What I won’t discuss in this post, is spending money on advertising with Bing, Google, Yahoo or any other search engine, or paying someone for “search engine optimization” services. Again, this post covers the basic foundation of what you need to do when creating post and pages, costing you nothing except a little bit of thought and time on your part.

What is search engine optimization?
In short, it’s taking the steps to get your website “ranked higher” in search engine results. Preferably, you want to be on the first page of results and the closer to the top the better. That said, you’ll need to be reasonable with your expectations. If you have a new site or are taking steps to improve your site, you can not expect to be near the top of the results for the phrase ‘scuba lessons’. That’s what I refer to as a “wide net” search where you’ll find it difficult to crack into the top page.

Most people searching the Web will be more specific with their word choices when searching. As an example, instead of searching for ‘scuba lessons’ they may search for ‘scuba lessons connecticut’ (without the quotes). That takes a wide net search and immediately makes it more local and provides better results for the user. And that leads us to the most important lesson … writing for the Web.

Writing for the Web
Some of your visitors access your site directly, but most of your Internet traffic will come via search results determined by complex computer algorithms that crawl through your content and determine relevance as compared to keywords. In other words a computer, not a person, is reading your website and determining where your pages should show up within search results.

When selling a newspaper, large catchy headlines – without one word relevant to the content of the article – can be effective at a news stand, but catchy headlines can destroy search engine rankings. As an example of the difference, take a look at this afternoon’s headline at the Post’s website … WELCOME HOMER.

If you’re wondering how Andy Pettitte did yesterday when he returned to the Yankee’s pitching rotation, would you search for either of the words welcome or homer? Absolutely not, and that’s why the Post uses the big graphics with text to catch your eye, while the actual headline of the story includes the words Pettitte, Yankees and return. They are writing for the Web along with writing to catch your eye.

For a scuba-related example, let’s say you’re promoting a group trip to the Bahamas. The headline Warm, clear water awaits you this May certainly peaks your interest when you read it, but it tells the computer analyzing your content nothing about what you are promoting.

Instead, the headline Spider Creations wrote for Scuba Shack in Connecticut was “Annual Bahamas Memorial Day Weekend group dive trip set for May.” This headline includes keywords scuba divers might type in if they were looking to join a group dive trip to the Bahamas. As an example, you might think the words ‘group dive trip bahamas’ casts a wide net, but since we included those words in the headline of the article, Scuba Shack’s Memorial Day Weekend trip to Nassau comes up as the second result excluding paid advertising.

Looking back at the headline we wrote, it turns out it was a bit long and Google – in this example – cut off the last nine characters which is something you want to avoid. In hind-sight, we should have removed the word ‘annual’ since it would not be one of the keywords someone would enter. (That said, if they did add ‘annual’ to the search, the result would move from number two to number one.)

So, when it comes to your headlines, take some time to think about what keywords potential customers will enter into search engines and include those words in your headline. But as we mentioned, catching the visitors eye is also important, so it’s always a good idea to do both, as we did when promoting Scuba Shack’s Nassau trip on the home page.

What about the text on the page?
Along with headlines, I’ve found the first two paragraphs of the article is important. You should include the same keywords used in the headline, but add keywords visitors may use. In our example, we included the words scuba, Nassau, Stuart Cove, and even the real name of the island … New Providence.

Along with including keywords, ensure the content you post in the first paragraph or two is original content. If you copy and paste content from another site, your search rank may suffer because the search computer knows you’re not providing original content.

Implementing these suggestions … and more
Depending on the website platform you are using, implementing the foundation of a solid search engine optimization strategy can either be very easy or kind of hard.

Spider Creations uses the WordPress platform exclusively for our websites in part, because search engine optimization is built in to the application, and free plugins are available to enhance the system.

WordPress allows you to easily create and edit headlines and the content of a post, but it also allows you to create and edit permalinks which are also read by search engines. Permalinks are also know as the URL or slug of a page. The permalink we’re using for the Scuba Shack trip is …

http://scubashackct.com/travel/memorial-day-weekend-nassau-bahamas-group-dive-trip-stuart-cove-2012/

Note that we’ve got some important keywords in there including the post category (travel) and some other words, even the year, we wanted to highlight.

As compared to http://scubashackct.com/?p=2380 - which takes you to the exact same place - the enhanced permalink tells the search engine something about your post and will get your article more exposure in search engines.

Some other basic foundation search engine optimization tips – all included with the WordPress platform – include:

• Publish an RSS feed, subscribe to the feed, and access posts from the feed. Encourage your staff and customers to do the same
• Use images in your posts, and use keywords within the Alternate Text of each image
• Use a search engine optimization plugin like All in One SEO Pack or WordPress SEO by Yoast (configured properly)

For more information on the subject, contact me and I’ll provide you with more tips, or manage your website presence and take care of the basic foundation of search engine optimization for you.

First things first. WordPress makes it very simple – almost too simple – to upgrade the core application and plugins via your site’s administration panel. You can’t miss the indicators informing you the core or one of your plugins have an update available. Once you see those indicators, you should absolutely resist the temptation to check off that box and hit the update button in your production environment.

You ask why? Well, take a look at the support forum for just about any plugin out there and you’ll see a recent thread starting with the following phrase … “I updated [insert plugin name here] and my site blew up”. This happens to almost every WordPress installation at some point, and in many cases the site administrator has not prepared in advance for this issue.

The problem could be a plugin conflict, a theme framework conflict or something else that is not easy to identify after the fact. Sure, you could just ignore those updates, but your site could then be open to a security exploit that will eventually make things even worse and more difficult to solve.

So, what to do?

Prior to hitting that upgrade button, you need to implement a backup strategy for your database, WordPress core installation, plugins, themes, theme framework, and your media library and uploaded files. Of course, there are plugins available to help you with this process and one of the more popular ones out there is BackupBuddy from iThemes. You thought your Web host took care of backups for you? Hardly. Almost all Web hosts only make backups for use after a catastrophic server meltdown. Their backups will not help you in a situation where you need to restore your site to your portion of the server.

Your backup strategy must include storing recoverable assets at a different location, preferably with a different host. Again, BackupBuddy provides the ability to backup locally to your server as well as move those backups to cloud file storage solutions such as Amazon S3 or Rackspace.

The next step missed by many is quality testing your backups on a regular basis. Yes, files can be corrupted occasionally, and if you need to restore from to a previous backup, you may issues if that backup file – or part of the file – is corrupted. On a regular basis I do restore full sites to a development environment that is unavailable to the public. This can be on your local computer or on a sub-domain like dev.yourwebsite.com.

Once you have your backup strategy in place, you’re prepared to update the WordPress core application and plugins. With a recent full backup in place and saved where you can access it, go ahead and upgrade your core and plugins – one at a time – and check out the site as you go along. If anything happens and you are unable to solve the problem quickly by deactivating a plugin or renaming the plugin’s folder name, you’ll be able to wipe out your current site, drop all of your tables in the database and restore using BackupBuddy with the importbuddy.php script in less than five minutes for an average sized or smaller site. Larger sites with a lot of photos or files in the media library will take much longer. (My largest site’s full backup, compressed, is about 575 MB.)

Once restored, you can move to the process of figuring out what went wrong with the upgrade. Again, if you update one at a time and check your site’s functionality along the way, you should be able to narrow the problem down to a specific plugin, and figure out what to do next.

With my current host, I’m able to create a domain in my Web Host Manager, create a MySQL database, upload and extract WordPress and have everything up and running in seven minutes flat. Granted, this is the default theme with no content or plugins, but it’s up … again … in seven minutes. All done manually with no magical set up scripts.

It’s so easy to do, I frequently create and blow away WordPress installations on a subdomain during my lunch break just to try something out. Heck, I create subdomains and restore full site backups – including all the images, files and templates – on a regular basis just to validate the backup file I have. (Do you validate your backups?)

With GoDaddy’s Economy hosting plans, this is simply not possible. Sure, it’s cheap. All I can say is “you get what you pay for.”

One of the most frequent questions theme and plugin developers ask when there is a problem with a site is “where are you hosting your site?” Let me give you a heads up … when the answer is GoDaddy, you’re developer is cringing. Sure, you could probably get your plugin to work, but where something might take 10 minutes to configure and get working elsewhere, it might take two hours or more with GoDaddy.

I’ve even had issues with my backup and restore plugin that were documented and confirmed with GoDaddy, only to have the issue completely resolve itself 24 hours later. GoDaddy support (who is generally very good) claimed they did nothing to fix anything.

Oh well.

Then we have my experience today as I’m sitting in the passenger seat on the way to Boston. I’ve got a new client ready to get going, and I figured I’d spend a short part of the trip firing up WordPress, getting the basics installed and at least install the Members Only plugin to restrict the site just to myself and the client while we’re putting everything together.

He registered his domain a few days ago. GoDaddy offered him one year of hosting during the check-out process. He went with it.

OK … I can work with it. I’ve done it before.

My client provided me with access to his GoDaddy account so I could “turn on” the hosting he purchased. I went through the steps, and the message at right was displayed at the end of the process. Now, I have to wait somewhere between 30 minutes and 24 hours to access the account. Keep that in mind when selecting a host, and please do keep your developer in the loop and ask them what they suggest.

In short, if you have products that have – for example – size and color variants and one of the sizes or colors are out of stock, Shopp won’t let your site visitor purchase any size or color, even the ones you have in stock.

Again, the issue is documented and the developer has provided a patch. For some reason, the patch is scheduled to be incorporated in version 1.2.1.

To Patch

In your favorite text editor, open up /wp-content/plugins/shopp/core/model/Product.php. Scroll down to line 622, and find the following…

if ($target->inventory == 'on' && $target->stock <= 0) $target->outofstock = true;

Replace that line with…

if ( str_true($target->inventory) ) $target->outofstock = ($target->stock <= 0);

Lines 619 through 624 should then read as follows.

}
		}

		if ( str_true($target->inventory) ) $target->outofstock = ($target->stock <= 0);
		$target->freeship = $freeshipping?'on':'off';
	}

• We did not want the visitor to have a user experience that forced them into “sharing” their information with a Facebook application (when they first post a comment, a pop up window confirms they want to share their contacts, email address or more with a Facebook application).
• We did not want to use the WordPress comments system, or use it in conjunction with Facebook comments.
• We were not concerned about the look and feel, we wanted to cater to the Facebook audience so the Facebook look for comments was good.
• We did not want comments for pages, only posts, and for this implementation, we were using a custom post type with a custom LoopBuddy Layout.

If you can suggest a way to improve this or add options, I’m all ears.

The above requirements may not meet your needs, but if so, this is how I did it.

You’ll need to have a Facebook account and create a Facebook application, call it [Your Site] Comments or something, and make note of the App ID/API Key that is created. You’ll need to add the following to your header.php file, just after the start of your tag. If your child theme does not have a header.php file, just copy the file from the Builder theme into the child folder. You may find the header.php file does not even have an element listed. Here is the code I added to the header.php file that I have in my child theme.

Obviously, make a back-up copy of your header.php file if you need to revert.

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>(function(d, s, id) {
  var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
  if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
  js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
  js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=YOURFACEBOOKAPPID";
  fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>

This is what the complete header.php looked like for me after I added the above code.

<?php builder_add_doctype(); ?>
<?php builder_add_html_tag(); ?>
<head>
<?php builder_add_charset(); ?>
<?php builder_add_title(); ?>
<?php builder_add_favicon(); ?>
<?php builder_add_stylesheets(); ?>
<?php builder_add_scripts(); ?>
<?php builder_add_meta_data(); ?>
<?php wp_head(); //we need this for plugins ?>
</head>
<body>
<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>(function(d, s, id) {
  var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
  if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
  js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
  js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=YOURFACEBOOKAPPID";
  fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>
</body>

In the code above, ensure you replace YOURFACEBOOKAPPID with the collection of numbers you got from Facebook when you created your app. Next, since I was not going to be using the WordPress comments at all, I changed the comments.php file. Again, make a back-up copy of the comments.php file in your child theme before changing. This is the pertenent code that was added, but the full code is below.

<div class="fb-comments" data-href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" data-num-posts="12" data-width="600" data-colorscheme="light" data-mobile="false"></div>

The full comments.php code looked like this.

<div id="comments">
	<?php if ( post_password_required() ) : ?>
		<p class="nopassword"><?php _e( 'This post is password protected. Enter the password to view any comments.', 'it-l10n-BuilderChild-Foundation-Glacier' ); ?></p>
		</div>
		<?php return; ?>
	<?php endif; ?>

	<?php if ( comments_open() ) : ?>
		<div class="fb-comments" data-href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" data-num-posts="12" data-width="600" data-colorscheme="light" data-mobile="false"></div>
	<?php endif; ?>

	<?php if ( ! comments_open() ) : ?>
		<p><?php _e( 'Comments are closed.', 'it-l10n-BuilderChild-Foundation-Glacier' ); ?></p>
	<?php endif; ?>
</div>

Of course, you need to ensure you have comments enabled in WordPress under Settings > Discussion, and the posts themselves should have comments activated in the meta area of the post. The above code with changes to comments.php should take care of your normal posts, but what if you are using a custom post type with a LoopBuddy layout? You’ll need to go into your custom layout (LoopBuddy > Layout Editor) and add some code to the Post Loop Text / HTML box.

Unfortunately, you will not be able to add this code directly since you need some PHP code to pick up the absolute URL (permalink) of the post where the comments will be placed. The solution I found is to create a shortcode that calls a function that you have placed in your functions.php file. (You can use shortcodes in the LoopBuddy Layout areas.) In my case, I added the following to functions.php of the child theme. (I’m showing the full functions.php code for easy reference, since it was mostly blank in the child theme to start with.) The only thing that was in the functions.php code when I started was the opening and closing PHP tags.

<!--?php
add_theme_support( 'builder-3.0' );
add_shortcode('fbcomments', 'addFacebookComments');
function addFacebookComments() {
   global $post;
   return '
<div class="fb-comments" data-href="' .get_permalink( $post--->ID) .'" data-num-posts="12" data-width="600" data-colorscheme="light" data-mobile="false">';
}
?>

The code above creates a shortcode called fbcomments and calls the function addFacebook Comments, grabs the permalink of the post, displays 12 comments per “page” and sets the width of the Facebook comments box to 600 pixel. Then, I went into the custom LoopBuddy Layout I have for this custom post type, and added the shortcode for this function into the Post Loop Text / HTML box.

[fbcomments]

The results can be shown here (a regular post) and here (a post using a custom post type and a custom LoopBuddy Layout). As a moderator for the Facebook application you’ll see some moderator features right in the comments box when you are logged into Facebook. Looks like this…

Again, you’ll note that if you are logged into Facebook, you’ll be able to quickly leave a comment, uncheck the box to “Post to Profile” if you want, and you don’t have an annoying popup that confirms you want to send/share information with the Facebook application. It’s just very clean for Facebook users.

Comments or suggestions are welcome.

Yes, we do have a 2011 DEMA Special in place and available through 5 p.m. on Sunday. Stop by for a free consultation on your way in or out, as we are 35 steps from the show entrance.

Our consultation will include a brief review of your current website and a discussion about future business requirements.

Spider Creations can bring you website and email marketing support from someone who has more than 10 years in the scuba industry as an instructor, dive center manager in both New England and the Bahamas.

See you this week!

The first efforts to deliver e-mail campaigns to customers were pretty straight forward. The general process was to collect a bunch of e-mail addresses in a text file or spreadsheet and simply copy and paste the addresses into the BCC field of your favorite e-mail client.

Eventually, desktop applications emerged allowing businesses to better manage the list in a database and by 1999, Spider Creations was managing and distributing HTML and text e-mails (at the same time) to customers using an online PHP tool tied to a mySQL database. Users could sign up for the list on the client’s website and remove themselves easily.

Although that tool did (almost) everything we could envision we wanted to do, the e-mail spam problem soon made it virtually impossible for a small business to send out bulk e-mail unless they were willing to spend the big dollar fees for a dedicated mail server that could not be associated with any of the thousands of servers who were sending out the junk.

Recently, multiple companies have sprouted up dedicated to ensuring your bulk e-mail got delivered to your customers. Spider Creations is currently using two services, Constant Contact and MailChimp to deliver e-mail for our clients after we have created the campaign.

Both distribution providers have strict rules to ensure distribution lists include members who want to receive e-mail from our clients. These rules exist to ensure our distributors have good relationships with the big-player ISPs and spam filter companies who actually let the mail through to our customers. (Trust me, you don’t want to have to call Cox Communications and ask them why your e-mail is not getting through.)

Along with a good relationship with the ISP, it’s very important you have a quality list with members who want to get e-mail and that your e-mail campaign is of high quality. If as few as three out of your total of 1,000 customers click that Report Spam button, you could have quite an issue to resolve.

Other features of Spider Creations’ e-mail campaign services include:

• Double opt in lists, have them confirm registration via e-mail,
• list cleaning (target and remove those from the list who do not open your e-mail),
• collect first name, last name, e-mail address and more to allow for distribution of personalized e-mails,
• automatic bounce and e-mail rejection handling,
• HTML and text e-mail delivery,
• full reporting on the percentage of customers who viewed and clicked on a link in the campaign e-mail,
• automatic daily, weekly or monthly e-mails including posts from your RSS feed,
• create new distribution lists based on who clicked on a specific link, and more.

If you’re interested in getting your e-mail campaigns off the ground, contact us and we’ll get you started. We can take your current distribution list and migrate it to one of our selected vendors depending on your business requirements and help you manage and deliver your campaigns.

Our e-mail distribution service management can be offered combined with our website maintenance program or as a stand-alone service.