Don't Forget To Do This If You Change The Theme!
Now it's back on Page 1 and this how?
I have always used professional themes for this website, the theme that I did have was Headway and as much as I like this Theme it had to go.
The reason is that you can not update this theme very easily because each version is a completely different theme and I was running the older version and not the latest one.
The new Theme is WP DaVinci which is also a good theme to use.
But here's where the problem arose, Headway has it's own built in SEO Plugin which doesn't require you to have any other plugin installed but the DaVinci Theme doesn't.
So over the period of me changing to a different Theme I never gave the SEO side of things a thought and couldn't understand whay my rankings were disappearing into Google's abyss.
While I was at the time updating a couple of my other plugins I had that "Ahhh" moment and thought blast, now I know what the problem is.
Installed my favourite SEO plugin, "Platinum SEO Pack" and then went about making sure all the SEO for the site was filled in plus working through every Post and Page to update all the content.
While I don't mess around too much with the SEO side of a website, the basics is the most important bit.
If you do change your Theme do make sure you check that you have all the required plugins installed and not leave any off otherwise these errors can cause you problems.
Lesson learned!
Recent Comments
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Thanks, this helped me. I was wondering if I changed my theme...would it require me to re-do my whole site?
Okay, so do we just check to be sure our site is showing up in Google Analytics? Is that the main place to check and also maybe Webmaster tools? I will also check my plug ins and when I go into any of my sites I always check for updates and do them. I do find that sometimes I use a theme for awhile and it doesn't look right to me and I change it. All of these are through WA.
Using Google Analytics is part of the training here in Wealthy Affiliate and is quite difficult to explain.
Basically it's to monitor the amount of traffic from a variety of sources.
Webmaster Tools can be used to see what words your visitors are targeting or using the most. You can also see what Country your traffic is mostly coming from.
I had this moment once when changing themes to WeaverII. The weaver theme has a place to put the Analytics code that is stored outside the theme so when I moved from another one that had the Google Analytics manually installed the theme stripped out my Analytics.
All of the sudden I wasn't getting any information from Analytics and I couldn't understand why until I checked and found the code missing from the site. Simple reinsertion took care of it but there were a few tense moments when I thought all my visitors had stopped coming.
Is the free version of Weaver II still your primary theme? I've used it for a couple sites now. You must really have become familiar with it. Have you considered others?
I had asked Kyle about this on his Blog about the latest Panda update and thought it that.
I just couldn't see that it was because I had changed the Theme.
Then I looked at the Google Analytics and realised something was up because traffiic was zero.
A few choice words were used......lol, then it dawned on me what I hadn't done!
Something so simple can really mess with things.
Yes, I look around frequently but keep coming back to Weaver II. It has a few issues but it still is so versatile I just seem to keep coming back.
Carson mentioned that we were able to decorate the blog posts and comments. It's not recognizing my html tags!
I'm sure glad that you found the problem. I had read your first post and when I saw your title to this one, I was intensely curious to know what you had found out.
From what I've read here at WA, the SEO plugin 'All in One SEO' is typically a basic, though very capable plugin for optimizing your site pages and posts. I haven't yet played with it, but you can opt for the plugin 'Wordpress SEO' (by Yoast) instead, which is supposed to be more customizable, something for intermediate to advanced users might use. I don't know it's capabilities.
It sounds like you've found yet another SEO plugin that you've grown to really like, 'Platinum SEO Pack'. What is it about this one that you like so well?
It's a more advanced plugin to the "All in One Seo Plugin" and allows to to do more things but it doesn't pay to mess around with the Default settings unless you know what your doing.
The "All In One SEO Plugin" is a good plugin.
Yoast is good as well but I find it to be resource hungry, this can affect the load speed of your website.
You are far better off sticking to what the Training here says to use.
I have used all three but prefer the Platinum SEO plugin because it allows me to change additional things that the "All In One SEO Plugin" doesn't.
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That is great information and I am wondering what is this Platinum SEO Pack and how does it differ from the WP SEO or is it part of WP?