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 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!

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!

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!

For those who do decide to yield and for those who do not integrate SEO functionality into their theme, this is the guide to follow on how to make sure your theme works with all the major SEO plugins and more in particular, my WordPress SEO plugin.

1. Basics
2. Head elements
   1. Titles
   2. Meta's
   3. Link items
3. Body elements
   1. Breadcrumbs
   2. Other body elements
4. Is your WordPress SEO plugin active?

Basics

Whether or not your theme is in the WordPress.org repository, you should strive to meet their Theme Review guidelines. With the theme check plugin you can simply check whether that's the case for most of the technical aspects. This makes sure you have all the necessary hooks for plugins to do their work. If any of those fail, fix them before even looking at the stuff below.

Head elements

Titles

The most common issue with SEO plugins and WordPress themes is with titles: theme authors have a tendency to hardcode (sections of) titles into their themes, which results in hard to fix behavior, which I recently discussed here and hasn't been fixed in WordPress core yet. In short, your title should be not even a tiny bit longer than this:

<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>

If you decide to embed SEO functionality in your theme, you should then put a filter function on to that wp_title functionality just like a plugin would. This allows you to "unhook" that filter when an SEO plugin is active.

Meta's

Meta tags come in a vast amount of shapes and sizes, but there are only a few that "matter". There are the meta description, the meta keywords (on which I have a strong opinion too) and the meta robots tag. In my opinion, your theme should never embed any of these meta tags, but, if you decide to embed SEO functionality into your theme, write functions for these things and hook them on to the wp_head action.

Be very, very sure to allow for site owners to fully disable any meta functionality you write. I regularly, read: daily, advise people to change themes when their theme has a lot of SEO stuff embedded that is just plain wrong or collides with other plugins. Make no mistake: a portion of your users, probably a large portion of your users, cares about their SEO. Getting it wrong is worse then not doing anything, so if I were a theme author I'd most definitely opt for the latter.

Link items

There are a lot of <link> items that matter for SEO these days. There are rel=canonical, rel=next and rel=prev and a few more. WordPress does rel=canonical on single posts and pages but nowhere else yet, though a patch for core is ready to make WordPress add rel=canonical in more cases, but your theme should not do any of these. You're, to be honest, bound to get them wrong.

If you do decide to add them, do it in the same fashion as meta elements: hook them on to wp_head and make sure site owners can disable the functionality.

Body elements

Breadcrumbs

While the above points make integration for any SEO plugin easier, this point is more specific for my own WordPress SEO plugin. Integration of my breadcrumbs is quite easy, use something like the following code:

if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {
   yoast_breadcrumb('<div id="breadcrumbs">','</div>');
}

This code will not display anything unless the breadcrumbs feature of my SEO plugin is enabled.

Breadcrumbs Variables

This breadcrumb path takes the following 3 variables:

$prefix
The code that your breadcrumb should be prefixed with. Default to an empty string.

$suffix
The code that should be added on the back of your breadcrumb. Default to an empty string.

$display
If set to false, will return the breadcrumb path instead of echo-ing it. Defaults to true.

Other body elements

You should take note of my guides on HTML heading structure and HTML Sitemaps. While my SEO plugin doesn't "interfere" with those, it's good practice to make them optimal. You should also read my WordPress SEO Theme Guidelines to make sure you're doing all the other necessary things.

Is your WordPress SEO plugin active?

You should check whether a constant named WPSEO_VERSION is defined, preferably like this:

if ( defined('WPSEO_VERSION') ) {
// Disable your SEO stuff
}

WordPress SEO Plugin Theme Integration Guide 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 includes a new tool built by yours truly to help you create the necessary redirects. Keep on reading!

Why change your WordPress permalink structure?

Most of the time I tell people to change their WordPress permalink structure, it's to get rid of the dates in their permalink structure. If their content is "timeless", it just shouldn't be there. In my opinion, the only type of site that should have dates in their permalink structure is a news site. All other sites should strive to write content that is "timeless".

Having a date in your permalink structure has proven to diminish the CTR from the search results for older posts. People are just not likely to click on a result that's two years old, even though it might very well be that your post has the answer they seek. With Google seeming to use that CTR more and more as a (very valid) ranking signal, that's becoming a more serious factor each day. I did a long post on WordPress SEO URL / Permalink considerations a while back, you might want to (re-)read that.

Performance considerations

Up until WordPress 3.3, there was / is indeed a quite serious performance issue when you have a lot of pages when you use just /%postname%/, luckily, that is solved in WordPress 3.3. I have debated people quite a bit saying that it's easily solved with some caching but having it fixed in core is a big step ahead, so there are no more excuses to not use /%postname%/.

Changing WordPress Permalink Structure

There are two steps in changing your WordPress permalink structure. The first is simple, go to Settings -> Permalinks and select Post name:

Change your WordPress Permalink Settings

If you don't have the post name option yet, you're not on WordPress 3.3, the release of which is imminent. You could wait a bit for the update, or you could just add /%postname%/ as a custom permalink structure.

The second step is to redirect your old permalinks to your new ones. To do that, you have to add redirects to your .htaccess file, I have created a little tool that generates these redirects for you based on your domain and your old permalink structure. To use this tool, click the button:

Generate Redirects

There you have it! If you copied the redirect into your .htaccess, you should test whether it's working. If it's not, chances are you're not allowed to use RedirectMatch, which makes changing your WordPress Permalink Structure a bit harder and not something I can easily cover in this post.

Let me know whether the tool works for you and what you've done to your permalinks!

How to change your WordPress Permalink Structure 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!

After a couple of years of struggling with email I have finally found the solution to make sure each of my emails reaches the inbox of its recipient and I'm about to share it with you.

Note: this is not a paid review. In fact, since Postmark doesn't have an affiliate program, it's not even a post with some affiliate links. It's just me solving a problem for myself that I hope you will now be able to solve too.

The problem: email not reaching its recipient

I wrote about email reliability before, but let's be honest: getting all the web servers we use for sites to send email reliably is a pain. You need to setup SPF records, preferably set up DKIM too and make sure that your web servers do not get blacklisted. One of my servers, for which I had set up SPF, for some stupid reason got blacklisted a couple of weeks ago, resulting in a couple of website review emails not reaching my customers. I hated that so much that I started looking for another solution.

On this site, I had switched from Gravity Forms to Wufoo a while back. Wufoo is another awesome web forms service, with the at that time "added value" that Wufoo would take care of the email sending for me. My main gripe with using Wufoo was that I really wanted my forms and the entries of my forms in my site's install, not somewhere else. On top of that, Gravity Forms gives me a bit more programming flexibility, so I wanted it back. So, I had two email problems and started to look for a solution to both at the same time.

Postmark: reliable email

I found that solution in Postmark, which handles transactional email through a set of reasonably simple but reliable API's. Using this pre-built library, I was able to replace the email sending in my website review application for Postmark within about 10 minutes.

Yes, Postmark costs a bit of money, but if you consider that at $1,50 per thousand emails, you run a lot smaller chance of losing customers over email not reaching its destination, it seems to me that that's money well-spent.

It took me a bit longer to code a WordPress plugin that I liked for Postmark. There are a couple of WordPress plugins listed on the Postmark site, but all of them relied on CURL, which I don't have on every server I run WordPress on, and they all ignored some of the headers that plugins like Gravity Forms passed along. So I used the same pre-built library, but adapted it this time to use the WordPress HTTP libraries and added a wrapper to more reliably pick up all the headers that might get added by plugins.

The result is a plugin that is pretty easy to use, my own Postmark Email for WordPress Plugin.

WordPress email sending tips

By default, WordPress sends email from wordpress@example.com, where example.com is your domain. In 99% of cases this is a non-existing email address. More and more people, including Postmark, are saying that using a non-existent email to send your email from is not a good idea. I agree. So I created wordpress@yoast.com, which gets filtered into a tag in my email.

The great thing about actually creating that email address is that you can also assign a gravatar to it. This means that when people use email clients like Sparrow, or other email clients that support Gravatar, they'll see a nice avatar image for your email too. In my case, I made sure that image was the Yoast logo.

Go forth and email!

And please do let me know your comments about both Postmark, the plugin and your tips for reliable email in the comments!

Sending Reliable Email with Postmark 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 I have just made changes to my WP site, does it help to toggle the cache plugin?

  Absolutely. My SEO plugin force refreshes the cache because otherwise people start emailing me that stuff doesn't work when it works perfectly. On sites with more traffic though, you could also just leave the cache as is and wait it out a bit.

• How do I move a WordPress site, changing its permalinks but keeping the social numbers counts (post tweets/likes/shares)?

  The answer to this is an unfortunate but resounding: you don't. I've written a tutorial on moving WordPress to a new domain quite a while ago, but you simply can't keep those stats. All the more reason to think long and hard about moving domains...

• My buddy Richard thought he was funny, and asked: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a wouldchuck could chuck wood?

  The answer is simple, of course: a woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

• Will you be focusing on wordpress for the rest of your life? If not what do you think will be the reason why you change your focus?

  I might be smart, but I'm no sightseer. Also, while I work with WordPress a lot, a lot of my time is also spent on consulting and website reviews (which we do for all sorts of sites).

• What is the best practice to SEO a WordPress.com site? Is it even possible?

  Of course there are things you could do on a WordPress.com site, some themes there are better than others and you can do a whole lot content wise. The minute you start asking questions like that though, you should really consider getting a self-hosted WordPress.org install and taking control of your own destiny. You'll reach a point where you'll want to do more and WordPress.com doesn't allow you to do that and the longer you wait, the harder it is to move, so, move now.

• When do you think that WordPress is going to completely rewrite their code base so it's an actual CMS instead of a hacked together glorified blogging system?

  I find I get that question quite a lot and it annoys me. WordPress is being rewritten all the time. Check out the development that happens on Trac. Most of the people who ask questions like that haven't had a decent look at the codebase for ages. WordPress IS way more than a glorified blogging system already and if there are specific issues you have with the way it's coded, patches are welcome!

• If you start working on a WordPress blog for a client and there are no plugins installed, which ones do you always install?

  A couple: my own WordPress SEO & Google Analytics plugins, W3 Total Cache and usually Gravity Forms. Of course each site is different so there'll be more plugins after that depending on that site's and site owners needs and wants.

• What do you think has more value? A good domain name or good link building?

  Good link building, any day, every day. You see, domain names, especially so called "exact match domain names" are bound to be devalued at some point. Good link building will always create traffic to your site, just from those links alone, so that's always worth while. Those links also bring in rankings but in really good link building, that's often just a side effect. I recently talked about Eric Ward's mailing list, you should check out that post.

• Your SEO plugin places a canonical tag on every generated page and I have an ongoing argument with a co-worker about that. He says that this tag should only be on pages that contain duplicate content and that it is intended to 'tell' the searchbot where to look for the original content. Googling around doesn't clarify a lot. Could you please tell your reasons behind placing it on every page?

  I get this discussion a lot. The thing is, if I was 100% sure that a URL could only be accessed through that specific URL with no query parameters added, I might not add a canonical. There's nothing against it, but it'd just be a bit cleaner. However, these URLs:

  http://www.example.com/

  http://www.example.com/?campaign=email

  Are essentially the same for a WordPress install in 99% of the cases. However, they're not the same for Google and other search engines. So, if I wouldn't add canonical, the link value of the second URL would be waisted and, in fact, you'd have a competing duplicate content URL in the search results. That's why I add it to all pages.

• I noticed you don't use a comment system like disqus or intense debate. Would be nice to hear your thoughts about whether we should or should not use a comment system in WordPress.

  If I were to use a comment system, I'd use Facebook comments. The benefits of that and the fact that it gets way less spam are quite high. So far I've decided not to do that yet because a couple of my regular visitors and active commenters actually don't have Facebook accounts. Also, my comment redirect plugin doesn't work with those systems, which I think is a pity.

  I'll say one thing: the amount of work I have to do to keep this blog spam free is nothing short of ridiculous. Read this post to see what I mean.

That's it, what do you think, should I do this more often?

Questions and Answers 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!

Last friday I was telling my buddy Remkus de Vries, known as @DeFries on Twitter, that I was almost done with the internationalization support for my WordPress SEO plugin. He told me that I should be using GlotPress, which is a collaborative, web-based software translation tool maintained by some of the people behind WordPress. I concurred and asked him to set it up for me.

He did and he wrote a post about it: How to use GlotPress for your translations. After a bit of work on my side on getting a registration form going, I tweeted about my GlotPress being there on translate.yoast.com. Within 20 minutes about 10 people had registered and started translating. I was very excited about that and decided to look into it a bit better by the following morning, when 14 people in total had signed up already.

Because I could see this becoming unmanageable quite soon, I decided to create a mailing list for the contributors. As you'll see when you've read Remkus' post I listed above, we use a WordPress install on /register/ to manager the users. This allows me to use Gravity Forms, along with its User Registration add-on, to allow people to register. Because I built it that way, it was a piece of cake to add the Mailchimp add-on and make sure all new translator were connected to the mailing list as well.

Be sure that when you set it up like this too, you make the language people want to translate into a variable in MailChimp too, so later on you can easily segment on that, by emailing just the people who are translating your plugin(s) into Polish, for instance.

The amount of people working on this has surprised me. I've tweeted about it twice and so far, 31 people have signed up and are actively translating into 12 different languages, so far translating 2568 sentences!

Your turn?

Are you using WordPress in your native language? Would you want to contribute some of your time to help translate my plugins into your native language? Then register here, you'll receive instructions from there. If your language isn't listed yet, please allow me some time to enable that language and from then on your good to go, looking forward to seeing my plugins run in more languages then were speaking on the tower of Babel!

(Collaboratively) Translating Yoast Plugins 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!

Today is also one of those days of the year again where I ask you, my dear reader, whether you're a lurker or not, to help me out. I've got three things that need some attention and I hope that one or two of them are applicable to you and you're willing to help me.

First of all, I'm soliciting testimonials for two of my plugins, I'd like you to tell me why you use them and how much you like them (if you like them, that is). So, if you please could:

• Leave a testimonial for my WordPress SEO plugin
• Leave a testimonial for my Google Analytics plugin

Next, if you hadn't noticed my previous post, I'm looking for (premium) themes and theme frameworks that work with my WordPress SEO plugin and for themes that are giving issues. This allows me to both compile a list of themes that work well with my WordPress SEO plugin as to reach out to theme developers and see if we can work together to get things fixed. So, if you use a theme that you didn't build yourself but that you either bought or downloaded from WordPress.org, please fill out this survey.

Reviews, Testimonials and Surveys! 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!

WordPress SEO Theme Compatibility 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!

Now, I've been with VPS.net for quite some time, from their very beginning in fact, and I've always liked the service and the people working there. I'm not one to easily leave and on top of that, having had issues at other hosting companies before, I know that things are bound to go wrong at some point. So, I decided to confront my contacts at VPS.net and "talk to the boss". That boss is someone I hadn't spoken to before, Rus Foster. Rus has recently (7 weeks ago) joined VPS.net as their new Managing Director, although he's been in the VPS business for years, replacing Nick Nelson, who's gone higher up in the UK2 Group.

As you can see, I asked him some, I think, rather tough questions. I was happy with the answers I got, and must say that the changes he's talking about below on the AMS cloud have indeed had a very positive effect on my yoast.nl server.

Interview with Rus Foster, MD of VPS.net

Hi Rus, thanks for agreeing to this interview. My goal is to shed some light on what is currently causing all the issues around VPS.net. First of all, it seems as though every day, somewhere in the world, a VPS.net SAN dies. Some locations have more issues than others, but in general, it's been quite bad lately. What's causing that? And, more importantly, what will you do about it?

Start with the easy questions eh? Nothing like whats your favourite colour? :)

Seriously though yes there have been SAN issues on some of our newer clouds.

Some of the SANS in multiple locations have been showing instability issues caused by the software running on them. As such we are starting to undertake a very aggressive upgrade schedule to move the SAN software to the latest version. Coupled with this we are also upgrading the storage network within each cloud to increase I/O speeds.

We are however also looking to start using the enterprise class Nexenta storage solution on our new clouds which is engineered fundamentally different to our current SAN solutions. The upshot of this is that the system is much more resilient to failure meaning in the event of a failure there will be no noticeable effect on customers.

This will be going live on our next cloud but more about that later .....

When you say "very aggressive upgrade schedule", what do you mean, exactly?

We have identified 6 clouds where we feel significant upgrades, or full migrations to new facilities are required. We are doing 1-2 clouds a week and aim to have everything completed within the next 6 weeks, if not sooner. This is a significant investment in our infrastructure to increase resiliency and performance.

To be fair, some people would say that it's a significant investment to make it work the way it should... Which clouds are we talking about?

There were decisions made in the past that were right at the time. Those choices however no longer reflect customers expectations as cloud hosting is becoming more mainstream. We are making decisions now that prepare us for the future allowing easier service enhancements to be rolled out to all our customers new and old. We are targeting clouds in both the US and Europe. Some of the work, for example on our Amsterdam cloud, has been completed.

Could you say that maybe you've grown a bit too fast? (Which would be partly my fault, perhaps, sorry about that)

We learn from mistakes. There is nothing wrong with growing fast. There is something wrong with not managing that growth. I would say that is where as a company we found ourselves tripping over our own feet. My personal focus is split into both pushing the growth of the company, looking at exciting new markets and technologies but also its vitally important that we look after our current customers. This is reflected in us bringing back such old favourites as sales live chat but also focussing on how we can help existing customers. This include things such as the cloud upgrades as well as some exciting upgrades we have coming for all customers.

Apart from the SANs, another issue seems to have been the fact that you weren't responding during those outages, either on tickets, or on Twitter, with the status blog being deafeningly silent too. What are you going to do about that?

Communications. Communications. Communications. Nothing travels as fast as bad news. We need to be quicker. We need to be more open. We are taking steps to do that. We are now proactively emailing customers in the event of an outage. We are making it the sole responsibility for the manager on duty to communicate with customers. The status blog and twitter are important fields of communication but they can't give customised responses to each customers. Our support ticket system is in place for that.

I've seen you jump in on more and more tickets yourself, are you one of those managers on duty?

Its best to lead by example. I never ask anyone to do something that I wouldn't be willing to do myself. When things get busy in an outage its really a matter of needing all hands to the pumps. Thats why you will see me replying to all sorts of support tickets from simple reboots to full implementations of load balancing.

I get the feeling, talking to some of the people who bought a VPS, that they actually shouldn't have a VPS. They have two types of downtime, the one caused by themselves as they don't really know their way around a web server, and the ones caused by SANs or other hardware failures at VPS.net. I think that for people who have a lot of those first issues, the new Cloud Hosting, or a somewhat faster WestHost package, both a bit more managed, would be better for them.

Do you agree? If people think that's true for them, is there any way for you to help in that?

We all love power. As a petrol head I dream of having a TVR Sagaris on the drive but do I need the power? Of course not. Some people do however need that power. It's all about what matches your individual needs. If people just have a few websites that need to "just work" then a VPS isn't always the best choice and there are other things in our current, and upcoming, product range that could suit them better. If however people do require large amounts of customisation VPS are still a good way to go. If they do require that little bit of hand holding they can always get an On-Demand ticket for a one time issue or pop management on top for unlimited help.

If a customer wants to move to another product we can move a reasonable number of sites free of charge.

Cool.

So you mentioned a new cloud... Tell me more.

Yes our Japan cloud is the first cloud to be running our new Nexenta storage system and OnApp 2.2. It will also be live next week. Coupled with this, as we know people might be a bit wary of the new solution, we are doing first month, free of charge, for customers new and old. There is a limit of 10 free nodes per customer.

What can customers do if they think they deserve more attention?
They can contact me directly at rghf@vps.net.

VPS.net issues: what’s up and what will they do about it? 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 I bring this up for a single reason: the title is the single most important piece of content on a page relating to SEO. In the most recent update of SEOmoz's ranking factors, the presence of a keyword in the title was agreed by SEO's to have an "influence value" of 94.4 out of 100. That's huge.

In WordPress' most recent default theme, dubbed Twenty Eleven, the content of that title tag is determined by the following code:

<title><?php
/*
 * Print the <title> tag based on what is being viewed.
 */
global $page, $paged;

wp_title( '|', true, 'right' );

// Add the blog name.
bloginfo( 'name' );

// Add the blog description for the home/front page.
$site_description = get_bloginfo( 'description', 'display' );
if ( $site_description && ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) )
	echo " | $site_description";

// Add a page number if necessary:
if ( $paged >= 2 || $page >= 2 )
	echo ' | ' . sprintf( __( 'Page %s', 'twentyeleven' ), max( $paged, $page ) );

?></title>

With all due respect, I hate that. The reason I hate that is that it means that on the front page of your site, no matter what you do, your title will always be of this format:

NAME OF SITE | DESCRIPTION OF SITE

On other pages, it will be:

NAME OF ARTICLE | NAME OF SITE

So we effectively hardcode in our design templates the way we output one of our most important bits of content on a page. That's very far from the separation of design & content that the web community at large has been striving for over the last few decades.

If you're now thinking, "hey, I'm using that theme and I have another page title for my homepage", you might be right, I'll get to that. The reason you're able to do that is also the reason why I regularly get questions about my WordPress SEO plugin and theme X, Y or Z having issues with the title.

The bad solution: Output Buffering the page title

I don't want to spend this entire article explaining what output buffering is, so if you don't know, this is a rather simple explanation. This process is used by most big SEO plugins. What they do is: catch the output of a page, look for the <title>, fix the contents of that title, return the output. For the record: if you check the "Force rewrite titles" box on the Titles page of my SEO plugin, it does just that. The reason my plugin has had issues with titles is exactly that: I don't have that box checked by default.

Now one can argue over whether output buffering in general is a bad idea or not, the way it's done here is arguably bad, although the only current working solution. It uses way more resources than should be needed to change the title and, possibly worse, it effectively disallows other plugins that don't do the buffering to have an influence on the title. On top of that, in my testing, on most servers it adds about 0.5 seconds to the page load time.

The good solution: something new in core

For quite a while, I thought that changing the way we, as a community, use wp_title would be a fix to this. I no longer think that it is. The reason for that is that it would create all sorts of other issues, with themes and plugins alike. In fact, Andrew Nacin already tried to do that a while back, see this changeset, and reverted the changeset because the output buffering plugins broke because of it. I think we need a new function, specifically aimed at displaying the page title. Ideally this function would hook into wp_head and would be using the theme_supports functionality.

I've been working with Andrew on a patch, which has been heavily discussed on this Trac ticket. I have good hopes that something along these lines will go into core, but would love to know your opinion.

Discuss: The Page Title in WordPress Themes 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 run a couple of WordPress instances on this server. This website, which you're looking at, but also a MultiSite install in /bugs/, running WooThemes' FaultPress. Now had I been paying attention, I would have read this post on the WooThemes blog a month ago, telling me to upgrade their WooFramework to fix vulnerabilities. I didn't, I was slacking. This morning I found out that was stupid, as that exact vulnerability was used to hack my server.

The issue is bigger though: so many of you don't upgrade regularly. You see, security breaches happen. I have helped quite a few plugin authors fix security issues in their plugins, and I myself have been helped by the likes of Jon Cave and Andrew Nacin to fix security issues in my own plugins. When I update a plugin though, it's very rare to see more than 20% of the users update within a week. We, as a community, need to get better at that.

Now, I'm on both sides of this fence, I'm a user and a developer. As a developer, I started thinking about how I could get more of you to upgrade. I know Genesis has a feature in their backend that's quite cool:

You just drop your email in there and you get an email when an update is available. I'm going to add something like that to my own bigger plugins, though I have to think a bit about what the best way to do this is...

The moral of this story is quite simple though: don't let this happen to you: upgrade your core, themes & plugins very regularly!

Why not updating your Core, Themes & Plugins is Stupid 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!