Bad SEO Tactics and Common Mistakes

Saturday, 09 January 2010 15:46

Once upon a time, search engine optimization (SEO), was like the Wild West - no rules, and people could do pretty much anything to get their websites up to the top of the search engine listings.  Those days have long gone, however, and the rule of law prevails.  Search engines know all the tricks, and are not slow to penalize any website that attempts to use them.  In this article, we'll look at the things you should definitely avoid if you're trying to optimize your site for web searches.

Duplicate Content

Copying content from another site and placing it on your site is a definite no-no.  Not only is this bad SEO practice, it's copyright infringement too.  You could find yourself in trouble with the law, as well as in trouble with the search engines.  Be aware that other sites might duplicate your content, so if you suspect this has happened and that your  rankings have suffered as a result, contact the search engine immediately.

Cloaking

This is a way of directing visitors to a different website, by disguising or cloaking the information that appears in the address bar.  Search engines have bots that will detect this very easily - but you can't detect them, since they're unnamed and come from undisclosed IP addresses.  Cloaking is a very quick way to get your site banned.

Invisible Keywords

This is the practice of stuffing apparently blank space on a website with keywords, written in the same color as the background so that you can't see them.  You might also find keywords written in a very tiny font at the foot of a web page.  Again, this is something that search engines can easily detect, and it usually results in a ban.

Javascript Manipulation

Overusing javascript is a very poor SEO tactic.  Although search engine crawlers can't read javascript at the present time, if there's too much of it on your site, it will set alarm bells ringing and the search engine will start to look for evidence of other banned practices.  Although you can't avoid using javascript to a certain extent, use as little of it as you possibly can, and keep it in separate file from the main site.

In the end, you can't fool the search engines in the long term, so why waste your energy?  If you can devote all the time and ingenuity that you've put into sneaky SEO tactics into making your site user friendly, content rich and legitimately optimized for keywords, your site will naturally climb up the rankings and you'll never have to worry about being banned.

How to secure my web site

Friday, 08 January 2010 00:00

Securing your website is something that you definitely don't want to leave to chance.  Your website is constantly bombarded by hackers, all of whom are looking for the tiniest weakness that they can exploit.  Once a loophole is found, it can be used to steal not only your personal and private data, but your customers' personal and private data too.  So if peace of mind and online business credibility are important to you, you'll need to keep reading.

Secure your websites

First of all, you need to know your enemy.  Who are these hackers, and how do they work?  The main thing you need to recognize is that hackers have all the time in the world.  They can afford to spend days, weeks and even months, patiently working away at your website to find weaknesses.  They can do this because the processes they use are automatic, and you simply don't notice they're happening.  A lot of it is guesswork.  For example, they can take the cookies that your site produces and run through an infinite number of variations to see what effect that has.  They can work away at the source code of your site's pages, and set programs running to try and crack the authorization process.

Install CMS updates to secure your web site

The first thing you can do to defeat these attacks is to ensure that your content management system (CMS) is up to date.  Out of date software is software that hackers have already managed to breach, so you don't want it running on your system.  Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress and other major CMS providers continually test their systems for weaknesses, and update accordingly, so you should install these updates as soon as they appear.  This can usually be done automatically.

Be sure to change the default administrator user name and passwords on your CMS once it's installed.  Hackers know what these defaults are too!  It's an obvious thing to try if you're trying to break into someone's site, because it's amazing how many people overlook this simple security measure.  It's a bit like leaving your front door wide open  for burglars.

Another devious hacker trick is to use PHP error reporting to get information about your site.  If your error reporting level is set too high, a hacker can find out a lot about your site simply by studying the error reports.  If you turn off the error messages entirely, and set your PHP configuration so that it doesn't display errors even if one occurs, you will plug a major security leak.  If you feel unsure or nervous about doing this, ask your system administrator to do it for you.

You can also keep hackers out of your secure files by correctly setting the htaccess file.  A simple bit of code will secure the htaccess file itself, as follows -

<files .htaccess>
order allow, deny
deny from all
</files>

Use the same coding to secure any other files you don't want people to look at.  To do so, just replace .htaccess with the name of the file you're securing.

Finally, don't neglect the issue of passwords.  If you can guess it, a hacker will be able to guess it too, and they're running programs that can go through millions of combinations until they find the right one.  Use an online generator to help you create an uncrackable password.

Always remember that hackers, like burglars, are opportunists.  If you take the basic security measures to keep your website safe, a hacker will swiftly move on to a site that is less well protected.  Securing your website takes minutes, but gives you a lifetime of peace of mind.

Wordpress Content Management System

Thursday, 07 January 2010 21:37

Wordpress is a very easy to use content management system (CMS), that has grown in popularity over recent years.  There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of websites that have been created using this system.  In this article, we'll look at its main features and benefits, to help you decide if it's a viable solution for your website, too.

WordPress CMS

Wordpress is very simple to install, but before you do so, you should check whether PHP and MySQL are in place on your host server, and that a file transfer protocol (FTP)  is available.  Wordpress needs PHP and MySQL databases in order to work, and you'll need FTP in order to upload files.  Once you've got that little bit of housekeeping out of the way, you can download Wordpress as a zip file onto your computer.

The next step is to create a database on the web server.  Don't forget to set yourself up as user for this database, so that you can actually get into it and use it.  Once you have created your database, rename the file wp-config-sample.php to wp.config.php and open it up.  You'll need to edit this file in accordance with the web server database, before saving it and uploading it to the web server at the root location.

That's the hard work out of the way!  Now you can enjoy configuring the program according to your requirements.  There are any number of plugins and themes that you can use, from polls to stats counters to comment functions, that will make your website unique, beautiful to look at and truly engaging for your visitors.  Wordpress has one of the largest collection of extensions of any content management system, so if you want something, you're more or less guaranteed that you'll be able to find it.

Advantages of WordPress

One of the great advantages of Wordpress is the extent of its back-up and support facilities.  There is a huge knowledge base, that will walk you through everything from installation to upgrades.  It's also blessed with an active community of users who post to the forum, so if you can't find what you're looking for, somebody will be only too willing to help.

Another great feature is the Wordpress showcase.  Once you've installed the program and got your Wordpress site up and running, you can showcase the site on the main Wordpress site.  Not only is this a way of getting the word out about your creation, it allows you to get useful feedback from your fellow site owners, who will review and rate the site and make suggestions.  You can do the same for other people's sites, of course.

Wordpress, then, is easy to install and easy to use, and it comes backed up with enough clear advice and technical support that even complete beginners can get wonderful, professional looking websites up and running within minutes.  Above all, it's fun!  So if you're looking for a content management system, Wordpress is one that you should definitely consider.

What is organic software

Wednesday, 06 January 2010 03:27

With an increased emphasis on environmentally friendly solutions, "organic software" is a phrase that you might have come across recently.  It's usually bandied about with concepts such as green web services, solar or wind powered servers, or eco-friendly hosting.  In this article, we'll look at what organic software actually is, and how you can implement it on your website.

Organic Software

Organic software, in essence, is another way of saying open source software - programs that are freely available and that can be downloaded from the internet, and that include full access to the source code so that they can be developed even further.  These programs are designed, developed and distributed with absolutely no manufacturing cost.  There isn't a factory somewhere putting this code onto disk.  As such, it is carbon neutral, and can be considered a green alternative to commercially available software. 

Organic conveys this sense of eco-friendliness.  It also implies that the software is in a state of development, that it can picked up and improved in a natural and organic way by open source programmers.  Once this has been understood, you'll very quickly realize that there are hundreds of thousands of programs out there that can be classified as organic.

Organic Web Hosting

If you're looking for organic web hosting or content management, then freely developed and designed programs such as Drupal would fit the bill.  Gimp, Picasa2 and Nvu are organic web design programs, vTiger is an organic customer relationship management program, and WAMP is an organic server management program bringing together Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP.  All of these programs were put together and refined by communities of developers across the globe, and they can all be yours for nothing more than a click of a download button.

Perhaps the most famous exponent of organic software is Mozilla Firefox, which declares itself to be 100% organic.  It's a non-profit organization, and all of its products were developed by a community, rather than an in-house team of designers.  Anybody can take the Firefox web browser source code and do what they like with it.  The rationale behind this is that it make for a stronger, more flexible and more user friendly product in the end.

Ultimately, then, organic software isn't anything new, and if you've ever downloaded a free program onto your computer, you already know how to implement it.  What is new is the move to associate open source programming with the environmental movement.  There is tremendous pressure not only to be green, but to be seen to be green, so it makes great business sense to rebrand open source product as ecologically friendly.  In this case, it's simply taking something that was already eco-friendly - open source software - and explicitly telling everybody that this is so.