player API of YouTube.

Summary

We hope you liked this post and it would help you pick the best WordPress widget to improve your site ranking and visibility as per your needs. By using the above widgets, you can easily improve your website’s overall presence and make it as lightweight as possible to attract visitors.

Instagram Maximize User Engagement

Instagram Tips To Maximize User Engagement

Blogging Tips, how to, ,

The Instagram social network has an average of 4.2 billion image likes every day and this can only increase as the platform continues to grow in popularity. If you are marketing a business, brand or website, it’s imperative that you include Instagram in the mix.

As with any marketing campaign, when you create visual content for your brand on Instagram you should focus on your target audience as much as possible. According to data compiled for a new infographic by website builder, more than 80% of the users live outside the United States and this includes several non-English speaking countries. About 19.22% of Instagram users are from the USA. For an international brand, this is, of course, a benefit. The fact that images are also the focus, helps break any language barriers you might face with other types of advertising.

Research suggests that if you can attract the right audience, at least 5% of them will take action to visit the website, share the post or shop for products, depending on your call to action.

Instagram Tips To Maximize User Engagement

Here are 5 tips to help you get started:

#1 Always use relevant hashtags

Without an easy way to find your post, your marketing efforts will go unnoticed. This is where the hashtags become useful. When you use popular hashtags relevant to your business, your post will be found by those who search for hashtags. A single hashtag in a post can increase the engagement by 12.6%. When you use hashtags, you can use 5-10 per post, but don’t go overboard as this will cloud your caption and might come across as spammy.

#2 Use the best images in every post

instagram best image

On Instagram, the appeal is purely visual and you should never ignore its importance. Even the best image can become useless if you don’t understand how your image is scaled by the app. Instagram now allows high-resolution pictures, but it scales down the images to 612 x 612 pixels. Brighter pictures garner 592% more likes and cool colors are widely preferred.

#3 Create contests on Instagram

50% of users follow at least one business and customers always enjoy free giveaways. Holding contests and giving away prizes is one of the tried and tested methods to improve engagement. When you create a contest campaign, you should be specific about what you expect the customer to do and what they will get in return. You can use these contests to increase likes, shares, and tags. Your contest should always contain a specific hashtag that is easy to share and remember.

#4 Use stories to establish brand personality

Recently, Instagram launched a snap chat-like feature, allowing you to create Instagram stories. You can write over unfiltered images and videos and post them as stories. These will be shown for 24 hours and it is a great way to increase engagement. The users can also create their own stories and videos using your content and this will engage them even more. Use these stories to define the personality of your brand. You can also provide time-limited offers exclusively for Instagram users using these stories.

#5 Cross promote on different platforms

On top of Instagram, your business should at least have a Facebook and Twitter account. These social media platforms allow cross-promotion which is useful for keeping your audience within your network. You can use the engagement features of other platforms to drive traffic to your Instagram posts and vice versa.

first wordpress blog

Shout out Loud With your First WordPress Blog

Blogging Tips, how to

Whether you are 20 years old or 60 years old, expressing your thoughts, views and opinions is your birthright. While there are various mediums to spread your words out, it takes time and efforts to get your write-ups published in print (newspaper, magazines).

So, how the heck you can express yourself? Well, in today’s time, when everything is accessed digitally, blogs are an ideal way to say and share whatever you want. And trust us, it is the easiest, most convenient, and affordable way to do so.
Create your blog in less than 30 minutes and just kick start!
Out of the many blogging platforms available out there, WordPress is believed to be the most preferred and reliable, even among the top-notch bloggers.

Why??

  • WordPress is Free and open source.
  • It is reliable and secure.
  • It is easily customizable

Convinced? So, let’s begin with our step-by-step guide to creating your first blog for free with WordPress.

Step 1 – Setup Your Blog

wordpress.com Setup

Setting up your blog relates to the domain name and web hosting.

According to Wikipedia, a domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. In short, it’s your website’s address on the internet. For instance, in www.wordpress.com, wordpress is the domain name.

Web hosting is the business of offering storage space and access rights for websites. Simply, it is where your website resides.

In general, a domain name typically costs $14.99 per year, whereas web hosting costs $7.99 / month. That’s why people find its affordable to create blogs online.

You can buy your domain name and web hosting services from any reliable and popular domain name provider and web hosting service provider like GoDaddy and Bluehost, respectively. Choose the hosting plan according to your need and budget.

Step 2 – Install WordPress

Install WordPress

Go to WordPress.com and click the Get started here button. Choose a name or subdomain for your blog. Pick a username and leave an e-mail address. Once you are done with the login process, you’ll be redirected to the Dashboard, which is the admin area of every WordPress blog. You’ve successfully installed WordPress on your system.

Step 3 – Select Your WordPress Theme

wordpress Theme Selection

If you want to magnetize your readers to your blog, you should give it an eye-catching look. WordPress theme allows you to play with the visual appearance of your WordPress blog.

WordPress offers thousands of pre-built themes that you can choose for your blog. You’ll get both free as well as paid theme options. But if you want to customize your blog then you’ll need Custom WordPress theme you can get it our wordpress theme shop.

  • Go to the WordPress
  • Click on Appearance and select the Themes option from it.
  • Click on Add New You’ll be redirected to a page where yo can see over 4100 free themes.
  • You can Filter your search for picking a theme from a specific category – industry, layout, etc.  This will simplify your theme search task.
  • Once you’ve chosen the theme of your choice, simply hover your mouse over it and click the Install In a few minutes, the theme will get installed on your WordPress.
  • Click on the Activate button to set it as your WordPress blog theme. You can always change them later by clicking the Customize button under the Appearance

Step 4 – Kick Start your First Blog

wordpress Post

Once you’re done with your blog customization, it’s time for you to write your first blog. Simply, click on the Posts » Add New button in your WordPress dashboard. A new window will pop-up on the screen. This is known as the “Editor” area. Use this area to write your blog. You can also add images, videos to your blog from the Add Media tab.

Once you’re done with writing your blog, click on the ‘Publish’ button to share your first blog with the world. You can also take a preview of your blog to check how it’d look after getting live on the internet by clicking the Preview option. If you need to revise your work to pour in some more ideas, save it as a Draft to publish later.

Note : Custom wordpress blog theme will only work in wordpress.org

Conclusion

Hope this article would help you get through starting your WordPress Blog easily. Feel free to share your feedback with us. If you get stuck somewhere, write your issues in the comment box below and we’ll be happy to resolve them. All the best!

seo onpage optimization tools

Top SEO On-Page Optimization Tools For Websites

Blogging Tips, ,

Every SEO professional works for the betterment of the website over the web. For this, he uses many SEO tools and techniques to optimize the site adequately and gathers more and more traffic for it. Among all the finest search engine optimization activities, On Page optimization is a right strategy that helps in good analysis of website’s performance at major search engines and other social media channels as well. It can be done by using some useful search engine tools. Thus, every webmaster needs to have depth knowledge about search engine tools used for On page activity of a website.

For On Page optimization of a website, there are many vital search engine optimization tools available, which can help you do better analysis of a site’s technical aspects, keywords, broken links, content quality, page speed, and a lot more. All you can check by using relevant On Page SEO tools as follows:

SEO On-Page Optimization Tools

Technical Analysis: For technical analysis of the website, following SEO tools are useful:

  • Google Webmaster Tool: This is a suite of Google SEO tools that help webmasters to control data and configuration of the site on Google.
  • BetterGraph Website Analyzer: This tool is effective in checking SEO related issues in the website like its ranking, meta tags, speed, etc.
  • Screaming Frog: This is an SEO spider tool used in crawling a website and also makes its audit easier.


Keyword Analysis:For Keyword Analysis of the website, following tools are useful:

  • Google AdWords Keyword Planner: This tool is used for checking the traffic generated for a targeted keyword of the site and also helps in finding more relevant keywords for it.
  • Jet SEO Keyword Density Checker: This tool allows you check the density of keyword in the content of the web page as well as review the site correctly.

Broken Link Analysis: For broken link analysis on the site, following tool is useful.

  • Broken Link Checker : With the help of this SEO tool, you can easily check the broken or dead links on your website. The tool enables you to scan an unlimited number of webpages and their links as well. It allows you to find the exact location of broken links on the site. This tool gives you the flexibility to check the quality of the links on the site manually. The tool is useful in validating both internal and external URLs and also points error codes in bad URLs.

Copied Content Analysis

Every SEO requires original content for optimization of a website or its keywords at major search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Google, etc. So, it’s important to do a proper analysis of content in terms of its quality and plagiarism. There are many free online tools available to check the plagiarized content.

  • Copyscape Plagiarism Checker: This tool is specifically used for checking plagiarism of the content on the site or web pages. Moreover, it can also be useful in preventing content theft and content fraud on the website. It offers a manual check for content duplicity on the site on a daily or weekly basis.
  • Siteliner: This is a free service SEO tool which enables webmasters to check various things on a site such as duplicate content, broken links, page power, reports, etc. For content, this tool is very useful, as it checks content very well and warns for its plagiarism easily.
  • Jet SEO Plagarism Tools: This tool is effective in finding internal and external duplicate content for specific web pages. It extracts the duplicate content in the text from both internal and external ends of pages and indicates for them explicitly.

Page Speed

Page speed is also an important factor in the performance of a website. It’s necessary to be checked the speed of web page to download on devices of any sizes like mobile, desktop, tablet, etc. Usually, page score of a website ranges between 0 to 100 points. If a page scores 85 or more then its means it has a good page speed.

  • Google PageSpeed Insights Tool: This is a well-known page speed tool used for checking the speed of a website. This tool helps in making a webpage fast to access
  • GTmetrix : It is a very popular tool that analyzes your page speed performance.

Thus, above SEO tools are very useful in On Page optimization of a website and also helps in generating more traffic for it.

Conclusion:

Doing On Page optimization of a website is easy with the help of relevant SEO tools that are useful in analyzing the worth of a site at various parameters like technical, page speed, keyword density, content quality, and a lot more.

optimize wordpress speed

How to optimize your WordPress website for Speed and Performance

Blogging Tips, Wordpress Guide,

The time your website takes to load greatly contributes to the success of your online business. If it’s slow, it will turn your visitors away. In fact, if it takes forever to load, they may not even think twice to hit the back button before letting your website load completely.

Though WordPress, as a CMS, is very well-coded, a majority of webmasters mess their WordPress sites by choosing a poor web host, installing plenty of low-quality plugins, and filling it with piles of garbage.
But even if you do not do such things with your website, there is still a possibility for improving your website’s performance and speed. There are various techniques that you can leverage to optimize your WordPress site for speed and performance while boosting your conversion rate.

Steps to Optimize WordPress Speed & Performance

1. Use a Caching Plugin

Wordpress Caching Plugin

WordPress is a server side programming language which is written in PHP. This means whenever your website is visited, it submits a request to the server to process it and then displays it on the screen.

This makes your website slow when multiple users try to access your site. However, WordPress enables you to break this monotonous process and display a cached version of your website to the user by reducing calls to your server and preventing it from downloading the same files on the user’s system again.

In order to generate a cached version of your website, you need to use a cache plugin such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. A caching plugin enables your website to load static content such as JavaScript files, CSS, and images from a reliable caching source. It’s much faster to load your website from the cache instead of the server.
Additional caching features include Content Delivery Network (CDN) support, Gzipping, caching of feeds, minification and much more.

2. Enable gZip Compression

Wordpress GZIP Compression

The third most effective way of optimizing your website for speed and performance is gZip Compression. GZIP compression decreases the size of the web files including HTML, CSS, JavaScript files and images that are being transferred between your users and the server. GZIP compression compresses your files up to 70-80%, which are then sent to your visitor’s browser. But before rendering the files, the browser automatically decompresses it and displays the extracted files.

Note: To check if Gzip Compression is already enabled on your website, you can use https://www.giftofspeed.com online tool.

To enable GZIP compression, add the following lines of code to your .htaccess file.


  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
# For Olders Browsers Which Can't Handle Compression
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
  BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

Enable GZIP in WordPress

Though this method is not always recommended as it involves PHP for enabling GZIP compression, it can be used by those who are new to WordPress and don’t know how to add code to the .htaccess file. But still, if it’s not the last option left, try not to use it.

Steps to enable GZIP in WordPress:

Navigate to http://yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/options.php
Look for gzipcompression setting
Once found, change the value of GZIP field from 0 to 1

2. Enable Browser Caching

browser caching

As a matter of fact, many files on your website do not change including images, JavaScript files, CSS files and more. The most effective way to take advantage of this is to enable browser caching, which enables your users to store a cached copy of your site locally to speed up its loading time.
To enable browser cache for your website, you need to add the following lines of code to your .htaccess file.

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

The above code indicates how long a specific file must be stored locally. If the time expires, the files will be downloaded again automatically.

4. Optimize your images

optimize images

There is no denying the fact that visual content plays a crucial role in making your website more engaging and user-friendly. However, adding tons of images to your website makes your website a lot slower. So does this mean you should stop using them? Of course not! However, you need to ensure that the images you are using on your website are accurately optimized.

There are plenty of image editing tools that enable you to save optimized images without losing their quality. One such tool is WP Smush.it. It is a popular image optimization WordPress plugin that automatically smushes your images to get rid of all the additional information attached to it such as GPS coordinates, the camera used for the photo, creation date and more, thus decreasing their load time significantly.

5. Optimize your WordPress Database

optimize your wordpress database

If you have been using WordPress for quite some time, your database will probably be filled with tons of data that’re of no use. Thus, it’s important to optimize your database performance and speed.

Well, this can be done simply by using a WordPress plugin such as WP-DBManager, WP-Optimize or WP-Sweep plugin. It cleans up your WordPress database for orphaned meta, post revisions, trash, pending spam comments, auto-saved drafts and more.

Conclusion

Optimizing your WordPress website has become the need of the hour. Slow loading websites not only leave bad impressions on users but also influence your search engine rankings. Moreover, as reported by a survey, a web user tends to abandon a website that takes more than 3-5 seconds to load. I’m pretty sure, you wouldn’t want to be in the category of abandoned websites.

Before you optimize your website, check it’s current speed using Pingdom’s Site Speed Test to know how much your website has improved.

SIMPLE TIPS PROFESSIONAL BLOGGER

Simple Tips To Become A Professional Blogger

Blogging Tips

We are moving ahead of the time when age and experience are no longer used to assess the credibility of an individual or the organization. Instead, a major emphasis is given on the ideas they exhibit or state in their list of “to-do” objectives. The latter is skillfully done by placing relevant and interesting content on the website via blogs. Blogging has emerged as one of the most simplified and effectual business marketing strategies. And, creating a failsafe blogging strategy can turn out to be the best decision for your business.

Wouldn’t it be great if you have an exact idea of the content and components to be added in the blogs and newsletter? Or have an idea of the reader’s perspective so that you can specifically target these first-time readers and turn them into your prospective clients. All this can be easily done with the help of an effectual blog strategy that perfectly manages time, skills and dedication.

Reasons Contributing To The Rising Popularity Of Blogging In Digital Marketplace

Content always remains the king! And no doubt, a number of diversified business companies have realized that blogging possesses a potential of playing a major role in creating an effectual marketing strategy. Blogging continues to be referred as the most inexpensive tool that helps in generating desired traffic and visibility to the website.

Site authors are specifically using blogs as a reliable content strategy that helps in an engaging target demographic to their site. Thus, helping in leveraging the reach of your business on a large scale at minimum expenditure. The other reasons contributing to the rising popularity of this technique is the availability of varied blogging platforms and tools. WordPress is a popular blogging platform that comes with an added functionality to modify the purpose and presentation of blogs.

However, to reap maximum benefits out of these platforms and tools, you need to become a pro in blogging. Before you move forward if you have a blog on WordPress then you should read first the WordPress guide for beginners to avoid mistakes. Below mentioned is a list of tips you must follow to become an expert blogger.

Simple Tips To Become A Professional Blogger

professional bloggin tips

1. Understand Your Target Audience

Having an idea about your target audience is the best way to plan your content marketing strategies. Now after having a brief view of the perception and demand of your audience, you can head on creating blog posts on the topics they would respond well.

2. Get Blogging Goals From Your Audience

Collect ideas from your audience and know about the topics they would love to read more. Nothing could be better than asking your viewers about the topics they would prefer to read on your blogs or you should cover on your blog posts. You can start by engaging readers on your blogs through comments and tweet. Once you start receiving such feedback and reviews on your posts, begin writing blogs on them and engage more readers to your site.

3. Get A Premium Blogger template

owning a blog that has a premium features always help you to become a professional blogger, With a blog using resposnive blogger template or premium wordpress theme you would be able to attract more visitors and they will provide better engagement and readibilty to the user.

4. Create Your Email List

Once you start writing your blog, try to make your own email list that can be used to promote your write-up amongst readers. There is no such rule that only those into marketing or selling something should have an email list. Instead, everyone who is into blogging can market their content at initial level through these strategies. You can grow your email list by using this great post.

5. Treat Your Readers Equally

twitter engagement
Never ever abandon your existing readers while pitching new ones on your blog. Many times, bloggers tend to pay more emphasis on driving new readers to their site leaving aside their old readers. This is a wrong practice that can affect the loyalty of your existing readers towards your blog. So, it is advised to value all your readers to get assured of your site’s growth.

6. Include a Call-To-Action Option

Unlike conventional methods of using sidebars for sharing the blogs, expert bloggers nowadays are using few advanced call-to-action option to improve the visibility of their blogs. Connect your sign up or follow links with these call-to-action features on your blogs to attract more readers.

7. Maintain The Consistency

It is easier to lose traffic than to gain it and this is what makes all the difference. So, always maintain the consistency while writing blogs so that you can let your readers get an idea of your blog and its profile’s credibility.

8. Content Should Be Unique

The added content should be unique and interesting so that it can grab the attention of the readers in less span of time. It takes the only fraction of seconds for readers to decide whether they should stay on your blog or leave it there only. Always give a catchy headline to the content to generate curiosity and readability of the content.

9. Do Not Include False Or Unauthorized Information

Never fool your readers by offering them false facts and information into the blogs. As it may lead to some rise in credibility issues between you and your readers, thus hampering its popularity further.

10. Be Patient

Do not follow blogging strategies that are claimed to offer quick returns in short period of time. As it is next to impossible to maintain the quality while covering such a vast web audience through these quick measures. Although, blogging is one of the popular short-term ROI generation paths, but if done meticulously, can help in reaping sustainable visibility for the blog.

11. Be Your Own Customer

To get a successful start for your business, start writing for yourself instead for others. Bring together your thoughts, ideas, and opinions and finely place them into the content of your blog.

Conclusion

Bringing success for a blog is a slow process and to start with a good content and advertise it efficiently through social mediums and other platforms. And to get an assured success for your blog, follow these above-mentioned tips to materialize your goals.