One of the things I like most about the WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast is that once you have the settings tweaked the way you want them, you can export, then import them elsewhere.

At Pubcon last month, I gave my presentation on exactly how I like to use that plugin,  and why I make the choices I do. As I explained, not every site is the same, and there are choices to be made.

To do a nearly perfect WordPress setup, we use our own Core Tweaks plugin first (based on my own WordPress checklist and then use Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin to take care of the rest.

Here’s a copy of the slides, and also, here’s a direct link to download my own recommended settings file to save you time. Note that you SHOULD go to the setting page to fine tune a little for your site, like adding your site name, etc. Any questions?

Almost two years ago at SMX Advanced 2007 I had a short talk with Matt Cutts about the nofollow tag being “okay to use”, and my last statement was something like this:

“So there’s really no “over optimization” penalty or anything considered “evil” about manipulating page rank exactly as you wish? Even if it’s just for funneling the link juice exactly where you want?

Matt told me that, yes it was “okay”, and he even agreed with me that it was one of the last available “Advanced SEO tactics”, and at the time, I commented here about his answer.

In 2008, there were discussions all over the web about it’s use, and in June of that year, I recommended using nofollow in my article “Further Beyond the top 10 SEO factors”

If you still don’t know how Google PageRank and their passing of “link juice” works, then this post may not make much sense to you. However, assuming that you DO understand the process, here are a couple of facts I’ve been considering.

• Every webpage can “pass along” approximately 86% of its available page rank through links on that page.
• The less links there are on a page, the more link juice there is available to pass on to each of the other links.
• Adding rel=nofollow to a link means Google stops passing PageRank to that link
• Other links that ARE followed, therefore get more “juice”
• Controlling the flow of your link juice helps your site and can help others you might link to

Assuming you buy into this whole “no follow” thing, (which I do wholeheartedly), then the logical recommendation made by most advanced search engine marketers is to ensure that ALL unimportant links on a page are no followed.

Generally, these are thinks like your privacy policy, security information, contact pages, customer / client logins, shopping cart “buy” buttons, and other irrelevant text phrases.

What If?
Taking this a step further, let’s say you have a page that’s a Google PR2, and it’s been around for years. If you include your header, your footer and your menu, lets assume you have 20 links on that page.

If 86 percent of that PageRank 2 is passed along to those 20 links, that doesn’t leave very much to go towards the two or three “important” links that you might have in your body text, does it?

However, suppose you were to nofollow almost everything? i’m talking about all the links in the header, all the links in the footer, and all of your navigation too. What if you limit your “followed” links to just a couple in the body text? Wouldn’t you then effectively be getting the maximum benefit out of that page? In essence, aren’t you then “juicing” every last drop of PR?

Jumping ahead almost 2 full years , the nofollow tag has become the subject of many longwinded discussions covering everything from “What is the purpose of the nofollow tag in the first place?” to whether its use is advantageous or not. My short answers?

It was originally conceived to combat pointless blog comment spam, yes it is very useful to sculpt your PageRank.

NoFollowize WordPress
In the WordPress community there have been various no follow and dofollow plug-ins, and all were developed with the the sole intention of giving the blog owner more control over where they pour their juice. Unfortunately, none of them really offered the sort of “total control” I was after.

Rather than just “dofollowing” various comments, it would be really cool if I could have this control over every link on any page selectively.

It’s this line of thought that led to the development of the ultimate no follow plug-in for WordPress, which will be available for testing anytime now.

Here’s a screenshot of the new panel appearing on every edit page.

At this point, we’re in final testing, and I’m trying to decide on the name – either NoFollowizer or Link Juicer. Can you cast a vote here?

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.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve become quite dependent upon WordPress because of the versatility of this open source management system, allowing us to do nearly anything we can imagine.

In many cases WordPress can be a good supplement to existing website, allowing users to easily add and manage search engine friendly content without the need of the Web designer.

In other cases, entire project developments can be done in WordPress, allowing the site to be managed well by non-technical users, with all of the “SEO” aspects happening in the background.

In addition to recommending WordPress for clients, we’ve built dozens of our own affiliate websites on the platform, and have even launched a separate business, matching WordPress themes to the look and feel of existing sites.

Regardless of what the purpose of the WordPress site is going to be, or what particular plug-ins may help the owner meet those needs, there are some fundamental steps that need to be taken regarding WordPress, and I’ve outlined them for you here.

1. Host on your own domain
The free version of WordPress that’s hosted at WordPress.com is fine for familiarizing yourself with the functionality of writing posts and trying it out, but I recommend never using it for anything permanent. Here are just a few of the reasons…

On WordPress.com hosted sites, you cannot use any plugins, since you have no FTP access. That means that you can’t use any of the cool things that have been developed, or any of the things that will be developed next.

Even though you own the content, you can’t monetize the site with ads, since it’s against WordPress rules.

Most important of all, since you don’t own the domain, if you one day decide that you’d like to host on your own domain, you can’t 301 redirect all of your old URL’s to your new location.

After you install WordPress -

2. Change the Admin Password -
Change your administrator password immediately after installation. Sometimes things are just flaky, and the admin email doesn’t arrive for hours, and in some cases, it never arrives.

I’ve also seen servers where the “lost / change password” function doesn’t work either. There is no way you’re ever going to remember that autgenerated password, so as soon as you see the splash screen showing you a successful install and the password, log right in and change it to a familiar and
secure one that you can remember.

3. Change your permalink structure
Search engines have gotten much better about crawling dynamic URL’s but it’s my belief that it’s still slightly beneficial to have keywords in them.

Not to mention that search engines are far less important than actual humans, aren’t they? Let’s face it – People are more likely to share and click on links that have decent URL’s, where they can tell what the item is about. For example, which of these two URL’s would attract your interest?

http://www.domain.com/free-superbowl-tickets or
http://www.domain.com/?p=32 ?

There are many options for permalinks, but my choice is this…
%category%/title%

Change by going to options – permalinks – and paste that code into the bottom line. If you get a message telling you that you need to update your HT access, then you should either do that manually, or simply change the permissions (CHMOD) for your .htaccess file so it’s writable.

If for some reason your posts don’t work after that just returned to the options section and recheck the default box, putting it all back to normal while you troubleshoot.

4. Make your display decisions –
If you’re using WordPress as a static site, then you need to decide whether you want to display your most recent articles (posts) on the homepage, or you want to have a separate homepage, and display your blog posts elsewhere. These options are chosen in WordPress admin at the settings – reading menu.

By default the homepage will show your latest posts, but if you prefer, you can choose to select a static page as your homepage, and a different page to show your posts.

Of course if you choose this latter option then you’ll first need to go create a new page as “Home”, and probably create a “news and articles” page as well, for the blog posts. You can also use the existing About page that comes added by default, but if you do that, I recommend you change the permalink for it as well.

5. Edit your title tag preferences –
(THIS IS THEME SPECIFIC)
By default, the WordPress titles are sort of weird. To better optimize them, here’s my solution. Just replace the <title> calls in header.php of your theme with the following code…

<title>< ?php if ( is_single() ) { ?>< ?php } ?>< ?php wp_title(”); ?> < ?php if (is_home()) { ?>< ?php } else { ?> | < ?php } ?> < ?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> </title>

This does a couple of things -
a. It places the individual post title at the beginning of the tag

b. It adds a “pipe” character | , or you might prefer to use a dash instead, but either one will have the desired effect of separating the title of the post from the title of the blog.

c. It gets rid of the >>blog archive >> that ends up going into many of the WordPress URLs

6. Change or delete “Hello World” post, permalink, and comment –
The first post that is installed by default for you is called “Hello World”. If you do a search on Google for “Hello World” or “Welcome to WordPress, this is your first post” and you’ll see how many people don’t even do that first part.

I also recommend changing the permalink to that post, which otherwise, will forever read /hello-world no matter WHAT the actual post title gets changed to. This is easily done on the right of the edit post screen.

7. Change “Uncategorized” category & permalink
By default, the name AND permalink to the first category is “uncategorized”, so you want to change that, by going to Manage > Categories in the admin panel. Be sure to choose a good master category name that will cover your bases for the occasional post you accidentally leave uncategorized, since this will become the default.

You’ll also want to be certain to edit the permalink at the same time, since that category is going to become a part of the URL.

8. Change “About” page title & Permalink
Depending on how you use static pages in your blog, this may not be necessary, but for me, it can’t be overlooked. Since I frequently use WordPress for static sites, the first thing I dio is go to the edit > pages – and change the title of “About” to Home, and make it the home page. Unless I forever want the permalink to be, /about I change that at the same time to home.

9. Update your ping list
Every time a new page or post is added, WordPress can notify multiple services that you have new content. Doing so will be spidered and visited more frequently improving your rankings. These options can be found in the Admin section, by going to settings > writing, and scrolling to the bottom.

Instead of using just the one service provided by default, (Pingomatic), I prefer to paste about 100 known and functional ping sites in the list, and I’ve made my entire WordPress big ping list available

10. Install your first plugin – BACKUP
This takes under 60 seconds, and can potentially save you a lot of misery. After the blog is going, I like to use the WordPress automatic backup plug-in, that will email your entire database to you on a regular basis, and even keep a copy on the server too – Download it here

Some people may argue that blocking or nofollowing your monthly archives (or even your category archives) belongs on this list,  but I think those choices are to be made on an individual basis, and chose not to include them on this list. Personally, I have not blocked either one on my blog, and Google seems to be figuring it out just fine.

It’s only after all these steps above are done that I’s recommend beginning to make your plugin choices and installing them.  Since there are literally hundreds of plugins that are rock solid, and will make WordPress do amazing things, I’m not going to get into them here.

I will say though, that If you want your site to be found, and you want it to perform well, then you need to do some reading. Talented developers all over the world are creating little miracle plug-ins every day, and you should make your choices wisely, and do lots of homework…

I’m pulling the trigger on something I haven’t had the guts to do before, but it’s long overdue. After nearly 3 years, I’m changing the permalink structure on my blog, although it’s not for the reasons you might think.

Besides search engine visibility, the more realistic answer is simple “user-friendliness”. People really aren’t that much different than search engine spiders when it comes to determining the relevancy of a link.

Another reason is that someone sent me an e-mail recently asking me if I’m such an expert, then why aren’t my own URL’s optimized for best performance?”

Well that person had a good point, and my answer was that I didn’t know any better when I first set it up, and I’ve just been too busy/lazy to change them, and afraid of even the temporary ranking drops that go along with changing URLs.

As more and more users look at the URLs in their browser status bar before they click, having keywords in your URLs is going to improve click-throughs.

For example, a while ago I wrote a blog post called “Things to hate about office 2007” and I needed to send someone a link to it.

When I pasted the URL I saw this – http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/archives/462 and that’s just not very compelling or informative. However, once I changed my permalinks, it looked like this – http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/microsoft/things-to-hate-about-office-2007/

“Are you crazy?” you might be asking yourself… “Doesn’t changing your URL’s or permalinks create 404 errors?”

Well yes it does, but not if you do 301 redirects.

“Are you even more crazy?” you might be thinking… “Isn’t doing hundreds or thousands of 301 redirects a complete pain in the neck?”

Well, yes it HAS been in the past, but there’s a cool WordPress plugin called Deans Permalinks Migration that made the process so easy it’s hard to believe.

With 301 redirects in place for all of my old URL’s, there’s really no risk of permanently losing search visibility, since all of my indexed URLs will still work, all of my inbound links will still work, and finally, the visible Google PageRank should flow to the new pages I’ve created with the next update.

The downside is of course that all the pages will show as a PR0 until at least the next update, and possibly two, but since we can’t sell links anymore, who really cares?

The other downside is that traffic and rankings will likely drop, but only temporarily. Exactly WHY this happens is in my opinion, on of Google’s shortcomings, but it does. Show me a domain that changes URL’s, but loses no rankings temporarily, and Ill call it a fluke. Things always drop.

That said, with a properly implemented 301 strategy, ALL of your rankings should (and will) return just as strong as ever, provided you don’t have other radical changes that would negatively affect visibility.

Check out the plug-in, and if you want to see how easy it is to use, I’ve added a 3 minute video –

I came across a WordPress plug-in called FAQ-Tastic , which allows users to submit questions to your website, and I’ve added it here.

You can create categories of questions, and even have different forms for people to ask questions about different subjects, with no apparent limit.

Upon submitting those questions, they receive an e-mail with your customized message, and view as the administrator of the blog receive an e-mail as well, notifying you that there are new questions to be answered.

Once you answer the question, they receive an e-mail thanking them, and providing them with a link to the new page where the question has been answered.

The free version works very well, but there are a couple of issues:

1. The page name is incredibly long. The title tag and URL created automatically are extremely cumbersome. There appears to be an interface for shortening the title and URL, but when I do that it still doesn’t work.

2. If you prefer to use one submission form for all your question categories, there’s no way (that I can tell) to change it to a different category. Therefore, it’s necessary to make individual submission areas for each type of question. It’s a snap, though.

Overall it’s a fantastic plug-in, highly useful and highly recommended.

Now, luckily for me, I happen to have a semi-personal connection with the webmaster of the developer, and through our e-mail communications, and he offered me a sneak peek at their “Pro Version”, and I have to tell you it’s quite cool

The first thing I noticed about the Pro version was that I could now change the question group of a submitted question, so that eliminates the need for me to have multiple submission forms. I just have to put in one form for all questions, and then assigned to a group when I answer. Nice.

The second thing I noticed was the addition of an option to add Adsense code, or any other code I might want universally to every new page created.

The third thing I noticed, that was a huge improvement was the ability to edit my URL and title tag upon approval of the question.

The only criticism I have of the paid version is that the question approval interface doesn’t seem to work in Firefox. Before reporting the bug, I looked at it in Internet Explorer 7, where it looked just fine.

This free plug-in gets a big thumbs up, and when the paid version comes out, you can bet I’ll be an affiliate, because it really rocks.

People engaged in serious online marketing have long been taking advantage of WordPress as a nearly perfect website platform to build and maintain websites for some time now.  Combined with cutting edge SEO plugins, it’s unstoppable, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, others engaged in serious PPC  testing have been taking advantage of Google’s Website Optimizer too.  Accessible right from your Adwords console, you can use it to split test your headlines, text and images for your landing pages.

Thanks to some industrious programmers, there is a plug-in available for WordPress that integrates Google Website Optimizer right into the WordPress admin control panel.

Although it came out this past spring, we really hadn’t played much with implementation until just recently, after reading about it in a Stomper forum thread, and it’s pretty impressive.  Unlike many of the cutting-edge plug-ins lately,  they’ve even offered a complete step-by-step guide for implementation.

The plug-in was developed by Content Robot in a cooperative effort between Future Now  who also has some amazing free  resources for learning Google website optimizer

Kudos, and thank you! – This stuff just keeps getting cooler and easier doesn’t it?