WordPress 2.8 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation

Hey Tam,

You can buy the theme now via the PayPal button link above.

Payment received and the theme has just been emailed out.

Thanks for the order Tam

BTW feel free to post a link to your site here when you’ve installed it. Doh!, that just reminded me of something I forgot to do with the theme

The current version has comment URLs disabled (SPAMMERS won’t gain a author link), meant to put instructions on how to turn it back on.

Very easy to do find comments.php and look for-

/* commented out to stop spam <p><input name=”url” type=”text” value=”<?php echo $comment_author_url; ?>”/> Website (*optional)</p> : */

Change to-

<p><input name=”url” type=”text” value=”<?php echo $comment_author_url; ?>”/> Website (*optional)</p> :

and commenter’s can again post their URLs.

Despite using various SPAM blocking tools, because I run so many blogs I still have a lot to go through each day. Hoping this will mess a few of the SPAM bots up.

Working on Blix theme right now, after that will be Almost String theme.

Should have both themes available in a week or so.

David

Code Fix for those using the original Talian theme and want the Translators images (top of left menu) to be within the green box (like other sections). The problem is a <ul> tag is missing, but if you add one it breaks the code validation.

Talian code fix below-

Edit left_sidebar.php

Find

<h3>Translators</h3>

Directly below add

<p>

Find the next </ul> and change to </p>

Save file.

Edit style.css

find-

.sidebar-box ul {

change to-

.sidebar-box ul, .sidebar-box p {

Save and upload both files.

Should now work like you see for my Talian with AdSense and SEO version of this great WordPress theme.

David

Have solved the plugin/excerpt problem, can now create WordPress themes that by default create archive pages (like monthly pages and the index) that show a small excerpt of each post rather than the whole posts (which can create enormous pages!!).

If you install my SEO version of the WordPress Post Teaser plugin I mention above (will be available to download for free soon) you’ll get an improved excerpt that works with the Alinks plugin (which I’ll also add my version to the site).

Basically by using my WordPress AdSense/SEO themes you can use the two plugins (and others I use) to generate an SEO’d blog with semi-automated internal linking of important keywords.

Will take me a few days to update the themes currently available and I’m still working on the RSS links problem (think I have a fix) so will do that at the same time. Will then send out the new theme versions to anyone who has bought themes from this site.

David

The Talian theme used on your site is the original Talian theme (not available from this site). The version I sell includes significant code modifications for SEO reasons and includes AdSense ad units.

If you look on one of your content pages you’ll see two blocks just above the comments box that says-

“The webpage cannot be found”

These are the AdSense ad units the original Talian designer added, they aren’t working because you haven’t gone into the code and added your AdSense publisher ID.

My version has a single file you edit (adsense.php) to include your AdSense publisher code so all ad units on all pages use your ID (much easier to do, one copy and paste and your done).

With regards your questions, all of those things are possible, but some are significant code changes. For example the Blogroll to Link change involves adding an alternative blogroll code because the original Talian theme uses the default WordPress Blogroll code which doesn’t allow you to just change the title of the header (it uses a default header code that’s stored in the main WordPress CMS coding).

I had to change this code on my version because I wanted to remove the H2 header created by the default code. So yes it’s possible to do this through the theme, but you have to make big code changes and it;s beyond the scope of this comments form to explain it (check out the WordPress codex for code or look at other themes until you find one with the right code).

Most of the other changes are probably doable through CSS changes.

David

“When payment is received you’ll receive a copy of the zipped AdSense theme by email (within 24hrs assuming no payment problems).”

Also take into account if it’s a weekend I might be taking a day or two off (rare, but it happens).

Been having a few problems with emails being filtered when I use my seo-gold.com email address!

I think the problem was caused when I left an open email form on that site and got a LOT of spammers using it for about a week before I realised (got the domain added to a blacklist I guess).

Setup a new email address using google-adsense-templates.co.uk which has never been used for email, so SPAM filters catching the theme zip emails should no longer be a problem (I hope).

If you do find your theme isn’t emailed within 48hrs first check your SPAM folder, the email subject will be-

“Payment Received – Theme Attached”

If you don’t find it send an email to

orders (at) google-adsense-templates.co.uk

With the obvious changes to make it work and I’ll check nothing went wrong at this end.

David

Hey David just checking in to see if there is an updated version of the theme for new the new version of WP.

Here is my site http://tamsheltonreviews.com

Tam is there a reason you’ve got no publisher ID added to the site you linked above?

Means you get no revenue, that is if the AdSense ads worked which they don’t when you don’t have a publisher ID (that’s why I have mine as default for testing).

David

Just checking up on the Talian theme I ordered yesterday 3/19/08. Tried sending an email but it comes back undeliverable.

Can’t wait to get it.

Thanks

Your Talian theme was sent on the 19th at this time-

Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:28:11 +0000

Received this email from you-

Subject: Follow up on Talian (Adsense & SEO) Theme order
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 08:46:00 -0400

Which was responded to on (included the attachment again)-
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:17:12 +0000

Was a delay due to moving dedicated server, might also explain if you got a bounced email.

Next email from you-
Subject: Talian (Adsense & SEO) Theme Order
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 08:06:19 -0400

Responded (didn’t attach theme this time)
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:21:22 +0000

Next email-
Subject: Please send my Theme.
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:30:52 -0400

You read the new home page (explaining the problem with SPAM filters) and said you’ve checked your SPAM folder and not found the theme emails (which would be a first) and had now added the two email addresses to your email whitelist.

Responded (theme attached again)-
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:00:22 +0000

Almost forgot one, got this via another sites email from you-
Subject: Cheap Text Links
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:35:54 -0400

Didn’t respond to that one.

Just moderated this sites comments and found your two comments which I allowed. Then immediately responded to.

Please tell me you got the theme now, it’s been sent three times including CCing to an extra email address?

David

I love the WordPress 2.3 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation.

It’s so nice for someone like me who struggles with modifying Wordpress themes to have it all done for me! And in a way that makes sense.

One of my pet peeves is instructions written as if the reader already understand how to do the task. Grrrrr! If I understood how to do it I wouldn’t need the instructions!

Ah, but that is not a concern with this theme. The instructions are very well-written. I had no problem installing the theme with my Adsense code. I even was able to modify the ads’ colors! (Yes, that’s a big deal for someone like me

Thank you for an excellent theme.

Mark

Hi David,

I really love the new theme, but I have two questions I hope maybe you can help me with. I’m new to using WP and no coder, so please be kind.

First, what do I have to do to get the sitemap to show up in the theme?

Second, I am trying to add a small logo picture to the header to the left of the blogname and blog description and am not sure where to add it in the header.php code so it will show up on all the pages?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Terry

Hmm your right Mark about the italics being messed up in the CSS. Just added em around some text in the first line of this post and it’s made a mess.

Will be easy to fix so expect an update within a few days.

Thanks for the heads up.

David

The AdSense ads can be turned off really easily, you edit one page and change a 1 to a 0.

Been asked this before so explained it at another page http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-theme-almost-spring-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html (comment from February 10th, 2008).

Basically change a 1 to a 0 and remove the Advert widget through the widget editor interface (using widgets is the easiest way to do it).

If you remove the AdSense ads you’ll have a fully SEO optimised WordPress site without ads, this makes no difference to how search engines treat the site, so you’ll get the same rankings either way.

The code of my themes are as optimised pretty much to the max, so as long as you use your keywords when creating posts etc… you should get much more traffic than if you used a standard WordPress theme.

Put another way if you name your posts like this-

What Happen to me Today, Life Sucks!

When the post is really about how your car insurance company screwed you out of an insurance claim on your car that was wrote of by no fault of your own. Then you are not going to get a lot of search engine traffic.

A post about the above should be named accordingly like-

Car Insurance Company Will Not Pay My Claim!

This covers many relevant keywords. Then you use the above keywords and related phrases to enforce those SERPs within the content.

You can see a post of mine like this here http://www.morearnings.com/2007/06/07/direct-line-car-insurance-not-good-value/

Currently that page is number 5 for the “Direct Line Car Insurance” search in Google.

My SEO optimised themes help well constructed content in gaining better SERPs, but without a little thought into that content and the themes have nothing to work with.

All my themes are optimised so from an SEO point of view they all work the same way (they all use the same code). which to choose is up to you, which themes look most closely matches your sites content? That’s the one to choose.

The Talian theme is one of my favourites, works well with many sites. I use it on a lot of my own sites. Funny really as didn’t like Talian at first

David

The Talian theme looks great. Do you create custom themes? Please contact me if you do. Thank you.

Hi Dave,
I couldn’t find a contact page for the SEO plugins post. So I’ll ask here.

I installed the “related” plugin and clicked the script and it failed (i think the path is off) Your instructions refer to a read me file. There isn’t one in the plugin folder. Can you point me in the right direction?

Jeff

can i get this package for $20 =( im low on budget

I need to translate English

Troy: sorry the price is fixed. I don’t do custom work per se, but point me at a theme and if I like it (for my use) I might convert it and add it to this site.

cilene: I added translation links to the Google translations you see on the top left menu you see above. If you want to add more it’s not that hard.

Unfortunately can’t add translation links to all translations available as would make the theme files too big! So went with the main ones.

That being said, I should add English (all my sites are English, so never thought about that).

Give me a few days and I’ll update the template and if you bought a copy you’ll get an updated zip file in a few days time.

Might be a little longer as need to install WordPress 2.6 on a few blogs and test the themes to make sure they haven’t created any new problems for me to fix.

They should work fine as the big changes came in 2.3 and 2.5, though you never know until you try.

If there are problems a fix will be sent out soon.

David Law

Hi

Please confirm that the image at the top can be changed on your templates.

Thanks
Mark

My version of Talian is used on this site and as you can see there’s links on the menu and I use widgets, so yes to the links widget question.

David Law

Are you going to have an update? I need a feature that will let me use separate adsense channels for each page. How can I accomplish this?

Thank you

You can check currency exchange at places like http://www.xe.com/

Right now just under $15.

David Law

Hello,
My first question is in relation to google adsense. First, with more than one website, I want to utilise my google channels to see whats working. Is it easy to add my own google codes to related files, just so long as I select the same dimensions for the google ad?

Also is it easy to add my ‘extras’ such as mybloglog etc to the sidebar code without creating lots of XHTML errors?

Think of me as a newbie who doesn’t have a clue about PHP coding. Keep it simple! When editing the sidebar text, if I saw ‘enter your html / javascript codes below’ I’d know it probably wouldnt cause viewing problems I did’nt know how to fix.

My site:
http://www.aid-renegade.com
I run wordpress 2.7 & my current theme (my second) messes up access to my RSS / comments Feeds. After 5 days I’ve had enough of waiting for a solution. Now my angle is ‘you get what you pay for’. Happy to pay your modest fee if the above conditions are met. I’m UK based & can discuss by mobile if easier, just use the email provided.

hi, im interested in your talian template, can you tell me whats the difference between targetted and non targetted versions? which would be more suited to a beginner with no coding skills, thanks

SOLD! Thanks for your promt reply. I’ve just paid for the Talian theme. Also thanks for info on URL channels too.

Hi,

I have a previous version on this great template.

Doesn’t seem to work in WP2.7, it’s fine in 2.3
Could be I haven’t installed it properly?
paulmclaughlins.com (working)
paulmclaughlins.com/golfguide (not!)

I want to buy the talian theme but i want to have menu ready on it: Home About and Contact Us buttons on the header top left side. can you do that before i buy it? and is it adsense ready in which there is a separate code to put or edit adsense code? thanks let me know as soon as possible. thanks.. email me in my email address..

Doh! Missed the AdSense question.

Since the theme is called Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO yes it’s AdSense ready

All you have to do is load a file called AdSense.php into a text editor and replace my AdSense publisher code with yours. Save the file and upload with the other files.

That’s it, you blog will look almost identical to this site in look/AdSense etc… The only difference will be out the box the theme uses the standard sidebar menu items (all of them), I strongly advise you log into the widget section of your dashboard and build your own menu based on what you want as menu items. For example I never show the monthly archive on any of my sites for SEO reasons.

If you don’t use the newish tag feature for example you’ll not want the tag menu item, if you never add pages to your blog you’ll not need that. Don’t want a AdSense ad unit on the menu, don’t add it as a menu widget, hate the translation links, don’t add them…

With widgets you get to build your menu (two menus, left and right for the Talian theme) the way you want it.

Be aware I go into hospital for a operation on my back early tomorrow morning (26th Feb) and expect two to three days stay in hospital. So if you want a theme ASAP you need to order in the next 7hrs to guarantee delivery before I go into hospital. Home page has this sort of information as well, when I get back I’ll delete the hospital information.

David Law

I just bought the theme. I don’t use paypal very often so I’m not sure if they will provide you with my email address. If not please use the email address used to make this comment.

Customer name:

GHE Texas Leads

Thanks!

uploaded the theme today – it looks great!

Thanks!

Hi Clayton,

The travel site (I own it BTW) uses the Talian theme with one minor change, the “Travel Adventure Deals” menu item (on the right) is a hand coded form Widget for for a travel affiliate I’m signed up to (make no money from it though!).

Everything else is the Talian with AdSense/SEO theme out the box, so you won’t have a problem putting the menu ad where you want it as long as you use widgets (not hard to learn).

The left and right menus are arranged differently to this site by using the WordPress built in Widget page: found on your Dashboard under Appearance/Widgets.

All my themes are fully widget compatible, if you’ve not used widgets you really should take a crack at them because it allows you to only add the menu items you want and use and in what ever order you like.

For example if you don’t use Tags or Pages (no About page for example, I rarely keep the about page) on your blog there’s no point having the Tag and Pages menu items since they’ll be empty and look out of place, so you use the widget page to only add the ones you use and leave the rest out.

This is why on the Google AdSense Templates site (this site) the menu AdSense ad unit is on the right and on the travel site it’s on the left.

This site is about selling AdSense themes and so I want visitors to see the Test a Theme links far more than I want them to click a Google ad.

When I rebuilt the themes for selling I worked on the principle most customers want to make money from their blogs, but in general they aren’t creating Made For AdSense (MFA) sites (site made only to make money from AdSense), so sites like this one.

The opposite is true for the travel site, since the travel site is 100% information pages, an MFA site that I want visitors to click the AdSense ads as soon as possible and having the menu ad on the top left results in a higher CTR, but it doesn’t look as good (ad cluttered).

Basically because I sell something on this site I want visitors to click the ads as a secondary option, but on the travel sites it exists for visitors to click the ads. On this site I also have to take into account I want to show potential customers what their sites will look like, so I’ve gone with a slightly cluttered ad look, but the ads on the right menu not left.

You can see from other sites I run Talian on the menus are varied due to using widgets-

http://www.skegness-attractions.co.uk/
http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/

On most sites I put the menu ad where I think the majority of visitors will accept them without thinking the site looks like it’s only there for AdSense. All depends on the site.

So a site where you have a lot of loyal readers you don’t want to use the setup I have on the travel site! On the other hand if like the travel site 99% of the traffic each day is new visitors from search engines and there’s not really any loyalty to your site, little point worrying about what a visitor will think long term.

Good thing is because of widgets you can set the menu ad anywhere on the menus (or not have one at all), you can also change the size and colours of the ads via the adsense.php file as well, so if you have a lot of very loyal readers who might be irritated by a lot of big ads, you can make them smaller very easily.

David Law

Hello again!
Overall my theme is still working fine but I’ve found a problem with the number of pages I’ve added. They are ’stacking’, a second line of page tabs below the original ones. Not a problem in itself but cursor action over the 2nd line needs help. You have to almost move the cursor to the top line before you can click on a tab in the second line. Give it a try:

http://www.aid-renegade.com

Not being a coder is there a fix you know of?
Thanks
David

Aid Renegade,

The page issue is a problem with many themes, I think the general idea of WordPress as a blogging platform is to create a small number of the static Pages and the rest are blog posts, so as themes are created the Page issue with header navigation bars are over looked. Not a problem with themes that lack the header navigation menu.

Two solutions, don’t add more than a few pages

Or add a little code to your header to limit the number of pages shown on the navigation bar.

The latter is achieved as follows.

Load your header.php file in a text editor or the WordPress theme editor.

find

< ?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=1'); ?>

and change to

< ?php wp_list_pages('include=1,2,3,7&title_li=&depth=1'); ?>

The include part of this determines which pages to show.

So if you just had

include=1

It would only list the 1st page created which is the About page I think.

To create your list you need to either go into your Dashboard and under Pages/Edit on the menu hover over the Title of a Page you want listed and read it’s post number, my sitemap for example is post=17 and looks like this when hovered over-

google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wp-admin/page.php?action=edit&post=17

So it’s the number 17 I was looking for.

Take these numbers and plug them into your include list, save and upload.

So if I wanted the About page (1) and the Sitemap (17) for this site only it would look like this-

< ?php wp_list_pages('include=1,17&title_li=&depth=1'); ?>

Save your header.php file and upload if you worked offline.

Should then only show the Pages you determine.

To list the rest of the pages you’ll need to use the sidebar menu called Pages, (yours is already on your menu) which is already listed if you don’t use widgets, if you use Widgets you’ll need to add it if you haven’t already done so.

I’d like to add this to the theme, but it’s one of those fiddly code things a lot of users aren’t comfortable with. Best I could do is include the depth=1 code which means sub-pages aren’t displayed on the header navigation menu.

David Law

Hi Clayton,

Glad you like the theme and thanks for your kind words, I sell these themes more as a hobby than as a business, I made them for my own use and seamed a shame to just use them myself

There’s a sitemap template with this theme, create a Page (not a post) and on the Attribute menu under Template select the Sitemap template.

Give the Page a name like I did for this site-

Google AdSense Sitemap

No need to add any content and you get a page like-

http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/google-adsense-sitemap

That being said the themes on this site shouldn’t need a sitemap (added this one as an example) since Google etc… can easily spider the entire site via the category links etc… from my perspective a sitemap page is a waste of PR/link benefit which is why I never create a sitemap on my other sites.

With regards creating child Pages I’ve made a mistake in the code! What I’ve done is restrict the Pages shown to just level 1 (Parent pages) by adding &depth=1 to the Page coding. Easy to fix.

If you use Widgets load functions.php in a text editor or the online theme editor and find-

wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=’);

Change to

wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&title_li=’);

That will then show all Pages on your sidebar menu.

If you don’t use widgets load left_sidebar.php and look for the same code.

Looks like I need to send out an update now

David Law

Edit: my code got deleted due the the PHP coding, fixed now

Hey Clayton,

Pasted a couple of PHP codes above and WordPress deleted them, sometimes you can post PHP and sometimes you can’t!! Removed the PHP part so fixed now.

With Google analytics you paste the code in the footer.php file above the /body tag.

The Blogroll links question, in WordPress 2.1 the option to add Categorised links was introduced. I tired to add this to my themes, but it caused some issues on my sites that I’m sure others will have, so decided to stick with the old coding that listed all links.

If you want to take a try at it you want to use the function

wp_list_bookmarks in place of get_links

Edit functions.php (widget users) or left_sidebar.php (non widget users)

get_links(-1, ”, ”, ‘ – ‘);

replace with something like this-

wp_list_bookmarks(’title_li=&categorize=0′);

That will give the same result as you have now (no categories), so if you make a mistake or hate the category version, but you want the updated code that’s your start point.

To add categories there’s a list of options at http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_bookmarks

The problem I found was because WordPress automatically assigns old links to the default link category, on this site it’s called “AdSense Blogspot Templates” and then uses that category name as a heading for those links you get a second heading under Blogroll and Links that doesn’t look very good.

Mine looked like this-

Blogroll N Links
AdSense Blogspot Templates
My blogroll links
….

rest of menu.

And if you add multiple link categories you’ll get something like this-

Blogroll N Links
AdSense Blogspot Templates
My blogroll links
….
Another Link Heading
More blogroll links
….

Which I think looks a mess!

This will be a problem for everyone who used WordPress pre 2.1! Nice feature to be able to add categorised links if you have a large blogroll, but causes a mess at first so didn’t add this to the code. I will replace the old coding with the non categorised code I posted above, just in case WordPress ever stops backwards compatibility with it’s depreciated code (unlikely, but you never know) and to make it easier to add this feature for those with BIG blogrolls.

David Law

LOL, I’ve updated all the themes for sale on this site and currently updating the theme files of all my WordPress sites (updated all my WordPress installations to WordPress 2.7.1 yesterday) as a way to test the theme updates I just made before sending out the free updates. currently on the Gs domain wise, (I update alphabetically) so just updated the Talian theme on http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/ (no issues found) and so have about 60 more domains to update and check, then I’ll be sending out theme updates to all customers as then I’ll be sure there’s no major issues with the themes.

So good to take a break and answer a question or three.

It is possible with WordPress to inadvertently create duplicate pages. For example if the last 10 posts you made all went into one Category, your Home page and the 1st page of that Category are going to be almost identical. Same is true if the last 10 posts have been added to the same two Categories.

The themes on this site are using the excerpt feature on archive pages (home, category, tags, archive pages) to reduce duplicating content. On archive pages you get a small excerpt of each post, so the single post pages are mostly unique in most cases. So with these themes you at least don’t get full posts copied within the archives.

I’ve learnt over the years it’s best not to create a page unless it serves a function, for example the monthly archive pages found by default on pretty much all WordPress themes add little if anything to the vast majority of sites. Go to a monthly archive page and look at it and ask yourself what does it add to your site not already found in the Category archives?

For this reason I never use the monthly archive menu links and if it wasn’t for the fact a lot of people use them, I’d not even include them in my themes (same with the Calendars which are worse), to reduce the SEO damage they are only shown on the home page in these themes.

Keeping in mind “only create a page if it serves a purpose” is what you plan to do going to add anything to your site?

For example will adding a post to 10 Categories or 10 Tags or 5 Categories and 5 Tags result in more traffic or make it easier for visitors to find a post they are probably interested in or are you doing it to ‘create’ more pages on your site?

If it’s just for more pages, don’t do it, it’s a waste of link benefit.

On this site I could add tags like-

WordPress 2.0
WordPress 2.1
WordPress 2.2
WordPress 2.3
WordPress 2.4
WordPress 2.5
WordPress 2.6
WordPress 2.7

And on the face of things that could result in more traffic, but I’m going to have to put all the theme sales pages (like the one you are reading now) in all these tag sections since all the themes work in all versions of WordPress 2+. That means I’ll have at least 8 identical pages with the only difference being the title 2.0, 2.1 etc…. and I know from experience Google will only index one set of this type of duplicate content.

Instead of doing this I’ve added all the above SERPs to multiple pages. Someone looking for a version of Talian that works in WordPress 2.7 will find my site in Google and in a few days time same will be true for WordPress 2.7.1 searches (just updated this page). Then I’ve added that page to the one Category “AdSense WordPress Themes” because overall most SERPs are now covered.

For your site if you’ve got lots of different content you can get away with using many more categories and/or tags, try to avoid adding everything from one Category to another one like described above as it’s such a waste of resources making these pages that add little to a site.

If I ever get to say 100 themes converted on this site then I could add all the categories or tags you find one big theme sites, AdSense Ready (all of them ), two column, two sidebars etc… but for now there’s not enough content to do anything like that.

What you are thinking of doing is what I’ve kind of done at http://www.elvincountry.com/ I used a plugin called Simple Tags http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-tags/ to automatically create most of the tags. Not as good as manually adding the tags, but with 1,000 posts!

BTW the break page function is a strange one. I’ve got some classic literature sites, like William Shakespeare plays and wanted to put them into WordPress without having to break each book page by page manually (how I did it years ago in almost static pages!!!). Came up with the perfect solution (got my son to write a script that did all the work) that relied on using the page break function, BUT it turns out that function pulls the entire contents of a post, not just the page number you want. Now if you have a couple of pages made this way, no problem, but if you had 50 pages worth of content (500 kb of text say) in one post broken this way, every time a visitor or search engine loads one of the 50 pages it access all 50 pages (big load on the server). Almost crashed my server by adding one book paginated over I think 100 pages as a test! Damn shame as WordPress would be ideal.

Back to loading themes.

David Law

Glad you got the update OK.

If you already have the Talian with AdSense/SEO theme installed you copy the new files over the old. Don’t forget to add your AdSense pub code to the new adsense.php file.

This will remove any changes you’ve made, so if there are important changes you’ll need to re add them to the new files.

For this reason you should always make a backup of your old files first, if something goes wrong you can at least reupload the old files and get your site back to where it was before the update.

Since you got your theme quite recently there won’t be a lot, if any important changes to the theme. About the biggest fix is the child Pages problem which you pointed out above.

Rest of the changes are updating depreciated code that won’t have any negative effect on your site, just means like the categorized links feature didn’t work any new features WordPress brings in by default might not work right away with the old depreciated code (quite grateful the categorized links code didn’t work with the old category code, it’s ugly).

So far it’s just the Category code that resulted in a feature not working and I updated quite a bit of depreciated code from WordPress 1.5 and earlier.

If you aren’t sure if it’s worth updating you could rename the updated theme folder offline and upload the new theme to test.

For example you could change the new folder to /talian-adsense-seo-03-new/ and upload.

You’ll then have two Talian themes listed on your themes page, to distinguish between them you could either hover over and read the URL of the files (look for new to know it’s the new one) or edit the style.css file in the new folder and change

Theme Name: Talian AdSense Targeted + SEO

to something like

Theme Name: Talian AdSense Targeted + SEO New

Then you can easily tell which is which.

This way you can directly compare what you have now to what the update looks like without loosing your customizations.

For others not sure what to do:
When I updated Talian for this site it made no changes to how this site works. If you have child Pages and haven’t used the code fix above the update will fix that problem (this site has no child Pages).

If you’re AdSense ad units have a green border around them you are using the Talian with AdSense/SEO from last year and the update will make your ad units look like what you see on this site (no border). If you want this ad unit look, but have made lots of code changes and don’t want to loose them you could use the adsense.php file from the update and just change the pub id code to yours.

On some of my sites like http://www.free-recipes.co.uk/ I had to edit 8 of the theme files to get the customization seen, from removing the dates of posts on all the files that use post content to adding the code for my youngest sons art work on the menu.

Can be a real pain keeping everything up to date and customized!

David Law

I think I’m going to have to block you from these comments Clayton, you keep finding my mistakes

Thought I’d covered the author pages, apparently not. The header.php code of the themes are very complex now and I’ve missed out the code for author names so it shows the H1 version of the blog name.

Easy to fix when you know how.

Editing header.php find

class=”header_site_desc”

below it is the code for the large link to the blogs home page.

What I’ve done here is create two** versions of this link, one is within a H1 header for pages that have no real SEO focus (monthly archive pages and the home page for example) and another that has no H1 header for pages with a keyword focus like category pages, single blog post pages etc… This way the H1 header on single blog posts are used for the name of the page which is the title of the post is keyword rich will help with the pages SERPs.

I should have added the author code within the H1 version as those pages have no keyword focus.

Find

if (is_page(”archives”) || is_year() || is_month() || is_day() || is_home())

Change to

if (is_page(”archives”) || is_year() || is_month() || is_day() || is_home() || is_author())

Save, upload and that will fix the problem.

**Actually it’s three versions, but one is to make the themes backwards compatible with early WordPress versions that don’t use the tag function, pre 2.3, lots of new themes that include tags on the menu etc… won’t work on WP 1.0 to 2.2, mine do by adding an if statement when including tag coding, if it’s not WordPress 2.3+ the tag coding is ignored and the theme should still work.

Glad I’ve only sent out the update for the Talian theme so far can fix this oversight before sending out update. I won’t send this out as a Talian update right away (will add to the next update and for new orders) since few people use the author pages, most blogs have one author. If a past customer wants this change and don’t want to do the editing above drop me an email listing the email address you used to order your theme and I’ll send it out ASAP.

Regarding your author pages, like monthly archive pages they have no real SEO focus and so from an SEO perspective don’t add anything to a site. This is why I removed the author links from all the themes: on most themes where you see the name of an author who posted the post (on my themes not linked) there would be a link to the authors page (like your author menu links). Since most WordPress blogs are single author sites this results in a set of archives pretty much identical to the home page archives.

Duplicate content = waste of link power and possible Google mixups: for example if there’s just the admin posting to a site the admin author page will be identical to the home page and there’s a very small risk Google will remove your home page from the search index and list the admin author page as more important (depends a lot on backlinks and luck, Google is FAR from perfect). From experience I know not to take risks with duplicate content, I’ve seen Google do some very strange things.

David Law

My recipe site at http://www.free-recipes.co.uk/ has over 60,000 posts and doesn’t struggle anymore

Had a problem with a plugin that made the Category menu ‘fold’, reduced the Category links from all of them shown all the time (as it is now, hundreds of Categories!) to only the top parent Category (about 30 Category links all the time), you would click a Parent and the Child Cats open (resulting in 30 to about 70 Category links opening on the menu).

This plugin resulted in 600-1000 queries if I recall correctly for every page loaded at a time where the site was getting over 10,000 visitors a day not including search engine spiders and this caused my server to STRUGGLE (crashed a few times) and surfing the site was slower that swimming through sand!

Before realising it was the plugin I bought a second dedicated server and only added the recipe site to it, still had problems (not as bad), realised it wasn’t the server to blame (the other server had all my other sites on it as well, millions of pages indexed in Google).

Removing the plugin reduced the queries per page loaded to a more normal 30 queries and now it runs smoothly. So without using a poorly written plugin WordPress can at least handle 60,000 posts with no problems.

I have other sites with, 5K, 10K, 20K, 30K posts on them with no issues. Many of these are datafeed like sites and so don’t get much traffic, but Google etc…. still spider the CRAP out of them most days and my servers memory (not that high) is doing fine! A case of 20,000 real visitors a day and the equivalent of another 100,000K visitors a day in the form of search engine spiders!

Added the WP Super Cache plugin to the recipe site as well, but don’t think it’s needed, especially as the site has a Google penalty http://www.45-year-old-millionaire.co.uk/3-month-google-penalty-for-selling-text-links-lifted.html which has the site at about 1,000 visitors a day right now. Just before the penalty looked like it was going to break into the 15K visitors a day region as added 30K+ new recipes that had just been indexed and started to rank! Tried selling text links from it, despite removing the two links sold the penalty remains other than a 7 day period when it was lifted.

So unless your site is on a really badly overloaded server I think WordPress can cope with it. 1,000 pages is nothing for WordPress.

BTW I enjoy giving SEO advice.

David Law

Figured I would drop a link here. Please feel free to remove it if you object. This pdf article gives a very interesting perspective on Soceal Networks and how to make them work with SEM. But even more interesting is how this article promotes Wordpress as THE system to use for the best SE results. (I am not an affiliate of Charles or anything – just get his emails as he has some very good information that is usually ahead of the curve.)

Aside from the SEM info in this article, I figure that the info here is a third party verification of why Wordpress is a great system to use. – Even better if used with the Talian Google Adsense and SEO Wordpress template!

http://socialmediascience.com/docs/The-Complete-Syndication-Revelation.pdf

Hey Clayton,

Not really the place to discuss this, but I read some of the The-Complete-Syndication-Revelation.pdf file and wasn’t particularly impressed. It’s the usual waffle with little meat of how to actually achieve anything useful, I didn’t look in full detail, but they usually then go to some sort of paid course/membership to make your wallet a little lighter to gain information that’s freely available anyway.

The ones I find funny are advising how to make money by selling something and their proof is the sales from the course you are buying! So if I buy your course I prove your course works because I bought it, I don’t think so!

I’ve never paid for a course to learn anything about Internet marketing, not a member of any paid membership deals etc… in fact my only costs are domain registration and server costs and yet I know the vast majority of the sort of stuff talked about in these types of courses (I choose not to do a lot of it, limited time). There’s loads of places to learn from for free like DigitalPoint forum.

The Duplicate Content WordPress Plugin.

Well was very concerned to read it originally blocked Category pages! I have loads of SERPs due to Category pages, so would never block the spidering/indexing of those!

There’s an issue with wasted links/PR using a plugin like this. Take the monthly archive pages, most themes by default have the monthly archive links on every page, this means with a 1,000 page WordPress blog we are looking at 12,000 links to monthly archive pages for every year of archives!

What a waste of link benefit for so little traffic!

This plugin doesn’t remove these links it stops the pages linked to (the archive pages) from being indexed making a waste of link benefit into a COMPLETE WASTE OF LINK BENEFIT with no traffic at all. That’s because Google doesn’t consider those 12,000 links as not existing anymore UNLESS you nofollow them as well and this plugin doesn’t do that.

So I would never use a plugin like this, everything the plugin does and so much more can be achieved easily through the theme coding.

If you use my themes as intended you will limit most duplicate content.

I advise not having a monthly archive section on the menu, but if you do the themes are setup to only show these links on the home pages. So with a 1,000 page site you only get them on the home page and the archived home pages (home page page 2, home page page 3 etc…) so http://www.elvincountry.com/ has 110 archived home pages and so there will be 110 pages linking to the monthly archive pages not over 1,000 (that site has about 1,000 posts, with the Categories probably 1,500 pages). As a side note Google tends not to index all these types of archive pages (no keyword focus, little traffic to them) so those 110 pages maybe 30 will be indexed. Better than all 1,000 pages linking to these practically useless monthly archive pages, but still not what I’d use my link power for. Use the menu widgets and don’t add the monthly archive menu to your menus.

You want Categories to be indexed as long as you don’t repeat the same stuff in all the Categories. Use your common sense on this one, there’s little point having 20 Categories if they all use the same posts, you can see on this site there’s only two Categories because, two Categories makes sense. The travel site has about 70 Categories because that makes sense.

My themes out the box use excerpts on all archive like pages: home archives, monthly archives, Categories, Tags and Search result pages. This means you won’t run into problems with your single blog posts (the pages most SERPs should come to) being treated as duplicate content to your archive pages.

As long as you don’t add those monthly archive links on your menu you have everything you need to have a well SEO’d site with low risks of duplicate content caused by WordPress.

BTW the plugin editor forgot about the home page archives, because of the way WordPress works there’s no way to block the indexing of the archived home pages through the header.php file, so you still have all those archived pages spidered and indexed. There is a way to block these through your robots.txt file, but considering how little link benefit goes from the home page to home page 2 to home page 3….. Google tends not to index them all anyway, I see these pages as a kind of sitemap so happy for them to be spidered/indexed.

David Law

Thanks again David. I am done messing around now. I just have to remove the archive section on my template as you suggest and then I can finally focus on building the rest of my content. Have a great day.

Hi Nissim,

It’s not a straight forward load one file change this code and you get different ads, but if you are OK with editing HTML coding it’s not that hard (multiple files to edit).

Lets say you wanted to remove the bottom AdSense ad unit on every page and replace it with an ad from eBay or Amazon. You’d need to load the relevant template files in a text editor, find the relevant code that creates the bottom AdSense ad unit and change it to your code.

Fortunately I labeled all the AdSense ad units within the templates so if you have a text editor (like Crimson editor, what I use) you can do a multiple file search for the text

AdSense Code Start

This will find all the code related to the ad units within the template files.

It’s the code between AdSense Code Start and AdSense Code End

For me it would take about 10 minutes to make these sorts of changes depending on exactly what I wanted to achieve (I don’t make this sort of change for customers before someone asks ) since I know where everything is, for someone with OK HTML skills maybe an hour to change all the bottom ad units to say Amazon ads.

Personally rather than replace the AdSense ad units I’d add the extra ads as well and then use the adsense.php file to turn off the AdSense ads I don’t want (instructions in the adsense.php file how to turn ads off). This way it will make it easier to put AdSense ads back in the theme if required.

If you want the AdSense ads AND add other ads (so both run at the same time) you’d do this like with any WordPress theme, decide where you want the ads and find the code where that place is and add the new ad code.

Regarding changing background colours etc… This theme is like any other WordPress theme in that most of the themes colour scheme is controlled through the css files which you can edit through the online WordPress theme editor or offline in a text editor. As long as you understand a little CSS coding and when a colour is due to an image don’t mind loading up something like Paintshop Pro, changing a colour scheme is possible.

That’s exactly what I did here http://www.seo-gold.com/ with the Talian theme. A few changes to the style.css file and a few images edited to get a slightly different look.

David Law

The plugins at http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-seo-plugins are what I use.

The AdSense ad units you can use up to but no more than three of them. With the way I’ve set the ads up you can either have a sidebar ad on the right menu (default without using widgets) or the left (by using the widgets settings).

There’s also two versions of the sidebar ad, one lacks the header saying it’s a advert. You should only use one or the other of these ad units as otherwise you’ll add four ad units to your theme and one won’t work.

If you read through the older comments you’ll see how to use widgets to add the sidebar ad unit where ever you want in on the left or right menus.

BTW Sent your theme earlier today, thanks for the order.

Question 3 is a hard one, if you plan to make the sidebars wider you’ll also have to either make the entire theme wider or the main content area narrower. From an SEO/AdSense perspective there’s no harm in doing this, but it’s beyond the scope of these comments to cover something as detailed as this beyond the following.

Load style.css in a text editor and play around with these classes (it’s the width you want to change):

#right-sidebars
#left-sidebars

.post-fixed
#post-entry
.post-meta
#post-entry h1

Probably

.sidebar-box
.sidebar-box span
.sidebar-box ul , .sidebar-box p
.sidebar-box ul ul
.sidebar-box ul li a:link,…………..
.sidebar-box ul ul li a:link,…………..

And other css classes!

Depending on what you want to do will depend on what you need to change, you have to make sure all changes match together, so if you widen the two sidebars you’ll have to widen a lot of other stuff.

I learnt HTML making changes like this, didn’t have a clue what I was doing, would make a change to see what it did

David Law

Not sure what you mean by something odd?

If you add a Description to a Category you’ll see it as the title attribute for the Category link instead of the usual-

“View all posts filed under Category Name”

When you hover over the link in a browser.

If you hover of this pages Categories (currently 2 Cats), one has the default View all posts…. and the other a slight derivative of the Categories name.

This is how it’s meant to look.

I wouldn’t worry much about what goes in your title attribute (not the same as the title element or title tag as a lot of people wrongly call it http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/title-tag-optimization.html) since Google etc… completely ignores it’s contents.

You see all these so called SEO experts adding keyword rich title attributes to their text links and even image links, but they didn’t go to the trouble of testing if Google actually counts it towards a pages SERPS (it doesn’t). See http://www.seo-gold.com/seo-tutorial/anchor-text-optimization for test details.

Thinking about it, if you tried to add html code to the description that could cause a mess.

David Law