The 42nd Estate » Blogging Tips

How To: Migrate Thesis SEO values to Hybrid SEO values

Adam Pieniazek — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:52:01 +0000

Having recently moved my personal blog from the Thesis theme to the Hybrid theme, I had to also migrate over a bunch of SEO values from the Thesis data set to the Hybrid set. It all went rather smoothly and only took a few minutes. Here’s how to move your Thesis post meta values over to Hybrid.

Since these steps are similar to moving All in One SEO values to Thesis SEO values, please refer back to that post for detailed instructions on backing up your database and accessing the database.

Backup your database

Before making any huge changes to your database, you should always back it up first.

Access MySQL

There are a multitude of ways to access MySQL, the two most common being phpMyAdmin and the good ol’ command line. Whichever way you choose, you’ll need to get to your database and run a SQL query.

Running the SQL Query

If we’ve lost you up to this point, please do refer back to our super detailed post on changing database values. Once you get to the section titled ‘Copy, Paste, Go!’, come back here and grab the below query code.

Otherwise, if you’ve been following along simply grab the below code and run it.

insert wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value)
select post_id, 'Title', meta_value
from wp_postmeta where meta_key in ('thesis_title');

insert wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value)
select post_id, 'Description', meta_value
from wp_postmeta where meta_key in ('thesis_description');

insert wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value)
select post_id, 'Keywords', meta_value
from wp_postmeta where meta_key in ('thesis_keywords');

insert wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value)
select post_id, 'Thumbnail', meta_value
from wp_postmeta where meta_key in ('thesis_post_image');

Line by line, this code will insert into each posts meta values a Title, Description, Keywords, and thumbnail URL, using your values from Thesis.

After each set, you should see a message noting how many records were changed:

Query OK, 66 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Records: 66 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

Addendum: Deleting Thesis database values

After migrating over your meta values to Hybrid, there’s no need to keep the old Thesis meta values cluttering up your database. After checking to make sure the values transferred over correctly, run this command to wipe the database clean:

delete from wp_postmeta where meta_key = 'thesis_title';
delete from wp_postmeta where meta_key = 'thesis_description';
delete from wp_postmeta where meta_key = 'thesis_keywords';
delete from wp_postmeta where meta_key = 'thesis_post_image';

WordPress 2.9 Timezone and Scheduled Posts Missed Fixes

Adam Pieniazek — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:41:33 +0000

On sites running WordPress 2.9, we’ve noticed a small bug appear on a few installations. After the upgrade it appears the timezone settings get misconfigured AND scheduled posts don’t publish on time. If the timezone was manually set (e.g. using UTC +/-), after the upgrade it would reset to a value one lower/higher and on certain server configurations scheduled posts simply wouldn’t publish.

There were a few other bugs, such as Josh Gans’ personal pet peeve, square buttons in the administration panels. The beta for WordPress 2.9.1 is already out but if you can’t wait a day or two, keep reading for fixes to the timezone and scheduled posts bugs.

Timezone Fix

In this blog we’re in the UTC -5 timezone [Eastern Standard Time], but after the upgrade the timezone was listed as UTC -4, throwing off the local time by one hour.

The fix for the timezone is easy, go into Settings –> General –> Timezone and choose a city that’s in the same timezone as you rather than using a manual offset. Yes Bostonians, that means you’ll have to swallow a small bit of pride and choose New York as your timezone.

On some WP 2.9 installs, this quick fix took care of scheduled posts not publishing. On others, we had to take a few extra steps.

Scheduled Posts Missed Fix

Scheduled posts are a great feature of WordPress, allowing you to write articles in advance and set them to publish automatically. Unfortunately, in WordPress 2.9 a small change in the cron code (cron is the process which publishes your posts for you, it’s a part of your Unix based server, not WordPress) causes scheduled posts to fail on some setups.

Important Note: If you’re hosted by The 42nd Estate, you should not experience this bug. If you do, please let us know!

The above timezone fix may also fix your scheduled posts error (it did on this install of wordpress), but if you’re on a very slow shared server or missing certain functions cron.php requires, it may not. If you’re scheduled posts are still not working after re-adjusting the timezones you’ll have to make a minor tweak to a core WordPress file to get scheduled posts working.

In your wp-includes folder, open up cron.php. On line 229 (or around there), you’ll see the below line:

$cron_url = get_option( 'siteurl' ) . '/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron';
        wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array('timeout' => 0.01, 'blocking' => false, 'sslverify' => apply_filters('https_local_ssl_verify', true)) );

Change it to:

$cron_url = get_option( 'siteurl' ) . '/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron';
        wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array('timeout' => 5, 'blocking' => false, 'sslverify' => apply_filters('https_local_ssl_verify', true)) );

Basically, we changed the timeout setting to a larger number. From reading through some of the Trac tickets out there, the cause may be due to a slow server, improperly configured server, or a bug in Curl. You can change the 5 to anything above 1, it seems some servers would round .01 down to zero, in effect causing an infinite loop that never got resolved.

WordPress 2.9.1

The awesome WordPress team is already hard at work cranking out version 2.9.1 that’ll fix these issues and a few other errors. If you have a few minutes please download and install the 2.9.1 beta to help the WordPress team debug the latest release and confirm that any issues from 2.9 are resolved.

Where to Find Batch Plugin Update in WordPress 2.9

Adam Pieniazek — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:41:53 +0000

WordPress 2.9 was released today and features a ton of additions. Amongst the new features and fixes:

Batch Plugin updates (a-w-e-s-o-m-e)
Built-in Image Editor
oEmbed support
Trash can (awesome – prevent accidents)
Post Thumbnails (awesome)
Sidebar Descriptions
Better Custom Post Type API integration

and a bunch more features.

One feature that I struggled using was the Batch Plugin Updater. Not because it’s hard to use (it’s quite the opposite), but because I couldn’t find it! Turns out the batch plugin updater is tucked in under Tools –> Upgrade.

Personally, I feel a more intuitive spot would be right on the plugins page, perhaps in the Updates Available tab or as a bulk option in the existing bulk options drop down menu, but that’s a minor quibble with an awesome feature that’ll save time for everyone using WordPress 2.9.

Five Free Tools to Check if Your Site is Up

Adam Pieniazek — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:32:51 +0000

So, you’ve designed and developed a great site that visitors find extremely useful and that search engines love to crawl. You no have no worries, right?

Wrong!

A great site that is search engine friendly and more importantly useful to your visitors serves no purpose if the server struggles and doesn’t keep the site up consistently and reliably. Monitoring your sites for uptime is a crucial aspect of running a successful web-site. If you’re not already keeping track of your site’s uptime, here’s five free tools to check if your site is up and running.

Down for everyone or just me?

You just tried accessing your web-site and it’s not loading. Uh-oh, time to panic? Not quite. The first thing you should check if your site is not loading on your computer is if it’s actually down or if it’s an issue with your Internet Service Provider.

Down for everyone or just me? is a great single-purpose web-site that will check any site on the web and report back if it’s actually down or if it’s just an issue with your internet connection.

Pingdom

While finding out if your site is down for just you or everyone is a great tool, it’s unreasonable to constantly refresh your site and then go and check if it’s really down. Site monitoring tools allow you to set it and forget.

Pingdom is such a tool, where you can point it towards your site(s) or server(s) and if the site goes down you’ll receive an e-mail, text message, or even a tweet or DM that Pingdom had trouble accessing your site. Pingdom can be set to check your site once a minute and it also has tons of graphs that show uptime and load time historically for your site(s).

You can sign up for a free account that will track one site or one server and send up to 20 SMS alerts.

Are My Sites Up?

What if you have more than one site but can’t afford a premium Pingdom account? Well, Are My Sites Up? is a great monitoring service that is free and allows you to track up to five sites with 25 daily checks. Are My Sites Up also offers a premium service that allows for more sites and more checks. You can receive alerts via RSS, text message, Twitter, e-mail or via a nifty iPhone application.

mon.itor.us

Similar to Pingdom, mon.itor.us will track your site’s uptime and offers a plethora of graphs to show site performance over time. The service is completely free and you can receive alerts that your site is down via e-mail, instant message, RSS or SMS.

Binary Canary

Last but not least, Binary Canary has a free monitoring account that allows you to watch up to 5 sites at a 15 minute frequency. If the site goes down you can be alerted via e-mail or SMS by e-mail. You can also purchase SMS and phone credits to receive alerts that way.

Ensuring your site stays up is an important aspect of running a successful web-site. With these five free tools, you have no excuse to not monitor your site’s uptime and load time performance. Have you got a favorite free monitoring tool you use to ensure your site is up? Let us know in the comments below.

SEO Presentation from City of Boston Marketing Workshops

Adam Pieniazek — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:45:18 +0000

So far, the Marketing workshops organized by the BRA and the City of Boston have been a great success. The crowd yesterday was awesome, involved and asked lots of questions. If you were at either of the events this week and have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment below or send us an e-mail.

Below are the slides from my SEO presentation at the Marketing workshops organized by the City of Boston. I’m planning on recording audio to go along with the slides this weekend and will update this post when it’s up. There’s two options below for viewing the slides, the first is a Google Doc, the second is a Slideshare doc.

And if you enjoyed the presentation, please subscribe to our blog, fan us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter!

Google Doc

Slideshare

SEO Presentation – The 42nd Estate – BRA – City of Boston

View more presentations from The 42nd Estate.

WordPress 2.8.5 Released & Exploit Scanner Recommended

Adam Pieniazek — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:11:58 +0000

WordPress 2.8.5 has just been released. The main additions are security tweaks, which makes the update a must download. The updates in this release include:

A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

The WordPress crew is also recommending users download the WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin to search for any exploits that might be installed on your server. We use the exploit scanner on several of our sites and it’s a good step to take to harden your WordPress installation for security.

Activate WordPress.com Stats After Upgrade

Adam Pieniazek — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:06:27 +0000

We’ve witnessed and received reports that after upgrading the wordpress.com stats plugin, wordpress.org blogs will not record stats unless you go into the plugins section and activate the plugin. No error messages are given during the upgrade, and it appears to re-activate correctly, but if you browse into the dashboard Blog Stats will not be listed.

I ran into this a couple of days ago on my personal blog, and didn’t notice it for a couple of days. Since then, I’ve noticed this bug on a few sites we manage and a few of our clients have reported the same bug.

The fix is quick and easy, but if you go about batch upgrading plugins you might not notice stats are not being collected for a few days and end up getting a flatline drop like I did (pictured above).

Top Ten Ways to Write a Top Ten Ways Post

Adam Pieniazek — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:38:13 +0000

Top Ten Bingo

You may have heard that lists are a great way to generate traffic to your blog. Well it’s true. People love lists because it gives them easily digestible information in a step by step format that encourages them to take action. One of the most popular list post type is the top X ways to do Y. Giving your visitors a single awesome tip on how to save money will likely turn them into subscribers. Giving them ten top tips on how to save money will make them evangelists.

But, how do you go about writing these how to lists, you may ask? Perhaps you’re doubting your ability because you’re not an expert in a massively useful topic. Well you don’t need to be! What you need is the ability to collect information and organize it in a way that is helpful and actionable. Though, as you’ll see below in our top ten ways to write a top ten ways post list, having expertise or creativity can help too.

Google It

It’s unlikely you’re treading completely new ground with your top ten ways to do X post, so fire up Google and take a look around. Do not copy someone else’s post, but use it as a base to make sure you cover the basics while also injecting new methods into your list.

Don’t Google It

Or, you could avoid Google completely and go entirely off your memory. It’s dangerous as you could accidentally mimic someone else’s popular post, but you might also find inspiration to blog about a few methods no one thought to mention before that came to you naturally.

Search Twitter

Since Twitter is real-time, searching it for your list topic could generate some fresh new ideas that were literally just thought of. If you find someone tweeting about a relevant step for your list, be sure to give kudos to the twit by linking to their message.

Ask Twitter

Got a big list of followers on Twitter? Ask your tweeps for ideas! Again, do be sure to give credit where it’s due, but your tweeple should be a great pool of new ideas, especially if many of them are in the same field as you.

Find The Missing Step

Look at other top ten lists and see if any of them are missing a step. Perhaps someone wrote a top ten ways to secure WordPress post but failed to mention a plugin or how to back up your database. Find the missing step and inform your readers about it.

Streamline It

While doing research, perhaps you found a few great posts already listing out the steps of your topic. But could they be improved upon? Could you drop 5 steps and streamline them so they’re easier to implement? If you can find a way to save your readers time, they will appreciate it.

Link It Up

Perhaps the topic you’re covering is very broad and tough to thoroughly go over in a single list of ten. That’s OK! Creating a link list that summarizes each step and points the reader to more expansive resources for each step is a great way to create a one stop article for your readers to get all ten pieces of information in one article. Then, if need be they can follow up with each link on their own.

Get a Guest Poster/Freelancer

If you know someone who has expertise in a field, utilize that connection! If your site is popular enough, you should be able to easily find guest posters willing to write a top ten list revolving around their field of expertise. They get a traffic boost, you get a free list and your readers get a great resource and get exposed to an expert. It’s a win-win-win.

Don’t know anyone with expertise in the field you want to cover? That’s OK. Hit up Elance, Craigslist, Twitter and other freelancing job boards. For $40-$80 you should be able to find a great writer who can create a compelling list that’s sure to draw eyeballs.

Get Expertise

Sharing with your readers how you learned something is a great way to build a list. Read a book, research online, or just hack away until you learn something and then share with your readers how you learned it.

First off, the fact that you used this method to learn something knew shows proof of the method’s effectiveness. Second, if they’re reading your blog then they’re likely already on a similar wavelength with you and would love to see how you learned more about that topic. Some of your readers may even be more experienced in that field and offer more helpful tips.

Hypothesize

It seems obvious posts are overtaking the blogosphere. Go in the other direction and approach a modern dilemma from a theoretical perspective. Maybe you’ll be wrong, maybe you’ll be right but if you write it right it’s sure to generate a discussion around the idea. For instance, write a top ten ways to create world peace post. Or go super geeky and write about the top ten ways to break the speed limit barrier and travel across the universe. Do let your readers know you’re just brainstorming or hypothesizing about possible solutions, not claiming any expertise or factual solutions. Sometimes it’s OK to pretend and aim for the impossible.

Going through the above list, you should be able to knock out top ten ways list posts in no time that are useful and beneficial to both you and your readers.

Have an additional tip for how to write great how-to lists? Share them below in the comments so we can all learn how to improve!

Top Ten Bingo photo by pigpogm.

Five Things to Look for in Source Code for SEO

Adam Pieniazek — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:12:08 +0000

A few ~~days~~ weeks ago [we're back!] we talked about why viewing the source code should be the first step in analyzing a site for SEO and a few tools to help make the task a bit easier. So now that we’ve got our source code fired up, what should we look for?

Five Source Code Inspection Points for SEO

Is the site text-based or is it all images?

Search engines can’t see pictures and struggle crawling Flash. If the site is predominantly coded so it’s un-crawlable (javascript too, though the search engines are getting much better), it might require a complete re-working of the site’s code before moving onto to other optimization parts. If all of your posts are predominantly images or Flash, then there’s not much content for Google and other search engines to see.

Images take the form of:

There are a few key points here.

Give the image file a descriptive filename, for example big-red-building.jpg, not img9192.jpg.
Use dashes in the filename to separate out words. While you can use underscores too, we’ve found dashes to work best.
Give the image an alt tag, which will show in case the image fails to load and helps describe the image.
Declaring the height and width of the image decreases load time which is a win for everyone

While it’s a great idea to have images on your site, having a site that is all images is asking for search fail, as Google and the other engines will have little, if any, text to crawl, analyze, and index. It may seem obvious to many of our readers, but over the years I’ve stumbled across quite a few sites that look great, but then you try to highlight some text and can’t and realize the whole site is one big image (or a bunch of images).

Many times, these image based sites are done as images because the designer wanted to use a specific font that is not installed by many users’ computers. Though I’ll rant against Flash below, sIFR Flash is a great way to get unique fonts on your site without relying on pure images. sIFR Flash will also put html code behind the Flash fonts giving the search engines something to crawl. Having said that sIFR Flash comes with its own disadvantages (mainly adding to page load time and having the regular html font appear for a few seconds before being replaced by the Flash font file).

Is It Flashy…too Flashy?

As noted above, search engines really struggle crawling Flash. They’re getting better, but for the time being it’s not a good idea to create 100% based Flash sites. Add in that not all users have Flash installed (iPhones for one) and that it’s not exactly fast (there’s nothing that’ll make a user bounce from your site quicker than a Flash loading screen) and you end up with a recommendation to stay away from Flash.

You can spot Flash by a few methods. The one way that covers it all is to look for .swf files. Flash can be embedded (like a YouTube video) or it can run the whole site.

Here’s a few embedded Flash code samples from the Flash Embedding Cage Match:

The embed method

The object method

Note, I couldn’t figure out how to show Flash code without the browser interpreting it so the above two samples are images, here’s a text file with the codes in plain text.

There are times when Flash is OK, mainly for videos and ads and other secondary content. In other words, Flash within an HTML site is OK, while a site that is completely Flash based is asking for trouble. Still, if you can use another method, do so.

Descriptive Title tag up top?

The meta title tag is one of the most important features for SEO. If the site is missing a title tag, start there. Next, make sure the title tag is unique and contains keywords which also appear in the site’s content. Ideally, your title tag and H1 tags should be similar, if not exact. The title tag should appear as high up in the source code as possible. It’s a way for Google and users to determine what your page is about, so it doesn’t make sense for this tag to be stuck down at the bottom of your code.

These take the form of:

 Your title here.

Title tags appear at the top of the browser window, above the address field. They also may appear in Google’s search results, so make them enticing and descriptive of the content to get users to click through and find the right content.

Is the Meta Description Descriptive?

Check to see if there’s a meta description tag. While not as important as the meta title, the description is still often used by search engines as a snippet that appears in the results. Having a tag that is descriptive of the content on that page is an important signal to search engines and a useful intro to readers.

These take the form of:

You should format your meta description to have the most important content at the front. For one, many believe Google values the content the earlier and higher up it appears. But the more important reason is that search engines may utilize your meta description as the snippet that appears in its search results. Making sure the focus of your page is noted quickly in the description informs viewers quickly about your page content and leads to more clicks and higher satisfaction.

An example, for this article we’re using the below text as the meta description:

Check your source code for these five SEO related pieces of code. Make sure these pieces are optimized for maximum usability and search effectiveness.

Is there an H1 tag?

Each web page should have one H1 tag that succinctly describes the content on that page. It’s a signal to search engines and your readers of what the content will be. Most wordpress themes will place the post or page title in an H1 tag. Ideally, your post titles on your homepage should not be wrapped in an H1 tag, but on the individual post pages they should be wrapped in an H1 tag. Tags flow in a hierarchy, so your most important content (the title) appears in an H1 tag, and sub-headings flow to the H2 to H6 tags.

These take the form of:

Your title (the main heading) here

For example, on this article the title tag is “Five SEO Source Code Checks”, while the H1 tag is “Five Things to Look for in Source Code for SEO”and the H2 tag is “Five Source Code Inspection Points for SEO”. The five titles in this list are all wrapped in an H3 and there’s two H4 sub-headings in the Is it Flashy point.

Originally, we planned to run this article as a list of ten, but as we’ve already crossed the 1,000 word threshold, we’re going to split it up into two parts to make sure it’s easily digestible. If you have any questions on part 1, ask away in the comments and we’ll do our best to answer!

How to Add Google Ad Section Targeting in Thesis

Adam Pieniazek — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:47:00 +0000

Recently Matt Cutts gave a talk called Straight from Google: What You Need to Know at WordCamp San Francisco 2009. His talk revolved around why bloggers blog (money? fame? fun?) and how bloggers can improve their SEO. Jim Gaudet noted a couple lines of code from the presentation that are highly relevant to bloggers using Adsense to make money online. The two lines dictate where the unique content starts and ends on your page and target your ads to that content. It’s a handy way to have the Adsense algorithms display more relevant advertisements to your visitors.

While Jim created a handy plugin to insert the Adsense section code, Thesis users can insert these two lines quickly and easily by utilizing a custom function and hooking it in before and after the post content.

The Code

To do so, open up your custom_functions.php file. Then copy and paste the below code into the file, save, and you’re all set!

Scroll down for an explanation of what this code does.

function adsense_marker_start(){
echo '';
}
add_action('thesis_hook_before_post_box', 'adsense_marker_start');

function adsense_marker_end(){
echo '';
}
add_action('thesis_hook_after_post', 'adsense_marker_end');

The Explanation

The first line simple declares the function. Then, we echo the Adsense start and end sections, which will insert the comment code telling Adsense what content to look at to determine what ads to show.

The last two lines of each function differ. For the start code, we insert the section before the post box so that it includes the title of the post. For the end code, we insert the section right after the post so it doesn’t include any social media icons, related posts or other irrelevant content you have there.

By letting Google know where your post content is, your ads will become more relevant to each page and should help increase click-through rates and revenues. For non-Thesis users, check out Jim Gaudet’s Advanced Adsense plugin which will do all the nitty gritty for you!