Given how many clients (and I…and the White House and Microsoft, etc.) have had sites hacked over the years, it’s worth a few minutes of your time to use Two-Factor authentication on every site that offers it. That includes Facebook, Google, WordPress, and most any other site that requires a login. It certainly doesn’t guarantee a site won’t be hacked, but it does add one more layer of security.

And speaking of security, this is off-topic, but if you leave your porch light on when you’re gone, it generally tells people that you’re gone–unless you have it set on a timer. If it’s on all day, that’s a sure sign to burglars that you’re gone and they’ll just find a dark window to gain entrance. I highly recommend motion detector lights instead. When I see a neighbor’s motion detector light go on, I go look to see what might be triggering it. Obviously, if they left a light on all the time, I wouldn’t have cause to look.

Motion detector lights are just one method to protect your valuables more than doing nothing. Likewise, adding two-factor authentication to every site possible makes it just a little bit harder for bad guys to access your online valuables.

Mercy was our first grandchild and just like her mother–happy, adorable, sweet, kind and witty.  She had been clean for 11 months and the medical examiner said there was only one injection site on her, meaning that the one time she fell off the wagon, it was a permanent fall.  I can’t write more now, but I will very soon.

It’s a good thing my clients don’t read this.  They probably wouldn’t be my clients anymore.  Am I right?

So, lesson for today:
1.  Back up your database monthly, whether you’ve posted anything or not.
2.  Update WordPress to the latest version (your site will show you if there’s a new version).
3.  Check  your plug-ins to see if there are newer versions.  And keep an eye on plug-ins that haven’t been updated in years.  Sometimes a plug-in developer will quit updating a plug-in, even if it’s a great plug-in.  It’s usually because not enough folks use it, rave about it, rate it, and donate to the developer.  At some point, you may need to replace the plug-in with one that is more up-to-date and compatible with your version of WordPress.   Anyway, update any plug-ins that have compatible updates available.

That’s all for today.

I’m hungry.

p.s. If you aren’t familiar with the “cobbler’s children’s shoes” reference, it basically means that the cobbler (a shoemaker) makes his and his family’s shoes last because he’s so busy making shoes for other people.  That’s me.  Only I don’t make shoes; I make websites.

She also had some sterling advice about Twitter, i.e. if you aren’t going to tweet 4 or 5 times a day, don’t have a Twitter account.

Use social media wisely.  If you only have time to do one medium, choose the one where most of your audience is.  The following is simply a guide to where you might focus your attention:  Facebook mostly for adults, Pinterestmostly for younger adults, Tumbler mostly for teens & younger adults, Instagram mostly for teens.

2.  Call-only ad campaigns for mobile devices since, according to Google,  70% of mobile searchers call a business directly from search results.

3.  Adwords for Androids app so you can manage your campaigns from your phone or tablet.

4.  Ability to add tracking info (to determine ad effectiveness, source, etc.) without having to lose previous statistics as is currently the case if you change what page an ad takes the customer to.  (Note:  this new feature is rather complicated to implement and may require third-party software to create the tracking code and analyze it.  I haven’t tried it yet).

5. Added 3 new requirements for the Google Shopping Product Feeds if you use carrier-calculated rates:  shipping_height, shipping_length, shipping width.

6.  Google Trusted Store certification, a free program that  provides additional assurance for your buyers.  Google estimates it takes 30 minutes to apply, “a few days” to implement the code and then 30 to 90 days for them approve you.

For more info on all of these, visit:  http://adwords.blogspot.com/search/label/Updates

I always send emailthat looks like it came from my website.  There are numerous reasons why I do that, but a big one is that people are careless with other people’s email addresses and that’s how an email address can fall into a spammer’s hand.

When that happens, you start getting tons of spam or the emails you send go straight into a spam filter trash bin because someone has spoofed your email address.

There are 2 main ways spammers can get your email address:
1. You show your email address on your website.  Bad idea.  Use a contact form instead.  Yes, you may lose a client or two, but over the life of your website, which is better: possibly lose a potential client or delete hundreds of emails a day just so you can find the legitimate emails?     And even if you don’t show your email address, be sure that your email address isn’t easily accessible by the “view source code” option in every browser.  If it can be see in the source code, then spambots can retrieve it and use it.
2. You get a virus that sends out thousands of spam emails to every email address in your computer. That virus will then send out even more spam that appears to be from each person in your email address book.
But I use Norton (or McAfee or AVG or whatever) and I keep my virus definitions up to date and scan my computer nightly for viruses, so how could I get a virus?

Well, maybe you don’t get the virus but you send an email to me and 10 other people, but instead of sending the email to yourself and putting all our email addresses in the bcc field, you just enter our emails in the to: field.  So, everyone can see everyone else’s email address and if that gets forwarded enough times without any of the forwarders taking the time to delete all those email addresses, sooner or later it’s going to end up in a pc that’s infected with a spammer’s virus.

So (if you’ve made it this far), be polite.  If you want to share something with me and 50 other people, please don’t show my email address to people I don’t know.

Speaking of which. . . oh my gosh, I continue to be amazed by a number of things including:

1. Why doesn’t everyone have their email set to view as text rather than HTML?  It would save so many people from having their computers infected because they click on a link that looks legit, but really takes them to a malware site.

2.  How many times do I have to tell clients to run nightly backups and, if nothing else, save their entire c: drive to a 16 gig flash drive (or whatever size is necessary) at least once a month and give it to a trusted relative on the off chance your house burns down.

3.  My own sister has been running a malware program instead of a respected antivirus program.  Buy Norton Internet Security or McAfee or AVG and set it up  to do a full scan nightly and to automatically check for updates and install them.  You get what you pay for.

4.  People fail to install all the updates to various software programs from Windows to their shopping carts and WordPress sites.  Updates are important.  They are most often “fixes” that relate to security or bugs.  Not installing them is akin to getting a recall notice on your car for a safety issue that needs fixing immediately and then ignoring it.  Not very bright.

5.  People will click on almost anything without a second thought, whether it’s in an email or search results.   Many of those links will take you to bad sites and I don’t mean bad as in not very meaningful.  I mean “bad” as in malicious.  In IE and Chrome (and probably Firefox and Safari), one can mouse-over a link and look down the bottom left of the browser window and see where the link will actually take you.  The same is true of Outlook.

6.  Don’t embed images or movies, etc. in emails.  Send your friends/relatives/business associates a link to the website or image and/or a description of it.  Give enough information that they know the email is really from you and that some evil person hasn’t phished your email address.

Oh, my, the list goes on. . . but I’ll stop here for now.   Except for one last thing:  listen to advice.  You aren’t a 13 yr. old who thinks they know more than their parents.  Unless you actually spend your day managing other people’s websites and making them rank well, don’t think you know more than the person who has.

In that case, that would be me.  If all my clients really followed my advice and suggestions, they would be much happier.  Of course, I wouldn’t make as much money, but, then, it’s never been about the money for me.  I made money in my old job.  I started this business to help people be successful on the internet.  It’s frustrating (as you can tell, after reading this) to make recommendations, have them ignored and then 2 years later have the same client come back and say, “Hey, why don’t we do this?  So-and-so said it was a good idea.”   I fear I may not present myself as authoritative as I am.

Such is life.

I use only “white hat” SEO methods, but the client who manages her own product database had gone a tad (a lot?) overboard on that keyword phrase in the succeeding years, as she added more products.  It took months of cleaning up product descriptions, etc. to delete the “offending”, but accurate, keyword to get her back on page 1 of results.

I noticed in April that she was moving up more and then, after the change a few days ago, she is again in the top 3.

The lesson to be learned: we’re at Google’s mercy!   Her products and targeted audience haven’t changed and her site has more of her type of products than any other online site.  While she could, and probably was, “guilty” of keyword stuffing, even that is a matter of opinion.   Pretty much everything she sells fits that keyword, so why wouldn’t she use it when describing the particulars of a product?

I don’t mean to be cagey by not providing her website, but it’s irrelevant to this subject.  Plus, I fear Google’s wrath!

Along those lines, I own a site that is very, very old that has always been in the top 3 or 4 for the very same keyword.  No more.  The content of the site hasn’t changed drastically over the years, but instead of being in the top 5, at least, I’m lucky to find my site on page 4.

The takeaway from that situation?   The only thing that changed, relative to the website and/or Google, is that Google started charging to show items in their Shopping section.   Since my site doesn’t actually sell products, but merely promotes them, I think it’s been penalized because I’m not contributing to Google’s revenues.

Now, let’s hope Big Brother doesn’t find out which sites I’m talking about!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKfQ308Hq2k