Sept 07 - Ikarus is now finally available in it’s WHITE version!!!! 

MORE OF MY WORDPRESS THEMES >>>

***News: July 21 - Comment section updated and fixed. Tested on WP 2.6 successfully. Please download updated plugins for WP 2.6.

Ikarus is my dream of a Wordpress Theme come to life. I’ve spent 3 months developing it and it’s absolutely perfect, with over 2,000+ user selectable variations and options all managed from the admin area. Four (4) homepage layouts (magazine, list, blog and magazine lis), over 10 colors that you can mix and match, left or right layout and tons more.

It’s the most complex programmed theme that will most likely ever be created. It’s my proudest piece of work and I’m glad to give it away free of charge. I’ve included some links in the footer that points back to my personal websites. If you’d like them removed please paypal $30 to webdesign@5shades.com.

I’ve created an exlusive demo page just for Ikarus so that you can witness the full potential of it’s power and flexibility. I’ve also made it terribly easy to customize and fit your needs.

Learn more about this theme from the options in the main menu on the demo page.

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My brand new site was actually indexed by Google within the first 3 weeks of being online. If you know anything about Google then you will realize that this is certainly not the norm. The only explanation I can give is it happened because I am using a blog platform. Also, from checking the stats provided by my web host, I can see that Google as well as all the main search engines are spidering my site at least every 3 days for new content.

There’s strong evidence that Wordpress blogs get better search rankings than other sites. We will explore that in more detail later, but for now just know that there are definitely search engine advantages to using Wordpress.

Why Wordpress instead of Blogger?

Have you ever used Blogger? I am referring to www.blogger.com. Blogger.com and LiveJournal.com are some of the best-known blogging websites on the internet. Unfortunately there is one major drawback, you don’t own the website. At any time Blogger can delete your username and profile resulting in the loss of all your work and effort. This is the perfect example of how no business built on Blogger or LiveJournal.com is actually yours. There is no option to have either of these hosted on your own server. Unfortunately, both Blogger.com and LiveJournal.com reserve the right to kick you off.

Only a website put together with your own pages affords you a viable business that you own. I for one would never put my business and hours and hours of hard work into a website that I do not own and cannot control.

Perhaps you may want to work towards branding your domain name. Maybe you have registered your own name for your blog. Again, these would be very difficult, if not impossible opportunities, unless you are running your blog from your own server or web host.

Features and Benefits of Wordpress

Some of the features and benefits we have touched on briefly above.

To me, the biggest feature and benefits are ease of use, readily available prewritten scripts and tools, and the fact that the search engines love it. However, there are many others.

Another positive factor in the Wordpress utility is that you do not need to know any programming like for instance ‘PHP’. With many blogging systems you often need to know how to program. With Blogger, you could and likely would spend hours embedding Google AdSense ads in the pages.

Wordpress also has the potential to be the perfect tool for your business to generate an average level of traffic to a central website.

Here is some of the most common advantages:

· You don’t have to know PHP.

· You don’t need to use the Wordpress hosting service. Although this is offered, it is not necessary.

· Wordpress has aggregator support for standard RSS configurations. This has already been done with Atom.

· Wordpress automatically connects and configures with MySQL databases with virtually no effort.

· Being built to standards increases longevity and future internet adoption

· Wordpress automatically imports images.

· The Wordpress template has built-in links added in the template.

· Wordpress allows for the customization of meta tags.

· Wordpress allows the administrator to design headlines.

· Wordpress allows for categories.

· Wordpress allows for customization of the sidebar.

· Wordpress allows for customized RSS Feeds.

· Wordpress allows archiving for posts.

· Wordpress allows for contacts in the template.

· Wordpress allows for an “about” page.

· Wordpress allows for the styling lists and is built with CSS.

Those are the most common used features but certainly not all. Again, because of the wide range of plugins and widgets, WordPress is basically unlimited in its ability to perform.

Joseph Murray is a professional online retailer and author working full time since April 2006 in Online Marketing. The current project is 7 Dollar Books. As the name implies all books are $7. Built on the Wordpress platform, 7 Dollar Books is an idea source for authors looking for new markets to sell their books. This WordPress article is an excerpt from his latest book, WordPress Money Machine.

Creating a WordPress blog is extremely simple, upload it and follow the directions. But making sure people are reading what you write is a lot harder.

One of the biggest obstacles most WordPress users have is creating a search engine friendly site. For most blog owners the majority of their visitors find their blog through a search engine and come across one of their many posts.

If “content is king”, then Search Engine Optimization is the queen.

The easiest and one of the best thing you can do to optimize your site is make sure you have ‘clean’ urls. In other words, you want your urls and permalinks to include keywords, and be easy to remember.

On a WordPress blog you can change your permalinks by signing into your admin panel. Then click the settings tab and the permalinks subcategory. From here, you can choose how to setup your permalinks.

My suggestion is to use the “custom structure” field and fill in “/%category%/%postname%/”.

You can also use one of the ready made structures that WordPress has created there.

If you’re using WordPress 2.5 you can easily change the permalink to test out different structures, since it automatically adds .htaccess redirection.

None the less if you’re having issues with 404 errors, I highly suggest, downloading the ‘redirection’ plugin that can be found on the WordPress site. It allows you to create custom redirects and logs all 404 errors.

Remember, a clean permalink structure not only makes your urls easy to read, but also make your pages rank higher in search engines.

1. What Is The Wordpress AdSense System All About?

I must say that the first time I read through this system, I was a little overwhelmed with all the new jargons I was learning, especially at the setup process of Wordpress blogs. I was clearly learning many new things with this guide, like how to optimize your blogs with the right titles, ad placements, how to pull in traffic etc, and it required some time to digest. After seeing the big picture, I was ready to start making my new blogs and hoping to see my AdSense dollars quickly.

2. What Are The Benefits of Using Blogs to Make Money from AdSense?

Wordpress contains many powerful plug-ins that help you in many ways, and they are all free. For example, there are tools to help you update your blogs faster, and plug-ins to help you optimize your site traffic. I really regret not finding out about all these powerful tools earlier. They can really make any marketer’s life much easier.

Wordpress is more than just a blogging software.

In the past when blogging first evolved, marketers did not give it much thought…until they discovered the power of syndication through RSS feeds.

With Rss feeds, they can now reach out to a target markets they normally would not have been able to.

Wordpress has an in-built syndication function, unlike Blogger.com where it still needs some configuration.

In addition, Wordpress has some powerful features that make it a marketer’s dream tool:

Many times new bloggers waste their time on searching templates for their personal blogs. Selecting a template for a blog is not a simple task to do but if we consider few points then we can certainly save our precious time and use it for some other important work like content creation.

Check these few points which we always neglect and waste our time on searching templates…

• Content is King!

As I always say content is king and you should always treat content as a king. To attract visitors, content plays an important role but if your template is suitable to your content then it will be a nice combination.

• Compatible with Latest WordPress version

If you are using WordPress for blogging then you must verify whether it is compatible with latest released version of WordPress.

• Widget Ready Templates

Nowadays almost all templates come with cool widgets. Widgets are important to enhance the quality of your blog. So accordingly select the template.

• Niche of your blog

Niche is as important as other things. Suppose you are blogging on recipes of drinks and if you put template of fast-food or so then it will look awful, so be careful and choosy while selecting templates!

• Customization

Select a template which allows more customization. If you are searching for free templates then first of all look at the template and find out places on that template where you can modify it with your skills.

• Attractive Templates

Attractiveness of template does matter; template should not be too old. It should be pleasant to watch and people should like it. Don’t choose too flashy or multicolored templates because blogs with such templates will always keep visitors away from your blog and even if they visit for first time,they won’t come back.

I used all these points while selecting template for my blog and looking at response from visitors,it’s working for me. I hope you will find a perfect template for your blog with the help of above tips. If you are a BlogSpot user then you can check some free blogger template sites here.

So, you must think of a good title, but use your keywords in it and if you can, use one of them in the first four words and if at all possible, make one of them the last word.

Make your titles interesting for your readers. Remember, if the title doesn’t grab attention, your reader won’t stay to read what you have to say. AND - that’s a reader who probably won’t be back. Your post and page titles are your one opportunity to make a good first impression. Don’t waste that opportunity.

Capitalize every word of your title except for the small conjunctions. Research has discovered that longer titles are better than short titles, but they still have to grab the reader’s attention. Make them convey the essence of what you have to say in an interesting, attention getting manner. Questions are good for titles - they make your reader want to know the answer if it’s a question your reader has.

Number 1, you can set up Wordpress to automatically ping all the RSS and blog feed directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get a lot of traffic right away. On top of that, you’ll be quickly developing backlinks to your blog almost automatically.

Think about how long it can take you to build a regular site, get the search engines to index it, get backlinks to improve your listings, and then start getting traffic. A blog like Wordpress can do all that “grunge” work for you automatically.

Number 2, Wordpress allows the use of Categories. Categories are a very powerful way to improve the structure of your site both for human visitors and for the search engines.

Let’s say the topic of your site is Widgets. You could create a Category for black widgets, one for orange widgets, and one for green widgets.

Now when you add posts to your blog, you can choose which of your categories your post belongs to. Now your blog will archive your past posts not only by their month and date, as Blogger does. But also by Category.

So if you have a visitor who is especially interested in green widgets, they can easily find all your posts on green widgets. They don’t have to go through your entire archives to find them. With a blog that has been around for awhile and has hundreds of posts, that would be pretty discouraging. Using Categories makes it very easy.

Categories are also very search engine friendly. When you use Categories in your blog, there is a link on every one of your pages to your categories. Think about this: would you rather be #1 in the search engines for March 2003, or for green widgets, one of the main keywords of your site?