Content Publication

The search engine companies do not publicize exactly how they determine a site’s search engine ranking, but they do give website owners tips for improving their rankings. Some search engines use frequency of new content as one of the factors used to determine a site’s ranking. When you have a static website, the content stays the same for long periods of time. If you have a blog on your site, you will be publishing new content regularly. This increased frequency makes it possible to improve your ranking.

Backlink Opportunities

Unless your website covers a unique or controversial topic, it is difficult to attract natural backlinks. Backlinks are one of the factors the search engine companies use to determine a site’s ranking. When another website owner links to your site, the search engine companies see it as a “vote” for your content. The more “votes” you have, the better your ranking. When you have a blog, you have many opportunities to attract natural backlinks. Writing in-depth posts that contain thought-provoking content is one of the best ways to attract natural backlinks to a website.

More Keywords

Keywords are the words and phrases people use to search for information online. When someone wants to find information about a topic, they opens a search engine window and type a query into the search bar. Smart website owners integrate keywords into their content to make it easier for people to find their sites. Blogging is beneficial for SEO because each blog post is an opportunity to target a new keyword. Someone who runs a party supply website might use “cheap party supplies” as a main keyword. When writing blog posts, the website owner may decide to target keywords like “princess party supplies,” “first birthday party supplies” and “dinosaur party supplies.” Targeting additional keywords improves the chances of attracting new traffic from the search engines.

Commenting

Opening your blog to commenters may actually help improve your search engine ranking. Comments add to the conversation, helping you attract more people to your site. Comments also act as new content for your blog. You do not have to pay anything for this content, giving you a great return on your investment. Some commenters may even use longtail keywords, helping you improve your ranking without spending a penny.

Viral Marketing

When something “goes viral,” it means that it has become very popular in a short amount of time. Think about a YouTube video that gets a million views in a week or an article that has thousands of comments. People like the content so much that they share it with their friends, and those friends share it with their friends. If you write controversial or thought-provoking content, there is a good chance it could go viral. This will bring additional traffic to your site and increase the number of comments you receive. All of these things can help you improve your search engine ranking.

Interlinking Opportunities

Interlinking is when a website owner links from one page of her site to another. This practice helps improve search engine rankings, but it is difficult to do if a site only has unrelated product pages. A blog gives a website owner many opportunities for interlinking one related post to another. Someone who owns a website about marketing might write a post on inexpensive marketing tips and link it to a post on free marketing tips. This makes it easier for readers to find content and also gives the search engines additional links to follow when crawling a website.

Any website owner who wants improved search engine opportunities should consider blogging. Not only can blogging help with SEO, it can also help attract new readers to a website. This SEO tactic is one of the most effective and least expensive available, so it should be a part of every website owner’s marketing plan.

Dashboard Access

Creating a basic website with WordPress does not require you to know any coding or programming. If you want a simple website that people can read and navigate, all you need to do is use the default templates and tools available. When you create a website with this platform, you do everything through the administrator dashboard. This dashboard lets you add new posts and pages to the site, change font colors, add graphics and videos, and even change the appearance of your site. The availability of the dashboard is one of the things that make WordPress so easy to use.

Widgets and Plugins

If you have a traditional website, you probably have to hire someone every time you want to make a small change. If you don’t have the budget to hire someone, you have to try to change the code yourself, which takes a lot of time and can create a lot of frustration. WordPress users have access to thousands of plugins, which are tools that help you add features to your site. If you want to add a newsletter sign-up form in the sidebar of your site, you can easily do so by adding a widget. Widgets also make it easier to manage ad units from affiliate programs and direct advertisers.

Flexibility

When you pay someone to design a site for you, you typically have to use that design until you are ready to pay for a redesign. This may not happen for several years. When you use WordPress, you can change the look of your site at any time with just a few clicks. There are thousands of free and paid themes available for this platform, making it easy for users to change the appearance of their websites. Even changing the layout of a site is easy when you use WordPress.

Search Engine Optimization

WordPress makes it easy to optimize each post and page for the search engines. There are dozens of tools available to help you assign content to categories, assign tags to each post, create meta titles and descriptions and add keywords to your pages. All you have to do is fill in the settings for each post and WordPress takes care of the rest. There are a number of plugins available to help you link from one related post to another, which can also help you improve SEO for your site.

Easy Ad Management

If you want to make money with Google Adsense or with one of the many affiliate programs available, you have to display the ads on your site. If you have a traditional website, getting the ad code to work with your website code can be a nightmare. WordPress has plugins available to help users manage AdSense units, Amazon affiliate products and other affiliate program ad units. There is even a widget available that allows you to rotate which ads appear on the sidebar of your blog posts. Instead of showing the same ad on every page, you can customize your ad placement to generate more revenue.

Security

One of the biggest benefits of WordPress is the added security. When you run a traditional website, there is always the risk that you will not immediately identify a security breach, allowing unscrupulous people to steal your information and even disable your website. WordPress regularly updates its software and keeps security in mind when doing so. If a new version of WordPress is available, you will get a notification at the top of your dashboard. Installing new versions not only improves security, it also expands the functionality of your site.

Due to its ease of use and availability of thousands of customization tools, WordPress is ideal for personal websites or small business websites. With just a little time and some clicking, you can create a website that gives visitors a great first impression.

Password Creation

One of the first steps you should take when creating your blog is making sure your password is not something that another person can guess easily. Avoid using common passwords like “1234″ and “abc123,” as this make it easy for someone to log in to your blog and delete your content or make malicious changes to the site. Use a combination of symbols, numbers, capital letters and lowercase letters to make your password as strong as possible.

Regular Software Updates

If you use blogging software such as WordPress, make sure you download and apply updates regularly, or hire a consultant that will do that for you automatically. When you use outdated versions of a piece of software, your blog is more vulnerable to malicious attacks, viruses and worms. If a security issue exists when a new version of the software is not ready, some software developers will release security patches that can reduce the risk of infection.

Plugin Installation

Plugins help bloggers maintain better control of their blogs and make it less cumbersome to make changes. There are plugins for managing ad placement, optimizing each blog post for search engine placement, getting rid of spam and managing comments. Despite their usefulness, plugins can also be a security risk. Before you download a plugin, make sure you know where it is coming from and who developed it. If the developer does not have a good reputation, avoid downloading the plugin. If you receive any kind of security notification after downloading the plugin, do not install it. Ignoring these warnings increases the risk that you will end up with a virus, worm or other malicious file.

Font

You might love Lucida Handwriting, but your blog readers may have a hard time reading a script font. Unless you blog only for yourself, the needs of your readers should be your top priority. Use a non-script font in a size large enough to see at several different screen resolutions. You do not want to force your blog readers to change their browser settings just to see what you have written.

Colors

Color can add a little personality to your blog, but it can also hurt people’s eyes and make them never want to come back. If you add color to your blog template, make sure it does not clash with other colors on the site. Avoid using neon colors, as these are often difficult to see. Do not use dark text colors on a dark background or light text on a light background. Before your blog goes live, ask a few people to look at it and let you know if the colors you used make the site difficult to read.

White Space

Text, video and pictures are important components of every blog. However, you also need some white space. Do not cram text together without using paragraph breaks or post dozens of pictures side-by-side. White space makes it easier to read your text and look at any photos or videos you post on your site.

Theme

Your blog’s design should match the theme of your content. If your blog is about marketing and you use a template covered with sports pennants, people who find your blog might get confused and leave without reading anything. Use colors, text and pictures that relate to your theme. If you use your blog for business, make sure the theme is professional and portrays your business in a positive light.

Customization

If you do not have the funds to hire someone to design a theme just for your blog, make some changes to an existing template to create something that is entirely your own. Most blog templates come with certain fonts, colors or widgets. Move the widgets around, change the colors or try new fonts. Making these changes will set your blog apart from other sites using the same template right out of the box.

Information Placement

Online readers do not have time to search your entire site for important information. You need to put it where they will see it as soon as they land on your blog. This means putting the most information at the top of the page so readers do not have to scroll down to see it. If you have an important announcement about your blog, you can create a static post that stays at the top of the page. This will help ensure that all of your readers see this important information.

Browser Checks

Unfortunately, your blog might not look the same in every browser. If it looks fine in Chrome, it might look buggy in Internet Explorer. As you make changes to the design of your blog, check the site in several browsers to make sure it displays correctly. You may have to make some slight adjustments so that the blog displays properly in all of the major browsers.

Usability Review

It’s difficult to determine how a reader will react to your blog if you don’t get feedback from other people before you go live. This is why you should conduct a usability review. Sit down with a few of your friends and ask them to visit your blog, click on all the links and use all of the features. Your friends should then give you their honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Making changes based on these suggestions will make your blog easier for readers to use.

Meet Passpack.com. It allows us to store every one of our passwords and other login details for quick reference. Employees of our company can access the secure database whenever they need to access clients’ login information. Passpack offers extra security with its complex login algorithm. Users must take several steps before they can log in, which reduces the risk of outsiders accessing confidential information by guessing your username/password combination.

Once we get into Passpack, we can easily find our passwords by using tags, filtering through predefined options, or paging through passwords in alphabetical order. Each entry contains identifying information such as a name, password, username and URL of the page the login information is for. Users can set how they want to share their passwords, making it possible for us to share some passwords between employees and others exclusively with administrators. The interface also allows us to safely share passwords with our clients by generating a secure PIN code they use when they attempt to view their password.

The security features of Passpack give us confidence that our customers data is secure. For example it has a password generator to help us create stronger passwords. It scrambles fields so passwords are hidden when visitors are in the office. And Passpack also contains anti-phishing messages, offline backup of password data, two-factor authentication and disposable logins for use on public computers or when traveling. It prevents people from stealing our passwords with key-loggers, as it has an on-screen keyboard for password entry. Our administrators can manage permissions, revoke shared passwords, control who shares and edits passwords, and add or delete users.

We save a lot of time with Passpack, as it allows us to log in to more than 25,000 websites with just one click. It also makes it possible for us to collaborate and share information easily with secure messaging and other protected collaboration tools. The price is just right, as Passpack costs as little as $1.50 per month for web workers and no more than $40 per month for businesses that need to manage 10,000 passwords and 1,000 shared groups.

Before making any changes to your blog, however, we highly recommend making a backup. This will ensure an easy fix should something ever go wrong.

Luckily, many pre-designed themes are structured more or less the same when it comes to editing. To edit your blog colors you need to click Appearance then Editor in your WordPress Dashboard. At the very bottom of the right hand side look for Styles. By default, most are labeled Stylesheet (style.css), this would be a good place to start making small changes to the appearance of your blog.

Many themes today have the Options page where you can easily change the logo, and modify the structure of your blog to your liking. It is advised to at least have some standard HTML and image editing know-how when attempting any changes to a theme. However if you feel like trying then first create a development area (a copy) of your blog, and start learning how to make these small changes to your theme without affecting your live blog.

Use a secure password and change it often

I bet your password is your last name and some characters? Your dogs name? Your favorite flower? If your password is even remotely as easy to guess as my examples then you should consider using a different password. Ideally it will be at least 8 characters long and include letters and numbers, both lower case and upper case.

Don’t use “admin” as a username

This is obvious to hackers. This is setup by WordPress as the default login name and many people don’t change it. Login and change your username.

Hide your WordPress version

WordPress automatically shows what version you have in your meta tags. Anyone looking at your page source can see it, then exploit potential security bugs your version may have. Instead, hide it.

Go to Appearance then click Editor. Make sure your theme is the one selected and click header.php

Look for:

Change it to something like:

Protect your directories

Some directories may not have an index file. This leaves them open to anyone viewing them. Just add the following to your .htaccess file:

This will return a 403 error when someone looks at a directory that doesn’t have an index.

Use your Security Keys!

Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor (i.e. notepad) and locate the following:

A Security Key makes your site harder to hack and access harder to crack by adding random elements to the password

You can use online code generator, then simply copy and paste into your wp-config.php file.
The four keys are essential for enhanced security. The four salts are recommended, but are not required, because WordPress will generate salts for you if none are provided.

Happy Blogging!

Themes Themes Themes

Free or Paid, WordPress has the theme for you. Even more amazing is that having a custom theme created doesn’t break the bank. In fact, it’s relativity affordable to have a customized theme made (depending on your needs of course). Check our blog design services for more information.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of amazingly free themes to choose from and with a little html know-how you can turn it into your own creation.

User-Friendly Interface

If the multitude of free themes available wasn’t enough then how about the fact that WordPress has one of the most user-friendly backends for blogging? It’s pretty straightforward. You want to make a new post? Then click Post then Add New. Want to add a new link? Then click Links and click Add New. The ease-of-use just continues.

Plugins

The plugins are what really makes this software really stand out. It goes above and beyond “blog software” when you see what the plugins can do. There’s one for nearly any task you can think of. You can turn your WordPress into a forum, arcade, user-submitted video site or joke site, and so much more.

Permalinks

The feature is, in fact, known as “pretty permalinks” in the WordPress community. You can create your permalinks almost any way you like. From the standard, to ending in .html, or category/date/postname and more. This feature really help with your SEO and is yet another feature that makes WordPress an incredible platform.

The features and functions of WordPress don’t stop there. Check it out for yourself.

To see the list of other bug fixes in this release, please click here.

These changes have attracted many corporations to the software and for good reason. WordPress 3.0 is sleek, has an attractive default design, lots of new built-in functions, and now offers Multi-User capabilities. Granted, we’ve had access to WP-MU for years but the setup and use of that software has been complex for many people. WordPress 3.0 changes all that.

The features and security WordPress 3.0 offers is unparalleled. It saves companies money by being open source, has an amazing community of developers and users for support, knows no bounds for customization and functionality, is SEO-friendly, and now has many e-business features.

You already know that WordPress has been more than “just blogging software” for years and with 3.0 it has become official. It’s allowing big businesses to consolidate many websites under one easy-to-use interface. Controlling plugins, themes, and information… it’s truly changing the way we manage our content.