You’re about to make a post on Facebook. Do you know who all would be seeing your post? Do you know how things can go horribly wrong?

I’m not talking about Facebook privacy settings and whether “friends of friends” can see your post. I’m talking about people who you are connected with on Facebook, and what they can see.

Here’s a quick guide to help you manage your Facebook privacy and avoid regrets later… 

Your Facebook Friends, Your Facebook World

Do you still remember when you first started out on Facebook? You had no friends. Then you found a few of your real life friends on Facebook, and you became Facebook friends with them. Not long after that, you started getting all kinds of friend requests. Some of them from people you know, others from friends of friends or people you met briefly somewhere.

Soon you had a list of a few hundred Facebook friends. Some of them you know well, others not so well. These people became a part of your own “private little world” that you created on Facebook.

Managing Your Facebook Privacy & Exposure

Who Sees What You Post on Facebook?

When you post something on your Wall on Facebook, you expect that your friends will see it. That is true, but not necessarily the whole truth. Here are all the people who could see what you post:

1. Friends you know well. These are the people who you intended your post for.
2. Friends you don’t know well, or in some cases, not at all. Yes, they’re also part of that “private little world” that you created on Facebook.
3. Potential employers. Many employers are asking for access to applicants’ Facebook accounts as part of the job application.
4. The government and law enforcement. Yes, they submit data requests to Facebook, get subpoenas from the courts, or even hack into data systems, as was recently revealed in the press.

What Does All This Mean To You?

It means that your Facebook post could end up in the hands of people that you never intended. If you are not careful about what you post on Facebook, it could come back to bite you later. Your Facebook privacy is not as secure as you think!

How Could It Come Back To Bite You?

Not everything belongs on Facebook

There are a lot of things that you can post quite safely on Facebook. However, some posts could come back to haunt you.

Here are some examples:

• You rant about a private family matter. Now your family is angry at you, not for stating an opinion, but because you did in public. Your friends see your poor judgment and decide that you can’t be trusted with personal stuff.
• You announce excitedly that you’re going on vacation tomorrow. You get home after your vacation and your place has been burgled. By whom? You don’t know, but it may well have a connection to one of those silent Facebook friends whom you don’t really know.
• You post a few photos from that amazing party you had on Saturday night. You forget about the photos and a prospective employer asks for access to your Facebook page. They see the photo of you half undressed and with a beer in your hand, lying across a few friends. Good bye job!
• You’re angry about something that the President did and you post something that could be interpreted as a threat against the President. Two days later, the police show up at your door and haul you off.

Each one of the above examples have actually happened!

How To Protect Your Facebook Privacy And Avoid Regrets

The quick and easy way to avoid trouble and protect your Facebook privacy, is this… Before you hit that Post button, ask yourself:

• Does this really belong on Facebook?
• Am I admitting to doing something illegal or in poor taste?
• What will this post say about me as a person?
• Can my post be misinterpreted?

You have to think about this every time. If you have any doubts, don’t post it! Protect your privacy and your image on Facebook. You will thank yourself later!

PS. Also see my article on how to Post to Specific Friends on Facebook.

PPS. Do you have Facebook privacy tips to share? Have you ever posted things on Facebook that you regretted later? What did you learn from that? Share in the comments below.

The post Facebook Privacy – Understanding How You’re Exposing Yourself On Facebook appeared first on Make A Website With Traffic.

Why?

WordPress is a very widely-used website publishing platform… lots of people use it! Unfortunately, this also makes it a popular target for hackers on the prowl for websites to compromise.

With just a few basic steps you can stop these attacks against your WordPress website, or least make it a difficult target.

WordPress attacks have been particularly bad over the past week, and it is likely that at least some of you may have received an email from your web host, warning about this.

The current WordPress attacks are “brute force” attacks where the culprits are using a bunch of computers to hit WordPress sites and hack into them by trying to guess the username and password of the WordPress Admin panel.

You can read more about this here.

 How To Secure WordPress Against Attacks

As I said, these WordPress attacks will always be around, even after this current spike, so how can you stop your WordPress site from being penetrated by such hacker attacks?

Here are some of the things that I recommend and have done to minimize WordPress attacks on the sites that I manage:

Step 1 Of How To Secure WordPress: Get Rid of the Admin Username

By default, WordPress comes with one username called admin after installation. Many people just continue using admin. Hackers know this. If you are still using it, you need to stop doing that.

It is one half of the equation that the brute force attack is trying to solve. Why make it easy for hackers by providing them with 50% of the information they need?

Here’s how to get rid of the default admin username:

1. Log on using admin. It will be the last time you do that 
2. Go to the Users menu and add a new user. The username you pick can contain the word “admin” if you want it to, but add something to that. You will have to use an email address that is different from the one you are currently using for the admin username. Give this new username Administration privileges. Pick a strong password (see below).
3. Log out from admin and log back in using your new username.
4. Go back to the Users menu and delete the old admin username. During this step, you will be able to transfer all earlier posts created under admin to your new username.
5. You’re done! Continue using the new username in the future.

Step 2 Of How To Secure WordPress: Pick A Strong Password For Your Admin Username

It’s amazing how many people use a simple word for a password… a word that can be found in a dictionary. Don’t ever do that, even for low-level websites!

For something as important as your online banking or the administrative logon of your WordPress site, you definitely want to pick strong passwords. I have written another article on creating strong passwords. Please read over that.

In a nutshell, use long passwords of 8 or more characters that include uppercase and lowercase letters, special characters like @ # $ %, and a number or two.

Step 3 Of How To Secure WordPress: Install WordPress Security Plugins

There are several excellent security plugins that you can install to further help protect your site against WordPress attacks. Here are the plugins that I use:

1. Wordfence: This is my favorite! Mark Maunder and his colleagues did an excellent job with this! Wordfence scans your WordPress core files and looks for modified files. If it finds anything, it has a feature that lets you easily restore the original version of the file. It will also email you if it finds anything that needs attention. It has helped me find several compromises in the past.
2. Limit Login Attempts: This does exactly what the name says… By default, after 4 failed attempts to log on, it won’t allow another attempt for 20 minutes.
3. SI Captcha AntiSpam: This plugin makes it easy to add captchas to pages on your site where people submit information, like comments boxes. I’m using it to add a captcha to my WordPress Admin panel logon screen. By default, this feature is disabled, so you’ll have to go to the plugin settings page to turn it on.
4. Bad Behavior: This one attempts to stop bots from even reaching your website. If they can’t reach your site, they can’t post spam or otherwise try to interact with it.

If you’re only going to install one of these plugins, let it be Wordfence.

Step 4 Of How To Secure WordPress: Keep WordPress Updated

Lastly, always make sure that you are running the latest version of WordPress. Many updates include security fixes that have become known since the last update.

If you install Wordfence, it can be configured to email you when updates are available for your WordPress installation or plugins.

If you follow these steps on how to secure WordPress, you will go a long way towards protecting your WordPress website and your hard work against attacks!

Stay safe!

The post How To Secure WordPress Websites And Keep Your Site Safe appeared first on Make A Website With Traffic.

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to win.erdownloads.com:80 (Network is unreachable) in /var/www/re/clientsite.com/public_html/index.php on line 20

This message was displayed above the header at the top of the website.

What this meant was that the webpage was trying to pull data from a site, win.erdownloads.com, but was unable to establish a connection. My first thought was, why on earth would WordPress’ main index page try to get data from erdownloads.com?

 Something smelled a little fishy!

I downloaded and opened index.php and there, just below the call to open the header, was a bunch of extra code inserted. To be sure that the code didn’t belong there, I compared this index.php file to an index.php file from another of my websites (that did not display the message ‘fsockopen unable to connect‘).

It was confirmed! Yes, this code didn’t belong there and it looks like the site had been hacked!

The simple solution was to simply remove all that code, but the problem is that these hacks usually involve more than one file.

I needed to find a tool that could scan my whole WordPress installation and look for any files that may have been compromised.

 Enter the excellent Wordfence Security plugin for WordPress!

 I started a scan, and within minutes, Wordfence found two files that had been compromised. It gave me the option of instantly restoring the original files. A few seconds later, the website was fixed.

 I left Wordfence installed because it does periodic scans of the website and will email me if it finds any problems. This gives me the peace of mind that I can quickly respond to any problems with my clients’ websites.

My advice to you is that if you see a message on your site that says, ‘fsockopen unable to connect’, don’t ignore it. Your site may be hacked. If the hack is designed to hurt visitors to your site, like con them into installing fake anti-virus software, the search engines will penalize you!

To the people who hacked my client’s site, please go find something useful to do with your time!

The post FsockOpen Unable To Connect – Your WordPress Site Possibly Hacked! appeared first on Make A Website With Traffic.

Do you do any of the following when choosing a password? 

• Use a common dictionary word?
• Use a password shorter than 8 characters?
• Reuse the same password for many sites?
• Save your passwords on a scrap of paper or a text file on your desktop?

If you do any of those things, it is time to review your password practices. You are an easy target for hackers who would only love to get their hands on your personal data.

Here’s How To Create Good Passwords

1. Make passwords of at least 8 characters long: In this case, longer is definitely better! Go with passwords that are at least 8 characters long. If you go with 10 characters, even better. Those two extra characters force a potential hacker to go through many more iterations in their effort to crack your password. 12 characters? Go for it!
2. Stay away from the dictionary: The first thing that hackers do when trying to hack into a website is to run through all the words in a dictionary. They can run through millions of words in a matter of seconds. If you insist on using dictionary words, at least replace some of the letters in the word. For example, replace all “e” with “3” and all “o” with “0” (zero) to turn a word like “categorize” into “cat3g0riz3”. This is still not ideal, but so much better than merely using dictionary words.
3. Use Phrases to make really good passwords: The ideal password is something that appears to be a bunch of random letters. The problem with those are that they can be hard to remember. A great way to create a password that looks like a bunch of random letters, is to use a phrase. Then use the first one or two letters from each word in the phrase to create the password. For example, if you use the first letter of each word from the phrase “The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog”, you get “tqbfjotld”. That’s pretty random, yet you can remember it, right? (Don’t use that phrase though, make up your own.)
4. Use Uppercase and Lowercase letters: This one is easy. Our password from step 3 could become “TqbfjotlD”.
5. Add numbers and other non-alphanumeric characters: Get in the habit of adding a number or two, or other characters like “@” or “$” to your passwords. That just makes it so much more complicated to hack. As mentioned in step 2, you can even replace some of the letters in your password with a number. Using our phrase password from step 3, “TqbfjotlD” could become “Tqbfj0tlD” by replacing the “o” with a “0” (zero). By adding a non-alphanumeric character to the front and another number to the back, it becomes “@Tqbfj0tlD1”.

Storing Your Good Passwords

Over time you will likely end up with a bunch of good passwords that you need to remember. If you can memorize them, fantastic! I know that I am not able to remember all my good passwords. The solution is to store them somewhere.

Please don’t store your passwords on a scrap of paper in your desk drawer! Yes, no hacker can get to them there, but a burglar can. And what do you do if the scrap of paper mysteriously disappears from your drawer?

Store your passwords on your computer, but please don’t store them in a text file on your desktop! Be sure that they are stored in an encrypted format that requires a master password to open the file. This way you only have to memorize your master password.

Some people store their good passwords in a text file, but on an encrypted USB drive that they can carry with them. I prefer software that is designed specifically for storing passwords.

My favorite application is KeePass. It is a free application that allows you to organize your passwords into categories. They are stored in an encrypted format and protected by a master password. It will also generate random passwords for you if you decide to go that way.

Be sure to keep a backup of your password store somewhere. I store mine in Dropbox. In fact, I place my Keepass database file in my Dropbox. This allows me to access my passwords from my desktop computer or laptop. Both computers access the same password database and Dropbox keeps it all in sync. It’s a great solution.

Using Your Good Passwords

Here are a few more guideline and tips for using your good passwords:

1. Don’t reuse passwords: This is not such a big deal for harmless websites, like perhaps a few forums where you are required to log on. However, do not reuse the password to your online banking account or your stock brokerage account.
2. Change passwords: Again, this is not a big deal for harmless websites, but it is a good idea to periodically create new good passwords for your financial websites.
3. Copy & paste passwords: If you store your passwords as I suggested earlier, you can copy & paste your passwords from your password store when logging on to website. This prevents any typos when entering the password. Also, if there happens to be a keystroke logger on your computer at the time, the logger will not record your password entry.

If you follow all of these “good passwords” guidelines, you will be taking a big step forward for your own online safety.

The post How To Create Good Passwords appeared first on Make A Website With Traffic.

Google owns a Panda that isn’t near as cuddly as this little fellow above.

After all the havoc it created in 2011, it was certainly not on the Christmas-list of a lot of webmasters out there!

Why?

It killed their traffic from Google… by as much as 80%, or more in some cases!

What Is Panda?

Most people know that Google has a search algorithm that it uses to return search results to people who search Google for information. Nobody, other than a few Google engineers, know exactly what the many factors are that this algorithm looks at. It’s kinda like the Coke-formula… a well-guarded secret!

We do know that the normal “search engine optimization” factors are important because it helps the search engines figure out what the topic of a web page is. We also know that the quality of inbound links are important because each link is seen as a vote in favor of the web page. These things, among others, are part of Google main search algorithm.

Enter Panda… the codename for a new “quality” algorithm that Google applies to results returned by the main algorithm.

Panda was set upon the world of websites on Feb 24, 2011, creating huge overnight traffic losses for many websites, big and small. Since that fateful day, there have been at least ten further updates to the original Panda algorithm, with the most prominent update probably being Panda 2.5.2 on Oct 14, 2011.

What Is Panda All About?

In one word… Quality!

Like Google’s main algorithm is aimed at finding web pages that answer the search question, Panda is an attempt at further refining the search results by identifying the highest quality answers.

As I understand it, the goal is to catch all those websites that are merely regurgitations of other websites (directly copied in some cases), or websites that produce massive amounts of shallow content that offers no real additional value.

Panda does this by applying a penalty to those websites that do not meet the quality criteria that Panda uses, thereby allowing sites that do meet the criteria, to “bubble up” in the results.

What To Do If You Got Panda-Slapped

As with its main algorithm, Google says very little about how Panda works. However, this article by Amit Singhal, one of Google’s top search engineers, gives some insight into the mindset you need to acquire when thinking about your website.

You’re going to need to take a good, honest look at your website.

Does it provide real value and give your visitors the benefit of your unique insight into the topic, or is it something that was hastily slapped together and that borrows heavily from content on other sites?

You want to be able to honestly answer “yes” to the former.

Here are a few things to pay attention to:

1. Give visitors a reason to stick around on your site: 
1. Write good headlines that entice visitors to read the page’s content. 
2. Provide your own, well-written, original content that includes your unique perspective. (Don’t “borrow” content from other sites, and in particular, don’t copy & paste content from other sites.)
3. Structure content properly to make your pages easy to read or scan (many visitors scan over pages).
4. Make sure that links to other pages on your site are well-organized and easy to find.
2. Easy on the eyes:
1. Make sure your site looks professional and instills confidence in the visitor. If it doesn’t, it is time for an update.
2. Make sure that the font and font-size on your site makes it easy for visitors to read your content.
3. Add images to your content where it makes sense. This helps to make content more interesting.
3. Compare your site to your competition:
1. Look at things that your competition provides to visitors that you don’t, and see if you can provide that too. 
2. Look for ways make your site better then theirs, i.e. provide useful things to your visitors that your competition does not provide.

I must say that, based on a test that I did recently, Panda is still a work in progress. I did a Google search for the main keyword of one of the best-performing pages on one of my websites, and compared the top 10 results to my own page. I am completely convinced that my page (at #57 in the results at the time, now at #33) was better than at least 6 of the top 10. (Yes, my own biased opinion.)

The point is, however, Panda will get better at its job as time passes and any website that does not focus on quality and value will lose out on a lot of potential traffic.

The post Panda – The Not-So-Cuddly Google Traffic Wrecker appeared first on Make A Website With Traffic.

They were using my website as a “resource” for their own visitors. My first thoughts were that I really didn’t like that.

Yes, in a way it is a compliment that they considered my content good enough to use as a resource.

However, I would have much preferred an ordinary link that allows my website to be displayed as I had intended. I did not recall agreeing with the site owner for my site to be used in that way.

Furthermore, I was not sure how this would affect other aspects of my site, e.g. the Google advertisements that appear on the site. The bottomline is that I decided that I did not want my site to load in this way.

Initially I considered contacting the website owner to get them to change it. Then it dawned upon me that there might be other sites that are loading my content in this way. I did not want to go on a hunting expedition to track them down and contact them individually. So I decided that “frame busting” code was the way to.

Frame Busting Code

There is a way to use Javascript to check if a web page has been loaded inside a frame, and if so, to cause the browser to reload the page by itself, i.e. outside the fame. This is called “frame busting”.

Here is the script that I used:

<script type="text/javascript">
if(top.location != self.location)
{
	top.location.replace(self.location);
}
</script>

I added this code inside the header (between the <head></head> tags) on every page on my site.

That’s all there was to it, and it works like a charm!

There is another method where you can achieve the same thing by adding some directives to the .htaccess file on your web server. The above Javascript works great though, and is easy to implement.

If somebody is loading your website inside their website and you don’t like it, I hope this article helps you to solve the problem and prevent it from happening again.

The post Another Website Loaded My Website In A Frame! appeared first on Make A Website With Traffic.

This set off all kinds of alarm bells in my head, so I immediately went to the site’s hosting account, looking for the file that Google mentioned in the suspicious URL. And there it was!

(For the sake of privacy of my client’s site, I won’t mention the exact name of the suspicious file – a Google search for the file shows which website was compromised – but I will tell you that it was a PHP file with a name made up of 5 random characters, e.g. bwrts.php)

I immediately downloaded the file to check it out. When I opened the file in my PHP editor, it was base64 encoded, which was basically a confirmation in my mind that this file served some or other dangerous purpose. Further investigation led me to find out that this file was part of a system to deliver fake AV trojans to visitors of other website.

Since I had my own experiences a year earlier with fake AV trojans, this really infuriated me!

I then scrutinized the rest of the website and found an unknown directory named “.files”. It contained a little more than 4,000 HTML files. I downloaded all of those and inspected a few of them. They seemed to be more or less identical, except that they were all named after recent popular search engine search terms, e.g. “super bowl 2011.html”.

The HTML files also contained links to other websites that appeared to have been compromised in the same way as mine, e.g. links like “www.website.com/bwrts.php?search-term”. I did a WHOIS lookup on those sites and discovered that they were all hosted by the same company that hosts my website! It was clear… those bastards had hacked into the host’s server and compromised a whole bunch of sites on the server!

I immediately contacted the website host and made them aware of the situation. A few hours later they assured me that everything had been cleaned up. I don’t really know what they did because I did all the cleaning on my website.

Cleaning Up The Hack

Here are the steps I followed to clean it all up:

1. Deleted the PHP file referenced in the Google message.
2. Looked for further unknown, oddly-named PHP files throughout the entire website. I found one tucked away in my /images folder and deleted that too.
3. Deleted the entire .files folder that contained the bad HTML files.
4. Disabled the master FTP account on the website (done from the Control Panel).
5. Created a new FTP account for uploading or downloading files and created a complex password for that account that uses a mix of letters, numbers, and punctuation characters.
6. Informed the website host of the situation to allow them to take action on their end.
7. Submitted a reconsideration request to Google to inform them of what I found and what I did to fix it, and asked them confirm from their side that the site was no longer compromised.

I hope this never happens to you, and if it does, I hope my story helps you to rescue the situation fast.

The post Website Hacked… By Distributors of Fake AV Trojans! appeared first on Make A Website With Traffic.

To me, the productivity-problem has two components:

1. Working on the right things, i.e. not keeping myself busy with stuff that don’t matter.
2. Getting these things done, and at the right time.

Toodledo

About two years ago, a friend pointed me to a great tool called Toodledo. As I immediately discovered, Toodledo rocks! It helps you define goals that you want to achieve, and then create tasks that you have to complete to achieve the goals. Tasks can be categorized into “Contexts”. You can assign several levels of “Importance” to tasks, assign start dates, due dates, and you can even set up repetitive tasks and sub-tasks.

Toodledo allows you to sort tasks in many different ways, e.g. Due Date, Importance, etc. It also has a very handy sort-view called Hotlist, which uses an algorithm to determine what the most important task is that you should be working on.

So, Toodledo solves problem #1… figuring out what you should be working on now.

I started using Toodledo and it worked great… I always knew what the most important thing was that I should be working on. But there was a problem… I wasn’t always working on the things that I knew I should be working on, or when I did, I would take forever to get them done.

Enter Google Calendar!

Google Calendar

I decided to start using Google Calendar to schedule my activities for each day. I would create several time slots and assign some time to each of the most important tasks that Toodledo says I need to work on. (I read somewhere that it is important to work on big tasks for a little bit each day until it is completed. That way the big tasks are not as daunting.)

This worked like a charm! Each day, not only did I know what to work on, but I also knew when to work on it. Each activity had a specific start and ending time, and I would hold myself to these times.

This added a sense of urgency to tasks. If I was working on a task and I saw that, for example, I only had 20 minutes left to work on it, it would inspire me to pick up the pace. All this led to me getting more done than ever before.

So, Google Calendar solves problem #2… actually working on the tasks and getting them done.

An added bonus to all this was that when I scheduled a little time off, I no longer felt guilty about taking a little time off. I knew that it was scheduled time off, and that I would get back to scheduled tasks later.

(As a side note, both of the tools I am using are online tools, meaning I can get to them from either my laptop or desktop and have no problems keeping everything sync’d. Both of these tools also work very well on my Android phone.)

Ready to try it? Here’s what to do…

1. Sign up with Toodledo. They have a free version, but their Pro version only costs a few dollars per year and offers more. I use their Pro version.
2. Sign up with Google Calendar. This is free. If you already have a Gmail email address, you basically already have Google Calendar.
3. Set up your Toodledo account by creating some goals, contexts, and tasks that support your goals. These are the tasks that you need to work on each day.
4. Look at your Toodledo Hotlist to find the tasks that you need to work on first. I sometimes also use the Due-date view as a double-check.
5. Schedule yourself to perform these tasks by putting time-slots on your Google Calendar. I use Toodledo’s contexts (categories) of tasks (e.g. Admin, Websites, Personal, etc.) and schedule time each day for each of the categories, working on the most important task in the category. This way I am constantly able to get to the variety of things I need to work on. (Let’s face it, we all have multiple different things we need to get to.) At the end of each day, schedule a time-slot for “Planning”, where you spend 30 minutes planning and scheduling yourself for tomorrow. Also, schedule 2-3 “leisure” slots during the day where you take a break, surf the web, or do email (in addition to lunch, that is).
6. Stick to the system. Hold yourself to the times you have assigned. Sometimes, especially in the beginning, you may misjudge the time needed to complete a task. In such cases, modify your schedule where necessary. I only modify my schedule when I need to complete a task that day, or when an additional 15-30 minutes will let me complete the task today instead of tomorrow.

That’s my system! It works very well for me. If you decide to follow it, I hope it works just as well for you!

The post How I Increased My Productivity Tenfold! appeared first on Make A Website With Traffic.

Page Structure

It is a good idea to structure any document properly, whether it is a web page or not. The typical way to structure documents is by using headings.

Headings come in levels, thereby giving you the ability to structure documents. A “heading 1” is the most important heading, followed by “heading 2”, “heading 3”, etc. Also, a heading 2 is a sub-section of heading 1, and heading 3 is a sub-section of heading 2, etc.

Such page structuring allows the reader to scan over all the headings and get a quick overview of what the document (or web page) contains.

The H1 Tag

The H1 HTML heading tag, <h1></h1>, is the tag we are most concerned with on any webpage when it comes to visible text on the page. The text inside this tag is supposed to tell us what the topic of the page is.Within the page structure described earlier, this is most important visible text on the web page.

Typically, there should be one H1 tag on a web page, it should be near the top of the page. It should contain text that not only entices the reader into reading the page content, but also contain text, typically carefully-selected keywords, that help the search engines figure out what the topic of the page content is.

How WordPress Themes Often Use H1

Many WordPress themes put the website’s name in a H1 tag and the site description in a H2 tag. (The page title is then usually put in a H2 tag as well.)

To human visitors it doesn’t matter much, but this arrangement tells the search engines that the website’s name is the most important text on every page. Yes, the website’s name is important for brand recognition, but surely it can’t be the most important bit of text on every page on the website.

Should the headline that tells the reader what the topic of the page is, not be considered more important? I think so.

A Smarter Way To Use H1

A smarter way to ensure that the search engines’ attention is put in the right place, is to generally use the H1 tag for the page’s title or headline.

There is one exception… the home page. One the home page, put the website description in a H1 tag (it does afterall describe what the entire website is all about), and put the home page’s heading in a H2 tag.

What about the website’s name? Don’t put it in a heading tag. Simply put it in DIV tags and apply CSS formatting to make the site’s name stand out visually on the page.

How To Implement This Smarter Way Of Using H1

Here’s how to implement this:

Your site name and description is typically located in the header.php file of your theme. Open that file in a text editor or your favorite php editor. Find the lines of code where your site name and description is specified. The site name code is usually <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>, surround by an A tag and probably also by a H1 tag. Your site description code is usually <?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>, surrounded by a DIV tag or possibly a H2 tag. Then do the following:

1. If your site name is surrounded by H1, change it to DIV, or <h1></h1> to <div></div>. You may also have to add a new CSS class to your theme’s style.css file and assign the class to the DIV tag. This new CSS class should contain the formatting needed to retain original formatting for your site name.
2. Replace your original site description code with a conditional statement that checks if the current page is your home page or not, and then places your site description either inside a H1 tag (if it is the home page) or a DIV tag (if it is not the home page). Here is an example:

<?php if ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) { ?> 

<h1 class="sitedesc"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></h1>

<?php } else { ?> 

<div class="sitedesc"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div> 

<?php } ?>

That covers your site description. The next step is to make sure that your page title or headline is displayed within the correct tags. Here you have to edit two of your theme’s files, page.php and single.php.

Open the first file and look for <?php the_title(); ?>, more than like surrounded by an H2 tag. Replace that code with a conditional statement that also checks if the current page is the home page and then either put the page title inside a H2 tag (if it is the home page) or a H1 tag (if it is not the home page). Here is an example:

<?php if ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) { ?> 

<h2 class="pagetitle"><?php the_title(); ?></h2> 

<?php } else { ?> 

<h1 class="pagetitle"><?php the_title(); ?></h1> 

<?php } ?>

Repeat this step for the other php file as well.

Add a CSS class to your theme’s style.css file that applies the same formatting to the H1 and H2 tags so that there is no visual difference when either tag is used.

And there you have it… your WordPress theme will now use heading tags on your website that will do a much better job for your site in the search engines.

The post Smart Use Of Headings In WordPress Themes appeared first on Make A Website With Traffic.

What Are Website Cookies?

A website cookie is a small text file that a website places on your computer. It contains information about your visit to that website. The cookie could contain a large variety of information about you, basically anything that the website wants to remember about your visit and that could help it identify you when you visit the website again.

The information in cookies is often stored in an ordinary, human-readable format, but sometimes the information is encrypted, usually for security reasons.

Cookies can last forever or they can have an expiration date after which they have to be recreated. Most browsers also have a function that allows you to remove all cookies, or to prevent cookies from being created in the first place.

How Do Websites Use Cookies?

Websites can use cookies in several ways. As I said, the basic goal is to store information to allow the web server (the computer that hosts the website) to recognize you. Here are some of the more common uses:

1. Your Preferences: Some websites allow you to customize the website according to your liking. You might change the website color scheme or layout. These preferences are stored in a cookie.
2. Session Information: Some websites set a special type of cookie called a session cookie. In many cases, these are websites where you have to log on to use the website, e.g. banking sites. Your session information, including a very short expiration period, is stored in the cookie. When the session expires, the cookie is destroyed and you have to log on again.
3. Tracking visitors: Many websites record visitor statistics, e.g. how many visitors did the website get, how many were repeat visitors, how do visitors typically navigate through the website, etc. Much of this data is recorded with the help of cookies.
4. Marketing: Websites that sell products will often track which products you look at and use that information to suggest other similar or related products to you. This information is stored in cookies.

Why Are Cookies Stored On Your Computer?

There are several good reasons why cookies are stored on your computer and not on the website’s server:

1. Storage: Some big websites get millions of visitors. If all the cookies for all the visitors were stored on the website’s server, that would require a lot of space.
2. Identification: If cookies were stored on the website’s server, it would be difficult to identify you on your next visit because your IP address (a unique number that assigned to your computer when you connect to the internet) may change from one visit to the next. A cookie on your own computer eliminates this problem.
3. Security: If cookies are stored on a website, it can be accessed by anyone who has access to the website, and you won’t know who they are. If the cookie is stored on your computer, it can’t be accessed by such people.

Privacy Issues With Cookies

There have been some ramblings on the internet in recent years about how cookies might be used to invade your privacy. I mentioned earlier how marketing websites (online stores) use cookies to make suggestions to you upon your return. Some companies, after you have looked at several products on their website (that they tracked with cookies) and after you have bought something from them, thereby giving them your name and address to ship your order to, may take all that information that they have about you and sell it to other companies who sell similar products. Before you know it, you may be bombarded with all kinds of offers.

The key here is to review the Privacy Policies of companies you deal with. If they say that they may sell your information, only do business with them if you are comfortable with that.

As you can see, the potential value that website cookies provide can outweigh the potential harm if you are careful who you do business with. Cookies are not dangerous to your computer and they won’t fill up your hard drive.

I always leave cookies enabled in my browsers because they offer great value.

The post How Do Websites Use Cookies? appeared first on Make A Website With Traffic.