Updated for Stallion Responsive 8.5 (October 2016). Within this part of the Stallion Responsive Tutorial Series we will take a look at one of the main Stallion Responsive SEO Package options pages, the Stallion Responsive Layout Options Page accessed under “Stallion Theme” >> “Layout Options”. The Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Package includes a LOT of layout/design options, I’m not exaggerating when I say a LOT, I don’t think you’ll find another WordPress theme with this many layout and WordPress design options. With Stallion Responsive you can turn on/off almost everything via a tick box that with most themes would require hacking the themes code. Having so many layout and design options is great, there’s not a lot you CAN’T do […]
Continue Reading WordPress Layout and Design Options
WordPress Theme Footer Copyright Date
Hello Dave,
How does one change the copyright date in your footer?
Thanks,
Stevan
WordPress Theme Copyright Notice Date
Changing the copyright date isn’t a theme option, it’s based on the date of your earliest post.
That being said if you don’t mind changing code, I suppose you could add any date by replacing this code with any date:
The file footer.php
<?php the_time('Y'); ?>Also see http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/the_time for possible code options. See the Related links at the bottom like the_date which might use the latest posts date (not sure).
David
WordPress Theme Copyright Notice Date
WordPress Page/Post Settings
If I do not want the posted date or author, or the ability to leave comments to appear on a particular page/post, how do I do that?
I guess how do I remove the byline from certain posts/pages?
Comments Wordpress Page Templates
Disabling comments on a post is a core WordPress feature, on the edit page there’s a setting.
There’s a Stallion feature under the Stallion Layout options page to turn all dates and author links sitewide off, no built in way to do it on a page basis though. The solution would be build a WordPress Page template and remove the relevant code from the template file and use that template for the posts you want the stuff hidden on.
If you understand basic PHP start with the file page-example.php it’s there for creating Page templates.
David
Comments Wordpress Page Templates
Remove WordPress Search Box
How do I remove or move the search box appearing on the top right. I do not see it in any of the widgets to remove it.
Disable WordPress Search Form
The header search form isn’t a widget it’s built in to the theme, to disable go to
Stallion Layout Options : Search Form OFF
This activates the Header Widget Area so you can add something else there via a widget: there’s limited space and formatting in that location, so obviously a large widget (like tags) won’t work correctly, on some sites I add the Google Translation widget. Since the search form and widget use the same space the search form takes priority so has to be turned off to use the widget area.
There’s replacement search widgets to add to other widget areas.
David
Disable WordPress Search Form
WordPress Footer Height
How do I increase the height of the footer? I edited the footer.php file and added three lines of text/html and the last line is cutting into the background. Is there somewhere else to enter manual html, as in a widget, that would appear in the footer area?
Guess this would be the place for this:
Fifth Footer Ad Widget
Which CSS file (and it’s location) is for this file area?
WordPress Footer Height
WordPress Design Layouts
There’s dozens of Stallion layouts and color schemes each with their own CSS files, so depends what layout and color schemes you’ve set.
You’ll find all CSS files under /stallion-seo-theme/colors/ basically a site will use one layout file and one color scheme file, though if you set unique layouts and color schemes on the Page/Post edit screens a site can use them all in various combinations. If you’ve done this you would have to edit all the CSS files you’ve used.
The fifth footer area uses the same CSS rules as the main sidebar and other footer widget areas, it’s spread over the layout and color CSS files. The widget is located above the footer, not below it, if you scroll to the bottom of this page you’ll see I’ve got the big Add To Cart button within the fifth footer area: added as a text widget.
To answer your first question the footer size is fixed on the layout files, think I set to 70px.
There’s a footer navigation menu, again on this page you can see 4 text links at the bottom of the footer area. Can’t add text (only links) added under Appearance > Menus.
David
WordPress Design Layouts
SEO of Image Thumbnail Links
Have been doing some tweaks of features and generally reviewing my links, especially those generated site-wide or via features I have switched on site-wide.
I have been thinking a lot about the thumbnail images lately (both on archive pages and those generated by the widgets such as Stallion SEO Posts).
I am wondering if there is SEO benefit to having the images linked in addition to the text links.
I can see the user benefit in that some people are accustomed to having linked images and it makes it more likely/easier for someone to click through to that page just by clicking on the image (via a popular posts widget for example).
Is there anything to be gained SEO-wise by having, and conversely, removing these image links? I am just wondering if I need so many links say from the archive page to a given post.
As it stands right now with the image links switched on, we’ve got it linked three times from archive pages: 1) the post title, 2) following “Continue reading [post link]”, and 3) the thumbnail image link.
If I use the Stallion SEO Posts widget, then I have 2 links: 1) the post title link and 2) the image link.
I realize that the image link has a different ending (ie, #img_rand instead of #text_rand), but doesn’t this still count as an additional link to that post? That’s what the internal linking tool I use tells me, in any case.
In looking at flow of link benefit, maybe 2 or just 1 links from posts featured via these archive pages/widgets is enough? Would there be any benefit in having a feature to switch this off?
If for example I removed image thumbnail links on my main index page, that would cut out 10 links which are going to posts that are already twice linked (and possibly even more with the recent articles widget active) from my most powerful page (homepage). Maybe that link benefit would be better spread to my more important pages (such as those featured in my main menu links).
I really don’t know the answer, but just wondering about any thoughts you have on this topic.
Thanks as always Dave.
SEO of Image Thumbnail Links
SEO WordPress Strategy 2015
For usability reasons (users come first) I wouldn’t remove the link part of the images, it would likely confuse site visitors.
Looking at your site amishamerica.com you aren’t using Stallion Responsive to it’s full SEO capabilities.
For example the links you are concerned about can all have unique anchor text IF you use the Stallion Responsive keyphrases. Looking through your site and it looks like you aren’t adding any Stallion keyphrases even to new posts?
If you aren’t planning to use the Stallion keyphrase under “Stallion Theme” >> “SEO Advanced Options” set “Stallion SEO Links Plus OFF”.
This will remove the #something added to the links and Google will only count the first link to a posts anchor text. This will remove your SEO concerns about so many duplicate links, but won’t be taking advantage of one of the most important Stallion Responsive SEO features.
Basically if you have 5 links on a page to a webpage with the exact same URL only the first links anchor text found in the code is indexed as anchor text (passes SEO benefit to the linked to page), the other 4 links would be indexed as body text (Google ignores them as links).
As long as the URLs don’t have #something at the end doesn’t matter how many duplicate links you add, Google only counts the first one.
If under “Stallion Theme” >> “SEO Advanced Options” you set “Stallion SEO Links Plus ON”.
The links will include #something at the end and each link will be indexed by Google as a unique link.
You only benefit from this SEO wise if you set the Stallion Keyphrases for pretty much all your posts. If you don’t set any keyphrases all the links will use the WordPress post title. If you have 5 links from a page and they all use the WordPress post title there’s not much point having Google index the anchor text of 5 identical links with identical anchor text.
There’s no SEO harm having multiple links with the same anchor text, though no SEO benefit either.
To use Stallion Responsive effectively you have to do what I’ve done on this site, every post has the Stallion keyphrases set.
Created a post recently: The Future of SEO.
Below are all the Stallion Keyphrases etc… that are used as anchor text for internal links (added on the Edit post screen).
WordPress Post Title : The Future of SEO
All In One SEO Title : SEO 2015
Stallion Keyphrase 1 : Google SEO 2015
Stallion Keyphrase 2 : Search Engine Optimization 2015
Stallion Keyphrase 3 : Google Search Engine Optimization 2015
Stallion Keyphrase 4 : 2015 SEO
By setting all the above the internal anchor text of links to the article will use those 6 phrases (other parts of Stallion use them as well) and Google will rank a webpage for multiple keyphrases.
The most important is “All In One SEO Title”, it’s used as the title tag for the post as well, if not set the the WordPress Post Title is used as the title tag. This is a new article (published 3 weeks ago) and the Google rankings for the above phrases are:
The Future of SEO = na
SEO 2015 = 5th
Google SEO 2015 = 4th
Search Engine Optimization 2015 = 2nd
Google Search Engine Optimization 2015 = 2nd
2015 SEO = 10th
This is without any incoming backlinks (not done any link building), all from onpage SEO including internal links.
The above is a major part of my SEO 2014 strategy and will be a major part of my SEO WordPress 2015 strategy.
I’m afraid it’s a lot of work, it’s taken months to create new posts here, do the SEO research for finding relevant phrases to target each post at. In comparison your articles tend to be poorly targeted, looking through your Google site search results the title tags aren’t very good.
Some bad SEO examples:
Stepping up, once again
Three sights
Food and Faith
Quadruplets!
About
Leaving
Debunking some Speech Myths
Better SEO examples:
Amish and happiness
The Amish Church District
Amish trivia
Getting off the Hedonic Treadmill, Part 1
So you want to join the Amish
Amish Easter and other holidays
The Amish and Meth?
Do you use any tools like the free Google Analytics Keyword Planner Tools for determining SERPs to target?
Your comments tend not to have comment titles and when they do they aren’t SEO optimized. There’s not much value in having your comments indexed if there’s no optimization of the title tags and the comment titles are when available used as the title tags.
Do this Google search
site:amishamerica.com ?cid=
and note the title tags, few are optimized for any money SERPs.
No one will search for
“Hi Katie, thanks for your question on Amish and technology”
Had you given it a comment title like “Amish and Technology” it might rank for relevant SERPs.
Without putting the time into keyword research, adding Stallion keyphrases and comment titles you won’t make the most out of the WordPress SEO package. Right now you are using Stallion Responsive V8 like it’s Stallion WordPress SEO V6.
David
SEO WordPress Strategy 2015
SEO Keyphrases Importance
1-So just to make sure I understand, let’s say I have Page A with 100 links on it. Of those 100 links, 5 go to the same webpage, Page B, using the same URL. You wrote:
“Basically if you have 5 links on a page to a webpage with the exact same URL only the first links anchor text found in the code is indexed as anchor text (passes SEO benefit to the linked to page), the other 4 links would be indexed as body text (Google ignores them as links).”
Does this mean that Page B with 5 links pointing to it gets 5% of Page A’s available link benefit, or just 1%? I am reading this as just 1%.
“As long as the URLs don’t have #something at the end doesn’t matter how many duplicate links you add, Google only counts the first one.”
From this it sounds like if the links have #something at the end, they will each pass link benefit (but if they don’t have #something, then only one will?)
Just asking about link benefit, not necessarily how Google treats the anchor text.
2-Point well taken about keyphrases. Have started doing them but as you say it’s a slog.
“You only benefit from this SEO wise if you set the Stallion Keyphrases for pretty much all your posts.”
Unfortunately, I have about 2,000 posts on the site. So your suggestion that nearly every post ought to have keyphrases set means I have a lot of work to do. No getting around that.
Being a blog with a lot of conversational reader back-and-forth, some of the posts will simply not be ideally SEO-ed and designed to live forever in search results. Some titles are thus not going to be keyword optimized.
This idea might fit in the same realm as the usability concept you suggested above, about leaving thumbnails linked. It’s something that makes it friendlier for the reader. A trade-off on a blog vs. a purely content site. I’d describe mine as a hybrid of those two.
So I oscillate between writing what I think are keyword-friendly titles, and titles which I feel will draw the reader in. If you go back the past few years I probably end up with a 60/40 or 70/30 keyword-focused/reader-friendly mix.
The posts you pulled in the example above were 80% forgotten posts, from 6-7 years ago, even more poorly done than later posts.
Maybe I should simply delete them, though have heard mixed advice on whether that’s good. Or could just improve them, but then the question is what to prioritize of these tasks.
With almost 40,000 comments on the site, writing titles for each will be another slog, though I generally always title my own comments. But, sometimes I haven’t, so you’ll find the auto-generated Hi Katie one you shared above.
Again, no way around doing the work. Your results are motivating. Obviously it’s clear from your response you feel keyphrase usage is one of the very most important features.
P.S. Feel free to change my comment title :)
SEO Keyphrases Importance
Google Search Engine Optimization Guide 2015
With most of what I write about SEO it’s aiming for the best possible search engine optimized website possible.
As you’ve touched on there’s a time issue, setting 6 phrases as you write a new article is manageable, editing hundreds of posts, not so easy!
If you already do keyword research (like I do) when creating an article it doesn’t take long to generate 6 phrases rather than one or two, barely any time at all for me.
If you look through my articles like the Future SEO article and note the headers I tend to use (H2 and H3s) you’ll find the Stallion keyphrases tend to be used as a header as well.
The Future of SEO articles keyphrases etc…
WordPress Post Title : The Future of SEO
All In One SEO Title : SEO 2015
Stallion Keyphrase 1 : Google SEO 2015
Stallion Keyphrase 2 : Search Engine Optimization 2015
Stallion Keyphrase 3 : Google Search Engine Optimization 2015
Stallion Keyphrase 4 : 2015 SEO
The Future of SEO articles headers.
H1 = SEO 2015
H2 = Google SEO 2015 History
H3 = Google Search Engine Optimization Difficulty
H3 = 2015 SEO : Performance and Usability
H3 = The Future of SEO 2015
The H1 is added by Stallion Responsive automatically, it will use the All In One SEO Title if set or the WordPress Post Title if not.
The H2 and H3 headers are manually added by me.
I loosely try to match the Stallion keyphrases to the manually added H2 and H3 headers.
You can see Stallion Keyphrase 1 is part of the H2.
Stallion Keyphrase 4 and the WordPress Post Title is part of two of the H3s.
Some parts of Stallion Keyphrase 2 and 3 are part of other H3s.
I don’t have a specific plan which keyphrases to add as a H3 etc…, try to match the content to the keyphrases and a keyphrases to the content. I tend to add one H2 and as many H3s as make sense for the content. Sometimes I’ll add H4s as well.
With the above approach I’m already doing keyword research to determine which phrases to target to add to the content including within the headers. Using the same keyword research to generate the Stallion keyphrases at the same time is easy. If I add a header I’ll look for a phrase to add as a keyphrase or if I want to use a particular keyphrase I’ll try to add it as a header as well. But it’s not a strict MUST add XYZ headers and keyphrases…
When dealing with user comments I use the same concept for comment titles, but much, much more loosely. I might use some of the Stallion keyphrases (or derivative) as the title of a comment, if it works (try to match the comment title to the articles SERPs and to the actual comment body text).
For this comment title I’m using “Google Search Engine Optimization Guide 2015” to so you can see what I mean. If this where a comment under the The Future of SEO article (I may well move this comment thread there later ** :-)) it will help with the main articles SERPs, because the comments content matches the articles SERPs.
** I use a couple of plugins for moving comments around and changing the threading: “Move WordPress Comments” and “Tako Movable Comments”. Don’t worry about the SEO implications of moving comments around, in Stallion Responsive 8 (or was it 8.1) added a canonical URL to the Stallion SEO Super Comments so Google automatically sorts out the indexing correctly.
Regarding the duplicate links. From reading what Google has released I believe if #something is missing from say 5 duplicate links they count as one link from the page, so only counting unique links. When #something is part of the URL it’s not completely clear how much link benefit is passed, there are indications each link passes link benefit even though they go to the same webpage, they are unique URLs. So 5 links with unique #something added to the URL could pass 5 sets of link benefit to one webpage, they certainly pass 5 sets of anchor text benefit.
I assume each link is counted as unique.
I consider this at worst SEO neutral and IMO SEO positive.
When linking from say a category you want as many links as possible to be relevant to the category, when looking at a category you can have three unique and SEO optimized links to each article (if you have the Comment link it’s one more, but that’s not SEO’d anchor text). I consider this a positive, your categories have more anchor text from them that target the sort of SERPs you want your categories to rank for, if you have a lot of unrelated links on sidebars the extra category links will add SEO value to the category SERPs.
If you silo SEO your popular and recent posts widgets like I do those are also a positive. Go to any post on this site and look at the anchor text of the popular and recent posts widget, it tends to use similar keywords as the post you are on. Go to another post in another category and the links and anchor text from the popular and recent posts widget change and tend to be similar to the post you are on. See the SEO Silo Post for more details.
All that being said it’s about priorities, with a site like yours I’d slowly modify all the posts overtime (could take years) and would prioritize your most important posts first. Maybe a case of every day edit one post and some of it’s comments titles (modify the big comments only). With 2,000 posts in a year you could have most of your important posts optimized without it being a case of ONLY spending your time modifying old posts. You may find some of your older posts are not worth keeping, if so either rewrite or delete and 301 redirect to the most relevant webpage. Given a choice I tend towards rewrite, you have an aged webpage that might have aged backlinks (worth their weight in gold), rewriting could generate new SERPs. If you are deleting consider moving the comments to a relevant post using the comments plugins I mentioned above, I hate loosing user comments, feel wrong to delete them.
On my site over the past 6 months I’ve moved something like 180 posts from other sites (that is time consuming moving posts and setting up redirects etc…) including almost 4,000 comments. I’ve rewrote over half the posts, re done all the keyword research from scratch and checked/modified every comment title, moved comments to the most relevant article whilst still maintaining 130 domains, finishing a Stallion Responsive update (8.1), getting 1/4 way through the 8.2 update and doing a bunch of other stuff.
What I’ve done here should really pay off early next year when the domain has aged.
David
Google Search Engine Optimization Guide 2015
SEO Posts Widget Image Links
Regarding the SEO Posts widget linked thumbnail images, if you’ve updated to Stallion Responsive 8.1 you can limit the number of thumbnail images like you see on my left sidebar.
I have the popular posts widget and the recent posts widget which are Stallion SEO Post Widgets to load a linked thumbnail image only for the first 2 links.
I’ve set it this way for performance SEO reasons. I’m loading two images per widget so it looks good for users and not having to load 8 images per widget to improve performance.
David
SEO Posts Widget Image Links
home page - page or post
David, how did you make a home page for this blog “Best WordPress SEO Package for Business”.
Is it a page or a post?
WordPress Static Page HomePage
That’s just a static page.
Created a WordPress Static Page, added content as you do :-)
“Settings” >> “Reading”
Tick “A static page (select below)”
Select the WordPress Static Page I made.
I did create a new WordPress Custom Page Template for this page which I called “No H1 Header, Meta Area, Author Bio” which as the name suggests is a template that doesn’t add a H1 header or the meta date area and the author biography box.
Wanted to set the H1 header manually to “Best WordPress SEO Package for Business” whilst setting the title tag to “WordPress SEO Packages”: standard page template the title tag is also added to a H1.
Didn’t want a meta date area which on other pages says “Post by SEO Dave updated October 1, 2014” and didn’t want the author biography box on the home page.
I’ll be including the page template in Stallion Responsive 8.2. but it’s a highly specific template, deleted several features as described above.
David
WordPress Static Page HomePage
Custom Page Template
If I want to make my own custom page template (different from which are preset in Stallion Resp), how to do that?
How to Make WordPress Custom Page Templates
It’s relatively easy to make custom page templates for WordPress and especially easy with Stallion Responsive.
You have two choices.
Use the example template (made for this reason) and modify to your needs, that’s the file page-example.php
This is basically the page.php template (it’s used to make basic Static Pages) with some info at the top to tell WordPress it’s a custom page template called “Example Default”.
Easiest way to use this template is make a copy of page-example.php and rename the copy to something unique like page-my-custom.php
Edit in a text editor and change the line
To something like
If you use the Stallion Responsive Child theme upload to
/wp-content/themes/stallion-responsive-child/
If not using the child them upload to
/wp-content/themes/stallion-responsive/
Note: if you use the latter make sure you have an offine copy, when you update Stallion you will loose the file, storing it in the child folder protects it from being deleted during updates. I’m afraid that’s how WordPress works, when you update a plugin or a theme using the built in updater WordPress deletes the theme/plugin folder and installs the updates theme/plugin. By using a child theme and storing modified files in the child theme folder the modifications aren’t deleted.
You can now use your new template (it would be called “Andrei Custom Page”) on any Static Page or if you’ve set the right Stallion settings (options under the “Stallion Layout Options” page “Custom Templates ON”) also on WordPress posts.
To add new features, make changes you edit page-my-custom.php what you do is up to you.
The other alternative is find a current page template that’s close to what you want, there’s over 20 built into Stallion. They mostly start with page-***.php and the sitemap ones start sitemap-****.php.
Example page-front-01.php “Template Name: Front 1 – Page Content and Archive Posts”
To make a new template based on this you’d make a copy of page-front-01.php and rename exactly the same way as described above.
Your only limited by your PHP skills and imagination :-)
David
How to Make WordPress Custom Page Templates