WordPress Theme Talian with Targeted AdSense Ads, Clickbank ads included and SEO Improvements Creator: David Cameron Law (aka SEO Dave) Latest Version of theme: http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-theme-talian-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html Version: 05 Based on original Talian Theme: http://www.va4business.com/business/64/free-premium-wordpress-blog-theme-talian-released-an-elegant-theme-that-is-very-much-close-to-my-heart/ Author: Steve Arun Installation ------------ To install unzip and add the /talian-adsense-clickbank-seo-05/ folder to your themes directory (like installing any other theme). Select it via the "Appearance" >> "Themes" section in WordPress Dashboard (like any other theme). Talian 05 includes it's own customisable admin menu that can be accessed directly from WordPress (for long term Talian with AdSense users no more manually editing the adsense.php file). To access the new admin menu, after activating the theme go to the Dashboard and on the left menu click "Appearance" >> "Talian AdSense and Clickbank + SEO" On the new admin page you'll find over 30 options. Only one setting requires changing if you ONLY plan to use AdSense on your site and three settings if you plan to use AdSense and Clickbank. For AdSense change the "AdSense Publisher ID" setting to your Google AdSense Publisher ID (this is essential if you want your AdSense earnings). For more information on finding your AdSense ID etc... please read the file 01-adsense-install-instructions.txt to setup AdSense If you plan to use Clickbank as well tick the "Clickbank ON" button and change the "Clickbank Username" setting to your Clickbank username (this is essential if you want your Clickbank earnings). For more information on finding your Clickbank username etc... please read the file 02-clickbank-install-instructions.txt to setup Clickbank All other options are optional and can be left at their default settings. Theme Information ----------------- This version of Talian includes 6 blended AdSense ad units per page, optimised for maximum ad revenue and the option of multiple Clickbank AdSense style ad units (Clickbank disabled by default). It also includes code changes so your blog is more likely to rank highly in the major search engines (especially Google). For example headers are much better used, the original used H3 for the menu heading, this version uses span giving them NO relevance to the search engines. This themes code assumes your blog page titles are the keywords you want the page to rank highly for, as long as you use relevant keywords within the title of posts you are half way there. You can read a list of features at http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-theme-features (there's a lot of SEO features in this theme). There's also support for several useful plugins (including edited SEO versions) that can be found for free at http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-seo-plugins/. For further search engine optimization information go to http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/seo-tutorial-for-wordpress http://www.seo-gold.com/tutorial/ http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/ Better Meta Description ----------------------- When I made my first WordPress theme with AdSense/SEO I copied the title of the page for the keywords and description meta tags. SEO wise this is fine since the major search engines no longer use meta tags for ranking purposes, that being said Google will sometimes use the meta description as the description it shows as a search result. A theme customer wanted to use the excerpt tag for their theme, so I helped them solve the problem (uses the rss version of the excerpt tag) and have included this code in all my WordPress themes. For blog posts and pages if you don't write an excerpt for your posts the first words of your posts/pages will be used as the meta description which might help with the click thru rate from Google SERPs. If you write your own excerpts those will be used as the meta description giving you the ability to customize your meta description. This isn't going to increase your search engine rankings, but it's still an improvement. Read about meta tags usage at http://www.seo-gold.com/seo-tutorial/meta-tags-optimization Targeting AdSense Ads --------------------- AdSense brings us the ability to target ads- http://www.morearnings.com/2007/12/25/targeting-adsense-ads/ and that brings us to version 03 Targeted themes (upgraded to version 05 now). All our version 03, 04 and 05 themes include the AdSense targeting code which means your important content and not your header, menu and footer areas are considered more important when AdSense ads are generated. This code will be particularly helpful to sites that have a variety of content where there is a tendency for the ads to concentrate on a small sub set of your content. Rounded Corners Ads Border -------------------------- A new feature added to Google AdSense ad units is the ability to have rounded corners for your ad border http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/google-adsense-rounded-corners-ads-border.html. Originally Google AdSense ads had square corners, we now have three options, the original square corners and 2 new options slightly rounded and very rounded. This feature has been incorporated into an easy to change options within the version 3+ themes (see below). Note: although the code is available within the theme, in late 2008 I tested running AdSense with a border colour that matched the background (actually all the ad completely blended with the theme) and this resulted in a significant CTR (click thru rate) increase. So the default is to have no border shown, so if you keep the default colours you won't see a border. You can add colour to the border, but I'd advise to keep as is since in my experience you'll make more money. Version 04 Updates ------------------ With WordPress 2.7 we have a new commenting system that allows for multiple pages of comments and threaded comments. Original Talian was created before 2.7 so lacks this feature, it's been added to version 04+, now your visitors can comment on specific comments. Unfortunately Google no longer respects the nofollow attribute, it now deletes the PR/link benefit it used to protect. I added quite a few nofollow links to my themes to protect PR, I've now removed them from this theme. Have replaced the login links with form post links (they look like links, but are form buttons). Also although in version 03 I'd removed the ability for your commenter's to add a link to a comment, I've added this back in, but replaced the link with a form post button as well that looks like a text link. These links are valid post forms (nothing SEO blackhat about them), Google will not see them as links and so no link benefit is wasted, but your commenting visitors can still gain click thru traffic from their comments without damaging your site with nofollow links. With regards nofollow links there is still a problem with links within comments. If you or your commenter's add links to the body of their comments they are by default nofollow, I have not found a theme level solution to this problem (yet). I have however found a plugin that solves the majority of this problem http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/remove-links-in-comments/. This plugin stops WordPress from turning a link like http://www.domain.com/ into a hyperlink, but it doesn't impact fully formed hyperlinks like Anchor Text so these will still add a nofollow link to your pages! My solution is manually remove that type of link. If you activate the threaded comments and ability to reply to comments the "Reply" to comment links also have a nofollow attribute. The code for this is in a core WordPress file, /wp-includes/comment-template.php the only way around it is to hack WordPress core files. I've hacked WordPress for my own needs and have included instructions of how to make this change. If you don't want to hack core WordPress files I suggest not turning on the reply to comments feature. Edit /wp-includes/comment-template.php (make a backup first) by finding the appropriate nofollow code and removing them, currently two needs removing. Easiest way to find them is search for: rel='nofollow' class='comment-reply-link' And delete the rel='nofollow' parts. Save and upload to /wp-includes/comment-template.php I've tried my hardest to get WordPress development team to change this in core WordPress, but so far no joy, my attempts below: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10550 http://wordpress.org/support/topic/287704?replies=1 http://codex.wordpress.org/Talk:Template_Tags/comment_reply_link As of WordPress 3.0.1 the nofollow attribute is still used :( Also see the file 07-nofollow-problems.txt for more information. Version 05 Updates ------------------ What can I say, I'm too nice :-) I originally planned to incorporate what is now Talian 05 into a theme I was going to sell on Clickbank, but I'm too nice. There's a new admin menu for settings, install the theme and go to "Appearance" >> "Talian AdSense and Clickbank + SEO" to check it out. New AdSense feature ------------------- Custom Ad Channels ------------------ Many customers have asked for this feature, so here it is. Each of the 6 AdSense ad units now have a custom ad channel all available via the new admin menu for the theme. To add a custom channel log into Google AdSense go to "AdSense Setup" >> "Channels" If you already have Google AdSense channels copy the ID number from a channel you wish to track and paste it into the appropriate box of the admin screen. Float Left or Float Right ------------------------- The main content AdSense ad that floats to the right of the main content can now be floated to the left instead. Clickbank Ads ------------- Banned from AdSense, no problem use Clickbank AdSense style ads instead. The AdSense program can be quite strict, can't have AdSense on porn sites for example (perverts click ads as well you know Google :-)). Now you can have: AdSense ads only Clickbank ads only AdSense and Clickbank ads on the same WordPress site If you wish to use Clickbank read the file 02-clickbank-install-instructions.txt New SEO Feature --------------- Found a great plugin called SEO Super Comments at http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-super-comments which unfortunately out the box didn't work with Talian, so don't download from the above source and expect it to work (probably won't), I've made a working version that's bundled with the theme. The SEO Super Comments plugin generates spiderable pages from yours and your users comments, so if you have a highly commented website it can potentially add a LOT of new pages with no extra effort by you. Take a look at http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-theme-talian-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html#comment-22683 and http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-theme-talian-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html?cid=22683 for an example. You can see the single comment is indexed in Google via a Google cache search: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.google-adsense-templates.co.uk%2Fwordpress-theme-talian-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html%3Fcid%3D22683 Because the concept had a lot of SEO potential I obviously figured out how to get the plugin to work with Talian (a combination of changing the theme and the plugins code), the fix wasn't pretty code wise but it works well. I've also made significant improvements to the plugins code including limiting comments that are created into pages to comments with a minimum number of characters (set to 250 characters), in this way you won't get a new page for very small comments like "I like your article". Changed the title of these new pages to the first 20 words of the actual comment rather than the same title as the post the comment was posted on (not a good idea to have all the comment pages having the same title!). Made the links to the new comment pages have SEO'd anchor text and generated a second set of links to the original comment URLs, so it's easy for visitors who find their way directly to one of these comment pages can easily find their way to the page commented on. Removed the option to add author links from these new comment pages as it added nofollow links! Fixed a canonical issue that resulted in Google etc... not indexing these new comment pages correctly. Basically had to stop WordPress automatically adding canonical links to the new pages as they linked back to the article the comment is from. What this meant was Google treated the comment pages as another version of the main article (I think this means the original SEO Super Comments plugin is broken)! I have sites with thousands of comments and this plugin has added hundreds of new pages that are indexed by Google and send traffic to the sites in their own right. Found one issue with my version of this plugin, if you have a page with a lot of comments and you have your comments paged there can be more than one way to load these new pages. Basically they can be loaded directly http://www.domain.com/article-name/?cid=22642 and via a paged link http://www.domain.com/article-name/comment-page-1?cid=22642. Although this creates duplicate content, overtime one version will be favoured by Google etc... I've renamed this plugin "SEO Super Comments for Talian" since my version will only work correctly with Talian 05 and it's included with this theme under the folder /talian-adsense-clickbank-seo-05/plugins/seo-super-comments-talian.zip ====================================================== If you use this theme please make a quick comment at http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-theme-talian-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html (both positive and negative comments welcome). http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/ More AdSense Themes http://www.seo-gold.com/ Hire a SEO consultant http://www.45-year-old-millionaire.co.uk/ My journey to wealth and riches or an embarrassing site documenting financial failure! If you purchased this theme from a site other than http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/ please let me know via themes@seo-gold.com. Those who buy from http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/ receive free support and theme updates by email. David Cameron Law Note: The original Theme is released under GPL License http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php so the bulk of the code is still under GPL License. The specific AdSense code that's not released under this license includes everything within adsense.php, first-ad.php, the AdSense Code at the bottom of functions.php and related code within other files (code between "AdSense Code Start" and "AdSense Code End"). The original theme code can be found at the link at the top of this readme file.