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?

*Last updated April 2012* – This post has been several years in the making, because since 2007, as fast as I’ve written things down in the notes, new WordPress plugins keep getting built and I’d have to scratch them out.

Sometimes we build plugins we need ourselves, as was the case with my desire to have a WordPress plugin that sets everything up with one click, but usually someone has built a solution to our needs.

There are always new ideas though, so rather than keep this ever-evolving document on my hard drive, I’ve decided to post it here in the hopes that either someone will develop plugins that do these things, or someone will comment and steer me in the direction of one that already exists.

In no particular order below, here are a few issues I’d like to see turned into WordPress plugins. If you know of any “answers” for these,  (either free or paid), please leave a comment! Likewise, if you have plugin ideas too, please feel free.

As solutions are found, I’ll mark these things solved and move them to the bottom, beginning with the first one for which I finally found a plugin this spring – Very cool.

This page will change over time, and as things are  solved, I’ll move them to the bottom with a link.

1. Post by email to a specific category

E-mailing a post to a dedicated e-mail address that you set up for WordPress works on most servers, but there is no way to specify a category when you’re submitting.

How hard could it be to make a plugin that causes e-mailed posts to go with specific category or multiple categories. Right now, the subject line becomes the title though, so it might be sketchy.

For now, the only option is to log in later and manually categorize a post. As long as WordPress’s 301 function is working correctly, you shouldn’t have any problems .

I wonder how hard it would be to be able to put the article title in the post of the subject line, followed by a bracket or other character signifying the category?

2. Scheduler for Automatic WordPress updates

WordPress updates are anything but automatic. Sure they’re automatic once you start pressing buttons and as you continue to make choices, and that FAR cry from how they used to be, but how much harder would it be to have admin page that lets you make your upgrade choices then by puts them on a scheduled Cron job? Why should someone have to work several hours once a month to update a couple hundred sites?

Remove the date snippet from the Google Description. By default, when it displays search results Google will (often) place the post date in front of the description tag, which in many cases can signify an outdated page affecting your click through rate.

Manually removing the date from your snippet isn’t hard, and there are several tutorials showing how it’s done, so why can’t someone just build this into a plugin?

Note – When we tried to make this an option in our Core Tweaks plugin, I was told that it was going to be “theme specific” and would likely cause us more support problems than it was worth. Can someone solve this issue With “hooks”? I’m not a programmer, but this sure doesn’t sound like an insurmountable obstacle to me.

3. Disable Pingback Notification

If you have a list of your pingbacks (essentially, “known backlinks”) then you can ensure that they not only get indexed, but that they stay that way.

This should be a simple hack.  We need the list of pingback URL’s to accumulate, but do NOT want to send a email notification to the site admin of the fact that the pingback has occurred, and WP doesn’t offer the option.

You can’t just turn off comments, because they can’t miss a “real” comment, so the only option in WordPress  is to completely disallow trackbacks.

Without going into the aspect of what someone would DO with a list of URLs that links back, then his one seems easy.

4. “My Reviews” Plugin

A WP plugin that can automatically retrieve reviews based on your business name and address, then & parses that into an RSS feed you can configure as a widget.

The widget could be highly configurable, offering readers a feed OF your reviews at different places like Yelp or Google Places, and could also have optional links for readers to LEAVE your reviews there at the site.

Most review sites don’t offer your businesses review  feeds, so this might mean some sort of scraper action, I’m not sure. Naturally an admin panel would be needed too, that allows you to select which ones you’ll display.

The links could be configured to open in new windows or nofollow, and presumably this plugin would someday incorporate whatever the equivalent rel=”me” tag will be for businesses will be.  Just brainstorming here…  Maybe somethign is already in the works by Get Listed ?

5. Small Business Perfection

A pretty good WP plugin for gathering and displaying testimonials came out this year, and so did a couple of others for adding reviews, and there are still others for adding microdata to the reviews (like showing stars and review counts in the SERPS) and still others (like our own Core Tweaks) that add a new contact page or drop in a Google Map.

I’m not listing any of them here, because although it’s possible to  patch together an all encompassing solution with three or four different plugins, but it’s really a pain in the ass. Not all are free, and the various support needs are tedious.

We need a thorough single plugin with an admin page for all business info and testimonial collection, with clearly defined short codes for everything.  Trust me, there are a ton of products out there, but none of them offer all of these things in one well supported plugin at any price.

Someone WILL do this, and I’ll buy it when they do…

Issues listed below here have been “solved” and my explanation follows:

The items listed below here have been “solved” as far as I’m concerned, and I look forward to watching this page grow and change.

*Disclaimer – In some cases there may be more than one solution, some free, some paid, and if there’s a paid option with an affiliate program, I’d be an idiot not  to use it.

Manage & Delete page revisions

When working on a new website, not to mention frequently updating an existing site, the number of page revisions that WordPress saves is simply astounding.

These constant revisions are nice in theory, but can bloat your installation badly, slow up your website, and affect your SEO, not to mention the speed and functionality of some other plugins or backup processes.

How hard can it be to allow for the easy deletion of these revisions? Since they can be manually culled from the database, some sort of plugin should be possible.

We would simply need individual checkboxes on each page or post edit screen, along with a check all box, and a default settings page allowing you to save a maximum of X revisions.

Solved With:
WP Optimize is an awesome free plugin hosted at the WP repository, and it was was well worthy of our donation dollars.

There’s something unnerving about knowing that your web host likely only keep seven days of backup. While the WordPress database backup plugin is great, it does absolutely nothing for your themes, images, uploads folder, and so on.

The perfect plugin that would solve this problem would be something that runs on a schedule, and once a day (or week or month etc.) it will not only make a copy of your database, but of your theme files and everything else that’s important, and either send it to you by e-mail, or upload to another Web server. This really shouldn’t be so difficult…

Solved With:
There is no better product I’ve found than the Volcanic WordPress Backup plugin. It’s completely free, and instead of e-mailing it to you, it will integrate with your Amazon S3 simple storage. Completely amazing, and nicely done. We back up over 150 WordPress sites weekly, then each month it automatically deletes three of the four keeping a year of backups. It’s all on autopilot, all free (aside from Amazon Storage) and easy to restore, too!

Any other plugins you’d like to see developed?

If you use WordPress to manage a website, thanks to their auto-save feature, and the fact that it stores every revision you ever make, the database can grow quite large.

In turn, I can tell you from experience, that someday, when you least expect it and can least afford it, your large database filled with old junk you don’t need will become corrupted or broken, leading to eventual backup, restore, or changing hosts, or some other problem. Trust me, it will happen.

Because the repair of a corrupted database can get SO time consuming and expensive, I highly recommend you take no chances, and keep your database under control.

The video below is just a 2 minute look at a free plugin called WP Optimize that we’re beginning to use pretty much universally.

It you use it, it could save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars, not to mention downtime and headaches, so you can even afford to make a donation to them like I did!

Here’s a very quick video that I made (under two minutes) showing what it does –

There is something wrong the widget behavior when I log into a few sites, but ONLY with my own login credentials, and the drag and drop features don’t seem to work.

Not only is drag and drop disabled, but there is a completely different interface for each and every widget, forcing me to manually choose the location of the widget I want to edit, and it happens no matter what browser or computer I log in from.

Ever seen this before?

Once I hit edit, these are the sort of options I see…

My programmer thought I was insane, because she could not see anything wrong at all, and it wasn’t until I logged in as her that I realized the problem was just with my own username.

This is happening on three or four different sites, and in the video below, you can plainly see what’s going on. Does anyone know why? If I find an answer I’ll post it here, but hopefully, someone else can steer me in the right direction…

I’m really looking forward to giving this year’s Pubcon presentations, not only because I’m heading to Las Vegas, November 8-12 for the longest running internet marketing conference, but because in both sessions, I get to speak about things that I have a strong passion for.

This year I’ll be speaking in two sessions, the first one is going to be called Tweaking WordPress and Installations
and it will be on Tuesday, November 9, at 1:30 PM in Salon E.

The Wednesday session is going to be about Web hosting and SEO, and it’s also in the same room at the same time the next day – Wednesday, 1:30pm in Salon E.

WordPress SEO and Installation
For the session on WordPress, most of my slides will cover some very efficient plugins, while one of the other speakers will be making the anti-plugin case for why you should hardcode some of those same functions into the theme.

It should be interesting, and these presentations are going to be a little shorter – We cut to 10 minutes max, so there will be plenty of time for Q&A with a live and local WordPress installation running on the screen, where each of us has already uploaded our preferred plug-ins and themes.

Web Hosting & SEO
In the web hosting slides, I’ll be touching briefly on some really fast troubleshooting tips for performance, buy the rest of my hosting presentation will focus on malware; The identification, the removal, dealing with Google webmaster tools, and finally giving some thoughts on preventing reinfection.

It’s a lot to cram into 14 minutes, but anyone who’s heard me speak knows that I talk pretty fast – Also, this year I’ve learned a lot after dealing with some nasty hacks and viruses, and can really offer some timesaving tips dealing with this stuff.

Thursday LunchTable
The schedule was released for the Pubcon 2011 Lunch Schedules , and I’m going to be hosting the WordPress table on Thursday, so if you have any questions or want to talk WordPress, I hope you’ll come by.

Pubcon Poker Tournament
I’m also happy to announce that SEO Automatic is going to be one of the co-sponsors of the fourth annual Purpose Inc Poker Tournament, and this year it will be at the Mirage, Tuesday November 09, 2010.

It’s only going to be a $100 entry fee this year, and he promises better organization than ever. Ill be there, and if you want to attend, Registration opens tonight at 8PM PST.

My Powerpoint Slides

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)

I accidentally came upon another way that WordPress isn’t working quite right, so I made a quick 2 minute video.

Over at SEO Automatic, I had created a page long ago to use for a new feature, my Automatic SEO Tip of the Week but I never made it live because I didn’t yet have enough content.

This morning, after I completed several weeks worth of content, and we had the sign up form tested and working, I was ready to make it live, but I had forgotten about the old one, and I created a new page.

Here’s a quick 2 minute video showing what I found..

Because the URL was already in use as a draft, WordPress appended a -2 to the permalink, and I didn’t notice until after it was live.

I thought it was ugly, so after deleting the original draft, I edited the permalink to remove the unwanted two characters.

What did I find? Yep, you guessed it… the old page name was now a 404 error. Interestingly, the “thank you page” after sign up DID codrrectly 301, so… go figure!

anyway, I manually added a 301 redirect, and then promptly installed this plugin, to manage things easier inside of the WordPress admin. I know this used to work fine, and I wish they’d stop breaking things…

I love WordPress, I really do, but i just screwed up a site by changing a bunch of permalinks to 302′s.

Worse, WP won’t allow me to change it back without digging into the database, so I effectively rendered my child page permalinks (URLs) useless.

In this short video I’ll show you exactly what not to do -( besides assume that WordPress will work the way it’s supposed to).

I’ve written about WP hurting search rankings before,  and while changing the LAST part of a permalink does now seem to 301 correctly,  in this case, changing the permalink of a parent page causes a 302  temporary redirect of all the child pages.

This, of course, kills your PageRank and effectively removes any inbound link equity that those pages may have obtained.  Nice, huh?

*Update 12/15 – We are now using this redirection plugin on all new or upgraded WP installations until they fix it…

I’ll bet you $1000 that if we took an existing and well established default site installation today, and first upgraded it to WP 2.82, then we set WP up correctly with our chosen SEO plug-ins, correct permalinks, etc. that we would LOSE rankings in the search engines within 90 days.

Why?
Because all of the default URLs will 302 to the new pages, instead of 301 redirect, and all of the inbound link equity and indexed pages would disappear. This means rankings would drop.

Why?
Because someone at WordPress actually made the conscious decision to change the CORRECT server response, a 301, into the WRONG one, a 302 with the latest release, 2.82. This doesn’t “accidentally” happen, someone forced a change!

Why?
That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?

There are probably hundreds of websites that I’m sure are already being affected by this, . All it takes is for them to have changed permalinks or once they were into a 2.82 environment, and it’s “game over” after Google gets done with them, isn’t it?

There are also probably dozens or even hundreds of well-meaning development firms that are “fixing” client blogs TODAY, and in reality they may actually be doing them harm.

If you didn’t see my first post, with a short video, you might want to check it out, but the bottom line is that there’s a right way to do a redirect, that retains rankings, inbound link value, page rank etc. and there’s a wrong way, and this is wrong.

When WordPress 2.82 came out, we did more than our share of quick upgrades because it came out so quickly after 2.81.

It was after we’d done a few of them that @johnandrews first mentioned that he’d seen a problem, and after investigating a little further I posted about it, and resigned myself to wait for the fix.

Now however, it’s been two weeks, and we’re doing new installations with 2.81, and that’s just dumb.

Then I got a phone call yesterday, where someone had a WordPress site that had been around for 18 months and was older, 2.5, but was just a default installation.

Then a couple of weeks ago, they upgraded to 2.82 and he’s already seeing a loss in traffic.

I saw that his pages in the index were still the default WP url structure, even though his permalinks.

I also saw that the old urls were now 302 redirecting to the new. Not good, huh?

His WP site had been around for 18 months, he has links, traffic, PageRank and rankings. if someone doesn’t fix this, (Maybe redo the thing in 2.81?) who knows what might happen!

What I really can’t understand is why WordPress hasn’t fixed it, and why nobody in the larger community of WordPress & SEO seems to be talking about it yet.

I find it hard to believe nobody’s noticed, but maybe not?

Anyone want to take the bet?

In WordPress, the traditional behavior of the past few months has been that if you edit the Permalink of a page or post, the old URL will generate a 301 (permanent) redirect to the new URL.

This action follows SEO best practices, and in general it follows anyone’s common sense. It tells search engines that the page has been permanently moved, and it also retains the value of any incoming links that may have accumulated for that URL

However, in WordPress 2.82, something seems to have gone wacky, and those actions are no longer happening.

This first came to my attention when I saw a Tweet by johnandrews saying that he was seeing that the old URL was remaining, and the new URL then 302 redirected to the old one.

He and I chatted a bit about it briefly, so this morning I decided to do a quick test for myself, and went to the one and only 2.82 installation that we have, and I changed the Permalink of the post.

While I did not see the old url remaining as John reported, when running the old URL or the new URL through either of these two server response checkers, I was shown a 302 redirect instead of a 301 and I also noticed that the trailing slash is no longer added.

So, I guess the the moral of the story here is don’t change any URLs if you’re running WordPress 2.82 – and changing URL’s really isn’t all that desirable anyway.

This leaves me to wonder what if editing the entire permalink structure on a new WP 2.82 installation might not be wacky too?

*** Update – Yes, it seems that changing the site permalink structure DOES ALSO generate a 302 from the old URL to the new. What a colossal screwup!

*** Update October 2009 –
Now with a WordPress 2.85 upgrade, I’m seeing 404 errors after changing a URL, so it’s even worse! Unbelievable.

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.