Try tricking Google to index your site higher and you might just find your website exiled from search. But how can you avoid this horrific blunder? In a WebProNews interview with Michael Stebbins of Market Motive, Michael explains what influences Google to ban your website and how to prevent this banishment from occurring.

See the interview below:

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Whether you’re in the market for a fresh blog design or need to start a blog from scratch, there are many blog themes and platforms to consider. Many clients come to us in a quest to find the best blogging theme to fit their needs. Although we always suggest Wordpress as the blogging platform they should use, we do recommend different Wordpress themes based on specific business needs and personal lifestyles.

This post’s sole purpose is to act as your guide to help you make your Wordpress theme decision quick and easy.

Let’s start with the basic elements of what your blog needs in order to work for your business:

1. SEO capabilities that will enable you to rank in search engines.

2. A look and feel compatible with your brand message.

3. Design that is in line with your blog purpose and what you’re trying to achieve with your blog—in terms of generating business.

4. Backend features that work for your specific lifestyle.

Below I have outlined the features and benefits, as well as the ideal users for three types of Wordpress themes: Thesis, ProPhoto, and premade Wordpress themes.

See the highlights below:

Thesis

**Little Disclaimer: We’re probably a little biased to Thesis as we use it for our own blog and LOVE it! But, that’s not to say it’s perfect for every type of business blogger.

Features and Benefits:

1. Great support: Thesis’ support forum is a collaborative community of other thesis users who use the forum as a place to ask and answer questions. Thesis also has a support and development team who is just a click away if an issue arises.

2. Easy-to-use design panel and font controls: The ultimate in user-friendly design controls, Thesis Design Options enables you to control most of your blog design without any knowledge of code. For example, you can easily add videos and pictures to your sidebar, change sidebar layout and width, and play with font types, sizes, and colors—all without having to know any code.

3. Faster page load times: Search engines look at page load time as an essential factor in page rankings, which is why having a blog that loads quickly is a must in terms of page rank. It’s also important when it comes to your blog visitors who don’t want to wait a few seconds for each item to load on your blog. They’ll leave without waiting. Trust me.

4. Built-in SEO framework: The Thesis creators prefer to call Thesis an SEO-Optimized Wordpress Framework rather than a Wordpress Theme. I would agree with them, and here’s why:

Unlike other Wordpress themes, Thesis has phenomenal, built-in SEO capabilities. No need to find an extra SEO plug-in to optimize your blog. And what’s even better is that Thesis design code is completely separate from HTML code. To understand the benefit of this separated code, you must first understand the basics of blog coding.

Most blog themes don’t separate HTML coding from the design coding. When these themes are used, too much added coding can puff up the code that search engines read. This type of inflammation disables search engines from understanding what your blog is about, and, in turn, deters your blog from ranking.

Because Thesis separates the design code from the HTML code, Google can easily read the clean HTML code and rank your blog. This way, you can do whatever you want in terms of design, and it won’t gunk up the code that Google reads. Also, whenever you want to change the design of your blog, you don’t have to worry about it affecting your hard-earned blog rankings.

5. Affordable: Thesis offers users two options: Personal Option and Developer’s Option. The Personal Option is a onetime fee $87.00 and provides users with the use of Thesis on one live website and one localized development server, access to members-only Answers and Forums, lifetime Thesis upgrades,  and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The Developer’s Option is a onetime fee of $164.00 and provides users with unlimited use of Thesis on sites owned by the user, access to all-new beta versions of Thesis before they’re released, access to Client Site Options, which allows users to deploy Thesis on sites for clients, access to members-only Answers and Forums, lifetime Thesis upgrades, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Great for business owners who . . .

• Want a customizable design and the ability to change the design and most layout components of their blog without the help of a developer.
• Use their blog as a main component of their online marketing strategy.
• Want an online area to showcase their videos and photos and provide additional resources.
• Desire to decrease the amount of time they have to spend finding SEO plug-ins.
• Are looking for excellent technical support.

ProPhoto

Features and benefits:

1. Easy-to-use design panel and font controls: Changing the look and feel of your blog is super easy with ProPhoto. Similar to Thesis, ProPhoto enables you to control most of your blog design without any knowledge of code. For example, you can easily add flash images to your header and slideshows to your posts, change sidebar layout and width, and play with font types, sizes, and colors—all without having to know any code.

2. Slideshows and Flash: ProPhoto acts as a flash portfolio. Because ProPhoto has a variety of flash features, the tone and design of your blog can have a sophisticated and highly engaging feel. Whether you want slide-out pages, drop-down contact menus, a flash header, or a stylish slideshow, ProPhoto lets users customize their blog flash components easily without having to know code.

3. Faster page load times: As mentioned above in the Thesis description, search engines look at page load time as an essential factor in page rankings, which is why having a blog that loads quickly is a must in terms of page rank.

Great for business owners who . . .

• Are in the field of photography or need to showcase high-resolution photographs in bulk.
• Want to feature slideshows and flash videos within blog posts and / or in the header of their blog.
• Want a customizable design and the ability to change the design and most layout components of their blog without the help of a developer.
• Use their blog as a main component of their online marketing strategy.
• Want to use their blog as an extension of their visual portfolio.

Premade Wordpress Themes

** Although premade Wordpress themes don’t have as many bells and whistles as Thesis, ProPhoto, and other enhanced and customizable themes, they are still a great blogging platform to use.

Features and Benefits:

1. Customizable Style Sheets (CSS): Most premade Wordpress themes allow for design and template changes using a customizable style sheet. A developer is required for changing the CSS and other types of blog coding such as PHP and HTML.

2. Customizable sidebars: Similar to all other Wordpress themes (including Thesis and ProPhoto), premade Wordpress themes enable users to activate widgets on their sidebars to post videos, pictures, and other engaging features. But unlike the Thesis and ProPhoto, you need to have some background in HTML coding to post these features to your sidebar.

3. Plug-ins: When using a premade Wordpress theme, consider getting an SEO plug-in to ensure your posts are ranked by search engines. Also, consider using a Share plug-in that allows your blog readers to share your post automatically with friends on their social media networks.

Be careful not to cram your blog with plug-ins as they can bloat your coding. And as mentioned earlier in this post, because code has a direct connection to the design and layout of your blog, too many extra plug-ins can bulk up your code and prohibit search engines from ranking your blog.

Great for business owners who . . .

• Want to test the waters of blogging before committing to a more advanced theme.
• Have an on-staff developer or designer who can customize the blog.
• Want a minimalistic and more basic look and feel to their blog.
• Don’t wish to use their blog as a main component to their online marketing strategy.
• Don’t have the time or energy to devote to proper blog posting and marketing.

Did you find this post helpful? If so, we’d love to hear what platform you think would be best for your business. Let us know in our comments section.

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Search expert, Bruce Clay, shares his insight into the direction of search and what’s behind the scenes of Google Caffeine. Tune in below to WebProNews’ interview with Bruce:

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According to Maile Ohye of Google, simple SEO changes on the front end of your website could mean higher conversion rates. In the below video from WebProNews, Maile Ohye offers exceptional tips on changes you can make to your website in order to help increase website conversion rates.

Take a look at the video below:

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In the video below, WebProNews interviews comScore’s Eli Goodman on the future of online search. In this interview, Eli analyzes the relationship between searching behavior and search technology in order to justify his predictions for the future of online search.

See the video below for an insider’s look at SEO changes . . .

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With the variety of opinions on the changes in search and the best SEO practices, who are we to trust to ensure our websites are ranking high in the SERPs so we can be found by hungry prospects? How do we know what SEO trends to implement and which ones to ignore?

Below are three SEO trends worth taking note of. If you don’t change with the times, you’re bound to be left behind.

Page-Load Time: One of the 2010 predictions / SEO trends for page-ranking criteria is page-loading time. If your website (or blog) takes seconds to load, you may plummet in SEO rankings. It’s all about speed. I cannot stress this enough. In Google’s mind, there is a huge difference between .15 seconds and .20 seconds to load. According to Google, your site should load in 3 seconds or less.

There are a variety of ways to make your web pages load quicker. One such way is Google’s Page Speed Add-on, which allows you to evaluate the performance of your web page and receive suggestions on ways to improve its load time. When you use Page Speed to evaluate your site performance, you receive scores on how your website functions and ways to make your site load more quickly, keep site visitors engaged, and reduce bandwidth.

Real-Time Search: Both Google and Bing are in the works of pulling up real-time Twitter and Facebook status results in their search engine pages. This dynamic approach to search engine results is shaping the way we communicate and receive news and social updates. Because of this predicted new time-sensitive search, it appears that optimizing tweets, YouTube videos, bookmarked articles, and Facebook posts plays a role in SERP rankings. Collecta is one such search engine that currently pulls up only real-time results. OneRiot and Topsy are two others worth checking out.

Social Media Optimization (SMO): Currently, social media results are limited within large search engines such as Google and Bing, but this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use tags and optimized descriptions and titles in your social media posts, videos, images, and status updates. The SMO strategy enables social media users to look through specific social networks and pull up results based on their search terms. If you utilize SMO practices, your name, posts, videos, links, or images are more likely to pull up in social network search result pages.

For example, if you post a tweet that says, “Web copywriting: 10 things you should know before hiring a copywriter,” you’ll be more likely to pull up in Twitter and Collecta search results under search terms such as “web copywriting” or “copywriter.”

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According to a study recently performed by Nielsen, 18% of searches start in social media sites, blogs, and Wikipedia, as opposed to traditional search engine result pages. This statistic is sure to rise as more and more people crave interaction online and are actively seeking conversations and information that interest them in the social media sphere.

So why is there such a rise in people searching for information on social media sites, as opposed to traditional search engines?

The raw nature of social media sites is to act as a community portal that facilitates real-time conversations. Those who search social media sites are looking to expand their search results into the realm of multimedia and results that influence conversation and do so in an extremely convenient way. They’re looking for videos, photos, instant news, opinions, updates, comments, and a place to share their ideas with others and expand their own thought processes.

How do these changes in search behavior affect your business?

First of all, it shows that your company’s participation on social media is crucial if you want prospects to find you through search.

Although websites are still extremely important in attracting clients and encouraging them to contact you or purchase from you, search is now encompassing much more than traditional business websites. This is why it’s essential for you to understand how to utilize all aspects of search when marketing and promoting your business online.

In addition to acting as a communication vehicle between you and your prospects and peers, your social media profiles also work as a way to display your company’s portfolio and establish your brand in a more interactive and social environment. If you use your website and social media profiles hand in hand, you can broaden the way people find your company and actually increase your chances of being found.

If you want your products / services to gain optimum exposure and create a demand, you must cater to every aspect of search. If your business can easily be found online, you have a much greater chance of selling to prospects than a business that only receives referrals and exposure via word of mouth.

In order to understand human nature and how it ties into communication and the speed of communication, let’s take a little trip back in time.

My goal here is to illustrate the speed, velocity, and power of social media websites and why these communication forms appeal to Internet users as opposed to lengthier forms of communication.

As you can see, human nature has not changed in our desire to increase the speed of communication. Clearly there was—and still is—a demand to simultaneously increase the speed of communication while boosting the amount of people the information reaches.

Today, everyone wants to communicate via the easiest possible form, know what’s going on in the world, and find news about topics that interest them—all in an instant. And social media is making this possible by enabling real-time communication, instant news updates, and fresh conversations.

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Ever wonder about the Google Wonder Wheel and its wondrous powers? In a nutshell, Google Wonder Wheel is an effective SEO keyword research tool that can be used to help you optimize all of your web copy, blog copy, and online marketing materials.

Whether you’re looking to refine your web copy, create an optimized press release, or launch a new YouTube marketing campaign, Google Wonder Wheel will help you to develop a list of relevant keywords that will increase SEO and build online exposure.

The best part about Google Wonder Wheel is the layout. If you love charts and graphs as much as I do, you’ll find Google Wonder Wheel to be extremely easy (and fun) to use.

How does Google Wonder Wheel work?

Let’s say you own a Travel agency that specializes in planning trips to Europe. Here are the steps you would take using Google Wonder Wheel to find relative keywords:

1. Type a key phrase related to your industry in the Google search box.

2. Then click “Show Options.”

3. Once you click “Show Options,” you’ll see a sidebar appear on the left side of your webpage. Scroll down to the option “Wonder Wheel,” and select it.

4. You’ll see a diagram, such as the one below, displaying your search phrase in the center circle, with spools latched to keywords / phrases related to your search.

5. Click on one of these keywords / phrases for keywords related to that particular word. For example, if I were to click “travel tours europe,” here is what I would see:

As you can see from the above diagram, the phrases expand to create even more keywords / phrases.

When should you use Google Wonder Wheel?

Ah, the endless uses of the Google Wonder Wheel! While you can use it to research just about anything, here are some ways I use it:

• When blogging: Tagging and keyword placement are crucial when blogging. If you aren’t placing relative keywords in the first paragraph of your post and the title, you may find your blog isn’t being found. Also, when tagging your post, keep in mind keywords and phrases you have scattered throughout your post. Use these terms in the tags section as these are used for search purposes. Without effective tags, your blog isn’t working for you because it can’t be found in search engine results.

• When creating an online press release or social media release: Optimizing your online press release is essential if you want to get found online. You want to make sure you are placing your keywords throughout your press release, and at least 2 – 3 of these keywords should be present in the first paragraph or title of the release.

• When optimizing web copy or refining your meta data: Stay up to date with Google search changes. Keep your web copy keywords fresh and related to your company and brand message. Many clients come to me because their marketing message isn’t clear and because they aren’t being found online. Once I look at their web copy, meta data, and other online marketing materials, it’s apparent why they aren’t being found. Their keywords are all wrong.

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In an interview with WebProNews, Eli Goodman, the Search Evangelist for comScore, discussed the anticipated search trends for the 2010. Some highlights of the discussion include:

* Advertisers are going to begin spending more money in online advertising and less money in offline advertising.”There is simply too much money being spent offline on branding and too little of that being spent online,” says Goodman.

* More in-text search advertising will be implemented in 2010 and the years to come. This means that when users scroll over relevant terms in the advertisement, a search results page could pop up or an article.

* Goodman expects to see a rise in social search. Marketers as well as everyday Internet users are going to begin searching social media platforms in addition to searching on traditional search engines such as Google.

Watch the video below to view the entire interview . . .

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Don’t underestimate the power of website images in your search engine optimization efforts. In the above video, WebProNews interviews R.J. Pittman of Google about the importance of quality images and how to optimize them effectively on your website.

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