SEO Tools Of The Trade

This site doesn’t have anything strictly to do with SEO. It’s just that I was developing a site and I needed to have a nice clean way to do an image popup for a picture gallery.

This link had a couple of very nice CSS solutions and I didn’t want to forget about the site.

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/csslibrary/category/C4/

Here’s a nice list of article directories. It shows the PR as well as what kind of links are allowed.

http://www.articletrader.com/distribution/list/

Found a good squidoo lens that talks about different ways to monetize your site, along with some good money-making alternatives.

http://www.squidoo.com/online-earning

http://www.flamillion.com/ – A very reasonably-priced site for buying some topical PLR articles.

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!