A premium WordPress theme can be one of the best ways to really improve the looks of your WordPress web site.

Because WordPress is free you don’t have to spend money purchasing it,so with the money you’ll save you can afford to get a great looking premium theme—and it’ll still be cheaper than a custom-designed site.

When you purchase a premium theme you can avoid the somewhat shoddy work that sometimes shows up in free themes. That’s not to say free themes aren’t any good, because many of them are great themes, but often a lot of the detail work that really makes a theme special is missing.

Anyone can put together a free theme and offer it to the public, but it takes a lot more skill, care, and dedication to build themes people are actually willing to pay money for.

One the other side of the coin, just because you pay for a theme doesn’t mean it’s worth what you paid for it. There are bad premium themes, good premium themes, and great premium themes. And even the good and great ones may not work to exactly fill your needs.

This article is all about helping you make intelligent decisions when choosing premium themes.

Some things we will discuss:

1. Things to consider and plan for before you even start looking at themes.

2. How can you best assess a theme’s quality?

3. What you should be getting when you purchase a premium WordPress theme.

Item 1: Needs, Wants, and Expectations

The very first step to selecting a premium theme is to gauge your own needs, wants, and expectations. You surely can’t pick the right theme if you don’t even know what’s right for you and what you really need.

So, first step, before you start looking at all of the really cool themes and get excited about all of the really fancy designs, you need to sort out what it is that you really need and want. What do you really want your site to look like, and what do you want it to do?

And before you even do that first step, you should probably understand what you’re getting in a premium theme.

What, exactly, makes a theme a Premium Theme?

No discussion on premium themes would be complete if it didn’t answer one question: What is a premium theme?

There are a lot of different opinions on what a premium theme should include, including but not limited to:
customization, documentation, support, higher quality code, better “design” work, etc.

What it comes down to though is that a premium theme is a theme you pay for, it’s as simple as that. All the other potential extras and goodies depend on what the creator of the theme actually delivers to you.

You can see some demo sites featuring premium themes at iTheme and Revolution.

For sure, not all premium theme creators are equal, and not all premium themes are equal. Everyone has a different opinion on what makes a theme great. Where one premium theme creator may have a lot of professional experience, another may only produce themes as a hobby. Both themes may be equally good but you’ll get a different experience from each.

If you choose to buy a theme from a hobbyist you can’t expect the levels of support a pro-theme creator can offer. If you buy a theme from a company that offers premium themes as a second thought, you might get terrible or non-existant service. These are things you need to consider.

Bottom line, do your research, don’t let slick marketing fool you, and make your decision based on facts.

What Do You Need in a Website, what do you need it to do?

Before you start picking themes you need to make some decisions. If you don’t do your homework now, you may end up regretting it later. The most important thing to figure out is what you need your website to do.

• What type of content do you need to manage?
• Do you need blog capabilities (news, portfolio, press releases, catalog, etc.)?
• Does your site need a specific call to action (like an e-commerce component)?
• How many pages will your site need?
• Will those pages need a hierarchy?
• What do you want to show or feature on the homepage?

These are the sort of questions you need to answer. You’re trying to figure out what you need
from your website. Once you have that sorted out, it’s easier to find a theme that offers what you need.

What Kind of Theme Should You Buy?

One of the most common mistakes in choosing a theme is assuming it will fit your needs. Premium themes
come in all shapes and sizes and colors. Some focus on a specific need while others focus on generic blogging.

Some themes are designed to put the focus on the content. At the other extreme are the corporate themes. These tend to focus on static pages and relegate the blog content to a small news section. The key is to not make assumptions about what the theme will or won’t do.

Shown here is the iTheme eCommerce premium WordPress theme that can be used to sell your products through an internet storefront created with WordPress. This is a good example of a specialized premium WordPress theme, in this case the theme was designed to showcase an ecommerce web site.

Just because WordPress is a blogging platform doesn’t mean that any theme will be great for blogging. WordPress is extremely flexible and more and more themes are focusing on sites that don’t focus on blogging at all.

What Features Do You Need?

Before you start shopping for themes you should decide what features you need. Some features may appeal to you when you read about the theme and view the demo, but if you don’t really need them then you may be paying for something you’ll never use.

In some cases those fancy features could actually interfere with what you do actually need. Finding the right theme for your needs is much more practical than finding a cool looking theme and bending and sacrificing your needs to make it work.

Here are just a few examples of some features that are available on premium themes:

• Featured post on the home page instead of the latest post
• Featured photographs from Flickr
• Featured video(s) from YouTube
• Advertising integration (Adsense, etc)
• Advertising management features
• Optional color themes to choose from
• Control panels for easily adding tracking code or feed URLs
• Header image replacement, resizing, and cropping capabilities
• Contact form (so you don’t publicize your email address to spammers)
• Tabbed sidebars
• Tabbed featured posts
• Multiple positions for sidebars and widget capable sidebars
• Multiple page layouts
• Menus auto generated from WordPress pages
• Menus auto generated from categories
• Menus generated from the blogroll
• Manual menu control
• Drop down menus
• Built in asides / sideblog
• Advanced search functionality
• Niche specific templates; e.g. real estate, auto sales, photography, etc
• E-commerce integration if desired
• Image / banner rotation if desired
• Reordering the home page
• Alternative graphics packs
• And more…

There are so many choices that you have your work cut out for you in choosing that “just right” theme.

How Much Customization Are You Really Capable Of And Comfortable With?

If the thought of writing or changing code or installing plugins makes you nervous, you better pick a theme that has everything you need out of the box. On the other hand, if you’re fine with tweaking code, installing plugins or adjusting the CSS, then you can be a lot more flexible when you pick a theme.

A lot of the features shown above are built right into some premium themes, and many of them can
easily be added to themes with plugins. If you’re OK making some of those changes yourself, it might give you a little more leeway in choosing a theme you like for other reasons.

Next up in Choosing A WordPress Theme-Part 2, we’ll cover specific details on what to look for when choosing a premium theme.

Google loathes duplicate content!

Google is trying to index and categorize the billions of pages on the web and calculate each page’s relevance to specific search queries. Therefore, to have any chance of attaining appearance in Top 30 SERPs (search engine results pages), pages must be accurately described…

Keep in mind that Google is an entirely automated text indexing system doing its absolute best to deliver the most relevant content to its core users. Those core users are NOT website owners! Google’s main focus is on its search customers.

If you want your website to get noticed, you’ve got to assist Google et al in every way possible, by accurately describing your own content. Make it clear and unequivocal what each page is about. Ensure it is original content, properly described, and easily accessible.

Apparently, there are over 200 elements that Google assesses as it’s trying to calculate a page’s relevance to a specific search query. Individually, some of them are almost insignificant. Collectively they add up to prominence or obscurity! The thinking man understands that the more elements you get right, the higher the probability of appearance in Top 30 SERPs.

Here’s a dozen of the primary indicators of unique content to an SE spider;

1. URLs: precise control of every page URL, carefully using primary keywords / phrase. Use Permalinks wisely!

2. Title Tag – 70 characters limit: Accurate, carefully using primary keywords / phrase. The single most important element for every page!

3. Meta Description – 150 chars limit: Accurate, carefully using primary keywords / phrase. By default, its used verbatim in Google SERP’s. Its very important to write a catchy phrase incorporating primary keyword phrase, one that impels viewers to click on it! I always use All In One SEO because I’m a “content control freak” and want to make sure every word is in the right place. Dynamic meta-tags are better than no meta-tags – but the ability to manually input as many elements as is possible is what makes the overall difference to SE Rankings.

4. Meta Keywords: Accurate, carefully using primary / relevant keywords and phrases. This should NOT be vaguely related words! It should be a set of long-tailed keyword phrases specifically relevant to the page content. I’d never use more than 8-10 phrases separated by commas.

5. 1st On-page Title/Heading: Headings offer limited space, but ALWAYS try and get at least one primary keyword into the title, and the tag must be H1 or H2, not an ‘imitation’ with large/bold text.

6. First Paragraph: Very important to get the primary keyword phrase into the beginning of the first sentence!

7. Last Heading: If you use one, reiterate a primary or secondary keyword phrase.

8. Last Paragraph: Quite important to get the primary or secondary keyword phrase into the beginning of the first sentence!

9. Images: Use keyword-rich image file names! Provide a descriptive and accurate image ALT text that uses a primary keyword phrase. Don’t overdo it – just lightly reinforce the page content descriptions.

10. Anchor Text: Provide links to other Internal Pages from primary/secondary keyword phrases within page content. Don’t waste the opportunity available to give clues to content on other pages! Using “Click Here For More” is not productive.

11. Menus: CSS drop-down menus are good. Text menus are good because they (usually) describe briefly the content of the page at the end of the link, providing an additional clue/reinforcement for the SE spiders. JavaScript menus are a disaster because they are completely invisible to Google et al.

12. Latent Semantic Indexing: Within the overall content, don’t use excessive primary/secondary keyword repetition. Instead, employ a sprinkle of similar words having the same meaning… and variations of the primary words; e.g. mortgage, mortgaged, mortgagee, mortgagor, lend, lending, lender, financing, funding, loan, loans, loaned etc… Reinforce the primary / secondary keyword phrases with supporting content. LSI is based on a mathematical probability that if a page says its about something, AND general content also contains related words / phrases, then it IS accurately described and IS specifically relevant to related search queries.

13. USE Google! They’ve got two absolutely essential items designed to help you! The first is the Google sitemap, and there are plugins available which totally automate generation of the sitemap.xml file every time you add or edit page or post content. The 2nd is Feedburner… Create a Feedburner account, and add your RSS Feed to it. That gives you an intravenous pipeline directly into the belly of the beast! I’ve regularly got blog posts and page content appearing in “Google Alert” distributions within 2 – 3 hours of publishing the post or page! Feedburner also offers you a managed email subscription service which routes your new content directly to interested users…

The above SEO tips provided courtesy of iThemes Premium WordPress Themes ]]> http://easywordpresssite.com/seo-tips/feed/ 0 http://tutordaddy.com/sell-your-products-online-with-a-wordpress-storefront/ http://tutordaddy.com/sell-your-products-online-with-a-wordpress-storefront/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 01:45:26 +0000 stanadm http://easywordpresssite.com/tempsite/?p=187

How To Create Your Own Internet Store Using WordPress

Learn how to set up a profitable online store to sell your products without spending one single cent on software.

This one hour video tutorial takes you by the hand and shows you how, step by step & detail by detail

Owning your own e-commerce store can be a very lucrative venture. Just look at Amazon.com. They make a killing selling products online.

You can do that too. You probably will never equal Amazon’s sales success, but you can get started on the path to accomplishing your goals. Just like any other business venture, all you need is a good product and people visiting your store.

Since your store will be online it can basically run itself other than the shipping aspect if you are selling physical products.

There is another kind of store you can build that does run on autopilot…..

• You don’t have to stock it
• You don’t have to ship anything
• The payments are all handled automatically.

This type of store deals with digital downloadable goods.

Our videos will show you how to set up your store using free software that handles the entire process no matter what type of store you want to open. If you are running a physical goods store all you have to do is ship the products. If you are going to run a digital download store it is all automatic after you set it up.

This one hour video tutorial will take you step by step through the process of installing the software and setting up your store. In our example we will show you how to set up a store for digitally downloadable goods. The process is virtually the same as setting up a store for physical goods with a couple of exceptions that we talk about in the video series.

Just think – you could have your own store set up and running TODAY just by following the instructions in these videos.

Don’t wait – get started today!

BUY IT NOW…..

Learn how to bring your ebooks into the twenty first century by publishing in the newest & biggest hot marketplace!

Find out how you, yes you, can publish your ebook to the Amazon kindle platform for absolutely no cost.

This is a huge marketplace that smart marketers are flocking to. Shouldn’t you be one of those smart marketers too?

Read on to find out how you can become a successful Amazon Kindle publisher…..

If you want to have a successful internet business then you must constantly be looking for new marketing opportunities. It is just a simple fact, the more targeted eyes you get to your products the more sales you make. More sales translates to more money in your pocket. We all like that, don’t we?

In the past most of your customers were on their computers looking for information through search engines. If you put in enough hard effort and hours to get your site on the first few pages, people would come to your site and perhaps some would purchase your products if they were interested. This required that the potential customer have a degree of computer literacy, and that they were comfortable paying for products from your website when they didn’t know you are anything about you. Many people are reluctant to pull out their credit card to purchase something under those circumstances.

So, you may as well face it – many people are bypassing your sales process because of these factors.

You can eliminate these problems though!

You can now target the non-computer savvy and untrusting customers.

The people in this marketplace, and there are a lot of them, are finding your product in a whole new way. They are using smart devices and eBook readers such as the Amazon Kindle reader and smart phones and internet tablets running the Kindle app.

This is a huge marketplace, and if you are not in it, you are missing out big time!

It simply is a whole new way of shopping and people have no fear of using it!

Amazon is now the biggest and most trusted online marketplace on the internet, and the simple fact is that having your book published on the Kindle site elicits automatic trust. You will immediately overcome a major sales barrier by being listed on Amazon.

You can see there is good reason for you to be listed on Amazon and the good news is it is free and this video series will show you exactly how to do it.

Here are just a few reasons that you should use the Kindle platform.

• It is totally free to publish on the Kindle platform
• It gives you massive exposure for your ebook
• It gives you instant trust from potential buyers
• It gives you some great cross promotion tools

And lots more.

This video series will show you exactly how to publish a successful Kindle Ebook.

All you will need to do is follow the simple instructions in the videos.

Here is just some of what you will learn:

• How to properly format your ebook
• How to set up your product
• How to use Kindle Digital Publishing
• Advanced traffic strategies

and much more…..

Learn How To Publish Your eBook On Amazon Now…..