WP SEO PLUGINS – WP-E-Commerce – Unique Page Titles

worrying-about-seo

There’s been a lot of fuss over plugins for SEO – of course many people love All In One SEO Pack, that is not news. But there are lots of other plugins that say they do what AIOSEOP does and better. Is this true? Try them out for yourself. You might like one better than another. One may do what you want better.

I don’t dis or back a plugin that I have not tried merely out of some sense of loyalty to someone I don’t know and have never even seen in person. I am unaffiliated financially with any other group or service. When I endorse a plugin it means I have tried it and it’s competitors out and the one I endorse does what I need it to do.

With all the hubbledy-doo and the hoo-ha churned out about about Google and Page Rank sculpting and being suspected of being a freaky spammer (bad) you might get the feeling that any minute you could be penalized for doing something wrong when you didn’t know it was wrong. I say please calm down. If you are not spamming,scraping or other bad things and are maintaining and updating your site with your own content in a timely, informative, natural and kindly manner, you don’t need to freak out. Google and other search engines might be a set of ever changing algorithms but behind those algorithms are real people.

See, it isn’t just how much cleverer you are than your competitor it is really about your content, how much of it there is, how often you make new content and how many people search for and find your content. Yeah, you can make mistakes and ruin your breakout links and etc. But you can recover from mistakes, too.

The bottom line is SEO used properly is for helping you and your content get the audience you deserve.

Headspace2
In my opinion Headspace2 is possibly a bit too much for the layperson to handle. It slowed down my test site to a crawl.
It took over and did not let me deactivate unactivated plugins that were already deactivated. Make sense? Nope.
It made me do crazy stuff like try to use an unactivated plugin on certain pages or posts. It made me think I could rule the world.
It did not produce UNIQUE TITLE TAGS ON SINGLE WP-E-COMMERCE PRODUCT PAGES!
In fact because of its taking over and causing a ruckus I had to start over with a fresh install.
My advice: take a few days to try this plugin out on a test site. Get to know it.
I don’t think a noobie should install it on a production site and you should never install this plugin without backing up your database.

Platinum SEO Pack
Ok, nice, but It did not produce UNIQUE TITLE TAGS ON SINGLE WP-E-COMMERCE PRODUCT PAGES!
gar.

All In One SEO Pack
Lately it has been slightly inconsistent. The newest versions do not produce unique page titles for the single product pages in wp-e-commerce.
The last known stable version that did is (warning, this is a download link:1.6.4.1)

stop-worrying-about-seo

The long and the short of it: there are a lot of SEO plugins for WordPress. Some are good and some are ok. Some are just copies of others. But only one delivers unique page titles for wp-e-commerce single product pages. And the newest news is you no longer have to edit your header.php to replace the title tag code. Whatever you’ve got will be rewritten by AIOSEOP, anyway.

Update!

I am not saying anything bad about AIOSEOP! I am saying it is the best WP SEO PLUGIN available.
There. Now that can’t be misunderstood. I hope.

No More Support For Fake Grid View For WP-E-Commerce!

grid view is a cruel mistressGuys, its been fun but WP-E-Commerce 3.7+ is just so different from 3.6 and the file I used to be able to hack to fake Grid View has been made kinda obsolete in 3.7. So unless you are willing to seriously hack your shop theme’s template files ( I know, it is so much fun! ) and learn how to float boxes with handydandy CSS, you should just buy the Gold Cart from Instinct. It’s a mere 40.00 dollars and a whole lot less headache (plus a lot cheaper than hiring me to do it for you, which I should not say). But the main thing is the shopping cart plugin is evolving and getting better with each release and I would never encourage anybody to stick with an older version just to keep a few dirty hacks.

Of course I will be writing posts to help anyone who wants to learn how to hack the products page like I did here to fake the Grid. I’ll also keep the old file up for downloading in case you really can’t afford 40.00 and need the Grid. Just remember it only works on the 3.6 series.

Best Place to Eat Late at Night and Eavesdrop

dumont_burger

Dumont Burger
www.dumontrestaurant.com
314 Bedford Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(718) 384-6128

It’s not because you’re nosy and it isn’t your fault you’re so hungry. You were at a show and then they had to go back to Williamsburg to return the band’s equipment. Nobody had had anything to eat and the door had let in more than 15 people (6 bucks a head) so the band had made money! Burgers for everybody! Except me. I’d already had my dinner at Sea. Volcanic Chicken. A disappointment. A huge portion but very bland. Keep your flaming gravy boats, I wish I had waited for the burger and fries. But if I had I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy a glass of Sauvignon Blanc (at Sea), one and a half gin and tonics (at Lit Lounge) and a final Cava (at Dumont). Yes, people. You must eat before drinking.

Dumont is always packed. There are no booths and the seating inside is communal which is why it is a great place to eavesdrop. All 5 of us managed to wedge ourselves into the center table the approximate width of a railroad tie. Next to me were a couple of folks chowing down and discussing some issues. At one point I heard in their conversation

“… Jamaica… doing blow…smoking everything…”

I was too polite to keep on listening but it certainly sounded like an interesting story.

Dumont has great fries. Crispy and salty.

Is Your WordPress Theme Threaded-Comments-Enabled?

talkbubbles

Threaded comments make it possible for your readers to start (or end) conversations with each other. Either way, it’s a cool feature to have.

Check your theme’s header.php file for a line of code that looks like this (should be before the body tag):
[php]<?php if ( is_singular() ) wp_enqueue_script( ‘comment-reply’ ); ?>[/php]

If it isn’t there paste it in and save the file changes.

Then go to Settings>> Discussion and select the option to turn on threaded (nested) comments.

More options for threaded comments:

  • Break comments into pages with [15] comments per page and the [first] [last] page displayed by default.
  • Comments should be displayed with the [older] [newer] comments at the top of each page.

Please ONLY attempt the next steps if you are comfortable using FTP or your Control Panel File-Manager and editing theme files. And always back up.

  • Grab the latest comments.php file from WP 2.8+ /wp-content/themes/default.
  • Copy and Paste your theme’s comments CSS into a text file.
  • Open the Default theme style.css, Copy everything related to comments and Paste into your theme’s style.css.
  • Use your theme’s comments CSS as a reference for colors and borders,etc so the comments style will match your theme.