Top 3 WordPress custom themes development systems or frameworks

January 20, 2012 — GoogleThem

When you customize WordPress pages and themes, it can be hard to remember what you’ve done a year or two later. That’s one reason why it’s good to use a WordPress development system or “Frameworks”. You don’t have to edit PHP, code like changing the functions.php to do things. Often you’ll find what you need in the theme/frameworks configuration screen.

A good WordPress backend has options to change page titles, use custom post types easily so that you can “target” various pages you want to customized without editing PHP.

This makes it so that you can see, your client can see, and you can more easily find your customizations later.

Another huge reason why is so that your WordPress theme updates don’t overwrite your custom WordPress pages so they don’t go away silently or worse yet…break your PHP code.

My top 3 WP frameworks are:

Genesis - good SEO for WordPress with page by page Meta Titles and tags. If you want to remove the WordPress H1 page title from the top of the page click here.

WooThemes - good modern WordPress themes with highly flexible options in the frameworks

RocketTheme - amazing themes and powerful plugins. To use the “Gantry” frameworks, which was created for Joomla, lots of it is done using widgets, however you’ll want a Gantry tutorial on positioning because these widgets are movable on a page using a unique system with sliders and number of widgets in a row. Gantry is using the standard 960px layout, and can be made fluid or liquid as well.

Posted in Genesis Frameworks, RocketTheme, woothemes, wordpress seo, Wordpress Tips. No Comments »

WordPress how to redirect error 404 page to home page or any page

November 13, 2009 — GoogleThem

My WordPress theme didn’t have a 404.php page included and I wanted to make any error 404 “page not found” go to the home page. This method would go to any page you specify. This is a somewhat hard coded solution and it is a permanent redirect in this case.

Contents of 404.php:

<?php
header("Status: 301 Moved Permanently");

header("Location:http://www.mywebsite.com");

?>
Posted in wordpress fix, wordpress seo. No Comments »

WordPress page title maximum length

August 31, 2008 — GoogleThem

My personal conclusion:
67 characters.

Page title maximum length for google

With WordPress you don’t get to use all of those characters by default and you must do some optimization to the engine to change this.

How to change WordPress page titles if you don’t have access to this article, you can request access from googlethem.

Posted in wordpress seo, Wordpress Tips. Tags: , , . No Comments »

Blogging Tips for WordPress

August 24, 2008 — GoogleThem

These blog writing tips are for WordPress or any blog such as blogspot or blogger.

Write pertinent content regularly, if you want to ramble about different subjects, then tag them and/or categorize them differently so that people (or you) can view your entries chronologically and in a long page that are on a similar subject of interest.

To get listed in google and other search engines, you either need to be linked to from somewhere else on the internet, or you need to get proactive and submit your blog to google, submit your blog to yahoo.

If you have a page that you want removed, log in to WordPress, or your favorite blog engine, delete the post (blog entries are usually posts and not pages), then you still have to remove the post from google’s website cache.

Posted in wordpress seo, Wordpress Tips. Tags: , , , . No Comments »

Hyphens in URLs or URL Rewriting for WordPress SEO

August 9, 2008 — GoogleThem

Hyphens in URLs or “URL Rewriting” for WordPress SEO, Content Management Systems (CMS), Dynamically Generated Content and Shopping Cart Systems”:

If you have a dynamic website that creates pages from data then you are likely to have URLs that have stuff like http://www.mysite.com/product.php?product_id=8

This is not easy to remember, means nothing to a human or search engine, and does not help with google SEO or any SEO.

You should find out how to setup your backend, shopping cart engine, blog engine, or CMS to rewrite the URLs to search engine friendly versions like:
http://www.mysite.com/website-software/easy-website-maker

Howto URL rewrite in WordPress:Admin->Settings->Permalinks->Custom Settings->Enter text "/%postname%/"
Most WordPress installs I see do it this way instead:
Wordpress:Admin->Settings->Permalinks->Custom Settings->Check Radio button "Month and name"

Whalla! WordPress will now take care of the search engine friendly URL rewriting for you based upon your article’s title!

What really happens with URL rewriting on an Apache server (let’s hope this applies to you ;-), is that the .htaccess file gets rewritten by WordPress, but you can have direct control by looking and and if you’re brave, editing this file. You’ll need to know Regular Expressions (Regex) to even attempt this, a great tutorial on URL Rewriting is at addedbytes.com

Footnote: Are underscores in URLs ok to use? Well, they can only be in the path, which is after the domain name, not legal in a domain name, spaces are not either for that matter.

Matt Cutts from a speaking appearance at Word Camp 2007 said that underscores will be parsed like hyphens soon at google if not already (august 2007). He also dropped some info implying that google can parse dictionary words out of a domain name, but I wouldn’t count upon that, the engine has to work harder to pluck your keywords out of a oneworddomainname.com

Now for Matt’s quote from this website:
“Matt: Now the interesting thing is that we used to treat underscores as if they were like word A Underscore word B We would glom that together .And we would index that as A underscore B If you searched for the word A we wouldn’t have returned your post.
We are in the process of changing that. We might have already changed that.

So dashes and underscores are almost exactly the same. but in engine world dashes are nice because if there is no space at all the search engine has to segment it.”

Posted in wordpress seo, Wordpress Tips. Tags: , , , , , , . No Comments »
«
»
Stop SOPA