Wordpress SEO

WP – How To Import Large WordPress XML File Above Default Limit Size? I wanted to export the posts, comments, categories and tags of one WordPress blog and move the contents using the export option in WordPress Tools in Wp Admin.

I found out you can do this in .htaccess – just add the following:

#set max upload file size
php_value upload_max_filesize 25M
#set max post size
php_value post_max_size 25M

Where I have added “25m” you can edit this to abover whatever size your xml file is.

Now you can export a large xml file and upload the file to another wordpress blog.

it’s simple to display a dynamic date in your footer in WordPress, perfect for dynamic footers so you never need to change your copyright notice on your blog when the year changes.

This little bit of code will display the current year. Just add it in your theme’s footer.php and you can forget about making sure you don’t look stupid, or give the impression your site is out of date and unused, at the beginning of every year.

&copy; Copyright 2004 - <?php echo date("Y") ?>

Simple and elegant php copyright notice for WordPress blogs.

WordPress how to install using cPanel:

If your hosting provider supplies the cPanel hosting control panel, you may follow these simple instructions to create your WordPress username and database. A more complete set of instructions for using cPanel to create the database and user can be found in Using cPanel.

1. Log in to your cPanel.
2. Click MySQL Database Wizard icon under the Databases section.
3. In Step 1. Create a Database enter the database name and click Next Step.
4. In Step 2. Create Database Users enter the database user name and the password. Make sure to use a strong password. Click Create User.
5. In Step 3. Add User to Database click the All Privileges checkbox and click Next Step.
6. In Step 4. Complete the task note the database name and user. Write down the values of hostname, username,databasename, and the password you chose. (Note that hostname will usually be localhost.) >>>

Note: Google said site speed is a factor. Contact Form 7 plugin for WordPress is quite bulky in terms of external scripts it’s loads.

You can speed up how fast Contact Form 7 loads (by loads) by ensuring the associated javascript files load ONLY on the contact form itself.

Quickly optimise your contact form 7 wordpress plugin by just adding the following code to the end of your functions.php – you can take 70kb off your load time.

NOTE: Be sure to wrap the following in PHP tags in the example illustrated below:

add_action( 'wp_print_scripts', 'my_deregister_javascript', 100 );function my_deregister_javascript() {if ( !is_page('Contact') ) {wp_deregister_script( 'contact-form-7' );}}add_action( 'wp_print_styles', 'my_deregister_styles', 100 );function my_deregister_styles() {if ( !is_page('Contact') ) {wp_deregister_style( 'contact-form-7' );}}

WordPress 3.1

If you are using WordPress Contact Form 7, you might want to redirect visitors to a thank you page when they successfully fill in your form. Ideal if you track completed goals in Google Analytics.

How To Redirect Visitors To A “Thank You” Page In Contact 7 for WordPress:

Go To WordPress dashboard and go to Contact Form 7 plugin settings page (click contact in your dashboard).  Find ‘Additional Settings’ at bottom of your form page and insert the following code:

on_sent_ok: "location.replace('http://www.yourwebsiteaddress.co.uk/thankyou/');"

Save form

Now visitors will be successfully redirected to your custom thank you page when they fill in your WordPress Contact 7 form.

* Rel:Noindex/Follow your  ”thank you” page to keep it out of Google SERPS using a Robots Meta tag.

WordPress 3.01

I wanted to add a little snippet of unique text, and have it display on my self hosted WP blog home page ONLY. It was actually very easy.

I added this code to my theme index.php:

<?php if(is_home() && !is_paged()):?>write text here<?php endif;?>

Note – I did not want a static home page for my wordpress blog (I wanted to display all my posts, but on the home page, just have a small piece of text on my blog home and no other pages or posts).

Simple stuff.

I was thinking of making a wordpress seo plugin, as I thought the existing things out there where filled with a lot of useless stuff you don’t need but Yoast has a great seo plugin suite that already does some of the sort of things I sort of wanted.

I’m now running WordPress SEO on Hobo (it is a beta plugin so backup before you install) and I successfully imported all my All-In-One SEO plugin details in a few seconds. EDIT – on reflection, some of these settings did not fully import. A few seconds to tweak though.

While All-In-One SEO plugin was useful, I often thought I would get time one day to strip all the (for me) useless feature bloat out of it.

I didn’t. WordPress SEO does that, and adds plenty more really neat stuff, and you can probably rely on Yoast to come out with an even better version at some point.

Yoast has a very solid WordPress SEO guide too for all WP fanatics.

(There’s a few things in there I wondered about -

The SEO title is limited to 70 chars

….it’s there so the snippet functions properly I think, as Google will read and index more than 70 characters, if not display more.

• The search engine snippet generator isn’t really a true representation of  how Google will treat your snippet in all cases. Disappointing but not unexpected.
• I’m also not really a fan of all this internal rel=nofollow lark these days
• It’s possibly a bit much to digest for a beginner seo
• Focus keywords is a cool little gimmick – would be nice if it integrated with SEMRUSH or something….
• I love the ability to control at a page level canonical urls and 301 from a post
• You can turn a lot of stuff on or off.
• You can verify your wordpress blog at Google, Yahoo and Bing
• You can set up a google xml sitemap too

I’m still interested in making a seo plugin, as some elements of seo are always going to be personal, or preferences, rather than scientific fact –  but it would probably be to work in conjunction with Yoast’s.

WordPress SEO is a cool plugin though.

And it’s free. Try it out.

I was surprised by the number of folk searching for this search term:

“leave a Reply Powered By WordPress”

As a dofollow blog, I’m pretty choosy about moderating comments. Now, you need to have answered a massive 10 intelligent comments before you get a search engine friendly link back to your site – and I close old posts within a few days so I can get on with my work.

That probably makes the links you get from this site pretty decent though.

Most “Leave a Reply Powered By WordPress” visitors though, don’t have the patience to hang around that long, and it seems to have worked for us in building our subscribers steadily.

I wonder of most comment spammers know that rel=”nofollow” links mean that most comment links they drop are pretty useless for Google seo.

Even dofollow blogs that allow comments usually increase the comment number they need for a seo-friendly link, or remove dofollow altogether from their now busy blog – it can be a merry-go-around

Blog commenting for seo is not a long term strategy in my book, or really the sort of thing you should be doing for a corporate site.

Think about that while you are typing in anything like, leave a reply powered by wordpress, into Google next time.

Though – I would probably modify the search a little:

• “Leave A Reply” “Powered By WordPress” +dofollow -”comments are closed”

….or something or other…..

WORDPRESS 3.0+

I wanted to display the recent post titles from a specific category, to visitors who landed on a post within that specific category (and i didn’t want to use a plugin).

List posts from a specific category ONLY on pages within specified category:

<?php if (in_category('32')) { ?>
<div class="moduletable">
<h3>Latest Snippets</h3>
<ol>
<?php
global $post;
$myposts = get_posts('numberposts=5&order=DESC&orderby=post_date&category=32');
foreach($myposts as $post) :
setup_postdata($post);
?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> </li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ol>
</div>
<?php }else { ?>
<?php } ?>

NOTE – I’ve bolded

• 5 (number of posts to display) and
• 32 – the category ID

Theses are the items I used in the example

How To Exclude A Category From RSS Feed in WordPress:

You just need to add this code to your WP theme functions.php file:

<?php
function exclude_category() {
	if ( is_feed() ) {
		set_query_var('cat', '-5');
	}
}

add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');
?>

In the above example -

-5

is the category ID I might want to exclude. – Pretty simple as it turned out.

We’ve built a subscription base of over 14,000 RSS subscribers with an interest in seo who expect a certain type of post to a particular schedule as a newsletter – but I also wanted the control of publishing posts that wouldn’t necessarily fit in with the normal seo related tips, and wouldn’t deluge my current subscribers with content they might not really want.

SO I wanted to be able to exclude a particular category from my RSS feed so I could publish more wordpress, web development and seo news type posts (like this one).

I can always do the odd round up post to let my subscribers know about this other content.

It could actually give me much greater control – perhaps if I publish something that’s popular, I can then have the option to promote to subscribers. Either way it’s more spider food for engines.

If it works.

Here’s a list of the WordPress plugins I use on this Hobo SEO Blog. Some plugins are permanent, some are being tested. Some are heavily modified, too. 1 or 2 although installed are not active yet.

WordPress plugins add functionality to the core wordpress CMS we create, design and develop web sites with, if you don’t know.

There are 22 plugins used: 15 active plugins and 7 inactive plugins.

Active Plugins

  Akismet 2.5.5
» Automattic (url)
Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. To get started: 1) Click the “Activate” link to the left of this description, 2) Sign up for an Akismet API key, and 3) Go to your Akismet configuration page, and save your API key.

  Comment Approved Notifier 2.2
» Yakup Gövler (url)
Send an e-mail to your commenters when you approve their comments.

  Datafeedr Random Ads V2 2.0
» Datafeedr.com (url)
The Datafeedr Random Ads plugin is a free plugin which allows you to simply and easily show random ads anywhere in your template files or using widgets. Go to Tools > Datafeedr Random Ads to begin using this plugin.

  Embedly 2.0.8
» Embed.ly Inc (url)
The Embedly Plugin extends Wordpress’s Embeds allowing bloggers to Embed from 218 services and counting.

  FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3.1
» FeedBurner (url)
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

  Google Analytics for WordPress 4.2.2
» Joost de Valk (url)
This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog, adding lots of features, eg. custom variables and automatic clickout and download tracking.

  Gravity Forms 1.6.2
» Rocketgenius Inc. (url)
Easily create web forms and manage form entries within the WordPress admin.

  MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate 1.8.1
» MaxBlogPress (url)
Automatically convert keywords on your blog into money making affiliate links. Also manage, track, cloak and shorten unlimited number of affiliate links from one central location of Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate. Adjust your settings here.

  Socialize 2.0.6
» Jon Bishop (url)
Adds actionable social bookmarking buttons to your site

  What Would Seth Godin Do 2.0.3
» Richard K Miller (url)
Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.

  WordPress SEO 1.1.4
» Joost de Valk (url)
The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.

  WP-PluginsUsed 1.50
» Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan (url)
Display WordPress plugins that you currently have (both active and inactive) onto a post/page.

  WP FeedCount 0.4 Beta
» Martin Gardner (url)
Take Control of your Feedbuner Count & Subscribers the easy way…

  WP Super Cache 1.0
» Donncha O Caoimh (url)
Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.

  Yet Another Related Posts Plugin 3.4.3
» mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) (url)
Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.

Which are your best WordPress plugins? Have I missed any?

Note – This page should automatically update with new / deleted plugins using the cool WP-PluginsUsed 1.40.

Google PR, Nofollow & WordPress Self Pings

By now everybody knows internal linking is very important – it gives you a chance to add keywords into your link profile and lets users navigate your website via contextual links. WordPress self ping trackbacks in comments (nofollowed by default) are a different beast though and if we are to believe the recent announcement on how Google treats nofollow links they might actually be sucking the PR right out of your blog.

I was reading a blog earlier today and noticed they’d self pinged an article about 50 times from their own blog posts!

If Google is treating nofollow as Pagerank sinkholes, why introduce 50 nofollowed links to a page that does not need them via trackbacks from your own blog that dissipate Google Pagerank?

Crazy stuff.

There might be an excuse for nofollowing external links in blog comments, (although we do not, using Hobo Linky Love)but surely not internals?

Advice – keep the comment area for comments, turn self pings off in WordPress with no self pings and conserve Pagerank pr link juice or whatever it is we’re working with these days, so you get more of your pages into Google.

QUICK TIP – Want to remove those trackbacks from posts? It’s easy, just go to your WordPress Admin panel, go to Comments, and search for “[...]” and you’ll see all the trackbacks you have and you can choose what to remove.

PS For beginners – What is a self ping? It’s when you link to a post on your own blog, and you get a trackback in the comments.

Andy Beard & Dave Naylor wrote interesting posts (see what I did there) about blog comments and specifically whether or not you should nofollow blog comments in an attempt to build a site that Google trusts and therefore allows to rank for competitive terms

We used to be a one comment dofollow seo blog. Now we remove nofollow from links only when the author has joined in on a few more posts and only if the site we’re linking to passes the smell test.

I just wanted a bit more control of comments for experimental purposes and Hobo Linky Love provides that, but I am committed to creating a blog that passes juice in some way while being conscious I am not linking to a bad neighbourhood.

But if you are starting out, and willing to build a decent site, I’d suggest and encourage you to remove nofollow from comments using Linky Love. It’s fine for visible blogs with a decent readership to proclaim ‘nofollow comments!’, but for the rest of us, dofollow increases your chance of getting the conversation going (so what if it increases the amount of human spam – it’s worth it.)

The more I read Dave’s post actually I think he is kinda turning into Google’s FUD Machine lol – perhaps it’s worth experimenting by nofollowing all my links?

Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments?

While Dave has a point about losing trust and the amount of idiots (some quite funny) who try to take advantage of dofollow blogs, I just don’t lose sleep over this any more. I moderate all comments anyway as more of a quality control on this blog rather than spam control, and expect to see a decent site as the recipient of a link or it won’t happen. I am doing what I feel Google wants, and moderately linking out to sites that I in the end vouch for in a small way because they are not on the surface spam.

If someone is willing to join in and add keyword rich content in a few comments, Stumble me or Digg me I’m all for that. Have a search engine friendly link, if your site isn’t crap.

I actively encourage my smaller clients to practice on the Hobo blog with comments until they go out and do it for their own sites if they can find like minded bloggers in their niche. I don’t comment on blogs for seo clients any more – if they aren’t willing to do it, I am not, (actually, I spend most of my time looking at site structure than getting links anyways these days) and generally I’m now to embarrassed not to sign off with just Hobo.

I honestly think it would be a bit of a cheek for me to nofollow comments with the amount of blogs I visited just to get a link. That’s how I found Andy’s site in the first place, but I can say that Andy’s niche marketing blog on my daily reading list now, and I happily link out to Andy all the time as a result.

I stopped harassing dofollow blogs just for links a long time ago (when Google zapped our PR7 to a PR5 – quite unrelated as every seo blog took a hit in PR because Google devalued that space…. for a while) and found actually contributing on a lesser number of blogs was more worthwhile for me.

I’m in a position now where I don’t need the odd link as I rank for the terms I want to rank for (on the whole) and this site has some measure of local authority, but it’s nice to get a the odd link on a dofollow blog as by and large when I am reading them I am supposedly ‘working’! Two birds with one stone sort of thing!

People who think visitors are commenting on their blog because their writing is best selling need a reality check. The vast majority of commenters want links, just like me, just like you. If they don’t want links they want something else. Well that’s how it starts off….

I can appreciate folks who are wanting links on this blog to add to their own sites trust if indeed they aim to build such a site in a year or two, especially if the site is topically relevant to this blog, and sometimes link out to commentators if I feel they are adding to the conversation here.

All I ask is for an intelligent (hopefully relevant) comment. Though sometimes you’d be surprised at how difficult this appears to be for some folk!

PS – As someone who chased down Dofollow links, believe me, as Dave comments, most people in the end do go nofollow again because of abuse.

As such, dofollow links have only a limited shelf life, I’d rather build citable content on my site these days (still practicing that, although I’m sure Lyndon could give me a few pointers on that, the lying b@stard lol – perhaps I should do another interview with him!

PPS – Any more trainee ninja commenters trying to drop links to any marketing guru’s website on this blog will get that guru outed as a pain in the arse – I am getting sick of gurus whose entire Internet marketing campaign seems to involve spamming dofollow blogs (including this one!). I expect more from those guys – everybody else come on in.