How to Get High Quality, Natural Traffic to Rank Higher the Search Engines

If you are looking to get traffic naturally on the other hand, there is much more scence and reason for the links you will receive. For instance, lets say you are in the music teaching indistry and you are looking to be found naturally in the search engines for the instruments you teach (guitar and piano in this case). He poceads to find high ranking sites that he could wright for that talk about either music, guitar, piano, or anything else that is relevant to guitar and piano (such as changing guitar strings, tuning a guitar or writing music for guitar). He can either contact them direcly or see if the site accepts guest posts. Also, when guest posting, make sure you get a link back to your site. This link will be relevant to Google because the topic on the page you did a guest post for (example: a guitar site) is simalar to the page you are linking to (example: your guitar services page). Google sees this as relevant. As a side note, you want to make sure you have Meta Keywords set up on your website before you go out getting links to make sure Google will know what your page is about.

I found that this is the best way to think about it: If someone who is well known for being a guitar writer or teacher suggests or likes another guitar teacher or writer that is less well known, they would naturaly recive some credibility. When google sees that “important people” are linking to your site that are well known in their fields, they see it as a vote for your site from an important person.

Why Marketing for Search Engines is So Important

• There are around 12 billion searches a month on search engines – It is an audiance you simpaly can’t ignore.
• Most people using search engines are in the mid to high income families (this would make scence due to computers being so expensive) – This means that the audiance of people you would be appealing to would be people who would be more likely to buy things.
• Natural search engine results have about twice as much visibility as advertisments on the same page
• Natural searches have about 1.5-2 times more actions, such as orders and page views, then paid advertisments – Basicly its free advertising that gives you better results then paid search, it just takes a bit more work

Why Marketing for Google is So Important

• Google has around 60% of the search engine market
• Yahoo is behind at about 20%
• Bing at around 10%

As you can see Google is twice as big as the second and third search engines put together. This makes google the ideal search engine to optimize your site for (at least in the United State – some users in countrys don’t use Google as much). Any questions and comments are welcome.

The image for this post was provided by Danard Vincente.

The 3 Most Common Types of WordPress Themes

1. Free themes from WordPress.org – These can prove to be good if you are looking for a simple site. There are a few things to watch out for when going for this option though. First you want to make sure the theme is coded well. If you are not a web developer yourself, this can be very challenging to do yourself. You cant overlook this either; if your site is not coded well, it will not look good to many of the search engines out there. However if your just looking to get your site going on something cheep and are considering upgrading later, The WordPress Theme Directory could be a good option for you. You may also want to go with one of the more popular themes due to the fact that they are usually the best and most updated themes.
2. Premium Themes (with little customization) – Many people go to sites like Elegant Themes to find a theme that works for them. Usually these sites are coded well, but they usually only have a few color schemes. Elegant themes is actually one of the few that provides the user with several different backgrounds and color schemes for every one of their themes to allow most sites made with the them to be unique. I personally suggest using Elegant Themes for this reason. There are others out there that are good as well such as themeforest.net, woothemes.com, and studiopress.com.
3. Premium Themes (with lots of customization) – If you want you website to be totally unique with a design others cant copy, I would go with this option. I use the Thesis Theme to do this myself. They have a completely separate options page for the theme to make it easy to make changes. They also have a forum with very quick responses. The only downside to this option is that you have to do a lot of the work yourself and it can cost a little bit more. If you are looking for a totally customized design without hiring a web designer, this would be the way to go. Headwaythemes.com might be another one you want to try, but I never thought it had as much power as Thesis.

Other Things to Look For in your WordPress Theme

• Make sure you theme follows your niche – This is basic, but still needs to be said. For instance, if you have a blog about food; you should have a theme that has the color scheme of food (such as green, orange, yellow, and so on).
• Make sure the theme coding is good – If you know anything about coding, it would be a good idea to look at the coding of the theme to make sure it will look good on the search engines. So if the code looks all jumbled and messy, it probably would not look good to the search engines.
• Make a design you can be proud of – Remember that this will be showcased to the world. Even if a picture does not show up right or things do not align properly, this would be a good reason to try a new theme. In the end, simple mistakes like that can though away tons of potential clients or customers.
• Make sure the themes has a couple customization options – While this is not essential, it would definitely be a good idea to make sure there is an options page with the theme you choose. It can make the customization process of the theme much easier.
• Make sure the comments look good – This is often overlooked, but it would be a good idea to see how comments look for the theme. This may not be important at the beginning, but can prove to be vital when trying to increase comment activity on your blog.

Do The Research!

Ultimately, you should look around for a while before you pick your final theme. It can be quiet annoying switching themes part way though due to problems in the theme coding or theme framework. That is why I personally go with the premium themes, so that I am able to contact someone right away if I have any problems. If you have any questions or comments, please leave one below.

When deciding what web hosting company to go with, the most important thing webmasters should be thinking about is the following:

• My site needs to be up 100% of the time – While this may be an unrealistic goal have; you should always be trying to aim for this. Many companies will not have a sufficient way of backing up their servers content. This is important to watch out for when picking your hosting service.
• I need killer support – This is crucial when or if your site ever has any problems. Lets say your site goes down in the middle of the night; you should have the option to contact an expert at any time. Another thing that should matter to you is the quality of your support. For instance, one of my first providers would send me to India every time I called during the night. I could tell they were reading from scripts almost every time and they proved to be very unhelpful.
• I must have a good help center – While the hosting may be top quality, they should also have a separate page with things like video tutorials, faqs, and step by step instructions on how to do many things on their site. This ensures that you won’t be calling every other day to learn how to do something simple.
• I should have a simple way to install WordPress – Most web hosting companies are moving to this, but it’s still vitally important to check. The main thing you want to find out is if they have a way to install WordPress with a one-click-install. This basically means that you can pick the url you want WordPress to install and you click one button and presto, it’s installed.
• Make sure they have other good features – For most of the top companies you should have unlimited hosting space, a good amount of email addresses, and support for many different coding languages. Its always a good idea to check out the features page of any hosting provider to make sure you are getting everything you want.

What I Use

I have been using HostMonster for the past several years and have found a lot of success with it for many reasons:

• My sites have never been down before.
• 24 hours support and the people I meet up with are usually pretty knowledgeable.
• They have a huge video tutorial library where I can find everything I need.
• They use simplepress to Install WordPress quickly and easily. They also give you the option to update your WordPress installs as well, which makes my life as a web developer much easier.
• They have all the features I am looking for, you can find a list of them here.

If you don’t like HostMonster, you could always look into these other great companies:

• bluehost.com
• justhost.com
• HostGator.com

Ultimately its up to you

While I do suggest HostMonster to everyone who asks me, that’s just my personal preference. You should make a list of your favorite hosting service and give each of them a call asking them what they do better than these other companies out there. Come up with a pros and cons list and make the best decision to your knowledge. In the end, most of these companies have a money back guarantee. You could essentially keep on switching companies until you find the right one.

I hope you found this post on picking the right hosting service helpful. If you have any questions or other things you would like to let the WordPress Marketing Tips community know about, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

My Top 12 WordPress Plugins

1. Akismet – This plugin has saved me tons of time when it comes to comment spam. It is created by Automattic (the people who created WordPress) and tracks what other people consider spam on their blogs to determine if any of these same spammers are commenting on your blog. They automatically take off these comments. Most of my comment spam instantly disappeared when I installed this plugin.
2. All in One SEO Pack – This is the all around best SEO plugin for WordPress. It basically does all the basics for SEO including titles, descriptions, keywords, and more. It is directly added to the proper place in your code. Many other people like to use other SEO plugins for purposes of auto-generating their SEO information. Let me just warn you ahead of time that is a bad idea. It is much better to do it on your own to make sure you target all the keywords you are specifically aiming for.
3. Broken Link Checker – This is a great plugin for finding links on your site that are broken. You don’t have the to manually click each and every link on your site to see if they work. You should just use this plugin instead. Much better solution in my opinion.
4. Fast Secure Contact Form – This has proven to be the best contact forum for WordPress. There are a lot of other contact forum plugins out there, but this one is best at keeping spam out of my mailbox. At the end of the each contact forum you make, you can create a spam filter to stop most of your contact spam.
5. Google XML Sitemaps – This has been essential for me for creating Sitemaps. What is so great about this plugin in particular? First, it updates automatically as you add new pages making sure you are never out of date. Second, it is set up to be read by Google easily. This allows Google to know much more quickly if you have added a new page. I also suggest you submit your sitemap to Google though Google Webmaster Tools.
6. Jetpack by WordPress.com – Jetpack connects with a wordpress.com blog to give you a lot of extra features for WordPress. This plugin was also made by Automattic. Some of the advanced features are having site statistics, spelling and Grammar proofreading, and extra sharing options.
7. Redirection – This is a great plugin for permanently redirecting a page on your site. For instance, lets say you want to move your website to another domain. You could set up redirects on your old site to send people to your new one automatically. This can also prove to be useful for changing a url for a page in order to send people who still click on old links to the proper page.
8. Robots Meta – This plugin is super powerful when it comes to stopping Google from looking on pages you don’t want it to see. For instance, you don’t want Google to see your author or admin pages. So, you can simply check a box that prevents Google from indexing those pages. There are a lot of other options, so you can set it up so that Google only sees what you want it to see.
9. ShareThis – While this plugin is not essential, I still felt like I should put it on because it is defiantly my favorite social sharing button plugin. There are a lot of other button plugins, but ShareThis by far has the most options. They have seven different button types along with the ability to add a facebook like and +1 button.
10. Similar Posts – This is useful to use at the end of each of your posts. Basically, you can suggest other similar articles to your user at the end of each of your posts. This does two things: keeps the reader on the site a little longer as well as helps you link similar pages together. This means that if one post for a particular subject succeeds, it helps all the other pages that are similar to it rank higher as well.
11. WordPress Database Backup – This is a powerful way to backup your site. You can download a backup of your site or just have the plugin send you a backup automatically every week to your email. This way, even if your server provider fails, you will still have your blog.
12. WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache – This is a simple Cache plugin. For those who are not sure what that is… Simply stated, it makes an html version of each page so that it will load quicker for the common user who visits the page. This make all your pages load quicker as well as boost your rankings in Google now that page speed is not considered a ranking factor.

One-Click-Wordpress-Install Option

For many people, a manual install can be much more annoying and time consuming if you are not an experienced web designer. The first time I tried to install it manually, it took me about a whole day to figure it out. That’s why I suggest doing a one-click-install with a hosting company like HostMonster. There are many hosting company’s that provide this service, but I use Hostmonster myself for their ease of use to install WordPress sites. I have provided a video below demonstrating how easy it actually is to install a blog on Hostmonster.

Manual WordPress Install Option

If you are not planning on using a hosting company with a one-click-Wordpress-install or would just like to install WordPress on your own without someone doing that for you, there are many resources at your disposal to learn how to do it.

I suggest you go to the official WordPress siteand read the How to Install WordPress page to learn more about installing WordPress manually. If you still feel a little bit fuzzy after going though the directions, maybe go ahead and look up some youtube videos on the subject. There are many different ways to do it.

What Next?

After you finish installing WordPress on your new site, go ahead and log in and start going through the settings of your new blog. Make sure the basic things are correct, like the sites name and tagline. After doing that, you should be ready to start adding some pages, getting a theme installed, and getting some more functionality on your site with some plugins.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment.

The best domains have the following:

• It has a memorable name that is easy to remember (no one will remember a site that has dashes or hyphens)
• They are short (short domain names are less known for being full of spam and are easier to remember)
• It is not hard to say (the harder it is to say, the harder it is to remember)
• It is not too hard to spell (you don’t want people finding other peoples websites that are similar to yours)
• They are not to similar to competing domains (this is important to note because it will probably be much harder to pass them if you choose the same name)

While these things are important for any domain to have, not a lot of people know how to actually come up with theses so called great domains! I have dealt with this problem many times myself and have realized that finding the best domain name could be split into 3 different steps: Brain Storming, Elimination, and Research.

Step 1 – Brain Storm Good Domain Names

The best way to do this in my opinion is to just take out a blank sheet of paper and just keep on writing down different ideas for you new website domain name. I would start off by writing down your top keywords down and trying to incorporate those into a domain name. The reason why you want your keywords in your domain name is that you will be more likely to show up for that term on Google. For instance, dogtraining.com will probably show up before petstuff.com for the term “dog training”. Finally, you want to make sure the domains you pick are unique and original.

Step 2 – Domain Elimination

There are many things you should watch out for when picking a domain name. Here are some domains you should look for in your list to eliminate:

• domains with no keywords in title (without keywords your domain is pointless)
• domains that are not easy to remember
• domains that are not catchy
• domains that end with anything other than .com (you should only get .org or .net if you really REALLY want a particular keyword)

Step 3 – Researching the Market

This part is essential to coming up with a domain name because without this, you won’t be able to see if you domain is profitable. Once you have created your list of keywords and domains, try plugging in some of those keywords into the Keyword Tool by Google Analytic. You will see exactly how many people search for the term daily, monthly, and yearly as well as find out weather the term is competitive or not. For the most part, you will want to find a term that has the traffic you want (for most starting bloggers this would be below 5000 visitors a month) and is either low or medium competitive (low is better for starting out.

From there you can take the keywords and type them in on Google to see if these top sites for each term seem reputable or not. Basically, what you are doing at this point is seeing if you have a chance of getting to the top of the list. If all of the top pages are from big sites with a high reputation, that keyword is probably not the best fit for you.

In the end you should have a short list of keywords and domain names that you can work with. From here you should do some more extensive testing. Maybe do a survey or buy a few sites and seeing which one does best. Whatever works for you.

What if the domain I choose is already taken?

This is also a big hurtle for many bloggers. The fact of the matter is that finding the best domain name is not easy! Even the most experienced people will take days, even weeks, to find the right name. If you end up getting stuck yourself, just keep on working at it and some ideas will eventually cross your path. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below.

How to work with Posts

How to work with Pages

How to work with Widgets

How to Insert a Video into WordPress

How to Manage your Plugins in WordPress

How to Manage your Categories in WordPress

What is RSS?

The WordPress Marketing Tips blog has several ways that you can subscribe, but the most common way is through our RSS feed.

What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a technology used to keep track of your favorite websites without the effort of having to visit each one individually.

Most people used to bookmark their favorite websites in their browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added, but RSS turns this process the other way around where the website lets you know when there is new content. In general this saves you time and helps you get the news feeds very quickly.

How to Use RSS

Use an RSS Reader – The first thing you’ll want to do if you’re getting into reading sites via RSS is to get an RSS Feed Reader.

There are many free readers out there, but I would suggest Google Reader from personal experience. If you don’t like that you can also try Bloglines, another decent reader. The best part is that it’s free.

These readers work much like email. When you subscribe so various feeds you’ll see unread entries from sites you’re tracking as bold. When you click on them you’ll see the latest update and be able to read each post in the feed reader.

Subscribe to Some Feeds – there are two places to look for a site’s feed:

1. On the Site (if you look on most any blog you can find a little orange buttons that count the amount of readers on the site or they will say: RSS, XML, ATOM, and sometimes a few others), but generally it will be the button you saw at the begining of this post)
2. On Your Browser (When you surf on a site that has an RSS feed, you will ushally find a link to it on the right hand side of the address bar where you type in the websites URL. Generally it will look like the button you saw at the beginning of the post or it will say RSS)

You Can Also Subscribe by Email

Many sites also allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds via Email as well, if you don’t like using a reader.

On the Kraken Designs blog we understand that not everyone likes to use a reader, so we have provided an option for you to subscribe via email by clicking the button on the top of the sidebar. You can unsubscribe any time you want and your email will be kept private and not used for any purposes other than to send you updates.

A Video to Further Understanding of RSS

I hope this page has given you a better idea on what RSS is. Thanks for reading.