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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says bloggers can now be fined for undisclosed endorsements. What does this mean? It means if you are a gaming review site and you get a free copy of the next Halo game to review (and you don’t disclose that you got it for free to review) – you can be fined up to $11,000 (per blog post). So what if you get a free software download or free premium access to a web site and review it (and don’t disclose it) – can you get fined for that too? Celebrities that endorse products without disclosure can be fined as well.

What this video from a Boston news channel that explains this in greater depth, and then we’ll come back and talk about this some more…

Now then, the Internet has made it much easier for people to lie, cheat, and steal. Years ago, when everybody had the local newspaper delivered to their doorstep the way you found out about products was in the ads inside the paper. Particularly on Sunday, I can remember years ago as a kid the greatest thing about the newspaper was the Sunday funnies, and all the advertisements from all the stores with the following week’s sales. Whether it was video games, toys, clothes, or electronics (in our house), this was how we knew about all the things that were on sale.

Some retail stores would put loss leaders on sale (items where they break even and make no money), just to get you through the door. Other stores might do the old “bait and switch” – and old time scam where you advertise one thing, but when people get to the store you replace it with something else. Maybe the original item never existed, maybe the store only had 5 of them to sell (but never disclosed that in the ad). Over the years, this has lead to many “truth in advertising” laws being put on the books. I don’t know how much good it’s done, since I still see infomercials for losing 10 lbs in a week with “results not typical” in such tiny print at the screen bottom I can’t even make it out.

The Internet has matured to the point now where, for the first time since 1980, the American federal government has felt the need to update the laws of “endorsement and disclosure” to include online bloggers. This is to keep the “bait and switch” from happenning online in a different way. It’s to keep a company from giving 100 bloggers free access to their product in exchange for something. For a coupon, a free account, actual money, free software, even free products mailed to their house. It’s to keep Sony from sending 50 top profile bloggers a free next-generation Playstation 4 in exchange for a favorable review. It’s to keep the record companies from paying 100 twitterers from tweeting how much they love the new Lady Gaga album. It’s also to keep bloggers from giving a favorable review to the latest “keyword crap” software just because they got a free copy and affiliate commissions from any sales made from the blog post.

This is all very noble (and necessary), but I’m sorry – this are no “Internet Police”. The government can barely find all the sex offenders and pervs online that need to be locked up (we’ve all seen Dateline: To Catch a Predator). The FTC admins they can’t police 100 million blogs, they can’t even police 1,000 blogs. I have to imagine that they will only prosecute the most egregious cases. Like my Grandma always used to say “they don’t make signs unless there was a problem”. Well, they didn’t update the rules for endorsements because there were no problems online. The updated it because there are MAJOR problems online, and they intend to prosecute and fine some of the biggest cases that they find.

So – if you’re a blogger does this make you rethink the ways that you do things? It should. Like you saw in the video, some people still believe that blogging is a “conversation” – and it’s true, in it’s purest form – it is. But when that conversation can be hijacked by media or advertisers than it’s unfair. It’s unfair for the public to think that people actually like or endorse something because 100 bloggers (that got it for free) said it was good. The problem is, I can get free stuff, disclose that I got it for free, and STILL completely fabricate a positive review because I got it for free, and I want to get more stuff for free. How do you police that?

Items to read:

FTC Official Guidelines for bloggers

NYTimes.com: Bloggers must disclose gifts

Washington Post: FTC Sets Endorsement Rules for Blogs

FTC to Bloggers: Disclose Freebies or face $11,000 fine

You might remember that image above from my post a few days back EPIC FAIL: Build a Niche Store Kelvin and Adam are Morons. It looks like they are taking their own stupidity right to the bank! That’s right, the official BANS – or “Build a Niche Store” is for sale on flippa.com for $200,000 starting bid, OR “Buy it Now” for $500,000! Honestly – someone ought to grab that up ASAP! The site (as dead as BANS is) STILL makes $10,000 per month. To anyone with a decent development team and marketing skills – this is a literally HUGE opportunity!

Like I said in my last post – I never really understood why Kelvin and Adam never did more with BANS. Why they never built more featured, expanded on the platform, never created an API, never partnered with anyone, never added tools to manage content or media, never created direct hooks into WordPress, and what I call the “river of lost opportunity” just runs on and on and on.

Maybe they have enough FU money to not have to worry about it, maybe they just weren’t smart enough to take it to the next level, or maybe they just don’t care. At least they were smart enough to figure out that what they DO have is still (at the present time) worth some money – and they should cash out while they still can.

Do you have the money to take advantage of this HUGE opportunity? I sure wish I did – because in the right hands, that product is just a GOLDMINE waiting to happen…view the Build a Niche Store auction, it will end Oct 15th, 2009.

My name is John T. Pratt (JTPratt), co-owner of the new WP EASYBAY ebay affiliate plugin for WordPress! I’m proud to say that the product is now for sale at WP-EASYBAY.com!

WP EASYBAY™ is an eBay affiliate plugin that places auctions in eBay posts and pages. You can augment your content and make extra money, OR even build an entire affiliate store! There are other eBay auction plugins for WordPress on the market, but none have all the features we do (and we’re adding more!).

Check out the BONUS Sidebar widget (at left)! You can add auctions in row or column layouts (or both on the same page)! You can set default settings for all auctions in plugin admin, OR OVERRIDE any individual setting with advanced parameters in single tags – you have TOTAL Control!

Look at all the features:

• Tracking Provider: choose from Be Free, Affilinet, TradeDoubler, MediaPlex, DoubleClick, Allyes, BJMT, or eBay Partner Network
• Affiliate ID: enter your affiliate or campaign ID number
• eBay Site: choose from 16 countries
• sellerid: include and/or exclude sellerid’s to list your own or a specific seller’s eBay auctions
• Bid Count: minimum and/or maximum bid count to filter auctions by
• Items Located in Country: choose which country for items to be located in by default
• Items Available in Country: limit auctions to those available in a particular country
• Postal Code: limit auctions to a particular postal code (only works with Max Distance)
• Max Distance: only show auctions with xx miles or kilometers of a postal code
• Number of Rows: number of auction rows to show by default
• Column or Row Display: display auctions in columns, rows (or both!)
• Image Only: only show auctions with images
• Show Buy It Now: shows buy it now links when available
• Date Format: choose up to 5 date formats when displaying auctions
• Localization options: Translate the words “Bid”, “Bids”, “End Time”, and “Buy It Now” to your language if necessary
• Advanced Programming Options: any parameter can be passed to EASYBAY tags using POST or GET allowing you to setup specific advanced search forms where visitors can enter their own specific search parameter(s) (such as zip code or bid amount). See below for live example.

The advanced programming options is a feature you won’t find in ANY OTHER PLUGIN!  Check this out – with just a little programming ability, you can build a form and pass vars into the WP EASYBAY™ tag and let visitors customize their OWN AUCTION RESULTS!

Just take a look at the image below, or view it live here!

In the very near future I’ll be writing a series on how to build up an entirely new niche store using WP EASYBAY™.

Key Things About WP EASYBAY™ you need to know

1. So easy a monkey could use it
2. Sidebar Widget
3. Advanced control of every option at the tag level
4. Advanced programming options
5. LIFETIME FREE Upgrades!
6. Affiliate program (signup to make money now!)
7. ONLY $39!!!

You can read more about WP EASYBAY here!

Broken WordPress Theme

Is your WordPress theme broken? Learn how to troubleshoot exactly what the problem is in just a few minutes. My clients hire me as a WordPress Consultant to fix their broken blogs, and many of them don’t have the technical ability to do it themselves, or they just don’t want to be bothered with these kinds of things when they could be concentrating on their work.

This post is part of my series Managing WordPress More Effectively.

There are, however, thousands of people, some trying to make money online – and some just ordinary bloggers – who have no budget and are trying to figure things out on their own. This post is for you – if you’re trying to fix your own broken theme. These are actually the exact same steps I take when fixing blogs, in fact this blog had an issue for awhile now where when visitors clicked a search results to come here from google, only the header would load, and no content. Even reloading the page wouldn’t fix it. This only happenned from google or google reader, and all other visits to the site worked fine. Once I deactivate all plugins, and reactivated them one by one I figured out (by process of elimination) that the problem was with the “Psychic Search” plugin I had installed. Once I removed it, all the broken pages were fixed.

The first thing you should know is that WordPress works great out of the box! If you’re current theme is broken, things aren’t displaying properly, pages aren’t fully loading, pages are not found or 404 error, or clicking or certain things breaks stuff – here are the steps you should take to get your theme working again.

1. Deactivate all plugins. Reload your your blog page with the problem. Does it work now? Activate all your plugins one by one, reloading your blog page each time – and the one that breaks it is the problem (deactivate and delete it).
2. With all plugins still deactivated – activate the “default” WordPress theme. Does it work now? If so – you’ve hacked your theme and broken it. Try downloading a fresh copy (or just switching themes)
3. Links to your own blog pages don’t work? Go to “Settings->Permalinks” and just hit “save” to update them again. Do they work now?
4. Blank pages, blank WordPress dashboard login – or can’t login: check your wp-config file first and make sure it’s there and has the right connection information. Reupload all the WordPress core files again to see if one was corrupted, and check your theme page again.
5. If you’re still having problems, the first thing I would do is to contact your web host and ask if there were any recent upgrades to the server you’re hosted on. Sometimes upgrades to apache or security rules can screw up WordPress sites, and you might not be the only customer affected. If that’s not it, search the WordPress Support Forum – there might be someone with the exact same problem as you, that has already found a solution!

98% of the time when your WordPress theme breaks it’s something simple, and the steps above will get you back in business again. If you’re already in there mucking around with themes and plugins – I would also advise that you read my WordPress Security Guide for DIY info on how to secure and harden your blog. If your WordPress blog has been hacked and you need immediate help, follow that link for information on asking me for assistance.

I would personally like to brand “BANS” or “Build a Niche Store” an Epic Failure, and here’s why…

First, I don’t want to scare anyone – to anyone reading this that doesn’t know what BANS is read Watch Me Build a BANS Niche Store from Scratch.  Second, although I prefer to build sites with eBay auctions in Worpress, BANS is still a viable way to make money if you build up the site with content.  You can still purchase BANS and build sites with it, the product itself isn’t dead or unavailable for purchase.

What is dead is BANS development. That’s right no more new features, no more new versions – NOTHING. Kind of kicks you in the ass when you purchased the product based on “lifetime free upgrades”. I mean, if eBay changes their API or a security hole is found, I’m sure they’ll fix that, but no new features for BANS at all.

The owners / founders of Build a Niche Store (Kelvin and Adam) IMHO are IDIOTS! Complete and utter MORONS to piss away an opportunity like this. They must be blind to not see the kind of marketing potential that is staring them directly in the face. In the first year Build a Niche Store was up I remember reading that more than 10,000 BANS stores had been published online. There were so many thin affiliate sites (with all auctions and no content) it actually came to the attention of google – who set it’s sites on BANS stores, making them a target for penalities and search engine removal – and basically the poster child for spam affiliate sites in general. DESPITE THIS, use of Build a Niche Store grew exponentially the second year.

Since it’s inception BANS has done little more than offer a way to create an instant online store featuring eBay auctions in any category, mixed with the ability to add pages of content. The problem is still if you add say 200 pages of golf club auctions, you start with no content – and it could take months to create as many content pages as auction pages. After a very long time of doing much of nothing Kelvin and Adam released an eBook: The #1 Way to Make Money Online, which is basically nothing more than an organized guide behind how to build and promote niche stores (by building lots of content pages and doing massive promotion). Kelvin and Adam were smart enough to realize that they could sell this eBook (which unlike a product requires no support) and market to their existing base of customers for an instant pile of cash. Why then, would they ignore their main cash cow that the had so much success with?

What they never did was expand on their own success by creating add-on modules to BANS, or at the very least creating an API for 3rd party developers to create products for it. They even could have created (or commissioned) a plugin to bring the BANS functionality into WordPress – one of the biggest markets for people trying to make money online (much bigger than BANS itself).

There are many other companies online selling products to add content to affiliate products in a script or in WordPress, like StoreStacker, DatafeedR, and WPRobot. They realize that you have to improve and add features to get more customers and remain a useful tool. Imagine what BANS could have been if it had support for YouTube, Flickr, Yahoo Answers, Article Directories, Amazon, Shopzilla, Chitika, Shopping.com, Commission Junction, ShareASale, LinkShare, Pepperjam (products), Neverblue, and other programs?  That’s the kind of swiss army affiliate knife people want.

It’s as if Kelvin and Adam have no marketing skills whatsoever (despite their own success), and have no idea how to take their business to the next level at all. Let this be a lesson – don’t let this be you! Don’t piss away a huge glaring opportunity just staring you in the face. If you can’t take your business to the next level, at least be smart enough to partner with people who can.

Have you used the new Bing.com yet? I love me some google! But they say Bing.com is the fastest growing search engine. I guess it doesn’t hurt much that Microsoft is pushing a bucket of money at it either. Make that 10 buckets of money. Anyway, the weird thing about Bing is that in it’s quest to be King of the web it seems to be indexing everything in sight. I mean, even things that weren’t indexed in MSN Live Search. Case and point, I have a joke blog Top Jokes that’s been all but forgotten by Google, I think I pissed them off at one time or another and they banned that site for good. Yahoo has it indexed, but I get minimal traffic from it. Then the other day I noticed I’m getting like 200  pageviews a day from bing.com out of nowhere:

Check it out – isn’t that weird? I did fix what I thought the problem was with the google indexing, and I did request reinclusion to try to get back into the google search engine. But even if your web site doesn’t have google indexing problems – you want to make sure that your site is “registered” in all 3 search engines. You might not even get listed in Yahoo! or or Bing if you don’t register your site (and your sitemap!). I’ve blogged about all this before, but I have many new readers since the last time I mentioned it, so I may have to revisit it in a future post series.

In the meantime – if you don’t already know it all 3 search engines have a “webmaster tools” login where you can register both your site and your sitemap.

1. If you don’t already have a sitemap, install the WordPress plugin Google XML Sitemaps

2. Register your site and sitemap with Google Webmaster Tools

3. Register your site and sitemap with Yahoo Site Explorer

4. Register your site and sitemap with Bing Webmaster Center

Maybe Bing.com or one of the other search engines can bring your site back from the dead!

If someone asked me to give them the best blogging advice in just one sentence, it would be “Giving things away is better than buying links”. My grandma also used to say “You’ll catch more bees with honey than vinegar”. Is your blog like honey – or like vinegar?

Blogs that are like honey:

• Really long posts with good resources
• Articles series and multi-post tutorials
• Free advice from experts
• Insight and experiences
• Honest commentary and opinions

Blogs that are like vinegar:

• Posts that seem like hype
• Content that’s all promotion, all the time
• Seems to good to be true
• Constant reposts of other peoples content
• Short posts with no real value

Become a Blogging Good Samaritan

Make it a point to become a blogging good Samaritan. A good samaritan is defined as “a compassionate person who unselfishly helps others”. The Internet was built on a foundation of free information. WordPress is given to you by a community of people who expect nothing in return. If you want to stand out in the crowd of hundreds of thousands of blogs, you would be surprised what giving back could do for you. There are some types of promotion that all of the money and “viral marketing” in the world can’t buy.

You have to give a little to get a little. In terms of your blog, think about how your content can unselfishly help someone else. It doesn’t matter what your business or brand is – everyone has something to give away, whether it’s advice, a FAQ, a tutorial, video, podcast, advice, reviews, or experience. How much does your blog “give” and how much do you ask for or expect in return? Creating a quality content resources will also attract the kinds of links google loves – natural organic ones, giving you a search engine boost like you’ve never seen! It also makes people bookmark, follow, stumble, and digg your site naturally.

Examples of Good Samaritan Bloggers

Lorelle on WordPress: The first place I started to learn about WordPress was by reading Lorelle’s never ending posts of WordPress tips, tutorials, plugins, themes, and knowledge. If I could give someone only one WordPress site to get started, this would probably be it.

Dosh Dosh: Maki has been consistently posting content for quite a few years now, and there are no fewer than 600-700 different quality articles you read on his site about blogging, social media, online marketing, and more.

Justin Tadlock: Justin is creator of the Hybird WordPress theme framework, and creator of many plugins as well. A true WordPress coding genius, his articles provide great WordPress hacks you won’t find anywhere else.

Alex King: Alex has written some of the most famous WordPress plugins online, such as Popularity Contest, Twitter Tools, and WordPress Mobile. There’s no denying his impact on the WordPress community.

Lester Chan: Lester is the unsung here of WordPress plugins, practically every WordPress blog online has at least one of his plugins installed. Download Manager, PostRatings, PostViews, WP-Polls, WP-Print, and 12 others have been downloaded more than 1.9 million times since he started.

Do you know of a blogging good Samaritan? Comment Now!

Looking for the best plugin to add incredible content to WordPress posts? If (like me), you’ve been manually searching youtube, image sites, wikipedia, and your old blog for content and things to link to, you’ll be very happy at what I’m about to show you.

This post is part of the Managing WordPress More Effectively series.

I’ve long been a proponent of “original content”, and even thought a lot of the content within this web site is about setting up WordPress powered affiliate stores, niche stores, and trying to make money with WordPress, we all know that to be successful you must have completely original and unique content. There’s nothing worse than going to a site with 3 sentence posts and links to affiliate content. Then again, on a site rich with media and content – I don’t even seem to notice if they have affiliate links.

Insights might just be the best WordPress plugins I’ve installed in a very long time. That’s saying a lot, because I’ve been on a roll lately gettig rid of old plugins that I no longer need. That coupled with the fact that WordPress now does a lot of things out of the box that it didn’t used do – has meant that I’ve been able to remove and permanently delete at least a dozen plugins that were formerly a staple in every WP powered site that I owned.  This is why I’m so geeked about what it does…

It’s better if I show you an example.  I play guitar, and I have a blog about guitar gear called Guitar Review.  I put all kinds of guitar related things on that web site, and there was a time when I’d post videos I liked with information about certain guitar players.  I haven’t done that in a long time because it’s time consuming, I have soooo many blogs now, and lots of client work.  I just installed “Insights” on that blog and I’m going to take you through creating  a new post about Billy Gibbons – the guitar player from ZZ Top (whom I love!).

Adding Images

The insights dialogue box appears below your content box for each post.  I selected “image” and did a search for “Billy Gibbons, and got results from flickr.  I choose a Medium 500px picture I liked and clicked on it, and it auto-added it to my posts.  This works in either HTML or Visual Editor mode.  In settings you can adjust the amount of search results you want to get.  Keep in mind that the page doesn’t have to refresh, this is all Ajax and the search results come up in real-time on your new posts creation page as you’re writing!

Adding Video

In this example I clicked on “video” and searched for Billy Gibbons.  When you click on one of the videos it actually comes up above the search results, and you can play it to see if it’s what you want.  When you find a suitable video, just click “Add Video” and it automatically adds the code to your posts!  If you’ve ever had to find YouTube videos for your posts, you should immediately know what a time saver this is to be able to search, view, and add videos right from a post creation page!

Search Wikipedia, Google, News, Blogs, and Books

The ability to do research within a post now is just incredible.  You can search wikipedia, and add the links directly to your post quickly and easily. You can also search google, google news, or google blog search.  Of course these are all available invidually – but I think sometimes when you’re writing a posts you might do research strictly in google, and forgot about search just official news outlets or what bloggers have to say.  The one that got me was google book search.  This is a search that I just never perform, and there are nuggets of gold available in there you probably have no clue about.  Let me give you an example.

I did a quick search of  billy gibbons using the “books” option in insights and got these results.  The one from “Texas Monthly” seemed interesting so I clicked on it, and this is what popped up in a new window:

Check it out, it’s an article about ZZ Top from the “Texas Montly” magazine originally published in 1976 – when they were just starting to grow beards!  I was aware of the fact that google scanned in books for some libraries and universities – but when did they start scanning all sorts of old magazines?  A bunch of the results are from old guitar magazines as well!  I’m sorry, whatever your niche is – this is an awesome source for research and new content!

Finding Your Own Posts

One of the habits you should get into is regularly linking your past posts whenever possible.  It keeps people reading your blog for longer periods of time, it’s helpful in building backlinks for your site, and helps readers out too when you specifically link directly related posts that a “related posts plugin” might not pickup.  The only problem is – you have to FIND those posts!  And if you’re a prolific blogger the only hope you might have is searching your own blog!  I think that this one feature of Insights is worth having the plugin for alone.  I mean, the other features are AWESOME, but I would have downloaded the plugin for this single feature by itself.  On my example post I’ve been working with, I did a Search for Billy Gibbons to find my past posts about him in the Guitar Review blog – BAM there they were!  Not only can you click to add the link to your new posts, but you can also click to view, and click to “edit” the post, how awesome is that?

Conclusion

I love this plugin, I can’t say enough good things about it! It’s completely free, and I’ve seen plugins like this for sale before. It’s created by Vladimir Prevolac, view his other WordPress Plugins. He’s also the creator of 18 other WordPress plugins, including Theme Test Drive. He has 2 free WP themes for download as well. Thank you Vladimir, for the plugin I’ve been waiting for – for a very long time!  I didn’t even mention in the post that this plugin also has a “google maps” feature where you can add google maps to blog posts – making it even more valuable!

Download Insights WordPress Plugin here

You can view the posts I created while writing this article here: Billy Gibbons:  Guitar Player of the Week

Let’s talk about Image Alt Text and how it relates to SEO. The alt tag in images is what you use to describe an image. You do this so screen readers and visually impaired viewers have a reference for the image, and also so search engines know what context the graphic was used in as well.

Let’s talk about keyword factors of SEO (search engine optimization) for a page or post:

-keywords in the URL
-keywords in the HTML title
-keywords in the page header
-keywords in the text
-keywords in links back to the page
-keywords in directory names
-keywords in filenames
-keywords in image alt text?

It’s widely known that all the points mentioned above (combined) make up SEO for a page or post, but the “image alt text” has been debated by SEO professionals for years. I personally have been using targeted keywords in my image alt text for years, and my experience has been that it does make a difference. There are times when I’ve not used it (when I could have). I hadn’t thought much about whether it was an SEO value that influenced SERP’s until I read this post at Webmaster magazine. In that post Peter did some informal research which blatantly showed how alt text was a very determing factor for search rankings (on the keywords he checked).

First, let me say that I mentioned long ago what a great resource Webmaster magazine is. Signup for Webmaster magazine for free. You’ll get both the digital version and 4 print magazines per year for absolutely nothing. I’ve been a member for 3 years, and that’s where the link above and idea from this post came from. If you’re not already a subscriber, you’ll missing out on a great free resource!

Next – let’s do a little research of our own, shall we? I’m going to do a google search for “Muhammad Ali fight”. I specifically added “fight” to the keyword phrase to see if I got pages with pictures as results.

You would think with a search like this that the number #1 results in SERPs would be the official Muhammad Ali web site and Wikipedia, closely followed by maybe YouTube – wouldn’t you? In this search result the #1 web site just happens to be a boxing memoribilia web site (actually the #1 and #2 results) – and I’ll show you why:

google ali results

Look at the results above, the order of the search results are as follows:

1. boxing-memoribilia.com (PR 4)
2. boxing-memoribilia.com (PR 3)
3. Wikipedia (PR 6)
4. YouTube (no PR)
5. infoplease.com (PR 5)
6. ali.com (official Muhammad Ali site) (PR 6)

Seems kind of lopsided doesn’t it? It seems like Ali.com or Wikipedia.com would be first. Before I explain (why I believe) it’s this way, let’s look at the google results for only the keyword search “Muhammad Ali”.

google search muhammad ali

The results look a little different don’t they?

1. Wikipedia
2. ali.com official site
3. Time.com
4. Google Image search
5. YouTube
6. books.google.com (books by Muhammad Ali)

So, how did a little tiny boxing memorabilia web site (with no pagerank) get to the #1 (and #2) slot in google for the search phrase “Muhammad Ali Fight”? I’ll tell you how – RELEVANCY!

As I previously mentioned “alt text” is a hotly contested item amongst professional SEO’s. There is high debate on whether or not it actually makes a difference or not. I’m going to throw my hat into the ring and say – I believe that it DOES make a difference, but specifically for what we call “long tail searches”. Obviously you probably won’t make a dent in the search phrase “Muhammad Ali” by placing a bunch a pictures on your page with those 2 words as the alt text. You can however easily take over the top spot for “Muhammad Ali Fight” if google thinks your site is more relevant!

I want you to go back to that very first image of the search results for the 3 keyword phrase with fight in it and look at it again. See the words that are bold?

Search result #1: All 3 words are in the title and description, and 2 out of the three words are in the domain name.
Search result #2: 2 of the 3 words in the title, all 3 in description, 2 in the URL
Search result #3: 2 words in the title, all 3 in the description, 2 in the URL
Search result #4: all 3 in the title, no description, none in the URL
Search result #5: 2 in the title, 3 in the description, one in the URL
Search result #6: 2 in the title, 3 in the description, one in the URL

It should be starting to make a little more sense to you now, so let’s add in the alt text information for all 6 searches:

Search result #1: header image alt text “Muhammad Ali Bio”, article image with alt text “Muhammad Ali Biography and Fight Record”
Search result #2: header image alt text “Muhammad Ali – Boxer”, article image with alt text “Muhammad Ali Autographs”, article image with alt text “Muhammad Ali Biography”, article image with alt text “Muhammad Ali Pictures”, article image with alt text “Muhammad Ali Quotes and sayings”
Search result #3: ali header image with no alt text, Elijah Muhammad address Ali pic with no alt text, Ali interview pic with no alt text, and 5 more Ali images with no alt text
Search result #4: YouTube dominates this results even though it has no description and not keywords on the URL. The page title is obviously created dynamically on demand for searches
Search result #5: one Ali image with alt text “Muhammad Ali”
Search result #6: every single image has no alt text, and despite the high pagerank the official home page of Muhammad Ali can’t hold it’s own against the lesser PR site

Is this scientific evidence? No. But it seems to me like it’s a pretty good indication that by using keyword laden alt text in the images of your blogs you can do better for long tail keywords. This is HUGE for niche and affiliate marketers.

In my opinion image alt text is definitely SEO!

In part 6 of the WordPress Security Guide you’re going to learn wpconfig security and more htaccess magic!  I will be shocked if the majority of you have seen these little helpful tips before – and if you would have implemented them a long time ago – your blog would have been much more secure!

wpconfig.php Security

Use the 4 secret keys

You may not know this but there are ways to give extra security to your wp-config file. The first is by using the included “secret key”, and most people I’ve encountered aren’t taking advantage of it – even though it’s been available since WordPress 2.6. All you have to do is open up your wp-config.php file in a text editor and edit the following lines:

Wordpress even has it’s own Secret Key Generator you can use to create strong and unique keys. Save the file and then upload back to the root of your WordPress site!

Move wpconfig.php out of the public HTML area

The other thing you can do is actually move your wp-config.php outside of your public WordPress site into a more protected area of your web hosting account. This is called moving it “outside of the root”, or out of the “public_html” or “www” portion of your site. It makes sense to do this since it contains the most sensitive information (your connection info), and it’s very difficult for a potential hacker to access the server level directory structure outside of your web site (unless he has already compromised your server). To do this, your web hosting account has to have access at least one level “above the root” of your web site (public html), and all you have to do to take advantage of this added security is to move wp-config.php to that one level above, WordPress will automatically look for it there and your web site will function normally as it did before. WordPress has an offcial page in the Codex on editing your wp-config.php file, if you need more information.

More .htaccess magic

Check out Part 3 of our WordPress Security Guide to read our first installment about the .htaccess file and how you can use it to limit access to your web site.  In case you haven’t read it, we’ll go over those things again here – along with a few more wicked ninja moves you can use!

Limit access to wp-config.php

We actually saved this for Part 6 because you’re actually going to use your .htaccess file to limit access to your wpconfig.php.  This is something you want to make sure you do, because there are lots of WordPress hacks designed to take the contents of your wp-config file (username and password) and dump them to a text file a spambot can pickup and send to a hacker.  If you block access to wp-config file in your .htaccess using this method, you block those hackers from getting your database login information.  Just add this code to your .htaccess file in the root of your wordpress site:

<files wp-config.php>
Order deny,allow
deny from all
</files>

Turn off Directory Indexing Another thing you can do is turn off directory indexing. As I mentioned in Part 3, most web hosts allow you to do this in your shared web hosting control panel. As I have witnessed in the past some (Bluehost) do not. I personally think a web host would have to be stupid to have directory indexing turned on by default – this is one of the most common attacks I’ve seen. This allows anyone to see the contents of a directory if there is no index file, and is the perfect way for a hacker to nose around your server. To turn off directory indexing just add the following code the .htaccess file in the root of your WordPress powered site:

Options All -Indexes

order allow,deny
deny from 206.126.97.25
deny from 65.182.185.214
deny from 119.148.69.90
allow from all

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^BlackWidow [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Bot\ mailto:craftbot@yahoo.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ChinaClaw [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Custo [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^DISCo [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Download\ Demon [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^eCatch [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EirGrabber [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailSiphon [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailWolf [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Express\ WebPictures [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ExtractorPro [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EyeNetIE [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^FlashGet [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GetRight [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GetWeb! [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Go!Zilla [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Go-Ahead-Got-It [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GrabNet [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Grafula [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^HMView [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} HTTrack [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Image\ Stripper [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Image\ Sucker [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Indy\ Library [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^InterGET [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Internet\ Ninja [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JetCar [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JOC\ Web\ Spider [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^larbin [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^LeechFTP [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mass\ Downloader [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^MIDown\ tool [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mister\ PiX [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Navroad [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NearSite [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetAnts [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetSpider [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Net\ Vampire [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetZIP [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Octopus [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Offline\ Explorer [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Offline\ Navigator [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^PageGrabber [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Papa\ Foto [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^pavuk [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^pcBrowser [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^RealDownload [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ReGet [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SiteSnagger [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SmartDownload [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SuperBot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SuperHTTP [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Surfbot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^tAkeOut [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Teleport\ Pro [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^VoidEYE [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Web\ Image\ Collector [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Web\ Sucker [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebAuto [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebCopier [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebFetch [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebGo\ IS [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebLeacher [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebReaper [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebSauger [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Website\ eXtractor [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Website\ Quester [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebStripper [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebWhacker [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebZIP [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Wget [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Widow [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WWWOFFLE [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Xaldon\ WebSpider [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]
</IfModule>

Order Allow,Deny
Deny from all
<Files ~ "\.(jpeg|jpg|png|gif|gz)$">
Allow from all
</Files>

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Access Control"
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 192.168.1.1
</LIMIT>