Matt Cutts put up a video about how Google deals with Robots.txt files. This will be a good one if you’re wondering exactly how Google sees your blocked URLs, etc…

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

How Robots.txt works in Google

Too often business owners make important decisions based on non-factual data. Risky assumptions can be rewarding, but the same goes for the Roulette… Do you really want to gamble with your business?

Take this scenario for instance: a site is 100% geared towards lead acquisition. It has “Try us for FREE” buttons and call-to-action all over the place. In fact, you could not buy their product directly if you wanted, all you can do is take advantage of that “free offer”. They run on that model for a few years, and begin to really understand how that machine works.

Then, one day the big cheese decides to skip this lead acquisition process and attempt to go straight into a direct purchase model. He may have his legitimate reasons for doing so, and it might make sense, but it’s REALLY important to realize that doing so is taking a huge leap into unknown ground! Continuing our story, they add a shopping cart to the site and give that “Purchase Now” more attention than the “Free offer” lead gen catcher. They still offer that “Free offer”, it’s just a bit over shadowed by the “Purchase Now” call-to-action.

So far so good, they need to test those grounds and see what happens as it could be a tremendous step forward for their business.

As any goals oriented individual would do, the big cheese asks the team to create some goals around this new strategy, and the problem begins…

There’s nothing wrong with being an optimistic team, but it’s suicidal to setup goals based on the top performing lead generation model when you’re turning your online business into a “Buy Now” machine. EVERYTHING changes!! Sure, maybe there isn’t too much difference to the naked eye, the site is still the same – we only have a new bigger and brighter button everywhere that says “Buy Now” or whatever.

This addition may be a small change in the site, or a small change for the parties in charge, but it’s a HUGE ASS CHANGE for the consumer!!! Now, all of a sudden you can buy something that you used to get for free, WHOA!

Just take this into consideration… Whenever you run into a situation where you’re making changes to your site, however small they may be, really pay attention at how that is affecting your business model. And be really careful at how you’re measuring your success. It’s important to set high goals, and they also need to be realistic – and realistic goals are almost never built on assumptions. Remember the old saying? “When you assume you make an ASS our of U and ME”.

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Never Take small changes for Granted!

The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) strikes again. I posted a video by this guy in the past, about pay-per-click management, but if you haven’t seen him yet, here’s another chance. The lyrics are good little guide on things to keep in mind when doing a redesign and/or a new design.

Watch the video and read the lyrics, comment your thoughts

Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration
a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation
if you have animation
use with moderation
cause search engines can’t index the information
display the logos of all your associations
highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration
but to try to prevent any client hesitation
every page that they click should provide and explanation
should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination
but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations
but don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time
make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat,
tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate
check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox
title everything including links and images
don’t use italics, use emphasis
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong
when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that’s the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker
design and code right man I hope you get the picture
what I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter
if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Designing SEO friendly code

I thought I’d post about this because it’s so simple and yet I am asked about it often.

How do I see all hidden files in my FTP using FileZilla?

or

I can’t see the .htaccess file but I know it’s there!!

If you’re running into that problem too, here’s what to do:

FIRST: Click on “Server”

SECOND: Select “Force Showing Hidden Files”

That’s it. You’re done. Look in the root folder now and you should see the .htaccess file or whatever other hidden file you may be looking for.

Just be careful, you could take a whole system down editing something you don’t know how to edit.

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

How to see hidden files in FileZilla

For those of us that were unable to attend PubCon 2008 in Vegas, Google has released a video by Matt Cutts which recreates the “State of the Index” talk he did there.

This is a summary of what Google did in 2008 and what they intend to do in 2009.

It’s a long video, but worth the watch! There’s a slide version if you just want to skim through this.

Enjoy

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

State of the Google Index – by Matt Cutts

I have just finished upgrading my Wordpress to the new 2.7! OOOoooohh. So far so good. After so many upgrades (c’mon Wordpress, give us a little break) I’ve managed to be good enough at it that I don’t pull my entire site down anymore. It was actually pretty smooth, and I must say, ’tis a good looking dashboard!

Also, in addition to keeping up with the Search Engine Optimization community, I’m trying to expand my horizons into the world of Paid Search as well. I already work in that realm, and have a basic strategic knowledge of running decent campaigns, but I would like to dive a little deeper in there as well, just to broaden my capacity as an SEM project manager. So in addition to picking up some new feeds from good Paid Search resources and blogs, I’m also getting certified with the Adwords program, just so I can flash that little badge. I know all you get is a jpeg that says “Google Adwords Qualified Professional”, but I didn’t see anywhere in their policies stating that I can’t print that image, cut it out and make it into a real badge!

Last but not least, I will make an effort to keep my blog updated more often than I have. I went over one month without posting anything and the theory I had talked about before — that my list of subscribers tends to increase when I don’t write anything — was debunked!

Enjoy this awesome little video that Videogum put together, I grabbed it from Boing Boing! The Most Awesome Viral Videos of 2008!!

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Wordpress 2.7, SEM, and a Viral Video

I’m glad I was able to break the silence before the one month mark. If you’ve been here before, you will notice that the SEO Survivor website has been remodeled. A little face lift if you will . This new design is clean and goes with my theme. I also changed my avatar a little bit and incorporated it into the header of the site, so that’s pretty cool!

I thought I would share my experience of going through this upgrade as it was truly a  learning experience. It all started with me downloading the latest version of Wordpress and installing it. Once the package was downloaded, unpacked and ready to go, I did what every sensible webmaster would, a back up. I backed up the site files and the database. After all of those cautionary steps, I went for the meaty stuff and started uploading the files. That’s when the S#1T hit the fan!

I did the usual database upgrade and tried to log in. No access. Puzzled I tried again, and again, and again, and still no access. So I went to my “Forgot Password” tool over and over and over again, and still nothing. So I started to sweat cold a bit and rolled up my sleeves to get inside my database and reset the password from there.

Now I know this isn’t new information, and it is available through the Wordpress support files, but I thought I would share it here too, just to provide another place to find this important information. I opted for phpMyAdmin for my database, so these instructions will cover those steps.

Before going into your phpMyAdmin, make sure the problem isn’t coming from your wp-config.php file. It’s extremely important that this file is 100% clean. No extra spaces in the beginning nor at the end, and make sure that the database username is correct, as well as the password. These are probably different than the ones we’re trying to reset since they are the logins for the database.

disclaimer: phpMyAdmin could screw things up even further, so don’t go in there if you’re not confident, or ready for the possibility to screw things up even further as stated before

• The first thing to do is to log into your phpMyAdmin account.
• You will see a list of databases, click on your Wordpress database.

• The tables of your database will display, if they don’t, click on Structure.
• Find wp_users.
• Click on the icon for browse or structure.

• You will be taken to a screen that lists the fields within the wp_users table.

• Find user_login and click on browse. Now look for the ID number associated with this login. Write it down somewhere, or remember it.
• Go back to the wp_users table.
• Find the user_pass field and browse to find the ID number associated with this login.
• Click edit.
• You will see a long list of letters and numbers next to the ID number.
• Select that mumbo jumbo and delete it.

• Type in your new password.
• After typing your pass, go to the dropdown menu and select MD5.
• Make sure you have the correct password, also make sure MD5 is in the box.
• Click on the Go button, it’s on the bottom right.

• If this didn’t do it for you, make sure you’ve followed all of these instructions correctly, including the config.php instructions above.

So I hope you didn’t need these instructions, but if you did I’m sure they came in handy. Please check the help page from Wordpress regarding resetting passwords for more information as the stuff I’m sharing with you here was learned from there.

Thank you for reading and make sure to comment if you have anything to add or share.

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Change is good but it can cause panic

Buenas tardes everyone,

It’s another perfect day in this perfect world we live in, and what better than some good updates from the Search Engine Marketing world to make everything fit right in? I can’t think of anything better… Below is a short list of some articles that captured my attention this week, nothing from the main news stream that you already heard about from reading major news sources. This is the good stuff you don’t find out from such sources, these are things that come from “a friend of a friend”. Today I am your friend’s friend, and here are the news I bring to you:

1. imnotadoctor exposed Big Local today. As he was doing the geek’s version of the daily muscle flexing in front of the mirror, which is googling keywords your site ranks well for, he found some major spamming going on. Not only that, but they have a fishy 302 redirect in place taking visitors from the target url (www.clovers.com) to their main site (www.BigLocal.com). You should read up on that story on Search Engine Land.
2. A Twitter Search engine is out. I found http://summize.com/ this week, but I’m not sure how new it is. Pretty interesting tool, and simple concept. It basically searches through people’s tweats and serves results. Here is the search result’s page for tweats related to the seosurvivor.
3. Google’s Porn problem seems to be far from over. In the last month there have been at least two instances where Google was spotted displaying explicit porno pictures in the universal search results box. When searching for “knuckles” and “Hot Celebrities” on regular search, with the “adult filter” on, you’d get a big old explicit image right there on the top of the results. Not cool Google, not cool at all. Granted, it’s freaking hard to keep those spamming porn sites out of the way.



4. Linda Phan, from eVisibility, wrote an awesome post about helping searchers find their way with local business ads. Amongst other things, Linda talks about how advertisers don’t get charged for people clicking to expand the plusbox, clicking on the actual map, or clicking to get directions to the business location, which is nice for all adwords users out there. A good read if your business is local and you use PPC.
5. The SEM industry still rocks! Danny DeMichele wrote a post on his blog talking about some recent studies showing that the Internet Marketing Industry is far from declining, it’s actually gaining more momentum! That’s a good thing to know for all those of us who are immersed in it 24/7.

I’m stirring the brain juice and crafting some fun posts for next week. Have a great weekend and pick up your trash

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Geek gossip

Today I’m going to write about a time when you should be turning off your SEO for Firefox tool.

I first noticed this anomaly while working on my own blog, and again when working on a client’s site who uses Drupal. (hey, they already had Drupal installed. Nothing wrong with it, but if you ask me I prefer other technologies)

Alright, back to the subject. For those of you who aren’t familiar with SEO for Firefox, it’s a Mozilla Firefox add-on that every SEO professional and enthusiast should have, along with SEO Quake. It’s a free resource. Read this post first, then after you subscribe to my blog (hint, hint), you can get yours here.

So, while writing my post about the DoubleClick purchase, I used <rel=”nofollow”> on some of my links cause I didn’t feel like giving Google any of my precious link authority . (If you don’t know about “nofollow” tags, this post explains it, but finish reading first!!)

To add the <rel=”nofollow”> attribute to my link tag, I had to switch to the “Code” tab in my post editor.

Now that I was in there, I added the attribute as you can see below:

Then I switched back to the “Visual” tab to finish up my blog post. I switched and notice that my SEO for Firefox was picking up that link as a “nofollow”, and highlighting it red as it likes to do with all “nofollows”. I thought: “Alright, you go nofollow! I mean… ummm… You are actually going nowhere, you’re a nofollow..” It acted as a confirmation that it was in place.

So I continued on with my post and published it. Once it was all done, I checked the live site on all browsers I have installed on my machine, just to be extra anal. Firefox first, duh! Check… Next was Explorer… Check.. umm.. Wait! Something wasn’t right there. I don’t have SEO for Firefox installed on my Explorer and somehow it was picking it up and highlighting it.

I thought to myself… Weird! Specially because that was the only nofollow on my page being picked up. Very weird indeed! What to do? I went back to the code. Logged back into my admin area, went into my “Manage” tab and picked this post.

Everything looked ok, I still didn’t get it.. So I went into the “Code” tab and lo! and behold! Well, see for yourself:

Did you see what happened there? You probably did, but just in case you didn’t, I’ll help you out. When I first added the <rel=”nofollow”> attribute to the link tag, I had my SEO for Firefox turned on. Then I switched to “Visual” mode and the SEO for Firefox did what it does best, it highlighted the link red because it saw a “nofollow” on the code behind it. When it did that, my post editor read it as if I had highlighted that word in red myself, so it added the extra code <style=”background-color: #ff0000″> into the link tag. The end result was a link with the red highlight in the code, not something I wanted at all.

From that point on, I learned to turn my SEO for Firefox tool OFF before working on a post

I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, please don’t be shy, comment, share, subscribe!

Til next time!

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

When Seo For Firefox Needs To Be Turned Off

As promised last Friday, I wrote a blog post on understanding what the “No Follow” tag can do for you.

The post was just published this morning and it has already received quite a bit of positive feedback from the Sphinn community.

If you have a website, need to explain “nofollow” tags to clients and don’t know how, or are interested in understanding more about how nofollow tags work, you must check this out at the eVisibility Insider.

Have a great week, and look forward to another post later this week.

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Using nofollow tags