Before we did the following work they were on Page 8 of Google for the keywords “berkshire youth theatre”

So we spent an hour or so working on their wordpress site.

While we can only speculate I think the key changes was to add some of the above keywords to their title tags for each page (their site has about 180 pages)
After altering about 50 – 100 of their pages, tagged the content using wordpress tags and display those tags in the theme. We then added those tags to the META Keywords field using one of the SEO plugins.

We then updated the sitemap and resubmitted (this was about a month out of date)

With only the above changes and 24 hours later they are now 2nd, 3rd and 4th position for the same keywords. Remember they were on Page 8 previously!

These are tightly focused and locally relevant keywords but the results are drastic.

• AdSense Integrator
  • This powerful plugin represents a complete solution to add and manage AdSense ads into your blog, it follows the last Google AdSense rules and updates.
  • After trying several Adsence insertion tools this was by far the easiest and gave enough options to ensure I will not bother to look at any others for a while.  It does what it says on the tin.  It allows you to place your ads where you want them using a simple and intuitive interface.
• Google Analyticator
  • Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics. After enabling this plugin visit the settings page and enter your Google Analytics’ UID and enable logging.
  • Keeping track of your visitors is important for you and your clients.  I have found this plugin to be the easiest of the Analytics integration tools.  There are a wide range of options if you want to dig in but you only really have to supply your analytics id for the site you wish to track.  There is the option to authorise the plugin with Google to give access to all your tracking codes from a drop down list which is a powerful.
• Google XML Sitemaps
  • This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Configuration Page
  • Your site is no good if no one can find it and your customers will want to see there vanity search appearing in Google asap.  This plugin automatically generates a Google XML site map and notified various search engine of updates and locations.  Very easy to setup.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade
  • WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. Go to WordPress Automatic Upgrade to upgrade your installation Thanks to Ronald Huereca for making the plugin run in automatic mode.
  • The new automatic upgrade facility in WordPress has made it one of my favourite tools. After years of trying to keep up with patches and upgrades at last we can see how it can be done (PHPBB take heed!!!)  However, if you have a pre 2.7 WordPress installation upgrades can be a drag which is where this plugin come in.  Install it and follow the prompts and it will backup your site and database and proceed to bring your installation up to the latest. Magic
• WP-Footnotes
  • Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post.
  • This is a very clever little plugin which automatically creates footnotes as you go along.  All you need to do is to place the note in the text where it belongs and place double brackets around the ((note)).  The plugin will detect this and move the note to the bottom of the page and reference it accordingly.  If you add another footnote higher in the page it will automatically renumber the footnote.  Very useful. You can see this in action here on this local history site.
• Advanced Category Excluder
  • This plugin helps you to manage your content, RSS feeds, sidebar widgets, and fine tune where you want to display your posts, pages, links, link categories, or hide.
  • This gem of a plugin allows you to control what categories do or do not appear on your home page or any other page for that matter. This is great if you need to use categories to control the layout of sections of your site. You can see this in action on this Silk Wedding Flowers Site. Note the home page shows only posts from certain categories and not posts from categories which have their own Page link in the Nav bar. Very handy.
• cforms
  • cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more.
  • I have been known to install WordPress only to host this plugin.  It is a very easy to use and powerful form managements system that is highly configurable and allows easy insertion of as many forms as you care to create with full control over the css of that form.  The 1st thing I do when rolling out sites is to replace the contact form with a CFORM powered alternative.
• kPicasa Gallery
  • Display your Picasa Web Galleries in a post or in a page.
  • Picasa / Picasaweb are amazing tools that cost nothing and achieve a lot.  Despite having access to very expensive software for managing the thousands of images on my PCs it is this humble freebie from Google that I use 99% of the time.  The export, email and upload to picasawebs features are simplicity itself.  There is no point in setting up elaborate gallery systems for your customers when this free offering is very fast and reliable.  It will also offer reassurance to clients that you are not the sole custodian of their images.  So once your client has uploaded thousands of images to hundreds of galleries how to do you integrate them into WordPress and keep the audience on site? This is where kPicasa comes in.  Once installed simple tell it your picasaweb username and which of the javascript effects you wish to use and then use the simple codes to insert the albums or all the albums into your pages.  Note that the latter option only works on an empty page which seems an unnecessary restriction. However, you can get around this by simply listing all the albums you want to show.  The user will see an image which represents the album and clicking on this will take them to a gallery of images all embedded in your site.  This can be seen used in this wedding flower design gallery.
• Picasa Image Express
  • Browse, search and select photos from any publicly available Picasa Web Album and add them to your post/pages.
  • While kPicasa takes care of displaying albums any user of Picasaweb will have the need to display an individual image from a specific album now and then.  This is where Picasa Image Express comes in.. This plugin adds a new icon to the media icons and gives immediate direct access to your picasa account and allows simple insertion of thumbnails into your posts.  Compatible with kPicasas lightbox feature. Together these two plugins offer the perfect gallery management solution.
• Multi-level Navigation Plugin
  • A WordPress plugin which adds a multi-level CSS based dropdown/flyout/slider menu to your WordPress blog. Visit the WP Multi-level Navigation Plugin page for more information about the plugin, or our navigation support board for help with adding the menu to your theme.
  • This is a very useful nav bar creator which is highly configurable and easy to style.  It is possible to use pages and categories in the bar and is very easy to insert into your theme.  The home page for the plugin has a theme creation tool which allows you to use a number of pre-made styles.  However, if you comfortable with CSS you can create any style you like.
• Page Links To
  • Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.
  • A neat little plugin that allows you to redirect a click on any page to any other URL. Ideal for redirecting menu items to categories or for integrating out-of-wordpress sections of your site.
• Special Text Box
  • is very simple, very little and very usefull WordPress plugin (for me and, I hope, for you). It adds little style sheet file and short code to blog for highlighting some portion of text in post as coloured boxes. That may be warning, alert, info and download portion of post’s text.
  • this is a very cool plugin that allows you to add a quickly syled text box to any post or page and even float to the left or right.  very powerful, effective and easy to use.
• Easily Navigate Pages
  • Display a folder tree of your pages that is easy to expand and contract on your Dashboard. Designed for people that use WordPress as a content management system.
  • This is a very handy widget for your dashboard that gives one click access to your pages.  Very good idea and nicely implemented. You can find more info on the authors blog

1) Step one… create a custom Category page for the category of your choice.  This is a very useful trick.  All you need to do is to create a new file called category-10.php (replacing the 10 with the id of the category you wish to affect).  The easist way to do this is to create a copy of archive.php and rename the copy as category-10.php.  Now when ever category 10 is called this page will be supplied.

2) Step two.. enable tumbnail support.  This is very simple.  All you need to do is to add:

add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );

this will enable thumbnail support across you theme.

to functions.php in your theme before the final php tag.

Now set the size of your thumbnails using

set_post_thumbnail_size( 50, 50 );

(note for additional options see here)

Thats it! All you now need to do is to go and edit category-10.php and call the thumbnail using

<?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>

If you want to create a grid layout just comment out everything and wrap the thumbnail link with the link to the post.
A typical your Archive.php might look like:

<?php get_header(); ?>
<div class="grid_16 content_wrapper">
<div id="left" class="grid_9 omega alpha">
  <div id="content">
    <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
    <div class="post">
      <?php $post = $posts[0]; // Hack. Set $post so that the_date() works. ?>
      <?php /* If this is a category archive */ if (is_category()) { ?>
 <!--     <h2 class="search">
        <?php single_cat_title(); ?>
        </h2> -->
      <?php /* If this is a tag archive */ } elseif( is_tag() ) { ?>
      <h2 class="search">Posts Tagged &#8216;
        <?php single_tag_title(); ?>
        </h2>
      <?php /* If this is a daily archive */ } elseif (is_day()) { ?>
      <h2 class="search">Archive for
        <?php the_time('F jS, Y'); ?>
      </h2>
      <?php /* If this is a monthly archive */ } elseif (is_month()) { ?>
      <h2 class="search">Archive for
        <?php the_time('F, Y'); ?>
      </h2>
      <?php /* If this is a yearly archive */ } elseif (is_year()) { ?>
      <h2 class="search">Archive for
        <?php the_time('Y'); ?>
      </h2>
      <?php /* If this is an author archive */ } elseif (is_author()) { ?>
      <h2 class="search">Author Archive</h2>
      <?php /* If this is a paged archive */ } elseif (isset($_GET['paged']) && !empty($_GET['paged'])) { ?>
        <h2 class="search">Blog Archives</h2>
        <?php } ?>
    </div>
    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
    <div class="entry">
      <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
        <h2><a href="<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>">
          <?php the_title(); ?>
          </a></h2>
        <p class="postinfo"><span class="upper">
          <?php the_time('M j, Y') ?>
          </span> <span class="category">
          <?php the_category(', ') ?>
          </span>
          <?php edit_post_link('Edit', ' | ', ''); ?>
        </p>
        <?php the_content('<p class="serif">Read the rest of this entry &raquo;</p>'); ?>
        <?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', 'after' => '</p>', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>
        <p class="postinfo">
          <?php the_tags( 'Tags: ', ', ', ''); ?>
        </p>
      </div>
    </div>
    <div class="clear"></div>
    <?php endwhile; else: ?>
    <div class="entry">
      <p>Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.</p>
    </div>
    <?php endif; ?>
  </div>
</div>

<br clear="all" />
</div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

To achieve an image grid layout change your archive file to something like

<?php get_header(); ?>
<div class="grid_16 content_wrapper">
<div id="left" class="grid_9 omega alpha">
  <div id="content">
    <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
    <div class="post">
      <?php $post = $posts[0]; // Hack. Set $post so that the_date() works. ?>
      <?php /* If this is a category archive */ if (is_category()) { ?>

      <?php /* If this is a tag archive */ } elseif( is_tag() ) { ?>
      <h2 class="search">Posts Tagged &#8216;
        <?php single_tag_title(); ?>
        </h2>
      <?php /* If this is a daily archive */ } elseif (is_day()) { ?>
      <h2 class="search">Archive for
        <?php the_time('F jS, Y'); ?>
      </h2>
      <?php /* If this is a monthly archive */ } elseif (is_month()) { ?>
      <h2 class="search">Archive for
        <?php the_time('F, Y'); ?>
      </h2>
      <?php /* If this is a yearly archive */ } elseif (is_year()) { ?>
      <h2 class="search">Archive for
        <?php the_time('Y'); ?>
      </h2>
      <?php /* If this is an author archive */ } elseif (is_author()) { ?>
      <h2 class="search">Author Archive</h2>
      <?php /* If this is a paged archive */ } elseif (isset($_GET['paged']) && !empty($_GET['paged'])) { ?>
        <h2 class="search">Blog Archives</h2>
        <?php } ?>
    </div>
 <div class="entry-spotlight">
 <h2>Spot Light</h2>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
      <div class="spotlight" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
        <a href="<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>">
          <?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?></a><p><a href="<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title_attribute(); ?></a></p>

        <p class="postinfo">
          <?php the_tags( 'Tags: ', ', ', ''); ?>
        </p>
      </div>

    <?php endwhile; else: ?>
    <div class="entry">
      <p>Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.</p>
    </div>
    <?php endif; ?>
<div class="clear"></div>
</div>
  </div>
</div>

<br clear="all" />
</div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Then edit the css so that each image floats to the left and had a suitable margin around it to look nice.

Not sure why there are so few posts to fix this as Arthemia is a very popular, clean, magazine style, FREE WordPress theme.  You can get more details on the theme and download it from the homepage. Of course, if your blog is hosted with Dx3webs just shout and we will install the theme for you.

This is the new version of Arthemia Free. I’ve done some changes in the post list in the front page, solve some CSS problem, added the thumbnail feature for post list in front page, archive, and search page, modify the comment list style, and added the WP-PageNavi plugin support. Pages and sub-pages in the top navigation bar are now shown automatically.

The fix is simple.

Edit footer.php

ADD

<h3>Recent Posts</h3>

<ul> <?php wp_get_archives(‘title_li=&type=postbypost&limit=5′); ?> </ul>

AFTER

<div id=”recentpost” class=”clearfloat”>

Also, this blog has a great guide to setting up and configuring Arthemia and you will need some of the plugins from here.