According to Pingdom and as reported by TechCrunch, about 48% of the top 100 blogs online use WordPress! In 2009 there are just about 27 of the top 100 blogs that use WordPress. And this figure almost doubled in three years time.
2009 statistics
2012 statistics
The current statistics is also a good gauge as to how many percentage of internet blogs use WordPress. According to Technorati, it “…found that 51% of blogs in the world use WordPress”. And that’s not surprising. Because if you search the term WordPress in Google Trends, you’ll find out that it is still trending upward on the same momentum as in the previous years. And if you type Android, you’ll find out that there’s a steep climb for this technology. But this is another story. We hope to bridge the gap between the two so stay tuned with our tutorials.
We’ve written articles on the past on why it is important to have a mobile or smartphone strategy for your website. If you use WordPress but do not possess programming skills, this can be quite difficult to do.
Here’s one WordPress plugin that just might do it for you. Just read our interview with them.
1. What motivated you to develop your plugin?
Today, publishers need to have mobile apps in order to reach a broader audience, and also show their users that they are progressive in our ever changing industry. Developing a custom application can be out of reach for a lot of publishers and bloggers, as the cost associated with app development is typically very high. JoeMobi was created to bring professional looking apps to publishers for a fraction of the cost.
2. Describe your plugin and explain to our readers how it will benefit their website?
The JoeMobi plugin and app creator allow bloggers and publishers the ability to create their own, professional looking native applications without the cost of custom app development or having to know how to program. Anyone who can run a WordPress website has all the technical knowledge necessary to create an app using JoeMobi.
Audiences are mobile, and if publishers want to reach them they also need to be mobile. JoeMobi allows publishers to be right where their users are, anywhere they are. Publishers can reach a broader audience by being available in all the app stores, and gain devoted fans from readers who prefer to be mobile.
Having a native mobile app, rather than just a web app, allows you to take advantage of features like push notifications. For publishers with real-time updates, this can help keep readers apprised of the latest content.
3. What differentiates your plugin from others in the same category
Many other plugins in the WordPress-to-app category just create web apps, or just iPhone apps. JoeMobi is the only app builder to create native BlackBerry apps, and BlackBerry is still the top selling smartphone in the UK and other parts of the world. Our goal is to provide site owners with a full suite of apps, on every major platform their readers are using. JoeMobi will be the one-stop-shop for creating a mobile app for your website.
4. What are your future plans with this plugin?
We’re launching the iPhone/iPad version very soon!
At the same time, we’ll be launching a live preview so users can see how their apps will turn out as they’re building it.
Future plans for the plugin include better support for custom posts, static pages, and customizing the menu, as well as supporting other 3rd party commenting systems.
Keep an eye on the JoeMobi blog for other exciting feature announcements!
5. How do you monetize this plugin?
The JoeMobi plugin is completely free. However, the use of the associated JoeMobi app creation service has a monthly or annual subscription fee. The fees help cover the costs to run our servers (that handle push notifications), provide support, and develop new features.
6. What are the different advertising / marketing methods for your plugin?
We are mainly marketing JoeMobi through social media and PR. We’ve had a number of prominent blogs in niches that our target audiences read feature articles about JoeMobi, and this has really helped drive interest in the plugin.
7. What advice would you give our readers if they want to develop their own plugin?
Developing a plugin requires a commitment to maintaining and updating it, and supporting the end user. Often the end user’s recommendation is the greatest marketing tool you have, so being available to help with questions is imperative. Support and maintenance will be an on-going, daily task for the lifetime of your plugin, and you should be sure you can make time for that.
Fortunately, JoeMobi has a team behind it who all contribute to support, updates, and maintenance of both the plugin and app creator service.
8. Name some of the premium websites that uses your plugin.
We have over 800 publishers using JoeMobi. Some of the websites who’ve created apps with our plugin include:
BlackBerry Cool
AndroidOS.in
RealAgriculture.com
Berryfication
 |
Developer: SpeakFeel Corporation Website: http://www.joemobi.com/ JoeMobi plugin and has now been downloaded more than 3,900 times and enjoys a near five star rating in wordpress.org. |
According to TechCrunch article, there are more users of Android phone compared to Apple’s iPhone. And the momentum is in Android’s favour.
Android app development has not rivalled that of Apple’s iPhone yet and that’s why there are tremendous opportunities here if one is interested. But the figures about Android are just to hard to ignore. With 850K activation per month, the potential for gaining a slice of visitors from Android users is just staggering. And this is where our tutorials will be coming from – that of visitor acquisition and retention for your website.
So how does one start with Android development?
Update: If you want the quick and easy way be sure to read how you can have an Android environment online without ever installing anything on your computer. Then from here, you can read our article about your first android application. This article is based on a previous article using the Eclipse editor but you should be able to follow through by copying and pasting the codes on the relevant files.
If you own a Windows or a Linux machine, the requirements are very similar.
1. Install Jave SDK
2. Install Android SDK
3. Install Eclipse
4. Install ADT plugin for Eclipse
5. Create AVD (Android Virtual Device)
Once you have done these, you’ll be ready for some fun with Android development. In our case, our development environment is Ubuntu – which is Linux. And here are some helpful links to help you get started with Android development:
This link should be enough to get everything going. However, if you do get stuck, then here are the other links that may be of help:
* Installing Java in Ubuntu
* Android SDK
* Eclipse
* ADT Plugin
Next Tutorial: How To Create An AVD For Android
Welcome to our new section of tutorials – mobile.htmlpress.net. This section will contain tutorials on mobile app development with the focus on developing apps that will complement your WordPress website. More importantly, this section will contain tutorials on how develop web apps using WordPress, JQuery and CSS because this is where we think the future of mobile app development will be. Native mobile app development also has a place that’s why we will be providing tutorials on native mobile app development and mobile web development.
Why these kind of tutorials?
The mission of this website is to provide tutorials where you can master creating an online presence targetting internet users. This means that just providing a tutorial on how to develop websites does not fulfill our mission. There are millions of websites out there and most of them are lost in obscurity. And this is why we have tutorials on SEO – seo.htmlpress.net – to help your website ascend search engine rankings. We also have a section on analyzing successful websites – dna.htmlpress.net – so that you can learn the methods used and hopefully apply it to your website.
Since the use of mobile phone is becoming ubiquitous world wide, then having a mobile phone strategy ensures that you are ahead of the pack when it comes to developing your site. And this section here is part of our mobile phone strategy too. The opportunity is now in the mobile arena. Ignoring this will be a too late if you start later.
Because Android is fast becoming the number one used operating system for smart phones, our tutorials here will focus on this for mobile app development. And for mobile web development, it will still be WordPress with jQuery. Click here to read an articles that helps differentiates a mobile app versus mobile web.
In the early days of the internet, directories and search engines were the main sources of getting traffic to your website. But things have changed as the internet evolved. YouTube, Digg and similar websites giving out free information became an alternative to search engines. This became the second generation of traffic sources. Then came the third generation which is we now know as social media sites i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and most recently Google+ and Pinterest.
So how do you keep in touch with what’s the newest trend for traffic sources? Here’s a few suggestions:
1 – Follow online marketers
Their pay check depends on it. The more traffic they get cheaply the better it is for their pay check. Not all online marketers would divulge their traffic secrets though. They usually divulge it only when their income starts to die down. Those who do while making money often have some strings attached to it i.e. getting you to sign up on their email subscription list, sell a products, etc. But economics is a bit of give and take.
Internet marketers like John Chow would give their trade secrets for free and often make their living off through affiliate links. Most of his own products are free and the information in them are often valuable.
2 – Follow Venture Capitalists
The tech companies that they invest in depends on traffic so the assumption is that they too are looking for new sources of traffic. Tech Crunch is a good resource to read about various start ups and also what the other new sources of traffic are. Although their blogs does not concentrate on traffic generation, you’ll be picking up some ideas about how the companies they invest in generate their traffic.
Blogs like Mark Suster’s are extremely valuable when it comes to this topic plus growing your online business too. He was the founder of Salesforce.com and thus have a wealth of experience in this.
3 – Follow tech blogs like this one
We are here to post articles like these to help you with your website. Our mission is to provide you the education to produce world class website from its inception and beyond. And when we say beyond, we mean giving you tutorials on how to grow your website i.e. getting traffic and other internet marketing strategies.
Did you know there’s a new generation of traffic source? You’re probably owning one right now.
Here’s the new generation of traffic sources that you can take advantage of for your own website:
If your website still does not have a mobile strategy, then you are falling behind the pack. And once you begin to entertain of having a mobile strategy for your website, you are bound to answer the question on whether to go mobile app or mobile web.
What’s the difference?
This infographic shows you what their differences are:
To summarize, mobile webs have the advantage when it comes to maintenance and cost. Mobile apps on the other hand have the upper hand when it comes to performance and user experience. A good general rule, if we take budget out of the equation, is that if your online app does not require a lot functional sophistication, web app built with HTML5, jQuery and CSS would be the most sensible way to go. That’s because these technologies will continue to grow and evolve – and companies are noticing it.
If your website is not targetting wireless devices i.e. smart phone and tablets, then it will lag behind the pack. With a lot of websites competing for online attention, the only way to ensure survival is to stay ahead of the pack before the next revolution becomes mainstream. This especially important if you are monetizing your site.
Today about 96% of small businesses use wireless devices in their operations. And the world is catching up. Which means that although this infographic is true for the USA, it won’t be long before the whole world follows.
One way to stay ahead of this trend is to create a mobile app for your website – especially if it has regular updates in its information, service or product.
Creating a subdomain is another way to organize your website. Subdomains are folders in your website that can be accessed with a special URL. This can help your visitors to navigate to that section of your website much quicker especially if your website has too many subsections.
Subdomains are also known as third level domains. Here’s an example: seo.htmlpress.net where:
.net = first level domain
htmlpress = second level domain
seo = third level domain.
This provides an easy way for user to access the SEO section of this website. In this way, regular visitors who would like to read SEO articles would just need to type this URL as opposed to using the search engine of the website, or looking for links that are related to SEO.
This subdomain tutorial shows you how to create a subdomain. For this tutorial we have used JustHost as the webhosting provider. This sub domain tutorial assume you already have web hosting using cpanel and a website.
1 – Login to your web hosting cpanel.
2 – Click the Subdomains icon to start creating a sub domain.
3 – On the Add Domains screen, enter the sub domain name (which in this example is mobile) and then press the Create button.
4 – Once successful, you should see a message similar to the screen shot below that your sub domain has been created without any issues.
5 – In this example, if you open a new instance of your browser and type: mobile.htmlpress.net, the following screen appeared.
From here, you can choose to redirect your sub domain to a folder on your site or have a new installation of wordpress.
Major changes are coming in Google’s search engine algorithm – again! Nothing new here. Google makes hundreds of algorithm tweaks per year when it comes to its search engine. But these changes will have potential to have the same ramifications and consequences as the Panda effect.
Semantic Search
According to the Wall Street Journal, Google will employ “semantic search” to its new algorithm. This means that the search engine will try to understand the actual meaning of the words and its various associations. The possible ramifications of this is that Google will be able to provide some of the answers besides relevant links leading to other websites.
As of now, Google is relying on third party websites when a user types in a search word or phrase. So if someone types: “10 largest lakes in California”, Google is hoping that there is a website out there whose content would contain a similar phrase as the search term.
The future of search will be more sophisticated than the current keyword-context based approach. When you search for Lake Tahoe, for example, you get some links to other websites and a Google Map about the lake. Google wants to give more information than this by perhaps giving its salt content, average temperature, etc.
How?
According to Mashable, in its interview with Amit Singhal (Google Fellow and SVP), is that Google is building a knowledge graph. This knowledge graph contains million of entities together with its attributes. Lake Tahoe is an example of an entity. It’s temperature is an example of an attribute. It’s size ranking relative to other lakes in California could be built in as an attribute or this entity can have a parent entity named California Lakes and the latter can then possess child entities of that ranks the lakes in California according to area. In doing so a relationship can be established between entities. Thus, if someone does search for “10 largest lake in California”, then Google can give the answer to the user and also show other third-party links that may contain this type of information.
Over optimization
According to an article in Cnet.com, Google plans to penalize websites that over-use SEO.
The major techniques referred to are in creating backlinks and keywords in the page’s content. This is long overdue as previous updates in the past have already touched on focusing more on natural organic growth. The graph below (in it’s presumptions) sketches roughly how a natural organic growth looks like:
The blue line shows that as the quantity and quality of a website’s content increase, then there’s a strong likelihood that its backlinks will increase naturally. The red line shows how an unnatural growth in backlinks look like relative to the quantity and quality of a website’s pages.
Our assumption is that there will be that ratio that Google will look out for. As an extreme example, a single page website with 10,000 links can be premably tagged as overly SEO’d.
There is also that keyword density that you must consider when posting articles on your web page. Too much use of it may tag your page as overly SEO’d.
How To Prepare For These Updates
These two updates alone can cause a lot of disruption to your traffic if you do not prepare for it. As an assumption, the probability of mixing these two updates to rank websites is always there. If your website is about lakes in California and it contains only three articles about your experiences of the different lakes in California, then chances are your website might not rank highly for the term “10 largest lakes in California” compare to another website that gives all the lakes in California and facts about them.
If the assumptions are correct, the best way to prepare is to go white hat SEO all the way. And there is nothing new in all these things if your SEO mantra is: content is king! Below are just some of the suggestions for preparing for these major Google updates:
1 – Think entity and attribute in a comprehensive way.
For this website, for example, we think about the other attributes that a website about building & maintaining a website possess i.e. tools used to create websites (HTML, CSS, WordPress, etc.), hosting, SEO, etc. And then we provide comprehensive lessons on each one of them. Again, content is king!
2 – Eliminate low quality posts.
You can do this with the Robots Meta plugin by making you posts no-index and no-follow. And after sometime, you can either do a re-direct of just delete those post.
3 – Eliminate low quality links.
If you have created some quick articles with links to your site, add more quality contents to it. Google looks into the the quality of the page that contains backlinks to your site. Create quality links to this article page… this gives the impression to search engines that your article submission has some substance.
4 – Look for other sources of traffic.
Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good strategy when it comes to internet marketing. It’s good to have a mix of other source of traffic. Social media can be a great alternative to where you can get your traffic and have some return visitors too.
5 – Review your HTML tags.
Malformed tags gives the impression to search engines that there is something wrong with your web page and therefore results into a poor user experience. Google does not like that. It like to refer website where they know that users will have a terrific user experience because this give a good impression on Google too. If this means going back to basic, then be sure to check our tutorials.
If you are growing your website and looking for new sources of traffic and you haven’t heard of Pinterest.com, then you could be falling quite behind your competitors. Big brands i.e. Whole Foods, Better Homes and Gardens, etc., have already jumped on the Pinterest wagon to get new sources of referrals.
Here’s why you should consider Pinterest as part of your website’s online marketing strategy:
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