Use Thesis’ Inbuilt SEO Capability – Remove All In One SEOPack
Thesis and the All in One SEO Pack plugin both allow you to specify title, description and keywords meta tags in your WordPress blog.
If you want to use Thesis’ inbuilt SEO capability instead of those of All In One SEO Pack, this post describes a method of migrating all the title, meta description and keywords from your existing posts from All In One SEO Pack into Thesis.
It’s a four step approach:
1) Check and note the meta tags of a single post that has All In One SEO Pack tags specified on it.
2) Run the following SQL statement using myPHPAdmin or some other SQL tool
3) Deactivate the All IN One SEO Pack plugin.
4) Re-check the title, description and keywords on your post are the same.
If the titles, descriptions and keywords are the same then all is well. If not then you can revert back to All In One SEO Pack by reactivating the plugin.
Step One: Check and Note Meta Tags of a Single Post
- Open a browser window and navigate to the your blog then click on the title of a recent post to open up the full post.
- Make a note of the post’s title.
- Right click with the mouse on your page and select View Source for Internet Explorer, or View Page Source for Firefox or Chrome
- Click <CTRL-F> to open the Find box and then type ‘title’
- Note the title that appears in between the <title> </title> tags
- Type ‘description’ in the Find box
- Note the description that appears immediately after <meta name=”description” content=”
- Type ‘keywords’ in the Find box
- Note the keywords that appear immediately after <meta name=”keywords” content=”
Step Two: Copying the Post meta data using SQL
Using a MySQL tool, perform the following updates to your MySQL WordPress database. Please take a backup first in case of errors. If you are unsure about how to access MySQL please read this helpful article.
If your version of All In One SEO Pack Version is earlier than 1.6 use the following query :
insert wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value)
select post_id, concat('thesis_', meta_key), meta_value
from wp_postmeta where meta_key in ('title','description','keywords');
If your version of All In One SEO Pack Version is 1.6 or greater use the following query :
insert wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value)
select post_id, concat('thesis_', substring(meta_key,10)), meta_value
from wp_postmeta where meta_key in ('_aioseop_title','_aioseop_description','_aioseop_keywords');
Two additional points which might be useful:
1. Please check then when you copy the above code snippets that they contain simple apostrophes and not the fancy opening and closing quotes. WordPress may not render this faithfully.
2. When you run the code you should see a message telling you how many rows have been updated. If an error message is shown then there may be a problem with the SQL (apostrophes, quotes, cut and paste, etc). If the message says ’0 rows inserted’ then maybe you need to run the other version of the SQL.
Step 3: Deactivate All In One SEO Pack
Open a new browser window, log on to your blog administration page, click on Plugins, and then click on the deactivate button next to the All IN One SEO Pack.
Step 4: Recheck the title, description and keywords
Refresh the browser page that is showing your blog page (not the admin page) by hitting F5, or clicking the refresh or reload icon and then repeat Step 1 above. If all is well then you title, description and keywords will be unchanged even through All In One SEO Pack has been disabled.
If the title, description and keywords are missing then do not worry: simply reactivate All In One SEO Pack and drop me a comment including the results of running the SQL query and I will see if I can help.
{ 42 comments… read them below or add one }
Good tutorial. I’ve added in the new code for version 1.6+ to our post (with credit back to you). Thanks for the update!
.-= Adam Pieniazek´s last blog ..How to Add Google Ad Section Targeting in Thesis =-.
Thanks man it worked great.. Though for people like me who simple copying and running this query, you need to replace wp_postmeta with the table which you have in your database.
You can also use wp-dbmanager plugin to check this..
Drat, this came about two weeks too late for me. I just copied and pasted all my info manually over a couple weeks from SEO Pack to Thesis’ areas for the info. I’ll pass this on to friends, though.
Sorry to hear you arrived here a bit too late. How are you getting on with Thesis? You gardening site looks good. I would suggest you add a couple of things – a slideshow using the Featured Content or the D13slideshow plugin and also a video of yourself doing some pruning – put this in the multimedia box. Get yourself a Flip Camera to shoot the video.
I’d love to get this working, but I only get 24 records imported when running the second version of the SQL code, and I have nearly 3,000 posts!
Just using the Select part of the first query returns 0 records.
Any ideas?
Try the following SQL to see what you already have
select meta_key, count(*)
from wp_postmeta
where meta_key like `%title`
or meta_key like `%description`
or meta_key like `%keywords`
group by meta_key;
This should tell you have many title, description and keywords you have for both AIOSP and Thesis
Hi Russel,
That returns the following:
thesis_description 26
thesis_keywords 28
thesis_title 5
_aioseop_description 11
_aioseop_keywords 12
_aioseop_title 1
And I have almost 3,000 posts!
Cheers,
Mark
Congratulations on your site. It is really very good.
olá!, seu site é bonito – mas `sobre` link vai à página `parceiros`
Russell, thanks so much for the excellent tips! I already have some pruning videos shot with my flip but they all seem to be the wrong size for the multimedia box, which is weird – maybe I am doing it wrong.
The slideshow of featured content is a great idea too. I’ll check into those plugins right now. Much appreciated!!
.-= Genevieve´s last blog ..Rubber Mulch: Where the Rubber Meets the – Soil? =-.
Genevieve, try using Vegas Movie Studio and Sound Forge Audio Studio by Sony as your editing tools for your flip camera videos. There is a 90 day trial version. Download this and see how you got on. You can clean up audio (background noise reduction, removing clicks, audio compression, fading in and out background music) as well as improve your video (cutting, brightening, resizing, etc, etc). We have tried half a dozen free and paid for tools and have found the Sony suite the one that gave the best quality at a reasonable cost.
Russell, thanks so much for the tips! Much appreciated, I’ll check those out this week. I’d love to have cleaner video.
Thanks a ton. It worked like a charm.
Cheers’
Vijay
Russel, thanks a lot for the tips. I appreciate the tutorial that you have here. Having a slideshow of featured contents a great idea too.
.-= Tim from SEO ´s last blog ..Links direct within Google Search Suggest =-.
I’ve been reading about Thesis on and off the past couple of days now. This is good to know.
Thanks,
Chris
.-= Christopher Basilio´s last blog ..Day 7: Incubator – Affiliate Marketing Game Plan =-.
Worked like a charm! I’ll be removing All-in-One SEO from all of my sites.
.-= john´s last blog ..What is EPR? =-.
I think I did this already, but I’ll give it a check. Before installing Thesis I had manually inserted the meta code from my old site to ease in the transition. But it should be off there now with the new Thesis created meta in place.
Hi Danny – As far as All in One SEO Pack (AIOSEOP) is concerned, you just have to do the SQL as described and then remove the plugin. It’s one less plugin to think about.
Hi Lizzy, yeah, what I had going on was a little different. I just added the meta information to my header by hand coding. I wrapped that in a nifty and carried on. The meta information was exactly the same as in my old site. I simply wanted the search engines to see the same thing as my old site until I added all the info of the new site. Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought it might help with the transition from old to new. (This was all before Thesis)
After installing Thesis, I simply went in a deleted that code that I had added and let Thesis add it’s own.
Note: I actually ran a search before installing Thesis. I noticed Google had picked up my inserted meta tags and was displaying them nicely over my new WP installation. So, my guess is… I was right. It worked wonderfully.
-Danny
More power to you Danny. Your site is looking great too.
Thanks for the tip! Been using the SEO pack for a while and been meaning to remove it.
.-= Charlie Street´s last blog ..Website Design and Development =-.
Thanks for this nice tutorial. Worked perfectly for me. thanks again
No problem Muhammad. Glad you liked it.
.-= Elizabeth´s last blog ..Learning About Affiliate Marketing =-.
Great information for those moving over. I have one, huge, seven-year-old blog that isn’t yet converted to Thesis and this will be a lifesaver.
.-= Alison Moore Smith´s last blog ..Start a New Blog in 1 Week =-.
Great tutorial. I kept putting off doing this because it sounded a bit technical, running a query against a database. But it turned out to be so easy, even I could do it. In my C panel there was a ‘query’ box down at the bottom right, I pasted in the text above and it all worked, automagically, as they say.
Thankyou! for a control freak it was great to be able to check before and after.
.-= Deb´s last blog ..Yeperenye caterpillar =-.
Simon, Deb Alison – Glad to be of help. Liz
Great tutorial! I’m wondering if AIO-SEO can be left running with all the settings, or will it conflict with the Thesis SEO settings? Thinking of moving to thesis, but this is not something I want to do right away.
Hi Scott,
Yes, you can leave AIOSP running. If AIOSP is installed its settings take precedence over the Thesis settings
Regards
Russell
Hello Russ.
I’m using AIOSEOP v1.6.10.3
I’ve followed your steps and I got the following output in PhpMyAdmin
2 row(s) inserted.Inserted row id: 1628 ( Query took 0.0012 sec )
Well, All what I want to copy are just the meta descriptions… Nothing more!
Hi Ted,
If the SQL only copied two row that suggests there are only two rows where you have explicitly set up a title or meta descriptions – both Thesis and AIOSP will both happily auto generate a title and meta description on the fly.
Run the following SQL to check what you have in the database:
select meta_key, count(*) from wp_postmeta
where meta_key like '%title'
or meta_key like '%description'
or meta_key like '%keywords'
group by meta_key
order by meta_key
Thanks for your response…
Showing rows 0 – 4 (5 total, Query took 0.0011 sec)
thesis_description – 8
thesis_keywords – 11
thesis_title – 2
_aioseop_keywords – 1
_aioseop_title – 1
Not so sure what that means.
BTW, I have 44 published posts and another 8 drafted.
Hi Ted,
Basically you have nothing to worry about.
It means that you were letting AIOSP choose the title and meta description automatically in all but 1 of your 44 posts. The SQL copied two rows because you had only set up one title and one keyword manually using AIOSP.
Thesis uses an almost identical algorithm as AIOSP for creating default titles so you SEO listings will not be impacted.
The only change you might want to consider it whether or not to include the Site Name as a suffix to the title. Thesis gives you are option to disable the inclusion of the suffix and I would normally recommend this so you can use the whole 64 characters of the title to focus on the keywords for the specific post.
Thesis does not automatically generate meta descriptions but this is not that important since Google will choose what to display as a description in the search listings. Meta descriptions are only really useful if they contain relevant and compelling text and this requires manual effort. In other words, automatically generating meta descriptions adds little value.
Thanks, I’m not worried or anything.
I know alll what you’re saying. The thing is that I have DiggDigg plugin installed and the icons of it are placed at the top of the posts after the headline. So when the meta description is auto generated by Thesis, It adds reddit links to the meta description and stuff.
So, Russ…
Is it possible to copy the automatically generated meta description from AIOSEOP to Thesis? Or maybe prevent those link from appearing in the description after removing AIOSEOP?
Hi Ted,
Great question.
The answer to the first part of your question is no, at least not easily. AIOSP dies not save the autogenerated meta descriptions – they are produced on the fly each time the post/page is requested.
To get rid of the Reddit links in the meta description you need to either: a) manually add a meta description for each post or b) See if you can get the Digg Plugin to move it links to the bottom of the post
Regards
Russell
Excellent post, thesis is a great theme but at the same time difficult to use.
Hi Kelly,
I guess it depends what you are trying to achieve and what your individual skills are. What was it you were having difficulty with?
I can see from your website that you are using the Weekly Theme which has some neat features to give a magazine look on the home page. To achieve this in Thesis would likely require the use of a plugin such as Featurd Content Gallery and some programming to create a custom page template – not a small amount of work.
If the Weekly Theme does everything you want it to, then it makes sense to stick with it.
Russell
Thanks for the good tutorial. Unfortunately I have a problem. I have run the SQL and deactivated the All in One Seo pack. Unfortunately on some pages I see the meta description (e.g on the page Zahnärzte, Zahnklinik), but I don’t see it in the post “Zahnimplantation”
Could you help me what is the problem? Should I activate AiOSP again? Of course I’m using Thesis.
Thank you!
Hi Russell,
Tried your technique but getting and error when I try to run the commands:
insert wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value) select post_id, concat(\’thesis_\’, substring(meta_key,10)), meta_value from wp_postmeta where meta_key in (\’_aioseop_title\’,\’_aioseop_description\’,\’_aioseop_keywords\’);
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '\r\nselect post_id, concat(\\\'thesis_\\\', substring(meta_key,10)), meta_value ' at line 1]
insert wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value)\r\nselect post_id, concat(\\\’thesis_\\\’, substring(meta_key,10)), meta_value from wp_postmeta where meta_key in (\\\’_aioseop_title\\\’,\\\’_aioseop_description\\\’,\\\’_aioseop_keywords\\\’);
Any suggestions?
Hi Bert,
Looks like all the single quotes have been preceded by a backslash. All backslashes should all be removed from the SQL.
Regards
Russell
Ildiko,
Thesis like AIOSP will create a default meta description if none is supplied manually.
What do you have in the custom_field ‘thesis_description’ ? What is the URL of the post?
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