Do bots have manners?

Do bots have manners? Yes and No. There are good bots and bad bots. It is the bad bots that may be an issue, if they don't mind their manners. The bad bots can enter your site and steal your bandwidth, traffic, email addresses, content, and possibly hijack a web page. But how do you address these issues?

With my article "Behind the Scenes with Bots Manners" you can get the details on how to save yourself a lot of frustration when you're trying to figure out what is happening to your traffic. It's may be a gradual trickle, then as your website becomes known, you 'll eventually get a major slowdown. Or, you may have the people that maintain your server give you a heads-up that your traffic is being stolen.

Please note: In some cases a bad bot is a subjective view. If you have limited bandwidth you do have to determine which bots can stay and which must go. Of course, the content scrapers, email harvesters and web page hijackers, are rather obvious bad bots that can steal your money. Learn from my article how you can help your server control the bots.


Behind the Scenes with Bots Manners
Do bots have manners? You may be saying to yourself, "I really don't care if bots have manners". But you should. Why? If they behave badly, you are the recipient of lost bandwidth, traffic, or content and email. But there are some ways in which you can keep search engine bots honest. How, you ask? It is the .htaccess file, the robots.txt file and the meta tag that can save your traffic, content and email from being stolen or abused. The first two, are simple text files, and the last, a line of code that direct all or specific bots that enter the web page, to follow your set rules. READ MORE...
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SON OF A LEGEND

One of the closest people to me ever died on May 2nd, 1999. His name was BIGGA B. He was my cousin and biggest supporter as an emcee. Bigga was responsible for giving Khalil and I the confidencce to try and do this shit. He introduced the West Coast to The Liks, Wu-Tang, Xzibit, and many more, he got us signed to LOUD. Bigga died on the road with my friend and fellow emcee Bad Azz. When he died his son Josiah was only 18 months old. I made a vow to Bigga that if anything ever happened to him I would look out for his son as best as I could. Time flies...this December Josiah will be 10 years old...I wish BIGGA could see his son.....Josiah is so much like him it gives me goosebumps to watch him...Rest In Peace my nigga, we miss you G, but through your son ....you live...ladies and gentleman let me introduce you to BIGGA J, son of a legend!!




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More on SEO and Bots

SEO and the bots? What do you mean. SEO and SEM encourage the bots to visit your site. Which you do want. But you also need to realize that with the good comes the bad. The good bots behaves nicely on your site. But the bad bots, can scrape your site, harvest your emails, steal your traffic and hog your bandwidth. So how can you make, or try to make the bots behave nicely on your site? Through behind the scene programs that instruct the bots on how to behave.

My article "SEO and the Good and Bad Search Engines" gives you an intro of setting your site up to protect yourself from the bad bots and to encourage the good bots to enter. But remember, a bad bot can be defined differently by a webmaster. But if you find your traffic suddenly disappearing and it's not due to any changes in how Google, Yahoo or MSN are spidering your site, then just maybe, you may have some bad bots stealing your hard work.


SEO and the Good and Bad Search Engines
By Vickie Scanlon

SEO is always a work-in-progress-and one that should be learned. Most people know about putting keywords in their content, and making their meta tags available and relevant to the content. But is there anything else to consider. Of course! You need to make your site search engine friendly, as well as, safe against the bad search engines.


SEO and Robots.txt and .htaccess

When the search engines crawl your site, they will check into your robots.txt file -- seeing if they have permission to enter your site, as well as, seeing what pages they should not index.

In addition, the robots.txt file will help you to tell certain friendly search engines not to enter specific pages that you do not want indexed. Then there are other search engines that do not follow the rules, hog precious bandwidth, and possibly steal your traffic. Yes there are friendly (good) robots and bad robots. So what do you do with the bad robots that don't obey the robots.txt file?

You should set up a .htaccess file to instruct the bad search engines to stay away. Some bad bots have no manners, and will take all your website has to offer, be it, your emails, images, content and traffic.

So, how do you get the bad robots to stop? You can utilize the .htaccess file to block the bad search engines from entering your site.

Sounds easy, but remember, the bad search engines will use different names to crawl your site, so you have to be ever vigilant - if you don't want to lose traffic. If you're not familiar with the .htaccess file or how to set it up -- go to Clockwatcher's for a nice tutorial on the subject.


SEO and Your Site Map

A site map is really important if you have a large site. Why? If a search engine has
a difficult time crawling your site, they will look to your site map for help. It's nice that they have another alternative to getting your site completely indexed.


SEO and Alt Tags

Make sure that you label your images. By using the alt tag within your html code for your images, you can tell the search engine what the image is about. Although you may know about the alt tag, sometimes, I included, have a tendency to forget to utilize it. Not only does the alt tag help the search engines to identify what is on your web page and what the image is about, but it also helps those that are blind.

To conclude, although keywords and content are extremely important, so are the mechanics of keeping your site search engine friendly and protected. Small sites may feel they do not need to protect their content. But if you have any ranking at all, the search engines will seek you out, good and the bad. And it is the bad search engines that can steal your content your traffic, and your bandwidth. So, don't ignore or fear the robots.txt and .htaccess process, your website can take a hit that can cost you money.


Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit her site at: My Affiliate Place for free tools, articles,ebooks, how to info, affiliate opportunities, travel and tech accessories, security software and computers for your home office or online business.
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Moving Blogs Between Accounts

Okay guys and gals...Blogger has finally made it possible for you to really screw up your Googly life...LOL...just kidding!

They have finally made it possible to move blogs...at will..between accounts. Now I'm not going to create more accounts to give you a show and tell but my Blog*Star buddy Chuck has a post with a lot of pictures!!

The steps are relatively easy!

First...with Google, set up the second account where you want to transfer the blog.

1.) From your Dashboard, go to Settings, then to the far right tab called Permissions.

2.) As the original administrator of the blog, invite the second account to be a blog member using the email address of the new account.

3.) Log into the second mail account and accept the invitation.

4.) As the original Administrator, make sure both accounts are "Administrators"...just click on the button that says guest and it will change to Administrator.

5.) Click "Remove" for the account that you want to delete. The account that is left is now the administrator.

6.) Log in with the new account and the blog will be on your Dashboard with full administrative access. Voila!
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Search Engines-Getting Indexed

What is a website without it's pages indexed? A less traveled site, lost in the maze of the Internet, for one. For a webmaster, a major frustration. Many a webmaster may be mumbling under their breath. "Yeah right, what can I do about it".

Well if you don't have a lot of money, you may want to venture into SEO. You can take the time to learn it yourself (no money route), or you can enlist the help of someone that is a pro in the SEO field (lots of money in my pockets) .

Some people have the money, some have the golden touch and don't need to venture into the SEO realm. But if you were like me, money was an issue and the golden touch was recked with minimal internet experience.

Granted SEO is always a work in progress- it can be frustrating, and when you think you've got it, the search engines change their rules again. That's probably a good thing, it keeps everyone honest.

Do I regret taking the SEO challenge? No. Why? I have been told by an affiliate manager that if you can meet the SEO challenge you can be rewarded by rank and thus traffic-which brings sales. Sounds good to me. But here comes the bad part, it won't happen overnight, but it can bring you long-term benefits if you work at it, and avoid the black hat tactics. As I write this last statement, I hear a low groan, mumbling and a frustrated sigh. Gee, those ugly sounds may have come from me, as I recall my own SEO beginnings. Don't get disheartened, the benefits are long-term.

If I can keep on track, you may see several articles on SEO, which may help. This week's SEO article is called: "Search Engines --Please Crawl My Content"

Click the link to read the article "Search Engines-Please Crawl My Content" it will give you some hints of what to avoid when you are creating your pages, so that the search engines can find you.
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THE BEST PART

Since we are supposed to be documenting shit here. I am going to show you 80% of the reason I wake up and want to continue living in this crazy ass world and my personal reminder that certain traits are hereditary....Aariona Chalom Johnson AKA ONA aka Chalom Infinite aka THE PRINCESS, remember the name. Without my encouragement, (although spending time with uncle Khalil is inspiring enough) she is destined to pursue a life of art, in some form.

Her favorite artist is Blondie..I am in TROUBLE. Loves to paint, read, sing, and play drums. READING AT THE THIRD GRADE LEVEL AT 6 YEARS OLD....the kid is serious, we have impromtu photo sessions all the time....here is a more recent session shot on location at the Twin Dragon on Pico.

....Children are the Best Part. I wrote that song (The Best Part) long before having a child and I now know the true meaning. This person was probably my biggest inspiration for certain songs on Change so much of my energy is manifested through her. Life is crazy. I want to have more, one day.





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Wanting to Start an Adwords Campaign?

When you are a newbie, you may be remotely familiar with Adwords, but yet, do not know what it is about and/or how to begin.

Or, it can be a frustrating situation, especially if you are trying to create ads for Google Adwords with the following mindset -- I don't know what I'm doing, but I'll give it a try. With that mindset, in most cases, you could lose most of your budget for a year, if not more. And yet, see no results. Ouch!

For those just beginning Mike Tekula article "11 Tips for Pay-Per-Click Success" may be just the answer to get you started. As always, remember, to set a budget for your Google Adwords campaign, and as he stated -- test, test, test.

For those who are at the Intermediate level and looking for a new angle to making money with Google Adwords, check out Adwords 180. Ian Rollinson, a qualified Google Advertising Professional, offers a technique that is base on the content network of Google Adwords. In fact, it would be great for the beginner as well, because he shows you how to keep costs down.


11 Tips for Pay-Per-Click Success
By Mike Tekula

This list details some very important points to keep in mind when creating or managing any pay-per-click campaign. Is this all there is to know about pay-per-click advertising? Absolutely not, but for those new to PPC it should serve as good place to start. Additionally, pay-per-click veterans or at least the moderately-seasoned will want to touch upon these points now and then to brush up on their fundamentals.

1) Do your keyword homework.
Use Google's free Keyword Tool or sign up for a WordTracker account to find out which keywords are the most competitive. The more competitive the keyword, the more expensive your clicks will be. While you're finding out which keywords are too expensive you'll come across some that aren't being targeted heavily by advertisers. Take a good look at these - they may be your keys to a successful niche campaign.

2) Don't bunch your ad groups.
You should be striving to separate your ad groups by keyword. Whatever your target, separate your keyword lists into closely related groups containing the same target words and write ads geared specifically to those words. Your ads will show up higher in results based on their quality, and search terms show up bold in results - a click-through rate booster.

3) Drive home your selling point.
What's your offer? Why are you better than the others? Remember that your ads are going to display with your competitors. The difference between a user clicking your ad and clicking a competitor ad is about 100 pixels on the screen - or a millisecond of time. You need to convince them that you are the one they want. You are better. Grab them.

4) Don't send users to your home page.
This is perhaps one of the worst things you can do to your Pay-Per-Click campaign. Internet users are notoriously impatient. Send them to your home page when they were searching for a specific product or service and see how fast they leave. Don't waste your advertising budget - send them to optimized landing pages.

5) Optimize your landing pages.
Your landing pages need to drive something home immediately for your users: "you have landed in the right place." They need to know that, yes, this is what they were looking for, here it is, here is why it is better than the rest and here's the easy thing they need to do to get it. In most cases you'll need to create multiple landing pages based on your different ad groups and keywords, but look at it this way - if your users aren't landing at pages geared exactly to their search phrases they'll leave and take your advertising budget with them.

6) Don't lie in your ads.
People aren't dumb. If you promise something in your ads you had better well deliver. Otherwise you'll not only waste advertising dollars but damage your brand. Be honest, and focus on points that make you stand out from the competition. Grandiose ad text might bring in clicks, but if it isn't the truth it won't bring in conversions.

7) Your domain name counts.
In most cases you can display a domain name that you own as the "display domain" but point the ads to a page on a different domain. Why does this matter? If you own a domain name that contains the keyword text it will show up bold and increase conversions. Enter the optimized domain as the displayed domain, point the ads to your landing pages and you can expect higher CTRs in most cases.

8) Utilize negative keywords.
Google has a new Negative Keyword Tool that will allow you to find negative keywords that you should specify for your ads. Negative keywords are those that you don't want your ads to display for. For example, if you're selling "blue widgets" you don't want to display your ads to those users searching for "free blue widgets." If you don't use negative keywords you are missing out on a chance to get more targeted traffic to your landing pages, and this can really hurt your conversion rates.

9) Test, test, and test some more.
The greatest thing about internet advertising is the ability it grants you to measure your success. It's easy to create A/B split tests with Pay-Per-Click advertising. Change one word, add a comma, include a value proposition. . .just make sure you only change one thing for each split or you won't know which variable it was that made the difference! You'll find out right away that this is a great way to optimize your click-through rates - just don't forget that clicks aren't everything!

10) Don't focus too heavily on CTRs.
Getting tons of clicks isn't always the name of the game. In fact, if you aren't using proper techniques to ensure that you're getting targeted traffic and sending it to well-optimized landing pages you can blow through your advertising budget in no time flat. Remember that the success of any advertisement is getting back more than you put in. It's an investment, not a cost - so do all that you can to better your rate of return!

11) Don't pigeonhole yourself.
We all know that Google AdWords is the most popular Pay-Per-Click service out there. Your competitors know it, your users know it - even your grandma might know it. It would be foolish to ignore Google as a venue for advertising, but don't forget that there are other search engines out there who offer similar services. Yahoo!'s new Panama search system is catching on, and Microsoft's adCenter is nothing to sneeze at either. Both companies are currently offering sweet promotional deals to new Pay-Per-Click advertisers to stay competitive so take advantage and diversify!

Mike Tekula handles SEO, SEM, usability and standards-compliance for NewSunGraphics, a Long Island, New York firm offering Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, W3C-Compliant web design using full CSS layouts and all things web design/development.

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For an Intro into Adowrds check out Adwords Basic on My Affiliate place

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