Many websites publish blogs to connect with their audiences and enhance their search engine optimization efforts, others use blog platforms as a CMS. WordPress is a robust blogging platform. Part of its appeal is the thousands of plugins that enhance its functionality. Here are some popular plugins that we consider especially helpful.

SEO Help – One of the important reasons to publish a blog is to help with search engine optimization. All-In-One SEO Pack is a WordPress plugin that helps with SEO. The plugin gives bloggers the ability to include the following metatags at the site level, as well as per post or per page: title, description and keyword. The plugin supports the use of Google Analytics, as well.

Comment Spam Management – Comment spam is a headache for most bloggers. One of the most amazing plugin that blocks spam comments is Akismet. It also blocks trackback spam, which are automatically-inserted links to other websites. In the event a spam comment does happen to sneak past Akismet’s filters, simply mark it as “spam” on the moderation screen and the plugin will learn from its mistake. Read the rest of this entry

Despite the fact that sitemaps are simply lists of canonical URLs submitted to search engines, it’s amazing how rare it is to come across a perfect one. Issues often arise when large site owners use sitemap auto generation tools that aren’t configured properly. These sites typically come with challenges for search engine crawlers like pagination and URLs generated by faceted navigation.

Spiders decide what pages to crawl based on URLs placed in a queue from previous crawls and that list is augmented with URLs from XML sitemaps. Therefore, sitemaps can be a key factor in ensuring search crawlers access and assess the content most eligible to be seen in search engine results.

The following is a quick overview of search engine sitemap guidelines and limitations followed by a technique to help identify crawling and indexation issues using mutiple sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools. Read the rest of this entry

As internet usage continues to grow, largely due to the exploding growth of smartphones and tablets, companies must have a compelling website to create a strong first impression and stand out from their competition. While there are a lot of elements and technology that go behind designing a great website we are sharing essential foundations to create a successful site:

• Know your objectives. The first step is to determine the purpose of your website and what you want your end users to do. Do you want to create interaction? Content consumption? E-commerce? Define the goals for your website and structure the design and content accordingly.
• Stand out. There is a lot of “noise” on the internet and it is up to you to grab your customers’ attention. How are you going to be different, better and be remembered? Be creative — find interesting ways to convey your content, find your own voice and create a website design that grabs attention.
• Call things by their name. Usability is about making things easy for your users. Make your site intuitive and call things by their name. Buttons and call to actions should say exactly what you want the user to do — join, click, enter, etc. You have a finite time to capture your customer’s attention. Unless you give a clear direction, the user will learn little about you. Read the rest of this entry

Getting your small business online can be difficult, until you have found the right combination of tools. In particular, creating a professional look and feel for your webpages is crucial for building trust and reputation.

I thought about a set of tools that make the every day task of adding new pages, changing the look and feel of existing page elements, and updating code so much easier.

Firefox and Firebug

Combined with Firebug, FireFox can help you to quickly improve your site’s HTML, JavaScript, Image handling and CSS. Basically FireBug turns your browser into a real-time webpage code analyzer and editor. You can make changes to your code in FireBug and see them instantly on the browser. This saves your from having to refresh your browser every time you want to see what effect code changes have had. There are also additional plug-ins that can combine with these to help you analyze page speed bottlenecks and more. Even if you don’t know anything about code, using these tools together can provide a lot of useful information about how your website is responding to page visits. Read the rest of this entry

Most website owners offer two variations of their sites – one is optimized for viewing on the desktop while the other layout is for mobile screens. The visitor’s device is roughly identified from the “user agent string” of their browser and accordingly the mobile or desktop version is served.

You can optimize your website design for different screens, including mobile, desktop and tablets.
But there’s a little problem with that approach. Yes, a majority of people are still accessing your website from their computers and mobile phones but in recent years, web browsing has expanded far beyond these screens.

Tablets, like the iPad and Kindle Fire, have become massively popular while some mobile phones, like the Galaxy Note, have big screens so it may not be a good idea to serve them a basic stripped-down version of your mobile site.

The device orientation matters too. For instance, the iPad screen is 1,024 pixels wide but if you rotate the device from landscape to portrait mode, you are only left with 768 pixels. A page that looked reasonably good at 1,024 x 768 resolution might appear less readable at 768 x 1,024 resolution, even though it’s the same device and only the orientation has changed. Read the rest of this entry