Miraz Jordan is a WordPress expert, and also writes the Mac Tips blog quoted here from time to time. She has 2 new ebooks available, at very reasonable prices!

First is How to backup your WordPress website, US$4.75. Backing up your WordPress blog or Web site is critical, as servers are not perfect and data can be lost. Yes, hosting companies say they backup and will restore quickly, but the real world is a little different.

The second book, How WordPress is put together is even more valuable, in my opinion, and it’s free! This is another example of Miraz’ generosity towards the rest of us, and I am grateful for it. This blog is a WordPress creation, so I am particularly interested in her new books.

How WordPress is put together

Understand how your WordPress website is put together. Come to grips with the various folders you see with your FTP software, and what the database is about. See how Themes fit in, and how much difference a theme can make.

How WordPress is put together briefly explains what WordPress is, and then uses screenshots and concise text to show what files and folders make up WordPress, and what their purposes are. It refers to version 2.8 of WordPress.

The book also explains which folders contain unique files, and which shouldn’t be touched, except by experts.

Other chapters explain about the version.php file, the Default and Classic themes, and the MySQL database.

Handy links round out this informative book.

Written for web developers who are new to WordPress, and for the clients of web developers who set up WordPress websites for them.

You can print this ebook, and copy and paste from it for your own personal use. It is not locked up with Digital Rights Management.

How to backup your WordPress website

Learn how to quickly and easily back up all of your WordPress website. Don’t discover too late that you’ve lost all your Posts, images or Theme files because you didn’t really backup everything.

How to backup your WordPress website shows you step by step how and what to backup.

This ebook shows how to back up the appropriate folders and files using FTP software such as Interarchy (Mac) or Filezilla (Windows). The book goes on to show how to back up the MySQL database using your website’s Control Panel or phpMyAdmin, part of the Control Panel many hosting providers make available.

This highly targeted book makes manual backup processes clear, taking readers step by step through the process, with screenshots on every page.

Written for web developers who are new to WordPress, and for the clients of web developers who set up WordPress websites for them. It refers to version 2.8 of WordPress.

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I took part in the 10-Week Photoshop Course, and am doing a 10-Week Illustrator Course in progress now. They are great! A 10-Week Flash Course is starting July 14, and more info can be found here: http://creativetechs.com/freeflashcourse.

I found the teaching methodology to be very good for me… your milage may vary. The ability to communicate with the presenters via twitter or the GoToWebinar app used for the classes provides feedback, so questions can be answered… my big gripe with most online or DVD classrooms.

If you cannot be available for the 11 am Pacific Daylight Time classes (they run about 2 hours, counting Q&A following the 60 minute class) the classes and any necessary files can be downloaded a few days after the event, for a fee. I’ve subscribed to both the Photoshop and the Illustrator courses, as I’ve not been able to attend all of them, and I like having them available later, to repeat if I need a reminder.

An alternative is for you to record the classes yourself. CreativeTech is fine with that, as long as you don’t post them on the ‘net or share with others.

All courses are using CS4 apps, but if you are using an earlier version, you can still participate. A lot of the information will apply to earlier versions, and during the Q&A, or even during the course, you can ask about earlier versions.

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Google’s Oligarchic Algorithm

By Andrew Lehman,
The Public Record

Original URL: http://www.pubrecord.org/commentary/920-googles-oligarchic-algorithm.html.

I’ve been running a web development firm since January 1999. Google and my firm were born a few months from each other. By chance, I began tracking Google’s rise shortly after its appearance, noting the efficacy of its search perimeters along with that of its competition.

Though Google was a very powerful tool early in its career, that muscular efficiency has diminished. That seems due to several factors.

Those folks whose job it is to figure out how Google works to achieve higher rankings often performed their job well, depreciating the searches that Google offered. Corporations able to pay the most money for professional optimizers tended to get the highest rankings. Google’s results often showed which firms had the most resources to pay for position. Google’s algorithms could not distinguish value from money.

Still, if you typed in “Chicago photographer,” you got a list of Chicago photographers on the first page, individuals seeking to sell their services to searchers looking for what photographers had to offer. That is not the case now.

Google decided to go public in 2004. On November 15, 2004, they enacted the first of several major algorithm changes, pushing many of the optimized sites from top positions, penalizing websites for using techniques that gamed Google’s evaluation algorithm. The result was an overnight tripling of Google revenues. Corporations and businesses formerly paying optimizers for high rankings to appear on the first page of a search were forced to pay Google for their ranking, on the right side of the screen, where Google sold ads.

It became in Google’s best interest that searchers looking for commercial products or services NOT find what they were looking for so that the Google advertising section would profit from the click.

It was clear to me that in preparation for going public, Google was actually seeding its searches with inefficiencies in order to encourage profits. Regarding commercial searches, it’s only got worse with time. By embedding top 10 positions with Wikipedia entries, videos and other tangentially related content, commercial businesses continue to be pushed into the second page, forced to pay Google for ad space.

I recently read that Google has decided to place a heavier emphasis on “brand” or conventional corporate websites when deciding how to rank. It is adjusting its algorithm to make it even more difficult for those businesses without deep pockets to achieve rankings. One could call this the new oligarchic algorithm.

As a small web developer seeking rankings for small, local businesses, I find the decisions that Google has made over the years have been sometimes fair, sometimes selfish, sometimes in between. The trend has been toward depreciating its mission of providing useful searches in order to make money while encouraging the corporate status quo.

This has been a particular problem for local businesses seeking business using the Google Ad Words program, where Google derives most of its revenue.

The company that would do no evil has little heart. Google’s attention continues to focus on those larger “brands” or corporations that it sees as peers in a global economic landscape dominated by corporate, controlling interests. Google encourages the status quo in several ways, using conventions that concentrate wealth with the very few.

Google’s famous algorithm encourages those sites with the most incoming links to rise to the top of rankings. Google has difficulty judging value outside a context of popularity or the simulated popularity that comes with businesses buying links to their sites to get high rankings. Google theoretically ranks respect. What it often only ranks is how much money a business is willing to spend to appear to be getting respect. Or, it ranks how large a corporation has become, presupposing that respect comes with size.

In the Google universe, each planet or business has size and gravity that can be determined by measuring mass. Google’s algorithm presupposes that mass, respect as determined by incoming links or established brand, is the only variable that determines gravity. There is more to respect than popularity or power. Google has no algorithm for measuring integrity.

Google is losing integrity in the process.

Before Google, the local yellow pages served local businesses by being the place where potential customers would seek local products and services. The Internet has destroyed the yellow pages. Local businesses are furious at the costs and poor results with yellow pages. Local firms are moving over to Google Ad Words as one of the few alternatives that approximates what the yellow pages used to offer. Some of those local businesses are using the services that some of the yellow pages companies are offering whereby the yellow pages becomes the broker for a local business with Google Ad Words.

Google works out agreements with the yellow pages to allow the yellow pages to act as an agent for a local firm, managing what the local firm spends with Google. The yellow pages drives traffic to a business’s website off of a Google Ad Words listing managed by the yellow pages.

Typically, a store contracts with the yellow pages for $500 a month to bring it traffic from Google. Usually that traffic goes to a special page created by the yellow pages that allows it to track exact traffic patterns, even noting the number of phone calls if a dedicated phone line is assigned to appear on that page. There is no transparency. The store is not allowed to know how much it is spending on any particular visitor.

It doesn’t know how much money went to Google or how much to the yellow pages. The store can form its own division and figure out how much it is paying for each person that showed up on the page, but it has no idea which search phrases are performing and which are not. It also has no idea what percentage of the $500 is going toward the yellow pages. Typically, an Ad Words specialist receives 10-20 percent. There is no transparency.

In addition, the yellow pages often brokers or handles the account for literally all competitors in a region. Google bases its Ad Words rates on several factors, the most important being how much money is being spent by the business. With the yellow pages handling many and sometimes all competitor bids, it is not acting in the best interest of the stores it represents by controlling bids to keep the rates low, but the yellow pages is behaving in its own best interest by pushing bids higher to beef up advertising expenditures.

It is a devastating conflict of interest for the yellow pages to be managing several competitors in a market. In addition, any local business seeking to buy positions in the Ad Words programs on its own, in those areas that compete with several businesses managed by the yellow pages, ends up paying fees inflated by the yellow pages interventions.

Google, working with the yellow pages to manage this program, takes the low integrity position of siding with the large corporation against the local businesses. Google and the yellow pages end up making enormous profits because they control the system. Small business gets screwed.

Will Google be seen as the bad guy when this corporate scam becomes widely known? I’m thinking likely not. Most stores I know loathe the yellow pages. There are several types of yellow pages in many markets. Not all engage in this practice. But they’ll all probably be associated with this scandal when it blows.

Andrew Lehman, a regular contributor to The Public Record, operates Andrew Lehman Design, Ltd., a web firm with over 400 clients specializing in local businesses and non profits. He is co-director and founder of the 1100 organization, Peace, Justice and Environment Project. Andrew is on the board of directors of In These Times. He blogs daily at neoteny.org and can be reached at andrew@pjep.org

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10 Tips to get your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) engine started.

Written by Eddie Rosenthal, Higher Source Sites

A study in 2004 indicated there was about 3% of the web indexed by engines, and at the moment (Mar,2009) estimates put the number of web sites around 250 Billion. With millions of web pages being returned for most search engine queries, it is hard to argue that it is becoming increasingly difficult to be among the top ten for your website! This article will try to show some things you can do by yourself or in concert with your webmeister to help put your site in the game.

Web crawlers, those programs that run continuously searching for hyperlinks and doing the grunt work of indexing your pages, will find your site eventually and without your intervention. But you might be able to benefit by knowing enough about the page’s content to point out to the engine what is relevant to index, and what is most important about your pages. You do this in several ways;

1) Your page title, the words that go in the < Title > tag is considered by far to be the most important piece of information you need to tell the search engine. But you must limit what you say here with not more than 70 or 80 characters, before the engine goes dumb and thinks you are starting to spam it. It is probably far better to tell what your business does, than just your business name, and will be better if you give some regional ( city, county name) location than your business name. Why? Because likely the future client does not know your name, but is looking for your plumbing service in sonoma county and typing that phrase in.

2) Your Meta-tag for keywords and descriptions are still important but probably more for the yahoo engine than google. It still is important to put those in but be careful not to dilute the keyword area with too many keywords, or too little. It is probably better to have the exact text from the page in the meta description or meta keyword than not have them at all, as long as the text is concise and describes your service or product. It is good to know if the keywords have attracted too much attention ( competition ) so that you have a chance of being found – if the ‘plumber in sonoma’ returns over 50,000 pages, it might be a good idea to find another phrase that people use – ‘relilable plumber in sonoma’ might work better. The only way to know that is to do some research on the keyword phrases – you can do this with one free tool that google has at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool allows you to plug in keywords ( short tail or long) and helps you determine if that phrase gets any traffic or not. To pick a good short or long tail keyword phrase you must probablhy find something that gets less than 50,000 but more than say 100 a day. Once you have picked out your phrases they go into the keyword meta tags, and into your document, but not too much. About 7% density of the keywords is a good percentage, any more than that and the engines will think you are spamming them.

3) Your graphics should load fast, in other words be optimized for the web. That means you probably have to put your jpegs thru some sort of photo editor like photoshop or fireworks, to make sure they load under two seconds. Nothing will turn off a user than to see how slow your pages load. One site that helps you figure out loading speeds of your images is at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/. I like to push my clients URL’s thru this free tool to judge quickly how much work I will have to do just with their graphics.

4) Another important point about graphics is that crawlers can’t read them. If you are using graphical text on your page it probably is good looking, but it won’t help your SEO. There are ways to textualize what you need over the graphics, say with Cascading Style Sheets, or sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). Using a few lines of javascript with a flash file embedding the text you want, allows the engine to be able to read your text. But you don’t want to overuse this technique either, as it will slow down the loading process.

5) It used to be considered that the page structure should be architected like a newspaper page, with titles, headlines and sub headings. And most SEO optimizers still think this is true. ( see http://www.sempo.org/learning_center/ ) for more information about current concensus on any of these topics above). I believe it is natural for the eye to want to see this hiararchy in order to digest quickly important information, before being attacked by too much information overload. So I believe it is important to have < h1 > tag have the most important information of the page at the top, with < h2 > sub headings below that. You can adjust the sizes of the fonts using Cascading Style Sheets, so that it is not an eyesore, and the search engines will read these tags and store them as important pieces of information about the page.

6) All the above should have text corroborating relevance by reusing the text in the headings and in the keywords and title. But not too much. The engine will think you are spamming. Every text I have read says the page’s copy should have about 200-400 words. So if you have 7 important keyword phrases, they need to be repeated in the text, and have headings or subheadings as well. It might be better to have more keyword density by having less verbiage, but make it relevant.
7) Images should have good naming conventions, which in the broader sense applies to page naming conventions. It is nice to have a ‘contactus.html’ page, but also it might be better to have ‘how-to-contact-reliable-plumber-in-sonoma.html’ as the page name. Why not? Search engines have learned to read and digest and index, so why not make the page name say something useful?
Alt tags – those ‘tool tip’ messages when you mouse over the graphic, can contain useful information for the engine spider(crawler). Why not make good use of that? ‘Logo of plumber’ is better than nothing. ‘Logo of Reliable Plumber in Sonoma County’ is even better.

9) Consider creating a user friendly sitemap, if you have five pages or more. Because sitemaps just index your site for users to navigate, it already contains the prime ingredients for search engine crawlers. You link your sitemap by putting a link to it in the footer, or in your regular navigation.

10) Create a special xml file to submit to engines. There are tools that help you submit a readily digestible file that has all the links of your site embedded in it, with text describing the site and the link. Once you have created the xml file you can go directly to google (search for creating an xml file and submit to google) for more information.

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Miraz Jordan (KnowIT) wrote a very interesting article today that all domain owners should know about. If you have a Web site and own your domain, watch out for renewal scams! I reprint it with her permission.

Beware domain name scams

by MIRAZ on 22 MAY 2009

Being vague about your domain name can cost good money.

In my article What do you know about your domain names? I aimed to help you set up and maintain good records about any domain names you own. One suggestion was to find out and record which company the domain name is registered with.

The renewal scam
Unfortunately scammers are out to take advantage of those who don’t know enough about their domain names. A colleague who read the last Tip made this observation:

… something that might be useful for a later article — emphasise not only knowing who your domain registrar is but also checking the validity of any correspondence regarding your domain.

There are scammers out there, one American company in particular, who like sending out letters to people saying it’s time to renew your domain name, please send us the money for it. I receive these letters for all my domains, and while I know to ignore them, I’m sure many unwitting clients would be hoodwinked into thinking they’re genuine and sending off the money.

If you receive a communication about your domain name, suggesting it’s time to renew, refer to your records:

• Is this invoice from the usual source — your web developer or the domain registrar who registered the domain?
• Is the correspondence actually about your exact domain name? Another scam is to catch out the unwary by mentioning a very similar sounding domain. For example, you may have registered example.org.nz and they talk about example.org or example.co.nz.

The related domain scam

Another scam is the one that offers to obtain for you a similar domain to the one you own. For example, I recently obtained the domain name doglobby.org. I aim to use it for advocacy in relation to pet dogs.

Since then I’ve received two emails offering doglobby.com. One said:

doglobby.com is coming availabe for sale in a few days.

Since you own the domain doglobby.org, we thought you’d be interested in doglobby.com.

If you do have interest in acquiring doglobby.com, please fill up priority notice form availble here: [url removed], and we will contact you as soon as the domain is available for purchase.

At the page they linked to I could offer an amount of money as a bid for the domain.

The other scam arrived once doglobby.com was actually available and offered to register the name for US$100. If you go to GoDaddy.com you’ll find you could register the name yourself for US$10 — the regular price.

Be smart with domain names

It makes sense to consider buying domain names similar to the ones you already have.1 That’s best done at time of purchase, but don’t fall in to the scammer traps. Know who your registrar is, keep good records and scrutinise carefully any offers to renew, order or reserve domain names on your behalf.

Work with your trusted web developer, and with your selected domain registrar. Don’t fall prey to the domain name scammers.

¹ A decade ago when I was training people on how to use the Internet the domain whitehouse.gov led to a legitimate site for US Government matters. On the other hand, the very similar whitehouse.com was a site showing graphic content of an ‘adult’ nature. That site now carries political content.

Written by Miraz Jordan for, and reproduced from CommunityNet Aotearoa Panui, May 2009. This article has been modified for publication here.

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So you’re ready for your first business website…

And you’re probably on a search for a good website designer – preferably someone who comes highly recommended by someone you know. Checking out designers before committing is absolutely necessary, but did you know that most website designers are not copywriters? So as you start negotiating and come to an agreement, be prepared to be asked for content. At that point many projects come to a dead stop.

Let’s face it, the average business person is not an expert writer, so the task gets put off and often never gets done. Finding a copywriter is an option. You can post for one on Craigslist, check a freelance site like www.elance.com, or ask your designer if he/she knows someone. If your budget is tight and you want to tackle the job yourself, you need to start out by asking yourself a few questions:

What is the purpose of my website? Do I want it to merely supplement or replace a printed brochure to drive people to my place of business or call me? Or am I planning to make sales on-line?

The answer to that question will determine your style of writing. The brochure website should certainly show you and your business off to best advantage and convey your unique selling proposition, but the tone can be more laid-back than an e-commerce site. When you are trying to make sales directly on your site, the copy must have the power to convince. Keep in mind that you expect someone to open their wallet and send you money without being able to feel, smell, touch the merchandise – or leaf through an informational product before buying.

For this reason e-commerce writing has to be much more extensive, descriptive and irresistible. Including testimonials on the site is essential. Getting the copy right means the difference between success and failure.

Ask your designer if he/she can include professional copywriting in the project quote. It’s a worthwhile investment, and many designers have access to writers of different styles and experience.

Posted by Astrid Harper http://www.bestfive.com/mem/copypro

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Website designers! You could easily double your business if you maintained reliable access to writers who can provide content that gets the message across clearly and irresistibly. When a small or start-up business contacts you for a website, you probably find that things progress nicely with you as far as layout and color scheme is concerned. Enthusiasm is high, the client is ready to go, and you’re happy to have a new client.

Then, when you ask for content, you get that deer-in-the-headlight look – my what? Oh – OK, I’ll get that to you next week. At that point at least half the time the project is dead because the content never comes. Sound familiar?

And even if it comes, chances are the writing is so poor that the site cannot fulfill its promise to create sales. You’ve probably had clients blame you for poor results. It’s a bad situation all around.

Professional content writing is always a good investment, and it makes sense to point that out at the beginning of the project. The easiest way to get this accomplished is to include copywriting in the project quote. Your client will thank you for removing all obstacles and delivering a professional turn-key product. Another nice side benefit for you is the incremental revenue you make by marking up the writer’s hours.

Posted by Astrid Harper www.bestfive.com/mem/copypro

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Adobe has made Acrobat 9 available for pre-order, with a free trial available soon.This will be a major update coming in 3 flavors: Pro Extended, Pro and Standard. Personally, I already pre-ordered CS4 which will include Acrobat 9 Pro, based on a quick look at Dreamweaver CS4 beta. More on that later…

Adobe’s Acrobat Family page is a good place to start learning about the new version.
The page has 2 links to view eSeminars, See the new Acrobat 9 (Weds. June 26, 9-10:00 AM US/Pacific time, and IT tips and support Tuesdays June 10, 17, 24 and July 1 9-9:30 AM US/Pacific time.

Adobe Acrobat Standard has heaps of features, some of which are particularly useful, such as the ability to:

• Scan paper documents to PDF and automatically recognize text with optical character recognition (OCR)Scan paper documents to PDF and automatically recognize text with optical character recognition (OCR)
• Save PDF files as Microsoft Word documents, retaining the layout, fonts, formatting, and tables, to facilitate reuse of content
• Capture web pages as rich, dynamic PDF files for review and archiving
• Merge files from multiple applications into a single PDF document
• Digitally sign PDF documentsDigitally sign PDF documents
• Easily create fillable PDF forms from paper or existing files using the Form Wizard

and more

Acrobat Pro adds lots more features, including but not limited to:

• Personalize a PDF Portfolio with customizable templates for navigation and branding
• Convert Autodesk® AutoCAD®, Microsoft Visio, and Microsoft Project files to PDF with one-button ease, preserving document layers in Visio and AutoCAD and object data in Visio (Windows only)
• Compare and highlight the differences between two versions of a PDF document
• Create dynamic XML forms with Adobe LiveCycle® Designer ES (included but Windows only!)

Acrobat Pro Extended adds to the Pro feature set with:

• Easily add audio, video, and quizzes to your PowerPoint slides and create rich, interactive presentations with Adobe Presenter (included)
• Compare and highlight the differences between two versions of a PDF document
• Embed video in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint and convert to FLV in PDF
• Embed video in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint and convert to FLV in PDF
• Combine multiple CAD formats in one assembly and save as PDF with Adobe 3D Reviewer (included)
• Convert 2D and 3D designs from major CAD applications to PDF for use by extended teams without expensive CAD or viewer software
• Create PDF maps by importing geospatial files that retain metadata and coordinates

and a few more…

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