It was an honor to be asked to speak this year at WebCam – Central Oregon’s web and creative marketing conference, coming up on September 29 and 30th.

This will be the third annual conference, and it’s gotten rave reviews for the past two years. The agenda and list of speakers is pretty impressive, not to mention the Thursday night Brew ha-ha party sounds like it’s going to be a blast too.

I’ll be speaking in Friday’s “Tools of the Trade” session, which I’ll be sharing with Taylor Pratt of Raven Tools. My presentation will focus on tools, software and tactics to help make “doing the job” more efficient.

In my twenty minute presentation I’ll be covering more than just SEO tools, and I’ll help you save time in your daily routines, chores and tasks too, showing lots of ways to do them more efficiently.  Coming to this session could shave hours per month off your workload.

Our SEO Tools of the Trade session will be at 11 AM on Friday, and if you’re planning on attending, the full two day pass is $479, and a Friday pass is just $249 –  a lot less than what most conferences cost.

Early bird registration ends next week, August 30th, so sign up now, and if you do come, please be sure to say hello!

Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team, and each year in the past, he’s been a participant in the “search engine smackdown” at Pubcon.

This year he had the stage all to himself, and I was in the second row for the session as he talked about the current state of Google, and about where they are going in the future,  and then I just sat idly by while he took some Q&A from the audience.

As always, Matt covered a lot, and there’s some great coverage of the session at places like Outspoken Media and Search Engine Land, and even an interesting mix of live blogging and chat at Search Engine Roundtable, but I thought I’d write down a few questions that I wish I had asked…

1. Why are certain industries (like ours) being excluded from localization? These industries rarely if ever show any local results, and this dates all the way back to the  7 pack, 10 pack and even earlier

• Web hosting
• Web design
• software programming
• Internet marketing

I suppose there’s an argument to be made that all these services can be done online, but often people really are looking for local help, like a web host in their home town, etc.

The speculation I’ve read is something akin to: “Too many SEO’s were abusing the system, and found it easy to game” or similar reasons, but I find that hard to believe, considering you still allow the locksmith industry to remain localized.

So what’s the deal? Why are our industries being singled out?
2. Why are there still so many inconsistencies from city to city and phrase to phrase in these new merged search results? At Pubcon it was about two weeks into it, and now they’ve been live for a month, yet they’re still a bit wacky.

For example, search “mechanical bull rental in Scottsdale”  vs. “mechanical bull rental in Phoenix , and see how differently they appear!

Why should the composition be different? There are likely similar per-capita searches by people wanting some cowboy fun in either city, and just as many service providers, so it makes no sense.

For that particular phrase, Scottsdale is devoid of any localaization, while Phoenix has been completely converted. Other phrases though, such as “event planning” demonstrate that it’s s not a “city by city” thing, but rather “phase by phrase”.

Without getting too technical, how do we explain this sort of absurd inconsistency to a layperson / client who is coming to use for answers?

3. Why is Google Webmaster Tools not consistently sending malware notifications to site owners when malware is found?

In a WMT account with multiple domains, we’ve had to click into the domain before noticing any malware warning stripe, or seeing any notification message at all.

In the past two months I’ve written about it twice, once at SEMpdx and once here, and I’ve sent in messages to Webmaster Tools that have gone unanswered. I’ve Tweeted a bit, and had some folks reply with “Us too! We thought somethign was up…”

Anyway – this seems important….

4. Why did Google take away such a valuable research tool? Marketers the world over are mourning the loss (in the Adwords Keyword tool) of the SIMPLE ability to get approximate impression counts on a batch of phrases that WE paste without the “suggestions”.

While there’s certainly always room for innovation, and the tool has gotten better, sometimes we don’t WANT  phrases added, removed, suggested, etc. and we just want the facts as we deem them necessary. Can we PLEASE get it
back?

5. Will you try our SEO Automatic app for Android?
OK, this one is totally self serving, and I admit it, but I think Matt would really be impressed!

I mentioned our SEO Automatic review to Matt at Pubcon 2009, and told him that we had an iPhone SEO review app, but now he has an Android, I think, and we released our instant SEO review for Android this year – Matt, I sure would love to hear your opinion!  ;)

Besides these, what other questions might I have asked?  What would you have asked?

I’m proud to announce that we are one of the sponsors for Portland WordCamp 2010 that is taking place this weekend, although I’m very disappointed that I can’t go.

When I was first approached about sponsorship, I wasn’t really sure that it would be a huge value for me, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I just had to support the event and the community.

I do believe that WordPress has been the single greatest catalyst for my success as an Internet marketer, and it was certainly the inspiration that led me to launch SEO Automatic in the first place.

Last year I spoke on the SEO panel (here’s the video) at the end of the day with Amber Case, Dawn Foster, and Rick Turoczy – (but I guess I must’ve sucked, because I didn’t get invited back this year

Who Wants To Go To WordCamp for Free?

At any rate, this conference is great, and I REALLY want to go, but both of my sons have football games on Saturday, and my youngest is playing a fall league baseball game on Sunday, so I’m unable to use my own sponsorship ticket.

I’ve now checked with the organizers, and I’ve gotten the thumbs up to give my ticket away, so who wants it?

All you have to do is leave a comment here,  e-mail or Tweet at me, and you could attend…

Please note that the “judging criteria” is completely arbitrary and I will give it to whomever I wish.  It’s not necessarily “first-come first-served”, but I do need to make a decision today and get them the name for the ticket, so you should act now.

So… do you feel lucky?  Well do ya?

(Comments now closed)

Google Instant was rolled out to the world yesterday, which changes the way search results appear.

Rather than waiting for you to push a button that says “search”, as you type, search results will simply appear, based on whatever you’re typing.

Although I HAVE seen it happen while I’m not logged into Google, I’ve also heard that it’s only supposed to affect those who are logged into their Google accounts. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a fast look -

Is Google Instant Just Special Effects?

There’s already been a very good summary written about the features and there’s lots of speculation over whether this is a good or bad thing for users and for SEO’s, but the bottom line here is that it DOES change the game quite  a bit, and it changes it in different ways for different people, depending on who they are.

Since this is my blog, here’s what I think about Google Instant Search…

How Will Google Instant Search Affect End Users?
Google Instant Search is the logical extension of Google Suggest, which gives you other search term suggestions right in the box as you type. Now though, instead of just offering suggested search terms, the results (and advertisements) will actually change too.

Some people will find Instant Search distracting while others may find that it provides a faster way to find what they want.

Peronally, I think in the long run, as people get used to it, it’s use is going to become second nature, and people will come to depend on it, but it will also broaden their thoufght process and will teach users to search more precisely, and with more specific search terms.

How Will of Google Instant Affect PPC Advertisers?
When I first saw this video several weeks ago, the very first thing that crossed my mind was, “What will this do to the impression counts in PPC campaigns?”

Decisions on pay per click advertising campaigns are based upon how often people click your ad, versus how many times it displays for a given search query. Knowing the accuracy of those numbers at least as accurate as they ever
have been) is a major concern, and fortunately Google has answered that clearly here – http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=187309

When someone searches using Google Instant, ad impressions are counted in these situations:

* The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).

This means that until someone has completed their typing, UNLESS they move off the search box and click your ad it won’t be counted as an impression.

* The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.

In other words this is normal behavior, and nothing has changed. Pressing the button or selecting one of the suggestions count as an impression/

* The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

This is self-explanatory but it’s really the only unknown piece of the pie. I’d like to believe that most people can beat the 3 seconds per letter deadline, but again, there are a lot of hunt and peck people out there. Is 3 seconds long enough?

Interestingly, the Google Webmaster Tools blog did mention today that after rollout of of Google Instant Search, your impression counts may appear to be skewed, so we’ll have to wait and see.

How will of Google Instant Affect SEOs and Organic Search?
For more interesting to me than PPC is how people find things organically, and I think this is going to be a plus for users, as well as for SEO’s.

Contrary to this article I think that this change in of Google Instant technology actually opens up the “long tail” of search even more, and will provide a greater opportunity for their content to be seen in the SERPs.

All over the web, people are giving their opinions over whether of Google Instant is a good or bad thing. Some even claim (ridiculously) it will be the death of SEO, and others in the media are parroting that sentiment!

As Matt Cutts said in his post about Google Instant Search yesterday,  “The best SEOs recognize, adapt, and even flourish when changes happen.”

Think about it – As people type, Google Instant makes the results and advertisements change before their eyes, more and content will have a chance to float to the top, for more and more laser targeted queries.

As someone searches for anything, the organic results will be changing multiple times, with a different #1 for each letter added to the search string.

Of course as people start to search more specifically, of Google Instant will show more and more specific suggestions, and people will arrow down to the “correct” choice too, so knowing these phrases, and utilizing them wisely into your content will make sense, of course.

What will be the Effect of Google Instant on Keyword Research?

Whether you’re doing research for organic or PPC, you’re simply going to have to step it up if you haven’t already. We need to know what those “suggest” phrases are, but Googles keyword tools do NOT give you that information.

Google does license out that API to others though, and the first tool I ever found for “Google suggest harvesting” was this one – http://www.promediacorp.com/suggester/ which is completely free.

Using suggestions from that tool, we were able to create lists, put phrases into Google Adwords, and after just a few hours of impression counts, we knew what was the most popular.

Yesterday, this post covered some other free tools that pull their data from Google Suggest, and I especially liked trying the two visualization tools recommended, What Do You Suggest and Seer for brainstorming ideas.

So What Keyword Tool Gathers the Best Suggestions?
Back in June, I ran across what I thought was going to be the Holy Grail of keyword tools, called Keyword Snatcher.

Not only would it compile a list based on every word with every letter combination from Google, but it ALSO used Yahoo and Amazon suggest too, gathering even more phrases.

It would also allow you to dig multiple levels deep, record the number (1-10) of where the phrase was on their suggestion list, and it even allowed for export.

The DOWN side of that tool though, was that there was no filtering, leaving you stuck with literally thousands of irrelevant phrases. The task of cleaning up the list into something useful was simply overwhelming.

So what’s the answer? For us, it’s been Keywords Magnet software, which seems to do it all, INCLUDING great filtering. There might be something come along that does the job better next month, but for now, nothings better that i’m aware of.

By the way, did you know that instant Search is not even Google’s idea? Yeah, me either…

Aflac is trying to get someone to make changes on their website, claiming that they’re guilty of Federal Trademark violation merely by using the letters a-f-l-a-c as part of a file name.

Even more ridiculous, this is being requested of one of their own licensed agents, with a circa 1998 website that’s never even been moderately SEO’d.

Last week, this e-mail arrived from Aflac Brand Protection:

Dear NAME REMOVED:

As you may know, American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus (Aflac) has used the name and mark Aflac to identify insurance underwriting services for over forty (50) years.

Aflac owns numerous trademark registrations for the Aflac trademark (“Aflac Mark”), including Reg. Nos. 1,570,222, and 1,679,644, registrations which are valid and incontestable.
It has come to our attention that http://www.DOMAINREMOVED/filename-changed.html includes Aflac in its meta data.

We believe that your use of our Mark is an obvious attempt to attract internet traffic to your website while capitalizing upon the goodwill associated with the Aflac name.

Such use of Aflac may result in trademark infringement, dilution and unfair competition in violation of the federal Trademark Act of 1946, 15 U.S.C. Section 1051 et seq.

In any event, Aflac requests that your company discontinue any and all use of Aflac at http://www.DOMAINREMOVED.COM/filenamechanged.html

Please reply to this email confirming your agreement to this request, and your agreement that you will not use in the future any mark or name similar to any Aflac trademark, service mark or URL, to conduct any business or activity on the internet.

Aflac reserves all rights, remedies, and causes of action it may have in this matter

Name Removed | Brand Protection Coordinator
Marketing Services
New Media
Aflac Worldwide Headquartersma
emailremoved
(No phone number was provided or I’d have phoned)

Huh? “…an obvious attempt to attract internet traffic to your website” – Doesn’t the mere existence of the website itself make it pretty obvious that the agent is trying to attract customers?

I took quick look at the site, then viewed just that file, and saw that is was a navigation sidebar.

On the site, there is no AFLAC logo (although there should be but there IS a button for “Get more AFLAC info” which is a graphic, and leads to a form.

Viewing the source code, you can see that either on the navigation file in question, OR on the Aflac form, the word AFLAC is not in the title, not in the description tag, and it’s not one of the meta keyword tags.

Other than mentioning in the body of the page that he’s an Aflac agent, and then in the body of the form once, that’s it – No other mention of Aflac.

So, I sent back this e-mail -

There’s no Aflac in the meta data – it’s an image to fill out an application! No keyword, no title, and no meta tag at all – not even text or an ALT tag!
What’s the problem?

To which I received this reply:

Hi Scott,

Thank you for your email.

For your convenience I have copied and highlighted the meta data at http://www.DOMAINREMOVED.net/filenamechanged.html. Aflac continues to request that your company discontinue any and all use of Aflac at http://www.DOMAINREMOVED.net/filenamechanged.html

And then they proceeded to provide the entire source of the page, with a couple of lines highlighted.
To save space, I’ve snipped those lines, where they remain UNEDITED.

img6on = new Image();
img6on.src = “./images/aflacon1.gif”;
img6off = new Image();

img6off.src = “./images/aflacoff1.gif”
This creates a hover effect over their menu, and is merely a reference to a file that contains the six letters in their name.

Then this:

<a target=”content” onMouseOver=”imgOn(‘img6′)” onMouseOut=”imgOff(‘img6′)” href=”aflac.html”>
<IMG SRC=”images/aflacoff1.gif” NAME=”img6″ border=0 alt=”Area Info” width=”141″ height=”44″></a></td></tr>

Which again, is part of the navigation, and simply provides the link to the form, asking to be sent some Aflac information

So, I sent them this on August 13th -

But that’s not “meta data”, those are file names, and aren’t subject to Trademark, are they? One is a page name, .html and one is just an image reference, and the letters Aflac only make up part of the file name.

I can’t believe Aflac could legally demand that nobody use “those letters” in a row for their file names under trademark law. This sounds like Aflac is overreaching a bit, doesn’t it?

Sincerely,

Now, five days later, I’ve still not received an answer, but I’ve been thinking about it, and here are some questions that are on my mind…

• Isn’t a licensed AFLAC agent allowed to mention the fact that they do that for a living?
• Does a trademark mean you hold the trademark on use of their five letters in a row?
• Was this really looked at by someone that knows and understands what they’re doing?
• What in the code exactly is covered by trademark law?

I think this shows an incredible lack of knowledge about what they’re “enforcing” and amazingly poor marketing judgement too, by Aflac.

Perhaps lawyers can’t be expected to understand all the intricacies of HTML, but surely the ones in charge of enforcing trademark law should know the basics, shouldn’t they?

Also, why would any clear thinking company choose to prevent a licensed agent from legally marketing their own product, making their stockholders money?

Does this blog post violate a trademark? For example, I DO seem to have meta data, with the word AFLAC in my description tag, and in the meta keyword tag, so am I in violation of trademark law too?

This makes no sense to me, and just sounds to me like an overzealous and uninformed lawyer making demands about something they don’t even understand, simply because they can.

I’m leaving this moring for Elite Retreat, and I’m writing this in the airport because my flight is delayed. It occurs to me that I may not be able to productively fill all of my “one on one” time.

Have you looked at who’s speaking at Elite Retreat 2009? Can you imagine not having an agenda of questions ready to ask these guys?

in all fairness, Tigh at Shoemoney sent out a “get ready” email about a week ago, and I saved it, planning to get back to it later, and that’s what I’m going to finish up on the plane.

However, last year at ER, each and every speakers let us “wear out our welcome”, on the last night by hanging around on their own time until EVERY single person had nothing left to ask but “Where’s the bar?”

To be honest, my biggest regret from ER 2008 is that I hadn’t shown up with a mile long list of questions – I had no idea that we would have all that personally devoted time.

This year it’s different, because I know it’s coming, and so do the other 34 attendees. also, my main focus is on furthur expanding services at SEO Automatic as I bring it forward with an affiliate program and brandable agency options.

I KNOW I have a specific agenda. But, like last year, if I were to get the opportunity, what would I do if there was nothing left to ask?

So, PLEASE tell me what questions might you ask of any of these people, and I’ll do my best to get to ‘em.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve put out a few SEO tools, but none have been as well received as my latest addition, SEO Automatic, which gives instant SEO feedback on any given URL.

The concept was simple – we needed to be able to review a website and look at all of the basics quickly so that we could begin to understand how much work was going to be involved in fixing the problem.

I quietly released the tool in late October with very little fanfare, and I didn’t even blog about it. I just mentioned it to my Twitter followers and then left it alone, since it was still in beta, and I thought it was still a pretty rough piece of work.

In November 2008, at Webmaster World / Pubcon I ran into Rand Fishkin in the exhibit hall, who told me that he really liked SEO Automatic, and that he was going to mention it in his presentation.

I was flattered and appreciative, but I had to scramble that night to make some changes to the site so that I could at least gather e-mail addresses! I knew that if “The Wizard of Moz” was going to mention it, I would likely get some good traffic, and to not even gather email addresses would have been extremely stupid on my part.

Little did I know that he was going to make it one of his “Six Killer SEO Tools”, in his part of the “Secret SEO Tools” session that had over 800 people in attendance. Rand actually gave my tool three or four screen shots during his talk, and had some nice things to say about me personally too. (Thank very much, Rand!)

Over the next couple of weeks I rebranded the ste as my own, (rather than just an anonymous tool), and since January 1 2009, it’s been used over 2,200 times, on nearly 1400 domains – all for free, and with no publicity other than word of mouth and Twitter.

This past weekend, the beta period officially ended, all of the pre-registered users were imported into the system, and rewarded with over $21,000 in free reporting credits for future use, with no membership fee required. An email went out to all users Friday night.

New Addition – Agency Option Now Available
The advice shown for each ranking factor in the tool is currently my own, and so is the determination of whether something is “important, or just “worth noting”, and so are the determinations of size or quantity, as in what constitutes “too many” links or what file sizes are “too large”.

However, using the functionality of this tool, some users may have their own ideas that they want to share with clients or prospective clients, using the tool to generate their own leads, or to demonstrate their own expertise.

That’s why I’ve now introduced an “Agency Option”, allowing them to edit ALL of the information shown by the tool, including the informational and educational links that are shown about each ranking factor.

The agency option is branded with YOUR WordPress theme, and runs with your logo, your look & feel, your contact information, and your advice.

Agency level users are now able to determine the importance level of each factor too, or even whether to show a particular ranking factor or not as part of the report, and this is all done from right inside the WordPress control panel.

Pricing for the agency option varies based on volume of use, so please contact me directly to discuss this by telephone, at 877-241-4453. (I’m in the U. S. on Pacific Standard Time).

I hope you’ll like what you see, both at the Lite version at Search Commander, Inc. and at the Pro version at SEOAutomatic.com.

Next Tuesday night, you’ll have an opportunity to hear two usability experts talk about real-life examples and case studies, and perhaps even some live reviews, (if you’d like to submit your own  site) in the February SEMpdx event.

Instead of the usual Hot Seat panel focused on nothing but SEO, two new panelists will be showing their skills:

Matthew Brown, NY Times
As Director of Search Strategy for the New York Times Company since 2005, Matthew Brown continues to drive the research and technology side of the search marketing effort for the Times, the Boston Globe (Boston.com) and the International Herald Tribune.

Matthew is responsible for the architecture and execution of solutions that deliver a more engaged audience to these online properties.

Melissa Casburn, ISITE Design
With 12 years of experience as a web strategist, information architect, project manager, and instructional designer, Melissa can get a lot done in a day.

Comfortable in both corporate and agency environments, she helps much-loved companies bask in the glow by adding stickiness to their sites.

She’s good at spreading the love too, creating experiences that inform, connect, and empower users.

As the Director of User Experience for ISITE Design, she leads a team of web strategists, information architects and content strategists whose focus is helping clients create and protect their competitive advantage online.

Are you brave enough to have your site critiqued in front of others? Maybe you just like to see others squirm? Maybe you just want to enhance your own knowledge, and stop making the same mistakes on your own site.

Join members of  SEMpdx next Tuesday, February 10th, 2009, at Hotel DeLuxe for an eventful evening of SEO and user experience, and you can sign up to attend right here.

Believe it or not, the board of SEMpdx has been getting a number of emails asking us where to register for SearchFest 2009, coming up in March.

So, I figured I would take a minute to point out the SearchFest registration, as well as the entire SearchFest 2009 agenda, and a link to our sponsors.

This year’s event promises to be the best ever, with a lineup of speakers including:

• Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land
• Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
• Vanessa Fox, Nine by Blue
• Marshall Simmonds, New York Times
• Neil Patel, ACS SEO
• Riona MacNamara, Google
• Laura Lippay, Yahoo
• Matt McGee, Small Business SEM
• Greg Hartnett, Best of the Web

and many more…

I will be moderating two sessions myself, including SEO For WordPress, and SEO for Bloggers and copywriters.

The event will take place at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Oregon on March 10, 2009, so what are you waiting for? Go register now!

I can’t even begin to count the number of WordPress blogs that I’ve set up personally, much less count how many have been done by various members of our team.

We used to use an actual checklist, to ensure that everything was done the right way with consistency, and for optimal visibility in the search engines.

Now, the entire checklist has been converted to a free WordPress plugin and the entire setup process is pretty much automatic!

Literally dozens of hours have been spent doing the same repetitive and mundane tasks, ranging from changing default permalink structure to renaming the default category from “Uncategorized”.

It’s not that any of it is particularly difficult or technical, it’s just that it’s unnecessarily time-consuming.

Why do something manually if you can automate?

Our typical checklist for a new WP blog setup includes:

• Changing the default post category name from “Uncategorized”
• Changing the default blogroll category name from “Blogroll”
• Deleting the default “Hello World” post
• Deleting the default comment on the Hello World post
• Change permalink structure to custom setting recommended by Scott & others
• Setting the Main Blog Email for convenience
• Setting the Admin User’s Email for convenience
• Change the name of the default page that WordPress adds from “About”.
• Set that default page to the static front page of the blog if using WP as a CMS
• Addding and setting which page displaying the posts for convenience
• Changing the article feed to either summary or full text
• Removing all the blogroll links that are auto-installed by WordPress
• Changing the RSS widget to offer “no-follow” and “open in new window” options
• Changing the blogroll links to more easily be no-followed and the default to open in a new window

Additionally, through the use of various plug-ins there are ways to make WordPress far more search engine friendly and user-friendly, for creation of not only blogs, but entire websites.

Some things simply can’t be improved upon, and to this day I’ll probably always use either the All in one SEO or Headspace to rank higher, in the same way I’ll always use the XML Sitemap plug-in.

But using WordPress as a content management system requires a bit more finesse, and there are some great plug-ins that allow you to control what your users sees on your menus, and you can have a far better web presence than “just” a blog.

Being able to determine the order of your pages on the menu, or even whether they should appear on the menu at all was always a frustration, and has kept many people from using WordPress to create entire websites easily.

When I began looking for ways to control these options, I ultimately settled on several plug-ins that I really liked.

The first was Page Order, which easily allows you to determine the order of the pages that appear on your menu
The second was page link manager, which adds an admin panel to choose which pages appear in the site navigation.

And of course, the third was Post teaser, which made it far easier for the layperson to limit the number of characters that appeared on a category page, archive page, or on the index page of a blog for each post. It’s better for several reasons to have just a snippet of text, and a contextual link to the rest of the post.

Well now, this can all be accomplished with the use of a single Worpress plug-in, that I’m calling my WordPress Core Tweaks, and it will will continue to evolve regularly.

We use WordPress to build a lot of websites, not only because it’s so easy, but because it’s great for search engine optimization.

However, when I began using it to build full sites as opposed to just supplementing existing sites with blogs, I noticed a big shortcoming.

If you create your static pages, then whatever you name the page becomes the menu item, as well as the headline at the top of the page. Therefore, on the homepage we would be stuck with a headline that said “Home” rather than an appropriate and relevant phrase.

Also, for some reason, 99 out of 100 WordPress themes (including Kubrick) don’t include an H1 tag up there, but instead are defaulted to H2 tags.

That made it not only ugly for visitors, but also not well optimized for the search engines, since I firmly still believe that webpages need headlines.

Calling this solution “mine” might not be fair, since all I did was identify the problem… It was my programmer Heather that solved it by coming up with the following solution.

As a bonus, it not only solved the default H2 problem, but it gave us an instant answer for having the menu say one thing, while the page says another aa the headline.

How to Change the H1 Tag
In your theme’s page.php and single.php files, look whatever is inside your H2 tags. Just replace whatever is between them with the following code:

<h1><?php $thisPost = $post -> ID; if (get_post_meta($thisPost, changeH1, true) != ”) {
echo (get_post_meta($thisPost, changeH1, true));
} else {
the_title();
}
?>
</h1>

Instantly, your H2 tag is gone from your pages and posts, replaced by an H1 that matches the subject of the post or the name of the page. Bingo, bango bongo, done.

*note that in some cases, the theme’s style.css file will treat these differently, making the font too large for your taste. If that happens, just change it in the style sheet.

Now is where it gets REALLY good….
Suddenly, we have the ability to edit each H1 tag as we see fit. If we do nothing, then it will still just match what we’ve written in the subject of the post or used as the name of the page, but we enter a bit of “Custom field” information, we can make it say whatever we want.

Be sure to use “changeH1″ (with a lowercase c and an uppercase H) just like you placed in the code above, and then put the headline you want in the value area.

After you use it the first time, you’ll never have to remember it again either, because it will be available from the pulldown menu, so all you have to do is select it and write the headline that you want to use as the H1 tag on the page.

To see a similar modification, look no further than the top of this page, where you can see that my H tag is different than the page title, nut I’ve also left in the behavior that makes the H1 a link – in this case, to itself.

Again, I have to thank my programmer Heather Barger, and if this all seems too complex, she’s laid it out nicely here with step by step WordPress H1 hack instructions.

Why am I giving away this secret now?

Well first, after using it for nearly two years, I doubt it’s much of a secret anymore,  and although I’ve still not read it elsewhere, I keep expecting to. If you have a link t osomeone else that’s posted it previously, please leave it as a comment here.

Second, because I’ve had this post in my drafts for almnost a year, and I already redi the screen shots once. Now with Wprdpress 2.7 out, I’m not doing them again, so I figured it was time to post it. !

Third, and more importantly,  I’m still trying to work on improving my Karma after my fiasco with Peak Studios from earlier in the month.  Maybe I can somehow overshadow the embarrassment of that voicemail I left…

Finally, because it’s the holidays, and I’m in the spirit of giving.

I’d like to wish all of you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, a Joyus Kwanza, or just a gool old fashioned Happy New Year… Choose whatever least offends you.

If you’ve ever imported large quantities of URLs into a spreadsheet, or even copy/pasted just a few rows, one of the things that you’ve probably disliked is the fact that those URLs are not “live”.

In fact, in order to actually visit those URLs as needed, you have to copy/paste each one of them into the browser address bar, which takes extra time.

2011 Update – Watch this!

You may have engaged in the ridiculous process of double clicking into each cell and then pressing the enter key. This moves your cursor down the spread sheet line after line, making each URL miraculously “live”. I’ve even had my 11 year old son do this for hundreds of rows before.

You would THINK that Microsoft would be “smart” enough to make these URLs immediately live upon entry, but sadly; that’s not the case. Even with http:// before the URL, Excel simply cannot understand that it should be a link.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation at the Oregon Computer Consultants Association meeting, where I was reviewing some of the things I hate about office 2007, and the Excel Queen Karen Westermann seemed to think this would be an easy problem to solve.

Well apparently, it wasn’t quite as easy as she thought it would be. Since she’s the Queen though, she did come up with a solution, so here’s a spreadsheet for this miserable task that I can share with you all.

The Make my links live tool is available now, complete with directions here. My son doesn’t like it though, since he’s now out of a job…