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Top 5 Useful WordPress Plugin For Your WordPress Website

June 15, 2019 by ivanc82 Leave a Comment

Here we have our selection the 5 useful WordPress plugin for your self-hosted WordPress site. We even have some of the plugin currently installed on our website. It just works well and good for your website SEO too.

Jetpack by WordPress.com
Jetpack has quite a lot of features in this plugin including statistic monitoring, subscribing newsletter, social media sharing and many more useful features. One of the best features we use for some of our client sites is the social media sharing feature, where you can configure manually add & use sharing button from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Pinterest and many more.

All In One SEO Pack
With the name already describe it all, All In One SEO Pack just work out-of-the-box for beginners. The plugin has all the SEO features you ever need to optimize your website for search engine including generating META tags & Meta descriptions automatically if you want it to grab the first paragraph as the META description. We actually preferred using WordPress SEO by Yoast as it has more advanced features. Forget the hassle of setting & configuring, we can help you with WordPress customization for SEO.

W3 Total Cache
The slow website really a frustrating issue for the website owner, therefore you need to do some website caching to speed up with website performance plugin! One of the best WordPress plugins we are using now, W3 Total Cache has features including browser caching, page caching, minify and CDN support. The other alternative uses WP Super Cache. If you’re using HTML, other CMS and not a WordPress platform, try caching using htaccess. Some features & server configuration might be limited on your current shared web hosting.

Nexgen Gallery
Nexgen Gallery is one of the best WordPress photo gallery plugins we used so far including lightbox effects, gallery slideshows and many more. You can find many features in the newly upgraded Nexgen photo gallery plugin for WordPress.

Contact Form 7
Used in most of our websites, Contact Form 7 is the best among all other contact form plugin. Fully customize the form to use as contact form, feedback form with CAPTCHA & spam filtering etc.

Need advance setting on the plugin? Save your time and try out our WordPress customization service now.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Best WordPress Plugins, Website Speed Optimization

Genesis Metro Pro Child Theme Customization

June 15, 2019 by ivanc82 Leave a Comment

If you’re using the new version of Genesis Metro Pro child premium theme by Studiopress and would like to do some customization on the post info, post meta & footer copyright, this guide might be able to help you out. There are no hard coding need to get this fix if you’re using the Genesis Framework. After the upgrade of Metro Theme to Metro Pro, some coding has been removed due to the conversion of XHTML to HTML5.

Remove Metro Pro post info

In case you don’t need the post date & author name in your posts, you can remove the Metro Pro, all you need to do is installed Genesis Simple Edit plugin. With this plugin, you can add, edit & modify the way you like. Simple blank out the Post Info, Post Meta and Footer Credits Text or replace with code snippets.

Genesis Post Info

Remove Metro Pro footer credit/copyright text

To remove the default footer credit & copyright text, use Genesis Simple Edits. Blank out or add manually with Footer Output column.

Remove Post info in category archives

In order to customize your category archives layout for Metro Pro child theme, add this code to your function.php to get the post info & post meta removed while aligning the heading alongside with image.

// Remove post info, post title, content and post meta and add post title and conent for entries in archives
add_action ('genesis_meta','child_remove_post_stuff_archives');
function child_remove_post_stuff_archives() {
if (is_archive()) {
remove_action( 'genesis_entry_header', 'genesis_post_info', 12 );
remove_action( 'genesis_entry_header', 'genesis_do_post_title' );
remove_action( 'genesis_entry_content', 'genesis_do_post_content' );
remove_action( 'genesis_entry_content', 'genesis_do_post_image' );
remove_action( 'genesis_entry_footer', 'genesis_post_meta' );

add_action( ‘genesis_entry_content’, ‘genesis_do_post_title’ );
add_action( ‘genesis_entry_content’, ‘genesis_do_post_content’ );
}
}

Hope this customization will help you for those using the new HTML5 Metro Pro child theme. Metro Pro is a premium theme easily customized for non-experienced or experience webmasters & developers. Metro Pro and all Genesis child theme by Studiopress is search engine optimized & lightweight. Get the Genesis Framework now.

StudioPress Themes is a premium commercial WordPress Theme Developer offering professionally designed themes, including the state-of-the-art Genesis Theme Framework, which was independently rated as the best framework available.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Customize Genesis Child Theme, Genesis Code Snippets, Genesis Framework, Genesis Metro Pro, Genesis Post Info Code Snippets, Theme Customization

Optimizing for Image Search – Traditional On-Page SEO Factors for Images

June 15, 2019 by ivanc82 Leave a Comment

At the time of writing image, search is still in its infancy. The problem is that an image file is very different from a text document from the perspective of a computer scientist. The technology problems of searching for relevant text in a corpus of all text has largely already been solved.

Images are a completely different story for two primary reasons. First, image files are on average much larger than text files. Whereas a text document may be made up of thousands of 0s and 1s on the binary level, an image with the same dimensions may be made up of hundreds of millions of binary characters. This means that computing power alone can become a bottleneck to solving the image search problem.

Secondly, algorithmically determining the meaning and contents of an image file is much more difficult than doing the same for a text file.

Whereas a word may have only a few meanings and contain very little, an image can have millions of meanings and contain many objects. Imagine the difference between the word “crowd” and an image of a crowd.

Although the word maps to the idea of a large group of people, the details of those people are not represented. This is not the same for an image of a crowd where the details of each person in the crowd are visible.

This, of course, is an oversimplification of the image search problem but it helps to illustrate its complexity. As a result of the complexity of these two factors (size and meaning/contents), search engines have relied on text-based metrics to rank images.

To make matters worse, these technical issues fail to address the social implications of image search. Whereas most search queries are done with the intention of getting information, the queries where images are the best result tend to aid people in stealing images. From an SEO perspective, this leads to the question of whether or not image search-referred traffic is even useful

Is Image Search Traffic Useful?

This is the most common question I get when talking to clients about image search. They are right in that many image searches result in the user simply stealing the image and not giving credit to the owner or the site where it came from.

My initial answer to this question is two-pronged:
1. I have never seen an example where image search referrals provide enough value that it warrants making image optimization worthwhile.

2. At the same time, I think that everyone, regardless of limitation or disability, should be able to use the Internet. This includes humans and computers alike.

In order for this to happen, there needs to be a way to represent images for those who are visually impaired and those systems that can’t understand them (which includes search engines). The best way to do that today is to optimize images just like SEOs do for a website as a whole.

Alt Attribute (Alt Text)

The code to include an image file in HTML takes the following format:

<img src=”http://www.example.com/image-filename.png” alt=”Alt Text” />

The parameter in the alt attribute (in this example, Alt Text) is displayed in the event that the image cannot be represented. This happens when the technology accessing the tag cannot display the image. This is most common when the image is broken or when it is accessed by software like a screen reader.

This text typically describes the image and is a very good ranking factor.

Surrounding Text

Many times the text that surrounds an image in a web document describes the image. This can take the shape of a caption or introduction to the image.

This information is very useful for image search engineers. It is relatively common for an image to rank for a query that matches the text around an image.

Filename

In theory, a filename should always describe its content. Unfortunately, this is not the normal case for image files. Many times they will be named by a computer (like a digital camera) rather than a human. This makes this a relatively poor metric for rankings.

That said, it does help to include descriptive words in image filenames because it is still used as a minor factor in image search rankings.

Traditional On-Page SEO Factors for Images

It is important to note that search engines still use normal ranking metrics for images (relevancy and popularity). This is usually done on the page where the image is located. (Note this is different than the image URL.)

This means that by optimizing a page in the normal ways, you are also optimizing its images. It is a win-win situation.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Image ALT Optimization, Image Search Traffic, Image SEO, Optimize Image Search

Optimize Website with Google PageSpeed Service

June 15, 2019 by ivanc82 Leave a Comment

Recently we implement and tested our website with Google Pagespeed service. The results are unbelievable. Website speed loading increased at least 70% with original loading speed before optimization shows 6.192s. Compared with original speed, after integration of Google Pagespeed service, our website speed loads at lightning speed of 1.993s.

Google Pagespeed Test
How does Google Pagespeed Service work? Request from your origin server will need to go through Google Pagespeed servers before reaching your web browser. Pagespeed servers will optimize all your CSS, Javascript & images and then transfer it to the browser at extraordinary speed. Now you can make your web pages load faster for your users with this free service from Google.

As explained in the FAQ, PageSpeed works best with W3 Total Cache, as it also gives you a second layer of caching.

All optimization settings can be adjusted through the PageSpeed Service console with a few ticks on options  which includes :

  • Serve Resources through Google
  • Inline small resources
  • Prioritize Content
  • Optimize HTML
  • Optimize Images
  • Optimize CSS
  • Optimize Javascript

Similar to free CDN & security service provided by Cloudflare & Incapsula, all you need to do is to point www to the DNS provided by PageSpeed. Find out more about PageSpeed.

PageSpeed Service is a limited free trial service provided by Google, pricing yet to be announced. So, have you tried out this service yet? Let’s give it a test & turbocharge your website! Our IT experts will help you with our website speed optimization. Contact us now!

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Google Pagespeed, Optimize Website, Website Speed Optimization

Google Penguin & The Effects to Website

June 15, 2019 by ivanc82 Leave a Comment

What is Google Penguin?
Penguin is the newest code-named update series Google has rolled out. Panda was an update that focused on the quality of legitimate sites and their content, giving boosts to sites with high-quality content while reducing the ranking of low-quality content farms. Penguin focuses on the other end of things. The Penguin update emphasizes removing sites from the rankings if they are found to be using black-hat techniques.

As the lords and masters of the Search Engine Optimization industry, Google sets the rules. Updates to these rules generally take place in the form of updates to the algorithm that regulates the ranking of a given page for a query. These updates may be minor, such as tweaks that affect only a small handful of spam websites or ban a certain domain. Others may be far more volatile, such as the recent Panda updates.

Black-Hat Techniques 
Black-hat is a term taken from the hacking community, meaning shady or illegal tactics. The opposite would be white-hat techniques, which are strategies for following the rules most effectively. The exact definition of what falls into one or the other colour that depends on the changing rules of the game.

In the early days of SEO, nearly anything was white-hat. Spamming keywords in hidden areas of a website was common. Creating networks of websites to link to a legitimate site for a massive SEO boost was an easy way for webmasters to make money. Eventually, Google caught on to these methods of gaming the system and started labelling them black-hat. They actively punish sites that take advantage of these tactics today.

Modern Day Black-Hat 
Penguin has a fixed definition of what is considered a webspam or black-hat technique. Here are some of the more common tactics that Penguin flags for punishment.

  • Keyword stuffing. This is when the keyword density on a page becomes so high that it could be an obstacle to the quality of the content
  • Cloaking. This is when certain code is used to cause the search engine web crawler to see different content than a user sees visiting a page
  • Link schemes. Creating a large network of machine-generated spam sites with the intent to link to a legitimate site, causing a huge boost to incoming links, is one possible link scheme. These schemes are considered artificial means of bypassing the current system of link exchanging for quality
  • Scraped or duplicate content. Stealing content word for word, stealing and spinning content or posting multiple instances of the same content are all ways to use one piece of content multiple times, sometimes via outright theft. These are all considered webspam and are punished

The History of Penguin
The first Google Penguin update was implemented on April 24, 2012, though it was not publicly identified as Penguin until the 26th. Penguin was meant to be a smaller-scale update than Panda, affecting only three per cent of English-language queries.

Shortly after the initial implementation of Penguin #1, many webmasters cried out about unfair traffic loss. Google created a feedback page for two purposes. It allowed webmasters to report black-hat sites that still maintained high rankings, and it allowed webmasters who felt their sites were penalized unfairly to receive reconsideration.

The second Penguin update occurred on May 25, 2012. It continued the anti-black-hat strategies of the original Penguin while processing many of the requests made via the feedback form. This generally improved the accuracy of the ongoing Penguin initiative.

For several months, Google warned users that the next Penguin update would be a major shake-up of the industry. Instead, they rolled out Penguin #3 on October 5th, a minor update that affected less than .3 per cent of queries. The SEO industry breathed a sigh of relief, though larger updates continued in other initiatives, including Panda.

The fourth Penguin update, labelled by Google as Penguin 2.0, rolled out on May 22 of 2013 and was the first Penguin update of the year. It was another relatively minor update, though Google has not released the exact details of what it targeted. Research into the evidence suggested that it was targeted at the page level rather than implementing site-wide penalties for entire domains.

Another Penguin update is undoubtedly forthcoming, but there is no announced date for its implementation.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Black Hat Techniques, Google Penguin, Keyword Stuffing, SEO Tips

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