Unfortunately all good things must come to and end, and my short trip to London is just past. I’m going to do a very little review about what you can do, where you can go, etc.

Where to sleep

In London you have a wide variety of places to sleep and of course with a wide variety of prices and a wide variety of important conditions like cleanliness, location, etc. I chose an EasyHotel, which belongs to the airline company EasyJet, also they have EasyBus, EasyFood and easy things like that . Good price, the room is small, only bed and bathroom, but really clean. It is well communicated with everywhere by underground and bus because it is near Victoria Station. I recommend it, you can check it out in their website.

How to get around London

If you have some money to spend you can do like me and rent a limousine:

Just joking friends . The best way is by underground but beware the time because at 12pm (00h you know) they stop the service. You can use the bus too, that typical double decker red bus. I think they run a bit fast, I felt like Harry Potter when he took that magic bus. By the way, underground costs £5.30 for a whole day ticket, don’t pay for a single ticket.

Where to eat

The typical “fish&chips” is history, I think I only saw once an stand offering it. If you are short of money you have lots of fast food places, the well known PizzaHut, McDonalds, Burger King, KFC (I don’t like this much), and lots Asian restaurants (Indian, Chinese, Thailand,etc). I liked very much a place called Wok to Walk which prepare obviously woks for a reasonable price:

Typical Tourism

If you go to London for first time there are places you must visit and it is almost a crime not to do it: The Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, Westminster, St Paul’s Cathedral, etc. With a good map of the city and the underground you won’t have problems but I assure that visit all places takes lot of time.

Shopping?? Who said shopping???

Yeah, London is one of the coolest cities to buy things. Fortunately on the month of July the shops are on sale and I’m and expert on look for bargains . If you want the coolest shops then you have to go to Carnaby Street, but I told you the coolest not the most expensive like Dior, Armani, blahblah…

But I highly recommend you to go to Candem and Portobello markets. These places are full of great things and bargains. Candem only works on weekends. If you are a businessman/woman perhaps you can bargain over the price with the seller, I got it.

For Apple Lovers

I couldn’t leave London without visit the Apple Store of Regent Street. I’m not Mac user but I had to see it. An enormous shop full of computers and devices and you can touch them!!!

Also they have a place to celebrate meetings and presentations.

Final Thoughts

London is a city with lots of faces and nuances, with many places to see, many people to know. I wrote a short review with few things of my trip, I took almost 200 pics and saw many other things but I don’t want to make this post too long. I hope you enjoyed it .

If you liked it then share it with others

In one of my last articles I explained you what was the robotx.txt file and what you could to put into it. One of the lines was:

Disallow: /go/    This directory contains something very interesting I’m going to talk about soon

What is this directory? Why I disallow the access to it directory? This is a trick lot of marketers use to hide their affiliate links or at least to avoid the ugly appearance this links usually have when you use them directly.

Imagine that you are paid for every sale a certain amount. Logically the company gave you an special link (your affiliate link) to know when you send them customers through it. This link could look like the following:

http://companyname.com/track/ref=23324&aff=ffi39d

This kind of links don’t look nice, it is obvious that is an affiliate one. But there is a way, very simple indeed, to disguise this situation. Write a php file for this offer, you should have one file per offer. Name it companyname.php for instance and save it in a directory named go in your root folder. Then you have to place the affiliate link into it like I’m going to show with our link above:

<? header(”Location: http://companyname.com/track/ref=23324&aff=ffi39d“); ?>

Ok, you got it, now every time you want to place your link in a post you only have to use one of these links:

/go/companyname.php or http://yoursite.com/go/companyname.php

Tha’ts easy, isn’t it? This way it is not obvious that you are using an affiliate link, more than that, it looks like it is pointing to another page of your site when actually it points to a landing page.

Why I disallow the access to the go directory in my robots file? Because every time a crawler follow one of my affiliate links it counts as a click through when actually the crawler is not a customer. This ruins the stats a bit so it is better to deny the crawlers the access to my go directory with all the affiliate links I have in it.

If you liked it then share it with others

Surely you have heard about a file named robots.txt at some point. It sounds very scary, you know, robots are complex machines but don’t worry because we are not going to see anyone. This is something that has been part of the search engines since many years ago.

We must start talking about Robots Exclusion Protocol, also known as REP. This protocol let the webmasters to have some control over what parts of the site (pages) they want to be crawled (indexed) by search engines and what parts not. There are several ways to achieve this goal but the most known is the use of the file robots.txt.

Why we could want to hide some parts of our websites to search engines?

There are several reasons, some important ones are:

• We don’t want to transfer Google Juice to pages like login, admin pages, etc. It is a waste of PR.
• We try to avoid duplicate content like categories and tags sections.
• We don’t want to have files of images available for searches to avoid hotlinking. This happens when you publish for instance a picture and other website copy your picture in their content but instead of copying the file they link it directly to your server wasting your bandwidth.

How can I create my robots.txt? What content should it have?

This file is a .txt file, you can create it with the notepad. If you use WordPress and you have installed the Google Sitemap Generator plugin then you have the option of create it automatically.

This file can be as short or as long as you want but you don’t need to make it difficult. Basically there are two modes:

• Allow: something, this means that you allow the access to something, it could be a page, a file, a directory, a file extension.
• Disallow: something, similar to the point above but in this case you deny the access.

You can disallow the access to a whole directory but allow the access with the allow command to an specific file in that directory. Let’s see my file, quite simple:

Disallow: /wp-admin/   It’s stupid to let the crawler enter here.
Disallow: /tag/     this is to avoid duplicated content
Disallow: /category/     the same to avoid duplicated content
Disallow: /go/    This directory contains something very interesting I’m going to talk about soon

# BEGIN XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN    this is a comment, it doesn’t have any value
Sitemap: http://www.binaryant.com/sitemap.xml.gz    this line tells the crawler where to find the sitemap
# END XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN    this is a comment, it doesn’t have any value

You have my robots.txt here if you want to take a look. Other bloggers disallow many more parts but for me it is enough. This decision depends on the nature of everyone.

If you liked it then share it with others

Hi friends, at this moment I’m on a flight over any point between Spain and UK. I hope to have good weather and do lots of interesting things. London is in a different time zone with an hour of difference and thanks to this I’ll recover this hour when I get there, I take off at 3pm Spanish time and I land in London at 3:50pm UK time.

I have programmed a couple of posts, but I think I should have wrote a few more…Ok friends, don’t forget to enter in my little contest, you can win one of the six ad spaces in my sidebar, it is easy so don’t miss the opportunity.

If you liked it then share it with others

Just a quick word to tell you that next Tuesday 8th of July Google will offer a free webinar about three of the most powerful tools Google has for webmasters:

• Google Webmaster Tools:a resource to gauge the visibility of your pages on Google.
• Google Analytics: the most free useful stats tracker for your websites, it allows you to know your geographical stats, the performance of your landing pages, Adwords, keywords and many other functions.
• Google Website Optimizer: a tool that gathers information about your site that you can use to find leaks in the performance and other ways to improve your web.

As I told you all of this is for free and via Internet. If you are interested in attend this webinar here you have the article of the Official Google Blog where you have available more information and the link to register.

If you liked it then share it with others