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.