3 Ways To Stand Out From The Crowd

Some tips to freshen up your WordPress site and let it stand out from the crowd.

1- PERFECT YOUR CONTENT

A typical blog post takes two and a half hours to create. in addition to creating content, bloggers must optimize for search engines, make time for social media, market their content, network, and engage with readers.

Here are some things you need to do before hitting publish.

Your Mission (Should You Choose to Write It)

It’s crucial that you figure out a few things first, like what your blog is all about and what you want to do with it. Having a kick-butt blog is a good goal, but let’s dig deeper.

Ever heard of a mission statement? It’s commonly used by businesses to identify values, goals, and purpose — typically in a few easy-to-remember sentences. And it’s critical to the success of your blog.

“I wish I would have found my mission sooner,” Jepsen says. “But I started it in a time when bloggers weren’t making money, and I didn’t know that was a trajectory I could take so I didn’t write it accordingly. If you’re looking to make money, you will write differently than someone who does it just for fun. Create a focused mission statement in order to know what your content should be and who your audience is.”

Let’s look at a few examples of mission statements.

• Amazon: “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”
• IKEA: “Our vision is to create a better everyday life for the many people. Our business idea supports this vision by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.”
• Nike: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world.”

Can you see how these concise statements guide how each business operates, shepherding big decisions to even the tiniest ones? It works the same way with your blog.

What is your call to action?

Don’t let your readers browse your About Me page and click away with an “Oh, that’s nice.” Encourage them to visit other pages of your blog by providing links to more content, whether that be additional blog posts or social media handles. After all, more clicks equal more traffic.

Perform keyword research

If you have some blogging experience under your belt already, you’ve probably come across the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Put simply, this refers to the process of making sure that your site and its contents are more likely to appear earlier in search results on sites like Google.

The first thing you need to do is to know which keywords you want to use to optimize your content. In other words, what search terms do you want each post to show up as a result for? You can determine this by performing keyword research, which helps you find phrases that are relevant to your content, and see how many times users search for them every month.

To do this, you can use a tool like Google Analytics to see what keywords your audience is looking for when accessing your site. Log in to your Analytics account and open up the Search Console, where you’ll see your queries.

You can then use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to search for related keywords.

Once you’ve done that, you can create posts that are organically centered around the keywords your users are interested in.

Optimize the Post for Your Keyword(s)

Once you have one or more keywords, you can start to create content that’s optimized for them. One smart way to do this is by using a dedicated WordPress plugin. There are several available solutions, such as Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack, both of which help you craft content based around a given keyword.

However, while it’s important to optimize your posts, be careful not to overdo it. Otherwise, you may accidentally hurt your SEO rankings by ‘over-optimization’. This means that if go too far in your attempts to make your content primed for search engines, they’ll actually penalize you for it.

Perfect Your Headline

Your headline is not just the first thing visitors will see when they open up your post. It might well be the first (and only) thing they see if they discover it in a search engine or find it shared on social media.

Write a Meta Description

A meta description is the snippet of text you see underneath a page’s title in search results. This is usually used to summarize the contents of the page.

Since a meta description can only be between about 100 to 300 characters, you don’t have much space to work with. You’ll therefore need to consider the key points of the post, and ask yourself exactly why somebody would want to read it. Then, engage your reader with that information right away. The benefit of reading your post should be clear to the reader from just the headline and description.

WordPress doesn’t enable you to add meta descriptions by default, but plenty of plugins include the option. For example, we’ve already mentioned Yoast SEO, which also lets you create meta descriptions for your posts when you edit them.

Include links to internal and external content

Links make your post more valuable to readers. It shows that you can support the ideas you’re sharing and provides resources so readers can explore the topic further. A blog that only links to itself can quickly come across as untrustworthy and insular.

2- REFINE YOUR SITE

To keep your site on the cutting edge of design, you need to understand what’s popular in the WordPress community. More importantly, you need to understand why some trends become, well, trendy.

Website Builders

To keep up with their competitors, WordPress is focusing more on this type of functionality. There are some popular WYSIWYG builders specifically created for WordPress that have been around for a while, such as Beaver Builder and Elementor. Now WordPress itself will be getting in on the act in 2018, with the full-scale release of the Gutenberg editor.

Gutenberg is a new text editor that is planned to replace the current TinyMCE-based editor within WordPress. Inspired by other WYSIWYG builders, Gutenberg features a drag-and-drop interface that enables you to freely customize different areas of a post or page. It’s not strictly a page builder — it won’t enable you to customize themes, for example — but it is influenced by the user-friendly, dynamic nature of builder interfaces.

This change will naturally have a huge impact on the WordPress experience, and the project has been controversial. Even so, it seems clear that page builders are the way of the future, and we’re likely to see them evolve and grow even more in the years to come.

Minimalism Evolved

Flat designs have been popular for a while now, and they don’t seem to be going anywhere. This type of minimalist design focuses on simplicity while using flat colors, clarity, and plenty of white space.

Not only does this put the focus on showcasing your content, it also ensures that your site will load fast and look good on all devices.

Designs have been evolving to incorporate gradients, shadows, and images to a larger degree. This creates a greater sense of depth on the page and can lead to some eye-catching designs.

High Saturation and Vibrant Colorshttps

The days of “You can have any color you like, so long as it’s black” are long gone. Today, bold colors and contrasting combinations are commonplace. People have very visceral reactions to color, so the choice of scheme can greatly affect how we perceive a brand or website. In fact, according to Buffer, 90 percent of our assessment when it comes to products is made based solely on color.

It stands to reason that using a striking combination of colors is a perfect way to make your site pop. WordPress designers have not been sleeping on this trend either. Many themes have a color-centric focus.

3- SECURE YOUR SITE

Although WordPress is a secure platform, you’re never truly safe from people with malicious intent. With WordPress’ star on the rise, it has become a target for hackers, so upping your security game is now more important than ever before. But given the vast array of available plugins, choosing the best ones to protect your site is a tough task.

Your website is often your first point of contact with customers, and an unsafe site could lead to a loss of brand reputation and income. Unfortunately, threats aren’t easy to predict because they’re always evolving based on new security developments. That said, there are generally three ways hackers target your WordPress site:

1. A single bot. An automated program that searches for and exploits known vulnerabilities.
2. A person. Simply put, this is a person sitting behind a keyboard manually attacking a website. It’s a slow yet thorough process, which is why this method is used to attack high-value sites.
3. Botnets. A group of machines running programs that are coordinated from a central location. Botnets can attack a vast number of sites simultaneously.

Many hackers attack websites just to show they can, but others have more malicious intentions. The ultimate goal is to gain control of your website. By doing so they can read, modify, and make changes to your files and database. There are a several reasons for doing so, but two key ones are:

1. To host illicit content. Hackers can use your site to host their own content, or redirect visitors to a site hosting illicit content.
2. To steal your website’s data. Everything from visitors’ email addresses to their credit card details can be of value to hackers.

What You Can Do to Keep Your WordPress Website Safe

Your first step is to regularly back up your WordPress site. While this won’t prevent an attack, it will help to get you back up and running quickly should the worst happen. While you can back up your site manually, there are a number of plugins (a couple are featured below) that can help make the job easier and more practical.

The next step is to ensure that WordPress ‘core’, along with all installed themes and plugins, are regularly updated. Outdated software can contain security vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit.

If you often deal with customer data, making sure their data is encrypted is key. While it used to be a costly endeavor, companies such as Let’s Encrypt now offer SSL certificates for free, and many hosts are jumping onboard.