Improving your Targeted Keywords List

Most Webmasters only think of their main keywords when the term, 'targeted keywords' come into their mind. More often than not, we only target our main keywords and forgetting the importance of the other long tail keywords. This is a major mistake that I have realized. Every Webmasters should have a list of the targeted keywords for their sites and keep expanding this list when they have done optimizing for a specific terms. There are several advantages for doing this. The greatest benefit is that we can concentrate on less competitive keywords since they are much broader and more specific. It is definitely much harder to optimize for 'SEO services' than for 'Affordable SEO Services'. There are two ways we can go about to increase and expand our existing targeted keywords list. One is to increase its depth, while the other is the breadth. To increase our current keywords depth, we can examine the Search Engine auto-complete feature. For example, you will see other suggestions offered by Google if you were to key in 'earn money ' into the search box. The suggested options include 'earn money online' and 'earn money quickly'. These are keywords that you can target and it builds more depth into our current list. Another great example of improving the depth of your keyword list is to use the online keywords tool such as the Overture and Free Wordtracker tool. These tools help really by providing other related searches that help the Webmasters to further expand their keywords. In terms of expanding the breadth of the keyword list, we must constantly check out our visitor logs and incoming links to analyze what are the keywords that constantly brings in traffic. You will be surprised at times to find out that some unexpected keywords are actually the major source for your traffic. Cpanel provides a very comprehensive list of referring keywords and it is highly advisable to check our the logs provided by them. To conclude, it is very important to target on new set of keywords from time to time as this will also help you to attract a new crowd. Focusing on much specific keywords from the start also make your optimization effort much easier.

Press Release: Why SEO Experts Should Not Use Press Releases

Rumor has it that press releases are the next big thing in the SEO business, and many companies are spending top dollars trying to write the next big press release announcing the next big balloon breaking technology. But is this really the next big thing?

By definition, a Press Release is a kind of news item released by the company on whom the news is being reported. As such, you will have to compete with all the other press releases and hope that your will get picked up.

Why Will Your Press Release Be Trashed?
1) Unless you are writing a press release about Microsoft, Adobe, Sony or one of the other mega-companies, or at least about a company that is relatively well known, forget about it. Journalists and news editors receive thousands of press releases a day and there is no way that they will waste more than a quick glance. So why should you pay a company seven to eight hundred dollars for them sending your press release to thousands of editors and journalists when they are going to junk it anyway?

2) Unless you are announcing a truly revolutionary product or technology (which I assume you are not since you are only interested in using the professionally paid and written press release to boost your search engine rankings), whatever you make up or announce such as some new free deal or new portal offering something unique, your chances of being picked up are very slim. Yes, the PR companies will tell you that they have vast experience in writing Press Releases that will make yours stand out and get picked up but this is not accurate. The only way your PR is going to get picked up is if it truly is something out of the ordinary or something that no one has ever thought off.

3) Unless you plan to spend millions of dollars and then just by sheer volume your site will go ahead in the search engines, this is not a good option. Why? If you send a large number of press releases then these will be placed on the different PR companies websites main page. Since most of these home pages have a very high page rank, your site will get a boost. The question is whether this boost is worth the large amount of money you will put into the PR companies pocket. No it is not. Use that money to buy (though I do not recommend this) links from high-ranked websites and you will pay less and receive more benefit.

4) Any press release, even if it has been accepted, will remain on the different pages for just a short time, making the time and effort and even more so the amount of money you paid fruitless.

Conclusion:
A press release is useful if you wish to contact the press and maybe get some free publicity, but it is of no use if you wish to use it as a tool in order to advance your website in the search engines.

My Troubles With Wordpress Themes

It all began in the late 90's. I wanted to put some news on my website. A diary. A list of forthcoming events. I started with simple HTML. One page, with sections for every post. Simple. Then I heard about 'blogs' and 'blogging'. Being smart, I picked Wordpress, the most popular software. How clever, I thought. If you get the WYSIWYG editor going, anyone can put up a web site. Very democratic. This encouraged my to post my outermost thoughts; on politics, London, and personal gripes. As a webmaster, I watched to see Google index them. "Here we go", I thought, "soon, my jewels of extrospection will belong to the ages". Except Google didn't like my blog. It wouldn't index much beyond the front page. Why, why, why? Duplicate content? I set it to put only one post per page. No improvement. I looked at what Google was indexing. Then I looked at the blog HTML. Soon, all became clear. In sum: - Wordpress was still duplicating my content, and
- It had no proper META tags, and
- There was a lot irrelevant HTML, and
- The layout obscured the content. I had a quick search on Google to find search engine optimisation tips. There is a plugin 'head META description' ( http://guff.szub.net/plugins/ ). But I didn't use that, oh no. For some reason, I got the notion that a complete theme would be the ticket. I tried modifying an existing one myself. Better, but not perfect. Google was starting to index more pages, but they all had the same title. My missives to an uncaring world were being ignored. So I got someone else to do one, based on my criteria, which were: - Grab a META 'title' from the blog post 'title';
- Grab a META 'description' from the blog 'excerpts';
- Put a ROBOTS 'noindex' tag in non-content pages.
But that wasn't enough. For best SEO results you need to configure Wordpress brutally. You have to be _mean_ to it. You have to _man_ enough. I did a bit of research and came up with to following tips. WARNING: They are extreme. If you already have good rankings, making radical changes to your URLs may affect them. In my case: - Moving my blog http://www.ttblog.co.uk to the root web directory,
- MOD_REWRITING its URLs, and
- Removing a 301 redirect, ... caused my PageRank to go to 0. BUT, page indexing was unaffected. This was temporary, as Google saw it as 'suspect' behaviour. I had radically changed my site. Here are the tips, for real _men_, who can look in the face of internet death and laugh: 1. Activate permalinks by going to 'Options/Permalinks'. You may have to enable Apache MOD_REWRITE on your web account. 1a. Shorten the permalinks code to just the %postname% variable. Don't bother with the date codes. This keeps your URLs short. 2. Point your blog in the uppermost directory possible. http://www.ttblog.co.uk is better than http://www.ttblog.co.uk/wordpress/ So a typical post would look like
http://www.ttblog.co.uk/Im-hard-as-nails-me/
rather than
http://www.ttblog.co.uk/wordpress/2006/08/03/Im-hard-as-nails-me/
3. Then install an SEO'd theme. My blog posts are now being indexed beautifully. The Google 'site:' command returns all my posts, and little else. For my next challenge, I take on Windows XP, and turn it into an operating system.

How To Block Direct Image Linking Using .htaccess

Most of us have a specified limit to the amount of traffic our web servers will handle for us. That limit seems very generous – until you start looking at image downloads and the bandwidth required. A few dozen users downloading an image – that's one thing. But what if you have an image that dozens of other websites like?

Worst-case scenario: suppose you run a site that gets hold of a picture taken by an Iraqi soldier of an incident that gains a lot of media attention. And suppose you have the exclusive rights to that image. You want to sell it, of course, not give it away, so you don't post it as a freebie. You may have a downloadable version that others can take away to post on their own website, generally with a link to your site. But your original image is reserved for your use only.

Here's the problem. Webmasters, often amateurs not really understanding why what they are doing is harmful, want to deliver the best possible image to their own readers. So instead of downloading your free file or linking to your site, they embed a link in their own page that downloads your picture, and only your picture, as part of their own website. This is easy to do; all you have to do is use the image link straight out to the other website.

With that excellent and lucrative image referenced above, you may have blogs on both sides indexing you; you may even have news sites or image sites indexing you. How much bandwidth can your site take before it exceeds your monthly limit? Chances are, even a medium-case scenario is going to turn your site into a DNS instead, and you will lose viewers and site ranking while you are unavailable. Not worth posting that great picture anymore, is it?

But you do have another option: the .htaccess file. This works primarily in Apache servers; if you're not certain what you've got, call and ask. Because not all systems will allow them, and some can even be damaged by improper .htaccessing, you should contact your server administrator before you upload one, anyway.

What Is .htaccess?

.htaccess is a type of file that has, for years, been used to restrict access to protected web pages or areas, such as error pages and password-protected directories. You create it using a text editor such as NotePad or SimpleText, and then save as plain (ASCII) text. Upon saving it, the file extension needs to be changed from .txt to .htaccess – and the rest of the name needs to be left off. Your file should be named nothing except for .htaccess. Not file.htaccess. Just .htaccess.

If your text program insists on appending the .txt, you can right-click the file anywhere you normally open it and select Rename to remove the .txt. If your computer system does not show file extensions, look up how to make it show them! Alternately, telnet and ftp programs will also allow you to rename files and remove extensions.

Creating .htaccess Files

Your first step in creating this file should be to open your text editor and save an empty page as .htaccess. Turn off your word wrap function. .htaccess files are intended to be single-line commands, and a word wrap can throw this completely off and make your file unusable, either by breaking lines in the wrong place or by putting in unwanted characters when it's uploaded.

When you upload an .htaccess file, it should be encoded as ASCII, not binary. CHMOD the file to either 644 or (RW-R—R--) so that the server can use it but a browser cannot; readable .htaccess files can compromise your security by allowing hackers to figure out what you have protected and where the authentication files are. (You can also prevent this problem by putting your authentication files above the root directory so that they cannot be accessed via www.)

An .htaccess file affects the directory it's placed in as well as any subsequent subdirectories; if you have files everywhere you want protected, you can put the .htaccess file in your root directory. If you only want to protect your images, you can put it in your images directory alone. The closest .htaccess file to any given directory, reading up the directory tree, is the one that is applied to that specific directory. Try to use the fewest number of .htaccess files possible; redundancies can cause an infinite loop, which is bad for your site.

Preventing Hot Linking

The most important thing you want to do with an .htaccess file is prevent hot linking of non-HTML objects like images and movies. Hot linking is often referred to as "bandwidth stealing."

Your .htaccess file will disallow hotlinking; instead of the image your thief is trying to use, they'll get something else, like a broken image symbol or content you specify (angry men are popular).

Your .htaccess file content should read as follows:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ - [F]

The first two lines you don't have to modify in any way. However, the third line's http://mydomain.com needs to be modified to reflect your URL. The fourth line in the example is set up to deny use of GIFs and JPEGs; you can add, using a pipe (|) separator, any other file type you wish.

If your server is set up to deliver alternate content (call your server administrator and ask), you can add another piece to the fourth line of code in the .htaccess file to do this:

RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.mydomain.com/angryman.gif [R,L]

This delivers an angry-man image you have in your directory; just as above, make certain you change that domain name to the proper one.