May 26, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice


a misconfigured robots.txt can make your angry
Why isn’t my site ranking!!!
“You’ve got to help me, my brand new site isn’t ranking anywhere. Why is Google ignoring me?”

I took a look and sure enough the site’s robots.txt file was set up to block Google and the other search engines from crawling the entire site. Fortunately the fix was easy. I changed the file from this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:

Problem solved.
(You can also just remove the file.)

I might be going out on a limb here, but I’ve seen more problems caused by misuse of the robots.txt file than solved.

One of the big misconceptions about robots.txt disallow directives is that they are a fool proof way to keep pages out of the Google index. Not only is this not true, but when the pages are indexed – they are indexed with almost no information adding a lot of low quality almost duplicate content into the index which might drag down the SEO performance of your site.

The robots.txt file has been around for years. In those early days, bandwidth was more precious and Googlebot often taxed servers, even crashing them, when it crawled a site. So using the disallow directive to keep Google from crawling pages often helped keep a site up. Those concerns are a distant memory today.

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May 5, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice


Young man playing ping pong
Letting the world know about your new content!
Three years ago I published “Just Say No to a Big WordPress Ping List“. Up to that point, like many other bloggers, I thought the more the merrier when it came to pinging services. After all, why wouldn’t I want everyone to know about my sparkling new post?

Then I wrote a script to vet many of the services that many bloggers were using and found several returned errors or didn’t respond at all. That was the first red flag. The second red flag showed up when I found out about a Matt Cutts warning that Google looked unfavorably on some of the services that many were using. Essentially some of them are spam magnets and you really don’t want your site associated with them.

So I cut down my ping list down from 31 services to just 3. And published my post, which got a lot of attention due to my contrarian stance.

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April 27, 2016 / Ads & Funnels, WordPress / by Kathy Alice


Recently I ran into a problem with adding a Facebook pixel to a LeadPage (which we had mapped to WordPress using the LeadPages plugin). I could see both the Google Analytics code and the Facebook pixel code in LeadPages’s tracking code dialog, but only the Google Analytics code was showing up in the source code. I solved the problem by reversing the order of the scripts, but at that point I decided there had to be a better way to manage all the tracking scripts you might need for a paid traffic campaign or optimizing a funnel.

Google Tag Manager iconThere is, it’s called Google Tag Manager.

Once you have it installed, Google Tag Manager makes it easy to manage your scripts. Instead of having to update your website with each new script, you just log into Google Tag Manager and add it as a new tag. The other benefit is that it will help your site’s performance as Google utilizes their own CDNs to execute the tag, and the GTM script itself fires asynchronously; taking the burden off of your server and not impacting your render time.

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April 22, 2016 / Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice


I was inspired to put together this infographic when I read Trond Lyngbø’s Search Engine Land’s article:

Keyword research: a key element of SEO & content marketing.

As the introduction says: “Many business owner see SEO and content marketing as separate, but columnist Trond Lyngbø argues that solid keyword research can and should be used to inform content marketing strategy.” – SearchEngineLand

I couldn’t agree more. Augmented by customer and market research, keyword research becomes a potent tool in your hands, giving you valuable insight into just not content marketing and SEO as Lyngbø asserts but also into multiple aspects of online marketing, including social and paid traffic.

To really do a thorough job with your keyword research, you should be including less traditional keyword research tools such #tagboard. My list of 22 Keyword Research Tools has plenty of interesting tools for you to choose from.

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March 24, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice


Search icon

Even in an era of the semantic web, keyword research is still important. But it’s not just about the specific keywords. We need research to understand our market and competitive landscape, we need research to help brainstorm the topic of our new blog post. The 22 keyword research tools I cover below will not only help determine keywords for your on page SEO, but help you assess your competition and may even help you validate a new idea. Most of the tools listed below are free, but I’ve included a few that are not.

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July 21, 2015 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice


Moving boxes .. and WordPress sites
Moving boxes .. and WordPress sites
I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus. For one thing I’ve moved my residence. There’s no way around it, moving sucks, especially when you lived in one place for seven years. So I guess it was only appropriate to have the challenge of moving a WordPress blog to a new domain for a client soon after my move.

The scenario

These moves can be really dependent on the scenario you are dealing with, for example: who has the domain registered etc., so I’m just going to detail what I did and hopefully it will help others.

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