March 2015 - Bravokeyl

Choosing the right theme for your site

One of the most important decisions you would ever have to make for your WordPress website is the choice of a suitable theme. The theme you choose would determine the overall outlook of your website, and would also have a great role to play in determining visitor engagement on your website. Therefore, it is extremely important to choose a good theme for your WordPress website.

But for the sake of those who do not already know, let’s define what a WordPress theme is and what it’s supposed to do.

What is a WordPress Theme?

Think of WordPress theme as an architectural design.

When you want to build your home, you would have to decide on a number of aesthetic features like how you would want it to look, the colors, designs and functionality. That’s exactly what your WordPress theme does; it helps you choose the overall design of your website and how you want it to appear to your visitors. It would also help you choose other things like:

Page Layouts of your Website.
Location of Widgets.
Font Styling.
Colors of your Website.
How your blog posts would appear as well as other unique features.

There are paid and Unpaid WordPress Press themes that you can choose from. You can also design your own WordPress theme if that’s what you would prefer. Even though there are a lot of free WordPress themes, Premium (Paid) themes are more reliable as they come with better client support and documentation.

Features of a Good WordPress Theme

To choose a good WordPress theme, it is important to know what a good WordPress Theme should look like:

Detailed Documentation

To install and use your WordPress Theme perfectly, you would need detailed explanations and step by step tutorials. This is why the first thing you should be looking out for when you want to select a WordPress theme is the documentation. The theme must have a detailed tutorial that teaches you how to install, modify and customize the theme to suit your own unique needs.

SEO-Friendly

You also need a WordPress theme that makes it very easy for search engines to crawl your website. The more SEO-friendly your website is, the more visitors it would attract and the more revenue you would be able to generate.

Mobile Responsive

Hey! It’s 2015; mobile responsive websites are a must have now because if your website is not mobile friendly, you would be missing out on a number of visitors your website.

Theme Customizer

It’s also better to go for a theme that allows you to customize as much as possible, and manipulate some of the key elements like the fonts, backgrounds and logos.

Social Sharing Options

Social sharing is extremely important in the World Wide Web today as it helps your content to have a wider reach and audience. Therefore, choosing a WordPress website that allows for social sharing is not just an option but a necessity.

Automatic Upgrades

WordPress theme publishers are always introducing new versions and upgrades all the time and it might be really stressful if you have you have to manually update your WordPress themes all the time, hence the need to opt for a WordPress theme that allows for automatic updates.

Retina Display Compatible

Most Computer gadgets that are being released in recent times come with Retina and HD displays. If you choose a theme that is not compatible with these features, the images and visuals on your website would have poor quality and would not be sharp ad crisp when accessed using a gadget with the HD or Retina display.

Useful Add-ons

Good WordPress themes would also have other useful add-ons that you would need to enhance your experience and those of your website’s visitors.

Lightweight

You should avoid complex and heavy WordPress themes and settle for themes that are easy to use and understand and that would not slow your website down.

Solid Client Support

You don’t want to wait for months to have your support ticket attended to. You need to be sure that if you ever run into any challenges with your WordPress theme, you would be promptly attended to and have the problem fixed very fast.

Excellent Reviews

Lastly, you want a theme that is already tested and trusted, with lots of genuine, positive feedback.

How to Choose a WordPress Theme

There are a number of factors to consider when you want to choose the most suitable WordPress Theme for you. Some of them include:

Pricing: Like I mentioned earlier, there are free and paid WordPress Themes and the truth is that with WordPress Themes, price often indicates good quality. Although there are some Paid WordPress Themes that have free versions, the functionalities are usually limited ad you would most likely be required to upgrade to a paid version to enjoy some of its features.

As for free WordPress Themes, a good number of them are poorly coded but you would find a lot of free WordPress themes that are great to choose from.

If you need to create a unique website, don’t go for free WordPress Themes as there are usually Thousands of Websites using the same Plugin but if you just need to create a simple blog or website, you can go for free WordPress Themes.

Weight: This is another extremely important factor to consider because some WordPress Themes have too many unnecessary features and bloat codes in them, which would only end up slowing down your website and increasing the load time.
Design: Your Website theme is supposed to make your website look more beautiful and appealing to users. Therefore, you should also consider the design output when choosing your WordPress Theme.
Mobile Responsiveness: This is not an option because doing otherwise would cost you a lot of potential visitors. Therefore, when searching for the perfect WordPress Theme to use, make sure it says ‘Mobile Responsive’
SEO Ready: You should also search for the term ‘SEO Ready’ or ‘SEO Optimized’ in order to be sure you are choosing an SEO friendly WordPress Theme.
Customization: Choose a WordPress Plugin that allows you to Customize easily from your WordPress Dashboard.
Security: The security of your website is very important, in order to avoid compromise of your website’s security, you should go for a WordPress Theme with strong security features.

With all of these in mind, you would be able to select the best WordPress Themes without much bloat codes.

Best WordPress SEO plugins Yoast vs All in one SEO

The WordPress platform is the single most effective way of sharing content across the internet. With blogging and article writing being the most popular way to communicate with your consumer, you can count on WordPress to help you generate organic traffic to your site even with little to no experience. In this article we will outline some most used SEO plugins that will help enhance your site’s search.

If you’re searching for a way to drive traffic to your site, it is important to understand SEO and how to optimize your WordPress blog. There are hundreds of SEO plug ins to download right from within the dashboard that will help augment your website for maximum performance across all search engines.

Even though, WordPress out of the box offers basic SEO functionality, SEO plug ins are a great tool to help boost your rankings and conversion rates all as a result of each plug ins unique features and options.

Most SEO plug ins focus on identifying important keywords and sentence structures that will help effect the search engines algorithms to better match up your article with other relevant content across the internet.

By using the right SEO plug ins you can extend the functionality of your WordPress Site and its SEO to get a better return on your reader base.

When conducting SEO it is important to know some of these basic tips. When creating an article on WordPress remember that to get the best out of your WordPress site, you’re going to want to pay attention to the keywords you implement into your post.

You’re going to want to have a focus keyword that will appear at least 2-3 times throughout your article that relates back to your articles title. Also, it is important to have a description for your article that focuses on your keywords but is short and precise. To long of a description or title will effect the way your article is indexed and can give your article poor visibility.

Two of the most popular plug ins within the WordPress panel are All in One SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast. With millions of downloads between each plugin, it would be safe to say that these SEO plugins make a great addition to your WordPress experience.

All In One SEO pack plugin works best to boost your websites SERP. It has a 4.4 out of 5 stars with a positive rating and review section outlining the benefits of this effective SEO program. Its great for beginner and advanced users and starts working right out of the box after install. Here is a list of some the features you can expect from All In One SEO Pack:

All In One SEO Pack Features

All In One SEO pack offers XML sitemap support that submits your sites content to Google and Bing search engines helping improve your SEO
The only plug in that offers an extensive SEO integration specifically for WordPress sites that run ecommerce
Generates meta tags automatically
Identifies and highlights duplicate content within the body of your post
Supports Google Analytics and metrics

If you’re looking for a SEO plugin that helps boost your posts by magnifying your content then SEO by Yoast is the way to go. The Yoast plugin helps you to write better content with its built in content analysis functions.

It can easily pin point and identify errors within your post, identify focus keywords and recommend configuring better sentences for better reader visibility. With over 1 million downloads and a 4.5 out of 5 stars, the SEO by Yoast plugin is the best way to attract new readers.
SEO by Yoast Features

It has better seo optimized Social Integration options
Automatically generates XML sitemaps
Built in content analysis function
Provides Snippet Preview to see what your title would look like in Google
Robots.txt and .htaccess are editable within the plugin
Permalink clean up
Available in 26 languages

Yoast also offers several extensions which are worthy to have if you are an advanced WP user.

When using these SEO plugins you will be able to soon see a significant difference in your sites traffic and word press performance. In order to take advantage of all the features of these SEO plugins, it is important to remember to follow each requirement of the plug ins built in fields. These SEO plugins will help you to not only have a better optimized site but it will also help you become a better blogger as well.

PC: All in SEO Pack plugin page

WordPress SEO By Yoast Vulnerability Puts Websites At High Risk

A perilous vulnerability has been found in the very popular plugin of the WordPress content management platform (CMS) putting about tens of Millions of websites at very high risks of hacking by the attackers.

The vulnerability is in almost all versions of a WordPress plugin which is called ‘WordPress SEO by Yoast’ As per Yoast Website, this plugin has more than fourteen million downloads which makes it one of the most famous plugins of WordPress to optimize websites for various search engines (Search engine optimization or SEO).

The person who discovered this vulnerability in WordPress SEO by Yoast is the developer of ‘WPScan’ (WordPress vulnerability scanner).

According to a published advisory the versions of WordPress SEO by Yoast before 1.7.3.3 are vulnerable to a web application flaw and this is known as ‘Blind SQL Injection’.

The SQLi (SQL injections) are known to be critical vulnerabilities they can lead to database breach and also to leakage of information that is confidential. Usually, in these attacks, a SQL query that is malformed is inserted into an application through client-side input.

How Does The Yoast Vulnerability Work?

However, in this case, the outside hacker cannot trigger the vulnerability itself because the flaw in actuality is located in a file that needs authorization for access and can be accessed only by Admin, Author or Editor and privileged users of WordPress. The file is ‘admin/class-bulk-editor-list-table.php‘

Thus, a trigger from authorized users is required for successful exploitation of this vulnerability. The attacker can make use of social engineering to trap the authorized users and make them click on a special URL that is payload exploitable.

As explained by Ryan to Graham Cluely (security blogger), if an authorized user of WordPress falls into the trap, the exploit will be allowed to carry execution of arbitrary SQL queries on the WordPress website of the victim.

A proof-of-concept payload was also released by Ryan for Blind SQLi vulnerability in the WordPress SEO by Yoast. This is as below:

http://victim-wordpress-website.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_bulk-editor&
type=title&orderby=post_date%2c(select%20*%20from%20(select(sleep(10)))a)&
order=asc

Patch for the Yoast SQL injection Vulnerability
If reports are to be believed, in the latest version 1.7.4 of WordPress SEO by Yoast, the vulnerability has been patched. The developers of WordPress plugin have done this and this is also mentioned in the changed log. It reads that latest version 1.7.4 has fixed “possible CSRF and blind SQL injection vulnerabilities in bulk editor.”

Normally, it is believed that your website is not seriously complete, if you don’t have the WordPress SEO by Yoast installed. The website owners aim at increasing the traffic of their website using this plugin and this vulnerability is really serious for them.

Thus, the administrators of WordPress that do not have an auto-update feature are highly recommended to upgrade their plugin (WordPress SEO by Yoast) manually as soon as possible. They should visit the WordPress plugin repository to manually download the latest version. If you have the WordPress version 3.7 or above, it is wise to enable the fully automated update of your plugins and themes. You can do this from the tab – Manage – Plugin and Themes – Auto Updates.