Touching again on the topic I posted about a few days ago, I thought I’d mention a little more on moving from HubSpot to WordPress.

This type of blog migration is the most common request I’ve had this past year.  Initially they were kind of cumbersome, but now the HubSpot migration process is so streamlined I’ve been able to do basic migrations in a few hours time.

The basic type of migration I’m referring to refers to just migrating the HubSpot content to WordPress, along with all post images.  All of this pre-existing content would then reside in a WordPress site (along with the necessary redirects) with your theme of choice.  After that, you can add any widgets or plugins your heart desires.

I know that other companies charge thousands of dollars for migrating HubSpot blogs to WordPress, but if you hit me up before January 10th, I’ll perform a basic HubSpot migration to WordPress for you for $300.

Interested in getting your HubSpot website moved to WordPress at this price?  Then head on over to Blog Movers and let’s get started!

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I have moved a lot of websites to WordPress over the past few years.  Many of these migrations have been migrations from other blogging platforms, such as Blogger or HubSpot, and others have been straight HTML sites that I converted over to WordPress.

I enjoy this type of work.  WordPress is a great platform for many types of websites, and creating dynamic, easy to use websites for clients does bring me some happiness.

That is why I just launched a separate website to focus on WordPress migrations.  Blog Movers is for moving websites to WordPress, and it’s people who want extremely flexible, SEO optimized websites instead of what they currently have.

The most frequent type of blog migrations I have done are HubSpot to WordPress and Blogger to WordPress, but I also have experience with other types of migrations such as Active Rain, Drupal, and Movable Type.

So if you or someone you know is thinking about moving their website to WordPress, head on over to blogmovers.net and let’s get started!

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HTML5 video on Android is still a hot mess, and can be frustrating if you’re trying to make your videos playable on as many devices as possible.  I’ve struggled with this in the past, and have settled on the following method to solve my problem.

I used the Universal Video plugin and modified it to add a link to the video for mobile devices.  It may not be the most elegant of solutions, but as far as I can tell it’s been working great so far.

You can see this in action on any other video on this site.  Immediately below any video you’ll see a link to the “mobile video version”.  Clicking on that link will take you to a version of the video that is playable on Android phones, and which has been optimized for mobile devices.

Creating Mobile Video

Let’s start by making a version of your video for Android.  In this example I am assuming you are using WordPress and HTML5 video via the Universal Video plugin.  I am also assuming you have already created the mp4 and ogg video versions of your video.

I use Handbrake for creating mobile video as it is the simplest way I know to do this.  Open the mp4 version of your video in Handbrake and then select the following settings:

• iPhone & iPod Touch Preset
• Web optimized
• If the destination file ends in “.m4v”, edit it to end in “.mp4″

Then just click “Start” and Handbrake will create a version of your video that is playable on Android phones!

Poster Image

The poster image is an option you can use with HTML5 video.  This is the image that will be displayed in place of your video until the user plays the video.  If no poster image is set, most browsers default to using the first frame of the video as the image in question.

If no poster image is set there will be a blank spot on Android phones where the video is situated.  I don’t like that blank spot, so I choose to add a poster image to fill the void.

In the Universal Video plugin the mp4 and ogg video versions need to have the same file name, and I’ve kept the same pattern with the poster image.  So if your video file name was “twitter-photo” then the poster image would have to be “twitter-photo.jpg”.  I chose jpg as the image file extension because that image format can be compressed to a smaller size than other image formats.

The Code

Like I said, I modified the Universal Video plugin to allow for the addition of a link to the mobile version of the video being presented.  I added a text link below the video that links to the Android video version and wrapped the whole embed code in a div with the class of “html5-video”.

You can download the Universal Video with Android plugin here.  If you already used the Universal Video plugin, be sure to deactivate or delete it before installing the Android version of Universal Video.

How To Use

Using this modified plugin is just like using the original Universal Video plugin.  If your video’s file name is “android-video” then you will need to upload the following 4 files to your site’s wp-content/uploads folder:

1. android-video.mp4 (MP4 video version)
2. android-video.ogv (OGG video version)
3. android-video-1.mp4 (Mobile video version)
4. android-video.jpg (Poster image)

It is important that the files you upload follow the pattern set above for the plugin to work correctly.  The mobile video version must have the same file name as the normal video version with the addition of the “-1″ at the end, and the poster image must have the same file name as the videos with the “jpg” image extension.

After you have uploaded these files to the uploads folder, you can embed HTML5 video simply by using this shortcode that pulls everything together:

[video src="android-video" height="360" width="640"]

(I’m using the height of “360″ and width of “640″ as an example.  Be sure to insert the correct dimensions for your video!)

If you have done everything correctly, you will have embedded an HTML5 video on your site that also supports Android phones.  And if someone visits your site with a browser that doesn’t support HTML5 video, they will get the flash fallback option through Flowplayer.

If you choose to use this plugin version I’d love to hear your feedback.  You can respond to me either with a comment below or through my contact form.

photo credit

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I often get asked how to do some of the basic setup steps in the Thesis theme.  Some of these questions pop up more frequently than others, so I decided to take 3 of the most frequent questions I receive and answer them with short video tutorials.

The questions I receive the most in this area are:

1. How do I set up tracking (Analytics) in Thesis?
2. How do I set up Feedburner in Thesis?
3. How do I change the menu in Thesis?

And without any further delay, here are my answers:

How to set up Google Analytics in Thesis

How to set up Feedburner in Thesis

How to change the menu items in Thesis

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Category pages are one of the most often neglected areas of any WordPress site.  This is a shame, because if category pages are used in meaningful way, they can become a strong force in search engine rankings.

The key to higher ranking category pages (according to Chris Pearson) is to add a unique headline and some unique content to your individual category pages.  Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

Well, it is.  If you use the Thesis theme then the capability of modifying your category archives is already built in.  All you have to do is go to the “Category” section in your admin dashboard, select a category, and edit the fields shown below.

In this example, the “Introductory Headline” and “Introductory Content” will be inserted at the top of your page before the list of categorized posts.  By adding some unique, optimized content along with some optimized meta tags, you will have taken a bold step in strengthening the possible search rankings for your category pages.

If the WordPress theme you’re using doesn’t have this built in ability, such as the default WordPress theme,  you could install Yoast’s SEO plugin and to handle the category page meta information.

Granted, you don’t have the option of creating unique titles to display on the category pages, but by edited the “Description” section you can add custom content at the top of your category pages.

If you’re wondering if category page SEO is worth the trouble, I invite you to ponder the following example:

Google the ultra-competitive term “affiliate marketing” and if you scroll about halfway down the first page you’ll probably notice that the affiliate marketing category page for Sugarrae is ranked there.  Her category page outranks millions of other websites because she has put in the effort to optimize her categories for SEO.

Do you see the value in doing something like this?  If you have previously taken steps to improve the rankings of your category pages, what did you do and how did it work out?

photo credit

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One of the best things you can do to help merge your blog posts together is to link to older content within your newer posts.  If you have a hard time remembering to do this like me, then maybe this tip will help you.

One thing you can do to automatically link to older posts (or category pages, or anything you want) is to add a custom function to your theme’s functions.php file.  Add this code once and you’ll rarely have to think about interlinking again.

Here is the code to add to your theme’s functions.php file:

function replace_text_wps($text){
    $replace = array(
        // 'WORD TO REPLACE' => 'REPLACE WORD WITH THIS'
        'wordpress' => '<a href="#">wordpress</a>',
        'excerpt' => '<a href="#">excerpt</a>',
        'function' => '<a href="#">function</a>'
    );
    $text = str_replace(array_keys($replace), $replace, $text);
    return $text;
}

add_filter('the_content', 'replace_text_wps');
add_filter('the_excerpt', 'replace_text_wps');

Obviously, you’ll want to edit this to suit your needs.  Replace lines 4, 5, and 6 with what suits your blog and feel free to add as many replacements as you need.

After adding this code snippet to your theme, any keywords in your post or excerpts will automatically link to whatever you want it to.  How sweet is that!

I found this tip through WpRecipes which found it from Kevin Chard.

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Here’s a quick tip that can help provide a little bump in your search rankings: tweak your blog post permalinks to reduce the amount of words in them.

Let me explain by giving you an example.  You’re writing a blog post on a new company that sells green widgets and your desire is for this post to rank well for “green widgets”.  The title of your post happens to be, “ACME Company in Seattle Sells Green Widgets”.

If your WordPress permalink structure is using the %postname% option, then your URL might look like this:

http://someblog.com/2011/07/acme-company-in-seattle-sells-green-widgets/

You are initially happy with the URL because you can see that it contains your target keyword, “green widgets”.  But is there something else you can do to the permalink that would give your main keyword a little more weight?

The answer is “Yes”.  You can alter the blog post permalink and totally rewrite it if you wish.  But what I would recommend is that you remove any unnecessary words in your URL that aren’t helping your cause.

If you look right below the title on the WordPress post screen you’ll see your permalink and a handy little “edit” button to the right of it:

Click on the “edit” button and you can easily add, remove, or modify any word or number in your permalink.  In the above example post, I would change the permalink from “acme-company-in-seattle-sells-green-widgets” to something like:

• http://someblog.com/2011/07/acme-seattle-green-widgets/
• Or simply http://someblog.com/2011/07/green-widgets/

By removing any unnecessary words and focusing on the words that matter to your article, you give your keywords more weight than they would have had if you kept the original permalink based on your post’s title.  And  every little bit helps in the search engine ranking game.

Do you ever modify your permalinks in any way to try and rank better?  What did you do and how did it work out for you?

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WordPress just released the 3.2 version of their software 2 days ago.  This latest version includes speed and performance increases, requires a minimum of PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0, and drops support for IE6.

Anyone wishing to upgrade their installation of WordPress should first ensure that their server fills the minimum requirements for the 3.2 issue.  If you are unsure how to check for these requirements, you could install the WordPress Requirements Check plugin and verify that you are safe to upgrade.

After I upgraded one of my WordPress sites, the first thing I noticed was the change in appearance in the admin area.  To illustrate this, here is the admin panel in the 3.1.3 release of WordPress:

And now in 3.2:

Other sections in the admin area, such as the post editing screen, have also had a minor facelift:

To illustrate a little more of what you can expect in the latest version of WordPress, have a look at this short video which gives a quick overview of the admin area and some of its sections.

Interested in seeing a little more before you make the upgrade?  Head on over to wpbeginner and check out their overview of WordPress 3.2. If you’ve already upgraded, what do you think of it?

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SEOPressor has been heavily promoting their “Shockingly Effective, Tested and Proven WordPress SEO Plugin” on Twitter for a little while now, and after taking a quick peek at their sales page I just felt the urge to dish out my 2 cents about it.

This is complete bullshit.

From what I can tell, SEOPressor is very similar to ScribeSEO but without the monthly dues.  But what separates SEOPressor from ScribeSEO is the taint of bovine excrement.

If you go to the SEOPressor sales page (I’m not going to link to them, just Google it) you will see some pretty bold claims.  Like how using this plugin will skyrocket your search rankings.  And they even provide examples of two websites that are ranked #1 for long tail keywords (“make money twitter” and “conceive a boy”).  I checked the search results in Google for the two sites they listed and yes, these sites did rank #1 for their precise search term.

But again, this is still total bullshit, and let me tell you why.

If anyone wishes to rank #1 in the search engines for a search phrase of 3 or more words, then the easiest way is to buy a domain that has that exact phrase in the name.  It’s a no-brainer.  If you want to rank high for the search phrase “monkey riding elephant” then you buy the domain of “monkeyridingelephant.com”.  For long tail keywords that’s often all you have to do; your content doesn’t matter.

If you’re skeptical of my claim, try Googling “salem treasure”  and see if salemtreasure.com isn’t the first listing.  That is a domain that I own that I haven’t developed or added content to, yet it ranks #1 for that search phrase.  Without the assistance of any hyped SEO plugin.

I have another domain that ranks high for “xsportz sunglasses”, yet you won’t find the word “xsportz sunglasses” anywhere in that site.  It ranks high for that term only because the phrase is in the domain.

The people behind this new SEO plugin won’t tell you that their example sites are ranking high because of their domain names.  They want you to believe that top results are due to their premium plugin.  I disagree.  Probably the only accurate statement I saw on their sales page is that ranking #1 in the search engines is not a typical result from using their plugin.

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I did a small update to the Universal Video plugin this afternoon.  Not a lot was changed in this release, but a requested feature has been included.

Now that iOS has been updated to 4, it should be safe to include poster images with HTML5 video and not prevent playback on devices such as the iPad.  Inserting a poster image is as simple as embedding video with this plugin.

Just as you upload the .ogg and .mp4 video types to the “wp-content/uploads” folder, you can also upload a poster image to this same directory as well.  The poster image can be named anything; it does not have to be named the same as the videos.  An example of the shortcode you would use now to include a poster image with your HTML5 video would be:

[video src="funnycats" height="360" width="480" poster="fuzzy-kitty.jpg"]

And just like that, you’ll have HTML5 video embedded into your post with the “fuzzy-kitty.jpg” cover image.

Hopefully this update clears up some issues with video playback on IE as well. Looking back over the code for the plugin I noticed that I may have set the wrong location for the Flowplayer script which would cause problems for the flash version to play. The location is correct now, so please update now to clear up any issues you may have had with the initial release.

And as always, if you have any questions or comments about this plugin, feel free to get in touch with me.

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