Houston Search Engine Marketing and Optimization Services

Who Are You Gonna Call When You Need A Guru?

Gerald Weber — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:16:45 +0000

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The Lowdown on Sub Digger Plus

Gerald Weber — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:45:51 +0000

Chances are you’re familiar with both StumbleUpon and Digg. Have you ever wished it would be as easy to Digg posts as it was to Stumble from site to site? Well, now it can be. Sub Digger Plus wasn’t created by Digg (so it’s uncertain if using it will get your Digg account in trouble), but it’s a great way to make keeping up with your friends’ Digg submissions. Not only is this tool helpful, it’s not difficult to use. In fact, if you know your Digg username, that’s all you need to enter to start using the tool (which works on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome browsers.)

With no plugins to download or software to install, Sub Digger Plus makes it simple to easily check out Digg submissions from your friends. After entering your Digg username, you’ll go to a screen with a toolbar on the bottom. Your friends’ submissions will load in the top of the screen. All you have to do is click one button to see the next submission. There’s also a handy list view that’s sortable. Depending on your personal preferences, you can choose to sort the list by Date, Diggs, Title, Submitter, Topic or Read (and any of these options can be sorted in ascending or descending order). This makes it super easy to see what your friends are doing at Digg, and provides you with the opportunity to create a really personalized Digg experience.

The bar that displays on the bottom of the screen shows you the title of the submission, the date it was submitted, and the avatar of the person who submitted it. This makes it easy to see the actual website that was “Dugg” while knowing who among your friends submitted it. If you’d rather see an overview of activity for the last 24 hours, this is easy as well. The fully functioning list view of Sub Digger Plus gives you all the information you need at your fingertips.

While the word is still out on whether or not Digg officially supports this tool for the site, it has the potential to make your life easier if you use Digg a lot. With the ability to sort in different ways, no need for special downloads, and the other features available, you’re going to want to at least check out this Digg submission tools. If you’ve ever been “stumbling” at SU and wished it was just as easy to check out Digg submissions, you’re in luck. Digg has always been relatively easy to use, but this makes it even easier to check out submissions and make sure they’re worthy of your Diggs. Being free makes it even easier to take it for a spin.

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How to Make WordPress More Secure from Hackers & Robots

Gerald Weber — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:30:59 +0000

WordPress is one of the most popular open source blogging platforms. Unfortunately, this also seems to make it a popular target for hackers. While keeping your WordPress installation up to date can prevent a lot of potential security breaches, that’s not a guaranteed way to stay safe. Today, I’m going to cover a few steps you can take to give yourself extra layers of protection against hackers and evil robots.

Although these first steps may seem extremely basic, it’s always good to be reminded of the fundamentals. A great example of this was the Twitter happiness fiasco that occurred a couple of months ago. While it did have some entertainment value, it also served as a reminder that even the most basic security measures can be overlooked if you aren’t proactively taking steps to be more secure. Here are a few lessons that can be learned from that fiasco:

Don’t use words from the dictionary for your password

For example, passwords like password or happiness.

Most brute force attacks attempt to gain access by trying a prearranged list of dictionary words. If you choose a password that is not a word from the dictionary, you won’t leave yourself open to this type of attack.

Don’t use passwords that aren’t strong

For example, all lowers case with no numbers or other characters.

What exactly makes a password strong? Strong passwords have the following characteristics:

Lengthy: Each time you add a character, your password becomes exponentially more difficult to guess.
A combination of letters numbers and symbols: The more characters the better
Uses both upper case and lower case letters
Use a password that is easy for you to remember but difficult for others to guess

Microsoft has some more detailed tips on how to create strong passwords that are easy to remember but difficult for others to guess.

Whatever you do, don’t allow UNLIMITED login attempts!

In the case of the Twitter fiasco, the hacker actually launched an automated brute force attack which ran overnight while he was sleeping. The WordPress Limit Login Attempts Plugin is an ideal way for WordPress users to protect themselves from such brute force attacks. It works using both IP addresses and cookies. It can be set to notify you via email when someone has been locked out due to four failed login attempts. The first time four failed attempts occur the user or potential hacker is locked out for twenty minutes. After the next four failed attempts, the lockout last for twenty-four hours. These are the default settings, but they are fully customizable.

Robots Behaving Badly

There are all kinds of robots that roam the web. While some of them are friendly (Googlebot), others have malicious intentions (like harvesting your email address so they can spam you to death, or spamming the comments section of your blog).

Bad Behavior is a very cool Wordpress plugin that stops these robots dead in their tracks. This plugin actually stops them from ever even visiting your website. The unique way Bad Behavior works is by analyzing the http request to see if it looks spammy or malicious. Besides the obvious benefits of having less spam on your site and in your email inbox, this plugin also keeps robots from using up your bandwidth and ensuring that your analytics stats more accurately reflect actual human visitors.

While this plugin is intended mainly as a spam prevention tool, I have also discovered that it may also prevent others from being able to view your site through a proxy server. This is a nice benefit since many hackers attempt to conceal their identity by hiding behind a proxy. Here is the message that usually will be presented when someone attempts to access the site from behind a proxy:

Click image for larger view

Secure WordPress Is another wordpress plugin that does many things in an effort to make Wordpress more secure. Here are a few of the benefits of the plugin:

removes error-information on login-page
adds index.html to plugin-directory (virtual)
removes the wp-version, except in admin-area
removes plugin-update information for non-admins

Limit WP-Admin folder to One IP Address

Chad Bean from SEO Hosting explains how and why to do this.

“Most of the vulnerabilities found in WordPress, affect files in the wp-admin directory. By IP restricting this directory, and the WordPress login page, you’re adding an extra security layer on top of your WordPress installation.

You can IP restrict this folder, by creating an “.htaccess” file in your wp-admin/ directory, with the following contents:

Of course, if you have a dynamic IP, this .htaccess file needs to be updated to reflect your current IP address. Multiple IP’s can be added by adding extra “allow from IP” lines, in case you want to access the admin from say your home, and office, or if you have mutliple blog authors.“

Note: where it says (allow from 000.0.0.0) actually put your IP address there. If you are not sure what your IP address is you can find out by visiting http://www.whatismyip.com

Note x 2: If you use this method to IP restrict the wp-admin directory, there is no need to use the Limit Login Attempts Plugin. The reason is because anyone who does not have their IP included will not even be able to view the admin login page; instead, it will simply go to a 404 page.

Always Have a Backup Plan

Even after implementing the security measures we discussed today, there is still the possibility of a worst case scenario where you are hacked and everything is lost. Fortunately, as long as you have a backup, you will be able to easily restore your data and files. The WP-Database Manager will backup and email a database backup to you on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

While this is great to have in the event of a database meltdown, it only backs up data and not files. So, what if all of your files were also to disappear?

Well, if you use a host like HostGator (which I do), they perform automatic weekly backups on all of their shared hosting plans. This can add a certain comfort level in knowing that you can always retrieve and restore a full backup. However, I still like to occasionally make a full backup myself, and most hosts give you a simple way to do this with only a few clicks. The best thing to do is to check with your host and inquire as to their simple procedure for manually creating a full backup.

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Digg Says Goodbye to Shouts, Hello to Facebook and Twitter

Gerald Weber — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:54:07 +0000

Last Tuesday (May 19th), Digg held their latest Townhall. After talking about upcoming Digg events, they began answering questions from users, and a screenshot of the first question they answered is below:

When presented with this question, Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose stated that they were planning on shutting down this feature in a few days. They said that while they realized this was a controversial decision, they had decided to replace it with new sharing options. The two sharing options they mentioned were Facebook and Twitter, and they said that these changes would make the sharing process simpler and more streamlined.

Digg stuck to this promise, and on Tuesday of this week (May 26th), they made the official announcement on their blog that they were removing the shout feature. In addition to discussing the ability to quickly share via Facebook or Twitter, the Digg post also stated that while they have removed the “Blog This” feature, they still have a shortcut for sharing via email (as you can see from the screenshot below):

While this may not seem like a major announcement or change, it is actually quite interesting in regards to Digg. The reason it’s interesting is because it is in contrast to some of their recent decisions. Back in March, I wrote a post for Search Engine Journal called “Why is Digg.com Taking the “Social” out of Social Media?” Although I provided several example of “anti-social behavior” by Digg, the most notable is that they had temporarily removed all of the external links from profile pages to social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. While they put the social links back several hours after the post was published, this move showed that at the time, they were trying to create a wall garden for themselves. However, after apparently rethinking their decisions, it seems that they have scrapped this approach and started to embrace the entire social web.

So, what does this mean for Digg? Well, in terms of Digg as a company, while they do risk giving away traffic to other sites in the social realm, I also believe that they can benefit by bringing in new users from these same sites who see content that is being promoted from Digg.

In terms of content, Greg from 10e20 said that:

“After the shout-pocalypse I believe that Digg will be a better place from a content perspective. Average stories won’t be artificially inflated; articles will be back to being judged based on their content … not on who has motives behind it.”

I personally disagree with this statement, because if people are trying to “artificially” gain exposure, they will be able to use their Facebook and Twitter profiles to do the same task that they previously did with shouts.

However, I do agree with his thoughts that shifting a focus to external social websites is going to cause “loads of user endorsements that will soon flood your Twitter stream, Facebook wall or your inbox.”

Now that you are up to date and have heard the opinions of myself and Greg from 10e20, I want to hear what you have to think about this topic, so be sure to cast your vote in the poll below!

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Revisiting SheerSEO One Year Later

Gerald Weber — Mon, 11 May 2009 11:42:02 +0000

Last week, I was browsing through some Search Engine Journal posts from last year when I came across the following post by Ann Smarty – SheerSEO : Another Way To Track Your Google Rankings. After reading her post and noticing that the tool had some very interesting features, I decided that I wanted to try it out for myself. Although Ann wrote a great post, it was written nearly a year ago, so I thought it would be useful to share my more recent experience with SheerSEO.

Since I do all my work on an iMac, the first feature that I liked about this tool is that it is web based, so it will run on Mac and Linux systems in addition to Windows.

After exploring the tool for awhile, the thing that really started to stand out in my mind was the amount of SheerSEO features that can really be useful for SEO agencies. To begin with, you can see all of your current positions in one table:

However, as their demo shows, one of the features that could provide a lot of value for an SEO agency is their tracking of historical positions. Clients expect to see progress, andSheerSEO makes it easy to show it to them:

If you want to use this tool to provide information to your clients, you can also take advantage of their white label feature, which allows you customize and brand the information that you show to your clients:

In Ann’s original review, she noted several shortcomings of SheerSEO. However, it looks like they have responded to her constructive criticism. Below are the shortcomings that Ann noted in her original post, along with information about any responseSheerSEO has made to them:

-direct links to the aggregated data: There are now links to these pages in the Position? column

-more backlink data: Although their Backlinks Watchdog feature could come in handy, I agree that this is one area where the tool could still be improved

-more sorting and filtering options: Currently, you can now select the Date Range, Search Engine and Search Term on the Historical Positions page

-the ability to track multiple projects: It looks like SheerSEO solved this issue by introducing a Master Account feature

One other main difference between when Ann reviewed SheerSEO and now is that while it was completely free to use when Ann reviewed it, a new pricing structure has been introduced for the tool. However, not only can you use the tool without paying for a full three months, but their paid options after the trial period are quite reasonable, as you can see from the table below:

After my experience with this SEO tool, I feel comfortable recommending that all of our readers sign up for a trial account. Given the fact that you can useSheerSEO for a full three months before paying a single cent, you should have no problem deciding if this tool fits your needs during that period of time.

When you try out SheerSEO for yourself (or if you have done so already), be sure to leave a comment with your experience for us all to read!

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