Reoptimizing Blogopreneur

I didn’t have much sleep last night, because I decided to relook at the codes behind Blogopreneur.com and re-optimize it with the new knowledge I have learnt since the last time I scrutinized the theme. It was also time for me to adapt and embrace the structural changes of WordPress 2.3 - particularly, the ability to tag natively.

I decided also that I will go ahead and use more plugins, so long as the plugins were very popular, or removing them will not cause a disaster to the theme. (My main concern about plugins is incompatibilty with future versions and the plugin author taking too long to upgraed)

Anyway, actually I didn’t do much but here are the simple changes I’ve made.

Going Fully Widgety

I decided that I am going to use sidebar widgets (and learn to write a proper one eventually), so I cleaned up the sidebar.php codes to just show up the widgetized sidebar. Nothing to do with SEO or what, but I just like to see clean code.

Now my sidebar is 4 simple lines of HTML plus a line calling out to dynamic_sidebar(). Neat

SEO is all in one

I gave in and used the All in one SEO plugin. Previously, I was using post fields to do this, and I realise that I sometimes forget to key in the description and keywords because the custom fields box was not on the first fold.

The change did not require me to do a lot. Most of the work is done by ticking checkboxes in the options box.

I realised that the plugins implements the functionality that same way that I did - except that their custom field was “description”, instead of “Description” (its just a change to lowercase), so converting the old posts was a breeze since I knew a little SQL. Just had to run the query to change all “Description” to “description”. Done.

What I like about this All in One SEO, is the ability to choose parts of the blog for spiders not to index. To be frank, I really think Google is smart enough to tell that a certain site is a blog and be more lenient when it sees the same content listed under the archives pages or category pages, so I’ve never really bothered about that - my search rankings are still great.

But since the functionality is there, lets just give it a go to see what happens

Feeding Feedburner

I installed the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin, and directed all my feeds to Feedburner. Hmm. Don’t ask me why I wasn’t doing that earlier. Its an excellent plugin.

Goodbye UTW!

Finally, I said goodbye to Ultimate Tag Warrior, and imported the UTW tags to the native tags using the built in importer. The importer worked like a charm, and besides, there are several sources of great documentation on the importing process which I could refer to.

I deactivated UTW, and if nothing goes wrong in 2 weeks, I’ll drop them and then go into the phpMyAdmin to delete the tables.

Actually, the main reason for me wanting to do this reoptimization is due to the native tagging thing. I have much trust in WordPress that the tagging features will be really worked on in future versions to give us more flexibility and functionality. Well, I really wish I could know how to participate in the development and report bugs or things like that, but unfortunately, I guess my standard of programming is not up to the challenge yet.

So, what changes have you made to YOUR WordPress codes and plugins lately?

Tags: all in one seo, feedsmith, native tagging, plugins, Search Engine Optimization, seo, ultimate-tag-warrior, utw, widgets, wordpress