Why this is important: The site design is essentially the first impression that someone gets when they land on your site. You may have all your usability and SEO elements in place, but if the design is lacking then your visitor’s impression of you will be lacking as well. A visually appealing site can not only bolster trust and credibility, but it can make you stand out among other less-appealing sites in your industry.

Why this is important: The logo lends directly to brand identity and site identification. It also creates a certain element of appeal and professionalism in the mind of the visitor. It holds an important role in visitor assurance and navigation.

Why this is important: The browser is (obviously) what we use to view websites. The goal is to give the visitor the best browsing experience possible, but we have to keep in mind that not all browsers are the same. We must make sure to accommodate different users, ensuring that they get the most value out of the site possible.

Why this is important: The domain name is part of the identity of your business. The URL chosen can have a significant impact on brand identity and in a lesser extent, keyword ranking performance. However, how your site domain name and page URLs function can have significant impact on the crawlability of the site as well as overall visitor and traffic performance.

Just because you have a well-designed site doesn’t mean that it is sufficiently usable. The web is littered with great looking sites that have a whole mess of usability problems. But it’s also true that just because a website employs effective usability strategies that it’s not necessarily pleasing on the eyes.

We’ve all seen those direct mail-like landing pages, the ones that scroll on forever telling you just how great the product is that you need to buy. Usually they have a big red heading, some pictures, testimonials and a lot of words highlighted to draw your eye to them. As ugly goes, these pages pretty much invented the thing, but you know what, they are extremely effective. And a lot of that is in their simplicity.

But these pages are meant to do one thing, and one thing only. Get a conversion. They are designed to sell the visitor on something. On the other hand, as we have been discussing over the past couple of weeks, a Destination Website is meant to engage the visitor. Yes, they can also sell products or services, but they go about it in an entirely different way.

The design of a website is an important aspect of building a destination that people want to return to time and time again. But don’t go out and spend all kinds of money for the most current, up-to-date website design with all the whistles and bells. Stop for a second to truly consider what kind of website design you really need.

At any given time I have three FireFox browser widows open, each with their own number of open tabs. So it’s natural for me to check and verify my changes using my browser of choice. Sometimes, I even think to check my changes in Internet Explorer. Admittedly, I don’t regularly check IE when the changes are relatively minor, but always when the changes effect formatting. But that’s not the other browser I’m referring to.

We get so accustomed to our own way of surfing the web that we forget that there many other browsers and browsing experiences that may be foreign to us. Now most web designers will do their due diligence and check a site in multiple versions of FireFox, Internet Explorer, Netscape and Safari. Heck you might look at a half of dozen other browsers that most people, including myself, have never even heard of. But those are not the browsers I’m referring to either.

There are four primary “other” browsers and browsing experiences that are typically overlooked by site owners, casual webmaster and, yes, even by the average web designer. But with more and more users moving to these alternate browsing experiences, it is even more important to check your websites to make sure that they function properly for these users.

While the search engines can’t read actual images, they can read what we say about the image. This information can be gleaned a few different ways:

• Image file name (image1234.jpg vs. mustang-gt.jpg)
• Text immediately surrounding the image
• The overall content of the page the image is on
• Image ALT attribute in the image tag

When trying to optimize images for image search, all of these can provide important indicators the search engines use to produce the best set of image results. In terms of traditional optimization and website usability, the ALT attribute plays an important role.

While perusing through the Reno Rodeo website I noticed a number of issues, some little, some big, but things that they can fix that can help them build a better web experience. I thought I’d take that and turn it into a post that will allow all my readers to learn from a real-life example.

Step 1: Make ticket buying easy(ier)

It took me a bit to find it, but you can actually buy tickets online. You wouldn’t know it, though, with the header telling me to call an 800 number to purchase tickets. This image should be linked either to the tickets page on the site or to tickets.com where tickets are actually purchased.

In the top row header there is a “tickets” link, but when I mouse over there is a bit of confusion with the drop down. Do I click the main button or the “ticket sales” button? It doesn’t really matter as the information on both pages is 95% identical (duplicate content alert!). Getting rid of that unnecessary drop down will help.

Clicking either of the ticket links above I am again offered the 800 number or told I can purchase online. But how? I have to read through that first paragraph to know that I can go to tickets.com, which is actually linked, but not linked to the Reno Rodeo ticket purchase page.

Scratch that, after several passes I see that the image tells me to “click here,” which leads to the tickets.com Reno Rodeo ticket page. This shows the value in having both visual (image) calls to action along with textual calls to action. I missed the visual one all together looking for the non-existent textual link.

I did find another way to order tickets easily. Go to the contact us link at the top which has a nice “Click here” for those of us who want to purchase online. That link takes you to the actual tickets.com Reno Rodeo tickets page as well.

Step 2: Broadcast your event dates better

Event websites like this need to broadcast the date of their events in the header. Right now you have to look halfway down the page, below the Reno Rodeo News, to find the dates of the event. Put that at the top. Throw it in the logo image below the 800 number. Make it bold, loud and obvious!

Step 3: Fix your security errors

Not everybody types in the “www.” in the address bar. Normally it’s not a problem but here it is:

This is easily fixed by implementing a redirect from renorodeo.com to www.renorodeo.com

Errors like this can stop a lot of traffic from moving forward. It’s smart to check your site on multiple machines and browsers to make sure you don’t get this, or any other visitor stopping errors.

Step 4: Organize your navigation

If you look closely you can see that the navigation is organized alphabetically. Now that’s a great way to organize your Blu-ray discs, but not the best for site navigation. What they need to do here is segment their navigation. Have tasks such as Home, Parking, Getting here, etc under a common navigational header, separate from video, cattle drive, team 355 and the like. I’d have to spend more time than I’m willing right now to figure out just how to do this right, but let’s just say that it’s all wrong.

Find ways to segment your navigation into scannable chunks. Create categories based on how users are likely to be looking for specific groups of information. This makes everything easier to find and navigate to.

Step 5: Move your news more accessible

There are several problems with the “Rodeo News” that is at the top of the home page. First of all, its location is all wrong. The news box pushes the other important content down too far on the page. I say they should move this box off to the side, even outside the main content area completely. By doing that they can then have the news available on every page, not just the home page.

Next, I want to know how to get to news older than the few entries they have listed here. I don’t see any links to “more news”, but I assume that they’ve been posting news since the beginning of the event. Just give me a place to go to catch up on what I missed.

Finally, where is the RSS feed? This is 2008, anything “news” has to have a feed. This lets your true customers keep up on the goings on without having to revisit the site several times a day.

I could go on, but think this is quite enough to make a pretty significant improvement in web usability. If Reno Rodeo implements these few items I’m sure they’ll see their web satisfaction go up, if not selling additional tickets as well.

Here are some typical coding issues that can screw up your on-page optimization processes:

Today I have answered questions regarding books for beginners, SEO techniques and how they have changed, pro’s and cons of CSS, different types of architecture and favicons.

On with the answers…

Most duplicate content issues have to do with on-page content. Mass page/content duplication can often have a negative effect on how the search engines spider and index your site. While I believe the title tag is the single most important piece of real estate on your site, duplication here is likely to have the least effect on the search engine crawlers. It will, however, have an effect on rankings, but that’s another discussion. Even still, it’s a duplicate issue that absolutely must be addressed for tactical SEO performance.

Duplicate titles is something we often see on newly developed websites or content management systems that don’t allow proper control of individual pages. While I get how when developing new websites the title tag can get overlooked, I’m amazed that people develop web software that still doesn’t take title tag customization into account.

In some cases it’s just a matter of some creative programming to fix. In others it might require some significant reworking of the system, or a scraping of the system altogether. And, of course, other times it’s just a matter of taking the time to get into your HTML or your CMS and writing unique title tags for all your products and content pages. If you have a lot of products or pages, this can be time consuming, but it’s well worth the effort.

If you can pull it off with your CMS allow Titles to be automatically generated based on on-page criteria, but also give yourself the opportunity to overwrite the defaults with your own customization. This is especially handy for product pages. The default can display essentially the breadcrumb trail of categories down to the products as the default. This will ensure all your title tags are unique, to a degree. But at some point you may want to get in and create a unique title tag for more punch and better search engine rankings. Having both options will give you the greatest degree of control without having duplicate titles until you get around to customizing them.

All said and done, your titles should:

• Short, 65 characters max
• Unique for each page
• Accurately reflects page content
• Contains main keywords

Related posts on duplicate content:

• Theories in Duplicate Content Penalties
• How Poor Product Categorization Can Frustrate Shoppers and Search Engines Alike
• Duplicate Content Issues: www. vs. no www.
• Duplicate Content Issues: Domain Name Redirects
• Preventing Secure & Non-Secure Site Duplication
• Create Infinite Page Duplication: Use URL Session IDs

Ok, first of all, that’s a bad URL shown above, but aside from that, tacked on at the end there is the session ID. Both URLs pull the same page pulled open via a different browsing session. The bad stuff happens if the session IDs also get attached when the search engines come for a visit.

Since a new session ID is attached with each new visit, each time the search engine comes around they are essentially fed all new URLs. If you have only a ten page site, the second time the search engines visit they add the “new” 10 pages to the index, for a total of 20 pages. When they come around a third time they now have 30 pages in their index. Once they start analyzing these pages they find page after page after page of duplication.

An additional problem arises as site visitors start bookmarking and linking to your site. Every link they add contains their very own session ID. The search engines follow that link to your site and now you’ve got another 10 pages of duplication. If they follow another link to your site, that’s 10 more. You starting to see where this is going? Essentially you can turn a 10 page site into endless duplications.

Even with a small site you can see why the search engines would stop coming around. But if you have a site with hundreds, or even thousands of products, you find two things happen. 1) The search engines will stop spidering new pages because there is just too much duplication. 2) The engines will start dropping pages out of the index altogether.

Now this is where my lack of programming skills show. I know there are some systems that will withhold the session IDs from search engines. This still has the potential of creating problems with inbound links. I can’t say for sure how search engines handle incoming links with Session IDs in the URLs, even if those IDs get stripped once the engine hits the site. I would think the link value will pass as if the ID isn’t there, but I don’t know.

Like sex, the only guaranteed protection here is not to do it at all. There are alternate means of tracking users for whatever reason. Avoiding session IDs completely ensures that you don’t open yourself up to inadvertent site duplication.

Related posts on duplicate content:

• Theories in Duplicate Content Penalties
• How Poor Product Categorization Can Frustrate Shoppers and Search Engines Alike
• Duplicate Content Issues: www. vs. no www.
• Duplicate Content Issues: Domain Name Redirects
• Preventing Secure & Non-Secure Site Duplication

There are two basic problems with this. First, it all takes time. Until the search engines figure out which dupes should be “merged” you’re essentially splitting link flow. Two inbound links, one to each version, produce only have the power than two links both pointing to a single version.

The second problem is that you leave it to the search engines to decide which pages or site should be dropped from the index. When you let the search engines decide, you lose essential control.

I’ll probably say this in every post I make about duplicate content, so forgive me if you’ve heard it before, but the less you make the search engines think they better. When it comes to duplicate content issues, they want to be told what to think. And you can do that by not presenting two versions of the same page.

One issue we’ve come across, especially with e-commerce sites is when products can be accessed via both secure and non-secure URLs.

This issue is typically caused by poorly implemented site navigation and linking. What happens is that the shopper adds a product to the shopping cart. At that point they enter into the secure pages. But when the shopper continues shopping, instead of proceeding to checkout, they navigate back into the site keeping the https: in the browser URL.

There are a couple fixes to this. The first is to not allow your visitors to enter the secure areas of the site until they are ready to check out.

There is no reason to go secure just by adding products to a cart. The place to go secure is when they hit the checkout button. But–and this is important–if they leave the checkout process to continue shopping, they need to be placed back into non-secure pages.

This leads us to our second fix: Use absolute URLs in all site navigation and shopping cart pages.

Quick refresher: an absolute link uses the full domain name in the link:

http://www.site.com/category/product.html

A relative link only uses the path from current location to the destination:

../product.html

When using relative links if the shopper is already on an secure (https:) URL then they’ll stay on secure URLs. When you use absolute links then you are forcing the visitor to go http: instead of https:

When shoppers can access secure and non secure versions of the same unsecure page, then likely the search engines can as well. This creates almost a complete duplicate of your site, one secure and one non-secure version. Using absolute links will ensure that at no point can a regular page be accessed in secure mode, thus preventing the duplication.

Related posts on duplicate content:

• Theories in Duplicate Content Penalties
• How Poor Product Categorization Can Frustrate Shoppers and Search Engines Alike
• Duplicate Content Issues: www. vs. no www.
• Duplicate Content Issues: Domain Name Redirects

Domain Name Redirects

The first thing you need to consider after you’ve purchased additional domain names is to decide what you want to do with them. Not every domain name needs to have a site on it, though it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some kind of generic company page in place for lack of anything else. But for the most part, you will probably want to redirect all your alternate domain names to your main company site. This is especially true of many of the issues covered in the article linked above.

The question then becomes, how best to implement those redirects. There are many ways to redirect websites, most of them will often do more harm than good. One of the most common ways to redirect domain names is to “park” them and point them to your main site. How your web hosts parks domains is crucial to know, in order to make sure that the domains are redirecting properly from an SEO standpoint.

Here is an example of a improperly redirecting URL (note: the image is just for example purposes):

This is how most web host companies park domain names. Essentially, every parked domain will feed the user the content from the primary URL, but it keeps the visitor on the domain name which they typed in. This can lead to problems with branding, not to mention the duplicate page(s) created by this kind of re-direct.

Here’s what you need to know about domain redirects. This is important to be able to tell your web host, developer, or whoever else is in charge of your website. You want your alternate domains to “301 redirect” to your main URL.

A 301 redirect tells search engine spiders that the domain they tried to access has been “permanently moved” to a new location, which is your main URL. When implementing a 301 redirect both your visitors and search engine spiders will be automatically forwarded to the new URL.

If your web host doesn’t implement this kind of redirect when parking domains or doesn’t offer 301 redirecting, then you’ll have to do it yourself. The easiest way is to get a second web hosting account for ONE of your alternate domain names, and implement the 301 redirect by adding the following code to your .htaccess file :

Redirect permanent / http://www.mainurl.com

…then parking all your other alternate domain names to point to the redirected domain.

Checking for proper redirects

If you’re not sure if your alternate domain names are redirecting properly, you can do a simple check using a program such as WebBug.

Click for larger image.

This screenshot shows me that the domain www.projectinsight.com IS properly redirecting to www.projectinsight.net, returning an HTTP header of “301 Moved Permanently” which is exactly what we were looking to achieve.

Without implementing proper redirects on your alternate domain names, not only will you have duplicate websites, but you’ll likely be splitting all your link flow between each version of the site. This will potentially cut your site’s value (as determined by the search engines via incoming links) in half.

While it’s possible for the search engines to figure out that domain A and domain B are the same, you’re still forcing them to decide which of the two domains is the one you are trying to brand, and they have a 50% or greater chance of getting it wrong.

www. vs. no www.

Real quick, go to your browser and type in yoursite.com. Does the URL in the browsers address bar change to a) http://yoursite.com or b) http://www.yoursite.com?

Now type in www.yoursite.com. Does the URL in your browser change to a) http://www.yoursite.com or b) http://yoursite.com?

In both of those instances, if you answered A then you have potential duplication issues. Here is an example of one of my articles on Gooruze.com which shows the potential duplication:

Take away the www. from the URL and lo-and behold you see the exact same article:

You can see how this can become a problem, with virtually every article having its www. or non-www. twin.

The various versions are accessed depending on how each person typed in the website in the address bar to begin with (or the link they followed.) Did they type in the www. or not? You may have, I may have not. If I then bookmark the site or provide a link to it from another site, and you do the same, we’re both sending the search engines to two different pages (URLs) both of which have the same content. If the search engines spider starting from either of those links, then literally hundreds of articles will be indexed, half of which are pure duplicates.

Fortunately, this issue isn’t as bad as a lot of duplicate content issues because most of the search engines have gotten pretty good at figuring out that those pages are the same, after a bit of time. In most cases the search engines will equate the two versions, with or without the www., as being the same page(s). But it doesn’t happen right away. In fact it can take several months or perhaps more, depending on the site, for the engines to tie the two together. While some are content to wait it out, the real danger is that you are potentially handicapping your link flow and incoming link juice while you wait.

The less you have to make the search engines think the better. Even if you’re confident that the search engines have already made the connection between the www. and non-www.versions being one and the same, you never know what might change that in the future. The best strategy then is to be proactive in “fixing” this kind of duplication.

If you’re running on an Apache server then the solution is relatively simple. Simply add this bit of code to your .htaccess file in the root directory of your server:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Don’t ask me to explain it, all I know is that it works! If your site is on any other kind of server, then you’ll have to contact your web host for a fix. The .htaccess file is pretty finicky so be sure to back it up before making any changes. Once you get the updated version uploaded, give it a shot. If you type in site.com the address should redirect to http://www.site.com. Now do the same thing but with an inner page of your site. Type in site.com/page and you should be redirected to http://www.site.com/page. There you go. All set.

In much the same way, the domain name(s) you select can also be a preventative measure against someone finding you. We can use The Home Depot as an example once again. My first attempt to get to their site I typed in www.thehomedepot.com. That goes nowhere. The URL to reach them is www.homedepot.com. This is a clear case of “what are they thinking?” The last time I checked (which was today) they bill themselves as THE Home Depot, not just Home Depot. It’s right there in their logo!

Would you believe that, according to WordTracker, approximately 63 people per day search for www.thehomedepot.com? That’s a reflection only of those typing that into a search box. Who knows how many are typing it into the address bar.

Just for fun, let’s assume that twice as many people mistype The Home Depot’s URL into the address bar as do those who attempt to search for it. If we then assume that only 10% of those searchers give up after the first try, The Home Depot is losing almost 5,000 potential shoppers each year, and that, I think, is a pretty conservative figure. That may not be a lot for a company like them, but no one ever makes money by being hard to find!

URL Alternatives

While the majority of people may naturally type your URL in properly, there will always be a handful that won’t. You have to consider carefully any variations that someone else might use, including:

• Alternate spellings
• Misspellings
• Abbreviated / Long-form versions
• phonetically similar versions
• Plural / singular versions
• .net, .org, etc.
• …sucks.com, …sux.com, etc.

Home Depot got the misspelling correct. If you type in www.homedepo.com you’re redirected to their site. But again, not if you type in www.thehomedepo.com. Another missed opportunity.

A couple of years back I did an interview for an online radio station. At the end of the interview they asked me for my domain name, in which I pronounced, but didn’t spell. As soon as the interview was done I realized my error. How many different ways are there to spell “pole”? “Pull” and “Poll” both come to mind! I immediately registered those domain names and redirected them to the main site.

Minimizing the competition

By purchasing these extra domain names, you’re not only securing alternate, yet mistaken paths to your website, you are also preventing your competition from siphoning off traffic meant for you. If you don’t buy these alternates, chances are someone else will. At best, the URL will have nothing on it and just show an “unavailable” error. At worst, they’ll redirect your visitors to their own website!

How strong your branding is will be a pretty significant factor in what domain people type in when looking for you. But no matter how good it is, there are always those that will get it wrong. Are you OK losing them to a competitor? If not, then consider carefully what domain names you might want to own and redirect to your primary URL. In The Home Depot’s case, I’m sure an additional 5,000 visitors each year is worth the purchase price of any alternative URLs.

Ok, let’s back up. What is a favicon?

If you’re reading this post from emarketingperformance.com then you need to do no more than look up to the address bar. If you’re reading this through a feed reader I’ll go ahead and throw a screen capture for you:

See that little icon of EMP with the orange line above it? Yep, that’s the favicon. It’s such a little thing, but it can make a pretty big impact. Site’s that don’t have a favicon show a generic icon like this:

That’s in FireFox. In Internet Explorer, if you don’t brand yourself with a custom favicon, Microsoft with brand themselves in your place. Here’s what it looks like:

Now I won’t go so far as to suggest the favicon will increase sales, but it does provide a nice visual cue for your site, especially once it gets added into a visitor’s bookmarks folder. Take a look at this snapshot of Netflix open up in my browser, along site my open bookmarks:

Look down at the very bottom, see the icon circled in red? That little guy there is a bookmark from a site that has no favicon. So you can see that not having a favicon prevents you from standing out among the others. This can be important when you’re bookmarked a list of your competitors!

Favicons are not that difficult to create. I found this great Photoshop Tutorial on How to Create a Favicon.

Here’s my new one next to the current favicon:

Granted, this new one took me all of 5 minutes to create from the site logo, but what do you think? I could definitely clean it up a bit, for sure. But not bad for a few minutes of work.

To add your new favicon so it appears in the location bar and bookmarks, in the tags of each page’s code add this:

< LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="favicon.ico" >

That’s it. You’re all set with your new favicon.

One site that we’ve been working with has just come from a fresh re-design. Once we started digging into the code, we’ve found that the designers have taken some pretty extreme liberties with the Hx tags.

Using the H1 for the title is an abuse I’ve seen many times before. It’s easy to slip an image into the H1 tag, so designers do this to display the company logo. But by doing so you’ve taken a great piece of SEO real estate out of play. Every page now has the exact same H1 tag: an image.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that the Hx tags are near as important as many people think. But I do believe they play an important role in putting the page hierarchy into expression. It’s like the outline for a term paper. The way you use Hx tags should outline the importance of various elements on the page. The H1 tag would be the equivalent of the title of the term paper. (For the sake of this conversation, let’s leave out the < title > tag.) At the very least you want the H1 tag to be unique on every page. It’s the first thing that visitors read, let them know what they’ll expect.

Continuing with our example above, you see that the “Quick Search” is wrapped in an H3. Is the search really a part of the outline of the page? Of course not. In fact I’ll go so far as to say that nothing in the navigation (top, side bottom or otherwise) should be in an Hx tag. Navigation is really nothing more than the table of contents for the site. OK, it’s a bit more than than, but you get my meaning.

Finally, look at the products. Each product, which here includes the product name and number, is wrapped in an H2. Like the Search above, this was done just for the simplicity of styling how the text looks. The problem with using the Hx tag on 10-30 products on each page creates a pretty severe case of Hx-bloat. At this point the hx tag loses all meaning. This is a case using the < strong > tags would be sufficient at separating the products from the rest of the information without over-using the Hx tags.

This is more closely aligned to how we would lay out the page architecture:

You’ll see that we have cut down the use of the Hx tags pretty significantly. By using the H2 twice, we’re saying from a structural standpoint, that the top portion is just as relevant as the product portion. But an H3 could work well here too.

Like anything, too much of a good thing is bad. Hx tags are not a magic SEO solution and play only a minor role in the overall optimization of a page, but it’s valuable enough to take the time to get right. Make sure your web developers are not styling the Hx tags as a shortcut to creating unique style elements.

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is the greatest open-source browser available. Firefox offers users complete control over the browser featuring tabs, pop-up blocking, useful toolbars, and many themes. Firefox is W3C compliant which means developers will not have to slave to make sure CSS is rendering correctly like IE. In addition, the browser has thousands of extensions that will aid developers and SEOs alike.

Google Docs

Google Docs has made document creation and sharing simple through an easy-to-use web document interface. Google Docs offers users an alternative to Microsoft Office with tools for word processing, spreadsheets, and more recently presentations. Google Docs allows users to share documents with other users ensuring easy collaboration. For more info, check out the Google Docs Blog and WebWare’s Five Google Docs Hints.

Adium

Adium is a Mac-based application that allows users to connect to multiple instant messenger accounts at the same time while using a single application. It works with AOL, MSN, Google Talk and more. Looking for a close PC cousin? Try Pidgin.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar makes keeping track of important dates easy. The web-based software easily integrates with Gmail and all other Google products. Check out Lifehacker’s guide to using GCal and all the tricks that are possible.

Programmers Notepad

Programmer’s Notepad is a very easy to use HTML editor similar to Notepad. Unlike Notepad, however, PN is a text editor with several extra features such as syntax highlighting, quick search, docking tools, and code outlining. The program is very easy to use and a straightforward solution for SEO’s and developers alike.

Handbrake

Open source program Handbrake is an easy to use DVD to MPEG 4 ripper. This tool allows users to make backup copies of DVDs as well as import movies into iTunes or iPods. This isn’t exactly an “seo tool” but everyone needs to have some time to relax, right?

7-Zip

7-Zip is an easy to use file archiver to pack / unpack all types of files such as zip, tar, gzip, etc. 7-Zip is a much faster alternative to the zip programs installed on Windows XP and Vista.

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer isn’t just another Microsoft program. Although I’ve already bashed the company twice in this post alone, I can’t say that there wasn’t any decent program to come out of the MS developer warehouse. Live Writer is a tool aimed at making blogging easier. It allows users to publish directly to most blogs like Blogger, Typepad, etc., in a very easy to use interface. The program allows users to preview their posts and compose entries while offline.

Gmail

What need I say about Gmail, quite possibly the greatest email program in the world. For starters, Gmail offers users up to nearly 6GB of storage, tagging, email conversations, and more recently IMAP. Gmail easily integrates into programs like Mail and Thunderbird, as well as iPhones and other mobile devices. Plus Gmail continually strives to make improvements aimed at bettering the user’s experience. Web-based mail is here to stay.

Google Analytics

At this point it’s safe to assume Google is taking over the world since three of my ten faves all come from the search engine monster. But in any event, Google has gotten analytics right. Google Analytics is a free web-based program designed to improving your site’s marketing and results. The program features a very easy interface and provides web owners a variety of features ranging from search trends, site trends, geography reach, and much more. Every SEO ought to at least try out this program to see what it can do for you and your site. Check out the Official Analytics Blog for more info.

Don’t worry though, there is a simple solution that will reduce your site’s susceptibility to these attacks, and buy you some time to plug security holes. It’s relatively easy to implement, even if you’re not a security expert.

It’s amazing what a high percentage of site hacks result from random, untargeted, automated attempts to find security holes. The sad thing is, that most of these incidents could be prevented with some minor security enhancements. (Most sites don’t even employ basic security measures!) However, I’m not advocating that people stop there — I highly recommend that site owners educate themselves on website security or consult a website security expert. If you would otherwise have no security in place, at least implement this. It will buy you a little time to figure out where your potential security holes are and plug them.

Before we proceed, I need to clarify a couple of points, and these are extremely important:

• This post is for going to primarily be helpful for those who have little or no security experience, and is not intended for advanced security. I’m assuming that those reading this are do-it-yourselfers, and without these tips your site would have little or no security.
• This method is not a substitute for good security practices in the coding of scripts.
• This alone WILL NOT prevent an experienced hacker from getting into your site.

NOTES ON SECURITY:

Security is about reducing risk, and lowering the statistical probability of a successful attack. You can never eliminate risk fully, and there is no such thing as 100% impenetrable security, even with the best measures in place. By increasing the the level of security for your site or application, you are shrinking the pool of hackers that have the [skill|experience|time|resources|desire] to hack your site. In most criminal acts, it’s about following the path of least resistance — if you increase the difficulty of success (sometimes by even a small margin) then often the hacker will go somewhere else.

Think of other crimes like car theft or breaking into a house. In most cases, if a thief is checking out your car, but discovers that you have a vehicle with all the top security measures, he’ll move on to an easier one. That is, unless he has a specific reason to target your car. There are very purposeful and targeted crimes, but these are much less common than the crimes of least resistance. When hackers break into banking or large corporate web sites, they have a specific target, and incredible amounts of skill and resources. Compared to typical website hacks, the overall percentage of attacks like this is extremely low, because there aren’t many out there who could carry it out.

Even with the best security measures in place, any server can be hacked by someone with the right skills and resources. There are always a few people smarter than your best security measures, but luckily, not too many of them. That’s why there is no such thing as complete security, and why security deals with reducing risk. That being said, lets move on.

Start With Your Logs

By monitoring website logs, you can discover that many of these come from User-Agent libwww-perl, and try to access url’s on your site that include another off-site url in the query string:

http://www.yoursite.com/page.php?id1=http://www.othersite.net/id.txt?

You can see that in the Query String (id1=http://www.othersite.net/id.txt?), they are trying to call the external url to try and upload files or inject code into your site. This is typical of botnet scripts that automatically look for vulnerabilities in your software.

By blocking access from libwww-perl, and blocking urls that include “=http:” you will eliminate many of these attacks, and keep inexperienced hackers from owning your site and/or server.

The Solution: A Few Lines of .Htaccess Code

There is a quick solution that most website owners shouldn’t have any problem implementing.

If the following is not already in your .htaccess file, then insert it near the beginning:

RewriteEngine on

Somewhere after that, insert the following:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} libwww [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)=http [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F,L]

If you’re on WordPress, you may want to use this version instead:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} libwww [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(wp\-login\.php|\/wp\-admin\/) [NC]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)=http [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F,L]

This won’t affect most of your other applications, because file uploads are usually done through a form with the POST method, not GET. (If they are using GET, then for security you need to take that script offline and replace it with one that uses POST instead.)

By implementing this minor security fix, you can eliminate a large number of automated botnet attacks, and prevent them from uploading files or injecting code into your site.

To be clear, this does not make your safe 100% secure, so don’t stop here. As I’ve mentioned before, this will not prevent experienced hackers from getting into your site, but it is an easy way for most site owners to increase a site’s security. (For comprehensive security measures, you may want to consult a website security expert.) The next step is to take the time to find and plug any security flaws your site may have.

UPDATE 12/20/07: When upgrading your WordPress blog to a more recent version, earlier versions of WordPress may ask to upgrade your database. This code will may need to be temporarily removed or commented out during the databases upgrade. Then replace it afterwards.

Other Basic Security Tips:

• Research scripts before installing.Before you install a web application, plugin or script, research it online through Google, Yahoo, etc and see if there have been security issues. This is most applicable with open-source scripts.
• Keep your scripts up to date!
  Application developers often find security holes, patch them and release regular updates to their product. If you’re not keeping up with these, chances are high that you’ll get hacked sooner or later. As soon as holes are discovered, hackers create automated scripts that target that hole.
• Be careful with file permissions.Don’t set a file’s permission to 777 (Read/Write/Execute) unless you know exactly what you are doing.

More Info on Botnets and Internet Security:

• Stop the Botnets! | Emerging Technology Trends | ZDNet.com
• Computer Scientist Fights Threat of Botnets
• Understanding Hidden Threats: Rootkits and Botnets | US-CERT.gov
• FBI’s ‘Operation Bot Roast II’ Identifies and Captures Eight Individuals Responsible for Infecting over 1 Million Compromised Computers | US-CERT.gov
• Cyber Security Tips | US-CERT.gov

This post was inspired by the recent hacks, and by a post on IncrediBILL’s blog: Block LIBWWW-PERL and web addresses to protect your site from botnets.

There are many tools available to aid your WordPress SEO efforts. One of the more popular tools is SEO Title Tag 2.0. This plug in allows users to add unique title tags to each page / post. For example, you can specify your homepage to have your business name and some keywords, and allow your posts to not carry the business name at all. In addition, users can manipulate the plug in to reverse the order of your title.

SEO Wordpress Title Tag Examples

Wordpress formats your title like this:
Blog Name >> Blog Archive >> Post Title

With the SEO Title Tag Plug in, users can adjust their tag to:
Post Title | Blog Name
or
Blog Name | Keywords for your home
and many more options.

To use this plug in correctly, users need access to the header.php file. Therein, the plugin requires you to slightly adjust the current php title.

It’s important to remember that SEO isn’t just for your business, it’s equally important for your unique blog and content therein.

If you’re like me, (and for your sake I hope you’re not even close) you love the internet in a totally unnatural way. You live it and breathe it. It’s what makes you whole and gives your life purpose.

See? Pretty scary.

But there are times when I’m on the internet, and for some reason I don’t feel fulfilled. These are times could be best described as walking barefoot in the most beautiful, serene, pleasant garden imaginable… and stepping on a slug.

It is really, really tough to wipe one of those suckers off. Trust me- don’t attempt. These slugs – “what are they,” you ask?

Affiliate sites. The scourge of the net.

I hate them. I hate the way they look. I hate the way they sound. If they smelled, I bet I’d hate that too. They fill my nightmares. They’re the late-night informercials of the web.

Again, see? You never want to be as into the web as me.

So why, oh why, would a site I know, trust and love consider turning a page on their site into one?

I’m looking at you, SEOMOZ. You’re beautiful. You’re incredibly useful. Just those two things put you above everyone I dated in highschool. Recently, Seomoz held a much-lauded contest to redesign the landing page for their premium services, and the top page designs are going through multivariate testing as we speak. Last week I took a peek at the current page and this is what it looked like:

Now, I love Seomoz (so please, still let me come to your conference next month!) but I couldn’t believe it. It had the cheesy header of an affiliate site, the car-salesman opening tag, the omg-I-just-threw-up-a-little sales letter copy:

Dear Friend,

If I was lying on my death bed, about to wheeze my last breath, and you (insensitively) asked me to sum up in just a few minutes the most important search engine optimization “secret” that I could bequeath to you before I rest in peace… then this is what I would whisper gently in your ear…

It goes on, but I will spare you the details. Later on it bemoans the practice of promising “hidden secrets that other SEOs don’t want you to know” and what they call “1980’s Style Photography,” but those who live in glass designs shouldn’t be tossing around stones like that.

And “what about length,” you ask? Well you didn’t, but I’m the one writing this post so I can put words in your mouth. This sucker is long. And I mean loooooooooooong. Below I’ve compiled some of the real nasties in affiliate site designs and you may be surprised which one is our beloved Seomoz:

Judging by length, the Seomoz premium content affiliate design is only marginally less evil than project black mask! That cannot be! I mean, project black mask is “So Nasty… So Forbidden… So Downright Evil,” I can’t even continue.

So, I implore you, good people of Seomoz: please don’t choose that design. I love the current one being tested. If we weren’t already members, I’d have Stoney plop down his money right now. In fact, I would be willing to ask Stoney to pay for another membership JUST so you don’t use the affiliate design.

I guess it comes down to the question, “just because something works, is it a good idea?”

In this case I hope not. Seeing that design win would be like seeing an infomercial replace an episode of 24. For me. For all of us- please don’t do it!

Dear Aaron Wall: Please don’t murder me- I threw you in for fun. We all know Seobook isn’t an affiliate site; it just looks like one!

Stoney introduced Rob and me to some pretty fun people. Rob asked me how it felt to be going to dinner with 12 guys, and I said: “Popular.” I also felt quite popular with all the rubber necking our Pole Position Marketing team shirts caused. We were quite the collective object of many a heads turning and fingers pointing. You could read people’s lips Check out the cool shirts. I bet next year there will be impersonators.

The first session of the morning was “Introduction to Search Marketing.” Having learned on the fly most of what I knew about SEM, I felt it would be good to sit in on a session where the majority of attendees would be the newbies. There wasn’t a whole lot introduced that I hadn’t already been exposed to. This session was not specific to paid advertising, but what I did appreciate was that I was able to take somethings that were mentioned and was able to apply them in my head to how I want to utilize that idea in one of my client accounts. The message that everyone should have come away from after this session, is that search marketing is all about three things. TEXT, TEXT, and TEXT.

The second session was titled “Ads in a Quality Score World” where we were introduced to many different aspects of the elements that figure into the Quality score, both for keywords and AdGroups. We got to hear from Clay Bavor, the product manager at Google, David Pann, Vice President of Marketing Design and Matching, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Brian Boland, Group Marketing Manger from Microsoft adCenter.

The third session I thought I was going to fall asleep during, but that was only because it was just after lunch, and lunch was good! The session was “Search Advertising 101.” This session really made me feel better about what I already know. Which isn’t to say there wasn’t something valuable to take away from the hour and a half. I didn’t take many notes during this session, but I enjoyed the Q&A that took the last thirty minutes. What I was glad to hear is something I’ve tried telling our PPC clients. Using Google to find your ad (using your keywords) just to check and see where your ad ranks, actually hurts your ranking. It was explained that Google can tell when the same URL searches for the same term, and doesn’t CLICK THROUGH any of the ads. When they notice the same URl search time and time again, it will start serving them a different set of ads, the thinking being this: If they’re repeatedly looking for widget A and don’t find anything to click on, we must be serving the wrong ads. Instead, use the Ad Preview Tool.

The fourth and final session of the day I was tired. I didn’t even realize how brain dead I’d gone with information overload until I sat down here to write out all about the sessions. Having lost complete track of which sessions I attended, I pulled out my schedule and checked. Only then did I realize I sat in on the wrong session. (shhhh, don’t tell Stoney) I was supposed to have gone to the “Contextual Ads & AdSense Clinic,” where instead I went to “Advanced Paid Search Techniques.” For having gone to the wrong session, I think it was an excellent choice. I think this session was the one that I got the most new information from. Matt VanWagner of FindMeFaster discussed Dynamic Keyword Insertion. I’ve done quite a bit of this but still enjoyed hearing about it.

By the time you’re all reading this little update, I’ll be sitting with eager ears through another day. Day 2, assuming I don’t forget what sessions I’m supposed to attend, I expect to learn about “Ad Testing: Research & Findings,” “Converting Visitors into Buyers,” “Creating Compelling Ads,” and finally “Landing Page Testing & Tuning.” The evening will be capped off with the GOOGLE DANCE 2007. We’ll be wearing our shirts. I’ve promised Rob that he doesn’t really have to dance.