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 just noticed that Google is performing a pagerank update. I haven’t been following the last PR updates, I don’t really care anymore. The only thing that matters to me are SERPs, Search Engine Results Pages. Good SERPs are the only thing that matters if you want a site to get lots of traffic from search engines. Page rank has nothing to do with the amount of traffic you get. But a site that has good SERPs for a competitive keyword will probably have some PR. When I first started out as a webmaster I was constantly checking webmaster forums to see if there was a PR update. For a lot of webmasters it has become an obsession, topics on webmaster forums about PR updates are always very popular.

I just checked some of my domains and found some weird things, I have a dot com domain from a failed project, it doesn’t do any traffic and until recently it had PR0. It did have some good backlinks but Google didn’t love it :p I just checked it with all the tools that I could find and some say it has PR4. Not bad if the PR is real, I was planning on selling the domain so if it really has PR4 I might get some decent money for it.

Most of the online tools are broken for the moment. I checked iwebtool, checkpagerank and a couple of others and none are showing me results for any of my domains. We will need to have some patience to see what we are getting from Google. The seoquake plugin for mozilla is also showing strange results, I think it only shows cached results. This online pagerank checker is still working but I don’t have clue if the results are correct.

When browsing the domain for sale section at digitalpoint I found this sports related domain for sale. The owner claims it has 35000 backlinks according to Yahoo. That’s a lot of backlinks for a 1 year old domain. And my Google toolbar says it’s page rank 3, so it must be getting some link juice from somewhere. I checked where all those backlinks are coming from… And then I found out how it was possible to get that many backlinks. The domain has sitewide links from a big forum with lots of pages indexed. It has some other backlinks but most are not related to sports. The backlinks from the forum have no real anchor text, so they don’t have much value in seo terms. The sitewide links from the forum are probably paid for, so my guess is that after the sale of the domain they will all be gone. The owner of the domain has a buy it now price of 700$. I don’t think it’s worth a tenth of that price. But hey who am I

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.