a digital marketing & technology blog
If you’re new to WordPress then you’re going to to have a hard time finding the perfect WordPress theme (or template). So I’m going to feature the Top 15 WordPress Theme Designers and Marketplaces to help you find your dream template.
Most of the WordPress Theme marketplaces featured here offer multiple options when buying. For example, you can buy a license for single-use, multiple use (developer version), or can even buy their entire collection of themes for a one-time/annual fee.
I first came to know about Jetpack for WordPress from web hosting companies. The popular web hosting control panel vDeck (used by iPage, PowWeb, iPower, etc.) recommends Jetpack for WordPress plugin whenever we do an automatic installation of WordPress script using their control panel.
But I started using Jetpack since the past 2 years only and it’s a fantastic plugin. It’s comparable to WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin as these plugins offers multiple functionality. And both these plugins are featured in the 13 WordPress plugins I can’t live without.
If you’re an SEO then you probably know that Google Panda is two years old. The first Google Panda Update (or farmer update) was on February 24, 2011 targeting content farms (and those made for search engine sites) and it was a nightmare for webmasters. And then there were more updates to penalize websites that were over-optimized (Google Penguin), using exact match domains, pages with too many above the fold ads, etc.
I love all these updates as it improves the search experience of users and that’s obviously the goal of a search engine. That said, Google is STILL far away from that “perfect” search engine definition.
Whenever I publish a blog post I manually search Google to make sure that the post is indexed. And yeah, Google used to index my latest blog posts in real-time until few months back. Nowadays there’s a short delay in indexing but nonetheless, the crawling speed is not bad.
Now what’s annoying is content scrapers. I noticed that another blog was copying all my latest posts by fetching the same from RSS feeds. And what’s even more uglier is that it’s ranking higher than me even though Google is indexing my articles before the spammer’s blog. It’s really embarrassing to see original articles showing as supplemental results (omitted results) on SERPs.
If you’re a newbie or someone who wants to learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO) then searching through a plethora of options on the Web is a task by itself. SEO is changing daily and you probably don’t know where to start, what to follow, and what to ignore, right?
I started writing this blog post as a link building resource blog post and then decided to cover (almost) all the aspects of SEO linking to some of the best resources available. If I have missed any interesting resource or an aspect of SEO then feel free to comment below and I’ll add it to the list.
First there there was Google Panda that penalized low quality websites and then after a year there came Google Penguin which penalized websites that violated Google’s webmaster guidelines.
In 2010 Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) announced that Google is incorporating site speed in search ranking. It literally means that websites that load faster will be ranked higher than sites which are slow. Google’s philosophy is that faster websites create happy users and it improves the user experience. It appears like patience is a virtue but not for web users as New York Times reports that an eye blink is just too long to wait for impatient web users.
One thing I hate about most Domain Name registrars and Web Hosting companies is that the auto renewal options is turned on by default unless you have turned it off manually. And hence the first thing I do whenever I register a domain name or a web hosting is set the “Auto Renewal” to off.
Recently I changed my mind and I chose to auto renew all the *important* domain names. Why? Because as Go Daddy says “Activate Auto Renew and never worry about expiration dates again”.
If you choose not to renew the domains automatically then you need to renew them manually. And if you don’t renew the domain name after its expiration then you may even incur a $80 fee if it’s done after the grace period which is 12 days (for Go Daddy).