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Archive for the ‘Yoast’ Category

With the wider introduction of the ga_debug.js script (Google Analytics Certified Partners had had access to that for a while so I’d been using it already); I finally had the chance to add a real debug mode to my Google Analytics plugin.

Since the debug script uses the console to display its information, I also added the option to immediately load Firebug lite. See how it works in the following screencast (ow and enjoy my new screencast intro, I’ll be doing loads more screencast in the coming months):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google Analytics for WordPress gets a debug mode is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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So you’ve switched over to a theme that comes with built-in functionality for titles and meta descriptions. Instead of using HeadSpace2, All in one SEO or another SEO plugin, you’re now using the theme’s built-in SEO functions and input boxes for title’s and meta descriptions. It just seems more logical doesn’t it? Loading one plugin less and using the theme’s functionality. It feels like that’s how it should be. I mean, that should be faster, right?

Wrong. Why that’s wrong? Let’s say that, a year from now, you’re tired of this theme and want something else. It happens to all of us. So, you’re switching themes. Have you guessed the problem yet? Because that theme you started using the titles and descriptions of uses it’s own methods and locations for storing those titles and descriptions, when you switch to another theme, it won’t recognize the old stuff.

If you’re smart, you’ll notice. If you’re not, you’ll be in even deeper trouble, as someone I did a site review for recently found out. She’d written superb SEO titles and meta’s for her last 50 odd posts, and the hundreds of posts before that didn’t have them. Took us a while to figure out she’d switched themes…

If you’re a developer, changing a couple of post meta fields in the database might be reasonably easy, but for most people, it’s not. That’s why your theme should only contain functionality that alters the looks and the code of your site, not the content.

So there are no “SEO friendly themes”?

Does this mean a theme couldn’t be SEO friendly? No it doesn’t. A theme still determines a large part of what your heading structure looks like, whether it shows your content first and then your navigation or the other way around, whether your code is clean and tight or all messy etc. etc. etc. These are all very important aspects of on-page SEO, and I applaud every theme developer thinking about this and trying to learn about it.

Conclusion

There’s a reason why we’ve got plugins and themes. We want to separate content from design. If something has to deal with your content, stuff you’d want to be the same regardless of which theme you’re using, it has to be a plugin.

Why functionality in themes is not always good. is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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Collis Ta’eed is a veteran blogger and co-founded the Envato network of educational sites and marketplaces covering niches like freelancing and web app’s and much much more. Collis’ network of sites reaches hundreds of thousands of readers monthly, his marketplaces are responsible for enormous amounts of income for developers the world over and his tutorial sites are the hallmark how-to repository for much of the web community.

Collis joined us today to share with us the mechanics of growing initial traffic to your blog, differentiating yourself in the market and monetizing your blog. Listen in to learn more about how to go from freelancer to business owner.
In the news:

• PHP 4 & MySQL 4 reach end of life
• Keep up with upcoming WordCamps in your area
• Matt Mullenweg has released many of his previous themes (with great photo gallery implementations)

Plugin picks of the week:

• Posts 2 Posts – Create relationships between posts of different types.
• Events Calendar Pro – Rapidly create and manage events
• WhyDoWork – Insert AdSense into your blog without modifying templates
• yphplista – An AJAX WordPress plugin for PHPlist integration

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So last week I’ve started sharing a lot more of what I read on a day to day basis on Twitter, and I decided I had to share these links here on yoast.com as well. Below is a quite extensive list of links that I found interesting, ordered by topic. I’ll try to do these on a weekly basis from now on.

WordPress

• Code Snippets and Examples

  • The only proper way of adding a Facebook “Like” button to your WordPress blog
  • An article I wrote recently for Smashing Magazine: Lessons Learned From Maintaining a WordPress Plug-In
  • Gravity Forms PayPal integration
  • 16 Vital Checks Before Releasing a WordPress Theme
  • How to Display Human Readable Post Dates in WordPress
  • Control WordPress Content via Userrights or Time
  • A good Beginner’s Guide to the Thematic Framework

• Plugins

  • BuddyPress Courseware beta; a very cool plugin for schools & other educational institutions.
  • Post to post; nice plugin for creating relations between posts.
  • Press This Reloaded; pretty useful if you need to, for instance, adapt the SEO title of a post.
  • WPMU.org features my WordPress Salesforce CRM plugin.
  • Custom Post Permalinks; I seriously think this should be in WordPress core, but as long as it’s not, this’ll do.

• News

  • Common WordPress Multisite Problems and Solutions
  • Top 10 WordPress News Blogs
  • When is the Best Time to Post a Blog Post? Not enough people think about this.

SEO

• Without any work from me, my Google Analytics plugin now helps you verify your Google Webmaster Tools account.
• I’m seeing similar stuff to this: Google Webmaster Tools Link data – a case study by Dave Naylor, my favourite UK SEO.
• Want an SEO job? Check out the Daily Mail’s robots.txt file

Analytics

• Qualitative Web Analytics: Heuristic Evaluations Rock! another great post by Avinash Kaushik
• The new Management API for Google Analytics rocks; check out the docs

Web design / web development

• Practical? No. Cool? Yes. Compressing Your JavaScript and CSS to PNG Images
• What a surprise: Steve Jobs was right, Flash fails on Android
• HTML5 for Web Designers: Book Review at Nettuts+ – I’ve read it too, it’s amazing
• Good Help is Hard to Find is another A List Apart classic. Wonder how to apply this to my plugins…
• A very concise explanation of the viewport metatag by David B. Calhoun
• A pretty awesome example of what can be reached with CSS3 now
• I’d almost start using Typekit: Adobe partners with Typekit to bring legendary typefaces to the web.
• MathML is now part of WebKit nightlies, go forth and play, all you math lovers out there!
• Delay loading of print CSS (in WordPress, but useful for everyone)
• Debugging Tools – jQuery for Designers
• This would work perfectly for WordPress plugin developers: Readme Driven Development

Online Marketing / Social media

• Daring Fireball – Online Advertising: Losing the Race to the Bottom – listen to this, seriously.
• What’s this thing called Buzz that Leo talks about?
• Facebook Tabs: What They Are & How to Use Them – Good writeup on RWW
• Quite curious how many people will do this: German Homes Can Now Opt Out Of Google – TechCrunch

Science

• Experts are usually wrong
• Everyone looks better after you’ve tipped back a pint or two, and now we know why
• A nice infographic on the history of the Internet
• Freakonomics: loved the book, looking forward to the movie, check out the trailer.
• Wonder what my wife does? Read her latest paper on the Intergenerational Transmission of Convictions.

Fun

• (Fake) Lady Gaga sings about Java programming with some hilarious quotes
• Gonna have to try this on my son in about 2 years: 4 Tools for Teaching Kids to Code
• Basically, you can’t block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook, because too many other people did it before you
• You know you’re a geek when you think this is funny

Lifestyle

• Trying to follow this advice: living a Balanced Freelance Life (even though I’m only partly freelance)

Mac

• Why Daniel Jalkut is sticking with the Mac
• Precipitate: search for and launch the info you stored in the cloud from Spotlight or G Desktop for Mac
• This is bloody hilarious: No Comment: Justin Long’s jailbroken iPhone
• This proved to be pretty awesome for mp3 splitting: Macsome Audio Splitter

Link dump: interesting reads from around the web is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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Early this year I gave a presentation, which has now been edited and will soon appear on WordPress.tv, the fun thing? You can see it here first:

My WordCamp Ireland WordPress SEO Presentation is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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Canonicalizing URLs is a very important  aspect of Search Engine Optimization but also of Social Media Marketing. This morning, when checking my feeds, I noticed an example that I thought could help you understand the what and the why of it. What I noticed was this: Smashing Magazine had put out one of their usually very popular “100 … WordPress themes” posts. This time called: 100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that post.

There is something wrong however, with how this post is being treated by several social networks. First of all, there’s Delicious. Check out this search; it’ll show you Delicious has 12 different URLs for the same post. While the proper URL for the post has the most bookmarks, as much as 15% of all the bookmarks are for “wrong” versions of the URL. This means that the post could, in later searches on Delicious, do 15% better if the URL had been canonicalized / standardized properly, in other words, if all this stuff had been redirected to the proper URL.

Those wrong URLs are basically divided in 2 groups: StumbleUpon “framed” URLs and FeedBurner or otherwise “campaign tagged” URLs. Let’s go through these groups one by one, and see if we can solve this.

StumbleUpon framed URLs

I very much dislike the fact that Delicious doesn’t understand these URLs. Delicious should be able to “stab” through a URL like that, and then bookmark the proper URL. But I also actually dislike the way StumbleUpon puts a frame around URLs. Somehow, when Digg did this, it created an outrage, but if StumbleUpon does it, it’s fine. Now their goals might be different, but I still dislike it. The “rough” solution is simple: add a frame breaker to your blog:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top !== self) top.location.href = self.location.href;
</script>

The issue is that doing this would prevent people from voting up your site on Stumble, something you might actually want to happen. The second solution is adding a visible delicious button to your site so people can bookmark the post through that button, using the proper version of the URL. It’s not as safe, but it might work for a part of the group that made the wrong bookmarks in the first place.

Google Campaign tagged URLs

These are the URLs that annoy me most. FeedBurner has the quite awesome option to campaign tag your posts, which means that it’ll add variables to your URLs like this:

?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SmashingMagazine

Those give some awesome insight into where your readers come from, and it’s a feature I’d hate to miss. However there’s one issue with it, and it’s in the very first part of that string: it’s the question mark. The question mark has a real meaning in URLs: it allows you to add parameters to a URL. For that reason Google and other search engines, as well as sites like Delicious, can’t automatically strip these off. There is, however, a very nice solution to this problem: campaign tracking using a hashtag.

This requires you to use the setAllowAnchor() function within your tracking code. After you’ve added that to your tracking code, you can now use #utm_source instead of ?utm_source, and suddenly the world looks much cleaner and nicer. Of course there’s a small issue left: FeedBurner still uses the question mark based tracking. This is fixed by redirecting the question mark based campaign tagger URLs to the hash tag based ones.

This may all seem a bit daunting, but I’ve got some good news: if you use my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, all you have to do is check a box under the advanced settings:

It will then automatically add the needed code and redirect all campaign URLs. Just another step towards a better optimized site, as this should prevent sites like delicious from bookmarking the wrong URL.

URLs, social media and campaign tracking is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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In this second part of our interview with Matt (you have listened to the first part, right?), we discuss VaultPress; Automattic’s new backup system. Matt explains the features, pricing. Going from that we discussed hosting and their uptimes.

Then the discussion shifted to the community, and how that’s built. We discussed how to get core commit access, and how Matt’s multiple roles within the community could collide. We got talking about how WordPress got where it came, how good product development is also good marketing, WordCamps around the world, how giving support helps you make better products etc. etc. etc. Best quote: Matt & Automattic are happy plumbers of the web

If you’re into WordPress, just listen to it live here, or download it to your iPod.

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After reading this post about the “WordPress white screen of death” I wanted to quickly share with you a quick hack I do in almost all WordPress installs I manage, that allows me to quickly switch on debug mode when needed.

In the file wp-config.php, usually found in your WordPress root, do the following:

if ( isset($_GET['debug']) && $_GET['debug'] == 'debug')
  define('WP_DEBUG', true);

Now I can open any page, and if something goes wrong there, like a white screen of death, I add ?debug=debug to its URL and see what’s causing the trouble. Pretty easy huh?

Now it might be wise to change that second ‘debug’ to a key of your own choosing, so not everyone out there can open debug mode on your blog.

Quick Tip: Simple WordPress debugging is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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I’ve just pushed out release 4.0.7 of my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. It contains a few minor bug fixes, and a little something I’ve been wanting to do for a while: a proper logo. It was designed especially for the plugin by Level Level, a Dutch WordPress specialist I’ve had the pleasure of working with before on the conversion of Dag.nl to WordPress. This is what the logo looks like:

The small version is used in the plugin heading on the admin page, a favicon version is used as a favicon for the admin page. I’ll be also updating the plugin page here on yoast.com with it as well as several video’s on using the plugin and the reports it can generate.

Thanks a ton to Level Level for this awesome new logo, I really like it.

Google Analytics for WordPress get’s a logo is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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I get about 10 emails a day asking me for help with a website, not a specific plugin error or something like that, but more general requests for help, often relating to my WordPress SEO article. In the past I just used to give this advice sometimes, for free. Recently I’ve begun treating those requests a bit differently: I’ll email back that I can do a site analysis and tell people what to improve, which plugins to use etc. But… I’m not going to do it for free, so I’ll also tell them that I’ll do an analysis like that starting from $500 for a ‘regular’ WordPress blog.

You see, while it’s of more benefit to one user specifically if I help him or her fix their site, it’s of way more benefit to the community at large if I spend the time I work for “free” by writing plugins or articles here on yoast.com or elsewhere, like my recent article on Smashing Magazine. A plugin or an article like that will help tens of thousands, if not millions, of people. A quick site analysis from me telling you what to improve is of no benefit to the community at large.

When I charge for it, and people pay me for it, I actually make more money (d0h), which allows me to in turn spend time writing those plugins and articles. Sounds fair, doesn’t it?

If you just realized you want me to analyze your WordPress site, and you’re willing to pay the $500? Go get yourself a WordPress site analysis then!

How to get me to analyze your site is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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