ProPhoto - Premium Wordpress Theme for Professional Photographers - Single Column, big pictures - Blog Template

Probably one of the most important things for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - the art of trying to get your website to rank high in Google and other search engines - is building lots of high-quality inbound links.

Inbound links are other websites that link to your site. Search engines view these as metaphorical “votes” for your site, and rank websites that have lots of inbound links higher than those that don’t. (This is a major oversimplification, but this is a SEO 101 lesson, not a nuanced article.)

How many inbound links do you have? Good question! Here’s a simple trick to find out approximately how many inbound links search engines are counting for your website. Just go to www.altavista.com (you can do this in Google too, but Google doesn’t show you but a small percentage of the inbound links it has indexed for your site) and type in

link:www.mywebsite.com

In the search bar, like so:

…and press Enter. On the next screen you should be able to see an approximate count of how many links to your site have been indexed by search engines.

You can also use this trick to hunt the backlinks of any sites you want. Frustrated by that other photographer in your area who ranks higher than you in search engines? Check out how many links they have! Chances are it’s more than you.

In future posts I’ll give some tips on building inbound links and making sure that you get credit for all of the ones you do have, but for now, happy hunting!

Firebug is a free extension for the Firefox web browser that allows you to inspect, edit, analyze, and debug any website. It has a truly awesome set of features that includes:

1. mouse over page elements to visualize invisible attributes like height, width, padding, and margins
2. inspect html, css, javascript for any element
3. edit css, html and view changes in real time
4. find height and width of any element
5. turn off and on individual CSS styles to see the effects
6. find exact line numbers and names of stylesheets referenced by CSS
7. lots, lots more

Every single web developer I know uses firebug on a daily or near daily basis. Whenever I get an email from one of you asking why this part or that part of your blog looks funny, I almost always turn on Firebug to quickly determine what the issue is, and usually can test a fix without ever leaving Firebug.

But Firebug is also great for non-developers who like to hack at their code. If you’re just trying to make a few small changes and don’t know much about HTML or CSS, Firebug can be a lifesaver. It allows you to try out all sorts of little changes to your websites code, without actually making those changes. If you get things working in firebug, you can just go and edit the actual files in the same way.

A lot of photographers do tinker with their own websites, and I think that very very few of them know about this invaluable tool. I made the following tutorial video to help you get a quick overview of the basics of installing and using Firebug. Let me know if this was helpful!

I’ve been asked a couple times how to force ProPhoto to show full posts when people visit your archive or category pages. Right now, the default for ProPhoto is to show excerpts of the posts in the category and archive pages. So, when a user clicks on an archive month, this is what they see:

If you want to change this so that the full posts are seen, in your WP Admin area, you’ll need to go to your “Design” tab (”Presentation” in WP 2.3.3 and earlier) and select “Theme Editor.” Then choose the file called “Archive (archive.php)” to edit it. (NOTE: don’t get confused with the file called “Archive (archives.php)” - they are named almost exactly the same - you want the one that is not plural.) In that file, look for a line that says:

<?php the_excerpt(''.__('Read More <span class="meta-nav">&raquo;</span>', 'ProPhoto').'') ?>

Delete it and then paste in this line:

<?php the_content() ?>

Click “update file” to save your changes and then check your work.

You can also do this with your category pages as well. Just open up the file “Category Template (category.php)” and do the same edit.

A word of caution, however. The ProPhoto theme was built to display excerpts only on these pages for a reason. That reason is to avoid ‘duplicate content,’ which search engines don’t like, and which can get you a small penalty in Google and other search engines. Basically, the issue is, search engines don’t like it when websites have multiple pages with exactly the same content. That seems spammy to them, because a lot of spammy websites have hundreds of pages of duplicate, computer-generated content. When you leave your full posts open on your category and archive pages, you end up with a good deal of duplicate content, because your posts may be shown in full in 4 or more pages: your home page (or paged interior pages), your single post permalink page, your category page, and your archive page. This is why a lot of WordPress themes excerpt posts on archive and category pages. It is also why lots of blogs even excerpt posts on their home page.

Technically, the best search engine friendly way to do things is to have only your single-page permalink post page show the entire post, and have every other place show an excerpt. Now, that’s a little extreme, so ProPhoto was built to be a compromise between what’s good for your readers and what is good for the search engine robots. You’re more than welcome to change your archive and category pages to show the full post, just do it with the awareness that there is search engine optimization tradeoff. At the end of the day, most people’s blogs are for people and not search engine robots, so you may decide that ease-of-use for your readers is more important. I just thought you might like to know why the theme (and many themes) are built that way.