Comment on Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

Stallion WordPress SEO Package Yep, because of what Stallion does with comments my site can gain Google traffic from supporting my visitors and all the interlinking helps the main article as well: the main tech support article gains at least one internal backlink from each of the 50+ comments posts so far.

It’s a heck of a lot easier to write a comment than a full post, no one expects super high quality content in comments, so you can be more informal in a comment that you wouldn’t get away with in a full article. And Google sees webpages, not posts or comments, so the Stallion SEO super comments are treated just like any other webpage, Google ranks them.

As you already have WordPress installed you have one of two choices.

If your WordPress install is the multisite version you’d be able to create a new blog in a subdirectory now: you probably don’t have multisite, go to your Dashboard, if it’s multisite in the top left hand corner you’ll see a “My Sites” link, hoverover and it will show “Network Admin”, that’s where you make new sites.

Going to assume you don’t have that.

Probably the easiest way to test a theme without using it on your current live site is install WordPress again in a subdirectory.

It’s important not to use a subdirectory name your website already uses. If you have a page that loads when you go to example.com/news/ using the sub-directory /news/ would break that section of your live site. For testing best to use something you are unlikely to every use, I create a lot of SEO articles, so I couldn’t add a sub-directory /seo/ but I could use /seotest/ because I’m unlikely to create a page with /seotest/ as part of the URL slug.

You might be able to install WordPress in a sub-directory via your control panel, no idea if HostGator has that option, if it does it will save you creating a database for the new install. I’ve got one cheap Godaddy WordPress hosting package (rest of my sites are on VPS servers) and the Godaddy hosting does have a quick WordPress setup option: pretty much gets you to WordPress installed, login and create content, set a theme etc…

If not in your HostGator control panel (never used HostGator, so don’t know how) create a new database for the test install and note down the details for accessing the database.

If you are familiar with FTP it’s easy-ish :-) to install WordPress.

Download the WordPress zip file from https://wordpress.org/download/

Unzip on your PC, you’ll have a new folder /wordpress-3.9.1/ in that folder you’ll find the folder /wordpress/

Rename the unzipped /wordpress/ folder to whatever subdirectory you plan to use /newstest/ for example, you’ll now have:

/wordpress-3.9.1/newstest/

If this was a new install you would go into /newstest/ rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php, load the wp-config.php file in a text editor and add your database details as supplied by your host HostGator (you can do this if you want).

Since you already have a WordPress install it might be easier to download (via FTP) your current sites wp-config.php file, put a copy in /newstest/, open that in a text editor and change the settings, these three settings:

/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'database_name_here');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'username_here');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password_here');

Reasonably good chance only “database_name_here” and “password_here” with “username_here” being the same for both databases. You get these from HostGator.

The rest of the settings shouldn’t need changing.

Don’t leave the “database_name_here” the same as for your main WordPress wp-config.php file, the test install will access your live sites database and change it. We want the test install to use a new separate database.

With the edited wp-config.php file upload the /newstest/ directory (don’t upload the /wordpress-3.9.1/ folder) to the root (root is where you see the current wp-config.php file) of your site using FTP.

When everything is uploaded go to domain.com/newstest/ and follow the Install WordPress instructions.

Login and follow the Best Way to Install Stallion Responsive instructions.

From the webpage above about child themes:

Many WordPress users are not familiar with WordPress Child themes, child themes add the ability to include extra features to a main parent theme allowing you to gain even more flexibility over WordPress. The Stallion Responsive SEO package relies heavily on a child theme (it’s free), it contains hundreds of images you can use as thumbnails, headers and banners within your WordPress powered website.

The Meganews WordPress Theme you linked to, though looks nice is awful SEO wise, you aren’t going to be able to create a site similar to that with Stallion: similar in the sense of exact color scheme and all the flashy features, the general structure pretty much any WordPress theme creates that sort of site structure.

Google has moved towards usability and performance metrics in recent algorithm updates, we have to care how fast a website loads, how easily a user can get to the content.

Google has a free testing tool called PageSpeed Insights (it’s relativity new and evolving). Check the MegaNews theme out http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftrendis.si%2Fwp-themes%2Fmeganews%2F&tab=mobile

Those are not good results, 39/100 for mobile and 49/100 for desktop. If you wanted good results with that theme you’d have to disable a lot of the flashy features.

Under Mobile click the “Show how to fix” link for “Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content”.

The MegaNews theme adds over 20 javascript files and a further dozen plus CSS files to create that look!!!

That is TERRIBLE Google SEO wise.

To add flashy features there tends to be a lot of javascript added to a theme and it’s going to have a negative impact on your Google rankings. Load that page on your phone, does it load fast (I didn’t check)?

Like I said Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool is relatively new and evolving, when I ran this site through the tool a few months ago (not long after releasing Stallion Responsive v8.0) it was scoring in the 90/100 range (they didn’t have a user experience section of results), Google has added new metrics to the tool and it’s resulted in the score dropping (working on the fixes for Stallion Responsive v8.1: got some inline CSS for tap target issues on this site now to test some CSS fixes, it’s why the paged comments number are so blinking big).

No way I can fix everything, if you check the home page results (which I’m not happy with), as I know these test results are important I’m looking for fixes: http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstallion-theme.co.uk%2F&tab=desktop

You’ll note most of the Leverage browser caching issues are with AdSense code and FaceBook like buttons:

# http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js (20 minutes)
# https://apis.google.com/js/api.js (30 minutes)
# https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js (30 minutes)
# http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/expansion_embed.js (60 minutes)
# http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js (60 minutes)
# http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/osd.js (60 minutes)
# https://oauth.googleusercontent.com/…e:rpc:shindig.random:shindig.sha1.js?c=2 (60 minutes)

If I turn the FaceBook like button and AdSense off no more Leverage browser caching issues. Same with minify javascript, it’s Google’s own AdSense code to blame!

Even the User Experience Issues are mostly AdSense.

Stallion Responsive is feature rich, but without causing unnecessary SEO damage. I could add those flashy features, but it would be at the cost of Google SEO traffic and Stallion Responsive is foremost a WordPress SEO package.

I’ll also add you should do some research on how visitors actually react to some of these flashy features, image sliders for example are pretty much ignored by users. They might click the first image in the slide, but because they tend not to add useful features (look awesome, but don’t add anything, fluff basically added by webmasters because it looks cool rather than serves a purpose) users have become blind to them.

Stallion includes an image slider feature and an accordion image navigation menu, both require additional javascript files loading, I don’t use those features on my sites even though I’ve optimized the code best I can.

David