If you’re trying to get noticed as the next big thing in the blogging world, you have to put a bit more effort into it these days than you did in the past. Fortunately, the most popular blogging platform in the world has added a feature that makes that easy. Some of the work, however, still consists of projects that you’re going to have to do on your own, though technology does make it much easier.
Responsive Design Trend
Mobile devices have necessitated that webpages adapt their content to a variety of different screen formats. If you have ever tried to access a standard desktop version of the website on a mobile device, you understand the difficulty here for users. You might have a great blog, but that doesn’t really matter if it’s nearly impossible to navigate your website on any of the mobile devices that people like to use to browse the Internet these days. Many WordPress templates, even professional ones, are still based around the basic blogging model that this content management system started out with.
WordPress.com recently announced that it has added responsive design to its site that will automatically adjust to accommodate mobile devices. This can also be accomplished by using any one of the many themes on the market that have responsive designs built into them. These themes allow your WordPress-based webpage to automatically adjust to different screen dimensions, so that users on mobile devices get a version of your website that is accessible to them. This eliminates frustration such as not being able to click on links, read text or having pop-up screens completely cover up the entire page, rendering the page completely useless.
JQuery Libraries and Speeding Them Up
If you’re not particularly technically adept, you may have seen web addresses with CDN in them and wondered what that meant. It stands for “content delivery network”. It’s a very important feature, particularly for those who use the JQuery library on the WordPress site.
A content delivery network takes your JQuery library of static content and spreads it out over a number of different servers located in different physical locations. When a user comes to your page and requests that content, the content delivery network will automatically look for the closest server to that person and deliver the content from that location.
One of the real advantages in this is that it reduces your bandwidth demands considerably.
There are several different options that you can choose from for CDN optimization. Microsoft, Google and JQuery itself all have content delivery networks that you can work with. If you are technically adept enough to be a coder, you can add this feature to your WordPress site with a very simple few lines of code.
Search Engine Optimization
There are few greater challenges than search engine optimizing a site. Currently, the most dominant search engine on the Internet is, by far, Google. Google changes its rules at its pleasure and, when they do, that oftentimes means that you have to change your policies in regards to search engine optimization, sometimes in very significant ways.
There are tools that you can use with WordPress, however, that can greatly assist you in getting noticed on the Internet. One of them is SEO Moz. SEO Moz perform several different functions, all related to making certain that your website is getting the publicity that it deserves.
SEO Moz includes a toolbar component that can install on Firefox or Google Chrome. This toolbar allows you to take a look at search engine optimization information for any website that you visit. The site can give you intelligence on your own website or, if you wish, you can use it to get intelligence on competitors’ websites. There is also a feature built into this tool that will take a look at your website and see if there is anything about it that is hindering your search engine optimization efforts. It will look for missing pages, empty tags and so forth, and let you know if there’s something that you need to fix.
Scribe SEO is another tool that you may want to take a look at. This particular tool analyzes your content and can be used as a plug-in for WordPress. The tool takes a look at your content and lets you know if there’s something that you should change about it to get Google’s attention. One of the best features of this plug-in is that it doesn’t use any black hat SEO tactics. It simply lets you know if there is a way that you can alter your content by switching around tags, improving your keyword density and so forth so that Google takes a look at your content and gives it the right weight in its search results.
WordPress is one of the most popular platforms on the Internet. With a few tweaks here and there, its native features can take your site to an entirely other level of success.
About Author: Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a web studio that creates original WordPress themes, that can be used out of the box. She loves to share blogging and technology tips.
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