SEO and low value pages

Perhaps a little less all-encompassing, I also see opportunities regarding support for future WordPress desires. Right now there are certain theme developers who are noted for being focused and reliable on the ongoing support side—those such as Genesis Themes by StudioPress and WooCommerce Themes. I see opportunities here for more support systems to keep all from crashing, as well as opportunities that are more focused on mobile WP sites and their functionality. With the current and future growth of mobile web overtaking desktop, it only makes sense. And because content continues to be “king” for the search engines and social media practice, ways to facilitate promoting immediate and ubiquitous content should only be enhanced. For example, I have read of different approaches to make it easier to push text and images from email directly to WordPress, more cleanly than in past. And whatever new hot social channel is on the horizon? Expect that to soon have integrations with WordPress as well, particularly with mobile.
With the high value and desire for content and easier ways to push it into WordPress, there comes the need to best serve that within your own site to visitors. We’ve already discussed the challenges and needs for good IA and UI for your site and blog. Those challenges and needs will grow as content grows on your own site. We’ve all stumbled upon older sites that have grown over the years with endless pages and content, spun out of control like rooms in a house on one of those hoarding reality TV shows. Don’t let this happen to you! Reevaluate your own content and the user-friendly means for readers to get to it, which also means onsite search. Yes—the options and design for searching your own site or blog for content. Sounds simple enough, but do you want to have separate search fields for your regular website content versus your blog? What if you have a forum on your site; do you want different search field and results there as well? Identify what makes the most sense from the user’s perspective. It may not sound smart to have different search fields, but it might make the most sense to the reader. From websites to blogs to forums to an eCommerce site. These are the scenarios showing why user testing is a good idea, even if it’s with friends and industry peers instead of actual customers. It’s also a great idea to find a similar site you like and identify how they solved the problem.

We can also naturally also expect web-, blog-, and digital-UI-design trends to affect WordPress sites. There are design trends toward overall distillation: flat design; sidebar reduction or elimination; fewer sliders; and long, scrolling pages as opposed to numerous pages of less content (like a Tumblr layout). We can expect to see more WordPress themes in such styles. However, referring back to SEO principles, we must be careful here: With all that content concentrated on one page, page load times can suffer—and consequently, so can search rank. Also, top-ranked pages tend to be under 2,500 words. And what about duplicate content? Without certain common info (such as “Contact” or “About Us”) consistently visible in a sidebar or footer, one might feel the temptation to duplicate this content within the page—exposing it to search rank venerability. And don’t forget that more than one or two outbound links within page text can dilute your page rank.

But what are your challenges with WordPress? Chances are someone else has the same, and with the WordPress community growing and growing, there’s a lot of potential as more and more such specific challenges develop. Therefore, become a theme or plug-in developer yourself! Many WordPress designers/developers out there use this approach to promote their own business of generating WordPress sites and blogs for their own client base! Or write a book like this one (just not better than mine).