Wait for the Prize. Slow and Steady Wins the Race!

It is said that all things come to he who waits. So it is with White Hat SEO techniques. There are no shortcuts with White Hat. It takes hard work and persistence, but it definitely pays off in the long run. You will see a gradual improvement in your search engine rankings if you stick with it. It won’t happen as quickly as it would with Black Hat, but more likely in the magnitude of weeks to months. Other results you can expect from effective White Hate SEO are:

• SIgnificant increases in web site traffic
• Increased conversion rates
• Higher average sales per order

Think of it this way. If you opened a brick and mortar operation, you might advertise in the yellow pages, hand out flyers around the neighborhood, etc. in order to draw traffic to your store. Customers visit because of your initial efforts, but if you want those customers to keep coming back again and again, it takes building a relationship.

On the internet, your neighborhood is quite literally the entire world. Drawing traffic though is much different. You could advertise, but advertising can be expensive. Ideally, you would draw traffic to your site through search engines. Customers will visit your site, but what do you do to keep them coming back again and again? And, what get’s you noticed by search engines in the first place? Good White Hat SEO helps build the relationship with your web customers.

Keep Content Relevant

With White Hat, it’s all about the content, relevant content, and more relevant content. Did I mention relevant content? What is relevant content? It’s content that is relevant to your business and your customers. If you are in the import/export business, would your customers want to read about Tim Tebow getting traded to the Jets on your site? No. They’ll visit a sports relevant site. Stick to content that is relevant to your business.

White Hat SEO Techniques

• Title: The title should contain four or more words, include a primary keyword at the beginning of the title, and not exceed 72 characters in length
• Description: Often a meta tag, should not exceed 165 characters in length, include your keyword phrase in the description. The description displays on the search engine results page (SERP). Use the description to show how you can solve a problem or as a teaser to get the user to click on your link. Don’t use the description to repeat text already convered in your ssrticle.
• Content: the length of your articles should be a minimum of 300 words, ideally with the paragraphs focused on a keyword phrase
• Hyperlinks: As a general rule of thumb, there should be 1 hyperlink for every 120 words. At least 1 of those links should be at the beginning of the article to show prominence.
• Keywords: Keywords appear in the body of your text
• Flesch Reading Ease Score: one of the best-known and most popular readability indicators which rates text on a 100-point scale based on the average number of syllables per word and words per sentence. The closer the score is to 100, the easier the content is to read; the closer the score to 0, the more difficult the content is to read. Research indicates that a score of 70 is likely appropriate for adult readers. A score of 100 represents that the content is understood by readers with at least a fourth grade education.
• Keyword Density – the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears in a particular piece of content in relation to the total number of words in the content. Current SEO best practices suggest that a keyword’s density be less than 5% for one piece of content.

Search engine companies spend hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars each year tweaking their algorithms to thwart the attempts of Black Hats. Black Hats can produce very quick temporary results, but the risk to the business owner is enormous. Not only do Black Hats charge a lot of money, but a business risks having its website delisted from search engines for unethical and deceptive optimization practices. Why would any hard working and respected business owner risk damaging their reputation like that?

Black Hat Techniques to Avoid

Before I delve more deeply into this topic, let me insert a little disclaimer. I am not writing about Black Hat techniques to teach you how to use them. This article is meant entirely to be a consumer education piece. An informed consumer is one who is protected from unfair and deceptive practices in the marketplace and I want to help you become an informed consumer.

• Clickbots: software robot that clicks on ads to help conduct click fraud/li>
• Cloaking: any of several means to serve a page to the search-engine spider that is different from that seen by human users
• Disposable Web Sites: low-quality web pages created with very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases
• Hidden Keywords or Text: unrelated hidden text disguised by making it the same color as the background, using a tiny font size, or hiding it within HTML code such as “no frame” sections, alt attributes, zero-sized DIVs, and “no script” sections
• Keyword Stuffing: the calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page
• Link Farms: tightly-knit communities of pages referencing each other, also known facetiously as mutual admiration societies.
• Link Purchasing: similar to purchasing your votes for helping promote online business
• Link Spam: links between pages that are present for reasons other than merit
• Spamdexing: also known as search spam, search engine spam, web spam or search engine poisoning is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes

Today there’s an ongoing war between the search engines and Black Hats. As the search engines determine to tweak their algorithms, the Black Hats are equally determined to game the system. To emphasize just how serious search engines are to defeat the black hats, here’s an article first reported by the New York Times detailing how JC Penney got caught black hatting: The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. Do everything you can to avoid the Black Hats. Ask questions before engaging a SEO consultant.

SEO Smart: Become an Informed Consumer

Now that you have a website, you’re likely wondering how to get it noticed by the search engines. You may even be considering hiring a SEO expert to help you along. You’ve visited their websites. You’ve spoken to them on the phone. You’ve received a few quotes and are about to pull the trigger on hiring one who promises you fast results, higher search engine rankings, and all within your budget. You’re also about to make one of the biggest mistakes of your life!

Ask most any big corporate CEO what their company is doing about SEO and they’ll answer, “Everything!” Now ask them what “everything” means and they won’t have a clue. All they know is what you know. You know that you need Search Engine Optimization, and just as the big corporate CEO, you are placing your trust in the hands of experts.

As a business owner, become an informed consumer. An informed consumer is one who is protected from unfair and deceptive practices in the marketplace. The SEO marketplace is one that is rife with unfair and deceptive practices. The trick to SEO success is finding the right expert. And you can find seasoned experts who consistently do a great job, if you know how to discern the difference.

When you negotiate the terms of an engagement with a SEO expert, discuss the strategies they will use to help you gain better search engine rankings. Ask them specifically about their use and history with Black Hat vs. White Hat strategies. What’s the difference?

Black Hat vs. White Hat, that is the question!

SEO strategies are classified into two broad categories:

1. White Hat techniques that search engines recommend as a component of good design, and
2. Black Hat techniques which search engines despise

White Hat techniques tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas Black Hat techniques tend to producevery fast results that could result in sites eventually being banned either temporarily or permanently. Search engines invest enormous amounts of cash to minimize the effect of Black Hats by penalizing sites they discover using black hat methods. They either reduce their rankings or eliminate their listings from their databases altogether. You may get away with it for a little while, but you will eventually get caught.

What’s Your Choice?

Think it can’t happen to the big corporate CEO? In February 2006 Google removed both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for their use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list. I guess their CEOs were doing “everything” for SEO.

…and get yourself banned from Google at the same time

You’ve built a website to market your business or products. You may have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars with a web design company who promised you fantastic results, increased call volume and new avenues of profitability. Then after your site went live, you eagerly anticipated a stream of new customers to come rolling through your door because your website is so beautiful. But instead of reaching the promised land, you discovered new opportunities to exercise your patience as you waited…and waited…and waited.

Does this story sound familiar? In the movie “Field of Dreams,” Ray Kinsella was driven to build a ball field because he kept hearing the mantra “if you build it, they will come.”

The world wide web can be a field of dreams for those who work hard and follow the rules. But for the folks who are seeking fast wealth and immediate gains, it could very well turn into a field of disappointment and despair.

When faced with undesirable outcomes, many business owners turn to SEO experts for help. SEO is an acronym meaning Search Engine Optimization. It’s not uncommon for SEO experts to promise fast results and increased search engine page rankings in very little time; even to the point of winning the prize of all search engine prizes…getting listed at the top of the first page of Google results—guaranteed!!!

The truth is, if a SEO expert is making you these assurances, they are lying to you. Nobody can guarantee a successful rise to the top of search engines results, especially Google’s. As an organization, Google spends hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars to protect the integrity and end-user experience of their search engine. They do not tolerate anyone or anything with a “secret formula” designed to fool their algorithms in order to bump up an otherwise deserving business in their page rankings.

Yet, this is exactly what so many so called experts promise in return for significant recurring fees. In fact, experts who promise this kind of success are probably using “Black Hat” strategies which can produce very fast results, but with the extremely high risk of being banned from search engine results. This happened to a client of mine who didn’t heed my warnings. He hired a SEO expert who promised to bump him up in Google’s search results. A few months after engaging this clown, he received the following notice from Google. (I’ve hidden the domain name to protect my client.)

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.<domain-name>.com/,

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

This letter is basically telling my client that his website has been banned from Google’s search results until he stops and corrects the linking schemes. The SEO “expert” he hired managed to generate 5,412 backlinks to my client’s site on over 1,000 other sites in just a few months. Unnatural is right! And the cost for all this? My client paid the SEO expert over $2,000 to be banned from Google, not the results he wanted, expected, or was promised. He did however receive 16 calls from new customers because of the immediate rise to the top. Not much of a trade-off, is it?

Easy Form Creation with Formidable Pro

At one time guestbooks were a very popular website feature. I’ve had one on my family website for years. When I ported eveything over from the static site to WordPress, I wanted to keep the tradition alive. Search WordPress.org for a guestbook plugin, and there are only 16 returned results. Some of them have absolutely nothing to do with guestbooks.

I tried a few of them and eventually settled on DMSGuestbook. At first it worked just fine, but as time went on and WordPress matured, the developer didn’t keep up with changing requirements. As a result, the plugin’s performance degraded and conflicted with many newer plugins. I knew I needed to do something to address the problem, but I didn’t know what. Then along comes Formidable Pro. Formidable Pro comes with 5 pre-made templates. They are a Contact Form, a Real Estate Listing form, one for capturing User Information, another for creating a Defect/Bug/Issue Report, and the last to create a Job Application. Unfortunately, there isn’t one for a Guestbook page. Happily, it means that I have an opportunity to build one for myself and dive deeply under the hood of Formidable Pro.

Building the form itself is very simple. The following video demonstrates how I started with the contact form template and turned it into a guestbook form.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Isn’t that easy? In real-time (without all the talking), it takes just a few minutes to create this form, but we’re not done yet. We still need to learn about the settings page, displaying the form on a page, and creating a conditional custom display to show the form’s entries. If you want to see where we’re headed with this series of tutorials, you can visit the Guestbook page on my family website. http://www.fontlife.com/about/guestbook/.

And while you are looking, please don’t leave without signing the guestbook.

The problem:

You spend countless hours preparing video content for your WordPress multi-site installation. Everything is just right and you successfully QA your pages in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. You deploy to production and sleep well at night knowing all is well. Then Adobe releases a “security fix” for their flash player and you start receiving notices from your customers, who pay to access your content, that your videos have stopped working in their Firefox or Safari browsers. Now you go into firefighting mode until the problems are eliminated.

Background and Impact

Adobe Flash has long been the beast we’ve been forced to live with. Perhaps Steve Jobs was right for not supporting flash content in IOS. This site, VictorFont.com, is just one of six domains I own and operate on my Hostek hosted server. The primary site is http://www.fontlife.com/. FontLife.com is the first domain I purchased in the 90s. It started out as a static family website built in html, migrated to .asp, then released as a third generation .NET application. I moved it to WordPress at the beginning of 2010 after conducting an experiment in blogging on WordPress.com. Now I have 5 additional subdirectory sites setup in the same instance of WordPress all of which play video content.

The problem began with a recent update to the Adobe Flash player. You might not realize this, but there are two versions of the flash player, an active-x control for Internet Explorer and a plugin for all other browsers. For displaying my videos, I use a licensed version of the JW Player from Long Tail Video along with the JW Player for WordPress plugin. Until this recent update to the flash player, JW Player has been running great on my site. After the update it continued to run great in IE, but in Firefox and Safari it wouldn’t even load the skin never mind play videos. I searched the internet like mad trying to find a solution. All I found is numerous posts from other people experiencing the same problem. There is only one solution I discovered that was offered on a few sites.

For anyone experiencing this problem, the financial impact risk could be enormous. It’s the job of any business to keep their customers happy. If your customers can’t view the content they are paying for, they won’t remain customers for very long. (Thank you Adobe!)

The Solution

Out of desperation, I tried the suggested solution and voila’ it worked! What is it? It’s creating a cross domain policy file and installing it in my site’s root directory. A support page on the Long Tail Video site says:

The Adobe Flash Player contains a crossdomain security mechanism, similar to JavaScript’s Cross-Site Scripting restrictions. Flash’s security model denies certain operations on files that are loaded from a different domain than the player.swf. Roughly speaking, three basic operations are denied:

• Loading of XML files (such as playlists and captions).
• Loading of SWF files (such as skins).
• Accessing raw data of media files (such as ID3 tags or sound wave data).

Generally, file loads (XML or SWF) will fail if there’s no crossdomain access. Attempts to access or manipulate data (ID3, waveforms, bitmaps) will abort.

This certainly explains what’s happening. The player.swf file is being served up from FontLife.com. The content and skin (xml file) is being served up from VictorFont.com. When I test from FontLife.com, I experience no problems. When I test from VictorFont.com, black screen only, no skin, and no video. The problem is clearly cross domain access.

The issue that truly muddies the water is the fact that everything still works in IE regardless of the domain from which I’m testing. I suspect the active-x control is not securing cross domain access properly, where the flash plugin in Firefox and Safari is correctly preventing cross domain access as Adobe intends. Whatever the case, adding the cross domain policy file instantly fixed the problem. I’ll get a good night’s sleep tonight.

For more details about this issue, visit Adobe Cross Domain Policy File Specification.

Premise 2.0: is the Complete Digital Sales and Lead Generation Engine for WordPress. In addition to all the great features Premise already has, you use the new and improved version of Premise to:

1. Build rock-solid membership sites with WordPress
2. Take recurring payments with automated access management
3. Automatically drip content out over time
4. Securely sell ebooks, software, and other digital downloads
5. Confidently create private forum areas with vBulletin
6. Quickly set up password-protected content libraries
7. Easily build check-out pages for PayPal and Authorize.net

And it still works with any WordPress theme or framework!

Now, this is the really important part…

Premise is now a complete digital sales and marketing system for WordPress, but instead of raising the price right away, Copyblogger is offering the Ultimate Plan for Premise 2.0 for $70 off the regular price of the old Premise!

Here’s why…

They’ve been pretty busy at Copyblogger Media, so the new Premise site that shows all the new features hasn’t been completed yet. Instead of holding out on this awesome release, Copyblogger is offering the promotional discount until they finish the site, then the deal is over and Premise 2.0 jumps up in price. Talk about action inducing…

I’m telling you this now because I use Premise myself and know what a great product it is. Opportunities like this don’t come around too often. Take advantage of it now before it’s too late. Get Premise 2.0 now: Premise 2.0: is the Complete Digital Sales and Lead Generation Engine for WordPress

Building forms is not something you can do natively in WordPress. You could go the root of coding somthing completely in PHP, but the amount of effort that requires is enormous. Then there’s the plugin root. There are quite a few plugins out there that add a simple contact form to a website. A favorite of many I read of in various forums is Contact Form 7. I’ve tried it. I don’t like it.

Last year I ended up purchasing a developers license for Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms is a robust form building tool. A developer’s license allows you to use the tool on any website you build for your customers. What I didn’t know at the time I purchased Gravity Forms is that their licenses expire after 1 year and you have to pay more to renew them annually. Not even Microsoft does that. I realize everyone has to make a buck, but a company that charges customers over and over for point releases is not a company with whom I want to continue to do business.

After my customers started asking about the persisitent Gravity Forms “Your license has expired” nag screen, I decided to switch to a different tool. I tried CForms II. It’s robust, but probably a little more complex than I like. Also, support for the tool seems dubious to me. The website from which you download it is all about food, Delicious Days. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I want to use a plugin on my website that was built by Chef Gordon Ramsay. He may be good in the kitchen, but I don’t trust him with php and MySQL.

Then I stumbled across another tool I had never heard of before called Formidable Pro. Formidable Pro is the brain child of Steve and Stephanie Wells, the owners of Strategy 11 Web and graphic design. Their website describes Stephanie as:

…a Software Architect and the genius programer who engineers all our back-end functionality to make state-of-the-art web applications do just about anything.

What Stephanie has done with Formidable Pro truly is genius; and her support is nothing short of excellent. Their claim that Formidable Pro makes it easy to build any kind of form in just seconds is the absolute truth. I have two examples of contact forms that I built and deployed in literally less than five minutes. The first is for the North Carolina Executive Roundtable. This form includes a hidden expandable area for optional information. The second is the simple contact form I use on this website and all websites that I own.

What I like most about Formidable Pro’s functionality is the fact that it’s easy to display the content captured with your forms through the use of custom displays. You do have to know how to code in HTML a little to create a custom display, but it really is easy. Using Formidable Pro, I replaced an old badly behaving guestbook plugin on my family’s website. Not only does it capture the data and send me an email when someone submits an entry, but I also built in the ability to approve the entry before displaying it and use a custom display to show the guestbook entries under the form. My next post is a tutorial to show you how easy it is to build such a form with a custom display.

Formidable Pro is available at http://formidablepro.com/ for a 1 time fee of $97 USD for the unlimited version. There is a single license version available for $37 and a lite version that you may use for free. Best of all, you’ll never have to pay another fee or renew a maintenance license for the lifetime of the product. Now if that’s not a great deal, than I don’t know what is.

Approach #1

The first approach is the easiest to implement and requires no customization at all. Functionally it works, but it will generate a W3C validation error. If W3C validation is as important to you as it is to me, you should probably jump to Approach #2.

This approach requires the Genesis Simple Menus plugin. This plugin allows you to select different secondary navigation menus for any post or page. Before we get started, make certain you have secondary navigation turn on in the Genesis Theme Settings:

Next, create and save an empty menu. I named the illustrated one “no-menu.”

Finally, using the Genesis Simple Menus plugin, select the menu you just created for any page or post upon which you do not want to display the secondary navigation menu.

As I mentioned earlier, this approach works but it produces the following W3C validation error because system still creates the beginning and ending ul elements and there aren’t any corresponding li elements for them to wrap around.

Approach #2

Approach #2 is what I consider the right way, but it requires inserting a few lines of custom code into your theme’s functions.php file. In this example, the code references the page ID for the page upon which you want the secondary navigation menu to appear. The page id is an internal WordPress identifier which is hidden by default. One way to find the page id is to view the All Pages screen and hover your mouse over the name of the page. As you do this, look at your browser’s status bar. The url of the page is displayed. The url includes text that reads “post.php?post=xxx” where the xxx is a numerical value representing the page id. This is not an easy way to find the page id, but this is WordPress and there are a lot of talented developers out there writing plugins that expand the platform’s functionality. One such plugin is WP Show IDs by Jason of Primo Themes. Install this or any of the other “show id” plugins and your “All Pages” screen will look like this:

Now that you have the page id, copy the following code to the bottom of your theme’s function.php file. Change the 8 to the page id of your target page and save the file.

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/** display secondary menu only on chosen page **/
add_action('template_redirect', 'child_conditional_actions');
function child_conditional_actions() {
if ( !is_page( 8 ) )
    remove_action('genesis_after_header', 'genesis_do_subnav');
}

/** display secondary menu only on chosen page **/
add_action('template_redirect', 'child_conditional_actions');
function child_conditional_actions() {
if ( !is_page( 8 ) )
    remove_action('genesis_after_header', 'genesis_do_subnav');
}

You can use any criteria to drive the “conditions” for displaying the secondary menus. What I’ve shown you is a very simple example. If you choose to use categories or multiple pages, you’ll have more coding to do, but at least now you have a head start for getting there. For example, for multiple pages, change the “if” statement to include an array of page numbers like if ( !is_page( array(8,9,20,23) ) ). This shows the secondary menu only on the pages listed in the array.

If you would like to see the site where Approach #2 is implemented, please visit Bachman & Associates. Click on the Associates menu item to see the conditional secondary navigation menu. It appears for each of the associate’s pages as well.

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