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WordPress, Genesis, Growth Hacking, Conversion Rate Optimization

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Informative blog articles from Blogger IQ Have you ever wondered why some people don’t ever open your emails? That not only is frustrating but it adds up to your email lists under “inactive users” bucket – which is an overhead as you pay to your email management subscription based on the number of users you have.

But they are not reading your hard work! How pity!

So, here’s the best tip on getting that list building problem uprooted.

A simple but effective way to ensure they read your emails from day one is:

Just ask to respond!

Yes! That’s it. All you have to do is to ask your email subscriber to just hit reply and say something. It could be a line on ‘the deepest and darkest fear they have in taking a step towards something’ or you could just ask them to tell you what is it they are working on that you can help with.

This helps in two things:

Crazy, isn’t it?

Writing content is one thing and getting it noticed by your audience is another. The bridge that covers this gap in majority of the cases is the search engine.

So how to ensure that your content is discovered and indexed by Google (and other search engines)?

This post covers the top 10 foolproof ways to improve Google’s crawl rate of your new content. Let’s start from bottom to top:

10. Social Sharing – by no means this is a great signal to Google. However, it’s wise to have your Social networking accounts linked to your CMS so your content automatically is shared when you publish it. There is a separate life for the posts published in your social networks that lives on its own. Which also leads to links from those websites to your blog and thus an increased crawl rate to your website.

9. Canonical – as long as you have unique content in its own unique permalink, you are good to go. But if you have multiple links leading to the same content, then you must have a Canonical version explicitly declared. You can do that by using canonical URLs.

8. Submit and Verify your website – submitting a website to Google is NOT the same as verifying it. I have already written a detailed post on this process on my another blog at The Key Ponderer here.

7. Sitemap – sitemap is an optional thing – as long as your site is really well structured. But with the usage of plugins like Yoast, it’s a cake walk to create a sitemap. However, you must submit the sitemap to Google in order for it to efficiently crawl your website. This shows how your site is structured. But having the sitemap will definitely boost the crawl success rate. Ideally, you can submit the sitemap through your Google Search Console once a week – depending on how frequently you update the site. Otherwise, even once per month is also OK.

6. Robots – having a carefully constructed Robots.txt file can really help in increasing the portions of your website getting crawled by the search bots. This, on the other hand, can seriously affect your crawling rate too – so exercise caution here. There are some pretty neat and useful guides from Google themselves on this subject – so refer those before you start editing that robots.txt file of yours.

5. Less plugins – obvious one! But it’s so tempting to install and test that fancy plugin. Happens all the time. Before you install another plugin, check if you REALLY need that. More than your need, see if your user REALLY needs that. If yes, and if it adds to the security or speed of your site, then fine. Or else, I highly recommend avoiding any more plugins than the basic ones for your WordPress site. This is because, the number of plugins loading every time on your site is directly related to the speed of your website loading time. Less the plugins, means less the loading time and that is good news to your visitors.

4. Regular Updates – as you can see a pattern now, all the metrics given in this post are quite related in some way or the other. More importantly, most of the metrics are directly dealing with making the visitor’s experience better. Of course, updating your site regularly takes 4th place for a reason – nobody wants to stay or come visit to a site that wasn’t updated in the last one year!

3. Interlinking – one of the common methods of indexing and knowing the other pages of your site is through links found from one page to another – a natural flow of information within your pages – more so on inter-related pages than random linking to other pages of your site. Beware that Google is still a bot but not a brainless one. So link to other posts and pages of your blog but only with relevance. Or else, that can even attract a penalty from Google.

2. Site Speed – I gladly repeated this to reiterate and make the point! Ensure your loading time is less than 2 or 1 second. Or else your visitors may not stick around. It’s a great and hard step to master, but a vital one – and it’s possible too. Site speed takes the 2nd place only next to well, users!

1. Users – at the end of the day, your website or blog exists for just one reason – to serve or help your users to get entertained/learn something/get helped. Whatever action you take on your blog, keep your users in mind, always! This can drastically improve the chances of better and effective crawling of your site by the Google bots, because Google loves traffic. The more the organic traffic to your site, the more frequent your site gets crawled and indexed and thus displayed on the first pages of SERPs.

Go… make something happen!

The single most widely used platform today across the world is the internet, without any doubt. All the apps, websites, online tools are set on this massive yet connected platform called the internet. For all the websites and their respective pages, we know that the address is what makes it unique and accessible from virtually any device that can connect to the internet. That address is technically called as a URL or Uniform Resource Locator. This is often referred to as a hyperlink. Basically, the URLs were established to replace the IP Addresses for the websites so it could be read manually.

Eg. http://www.example.com

This blog post addresses most commonly asked questions about URLs. In fact, this guide is ALL that can be about URLs. If you are an SEO (O as in Optimizer), or a Search Engine Marketer – you will still find some useful content here. Just hang in there…

It’s often said that URLs must not be gibberish, meaning, it must not have any random content or auto-written text like random text or numbers. Instead, this must be carefully crafted as if you are accessing an organized folder with the contents having meaningful file names.

Eg. of a great URL: http://www.example.com/category-word/subcategory-word/main-word-or-phrase.html

Here are 7 different best practices to construct a URL: If you really want to get your hands dirty knowing more about URLs, here is a great article from Added Bytes on rewriting URLs for improving the usability and search friendliness of your site.

Let’s say we are hungry and want to eat something badly!

Recommended reading: Get Pat’s Theme!

We have two options:

Though the first option is more healthy and more satisfactory compared to the second, the latter one is pretty quick to satiate our hunger.

In this guide post, we will focus on the second option to add a scroll to top button in a WordPress theme.

Note: This plugin has been tested on a Genesis child theme as well. It works perfectly fine!

For this purpose, we will download and use a plugin called WPFront Scroll Top. A free plugin!

After having experimented with a lot of plugins that promised to do this job, I finally found the WPFront Scroll Top plugin. This not only did the job, it was also easy to customize the look and functionality. And for those who are looking for option # 1 to cook their own meal, here you go:

We don’t want sharing buttons to be shown on all the pages of our blog. Do we?

If that’s the case, for example, let’s say you don’t want to show the Genesis Simple Share buttons showing on your ‘About’ page. By default, the plugin settings page offers only limited options to disable/enable on specific page types: However, to disable on custom pages and posts we create – we have to go further deep and close to the page or post created by us. In our above example, to disable the sharing buttons on the ‘About’ page, we have to navigate directly to the ‘About’ page.

Depending on your WP Editor page settings, you’ll find Share Settings option like this either on the right side of the WP editor area or at the bottom: That should take care of enabling/disabling your Genesis Simple Share plugin buttons from appearing on selected pages.

Note: if you don’t find the ‘Share Settings’ box, make sure that is made available under your ‘Screen Options‘ at the top.