Faster website improves user experience and hence directly affects the bounce rate as well as the returning traffic. If you are targeting global audience, you should know that they are using different types of internet connections – some are fast and some are slow. Those with high internet speeds don’t care much about the site load time because almost every websites loads in a matter of seconds. However, those with slower internet connection, each byte downloaded is precious. Therefore, the goal should be to reduce the site load time by tweaking and optimizing the website.

Google Also Recommends Faster Websites

As you might know, google has included site speed as a part of their search algorithm. This was done by google for the same reason – website usability. They also believe that a good website should be fast loading in nature. Therefore, they have provided tools to check site speed such as google analytics and some other firefox plugins. This helps you find the bottlenecks such as SQL Queries, DNS Lookups etc.

Plugin Performance

Similar to the tools provided by google, godaddy has launched a wordpress P3 Plugin Profiler. This ingenious tool generates  ”creates a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time”. In layman terms, it finds the speed bottlenecks.

It generates virtual traffic for the website and measures the performance of each plugin and stores them in the results file. You just have to click on “Start scan” and it will do all the work automatically by loading multiple pages of the website.

It displays a pie chart of the average total time taken by each plugin. Here is what my website’s test results looked like:

As you can see, you can easily visualize which plugins are consuming more time and hence, you can act on it by:

1. Removing the plugin

2. Replacing it by another plugin which consumes less time.

3. Using a code snippet which has the same functionality as that of the plugin.

It’s a pretty cool plugin and has a lot of advanced features such as detail stats and timeline. You should give it a try!

Site Performance: Determining the Blocking Factor is a post from: Blog Godown

You have spent long months to create your WordPress membership site and you have just launched it but to your (unpleasant) surprise, it doesn’t attract the attention you thought it would. While for newly launched sites low numbers of visitors in the beginning are just normal, if you want to make your site popular faster, you have a secret weapon – free content.

Free content must be your companion not only in the beginning. In fact, throughout the whole lifecycle of your membership site, free content is something you can’t go without. This might sound illogical but as I will explain in the next sections, your paid membership site can’t be successful without lots of free content with top quality.

Free Content Isn’t Cannibalizing Your Paid Content

Many inexperienced webmasters of membership sites will frown at the idea to have huge amounts of free content because they think it will jeopardize their paid content. The logic is that nobody will pay when he or she can get something for free.

However, this isn’t so. Your free content and your paid content are not competitors – or at least your task is to make them non-competitors. You don’t offer the same stuff for free and for a fee. For free you offer the basics, for a fee you offer the more advanced stuff.

If you are familiar with the open source model, the model you need to apply is similar to the model of open source software – great free functionality and paid extras. Depending on the type of your WordPress membership site, the free and the paid components can vary.

For instance, if you have a membership forum, you can allow everybody to register for free, read threads and post in them but reserve access to more advanced areas, such as a job board or a marketplace for paid members only. As you see, the two functionalities aren’t competitors; in fact, the paid ones supplement the free one.

Free Content Helps to Attract New Members

Maybe you still don’t see why you need free content. If we continue the above example with the membership forum, your free content will be visible to everybody on the Web and the people who are looking for a solution will find the threads where their problems are discussed. It is true that many of them will solve their problem for free by reading the publicly accessible areas of your site but if they are pleased with the quality, they might become your regular visitors.

Most of these free members will never upgrade – this is a fact. Still, don’t regard free content as a loss of valuable resources. Even if 1-2% of your free members upgrade, for a site with huge traffic this is enough to become sustainable. Additionally, if you place ads on your site, you do profit from your free members, too (very often you might profit from them more than from your paid ones), so there is no reason to consider the free sections of your site to be lost profit.

Free Content Promotes Your Site

Finally, in today’s competitive world, no business can be successful without promotion. You just need to accept that a certain portion of your budget will go for promotion. You can launch a dedicated ad campaign and pay for it but your free content does a great job in promoting your site without having to pay extra fees.

If your free content is top quality, this increases the chance to rank well with search engines. Search engines are still the best alternative to get free quality traffic and you can’t miss such an opportunity.

There might be a bunch of paid membership sites that offer no free content and still are successful but more often than not, this approach doesn’t work. Free content with superb quality is a must for a membership site – this is how the business goes.
plugins.

Why Your Paid Membership Site Can’t Go Without Free Content is a post from: Blog Godown

So there I was installing some new free WordPress plugins on my blog to try and add some functionality to my site when suddenly – BAM! – all my posts disappeared.

Irrespective of where I went on my blog, all I got was a “file not found” error.

I started to sweat. I could feel my temperature rising. Six months worth of work up in smoke.

I checked my admin panel. No articles. I checked my database. Gone.

All those articles – which had taken months to create – and which were drawing significant traffic from the search engines every day had been deleted thanks to one rogue plugin that hadn’t functioned as it should have done.

If this was my only website that could have been “game over” for me. Time to go and get a real job till I had time to rewrite all the content on my site.

But as luck would have it a few weeks before I put in place a system that I hoped would help me recover from situations like this. Situations which only *ever* happen to other people, surely? It almost seemed like a pointless exercise at the time. Now I needed to test it in the real world to see if it really worked.

I clicked the link in my control panel and waited with baited breathe. Time stood still. Everything depending on clicking that one link. Did the system work?

Less than four minutes later my blog was fixed. All my (previously deleted) articles were back and my site functioned just as well as it did the day before that plugin wiped my site from the face of the planet.

I could breathe again.

I don’t know about you but I put a *lot* of time into making my WordPress blogs as good as possible. I spend hours on creating high-quality content, finding the right images, making my theme just right.

If I lost it all – through a mistake or a serious hacking attempt – I would be devastated. I dread to think how long it would take me to get things back to normal – if that were ever possible. Imagine losing your design, all your content, your internal links, your pictures and more.

Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?

So why would you take the risk of not backing up your blog? It’s really not your web hosts duty, and while they *may* be able to help if the worst happens, it’s really not down to them and you will have little or no recourse if anything happens to your site.

This is why a short while ago I set out on a mission to try to find a cheap, simple and reliable way to automatically back up my WordPress sites so that if the worst ever happened I could quickly recover from the problem and be up and running again in no time.

Infact, truth be told, I’m glad I did. As you’ve just read I managed to accidentally delete every piece of content on my site yet my back-up system worked flawlessly. Disaster averted.

So now you know the potential problems of *not* backing up your WordPress site, and you’ve heard about how I got to test the method in the real world with satisfying results let me talk you through the exact system I am using so that you can implement exactly the same strategy on your own sites.

Not Backing Up is a blunder in the making!

I use a combination of two services to back-up my WordPress sites.

The first of these is the WordPress Automatic Backup plugin available for free from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/automatic-wordpress-backup/

The second service is the Amazon S3 online file storage service. Run by Amazon.com this is a fast, reliable and very cost-effective place to store large, valuable files off-site so that even if your hard-drive gets fried you will still have a copy of your files safely held.

The plugin is quick and simple to install and then interface with your Amazon S3 account (which you can sign up for at https://s3.amazonaws.com).

As a useful tip, Amazon S3 can be a little hard to use if it’s your first time. To make life a lot easier download the S3Fox plugin for Firefox which enables you to easily transfer files, create folders and so on in a clear, visual manner much like most FTP software.

You can set the WordPress Automatic Backup plugin to save back-ups of your content, plugins and even theme on a regular basis. Then if the worst happens you can simply go into your WordPress control panel, click on the restore link and the most recent back-up will be downloaded and installed by the plugin.

Go and do it today. You may think you’ve got better ways to spend your time but like me – when disaster strikes – you’ll be glad you spent those few minutes to install the plugin. Back-up now, and enjoy the peace of mind of knowing your hard work is now safely protected.

How I Accidentally Deleted Every Article On My WordPress Blog – And How I Fixed The Problem In Just 4 Minutes Flat is a post from: Blog Godown

SQL injections are far more frequent than you would believe. An attack that stars with several thousand web sites has the potential to reach more than a million within days. The mechanism of infection itself remains unchanged. Only the scope of the damage is what changes. It is growing at an exponential rate, notwithstanding the fact that modern frameworks have built-in protection systems that frequently manage to thwart SQL injections. The injection inserts a random bit of HTML, which misdirects the user to a sham anti-virus site, where they learn they have been infected.

How to know you are at risk?

It takes a while to prepare SQL injection attacks. One was registered in October, but it took until December to show up on the radar. However, most infections have occurred recently. The sites that become infected generally use the same structure with a .php extension file. Only sites built on a Microsoft SQL Server 2003/2005 are affected. The type of sites affected is quite heterogeneous, including a large number of university and international government sites.

Know the enemy

To protect your site, you should know how the malicious script gets into a database. SQL attacks carry out a SQL loop, finding every normal table by searching in the system objects directory. Then every column is embedded with the harmful script, which relies on the system objects table in entirety. This is why it is usually just Microsoft SQL Server databases that are hacked.

Protect your site

So how do you protect yourself against these vicious attacks? You have the standard protection measures, such as using prepared statements, filtering, white- and blacklisting if it is possible to filter for control characters and if it is impossible, respectively. Server admins should check for files that materialize as if out of thin air on the httpdocs directory. This is how malware is embedded in your system. The attack is major and really vast in scope. It is very hard to get rid of this script. Users of security software firm CA, whose site was hacked, are being redirected to a Chinese-hosted malware site.

Urgent measures

How do you deal with a SQL injection? First, remove all infected pages on your web site by taking them offline at once. If you can, find out where, how, and when the system was hacked. Talk to (and by all means hire!) a professional, who will detect all the pages that are vulnerable to attacks via SQL injection. Get them fixed. Every single page should be fixed, because even one vulnerable page is enough to corrupt all your data. Then, what you must do is roll your database back to before it was hacked. Make sure you install the Real Player patch if your Real Player is vulnerable as to keep it from getting exploited. Get a reliable AV system, such as AVG. Keep in mind that even if you manage to contain the damage to your system, your clients will spread it because they will download the script as they browse your sites. This could be damaging if their Real Player is vulnerable. Your site is not working properly, and you are embarrassing yourself in front of your clients. Think about it and do not dawdle, waiting for things to fix themselves!

Protect WordPress against SQL Injections is a post from: Blog Godown

Search Engine Optimization can be very puzzling for bloggers, beginner as well as for experts. Search engines like Google or Yahoo view what’s going on, on your blog as WordPress is structured in a SEO friendly way. However there are really helpful plugins that which makes life for bloggers simpler and it also helps you to rank better. The SEO plugins below are what I consider the ones that should be installed for every blog you host. No matter what topic you focus on.

1. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack is included in every list you find and with good reason. It allows you to configure your page titles, Meta tags and keywords as well as descriptions for either your whole blog or for individual page by individual page. Another advantage of this plugin is that it is compatible with other WordPress plugins and every beginner can handle it.

2. Permalinks Moved Permanently

A lot of bloggers choose a wrong permalink structure at the beginning of their blogging career. Once you have gathered a few experiences you might notice that the structure needs to be adapted and changed. Herein lays a problem. If you manually change your permalink structure your traffic will come to a standstill until your site is indexed again. This could take a while. This plugin is similar to the Redirect plugin that is also available from WordPress but rather than redirecting traffic it manages your permalink structure.

3. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links is important as it helps you to interlink your subpages to one another. All you have to do is predefine keywords that the plugin should link to other articles that focus on similar subjects. This doesn’t just help your readers to find other relevant posts but it also helps Google to see how well structured your blog is and will eventually turn into a better ranking.

4. Robots Meta

Search engines crawl and index all your pages of your blog. When this occurs, it can happen that it creates duplicate content which you don’t want as Google could punish you for it. The Robots Meta plugin allows you to select which sections of your blog Google should crawl.

5. Akismet

This Plugin is from the makers of WordPress, and although it doesn’t have that much to do with SEO it is always on top of my list no matter what list I create as it is so handy that ever one should have it installed as it protects your blog from comment spam and pingbacks and trackback that you don’t want.

I hope that with the above SEO plugins you’ll be a lot faster and more successful in your blogging. For further questions and suggestions don’t hesitate to contact me.

Finding the best hosting in the United States or the best UK web host may seem overwhelming.  Don’t rush into buying the first one you find, look around and see which one fits your needs better. 

Top 5 SEO Plugins for WordPress Hosting is a post from: Blog Godown

Akismet

Usually, bloggers use a plugin – Akismet (which is bundled with the wordpress installation). It is by far, the most effective anti-spam plugin. Any comment which does not pass its test is sent to the spam folder.

Although, it is good to see that all the comments which look spammy are sent to the spam folder. But, some of these comments are genuine but somehow do not pass Akismet’s test because of the following two reasons:

• The Name contains certain keywords which are usually considered spammy
• The website link or the email id have spammy names

I, for one, value my reader’s opinion and so, I make it a point to include all the genuine comments to the table. I was not happy with Akismet because it was flagging some genuine commments as spam and I had to check the spam folder manually to approve comments. This was time consuming and very frustrating.

Conditional Captcha

Conditional Captcha

I came across  the Conditional Captcha plugin which conditionally flagged comments as spam. Whenever Akismet flagged any comment as spam, the conditional captcha plugin will display a captcha to verify it (the commenter) was a human and not a bot. If the captcha is filled correctly, the comment can be sent to the spam folder, or in moderation queue or be approved. The ones that fail the test can be deleted permanently or sent to the trash.

By this technique, I am able to reduce the spam comments to about 10% of the comments I get.

I hope this quick tip will help you tackle the problem of spamming.

How to reduce spam by 90% is a post from: Blog Godown

In order to build good relationships with my commenters, I thank them when they are commenting for the first time. Each first time commenter on my blog is redirected to Thank You for Being a Contributing Member of our Community page.

I will tell you why I created a Thank You Page and why you should do it too.

It shows I care

As I mentioned, blog community is very important to me and a thank you page shows that I value the community. When a commenter is redirected to this page, he or she will feel that the blogger cares about them. Their opinions and problems will matter to me and I will reply to their comments and find solutions to their problems. This builds a more personal relationship with the commenter – a connection which is hard to establish in the first time. A reader of my blog Warren Whitlock was so impressed with the page, that he shared it on his amplify page. His response to the page – “Here’s how you thank people who add value to your community”.

Better Conversion Rate

In the thank you page, I have mentioned my blog feed, newsletter, twitter and facebook pages. A first time commenter may join any of these networks to stay updated with the blog. You may be wondering, how does this page have a better conversion rate than any other page, as other pages also have links to feeds and social networks. There is one simple answer to it. When you have a normal page, the reader may or may not be engaged with it. But, through a Thank You Page, you are able to get your reader engaged by showing them that they are an important entity of the blog community. Once, the reader buys what you are trying to sell, in this case – your blog content, she will not hesitate to join your community.

Better Informed Readers

In the page I also mention what our blog is all about and what is our mission. This helps readers to be better informed about our blog, i.e what niche it is in and what we have to offer. Through this information, they can take the decision to join our community or not.

Don’t you think that a page which has so many advantages, should be part of your blog? I think it should be!

Now that I have covered the why part, I have to cover – how to create a thank you page for commenters.

I use the Comment Redirect plugin to redirect first time commenters to the Thank You Page.

1. You have to create a page

2. You have to download the plugin and install it on your wordpress blog

3. In the Settings of the plugin, you have to select the page you want you readers to be redirected to.

You can use this plugin for other things like you can redirect them to a free resource like an ebook. It depends on how you want to engage with you audience.

(Image Credit)

Why and How to Create a Thank You Page for Commenters is a post from: Blog Godown

Spamming has been one of the worst ways for people to try promoting their stuff, and which is a big trouble for the bloggers always. They always have to moderate the comments they receive on the posts, just to make sure that no spam is posted on the blogs. For the wordpress blogs, the availability of several plugins makes the job easier in protecting the blogs from unnecessary spam by automatically throwing away the spam from the moderation section.

Here are a few wordpress plugins which help protect the blog from spamming

Akismet WordPress Plugin

Akismet – Visit Plugin Page
This is one of the most used plugin, which comes as a default installed one which just needs an activation through the API Key. Akismet checks every comment and sends the comment to the spam box if it is suspicious or has been already marked as spam by any other blog owners in their blogs. There is a free and paid option available, depending on the need, like personal blogs can use the API key and Akismet services for free but businesses and commercial sites can pay to get more out of it.

Wordpress Hashcash Plugin

WP-Hashcash – Visit Plugin Page
This is an anti-spam plugin that works on eradication of spam and sending the spam to the Akismet section when the visitor fails to submit a proof that they opened the blog through a browser. If they passed it, then the comment is sent into moderation, or else the comment is regarded as spam or one sent by a robot or automated system. It also helps in preventing trackback or pingback spam.

bcSpamBlock – Visit Plugin Page
This is another plugin similar to Hashcash where it tries to ensure that the client that has reached the page is a human and not a bot. A specific code is sent into the javascript and if the users don’t have the javascript enabled, they need to just copy and paste the code into the textbox to confirm. For preventing the trackback and pingback spam, the plugin ensures that the the trackback responds correctly to the referrer website.

Bad Behavior WordPress Plugin

Bad Behavior – Visit Plugin Page
This plugin not just prevents spammers from posting their spams on the blogs, but also sometimes prevents them from even visiting your blog. This not just helps you keep away from spammers, but also the site’s load is always fast and the logs are clear. It can be used along with the other spam protection services to ensure maximum safety of the blog.

AVH First Defence WordPress Plugin

AVH First Defense Against Spam – Visit Plugin Page
The AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin gives you the ability to block spammers before any content is served. This is supported by Project Honey Pot, which is a local blacklist. The visitors that are trying to post comments are checked at stopforumspam.com and this checking is done only after the content is served. The spammers can be blocked based on the information supplied by a third party or by using the local blacklist of IP addresses.

Defensio Anti Spam WordPress Plugin

Defensio Anti-Spam – Visit Plugin Page
Defensio is an advanced spam filtering web service that learns and adapts to your behaviors and those of your users. Apart from the spam filtering, the plugin also helps in detecting malicious content, URL categorization, script detection etc. The usage of Defensio would need you to deactivate all other plugins that work in preventing spam in wordpress blogs.

6 Best Anti-spam plugins for WordPress blogs is a post from: Blog Godown

Social media is a powerful way to increase your online brand awareness and the relative low cost of engagement makes social media is the cornerstone of small business marketing strategies. However, with so many social networks to manage, it’s easy for communication and branding to become scattered and inconsistent. Here are 5 tips to get your social media branding right.

1. Make Your Blog Match With Your Website

Branding starts with the look and feel of your primary website and any auxiliary sites where you have established your presence, starting with your blog.  If you don’t have a blog, you should definitely consider having one, and use a self hosted blogging platform like WordPress to power your blog.

Social Media Examiner's Blog

Your blog is the most important branding tool in your social media toolbox as it is the one channel that allows you to have meaningful communication with your customers and potential customers on a regular basis. Therefore, make sure your blog matches with the look and feel of your primary business website. Definitely, do not use a hosted blogging solution that does not allow you to customize the design to match your official site or allow you to match the URL to your own domain, such as www.yourcompany.com/blog or www.blog.yourcompany.com. WordPress.com - though it is free, but, it limits you to a handful of blog templates and charges you a monthly fee to point to the default www.yourblog.wordpress.com URL to your own domain. At that point, you might as well have a self hosted WordPress blog, and hire a WordPress developer to skin a WordPress blog template that exactly matches your existing business website design for a nominal fee.

If you don’t have a website yet, or are contemplating a website overhaul, you may want to consider using WordPress as your content management system (CMS) and using a WordPress CMS theme that incorporates both website and blog layouts. This is a more elegant solution than having a website on one platform and your blog on another. Woo Themes and Elegant Themes offer a wide variety of beautiful, professional WordPress CMS templates for under $75. Another great option is the free Business Turnkey WordPress theme, which gives you 3 color schemes, layouts and font styles to choose from.

Check out the video demo on how a Marin landscape design contractor took advantage of the Business Turnkey theme to create a stunning website.

2. Make Sure Your Social Profiles Match Your Brand

This might seem like a no brainer, however, because different social networks have different layouts and accommodate profile image dimensions, you may find yourself designing a custom social media avatar that you can use on these sites. For example, Twitter profile images are 73 by 73 pixels, while Facebook Fan page profile images will be compressed and scaled down to 200 by 283. LinkedIn company profiles give you a 50 by 50 pixel avatar, and allow for a 100 by 60 pixel business logo.  If your logo exceeds these dimensions in width, as many logos do, you will end up with an oddly cropped or stretched logo. If you decide to resize the logo, make sure your company name is large and clear enough to read. If it isn’t, then have a designer create images that are both optimized for each social network and consistent with your brand. It is well worth your trouble to have your logo optimized for social media sites as opposed to having them be oddly cropped, which looks unprofessional, or using a different image, which creates brand confusion.

While Facebook and LinkedIn do not allow you to completely customize your profile page, Twitter does. Consider hiring a designer to create a custom Twitter profile that matches the look and feel of your official website.

Social Media Examiner's Twitter Page

3. Use Your Social Media Profiles to Dominate Google

Once you’ve established a consistent brand presence on the social media sites of your choice, make sure you cross-link these sites to each other. You should have social media icons on your website and a blog that links to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, etc social profiles. On the flip side, you should make sure your social profiles link to your official site, blog, and other social profiles. Not only to help your customers and fans find and befriend you, linking to these sites also tells search engines that these social profiles are related to your brand. Furthermore, you should make link building an ongoing initiative – always try to link to sites you control with your company name in the link anchor text.
The goal with this exercise is to have all your social sites show up in search engines for your company name. This is a great strategy for online reputation management – by preemptively occupying Google page 1 with social media sites that you control, this makes it harder for negative press or reviews to float to the top.

4. Be Strategic About Your Content

Now that you’ve established your presence on the social web, there are 2 ways you can be strategic about your content. The first is to use your social media outlets and networks intelligently to proliferate content related to your industry specific keywords.  For example, if you are an eco dive resort in Fiji, you want to make sure every Facebook post, Tweet, Flickr photo, YouTube video, etc. includes relevant keywords, such as Fiji diving, Fiji eco resort, Fiji manta ray diving, etc.  Use this content to increase brand awareness and to drive traffic back to your website.

The second is to syndicate your content as much as possible, so you don’t find yourself overwhelmed by the need to create new fresh content every day for every site. Use the Networked Blogs Facebook app to syndicate your blog posts to your Facebook Fan page. Use Hootsuite to schedule Tweets, Facebook updates and post blog posts to your Facebook Fan page. A gazillion free and paid tool exist to help with social media syndication. Pick the tools that make the most sense for you.

5. Participate in Conversations About Your Brand

There’s nothing worse than allowing dialogue to occur on the web about your brand, and to not participate in those conversations. It is easy to monitor the online conversations that are taking place about your business, products and services. The most basic way to monitor brand mentions is by using Google Alerts. Set up Google Alerts to deliver brand mentions directly to your email inbox, or as an RSS feed. You can also set up Google Alerts to alert you on product related keywords, industry keywords, and even competitor names.  Other useful tools for keyword based monitoring include Tweet Deck, HootSuite, SocialMention.com and, on the pricier side, Buzz Logic and Radian 6.

Rather than just pushing information and messages out to your audience, don’t forget to take the time to respond. Read the comments they leave on your blog and social media outlets and write back.  Many small business owners follow their first reaction to delete any negative comment when they see one, but this is a big mistake.  When you see any comment – as long as it isn’t abusive – take the time to respond.  You may be able to win over the person who posted the comment, but more importantly, you will show the rest of your audience that you are taking an active role in social media and are available if they have questions or comments.

A uniform brand and message across all of your social media networks is key to communicating professionalism and attracting the right client. Social media is a powerful tool to that can take your small business brand to the next level. With these 5 tips, you will be well on your way to compete successfully with big businesses in your niche.

(Image Credit for Social Media Landscape Image: FredCavazza)

Five Tips to Creating a Strong Online Brand Using Social Media is a post from: Blog Godown

Sight WordPress Magazine Theme

Sight is a very beautifully designed wordpress theme. It is minimalistic but it manages to surprise people with its stunning appearance. Also, it is highly customizable and it is loaded with many useful features.

Live Demo |  Download

Journal Crunch Magazine Theme

This theme has a very professional newspaper type of look. It has a set of shortcodes which can help you beautify your blog posts by formatting them properly.

Live Demo |  Download

WordPress Anniversary Theme

A wordpress theme released just on the occasion of wordpress’s anniversary. The theme is light colored and the addition of rust color to buttons and other items makes it more attractive.

Live Demo |  Download

Shaken Grid

Shaken has a grid like structure and it is ideal for those who want a portfolio or who want to show their posts in a grid layout. Either way, it looks very different from other wordpress themes

Live Demo |  Download

The Morning After – Minimalistic WordPress Theme

The black and white usage with images and a tinge of blue, makes it an extremely likeable wordpress theme. It is a good choice for magazine type blogs.

Live Demo |  Download

Simplo

As the name suggests, it has a very simplistic design which can be implemented in any type of blog. It comes with the option of 6 different colour styles.

Live Demo |  Download

Mansion – Photoblogger’s Wrodpress Theme

A beautiful blog theme for photobloggers. All the images are displayed in a grid fashion on the homepage. The dark background accentuates the beauty of the photos.

Live Demo |  Download

Boldy WordPress Theme

Boldy wordpress theme has got bold looks. It is a good theme for professional/corporate bloggers and it is bundled with a really nice jquery slider which multiplies its coolness factor.

Live Demo |  Download

Oxygenous WordPress Theme

The Oxygenous’s homepage has a slight grey touch to it which matches really well with red and orange which are used in buttons. Also, it displays category wise articles in a beautiful grid form.

Live Demo |  Download

The Seven Five

The seven five wordpress theme has a great black and white style and the solid image borders enhances the beauty of the website.

Live Demo | Download

10 Refreshing and Beautiful WordPress 3.0 Ready Themes For Blogs is a post from: Blog Godown

The author of this plugin Vladimir Prelovac, has developed a new premium version of the plugin especially for small and large business owners and bloggers.

There are a number of features that set it apart from it’s free version. To name a few:

• Nofollow whitelist – Allows you to specify a whitelist of domains that you do not want to add ‘nofollow’ attribute to (for example for your own sites). It is a really good feature for bloggers who want to optimize multiple websites for search engines. Linking one website to the other will help increase the page rank as well as the search engine rankings
• Advanced automatic interlinking options – SEO Smart Links is more powerful with new features like:

1. Option to prevent cross-category linking (autolink to articles within the same category only)
2. Option to parse only posts older than given number of days
3. Post slug keywords can be matched now
4. WordPress 3.0 custom taxonomies support
5. Option to specify the minimum length in characters for keyword to be considered
6. Disable WordPress texturization filter option

• Caching: To interlink, a lot of resources are used to parse content. For large websites, it would mean excessive load on your site. To reduce the load, internal caching is used which is compatible with W3 Cache and WP Super Cache plugins.
• Link Cloaking: One of the most useful feature for affiliate marketers. The affiliate links can be cloaked using a base permalink for redirection like /go/. It will help you increase the number of sales.

There are many more interesting features which can be checked out at their sales page.

The Premium SEO Smart Links Plugin is available in 3 licenses :

1. Personal (79$) : For bloggers with a single blog.
2. Professional(149$) : For multiple blogs.
3. Business (299$) : Recommended for businesses. Can be used by you and your clients.

You will get a special 10% off on all these licenses if you use the coupon down10.

Take a look at the video of this plugin:

What do you think about automatic interlinking? Have you used any plugins for that? Have you tried the SEO Smart Links Plugin?

Premium SEO Smart Links Plugin has been Launched is a post from: Blog Godown

Go Green By Blogging using some eco-friendly plugins

Blogging is an integral part of businesses these days and you can make the most of your online business with proper use of plugins and social networking through your blog- you might be setup properly with cloud computing and VOIP phones, but without the down and dirty tools to reach your target audience, you may not be as successful.

Consumers that follow a green lifestyle are excited to be in the know of the latest information available to them, such as new products and green living news. To aid in your own online green business, a blog that ties in with your social networking is almost too good of a marketing tactic to not try. The green community is unique in that,

• The industry is fueled by community and joint participation
• Participants wants to share and get everyone involved with the cause they’re supporting
• The industry is always being shaped and grown, so new strategies need to be visible and shared
• Content sharing is a huge part of the community

Most CMS’s, like WordPress, give the option of plugins to enhance the operations of your site and will work in conjunction with your social networking sites. Yup, even though there’s a gazillion plugins out there for WordPress, there’s some useful ones that you’ll want to find and utilize.

A main component of green blogging and social networking is sharing content- as mentioned earlier. If you are introducing a new product or brand, the most exciting way to create buzz is by sharing the information immediately through the site. There are plugins that will allow the content you put on your blog to immediately show up on your social networking affiliations.

For example, if you have a blog and also have a fan page for your business on Facebook, there are plugins available that will automatically notify all of your fan page followers that a new blog has been posted.

There are even plugins that will allow followers to see the blog post right away. By using a plugin that allows you to share information immediately, you are creating a novelty quality that induces viral marketing. There’s an abundance of WordPress plugins that will work directly with your Facebook page.

• Facebook Dashboard Widget- Pulls in your Facebook updates directly into your WP dashboard. Sure- this doesn’t really work in sync with your Facebook Fan page, but it will help keep you connected with others in the green community from behind the scenes.
• Facebook Posted Items- This pulls in your “posted items” into WP. This way, if you have readers that don’t really utilize Facebook, you can still allow them to see what you’re posting on your site.
• WP-FacebookConnect- This allows you to set your site up with Facebook Connect so your users only need a single sign in to pull in all their information.

On the Twitter end, there’s a few (read: tons) of different plugins, but these generally have been user friendly and haven’t seen as many issues:

• Twitter Tools- Full integration between your WordPress and Twitter account. You can set it to tweet when your posts are published so that your community can see them right when they go up.
• TweetMeMe- Allows your blog post to be shared and retweet
• TwitThis- Another plugin to share, with placement above or below post.

Creating this instant buzz will play a huge part in your branding, which will allow you the platform to introduce more products on a regular basis. When you have become a branded and reputable green website, your followers will trust the new products and information you are introducing to them.

Staying active through social networking and sharing information with easy to use plugins also brands you as an expert in your field. Consumers and followers have confidence in your interest in the green lifestyle because of your active participation in creating new pertinent content on a regular basis- they’ll start seeing you as a source rather than background noise.

Keep sharing and take advantage of blog plugins available to make your lives, and your readers lives, easier.

WordPress Plugins to Share your Green Community Blog is a post from: Blog Godown

In my opinion, WordPress is the best platform for blogging because there are so many WordPress plugins available that can be used freely to optimize your blog’s functions. WordPress plugins allow bloggers to use many advanced blogging functions without the need to learn “how to code”. Bloggers only need to find a suitable WordPress plugin (which is easy to find), upload, and then install it. There is no need to do coding like in the other blogging platforms. However, since the WordPress plugins act as a third party application, it may not work well for our blog sometimes. It may slow down our blog, produce a broken layout, or cause any other blog problem.

We may be forced to uninstall a plugin to overcome a particular blog problem or if the blog’s state is very bad or it needs to improve it’s performance. Here, I share six reasons why you should uninstall  WordPress plugins from your blog:

Reason #1. You Can Do It the Manual Way

WordPress plugins are used to do certain advanced blog functions without coding in the first place. However, there are many WordPress plugins that perform very simple functions. These kind of WordPress plugins  load our blog with unnecessary additional interfacing and increase the load time. Also, we can replace these simple WordPress plugins with simple programming code. Therefore, I suggest that we always use the  manual way instead of using a WordPress plugin for simple functions since the code will be very simple. It will be able to reduce the blog fault problems and load time significantly.

Reasons #2. Slow Down Your Blog

I already mentioned it in reason #1 but I think it is better to discuss it in a separate section. It is because of this reason is extremely important. Since WordPress plugins act as third party applications and also, they usually need database resources, sometimes there will be a significant reduction in blog speed. It is always true that too many WordPress plugins will surely slow down our blog. The bad WordPress plugins are the major cause behind the slowing down of blogs. Therefore, we should uninstall all the WordPress plugins that significantly slow down our blog.

Reasons #3. Find A Better Plugin For The Function

There are so many WordPress plugins out there and some of them provide the same basic function. It means that we can always replace one plugin with another plugin and still enjoy the same functionality (with more features and advanced functionality). Therefore, it is normal that we uninstall a WordPress plugin and replace it with a better WordPress plugin. Improvement in blog performance is a good reason behind a plugin change.

Reason #4. Conflict With a More Important Plugin

If we use many WordPress plugins, there is a big probability that a conflict occurs – a conflict between two or more WordPress plugins. I, myself experienced this WordPress plugin conflict. The conflict which forced me to uninstall some of the WordPress plugins. In this conflict situation, we will be forced to sacrifice some WordPress plugins for more important WordPress plugins. It means that we uninstall the less important WordPress plugin so that the important one can run smoothly. We can remove it forever or search for another plugin that does not conflict with the important plugin.

Reason #5. Feed Up The Blog Resources

This reason is related with our web hosting service. There are many bloggers that use cheap web hosting service which allow limited resources to be used. If our resources feed up, our hosting account may be blocked or disabled. It is legal because it is already mentioned in their web hosting contract (Term Of Service/TOS). Therefore, we  need to a keep the resources’ usage below the threshold. For this, we may be forced to uninstall our blog’s WordPress plugins since there are some WordPress plugins which demand very high resources to run properly.

Reason #6. Create Too Many External DoFollow Links

As we know, too many external dofollow links can harm our blog rank in search engine eyes. It is because too many external dofollow link make search engine determine our blog as link farm site. Therefore we need to be careful and always in full control of our blog’s external dofollow link. In this case, we may need to uninstall our blog WordPress plugin since there are some WordPress plugins which require dofollow links from users.

Final Words

In my opinion, the best thing about WordPress as blogging platform is that there are many WordPress plugins available to help bloggers who do not have deep knowledge in programming. Therefore, it allows Bloggers to have advanced blog functions without the need to do coding. However, sometimes, there are reasons to uninstall our WordPress plugins. In this blog post, I already shared six reasons to uninstall WordPress plugin from our blog. If we look at the relationships between all of the reasons that I mentioned in this blog post, all the reasons are related with improvement in blog’s performance.

That’s all the updates this time, wait for the next update!

6 Reasons Why You Should Uninstall A WordPress Plugin is a post from: Blog Godown

1. Content, content, content! - While you want to include terms that people are likely to search for, no one is going to read a plagiarized blog, one that merely spams search terms, or nonsensical writing. People want to see originality and creativity, so pull out all the stops. Depending on your audience you may want to use humor, anecdotes, or other literary devices to get your point across and draw in readership.

2. Linking Up – Use search keywords as links to other sites which will backlink you, but only after making sure your link destinations make sense. For a gardening blog, you wouldn’t want to link to your mechanic’s business site.

3. Location is Key – Having key phrases is great, but don’t forget to state where you are. Many business sites overlook the fact that they usually only provide services to people in their immediate area. If you’re a lawyer in Chicago for example, you may want to use phrases like “Chicago attorney,” and switch that up with names of Chicago suburbs as well.

4. Education Priorities – If your website has anything at all to do with education, make sure to get reciprocal links from .edu sites. Since .edu sites are more heavily weighted on search engines, this will make your page ranking increase. Some .edu sites do actively look for link sponsors, so check around for them, or if you know anyone who works on a website for a local school district or university, talk this plan over with them.

5. Phrases not Words – Most bloggers know to switch up key terms, but aren’t always aware that most people’s searches consist of phrases in order to narrow down results. For our lawyer example, using “personal injury law,” “injury attorney,” and “personal injury legal representation” will generate many more search hits.

6. Call to Action – While you don’t want to oversell yourself by spamming your business name repeatedly (since most people won’t be searching specifically by your business name), you do want to let readers know you’re open for business. Make sure you have a strong call to action in your conclusion that links to your main business website.

7. Adapt and Survive – SEO rules change on a daily basis, so expect to start thinking of your WordPress page as a constant work in progress. Don’t be afraid to change up phrases and techniques in order to stay on top of the game, and read up on which search terms are hot in your industry at the moment.

8. User Based Content – You’ll notice that many popular sites and blogs allow the viewers to put their two cents in. Enabling features like reviews, comments, and sharing options will drive more traffic to your site, and thereby help improve your page ranking. People love to check out sites where they get to give input as well.

9. Fresh Content – Your WordPress site will fall into oblivion if not updated constantly. You can be the most talented writer in the world, but people will not visit unless they can expect new entries on a regular basis. At the very least, try to update your site 1-2 times a week to keep it fresh in the public eye.

This article is a part of the guest blogging contest. If you liked this article, then help in supporting this author by retweeting and commenting on it, which will enable the author to win this contest. By the way, you can be a part of the contest, it is still not late

9 Quick and Easy WordPress SEO Tips is a post from: Blog Godown

SEO short formed as search engine optimization is a process whereby a website is being optimized to appear and rank in the search engines. So many people think SEO is not required to rank in the search engines, but i want you to know that if everything is not in place such as the robots.txt and some other on page factors then your page will not be indexed by the search engines. So many factors are entailed when talking about Search Engine Optimization but we have to deal with the important ones first.

i. ON PAGE FACTORS: The onpage factors of a website has a long way to go in affecting a websites search engine rankings. Some you need to work on are:

• META TITLE: The meta title is your website’s title, it is what is being shown to your visitors by the search engines. The following are tips for choosing a good website title:
  a. Let the title be attractive.
  b. Let it make sense.
  c. Let it be in line with the theme of your website.
  d. Make sure your keyword is included in the tilte.
  e. Make sure the title is as short as possible.
• META DESCRIPTION: Aside the meta title, the meta description and keywords does not influence your search engine rankings, but why is there a need for optimization? You ask! The need for having a good meta description is because this will be shown to your visitors by the search engines, it will also improve your click through rate. It is possible for you to achieve high search engine without getting the right amount of visitors if you have a poor meta description. It is important to make your meta description attractive, but don’t worry about the keywords in the description because it will not affect your search engine rankings.
• META KEYWORDS: This has to be the list of your desired keywords, you might not bother much about this as it is less regarded by the major search engines.
• KEYWORD DENSITY: This is also a very important and overlooked method of achieving high search engine rankings, this is also very important when targeting highly competitive keywords. It is important to make sure that your keyword density is not more than %3 of your whole content.

ii. OFF PAGE OPTIMIZATION: Every other thing that can be done outside your website to improve your website rankings/traffic is called off page optimization. Some of the important off page optimization strategies are link building, Social bookmarking,Creating media awareness e.t.c.

• Link building: This is one of the most important factor for ranking websites and it is very important to consider mostly dofollow websites in your link building efforts. It is also very important to deeplink to inner pages of your website from bot your website and other link sources.
• Social Bookmarking: This is another method of improving your search engine rankings, and any webmaster that is not tapping this yet is missing a lot. Some good social bookmarking sites to start with are: Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Sphinn and Twitter(social networking).
• Creating Media Awareness: This can be done by creating videos and uploading them to video sites such as Youtube. Just make sure your link is included in your description and and video when doing this. It is also important to consider press release sites.

Great SEO tips for Everybody is a post from: Blog Godown

1. Akismet

If you have just converted your blog, you will see a gush of spam comments coming your way. It is hard to tell that how these spam commenters get to know about the blog which has just been created, even when search engines are not aware of it, but they somehow manage. These spam comments make the comment moderation an arduous task. In this situation Akismet acts as a savior and it automatically filters comments which are considered spam and decreases the immense load of spam comments that come your way and reduces the moderation time.

2. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search and is very important for indexing in search engines and for overall SEO purposes.

3. WP Super Cache

WordPress uses PHP script which is dynamic in nature. As the pages in wordpress are dynamic, they take a lot of time to load, especially if the number of plugins used is huge. WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates static html versions of the dynamic php scripts. As the page is static, it loads faster and so the plugin helps you speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

4. All in One SEO Pack

If you are beginner and don’t have any knowledge on SEO, then this plugin will work wonders for you. The All in one SEO pack automates the work of SEO by automatically adding the Title Tags and Meta Keywords. Though if you want to do the SEO work manually, you can do that easily with the help of this plugin.

5. Contact Form 7

A simple yet flexible contact form plugin. It is easy to use and it requires only a one line code, which should be pasted on a page where you want it to be displayed.

6. SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images is a handy tool for Image search engine optimization.

7. WP Greet Box

WP is a nice little plugin which displays greeting messages to users coming from different sources. It is a great tool to increase the number of subscribers to your blog.

These are some of the few plugins which are required for the progress of a new blog. There are plenty of options for advanced functions and it all depends on the blog owner’s choice.

Which wordpress plugin is your favorite?

7 Must Have WordPress Plugins is a post from: Blog Godown

There are many questions which come to mind before converting from blogger to wordpress.The most asked question is:

Will there be a decrease in blog’s pagerank due to the conversion?

If you are using a blogspot domain, you will be losing out on page rank because blogspot domain is only available for blogger and for wordpress you have to buy a custom domain. If you have a relatively new blog, then there is no need to think about page rank, because you can always regain it by posting good content and link baiting.

If you have already bought a domain and you are using it for your blogger blog, then you would not be losing on anything, so go ahead and convert.

Blogger To WordPress Conversion

Blogger to WordPress conversion can be done manually or by using Harsh’s excellent Blogger To WordPress services.

You can convert your blog manually using the following steps :

1. Buy Web Hosting

The first and foremost step in conversion is buying a reliable web hosting. Web Hosting is required to set up your wordpress and also to add files. You don’t need hosting in blogger because blogger provides free hosting for posts and 1GB hosting for images which is enough for most bloggers.

There are a lot of  Web Host providers in the market. But there are only a few which have a good service and support.

Some Recommended Hosts

• BlueHost (It is recommended by  WordPress)
• HostGator
• WPWebHost
• FatCow

2. Changing Nameservers

If you are already have a domain name, then after buying web hosting, you will receive a mail from web host provider containg nameserver details. You need to add the details of the nameservers in your DNS dashboard. This will help in forwarding your domain to the blog posts.

3. Installing WordPress

In your email you will also receive your host account information. After logging in to your cpanel, click on Fantastico and then click on WordPress and then install it. You will have to add details regarding your database, and then username and password. After filling in all the details your wordpress is will be up and running.

4. Importing Blogger comments, Blog Posts

Next step is to transfer all the posts and comment data to your server, this can be easily done using the WordPress Import feature.

Go to Tools>Import

Then click on Blogger and then click on authorize.

You will be redirected to a page as shown below.

Click on authorize, then you can easily import posts from any blogger blog that you own by clicking on the import button.

5. Maintaining Blogger Permalinks

Blogger has a really different permalink structure than wordpress, it uses month and date and the title of the post in permalink, whereas wordpress uses postnumber(eg.http://www.bloggodown.com/?p=123). To prevent any loss in page rank, we need to modify the permalink structure used in wordpress, to keep the blogger permalinks intact.

To do this, Go to your  Dashboard and then click on Settings>Permalinks

And change it to Custom Structure and enter /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

Keeping Blogger Permalinks Intact

6. 301 Permanent Redirects

301 redirects will be used to tell the search engine that your blog has been moved to a new place, and all your traffic will automatically redirected to thenew domain address.

For more info on 301 redirects follow the information provided by the following post

How to migrate from blogspot to wordpress with 301 permanent redirection without leaving traffic behind

Now start posting and try it out .

Blogger to WordPress Tutorial is a post from: Blog Godown

Reasons why you should change from Blogger to WordPress :

1. Professional Blogging :

Most of the blogger blogs are owned by bloggers who blog as a hobby not as a business or a profession. Blogger is a really good platform for newbies, who don’t have any knowledge of blogging and who just want to explore. Through Blogger one can easily learn the basics of blogging and the art of writing good posts.

But if you are looking to move ahead and start blogging professionally then you should take the next step and  switch to wordpress, because of its features and the ability to have full control over its design layout.

2. Multi-Author Blogs and Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging and Multi Author blogging is a mess in Blogger, because there is no way to moderate posts submitted by other authors. In comparison to this, WordPress has the ability to moderate posts and also assign roles to content submitters as Authors, Contributors or Admin. This way you can easily control and decide which authors should be moderated and which should be allowed to have full control.

Another cool feature of the latest version of WordPress stable release 2.8.6 is that it fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges. This makes Guest Blogging and Multi Author Blogging extremely secure and a really good experience.

3. Plugins

The Plugins feature of WordPress is one of the major reasons why bloggers move to WordPress. Though Blogger platform has recently added the Gadgets feature which is quite similar to wordpress plugins feature, but it is a relatively new concept and there are a handful number of people who are actually creating new gadgets. On the other hand, WordPress Plugins feature is an old one, and there is a vast collection of  useful plugins. Actually there are so many of them, that you need a guide to tell you which plugins are actually worth installing to your blog .

4. HTML vs PHP Scripting

Blogger uses HTML and WordPress use PHP scripts. PHP scripts have much more functionality as they use dynamic HTML and therefore it can change automatically, but for HTML we have to manually update the code. Besides individual blog posts in Blogger can only include HTML, no javascript  can be used. Whereas in WordPress, you can easily add javascript to each page.

5. Themes and Design

Before the new version of Blogger was released, it really had no major design customizability and the Themes were few. And even when the new Blogger has been released, most of its themes are converted from the original wordpress ones.

WordPress has got a huge list of themes to choose from, some have good seo features, while others have good navigation and JQuery effects. You will always find one that suits your needs. And if you want to design your blog by yourself, you can do so easily, using the popular seo optimized Thesis Theme.

6. Search Engine Optimization

SEO is very important for your blog, because it increases your search engine rankings and hence gets you a lot of organic traffic.

In Blogger, you can do SEO for images and Posts by adding the the meta keywords and alt tags for each post manually. And to top it all the meta keywords are to be added to the template, which increases the size of the template and hence decreases blog speed.

WordPress has the most sophisticated way to do SEO. There are many plugins which can optimize the site for SEO automatically. The best plugins for SEO in my opinion are the All In One SEO Pack and the SEO Friendly Images.  So SEO work in WordPress is minimal.

In all, Blogger is for new and rookie bloggers and WordPress is for the expert and professional bloggers.

Blogger to WordPress conversion is not very new and many have got fabulous results with WordPress.

What’s your opinion?

Why you should convert your Blogger Blog to Self Hosted WordPress is a post from: Blog Godown