Category: WordPress

Why You Should Embed YouTube Videos in Your Blog Posts?

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Benefits of Embedding YouTube Videos

Today’s blog post is based around a super simple topic, yet something that I’ve personally seen noticeable results with…

What I’m talking about here is embedding YouTube videos in your blog posts.

This is just another way to stand out from your competitors and add more personality to your blog.

Today we will be going over some of the benefits of embedding YouTube videos in your blog posts, but first let’s explain how you would actually do this in the first place.

How to Embed a YouTube Video in WordPress Blog?

First things first, head over to the video that you would like to embed into your blog post and click on the “Share” button.

How to Embed a YouTube Video in WordPress Blog

 

Now you have two options here:

  • Option #1, you can grab the “embed” code and paste that directly into the “Text” editor within WordPress (see next steps below).
  • Option #2, you can grab the URL provided and paste that directly into the “Visual” editor within WordPress (for the sake of keeping this particular blog article to the point, I only demonstrate option #1 below. However, option #2 is dead simple and if you have any questions, please feel free to leave me a comment below).

Embedding YouTube Videos

 

Next “copy” the embed code (alternatively, as stated above, you can just copy and paste the YouTube URL provided directly into the “Visual” editor within WordPress).

How to Embed YouTube Video in Blog

 

Lastly, find the blog post you’d like to edit and once inside hit the “Text” tab. Then simply just paste the embed code in from the previous step.

Embed YouTube Video on BlogYou will also want to “preview” this to make sure it looks okay (note: you can adjust the height and width dimensions of your video if necessary).

Benefits of Embedding YouTube Videos in Your Blog Posts?

Now that we’ve gone over exactly how to embed YouTube videos directly into your blog content, let’s examine some of the benefits of this strategy.

Again, a simple yet powerful tip!

1.) Provides Readers Exposure to a New Platform

Many of your blog readers may not know that you have a YouTube channel unless you embed your videos into some of your posts. This is a such a great way to expose some of the traffic from your blog to your YouTube channel. If these people already like your blog content, there’s a good chance they will like your YouTube videos as well. Which leads to the next benefit!

2.) More YouTube Subscribers

When you embed high-quality videos into your posts that help explain or sum up the content, people are way more inclined to subscribe to your YouTube channel. They are now primed and ready since they are already visiting and hanging around your blog. Embedding your YouTube videos within your blog content as an on-going strategy can really help grow your subscriber count and help build a loyal audience (both on YouTube and your blog).

3.) Longer-Time Spent on Page

If a visitor happens to watch your embedded video on one of your blog posts, this will most likely increase the time spent on that particular article. This is incredibly beneficial from an SEO perspective. The longer you can get people to stay on your website and click around, the better. This is a really easy and helpful tip to better optimize your blog posts for SEO.

4.) Potential for Inbound Links

If your content and videos are high-quality and provide loads of value, then these types of posts (copy with an embedded YouTube video) can attract inbound links. Informative articles get linked to and shared all the time. When you produce a really good piece of content on your blog that combines both text and video, you increase your chances of other webmasters linking out to you. Another huge SEO benefit that could lead to increases in targeted organic traffic.

5.) Makes Content More Engaging

Have you ever come across a blog post that flows fluently, smoothly and is very easy to read? Well, embedding YouTube videos within your blog posts can provide the same experience to your readers if done properly. YouTube videos within blog content can be a great way to break up the text and make it easier for your traffic to digest the information and stay on the page (similar to why we use text headings). Videos reveal additional layers about you, your brand and also helps add more personality to your posts.

6.) Deeper Relationships & Connections

When your readers either see your face or hear your voice (through video), this helps build deeper relationships and connections with your audience. Complimenting your text content with video really invites people into your world and creates a unique experience. It also shows that you’re transparent, human and willing to put yourself out there to help people your readers. This is a great way to build a following that will last for the long-term.

Bonus Tip:

Make sure you are also adding your blog article links within the YouTube description section (see screenshot below). This is an excellent way to drive more traffic to your blog with YouTube!

Adding Blog to YouTube Description

Conclusion

It’s hard to believe that so many wonderful benefits come from such a simple tactic like embedding YouTube videos in your blog posts. Yet, I’ve noticed over the course of my blogging experience, it’s the little steps over a prolonged period of time that yield the best results. Make sure to combine this strategy with other foundational blogging techniques for the best results!

Do you currently embed YouTube videos within your blog posts?

Have you noticed any positive benefits yourself?

Check out my video version of this post here!

13+ SEO Friendly WordPress Themes to Rank Well In 2018

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SEO Friendly WordPress Themes

Ranking a website in the major search engines depends heavily on the SEO work done by the digital marketing professional. A website, which is optimized with the latest SEO best practices, can perform well in Google and other important search engines. Poorly optimized websites usually have a lower ranking in Google, high-bounce rate, and provide a poor user experience for visitors.

WordPress already has some built-in SEO features, which can help a lot with your overall SEO strategy. If you use an SEO-friendly WordPress theme for your website, it increases the effectiveness of your SEO approach and gives you a leg up on the competition. So if you are looking for an appropriate SEO-friendly WordPress theme, we put together the perfect list of the 13 best themes out there today:

1.) SEO WP

This theme is a gift to all professional WordPress bloggers and website owners. You can create all types of WordPress websites/blogs using this theme. It is fully optimized for SEO and is compatible with the latest SEO guidelines of Google. It is responsive to all mobile devices also, which is essential for good ranking of websites in Google’s SERP. Several things in this theme, such as meta tags, HTML structure etc, are organized to best suit the search engines and your website.

2.) Lighthouse Blog

To be a successful WordPress blogger is the dream of millions of people all around the world. But, only a few of them get the desired accomplishment. If you want to see success as a blogger, choosing an SEO-friendly theme is vital and should be taken seriously. This theme here is fully optimized for SEO and has more than 70 settings. Your website will load fast on all devices and will give viewers the optimal view.

3.) Mr. SEO

This is an SEO friendly and social media theme for all professional WordPress website owners and bloggers. This theme makes your website naturally SEO-friendly and compliments your SEO work with its various features, such as Extensive typography options, Social Icon widget, Call to Action short code, etc. It includes a child theme also. This means you can easily customize your website and give it a favorite look to attract more customers towards your website/blog.

4.) Marketer

Marketer is another SEO friendly WordPress theme with lots of customization options. You can customize this theme as per your needs and create all types of various styles of WordPress websites. Its flat design and responsive layout will make your website stand out and visitors come back. It is Cross Browser Compatible and has Google Fonts.

5.) Luxury Travel

A good number of people love to travel around the world, explore new things, enrich their knowledge, and make friendly relationships with the people belonging to other religions, languages, cultures, etc. You can potentially make big profits if you create a WordPress travel website using this theme. The Luxury Travel theme is coded very well and loads quickly on all mobile devices. It has SEO features and social media options that help you tremendously in your SEO efforts and enables you to get the desired outcome in an easier way.

6.) Magazine Newspaper

This is an ideal theme for news organizations, media persons, journalists that run news websites with the WordPress CMS. Use this theme to create compelling news websites and leave your competitors behind using its pre-installed SEO features. This theme can also be used for creating other types of WordPress websites/blogs outside of the news industry.

7.) Hotel Resort

Use this theme to create an SEO friendly WordPress website for your hotel/restaurant business and serve a large number of customers with your solid web-presence. You can easily optimize your website using its SEO features and ensure it is up to date with the latest fixes.

8.) Envo Business

With business organizations going online with websites/blogs, having a feature-rich website portal on a low investment always seems like a challenging job. Why don’t you use a WordPress site for your business? Use this theme to create an attractive business website with just a few clicks. Its SEO friendly features work as a catalyst in your SEO practices and help you to increase the ranking of your website on all major search engines.

9.) VT Blogging

VT blogging is a free, but dedicated theme for the creation of WordPress blogs and websites. It is fully responsive to all mobile and hand-held devices, which means your website will rank better in Google’s SERP and help you generate more business from smaller screens. Using its customization options, you can make important changes to your website and make it more authentic for visitors.

10.) VW Ecommerce Shop

E-commerce SEO is not an easy task as even the most experienced digital marketing professionals face several difficulties to stabilize the ranking of E-commerce websites. If you want to run a small and medium scale E-commerce business enterprise, use this theme to create your website. Its SEO friendly features work as a companion when you compete heavily with your competitors and aid in higher search engine rankings.

11.) Corporate Plus

With this theme, you can create awesome websites for corporate organizations, companies, and business firms. This simple, but attractive theme comes with several customization options, allowing you to tweak your website to your liking. You can also use this theme to create other types of websites as well. With its SEO-friendly features, you can boost the effectiveness of your SEO campaign to bring in more organic traffic to your website.

12.) The WP Fitness

This is an ideal theme for anyone who runs health and fitness clubs. With this theme, they can setup a great website for their fitness centers quickly and easily. The WP Fitness theme is SEO-friendly by default. So, it works as a helping hand and enables you to boost the ranking of your health/fitness website on all major search engines.

13.) Bloger

Desperately searching for a feature-rich and SEO friendly theme for your WordPress blog? If yes, then switch to this theme. You not only get an awesome looking blog but also it offers top-notch SEO features as well.

Author Bio:

Lauren Mclaren works as a website designer and blogger at  Digital Muscle Limited which is an SEO Company in Sydney. She loves writing about new updates and trends related to WordPress and SEO Technologies.

3 Quick Ways To Improve Your WordPress SEO

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WordPress SEO Strategies

Millions of people worldwide use WordPress for their blogs, websites, and even online stores. There’s no doubt that it’s a great CMS; the numbers speak for themselves, however, their ‘out-of-the-box’ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a quick, or even good, solution to apply to your SEO strategy. Although there are plenty of ways to drive and encourage traffic to your website, we all know that SEO is the crucially important, mainly because it produces actual results.

What we’re really saying here is, don’t rely on WordPress’s SEO to get your website to the top of Google’s search engine ranking. In this post, we’ve put together 3 quick and effective ways for you to improve your WordPress SEO, without too much effort.

1.) Choose the best WordPress Web Host

Now, you’re probably wondering, what does your web hosting provider have to do with increasing your WordPress SEO? Google takes into account many factors when calculating your website’s position on their search engine results page (SERP); one of those factors being the speed of your website. Your web host, when it comes right down to it, WordPress SEOdetermines the downtime of your website, and the speed in which your website loads.

It’s really important to check out the uptime and potential server speed from your web host; most web hosting providers offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, giving you the reassurance that you require. However, it’s not as simple as finding a web host that provides a guarantee; there are other factors included too, such as their reputation, customer support, and hosting features. You’re going to need a web host that gives you access to 1-click installs, such as, WordPress, to ensure that you can gain easy access to your website, and your web host’s control panel at the same time.

Being smart about your choices will return great results; look for a web host who offers specific WordPress hosting plans, as well as speed and consistent high performance.

2.) Use a reputable SEO plugin

I can’t put into words how great WordPress plugins are; software that can simply boost the usability of your website at the click of a button – but, don’t go overboard. There are A LOT of plugins available for WordPress, and as tempting as it may be to install every shiny plugin, that’s not the trick here. Using a recognised and reputable SEO plugin can certainly help your SERP ranking, such as, Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO has been branded the number 1 WordPress SEO plugin, and there’s plenty of reasons for this. If you’re new to WordPress and/or SEO, there’s a lot of terminology that won’t make sense. Yoast SEO pretty much deals with all the jargon for you and performs all the tedious tasks to ensure your website gets seen. From Sitemaps and breadcrumbs, to meta descriptions and oodles of features, Yoast SEO integrates and manages your WordPress website with Google to the best of its ability.  It even goes as far as providing you with all the tools you need when writing content for your website; is it SEO friendly? Does it conform to SEO standards? How will your page look on Google?

Yoast SEO is free to download, with premium options available. It’s updated regularly and has over 5 million active installations. It’s most certainly a quick and easy way to improve your WordPress SEO.

3.) Use a responsive design or template

If you decide to use one of WordPress’s templates, of which there are literally thousands, you’re going to want to make sure that it’s responsive. How often do you browse the internet on your mobile phone? Probably quite a lot! So, would you be happy if you were using your smart phone, and came across a website that wasn’t optimised for your screen size? Of course not, and neither would Google!

Another one of Google’s ranking factors is responsive design; creating a website that will look great on both desktop and mobile is essential in 2018. Whether you’re using a computer, phone, or tablet, your website design or WordPress template must be responsive.  Most WordPress themes are, which is great, as it saves trawling through thousands of designs to find one that’s suitable.

Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, WordPress is a great platform to use to create a new blog, website, or even run your own business. There are plenty of tools available to get you started, and simple tips and tricks to ensure that your WordPress SEO is up to scratch. It may seem daunting at first, but, there’s an abundant amount of information available on the internet to guide you along your way.

Author Bio:

JannJann is a Content Writer at ukwebhostreview.com – She is committed to providing all you need to know about technology along with researching and analyzing the best hosting providers.

 

Any questions or comments? Let Jann and I know in the comments section!

How to Boost Usability of a WordPress Website- Tips & Tricks

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Wordpress Tips

The main reason why WordPress is currently managing about 28 percent of all content on the Internet is due to the fact that it has an incredibly beginner-friendly learning curve. This is mostly due to the fact that it allows you to design a website without having to actively learn how to code. However, learning how to use the basics and knowing how to get the most out of your WordPress website’s potential is not the one and the same thing. With this in mind and without further ado, here are a couple of tips you might find particularly useful.

1. Lightweight theme for ultimate responsiveness

The first thing you need to put your mind to when designing a website is its responsiveness. Broad online audiences expect your website to load within two seconds and get seriously frustrated when it fails to do so. According to one survey, it takes only 4 seconds of non-responsiveness in order for your website to lose about one-quarter of all its visitors. In order to avoid this happening, you need to look for a lightweight WordPress theme. Recognizing it is quite easy since it has to A) appear minimalistic, B) be HTML code optimized and C) have a small size of the theme files. While there are some exceptions to these three rules, they usually hold true.

2. Eliminate unnecessary plugins

WordPress Tips and Tricks

While each plugin you use may add a new function to your website, install too many and you will see a significant decline in your website’s functionality. Due to the fact that each of them requires an additional HTTP request, this will slow down your website’s load time and in this way cause a problem discussed in the previous section. Furthermore, more plugins require more maintenance, which is yet another reason why you should prioritize when it comes to your website’s third-party software selection.

3. Find the right host

The next thing you need to keep in mind is that not everything is up to you. Finding a host who can’t deliver on their promise of speed and uptime can land a devastating blow to a struggling young enterprise. Therefore, you need to keep both your eyes open when looking for the right cPanel hosting option. As for the other features you need to focus on, the uptime (at least 99.99 percent of the time), decent monthly traffic (at least 50 GB) and 24/7 web support are a bare minimum.

4. Keep it simple

Throughout this article, we argued just how important it is to keep your website fast and functional. However, keeping its design simple gives you a boost to the overall CX (customer experience), as well. For instance, a more intuitive navigation means that your audience will have an easier time finding their way around your domain, however, it also means that your website might get indexed sooner.

Additionally, a simple check out system means a significantly lower shopping cart abandonment rate (provided that you have an e-commerce website). Finally, a transparent CTA (call-to-action) button could lead to a lower bounce rate, not to mention that more whitespace also boosts the readability of your content by quite a bit. All of these perks boost your SEO rank and your overall standing in the digital environment.

5. Image optimization

At the end of the day, in order to make your content more appealing, you need to add the right images to it. Since the human brain registers about 90 percent of all information it receives visually, the choice of an adequate image is more than important. However, what matters the most is that the image is well-optimized for your website, especially today, where people are likely to access it through various devices. As for the way in which to go about this, the choice is yours. Some decide to do so manually, while others prefer turning to plugins and completely automating this process.

At the end of the day, sometimes, in order to get more out of your website, you need to add less. Still, going with the minimalist approach doesn’t mean that you should leave your website virtually empty. There is a fine line between creating a beautiful minimalist web design and displaying a lack of care for your website’s appearance. Needless to say, while you should favor functionality above the aesthetics, you can’t afford to neglect the looks either. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t; yet in the world of web design, these are some of the choices you will just have to learn how to live with.

Author Bio:

Raul- Technivorz

My name is Raul and I am editor in chief at Technivorz blog. I have a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. Please take a minute to connect with me on Twitter and Facebook.

 

 

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