Great Themes at Elegant Themes
If you are using WordPress to build websites, then you might want to go check out Elegant Themes. These are some really nice themes that I’ve begun to play around with. Several of the themes come with multiple color schemes which can be changed within the admin panel by simply choosing from a drop down box. The code is simple to navigate for editing purposes and the downloads include any necessary plugins as well as an easy to follow installion and setup guide. The best thing though is the price. As of the date of this post, you can get access to all his themes for $19.95 per year. If you are like me, you probably like to avoid subscriptions but I think this one is a no brainer. If you choose to discontinue your subscription after the first year, I don’t see anything in the agreement that says you can’t continue to use your previously downloaded themes. I’ve paid over fifty bucks just for one Revolution theme and several of these themes are just as appealing in my opinion. Anyway, go check it out. You might find the theme you’ve been looking for.
How to Have Your Blogroll Show on Your Home Page Only
For those of you running WordPress with a blogroll in your sidebar, you might want to set up your blogroll to show on your home page only. Why? There are two good reasons: it’s better for you and it’s better for the sites listed in your blogroll. It’s better for you because it minimizes PageRank bleeding. Unless they carry the nofollow tag, all links pass along some of your PageRank to whatever page is being linked to. Having your blogroll appear on every page of your website only increases the number of offsite links which you are giving PageRank to. If you have five sites in your blogroll and 100 pages on your site, that makes 500 links which could be draining your PageRank. By having your blogroll show on your home page only, that number would be reduced from 500 to just five. Read More »
Is Your Meta Tag Title Driving Traffic the Other Way?
If your website is ranking well but you don’t seem to be getting your expected share of traffic, you might want to take a look at your meta tag titles. In case you’re wondering, the meta tag title is the text heading that appears in the title bar or tab area of your browser. The search engines use the meta title as part of their method of deciding what your page is about, but of course it’s not the only part. They also look at other factors such as the content of your page and the anchor text of inbound links. More importantly however, the meta title is the title of the listing that you see in the search results of Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. This is what the user will see before determining whether or not to click on your listing and proceed to your website. Writing an effective meta title can mean the difference between the user clicking on your website or going somewhere else. Read More »
How to Use HTML Anchor Text Links
This may seem like a very basic webmaster concept, but many of those who are new to building websites do not know how to use html anchor text links in their content and some of those who do know do not use them properly. If you don’t know what anchor text is, it’s the text on a website that you can click on and it takes you to another page or site. It’s usually a different color than the other text and may be underlined, although not always. The actual words being used to create the link is called the anchor text. This text helps tell the search engine spiders what the page being linked to is about. Read More »
Build a Niche Store Review
Back in April while researching some products on ClickBank I came across a piece of software called Build a Niche Store, often referred to as BANS. At first glance I thought it looked like another get rich quick scam but after further browsing of the site and doing some Google searches I decided to lay my money down and try it out. In a nutshell, BANS is a website builder that makes it extremely easy to set up eBay affiliate sites with the goal of earning sales commissions from the eBay Partner Network, eBay’s affiliate arm. Read More »
WordPress Sitemap Plugin by Dagon Design
If you’re running WordPress on any of your sites and wish to have a human readable sitemap, then take a look at the WordPress sitemap plugin by Dagon Design. Some webmasters only worry about having an XML sitemap for the search engines, but others like to have a sitemap for the user as well. This plugin makes doing that a snap. All you have to do is configure the plugin, create a page (typically named Sitemap) and insert a short piece of code in the html section of the page editor. Presto! Now you’ve got a nice sitemap for your users.
The sitemap is highly configurable with options to display pages and posts, posts only or pages only. Posts are displayed by category and can be shown with comment counts and dates if desired. You can exclude any pages or categories you don’t want displayed. Password-protected pages and future-dated pages can be excluded as well, so any scheduled posts you have won’t be displayed until actually published.
I use this plugin on several of my sites, including this one. You can check out a demo of the WordPress sitemap plugin at Dagon Design.
Textbroker Review: Not Bad, But Not Great Either
If you’re a niche store builder then you know sometimes the most difficult thing is keeping your sites fresh by frequently adding good unique content, especially if you have many sites. In some cases the problem is that you have a niche that you aren’t really knowledgeable about, but often times the problem may simply be a lack of time. A solution that many webmasters use is to outsource part of their content creation. There are several content services available. Some of them are big name websites while others are lesser known and can be found on various Internet marketing related forums. One that I recently chose to use is Textbroker so I thought I would write a little review about them. Read More »
