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3 Expert Tips to Improve Your Conversions

How to Write Blog Titles: 3 Expert Tips to Improve Your Conversions

Photo by Damian Zaleski on Unsplash

Before you wow readers with your content, before you develop an emotional connection between them and your brand, before they even click on your article… you have to get your foot in the door. Therein lies the art of writing blog titles.

Blog titles and headlines are a quick pitch to encourage visitors to read your content — and by “quick,” we mean less than a sentence. Each individual word must be chosen with care, because only the best titles translate into clicks.

That’s why we’ve compiled this list of expert advice on writing blog titles. Apply them now to turn your blog from a list of words into a conversion powerhouse.

Numbers

If you’re looking for quick and actionable advice for writing headlines, it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3. Numbers in titles generate 73% more engagement and social sharing.

The thinking is that numbers give browsers an idea of what they’re getting into. If this article was just said “Expert Tips…” you wouldn’t know if it was a blurb post with 1 or 2 tips, or an epic manifesto full of hundreds of writing tidbits. By including the set number, you get an idea of this piece’s length and depth, making it more comfortable to click.

Diving deeper, odd numbers work better than even numbers. They seem more natural, whereas even numbers seem like the author manipulated the data to round it off. Going deeper still, lucky number 7 has the best results.

Use Power Words

Some words can make a big difference, but others can make a gargantuan difference. Content marketing strategist Kerri Stover recently compiled a list of 17 “must-use” words in headlines. While some of them fall into the clickbait category (there’s nothing shocking about “shocking” blog posts anymore), there’s still enough wisdom there worth repeating.

Try adding some of these power words into your next blog title:

  • New — Everyone likes new things.
  • Now — Great for immediacy and urgency.
  • Who/What/Where/When/Why/How — Question words add an inherent mystery into your blog title, playing on the browser’s natural curiosity.
  • You and Your — Addressing the reader directly to develope a personal connection. It gets them from thinking in the general to thinking about how the post will apply to their lives specifically.
  • Video — Videos are popular content anyway, so mentioning you have one is a good selling point.

It’s not enough to throw these words into your headline haphazardly. Make sure you only use them when they flow organically.

Keywords and Colons

When it comes to keywords in blog titles, you start to stray from set-in-stone rules and rely more on instinct. Statistically speaking, formulas work; but rely on formulas too much and your headlines will become repetitive and uninteresting.

The rule for using SEO keywords in headlines is to have them close to the beginning of the title. We find one strategy that works well is:

keyword phrase + colon or hyphen + the value proposition

This checks all the right boxes: keyword at the start, explaining the article’s value, plus titles with colons or hyphens actually perform 9% better. We formatted this article’s title like this as an example.

But again, using this formula every time will have the opposite effect, and regular readers will catch on that you’re phoning in your headlines. It’s best to use this formula sparingly, and remember that keywords don’t always need to start a title for the post to be successful.

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What Does rel=noopener Do In WordPress Posts

What Does rel=noopener Do In WordPress Posts

Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash

With the release of WordPress 4.7.4, there was a change to the way links are created in WordPress posts and pages. If you flip over to the “text” view in the WordPress editor, you’ll see that links you’ve told to open in a new tab are now tagged with rel=“noopener”. Many WordPress users have wondered what this attribute means, why it’s being added to their links, and, in particular, whether it has an impact on search engine optimization in the way that attributes like rel=“nofollow” and rel=“noindex” can.

In fact, rel=“noopener” is added to links that open in a new tab as a security precaution. When a link opens a new tab, the page that opens in the second tab is able to exert some control over what appears in the original tab. This ability is conferred by the JavaScript window.opener object, which gives JavaScript running on the child tab access to the contents of the parent tab.

The window.opener can be used to “hack” the contents of the parent tab. That’s bad news if the original tab contains sensitive information or forms that could be used to input sensitive information. You can see an excellent demonstration of this process on the “about rel=noopener” site.

A simple application of this hack would be to embed a link in a WordPress page that opens a new page in a new tab. Code in the new page could then be used to change the contents of the original tab to a fake login page, which would then transmit the user’s login details to the malicious third-party. If the parent and child tabs contain pages on different domains, there are greater restrictions on the window.opener object, but the child tab is able to redirect the parent tab to a different page. It’s easy to imagine a situation in which an attacker spams malicious links that redirect the parent tab to a phishing site.

As you can see, the window.opener object presents a security risk without adding much that’s useful for the vast majority of WordPress sites. The rel=”noopener” attribute tells web browsers to disable the window.opener object. Without access to that object, there’s no way a child tab can influence its parent.

Does rel-noopener Hurt SEO?

The short answer is no. The rel=”noopener” attribute has nothing to do with search engine optimization. Search engine crawlers ignore it, and it doesn’t impact the pages they crawl or how they rank and index pages.

Although rel=”noopener” removes the security risk, WordPress hosting clients should think twice before forcing pages to open in new tabs or windows. If users want to open tabs in new windows, their browsers make it easy to do so. Forcing pages to open in new tabs is an unnecessary imposition on the expected user experience of the web.

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Eight Reasons Your New WordPress Site Isn’t Ranking In Google

Eight Reasons Your New WordPress Site Isn't Ranking In Google

Photo by Benjamin Dada on Unsplash

You launch a new business website and write a few pages of content, publish a handful of blog articles, and share content on Facebook and Twitter. But after a few months, your site is nowhere to be seen in Google search results. What’s the problem?

There are many reasons a new site might fail to rank in Google, but, in my experience, there are a few pitfalls many new site owners fall into.

Thin Content

The most common reason for failing to rank is that your content simply isn’t good enough. Google wants to send its users to high-quality, informative content. If your product or service pages are bare of useful information and your blog isn’t much better, the chances of your site’s pages finding their way onto the first page of the SERPs are low. On today’s web, quality is just as important as keywords.

The Competitions’ Content Is Better

Ranking is relative. Even if your content is reasonably well-written and informative, it won’t make a good showing in the SERPs if Google judges your competitions’ content is more valuable to searchers.

Your aim should be to publish the best content on the web. That might sound like a lot to ask, but the richer and more compelling the content, the higher it will rank.

You’re Targeting Highly Competitive Keywords

A new site is unlikely to rank well if it’s competing against established sites for very popular keywords. There’s no chance a new WooCommerce store that sells shoes is going to rank for “shoes”. You’ll have to get a little more creative with long-tail keywords. Try “red stilettos by Manolo Blahnik” for example.

No Incoming Links

Incoming links are still the single most important search ranking signal. As a new site, your link profile isn’t going to be competitive with established sites in the same niche. Among the most effective link building techniques are publishing great content and sharing it on social media, publishing guest blogs on other sites, and reaching out to bloggers in your niche (but don’t offer to pay them for links).

Over Optimization

Too much of a focus on SEO can be counter-productive. I have suggested that you should target long-tail keywords, but if you publish content that’s a thinly veiled excuse to stuff as many keywords as possible onto your site’s pages, you won’t get anywhere.

Be frugal with the use of keywords and embed them in high-quality content only when it appears natural.

Poor Performance

Slow sites don’t do well in the SERPs, and they do even worse in mobile search results. To be competitive with other sites in your niche, focus on reducing latency and page weight. One of the best ways to improve the speed of your WordPress site is to use a WordPress hosting company that offers performance-optimized hosting. If you don’t have great hosting, other performance optimization strategies aren’t going to make a lot of difference.

Your WordPress Site Turns Search Engines Away

Discourage search engines from indexing this site

A simple configuration error can cause your WordPress site to disappear from the SERPs altogether. In the WordPress Dashboard, select the Read menu item under settings and make sure the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” option is unchecked.

Your Site Has Been Hacked

If your site has been hacked, Google will remove it from its index. It’s entirely likely that if your site has been hacked, you’ll know nothing about it until Google pulls the plug. Take a look in Google Webmaster Tools to see if Google thinks your site is infected with malware.

Fixing the eight SEO errors we’ve discussed today won’t guarantee you a place in the SERPS, but they will lay a foundation for future optimization and give you fighting chance against the competition.

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The 5 Best Online Image Compressors for Improving Your Loading Speed

The 5 Best Online Image Compressors for Improving Your Loading Speed

Photo via Pixabay

It’s the age-old conundrum: how to have your cake and eat it too. You want a gorgeous, rich website full of high-quality images, but you want it to load as fast as possible for the best UX. Some will say you have to choose one or the other, but the truth is you can have both — and quite easily — with online image compressors.

Image compressors reduce the file size of any image without harming image quality (at least not to the naked eye). And, what’s more, you can do it all online… and for free.

But which of these web builder’s little helpers works best? Today, we discuss the 5 best online image compressors.

Optimizilla

A good go-to in the field of online image compressors, Optimizilla offers all the standard features and acts as a reliable benchmark.

Optimizilla only works with JPEGs and PNGs, but for those file types it’s one of the best free image compressors. You can control how much or how little quality reduction you want on a scale of 1-100, a feature that lets you find the perfect balance required for your site.

Another nice advantage is its bulk compression, allowing up to 20 images at one time. You can download compressed images individually, or together in a ZIP folder.

Kraken.io

Similar to Optimizilla, Kraken.io still offers the basics of online image compressors, but with a few slight variations.

For example, Kraken.io simplifies the process for new users with its “Lossy” and “Lossless” options. Lossy slightly reduces the image quality in a way that’s still hard to notice, while Lossless retains the pixel positioning for zero quality loss (but less file size reduction). On top of that, you can still choose “Expert,” which allows you to customize the quality reduction on a scale of 1-100, as well as preserving metadata and personalizing chroma subsampling.

Other features include resizing images, bulk uploading, and downloading as a ZIP. The only glaring drawback is that the free account is only temporary — after 100MB, you’ll have to buy one of their plans to continue usage.

Resize Photos

Somewhere between online image compressors and photo editors is Resize Photos. For starters, as the name suggests it’s one of the compressors that also resizes images (good for when your free account on Kraken.io runs out). But what really sets it apart are its dime-store photo-editing options.

Don’t expect anything glamorous from Resize Photos’s photo editing — there’s little you can’t do on Instagram. Still, quick fixes like rounded corners, drop shadows, borders, and basic filters (sepia, black-and-white, negative, etc.) can be implemented right away. Our favorite feature is the caption tool, which can be great in certain situations like memes, but could negatively affect SEO if used too much.

If you’re looking for a quick, and free, solution, and already need an image compressor anyway, Resize Photos is a great time-saver.

Convert Image

Don’t let the ugly interface fool you: Convert Image is one of the most advanced free image compressors available.

Convert Image’s crowning achievement is that it accepts more formats than most other online image compressors: JPEG, PNG, TIF, BMP, PCX, PSD, PSB, XCF, PDF, and even GIF. The standard compressor turns everything into a JPEG, for better or worse, but the site also offers a host of other features, including a file converter.

It’s worth exploring the site’s secondary features, located on the right side of the screen. There, you’ll find options for resizing, scaling, and basic photo editing. Convert Image has some interesting effects other image compressors lack, like sketch drawing filters and disco light overlays. But on a more professional level, you’ll probably be more interested in its options for favicon conversions and watermarks.

TinyPNG

One of the oldest and the best, TinyPNG is another staple in online image compression. They offer the basic options an image compressor should: JPEG and PNG compatibility, bulk uploads up to 20, 5MB max. per image. The paid Pro plan offers even more options for only $25 per year.

What we’re excited about most are its expansions into other tools. TinyPNG has a plugins available for WordPress and Photoshop CC 2017, adding even more convenience and removing extra steps if you use these platforms. On the horizon is compressing animated PNG images, with a beta version available on the site now.

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WordPress MacOS Editor MarsEdit Gets A Major New Release

WordPress MacOS Editor MarsEdit Gets A Major New Release

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Five years ago, we wrote a roundup of third-party iOS and Mac applications for writing and publishing WordPress articles. At the top of the list was MarsEdit, a MacOS blog editor that supports a number of different blogging platforms, including WordPress. This month, MarsEdit’s developers, Red Sweater, released MarsEdit 4.0, a comprehensive update with new features, improved WordPress integration, and an interface upgrade so that it doesn’t look out of place next to more recent apps.

MarsEdit is only a couple of years younger than WordPress itself. First released as a standalone application in 2005, MarsEdit gained popularity among bloggers in the Apple world, including John Gruber and Jason Snell.

Don’t be fooled by MarsEdit’s age; with the most recent release, it’s as slick and functional a native blog editor as you could hope for.

The most important aspect of a blog editor is, of course, the text editing experience. MarsEdit supports rich text, if that’s your cup of tea. But it also offers full support for Markdown with a built-in preview.

The editor supports everything you would expect of an application that boasts comprehensive WordPress support. Images embedded in posts are automatically uploaded to the site and featured images are fully supported, as are both categories and tags. Most of what is possible in the WordPress editor can also be done from within MarsEdit, with the added benefit of being able to work on posts while offline.

Like many modern text editors, MarsEdit 4.0 offers a typewriter mode, a feature I wouldn’t be without. With typewriter mode activated, the cursor stays in a fixed vertical position on the screen so you can keep writing without having to scroll up all the time to avoid craning your neck to look at the bottom of the screen.

One of my favorite features of MarsEdit is its ability to download a complete archive of a WordPress site. In the era of cloud backups, that might seem like a bit old-fashioned, but hugely useful to be able to quickly download a complete copy of all the content on a site.

Also useful is the ability of MarsEdit to automatically download a copy of a WordPress blog’s theme, which is then used for post previews. Being able to see exactly what a post will look like when it goes live is a big improvement on applications that provide only a simple HTML preview — it’s nice to know what my posts will look like before I upload and preview in WordPress.

Link bloggers will appreciate the accompanying Safari extension, which makes it easy to get content from the browser into MarsEdit.

So, who is MarsEdit for? If you blog on a Mac and don’t need a tool that is available on iOS, MarsEdit is a great option. It provides deeper and more intuitive integration with WordPress than many of the Mac text editors capable of pushing content to WordPress.

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Looking for Fast WordPress Themes? Here’s Three!

Looking for Fast WordPress Themes? Here's Three!

Photo by Igor Miske on Unsplash

The tortoise may have beaten the hare in a foot race, but it wouldn’t last long in the world of web development. Speed is the name of the game in today’s digital industries; not only do users expect sites to load quickly (and bounce if they don’t), but loading speeds also factor into Google search rankings — including mobile.

With that in mind, we were curious about which WordPress themes performed best when it came to loading times. Drawing on Pingdom research conducted by Athemes, we picked out 3 of the fastest WordPress themes to give your WP site a head start right out of the blocks.

H-Code

  • Load Time: 1.14 s
  • Page Size: 2.6 MB
  • Price: $60
  • Performance Grade: 99 (A)

A Swiss-army theme for virtually any type of site, H-Code is a good theme to start with. Earning an near perfect performance score on Pingdom and a hasty loading time of just over a second, H-Code matches its impressive speed with equally impressive options for site building.

You can select your ideal setup from over 50 homepage demos, including both multi-page demos and even some single-page ones. Tons of pre-built content templates make this as fast to design as it is to load. The theme also supports your favorite WP plugins like WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, WPML, and Total Cache — an ideal theme for beginners and experts alike.

SociallyViral

  • Load Time: 0.68 s
  • Page Size: 402.7 kB
  • Price: $59 (sale)
  • Performance Grade: 100 (A)

Viral content waits for no one, which is why having a quick-loading page is no less than essential for widespread content consumption. That’s the heart of SociallyViral, a simple and speedy WordPress theme designed for digital marketing. With a perfect Pingdom score and a loading time easily under a second, this theme is perfect for shareability.

Don’t expect much depth with SociallyViral; it’s best for landing pages and smaller, targeted sites as opposed to mammoth enterprises. Still, for what it aims to do, it’s one of the best: it prioritizes its social sharing buttons, integrates easily with AdSense to take advantage of clickthrough rates, encourages email signups with nice opt-in forms, and lets you advertise your trending/popular posts with special widgets.

Pillar

  • Load Time: 1.4 s
  • Page Size: 2.7 MB
  • Price: $59
  • Performance Grade: 98 (A)

Last, we have another multi-purpose theme that assists a variety of industries. Pillar is incredibly malleable, with homepage demos for agencies, businesses, ecommerce, portfolios, landing pages — pretty much everything.

The theme comes with 110 ready-made templates for conventional and niche pages alike. You have your regulars like About and Contact, but also specialized pages like product pages or case studies. Over 140 content blocks let you further hand-tailor your site as you like with options for pricing tables, people profiles, testimonials, etc. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also eight site headers and four site footers to choose from.

All these options make Pillar one of the strongest choices for a robust WordPress site that’s not weighed down for speed.

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How Does Memcached Make WordPress Hosting Faster?

How Does Memcached Make WordPress Hosting Faster?

Photo by Mike Wilson on Unsplash

Our WordPress hosting platform incorporates many performance optimizations that guarantee content is delivered to your WordPress site’s visitors as quickly as possible. Among them is the Memcached instance we include with all shared and dedicated WordPress accounts. I’d like to take a look at what Memcached is and how it works to make your site faster.

First, think about what happens when a browser sends a page request to a WordPress site. When WordPress receives the request, a PHP script is executed. The job of the script is to ask the site’s MySQL database for the data it needs to build the page. It then constructs an HTML page by combining that data with a template.

Which content is included depends on several factors: who requested the page, what they requested, the context of the request, and so on. The same base URL can return pages with completely different content — that’s what makes WordPress dynamic.

But often, the content isn’t different. You’re looking at a post generated by WordPress. If someone else requests this post, they’ll see the same thing for the most part. If left to its own devices, WordPress follows the process I have just outlined for every request, even if the post it is about to serve is exactly the same as the post it served five minutes ago. It takes time to build a page dynamically, so recreating identical pages over and over is wasteful.

Caching is the solution. Caching just means that after data is used, it’s saved for a while in case it’s needed again. Caching is ubiquitous: a WordPress server caches at every level, from its processor and RAM to caching plugins like W3 Total Cache (also included in our WordPress accounts) and content distribution networks.

Memcached is one of the layers of caching we use to decrease the amount of time-consuming work your WordPress site has to do. Memcached is a key-value store that works just like a dictionary. When you want to find the meaning of a word, you look it up in a dictionary by turning to the right place in an alphabetical list of words. The word itself is the key. Next to the word is the definition that explains what the word means. The definition is the value.

Unlike a word dictionary, Memcached uses a URL as the key. The web page is the value. The first time a page is requested, it has to be generated by WordPress and sent to the user in the usual way, but it’s also stored in the Memcached instance. The next time a page is requested, Memcached looks in its store for a key that matches the URL. If it finds the key, it returns the associated value (the web page’s contents) immediately.

Because the page is stored in Memcached, it doesn’t have to be generated again. Sending a page from Memcached is much faster than generating it from scratch and the server has to do a lot less work. Memcached is just one of the many reasons our WordPress hosting accounts are so fast — you can see some of the other optimizations here.

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What Is WooCommerce?

What Is WooCommerce? So you’ve decided to launch a new eCommerce store. One of the first decisions facing you is which eCommerce platform to base your store on. There are many excellent eCommerce applications to choose from, including Magento, Craft Commerce, and WooCommerce, among others. Before making a choice, you should understand what the options are and how they differ.

In this article, I’m going to focus on WooCommerce, and in future articles I’ll take a look at the others.

WooCommerce Is Free

The first things to know about WooCommerce are that it is free and open source. You don’t have to pay anything to use WooCommerce, and its code can be examined and edited by anyone. You might not understand why this matters, but if you use WooCommerce for your eCommerce store, you own and control the store and its data. That’s not true of many eCommerce platforms.

WooCommerce is based on WordPress, so before we move on to talking about it, let’s take a brief WordPress refresher. WordPress is a content management system. In fact, it’s the most popular content management system in the world by a large margin. A content management system makes it easy to publish content on the web. Rather than writing code, CMS users interact with an intuitive interface. Content management systems make web publishing accessible to everyone.

WooCommerce and WordPress

One of WordPress’ most important features is its plugin system. WordPress itself provides a core set of features for managing and publishing content, including a text editor, taxonomies for organizing content, and under-the-hood systems for interacting with web servers and databases. Plugins extend that basic functionality in interesting ways. For example, the Yoast SEO Plugin adds features that help WordPress users optimize content for search engines. There are many thousands of WordPress plugins.

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that modifies WordPress’ behavior and adds features that transform it into a powerful eCommerce platform. WooCommerce can support eCommerce stores that range from single-product stores to stores with thousands of products. WooCommerce brings to WordPress catalogue management features, navigation interface elements suitable for eCommerce stores, integration with payment gateways, tools for managing shipping, and many other features.

WooCommerce Features

WooCommerce is scalable; it’s capable of supporting very busy online retailers. It’s also mobile friendly: many shoppers make purchases on their mobile devices and mobile-friendliness helps to build great experiences for shoppers and with search engine optimization.

Just like WordPress, WooCommerce has its own plugin ecosystem, with a mixture of paid and free plugins. The plugins — or extensions as they’re called in the WooCommerce community — add features to WooCommerce, including payment gateways, analytics integrations, dynamic pricing, among others.

WooCommerce Hosting

To use WordPress and WooCommerce, you’ll need a hosting account that supports WordPress. Performance and support are especially important where eCommerce is concerned, so you should make sure you choose a hosting provider that understands eCommerce hosting and offers performance-optimized WooCommerce hosting specifically engineered to make the most of WooCommerce.

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eCommerce, WooCommerce, WordPress

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OpenVPN Helps To Keep Your Magento And WordPress Dedicated Servers Safe

OpenVPN Helps To Keep Your Magento And WordPress Dedicated Servers Safe

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

When a user connects to your Magento store, they connect over HTTPS, a secure protocol that uses an SSL certificate to encrypt data sent between the shopper’s browser and the server that hosts the store. Without HTTPS, it is possible for a third-party to intercept the data, putting the shopper and the store at risk. But shoppers aren’t the only people that might need to access your store and its “front-entrance” isn’t the only way in.

In some cases, making a change to a store may require a developer or other professional to connect using a service like FTP. FTP is an old protocol that is often still used to upload files to a server. It doesn’t have any built-in encryption, so data is sent in the clear. There are several services a dedicated server hosting client might want to make available, but that are inherently insecure. Usually, insecure services like FTP are blocked by a firewall that prevents anyone from accessing them, but that may be inconvenient.

Retailers and publishers often work with third-parties such as design agencies or teams of outside developers. Remote employees may need to connect to the store while they’re in an untrusted location like their home or a coffee shop. Without a VPN, that’s a bad idea because sensitive data is sent over WiFi networks and the internet in the clear. It is trivially easy for a bad actor to intercept it, which is why we make OpenVPN available on dedicated server Magento and WordPress hosting plans.

The “VPN” in OpenVPN stands for virtual private network. A virtual private network provides the same protection as HTTPS to services that aren’t usually encrypted. When someone needs to connect to a store using FTP, they first connect to the virtual private network. You can think of the VPN as a tunnel through which other data is sent. That data is encrypted using similar techniques to the SSL-based encryption that HTTPS uses.

Once connected to the server’s virtual private network, the user can then log in over FTP and upload their files. The data they send will travel over the secure connection managed by the virtual private network. A man-in-the-middle attacker will not be able to intercept or alter the data.

Our WordPress and Magento dedicated server OpenVPN service is certificate-based, rather than credential-based, which means third-party users will need to have the relevant certificate on their machine. They won’t have to remember or use a password.

We make OpenVPN available on select WordPress dedicated server and Magento dedicated server accounts to protect hosting clients and to make it easier for them to grant secure access to third-parties. All users need to connect to the VPN is an OpenVPN client, many of which are available for free.

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Magento, Security, WordPress

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How Do Visitors Find Content On Your WordPress Blog?

WordPress Basics: How Do Visitors Find Content On Your WordPress Blog?

Photo by Anthony Martino on Unsplash

When used as a blog, WordPress’s home page shows a reverse chronological (most recent first) list of articles. Readers scroll through the list, clicking on posts they find interesting. But WordPress also has several other ways for users to find posts. Understanding how they work will help you provide a better experience and increase the likelihood that user will stick around to read more posts.

Aside from the home page, the most common way for a user to browse the posts on a WordPress site is the archive page. Different themes display content on the archive page in different ways, but the most common organizing principles are by date, by theme, and occasionally by tag. Archive pages organized by date don’t need much explaining: typically readers click on a month and are taken to a list of posts published in that month, a more compact version of the home page.

WordPress Taxonomies

Categories and tags deserve a little more explanation. Both are part of the taxonomy (naming) system that WordPress makes available. Categories are broad “sections” into which posts can be organized. A fashion blogger might have categories for articles called: “fashion shows”, “designer spotlights”, “fashion news,” and so on. Categories are broad themes and each post has one category. Categories show up in various places in the WordPress interface, most notably on archive pages and in navigation menus.

Tags are similar to categories: the major difference is that a post can have as many tags as the site owner wants. Tags are usually used to indicate more specific themes within a post. Our fashion blogger might have tags for “shoes”, “manolo blahniks”, “kitten heels”, and “everyday wear”. You’ll notice that all of these tags might be relevant to a single post in any of the categories discussed above.

Related Content

Yet another way for users to find content is through related content widgets. These are usually located at the bottom of a post and include links to other posts that might be interesting to the reader. If you want to include a related content widget in your posts, there are several excellent plugins that will do the job. The Jetpack plugin collection includes a related content module. If you don’t want to install Jetpack, WordPress Related Posts is a popular alternative.

WordPress Search

I’ve left the most obvious way to find content until last. WordPress includes a fairly powerful search box, which will help readers find specific content. While WordPress’ search functionality is adequate, many WordPress site owners choose to replace it with a more configurable alternative. Relevanssi is a plugin that replaces the default search box with a more capable tool that sorts results by relevance, can do fuzzy searching, and can display search suggestions similar to Google’s.

As you can see, WordPress provides a multitude of tools for helping readers discover content, but they require some input from bloggers. If you take the time to properly tag and categorize posts, the site’s archive pages, navigation, related posts, and search functionality will be much more effective.

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