The +1 button will allow visitors to your site to recommend it to others, in a way that will be displayed in Google’s search results. It seems reasonable to expect the +1 button to influence those results as well. (Bing search has already announced that social links will factor into their search algorithm going forward.)

Worth noting: I was able to add +1 links to LaneViolation.com in about 90 seconds.

Would you like to add +1 to your site? Contact me, and I’ll get you set up.

The one I remember most was an umbrella stand, made out of an elephant’s foot.

As a kid, I had a hard time with this. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that the guy billed as one of the world’s foremost naturalists spent much of his time in nature blowing animals away with high-powered rifles.

Which brings us to the story of Bob Parsons.

In case you’ve missed the controversy, here’s a quick summary. Bob Parsons, the founder and CEO of GoDaddy, went to Zimbabwae on vacation. While there, he shot an elephant. He captured the whole thing on video, which he posted to his site. He claims that the animal he shot was doing massive damage to the crops grown by a local village and the elephant meat fed a whole lot of hungry people; his critics say there are much better ways of dealing with problem animals, and that his choice of vacation spots went to support the government that has played a fairly large role in keeping those people hungry.

Got all that?

In the wake of all this, I’ve seen lots of people posting reactions similar to this one from Internet entrepreneur Peter Shankman:

Hey @godaddy - I own four hundred domains. Your CEO killed an elephant for "sport." Watch me "sport" my domains to another registrar.

March 31, 2011 3:28 pm via Mobile WebReplyRetweetFavorite

@petershankman

Peter Shankman

I don’t disagree with the sentiment, necessarily. But here’s my problem with all the outcry…

Is anyone really surprised that the CEO of GoDaddy isn’t the most enlightened guy? I mean, the only reason anyone’s ever heard of his company – an outfit that provides a service one can buy for roughly the same price at any one of a hundred or so locations – is their string of “banned” soft-porn Super Bowl ads. The fact that he’d create a controversy and milk it into a long string of media avails shouldn’t be generating the Casablanca-memorial “Shocked! Shocked!” response from anyone.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure – I don’t use GoDaddy for any of my own sites. The reason has nothing to do with Bob Parsons’ vacation choices or his caveman approach to marketing. It’s the simple fact that GoDaddy’s online tools are very hard to use. Their web site is a compartmentalized mess with separate services and logins every three pages, interrupted only by incessant up-sell messaging.

Their phone customer service, in my experience, is excellent – but it has to be. The site is that hard to use.

Speaking of Upsell Messaging…

Are you a GoDaddy customer that wants to take your business elsewhere? Here are a few things you should know:

• If you’ve only used GoDaddy to register domains, you can move the management of those domains just about anywhere with minimal trouble.
• If you’ve used GoDaddy to host your web sites as well, the move can be a little more complicated. You’ll need to arrange an account with a new host and get everything copied over before flipping the switch. And you should anticipate some down time for your site when you do make the move.
• Don’t forget about the e-mail. If you’ve got e-mail accounts connected to the domain you’re moving, you’ll need to account for them as well. One option would be to use Gmail to manage e-mail for your personal or company domain.

Need some help getting set up with a new host? Contact us for a free estimate.

Should you take the plunge and upgrade? In a word… yes.

As I’ve said before, keeping WordPress up-to-date is generally a good idea – both for site performance and security reasons. But this version also includes some new features that even casual WordPress users will find exceptionally handy.

WordPress Admin Bar

One of the first things I do when building a new WordPress site is disable the “edit this post” links that pop up in various places. They make managing a site more convenient, sure – but I want to see the same version of the site as the people who are visiting. (I’m funny that way.)

The new admin bar is a great solution. Instead of links on the site itself, it offers a toolbar that appears above the site.

If you’re logged in to your site, the toolbar offers quick access to just about everything you’d ever want to do, and can even be configured to show recent site traffic.

The toolbar can be disabled if you’d rather access the tools through the usual admin panel.

Internal Link Finder

Say you’re writing a blog post, and you want to link to something else you’ve written on the topic. You could open up your site in another window, find the article, and cut-paste the URL. On some of my sites, I do this probably 100 times a week.

WordPress 3.1 makes that process a whole lot easier. When writing a post, highlight the words you want to link and click the “link” icon… and you’ll see something that looks like this:

That “link to existing content” tool allows you to search through all the pages on your site and create links – right from the “add new post” screen. That’s exceptionally handy – especially when you consider the fact that using internal links can give your site’s search standing a significant boost.

More

There are tons of other features… custom post formats, changes to WordPress multisite, and other goodies – WordCast has a good rundown.

Upgrading

Should you upgrade on your own? Depends…

If you know your way around the WordPress interface well enough to back up your database and theme files and turn plugins on and off, you’re more than capable of upgrading. Check the Upgrading WordPress section of the Codex for instructions.

If the words “back up your database and theme files” cause you to sweat uncontrollably, break out in hives or have any other adverse physical reactions, give me a buzz and I’ll be happy to help out.

Remember, ctzdesign.com offers hosting for clients – and keeping WordPress up-to-date is one of the features of that service.

Simple.

They cheated.

According to a report published in The New York Times, JC Penney hired people to post hundreds of links to their site on Internet forums and blogs, without any regard for the content of those sites. All those links to the retailer boosted JCP’s search standing to eyebrow-raising heights.

That’s one of many practices that the search industry calls “Black Hat SEO” — the “black hat” being synonymous with the bad guys in an old-school Western. It’s become a catch-all term for practices that boost search ranking by going against Google’s guidelines and basic business ethics. Once upon a time, Black Hat SEO was more about porn and illegal software download sites putting Disney terms in their meta-keywords. Today, it’s major auto companies, clothing labels, and the anchor store in your local mall.

Why do they do it? Because it works… to a point. JCP went through the holiday season as the top result on dozens of shopping searches. But in a way, they fell victim to their own success — they did such a good job of gaming the system, people started to wonder how they pulled it off. That got Google’s attention — and brought about a massive SEO smack-down. Those terms that JC Penney was dominating? Now they’re coming up on page seven of Google’s results. And when it comes to search, page seven might as well be page 107.

Bear that in mind when you consider your own SEO strategy. Does it make more sense for your business to go the “white hat” route — making sure that your content can be easily crawled by search spiders, that you’ve created keyword-rich content that accurately describes what your pages are all about, and that you’re building high-value links on credible sites? Or the route that might be quicker and easier — but potentially far more costly?

The yellow box is back.

The good folks at WordPress have released another upgrade – version 3.0.5. Like the last few, this one is intended to plug some security holes:

Two moderate security issues were fixed that could have allowed a Contributor- or Author-level user to gain further access to the site.

One information disclosure issue was addressed that could have allowed an Author-level user to view contents of posts they should not be able to see, such as draft or private posts.

Two security enhancements were added. One improved the security of any plugins which were not properly leveraging our security API. The other offers additional defense in depth against a vulnerability that was fixed in previous release.

Keeping WordPress up-to-date is generally a good idea… especially these security updates; they usually aren’t very disruptive for existing sites. I’ll be updating all the sites I host today… if you’d like help with yours, drop me a line.

From Google’s official webmaster blog:

We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.

Worried that your site isn’t quite as zippy-fast as it should be? There are a wide range of things we can do to improve the situation:

• Optimize your photos – smaller file sizes mean faster load times
• Avoid “widget creep.” Every add-on to your site that pulls information from an external server (Facebook and Twitter widgets, badges, etc.) adds to your load time.
• Streamline your site’s code – are you calling 14 different CSS files when you really only need one?

And that’s just the beginning.

For some tools you can use to check out your site’s performance, visit: http://code.google.com/speed. If you need some help speeding up your site, contact me for a free estimate.

We can help you get your message out in the oft-confusing world of social networking — even if you have no idea what “tweeting” means.

We’ve been helping companies large and small analyze their website performance for years, using a wide range of tools ranging from free products like Google Analytics and bit.ly to enterprise solutions like Omniture’s SiteCatalyst.

We can help you figure out how people are using your site, and where there’s room for improvement.

The art involves crafting content that will appeal equally to the search engine “spider” scripts that index pages for use on Google, Yahoo! and other engines, and marketing your site in such a way that other sites will link to yours as a useful reference.

But that won’t do you much good if your site is built using technologies that the spiders can’t read, which is where the “science” comes in.

We can help with both sides of the equation, having years of experience both in constructing sites that are optimized to be read by — and communicate with — the major search engines and in constructing our own content sites (like basketball.about.com) that rely on search traffic to be successful. We can apply the lessons we’ve learned to help improve your business’ standing in Google and the rest.