Well he may be from Yorkshire but he does have many uses, DaveN updated his blogs structure and its title tags in the last few days and its something i have been meaning to do for a long long time.

He tells you how to do it step by step but I thought I would also do a quick tutorial on it so people have the official Dave version and an idiots guide…..

OK so the normal thing people do with wordpress blogs is to use the standard wordpress admin to choose a permalink structure.
This is the typical one that many people choose
http://www.seoidiot.co.uk/2007/07/14/sample-post/

And by default wordpress gives titles like this
www.affearners.com >> Blog Archive >> Now posting to the blog from Imified.
Boy that blows doesnt it!

OK so what we will do to sort that is get a plugin to sort the titles and then update our htaccess file to redirect all the pages to the new friendlier version.

Go get SEO Title plugin and upload it to the plugins folder on your blog (Blogdirectory/content/plugins)
Unzip it on the server or before hand and ftp

Now go to your wordpress admin area and activate the plugin
Next we need to change the title slug wordpress uses from

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

To

<title><?php if (function_exists('seo_title_tag')) { seo_title_tag(); } else { bloginfo('name'); wp_title();} ?></title>

We do that change in the header.php file of the theme you are using – you will find that in blogdirectory/content/themes/blogthem/header.php
You can of course make your files editable by changing their permissions and do it from the admin interface, if you do please ping me your blog address and ill know your easy to hack!
Now that will allow the plugin to control the title tags – go look at the options for the plugin in your admin section and choose any options that make sense to you – the SEO Titles site you got the plugin from gives a good guide.

OK pretty easy so far! One stage to go!

Now all we need to do is update our htaccess file to redirect traffic to the new structure.

Open up your htaccess (same directory as your header.php for the theme you are using) and paste this in exactly as it is: -

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /seoblog/
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/([^/]+)/?$ /$4.html [R=301,L]

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /seoblog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php
</IfModule>
OK thanks again to Mr N and the SEO Titles plugin guys.

Disclaimer – do this at your own risk! I tend not to care if I make a mess of my blog so I am a bit careless on these things!

Juts did a new design for the blog – let me know what you think

When creating sites on a large scale you have to be sure that you dont make life easy for anyone looking to track you down or to ban your entire network. So it is important that you dont leave any footprints.

I have talked with people who change their template on each batch of sites they do – to be honest I never did, I simply changed em once in a while.

What really gets me though is when people use a publically available system and dont even bother to change the default templates it comes with. Some people also make a simple error here too, they see the structure of the site in visual terms rather than in coding terms. They simply look at the css and alter it to give the site a different look. Dont get me wrong you can make sites look completely different using just the css but remember one thing.

THE SPIDER SEES THE CODE NOT THE PAGE

So altering the css and leaving the divs and page structure as is means from the spiders point of view its the same as the default page, stupid move eh?

Even when I am doing wordpress templates I change the layout structure from css to tables so suddenly from a search engines point of view its not a simple wordpress blog its a normal yet unique website.

Think people think!

Edit: THIS IMAGE IS OF ESRUN – HE MADE ME POST IT IN PLACE OF HOMER

[photopress:Photo_74.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

I have never been one for idly clicking ‘Upgrade’ in any control panel without thinking that its going to go very badly.

Upgraded wordpress today and I hope its gone through ok… who knows…

[photopress:banned_google.jpg,full,pp_image]

Well I decided to create a new theme for Wordpress that allows you to embed your own custom Youtube Video right in the theme template.

Here is a link to the example and you can pick up the zip file for the theme itself there too!