Posts Tagged ‘Plugins’

Why You Should Be Using Wordpress on Your Website

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

If you do not have a blog, then you should. With a blog you can encourage user interaction, start conversations, ask questions, post content, and much, much more. Also, search engines love blogs, and therefore blogs can rank more highly than similar websites. You have probably noticed that you come across many blogs during your searches, so you should know that I am not lying.

You may have noticed that I tend to love Wordpress blogs. In fact, what you are looking at right now is a Wordpress blog that I have put onto my website. You may have also noticed that I have created Wordpress themes that you can use for free.

Why do I like Wordpress so much? Well, here are a few of the reasons that I absolutely love Wordpress blogs and why I think everyone should be using them:

1. Anyone Can Use It

Anyone can add a Wordpress blog to their site either using Fantastico or through Wordpress.org. This means that anyone can add a Wordpress blog to their website, or make their website a Wordpress blog. It is also free, which means you can have a great blog set up on your website in no time!

2. It is Search Engine Friendly

Wordpress blogs are designed in a way that is friendly for search engines. This means that your blog will get indexed quickly and rank highly with little effort on your part. You can also get plugins that can enable you to really set up your posts and pages so that they easily rank in the search engines.

3. You Can Choose From Thousands of Themes

With Wordpress you can choose from thousands upon thousands of themes so your blog will look like whatever you want it to. You can even get themes that look like normal websites, but still have all the benefits of a Wordpress blog.

4. No HTML Required

If you have no knowledge of HTML, it doesn’t matter with Worpress. At times it can be helpful, but HTML is not needed to have a fully operable Wordpress blog.

5. Thousands of Plugins & Widgets

Probably one of the best parts of Wordpress is that you can use thousands of plugins and widgets so that you can automate many processes including SEO, and you can add many cool features such as polls, surveys, language translators, and basically anything you can think of to your blog!

These are just 5 of the reasons you should be using Wordpress blogs. If you are not already using one, you should seriously look into it right away. Wordpress is an amazing tool that if you aren’t using, you are missing out.

To Your Success,

Shawn Horwood

If you would like to take your internet/affiliate marketing to the next step, then I want to help you! Visit my blog for more Articles, Resources, Product Reviews, Search Engine Optimization Tips, Profitable Niches, and more: Make Money Online Blog

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WordPress SEO Tips

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Here are some steps you should take to optimize your WordPress blog for search engines:

1. Change the Permalink Structure: By default, the Permalink structure in WordPress is very dirty, with url’s being shown as ?p=123 etc. You can easily change this by going to the permalinks tab of the WordPress settings, and using a custom structure like /%postname%/

2. Optimize your Meta Tags: Write unique title tags for every page, and also write meta description tags for every page. You can use the All in One SEO Pack to make your life easier.

3. Use only excerpts of your post on the home page, category page and tag pages. This should help you to avoid facing duplicate content issues

4. Use the Xml Sitemaps plugin to generate a sitemap. The plugins default settings are fine. Simply upload and activate the plugin and you’re fine. But one other thing I do is to submit the sitemap to Google.

5. Use Proper Internal Linking Structure: It is very important to maintain a good linking structure within your blog. It helps keep visitors on your blog and helps in improving search engine rankings. Here are some steps you can take to improve your internal linking structure:

6. Optimize your Images: some of the ways you can do this in are – Use keywords in the alt attribute. – Include keywords in the image names – Enter a description in the title tag. – Use the Seo Friendly Images Plugin

7. Ping Sites after publishing new posts. Go to the Writing Tab and scroll down to the update services box. Add a list of sites you want to ping when you publish new posts in the box. Use the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer Plugin

8. Make sure your code is valid. Use the W3C Validator to check the same.

9. Make sure that your blog title is an h1 on the home page and that your post titles are an h1 on the post pages.

10. Choose between www and non www version of your site and redirect one to the other. You can use the Redirection Plugin for this. Another plugin which you can use is the Enforce www. Preference. I redirect the non www to the www, but you can do whatever you want, it doesn’t really matter. Also, you might want to redirect the index.php version of your site to the homepage.

11. Lastly, use a related posts plugin, and use simple text based navigation. Also, optimize your anchor text when you link to other pages.

For A list of the best WordPress plugins, check out this post on Best WordPress Plugins. Another post you might like is this roundup of the Best Web Layouts

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Can I Learn WordPress in One Week?

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

You own a small Italian gourmet store and are passionate about Italian cooking. You have been advised to start a blog for a long time and now that you have decided to do so, you are a little concerned about the technical details of the whole process. You just want to share your cooking passion with others through the blog and hope to hear about new recipes as well. Not being technically inclined, you wonder if you would be at the mercy of some technical person every time you are in the mood to write up something on your blog. Well, with WordPress, you have the power to build a blog and manage it just the way you want.

Learning the Basics of WordPress

You can certainly learn the basics of WordPress in one week, maybe even less. To begin with, there are two ways in which you can use WordPress. You can install WordPress on your website through your web hosting service provider and customize it to suit your needs. This will give you more flexibility and control over the website, but you’ll need some basic technical skills in setting it up. The other simpler option is to use WordPress.com which provides you free blogging services. You can begin your blog in a matter of minutes. Being a free service, it does have its limitations but is quite enough if you are just starting out. It offers enough customization to give a professional look to your blog.

Note that there are two WordPress sites: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. The .com site provides the free blogging service and the .org site provides the technical support, free themes and plugins for more advanced users.

To start your own blog, visit the WordPress.com website and click on the ‘Sign Up’ button. You will immediately be taken through several screens where you will have to fill in simple details like your email address, user name you desire and your password. You will of course be asked if you would like to start a blog and if so, you will be asked for the desired blog name. You may want the name ‘ItalianGourmet’ for your blog and being on WordPress, the complete address will be ‘italiangourmet.wordpress.com’. Your site will be a subdomain because it’s part of the WordPress.com site.

As you log into your new blog you will be taken to the user dashboard. From here you will be able to customize the blog by changing the design, adding useful features – called widgets – like an RSS feed, search tool, area for user comments and so on. You can decide what content goes where on your blog. If you have any problems, you just need to click on the ‘Support’ tab and you will be given access to online help and will also be directed to many user forums where similar issues are being discussed.

Once you have finished customizing the look of your blog and have added enough functionality to it, you are now ready to write your first blog. All you need to do is type your thoughts, give it a suitable title and click on ‘Publish’ for your first blog post to go live. You have learned the basics of how to use WordPress! It’s that easy to get started.

Though WordPress is better known as a blogging tool, it can also be used as a complete website management tool as well. Most hosting companies now include WordPress in their hosting packages. Although this does allow for greater freedom in designing and developing your website on the whole, it does require some technical expertise. A good option is to start off with a blog on WordPress.com and get comfortable using it before moving on to a hosted option.

Kurt R. Hansen

Find out more at: TheWebHostReport

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WordPress Login Security

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

WordPress remains a very secure and stable blogging platform, but there is more that can be done out of the box to help protect your private data. There are many simple steps that can be taken, even by the inexperienced blog owner and a multitude of plug-ins available that can help. Once thing to be particularly aware of is brute force attacks. Brute force login attempts are one of the more common, rather annoying and potentially dangerous types that can occur.

Brute force happens when an attacker targets the login screen for your blog and repeatedly attempts to guess the username and password to gain access. By default, Wordpress allows you to type in incorrect usernames and passwords infinitely. Since there is nothing to stop the attacker, they can try for minutes or hours entering a dictionary list of names and simple passwords in the hope of just stumbling upon the correct one. Installing something as simple as the “Login Lockdown” plug-in can combat this.

The plug in works by limiting the number of attempts you can make to enter your username and password in a given timeframe (typically 3 tries in a 5 minute period). Once that limit is reached, the IP address of the potential attacker is blocked for up to an hour. This is usually enough to discourage the would be hacker and make them move on to a different target. There are many plug-ins that can do this, but we recommend the plugin is recommended for three reasons:

  1. Easy to set up
  2. Easy to administrate
  3. It just plain works!

Brian Yurick

Need help installing, upgrading or optimizing your Wordpress blog or site? http://easywordpressinstall.com can help. Try us out!

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WordPress is No Longer Just For Blogging

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Seems like a rash statement I know. But by the time you finish this article you will know six ways to use Wordpress besides as a blog. Exactly why WordPress is more powerful than the majority of static websites. And why you should be using it too.

WordPress is well known as one of the best, if not the best, blog platforms around. What you may not know is that with minimal effort WordPress can be used in not just one or two other types of sites but at least six and probably ways besides Being used as a blogging platform. Don’t believe me here are six different ways you can use WordPress.

1. As a squeeze page to collect leads for your email list

2. As a review site allowing you to make affiliate sales

3. As a sales letter for your product that is search engine friendly

4. As a static looking site for any regular content site

5. As a membership site to help you generate residual income

6. As an affiliate site to promote your favorite affiliate programs

Those are the ways that you can use WordPress That brings up the question as to why you would want to use it for any of those things. There are 3 primary reasons.

1. The structure of a WordPress blog with just a couple of plugins is very appealing to the search engines.

2. Search engines tend to spider them faster because of the structure that is inherent in the software.

3. Add in the automated RSS feed and you have a perfectly set up spider friendly site quickly and easily.

Think how many more visitors you can get by having the search engines liking your site structure. Think your page just may rank a bit higher in Google, Yahoo and Bing? Will that generate more visitors to your site for whatever purpose you are using it? I sure think so what about you?

The other great thing about WordPress is the ease of installation and the vast number of plugins. You can add lots of functionality quickly and easily. There are literally thousands of plugins available to you.. The really nice part is most of them are free.

There are also a huge number of themes available to customize your blog to get the look you want to achieve. All of these things together mean that once you get comfortable with WordPress you just may put your webmaster out of a job. It is easy when you know how.

To discover exactly how to bend WordPress to your will spy on this programming nerd and watch exactly how he does it at http://WPNerds.com

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How to Secure WordPress

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

If you are an internet marketer, you probably have quite a bit on your plate already.   You have spent a great deal of time putting together a good website or blog and are really concentrating on how to deliver your product or information.   Unfortunately, there are a certain breed of people out there in cyberspace whose self appointed mission is to break into your vault and create havoc.

If you are using WordPress as a platform to blog from, here are a few tips on how to secure WordPress

Keep WordPress Updated and Backed Up

Older versions of WordPress still have many vulnerabilities that are widely known in the hacker community.  To their credit, the WordPress people are always doing their best to plug security holes and are updating constantly.   So your first line of defense is to keep your blogging platform updated.

Medical Tip:  To avoid increasing your blood pressure, always be sure to make a backup of your blog before installing any updates.   Its a good idea to regularly to keep your WordPress backed up regularly anyhow, since any number of things can go wrong.

Another tip is to delete the meta tags that tells the world of the version of Wp you are using.  This info is usually in the header file.

Keep Your Plugins Hidden

One of the great things about using WordPress is the plugins. While they greatly increase your blogs capabilities, they too contain certain bugs and vulnerabilities that are exploited by hackers.   So be sure to keep them updated also.

It is easy for anyone to see what type of plugins you are using by visiting the wp-content/plugins folder.   To keep potential intruders from finding out the plugins that you use, create an empty  ‘index.html’  file and place it in your plugins folder

Its also a good idea to check your plugin folder and make sure the plugins there are the ones you want.  Some hacker, once they get into your files upload their own plugin.   So if you see something that you are not familiar with, delete it.

Here is a  Free WP plugin that keeps track of the attempts to login to your site.   Many hackers use brute force to try and get your password.   So, if there are too many of them coming from the same IP address within a short period of time, the plugin will disable the login function for that IP range.   Login Lockdown:  bad-neighborhood.com.  Click on login lockdown and you will be taken to the download page.   Be sure to check out their other plugins to.

Change Your Passwords

This is an easy hack that is often exploited.  You can have a more  secure blog by making up a crazy, difficult password.   Even change it monthly if need be.

But not only your WordPress login.  Don’t forget your hosting account and your ftp passwords as well.

Headache tip: Be sure to write your passwords down immediately and keep all your them all in a safe place.

Secure the /wp-admin/ directory

Your  most sensitive Wordpress information is stored in the /wp-admin/ folder.  By default, WordPress leaves that folder open, so people can access these files to make changes  if they know what they are doing.

To secure this folder:

Place an .htaccess file inside the /wp-admin/ folder to block the access to all IP addresses, except yours.

Here is the code you need to put in the .htaccess file:

AuthUserFile /dev/null

AuthGroupFile /dev/null

AuthName “Example Access Control”

AuthType Basic

order deny,allow

deny from all

allow from xx.xx.xx.xx

allow from xx.xx.xxx.xx

Now, ff you ever find your site being redirected to another website you will need to:

Check For Hidden Code

This requires a bit more knowledge of the inner workings of WP on your part, so don’t mess with it unless you know what you are doing.

Browse your theme files

Log into your WordPress control panel, go to the theme editor, and look inside your theme files.   See if there are any lines of code that are not supposed to be there, or that contain a PHP code that you don’t recognize.

Check your database tables

Some hackers upload fake images to your “Uploads” folder and activate them with a plugin call.   To detect this you need to open PHPMyAdmin, browse the “wp-options” table, and edit the “active_plugins” record.

On that record you will see a list of all the plugins that active on your blog.   Delete any that seem unusual or that you aren’t using

Browse your site files through FTP

Log into your FTP account and browse through the folders on your site.   You are looking for any files that have a strange name or that look suspicious.    If you have another WordPress blog installed on another site, compare the structure of the files to make sure they match up.

Tip to avoid a heart attack:  Remember: Backup, backup, backup, before you star messing with anything!

Be Fearless

Billy Ojai

Do you want to make more money in Internet Marketing? One way is to learn good copywriting techniques. Pick up your Free copy of ‘Copywriting for the Web’ at http://billyojai.com

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