Have a look at your browser’s address bar – your sight is just fine. You actually are on orenyomtov.com as opposed to this morning, when this website lived under the .info TLD.
It has been quite a long time since I made the decision to move to the new domain. But there were two drawbacks which delayed the domain transfer. The first one is lack of time, and the second one is… Well, my laziness.
Anyways, I thought I would share some of the steps I took in order to move the website to the new domain. I was lucky enough that I didn’t have to change hosts. Doing that may have required some additional steps.
- I bought the new domain and linked it to my hosting.
- I downloaded the latest WordPress installation and uploaded it into the new domain by FTP (Looking for an FTP client?).
- I copied the
wp-contentfolder. And in my case, the “downloads” folder which is the folder I chose to store the uploads in (Default iswp-content/uploads). - I also copied the
wp-config.phpfile and the.htaccessfile. - I used the Search and Replace WordPress plugin to replace “orenyomtov.info” with “orenyomtov.com” in the database.
- I notified Google of the domain change in Google Webmaster Tools.
- I exported a new sitemap using the Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin and submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools.
- I opened a new Google Analytics account and deployed the new tracking code in the theme I copied in step 3.
- I edited the old .htaccess file to contain only:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://orenyomtov.com/$1 [R=301,L] - I updated my FeedBurner account and all other similar services.
- I updated my website to the new URL in all of my favorite social platforms (@orenyomtov) and forums.
- Twit twit.
- And then I began writing this post.
The move didn’t take as long as I expected it to take. Even though it does seem a little complicated after writing it all down.
I hope that your move will be as smooth as mine. Good luck, Oren.
I’ve received many emails complaining that the plugin does not recognize YouTube videos. Because of lack of time, I delayed the update until now.
I just released an update to the plugin which should solve most of the issues that I was contacted about.
Go ahead and download the new version:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/youtube-thumbnailer/
As you can see in the plugin’s stats page, It currently has 1050 downloads!
Although the number may be not as big as other plugins (All in On SEO got over 2.5 million downloads), it means a lot to me. Every time you see numbers on the internet you don’t really think about them as you would outside the monitor. When viewing YouTube videos, if I see a video that has less then 5k views most of the times I won’t enter it and try to find another one with millions of views.
But when you think about the actual numbers it’s a huge amount of people sitting on their chair at home or at work, entering YouTube and watching the video. The same goes to plugin downloads, It’s really cool to know that my plugin helped over 300 (?) other people around the world that have their own website.
Update: It how has over 3000 downloads!
As I’m sure you have all seen at least one time, each plugin at the wordpress plugin directory has a “stats” page.
The stats page tells you the statistics of the plugin downloads, how many downloads have been today, yesterday, this week and all times. It also displays a cool graph with all the information in it.I don’t know why but I just have this feeling that says I “must” click the stats tab and check the numbers out.
After looking at many stats of many plugins I noticed a similar pattern in the graphs. There is a wave action that looks like this (if you want you can see it for yourself in the popular plugins section):
Then I did some research on the dates that the waves began and I realized that those waves are happening every time an update is released.
That’s pretty cool and all but It got me thinking, If every download counts, even the update downloads and every big plugin has 4+ updates that means that the “All Time” download counter is 6 times or more (plus people that download the plugin to check it out and then delete/disable it) the actual number of websites using it.
I just want to let everyone know that the download counter is really far away from the plugin users number/the number of blogs using the plugin. Next time try to say download count instead of plugin downloads.
I want to thank everyone who sent feedback and feature requests for the post editor buttons plugin.
Because of you I have released 3 more version of mainly bug fixes to the plugin.
The feedback was send through comments on the blog and email messages to me, if you have something on your mind, do not hesitate.
Now you can download and use version 1.3 that works perfect.
By the way if you have an idea for a brand new plugin – contact me :)
Post Editor Buttons?
This plugins allows you to add your own buttons to the post edtor’s toolbar.
I’m talking about the buttons that you see above your content text area when editing posts (b,i,link,img,ul,li).
For example you can add a “h3″ button to make subheaders in your post.
There are virtually endless buttons you can add.
Screenshots
Here is the plugins interface:
This is the output of the above settings:
Download
You can visit the plugin’s WordPress.org page, download the plugin right away and upload it into your plugins directory.
Feedback
Comment whatever is on your mind.
First I’d like to announce the upgrade of orenyotmov.info to the WordPress 2.8 official version.
Now, if you are asking yourself if you should upgrade then the answer is really just a big plain YES.
Why?
- Five second upgrade (no kidding). You click one button, do the auto-updating for you plugins (if needed) and you’re done.
- Widget management – This one is a dream coming true. In WordPress 2.8 the widget management was made ten times better. You can say goodbye to the old annoying “Save Changes” button and sidebar selection scroll down. It’s all in AJAX now, click save and your done, no page refresh for every change. In fact – no page refresh at all. There is also the “Inactive Widgets” section where you can store widgets that you no longer use, but don’t want to lose their preferences. Did I already mention it’s all using full Drag n’ Drop interface?
- Theme installer. No more 20 minute theme uploading! Now you just pick your theme and install it in second, just like the plugin installer. It can really save you some valuable time. There are also feature check boxes for all kinds of stuff that one can ask from a theme such as: number of columns, colors, sidebars, subject, translation-ready and many more.
- Most of the popular plugins are working great at WP 2.8, there is no need to be afraid about that. Maybe is the first week or so you shouldn’t rush and upgrade but now it’s all perfectly safe. If you are still nervous you better look up your plugins at the plugin list of plugins that work on WordPress 2.8. If a plugin that you are using is not listed – the best thing you can do is contact the plugin author.
Bottom Line
Just do it.
WordPress is a great search engine optimized system even right out of the box but there is a lot more to do if you want to improve it.
If you have a blog or a website, you probably want people to come and read what you have there and this is where the SEO comes into place.
About eighty percent of a website’s traffic (traffic = visitors) comes from search engines like Google. If you want to increase the traffic coming from search engines you need to rank higher in the results, in order to do so you need to search engine optimize your website.
The most important things you need to do with your WordPress website are:
- Use Pretty Permalinks.
What does this mean? If you take a look at the address bar when viewing this post (not through the homepage or archive pages) you will see that the address is not something likehttp://orenyomtov.com/?p=123(the default in WordPress), instead it’shttp://orenyomtov.com/wordpress-seo-tips.html. This way you have the keywords of your title also in the URL and that helps a lot. - Use All In One SEO Pack plugin and change the post title tag from
%post_title% - %blog_title%to%post_title% - %blog_title%.
Why? This swaps the blog’s name and the post’s name in the<title></title>tag. The first words in the title tag are more important from the last words so putting the post’s name first makes the page title more relevant to it’s content. e.g. beforeOren Yomtov’s Website - WordPress SEO Tips, afterWordPress SEO Tips - Oren Yomtov’s Website. - Use tags and categories wisely. They can contribute a lot to your search engine ranking as well as do nothing/hurt your ranking.
Don’t use too many tags (I say use about 4-8 tags per post), and when you do use them, try to use the same tags over and over again. WordPress Simple Tags plugin may help you with that. Try not to create more then 2 new tags for each post (of course when writing the first posts of the blog, almost all of the tags will be new). The same goes for categories, there is no need for lots empty/one post categories. When creating categories think what will help the user to navigate through your site and that will be the best for SEO most of the time. - Use Google Sitemap Generator plugin in order to auto generate the sitemap of your website each time you add a post/page. This helps Google to reach pages that they might not reach otherwise. After you install this plugin and make sure it works (check your sitemap.xml file), add & verify your website at Google Webmaster Tools and then submit the sitemap.
Remember, at the end of the day, your website is not for Google’s crawlers. It’s for humans, average users like you and me. So you need to keep the balance between what’s good for search engine optimizing, and what’s good for your readers.
My Mass Custom Fields Manager WordPress plugin just got his WordPress.org page at
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mass-custom-fields-manager/
I’m still collecting feedback and notes so at the next version all the known bugs & issues will be taken care of.
Plugin Description
Mass Custom Fields Manager (MCFM) is a plugin I wrote in order to help people who use WordPress to manage their post’s custom fields with ease.
If you don’t want to spend your time editing each and every single post’s custom fields to the same value or you want to delete/update specific posts you don’t have another tool that let’s you do that.
Here is a screenshot of the plugins interface:
You can choose posts by category,ID,custom field value and more and with a click of a button manage their custom fields.
Download Link
The download link for the Mass Custom Fields Manager WordPress Plugin by Oren Yomtov.
FAQ and Feedback
If you have any questions please comment or contact me through the contact page.
