SEO Emperor

Also having problems finding the right wordpress theme for your blog? There are thousands of free wordpress themes on the net. Searching for wordpress themes on google gives more then 10 million results. Still I can’t find a theme that I like, that’s why this blog still runs on the default wordpress theme.
I have a photo site that currently runs on static html. I never put much time in the design of the site, I regularly put up new photo galleries and that’s about it. I want to write some content for the site, and don’t want to spent a lot of time writing html. With a blog you can concentrate on the content and not have to worry to much about webdesign. So I have decided to make a wordpress theme myself. Nothing fancy, I already searched for some wordpress themes which I can use and modify to my liking. Why start from scratch if someone else has already done the hard work Sometime ago I made a simple wordpress theme for another site, I just modified the default wordpress theme to my liking. It is a simple 3 column theme, it took me about 3 hours to make. Not bad for the first time, I had never really looked into how wordpress really worked so it was all new to me. Actually modifying a wordpress theme is not that hard. You don’t need to be a skilled coder, basic knowledge of CSS and some html is enough. PHP skills will be needed if you want to make an advanced theme with a non standard layout.
Some of the resources I have used to make my own wordpress themes:
How to make your own wordpress theme.
How to create a wordpress theme.

I finally updated this blog to the new Wordpress 2.5 version. I first installed it on my home server to check if all my plugins still work with this release. That’s always the biggest concern when upgrading your wp blog, making sure that all the plugins are compatible. I have only come across one problem, on one of my blogs I use the embedded video plugin, unfortunately it doesn’t work anymore with wordpress 2.5. I have checked the developers website but there hasn’t been an update for some time. So I’m sticking to Wordpress 2.3.3 for that blog. I’ve spent quite some time googling for a fix but haven’t find one. It’s a very popular plugin and a lot of people are waiting for an update so hopefully someone finds a fix fast.

I haven’t had much time to check out all the new features but the new admin panel looks very different, they have moved a lot of things around. For someone that has been using Worpress for a couple of years its quite a change. There are some cool things, it’s now possible to customize the admin panel with widgets. So you can see only the things you want and so on. Coolest new feature of all is the exif extraction, when you upload a picture that has exif data it will extract that data and put it in custom fields. This is really great for photo blogs.

I have been a long time linux user, to the point I don’t feel comfortable at all anymore working on a Windows workstation. The last Windows version I really used was Windows 2000. After playing with Mandrake, Debian and Slackware linux I finally found Gentoo linux and sticked with it. It’s a source based distribution which means I have to compile all programs myself, I don’t use binaries. Some people find this time consuming and a total waste of resources, I have been very happy with it. My enthusiasm for linux comes from the stability and high level of productivity it gives me. Combined with a very powerful 4 core dual opteron workstation and two 22inch LCD monitors I have a machine that can handle anything and is a pleasure to work with.

The webmaster tools I use:
1) Whois: To check if a domain is free or by who it is registered I don’t surf to some website, I just use the command line tool whois. You just type whois domain.tld and it gives you the whois details. Works much faster then any online whois service. I believe the whois tool is installed by default on every linux distribution.
2) Quanta plus: Quanta is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment. The most advanced and user friendly text editor I have used. It can handle all sorts of code, html php css and a lot more. I use it for all my webdesign needs.
3) NVU, pronounced “N-view” is a WYSIWYG editor similar to Frontpage and Dreamweaver. Ideal for people who don’t like editing code or for those who don’t know anything about writing html. I prefer to write code myself in Quanta but for some repetitive tasks a WYSIWYG editor can be handy.
4) Gimp, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It can almost rival Adobe Photoshop but Gimp lacks CMYK support. Most other features in Photoshop you can find in Gimp. A lot of people (mostly Photoshop users) dislike gimp because of it’s user interface. The gimp developers did not want to make a Photoshop clone, so the UI is hard to learn for someone used to Photoshop. I also had some trouble learning gimp, eventually I bought a couple of books to help me out.
5) Mozilla Firefox Firefox is my favorite browser, it’s fast secure and you can find a lot of plugins for it that are a webmasters best friend:
Seolinkanalysis This plugins shows you the pagerank of your backlinks in Yahoo and Google webmastertools. Ideal to see how your link building campaigns are doing.
Seoquake, Seoquake shows you the pagerank, indexed pages, backlinks and Alexa rank. It shows these statistics in a small bar on the top of every page you open, great do some investigative work.
Web developer The web developer plugin adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. I use it mostly to check if a link is dofollow or nofollow.

To upload files I don’t use a separate ftp program, I use the standard KDE file explorer Konqueror and copy paste the files to my websites. By right clicking on files and folders you can change the permissions. It works the same way as my local file systems.

After you have done your wordpress installation and set up the basic configuration I always install some plugins. These plugins can really make the difference for your blog and I find them essential for all my blogs. First of all I activate the akismet plugin which is installed by default, you just need to fill in the Wordpress API key and your done. This protects your blog against spam comments. Another plugin I always install is Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam that also helps against spam. With these 2 plugins you should be protected against all automated spam. This is of course wishfull thinking, spammers get smarter by the day. If you look around on the internet you will have no trouble finding scripts that can bypass them. The next two plugins are very important seo wise. They will help to get your blog indexed and let search engines know what your blog is about. The “Google-xml-sitemaps-generator” doesn’t need much explanation. After activating and configuring (which is very simple), the plugin generates a sitemap every time you update your blog. This sitemap is compatible with Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and Ask.com. I have had no trouble getting a blog indexed by Google just by adding a sitemap to Google webmaster tools, even for a blog which had zero backlinks.
By default a wordpress blog doesn’t have any metadata. The value of metadata isn’t that important anymore to search engines. Many years ago it was possible to get listed high in Yahoo by using metadata and spamming your keywords all over your frontpage. Unfortunately those days are long over. I still think a correct set of metadata tags helps seo wise. The All-in-one-seo-pack adds metadata tags to all your posts. When writing a post you will have the option to fill in title, description and keywords. It’s not much work and helps search engines indexing your posts, certainly on short posts with little or no text, for example when you post a funny Youtube video.
Now that I am talking about Youtube, when embedding a Youtube video on your blog and you just copy paste the embed code from the Youtube sit. The code you are generating is not XHTML valid. It’s not that much of a problem, but if you want to keep your blod strictly XHTML valid it’s not a bad idea to install the “Embed-video-with-link” plugin. It ads a button to the “write post” section, when clicking it you get a pop up box asking you the video ID and video site. The plugin supports a lot of video sites and gives you clean XHTML valid code. To check if your website is XHTML valid just surf to World Wide Web Consortium, these are the guys that make up all the web standards. You can easily check your code and it will give you some tips and guides on how to improve your code.

When you want to start blogging you have to make some choices. There are many different options available to start a blog. You can take the free blog route by setting up a blog at Blogger or Wordpress. This way you don’t need to register a domain as they will give you a subdomain or pay for hosting. Of course you can register a domain and forward it to your subdomain saving the cost of hosting. These free options have their limits, you can not just install what you want on it. A lot of Wordpress plugins for example don’t work on blogs hosted on Wordpress.org. Wordpress also doesn’t provide you with a decent statistics system, making it difficult to track your visitors. I have a blog on blogger.com and although it’s very easy to setup and write new posts it lacks a number of options to fully customize your blog. Blogger has one benefit, since it’s owned by Google a blogger account will be indexed quite fast. Blogger also provides the option to sign up with Adsense, giving you the possibility to make money with your blog. It’s also a fast way to get your Adsense account approved. When you have a blog on Blogger or Wordpress you don’t really own the blog, so you can’t sell it. I still prefer Wordpress on my own hosting, this way I can do what I want with it and add other things to it.