Flame Scorpion

There is a long debate about the search engine ranking factors. Most important parts of SEO are on-page optimization ( content, headlines, meta tags, keyword density ) and off-page optimization ( link building, social media ). Most people tend to think that on-page optimization is responsible for a percent of the ranking, and off-page optimization for the other, but this is not true. Actually, they are 2 different things.

Let me put this differently. You can have the best optimized page in the world, but if you have no links then it is impossible to rank for a competitive keyword that is targeted by many websites ( you can rank for searches that match exactly your page title and there is no other page that have the same title ). For every keyword you want to target, google gives you a rank score, which is firstly based on the links pointing to your website. This score is amplified by the on-page factors like having keyword in title, having the keyword many times in a page etc. A page with 1000 links can rank higher than a page with 1500 links but where the targeted keyword is not in title.

Why I think that link building will be the most important factor for a good period of time ? When search engine started, they were not taking into account the links, and they relied only on the content. It worked at first, until webmasters figured out the algorithms and they wrote the content so they can rank better even if they valued less for searchers. Then search engines adapted and they started to consider that if someone link to a website means that the content of the website is relevant to the anchor text of the link and to the content of the linking page. Links are considered votes and it is not a bad thing to search for places where to put your link if they are legitimate, or to get a link building service.

It is true that people are making impressive efforts to cheat the search engines, buying links, getting into link-wheel schemes and many other tricks, but search engines are constantly improving the algorithm. There is a change that a website, even if bad tactics are used, to be able to rank on the first page, but they will get into a direct competition with other pages. If the content of the pages is not good and there is no value added for the searchers of that phrase, they will immediately hit the back button and google will notice this and can use this to improve the results. Also, good sites will get more links and will surpass bad websites.

Link building is not the only thing that matters, but it will still be important if it is done right.

When you run a blog, you have probably hundreds or thousands articles, one longer than other. I bet that from all those articles there are a dozen of them which stand out, that were cited by a great blogger, or in a popular forum and receive a lot of traffic. There are posts that attract people to your blog, but if you analyze the entrance pages where people come for the first time on your website, you can notice that more than half of your first time visitors are on other articles, probably there are a few on each article but with all that content there is an important number of visitors that come, read and go.

These visitors are coming mostly from search engines because they typed in the search box a couple of words that are found on your page and probably in a simillar order. They are very targeted and focused, they know what they need to find out, they read what they want, they solve their issue and they leave. Most of them are leaving. [Read the rest of this entry…]

I talked many times about Genesis, a framework which adds a lot of functionalities to wordpress. With genesis you can manage the content and the layout of your site much better. Unfortunately, if you want to customize the look and feel of Genesis, you can either start from the default genesis template and then modify it, or to install child themes. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Well as time has passed, so have advances been made in all fields of activity. Since dwelling in the past is quite a rough way to live your life, time to get a reality check and look at what today’s BEST WordPress themes are.

This edition focuses mostly on the themes that could be life-saving if you find yourself in a dire need of a theme for a presentation website or anything similar.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

BuddyPress is a small plugin that allows you to build your own social network and integrate it in your website.

It is very useful if you plan to create your own network for a certain office space or a sports team or any other small to medium place that more people frequent.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

The WordPress JetPack Plugin super charges your home built WordPress site so that it has almost the same power as the site built through WordPress.com.

It is a great plugin, a MUST even, for every site.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Now whenever you create something important or good, naturally you want that something to be recognized by people as being YOURS. That is when you place a copyright or something similar in it.

I am not against that. Personally, I encourage it. Take pride in your work and let the others know it belongs to YOU.

However, don’t place copyrights that will crash everything if you touch it.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

WPTouch

This plugin is very useful for the programmer on the go.

And already this is starting to look like and sound like a TV commercial, but I can assure you this is more than just that. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Every self-respecting blogger knows the importance of comments on their blog as well as the importance of leaving great comments on other people’s blogs. I would even go as far as saying that they are vital component of marketing and networking, more so even than search engine optimization (SEO) or social media.

But lately comment systems and platforms on blogs have become a bit complicated. While many bloggers are still using their native comment platform that WordPress provides, others have taken to some of the many third party commenting platforms. I’ve heard mixed opinions and different arguments about all of them, so choosing the best commenting platform for you can easily become a challenge and a headache.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

The latest version of WordPress was recently released. Despite there are not so great new features, like we were used in previous versions of wordpress, the improvements were great in terms of speed and design.

The admin interface is now faster and lighter, which will improve the writing and management experience. Another great fact is the new default theme, “twenty twelve” which is now HTML5 validated. Another great thing is the possibility to write a post in full screen mode. If you ever felt that your writing box is too small, now you can have it on the whole screen.

The wordpress development team has great plans. To get advantage of new features that they can use, they are dropping support for older versions of php, mysql and IE6. Altough this may not be seen good by conservators, they can still use the older version of wordpress if they want to stay with older versions of PHP, or to provide support for older browsers. It was announced a year ago that the support for PHP4 and MySQL4 will be dropped, and there is no surprise that this happened. A bigger impact will have the drop of support for IE6, while developers can upgrade the servers, they have no control on what browsers their users are using, and some may be concerned that they will lose visitors.  According to ie6countdown ( a project started by microsoft ), only 2% of web users are using Internet Explorer 6 in United states. The world-wide percent is 10%, but this is mainly because in China the percent is 33% and 10% in India.