Previously, we have seen two very useful strategies that you can employ to stay on top of the whole SEO game. As a webmaster, it is important for you to consider that search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo constantly upgrade their algorithms and make tweaks or changes to it on a regular basis. This could have an effect on certain sites, however in general there are some tried and tested SEO guidelines that you can follow to ensure that your site rises, or at least maintains its current position in search results for the keywords that you are targeting. Here are some more tips that you can use for this purposes:

• Have Quality Content on Your Site

Search engines are looking for quality sites to include in their search results and make them more visible than other, lower quality sites. Now how do you make your content be of good “quality” for the search engines. There are certain things to consider. You will see, most of it is really common sense and stuff that most webmasters are already applying. But it never hurts to be reminded of these:

Use proper spelling, grammar and sentence structure in your content.

That’s right, according to many SEO experts, if your site content is well written, then you have a higher chance of getting good search engine rankings. Now what do we mean by proper spelling, grammar and syntax? Will making a few typos or misusing a word cause you to plunge down? No. But your content must have general “proper” English, or whatever language your web site is in. Want some examples of what kind of phrasing would penalize you? Phrases like this:

“At our compani we are workings very hard for sattisfactions of ensuring customer makings of quality production for disposal of everyone, now when you buying from us happiness will existing for you!”

Basically, phrasing that the would cause the average individual to scratch their head and think “Huh? What do they mean by that? It doesn’t even make sense!”. If English is not your first language, then hire a freelancer to proofread the content of your site. This can be done for $5 on Fiverr and can definitely be worth it when it comes to SEO. It will also help you improve your overall trust level with site visitors.

Don’t keyword stuff

Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of inserting numerous keywords into your content, even in places where such keywords would be out of place, or simply would be repetitious. While you should definitely have the targeted keywords on your pages, try not to exceed a keyword density of around 2%. Anything more is likely to sound unnatural to readers and will get you penalized by search engines in many cases. Also, avoid creating long “laundry lists” of keywords, which basically consists of stuffing all keywords in one sentence one after the other, separated by commas. This is also bad for SEO and will have the additional bad effect of making the text awkward to read.

Written by Tony Vercetti - Websites For Sale | Make Money Online

As you are learning to earn money online, it is important to find out about various money making methods that you can use. Even though you may not be planning to use a certain method right away, it is always a good thing to know about various ways to make cash. This is in case one of your previous money earners dries up, you would always have a backup strategy in place.

Creating your own product

If you’ve been into the online money making scene for a while, you have probably seen the names of various gurus come up, such as Frank Kern, Mike Filsaime, Jeff Walker and company. These people are without a doubt earning millions of dollars by selling something that a lot of people online are searching for: information.

Now, can you become as successful as them? Maybe, maybe not. But one thing that is true, it’s the fact that if you make significant efforts, you are likely to earn a decent amount of money by creating and selling your own informational products online. But first, don’t get sucked into all of the hype out there. Success in this industry doesn’t come overnight. Even the top names in internet marketing did not become rich the first time they have put something up for sale online.

The first thing that you would need is an idea for a product. Ask yourself, what are your areas of knowledge? And you don’t need to be a professional on the subject matter either. You simply need to have gained a level of knowledge on the subject matter that is above that of the average person. If you take a look at many of the info products out there today, they consist of little more than information that is either simply common sense or freely available online if one would spend a few hours searching for it. The info is simply neatly arranged and rewritten in a way to make it simpler to understand for the target audience.

You would also need a web site, payment system and sales page for your product. Notice those long sales letters, filled with underlined words, calls to action, bullet lists of how the product will help the customer, etc? You can easily find freely available or inexpensive templates for your sales page that will make it resemble that of the top gurus. Of course, the words on the sales page matter: they will basically say to the reader “You have a problem, and I have a solution for you.” The most professional sales pages are designed by professional copywriters who charge thousands of dollars for their services. At the beginning, you probably won’t be ready to put up such an investment on your first product. You should know, however, that there are freelancers out there who can write a decent sales copy and even customize your product’s complete web site for around $50 to $100.

Once everything is set up, now is the time to promote your product. There are various ways to do so, but one of the most effective one is to advertise by buying ad space on websites, blogs or forums that are related to your niche. For example, if you are selling a dog grooming guide, you could buy ad space on a dog related forum.

Written by Tony Vercetti - Websites For Sale | Make Money Online

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of those things that is either really hard for you to grasp or very easy. The good news is there are a ton of people out there that are willing to help you with your SEO plan. The bad news is there are a lot of people out there that can claim to help you with your SEO plan.

When you hire a contractor, whether online or not, it is best to check their references. Ask them to give you past work from clients or from themselves and to give a short bio about themselves so you can get to know them a little bit.

Hiring a contractor can be a great experience, or it can be a constant struggle and fight to get the work done as it was promised and a complete waste of time. In order to make sure you receive the former experience, rather than the latter, there are a few things you can keep a look out for.

Pay Rate
If one contractor who is bidding on your project is extremely low, they probably aren’t going to be of high quality. I know that this may seem like common sense to a lot of people, but it gets over looked. You will see a trend of where the average is on a project for good work (when 10 people are $300 and 1 is $50, I don’t think the $50 is going to do as good of a job for you). Also, don’t take the highest bidder, either get them to come down in price with the rest of them or pick the best out of the following criteria.

Experience
How long has the contractor been active on the website you are using? If they have been their for 3-4 years compared to someone who signed up yesterday, I am going to go with the person that has the better reputation and experience on the website.

Reviews
Most websites like Elance.com or Odesk.com allow users to post reviews and feedback from completed assignments. Read through the reviews thoroughly and create a list of information about each contractor so you can keep their offers straight. Also see how much earnings that have made from working on the site. Someone with $30,000 vs $100 is going to have a lot more experience and better reputation.

Make sure you do not jump at the first SEO consultant that comes your way, do your research and find the right person for your job.

Photo Credit: Host Wisely

Written by Miles Williams - Websites For Sale | Make Money Online

 
Getting Started

First thing I recommend is that you login to your wordpress blog and upgrade to the latest version straight away via the dashboard as wordpress are always working on new patches that fix any known threats.

Then start upgrading all your plugins as there may also be new patches that the plugin developer may of fixed that are known threats to his/her plugin that could harm your blog.

Protecting Your Plugins 

With so many plugins available free on the Internet which most of us have installed, you may be open to an attack as some plugins may have flaws in them, which an attacker could use to alter your blog in some way.

All a hacker has to do is go to www.yourdomainname.com/wp-contents/plugins/ to find out what plugins your using.  Some clever hackers will have some sort of scanner software to scan your blog for any open backdoors to gain access to your plugins.

Solution

To prevent a hacker from accessing your plugins simply setup a index.html file and upload it to your plugins folder /wp-contents/plugins/

 

 

Password Security

This one is common sense, yet most of us use the same password for all of our website logins.  It’s wise to use a different password for all your logins and have a mixture of numbers and upper and lowercase characters.

If a hacker has managed to get your password and has hacked into your hosting server and finds all your other blogs, if your using the same password to log onto all your blogs, you’ve just given the hacker full access to your entire network of blogs.

You should also change the default admin username to a different name.  Because if the hacker knows your username then he’s halfway there to getting into your site.  To do this create a new username and give it admin privileges and delete the original admin username.

Protecting Your WP-Config.php File

 

Your wp-config.php file within the root of your wordpress blog contents information about your database.  For example the database name, username and password.  This is a file you should protect.

All you need to do is add the following code to your .htaccess file if you have one.  If you don’t have a .htaccess file setup at your root then open up notepad.exe and add the following text:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# protect the htaccess file
<files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

# limit file uploads to 10mb
LimitRequestBody 10240000

# protect wpconfig.php
<files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

# disable directory browsing
Options All –Indexes

I put this text into a file I call htaccess.txt on my local drive, I upload it to the root of the host, and then I rename it on the host to .htaccess and then it immediately disappears because it acts like a system file

Login Limitations 

It’s a good idea to limit how many times a user can enter in a wrong password to get access to your blog.  There is a good plugin for this called “LockDown” which will lock out users if they enter their password wrong too many times.  You can choose how many times users enter their password and also how long they’re locked out for via the options page – Click Here To Download

Hiding Your Wp-Admin Login Page 

A great plugin called “Stealth Login” can hide your wordpress login page so if your password did leak out, a hacker would have a hard time trying to find your login page.  A good use for this plugin is to prevent any malicious bots from accessing your wp-login.php file and attempting to break in.

Click Here To Download Stealth Login  

Hiding Your WordPress Version 

By default, WordPress theme’s have a line in the header.php to display the current version of WordPress you use (can be found by viewing source).

Since anyone can find your WordPress version this way, your blog is prone to hackers until you upgrade to the latest version. To prevent displaying your WordPress version, just open your theme’s header.php file and look for the following line

<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” />

And replace it with <meta content=”WordPress” />

To access your header.php within your wordpress dashboard, click on Appearance / Editior and then click on the Header.php file as shown below:

Some themes might already have this done for you, but it’s worth taking a look.

Protecting Your Database 

Another great free plugin is called WP-DB-Backup, which makes backing up your databases very easy and automated.  You only need to set this up once and set it to run at regular intervals.

This plugin automates the backing up of your databases and can have it sent to your email inbox.  Other than the default table created by WordPress, you can also backup custom tables created by plugins.  In the event that your account crashes, you can easily import and restore the database with the backup.

Click Here To Download WP-DB-Backup

Change Database Table Prefix 

When installing wordpress, it uses the default “wp” prefix in your database tables which makes it easy for a hacker to hack your database tables if he managed to get in.  You can easily change the prefix to other terms that are difficult to guess using the wp-security-scan plugin.  Click Here to Download

WP-Security-Scan checks your WordPress for security vulnerabilities and suggests/provides corrective actions. The corrective actions include changing your database prefix, hiding the WordPress version number from the header and allows you to test out the strength of your password.

Once in a while, it is a good idea to run the inbuilt security scanner and check your blog for any security invulnerabilities.

Protect Your Blog From Comment Spam 

Spam can be a danger to your blog and its visitors. Comment spam can insert unwanted content onto your website. One way of protecting against spam is using plugins that track comments and trackbacks, running them through tests to check on whether they are spam and then refusing or approving based on the test results. Though its worth noting that this is not completely full proof and depending on the size of your blog you may even want to personally moderate commenting, or maybe even limit commenting to specific posts.

Anti-spam Plugins and additional resources on how to protect from comment spam:

Akismet

Codex on Combating Comment Spam

Codex listing of Spam Tools

Limit Self Registration Of Users 

WordPress supports the ability for users to create new accounts for the purpose of posting. Though this registration does allow them to subscribe as well, which gives them access to reading only. Turn self-registration off in

Settings:  uncheck anyone can register

or limit your readers to the subscribe role only.

Delete the Install.php from your root directory 

After you have installed wordpress make sure you have deleted the install.php from your root directory, as anyone could run this file and cause damage to your website.

Checking Your Theme For Harmful Links 

 

When you are installing a free wordpress theme you have found on the Internet you need to make sure the free theme doesn’t have any harmful links that could potentially ruin your rankings with Google.

Some designers will sell footer links on these themes, which is how they make money by allowing you to download them for free, but some designers will hide the footer links so you don’t see them, which is against Googles webmaster algorithm and will harm your rankings.  Also some of this links will link to what is known as a bad neighbourhood of websites which are currently blacklisted by Googles eyes and if your linking to them, your blog will loose its rankings.

Here is a typical themes footer with links you will find on a free theme

Now if I run my cursor over the bottom of my entire footer and highlight it, I might find some hidden links just like the following in red:

Now you can guess how bad this would look in Googles eyes and what affect this would have on your blog.

So when you download a free theme make sure to check the template files for any hidden links

You can do this from within the dashboard under Appearance / Editor / Footer.php

 

I highly recommend you get your wordpress themes from Woo Themes

Click Here To See Their Themes
Keeping Your Computer Clean

Its very important to make sure the computer your using to edit your wordpress blog is clean from any spyware, viruses, malware, adware, etc.  For example you could have an infection of keylogger on your pc, which will track all your passwords, and be able to hack into your wordpress blog and other websites you use.

Make sure you have an up to anti virus and firewall protection on your computer.  A very good application, which is free to use, is called “C Cleaner”, which will scan your computer for any spyware, adware and delete them. I recommend installing this and running this at least once a day if you use the Internet a lot as it will detect any infections you get from visiting websites that install applications in the background without you knowing.

Click Here To Download

 

 

Server Vulnerabilities 

The webserver running WordPress, the database with the WordPress data, PHP and any other scripting/programming language used for plugins or helper apps could have vulnerabilities. Therefore, make sure you are running secure, stable versions of your web server, database, scripting interpreter, or make sure you are using a trusted host that takes care of these things for you.

It should also be mentioned that if you’re on a shared server (one that hosts other people besides yourself) if someone else is compromised, then it’s very likely you could be compromised too even if you follow everything in this guide. Be sure to ask your web host what security precautions they take.

One Hosting Company I recommend is Hostgator –

Click Here To View Price Plans

Written by Andrew Fitzgerald - Websites For Sale | Make Money Online