withinweb

Google has released its new Keyword Tool which generates accurate traffic data for keyword terms. See : https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

With the new Google tool you can search for any keyword or keyword phrase and see the estimated traffic.

The first column shows Advertiser Competition. The bar graph represents the number of advertisers that are bidding on each of the keyword phrase in you results. From this you can determine quickly whether a PPC Adwords campaign will require a high bid price and large budget.

When it comes to SEO, most people understand that a Web site must have content, “search engine friendly” site architecture/HTML, and meta data such as title tags, meta description, graphic alt tag tags and so on.

However, some web sites totally disregarded the robots.txt file. When optimizing a Web site, don’t disregard the power of this little text file.

What is a Robots.txt File?

Simply put, if you go to www.domain.com/robots.txt, you should see a list of directories of the Web site that the site owner is asking the search engines to “skip” (or “disallow”). However, if you’re not careful when editing a robots.txt file, you could be putting information in your robots.txt file that could really hurt your business.

There’s tons of information about the robots.txt file available at the Web Robots Pages, including the proper usage of the disallow feature, and blocking “bad bots” from indexing your Web site.

The general rule of thumb is to make sure a robots.txt file exists at the root of your domain (e.g., www.domain.com/robots.txt). To exclude all robots from indexing part of your Web site, your robots.txt file would look something like this:

User-agent:
* Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /junk/

The above syntax would tell all robots not to index the /cgi-bin/, the /tmp/, and the /junk/ directories on your Web site.

There are situations where you might use the Robots.txt file to cause issues with your site optimisation.  For instance if you include a * Disallow: “/” in your Robots.txt file it will be telling the search engines not to crawl any part of the web site giving you no web presence - not what you want.

Another point to watch out for is if you modify your Robots.txt file to dissallow old legacy pages and directories - you should really do a 301 permanent redirect to pass the value from the old Web pages to the new web pages.

Robots.txt Dos and Don’ts

There are many good reasons to stop the search engines from indexing certain directories on a Web site and allowing others for SEO purposes.

Here’s what you should do with robots.txt:

* Take a look at all of the directories in your Web site. Most likely, there are directories that you’d want to disallow the search engines from indexing, including directories like /cgi-bin/,  /wp-amin/,  /cart/,  /scripts/,  and others that might include sensitive data.
* Stop the search engines from indexing certain directories of your site that might include duplicate content. For example, some Web sites have “print versions” of Web pages and articles that allow visitors to print them easily. You should only allow the search engines to index one version of your content.
* Make sure that nothing stops the search engines from indexing the main content of your Web site.
* Look for certain files on your site that you might want to disallow the search engines from indexing, such as certain scripts, or files that might contain e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or other sensitive data.

Here’s what you should not do with robots.txt:

* Don’t use comments in your robots.txt file.
* Don’t list all your files in the robots.txt file. Listing the files allows people to find files that you don’t want them to find.
* There’s no “/allow” command in the robots.txt file, so there’s no need to add it to the robots.txt file.

By taking a good look at your Web site’s robots.txt file and making sure that the syntax is set up correctly, you’ll avoid search engine ranking problems.  By disallowing the search engines to index duplicate content on your Web site, you can potentially overcome duplicate content issues that might hurt your search engine rankings.

If you have a number of membership options in PHP-SecureArea, these can be all displayed and selected from one drop down list.

For example :

<form action="/phpsecurearea/ipn/process.php" method="post">
<select name="item_number">
<option value="Memb01">1 month membership (£10.00)</option>
<option value="Memb03">3 month membership (£20.0)</option>
<option value="Memb06">6 month membership (£35.00)</option>
<option value="Memb12">12 month membership (£60.00)</option>
</select>
<input type="image" src="/phpsecurearea/images/btn/x-click-butcc-subscribe.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="" title="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!" />
</form>

You first have to create separate product items in PHPSecureArea, for 1, 3, 6 and 12 months.

Entering them into the drop down list will provide the customer with an easy way to select instead of creating a button for each product.

If you are looking for a suitable hosting company, then Lunarpages.com is worth taking a look at. The Basic Plan is PHP/mySQL based, is competitively priced and in addition has unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. LunarPages.com

If you are using an application like PHP-IPNMonitor to sell digital files you need to make sure that your files are secure.

The best way to protect digital files (those files that you are going to sell) is to place them outside the root of your web site.

The root of the web site is normally the public_html folder or the www folder.

When placed ‘below’ these folders, it is not possible for anyone to get to those files using a web url address.

However, some hosts do not allow this, so instead you can protect your files by placing an .htaccess file in the folder.

An example .htaccess file which would do this is:

IndexIgnore *
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName Downloads
AuthType Basic

<Limit GET POST PUT>
 deny from all
</Limit>

This will only work on a Linux type server and not on a Windows server.
http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml has quite a good set of examples and gives some good background information on htaccess / htpasswd files

thesitemapper can be run using the Windows scheduler as an alternative to the built in scheduling system.

Setting up a schedule in Windows XP and Windows Vista is quite similar.  The only issue is that the schedule task will ask for a username / password so that the task can be run when no one is logged in.  If you are the
only user on the computer, and it is logged in all the time, then click on the tick box to allow the task to
run only when the user is logged in and it will not ask for a password.

In Windows Vista :

Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Task Scheduler

In the scheduler display, select the program to run as
‘folder name \ thesitemapper.exe crawl’
where the folder name will be where ever the program is located.

Then set the ’start in’ to the folder where thesitemapper.exe is located. 

Click on ‘Run whether user is logged in or not’
Click on ‘Run with highest privileges’
Click on ‘Do not store password’

Enter in the schedule day / time details and make sure the schedule is enabled by the ‘Enable’ tick box.

PHP-IPNMonitor, PHP-SecureArea and PHP-KeyCodes all require a mySQL database and hence require a database username and password. Normally you will interact with the mySQL database using a control panel which will incorporate tools to easily create database and users. These facilities are provided by your web host and will be the best way to create database users.

However, with some web hosts it may be necessary to to create a user using myPHPAdmin.

To creating a user using the myPHPAdmin interface, asuming that you are logged in to myPHPAdmin with full previleges :

In a sql text box enter :

GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON ipnmonitor.* TO ipnmonitoruser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'piggy911';
FLUSH PREVILEGES;

This above assumes that ‘ipnmonitor’ is the name of the database, ‘ipnmoniotruser’ is the name of the database user and ‘piggy911′ is the password.

This will create a user with select, insert, update and delete previlages which is all that is required for a normal user.

NOTE that to create tables the user needs to have create table privileges which can be given by changing the the sql to

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ipnmonitor.* TO ipnmonitoruser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'piggy911';
FLUSH PREVILEGES;

PHP-IPNMonitor can display ‘buy now’ buttons and ‘add to cart’ buttons in a number of different ways.  Buttons can be created by hand and then added to existing web pages or they can be displayed dynamically through a template system.

PHP-IPNMonitor uses the pat template system which includes a caching method to improve the speed of the pages.

When you install PHP-IPNMonitor all you need to do is change the permissions of the template folder ‘tmplcache’ to be set to 777.

When the page is viewed, caching will be implemented and pages will display quicker.  The folder ‘tmplcache’ is part of the installation structure although it is an empty folder.

Version 2.42 of thesitemapper has been released and has a few extra features and tweaks.

For those who are not faimilar with thesitemapper here is a quick summary :

thesitemapper is a program that you run on your PC to generate XML and HTML site maps and automaically ftp them to your web site.

XML site maps are intended as a way of informing search engines of new and changed pages instead of having to manually submit them to the search engines.  The xml page matches the xml site map protocol standard which is used by all the major search engines.

HTML site maps are listings of your web site with title, meta description and so on.  They are used as a way to provide an alternative view of your site helping customers to find what they are looking for.

thesitemapper has a fully functional trial version which lasts for 30 days with the licence key costing $40 USD.

Full details and example displays can be seen at http://www.withinweb.com/thesitemapper/

The withinweb.com web site has been changed to incorporate full details of thesitemapper although there is still a separate website for the application at http://www.thesitemapper.com

WordPress 2.6 is out now and ready for install.  Here are only some of the improvements WordPress 2.5 has over WordPress 2.6:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

Download from : http://wordpress.org/download/