There are many ways to gain guaranteed SEO benefits for your website if you are using the WordPress CMS, some more effective than others. Most of your benefits will be with off site SEO but there can be some on site SEO advantages.

People reading this article may or may not be aware that the majority of your SEO benefits will come from off site SEO, back linking is a huge one, especially if you are anchoring your back links with the correct text. Here I will not go into this aspect of SEO however, this article is more concerned with how you can improve on site SEO via WordPress plugins.

As you are probably already aware there are thousands upon thousands of WP plugins that all claim to benefit you in some way, not all are made equally however and sorting through all the garbage to actually find something of real use is extremely hard work, especially if you are new to WordPress and all the plugins that are available.

I cannot claim to be an expert on every single plugin available, the number to be tested is just too many and would take a lifetime to test individually but the following list shows a few of the plugins that I find are most useful for my personal needs and do give me guaranteed SEO advantages of one description or another.

Your list may vary depending on the reason why you are building a WP site but I think most people will find the list to be of use for the basics plus a few added extra bonuses.

While some of these plugins are not directly related to SEO they may help you to avoid disasters that will ruin your sites credibility with both search engines and visitors alike so do not be fooled by the simplicity of what some of them do.

While on site and off site SEO are very, very important the integrity of your site as a whole does come into play. If your site goes down or is slow or littered with links that go nowhere these problems will all add up to a bad site that both man and machine will dislike and avoid.

One more point that you should bear in mind when installing plugins:

Do not over do it! I bring up page speed further into this article, one of the things that will slow your site down is a lot of plugins. Certain plugins are non optional, a sitemap and a database backup are for example 2 things that you absolutely need but if others are going to be of little use to you, forget them! Use your head in regard to what you need for the function of your site.

Never install a plugin just for the sake of it, only use them to improve functionality!

WordPress plugins with guaranteed SEO benefits

The first thing that any site needs is a sitemap, you don’t need to be a coding expert and create your own thankfully with ‘Google XML sitemaps’. There are other sitemap plugins out there but this is one of the most trusted out there and something that no WordPress site should be without.

‘Yoast breadcrumbs’ is a great breadcrumb plugin that will leave a trail for your readers to be able to find their way around with greater ease. If set up correctly it will also help with internal SEO as it makes the text bold for the current page in the breadcrumb trail and also allows to set your own anchor text for both the homepage and blog page.

The ‘official Statcounter plugin’ is another great piece of kit for your website, while it does not offer any immediate guaranteed SEO benefits the information that can be garnered from Statcounter.com is invaluable in your future SEO decisions.

Where are your visitors coming from?

Where do your visitors go from your site?

What keywords are attracting visitors?

With this information and more you can start to make future plans, see what is working and see what is a wasting your time.

It is well documented that Google now takes into account the speed that your website loads, feeding cached versions of your sites web pages is a no brainer when you take also consider that visitors may also click away if your page takes too long to load. Help to improve page speed by using the ‘W3 total cache’ plugin. If you also have a lot of things going on in your sidebars you may also consider ‘WP widget cache’.

Something that every WordPress site needs is a backup system of some kind. I recommend ‘WordPress Database Backup’. Depending on how active your site is you can set the plugin to Email you a complete backup of your site anywhere from every 900 seconds to bi monthly. Guaranteed SEO benefits? Well… How good is it for your SEO if your site crashes and you have to start from scratch?

Ever had your content stolen from your site via your RSS feed? Then you will like the next plugin. It’s called ‘RSS footer’, a simple yet effective plugin that shows a link on the post that they stole which leads right back to your site, if anybody scrapes your feed content the guaranteed SEO benefit is that you get free keyword optimized back links and maybe a few visitors from the thieving gits site.:-D Bonus!

‘Broken link checker’ Ever been in a rush and put a link into a post or page that is not correct only to find out days or weeks later? (Do you have some that you didn’t find at all come to think of it!?) This plugin will monitor your site and report any links that are not working so you can correct them immediately.

Google hates broken links and your visitors won’t like them too much either, neither should you if you want your site to do what you want it to do and direct visitors where you want them to go.

How often do you finish off a page or post and notice mistakes? You go back and correct them and then you make a couple of improvements and tweaks to the page, hitting the update button every few minutes to put it right… Bad!!

Every time you post or update one of your pages WordPress automatically pings the Pingomatic site, if you are repeatedly pinging all the time your blog can get banned from the update sites for ping spam. Cure this with ‘cbnet Ping Optimizer’ which will only allow pinging when you actually publish for the first time. Pinging on an update will be disabled hence protecting you from being labelled as a ping spammer.

Best of luck with your WordPress site, I hope this information was of use to you.

The Importance of Using a Unique WordPress Theme

If you’ve used WordPress to blog already then you will know that you have the ability to choose a WordPress theme for your blog, and your options are either choosing a paid or free theme. The difference between the two themes is simple, the free WordPress themes will be available to anyone, but if you buy a WordPress theme then you can make sure it’s unique to your blog only. Now a unique theme isn’t very important for every blog you own, but for your main blog you should make sure you have a unique WordPress theme for numerous reasons. For adsense and niche blogs there isn’t much need to create that unique appeal to the visitors and you don’t need a unique theme for these blogs.

There are lots of reasons why you should use a unique theme on your main blog and we’re going to take a look at some of the reasons right now. The most obvious reason is too create a unique appearance and appeal to your readers. Most of your readers will read other blogs and with over a million blogs and not too many free themes there are a lot of people using the same theme. If you have a unique theme then you will stand out from all of the bloggers using a free theme. Most blog readers also state that they will typically stay longer on a blog that has an appealing and attractive theme.

The most important of your theme is that it functions correctly and is carefully coded so that everything is clean looking. If you don’t have these skills then you should make sure you hire a professional for the job so that it’s done right the first time. Once you have the theme coded you need to ensure you have a very attractive header. You’ll notice a lot of the new bloggers are using cartoons in their headers to create a sharp looking and appealing image for the readers. I think it’s a great idea and they look awesome so make sure you have a colourful and attractive header with some sort of a logo. It’s important that you have your own logo in your header so that you can use the header down the road when branding your blog. If it’s a catchy and attractive logo then you’ll typically draw in more visitors and you’ll also be remembered by people by the logo which is the point of a logo, so this is good.

Apart from the header you want to make sure that the sidebar or sidebars are constructed with the readers in mind. You should try blending in all the widgets you plan on using into the sidebars so that they look like there apart of theme. It may take some struggling trying to do this, but in the end you’ll have a very attractive blog that is sure to retain its visitors. Creating your theme to retain visitors is a very important feature that most free theme bloggers never can utilize, so if you use a unique theme you’re one step ahead of most people. Now all you need to do is send traffic to the blog and write great content.

Another of the great WordPress plugins that deserves special mention is “”Simple 301 Redirects”".

One thing about essential WordPress plugins is that if you do not know about them or do not know how to use them, you do not realize how great a functionality you are leaving out of your content management system.

“”Simple 301 Redirects”" is a good example of this. I recollect that I have been in and out of internet marketing three times over the years before this my final stay. Each time I resurfaced on the internet marketing scene, had I known about this great WordPress plugin, no doubt my search engine rankings would be higher today.

I simply would have deployed it to transfer my old blog posts to the new amended/updated pages and thereby seamlessly preserved the old pages rankings. But alas, each time I resurfaced on the internet marketing scene, I simply discarded the old blog posts and posted new/updated pages of these old blog posts on my new blog without linking the two.

That is one of the many setbacks great WordPress plugins like “”Simple 301 Redirects”" set out to correct. It provides an easy method of redirecting requests to another page on your site or elsewhere on the web. It’s especially handy when you migrate a site to WordPress and can’t preserve your URL structure. By setting up 301 redirects from your old pages to your new pages, any incoming links will be seemlessly passed along, and their pagerank (or what-have-you) will be passed along.

Note that “”age”" and “”number and nature of backlinks”" are critical factors in search engine rankings. Any action you therefore take to preserve these for your blog posts will definitely positively impact your search engine rankings.

I’ll give you a perfect example here. I wrote a blog post in December 2009. At that time, I still was not as thoroughly grounded as I am now in search engine optimization (SEO) and so was not optimizing effectively for my intended keywords. I recently changed the title and made some minor adjustments to the body of the blog post and were it to be before, I would simply have left it at that.

Does it strike a chord in you that anytime you do such and leave it at that you are simply beginning your SEO for that post all over again? All the backlinks to the previous post will be gone forever. So also the age, as the new blog post will now be indexed afresh while the old blog post on subsequent visits by the Google bot will read “”not found”", again compounding your crawl errors in your Google webmaster tools. Note that all these ultimately negatively impact your page rank.

So what did I do? I simply inserted my old url in the “”Simple 301 Redirects”" interface and pointed it to my new url which I also inserted in the interface and saved. Just as simple as that and wow! a whole lot has happened with those simple steps. The backlinks and age of my old blog post will be seamlessly passed over to my new blog post and the page rank of my web page preserved.

Let me explain another purpose to which you can deploy this plugin that I have identified as one of the great WordPress plugins.

If you go into your webmaster tools account, you will see indicated, crawl errors that resulted while the search engines were trying to crawl your web pages. You can rectify some of these errors and thereby have a more “”efficient”" website which will impact positively on your search engine rankings by utilizing this plugin to redirect some incorrectly specified links to their originally intended destination.

Those links that you have control over and can still amend such as your backlinks in forums, you can make amends to. But what of incorrectly specified links that you no longer have access to? For example, links on your articles republished on other sites.

This is again better explained with an illustration. I erroneously inserted a link in one of my articles which was republished on another site and noticed the error from “”crawl errors”" in my Google webmaster tools account. The link led nowhere i.e. 404 page and I subsequently redirected it to its originally intended destination, thereby preserving that backlink. This becomes very important when you realize that you can have many of such errors over time.The “”Simple 301 Redirects”" plugin’s many uses can only be limited by your imagination.

In summary, the “”Simple 301 Redirects”" is one more of the great WordPress plugins.

Benefits of hiring a designer

Are you bored using those free themes for your wordpress blogs? If so, its time for your to hire a WP designer who would be designing a unique WP theme based on your requirements. This will make your blog stand out from the crowd. Not just that, it’ll even increase the number of visitors to your site.

Getting a brand new theme for your blog can do a lot to your online business. This may even make others contact you for getting more information regarding the theme. If you are planning to give them your unique theme, then you may ask them a fee for the same. This way, by hiring a good designer you won’t be at lose.

But before you hire a designer you should be discussing certain things with him. You should be asking him to show demos of the themes that he have created in the past. This will make you know more about the skills of that particular designer. You should also ask, the time frame for getting the whole theme designed for you. Then you can start telling more about your project like what all features you would be needing etc. You can even ask his own views on the same. Sometimes, he would be having some better ideas for testing in your blog. Since, they would have designed themes for many, they’ll having an edge over us. So, it’s always a good idea to ask their views regarding the theme that has to be designed.

Depending on the niche of your blog, a good designer may come up with some cool designs for you to choose from. And if you don’t like the samples that he have designed, you may ask him to come up with a new one. There is nothing wrong in that. It’s your right to ask for it – there is no use to pay for something that you don’t like. A good designer will be patient and will be cooperative. So, these are some of the things that you should be keeping in your mind, if you are planning to hire someone to design your favorite blog.

WordPress is a fantastic way of creating a good, reliable content management system. For a web designer with knowledge of PHP and MYSQL the possibilities are endless with custom templates and designs.

In our experience WordPress gets indexed by search engines like Google very well. Google likes websites on blog platforms because they will be continually updated with information and content such as news and articles. You do however have to get a WordPress site ready for the search engine which means adding a few plugins and applying some careful thought.

Let’s have a look through the various plugins required and what they do:

On Page Optimisation Plugin such as SEO Ultimate

Firstly you will need an on page optimisation plugin that allows you to create good page titles, descriptions and keywords. One of the best for this is Ultimate SEO.

This plugin will allow you to create unique titles, descriptions and keywords for each WordPress page and post. You can do this from the dashboard area once you have added your content which keeps things very simple.

Sitemap Creator Plugin such as Google Sitemap XML

Every good website needs a good sitemap and WordPress is no different. You will want to create a good XML sitemap in order to add it into your Google, Bing and Yahoo webmaster accounts. Then a HTML version is required for the website itself.

A sitemap is very important to a website because it allows search engines to see every page you have on your website, which is especially good if you have any hidden away.

Custom Structure Permalinks

This is not a plugin but is something that has to be done to improve the performance of any WordPress website with the search engine results.

Permalinks are the URL’s created for each page, if you leave this to the default setting you will find that the URL’s contain characters such as pageid=3 which are not good for SEO.

Simply adding the following code to custom structure in your permalink settings %postname%/ will ensure that your URL’s represent your pages better and help with ranking.

Getting your website onto the WordPress platform is a great thing to do because it gives you control of your website making it a more dynamic experience for your users. Do make sure that it is search engine ready and you will reap the rewards that this system has to offer.

So you’ve got your website up and now you’re ready to get some people reading it.

First Tip:Write content that people are looking for and that is targeted to your website’s purpose. Fill your website with high-quality information that serves a purpose and provides high value at the same time. People come to the internet looking for information,entertainment or to find the answer to a problem – do any combination of these three things on a regular basis and you’re sure to have a hit on your hands.

Second Tip:Decide with a clear set of goals what you want to use your website for. Will it be to draw traffic to a service? To make money through affiliate marketing? To sell your own products? Or a bit of all of the above.

Third Tip:Get out there and let people know your website exists! I’m not going to cover the dozens and dozens of ways to get traffic here. You need to build a plan you can follow and one that works for you.Understand that just because you build a website that doesn’t mean people will automatically find it.

A few ways to get your website found are:

- Website Directories: There are many paid and free directories available on the internet you can submit your website to.

- Leave Comments on Blogs: Commenting on blog brings you both traffic as well as incoming links if the blog has the no-follow attribute disabled.

- Links from other sites: Links from popular websites is a good way to get both traffic and links as well.

- Writing articles for other websites: By writing articles for popular websites you can build your reputation as an expert and increase traffic.

- Link from your products: If you sell any physical or information products be sure to always make your website known on them.

- Your Email Signature: You probably email a lot of people every single week. Get your website address at the bottom of those emails to get more people to your site.

- Social Media Sites like Twitter and Facebook: Social media is all the rage these days and it can help you build relationships that translate into website exposure.

- Partner Up With another High Profile Website Owner: There are many ways you can partner with a website owner to create a mutually beneficial promote. Just get creative!

Set your goals, stick to them and you’ll start to see your efforts pay off as you build a website that people love to come back to again and again.

The Cheapest Online Business Investment is Software

If you’ve decided to take on the world of running an online business then you’ve probably already ran into some of the early costs such as domains and hosting. You may have also spent some money on some learning materials which is fine if you need some guidance on what to do, although you can find most information by reading blogs thoroughly. As you get your first website live and you add some content onto the website you’ll want to begin getting traffic and earning money.

The problem is that the money isn’t going to just roll in and you need to invest time and money into your online business. Now you have two options when you need to get traffic to your website. You can do it yourself and invest in software to assist you or you can hire people to do it for you. Now if you’re completely clueless then you probably shouldn’t be attempting to run an online business. The problem when you hire people is that they will do the bare minimum and never talk to you again unless you place more money into their pockets. Now you can’t really blame them for doing this, but it’s not going to help you make money.

When you’re just starting out in the online business world you want to do everything for as cheap as possible. The cheapest online business investment you can make is buying the tools that will assist you making money from the beginning. There is no point wasting time doing things manually if you’re committed to running your online business. You will need to invest maybe $500 initially into your online business software and then you’ll be well on your way.

This isn’t a guaranteed method to making money with your business, your product and other things will reflect your success as well. When you get the tools you need though you’ll be lining yourself up for success. Even if it isn’t with your first website, you might choose a new niche to test out and it might work. The good thing about the online tools you’ll be buying is they can be used with all of your websites.

You’ll first want to purchase an online directory submitter, article directory submitter and social bookmarking submitter. These will make these processes automated rather then being done manually and can shave off hours of work every single day. You should also invest in a keyword tool so that you can properly analyze keywords for your website which reflects how well you’ll do. Keywords are very important to gaining the right targeted traffic so the investment is worth it.

Once your business starts making money then you can look at investing some of your profits into more tools for your business. There are plenty of awesome tools out there that automate processes online for your business and using them can save you lots of time and increase your potential reach. Don’t jump into an online business expecting to spend nothing and turn it into $500 a week, unless you plan on offering a service to other webmasters. If you want to be the webmaster though then expect to have some money that you can afford to invest into your online business initially for software.

In these days, many web developers and programmers offer striking and stylish WordPress themes to give unique and exceptional touch to your blog of this themes and plugins are the essential aspects that the blog should have to enable easy maintenance and convenient blogging. Where you to get suitable and satisfactory this themes to adorn your website? Though there are many online sites which offer wide range of its themes and plugins, all are not authentic and reliable.

While selecting from online sites, you have to ensure that the site offers its themes rich with high quality and great appearance. It is not a good idea to select WordPress themes from individual web developers. One of the major reasons is that individual developers do not have good collection of many that themes to choose from. This is where wholesale dealers of WordPress themes receive importance. Getting sites which offer this themes of many popular web developers is not a difficult task. Just elaborate your search over the internet where you can get great results for your search. Wholesale dealers will offer the that themes of your search.

No need to search at your area or inquire among friends and relatives to get references of niches offering different types of this themes and plugins. Turn your foot to computer room and type quality WordPress themes on the text box of search engine. You will get amazed viewing the results that the search engine offers on WordPress themes. You have to select any of the best and affordable sites for quality WordPress themes and plugins. While searching online, you will be able to compare the rate tags and quality of themes. This will help you select the better out of the best. If you wish to get more details about the site or the themes and plugins they offer, ping their exceptional customer care service. Make try on themes and plugins via themesandmods! No doubt the rest will be best for you.

Portfolio WordPress Themes is a WordPress theme that provide designed for web portfolio and now also for web portfolios. It includes with an administrative panel that will allow to edit the head quote text and you can also edit all theme colors, font sizes and you can fill a curriculum vitae and display it into a special page.

This is very interesting and fun as portfolio WordPress themes for WordPress, this theme allows you to showcase your work while adding subtle personal touches with a large billboard featured area on the homepage to a large bold, list and post views on the interior pages thus, this theme will enable you to showcase the best of your work. Actually portfolio WordPress themes is a sleek and sexy but somewhat flawed WordPress theme in making easier to the photographers or designers to create a certain site showcasing their latest work because it look modern and has wonderful typography and large images which would create an attractive looking portfolio site.

Nevertheless, this theme comes with 4 color options available through the themes settings in the admin section, as well as the ability to post a project and determine whether you want it to be more feature in the homepage or billboard area. The theme demo also allows downloading from where you can edit and create impressive portfolio such as seven diverse styles to choose from default, blue, red, grunge light, grunge floral, antique, blue creamer and nightlife colors, the template will also automatically and visually separate your blog and portfolio content in making this amazing theme for aspiring designers, developers, artists and photographers, you can make it unique page templates types for the portfolio, blog, blog archives, tags and search for more theme display, this can be optional automatic image re size which is used to dynamically create the thumbnails and featured images and lastly it includes widget enabled sidebars.

The WordPress should look perfect to anyone that wishing to showcase any kind of portfolio as it seem the themes well designed everywhere and this one is no exception, you can get the options to show off your blog and your portfolio at the same time with a nice looking image slider with your own choice of ten different amazing color styles to pick from a complete advertising settings that can directly add a page into so your reader who will understands what your blog is all about and who you are another one is the widget zed sidebar by this it will allow to load up your own logo that comes with full help and installation documents.

The theme is based on the idea of making a portfolio in creating and starting by pointing out using WordPress with a short tutorials for the guidelines of the design, the code for WordPress used where you can explained the custom write panel created to edit the content and the adaption to the slider effect script and can be modified depending on what the user needs.

The Difference between Web-Based Software or PC Based Software

You’ll find that as a webmaster there are plenty of tools to assist you with your marketing and promotion tactics. Each program is different though and there are some which are web-based and some which are pc-based. There is a big difference between the two and you’ll need to know the difference as it’s very important so that you don’t waste any of your money.

PC-based software programs are run on your desktop and are easily installed on your computer. Once you buy a pc-based program you’ll be able to download it and download it to your desktop immediately. It will be able to run on your computer without the need for using the internet at all. These are the programs which I personally prefer and when I have the option I always choose PC-based over web-based. The reason is it’s a lot simpler to install and it’s a lot easier to use without having to worry about anything.

A web-based software program is a program that you need to install on your hosting plan. In most cases your hosting will be able to support the software, but sometimes it won’t be able to and you’ll need to either get a better hosting plan or not get the program. Installing these programs can be a bit difficult to do if you’re new to the technical aspect of website building, but there are always plenty of instructions. Often you can pay a small premium as well in order to have the owner of the software install it for you, and this is recommended if you don’t know what you’re doing because it will save you a lot of time. Once there installed then it becomes easier to use these programs, but you still need to worry about server resources and things like this. Some automation programs that run on your hosting take up a lot of resources so often you need either a VPS or DS which can be costly.

As you can see there are some great reasons why pc-based software is a better choice then web-based software especially for those of you who are new to this industry. Tools that run on your desktop can be installed within a few clicks typically and using them is a breeze. You also don’t need to worry about having your hosting shut down for using to many server resources, or the need to invest in expensive hosting in order to use the software.

If you’re new to internet marketing and would like to use some automation tools then you should make sure there pc-based. There the same price as web-based software they just have the advantages of easy installation and no need for hosting. Hosting is expensive to purchase so when you’re new to the game you don’t want to have to invest on it. Instead make sure that the programs you purchase are pc-based, so that you don’t need to worry about problems.