What that means is, if you leave a comment that adds value to the post, you’ll get a link back to your site that can actually help you rise in search engine results pages.

And that is especially the case because this yoga dofollow blog also uses commentluv.

Do you know of any other dofollow yoga blogs, or blogs in related categories?

It’s a domain I have owned for a little while but haven’t done much with, so I’m happy to put it to use for the yoga community.

This yoga directory not only accepts yoga links, but you can also submit yoga articles about your interests or expertise.

Start today by registering for an account. Then submit a link to the yoga directory about your business. After that, write a little article about your services and submit it, too.

This is a great way to start building links to your yoga site, so submit your site to this great new yoga directory now.

As mentioned in the previous post, I used Grouper Evolution’s regex plugin to make it happen.

The parsed page is http://www.yogaknoxville.com/pages/, which I built using a page template (do me a favor and don’t link to it). The Improved Include Page plugin made it easy to create the list of pages with extracted content once I modified it a bit to display the page titles linked to their permalinks. I also asked the plugin to strip out all html tags, this has both advantages and disadvantages, but it was the lazy way to make the formatting look decent.

The only real downside to this method is that you need to add each page to the template by hand. This is great if you only want to include a few pages. Not great if you have a ton of pages. The ability to add all pages at once while excluding those you don’t want to show up would be a major improvement.

If there’s interest, I can put up the template example and the modified plugin for download. It’s too late at night to worry over it at the moment.

Even better news. Now that we have a rss feed with pages, we can remix it (or “mash” it) with our posts feed, producing a feed with both posts and pages. You can do this with the new edition of CaRP Evolution.

So I’ll admit it, I’m a former SiteBuildIt (SBI) customer. I’m still a great fan and an affiliate. I migrated to WordPress for my own sites primarily because it’s much cheaper ($299 a year for SBI versus free for WP, not counting hosting, time, and whatever other tools you end up buying), but also because I wanted to learn the nitty-gritty of how to build a web site.

Little did I know it would take me about 3 years to learn how to do with WordPress just about everything SBI could do at the click of a mouse…

…including putting your static pages into a RSS feed. Today I spill the beans.

Aside: The cool part about “wasting” all that time is that people now pay me hourly to make their WordPress blogs do pretty much what an SBI site does out-of-the-box. (First they want a blog to help with their SEO. Then they want to un-blog their blog so it looks like a site but runs on a blog platform, in other words, use WP as a content management system. Hello, that’s SBI, only SBI also takes care of the hosting and the SEO, making sure you build your site right the first time instead of having to hire someone like me to come back and rewrite content and re-engineer the behind-the-curtain Wizard of Oz stuff for you. Anyway…)

If this is sounding like a SBI testimonial, don’t be confused: It is an SBI testimonial up to this point. The part of me that loves simplicity loves SBI. Now then, let’s talk WordPress.

The true destroy-it-yourselfer in me loves WordPress, because I like to know how things work, and I like to be in total control. So what if I have issues.

Now that I’m somewhat familiar with WordPress, having written a plugin and altered several others, created a few themes, and learned a little about things like html, css, php, mysql, ajax, perl — stuff I was blissfully ignorant of a couple of years back — there are really only two features I still miss from SBI.

The two features I miss are (1) the Brainstorm It! keyword tool (I now use Chris Lee’s Keywords Analyzer which is great but not quite the same), and (2) that SBI adds all its pages to a site feed, not just the posts from its included blog feature.

WP, on the other hand, includes posts in its feeds, but not static pages. From a blogging purist’s point of view, this makes total sense. But if you’re like me and don’t really give a whit about blogging per se and just want traffic, making all of your content available for syndication makes even more sense.

Enough jibber-jabber.

How to add WordPress pages to a feed

1. The essential piece of this puzzle is Antone Roundy’s Grouper Evolution. There is a free version of Grouper available, but you will need the paid version to carry out what we’re going to do. A single-user license is $24.97 and worth every penny.

While you’re at Antone’s site, get CaRP Evolution, allowing you to display feeds on any of your sites in search-engine readable HTML instead of javascript. Again, there is a free version, but you will need the paid version if you want to create a mash-up of your WordPress static pages rss feed with your regular WordPress feed, creating a feed with both.

2. Now, about your WP blog. It’s going to take some work to create a page somewhere on your site that not only lists your pages, but also excerpts some information from those pages. Page excerpts or descriptions don’t exist by default. Depending on how you’re set up, multiple loops may be just what the doctor ordered to get the job done. There’s also this thread on the WP forum that offers a solution.

You want to end up with something like this on your page:

• A Page A description or content from A Page.
• Another Page A description or content from Another Page.
• A Child Page A description or content from A Child Page of Another Page.
• Another Child Page A description or content from Another Child Page of Another Page.
• A Post A description or content from A Post.
• Another Post A description or content from Another Post.

Nested lists will also work fine with this example.

Really, the sky is the limit as to how you set this up, so long as you understand something about regular expression (regex). If regex isn’t your forte, stick to what I’m spoon-”feeding” you.

3. Install Grouper Evolution as per the documentation.

4. Create a new php page for your feed. Giving it a name like grouperfeed.php or something similar will make it easily distinguishable from the WP feeds. Save it to your WP installation’s root directory.

5. Save the following code in grouperfeed.php:

BUMMER. WordPress isn’t outputting the code correctly in this post. It’s getting garbled.

I wrote this post without intending to tease you. But it just isn’t working. So I’ve put the code in my autoresponder. Sign up in the sidebar for my newsletter and you’ll get the code immediately. You can cancel whenever you want.

The file has line-by-line explanations of what the code is doing.

Two drawbacks: Your channel title and description will not be displayed, and your posts will not show up newest-posts-first in your feed. Think twice before replacing your main feed with this Grouper-generated feed. But you can use it as an auxiliary to syndicate your pages, certainly submitting it to pingoat, technorati, and feedburner among the many possibilities.

See the Grouper Evolution site for more details on what you can do with this wonderful tool. Sorry, due to the complicated nature of regex, no support is offered for getting this running on your site.

I’ve just completed the Bipolar theme you can see in use here.

The theme is quite lean, boasting some great features:

1. The theme supports tags, new to WordPress 2.3.
2. Title tags are SEO optimized, so you won’t need a plugin to do the job.
3. The theme is widget-ready.
4. It’s ready to nest a phpBB2 forum within the blog via the WP-United mod for phpBB (optional).

The last one is a big one, because most themes need some major tweaking to get the forum to look halfway decent. I spent a couple of days getting WP-United running then designing a theme that looks good with phpBB’s subsilver template and thought, what the heck, I’ll make it public.

This theme will NOT work on WordPress versions prior to 2.3 without revisions.

Here is a screen shot:

Other points of interest:

• The forum.php template is included for your forum page. I recommend you use it instead of the default page.php for the forum (if you have one).
• The theme is CMS ready — if you create a page named “home” using the default page template, you can make a page named “blog” or “posts” or whatever using the included blog.php page template, which mimics the index.php. Then all you need to do is go to “options” and “reading” in your admin section, and set up your static front page. You’re ready to go.
• To set up WP-United in a way that would work so that I could keep WordPress in the root directory, I had to rename the WP index.php (in the WP root, not the file by the same name in the theme directory) to index-old.php, then rename the blog file included with WP-United to index.php. In the latter file, I had to type in the path to my phpBB installation. I used the absolute path: ‘forum’ — it was maddening getting it going, but armed with this knowledge it should take you no time. This was the only workaround I could figure out for the trailing slash that kept appearing, causing a White Screen of Death.
• With this theme, you can select “full page” in the WP-United setup in your phpBB admin (once you install the mod). You won’t need to change the style sheet. But it does slow things down. I like how it looks with the sidebar, but it’s your call.

The XHTML validates on your WordPress pages. Note that the XHTML does not validate on your forum pages.

Of course I can’t make you do it, but I ask that you keep the links in the footer — they’re for a good cause.

To install this theme, first download it (zip or tar version), then unzip the whole folder, uploading it into the “themes” folder inside “wp-content,” found in your WordPress root directory. Select the theme from “presentation” in your blog’s admin area.

To make this theme work with WP-United, you will first need to have both WP 2.3 and phpBB installed. Then you will need the WP-United mod for phpBB installed (I recommend using the ‘easymod’ mod to do it). Please note that I have just told you everything I know about making WP-United work, so please use the WP-United documentation, forum, or support for further help and information.

(So far I’m the only member of the group. But I can still dream of others writing my content for me, can’t I?)

By trial and error, I identified the Permalink Redirect plugin as the culprit. It had been holding my category feeds hostage for over a year, and I didn’t even know. I disabled it. Category feeds work just fine now.

So I deleted Permalink Redirect. Forever.

Of course, as soon as I figured it out who the culprit was in my plugins folder, I found that several other people had come to the same conclusion and written about it on their sites. Sometimes a little bit of search mojo goes a long way, and my mojo hadn’t worked, apparently. So if you find this post, you’re welcome in advance for the minutes or hours you would have wasted without my kind help.

The nice thing about the Permalink Redirect plugin was that it added trailing slashes to urls.

Who cares about trailing slashes?

You should. Because Wordpress adds them to the ends of your urls, treating every post and page as its own subdirectory.

Not everyone who links to your pages, though, will add the trailing slashes. That goes for the search engines, too.

And what that means is, the same page will be counted as both a page and a folder. Your analytics will be funky, and search engines may be confused, perhaps even splitting page PR.

You need to fix it to make your site more search engine friendly. This can be a small but important step in your on-page search engine optimization (SEO).

There’s an easy remedy in your Apache .htaccess file. And I used my search mojo to see that someone has already described the cure so I won’t have to: Two Wordpress plugins you don’t need… and shouldn’t use.

The answer? Find the audience and get in front of ‘em. And in the online world, that means being in the top search results for related keyword searches.

I imagine, if you’re a business owner, you worry about the same thing — how to help your customers find you.

That’s where I’d like to offer to help.

You see, seo done right is NOT about tricking search engines. It’s about catering to customer needs and delivering the goodies. When you do this well while keeping the search engines’ suggested best practices in mind, you will succeed.

So — here’s my offer. A free 30-minute phone consultation to the first 5 people who respond. Use the contact form to tell me about your site, your business, and your goals. I’ll create a strategy, then we’ll talk about it.

The only restriction is that you have a Skype or ICQ account so we can talk online. I look forward to it!

The good news is, I’ve cleaned out the spam comments. The bad news? I turned off comments to cut back on spam. Trackbacks and pingbacks are still on, however.

I’m revising my life a bit, stepping away from mainstream copywriting. In fact I’m thinking about forwarding my entire copywriting domain (www.morganletters.com) to this site. You see, most copywriting is the manipulation of people’s emotions to make them think that things will make them happy, and that just ain’t so.

I’m tired of playing on people’s scarcity complexes.

I leave in two days for yoga teacher’s training. I’m psyched.

I’m also psyched to help the healers of the world build and manage their online marketing, starting with their web sites.

This blog will soon undergo some visual revisions, and I’ll get back to the new release of the AutoSEO 3-column theme. Lucky for everyone I’ve learned considerably more about blogging, SEO, and design since I first built the theme.

Hope everyone’s doing well.

Peace,
David

Here’s what will be fixed in version 1, to be released next week:

1. Fix links to “related info” and “comments,” that you may have noticed are a little funky.
2. Put the code for the recommended plugins into the theme in a way that it will work whether you’ve actually got those plugins activated or not.
3. Take out the Feedburner stuff. With a Feedburner redirect you won’t need the Feedburner code I threw in there (with varying degrees of success) anyway.
4. Fix some of the bookmarking and feedreader links.

I’ll make another announcement when it’s ready for download.

Anyone find any bugs I didn’t already mention?