With all the talk about blogging and social media lately, you’d think there was nothing left to do in the world of search engine optimization. I’m guilty of tunnel vision myself. After all, social media is far more fun to talk about than title tags, keyword selection and canonical issues. That said, sometimes the best way to give your site a boost is to go back to basics. Whether it’s a refresher or your first shot at optimizing your site, here’s a trip down content revitalization lane.

Step 1: Pick the Right Keywords

When you’re talking organic search, it’s hard to argue that choice of keywords is the single most important factor in a successful search engine optimization campaign. (Yes, yes, I know…everyone thinks links are most important, but if those links are helping you rank for the wrong keywords, it won’t do a lick for you.)

Selecting your keywords isn’t simply about making random guesses and popping a few words in your title tag. It should be one of the foundational elements of any search engine optimization campaign. The keywords you aim to rank for define the type of traffic a successful campaign will eventually send to your site. Aim for too broad a phrase and you’ll have trouble ranking well and will end up with traffic that doesn’t convert. Aim too specific and you’ll get good quality traffic, but not enough to keep you going.

That’s why it’s essential to understand the keyword buying cycle. (The process of refining a search over time to reflect the move from researching to being ready to buy.) It’s also essential to tap into a keyword research tool so you can find out what phrases people are actually using when they search. Time and time again I’ve seen companies be surprised at what people are really searching for.

For a super general example, I ran a quick search on the phrase “cakes” and built the following list. (Your list should be quite a bit larger, but the concept is the same.)

Now, you may be reading this and thinking “but I’ve already done my keyword research.” Well sure, but how long has it been? Did you put up a site a few years ago and haven’t thought a thing about your keywords since then? If so, how do you know you aren’t missing out on new traffic from new keywords? Remember, the way people search changes over time. If you haven’t done keyword research in the last six months, I’d suggest taking an afternoon to see if your keywords and phrases are still current.

Keyword research can also give you the kick in the tail to add new areas of focus to your web site. Maybe you’ve been thinking of expanding your business, maybe you’d like to take your blog in a new direction. Keyword research can be a great way to dictate which direction you head. After all, if you stumble upon a topic with a lot of searching and not much competition, you’re gold!

Step 2: Divide Keywords into Groups

Once you’ve built your list of new keywords and phrases to target, you’ll need to sort those phrases out into groups so you can come up with a content plan. The best way to do this is to break your list down by topic, like so:

Now you can see what started as one big list turning into some distinctive content areas. While the groups in the image above may show us new areas of focus (i.e. types of cakes, events, wedding related content) the groups can be broken down even further.

Step 3: Start Creating New Content

Once you have your final list divided up into specific topics, you’re at a point where you can being mapping out some content. Your best bet is to take each group of keyword phrases and write up a couple of ideas to go along with it. Decide what type of content is a good fit and what the focus of the content should be. For example:

Keep in mind that new content doesn’t always have to be pure text. For example, you might have noticed the keyword phrase “wedding cake pictures” on the list above. I suppose you could write an article about how to take the best pictures of wedding cakes, but it would make far more sense to build a photo gallery of the wedding cakes you have created. After all, photo galleries don’t have to be made up solely of pictures. You can easily write up some descriptive text describing the style of the cake, the type of cake, the decorations and so on.

Keyword Research Can Spark a Content Rush

It’s easy to think you’ve covered every angle and every perspective of content for your site when you’ve been writing awhile. Bloggers talk about writer’s block and business owners feel like they have nothing new to say about their products. Sometimes taking an afternoon to go and do a little keyword research can give you a great reminder that there are still plenty of ways to talk about your business. Even if you only get a handful of blog posts out of it, you’re still ahead of the game.

source:www.searchengineguide.com/jennifer-laycock/sem-bootcamp-three-steps-to-creating-new.php 

Tags: age, ark, blogger, boot, engine, events, IDE, image, Keyword, keywords, list, mapping, optimization, PHP, ping, Plugins, proc, process, ranking, search, search engine optimization, SEM, SEM, traffic, XP

Ever go to get on a computer and the user is logged out, and you don’t know the windows password? Or do you have some access, but not access to a users private files, and you want access to those files?

This quick tutorial will show you the steps to change and reset any user password on a windows computer, and also show you how to protect your computer from people doing this to you!

---

CHANGE/RESET PASSWORD FOR ANY USERNAME

1. Reboot the computer
2. Right after the bios is finished, hit F8 (or F2,10,12)
3. Select ‘Safe mode’ or ‘Safe mode with networking support’
4. Windows will boot up to the logon screen. Click administrator, 9/10 there is no password.
5. Do, Start->Run->type ‘command’
6. At the prompt, type ‘net user’ which will display a list of usernames. Find the one you are looking for, try ‘net user username’ for them all. Type ‘net user /HELP’ for more info.
7. To reset the password type ‘net user username *’ where username is the username you want to reset.
8. For no password, leave blank.
9. Now, reboot and you can login as that user.

SECURING YOURSELF FROM THIS METHOD

1. Log into your account (must have admin rights)
2. Get to a command prompt and type ‘net user username *’ where username is Administrator, or the renamed administrator account.
3. Give administrator a STRONG password.

I never use windows, but when I do, I re-install the OS on a clean harddrive, and take steps to secure it before I connect it to the net for windows and antivirus upgrades.

One of the first things I do is give the Administrator a password. I also disable the guest account, and give the guest username a password.

Next I uninstall all networking components except TCP/IP. Next I disable netbios in the TCP/IP component settings.

Then I disable some services from running, use ‘net user username /DELETE’ to delete the “SUPPORT� and helpdesk usernames totally, and do a bunch of other stuff.

Caveats: If you are on a pc that does not allow you to boot into safe mode, you can get around this. They aren’t disabling the safe mode from the OS, they are just not allowing it from startup by pressing a function key. All you need to do is reboot, and then when windows is still loading, before the login screen, turn off the computer by holding down the power button for 5 seconds. Then turn it back on and you should have safe mode available. You can try this at many different stages to get to a safe mode.

If you have administrator rights, you can modify your boot.ini file to automatically boot into safe mode, or, preferably, you can modify your boot.ini file to give you a choice of booting into safe mode every single time you reboot. I have a custom boot.ini on every windows I run.

You could also use a linux “live cd� such as knoppix to edit your boot.ini file. But if you are going to do that, why not just use a live cd to reset the password, or retrieve the hashes and crack them with saminside?

See available boot.ini switch options at microsoft support boot.ini switch options
This is meant to be for beginners so don’t give me any grief for how easy or simple this is. Not all of us even use windows. Questions/Comments welcome.

Tags: age, antivirus, apache, BIOS, boot, cd, Command Line, components, computer, count, cp, IDE, image, Knoppix, Linux, list, Microsoft, option, Plugins, PROM, Tutorial, Windows, Windows, Windows Security, Windows XP, XP

I’m freaking out. I went and logged in to Google Analytics this morning and it reported this: “No pages from your site are currently included in Google’s index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines. Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines.” Oh my god! What guidelines? How can I figure out what caused me to get the boot and how do I get my site re-included?

Yow. That is a scary thing to find once you log in to your admin account!

The good news is that if you aren’t trying to “game” the search engine, then it’s likely that you’ve inadvertently done something that’s easy to fix and yes, you can get back into their index if you request a reinclusion.

What you must do immediately is go and study the Google Webmaster Guidelines, take notes on anything you think might be a mistake you’ve added on your pages, and then methodically ensure that each and every page of your site is clean of any problems.

Common problems include having foreground and background colors too similar, or identical (white on white is a classic search engine spamming technique, and easily identified), having different pages for search engine spiders than users (called “cloaking”), pages that contain identical content to other pages on your site or other pages elsewhere on the web (called “duplicate content”), and loading up pages with irrelevant words (”keyword stuffing”). Fundamentally, the best advice I’ll give you is exactly the same as what Google suggests:

Make pages for users, not for search engines.

That’s really the key to all of this, and if more people focused on creating the best possible content on their site, unique, fresh content that met a genuine need in their user community or market segment, we’d have less “blackhat” seo and more great results from a given search.

Okay, off my soapbox. :-)

Once you believe that you’ve cleaned up everything that might be a problem on your site, you can request that the Google folk reevaluate your site, check for whatever problems where previously there, and, hopefully, get back into the index. Start here:
Submit a reinclusion request.

Can it be done? Definitely. I know of a number of sites that have been banned for violations of the Google webmaster guidelines and, upon cleaning up their act, have shown back up in the index with good SERPs and all. What percentage are reapproved? I have no idea, but I bet it’s not that high…

Good luck. Please do come back in a week or three and let us know how it went!

Tags: age, ark, boot, count, engine, Google, Google, google analytics, IDE, Keyword, page, search, Search Engines, SEO, Sites

Picture this: You’re a successful entrepreneur running a bustling online business. You’ve paid your dues, put in a lot of long hours, and your hard work is finally producing profitable returns. You have a steady stream of nicely converting traffic, excellent cash flow, and the power to be your own boss. Life is good.

One day you turn on your computer and because, like most of us, you’re obsessive about checking your search engine rank you do a quick search and poof! …your site, which was ranking #1 on Google’s results just the day before, is now suddenly nowhere to be found.

You check your logs and find that traffic is tanking at an alarming rate. Online sales have slowed to a trickle. Suddenly, life ain’t so good anymore.

Like most online entrepreneurs, your website is your livelihood – and getting kicked out of Google may be one of the most terrifying business setbacks imaginable. You need to know why it happened. You need to know the quickest way to get back in. Perhaps most importantly, you need to know how to keep it from happening again.

With that in mind, we present to you the complete guide to *not* getting banned from Google.

How Do I Tell If My Site Has Really Been Banned From Google?

First, let’s point out that having a site banned from Google is a fairly rare event, reserved for particularly egregious behavior. Usually, most objectionable offenses result in a reduced search engine rank; not an outright ban. Your page may still be in Google’s index, it’s just no longer residing in the upper echelon of the search results.

At one time, the Google toolbar was a fairly easy and effective way to find out if you had been banned from Google: A completely gray PageRank toolbar meant that Google did not have that page listed in their index – either because the page was too new to have been indexed, or the page had been banned by Google; a completely white tool bar meant that the page was listed by Google but had almost no PageRank, or that the PageRank hadn’t been calculated yet.

To a large degree, however, these guidelines are no longer reliable. The PageRank reporting, as indicated on the Google toolbar, has been inconsistent for the past several months now. PageRank updates have been taking an inordinately long time and often appear to be flatly inaccurate. Adding to the confusion are reports that banned pages are sometimes showing a white bar, sometimes gray, and sometimes even green. We’re not sure whether Google is having technical issues or if Google is purposefully crippling the PageRank feature to make search engine optimization more difficult.

Whatever the case may be, we can no longer consider the PageRank feature of the Google toolbar to a reliable indicator of whether or not a page has been intentionally dropped (banned) from the Google index. Fortunately, however, there are much more effective ways to determine if your site has been removed from Google.

The easiest way to tell if your site has been banned and completely removed from Google’s index is to enter the following into the Google search bar:

This will show you most of the pages that Google has indexed for this domain. If this doesn’t produce any results, try searching for some text – such as an address or phone number – that you are sure is unique to pages from your site and were previously indexed by Google. You could also try searching for a short piece of text. For example, to see if this page is indexed, we might search Google for the opening phrase of this article…

“Picture this: You’re a successful entrepreneur running a bustling”

Be sure to include the quotation marks so that Google searches for the entire string. And, limit the phrase to Google’s 10-word query limit.

If your page shows up in Google’s search results, then you have not been banned. If neither searching for a unique string of text nor doing a site: search produces results, then your page/site is definitely not in Google’s index.

Don’t panic yet… this still doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve been banned by Google. There are several other causes for a site falling out of the Google index.

If I Haven’t Been Banned, Then Why Am I No Longer Listed?

• The most common reason that your site might disappear from Google is that your server was down when googlebot came calling to re-index your site. If their spider tries to download a page but instead gets either no response or an excessively slow response, it will assume that site or page no longer exists. Presto! …you’re deleted. To prevent this from happening, follow the steps we outline in our comprehensive article about maximizing your site’s uptime.

• Another common reason your site can disappear from Google is a faulty robots.txt file. We recommend robots.txt files as a great way to keep portions of your site off limits to search engine spiders. For instance, there’s probably no reason for Google to index your images directory or your cgi-bin directory, so why waste their time and your resources by allowing spiders to access parts of your site you don’t need indexed.

  However, it your robots.txt file is written or set up incorrectly, you could be inadvertently shutting googlebot out of your site altogether. One common mistake we see is where someone places the following code in their robots.txt:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /

  These two lines, when placed in a robots.txt file located in the top-level directory on your server, are enough to exclude every search engine spider from your entire site! Not only will you not get indexed by Google, you probably won’t be indexed by any other search engine either. And even if you were indexed previously, a poorly done robots.txt file can easily get your site deleted from the engines.

  To insure you are crystal clear about the correct procedures, be sure to familiarize yourself with the robots exclusion protocol.

  ( Editor’s Note: Use the robots.txt tester to check your robots file for errors or create a new one from scratch using the Simple robots.txt Creator. )

• Another commonly overlooked reason for dropping out of the Google index is that your site recently lost some links. If your site was made up of pages that had almost no PageRank to begin with, and those pages lost some of their incoming links, it’s possible that your PageRank dropped so low that your site was removed from Google’s index. While rare, this does occasionally happen, so check your incoming links and make sure you still have enough good ones to keep you well-listed in Google.

• Finally, sometimes getting booted from Google can simply be chalked up to faulty behavior by the Google spider. It’s not easy to maintain an index of over four billion pages every month. Sometimes things go wrong. If you think this may be the case, your best recourse is to contact Google directly at help@google.com. Calmly explain your situation. Politely ask them why your pages were removed from their listings. If it is their fault, they will usually reinstate your site fairly quickly – that is, once they’ve responded to your email, which can take up to a week or more.

Tags: adding, age, ark, boot, code, computer, download, engine, error, Google, Google, IDE, image, list, optimization, page, PHP, ping, proc, PROM, ranking, search, search engine optimization, SEF, server, traffic, XP

Tags: age, apache, boot, configure, Debian Etch 4.0, etc, Free, IDE, list, scripts, search, server, Sound