As many blogs that get decent traffic know, you often get a lot of spammy comments on your posts, even when you have a decent anti-spam plugin or two.  Well, there are other routes to go when you STILL get spam comments.  And I’ve found a nice one.Any good web designer knows what the htaccess file is and what it’s used for.  What a lot of people don’t realize is how powerful this file can be, when used right.

The htaccess file is a file that works properly from the root directory of your domain.  Usually it’s used to handle issues like canonicalization, but can also adjust the traffic you get in different ways.

In my case, I had found a few individuals from China that seemed to like trying to comment on my blog about luxury shoes.  Now I understand the general misunderstanding from people trying to do SEO on blogs with comments, but really – commenting on internet marketing blog entries about shoes?  That was enough to make me go ahead and take action.

So what I did is collected the IP addresses from all of these spammers (easily findable through any of my multiple log tracing tools, in addition to being blatantly visible through the blog back end comment tab).  I took these addresses and then created two lines on my htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} 222\.79\.17\.112
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/spammer.php [R=301,L]

Once these lines were entered, what it will do is take any visitors from the specified IPs and redirected them to a lovely page I made, just for them.  And no, the IP address has NOT been hidden to protect the guilty.  To make this work properly, all you need to do is make sure you put these first two lines in your htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

After that, just change out the IP address for the one you want to redirect, and then make that page one which you want to point them to (can be another domain entirely, if that’s your choice).  Then they can spam no more!  Or cease to bug your site, with whichever way they have offended you.  Have fun with it!

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Google is continuously finding new ways to measure the quality of web sites, to choose which pages should be ranked higher.  Relevance is still king for SEO, but one new element for search engine optimization (listed by Google directly) is web site speed.

With the speed the world works today, being able to access a site quickly is becoming more of a judgment factor for everyone, both web browsing individuals and the major search engines.  Coming to a site that takes a while to load will reduce the chances that that visitor will continue to return.  And for the search engines, worse performing web sites will get a hit in SEO value (not a big one, but it still affects rankings).

To find out how to improve your site speed there are a few options available.

YSlow – One that I personally like using is YSlow.  Made by Yahoo, this free tool will give you information on which elements of the page are slowest, and gives recommendations on how to refine these issues.

Google Webmaster Tools – This is another free tool that will show all sorts of information on the site, including a graph showing average load time.  Hopefully you’re already using this one.

There are several other ways to increase your web site’s loading speed.  But realize that this is now something becoming more of a concern for ranking in the search engines.

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It’s surprising what being snowed in can do for your productivity over a weekend.  I’ve finished up with some changes to the site, finally added a Portfolio page and an About Us page (so you can see what my ugly mug looks like).

The portfolio page has a few of our designs available for viewing, plus some lovely testimonials.  They include one from a certain Perry Marshall who most people know as an AdWords guru.  I’m particularly proud of that one.  I have him to thank for my iPhone 3Gs (won it in the contest he mentions).  Thanks, Perry!  I still bow down to his business skills and AdWords knowledge, although my knowledge is always growing.

And the About Us page is not overly huge, but I expect it to grow as we expand further.  You can find out a little bit more about me there if you’re interested to find out (although I have no idea why you would want to know more).

That is all – I just get happy when I make updates to the site, and these were long overdue.

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SEO, by its very nature, requires changes to the construct of the web pages in the site being optimizated.  Because of this it’s usually easier to integrate SEO with web design on the initial construction of the site.

By doing this in combination, the decisions of which pages to create can be more targeted from a marketing perspective, and this can make a well-ranked site look good instead of just “adjusted”.

The key to this is finding a web designer and an SEO expert that can work well together to make this process seamless.  Or else to find an SEO expert that also does web design (as TMO does).

Attention to these details was pointed out by Last Click News.

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Nothing really SEO related on this one.  I stayed up to figure it out (and because my hosting apparently needed to reset the server, yay).  It appears someone from Qatar of all places thought they needed to provoke my YARPP plugin with a bug.  It kind of hosed my blog for a day.  Sadly, I did not notice until tonight.

But now it is fixed.  And with the magic of my web skills, any visits from that particular IP range will now be rejected.  Hopefully not a lot of people in Qatar will really need my services urgently.

It did annoy me because I lost some sleep to fix it.  But I am pleased because I am victorious over the silly attacker.  I might need to contact the plugin designer to have him do an update to fix that bug.  At any rate – blog, live ON!

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It looks like holiday shopping this year has moved even more heavily online.  As companies are realizing that more people are actively searching online for their commercial searches, they’re starting to see the value of search engine optimization.

Because of this, the IT industry is starting to anticipate a high demand for SEO skills in 2010.  (Yay for us professional SEOs!)  In Great Britain alone, demand for SEO and online marketing skills went up by 40% last year.

The skills of SEO, pay per click management, social media marketing and web design are all being looked for, ideally in a combined package.  SourceWire has all the details in an article based on this story in the UK.  (And I have to add a little something something here – Tulsa Marketing Online does in fact do SEO, PPC, social media and web design.  Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.)

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When it comes to web design, one of the biggest issues is figuring out how to maintain a web site after it’s been completed.  The resolution to this issue is usually what’s called a CMS (content management system).  The trick is finding one that will work and is easy to update with.

When we’ve done Tulsa website design in the past, we’ve tried different approaches to the CMS.  But it’s come down to using one that’s very solid and many people are already familiar with.  And that is Wordpress.

Wordpress comes with standard templates (known as themes in Wordpress) and such, although for web design you’ll want to create your own.  Creating a customized template is much like creating a custom website design, just within the Wordpress framework.

The results can be quite good.  We have a Tulsa roofing client that we built their site with Wordpress.  They were thrilled that when we were finished they were able to make changes on their own (without needing to call us for help) with this CMS.  It made things easier for both us and them.  It was a little extra work at the beginning for us, but in the end it saved a lot of extra work for us and money for them.

The benefits are several:

• Lots of plugins to choose from that make putting cool add-ons easier
• Very easy to edit content, good for both the designer and client
• Easy visibility from the search engines (Google loves Wordpress)
• Adding or removing pages is quick
• Editing is done all online, no need to mess with FTP shenanigans and such

There are a couple of bad things, though:

• There’s no real “dev” area you can easily put together that I’ve found, aside from not linking to all your pages until you’re live
• Wordpress does need to be updated regularly to keep on top of security issues and such
• Sometimes Wordpress can have technical problems that aren’t always easy to solve

If these bad things are worth the risk to you, then using Wordpress for website design might be worth trying out, especially if you’re trying to find a good CMS to use.

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It looks like smaller cities are starting to see their businesses move more online with web sites, online marketing and social networking.  This would not surprise me too much to see, as the demand here for Tulsa SEO has increased, as well as for Tulsa website design.  I’m willing to bet it’s very similar in other cities.

In this case, it appears that Columbus is definitely on the list of cities rising in their online presence, and it’s showing for several different types of markets.

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I had noticed recently that I was sending emails to certain people and not receiving replies (when it could be expected I’d get some).  Well, it appears that some hostings services are starting to tightly conform to RFC 2181 by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), which was updated in July of 2009.

What’s happening is basically that mails sent by the mail servers that are set up with aliases for the domain are getting bounced by these hosts that are conforming to RFC 2181.  The servers should be set to a proper A record or directly to an IP address to prevent this issue.  If you’re having similar issues, talk to your hosting company (if your mails are bouncing) or talk to the people who sent the emails whose emails bounced when they sent them to you.

For me personally, I know I need to keep my emails in check since it’s a primary form of communication and business, so this is rather important.  It’s good to be aware of such updates that can have an impact on potential business and even on personal communication.

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So, FINALLY the new design is up.  I know, it tends to be the standard that web design companies do great design, but for some reason or another their own design is not exactly… pretty.  So I thought it was time to get Tulsa Marketing Online site’s design redone.

Yes, the blog is still in the original design, but hey, it’s a blog.  And the old site wasn’t horrific, but I didn’t like it too much.  I actually was the first designer, but I cannot claim fame for the new one.  That’s why there are people who are professional designers and do it better than silly coders/marketers.  I’m happy with the results, hopefully you like it, too.

In fact, go ahead – post a comment, tell me what you think!  I’m planning on making further (more minor revisions) to it, but I needed to get the redesign up sooner than later.  Now people visiting will know that this is more of the caliber of work that we do for web design, as opposed to the atrocity that was up before.

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