Features

• Modern, three columns, Photo-friendly, Widget ready, SEO friendly
• Passes xHTML/CSS validation
• Out of box full SEO optimization including titles and page headings
• Easy to add Adsense
• Optimized for speed and loading time, no javascript usage
• Adjustable rotating images in the header
• Gravatars support
• Out of box Social networking buttons
• Multi-pages widget
• Chunk long urls in comments
• Redirects Google image searches to your site for better exposure
• Customized 404 page
• Access to admin menu from home page (click on blog description)
• Plus much more…

Download Amazing Grace

License

Amazing Grace theme is released under GPL License.

You may freely remove footer links if they bother you.

But it will take time if you creat such links manually. SEO smart Link WP Plugin will do it all for you.

Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs.

Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

Everything happens completely transparent, and you can edit the options from the administration settings panel.

Features of SEO Smart Links Plugin:

• Find keywords in your posts, pages and comments and link them to your other posts, pages, categories and tags
• Full control with customizable options
• Ignore list for keywords you do not want to link
• Improves your site’s interlinking
• Control external links with custom keywords
• Add nofollw attribute or open links in new window

Download SEO Smart Links Plugin

• Download: SEO Smart Links

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase search engine optimization probably came into use in 1997.

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page’s content. But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable because the webmaster’s choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site’s actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches. Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.

By relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster’s control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

Graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed “backrub,” a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags[citation needed], headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming. In recent years major search engines have begun to rely more heavily on off-web factors such as the age, sex, location, and search history of people conducting searches in order to further refine results.

By 2007, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals. The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs. SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.

]]> http://wptips.info/history-seo/feed/ 2 http://wptips.info/increase-traffic-wp-blog/ http://wptips.info/increase-traffic-wp-blog/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:47:34 +0000 admin http://wptips.info/?p=90 So you have just installed WordPress and started your blogging. Now this a very common and important question is How to increase traffic to your new blog. Infact, this is  too difficult to increase traffic to your blog because of increase in competition nowaday. Anyway, herein after some tips that should work for any new blog:

1. Unique and quality content.

2. Building backlinks for your blog

3. Submitting blog to various search engines.

4. Submit blog to Blog or Web Directories

5. Advertising and Promoting your blog

There may be other methods, which I may have missed, to increase traffic to your blog.

All the above options except the last one are free, but they will get you visitors in long term , i.e. they will not bring visitors to your blogs instantly. If you have some good budget you can try various ad networks to get quality visitors for your blog, though I’ll suggest Google Adwords.

In the end I will suggest you Unique content and Link building as these will really help you in getting good traffic to your blog in long term.

Install | Preview

GreenPoint Milanda 1.3.EN Wordpress Theme. Fixed width 980px, 3 columns. 6 sidebars – top, left, right, bottom, top-center, bottom-center. Widget Ready, AdSense ready. Picture in the header changes dynamically according different time of the day.

Phantom

Install | Preview

A lightweight dark gallery and showcase theme from BFL Wordpress Themes.

daffodil

Install | Preview

Created by pure-essence.net. Daffodil, green, yellow, black, flower theme.

Amerifecta

Install | Preview

Amerifecta is a versatile theme, built for speed with seven widget positions; three in the sidebar and four in an extended footer. Amerifecta features a clean design, suitable for a wide range of applications.

Designers will appreciate the fixed width grid layout, including a baseline grid for vertical text alignment. To visitors this makes the site ‘look and feel’ right. Users will also appreciate the light page weight, around 100k! Page architecture is built to load the content before the sidebar and widgets, help to optimize pages for search (better SEO).

Aapna

Install | Preview

Aapna Theme is a Photo Blogging Wordpress Premium Theme. Best for Personal Blog with Dynamically Rotating Album Pictures – Developed by Saumendra Swain You can put rotating images of your choice on the Header.

ShinRa of the Sun

Install | Preview

A clean white and orange theme with two right sidebar, both ready for widgets.

Unnamed Lite

Install | Preview

Unnamed is a three-column, widget-ready wordpress theme. It is easy to use and highly customizable.

Elements of SEO

Install | Preview

Elements of SEO is a simple, 3-column Widget-ready theme created for Wordpress.

OmNomMonster

Install | Preview

Rotate Text

Install | Preview

Rotate Text is a unique theme, which has interesting small bits scattered all over the theme zip. It has a nice flash animation in header, which gives this theme an edge. It has nice simple web 2.0 dark color palette, Also theme has clean coding so that it can be modified very easily to one’s need. It has in-built AJAX comments which requires no extra plugins to be uploaded. It has 125×125 ready ad blocks in the ad.php template file, which is also adsense code ready. Theme is also checked on all browsers for good looks. For support/custom modification of this theme, please contact EP.

Details

Styleicious

Install | Preview

Here are three ways to consider when you kick off trying to earn some money from your blog. Choose one suitable with your blog or combine two (never three, it is too many)  earning methods in one blog.  I am now earning good living from my blogging.

1. Promote other people’s products (affiliate)

As an affiliate (someone who promotes other people’s products and make’s a commission), you can do really well through a targeted blog. This option can be more rewarding than both the other two ideas written about in this article, since it is more cash rewarding than Adsense but it’s far less hassle than creating your own products. Promoting other people’s products means you don’t have to worry about creating an entire sales process or managing customer service – which can often be a bit of a headache! What you definitely need to do is to determine the niche you’ll be writing about and therefore the kind of products that you want to promote. They could be either digital or physical products – there are hundreds of thousands to choose from out there, however digital products are by far and away the easiest when you’re starting out. To make this work well you need to consider blogging about a niche that; a) has a solid market, and b) is something that you can easily write about (it doesn’t have to be something you know about and you can research on the web). Once you start to build a following on your blog, you can start to build a good revenue stream by promoting good products to them.

2. Display Google AdSense

This is the easiest of my three ideas but is the least likely to make huge amounts of money. In short Google AdSense is where you use a small bit of code (which Google gives you) on your blog page and this displays relevant advertisements there. As the code does the hard work of working out what your page is all about and what its readers might want to see in terms of ads, you literally do nothing else and hope that your readers click on the ads they see there. You get paid a few cents/pence per click. So, as you can now tell, you need a lot of people clicking to build up a good amount of income! That said, there are many people who make a good amount of cash in this area by hosting numerous content rich sites across a number of niches. Once again, you need a really good niche here to ensure relevancy with ads and their connection with the reader. Notice a theme developing? – A Niche is so important!

3. Sell your own products

This option can be most effective after you have already earned loyal readers. You will have become a good ‘authority’ within your niche – whatever that niche is – and you are ready to ‘take the plunge’ by providing a product for them directly. You could produce and sell an e-book, a video series, or an audio course of some kind. Maybe even a membership site? Or a combination of any of these things. Choosing which service or product you would offer depends on the type of niche that you have already captured through your blog and the type of feedback you have received from your following on the affiliate products you’d promoted to them. Now, producing your own products means that you will need to take care of fulfilling the orders (or use something like Clickbank for digital products) and deal with any customer service issues that might arise. This additional hard work that you put in to dealing with your own product and customers will be all worth it though – all the profits are yours to keep alone and you can even get other affiliates selling your product for you!

Starting out on any of these options may seem overwhelming for you at first but don’t let that stop you from taking a chance on earning through your blogs. This is just a short article but there are lots of ways for you to learn the ‘tricks of the trade’…check out other blogs and see what they are doing. Observe them over time and watch how they build their relationships with readers. There are also websites which can give your hints and tips on blogging – as well as plenty of e-books and video courses which could prove useful.

And don’t forget – you need to ensure you are going to enjoy blogging, so choose a subject you think you’ll like – else it’s unlikely to succeed.

Happy blogging!

Wordpress is an extremely powerful blogging platform. Wordpress makes blogging easy and fun. It includes great plugins that are authored by many people from all over the world. And you can find plugins for media, commenting, posting, editors, Technorati, Flickr, backing up, etc. But many people get bogged down on the installation of Wordpress. It’s best to have someone hold your hand and guide you through the process. Let’s get started.

First things first, you need to get the installation files from Wordpress. Do a google search for Wordpress. Click on the download link on the top of the screen. On the download screen you will see options to download a .zip file or a .tar.gz file. Most users will want to download the .zip file. .Zip and .tar.gz files are simply files that are compressed. This saves download time because the file size is smaller. Click on the .zip download button. It will list the latest Wordpress version on it. Save this file to your desktop. Now, you will need to have an extraction program in place. If you are running Windows XP, it has a file extractor built in. Right click on the file on your desktop. It will have a .zip extension. Choose “extract this file” or an equivalent message in the menu. Run through the wizard and choose to view the files at the end. This will create a folder on your desktop with all the wordpress files. It is usually named wordpress with the version included.

And now we get to the difficult part of the install. This seems to be where most users have an issue. In order to run Wordpress, you need to be using a linux hosting account. Wordpress will not work on a Windows hosting account. You also need to set up a mysql database for wordpress to use. Consult your hosting account for directions on how to do that. Technical support should be able to help walk you through that if you get stuck. Now, we need to change some values in a file in the wordpress directory that you previously extracted. Go there now and find the file named “wp-config-sample.php.” Open that up in notepad. You can find notepad by clicking on the “Start” button, going to “all programs,” and then “accessories.” You should see notepad listed there. When you open this file you will see the following at the top:

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database

define(’DB_USER’, ‘username’); // Your MySQL username

define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password’); // …and password

define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

You will need the following information about your database: the name of the database, the username of the database, the password of the database, and the database host name. You simply input this information into the “wp-config-sample.php” file. Let’s use an example to make this clearer. Let’s say I create a database named “Wordpress.” The user for the database is “mydatabase” and my password is “Great1*” I simply input this into the file:

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘Wordpress’); // The name of the database

define(’DB_USER’, ‘mydatabase’); // Your MySQL username

define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘Great1′); // …and password

define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

Now, here is a little caveat for Godaddy users. Godaddy does not use localhost for the database host name on shared hosting accounts. If you’re using a Godaddy account, then you are most likely using a shared hosting account. You will need to go to that account’s control panel. You will need to go to “Mysql.” And next to the Wordpress database, you will need to click on the pencil icon as if you are going to edit the account. This is under the “Actions” section. This will show you the database host name. It will be something like mysql597.secureserver.net. Replace “localhost” in the “wp-config-sample.php” file.

Once you are done with this, you will want to change save the file as “wp-config.php” and not “wp-config-sample.php” This is very important since this controls how Wordpress functions. Now, you need to get your FTP information from your hosting provider. This will consist of a username and a password. You will need an FTP client to upload these files to your server. I totally recommend SmartFTP. It is an awesome, free FTP client. You can find it at http://smartftp.com/ . Now, copy all the files in the Wordpress folder. Do not copy the Wordpress folder itself! You should have a list of files and folders like wp-admin, wp-content, and wp-includes. Now, fire up SmartFTP. Enter in your website name, like ilovemywebsite.com. Enter in your username and password and hit enter. This will open up the space where you can upload your Wordpress install. Now, right-click in the white space on the right and select “Paste.” This will start uploading all your files to your web server. Sit back, relax, and enjoy a cup of coffee.

Once this is all done, you are ready to start the Wordpress install. This is super easy and super fast. Just navigate to the install.php file. To do this, open up your favorite web browser, like internet explorer or firefox. Now, using the website name from above, you would go to http://www.ilovemywebsite.com/wp-admin/install.php. Obviously, replace “ilovemywebsite” with your website name. Follow the directions on the screen. At the end, note your password. Do not lose this! Now, log into your new Wordpress installation. The first thing you will want to do is change that awful password. You can do this by going to “Users” and then “Your Profile.” You should see an “Update Your Password” area on the bottom right. And that’s it! Enjoy.

WordPress has evolved around the years with introduction of themes, plugins and widgets into the blogosphere. Those additions really made WordPress very popular with bloggers due to the flexibility and ease to modify and customize the blogs. They could produce very professional-looking blogs in a short time frame with WordPress compared to when they had to do it using the HTML codes.

Theme is a way to “skin” a blog. It provides control of the look and presentation of the blogs. Without changing the core software, bloggers have the flexibility to change the display of posts and the blogs. By simply modifying some template files included in a particular theme, we can customize the blog’s look on-the-fly without having to worry about compatibility with the application and other components used by WordPress.

Since it is an open-source application, there are many people willingly working on and sharing the WordPress theme with everyone. Most of the blog themes are available free of charge. You can just use search engines to find WordPress theme with whatever additional attributes you want to have. You will be presented with hundreds if not thousands of websites that have more information on themes. You can also visit WordPress Theme Directory for a complete listing of officially recognized blogging themes.

Plugins are used extensively to extend the capability of WordPress blogs. There are just too many things to list down what you can do with WordPress plugins. I guess you can find just about anything you want to do available. If you can’t find it, it is relatively quite easy to make one if you have some basic programming skills. Just like the themes, there are many plugins available. Most of them are also available freely on the web. Beside using search engines, WordPress plugins are also available at WordPress Plugins Directory.

Another benefit of using readily available themes is that many people have designed adsense-ready themes. Adsense is a way to monetize your blog. Adsense is simply an opportunity for bloggers to display google ads on their blogs. They will earn money when people click on the displayed adsense. With adsense-ready theme, it means bloggers can configure adsense easily just by entering their adsense pub-id into some parts of the theme files.

1. Tell a Friend – WP-Email

This plugin allows visitors to recommend your blog post or page to a friend via email.

2. Subscribe to Comments

Your visitors simply check a box under the comments field which allows them to receive an email notification whenever further comments have been added to the post.

3. Random Posts Plugin

Displays a list of random posts from your blog at the end of a blog post encouraging readers to stay on your site.

4. Similar Posts

Displays a list of related posts from your blog at the end of each post. This encourages readers to stay on your site.

5. Recent Posts

Displays the most recent posts from your blog.

6. Digg Plugin

Allows you to add a Digg style icon button to each blog post encouraging readers to Digg your post.

7. Share This Pugin

Allows your visitors to add your blog post to social bookmarking and networking sites. You can see how this works by clicking the Share This link at the bottom of the post

8. Sociable Plugin

Works in a similar way to the ‘Share This’ plugin  by allowing visitors to submit your posts to their favorite bookmarking sites.

9. All in One SEO Pack

Optimizes your blog for the search engines making your blog posts and pages easier to find and rank.

10. SMS Text Message Plugin

Your visitors can enter their mobile number in a sidebar widget and be sent updates via SMS when your blog has been updated.

11. Increase Sociability Plugin

This plugin recognizes when a visitor has arrived via Stumbleupon or Digg and provides them with a nice reminder to encourage them to vote for your post.

12. Subscribe Remind

Places some text at the end of each blog post reminding visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed.

13. What Would Seth Godin Do Plugin

Works in a similar way to the ‘Subscribe Remind’ plugin but has some added functionality in that it uses cookies to distinguish between first time visitors and regular visitors. You can create messages to add to the top or bottom of blog posts and first time visitors can see one message whereas regular visitors can see something entirely different.

14. Top Commenters Plugin

This is a great plugin for encouraging repeat visitors. Readers that leave the most comments get their link displayed in the sidebar of your blog. As the nofollow tag is removed the reader gets full credit for their link.

15. Comment Relish

This plugin sends out an automatic email to any new readers to your blog thanking them for leaving a comment. This is a great way to get return visitors. You can customize the email any way you like.

16. Dofollow Plugin

Creating a dofollow blog can often bring in traffic. This plugin strips the nofollow tag from blog comments.

17. Lucia’s Linky Love Dofollow Plugin

Another dofollow plugin but this one is slightly different in that it allows you to remove the nofollow tag after a certain number of comments have been left by a reader. You can set this to anywhere between 3 and 10 posts.

18. Google Sitemap Generator

This will generate a sitemap for your blog which will help Google find and index your blog.

19. Add to Any Subscribe Button Plugin

Allows your readers to subscribe to just about any type of RSS feed.

20. Ultimate Tag Warrior

Allows you to tag your posts which are picked up by blog search engines thereby helping to increase traffic.

The above WordPress Plugins may be known some. If not try it and find how much your traffic increase.