1) Backup your database and all files

2) Deactivate all plugins

3) Go into your web host cpanel and click on the ‘Upgrade to WordPress 2.5 link’

4) Click the Upgrade button.

5) Re-activate your plugins

I was able to upgrade to 2.5 in less than 2 minutes and I didn’t even need to revert to the original WordPress theme.  So far it looks as if the update worked and my plugins are functioning normally after being re-activated.  Let me know if your update works as smoothly!

Although the default WordPress navigation structure makes it easy for blog readers to find information, the problem is that the same posts appear in multiple areas throughout the blog and this creates different URLs all pointing to pages containing the SAME information – the dreaded duplicate content.  What duplicate content does in the eyes of the search engines is reduce the importance of the main content areas of your site, such as the unique pages and individual posts. Duplicate content can also lead to your blog or website being penalized and not ranking well for your search terms.

This is generally a simple problem to solve, but if you are a new WordPress blogger you might not even realize this problem exists on your blog and could overlook addressing it until it’s too late.  All that is necessary for you to do is to tell the search engine spiders NOT to index certain pages of your site.  For example, you may not want the ‘tags’ pages, ‘archives’ pages or even the ‘category’ pages indexed since they all contain duplicate content.

You can address this problem by manually adding ‘noindex’ meta tags or you could simply use the Duplicate Content Cure plugin.  I am using this plugin on this WordPress blog currently and what it does is simply add the line: <meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” /> to the head section of pages you want indexed and the line: <meta name=”robots” content=”NOindex,follow” /> to the pages you do not want indexed.

By default, this plugin prevents the search engine spiders from indexing tags pages, all archives pages and categories pages.  If you need to have your category pages indexed, for example, all you need to do is:

Change
$index_category_pages = false;
to
$index_category_pages = true;

in the duplicate-content-cure.php file.  As you can probably see, this changes the directions to the search engine spiders from ‘do not index my category pages (false)’ to ‘please do index my cateogory pages (true)’.

Since I am a relatively new WordPress blogger myself, I normally choose to utilize essential WordPress plugins whenever possible – especially if the plugin in question is easy to use and beneficial to my blog’s search engine rankings.  The duplicate content cure plugin is definitely both of these!

Like me, I imagine most of you are using a custom WordPress theme for your blog.  The ‘template.php’ files on which your custom theme is built may not be ‘ready’ for the All-In-One-SEO-Pack plugin and if your theme is not ‘ready’ then installing the SEO plugin won’t do much good.  As I discussed in the previous post about verifying the functionality of the plugin, it is relatively simple to check whether it is doing what it is intended to do.  I assume you made it to this post perhaps because you performed the simple check I recommended and found that your all in one SEO pack plugin was not working as intended. Let’s discuss how to fix it.

The first thing you need to do is to login to your cpanel.  Remember, this is NOT the same thing as your WordPress admin login.

Step 1) Login to your cpanel.  Go to: http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel and enter the username and password that you received from your web hosting service.  If your host does not provide cPanel access or you are currently looking for a new hosting service for your WordPress blog, check out HostGator.  This blog is hosted on HostGator servers, as are the majority of my other websites.

Step 2) Click on the FileManager icon from your cpanel home page.

Step 3) Navigate to your Custom Themes folder.  This is the ‘themes’ folder into which you uploaded your custom WordPress theme.  The path will look something like: /public_html / wp-content / themes / soloss1 / where ‘soloss1′ is the name of this blog’s theme. Your theme name will probably be different – unless you are using the same custom theme as KillerIncome.net

Step 4) Find the file called ‘header.php’ in THIS folder.  Make sure you have navigated to the correct folder because the fix will ONLY work if you do it in the CORRECT header.php file, which is the one your custom theme is using.

Step 5) Click on the file ‘header.php’ from among the file list down the left side of the page.  You should see the file name ’header.php’ appear in the top right hand side of the page you are on to the right of the scroll bar.  beneath the filename in the upper right portion of your screen you will see some links, one of which is a link to ‘Edit File’

Step 6) Click ‘Edit File’ and an editor page will open and display the source code of your header.php file. 

Step 7) Scroll down to just above the HTML tag </head> that denotes the end of your HEAD section and add the following line of code: <?php wp_head(); ?> just above </head>

Step 8 ) Save and close your header.php file.

Step 9) Verify that your All In One SEO Pack Plugin is now working correctly

That’s all there is to it!  You should now be ready to utilize the SEO plugin on your individual post pages.  In our next post we’ll talk about some of the best ways to use this plugin to optimize your web pages to their fullest extent.  Until next time!

One common pitfall among new WordPress publishers is that WordPress is so easy to use that it separates the developer from the actual code ‘behind the scenes’ upon which WordPress is built.  This is nice if you are like me and want to avoid the more technical workings of your blog, but it leads to a sense of complacency that can cause us to become lazy when it comes to checking and verifying that modifications we make to our blogs are actually working.  How many of you – after installing a new plugin – actually check to verify that it does what it is intended to do?  I know I am guilty of just uploading any new plugin to the plugins directory, activating it through the admin panel and then moving on to other tasks.

If I had stopped at this point after installing the All In One SEO Pack on this blog, I would have never noticed the common (and easily fixable) problem that I encountered with this plugin shortly after activating it.  Before we get to this issue, let’s first review what this plugin is supposed to do.  Namely, it allows the developer to create unique META tags, including keyword and description tags, on each post page of your WordPress blog.  Something that is essential for optimizing your weblog.

To verify that the All In One SEO Pack plugin is working properly, you should see something similar to the following in your post’s HEAD section after installing this plugin and creating your first post using it:

<!-- all in one seo pack 1.4.6.6 [243,361] -->
<meta name="description" content="Learn how to optimize your WordPress posts for the search engines. Create unique META tags, including keywords and descriptions using the all in one seo pack plugin for WordPress." />
<meta name="keywords" content="optimizing wordpress blog, all in one seo pack, installing all in one seo pack for wordpress, creating unique meta tags for wordpress posts, using the all in one seo pack plugin, optimizing your wordpress blog for search engines, wordpress seo" />
<!-- /all in one seo pack -->

When I installed and used the SEO pack plugin for the first time, I did NOT see these META tags.  I checked some other blogs out there and did a ‘View Source’ on some of their unique pages and saw code similar to what you see above.  Something was wrong with my install and if I had never checked to verify that the All In One SEO Pack plugin was working properly, I never would have noticed this and I would have missed one of the essential steps for optimizing my WordPress blog for the search engines.

I had to discover what was wrong and see if there was a way to fix it.  I did some related searches and found a simple fix that allowed me to use the all in one SEO pack with my custom WordPress theme.  I will discuss this simple fix in my next post in this series, but for now I urge all of you WordPress bloggers – and maybe even some of you more seasoned veterans, especially those of you who *think* you installed the all in one seo pack, to do the following to verify that the plugin is working properly on your website:

Step 1) Go to any of your individual posts (not category or archives pages)

Step 2) Right-click on the page anywhere and select ‘View Source’

Step 3) VERIFY that you see code in the HEAD section of EACH of your post pages similar to the code example above

STEP 4) If you see the code then relax your SEO plugin is working correctly, otherwise read my next post on getting the all in one SEO pack plugin to work with your custom WordPress theme now!

 Anyway, thanks for reading and please subscribe to my RSS feed by clicking the small grey Feedburner chicklet to the right.  See ya soon.  Madman out!

WordPress, as powerful as it is, does NOT come ‘search engine optimized’ right out of the box.  Anyone who is new to blogging or to search engine marketing in general may not realize that simply using WordPress with all of its default settings intact and without any essential modifications is simply not going to get your WordPress blog to the top of the search engines.  Perhaps this is why so many new bloggers trying to become internet entrepreneurs fail; not from lack of trying, but from lack of some basic knowledge.

WordPress blogs are built from template.php files.  There is one template file for the header section ‘header.php’, one for the sidebar(s), ‘sidebar.php’, and so on.  This is nice and convenient because this leads to the uniform look of your website.  It is also convenient because once you have advertising on your WordPress blog, you only need to place an advertisers banner or button ad in your ‘sidebar.php’ page, for example and it will appear on all the pages of your blog.  The reason is because the page ‘sidebar.php’ is INCLUDED in each of your blog’s instances.  The same goes for ‘header.php’.

Now, while this is convenient when placing ads on your blog and essential for maintaining a consistent ‘look’ across all of your pages, it is VERY BAD for search engine optimization (SEO).  Let’s take a look at why this can cause your site difficulty.  Suppose you want to create targeted META tags for each of the pages or posts on your site (which is mandatory), but you decide to put your META description and keywords tags in your ‘header.php’ – what would happen?  That’s right! Since each page contains your ‘header.php’ you would get the SAME description and keywords tags on each page.

Suppose you try to put your META tags into each post (like in this post, for example).  Well what would happen here is that the content of each post in your WordPress blog is contained in the BODY of your page, NOT in the HEAD section where the search engine spiders are looking for your META tags!  Seems like quite a dliemma, doesn’t it?  How is it possible to get your META tags in the HEAD section of each of your posts, while simultaneously keeping your META tags OUT of your ‘header.php’ file so that they are UNIQUE to each of your pages?  WordPress plugin 1.4.6.6, the all in one seo pack to the rescue!

This plugin is the first and most essential plugin that you need to add to your WordPress blog to optimize your pages properly for the major search engines.  So let’s talk about where to get this plugin and how to install the WordPress All-In-One-SEO-Pack.

Step 1) Get the WordPress All In One SEO Plugin here.  All you need to do is visit the aformentioned link to the official WordPress site and click the ‘Download’ link.  This will Download the zipped plugin files to your hardrive.

Step 2) Extract the zip files using WinZip or some other zip utility.

Step 3) Use your FTP utility to transfer the unzipped files to the following folder on your web server: /wp-content/plugins/ Once the plugin files are in the ‘plugins’ folder WordPress will be able to recognize this plugin.

Step 4) Activate the all in one seo pack plugin.  Do this by logging in to your WordPress admin panel, click ‘Plugins’ along the top menu bar and click ‘Activate’ to activate the All-In-One-SEO-Pack plugin.

You have now installed and activated the All-In-One-SEO-Pack WordPress plugin.  In the next installment of this series of posts we’ll discuss how to verify that this plugin is working properly, what to do if it is not and how to use this plug-in to optimize each of your WordPress posts for the search engines.

WordPress works pretty well ‘out-of-the-box’ so to speak, but there are necessary setting changes that need to be made in order to optimize your WordPress blog for Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the rest of the big search engines.  One of the first simple, but oh so necessary tasks, is to change how your WordPress installation displays URLs.  Initially, WordPress does not display search engine friendly URLS.  Search Engine Friendly URLs are URLs that display the title of the post in them, they have a meaning and contain keywords that are relative to the post.  For example, a Search Engine Friendly URL looks like: http://www.killerincome.net/changing-the-default-wordpress-theme-to-a-custom-theme/ you can clearly see the title of the post right in the URL. But this is not the way WordPress displays URLs by default, this is the result of a simple setting that you need to make to your blog before you start writing and posting.

The way to modify this is very simple. Once you log in to your WordPress admin panel, simply click the ‘Options’ link along the top menu bar.  One of the sub-categories under the ‘Options’ menu is ‘Permalinks’ so you will need to click that to get to the area where you can customize how WordPress displays your URLs.

Under the ‘Common Options’ heading you will see different URL options, including Default, Date and Name Based, and Numeric.  The one you want to select is the last one – Custom.  So click the radio button to the left of the word ‘Custom’ under the Options heading and type the following into the ‘Custom structure’ textbox: /%postname%/ make sure to include the slashes. 

What this does is simply append the post name (i.e. the title of your post) to your domains URL so that you get a Search Engine Friendly URL that looks like: http://www.killerincome.net/changing-the-default-wordpress-theme-to-a-custom-theme/ instead of the default WordPress URL that could look like http://www.killerincome.net/?p=123. As you can probably guess the second URL does not really convey any meaningful information to the Search Engines about the topic of the post, while the former URL specifies exactly what the post is about. Hopefully you have learned something new from this post.  Ultimately there are a few more necessary steps to make your WordPress blog as search engine friendly as it can be, but if you have been following along so far you are well on your way.  Website (or blog) preparation is an extremely important search engine optimization step that a lot of website and WordPress blog owners overlook and then wonder why their site is not appearing or ranking well in the search engines and why they are not making any money.  As you can see, with a few extremely simple tasks you can have your blog already ahead of much of your competition.

In the next part of this series on optimizing your WordPress blog for the search engines, we’ll talk about an essential WordPress plugin that will allow you to modify the Titles and Meta keywords and descriptions for each of your posts so that you can better differentiate your blog pages in the eyes of the search engines.

See ya next time!

Step 1) Go to the following site: http://www.elegantwpthemes.com – This site, Elegant WordPress Themes has free themes that you can download.  If you are looking for more original WordPress themes or you need a specific type of theme not available from the free site mentioned above, check out Revolution WordPress themes for advanced developers.  Take a few minutes and find a theme that is appealing to you and that you think your blog’s visitors would like.  As you browse the free WordPress themes, you will notice that beneath each theme is a small grayish blue ‘Download’ link.

Step 2) Once you have found the theme you wish to use, simply click on the ‘Download’ link.  A dialogue box will pop up and ask you what you want to do.  Select ‘Save’ and save this theme in a folder on your computer that you will be able to easily find later.

Step 3) Extract the files.  Each custom WordPress theme comes in a zipped folder and the zipped files need to be extracted before you can proceed.  Most users probably have some type of unzipping software already on their computers, such as WinZip.  If so, all you need to do is to navigate to the folder you saved the Custom WordPress theme in and double-click the zipped folder (the folder with the zipper on it).  Your zip utility will open a window and all you need to do next is click ‘Extract All Files’. This will extract all of the files from the zipped folder.

Step 4) Transfer the theme files to your webserver.  For this step you will need some type of FTP software, such as Smart FTP, WS FTP etc. This post assumes that you have and know how to use some type of FTP software to transfer files electronically.  Open your FTP connection using one of the aforementioned FTP tools and navigate to the folder: /public_html/wp-content/themes.  You will see the default theme folder here, as well as the classic folder, which is the one extra theme WordPress comes with.  This is where you need to put the folder containing your custom theme that you extracted. The easiest way to do this is to open your Windows Explorer on your computer and navigate to this folder where you donwloaded and unzipped the custom theme on your computer.  Have this folder open so that you see the root folder containing your theme.  In the case of this blog’s theme, the theme folder was called ‘soloss1′.  Then simply drag the folder from your computer’s Window’s Explorer window to your FTP window.  This folder along with all of the subfolders and files will be transferred to the folder: /public_html/wp-content/themes.  You will now see the new folder along with the default folder and the classic folder here.

Step 5) Activate your new theme.  Login to your WordPress admin panel and click the ‘Presentation’ link along the top.  You will now see the new custom theme that you uploaded to the ‘themes’ folder.  To the right of this theme’s name, you will see a link to ‘Activate’ this theme.  Click the ‘Activate’ link and your new theme will become the active theme on your WordPress blog website!

Well, I hope that wasn’t too painful!  You’re new WordPress blog should be coming along nicely now that you have installed WordPress and updated the default WordPress theme to a custom WordPress theme.  Next we’ll talk about some more essential customization tasks that you will want to do to prepare your WordPress blog to start getting search engine traffic.  Thanks for reading!

I will explore domain name registering and hosting in subsequent posts, but this post is strictly about the one click install of WordPress using Fantastico so that is where I will begin this tutorial.

Step 1) Log into your host’s cpanel. The way to do this is to go to the URL: http://www.yourwebsitename.com/cpanel. Remember to replace ‘www.yourwebsitename.com’ with the exact URL of your own website. You will be presented with a small login box that looks like:

From here, you must enter your username and your password in the appropriate areas above. Your username and password were set by you when you secured hosting. You were probably also emailed your username and password when you received your nameserver information from your hosting provider. As a last resort, you can probably get your host to resend these to you via email if you can’t remember them or find an email containing this information.

Once logged in, you will see a screen similar to:

Way down at the bottom in my cpanel, you can see a blue smiley face icon with the title, Fantastico De Luxe.

Step2) Click the blue smiley face icon. You will be presented with the following screen:

Along the left sidebar, you will see the heading, ‘Blogs’ and beneath this heading ‘WordPress’ is the third entry down.  Click ‘WordPress’ and the next screen you should see will look something like this:

Step 3) Click New Installation. At this point you will be asked to fill in some fields:

Among them, you will be asked on which domain you would like WordPress installed. For most users, this is simply your root domain (i.e. your URL), however for some users who already have an existing website and may just be adding a blog feature, they may want to install WordPress in a sub-directory, called ‘blog’, for example. In this case, you will fill in the ‘Install in directory’ box with the name of the subdirectory in which you want WordPress installed. Otherwise, leave the ‘Install in directory’ box empty.

Fill in a few additional fields, such as what you want your username and password to be to access your WordPress admin panel (this is NOT the same as your cpanel – the WordPress admin panel is accessed via the URL http://www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin) and click the button at the bottom of the screen that says, ‘Install WordPress’ and you are done!

You now have a working installation of WordPress installed on your website and you can begin to explore the features and administrator’s controls that allow you to post, edit and update information using the full power of the most widely used blogging software online.

Next, we’ll explore how to change the default WordPress theme to something a little more attractive. Until next time, I hope you are starting to earn some killer income online from your own websites and blogs!