A Recent WP Community Event Keeping WordPress websites safe has been big news lately. In response Automattic hosted a WordPress MeetUp last Wednesday evening featuring discussions to keep this awesome open source platform safe from hackers. If you didn’t make the schlep into San Francisco, no prob. Here’s a recap of the dialogue and idea-sharing event: Why …
WordPress 3.5.2 Security Release Explained
Latest WP Update for Maintenance & Security WordPress 3.5.2 was released just a few days ago. In light of all the security attacks related to our favorite open source website platform, I’ll highlight the WordPress security fixes along with why it’s so important to upgrade to this version. 7 Security Issues Resolved Running the latest …
Google SERP & New Carousel
The Google SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) has a new feature. Have you noticed the “carousel of images” located at the top of your search window? Carousel has launched for English Google SERPs and is the newest release from Mountain View, and it can be great news for restaurants, hotels and other consumer retail businesses. They …
Web Directory, Link Farm & SEO Ranking
With all the recent changes to the Google Search some of our clients are worried about links from a web directory negatively affecting their SEO rankings. Since it can be a confusing topic, I’ll explain the search engine ramifications of gaining links from a web directory versus link farms. What is a Web Directory? Web directories …
301 Redirect: WordPress How Tos
The What, When & How of URL Redirection A 301 Redirect — also known as URL redirection — is an important technical element of managing your WordPress website. Properly alerting search engines of URL changes can dramatically effect SEO equity. Too often hard-earned SEO rankings can disappear in a flash. And when it’s gone, it can’t be …
Google Analytics Dashboard Customization
Arranging Key Reports At A Glance Your Google Analytics Dashboard can provide amazing insights on the health of your website. Like any tool, learning all the bells and whistles can be daunting. I’ve been playing around with customizing dashboards and including Real-Time Widgets and I’m loving it. GA is notorious at providing tons of information. But it …
3 Keyword Research Shortcuts
Real World Ideas When Short on Time Ideally keyword research would be the basis of a website’s structure. Done right, it’s a labor intensive process that balances keyword benefit (number of potential searches each month) and opposition (how difficult it is to compete). The benefit is a website that has an amplified signal when trying to reach prospective …
Brute Force Attack Measured
The WordPress Brute Force Attack has been breaking records recently. And not in a good way. Securi posted some alarming statistics on April 12, citing that the attack scans were triple from old averages — increasing from 30,000 to 100,000 per day. Now they’ve revised those figures to a million, measuring the attacks at 30x …
Protecting WordPress from Attack
Protecting WordPress against the recent (and massive) brute force attack has been a popular subject on online newswires lately. While security attacks on open source platforms (like WordPress) are nothing new, this latest barrage has become truly sensational. Let me clear up what’s really happening and, more importantly, what you can do to protect your WordPress website. …
SEO Tools: Fooling Google?
Using On Page Optimization Tools Wisely Recently I pondered the question “can an SEO consultant become so good at fooling his SEO tools, but not really fooling Google?” We use various tools and have gotten so good at them that we rarely get low optimization scores. Many SEO Tools are guessing at Google’s algorithm. We happen …