Shaun Low

Keyword research is very basic to online marketing of all sorts, Blogging is no exception to that rule. Blogs generally rank well in search engines mostly due to their structure and frequently refreshed content. However, if you blog and don’t use the words people are actually interested in or actively searching for, you could be missing out big opportunity to get traffic.

Keyword research is just not confined to search engines. Even if you considered that search engines don’t deliver traffic, would keyword research still be meaningful and valuable? Without an iota of doubt it would be.

This is so because Keyword research is also market research. Systematically conducted, it lets you know what people are interested in, what they are searching for on the Internet. Furthermore, it let you know the actual keywords and phrases that people use to search for those topics. All this empowers you with loads of information about your target audience.

Recently, Brian Clark launched a nice and new 5 part series on keyword research.

This five part guide informs you on the following topics:

• Keyword Research: It’s Not What You Think
• How to Choose a Popular Niche for Your Blog
• How to Find Post Topics That Score Big
• Keyword Research Can Help You Make Money From Your Blog
• A Primer on Keyword Research Tools

Off and on we’ve been informing our readers about keyword research tools, see: 10 Of The Best SEO Keyword Selector Tools! and Free Keyword Suggestion Tools and KeywordDiscovery, Another Keyword Research Tool Makes Waves. Furthermore, if you’re an advertiser you might be interested in making the best use of the keywords that you find with your research, see: AdCenter: 4 Fruitful Tips To Maximize ROI Through Keyword Expansion!.

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About the author:

Nav is the founder and CEO of Page Traffic, a premier search engine company
known for its assured SEO service, web design and development, copywriting and full time SEO professionals.

Navneet has wide experience in natural search engine optimization, internet
marketing and PPC campaigns. He is a prolific writer and his articles can be
found in the “Best Articles” section of many websites and article banks. As
a search engine analyst , he has over 9 years of experience and his
knowledge is in application here.

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Yesterday I received an email from a reader of my Internet Marketing 101 blog. On a post called Five Secrets to Promoting Your Business Blog I included a recommendation to post to influential blogs in your niche.

The reader responded that one barrier to leaving comments on blogs is the use of CAPTCHAs–those annoying, messy boxes of alpha-numerics that are supposed to separate the people from the machines. Unfortunately, they can be an impenetrable barrier to people with disabilities. More unfortunately, MaineBusiness.com, which hosts my blog, uses CAPTCHA to prevent comment spam on their site. (So does TypePad, which powers this blog.)

The reader mentioned that census figures show 20% of the population are somehow disabled; obviously, not all of the would be stopped by a CAPTCHA, but why would you use a tool that stops the voice of your reader and quiets the conversation on your site?

Obviously, there’s a very good reason for using CAPTCHAs. They help stem the tide of comment spam generated by computers. Spammers use computers to send out an infinite, unending stream of spam to online forms for a variety of reasons. These spams reduce the signal to noise ratio, clog the tubes of the Internet, and reduce everyone’s productivity.

New CAPTCHA tools often give people alternatives to those messy alphanumerics. Sometimes there’s also an audio option (the computer will read you the answer and you type it in) or a simple math problem (what is 2 + 0) that these spam bots haven’t yet caught up with.

Regardless, it’s an ongoing battle between keeping communication flowing while keeping noise out. In a recent post, I talked about some of the benefits I’ve seen by using some non-CAPTCHA tools on online forms. However, ultimately spammers will figure those out as well.

We are in an arms race with the spammers, and of course there are innocent bystanders that are getting hurt, or at least disenfranchised.

There’s no right answer on how to handle the balance of reducing incoming spam and keeping the lines of communication open with any human who wants to be part of the conversation. Each company, each Web site owner, and each blogger needs to make their own decision.

What have you found that works for you?

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Rich Brooks is president of flyte new media, a Web site design and Internet marketing company in Portland, Maine. Flyte works with small businesses to build professional Web sites that often include e-commerce, Flash and content management systems. They promote their clients’ sites through search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, business blogs and podcasts, and viral marketing.

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Dear Rich,

I’m looking to identify influential bloggers in my niche who might be interested in reviewing products and linking to those products on my Web site. How can I find them?

–Blogging in Bowdoinham

Dear Blogging,

There’s a couple of issues raised in your question, so let’s hit the obvious one first: where to find influential bloggers?

One easy place to start is Technorati. At Technorati you can search for specific keywords that bloggers in your niche might be writing about…anything from “Paris Hilton” to “Paris, France.”

The default search type (at the point of this blog post) is “posts.” You can choose to see all posts, or filter by the amount of authority each blog has. In addition, you can choose to search by “blog” and then Technorati will sort by authority. (Technorati is constantly changing…so everything I write is as of right…now!)

Technorati currently throws two numbers at you: Authority and Rank. What do these mean?

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.

Hopefully this will direct you towards the influential bloggers you so desperately covet. If you’re not specifically interested in a particular niche and just want to find the most popular bloggers, check out the Technorati Popular list.

The second issue is more thorny. There’s nothing wrong (IMHO) with sending products or services to bloggers to review. This has been part of public relations for just about ever. However, some companies pay bloggers for positive reviews or pay them for writing about the product or service and linking to the Web site.

Although there is a cottage industry of pay-per-post bloggers, I find the practice shady, even if the blogger in question admits this is a paid link. (Many do not.) Google is now cracking down on paid links to boost search engine rankings, and these pay-per-post scenarios may come back to bite a company in the ass.

I’d recommend staying away from pay-per-post situations, but I think sending influential bloggers demos, samples and PR packets is an understood cost of doing business.

In case you’re wondering, I’m open to reviewing software, books, beers, bourbons, travel and sweets.

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About the Author:
Rich Brooks is president of flyte new media, a Web site design and Internet marketing company in Portland, Maine. Flyte works with small businesses to build professional Web sites that often include e-commerce, Flash and content management systems. They promote their clients’ sites through search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, business blogs and podcasts, and viral marketing.

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Today I will attempt to answer the third question in my “Marketer’s Foray Into Social Media: How will my social media campaign be measured?”, the ever-so-present question of social media measurement.ruler1.jpg

We answer this question constantly at Ignite, not because it is impossible to measure a social media campaign (quite the opposite!), but because it calls once again for a tailored equation per client. Like everything with social media marketing, it often depends on what the client’s objectives are (what are you trying to accomplish by utilizing social media?) as well as their expectations of the campaign.

I will say that expectations are often the most difficult measurement objective to balance because often outcomes are surprising and unpredictable: while a client may want a high volume of traffic as their metric, another social media campaign might be better off measuring a smaller, niche audience that is actively participating in the social media space.

Therefore, to give a better idea of how a social media campaign can be measured, we must dive into the different types of social media measurement, and a little into how each are measured.

1. Traffic Measurement: Traffic measurement is often the most common type of social media measurement. While the more web traffic the better, in order to really quantify campaign results we always start with a baseline comparison and objective setting. This is where we study competing site traffic and analytics to develop realistic objectives for our campaign. For some sites, 100 visitors a day would be a success while for others it would be a dismal failure.

2. Audience Participation: Audience participation is often one of the hardest measurements, because it requires very specific goal setting and frequent monitoring of the social media chatter. For this measurement, we start by outlining which audience participation is worth more than others (ex. Is commenting worth more than outside blog coverage or vice versa?) , and then set up systems that track and report these conversations.

3. Goal Funneling: Establishing a funnel tracks specific audience interactions with the web, specifically how an audience member arrives at a goal. This “funnel” can help a client track how many clients purchased an item online, or simply how many readers downloaded a white paper. This measurement technique typically works well for e-commerce sites, but if you’re clever it can work for most any site.

4. Image/Perception Building: This type of measurement appears to be the abstract and long-term measurement that companies resist the most. However for some companies, especially those with a negative image online, perceptions can easily be tracked and measured. Kryptonite locks for a great example of a company who is still suffering from a poor web perception that has lived on the web for years and years. You can measure this with pre- and post- surveys of customers, the general public, whomever the target is.

It doesn’t just have to be “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you like Company X.” (In fact, that’s not a very good question at all.) You can measure reputation, but you can also measure other things like “intent to buy”, as in “If you were to buy a dog in the next 90 days, how likely would you say you are to buy a labradoodle? Very likely, somewhat likely… etc. etc.” These types of questions can be a good way to see if you’re moving the needle on perception type campaigns.

5. Outcomes Tracking: Another way to track something could be the amount of times an activity occurs (or does not occur) once the campaign gets going. For example, if you begin to use social media for customer support, do inbound phone calls drop? This could be a huge ROI (and we’d be happy to help with that). The issue here is to control (to the extent possible) for other facts. For example, did the 15% drop in inbound phone calls correlate with a 15% drop in sales the last quarter?

Finally, whatever way you do it, a social media should be measured frequently and throughout the campaign (remembering my earlier post on how long the campaign should last). Therefore, if you are looking for a social media agency, make sure that you choose an agency that makes you aware of and involved in the measurement objective setting and that will openly share analytics throughout the campaign. If they are hesitant, walk the other way. There is no social media marketing without analytics of some kind.

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As a Social Media Strategist for Ignite Social Media, Lisa McNeill outlines social media tactics and develops social media campaigns to help companies reach customers and build brand advocates. Her expertise in project management and marketing additionally guides the execution of these campaigns.

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Click costs keep rising as more advertisers enter search marketing and streamline their sales process. At the same time the value of traditional ads (not tied to search) keep dropping as more and more web users are becoming aware of advertising. One of the easiest ways to increase user satisfaction, visitor value, and make more money from your site is by featuring your best content.

Featured News

Whenever a big news story in the search space happens Danny Sullivan covers it in depth. When Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! Danny responded by covering the news, the conference call, and even doing a follow up interview with Microsoft. With Danny owning the search news field him publishing the latest news regularly (and in depth when important events happen) that is featured content.

It is hard to become well known in a market that is already saturated with people like Danny. How do you compete in a marketplace where guys like Danny have more knowledge, experience, social connections, and mindshare? You probably can’t enter the market late and just decide that you want to own the search news topic. Instead you must compete by targeting one idea at a time, and do it more comprehensively and better than anyone else in the field by creating featured content. Evoke emotional responses that associate you and your company with ideas.

Featured Content

Most successful publishing businesses offer content of various levels of depth and quality. If you are new to your field and every page on your site is just like the next, and you are cranking out many pages a day, you probably are not creating featured content.

It is hard to take marketshare or mindshare from other people in your market unless you have something worth talking about, and something people associate you with. You need to own an idea. Everyone who is well known is remembered for something.

* Seth Godin highlights his wide array of top selling marketing books in his sidebar.

* Hugh MacLeod frequently posts cartoons to his blog, offers his How to Be Creative Series, and gave us the Hughtrain Manifesto.

* This site offers SEO for Firefox, The Blogger’s Guide to SEO, the SEO Book Keyword Tool, 101 Link Building Tips, a glossary, many other tools, and a comparison of search engine relevancy algorithms.

Selling ads to Yourself

In a rush to monetize many businesses plaster ads all over their site, only to get marginal returns, and have many people assume they are a fly by night operation not in it for the long run. If your site is new, one of the biggest things you can do to gain momentum is to avoid aggressive ad placements on your site and find ways to advertise yourself and your best content until you build market momentum and a great business model.

I tested placing an affiliate ad on my blog’s sidebar recently, and made about 1 conversion a day for the featured offer. That might sound like a quick and easy passive revenue stream, but I get a lot of traffic to this site. What would happen if I featured some of my own best content in the same position?

I recently put that question to the test by pushing my keyword tool on the sidebar of my site. Many more people are using the keyword tool, and my affiliate link to Wordtracker on the keyword tool page is converting about twice as often, offsetting any loss I had from removing the other sidebar ad.

Rather than running a broadly matching ad I am advertising some of my own featured content and introducing many more people to my keyword tool. That usage will lead to greater user trust, more links, higher rankings, and more affiliate commissions. If I had to try to buy the links I am getting naturally how much would that cost? If I had to buy traffic to my keyword tool how much would that cost? Much more than it is costing me to advertise my own featured content.

Make sure you highlight featured content in your sidebar to drive link equity and mindshare toward it. Your featured content is what builds trust and keeps people coming back.

Blog Homepage vs Static Home Page

For years I featured my blog on my site’s homepage. But that design probably scared off thousands of visitors new to the field of SEO who thought I was writing over their heads. Late last year I changed my homepage to a page which featured my best content and guided users through my site. Before I made that change, if I stopped blogging I saw sales drop. And when I started blogging sales would pick back up.

When I arrived in the Philippines for my wedding I went a week without blogging and did not notice a drop off in sales. Your brand lovers are willing to navigate to wherever your frequently updated content is. Your homepage should be optimized to capture the hearts and minds of people new to your field.

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Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, a dynamic website offering marketing tips and coverage of the search space, free SEO videos, and free SEO tools. He is a regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and publishes dozens of independent websites.

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There are a lot of social networking sites out there that can help you network with other people on the internet. Some of them are there to share stories, images or video. LinkedIn is there to help you share yourself with other professionals. You can get endless amounts of work on LinkedIn if you simply sign up and add people that you already know to your network. Understanding the importance of LinkedIn and how LinkedIn can help you become a more networked and well-known industry professional is impossibly helpful for everyone.
LinkedIn can help you become better networked

#1 It can bring you more money and job opportunities

LinkedIn can bring you job opportunities, freelance and fulltime that can help you to move of within your industry. It doesn’t even require you to do much extra work, you may want to add others in your industry but aside from that there is very little work that needs to be done to ensure that your name is in the industry pool. You may want to participate in LinkedIn answers to get your name out there a little better. There are also posted jobs on LinkedIn that you can put your name in the hat for aside from just being networked with others.

#2 It can help you keep in touch with industry leaders

You don’t have to just add the people you know on LinkedIn, you can have others introduce you to someone that you may want to know. Someone that can help you with your career or possibliy someone that would be willing to go into a business venture with you. I have been contacted by multiple people about blogging ventures recently through LinkedIn.

#3 Stay in touch with other professionals

You may have the best job out there or be an industry leader yourself, but LinkedIn is an easy and professional way to stay in touch with other professionals you have worked with or for. It is also an excellent way to stay in touch with other professionals in your industry that you may have met at a convention. It is better than sharing your MySpace or Facebook account and other professionals getting to see how unprofessional you really are.

#4 Get recommended by other professionals

You can easily get recommended by other professionals that you have worked with by just asking. These recommendations add a lot of power to your ability to get hired or your caliber of professionalism within your industry. The more people that recommend you the better your profile will look to others in your industry and connections list.

#5 Get answers to your questions from other professionals

You can easily ask a question on LinkedIn to find help from other industry professionals. Their answers area is very helpful and there are always quick responses to your questions. It can even be a way for you to further network— beyond the normal benefits of getting a quick and reliable answer to your questions.

#6 LinkedIn is your online resume

There are more and more people leaning towards a paperless method of doing business. Global warming is a real issue. I would personally almost prefer to see someones LinkedIn profile before they are hired then a regular resume. There is a lot more information available on a LinkedIn profile than would be available on a resume. You have your work history, school history, bio, web sites and how much work you have put into networking with other professionals. Which says a lot about who you are and how serious you are about the industry you are in.

#7 LinkedIn is like having a website

For those that don’t have a website or a means to have people locate them on Google. LinkedIn fills that void. I know that I see my personal LinkedIn profile come up in Google near the top of the results. This can help other professionals find you if they have lost your phone number or email address. It can even help other companies locate you if they are interested in hiring you for contract or full time work.

#8 Helps you keep track of you

I know that anytime I have to go and make a new resume I always have to reference my old resume to make sure I don’t miss any important points that I want to include. It is nice to have an online version of your resume to reference and ensure that you are including all the pertinent information that you will need to use.

#9 You can put your picture on it

Last year they added the ability to put your picture on your profile. You can now be recognized easier if someone has forgotten your name but remembers what you look like. It is also helpful for people to remember what you look like if it has been awhile since they met you. Especially if you are about to meet them in a public place that may require somewhat quick recognition.

#10 It isn’t MySpace

It isn’t going to send you spam from people wanting to be your friend. There isn’t a way to spam LinkedIn users and there isn’t any way to add additional code that can be manipulated to trick you into giving out your LinkedIn account information. You don’t have to worry about other not-so-savvy professionals adding glitter and 18 videos to their profile either.

What reasons do you use LinkedIn?

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Dustin Brewer is a web designer located in Oklahoma City, OK specializing in aesthetics in design, web standards, accessibility and usability. He also enjoys helping others to discover CSS and web design best practices through his web site, dustin brewer, a web design news site.

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There are many different types of blogs on WordPress spanning dozens of different languages. Moreover, WordPress classifies the blogs into two primary categories (Popular and Spam). While those belonging to the popular category are acceptable to WordPress, the ones classified as spams are obviously not. Furthermore, the unacceptable ones being “spam blogs” or splogs, they are meant be deleted as soon as WordPress finds them or they get reported.

The intriguing point however is that “SEO” blogs to have been considered as “spam blogs” by WordPress and hence they have no place in WordPress observes Lee Odden. Before you reach any conclusions you need to have a decko at their definition of SEO blogs from WordPress, “SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.”

Certainly not and such blogs shouldn’t have a place anywhere. Given the fact that WordPress isn’t referring to the blogs which try to hoodwink search engines as spammy, the fact that when they term the spammy blogs as SEO blogs it leads to a mis-perception that the blogs which simply talk about SEO are also included. Perhaps such “black hat” blogs could be better termed as “search engine spam blogs” as Lee suggests, or any other term which clearly draws the distinction. Apparently there are quite a few blogs on WordPress which are about SEO

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Nav is the founder and CEO of Page Traffic, a premier search engine company
known for its assured SEO service, web design and development, copywriting and full time SEO professionals.

Navneet has wide experience in natural search engine optimization, internet
marketing and PPC campaigns. He is a prolific writer and his articles can be
found in the “Best Articles” section of many websites and article banks. As
a search engine analyst , he has over 9 years of experience and his
knowledge is in application here.

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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.

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Barry Welford, President of SMM Strategic Marketing Montreal works with business owners and senior management on Internet Marketing strategy and action plans to grow their companies. He is a moderator at the Cre8asite Forums and writes on current issues on the Internet and on the Mobile Web in three blogs, BPWrap, StayGoLinks and The Other Bloke’s Blog.

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This 7 minute and 30 second video evangelizes blogging to new internet marketers. The reasons I am such a big fan of blogs are:

• they are easy to set up & update
• they offer many feedback channels
• it is easy to track how ideas spread through blogs
• it is easy to join the conversation
• there are many channels to spread ideas quickly
• blogs offer many ways to show social proof of value
• blog posts typically do not feel like ads, even if they are

I am not sure how well it came out. Please let me know what you think of the video. Did I talk too fast? Was it too information dense? Was I clear enough?

And if you have not yet seen The Blogger’s Guide to SEO, please check it out.

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Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, a dynamic website offering marketing tips and coverage of the search space, free SEO videos, and free SEO tools. He is a regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and publishes dozens of independent websites.

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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.

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.

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About the author:

Barry Welford, President of SMM Strategic Marketing Montreal works with business owners and senior management on Internet Marketing strategy and action plans to grow their companies. He is a moderator at the Cre8asite Forums and writes on current issues on the Internet and on the Mobile Web in three blogs, BPWrap, StayGoLinks and The Other Bloke’s Blog.

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