Guest Post by Charly Daniels

People come into search marketing from a variety of different genres. Some are writers, some are magazine editors, some are from PR, etc. Whatever your angle, though, it’s vital that you continue to take on new skills. It’s essential, for instance, that you take on some aspects of basic web development. Here’s why:

It’ll help you reach more clients. Although WordPress is without doubt the easiest backend for SEOs to deal with, you won’t be able to deal with it all the time. Many of your clients will use other backend systems such as Magento, Droopl and even their own bespoke models. Helping to code, even at a basic level, will mean you can comfortably integrate meta strategies in any site.

It will help you add content. ‘Content is king’, as I’m sure you’ve heard thousands of times before. It’s certainly true. However, all those beautiful infographics, interviews and blog posts won’t mean much if you can’t put them anywhere! Knowledge of PHP and CSS will mean that whatever CMS you’re confronted with, you’ll still be able to ensure that the content gets online and is viewed by the right people.

It’ll help integrate with social media. With social becoming more and more important to search rankings, it’s important that your site integrates well with your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Whilst WordPress offers easy-to-install plugins that help you do this, but most other CMS won’t – especially not the bespoke ones! Basic programming knowledge ensures that you can integrate your social channels with almost any website, without worrying about plug-ins.

It’ll help you solve problems. You can conduct the perfect SEO campaign, but if the site you’re pointing towards has a whole host of issues then you’re still going to suffer in the SERPs. It’s important for you to be able to look at the way a page is coded, how the meta is set out, how the H1s and H2s are arranged and to be able to improve what you see. Otherwise, the site itself will only hold back your results and make you look worse!

It’ll mean you can conduct an SEO campaign from scratch. Coming into a search campaign when the site’s already on page one is one thing, but starting it from the beginning is entirely another. Being able to develop (even to a basic extent) will mean that you can integrate your own meta data on the pages you want, and will help you control both ends of the campaign.

For more advice on SEO & Web Design check out SEO Essex

Well, not really a battle – 2 totally different animals, but here’s something that happened to me this evening while transferring an Actinic online store on to my Hostgator servers (and by the amount of forum posts on the subject, it’s happened to a LOT of other folks too).

Unfortunately no-one seemed to come up with a solution. UNTIL NOW that is.

Here’s the thing:

I run a great slogan t-shirt company http://www.timebombtshirts.com (don’t look at it people – it’s RUDE!;)) and migrated it to hostgator – no problem it seemed. Then on testing, when I clicked “Checkout Now” button the following error appeared:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /cgi-bin/os000001.pl on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an

ErrorDocument to handle the request.

EEK!

I’ve been on to live chat support with Hostgator for the last 1/2 an hour and finally found the answer. Instead of me going through each step (checking paths to cgi-bin / perl / waiting for nameservers to fully propagate etc…) I thought i’d just give you the transcript which you are free to copy, paste and send to hostgator (or your particular hosting company) which should get you a super-speedy response and a working website in a matter of a few minutes…

[Initial Question]: Hi, I am having an issue when clicking “Checkout Now” on timebombtshirts.com – The following error appears:Forbidden You don’t have permission to access /cgi-bin/os000001.pl on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Possibly a perl script or permissions error?
(2:18 pm) [System] Customer has entered chat and is waiting for an agent.
(2:21 pm) [Ehsan M.] Welcome to HostGator.com Live Chat. My name is Ehsan, and I will be happy to assist you with your inquiry.
(2:22 pm) [Ehsan M.] Hello, how are you doing today?
(2:24 pm) [Richie]: Hi Ehsan, all good thanks:) – permissions are ok on cgi-bin… path to perl and cgi are all correct – bit stumped as to what the problem is.
(2:27 pm) [Ehsan M.] Sure no problem. To further examine this issue I do need to verify you
(2:27 pm) [Ehsan M.] For security purposes, I will need to verify your identity by having you provide your account’s billing credentials in the popup that will soon follow this message. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
(2:27 pm) [AccountVerifyRequest]: {“requestedBy”:”******”}
(2:30 pm) [AccountVerifyAttempt]: {“clientId”:”1*******”,”

WordPress Tutorials: Installing a WordPress Blog on Hostgator

Most web hosting companies these days have a cPanel admin area similar to that of Hostgator, so instead of going through each individual host (of which there are thousands), we’re just going to concentrate on one.

Here’s a step-by step video showing you how to Install a WordPress blog on Hostgator

>>>Hostgator<<<