Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
Rand Fishkin pleasantly knocked the wind out of the sails of a the crowd of SEO pretenders with a quick ten question SEO quiz.
Rand believes that anyone selling SEO should be able to answer these questions:
- What four search engines comprise 90%+ of all general (non site-specific) web search traffic?
- Explain the concept - "the long tail of search."
- Name the three most important elements in the head section of an HTML document that are employed by search engines.
- How do search engines treat content inside an IFrame?
- What resource and query can you use to determine which pages link to any page on SEOmoz.org and contain the words "monkey" and "turnip"?
- What action does Google threaten against websites that sell links without the use of "nofollow"?
- What is the difference between local link popularity and global link popularity?
- Why is Alexa an inaccurate way to estimate the traffic to a given website?
- Name four types of queries for which Google provides "instant answers" or "onebox results" ahead of the standard web results.
- Describe why a flat site architecture is typically more advantageous for search engine rankings than a deep site architecture.
- BONUS (Answer this one and I'll be very impressed): Name twelve unique metrics search engines are suspected to consider when weighting links and how each affects rankings positively or negatively.
I was able to answer all of them apart from local link popularity and global link popularity and managed ten of the twelve metrics quickly.
Of course concerning link popularity I know the concept, but think of it as topical links rather than local link popularity.
How did you do? Check your own answers here.
By Alec
SEO |
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
It's no secret that we are big ecto users at Foliovision. But we've found Ecto for Windows more trouble than its worth. We are not the only ones to think so.
Rather than continue to fight Ecto for Windows which is a bit overkill for what we need to do on our Windows computers we went looking for an alternative, preferably something more portable. The Firefox extension JustBlogIt seemed like just the trick.
Basic, but easy to use and open to multiple accounts - very important to cover our multiple weblogs.
JustBlogIt worked a treat with my legacy Typepad account (if you're asking I don't enjoy Typepad at all - tech support is terrible even on a premium account), but wouldn't work with our WordPress weblog, always returning a PHP fatal error.
I asked Jérémie to investigate and this is what he came up with:
It seems that wordpress development team forgot about this file since the version 2.1 of it because it works on JB which is running under the version 2.0.6 and not on JulieK (2.1.2) FV (2.2) and WTR (2.2.1).
When we are trying to run the file it displays a PHP Fatal Error because one function neede to run the editor is missing. The error is:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function the_quicktags() in /hsphere/local/home/fvmaster/foliovision.com/wp-admin/edit-form.php on line 35
After looking on internet and wordpress website and finding almost nothing newer than WP 1.6 (already in WP 1.6 users got that error) I just decide to fix it myself. I looked on the core for that function, copy and past to bookmarklet.php, the function is present on the file /wp-admin/admin-functions.php. It is:
<?
/*Hacked By Foliovision - this function is present on the file /wp-admin/admin-functions.php
Somehow edit-form.php should call it but it is never integrated on its file. I just copy it here:
*/
function the_quicktags() {
// Browser detection sucks, but until Safari supports the JS needed for this to work people just assume it's a bug in WP
if (!strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Safari'))
echo '
<div id="quicktags">
<script src="../wp-includes/js/quicktags.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">if ( typeof tinyMCE == "undefined" || tinyMCE.configs.length < 1 ) edToolbar();</script>
</div>
';
else echo '
<script type="text/javascript">
function edInsertContent(myField, myValue) {
//IE support
if (document.selection) {
myField.focus();
sel = document.selection.createRange();
sel.text = myValue;
myField.focus();
}
//MOZILLA/NETSCAPE support
else if (myField.selectionStart || myField.selectionStart == "0") {
var startPos = myField.selectionStart;
var endPos = myField.selectionEnd;
myField.value = myField.value.substring(0, startPos)
+ myValue
+ myField.value.substring(endPos, myField.value.length);
myField.focus();
myField.selectionStart = startPos + myValue.length;
myField.selectionEnd = startPos + myValue.length;
} else {
myField.value += myValue;
myField.focus();
}
}
</script>
';
}
?>
I've also attached the full fixed file bookmarklet.php to this post. Just download and replace your existing bookmarklet file in ftp://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/bookmarklet.php
And enjoy one click citation in WordPress with JustBlogIt.
By Alec
WordPress |
