Website visitors can be either humans or robots / spiders from the search engines. Although human visitors are what you are seeking, those robots are important since their efforts will result in many other human visitors coming to your website. Many websites find that more than two thirds of the traffic may well come from Google. Luckily what works for humans usually works well for robots too.

The Website Structure

Having appropriate webpages that people may wish to visit is clearly important. The rules to follow are clearly laid out in an article by Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian entitled Navigation - Make it Easy to Get Around.

Although written in 2000, the principles are still the same:

It isn’t difficult if you put yourself in your customer’s position and think about the things you would like best on a site like this. Here are some essential questions to answer:

• Where am I? - an aid to one’s present location on the site
• Where do I go next? - a roadmap or directory of the entire site
• How do I get there? - an intuitive or descriptive system of navigation
• Am I still on this site? - a consistent look-and-feel across different sections of the site

The Scent Of Information

In some cases particularly with larger sites, the human visitor may get slightly confused. He or she may have only a general notion of what they are looking for. Jared Spool has introduced the concept of the Scent Of Information. Just as a tracker dog may follow the scent to find their objective, your human website visitor needs some confirmation that they are heading in the right direction. Spool and his team at User Interface Engineering have refined these notions and a summary of their findings is available in their report summary at Designing for the Scent of Information

Tags

Although search engines such as Google are now very adept in determining the sense of any given web page, they are far from perfect. At one time the keyword meta tag could be used to flag important concepts on a web page. However it was effectively devalued by webmasters including vast arrays of keywords in this meta tag for their web pages. A much better indicator is now available for both regular websites and for blogs. It is known as a tag and is indexed by such services as Technorati.

If a few well-chosen tags are applied to a web page, then a human visitor interested in a topic can rapidly explore those web pages which have been tagged with that topic. More and more websites are using this approach to help human visitors find relevant pages by adding a Tag Cloud Web Page. What is particularly valuable here is that such tags are even more important to those search engine robots. Tagging web pages will bring improved search engine visibility.

Categories

The final signpost applies only to blogs. It allows a human visitor to look only at those blog posts that relate to a particular topic that is covered by the blog. It may be appropriate to have up to a dozen categories in the blog. The disadvantage of this approach is that blog posts are then listed in reverse time order with the most recent first. This is likely to be useful to only a minor fraction of human visitors. Nevertheless it is worth doing, because it again is a way of making blog posts more visible to search engines.

Conclusion

Getting a human visitor to a web page of your website is a challenge. Once they have arrived, you hope that your website will be ’sticky’ enough that they stay around. A big part of that is achieved by ensuring there are highly visible signposts to other web pages they might like to visit. Tags and categories are second lines of defense to ensure they do not click away.

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Tag clouds are not a new innovation. In 2005, Pete Freitag gave complete and somewhat complex instructions on How To Make a Tag Cloud. His website still shows a fine example of the tag cloud created by his approach.

Not everyone was so enamored by tag clouds. Jeffrey Zeldman expressed the view that Tag clouds are the new mullets. He suggested that every one was leaping onto the bandwagon of this fascinating new technology.

Before we go further it is very important to make a clear distinction between tag clouds, which provide hyperlinks to individual posts or articles, and what might better be called Word Clouds.

Some Tag Clouds Are Only Word Clouds

Some software will take a body of text and display common terms in the text by grouping like terms together and visually emphasizing the more frequent terms. These might best be called Word Clouds. Interesting examples of this are TagCrowd and the Tag Cloud Demo created by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, Inc.).

To repeat, although the same term is used for these, these are not tag clouds, as we are using the term. They should more precisely be called word clouds.

That is not to say that what they do is not of interest. Indeed Noah Brier uses the same concept in picturing how visitors to his website, Brand Tags, perceive some common brands. As he suggests, the basic idea of the site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is. He uses word clouds to display and summarize these perceptions.

Tag Clouds That Get You There

Word clouds are of some interest, but tag clouds that include hyperlinks to other webpages clearly are much more valuable and useful. Although these tags could be determined by computer analysis, they are likely to be much more relevant if they are assigned by the author of the web page. They are now very easily handled and displayed for blogs that are using the latest version of WordPress version 2.5. A tag cloud such as that displayed in the right sidebar is easily created using the information in Template Tags/wp_tag_cloud.

The use of tag clouds is becoming more valuable as the Internet becomes increasingly crowded and search engines sometimes produce only low relevance items. Perhaps this is why Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet, has received a $350,000 grant from the James S and James L. Knight Foundation to work on “source tagging”. He and Martin Moore are working with Reuters and the BBC to figure out how to incorporate this process into routine journalistic workflow.

We can only hope that “source tagging” helps you find the original items. Perhaps it hardly needs to be said given the riches that Sir Tim has given us already.

Related:
A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
Posted by Lisa Barone
Live blogging from SMX Social Media Marketing, April 2008, Long Beach CA

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Spread the word, it’s RSS News Feeds Awareness Day. Although the International Labor Organization may currently be the biggest group celebrating May 1, that could change. Perhaps Daniel Scocco had forgotten about the ILO in coming up with the idea of designating May 1 as RSS Awareness Day. However given that RSS newsfeeds unleash the communicating power of the Internet, the word can spread very fast. I learned about this from the RSS news feed of Andy Beard, who had blogged about it. As we all tell our readers about it, then the momentum becomes unstoppable.

RSS news feeds have been around for many years. It’s the fastest way to be aware of what the BBC or CNN is reporting on. In order to subscribe to the RSS feeds of such favorite sites, all you need is an RSS reader. Here are three web-based and free RSS readers that you can use. All work well and it’s a question of what works best for you:

• Google Reader
• Bloglines
• Newsgator

Once you have your RSS reader working you can just head to your favorite website and subscribe by clicking on the RSS icon.

Courtesy Andy Beard

Another important way of staying on top of breaking news is with Google Blogsearch. It went through a rough spot during recent months but it’s now back functioning well to alert you to Hot News Items. That too is relying on RSS news feeds. All in all, it’s good to be aware of the power of RSS news feeds. If making May 1 RSS News Feeds Awareness Day can help spread the message, then let’s all ping away.

Related: News Feeds Boost Website Traffic

Other Related Posts

• October 20, 2007 -- Google BlogSearch, The Neglected Orphan
• June 30, 2007 -- RSS News Feeds To Stay Alert
• April 28, 2007 -- Yes, The National Gazette Does Have News Feeds

As far as we can tell this does not seem to be the case. Below are shown the starting text in the SERP snippets for the same blog post in four different language versions of Google. In each case the date is shown in the language of the searcher. In each case also, the snippet used the same 138 characters from the Description meta tag.

Google - English - http://www.google.com

Google - French - http://www.google.fr/

Google - Finnish - http://www.google.com/ig?hl=fi

Google - Saudi Arabia - http://www.google.com/ig?hl=ar

Danny Sullivan has questioned in Sphinn whether this is a real phenomenon. However it seems to be the case for blog posts that appear in more popular searches. The posts on the same blog that preceded and followed this post, which are less popular, still currently come up in SERPs without dates. Whether this dating becomes the general rule or disappears at some time can only be a matter of conjecture at the moment.

If you have any views on what is happening here, then please add your comments.

Other Related Posts

• August 5, 2008 -- DMOZ Descriptions Do Not Work For Google
• March 25, 2008 -- Do Google Snippets Work Better Than Twitter?
• August 1, 2008 -- Ideal Google Snippets To Target Your Prospects

The creation of those Google snippets is an entirely automatic process. In other words it’s a computer-generated snippet. Google does try to help you to get better snippets. Matt Cutts has even made a short video about snippets (just over 8 minutes) - tip of the hat to Kathryn Katz. A key element in getting good snippets is the description meta tag. There is an interesting discussion currently going on in the Cre8asite Forums about that. One most useful piece of advice from Ron Carnell is to have a sentence of not more than 155 characters and spaces in that meta tag. Since this is the length of a typical Google snippet, then it is highly likely that your engaging sentence will be used as the snippet.

That was true until about four days ago. Suddenly there has been a switch in the automatic snippet creation process, at least for blog posts. It is not yet universal for all blog posts but seems to occur for ones that frequently come up in keyword searches. Here is an example:

The snippet for such blog posts now starts with the date of the post displayed in the language of the searcher. In English this uses up about 17 characters of the snippet including the ellipsis (…). Since the total length is still 155 characters and spaces, this leaves only 138 characters and spaces for you to write that engaging sentence.

It’s still early days so whether this change will be applied to all blog posts or will remain a permanent feature for Google is still in question. Yahoo! and MSN/Live still seem to be working with the longer 155 characters snippets. Anyone with a WordPress blog who uses the All-in-one-SEOpack plugin is faced with a dilemma. It suggests that descriptions should not be longer than 160 characters, but that number should now perhaps be reduced.

Other Related Posts

• August 1, 2008 -- Ideal Google Snippets To Target Your Prospects
• August 5, 2008 -- DMOZ Descriptions Do Not Work For Google
• July 24, 2008 -- Business Strategy Reality Check With Google Adwords Keyword Tool

As we all spend more time in social media, such as Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon or Sphinn, the ability to write catchy headlines becomes as important as it ever was. If someone skimming through a list of possible topics is intrigued by your headline, then they may dip in to find out what it’s all about. That’s why Brian Clark suggested you should be writing Magnetic Headlines. If you were using WordPress to write your blog, then you would presumably put that catchy headline in that field labelled Title. It all seems so easy, but in fact it’s a little too easy. In what follows to avoid confusion, we’ll call what appears in that WordPress Title field the Headline.

Although your Headline may be written to attract human beings, it may not work well in a search engine keyword ranking. Since the largest proportion of the traffic to your website will come via search engines, it may be worth using something that the search engine robots will find attractive. The problem is that WordPress uses the expression in that Title field in a number of different ways. It is of course used as the headline in the < H1 > heading for your blog. It is also used as the Title element in the head of your blog page. This is the text that appears in the bar across the top of the screen. If you have nominated Pretty Permalinks, then the WordPress will also use the same text to develop the URL for the post.

Creating Optimal Titles

This is where the dilemma arises. The Title in the head of the blog page is very important in search engine rankings. The URL may also have a slight effect on these rankings. Optimizing the text for search engine robots will likely produce something, which is not necessarily one of those Magnetic Headlines that was being suggested.

Luckily help is at hand from a variety of sources. For example, Stephan Spencer and his colleagues have developed SEO Title Tag 2.1.3, which allows you to specify a Title for the blog post, which can be different from the headline. A more complete solution is provided by the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn from Uberdose. This not only allows an independent title but also has a number of other useful features. Even used ‘out of the box’ with default settings the PlugIn will achieve a good part of what is needed to optimize your blog posts for the Search Engines. Katy Castro has a good description of how to use it.

Getting the Meta Description Right

An equally important element in getting search engine traffic to your blog post is the text in the Meta Description for the blog post. The All in One SEO Pack allows you to prepare a separate description for each page. If you don’t, the default is that it will take the first 155 or so characters from the start of the post and use that. That avoids a problem Google has in indexing blog posts that all have the same Meta Description. Checking your website with the Google Webmaster Tools website will tell you whether duplicate descriptions is a problem for your blog.

By writing the most engaging description of your blog post in 155 or less characters, you increase the chance that this is what Google will show in its search engine report pages (SERPs). Most such snippets are a jumble of words that Google selects to try to show that its selection may be relevant to the keyword search. A well-crafted sentence will encourage many more visitors to click through to your blog post.

Although the Keywords MetaTag is of limited value nowadays, the plug-in does allow you to specify what keywords are most appropriate. Again if you do not specify keywords, the plug-in will select keywords by default from either the categories or from any tags that post may have.

The URL Of The Blog Post

A secondary factor in the optimization of the blog post is the URL for the blog post. Selecting the Pretty Permalinks option is one important step here for a WordPress blog. Unfortunately as mentioned above, this is again derived from the Headline of the blog post. You will find the text used in the Post Slug element in the right hand column of the Edit screen. It is derived by taking the Headline of the Post, putting all letters in lower case and adding hyphens between the words. This is not something where the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn helps. However as the WordPress Codex recommends, if you want to create a more memorable URL, then you can create such a one using lower case words and hyphens. Often taking the Title you have derived for the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn and converting it will be a good way to go.

Conclusion

Users of the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn are effusive in their praise of how well it works, even using it ‘out of the box’. If at least for your more worthy blog posts, you go the extra mile by crafting individual entries for the PlugIn, then you will see a significant increase in your visitor traffic. If you want to see how such a post appears, you can check this post. The headline was of course, Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots. However in the Title bar at the top of the screen, note the Title of the post, Write SEO Titles For High Rankings. A version of that also appears in the URL. Check the description by viewing the source code. It’s all extra effort but a very good use of your time.

Other Related Posts

• August 5, 2008 -- DMOZ Descriptions Do Not Work For Google
• July 29, 2008 -- Knols, Knols, Decisions, Decisions
• May 15, 2008 -- Keyword Selection Strategy

Pierre Far, in a guest post on Techipedia today asks the question, Is Social Media the Final Frontier of Marketing? Given the popularity of such activities as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, it’s clearly a question that many marketers must be asking.

As confirmation of the topicality of the question, only three days ago Business Week had a long nine page article suggesting that Social Media Will Change Your Business. A few quotes will show how Business Week is seeing all this.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they are simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they are going to shake up just about every business. … Given the changes barrelling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They are a prerequisite. And yes, that goes for us, too.

Still, blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass media’s core concern: the splintering of its audience. Advertisers desperate to reach us need to tap niches (because we get together only once a year to watch the Super Bowl). By piggybacking on blogs, they can start working that vast blogocafé, table by table. Smart ones will get feedback, links to individuals-and their friends. That’s every marketer’s dream.

In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here’s betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.

Overall Business Week seems to suggest that the big mainstream companies will still be the ones in control. Perhaps they’re missing the real point about social media. Pierre Far sees it in a different light.

The point is that consumers now have a more potent aggregate power: someone with a problem can now reach others with the same problem faster, build a community around this shared problem easily, and mobilize lots of people behind the common cause more efficiently. That’s what’s new: a significant leap in efficiency. This gives consumers a loud voice that companies have to listen to.

This message has been around for some time. It started with the Clue Train Manifesto in 1999. As the authors said then, As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies. If Business Week does not fully understand even now, how long will it take for the mainstream companies to realize that others are now in charge?

Related:
Business Blogging Now
Riding The Internet Tidal Wave
Smart Advertising On Cell Phones

Other Related Posts

• January 25, 2008 -- I Twitter Therefore I Am
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The previous two articles in this series have suggested ways to combat the ever-increasing hack attacks that WordPress blogs are receiving. In this final article, we will discuss some real-life examples and what can be learned from them. As a disclaimer, it should be noted that some hackers are very skilled and are continually improving their methods. These are anecdotes from the past and the future will undoubtedly be very different.

Typical Hacking Exploits

For specific details of typical hacking exploits, the following accounts are particularly good:

• Is your Wordpress Installation Compromised? Al Gore’s is - by Stuart McKeown (12. Nov 2007)
• Matt Heaton (Bluehost and Hostmoster CEO) WordPress blog Hacked by Mick Jagger from Moscow - by Noah (3 Dec 2007)
• Blackhat SEO Spammer targeting High PR WordPress Blog - by Noah (14 Feb 2008)

The methods used in these cases are probably all the work of one hacker, by nickname goro, who may well have been one of the commenters on the first of these three posts.

We will not go into the specific details here (since they will undoubtedly evolve), but rather discuss the bigger picture associated with these exploits. In the case of the hacking done on the SMM blogs, there were some clever refinements. The mechanism inserted on the domain generated hundreds of random, unique blog post web pages, which included links to online pharmaceutical web pages. Since the websites were well ranked in Google, many of these hundreds of blog posts were served to the search engine spiders as they made their visits. After a period of hours, the mechanism then stopped. This may have been to avoid a huge spike in traffic, which would have been more easily detected.

How Google May Have Rewarded Their Efforts

During the last two or three months, Google has been giving much more rapid visibility and higher ranking to blog posts in its regular web search. In the latter part of January, blog posts appropriate for particular keyword searches would appear within a small number of hours in the regular web search. The algorithm may well be using the RSS news feeds associated with the blogs. This gave particular prominence to the blog posts generated by the hacking mechanism. They would almost always appear among the top five positions on a search for particular online pharmaceuticals and often in the first position. Presumably this gave a significant economic advantage to the hacker.

Although the hacking mechanism was removed within 36 hours, the false and now non-existent blog posts still persist in the Google index over 3 weeks later. In some cases the cached versions of the false blog posts are still available.

An interesting parallel development during this time is that Google Blogsearch now has a delay of a few days in displaying new blog posts. Until recently such a new blog post might have appeared within an hour or two, since it was triggered by the pinging of the RSS news feed. Whether this is a reaction to a large volume of blog posts generated by hackers one can only surmise.

How To Repair The Damage

Hopefully this series of articles has sensitized you to the dangers of hacking. This should prompt you to maintain a constant vigil so that any hacker intrusions will be spotted rapidly. You should also as Wayne Liew suggests regard Wordpress Upgrades as a Must. The continuing improvement in security may not serve to keep out hackers but at least it may encourage them to attack an easier prey.

If your WordPress blog is hacked, it can be quite a challenge to find out what has been changed. Sometimes the hacker may have modified files deep within folders that are not normally touched in upgrading, such as the images folder or the wp-content folder. Checking the size in bytes of particular files compared with versions in the most recent backup will reveal suspicious differences. Sometimes the .htaccess file may have been modified to create additional and inappropriate mechanisms. In such cases, you’ve got to make sure that you eliminate all such additions to the website. If you have backed-up a clean version of the website recently, it might be better to take down the website and replace it with a clean version.

Related:
Blogs Take Center Stage For Marketers And For Google
How to Remove Wordpress.net.in Spam Injection

Previous articles in this series:
Wordpress Blog Hacked
Guarding Your Wordpress Blog

Other Related Posts

• February 7, 2008 -- Guarding Your Wordpress Blog
• February 5, 2008 -- Wordpress Blog Hacked
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Brian Solis has just published The Definitive Guide to Social Media Releases. It would appear that Social Media Releases are what Press Releases have morphed into in this new multimedia interconnected world. One quote brings out a key part of his message.

So again, we ask, what makes a Social Media Release Social?

Well, at the end of the day, if you’ve ever written a blog post, much of what I’m describing already exists. There’s nothing to say that you couldn’t do this right now simply by creating a customized blog that is an extension of your company’s online newsroom.

This marketer’s realization that blogs provide a powerful mechanism for communicating with the marketplace comes at an auspicious time. It would seem that Google also now strongly believes that blog posts often provide the most relevant information in keyword searches.

The speed at which Google is latching on to blog posts has been commented on very recently by a number of Internet marketing commentators, such as Search Engine Journal (Julie Kent), WebProNews (Doug Caverly) and Search Engine Roundtable (Tamar Weinberg). However a comment by Michael Martinez on the last item questions whether this is really new.

Indeed it is not new. It is just the latest step in a process that Marissa Mayer announced in May 2007 with a post on Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer. Universal search would provide the most relevant answers to keyword searches from all the search processes that Google did.

It has not been smooth and continuous improvement from that point onwards. Prior to that, Google had been indexing blog posts extremely well based on their RSS news feeds. It was rapid and it was relevant. Results could be accessed by using Google Blogsearch. By October inexplicably the results became somewhat chaotic, as we discussed in the Cre8asite Forums. By the end of November, curiouser and curiouser, blog posts were indexed better in the regular Web search than they were in the Blogsearch.

Since then the visibility of blog posts in the regular Web search has been even stronger. You can still find the Google Blogsearch if you look for it, but it clearly has lost star billing. The main choices on the regular Web search program are as follows:

If you click on that ‘more’ then you will see the menu shown on the right. It’s probably only a matter of time before the option to search Blogs disappears entirely. However Google has always been notoriously slow at firing processes that are no longer seen as useful.

So the message is clear. Blog posts are just regular web pages like those to be found in any website. Indeed given Google’s fixation on inlinks (or back links as they somewhat confusingly describe them), it is not surprising that blog posts tend to be more visible than regular web pages.

Once the marketers really smell the coffee, we can expect to see many more Social Media Releases coming out as blogs.

Other Related Posts

• November 27, 2007 -- Google BlogSearch Is Broken
• October 20, 2007 -- Google BlogSearch, The Neglected Orphan

This is the second in a series of articles on how WordPress blogs may be hacked.

Unfortunately it’s becoming a more and more frequent occurrence, even though some seem unaware it has happened. If you have not yet read the first article, Wordpress Blog Hacked, you may find it useful to do so before reading this follow-on article. However it is not required reading.

You may naturally feel that calamities such as your house burning or your blog being hacked only happen to other people. It’s not true and it’s always wise to take precautions. Just imagine returning to your home one evening and finding it in flames. You close your eyes and cannot imagine it’s happening to you. You open them again and it’s all still flames.

How can you recover from such a tragic event. That is why most of us take out insurance and have security alarm systems to prevent such happenings. The more valuable your house, the more you are willing to invest in the right level of protection.

Getting your website hacked can be an equally unwelcome experience. Just see how Anita Campbell describes it in a recent article, Hacked: It Could Never Happen to My Site (Famous Last Words).

On Christmas morning, I tried to open this site as I normally do first thing in the morning, just to do a quick check. The home page of the site was completely blank! Nothing. Nada. I could not post anything new, either. I realized that a cracker had hacked the site. As I investigated later that day I discovered quite a bit of damage to the site.

Imagine seeing that blank screen. It’s as devastating in its own way as all those flames consuming your house. However if you think that is what happens when a site is hacked, you haven’t come up against the latest generation of skillful hackers. You won’t be aware that they have come in and taken over the attic of your house. They may create thousands of parasite webpages on your server without changing the physical appearance of your blog. That is what happened to the two SMM blogs that were hacked two weeks ago.

Eternal Vigilance

The first part of the security plan for your blog must emphasize vigilance. If you’re Al Gore or Matt Cutts, your blog is valuable real estate. Its traffic represents real economic potential to a hacker. Just as for a palatial home, you should invest in significant security systems. However for reasons we will discuss in the third article in the series, even more modest blogs are attractive to hackers. What you must do is to determine what you believe the risk of hacking to be and then invest an appropriate amount of effort in protecting against that.

If your blog is worth hacking, then likely it will be hacked so as to give the maximum time before you detect the intrusion. As will be explained in the next article in this series, hackers may only need access to your website for a few days to gain full value for their efforts. You will notice that Anita Campbell’s blog was hacked on Christmas Day. The two SMM blogs were hacked one Saturday morning. One important lesson is to never leave the blog unattended for too long.

There are two simple ways of checking whether intruders may be ‘in the house’. The first and easiest step is to check the source code of your blog. Just visit the blog and then use the View choice on your browser menu to examine the Source. With Firefox if you prefer you can use < control > U to see the source code in a different window. It may be this will show some lines of code or hyperlinks that should not be there. If you have followed the steps to be described later, then hopefully the code is as you expect it to be. A very rapid way of checking changes in source code is given in the article, Fast Alarm For Hidden WordPress Hackers.

Another way is to examine the traffic to your website. If there is an unexplained and massive increase in the volume, then this may be a sign of trouble. Similar increases in traffic may be seen in other analytic programs such as Google Analytics or SiteMeter. However depending on what hacking has been done, the increased traffic might be hidden from these tools.

To avoid these intrusions, there are certain recommended steps which are described below. As was mentioned in the previous article in this series, the best you can do is to ensure that your blog is as secure as you can make it. There are a host of other blogs that are insecure, and that may be your biggest protection.

Upgrade to the latest version

The most important recommendation that cannot be emphasized enough is to always upgrade to the most stable recent version of WordPress. The WordPress community is very active and as security holes are spotted, then as quickly as possible they are plugged. This does not guarantee that hackers will be kept out. However they may choose to attack earlier version blogs that have easier access holes.

You should also upgrade to the latest version of any plugins that you are using. A plugin may well be written by a single volunteer author so less attention may have been paid to security considerations. You should do a little research on each plugin you intend to use to make sure that others have not had security concerns about it. It is also recommended that you put an empty index.html in the plugins subfolder. This prevents anyone checking that folder and receiving a full display of all the plugins being used.

Harden Your Administration

In addition to working with the latest version of WordPress, there are a number of steps you can take to make hacker intrusions more difficult. The references below explain in greater detail what is involved. Here we summarize only the more important points.

Having user names and passwords that are not easily cracked for access to the blog administration panel is critical. In addition if you have a highly visible blog then you might wish to use the Login LockDown Plugin. This blocks access to the administration panel for a certain period after a small number of incorrect attempts.

You can also restrict access to the admin folder by having an appropriate .htaccess file there. This would specify the IP addresses for those who have rightful access to the folder. This would take the following form:

order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist home IP address
allow from 20.20.20.20
# whitelist office IP address
allow from 30.30.30.30

The extent to which you go beyond these steps should be based on your assessment of the risk of being hacked. The references spell out the possibilities.

References:
Hardening WordPress - WordPress Codex
Three tips to protect your WordPress installation - Matt Cutts
5 WordPress Security Essentials - Lee Robertson
How to Protect Your WordPress Site - Anita Campbell
Protecting Your WordPress Blog - Lorelle

The final article in this series is How Wordpress Blogs Are Hacked.

Other Related Posts

• February 19, 2008 -- How Wordpress Blogs Are Hacked
• February 5, 2008 -- Wordpress Blog Hacked
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

I find Chris Anderson often has very thought-provoking ideas. He is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”. That Long Tail concept helps explain why so many surprising Internet businesses work. He honed the ideas for many months before the book came out through his Long Tail blog.

He now is following the same path for his next book which will be FREE. You can learn more about it in an ITConversation on FREE: The Economics of Abundance and the Price of Zero. Here is some of the introductory text:

From free scoops of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream to the business model where razors are given away to sell the blades, there’s a whole gift economy at work that competes with the commercial economy. We think of free as scary and radical but this economy has always existed. Previously not dignified as an economy, its currency is not money: It is reputation, attention, respect, fame, fun or money from a superior service after giving away something inferior for free.
…
You can build whole businesses around giving stuff away for free. He puts his money where his mouth is. He’s giving away the audio version of his upcoming book, “Free: the Economics of Giving Stuff Away”.

He homes in on an important piece of the puzzle in a recent post on The big lie about free. The key is towards the end:

In a recent post, we listed dozens of business model built on free. All of them are based on the notion that free stuff does have value and the way we measure that is in the time people spend with them. Do I actually need to remind Wall Street analysts that time is money?

Time is an important currency. If we give someone minutes of our time, we give them something of great value. We only have each minute once. If an advertiser tries to grab that minute, then we may well be offended. If on the other hand we are so intrigued by that advertiser’s YouTube video, that we watch from start to finish, then we freely give those minutes. The advertiser has earned those minutes and had a real opportunity to communicate with us. I think once more Chris Anderson is on to a winner.

Related: Time is Critical

Other Related Posts

• April 12, 2007 -- Why The Average Joe Doesn’t Blog
• January 19, 2007 -- Slogging For The Long Tail

In this post, you will find hints on how to stay vigilant so that you will be aware if your blog is hacked. In a subsequent post, I will give some more advanced tips on how to stay vigilant and make your blog more secure. In a final post, I will describe some of the results of such hacking activities.

An underlying realisation in all that is written is that some hackers are extremely knowledgeable and skillful. The best you can do is to ensure that your blog is as secure as you can make it. It then is like the old joke about outrunning the bear. You don’t need to outrun the bear, but only your buddies who are with you. There are a host of other blogs that are insecure, and that may be your biggest protection.

Whose Blogs Get Hacked?

WordPress is quite rightly enormously popular software for writing blogs. As more and more people use it, it becomes a more interesting target for hackers who try to exploit any weaknesses in the software.

It was not surprising to see items such as Wordpress 2.1.1 Dangerous, Upgrade beginning to appear early in 2007. Nor was it difficult to believe that Matt Cutts WordPress Blog had been hacked, when this appeared on April 1, 2007. That was a spoof but since then there have been many real hacking incidents. Al Gore’s blog was, according to Stuart McKeown, as was the WordPress blog of Matt Heaton (Bluehost and Hostmonster CEO). It continues unabated as Stephan Miller and members of the Wordpress Support Forums can testify.

How Will You Know If Your Blog Is Hacked?

The real problem is that you may not realize your blog has been hacked. There may be no visible trace of the hacker’s work. The hacker may wish to boost the search engine visibility of online non-prescription medications or pornographic websites. It is done in such a way that it is hidden from prying eyes.

One useful test is to look at the source code for the blog. In Internet Explorer this can be seen by clicking on View > Source. In Mozilla Firefox, this can be seen via View > Page Source or from the keyboard by pressing U. Sometimes code can be found which has been inserted by the hacker. Another indicator can be very much higher levels of traffic. This will be covered more fully in the next post in this series.

Make Your Blog More Secure

Matt Cutts has given some useful tips to protect a WordPress installation. The most important of these is to ensure you always have the latest and most secure upgrade of WordPress. It is perhaps fitting that this blog post appears when WordPress version 2.3.3 has just been issued. This topic will be covered more fully in a subsequent blog post.

Further Articles in the series:
Guarding Your Wordpress Blog
How Wordpress Blogs Are Hacked

Other Related Posts

• February 19, 2008 -- How Wordpress Blogs Are Hacked
• February 7, 2008 -- Guarding Your Wordpress Blog
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

René Descartes felt that the proof of his existence was that he thought from time to time. Quite a number of people, including Richard Ziade, Richard Buchanan, Charles Rhyne, Graham Chastney among many others, are now confirming their existence by twittering.

It’s been around for some time although some of us were initially reluctant to twitter. Not so for many professionals who apparently have been using twitter extensively for some time. Now over the past few weeks it seems to have entered an explosive growth phase like so many other social media such as Facebook and YouTube.

Twitter is disarmingly simple. You can tweat or receive tweats on your cell phone via instant messaging. 140 characters to tell whoever is listening whatever you feel like telling them. It can be almost like dropping pebbles down a very deep well. Sometimes you hear a splash. Sometimes you don’t. The Twitter FAQ gives a few more details but there is very little more to tell. It’s completely free and there are now a number of widgets (Apps) that simplify the process of twittering.

Twittering is now being used more extensively as an additional channel in Internet marketing. Lee Odden has provided a Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR, while Darren Rowse sets out some Tips for Bloggers. Clearly we’ve only seen the beginning of all this twittering activity.

So what will be the future of this new method of communication. Although it’s free it should not be difficult to monetize Twitter given the huge volume of traffic. The key concern must be whether this will become an increasingly noisy tower of Babel. Will the bandwidth be available to carry all the tweats? Twitter was overloaded apparently when Steve Jobs gave the keynote address at MacWorld 2008. It was again down this morning for a time. Twitter means instant communication. It can only work if instant always means instant.

Related:
35 Twitter Tips from 35 Twitter Users
26 Reasons Why I Love Twitter - Plus 27 More just in Case

Other Related Posts

• March 18, 2007 -- To Twitter Or Not To Twitter
• March 25, 2008 -- Do Google Snippets Work Better Than Twitter?
• February 22, 2008 -- Will Business Boldly Go Into The Social Media?

This is one of those meme posts. You know what I mean. Someone tags you and you’re supposed to tag someone else. If it’s someone you know well and like, then you don’t like to break the chain. So here we are.

I was tagged by Kim Krause Berg, usability expert and owner of the Cre8asite Forums, who had been tagged by Barry Schwartz, the energetic owner of SERoundTable. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is such a time-consuming activity now, particularly with all the burgeoning social media (Digg, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, Mixx, etc.), that it can expand to fill whatever time window you give it. That’s why it’s important to budget your time carefully and leave time for the things that are really important in life.

I am constantly surprised by what I see around me and like to write about it. We human beings are often eccentric and there’s a wealth of material. I like words so if I’m not writing then I’m often reading and it can be on a host of subjects. I consume detective thrillers rapidly if I merely want to relax.

What I really like to do is to get out into the open air. We now have two senior Golden Retrievers although both of them have their puppy moments. So that ensures two or three long walks a day. Having just moved to British Columbia, we are also intrigued to see the different birds here as compared with those we saw in Québec.

Having now done my duty, I pass the baton on threefold. Over to you
Ruud Hein
Pierre Far
Paul Flanagan

Other Related Posts

• May 15, 2008 -- Keyword Selection Strategy
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots
• August 20, 2007 -- Google Rankings Drive Sales - SEO Expectations

There are many other blogs that are not so profitable. Blogging software is freely available, domains and hosting services are cheap and programs like Google AdSense can generate income without requiring any special efforts. The blogosphere is full of such blogs created solely to generate AdSense revenue. They provide little service to readers and minimal revenue to the owners.

There are shining exceptions to this, as San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer, Sam Zuckerman, points out (tip of the hat to Techmeme). Here are some short excerpts from his article:

The economics of blogging is so strong that entrepreneurs often can self-finance, which lets them tell potential investors to take a hike. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington said he’s walked away from venture capital deals four separate times.

“Every time we almost did a round (of financing), we grew so fast the terms didn’t make sense anymore,” he said.

The emerging business model is to start by selling advertising and build from there with events, subscriptions or product sales. And with audiences growing at double- or triple-digit rates, ad prices are soaring for top blogs.

“When we started selling advertising in this space late in 2005, it was very experimental and risky. We were able to get maybe $4 or $5″ per 1,000 page views, John Battelle, owner of Federated Media Publishing, a sort of uberblog, selling advertising and carrying out business functions for a stable of 130 independent blogs said. “For the same impressions we were selling then, we are now on average $20 to $30.”

The economics of blogging is ideal with low fixed overheads and the variable cost of writers is often low. Startups do not involve massive investments with long delayed revenues. With creative ideas that appeal to the right niche market, low-cost promotional efforts can start an exponential growth in visitor traffic. All it takes is passion and persistence.

Related:
Blog Networks Bringing Home the Bacon
Blog Networks become profitable (weren’t they always?)

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• December 29, 2004 -- Do you see what I see?
• January 15, 2005 -- There’s truth in them there blogs!
• January 10, 2005 -- A Tsunami Of News

In our recent TransCanada trip to relocate from Montréal to Langley BC, we had a rapid exposure to a few of the diverse parts of Canada. The TransCanada Highway, which we followed, is of course almost a one-dimensional view of the country. At any point going either south or north we would have seen even more diversity. However time was of the essence so we grabbed what we could. Here I will recount just a few of the impressions as we made our way across the country.

• Visiting Petawawa, Ontario, a major Canadian forces base, we were struck by the continuing reminder of the sacrifices being made by our troops in Afghanistan.
• In Wawa, there were multiple large statues of Canada geese including the largest one in Canada. On the other hand there is only one bank in town, the Royal Bank.

• The North Shore of Lake superior is incredibly beautiful.

• We stopped at Nipigon at dusk, since there were warnings from storeowners and the Ontario Provincial Police by radio on the danger of driving after dark given the frequent moose crossing the road at night. We saw such a moose crossing behind us just before we stopped for the night.
• In Thunder Bay, there is a memorial to Terry Fox. It was there that he had to give up his run across the country from St. John’s Newfoundland to the West Coast when cancer invaded his lungs. One can only marvel at his fortitude. It is fitting that he is such a motivating example to so many others.
• Ontario is a surprisingly large province with two time zones. The areas of Ontario, west of 90° west longitude, are in the Central Time zone.
• Entering Manitoba, to our great surprise we immediately lost cell phone reception via Telus and only regained its immediately upon entering Saskatchewan. We questioned whether this was really friendly Manitoba but it now appears it was Telus to blame.
• Entering Saskatchewan, we were somewhat surprised to see via our cell phones that we had gained another hour although Manitoba and Saskatchewan are in the same time zone. The next gas station attendant confirmed that Saskatchewan doesn’t observe daylight saving time. In summer its clocks are aligned with Alberta, while in winter its clocks are aligned with Manitoba.

• Although some find the Prairie Provinces overly flat and somewhat boring, we found they had their own particular beauty.

• Calgary and Alberta as a whole are still “enjoying” their booming economy. This apparently results in a severe shortage of labour in many fields. Heading west from there, there are great views of the snow-covered Rockies above the line off Foothills.

• The magnificent Rockies are beyond description and we thoroughly enjoyed our trip through the Kicking Horse Canyon and Rogers Passes.

• We then traversed the Coquihalla Highway and then on down to the Fraser Valley and our ultimate destination.

The journey took us 7 days and we travelled over 4,000 km. A more extensive set of images will shortly be available on Flickr.

Related: Following the Trans-Canada Highway with Google Maps

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• November 19, 2007 -- Go With The Flow
• February 16, 2007 -- Newspapers And Walled Gardens
• June 8, 2006 -- Blogger-In-Chief, IBM

Dear Mr. Cutts,

I have two purposes in writing. First I would like to offer my support on the suppression of the Google Supplemental Results label. Secondly I would like to offer a simple suggestion that perhaps could reduce the concerns that some webmasters have on the Google Supplemental Index.

On the Supplemental label suppression, although it provided some information it really was too crude a measure. Anyone who needed such an imprecise signal of weak performance would likely not be very effective in dealing with it. The Supplemental Index was introduced for computational reasons to provide the best balance between speed of computation and relevancy of results, at least in Google’s estimation. It may appear to separate the sheep from the goats but this is only a problem if one of your sheep looks too much like a goat.

Where this has turned out to be a problem is with blogs. A recent post by Michael Gray, How Wordpress Makes Comments SEO Unfriendly, points out how this can happen. As he said:

I love WordPress I really do. It makes it really easy to publish, however the WordPress developers really need some help sometimes. It seems when there is a choice to make things SE friendly, more often than not they make the worst choice possible.

The big issue he is describing is that blogs produce RSS news feeds as well as blog postings. There is a certain duplication of content between these and that can be a trigger to designate Web pages as goats. Goats are housed in the Supplemental Index and tend to be less visible for keyword searches. There’s the problem.

.. and the solution is .. Like any other competent SEO, my instinctive reaction is that if Google has a problem, then it’s up to me to find the solution. Of course the natural answer is an appropriate robots.txt file that will block the Google robots so that they only see one copy of any content.

It then struck me that the blog postings and the RSS news feeds are prepared for human beings and both have value. If anyone has a problem, should it be all those bloggers or should it be Google? If we assume it is Google’s problem, is there any obvious solution.

Once my mind was thinking in this direction, a possible solution did come to mind. I apologize, Mr. Cutts, if there is an obvious flaw in what I am about to propose but I felt it was worth bringing to your attention.

What triggered my thoughts was a post you wrote in April 2006. You were explaining with pride, quite rightly, that Google with its crawl caching proxy was reducing the load on websites through visits from your spiders. You had the following diagram to explain the functioning:

Although different Google services would have different Googlebots, any given one would likely use the cached version of the web page if it were reasonably recent. At the time that sounded a great idea. Presumably those cached versions would reside in the regular index unless deemed to be goats and assigned to the Supplemental Index. Unless the diagram is misleading, there is no suggestion that different Googlebots would deal with cached versions that were segregated in some way. Of course images would be handled in their own database (Index) but that is a clear distinction since it deals with non-text content.

If I’m understanding correctly, we now have a somewhat paradoxical situation. The regular Google keyword search deals with standard HTML or equivalent web pages. The Google Blogsearch deals only with RSS news feeds. So in applying these algorithms two quite distinct sets of entities are examined. On the other hand it would seem that all these entities are held in the same database and may be assigned either to the regular index or to the supplemental Index.

If this is a correct ‘big picture’ view, then that leads to my suggestion on smarter robots. In fact it’s only a small increase in smartness. Since Blogsearch and the regular search deal with quite different entities, why not segregate the work of the robots. Some would deal only with news feed type files: others would deal with regular web pages. By keeping them in separate databases, the problem of duplication between feeds and web pages would be avoided.

I hope this suggestion is of value. If it is not, then an explanation of the flaw in the argument may help us all understand better how the Googlebots are behaving.

Respectfully submitted,

Barry Welford

Related: Google Supplemental Label Out, PageRank Next?

Other Related Posts

• May 15, 2008 -- Keyword Selection Strategy
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots
• December 27, 2007 -- Forget We Ever Mentioned A Supplemental Index - Google

I have just become acquainted with the johnon.com blog. It deals with Competitive Webmastering & SEO. It often has thought-provoking entries and today is no exception. How could you resist reading an article entitled “Five Basics of Writing ‘Five Basics’ Articles for SEO“. It’s written with tongue-in-cheek and clearly is concerned with developing links.

Perhaps it’s missing the point to comment on the content of the post. However I’ve always found the most effective efforts for SEO come from thinking about both links and content. I’ve always preferred to stick to the Rule of Three. If you really want people to remember and act on your advice, I think it is better to try to limit it to Three Golden Rules. This also helps to achieve two of johnon.com’s basics: namely be brief and be specific.

Without further ado, here are Three Golden Rules for SEO:

1. Choose something topical: in other words, write about something that people may well be searching for.
2. Check what others have said: make yours more search visible.
3. Link out to others: particularly authoritative sources.

So if you are inclined to write your own “Three Golden Rules” article, do yourself a favor and link back here.

Other Related Posts

• May 15, 2008 -- Keyword Selection Strategy
• April 3, 2008 -- Ten Commandments For Google Links
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Li Evans tagged me in a meme on what magazines I read. Like many others I really don’t get involved in memes, but here I am again. It got me thinking on memes and why they don’t die almost as soon as they’re born.

In some ways, a meme is a small-scale simulation of the bigger social media such as Digg or Reddit or Myspace or Facebook. If the group involved or who might become involved looks interesting, then you decide to invest the time to become part of it. A meme has to have a slightly greater USP since it clearly is of limited life. However someone you know asked you to be part of it so there’s a slightly greater incentive to join. However we all know we’re far too busy for this so that person shouldn’t be too upset if they don’t hear any response when they drop the stone down the wishing well.

In this case, it was Andy Beal who started the Meme with his question: What Magazines Do You Read? Li was tagged by Andy and now I carry the baton. If I do tag five people, this will be a pure example of sociability since by now I read very few print magazines that are not online. Instead I fly at hyperlink speed through the RSS news feeds looking for headlines that point to something that intrigues me. The only physical ones I read are for pure enjoyment where I can’t find a satisfactory online substitute. I guess I’m part of the way the world is evolving. So here in no particular order are the few I read:

1. National Geographic
2. Canadian Geographic
3. PME - a French magazine for Quebec entrepreneurs
4. Search Marketing standard

Reading for pleasure usually involves books but those aren’t included in this meme.

So will I/won’t I help this meme to continue. It’s touch and go but social pressures are sometimes insidious and difficult to resist. So I pass on the batons to:

1. William Slawski
2. Donna Fontenot
3. Ev Nucci
4. Jim Hedger
5. Darren Moloney

Don’t worry, there’s no pressure. I won’t mind either way.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• July 10, 2007 -- Microsoft Uses Marketing To Steal Market Share From Google
• December 24, 2006 -- Happy Christmas Greetings To All Our Readers
• November 18, 2005 -- Google shares break $400 mark - the Internet tsunami continues

Victor Keegan in the Guardian today says To the average Joe, blogs aren’t cutting it. His article is somewhat downbeat about the state of the blogosphere. He acknowledges that there’s quite a bit of activity.

This month’s state of the blogosphere survey by Technorati, the monitoring service, was greeted as if it were the online equivalent of the President’s State of the Union address. It undoubtedly reveals a fascinating array of statistics and confirms that blogging - the writing of online journals - is continuing to expand, albeit more slowly than before, and is still a force to be reckoned with.

According to Technorati, the number of weblogs has risen to 70m compared with 35m some 320 days ago. But interestingly, only a third of these are English-language blogs. This is a great tribute to the way other languages have populated the space, led by the Japanese with an astonishing 37% of all blogs.

Nevertheless Mr. Keegan feels it shows only a small fraction of the English-speaking world is actually writing blogs, even if they may be reading them. It’s all a somewhat ‘Glass Half-Empty’ kind of view. Perhaps it’s not surprising coming from a newspaper journalist.

For the ‘Glass Half-Full’ view, you should turn to the author of that Technorati Survey, Dave Sifry, as reflected in a blog post, The State of the Live Web, April 2007. There’s much to marvel at in what he writes but here’s a small taste:

Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we’re seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That’s about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day.

So why such a difference in viewpoint. One key factor is that long tail nature of the Web. We’re not talking Mass markets here. Most people don’t blog so neither does the average Joe. But even a tiny percentage of people in a micro-niche of a market can make connections and interrelate in a meaningful and self-sustaining way. That tiny percentage when applied to a huge population perhaps spread over several continents can still amount to a sizeable audience. There’s the attraction in blogging. It works and that’s why it will continue to grow, particularly as it expands into the Mobile web opened up by that huge population of cellphones.

Other Related Posts

• February 7, 2008 -- FREE from Chris Anderson
• May 26, 2007 -- Tagging - Humans versus Robots
• January 19, 2007 -- Slogging For The Long Tail