What are those things we should have in the back of our minds when combing for WordPress themes to make money online with our blog? Are there specific yardsticks or are there theme considerations to look out for when choosing a theme for your blog? I did interview some successful bloggers and SEO consultants and here are the results of my findings:
The Result
What is a blog? A blog has a more personal touch or it expresses the opinion of the blogger whether popular or not. Usually a blogger is an expert in a chosen field. Blogs are dynamic Web sites because contents are posted regularly if not daily compared with static Web sites. For a blogger to make money online, content is the key. Nonetheless, the display of such contents are affected by the WordPress theme we choose.
All the experts I interviewed agreed on a way to allow people share information on social media forums. A must-have feature of every successful blog is the ability for readers to contribute or castigate a post and rate a written piece.
Social Media Buttons
Social media buttons are crucial features of blogging themes. All the successful themes I have come across have social media buttons. They don’t only make a blog lively but can also when done right, bring in truckloads of traffic. The most popular and important is the Facebook and Twitter buttons. It is important to know that Facebook currently has over 500 million users and Twitter around 200 million accounts. These are powerful means of modern communication and social living that you can’t ignore.
Niche specific features
A blog dedicated to “how-to” tips should have related article features immediately beneath every post or at the sides. This makes it easy for people to find all the pieces of information they need and stay longer on the blog.
Pagination
What is the importance of pagination? Experts believe that without pagination or a way to group posts by date, a Web site can not be classified as a blog. A post usually has a teaser and title for one to click and read more. Visitors could view more than 10 posts on one single page at a time. This is a superb way to show several pieces of information at the same time. Of course, the older articles are under higher pagination numbers.
Other SEO Considerations
Each page should have a unique title. There should be only one H1 tag on the blog and it should be the title of the blog on the main pahe, and the title of the post on the subpages. All images must have alt image tags. The coding must be W3C validated.
It is important to choose the right theme for your blog. A theme with clean and optimized HTML code and the right features would improve your chances of making money with your blog. Free themes are hardly designs to suit anyone’s needs, which is why you need a unique theme with all these features and many more. Bascially what it comes down to before choosing a WordPress theme for your blog is to investigate, view the source code and check every aspect of it before you decide to purchase it.
If you have comments and would like to add some key features a successful blog should have, please feel free to leave your comment below.
Article by Vishal
Vishal Gaikar is a professional blogger from Pune, India. If you like this post, you can follow him on Twitter.
