How To Add Schema Markup

Adding schema markup

This article is to help GeoTheme users add schema markup (schema.org) to their directories it will be added to as and when I have time so please be patient.
it is relevant to add sites and blogs but certain parts will only be relevant to GeoTheme.

In the mean time here is the starting point. Test Pages of my directory site with the Google tool and compare to your own as you go on my directory site The Bathroom Home Directory.

Home page:
All you can do here is add into your header for Google + and declare you are a website.
So in your header.php download it from the GeoTheme directory.

Open it in a plain text editor.

Next add in your Google + publisher details.

This next part is used for multi author blogs like Geotheme. Although it will work fine for any other single author WordPress blog.

You could use a link similar to above for author rather than a php query like below just change publisher to author.

Save and upload the file to your child theme directory.

 

Schema markupIf you are not sure where to get you publisher id, visit your Google + account and click on profile look for the long number.

That should then test you page with the schema markup testing tool.

Hopefully all should be good on the home page, also you will notice that if you have any place, event pages that someone has added where the have filled out the Google + details in their profiles the author schema markup should show as well.

I will add to this post soon to do some more for your breadcrumbs and other items for schema rich snippets like ratings etc….

*Addition
I have noticed that in Blog category pages The Google structured data tool was recording the author details multiple times for each except that was being shown purely because it has rel=author then it was echoing the author link, so I found an easy way to deal with this is altering the blog_listing.php (GeoTheme) template which is very common in all blogs to have.

This will echo out on the page your author page url, which now Google knows who you are and your G+ id, so the simple solution is to alter it from a link to just your name by using instead the below.

If you want to be notified follow my tweets below.

 

 

 

Updating Geotheme

Geo Theme Word Press Geo Directory

This question is asked a lot and the thread we have on the forum is long, so I though it best to create a how to.

*Warning

If you have edited your core GeoTheme theme then you are doing something wrong and you will need to move any alterations into you child theme folder before carrying out this process, If you are not using a child theme even if you have not customised any files then you need to use a child theme for this process to not loose any settings.
I would always recommend backing up both Database and Directories first.

You will need an FTP Client.

Here are ftp clients that are free any easy to use.
FileZilla
FireFtp

I do not recommend using Control panel or any other means for updating GeoTheme.

I am using Ipswitch WS_FTP PRO but the same principles will apply.

You will need your connection details to connect via FTP.

Host Name: This usually ftp.yoursite.com or your sites IP Address

UserName: YourUsername

Password: YourPassword

If you are unsure of these details please contact your sites host.

Okay so you have a connection via FTP.

Download GeoTheme

Now download the latest version of Geo Theme from the Account area at the top of the forum page when logged in.

Geo Theme Update
Updating GeoTheme

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now save it to a new local folder.

The file is compressed so next you will have to extract (Unzip) the files, Right click and extract to here or unzip to here depending on which program you use.

Okay now rename the Geotheme Directory on your computer to GeoTheme_New.

Open your Ftp Client and in the left pane navigate to GeoTheme_New on your right pane navigate to your sites Themes directory /wp-content/themes.

You can now select the GeoTheme_New folder and upload it to the themes directory, This will take some time depending on your connection speed and server.
*Note if your connection times out or disconnects whilst uploading then you are best to start again.

Activating by swapping over the file names

Updating Geo Theme

 

 

 

 

 

Now Rename the current GeoTheme folder in /wp-content/themes to GeoTheme_Old and rename the GeoTheme_New to GeoTheme, once this is done you should now be on the latest version, check to see that your site is operating as you would expect.

You can for a safeguard download the old version of GeoTheme_Old and then delete this from your server.

Congratulations you are now updated.

Tim

Please if you have any issues then refer back to The GeoTheme forum do not comment here.

If you think this can be improved then feel free to comment here.

GeoDirectory Presentation – WordPress London

GeoDirectory @ #wpldn WordPress LondonWe will be doing a presentation about the all new GeoDirectory for #wpldn (WordPress London) on Tuesday the 25th March 1014.

Attending will be Stiofan O’Conner (GeoTheme), Tim Clark and Ben Clark (Klick Design), #wpldn is an mixed audience of WordPress Developers and users.

The discussion will be covering from conception to completion and will be discussing the GeoDirectory Plugin and in many features.

Stiofan will be giving a technical overview on the functions built-in to Geo Directory plugin and  answering any questions relating to the process of building the Plugin, which will also cover the history behind the concept.

Tim will be discussing the products features and uses and designing with GeoDirectory.

We will also cover the different ways that current GeoTheme users are making money from the product or simply just enjoying developing great sites.

To join in visit and sign up to http://www.meetup.com/London-WordPress/

 

 

 

Importing data into Geo Theme

Tips and Tricks

This is the basic rules for all importing into databases with text.csv files not just Geo Theme.

Open office

So we understand we use Open Office right! Available for both Windows and Mac No questions asked good.

So you have you spread sheet of data you have created or exported.
If you have not then I suggest that you create one by going to GT Tools >> Import/Export and downloading one or grabbing it from here.

If this does not work for any reason check out FAQ’s at the end.

Opening for CSV

Open Office open as for GeoThemeI get asked quite a lot what are the setting meant to be when opening a comma separated value file, so I thought I would just add in a screenshot to help of the opening screen.

Select UTF8 for the Character set, Seperated by Comma (Hense CSV) Text Delimiter ” (this is default) and Quoted Field as text.

That is ready to open.

You can click on the image to the right to open a larger version.

 

Save As

Importing data into GeoTheme

The most important aspect of importing into a database is saving correctly.

Okay its not save it is file Save as!

Edit Filter Settings

Importing data into Geo Theme

Next the Dialog box, two things here Save as type will be text.csv and you have to tick the Edit Filter Settings Box.

Open Office Keep FormatFormat

Next click Keep Current Format.

 UTF8 and Quote Text Fields

Next is the below dialog box it is important to change the Character set to Unicode (UTF8) just press the U on your key board and down twice for a quick way to select it from the list.
You also want to make sure the you tick the Quote all text cells, this is important as the format we are saving is CSV Comma Separated Values, when importing with comma separated items like category1,catergory2 within a cell what we are doing is wrapping them ,”category1,catergory2″, so the data stays in that column.

Save as

 

FAQ’s

That is all you need to know, just a little FAQ below in case you have issues.

 

The trick is an apostrophe ‘ yep just add it before your date in the cell Gt has a date format like 2013-11-30 sometimes Open Office will alter these to your computers date settings so just import as ‘2013-11-30 :)
Well that is annoying, So all you need to do is highlight the column by clicking on the column letter identifier so it goes blue, then Go to the menu, Format >> Change Case >> lowercase. :)
Since Version 3.4.1 It has been a requirement that you need either 1 or 0 in the is_featured column, 1 for yes and 0 for no.
You can fix this using GT Tools >> Diagnostics >> Run and there is a under “Featured database checks” click the fix button. :)

 

Any more bits you want me to add to the FAQ or Tutorial let me know.

GeoTheme a WordPress Directory Theme

GeoTheme is a WordPress based “Yelp Clone” directory theme.

GeoTheme WordPress DirectoryWhy Geotheme?

Well believe me I had a struggle with this one, I was asked by a client to find a directory based website template, they wanted to create a directory based on places and events in London, already being familiar with WordPress I took the logical route of looking at plugins and themes that could be used as a starting point.

After many hours of deliberation and reading reviews on geo location based products I decided to recommend GeoTheme as the starting point for the project.

A few weeks later I had delivered with the support of GeoTheme and its members in creating this site, and it has worked out very well.

There were some hurdles to overcome mainly due to Geotheme’s vast array of options and setup complexity’s and the particular requirements of my client, but what was achieved was an end result that worked and looked great.

I was then approached by one of the guy’s who developed GeoTheme to assist them as a moderator on their support forum, I was pleased to join such a great team of very good developers to assist them in support queries.

This left me with a bit of a dilemma as a moderator I had to know more about this complex theme fast, so I used one of my dormant domains to create a site to be able to cross reference with when answering questions on the forum, so I quickly put together The Bathroom Directory, pretty much within a few days of the launch I had paid listings.

I did not go out to create a business which proves how well GeoTheme works.

This site is now ran by Ben Clark my nephew, he came up to London to stay with me and loved the concept behind the site and it’s design, so it is now being run as a business, and he is doing rather well with it, now he has well over a thousand listing many paid for and is quickly moving towards having a successful business.

I now have had to set up another Geotheme site on my development server as a test site for my work on the forum.

If you would like to know more about Geotheme then please feel free to contact me. You can also find more details on the Geo Theme website here.

Robots Seo Basics Part 5

Robots SEO back to part 4Robots SEO

If you have landed on this robots seo page be sure to not miss the start of the SEO basics tutorials Here.

Robots txt SEO

By robots, I mean Robots SEO file, not a robot made from text on the right, I just want to make that clear.

This is a file that is placed in the root directory of your website, it tells search engine spiders where and where not to go to index your pages.

You can also use it to tell a search engine where your site map file is.

A “robots.txt” file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site.

You really do not want search engines indexing areas of your site that are not useful to your users. And believe it or not also using your servers resources.

Restrict crawling where it’s not needed with robots.txt. You can target specific search engines with examples below of User-agent:

Not all search engine spiders obey your robots.txt file so it is not a total solution but it is a must to put in place for all the main search engines.

I have tried out this robot file generator and it works fine, there are lots more available.

SEO Basics Part 6 Coming Soon…

Feefo Benefits not just SEO

What are the Feefo benefits?

Feefo benefits are obvious to me, there are other choices to using Feefo on the market, but in my experience of using Trust Pilot, Trusted Shops and pretty much all of the other customer feedback services, I found Feefo to have the best feedback response rate by far.

When a customer buys the product or service from you, the customer then receives a request to review the product and service, it’s simple Feefo get more responses at this point.

Feefo Benefits Reviews For Your websiteBy displaying an image similar to one I have designed on the right, your customers have confidence in you straight away. This image can be displayed on the home page, category pages or product pages.

It is linkable when the user clicks on it, they will see the live reviews on you and on the products you sell.

On your product pages you can have displayed the star rating for the products and the reviews specific to that product.

Now with other Feedback services like Trustpilot you get a link to your home page not with Feefo you also get one directly to the individual product page, great for SEO.

This will help the customer to understand what they are buying and stop them from going off to another site, maybe a review site or a competitors site to find out more about that product.

Example Pages

Feefo Benefits Product Page Veiw

Click to Enlarge

Here is an example of a product page with Feefo feedback displayed.

So we can see that you have saved yourself time and energy writing your own product reviews :) not that you would do that!

Apart from giving your customers confidence in you and your products, you are keeping fresh content on your product pages, this is always good for SEO.

Search engines will always rank pages higher that have fresher content and will spider your pages more, just to make sure that they have the latest cached version.

Feefo Benefits on Google, Shopping and Natural Search Results.

Google Results Feefo Benefits

Click To Enlage..

Your reviews and stars will show up in the Google shopping results, your product rating stars will show up in Google ads and even in the natural search results as snippets (snippets not guaranteed).

As with the examples in the image to the right, you see not only do you stand out, but the customer will have confidence.

You will also get links back from Feefo’s own website, as they display a live feed, from the home page and also display your results on the your company page.

Feefo’s page on Google stars.

Contact Me About Feefo

If you are interested in trying out Feefo I can arrange a free trial, or if you can see the benefits already then contact me and I will start to get the integration in motion for you.

Feefo Customer Feedback System

Feefo feedback system

Feefo customer feedback system.

I have integrated the Feefo feedback system into several websites now and I have been so impressed that I thought I should let people know more about it. If Google loves it then you should, check it out on Google Shopping.

What is Feefo?

Feefo is a review system based purely on feedback on customer service and the product that they purchased from your E commerce store, or services that they have used.

How does it work?

When you send your customer an invoice for a purchase or service a copy is also sent to Feefo, Feefo then contacts your customer with a jointly branded email asking them for feedback on the service they received from you and the product itself.

Your customers can score you either Excellent, Good, Poor or Bad, indicating their level of satisfaction on the products they purchased and the service they received from you. There is also a comments box to add additional feedback, once published you can add a reply to their comments.

When the results are delivered to Feefo they then publish the details live on thier website, then your score is totalled and updated.

Feefo live feedHere is an example of a live feed that I have set up for my client.

Click on the image and you can see it in action.

Feefo starsFeefo have created API’s that enable you to then display the results on the product page itself. You can also display your overall score on your sites home page and indeed any category pages you wish to. You can also display the comments and written product reviews and jazz it up by adding review stars.

How much does the service cost?

Currently Feefo charges £199.00 for set up costs, I have been through this process and they are great at customer service, they hold your hand all the way, they will help with the technical integration, training, development and general support.

There are three levels of monthly costs.

Up To 200 feedback’s a month = £99
Up To 1000 feedback’s a month = £299
Bespoke package that covers 10k per month = £499
*prices are plus VAT.

Feefo Contact Me

Don’t just read this without seeing the benefits of FeefoBenefits Feefo in Part 2.

SEO Content Seo Basics Part 4

seo content part 3SEO Content  SEO Basics Part 4

With SEO content being a very important subject the words “Content is King” is a statement that I use a lot.

SEO Content is one of the most important SEO areas, websites that use relevant well written content will be ranked higher than sites that use little, poorly written content.

In this article I am going to contradict myself so please forgive me.

The correct way to use content on your website.

  • Minimum 300 words
  • Make sure that you use the keywords for your target search term.
  • Break up long sentences.
  • Do not use Sesquipedalian for the sake of sounding clever 😉
  • Make useful content for your target audience.

seo contentFlesch reading score is a great tool for content. This is available in office and outlook (instructions here) also I am sure if you search you will find some useful sites.

It will score your readability out of 100 points, The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. For most standard files, you want the score to be between 60 and 70, this is the score that will mean most 11 year olds wiil be able to read with ease.

This article has a score of 74.9 in the Flesch Reading Ease Test.

For information based websites this is easily achievable but for E commerce Sites this is very difficult to do. Lets imagine that you sell hats, how many times can you really describe in 300 words a hat on each page of your website with useful individual content for SEO.

Acheiving the content for SEO for E commerce.

There are two main approaches to dealing with this issue, the first is to create landing pages of useful content optimised for SEO but not stuffed with keywords for the sake of it. A good example a of way to deal with this is to create branded landing pages.

Another good solution is to have a blog set up with articles about the subject the you sell.

When you have created the content pages you will need to link to your product pages from the landing page or article using anchor text which is the clickable text that users will see as a result of a link, and is placed within the anchor tag.

This is an anchor tag optimised for red hats.

Seo Basics Part 5

Improved Responsive Menu Twenty Twelve for i Phone, Android, Mobile and Tablet Devices

The Improved Responsive Menu Twenty Twelve

Improved Responsive Menu Twenty Twelve

Click To Enlarge

Improved Responsive Menu TFor Twenty Twelve

Click To Enlarge

This menu is used on Klick Design test it out first on your device.

I have assumed that you have created a child theme for Twenty Twelve if you have not then read this first.

Right lets start to change the menu, first you need to create a new custom menu.

Klick responsive menu settings.

Click to Enlarge

Navigate in your dashboard to Appearance>Menus and create a new menu.

Name the menu ‘Klick’, add the pages you want to the menu save the menu and select it as your primary menu.

For the next bits you can download the zip at the bottom of this page.

First open the add-to-styles.css file copy the code into the bottom of your child styles.css’

Next create a folder called js in your child theme and upload the klick-nav.min.js to that folder. I have minified the js for you to load nice and fast.

If you ever need to minfy a .js file then I use this tool it is free an just does it in a browser window.

Add the code from the add-to-functions.php into your child functions.php or simply rename the add-to-functions.php to functions.php and upload this to the child theme.

What’s left well it should be working for you now, You have your improved responsive menu twenty twelve so next to style it to match your theme colors.

In the above css you can change the width, background color and color of the text, I am sure some of you will get fancy.

Klick Design Responsive menu