Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO theme has been tested on WordPress 2.* including 2.0 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.5, 2.6, 2.6.5, 2.7, 2.7.1, 2.8. 2.8.1, 2.8.2, 2.8.3, 2.8.4, 2.8.5, 2.8.6 and WordPress 2.9 and no issues found. When WordPress updates again (WordPress 2.9.1, 3.0 etc…) it will be tested and any problems will be fixed and all customers who have bought Talian SEO/AdSense theme will receive a free update (this is also the case for all WordPress themes sold on this site). Currently updating Talian to version 4.0, see comments below for details of new features: December 2009.
Talian with AdSense/SEO is widget compatible and uses tags (new feature added to WordPress 2.3).
Targeted AdSense Coding: we’ve Incorporated this feature into all of our WP themes including Talian as of January 2008. The targeted AdSense coding can not be used with popular WordPress AdSense plugins, unless you edit your WP theme manually, so our premium themes are better than using an WP AdSense plugin.
Google AdSense very and slightly rounded corners ad border code to Talian with easy options to switch between 3 border versions (very rounded, slightly rounded and square corners on AdSense units).
Talian was the first SEO/AdSense Ready WordPress theme for this site, but not my first AdSense ready WordPress theme (made roughly half a dozen SEO/AdSense themes previously).
According to WordPress theme viewer Talian is the most popular theme downloaded from wordpress.net with almost 12,000 downloads (as of mid September 2007). Which is why I converted it to AdSense + SEO.
Unlike my earlier WordPress theme creations there will be only one version, AdSense + SEO, though there’s a very easy way to turn the AdSense ads off, turning the theme into SEO only.
At first I didn’t like Talian, but during the LONG process of adding search engine optimization HTML code and Google AdSense code it really grew on me! I’m not one for 3 column WP themes, tend to look cluttered, but this one works which is why I’m trying it on this WordPress blog and a few others.
Through rigorous testing I’ve found this to be the best AdSense theme (from a CTR perspective), with a CTR on some sites above 6%. SEO wise there’s little difference between Talian and any other WP theme sold on this site: they are all fully SEO’d.
WordPress Talian theme with Google AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Take a look at Adventure Travel Vacations for a website currently using the Talian theme and a high AdSense CTR.
The first screenshot shows a home page of a Talian Theme test site which was used to edit the templates. You can see one of the three Google AdSense ad units in the screenshot, this is a 250×250 ad unit that floats to the right at the top of the content of the first post only.
I’ve looked at other WordPress themes that include AdSense and other than a copy cat (someone copied the code of an earlier theme of mine) no one uses this technique of floating an Ad unit within the content of the first post of archive pages. This location is one of the most clicked areas (AdSense hot zone) and so by utilising this location this ad unit almost always performs well.
You will find the same ad units and placement for all pages of the blog, which will maximise AdSense revenue.
The second screenshot shows a single post page, this is where individual posts are shown (like the page you are reading now). You can see the floating ad unit again and the top of the vertical 160×600 ad unit on the right menu.
In my experience it’s these pages that will create most AdSense revenue, especially the 250×250 square unit within the main blog post content (it’s a real hot area).
Further down the page is the third and final ad unit, out the box it’s set at 336×280 (large rectangle to catch leaving visitors), but there’s an easy to use options page where ad unit sizes and colours can be changed, so changing the size doesn’t need a PHP programmer or anything 
.
Talian with AdSense + SEO Installation Instructions
Make a PayPal payment for £9.99 for Talian using the PayPal button below-
When payment is received you’ll receive a copy of the zipped AdSense theme by email (within 24hrs assuming no payment problems).
1. Unzip the Talian WP Theme zip file.
2. Edit the file adsense.php within the /talian-adsense-seo-03/ folder to include your Google AdSense code (read the readme.txt file for more details, very easy to do).
Note: Adding your unique Google AdSense publisher code (your pub-##### number) is the ONLY required change needed to the entire Talian template to make the theme ready to turn your WordPress blog into an AdSense residual income stream.
3. Upload the entire /talian-adsense-seo-03/ folder to your WordPress themes directory (via FTP, just like any other WP theme you’ve tried out).
4. Log into your blogs dashboard and under Presentation select the new Talian theme and you are done.
The Talian AdSense + SEO theme out the box uses blended ad unit colours and large ad units for maximum CTR/AdSense revenue. If you wish to change unit colours and/or ad unit dimensions this can be achieved by editing just one file. If you don’t like the 250×250 sized ad unit for example, no problem a few minor changes and you could have a smaller 180×150 ad unit. Don’t like image ads, again no problem specify text only ads.
Search Engine Optimization
Most WordPress themes aren’t too bad SEO wise when downloaded directly from their original creators, but there are always improvements that can be made for maximum SEO impact and this theme was no different.
The Talian AdSense + SEO theme includes-
Optimized title elements (and meta tags, though they aren’t very important these days). Take a look at the title of this page, note it’s keyword rich and lacks the name of the site (for SEO reasons).
Optimised headers, for example on blog post pages like this one the name of the blog is NOT within a H1 header, (every theme I’ve used has a H1 header that holds a link to home page). Instead the title of the post is within the H1 header and the link to home is only a H1 header on pages that lack a true keyword focus like the monthly archive pages. This is the first WordPress theme I’ve edited that I thought to do this and it should result in significant SEO improvements. will be converting all my WordPress themes to use this feature.
Optimised anchor text of links and rel=nofollow links to unimportant pages (from an SEO perspective) like the trackback and RSS feed pages (those links waste a LOT of PR/link benefit).
Basically optimised everything I could which makes this the most optimised theme I’ve made so far.
BTW if your using the original Talian theme there’s a small code error near the language translations (left menu) that means the language image links aren’t within the box. Pretty easy to fix.
Make a PayPal payment for £9.99 for Talian using the PayPal button below-
When payment is received you’ll receive a copy of the zipped Talian SEO/AdSense theme by email (within 24hrs assuming no payment problems).
Compatible with WordPress 2.0, WordPress 2.1, WordPress 2.2, WordPress 2.3, WordPress 2.5, WordPress 2.6, WordPress 2.7, WordPress 2.8 and WordPress 2.9. Will be updated for WordPress 3.0 etc… and sent out for free to all Talian SEO/AdSense Ready WP Theme customers.
Tags: WordPress 2.3, WordPress 2.6
223 responses to WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
All the themes use the targeted AdSense coding.
What this means is the main content of a page is enclosed in the following code supplied by Google AdSense:
!– google_ad_section_start –
Your important content that you want Google AdSense to consider important when choosing keywords.
!– google_ad_section_end –
What this is meant to do is Google AdSense will look between this code and try to use the content within to target your AdSense ads.
The theory is the content you write is going to be more keyword targeted page by page than using that content and all the template type content, links on the menu etc…. So by enclosing it in this code Google AdSense should target your content better which should result in better ads which should result in a higher CTR.
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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!)
Hi Paul
Your using the original Talian theme that I also used to create the Talian with AdSense/SEO theme I sell from this page (and use on this site).
When I create a WordPress AdSense/SEO theme I make a LOT of changes to the html code from the theme I’m basing it on.
So though the theme you are using looks similar to the one sold here, it’s not the same code, so I have no idea what does/does not work in WordPress 2.7 regarding the original Talian theme (I’ve never used the original Talian theme on a site).
All I can tell you is my version of Talian with AdSense/SEO works perfectly well in WordPress 2.7 and if it breaks in WordPress 2.8 or whatever I’ll fix it ASAP and send a free update to all past customers.
I really hate how the original Talian theme translation images don’t fit within the bamboo colour block on the left menu (fixed in my theme).
Good look fixing the theme.
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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..
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hi MJ,
I don’t do custom work for free and my current SEO charges are £75 an hour.
Fortunately what you want doesn’t require code work, create a pages (not posts) called
About
Contact Us
And they will be added like the WordPress SEO Plugins button you see on this page.
You can’t add a Home link this way since you can’t add a Home page that links to home. For this you’d need a small amount of code work, though there’s a Home link at the top of the header (name of the site) and a link at the very bottom within the footer so not needed.
If you want to add a Home link still load header.php into a text editor (Notepad for example)
Find
class=”navigators”
And below it is the code that needs editing.
Add below the <ul> tag this code replacing domain.com with your URL-
<li class="page_item"><a href="http://www.domain.com/">Home</li>
To give-
<ul>
<li class="page_item"><a href="http://www.domain.com/">Home</a></li>
Rest of header code below.
Save upload and you’ll have a Home link on the left of the other links.
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
I’m back home from hospital and have full access to all my files etc… so themes should go out on time now. Looks like few people ordered due to the notice on the home page, so not much to catch up on
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!
Hi Ian,
Just dispatched your theme and the email addresses matched, so shouldn’t be any problems.
Thanks again
David Law
uploaded the theme today – it looks great!
Thanks!
I want to purchase this theme. But first I need to ask if another theme that you linked to on one of your other pages can be purchased. The theme is here:
http://www.elvincountry.com/
I want to use the plugins that you mentioned to make the blog into a CMS for my website.
Also I know from your comments and research that the ad placement above is the best. However, with the travel site above they have also put adsense block in the top left. Does this increase the ctr or does it make visitors leave faster as they may think it is too much advertising?
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Thanks for the excellent answer. Your templates look awesome and by using the wordpress widgets I can put the adsense ads whereever I want on the right and left menus. My site is a hiking site and the visitors are 90 percent new visitors from the search engines so I will test to see what brings in the most revenue.
One of the reasons I am purchasing this template today is because I could not get the adsense ads into the individual page posts like you have with your adsense template.
The main reason I am purchasing this template is the SEO setup. You really know your stuff!
Thanks,
Clayton – Kelowna BC, Canada.
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
I installed Talian at www.tracksandtrails.ca and it worked perfect! I have been looking for the perfect solution for years and have found it. I have lots of changes on my site to put my content into this new system but it already looks great since your template had everything right where it needed to be.
I also used the link you provided for the SEO plugins. The plugins you suggested are excellent, I just have to set them up still.
In adition to the plugins you suggested, added one more for a sitemap. I just googled “wordpress sitemap” and took the first link.
I think a sitemap is good for SEO for a number of reasons.
Thank you very much for providing this quality (nothing comes close anywhere) for such a good price so folks like me who want to get started in an online business can for very good price!
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Thank you again David.
I will hold off on the sitemap as you suggest. Like you mention, the categories alone should be adequate for a sitemap.
1) I think the code you were going to paste into your answer above was left out. I found the code in the theme editor under “theme functions” and I found the section of code and changed the 1 to a 9 just to see if it would work but that was a no go.
2) Is it possible to have parent child links in the “Blogroll N Links” section?
I added a category in the Links (hiking stores) and made a child link but the link showed as usual with no category showing. This is not too much of a problem though, it would be real nice if we could put a category in the Blogroll N Links.
3) And finnally, where should I place my google analytics code? – may be another part of an update eh?
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Third potential option for page menu help.
Create sub categories for pages.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Listing_Your_Pages_on_Your_Site
The only thing is I tried to create a sub category for my site (listed in my above comment)but after I followed the instructions the new page does not show at all!
Maybe someone can tell me why. I created a new page as a child to “Authors” in my admin but the page does not show on the side bar or menu tab???
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hello David.
Thanks for the “fixes”. They all worked fine. I agree with you on the Links. Since I will have a lot of link resources over time, I will make a page called “Hiking Links” and have the blogroll point to the appropriate link page.
I do not want more than 50 links on a page so for each link resource category I will make a page break so the new set of links will be on a new page. ( I haven’t tried that yet but in the Wordpress help files I found info on how to break a page into more than one pages.
***Here is what I think is a good question.***
In the past I have added a single post into several categories and never used tags. By doing that, am I making duplicate content?
I think it may be better for me to add multiple appropriate tags to a post and then just put the post under one category. I am creating Parent/Child categories such as “Canada” as parent and “British Columbia” as child and then a city such as “Kelowna” as a child of British Columbia. With this example, if the post I write is about a hike in Kelowna, I would just select Kelowna as the category and not Canada and British Columbia. Correct?
This is a detailed question about my site but I think it could apply to many Travel Wordpress Blogs etc.
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hello David.
Thanks for the great answers above. Give me lots to think about. I just got your update for Talian SEO ready Google Adsense Theme, I guess I upload it and install it just like installing a brand new theme, right?
I will be making use of Tags Plugin as well. I really appreciate all of your answers and help because I am getting this theme ready for a huge surge of content that I will be moving off my old system into this new Wordpress Thems. Having the foundation set up properly now is really important. Your advice and answers have been timely, helpful and have given me the confidence in Wordpress and what it can do for me. Best thing is that it was so easy!!!
Have a great day.
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hi again.
Everything worked fine.
Here is an odd thing that happened before the last update and after;
When you go to tracksandtrails.ca where I have the wordpress theme 2.7.1 installed, click on one of the “Rangers” on the left sidebar. (The Rangers are the “Authors”. when you click on one of the Rangers, the new page does not show the Title of the the website at the top left of the page.
This happened before I made the change from “Authors” to “Rangers” I think.
If it is not too much to ask, I am wondering where I insert this piece of code into a loop to display a Post Author name under the title of a post. I have been reading lots of wordpress help and trying to place the code in different places of the wordpress theme and template files with no result. Written by:
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Thanks again David! I think I am pushing Wordpress to the limit – my site may be better served by a total CMS system like Joomla but this Wordpress system is so easy and intuitive to use, I’ll stick with it.
I really appreciatte your SEO FREE consultation!
But more than just giving free advice, you are helping folks like me get a real solid understanding of Wordpress and SEO.
I am using your advice! It is very valuable. When we set up a site we have to take any measure to avoid Google pitfalls. Like you say they are not perfect and sometimes they make global updates like a couple months ago when many bloggers websites fell from front page rankings into the basement. If we pay attention to good SEO advice and do not use Black Hat methods, our websites should continue to rank high on Google and other search engines.
Thanks again. (had me worried there when I read the first line of this post) I think I have most of my bug testing done now though!
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hello Mr. Law.
Really appreciated your last post. It is rare to find someone in internet marketing and SEM be so transparent. The information and guidance given in this feed is a real help and encouragement. Not only that but you have already answered my next concern and I did not even mention it yet! I was thinking a drop down menu would be real nice but the reality of my visitors and that of many websites is that visitors come to individual posts or pages from a search engine instead of dropping by the home page and pouring over the menu.
The info about the menu plugin above really helps me be aware of any thing that I may try in that area.
Thanks!
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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.
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hey Dave.
What do you think of this plugin for ensuring the problem of duplicate content in a WordPress Blog is fixed? I installed it.
Author URI: http://www.seologs.com/wordpress-duplicate-content-cure/
Seems like it could be a good plugin for folks who want to use archives etc. (As long as it is configured to crawl the categories. In addition I put individual posts into one category.)
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
How can I change google ads to any other affiliate ads?
is there a way to cod inside the adsense.php file.
And if I want to make multiple ads (google and other) for any type of pages.
How do I do this?
thanks
Another question,
Can I change background colors, fonts, headers colors, H1 etc. through the editor?
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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.
Thanks Dave for your answers,
Some other questions –
1. What plugins do you recommend to use (Alinks, Post easer, Related post, Popularity contest etc…)?
2. I understand that there are 3 ads (central, right and bottom), why you haven’t include the one on the left, where it’s seen in “adveture” website? It is one of the best locations.
3. can you give me a clue where to change the width of the clumns? style.php? do you recommend to do this change?
Thanks,
I have just passed the payment.
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
At the category description, I found that the theme does not take the desription from the category admin but rather take something odd:
how can I change it?
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
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Thanks,
I agree with what you wrote.
however, what I meant is the term -&raque- that apears in the archives meta desc. as well as in categories: like is this site see one of categories meta description – description” content=” » AdSense Blogspot Templates, AdSense templates and themes for WordPress and Blogspot blogs”
what is raque??
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
LOL
Understand now. That’s the meta description for the Categories, the Categories admin description setting is for the Category menu links title attribute I spoke about above, so isn’t used as a meta description.
Since WordPress doesn’t have a built in way to add a unique meta description I used the name of the Category and the general Blog description for this meta tag.
The raquo is the code for the two >> like sign and is built into WordPress (you can’t easily remove it at theme level, probably a way, never tired). You can see the >> in the title element (title tag) of Categories and blog posts/pages as well. Basically it’s a built in separator as the usual title element format is-
Blog Name >> Post Name
Blog Name >> Category Name
Since the meta description is not used by the major search engines for ranking purposes it’s not important what you put here beyond as (probably discussed above) Google will sometimes use the meta description as the snippet of text for a search result, (might increase your click thru rate a little if it reads well) but it does not increase rankings.
Without using WordPress plugins you can’t add a custom meta description and I personally wouldn’t use my time using a plugin and creating unique meta descriptions to this level as they have so little value.
You know I charge at least £250 a month retainer fee to my SEO clients for support questions like this
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Sorry
for nagging.
I wouldn’t mind to be charged (IF I sucesed +I believe I will).
You assisted me a lot and I appreciate your help.
Was a joke Nissim, the “don’t do it as it’s not worth it/good from an SEO perspective” tone of my last comment is like over half of my emails to SEO clients who are asking for advice on how to optimize their sites and it was funny (funny for me anyway) to be doing it here for an AdSense theme as well.
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Greetings David.
One more question on the Talian WordPress template.
When I add a widget from the widget list, I look at my site and it adds the widget to the sidebar but removes everything else (categories, pages etc)
This happened in the past before the 2.7.1 update as well. Before I was just testing so it did not matter if I couldn’t use the widgets but now I want to add a RSS image and text that links up with my feedburner feeds page.
Oh, there was one more thing, In the theme editor I removed code so archives would not show in my left sidebar but the archives still show only on my homepage. When I click a category or page the archives do not show on the sidebar.
I think it is possible that I messed around too much and may have to reload the last template update to get back some default code and then try removing the archives from that point. I really want to get rid of the archives links as per your SEO advice.
Hope you can help.
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hey Clayton,
You’ve misunderstood how widgets work, when you add menu widgets you have to add ALL the widgets you want to show on the two Talian menus. So if you want a menu setup like mine you’d add to sidebar 1 these widgets:
Translators GAT
Theme Switcher (custom coding)
Categories GAT
Popular Articles GAT
Recent Comments Gat
Click save changes and sidebar 1 will now show all those menu items.
Do similar for sidebar 2 with
Adverts Clear BG GAT
Recent Articles GAT
etc…
You can setup your two menus with whatever menu items you use and leave the rest out.
This will over write any changes you made to the sidebar.php file, to get any custom code work on to your sidebars now you’ll need to add it to the functions.php file in the widget format (has some surrounding code).
If you compare sidebar.php to some of the coding in functions.php you’ll see all the sidebar code is there as well, this is the widget form of those menu items plus the extra clear background AdSense ad unit code to give more ad options.
With regards to the archive coding problem, once you use widgets as described above all changes within sidebar.php file is ignored. When you learn how to use widgets correctly this will solve your problem: don’t add the Archives widget to one of the menus, no need to mess around with the sidebar.php file at all (or any code work to not show it).
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Thank you very much. I can also report that after moving content to the new Talian Template, my CTR is going up. I still have lots of content to move over prior to getting the full effect.
Greetings Dave,
Just wanted to make sure you received my payment on May 13th. Looking forward to receiving the theme.
Hope your back is better.
Hi Serge,
Got your order and was posted right away, look for this email:
Subject: Payment Received – Theme Attached
From: AdSense Templates #########
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 11:55:34 +0100
Will have the theme attached.
If it’s not in your Yahoo Inbox check the SPAM folder, I have a LOT of spammers using my domains as their return email addresses for their spam emails which results in the domain getting blacklisted unfortunately! I’ve never sent a single SPAM email to anyone yet have at least half a dozen of my domains on blacklists, really irritating!
I’ve also sent the email again via another email address that rarely gets used, so that should get through. If you can’t find the emails let me know an alternative email address and I’ll send to that one. Not had problems sending to Yahoo addresses, (pretty sure they don’t delete spam marked emails before delivery) so that shouldn’t be needed.
My back is very slowly recovering from the operation, been 12 weeks since the operation so the discs should be well on the way to being fused now. Thanks for asking.
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Greetings,
Thanks for your quick reply and sending of theme. You were right it went into my spam folder. Great that I didn’t have a chance to clean it up because it might of landed in the trash. Your lastest email also went to Spam.
Take care.
I added a page about my AdSense Income http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/adsense-income this week (feel free to comment on your AdSense income there) and it resulted in the navigation menu below the header (the orange buttons with white text) wrapping and looking terrible.
This is caused because there’s only so much space available in that location and four buttons with so much text was too much for the Talian theme out the box.
I really wanted this page and link on that menu with that text, so edited the css to make it work and here’s what I did.
Loaded style.css in a text editor.
Found
.navigators {
float: right;
width: 490px;
}
.navigators ul {
margin: 0px;
float: left;
width: 490px;
list-style-type: none;
padding: 36px 0px 0px 0px;
}
and changed to
.navigators {
float: right;
width: 620px;
}
.navigators ul {
margin: 0px;
float: left;
width: 620px;
list-style-type: none;
padding: 36px 0px 0px 0px;
}
Changed 490 to 620 twice.
Saved the file and uploaded over the original.
That’s it.
You can see this has pushed the button like links under the blog description and name of the site (compare the navigation menu to this site http://www.free-recipes.co.uk/ that uses default Talian style.css and fits fine, just 3 page links) and so if you did this with a site with a really long blog description this could mess up.
With my navigation page links you can see I use a lot of text, this is for SEO reasons:
* WordPress SEO Plugins
* Google Sitemap
* WordPress Theme Features
* AdSense Income
I could have shortened these a little, but it could have hurt those pages SERPs.
If you have less pages or much shorter titles you might not need to make the width as wide as I have, I went from the default 490px to 620px which is quite a lot. If you find your page titles don’t quite fit maybe adding an extra 30px padding will be enough, experiment: as long as you keep backups of the original it’s easy enough to reupload the original files and fix your mistakes
Another way to make these page links fit is to exclude some of them.
On this site I use a static home page (a WordPress feature) and don’t want that page to show on the navigation menu, so have excluded it.
I loaded header.php in a text editor and changed:
wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&title_li=&depth=1′
to
wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&title_li=&depth=1&exclude=12′
Added &exclude=12
The number 12 in my case represents the post number of the page I wanted excluded. To find the post number you need to edit the page you want excluded and read the post number from the URL.
When you edit a page the URL will look something like this-
google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wp-admin/page.php?action=edit&post=12
post=12 tells us that page is number 12, so we use &exclude=12 to exclude it.
If you have several pages you want to exclude from the navigation menu add them all.
For example if you had 3 pages with the post numbers 1, 7, 12 and 18 your code would look like this-
wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&title_li=&depth=1&exclude=1,7,12,18′
I use this coding on a few sites where there are too many pages to ever fit on the navigation menu below the header.
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Any idea how I can be able to link the tabs on top of this theme (seo tutorial, adsense income etc)to my other websites, I want to integrate the sites together, I have tried a number of things but none of them seems to work out, I am using talian theme.
Thanks
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hi Chuka,
Yes it’s possible to link to other sites, but not without editing the template files.
As it happens the SEO Tutorial link on my navigation menu was created the same way as you would add a link to another site since the SEO Tutorial page is called “SEO Tutorial for WordPress” which is too much text for a link there, so I added it to the template file and used the exclude function to not show that link twice on the menu.
Load header.php in a text editor like Notepad and find
<div class=”navigators”>
<ul>
Below this add your link with this format:
<li class=”page_item”><a href=”http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/seo-tutorial-for-wordpress”>SEO Tutorial</a></li>
This will put the link at the front of other navigation links, if you want it after your current links paste the above type of link code above the end </ul> tag instead
link code here
</ul>
</div>
This would result in the link showing after your current links.
Save the file and upload over the original header.php file. Don’t forget to make a backup of your original header.php file.
That should do it.
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
I just tried it and it works, however if the permalinks settings are changed from default, it gives error message
Also it doesnt link to subfolder (eg: “http://abc.com/subfolder”) I am considering using it with the default permalink if I can connect to subfolder as some of my important pages are in the subfolder unless i succed in making it work with numeric or custom structure settings
How important is Permalink for SEO?
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
I have fixed it, I used ” instead of ” I guess the godaddy text editor must have changed the one I copied and pasted from here, hence the error, I am also using the SEO friendly permalinks without problems.
I think I am ok now, Thanks
This is the error message I got when using the permalinks with the exclusion code you gave me, I just read about permalinks on this website and have decided to use it.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_ENDIF in /home/content/a/b/c/XXXXXX/html/about/wp-content/themes/talian-adsense-seo-03/404.php on line 15
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hi Chuka,
The fix to your links to other sites in the navigation menu shouldn’t have any impact on the SEO friendly permalinks created by WordPress, the Talian theme doesn’t create the permalinks it’s all WordPress core using mod_rewrite.
Sounds like you’ve made an error in the editing, have you tried converting to SEO friendly permalinks using the unedited Talian theme? If it works with the original header.php file strongly suggests it’s a editing mistake (make sure you edit files in a text editor like Notepad NOT WordPad, MS Word or anything that adds formatting like Frontpage and other WYSIWYG type HTML editors).
If both fail suggests something like the .htaccess file is missing (incorrect code added).
Did you setup the .htaccess file as described within the WordPress permalinks setting? If your not sure see the SEO friendly permalinks link above for examples as without the .htaccess file the links to posts/categories etc… won’t work correctly since the mod_rewrite rules aren’t in place.
If you are sure everything is working correctly try disabling all plugins see if that fixes the problem. If it does enable plugins one at a time to find the culprit.
As you probably read at http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/seo-tutorial-for-wordpress/seo-friendly-wordpress-permalinks SEO friendly permalinks are important, but if you can’t have them it’s not the end of the world. Just one of many SEO ideals that not every site gets.
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hi David,
I’ve had your template for a couple of months now, but only just took the time to read this very useful series of comments.
My idea for using your template was to assist in getting some good ranking for my sites as I build them. Planning on perhaps swapping to a more visually appealing template once traffic is established (a magazine theme like the Revolution ones, etc).
At the same time as building content and links to the site, I promote affilaite offers. One of the best ways of doing this, I decided, is to create a static page with a landing page/squeeze page.
Wordpress isn’t ideal for this sort of thing so what I’ve done is create a custom page, and strip as much of the Wordpress code as possible without breaking it – so I can still use the Wordpress html editor to create the page I want.
This is what I’ve done, I wonder if you might comment on it:
<div class="post-meta" id="post-”>
When I use this as a custom page, I am able to add html code to the page editor and get what looks like a standalone landing page/squeeze page with some low key links back to the home page just to keep the SEs happy.
I believe that ’standalone pages’ are less SEO friendly so I thought this might be a good way ahead. I’d be interested in your expert opinion on this – and have I stripped the page code properly (it seems to work!).
Finally, I’m assuming you don’t load each of those recipes individually – and somewhere you mention ‘fed’ content – what do you recommend for this? I am currently trying a plugin called caffeinated Content which pulls from article directories – do you have any experience with this or similar ‘Content trawlers’?
Many thanks for a great wordpress theme.
Phil
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Oops – the code didn’t appear.
Ok, here it is again, without the code elements:
?php
commenting
Template Name: TalianSalespage
commenting
?
div id=”content_talia”
div id=”post-entry”
?php if(have_posts()) : ?
?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?
div class=”post-meta” id=”post- ?php the_ID(); ? ”
div class=”post-content”
?php the_content() ;?
/div
/div
div class=”post-fixed”
/div
?php endwhile; ?
?php else: ?
?php endif; ?
/div
/div
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hi Phil,
I can see what you are aiming for and I’ve considered trying something like this myself. Basically what you are doing is creating a custom template that can be accessed as a static Page. It’s similar in concept to the Sitemap.php template file supplied with Talian.
Anyway, a standard sort of squeeze page would lack a lot of the elements associated with a WordPress page and I can see from your code you’ve removed a lot of that code. Looks good to me, obviously as you removed the header, footer and sidebar code you loose all the SEO parts there. So you’ll have to add your own SEO’d title element etc…
I’ve not tried this (just had the thought), but you could in theory use an almost blank template file (no code to be used from a template, just the content function) and paste an entire HTML page as WordPress page.
This would use no template elements from Talian (any theme) so would be a completely stand alone page, but it would still be linked like any other page from the menu etc… so gain internal links automatically.
If I tried this I’d write a unique excerpt since otherwise your pages top HTML elements will probably be used as an excerpt on the related posts plugin etc…
Would be useful for adding squeeze pages etc… provided by affiliates, though you’d have to SEO the entire page from scratch as this way you’d get no optimization from the theme at all.
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hi David,
thanks for your reply – and so soon after I posted too!
It may appear that I know more than I do, though. So while your answer is interesting, I would need more detail to achieve what you seem to be suggesting.
I know my way around html and css – but when it comes to php, javascript and Wordpress structure I resort to guessing what something does then performing trial and error until I get somewhere. Hence, the code pasted above became the solution simply because whenever I tried to take more away the whole thing collapsed.
As for SEO on the ‘blank page’, it would, of course, be nice to be able to do some – if you come up with a solution I’d be glad to hear it. Currently, I intend direct linking so organic listing for the sales page will have to suffer until I figure out how to do what you suggest.
By the way, for anyone interested – I wanted to change the ’someimage.gif’ not only to another image but, due to its prime position, to a banner ad for an affiliate offer.
I’d love to say I came up with the solution but, as usual, I simply came up with the right google search – and this is what I did: http://webdevnews.net/2007/01/css-trick-turning-a-background-image-into-a-clickable-link/
- it works perfectly.
By the way – any thoughts on Caffeinated Content or that kind of plugin?
Thanks again,
Phil
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
I’ve played around with plugins like caffeinated Content (not tried that one), but so far they always get penalised in Google long term (lots and lots of SEO tests).
I have some sites running that add content automatically from Google news (rss feed), but the traffic is pathetic. So currently not looking at adding more (waste of resources on my servers).
My recipe site I bought a WordPress script (WordPress Datafeed Import Script) that allows you to import datafeeds (csv format only) into WordPress. I had my eldest son (goes to University this year to study a Computer Programming degree) to write a PHP script to convert 100,000+ recipes in a weird format into csv format and then used the WordPress Datafeed Import Script to import them into WordPress.
I’ve not used the WordPress Datafeed Import Script since about WordPress 2.6 and it looks like the author is no longer supporting this product, so no idea if it will work in WP 2.8 and looks like it will break eventually. I personally wouldn’t buy the script today because of the lack of current support. Doesn’t help that the author used security PHP coding so you can’t edit the scripts code yourself (so if it breaks, you’ll never be able to fix it).
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
To create a template page that will only show the content of a page and nothing else (no theme parts) try this code:
< ?php
/*
Template Name: Blank SEO
*/
?>
< ?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
< ?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
< ?php the_content() ;?>
< ?php endwhile; ?>
< ?php else : ?>
< ?php endif; ?>
This is the minimum code needed to show the content of a page.
Name it something like blank-seo.php and upload it to your themes folder (this will work for any WordPress theme).
Create a new page (only works with WordPress Pages, not Blog Posts) and select the Blank SEO template for that page.
Name the Page something relevant and add your squeeze page as the content.
Save it and it should create a page that uses all the HTML elements of your squeeze page and have no WordPress theme elements at all (no header, sidebar, footer etc….). The page will also be linked fro menus etc… like any other page.
I tested this on this site earlier, made a page called SEO Test which could be found at
google-adsense-templates.co.uk/seo-test
After testing I set it to Draft, which interestingly means it’s removed from menus etc… (so no links to it), but still exists (can be loaded, so you can see it yourself).
As you can see it shows a single line of text (all I added to the content) plus some text related to a Popularity Plugin I use on this site. Some plugins are added to the end of the content function and this plugin does that.
Had I added a full HTML based page to that page (and disabled the Popularity plugin) it should look like any other static HTML page.
Not the most useful thing to do with WordPress, but shows it works
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Thanks for the amended blank page code – that’s a much cleaner solution than mine.
Phil
Hello,
Call me 5 months slow on this one but I just realised, as per this comment form I’m using now, that you cant leave an optional url with your comment post. I cant find an option for it in the dashboard discussions section. Can you help with this? Is this just a standard thing for WP?
PS – Last week I used the Wordpress automatic update to WP2.8 without any problems that I’m aware of.
Thanks!
David Elton,
http://www.aid-renegade.com
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
I assume you mean you can’t add a URL to comments with the Talian theme. If so it’s something I added (well removed to be precise) to reduce comment SPAM for links).
By default Talian like all the WordPress themes on this site will not show the URL options for those posting comments on your WordPress blogs. The benefit of this is, it removes an incentive for link spammers to comment on your blogs. Some people only post on comments for links and quite frankly the vast majority of their posts are very low quality (over my WordPress blogs I delete at least 20 low quality comments a day despite no link being available!).
I’ve been running the themes this way for ages and have pages with hundreds of user comments since the vast majority of real website users who want to comment don’t care if they get a link or not.
That being said if you want the URL option look in the /alt-files/ folder of the Talian theme and you’ll find a comments.php file that includes the URL coding. Copy comments.php over the current file and you’ll see the URL box on comments again and author names will be links again (removed that as well).
I have a Yo Mammas So Fat jokes page http://www.free-funny-jokes.com/yo-mamas-so-fat-jokes-part-1.html with over 600 comments! The site as a whole has over 2,000 approved comments (I had to read them all and many are racist unfortunately!).
A page on the Apollo Moon Landing Hoax (or not) http://www.conspiracy-theories-hoax.com/apollo-moon-landing-hoax.html has 80+ comments. That site has only 18 posts with over 400 approved comments.
So you don’t need an incentive to get people to comment on a site. This site has over 200 comments spread over 28 posts/pages.
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hello,
When I upload the alt-files/comments.php file I see the following error message:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘<' in /hsphere/local/home/dibna1/aid-renegade.com/wp-content/themes/talian-adsense-seo-03/comments.php on line 69
I looked at the file in notepad (full page) & there isn't a line 69. Currently I've reloaded the original comments.php
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Hi David,
Your comment was tagged as SPAM by Akismet, no idea why.
You found a code bug.
When I made the default comments.php files (for all themes) I added some PHP code around the HTML code to comment it out.
< ?php /* HTML code to comment out : */ ?>
When I had the idea to add the alternative files I was meant to remove all this PHP code, but left some of it in so it looked like this
< ?php HTML code to comment out : ?>
Should be
HTML code to comment out
Took me 15 minutes looking at the code to figure out what I’d done wrong as at first glance it looks fine.
Not had anyone else point this out, so looks like you are the first to use the alternate comment.php file
I’ve attached a working comments.php file that I’ve tested to an email. Sorry about that.
I’m working on adding the Link unit ads (the text link like ones) to the themes. I don’t think they will increase AdSense revenue by much, but good to have the option (each ad, soon to be 6 can be turned off). You can see my online test at http://www.musicred.com/, there’s three new Google link unit ads, one just below the header area, one at the bottom of the first post and one on right menu (title “Related Searches”). On single post it’s a bit different, still not set on exact location yet (more testing needed).
I also want to incorporate Google custom search into the themes as well, but so far stumped on how to, Google AdSense has made it’s code so much harder to use for themes used by multiple publishers since changing the way it codes the ads (I have to use the old type of code), adding the three new link unit ads was hard enough!
Will update the comments.php files when I get the above into all themes and send out new zips to all customers. If anyone else in the mean time wants the fixed alt comments file let me know and I’ll email it.
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
Great job David, new alt/files comments file works fine. I also use Akismet which is why I’m not too bothered about spam links as I still approve comments to to show on my site. I Recommend Akismet to any other WP bloggers.
I just found this, I am curious, because I’m using the orginal theme and it seems to be a problem when viewing the site with explorer. Like for my blog the sides are missing. Would this solve the issue?
I’ve fixed a lot of issues that’s developed with Talian as WordPress has upgraded. As you can see from this site it works as expected in all major browsers including Internet Explorer.
If this version of Talian breaks when WordPress or a major browser FireFox, Internet Explorer, Opera etc… updates I’ll do my best to fix it and send out a free update: I use the themes for sale on this site on over 50 of my own domain, so if a theme breaks multiple sites of mine break just like yours!
David Law
WordPress 2.9 Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense and SEO Optimisation
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