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How to Get Videos and Images to Show Up in Google Search

Cathy — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 13:53:57 +0000

I am sure you have seen images and videos in Google search whenever you are searching for anything. If you display multimedia on your website it is an additional way for you to get traffic to your websites, but if Google can’t find it or do not know what topic it is about they will do you no good.

How to get images to show up in Google images search

When you add images to your blog posts and pages it is a great way to get additional SEO for your search terms but you must give the search engines specific information before they can index them properly. A search engine is a robot, and as such it cannot see the image to know what it is therefore you must tell them within the code of your pages. You do this by placing your keyword in the file name (ie: multimedia-help.jpg), the ALT tag, or alternate text, also should contain your keyword (ALT=multimedia help), your image title (title=multimedia help) and your image description (description=Multimedia help for webmasters).

In WordPress, it is very easy to include this step every time you insert an image into a post or page. Make sure you fill in every field (caption is optional) and rename your image. One word of caution, keep it short and to the point. Only one keyword should be used. This is NOT an opportunity to put in a long list of keywords as that will hurt you rather than help.

By using the images as a means of supporting your content and keywords, you can get a few additional keywords into your post without having to cram them down the throats of your visitors. Nothing is worse than going to a website and having the keyword being overused to the point where it is almost painful to read.

You will find your images now show up in the Google image search for your search terms because you have given the search engines a clear message within the code of exactly what the image is about. If they still are not showing up you can create and submit an Image Sitemap to the search engine. With WordPress, you can use the Google XML Sitemap for Images plugin to handle this task.

How to get videos to show up in Google video search

Video is one of the most effective means to get your message out there. They convert better than any other form of marketing, they keep a visitor on your site longer which improves your bounce rate and people just tend to prefer video over reading. The best way to get your videos to show up in search results is:

Upload it to YouTube.
Embed the YouTube code on your website
Submit a Video Sitemap to the search engine

There is no denying how big YouTube is and the fact that Google owns it tends to make them favor their own over another website’s videos. So if you want your videos to appear in the video search, you really do need to utilize this. Another benefit of hosting your videos on YouTube is the amount of traffic it will generate to your website. Just make sure you put your website URL in the video and in the video description.

For WordPress, you can use the Google XML Sitemap for Videos plugin. This will create a sitemap of all YouTube videos on your blog and submit it to the search engine. You do not have to worry if someone takes down their video that you have embedded on your site as the plugin will deal with that but for your viewer experience you should remove or replace it with a functioning video.

WordPress Plugins – The 11 Best Plugins for SEO

Cathy — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 12:03:21 +0000

I often get asked “What are the best WordPress plugins?” The answer is not always a simple one because every website has different needs.What I do tell them is that there are a core set of plugins that I automatically install on every WordPress installation I do whether it is for myself or for a client. These core plugins handle all of the heavy lifting of the SEO of your site allowing you to ensure every single page an post has the best opportunity possible to rank well in search engines.

The Best SEO WordPress Plugins

WordPress SEO by Yoast – There are a number of different SEO plugins but I find this one particularly useful, especially for clients who are not SEO experts. What I like about this one is that it does a page analysis of a post and gives you tips on how you can further improve the SEO of your post before you publish. It’s like having a built-in checklist so you will never miss a critical element of optimization on the page. This means that overall, your site will perform better in the search engines for every search term you target.
PubSubHubbub - This plugin allows you to let people know in real-time when you have added new content or updated your blog. Google Reader, Google Alerts and FriendFeed, and many others, use this format for their RSS updates. This takes your RSS feeds beyond the standard Atom and RSS2 which is built-in to WordPress.
cbnet Ping Optimizer- This is an essential plugin. Every time you click publish on your blog editor when you are creating a post your site will automatically ping to various ping networks. If you are like me, you hit that publish button or save button multiple times during the course of creating the post. This means you may be pinging the site 10 times in a short period of time. Without a way of controlling how often you are pinging, you could potentially be spamming the ping site. If this happens, you risk being banned and your site will no longer update. This plugins ensures that does not happen because it controls how often your site interacts with the ping servers.
XML Sitemap Generator – If you don’t know what a Sitemap is, it is a complete list of your website structure including every page and post. This plugin will help the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com crawl your complete website to ensure every page is indexed. Normally you would have to create the XML file and manually submit it to each of the search engines. This plugin creates the XML Sitemap and submits it for you. Then every time you create new content it will rebuild the sitemap to include the new content and resubmit it to the search engines.
Google Analytics for WordPress – This is fairly self explanatory, this plugin will allow you to add the Google Analytics code to your blog. This particular plugin offers more features than the standard analytics plugins than we have seen in the past.
Google Analytics Dashboard – This one is not really essential but I personally find it handy to be able to view my Google Analytics right in my WordPress dashboard. Because I am an active blogger and manage many client accounts, I find that it saves time to be able to track my stats all in one place. You still need to have an analytics plugin like the one above to input your code, this one simply imports that results to your dashboard.
WP Policies – Some would argue whether this is an actual SEO plugin but I personally think it is. Legally you must put a privacy policy on your website if you display Google Adsense or if any of the plugins you use, such as analytics gathers any kind of information or contains any cookies. Without a privacy policy in place, your site may not rank well in search engines. Therefore I consider this an essential to SEO. This particular plugin also allows you to create various other policies such as earnings disclaimers, etc. It will generate these automatically for you and you can choose which ones you want/need for your specific website.
SEO Smart Links – This will look after your internal anchor text links. Once you have input your keyword terms into the settings and the urls that they should link to the plugin takes over and automatically builds those links for you whenever you use the keywords within your pages and posts. You can add new search terms anytime or edit the existing ones.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin- There are other related posts plugins available but I find this one to be the best. What this does is scan through your blog and place links to related posts at the bottom of the post. Like internal links, this is a great way to show the search engines and your visitors that you have more information on any given topic. It will help you rank better for your search terms.
WP Tags to Technorati - This plugin will create technorati tags from native WordPress tags. This allows Technorati to index them in their tag pages.
Broken Links Checker – Nothing is worse than broken links. They hurt your credibility and they can cause search engines to fail to completely crawl your website. This plugin will continually crawl your website looking for broken links and display any it finds so you can quickly go in and fix them. This is especially good if you have outbound links in your posts (which you should) since you can’t control whether someone makes a page inactive on their website.

So there you have my list of what I consider the best SEO plugins and I make them the core of every WordPress site I install. If you use them for your WordPress, you cannot help but perform better in the search engines.

Do you have a favorite SEO plugin that works well for you or one that you think I have left off the list? Leave a comment to let me know your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: best seo plugins, best wordpress plugins, optimizing wordpress, wordpress plugins, wordpress seo plugins

Mailing List – 3 Creative Ways to Get More Vistors to Opt-In

Cathy — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:49:34 +0000

List building is, or SHOULD be, one of the biggest priorities of any website. While getting your website to generate revenue is also very important, many website owners overlook building a mailing list as their number one tool for generating sales. It doesn’t matter whether your business is internet based or an offline “bricks and mortar” business; both will benefit from having a customer base available at the click of the mouse. Getting people to fill our an opt-in form can be a challenge and this post will share with you three very creative ways to generate more leads.

Why you need a mailing list:

Think about this. People who have visited your site and opted in to your mailing list have already shown they have an interest in your products or services. They may or may not have already bought from you. Many of these visitors are not quite ready to buy yet for a number of reasons. If you do not capture those people’s emails before they leave your site, you may never see them again. For whatever reasons, they may not have bookmarked yours site, they found another site that caught their attention, they forgot where they found your site,and so on, they may never return to your website. If that happens, the sale will go to the website they find when they are ready to make their purchase. By having these potential customers on your mailing list and actively staying in contact with them, they will naturally turn to you when they are ready to buy.

Your buying customers can be a great source of future revenue. By having them on your mailing list it allows you to up-sell complimentary products, cross sell and have a waiting market whenever you introduce any new products. Since these customers already trust you, they are an easier sell.

You may not know that I run a very profitable offline business. Before I started building a list I was selling products but my conversion rates were sporadic at best. I had no problem getting traffic, but I thought I should be selling more products for the amount of visitors that were coming to my website. Then I began learning about building a list and email marketing. This truly was the turning point for my business, although I didn’t know it at the time. Now I can easily take my mailing list of about 20,000 and generate $10,000 in sales per week without breaking a sweat. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you will get the same monetary results. I sell big ticket custom-made items and those sales represent 5-10 sales per week. If my mailing list were for items that were not considered major purchases, I may well have gotten 100-200 sales per week from them. The fact is that when you have a customer base who have already shown an interest in your product, a mailing list is a very cost effective way to reach your market. It has a much higher ROI than advertising.

Creative Ways to Get More Opt-ins to your Mailing List:

When I first started, like many of you I am sure, I put an opt-in form on my website and I expected every visitor would naturally want to fill it out. Boy, was I in for a disappointment! Very few people did. Then I read somewhere that if you offered a free PDF that your opt-in rates would soar….nope. That didn’t work either because everyone else was doing that too and people quickly realized that the free reports generally had very little value as they didn’t contain any new information.

It was time to start thinking outside the box and put my creativity to work. Now I should point out that I use Aweber as my mailing list manager/autoresponder service. I have tried them all, even the heavy hitters, but I have found that Aweber is by far the best and at a smaller price tag than many of the others. So if you use a different service, you may or may not be able to implement these tactics.

Replace your contact form with an opt-in form. You can replicate the look of a standard mailing form by including additional text fields. Create a contact page and put your opt-in form on it. If you use the double opt-in method for your list, the customer still has to confirm their request and they will if they really want an answer to their question.
Did you know your visitors can opt-in to your mailing list via email? If you are like me, you field a lot of email questions about your products or services. You can set up your mail link on your website, or your reply link in your email, to go to your email opt-in address instead of your email address. You will still receive the email via Aweber, but the contact will now be added to your list.
Create a brochure or current price list of your products instead of a free report. This idea was the first creative tactic I developed and it worked extremely well for me. I found that 90% of the questions I was answering by email every day were questions about my products and the pricing of the custom items. So I created a PDF of FAQ, additional product info and the current price list and made it available via opt-in form. I removed all of my email contact info from my website so the only way a customer could get additional info on the products was through this opt-in. I don’t put the prices of my products on the website, instead, I will tell people to download the current price list as the prices can change from time to time….and guess what? It worked! I not only grew my list, I cut back on the amount of time I spent answering questions in my email so it made me more efficient.

If you only use one of these lead generation strategies your list will grow but if you can put all three of them to work for your business you will never run out of customers to sell to.

Facebook Stats 2011- Why Your Business Needs to Take Facebook Seriously

Cathy — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 21:54:54 +0000

Recent Facebook stats revealed by OnlineSchools.org about The State of the Internet 2011 give a pretty clear picture of just why your business needs to take Facebook seriously. Everyone knows how big social networking has become but many do not understand the fascination and discount the relevance to their business. The fact is, you don’t have to understand why it is so significant to today’s society, but you do need to acknowledge it and understand the impact it can have on your bottom line.

Here are some of the Facebook Stats that may surprise you:

People spend 12.3% of their internet time on Facebook
There are over 2 Billion videos viewed on Facebook per month
The average person spends 17 hours and 33 minutes on Facebook per month
There are 33 Billion pieces of content shared on Facebook per month

To put this into perspective, giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines combined only account for 3.5% of the average person’s time spent online. YouTube accounts for 5 hours and 50 minutes of a users time spent online.

So it only goes to say that you are crazy not to be tapping into the opportunities that Facebook offers your business for connecting your products and services to your market. At the very least, a Facebook Fanpage for your business should be considered a necessity and if you do not have someone tending to your social networking you need to seriously consider it because you know your competition most likely does!

Did you know that the average American women spends 1 minute out of every 6 minutes on social networking sites? Who do you think is responsible for the majority of the purchases made in a household?…That’s right, Women!

It is reported that 1 person out of every 13 are on Facebook. Those are pretty staggering numbers. I don’t know of any other platform where you can reach such a large majority of the market and those numbers are growing daily. Whether you understand it or not, these Facebook stats don’t lie; your business needs Facebook.

SEO Tools – On-Page SEO Checklist

Cathy — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:22:16 +0000

This on-page SEO checklist is one of the handy SEO tools you should use as a resource whenever you are creating any content for your website or articles. Bookmark it now so you can come back to it at any time.

Your website optimization is even more important since the Google Panda update to ensure you have quality content that will score well in the new page ranking algorithm. You may know that Google scrapped a huge number of websites and web pages that they deemed poor quality. If you have any pages or posts on your site that may have fallen under the axe, you should either take steps to improve that page’s quality or get rid of the offending page altogether as it can effect the overall performance of your website.

I have created this checklist for you so it will be easy for you to make sure you have all the elements in place to get your website ranking well in the search engines. Use this to optimize every page of your site. Even though this is second nature to me, I still keep this handy when I am writing posts and articles as a reminder in case I happen to forget something important. Even the little things can have an impact on how well a page does.

SEO Tools – On-Page SEO Checklist

Choosing your Title and URL

Keyword at the beginning of the title
Keyword in the URL or blog permalink
Title is no longer than 66 characters
Title contains more than 3 words

Creating Meta Tags

Your description begins with your keyword
The length of the description is no more than 160 characters and no less than 150 characters
You have between 5-8 content relevant meta keywords per page specific to that page’s topic. Avoid using the same keywords for every page.
The meta keywords contain your focus keyword

Key elements for optimizing the page content

Keyword at the beginning of your H1 tag (most blogs will create an H1 tag by default from the title)
Keyword at the beginning of an H2 tag (create a subtitle somewhere in the content for this)
Include an image with the keyword in the file name and the ALT tag and title
The content must be a minimum of 300 words. (400-500 is even better)
Your keyword density should be at least 2% but no more than 4-5%
The keyword should appear in the first sentence of your content.
You should include at least one outbound link to a credible source (anchor text)
Include at least one, but no more than three, anchor text internal links to related pages within your content
You should use related keywords within your content. You can get a list of related keywords using the free Google Keyword Tool
Use your keyword in the last sentence of your content
Grammar and spelling is important to a site’s readability score so do be sure your content is reader friendly

SEO Tools- Here are a few free SEO tools you can use on your blogs and websites

Google has some pretty useful free SEO tools at Google Webmaster
Free Keyword Density Checker
Readability Score Tool

If this post has been helpful to you or if you have any free SEO tools you would like to add to the list please let me know in the comments below.

Link Building -Internal Links vs External Links – Which is Best?

Cathy — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 12:02:53 +0000

Link building is a task that some website owners tend to get fixated on. While it is certainly an important part of any SEO strategy, it should not be the main focus of the time you spend promoting your business. With all of the methods available to you today you should not have to spend time chasing back-links.

Which is best- internal links or external links?

The answer is both. Both are important to your website ranking and both can be fully automated so you do not have to chase them. I see so many people hung up on getting reciprocal links and inbound links that it drives me crazy! The results are usually minimal at best and so much time is wasted on it that could be put to use really making a difference for your business.

To find out how to automate internal links read my article- Internal Links – How They are a Key Factor in Your Website SEO

To find out how to automate your external links read this article- RSS Feeds – How I Get My Blog Posts Indexed Almost Instantly

If you do just those two things, you will not ever have to worry about link building. What you should be focusing your time on is creating other forms of useful link building that you have full control over and will help your business gain authority status as well as generating traffic to your website.

Make use of Web 2.0 sites for back-links, traffic and credibility

Instead of spending hours sending email requests for links, use that time to build Web 2.0 pages on Squidoo, HubPages, Blogger, WordPress.com, etc. Create a link from these sites back to your business website. These are community types of sites and you will gain traffic from them as well as getting those important external links.

Make sure you also sprinkle in some links to your other Web 2.0 pages too so they will gain back-links as well.

And don’t forget to go to Feedage.com and create RSS feeds and blends for these pages as well as your main website.

I guarantee if you start doing this rather than chasing links you will see results.

Internal Links – How They are a Key Factor in Your Website SEO

Cathy — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 20:54:41 +0000

Internal links are likely one of the most underused elements of on-page SEO. Aside from basic site navigation, many website owners stop there when creating internal links. Even then, they do not take full advantage of the SEO opportunities provided by their navigation links.

Internal anchor text links can go a long way to getting your site indexed for the search terms you are targeting. Although the site navigation is a part of your linking, there is much, much more you can do with links on your website to support your efforts in gaining page ranking. First, I will explain what an anchor text link is for those who are new to optimization.

An anchor text link looks like this: SEO Q&A You notice that the term “SEO Q&A” is hyper-linked to the page for the SEO Q&A content. It is placed within this article so it is considered a contextual internal link as apposed to links you would normally find in the site navigation. Using this within your blog or website content is a very powerful tool.

How Internal Links help optimize your website:

First, they are a benefit to your visitors as an easy way for them to find additional information on the topic they are interested in. By providing them an natural way to surf more pages of your site, they will increase your page views and decrease your site bounce rate. In turn, they improve your site performance from a search engine standpoint. Search engines like to send visitors to sites that provide the best information. One of the ways they judge if your site is relevant to a search term is by the number of pages a visitor views and the length of time they spend on your site.
Internal links count as back-links to the pages they are linking to. So many people spend copious amounts of time building inbound links from other sources that they do not realize you have opportunities to boost your link popularity within your own site. For example; if I want to rank for the term RSS to email I would make sure that any page containing that term would link to my page about RSS to email. The more posts or pages I create with that term as an anchor text link in the content, the more back-links I am building for my keyword.
Assigning importance to your most profitable pages. By using anchor text links within your content for your specific “money pages” you are telling the search engines that that page is the most important page for your search term. As a result, that money page will rank higher in the search results. Let’s say I have 20 pages of content all about RSS feeds and 19 of them have an anchor text link to the RSS to email page, then Google would recognize that out of those 20 pages, the RSS to email is the most important one and they will serve that one to the searchers first.
Get more pages crawled and indexed. When the search engines visit your website, they come in through whatever link happened to lead them to your site. As they crawl through the content, they follow the links and crawl those pages as well and then the links on that page, etc, etc. By having internal links in your content, you can lead the search engines through your site.
Funneling or creating a silo of your content. The more relevant the links are to that page’s content, the more the search engine will know that your site has a wealth of information on the topic. Otherwise, the search engine will crawl the site in chronological order. ie: your post today, the post from yesterday, the post the day before, and so on. Since you may not be posting every day on the same topic, you will dilute the effectiveness of your content. By having relevant internal links within the content, you are guiding the search engines through your pages in a way that is more search friendly. Using Related Posts links at the bottom of your post is also a great way to use internal linking to make search engines follow all of the relevant content on your site.

There are WordPress plugins that can handle these tasks automatically for you. The “Yet Another Related Posts” WordPress plugin will automatically create a list of links to related posts at the bottom of all of your blog posts. You can customize the plugin to show a specific number of posts.

SEO Smart Links is another WordPress plugin that will automate your internal anchor text links. This is a great plugin that will make internal linking hands-free. Once you have installed the WordPress plugin, all you have to do is set up the keywords and corresponding URLs in the plugin settings. Then all you have to do is remember to use those keywords in your content. Every time that keyword appears, it automatically turns it into an anchor text link for you. Anytime you want to rank for a new keyword, you just go to the settings and input the information for that term.

With both of these plugins in place, you never have to think about internal linking again. It is all done for you. That is the best kind of SEO there is!

RSS Feeds – How I Get My Blog Posts Indexed Almost Instantly

Cathy — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 01:42:28 +0000

My blog posts get indexed in Google within minutes. Quite often by the time I publish my content and then go and do a site search in Google, it is already indexed. This isn’t some hidden magic used by an SEO expert, it is something that any blog owner can implement for themselves.

Not taking full advantage of the built-in RSS feed of your WordPress blog is a mistake many blog owners make. If you are not familiar with what an RSS feed is, it stands for Really Simple Syndication. People can subscribe to your blog through the RSS feeds and anytime you update your blog, they will get an update and notification of the new content you have just created on your blog.

There are a number of RSS feed directories and Ping directories that you can put to work for your business. This means your posts get back-links instantly in high profile websites that Google crawls constantly. As soon as Google finds a link to your website, it follows the link and indexes your content.

The key is using your blog RSS feed to spit out links to your new content to a selection of RSS and ping sites by using some free services and a couple of free WordPress plugins.

PingFM

The first service I use is called Png.Fm. Go there and create an account. Add your networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Fanpages, LinedIn, etc. There are about 30 or 40 different networks available to you. For this particular blog I only have my Twitter, Facebook and Fanpages set up. You can add as many or as few as you like but I suggest at least these 3. Then you add your RSS feed to PingFM.

Now every time you create a new blog post, your RSS feed will update your profiles and Fanpage for instant back-links.

Feedage

The next free service I use is Feedage.com. This is an RSS feed directory. All WordPress blogs have a feed built-in. For most blogs the feed url is http:yourblogurl/feed/ If you are not sure, type that URL into your browser and it will display your feed. The first thing you want to do once you have created a Feedage account is to Submit Feed. Choose the most appropriate category, enter your feed URL, fill out the Captcha and submit. Now the directory will be updated every time you create a new post.

Normally that would be all you can do, BUT Feedage offers a couple of cool features that will allow you to get unlimited feeds from one blog by using their RSS Blender and HTML2RSS creator and I highly recommend that you do use this. It has a big impact on building links to your blog.

First, you go to the HTML2RSS section and input the url of any post and click “create feed”. I suggest you cut and paste all of your RSS links to a file and save them for future blends. I like to categorize my feeds in my files. A list of feeds for WordPress Tutorials, one for SEO, one for marketing, etc. That way I can make an unlimited number of blends by mixing and matching within the category.

When the feed is created, there is a link under the feed URL to submit the feed. Do this and then paste the same URL in your file. Continue creating HTML2RSS feeds and submitting them individually until you have all of your posts converted to feeds. (this may take a while the first time if you have a lot of posts) You don’t have to do them all at once if you have hundreds of posts, but I suggest you do a good amount of them and make sure you use this strategy from now on. You can always go back at a later time and finish up.

Once you have all of the feeds submitted individually, now you can start creating blends. Go to the RSS Blends section. You can create blends from 5 different feeds. So just begin mixing and matching the feed urls from your file. Select “1″ as the number, since each individual feed only has one post. Click the Create Feed button, and then submit your newly created feed.

Another little trick I like to do is to add in someone else’s feed into the mix of my blends. I will do 4 blends of my own feeds and one blend from another high PR blog. There are two highly respected sites I use that I consider to be experts in my niche. Since my blend feeds will never get updated because they were created from HTML2RSS, by adding in an active feed from another site, my feed now will get updated every time that site adds a new post just like my site feed will.

The 2 free plugins I use are cbnet Ping Optimizer and XML Sitemap. Just type those into your “Add New” plugins and install them.

I guarantee if you do these things every time you post it will get indexed within minutes. Usually by the time I have finished submitting the RSS feed to Feedage I go and do a site search in Google (site:domainname.com) it is already indexed. I don’t do blends every time, usually I spend a half an hour once or twice per week creating blends. Try it and leave me a comment to let me know your results!

How Do You Know You Need SEO Help?

Cathy — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:17:56 +0000

SEO is not rocket science although many SEO companies would have you believe it is extremely complex. Once you have your site promotion and optimization planned out by a trusted expert, implementing it is relatively easy if you have the luxury of time on your hands or if you have the funds to pay for a large advertising campaign. For most business owners, you are too busy running your business and dealing with your day to day tasks to spend hours on promoting your website, building links, blogging, social networking and creating multimedia. You likely also have a very modest budget to sink into the project and have the need to see a return on your investment in as short a time as possible.

If I could put a finger on the one thing that makes a website successful it would be…consistency. All good SEO strategies include:

Fresh content creation. This means blogging at least 3-4 times per week.
Social networking. Building networks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. takes work to manage and grow. While a portion of the work can be automated through your blog, it is still a necessity to actively participate and interact.
Social media. Creating videos, reports and podcasts is an integral part of your marketing plan. There needs to be continuity in giving your followers information in formats they use.
Email marketing. Building and growing your mailing list is vital to generating more revenue online.
Link building. The number of inbound links is a key factor the search engine use to calculate where you should be positioned in the search results. Growing your link popularity is important to moving up the ranks as well as traffic generation. You can’t buy your links, so you must spend time creating Web 2.0 pages, article marketing, submitting press releases, posting on forums and blog commenting.

Most website owners know this, but they do not have time to do it all so they skip the things they don’t enjoy or don’t have time for. They may do one task this week, another the next week, and so on. This isn’t consistent. As a result, it takes forever to make any progress.

You may think you can’t afford SEO help, but can you really afford to take years to make money from your website? If you can’t accomplish all of the tasks above on your own then you know you need help.

WordPress Security – What to do if Your WordPress Has Been Hacked

Cathy — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 21:48:00 +0000

“Help, my WordPress has been hacked!”

Nothing is worse than the feeling you get when you visit your website only to find a huge Google warning that says “Warning: This site might hurt your computer”! The first time it happened to me I wanted to cry. I had worked so hard at getting my site indexed and ranking well and I thought I had lost everything to a hacker.

Once I got over the initial shock, I found it was fairly simple to work through.

What to do if your WordPress has been hacked:

The first thing you need to do is prevent any users from coming to your website. You don’t want to inadvertently infect any of your visitor’s computers. Fixing the hack is usually easy and fast but in the meantime you must take care. Create a simple index.html file stating the site is temporarily closed for maintenance and FTP it into the root directory. (don’t forget to delete this once the site is fixed)
Next you want to go to Google Webmaster Tools and remove any URLs that contain the malware. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734&rd=1 Don’t worry, you will get theURLs re-indexed when the cleanup is completed.
9 times out of 10 malware can be easily be removed by deleting your current corrupted blog theme and reinstalling a clean one. Use your FTP client and navigate to wp-content/themes and just delete the folder that contains your theme files. Once it has been deleted, you can upload a clean version of the theme.
If installing a clean version of your theme didn’t do the trick, the next place to look is your plugins. In your FTP client, rename your plugins folder plugins.bak and create a new plugins directory. Once you have done that, check to see if it fixed the problem. If it did, then delete the plugins.bak directory and do a clean install of all of your plugins.
If none of the above works, then you may have to do a database restore from a backup file. This is exactly why it is important to do frequent backups of your database. If you are unsure how to do a database restore, you should contact your web host. They should be able to remove the database and restore the site with their own backup of your site.
If all else fails, you may need to do a fresh install of your WordPress.

Once you have the site cleaned up, you will need to go into Google Webmaster Tools and submit your site for reconsideration. This is easy to do and usually results in your site being re-indexed within 24 hours. Oh, and don’t forget to change your password!

How to prevent WordPress from getting hacked again

Because WordPress is an Open Source software and many different developers create themes and plugins for it, there are sometimes opportunities for hackers to find a way in the back door and place MalWare or destructive code into your blog.

There are many ways you can protect WordPress from future hacker attacks.

For starters, never use the default “admin” as your log-in username and make your password secure. It might be easier to remember a blog123 password, but it is also pretty easy for a hacker to figure that out. Use at least 8 characters with both upper and lower case, numbers and punctuation.
Install a firewall plugin. This will prevent anyone from being able to alter your code or upload files to your server. WordPress Firewall 2 is a free plugin that I recommend.
Next, install a Security Scan or Malware Scan plugin. WP Security Scan by WebDefender is a very good choice. This plugin will help you create backups and change the file names of the most commonly hacked files.

If you make your WordPress security more difficult for a hacker to easily tap into, they will not waste their time on your site as there are thousands of other sites that are much easier for them to get into.

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