The Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme is the best All In One SEO package for WP blogs and WP powered websites. Stallion is much more than a WordPress theme, the WP SEO package protects your hard earned off-site SEO using advanced on-site SEO techniques like no other WordPress SEO solution. WordPress On-Page SEO There are two elements to search engine optimization, on-page or on-site SEO and off-site SEO or off-page SEO. On-page or on-site search engine optimization: What we do on our websites, we have full control over this aspect of search engine optimization and Stallion includes dozens of SEO features to increase search engine traffic. Off-site or off-page SEO search engine optimization: Any off-site promotion that has an SEO […]
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Stallion Clickbank/Paypal Transaction ID
Where would I find my Stallion transaction ID. If it is the email I purchased Talian on I already tried it and it will not work.
Any ideas please let me know.
Thanks Lyle
Stallion Theme ID Reminder Form
The quickest and easiest way to find your PayPal/Clickbank transaction ID is to put the email address you used to make the order (Talian or Stallion) into the Stallion Transaction ID Reminder form that you find on the main Stallion Theme options page (it’s just below where you add your Stallion ID) after you activate Stallion via “Appearance >> Themes”.
Within a few minutes you’ll receive an email to your order email address with your Stallion ID.
If that doesn’t work or you’ve changed email addresses drop me an email.
Note: only Talian customers who ordered before Stallion was released (early March 2011) are entitled to the free Stallion update. All Talian customers entitled to a free update have their email addresses added to the Stallion ID database, so all they have to do is use the Transaction ID Reminder form to obtain their Stallion ID.
BTW checked the email address you made this comment with an it’s in the database, so all you have to do is add it to the reminder form (I’ve done it for you). Give it 5 minutes for the email as Godaddy is a bit slow sending the emails.
David
Stallion Theme ID Reminder Form
WebSite Design Ideas
The ideas you are working on are all good to improve the Stallion theme. My ideas that follow are just a unloading of ideas I am playing with. I have no expectations and do not know if they would be good for the whole but here goes. They might not make sense and 99% might now be feasible for this simple upgrade, but I thought I would put them out there.
Design and colors on Stallion
I think design or cosmetic options always enhance value as people are visual on the web.
Anything to keep people on the site or decrease bounce rate is good. I think style plays a role in SEO.
All the elements from colors to dimensions that enhance the theme is value added. I think there is great flexibility now. You have headers, banners, color choices. With imagination almost anything can be done working with the theme as it exists now.
However, there are always ways things can be improved. One idea might be to allow color or an image on side outside the theme proper. That means with CSS you could have a white theme but on the far right and left outside the theme boundaries you could have a color or pattern.
Another design option might be color flexibility of the fine lines and boarders. You could have a simple or white theme, but then a light blue or option as the border or accent lines. Or the width of the lines could vary. I look at a lot of sites by female designers and notice they are often more delicate with the lines. Or turn off border. Also font types and sizes. People love different font options.They tend to focus on design details more than geeky guys.
Another design idea is having a newspaper or magazine style as an option or a template or two for a first page like this. These are popular now. Or at least a ‘Wow’ first page that looks different from the rest of the blog.
Ideas to increase money from Ads
My brainstorming buddy and I are looking at ways to increase CTR with Stallion. Stallion performs very well with Adsense because of the flexibility of placement and concentration on heat map areas.
These are some ideas we were playing with, when I place a large image of 540 width at the top of the post, this increased money for that post. (My friend used an integration of Adsense and analytics to observe this on post it was done on).
Then below it the first ad. This seems on initial but limited experimentation to result in a higher CTR. That is give more flexibility in top ad placement. It would be one paragraph down or more.
However, to do this in a uniform way it would be coding on your part, I think a lot.
It is similar to the idea of having ads appear in the center of the post. That is not at the top or bottom but in the middle.
I think the top is the best for clicks, however, now with the new Panda updates I am concerned about too much above the fold. “The fold” being as you fold a newspaper or the first half of the page. I think SEO in the post Panda world is a little different, but I do not know how, but this might be an idea as there is some chat on forums about ‘the fold’.
You are brilliant in that you put the sidebars etc bellow the content. This means the content not junk is seen first.
Another idea might be to give two sidebar ads. I know we talk about the pluses and minuses of this before.
Promotion and other ideas
Direct traffic and SEM is a first defense against Panda, I think. Anything to help these things from a subscribe by mail option from Feedburner or more options to promote the subscription to the site.
Of course Facebook is the main social media option today. It is easy to create a side widget that links to a company Facebook landing page. However, maybe an option to have this integrated in the header like the search box? Just an idea.
Also a Stumbleupon button. I think social media gets junky but FB, Twitter, Stumble are big.
Google want to make YouTube the next Netflix. They are pumping up this newly acquired business. To stay ahead of the curve I am trying to create more videos as they are easy way to get links to your site that people explore. If you could somehow integrate more YouTube, such as a side widget with latest videos. I look at a site like smosh.com and know I will never be like them, but I am thinking about ideas for more videos now.
Similarly I do not know what teens (big users of the web) would like? Maybe mobile phone options? I do not know. But I noticed 15 to 30 year olds are on on some of my websites, to capture the next big thing, would be great.
New options are also something I am playing with as Google likes news sites apparently.
Shopping cart and other money ideas
OK again a pipe dream and things that can be done with plugins but having an e-commerce aspect to theme is an idea in the future. I will be selling some flashcards soon and many cart options I will do with a widget. But maybe others are looking to sell things and would find and SEO shopping cart type thing of value.
Or a classified ad way of advertising. Maybe this is better left to a plugin.
Well, these are just ideas and many might not be good or might not be practical, but I thought I would put them out there. They are just a start. I think ignorance keeps me from being a millionaire. If I knew exactly what to do in months I would have a million. So this is some brainstorming to try to break through.
WebSite Design Ideas
WordPress Design Ideas
Some of the above suggestions are on my list of things to add to Stallion, especially new website designs like a magazine style. I just got the new sidebar layouts listed above coded which should make it easier to port in more web design options.
In Stallion 6.1 I’ve added background colours to the outside of the main 1,000px area. Other than on the new dark blue colour scheme (set to blue) I’ve set them all to white background (as they look now), a simple edit (change one colour code) of the colour scheme css file used will change the outside background colour (in Stallion 6.0.1 it’s a lot more hassle to make that change because the background colour would come through sidebars etc…).
I would like to add the ability to change important fonts and colours within an options page, but the only way to do this is to add inline css to the header which is easy to do, but not ideal (you don’t want dozens of lines of css loaded in the head of every page). There is a way to do this via PHP, but it’s not reliable, so can’t use it with a public theme. Real shame there isn’t an easy way to have options within a css file. I could add a blank css file for users to add their own CSS that would override the main styling, but it wouldn’t be options based.
It is difficult to have an AdSense ad shown in the middle of a post without manually adding the AdSense ad code yourself, for that to work it would require the person writing a WordPress post to add something in the content (like a shortcode) and right now that’s not a high priority (really difficult to code :-)).
Above the fold is definitely the best for high CTR which is why there are so many areas for adding ads above the fold in Stallion. Two AdSense sidebar content ads is on the list of things to do, want it coded so it won’t result in 4 AdSense content ad units used as some who don’t know the AdSense rules will add too many ad units (happened with Talian 5 which has two widget AdSense ad units).
I’m looking at adding more promotion like features to Stallion, added a Flickr widget and a custom banner ad widget and looking for more features to add. It’s really easy to find interesting features to add that have the potential to generate more traffic/revenue, but it’s not so easy to achieve this without compromising search engine optimization (for example the Flickr widget is javascript based which has no negative SEO impact).
Thanks for the ideas, keep them coming :-)
David
WordPress Design Ideas
bbPress Theme Compatibility
I might abandon the idea of a forum, but just FYI you might want to test the theme with bbPress, the new plugin. For me it does not seem to work. It creates a page for the forum description but none of the functionality of the forum is compatible.
bbPress WordPress Forum Plugin
I had a quick look at the bbPress WordPress Forum Plugin on TwentyTen and the Stallion SEO theme and looks likes there’s some issues with Stallion, basically bbPress features missing.
Presumably there’s something bbPress forum code uses that’s not included in Stallion.
I noticed multiple rel=”nofollow” links during the tests, so will probably need the bbPress plugin code editing to make it worth recommending as part of an SEO setup.
I’ve played around with forums and I’ve found they just aren’t worth the time because the moderation of user input is a pain and because users have to register it’s hard to get them to comment without spending a lot of time posting to the forum yourself.
phpBB forum software (I think it’s the most popular forum software) for example (which I made a reasonably well SEO’d theme for) is awful.
With WordPress most SPAM comments are automatically deleted and the ones that are held for moderation are very easy to get rid of. With phpBB you have to log into a moderation part of the site, load each post that’s in the moderation queue to see what it is, click delete or whatever, confirm the action and wait for it to go back to the moderation section!!! Absolute nightmare time wise, must take over 30 seconds to delete one obvious SPAM post!
Stand alone bbPress forum is a little easier to moderate, but it’s still a pain to moderate.
It’s why I incorporates the SEO Super Comments plugin with improvements into Stallion, it’s easy for users to make a quick comment with no forum sign-up, is very easy to manage and the content is SEO’d because it’s using Stallion as the theme. Sad to say racists like the setup, have a thriving racist community on my jokes site, over 28,000 comments with most about racism!!!
David
bbPress WordPress Forum Plugin
bbPress Theme vs WordPress Comments
I think I found a solution where I can run Stallion theme and bbPress.
The problem was: Forums and topics are not showing up in my Stallion theme.
The solution:
Try resaving the permalinks.
I am a big believer in your super comments by the way. When I look at my stats and analytics, I am getting a reasonable amount of traffic on long tail searches directly related to your version of super comments. :)
People create comments and content and others searching find it. I only clean up the titles now and then. It takes 3 seconds but is worth it.
If you could ever expand or improve your super comments it might be a worthy allocation of time. I believe commenting or at least user interaction is the summa bonum of getting Google to like your site.
I do not know if a reputation button or expanded profiles would help. I am not sure what would get people to comment more and interact more on a particular website.
Dave, thank you for the kind reply. Great customer service. :)
bbPress Theme vs WordPress Comments
bbPress Theme
Sorry for jumping the gun on this, but I still do not know if it is working 100% yet. Still testing.
WordPress Images
Hi Dave,
can you please tell me why the images i put into my articles show up on the top of the article as a small image?
And then show up in the right place in the right size?
WordPress Auto Thumbnail Images
You’ve turned auto thumbnail images on under
Stallion theme >> SEO Advanced
Auto Thumbnails : Thumbnails ON
This takes an image from a post (can be an image that’s part of the post, featured image, image linked to on another site or the YouTube screenshot if you embedded a YouTube video) and uses it as a thumbnail on archive pages (home, categories, tags etc…).
If you also run the SEO Post Teaser Plugin from my WordPress SEO Plugins list (which it looks like you do) it doesn’t always look so good because the image can be shown as a thumbnail and as the original image on archive pages.
When you don’t use the SEO Post Teaser plugin (like this website) the thumbnail can make a site look a lot better.
David
WordPress Auto Thumbnail Images
WordPress Theme Compatibility
I upgraded a test site to WordPress 3.2. So far mostly okay.
There are some cosmetic problems on the Admin panels:
the admin footer jumps into the middle of the options the bit that says
“Thank you for creating with WordPress. • Documentation • Freedoms • Feedback • Credits”
I’m not game to try it on a larger site – I may wait until WordPress 3.2.1 for that.
Any issues you are aware of?
WordPress Theme Compatibility
WordPress Beta Test
I’ve been keeping an eye on the bleeding edge WordPress releases for a while and so far not had a major issue with Stallion on my test sites.
The footer floating in the wrong place is on the list of things to fix in Stallion 6.1, as you say it’s not major problem, has no impact on your visitors experience.
This site is running WordPress 3.2, no problems so far.
David
WordPress Beta Test
WordPress Theme Save Default Options
In the Stallion 6.1 update there will be a new file with the theme where you can manually set all Stallion theme options (except your Stallion ID) that after activation tick a box and click Save Options and all your default settings will be propagated through the database.
Still not finished Stallion 6.1, right now there’s 208 options (added around 20 new options so far) in Stallion 6.1, most users with a lot of sites (like me) will probably change around 20 options per site if they don’t tend to change AdSense colours etc… that aren’t the current built in defaults: AdSense publisher ID, Chitika username, Clickbank username, Facebook button on, Twitter Button on and Twitter Username, SEO Super Comments on etc…
This new file will give you the option to add them all to the file, which looks like this:
Since with a theme with so many options I had to go with basic defaults, I don’t force users to use the SEO Super Comments plugin or have Twitter/Facebook buttons etc… (Google + button is included in 6.1 BTW) I’ll be making myself a set of defaults for the general type of settings I like to use (my favourite Stallion colour scheme is Red for example) and will release them to theme users who want to use the sort of SEO setup I use, but don’t understand SEO too well.
For those who build a lot of sites with Stallion this will save a lot of time, you’ll be able to make up half a dozen of these files say with different settings for different types of sites and have all your preferred settings added in under a minute.
Biggest problem with developing an SEO theme update is feature creep, while working on the code you think of a new feature and spend the entire day implementing it (took 2 hours just to make the file from the current settings) which slows a release down :-)
David
WordPress Theme Save Default Options
Premium Theme Update
When it’s ready I’m really looking forward to Stallion WordPress Theme 6.1.
The Google +1 button and configuration files in particular are exciting features.
One of the things that has been holding me back from building more niche sites is the dread associated with configuring them. Add to that the security patching & testing, I’m not sure I want any more tld’s.
At least having an editable configuration file will make one part of that process relatively easy.
Premium Theme Update