However, I am testing this now on key posts. I am big on LSI and synonyms.

By adding related keyword phrases with synonyms this helps with SEO because you can vary your keywords so it does not seem to spammy.

I will also play with excerpts meta descriptions etc, but I think related keywords is written write could be the most important signal for relevancy if your post is written naturally.

All these extra SEO feature that are below the post area once you finish writing are welcome, even though they are extra work. My SEO strategy is to work these in an important posts.

One funny result I notice that may or may not be related to: The All in One feature – I will let you know if I can not fix it.

Sorry for all the comments, this last week I was in Disney (again) and riding a 15 foot artificial wave, I gashed my head and have 10 stitches after colliding with someone. Hence I am taking it easy, laying in bed with my laptop and playing with the new Stallion theme and discovering a lot of cool features and some old ones I neglected.

Like how could I miss something so basic as the ‘SEO Post widget’ and all the cool options. Especially latest modified. My new mantra is to modify old posts and improve them as it seems Google is rewarding me for doing so, even more than new posts. So that plugin plus the related keyword phases, etc helps be modify old posts and improve them.

If anyone has any other tips or tricks with Stallion, I am all ears. What features you use or find useful? My sites get a reasonable amount of traffic. Maybe in aggregate all my sites are over 20,000 views a day (maybe less than 10k post Panda, need to check and add them all). So I do well, but always looking for the next thing. I can not write content, develop new ideas for websites (for example, I am now trying to see if I can make WP a dating site – have not been successful yet), spend time with my family, and hence I miss major features with Stallion or ideas with WP.

When I tested the auto thumbnail feature I would always add the featured thumbnail last and it would always work as I expected.

The order is

Last image added (date wise) to a post via WordPress, if it’s the featured image you added last to the post it’s used, if after adding a featured post you insert an image into the post that’s used.

Ideally it would always use the featured image first, so will see if I can get that working in a future Stallion release.

If using the featured image is essential for a particular post a work around is remove the featured image and add it back as the featured image so it’s the last image added.

Thanks for the feedback.

David

I have made a few other minor design changes in the meantime but I think this supports the idea that the thumbnails feature could be a good way to keep visitors more engaged with content and on the site longer, especially if you have posts with some nice attention-getting images.

Either way, I think it definitely makes the main page look sharper. So for anyone else out there I’d recommend trying this feature if you’re not already.

Just a note on getting the right image to show if you have a preferred image–in my experience I have found that the “featured image” option doesn’t seem to work, unless I am somehow setting it wrong, but I don’t think so. Rather, it seems the last image inserted into the post is the one that it automatically treats as the default image. So something to keep in mind if you are doing a post with multiple images and wish for a particular image to be displayed.

Yesterday was checking comments on that site (check that site every couple of weeks) and Akismet had filtered over 1,000 spam comments since my last check, checking through what had passed Akismet found a couple of SPAM comments that got through which I manually marked as SPAM (I understand Akismet learns from us marking SPAM as SPAM).

Stallion has built in comment link features under the Stallion Advanced SEO options page section “Links and Comments”.

The site I mentioned above has author URLs disabled (via Stallion : authors can’t add an author URL and Stallion doesn’t show an author URL, also comment body links with format htt://www.example.com are not converted to clickable links) and it makes little difference to the automated SPAM that’s posted by SPAMMERS using SPAMBOTS since it’s automated (doesn’t cost them much time to add your sites URL to their SPAMBOTS list of blogs to SPAM).

Stallion also protects your site from wasting link benefit via author URLS and in the case of SPAMMERS author links that can get your site a penalty. If you have author links turned on in Stallion (like I have on this site) your commenter’s can add author links, but they are invisible to Google etc… Your visitors can click the links and so you can reward your commenter’s with click through traffic, but there is no SEO damage to your site and no SEO benefit to your commenter’s sites (no link benefit is passed or lost : with all other WordPress themes I’ve seen comment author URLS have nofollow added to them and this deletes link benefit!!!).

For most sites I use Akismet, allow author links to be added and shown and have WordPress set to moderate all new commenter’s first comments. When I approve a commenter’s first comment all future comments are approved automatically. This is a really good setup for an important site you put time into.

David

Thanks.

Benny