SEO Tools Of The Trade

Found a nice Google Ranking Factors table on this site.

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

I like how it lists both positive and negative factors for on and off page optimization.

This really isn’t a hard SEO tool suggestion. Just a note for people like me who use a lot of WordPress blogs.

I created a WP blog and wanted to set up a separate “members only” section where I could post FAQs, tips, suggestions, etc. So my main blog was at www.mainblog.com and my members-only blog would be installed at www.mainblog.com/members.

Sounds easy enough — just do another WordPress install in the /members directory.

To make life easy, I thought I would just use the cPanel directory password feature. Now here’s the problem. When I did a cPanel directory protect, and then tried to access www.mainblog.com/members, it redirected me to my 404 page!

After a lot of searching I found this posting: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/111914

Basically the fix is to put these two lines at the top of the .htaccess file.

ErrorDocument 401 /members/index.php
ErrorDocument 403 /members/index.php

I think it might work with just the 401 line but someone suggested trying both. Apparently when you password protect a directory it kicks out either a 401 or 403 error. If you don’t put in the above code WordPress eventually treats it as a 404 error and redirects you to that page.

A nice trick and my members section blog is now password protected!

P.S. Don’t forget to remove the members directory from being spidered in your robots.txt file.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php

http://hubpages.com/hub/SEO-Optimization-and-Keyword-Research

I personally tend to use http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Here you can find a free disclaimer builder for your website.

http://prioritydigital.com/free_details.htm

Obviously my disclaimer for the above disclaimer is that I don’t know if it’s legal or not. You be the judge.

The lastest SEO technique for getting links is posting on blogs. Old news, you say? Well, it was quite the rage a while back until blogs were getting smashed by automated blog spambots. Then along came the no-follow tag which eliminated the benefits of posting for both the spambots as well as legitimate posters.

Well, now the pendulum is swinging back the other way as blog owners are WANTING to get posts — legitimate posts. So blog owners are adding the do-follow tag to show that their sites will indeed pass the link love.

To counter the spambots website owners are using a variety of plugins such as Captcha and Akismet.

Check out these do-follow lists:

http://courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow/

http://www.code4gold.com/forums/index.php/topic,13536.0.html

I’ve been using my trusty HomeSite 4.0 program for years. Nothing fancy in comparison to Dreamweaver or even *gasp* Frontpage.

However, I just saw a posting for this little gem. A free HTML editor that rivals Dreamweaver and Frontpage in terms of functionality. Or so they say.

http://nvudev.com/index.php

Check it out and let me know if it’s any good. At least the price is right!

A few resources to get either PLR or unique articles:

1) www.plrpro.com – A membership site where you get 100s of PLR articles a month.
2) www.plrminimart.com – Respected PLR writer Tiffany Dow’s $5 site. No monthly fees, and very cheap prices.
3) www.rentacoder.com – Put up some bids. Around $10 for a good unique article.
4) www.warriorforum.com. – Lots of Warrior Special Offers and PLR writers.

If you are developing videos to promote your sites and you are needingsome royalty-free music, for the price of a link you can find some nice pieces here: http://incompetech.com/

If you want to pay for a license so you don’t have to give any credit, it runs about $30 per piece.

I decided to go shopping again for some reseller hosts after one that I have been using and recommending turned out to be a major dud. I would NOT recommend Power360Hosting anymore. Lousy uptime and very slow to fix issues. Plus, they have a trouble ticket system and I’ve upped the bar now. The hosting service needs to have at least online chat support if not 24/7 phone support.

I saw this list on webhostingtalk.com and will be checking them out.

http://www.downtownhost.com/

http://www.hostcaters.com/

http://futurequest.net/

http://www.handynetworks.com/

http://www.cartikahosting.com/

http://ljhost.com/

http://pair.com/

http://ez1host.com or http://www.techark.com/

http://www.clook.net/

http://httpme.com/

http://www.glowhost.com/

http://spiderweave.com/

http://www.agilehosting.com

http://glowhost.com

http://ljnetworks.com

http://mxhub.com

http://www.utropicmedia.net/

I’m on the fence for HostGator. The have a good price for their reseller hosting and a lot of positive reviews although some VERY negative reviews as well. The negative reviews are kinda scary because it seems like people have had their sites shut down for minor infractions and the impression I get is that HostGator is not too sympathetic.

I was considering AQHost until I chatted with their customer support. Very poor and rude, I felt. So no signups for me there even though they came highly recommended.

I’ll let you all know who I finally picked.
=======
11/27/07 – Update. I finally picked downtownhost.com. At first I thought there were a little pricey for me at $22.95 / month for a reseller account. However, when I asked their online sales guy if they had any cheaper plans he told me that had a 25% off coupon. Nice!

So far they’ve been pretty helpful in getting my accounts transferred over. I hope they work out for me because it’s a royal pain to have to move hosting services…

Here are a couple of very cool tools that help you monitor your Adsense clicks and revenue.

http://www.singerscreations.com/RSS/Posts/379.asp

http://code.mincus.com/3/adsense-notifier/

The first one works on the Windows platform. The second tool is designed as a Firefox plugin.