The SEO News Blog from Pat Marcello

If you read this blog, you know that I think what Jeff Johnson does is pretty interesting. I’ve watched scores of his videos, and have always planned to do something with all that knowledge. He’s a powerhouse of an affiliate marketer, and I need the time to find a niche where I can rule. Time is the enemy in my world. Anyway, I think Jeff is a pretty smart guy.

So, today, I got about 6 emails from him. (I think I’ve joined his list at least a dozen times.)

He was advertising this new SEO-friendly plugin for WordPress. Pat is all eyes.

I went over to his blog and read more about it. What it does is find plugins for you that are important to your blog’s SEO profile, and it tweaks the settings to match Jeff’s. I thought, hmm… I need to check this out, just because — SEO and all.

I downloaded it.

I let the blog install it and activate it from the zip file. No problems.

It was pretty happy with me because I already have most of the plugins Jeff recommends, but there were a couple, like the CAPTCHA code plugin for comments, which I had mused about but never installed, and the Google XML sitemaps. I had the plain Google Sitemaps, but hey… If Jeff wants to give me his settings, I’m going to download the right plugin, eh?

Once I had them all, I told Jeff’s plugin to change the settings, and bingo! I’m 99.96% optimized.

I had to go in and change the number of posts to show setting because he had it at 5. It left a bunch of white space at the bottom of the blog, so I changed it back to 10, hence my not perfect 100%. Oh well… Not changing my theme. Sorry.

The drawback?

Well… You have to agree to allow Jeff’s blog feed to sit at the top of your dashboard. To me, this isn’t a big deal. In fact, it’s kind of a blessing. I read his blog anyway, and now, I can come here and read from here. Nifty.

I’d recommend this plugin to you, especially if you don’t know what plugins or what settings to have to make your blog SEO-friendly. Two caveats…

First, you must be using WordPress 2.7. You should be anyway, but don’t use Jeff’s plugin if you don’t have it running now.

Second, not all plugins work with all themes. If you install it and something goes glitchy, just deactivate the plugin. Or worse, if your blog goes away, just rename your plugins folder and it will come back. then, delete the plugin and you should be back to normal again.

With those two things in mind, it’s a great free tool. I’d check it out: http://budurl.com/jeffj

I really like the WordPress plugin HeadSpace2.  It’s easy to use and much quicker than using All-in-One SEO, but let me tell you…

I installed it and have been using it for the past few weeks. I decided that I liked HeadSpace2 a lot better than All-in-One because I have very little time, and it saves me a ton of time. So, I uninstalled All-in-One…

HUGE mistake!

I lost all of the titles and descriptions to every post for the past two years that I’d done with All-in-One. Argh! That’s like 325 posts!

So, I’m going back, and one-by-one adding the titles and descriptions back in. It’s pretty quick because I’m using HeadSpace2, but it will still take me several days to get it all done. GRrrrrr….

Here’s the deal: All-in-One will run with HeadSpace2, so if you want to switch over, just don’t uninstall All-in-One. Don’t use it, but let it sit on your blog so that it won’t lose all your information. You don’t have to see it.

Just go to the upper right-hand corner of WordPress 2.7.1 and click on “Screen Options,” then unselect “All-in-One SEO” and you won’t see it again.

Thanks to Brent over at ListBuildingNexus.com, who pointed this issue out.  Luckily, it is fixable.