While a problem may not present itself for months or years, it’s reasonable to assume that someday, something will go wrong and you’ll wish your database was smaller and cleaner. Perhaps it will come during a routine upgrade and you’ll notice something’s out of whack, or the automatic upgrade will fail, forcing you to upgrade manually.

On the other hand, you might discover a problem only after something has gone seriously wrong – like while trying to restore a backup after a loss – and at that point, to put it technically, you are screwed.

Because we manage a lot of domains on a lot of different hosts, we’re probably a lot more prone to see a problem than you are, however, it never hurts to be safe, and be proactive. That’s why it’s a good idea to keep your database clean of unnecessary data.

A few weeks ago, while dealing with a site that had literally hundreds of revisions for every page, and a giant database that was giving us problems moving from one server to another, I looked for a plug-in that would get rid of all these revisions that we no longer needed.

I found a good one in WP Optimize, that not only gets rid of unwanted revisions, but also optimizes the database tables, which was previously only accessible through your web hosts phpMyAdmin.

Rather than tell you all about it, take a look at this 2 minute video…

The original post is titled Optimize Your Database , and it came from GetWPress .

This has most commonly been used in the page.php file of the WordPress themes only, but can certainly be applied to any page that you would like the ability to set the h1 tag (or some cases, if you prefer, the h2 tag). Remember, it is recommended to set the default theme h2 tags displaying the header of the pages to H1 for an SEO advantage.

This documentation will demonstrate applying this hack to page.php in your theme, but can easily be understood from that point on doing the same to your template pages, index.php, single.php, etc.

Step by Step:
1. You will need to be using an installed version of WordPress at least 2.x or greater as this method uses the “Custom Fields” you will find toward the bottom of the page in the admin area as you create or edit pages or posts.

2. In your favorite editor for editing your theme pages, or using the Theme Editor under the Presentation tab of the WordPress admin area, open pages.php for editing.

3. In the default theme of WordPress or the theme you are using, you will see a section toward the top of the file that looks exactly like or similar to this:

It’s this line – <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2> that you will be changing. It may not look exactly the same, but will almost always be enclosed in h2 tags.

You will want to replace the contents inside those tags, but it is highly recommended that if they currently say <h2></h2> to change those to h1.

4. Replace that line with the following:

So your file should now look similar to this:

5. Save the file and upload it to your theme folder or save the file in the theme editor.

6. Now you can edit or create new pages and use the custom fields to change the heading of the page without changing the actual title of the page.

7. To do this, as an example, let’s create a new page named “Test”.

8. Publish the page, then view it from your WordPress site.

9. You can see that not only the title in the browser, in the menu, and the heading of the page says “Test”.

10. Now back to the admin area, edit the page “Test”.
11. Scroll to the bottom of the editing area until you see “Custom Fields”.
12. You may have to click on the “+” sign to the right to see the area for editing these fields.

13. Here you will need to add “changeH1” to the key text box for the first time. Be sure that changeH1 is spelled exactly the same and the “H” is capitalized.

14. After you have done this the first time, you will be able to select the changeH1 from the drop-down box under the word Key instead. It is only necessary to add the key once with a value, and from that point, it will remain in the drop-down list to be selected easier.

15. Now change the header by typing a new one in the Value text box to the right. Let’s just test it out by typing “This is my new heading text”. Then click “Add Custom Field”.

16. Save and continue, or save the page now.

17. Go back to your site and refresh to see the change.

18. Now you can edit any page to display a different heading just by setting the “changeH1” key in the drop-down list and typing in the heading you want in value. Don’t forget to click “Add Custom Field”.

19. If you have already set a heading in a page using this method, you can also go back to editing the page, and change the value in the box just above where you set it originally. After making the change click on “update”.

The original post is titled H1 Hack for WordPress Pages , and it came from GetWPress .

“If you do everything on WordPress, you’re pretty much covered for SEO.”

That’s exactly what he said, (I wrote it down) and I could barely believe my ears.  I mean, yeah, WordPress is pretty much magic when properly configured, but to have Matt Cutts from Google give it his stamp of approval at a conference presentation was pretty amazing to hear, especially since Google owns Blogger.

To be perfectly clear, Matt was speaking of a self hosted WordPress blog using their free software, and not free hosted blog platform available WordPress.com. There is a huge difference, so don’t be confused!

There are plenty of expensive and cumbersome options for building a website, that lock you into a certain web host, programmer or company, and that’s one of the things I love most about the open source WordPress system.  You’re free to host where you want,  tweak it to your hearts content, and you’re not locked in to an expensive solution.

I would have to say that while WordPress isn’t quite perfect “right out of the box”, with just a few minor tweaks and plug-ins added, it can compete with almost anything else on the market for SEO purposes.

My own success with 100% WordPress powered sites has been outstanding, and for a while, it was the best kept secret in SEO.  Now, with this public endorsement by one of the most famous names in search, I only see it’s use increasing over time, as the community continues to grow worldwide.

The original post is titled Pubcon Quote from Matt Cutts About WordPress , and it came from GetWPress .

Once you have an established URL structure, a change can cause you to not only lose search engine visibility, but all of your PageRank will drop to zero, and all of your inbound links will no longer work. That can’t be good!

Additionally, if all of the page names in the search engines index cease to exist, then anyone that ever clicks on one of your Serps would be taken to a 404 error. That’s bad!

Sometimes there’s a lot of legitimate reason to want to change, usually because they were set up in correctly in the first place. The proper way to make change would be to implement real one redirects for every single URL that’s changing. This can be quite the daunting task.

Luckily there is a plug-in available to make this process painless. It’s called Dean’s Permalinks Migration, and here’s a three-minute video to show you how it works…

The original post is titled Safely & Easily Change Permalinks , and it came from GetWPress .

As a quick lesson in SEO, I’ll point out that on the homepage I’ve added text links to the purchase page,  using different anchor text five times.

Because I don’t have a lot of content on this site yet, I’ve chosen to place four primary search phrases there, made them bold, and then linked all four to my shopping cart page.

The fifth link, near the bottom of the homepage is nofollowed, so that I’m not wasting any link juice following text for which I don’t care to rank. Make sense?

Future posts will go into the plug-ins being used, but first I have to get the privacy and contact pages up, (which of course will be nofollowed). Stay tuned…

The original post is titled Using Anchor Text and Nofollow , and it came from GetWPress .