Why you'd want to know the update that caused it

The idea is that if you know which update caused your traffic to drop and you know what that update targeted, you only have to fix that specific issue and your rankings will be magically restored. The reality is that it's really not that black and white. Quite often now people blame one update, but if we look at the SearchMetrics stats for their domain, they've had a gradual decline over the last few months with a bigger decline in recent weeks. If we based our actions solely on what Penguin targeted (and that's not even really clear yet within the SEO community) we might be missing other issues.

There were other updates that didn't get named by Google in the same way but had a huge impact in some countries. We've seen sites with over-optimized anchor text being hit from the beginning of the year already, but suddenly people now attribute that to Penguin. The end result for you as a site owner: it doesn't matter.

You need to fix all your issues, not just the ones that this specific update "targets".

How to get "your" traffic back

First of all, it's not your traffic. It's Google's traffic. Being mad at Google, or anyone else for that matter, won't help you one bit, it's Google's traffic and they can do what they want with it. So to regain the traffic your website was getting from Google, you need to play by their rules and in all honesty: those rules haven't changed all that much over the last 10 years. The only thing that's happening is that all the ways people found of bending those rules are slowly breaking.

Don't try and play a game with Google if you don't understand what you're doing. There are dozens of great blackhats out there whom I respect, but that's because they do their own research and they don't start complaining publicly when Google catches them. If you have to read about and apply other people's tricks, you're probably not going to win. As the old saying goes: if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

So how do you get your traffic back? By getting your site re-aligned with Google's values. If you've lost in the Panda update and now recently lost a lot of traffic again, Google is sending you a message: your website doesn't fit our idea of quality. Fix that. Don't try to remove the one or two links that you think might have hurt you.

Now of course, you're more than welcome to order a website review and get our opinion, but please don't expect us to come up with a silver bullet. There are no silver bullets in SEO, just a lot of shiny silver drops of sweat, coming from your forehead.

Penguin, Panda, it’s not that black and white.. is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

As a side note, BlueGlass LA is probably the best conference I've been to in a while, with a ridiculous line-up of speakers, if you're going to go to an internet marketing conference, BlueGlass conferences are seriously among the very best in the US, second only to SEOktoberfest.

Having a blast at BlueGlass LA is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

You see, bo.lt makes a copy of the page at the moment it's prepared for sharing, they say they do that because of speed. As Avinash tweets a lot, he probably made that copy a couple of hours before he shared it. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if I hadn't added stuff to the page in the mean time and fixed a lot of typo's. Everyone who'd use Avinash's link wouldn't see those changes. And bo.lt decided that for me, without asking me anything, or even worse, giving me the option to opt-out.

SEO Impact

Surely those bo.lt guys are at least trying to give the rankings for those pages people share through its service their links back? No. They don't. Well, not unless you're not already adding rel="canonical" elements to your site yourself. Each user has its own subdomain. Avinash's subdomain is zqi.bo.lt. As you can see for yourself, quite a few of his shared pages are indexed by Google. That shouldn't be possible. Bo.lt should add a canonical back to the original page if there isn't one in the source already.

No Analytics

They claim a webmaster gets all his normal stuff, ads and analytics etc. Except that for both Clicky and Google Analytics there are no views measured for that bo.lt link, because Clicky refuses pageviews from other domains and I've filtered those out of Google Analytics to prevent others from rendering my analytics useless (yes, people do try that). So, "my" visitors don't get the changes I made to the copy, making me look stupid and I can't track which visitors those were and where they came from... At this point, I want out.

Opt Out

I've gone through their documentation, both normal and for developers, and there simply is no documented way to opt-out. So I decided to dive a bit deeper and figure out which user-agent bo.lt uses. It turns out that they actually do have a page about their user-agent. The next step would normally be simple: add a line to your robots.txt blocking bo.lt. Unfortunately, in my tests, bo.lt never actually retrieved the robots.txt file so they're not adhering to the robots.txt protocol. They really should. They're taking my content, they're not asking for permission and they're not allowing me to opt-out. Someone could sue them over that. I'm just going to request, through this blog post:

Bo.lt, please add an option to opt my sites out of your service.

Also, in my opinion, if you're using bo.lt, you should probably start considering alternatives.

Disclaimer: please be aware that I like Avinash a lot and don't blame him for anything. He's a great guy and an inspiration to a lot of us in the online marketing industry. It's the bo.lt service I dislike and I think that after reading this he will switch to something else as well.

A "hard" out

I figured out a "hard" way to get out of bo.lt doing its thing, add the following to your .htaccess file:

RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} bo.lt/ua
RewriteRule . - [F,L]

This will block bo.lt, giving it a "forbidden" page.

Why I dislike Bo.lt is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

If you read any blogs in the world, by now you'll know WordPress dominates the top 100 blogs in the world, Matt had some interesting comments about that. We've seen more WordPress stats, like these by Lorelle. I then started adding more stats on my own.

I asked Experian Hitwise to give me some stats about visits to WordPress.org, Drupal.org and Joomla.org in the UK and US, which they did (thanks!). oDesk and Freelancer.com have some great WordPress stats pages and of course there's a bit of info on WordPress.org itself. So, with all of that and some I'm probably forgetting, Design by Soap made the following infographic for me, I hope you like it, if you do, please share it! (click here for a larger version)

WordPress Stats

WordPress Stats Infographic is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

My background

As a former Theology student and as someone raised in the Christian tradition, I have a fairly specific (and in some eyes: stringent) set of ethics. I don't work on gambling or porn related sites because of that. I'm aware that others have different opinions on this and I don't judge others when they have other ethics with regards to their work. To each his own. Sometimes though, I draw the line.

Among my friends are some of the world's best black hat SEO's. These are also guys that will never break a law or willfully hurt other people to get their rankings, they just game Google's algorithms. I know Matt knows at least some of them and there's even a form of "honor" among them: he seems to appreciate their ability to outwit their algorithm. Unfortunately not everyone in the SEO "community" is that clean: some people are willing to break laws or hurt other people.

After the last SES conference in Amsterdam, which I arranged the speakers for, one of the speakers (not the keynote :) ) admitted to me he wouldn't mind teaching other people how to hack sites or how to build trojans to gain links. I was too startled to give a proper response but decided later that day that I would never allow him back on a conference I arranged speakers for.

Spammy Link Building in the Netherlands

The last few days there's been an outcry in the Netherlands over several companies using comment spam and forum spam as a method of gaining links. They'd been caught creating fake profiles on all sort of sites and pretending to interact while really only inserting their links. I had to laugh a bit, as would most of my UK, American and German friends, as that's so common outside of the Netherlands nobody would be surprised to see that anymore.

There was one specific case though that "hurt" more than others (which was by another company by the way). Someone had willfully created an account on a forum for MS (multiple sclerosis) patients, claiming to be a patient, while was spamming links there to health related offers. That's so low that it hurts.

Outing Non-ethical SEO practices: immoral?

Recently Joe Hall, whom I respect a lot, did a post saying SEO "outing" is immoral. He mentions that while the outed practices themselves might be non-ethical, those people have families too, etc. Basically: people lose their jobs because of it. That's true. And that's sad. Especially as most of those people will not know what hit them.

I will counter that though: those companies have grown by using their unethical methods, costing other people their jobs in other companies. This is a zero-sum game in most cases. Google doesn't tell people what to buy, it helps them find where they can buy it. Keep this in your mind at all times: search doesn't create demand, it merely funnels it. I refuse to let people who use unethical SEO methods "win" because they support families, simply because their more ethical competitors support families too.

I recently outed GoDaddy over using spammy link building techniques and got a lot of flack for that from other people in the industry. Some seem to think that it's all of "us" (SEO's) against "them" (Google). I wholeheartedly disagree. GoDaddy was using its paying customers to strengthen their own SEO without consulting them, in fact, they were specifically hiding what they were doing in their editor.

I don't mind them "playing" Google's algorithms. I mind them abusing their customers websites without their consent. The only way of making that stop is to ask Google to remove the value that abuse has. In the same way I loathe WordPress plugin developers who add links to their users sites without consent.

I will not "out" people for buying high quality, relevant links from high quality websites related to their own topic, I have less issues outing people who hack into my website to gain a few links. This happens more often than I dare to admit.

Policing the web

Joe goes further and says:

"If your paycheck doesn’t say “Google” on it, it’s not your job to police the web."

My paycheck doesn't say Google. I'm not policing the web. Neither is Google. Google is trying to maintain a set of rules within its own index. It has all the rights in the world to do that. My paycheck doesn't say "WordPress" either, yet I help develop that project because we all benefit. There really is such a thing as "the common good".

That's entirely different from outing every SEO I find that does something outside of Google's guidelines, I'm smart enough to create my own set of ethics. I hope you are too. I for one intend to help them battle unethical SEO's because I think we all benefit from that.

The ethics of SEO is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

We often advise on how to gain trust in our website reviews, and I've compiled a list of some of the advice we've given over time. Of course, trust can be earned in more ways than this, but we'll give you these seven to start with.

1. Use clear and normal language

This is an often overseen issue that causes a lot of misgrief with your visitors. You should speak their language, not drown them in a sea of technical specs you don't even understand yourself. Use a clear and direct style of writing. Keep your audience in mind. Do not focus on telling them what you want to tell them, focus on providing as many arguments as possible why their quality of life improves after buying that specific product.

2. Testimonials

Do not brag about your products yourself. If your products or services are really that good, I'm sure you'll find someone else that can do the bragging for you. Make sure your visitor understand that the testimonial is written by an actual customer, by listing at least name and company and if the customer agrees, even a picture of him. Video seems to be the next big thing in testimonials, by the way. In my opinion, that video testimonial should be accompanied by a written excerpt:

Testimonials as seen on cloversites.com

3. Verified signs

Everyone can create a verified sign, so don't let those verified signs fool you. But the majority of your visitors actually believe that you are the 'Most appreciated hairdresser of Mississippi' or the 'Best Plummer 2006'. Man, I hate those signs. But when the signs are from well-known companies, they really do add value to a webshop:

"Verified" signs

By investing in the guidelines of the right verification companies  the webshop shows that it has been keeping the customer in mind when setting up the website.

4. Pictures

If you recognize the woman on this picture, please call the following toll-free number...:

You can do better than that stock photo. Listing actual pictures of yourself and/or your employees pushes conversion due to recognition and identification.

5. List your physical address

This one is really simple: people want to know there is a place to go to in case of problems (if any). Having an actual store next to your webshop works even better, especially if a lot of your customers are relatively local.

In the Netherlands digitalstreet.nl made this concept into a huge success, even though they're located in the south-west of the Netherlands (quite near to where we are), people come from all over the Netherlands because they'd rather buy the product in the store. There are more stories like that, but even if you don't want to do that, just listing your address on check-out pages increases trust a lot.

6. What happens after check-out?

There's this hesitation in almost all buying decisions: right before you click the Pay Now button. What's going to happen next? Am I charged for taxes, import, anything else? Can I select a wrapping paper? Explain what happens after clicking that button. That way the customer is included in your ordering process and there are absolutely no suprises. That can be done with just a few short lines of text:

7. Show you care about more than making money

The most important thing is that your website has to reflect your believe in the product or service you provide. Just a list of products is not enough. Also tell your customer about your company, your main values or mission statement. I really love the 1% for the Planet from Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia) and Craig Mathews (Blue Ribbon Flies) http://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org. Next to showing that you are involved, it also creates a huge sympathy and trust factor.

We'd love to hear your tips!

If you are selling products or services on your website, you must have thought about this subject. I'm curious: What have you done on your website to increase trust? What are you going to do?

7 ways to Increase Sales by creating Trust is a post by Michiel Heijmans on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site.

So, Google wants to do something about over-optimization. That's not saying they want to do something about SEO. As Matt said on that same panel one more time, they have nothing against SEO, they have something against spamming.

So, if you write texts with a keyword density of 25%, you maybe should be worried. If you install an SEO plugin that helps you write more search engine friendly content (and even warns you when it thinks the keyword density is too high) and optimizes most of the technicalities for you, there's nothing to worry about. Several Googlers use my plugin, do you really think they'd do that if they considered it over-optimization?

Now, stop over-analyzing everything Matt says and get back to work, building good websites for users.

Over-Optimization vs Optimization is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

My presentation on how to use my WordPress SEO plugin (warning, I was a bit groggy and it shows), was recorded by Webschorle.

My interview with Tobias Fox:

SEO Campixx 2012 is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Now, the webinar with SEO Braintrust was recorded and you can view it right here:

For a full transcript and the slides, see the post on SEO Braintrust.

WordPress SEO Webinar with SEO Braintrust is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Yesterday I was helping out Rick, and found something that was the reason for this post. His blog, Noah's dad is a blog about a child with Down syndrome and aims to help other parents with children with Down syndrome. Rick contacted me over Twitter as he'd recently switched to my WordPress SEO plugin and a new theme, but his rankings were dropping.

Turns out that the theme he was using had a faulty rel=canonical link in its header, pointing to the site's homepage instead of the proper URL for a page or post. He was also using my SEO plugin, which added the correct canonical link, but because of how the theme was built, the canonical from my plugin was below the one in the theme and thus Google picked up the wrong canonical. That caused Google to literally remove a lot of the blogs pages from the index.

I've since emailed the theme authors and they're taking action to fix it, so there's no reason for me to name them here, but I think it shows that they, as goes for many theme authors, didn't really know what they were doing.

Some themes have a better reputation in this regard. StudioPress first hired me and later on my good friend Greg Boser of BlueGlass, one of the best SEOs in the world, to make sure their themes were SEO friendly. They, unlike others, have earned the right to say their themes are SEO friendly. Others might have invested in the same way, but it's hard to know for sure. Do you want to bet your site's rankings on that?

Why some WordPress Themes hurt your SEO. is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I'm specifically also looking for people in Europe to quickly fill out this form, I'm finding it's a bit harder there to find a decent WordPress host than it is in the US.

Keyboard picture from Shutterstock used under license.

WordPress Host Survey is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I also hate the suggested person box. I understand I could (and probably do) drive traffic through that, but I don't need it. And I hate their new ad sitelinks even more. The first organic result is almost below the fold now...

Luckily, this is all easily fixed. Most browsers support a feature that's called a user stylesheets. This is a CSS file on your computer that is applied to each page you're looking at, on top of that page's stylesheets. The location is different for each browser / operating system combination, so you might need to Google a bit if you're not using Chrome, for which I've listed them below:

• Chrome on Mac:

  ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/User\ StyleSheets/Custom.css

• Chrome on PC:

  C://Users/Username/AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User StyleSheets/custom.css

This article (while a bit old) seems to have good ways of making a user stylesheet for other browsers.

User styles to hide ads, TOS warnings and suggested persons

So with this small addition to that stylesheet, you can hide the specific sections you don't like:

/* Hide the Ads */
#tads, #mbEnd, #bottomads {
display: none;
}
/* Hide the suggested person box */
#rhs_block {
display: none;
}
/* Hide the TOS warning nonsense */
#bb_pp_tos_ack {
display: none;
}

Now my search result pages are nice and clean again, gotta love it.

Changing the look of your Search Result Pages is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

It’s a vastly overrated notion that a homepage should include all sections of your website and serve all kind of visitors. It needs one clear call to action.

Clutter:
To make disorderly or hard to use by filling or covering with objects

The need to put everything on one homepage

Employment websites do it. “Employers subscribe here”, “Companies list here”, “Latest jobs”, “Build your resume”. Real estate agents do it. “Buy these new homes”, “Sell your home with us”, “Latest sales”, “Upcoming events”. That’s really just the tip of the iceberg.

It seems that most homepages are designed with one thing in mind: “How do I make everything on my website accessible from this one single page.” Well, you can’t. Not in a way that your visitor will understand your company, product or really anything at all.

One clear Call to Action

To guide your visitor into or through your website, you should give him directions. Pretty similar to how a road needs road signs actually. Yes, you can put up multiple signs, but you should make the most important ones the biggest. Make it as big as possible. Make it stand out.

Everybody has visited that one great looking website in all shades of grey that had an orange RSS button that drew all attention. That’s really bad design in my opinion. The thing that stands out is your call to action: that’s what you want visitors to click on.

A different approach to a Call to Action

There are many ways to use and implement this call to action. One is using the big bold button, preferably in a color that is not used in the design of the website (the orange RSS button mentioned above). You might also use whitespace to emphasize a specific part of the homepage, making it stand out that way.

We recently had a client for a website review who has this (quite common) idea of starting his website with a choice: three options for three variations of a product. That would imply three call to actions…

No problem, if you combine the two ways mentioned above. So make a block that really stands out (use sufficient whitespace around it) and add three similar call to actions, with (very important) a descriptive title for that block, like “Make your choice”. That way, the entire block becomes your call to action.

Now let’s illustrate the simplicity of call to actions by looking at some example websites (none of them are clients):

Jobsite.co.uk

“Jobsite is a leading UK online recruitment site, dedicated to helping you find your next job.”

I actually got lost on your homepage already. Yes, I understand you want me to search for my next job on your page, or do you really want me to register first? One very distracting issue this homepage has, is that the Vision2learn banner has the largest call to action of the page…

Scuolaleonardo.com

Since we do website reviews for websites from all over the world, I decided to look up an Italian School in Italy and found Scuola Leonardo da Vinci. After looking at their website, I decided to stick to Google Translate… as I couldn’t find where to apply for a course.. The question “Where do you want me to click???” is impossible to answer for this website. The total lack of a call to action, combined with the overall clutter, makes a visitor head back to Google in the blink of an eye.

Walmart.com

Help me out here, Walmart. Why do you want me to click my empty cart? Don’t get me wrong, for shopping sites, emphasizing the cart is always a good thing. But I think what Walmart wants me to click is something else, like the free shipping offer or perhaps a product I could buy. Now that should be the orange button on that homepage! Also, the banner “Shop Top Brands” is just a list of products and prices. The call to action on that banner should also be clear (“Shop NOW” or something like that).

Get to work!

What is your homepage's main call to action? Is it clear enough? Go and make it clear. You'll have a better website for it!

Image for 3D person sitting on a question mark used in license from Shutterstock.

Where do you want me to click? is a post by Michiel Heijmans on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The Site & The Problem

The site has a very simple concept: it explains how to pronounce certain words in several languages. When the site hadn't been optimized yet, most of the traffic was for the term "how do you say" or "how do you say that word" and for some specific pages. Those specific pages had been linked to by other websites.

You see, this site's issue was quite simple: there was no way one could get to a specific page without searching for it. So, in our review we proposed several methods of making a browsable archive, one that a search engine could go to and find all the pages in it. They did and the solution worked wonders, now, if you search for "How do you say fruits de mer", you're taken right to the best page for it: "how to say fruits de mer".

The Analytics

What that means traffic wise? Well, this, and we're only just getting started, as the site was updated on Jan 19th:

Update

After publication of this post Marie-Ora, who owns the website, sent me an updated screenshot of the stats:

Conclusion

Is there stuff on your site that is impossible to reach for search engines? Now is as good as time as any to fix that. Is your website not getting the traffic you're hoping for? Maybe we can help with a review!

Website Traffic times ten? Sometimes it’s easy is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Google sometimes lists URLs that it's not allowed to spider, because it's blocked by robots.txt, because a lot of links point to a URL. A good example of this is a search for [RTL Nieuws] (disclosure: RTL is a client of mine). rtlnieuws.nl 301 redirects to the news section of rtl.nl. But... rtlnieuws.nl/robots.txt exists... And has the following content:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Because of that, the links towards rtlnieuws.nl don't count toward the news section on rtl.nl, and Google displays rtlnieuws.nl in the search results. This is unwanted behavior that we're trying to fix but for now it's a good example of what I wanted to explain. By blocking /wp-admin/ and /trackback/ in your robots.txt, you're not preventing them from showing up.

Unfortunately, recently the /wp-admin/ block was added to WordPress core, because of this Trac ticket. In the discussion on that ticket, I've proposed another solution in this patch. This solution involves sending an X-Robots-Tag header, which is the HTTP header equivalent of a meta name="robots" tag. This would in fact remove all wp-admin directories from Google search results.

WordPress Robots.txt blocking Search results and Feeds

There are two other sections which are blocked in the suggested robots.txt, /*?, which blocks everything with a question mark and as such all search results, and */feed/, which blocks all feeds. The first is not a good idea because if someone were to link to your search results, you wouldn't benefit from those links.

A better solution would be to add a <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> tag to those search results pages, as it would prevent the search results from rankings but would allow the link "juice" to flow through to the returned posts and pages. This is what my WordPress SEO plugin does as soon as you enable it. It also does this for wp-admin and login and registration pages.

I'm aware that that is different from Google's guidelines on this topic at the moment, which state:

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

I've reached out to Google to get clarification on whether they would say my solution is acceptable as well, or perhaps even better :) .

Blocking /feed/ is a bad idea because an RSS feed is actually a valid sitemap for Google. Blocking it would prevent Google from using that to find new content on your site. So, my suggested robots.txt for WordPress is actually a lot smaller than the Codex one. I only have this:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/

I block the plugins directory because some plugin developers have the annoying habit of adding index.php files to their plugin directories that link back to their websites. For all other parts of WordPress, there are better solutions for blocking.

The other WordPress Robots.txt suggestions

The other sections of the robots.txt as suggested are a bit old and no longer needed. Digg mirror is something for us old guys who remember when Digg used to send loads of traffic, Googlebot Image and Media Partner are still there but if you only have the above in your robots.txt you don't need specific lines for them in your WordPress robots.txt file.

WordPress robots.txt Example is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Gravity Forms + Custom Post Type addon

By default, Gravity Forms allows you to create posts through a form. It doesn't have support for custom post types at the moment though, in part because a wonderful plugin was already created that allows for this. This plugin, aptly named Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types can be downloaded from WordPress.org.

Once you have both Gravity Forms and this plugin activated, you can start creating a form. The first step is to make the form fill our custom post type. We start with creating a form and dragging in a title field:

The title field can be found in the posts field section of Gravity Forms field, below the advanced fields:

Once you've added this input field and given it a name, go to the advanced section of its edit block, you'll see an option to save as post type, this has been added by the afore mentioned plugin:

You check the box and select the custom post type you want to use, in my case, WPSEO Themes. Now we start adding the form. We need a couple of different types of values:

• The title: done.
• The "description", which will just be the body text, so you can easily drag in the Body input field.
• An image, which should be saved as the featured image too, more on that below.
• Several custom fields, more below too.

Adding a featured image trough the form

This is actually pretty easy: drag in an image field and click edit, you'll see something like the screen below:

As you can see, setting the image as featured image is as easy as ticking the box. It's wise to also ask for a description if you don't know what's going to be on the image. In my case, it's a screenshot of the theme, so I won't bother and just set the alt tag automatically.

Adding custom fields through Gravity Forms

The next step is to add the several custom fields we need. In my case I had 5, but you can have as much as you want. You start by dragging a Custom Field input into your form. Once you have that, you click edit and you select the appropriate custom field type:

In this case, I'm asking for the theme URL, so I select website, but there are all sorts of options you can choose from, as you can see. Now here comes the tricky part, you need to set the name of your custom field. You should go into your Types -> Custom Fields page and check the second value below the custom field title:

That's the name of your custom field, but you should prefix it with "wpcf-", because that's the Types plugin naming convention, which prevents its custom fields from clashing with other ones.

Of course, if you created a custom field group from already existing custom fields you don't need to prefix the custom field name.

True / false or "boolean" input fields

Some of your custom values might be checkboxes, they're either on or off, true or false. That's called a boolean value in math / developers language, but for you, it's really simple. Just create a custom field type "checkboxes", and go into it's settings:

Be sure to check the "enable values" box and set the value to just "1". That way, if checked, Gravity Forms will save it as value "1" and the Types plugin will "get it".

Deciding on workflow

Now, once you've used the above info to finish your form, you need to decide on a workflow. On the post title field, the one whose advanced settings we used to save this input as a custom post type, we now go to the "normal" properties:

As you can see, you can set a default post author and a post status. Now in my case the author will be me in most cases, as nobody will be logged in. However, if you have enabled registration on your site, you can force people to be logged in before even being able to use this form, by going into your forms advanced settings and checking the "require user to be logged in" checkbox:

This allows for all sorts of workflows, find one that suits your site!

Conclusion

We still haven't written a single line of code, yet we've already created a custom post type and created a form that allows people to submit custom post types to us.

So, one more thing to check of off the to-do list:

1. Creating a custom post type + custom fields.
2. Creating a form through which people can submit themes that fills this post type.
3. Creating a browsable interface for this post type.

In my next post, I'll explain how to use the Views plugin to create "views" for this post type and unveil the finished product!

Use Gravity Forms to submit custom post types is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Database of Themes that support my WordPress SEO plugin

I've also got a project I'll use this for: I want a database of themes that support my WordPress SEO plugin, with some specific settings info, a screenshot, etc. I want to store these as a custom post type. So the first step is to determine which info I would need to store:

• Basic stuff:
  • Title of the theme
  • Short description
  • Screenshot
  • URL
  • Is this a paid theme or not?
  • Price (if applicable)
• And some more advanced stuff:
  • Does this theme have its own SEO options that "yield" to WordPress SEO?
  • Does this theme support breadcrumbs?
  • Does this theme require force rewrite titles to be on or not?

Creating a Custom Post Type

Having determined what I wanted to store, the next step was to create a Custom Post Type. That's as easy as using this interface:

I could add Taxonomies to it as well, but I'll leave that for now, although creating a taxonomy is just as easy through the Types interface. I end up with my WordPress SEO theme CPT:

Adding Custom Fields

You'll think "huh, that hasn't got any of the specific data yet": that's right. It doesn't. That's where the true power of Types comes in, you can create "Custom Field Groups" and add these to post types. So I did:

As you can see you can choose from a lot of different types of fields, and all these types have their own content checks. For instance for a URL, it'll allow you to "force" a correct URL. I've added the custom field group to my WPSEO Themes post type, and now, when I go into edit or create a new WPSEO Theme "post", I get this interface below the title and content area:

So far, no coding was required, thanks to the wonderful Types plugin! You can get that, for free, on wp-types.com or on WordPress.org.

So, what we needed to do:

1. Creating a custom post type + custom fields.
2. Creating a form through which people can submit themes that fills this post type.
3. Creating a browsable interface for this post type.

Subscribe below to make sure you won't miss the next two steps!

Types WordPress plugin – Easy Custom Post Types is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Forcing Clicky to track a link as outbound

First of all, you need to know that when you add a class clicky_log_outbound to a link, Clicky will track each click on that link as an outbound link. Now I always add a class track or aff to my affiliate links that I want to have tracked, for instance:

<a class="track" href="http://yoast.com/out/clicky/">Clicky</a>

Of course I could manually add the clicky_log_outbound class, but that's just a tad bit too much work, especially as most of my links have been "classed" already and I might want to use this class for other stuff later on.

Now, I add a tiny filter function to my sites functions.php file, this searches for links with class aff or track and adds the clicky_log_outbound class:

function clicky_outbound_filter( $content ) {
	$content = preg_replace('/<a([^>]+)?class="(aff|track)"([^>]+)?>/',
		'<a\1class="\2 clicky_log_outbound"\3>', $content);
	return $content;
}

add_filter( 'the_content', 'clicky_outbound_filter', 10, 1 );

That's it! Clicky will now track those links as outbound. Now let's set such a link up as a goal.

Goal Tracking in Clicky

For goal tracking you need to have a premium (read, paid) Clicky account, but it's well worth it. Setting up a goal is a piece of cake. You go to your site's analytics and then to Goals, Setup. You'll see this interface:

You simply name the action, set the goal URL to be your outbound URL, you could do /out/clicky/ or, when you sometimes forget the last slash, /out/clicky*. You can set up revenue and even a funnel, a required page before one can reach that goal.

Once you've done that, the goals will show, in realtime, in your Goals overview and in your "bigscreen" Clicky display.

More tracking power: campaigns

This feature becomes even more powerful when you combine it with another great feature of Clicky; campaign tracking. Clicky fully supports the _utm type variables Google Analytics uses, so you can track campaigns and terms within campaigns. That is, in fact, how I did the tracking in yesterdays post about WordPress Dashboard widgets.

Tracking Outbound / Affiliate Links with getClicky is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

When I added mine, in the beginning, it drove lots and lots of traffic. People weren't used to it yet and thought I had somehow "found my way into core". Recently, I've added more elaborate tracking to my WordPress SEO plugin links. Allowing me to see how much traffic the individual sections of my plugin were sending back to my site. Let me share that with you now (click for a larger version):

Traffic and conversion statistics for plugin links for the last 28 days

As you can see, the widget sends a bit of traffic (1800 visitors in total) but only drove 3 conversions... Conversions on my site are click outs on affiliate programs and, more importantly, sales for my website review service. Turns out, people clicking on from the plugin interface or the plugin link are far more valuable visitors than people clicking on the dashboard widget.

So, in an effort to annoy less people and focus on the traffic that matters, I've just pushed out version 1.1.5 of my WordPress SEO plugin, without the dashboard widget. I will shortly remove it from my Google Analytics plugin too. Of course other developers should do their own analysis if they want to, but for me it's clear that the widget doesn't help enough to be interesting.

If you used the dashboard widget regularly to find new posts on my site, please consider subscribing to my newsletter using the form below!

On WordPress Dashboard Widgets is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There's been some outcry though, because Twitter and Facebook aren't "highlighted" as much as Google+ in those new social results. Danny is doing some awesome reporting on this, first in "Search Engines Should Be Like Santa From “Miracle On 34th Street”", later in an interview with Schmidt.

Google used to have access to the Twitter firehose, all the tweets coming in in realtime, enabling them to index tweets at light speed. Facebook used to show some friends of a person on a profile to visitors to that profile who aren't logged in, now look at the cache for my Facebook profile: just other people with the same name.

As I said in a reaction to a Google+ post by Jeff Jarvis: what both Twitter and Facebook are afraid of is that they're "giving" "their" social graph to Google, thereby allowing Google to easily grow its own social network because it would make it very easy for Google to suggest friends to you or say "these friends of yours already use Google+, shouldn't you use it too?". So by opening up, they'd open their books to a competitor.

This, ultimately, should be a users choice, not a platform choice. When it does become a user choice, of course Google should favor the social network the user is the most active on, so if I'm more active on Facebook than on Twitter or Google+, it should highlight that above the others. Right now, it seems to be mostly highlighting Google+, which will raise some eyebrows here and there and is food for discussion.

A while back at the first Fusion Marketing Experience in Brussels, Bas van den Beld of State of Search interviewed Olivier Blanchard and myself about search and social. We talked about how the two intertwine and can't be unraveled, in fact, as Olivier said during the interview: "it's like coffee and cream, once they mix you can't get the cream out of the coffee". See the interview here (the sound is not the best ever, I know):

The thing is: this is a done deal. There's no way back. Search and social have now officially teamed up, so you might as well live with it. It also means that not using Google+ is... Not really an option if you're a marketer, but I guess we had that one coming for a while as well.

So, what does this mean from a tactics perspective? For now, it means: share every post on Google+ too, make sure you have Google+ buttons on your posts and, most importantly: keep building relations with people! It's not like that much changed; social mentions might have become a new and maybe even important ranking factor, but even quality links are usually the result of a relation, of social interaction.

The formula to success didn't change: you have to keep building relations / followers / an audience, create great content and make sure people notice it.

Search & Social – you can’t get the cream out of the coffee is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!