WP Dude

Webinar: WordPress SEO

2010-09-06T12:00:28Z

I am holding a live group coaching webinar on Thursday 9th September and I would like to invite you to join me.

The coaching session will take place at 9AM Pacific, 12pm Eastern and 17:00PM UK time. The session will last approximately 45-60 minutes.

Webinar: WordPress SEO

I will be giving a group coaching session on how to configure your WordPress site so the search engines can find your content and drive the correct people to that content.

The webianr will focus on the on-site changes you can make to your blog to ensure you get the most traffic.

I cannot promise you page #1 on Google, but I can point you in the right direction.

How The Webinar Works

It will be part presentation, part live tutorial so I can show you how to configure your site for SEO. At the end I will open the floor to a question and answer session.

The beauty of the webinar system I use is that we can interact via chat sessions so you can ask questions while I show you how to optimise your system.

The Agenda

Here is the agenda for the session.

Use all in one seo pack plugn
SEO slugs
Creating a breadcrumb trail
Internal linking
SEO copywriting with the scribe SEO plugin
Q & A

Cost

The session costs $27, for that you get the live session, the Q & A and a recording of the session

Limited Spaces

This is not some internet marketing scarcity ploy, but my webinar software has limited slots available so sign up as soon as you can to avoid disappointment.

Join Now

To join the webinar, lcick on the button below to buy a seat ticket. IMPORTANT, you will be able to download details on joining the session after checkout, please read this pdf

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Webinar: WordPress SEO

Webinar: Integrating WordPress and Twitter

2010-08-27T15:28:01Z

I am holding a live group coaching webinar on Thursday 2nd September and I would like to invite you to join me.

The coaching session will take place at 9AM Pacific, 12pm Eastern and 17:00PM UK time. The session will last approximately 70 minutes.

Webinar Integrating WordPress and Twitter

I will be giving a group coaching session on how to integrate your WordPress site with twitter to take advantage of this booming social media platform.

How The Webinar Works

It will be part presentation, part live tutorial so I can show you how to configure integration between your site and twitter. I will also give you some tools to help promote your blog posts on twitter

The beauty of the webinar system I use is that we can interact via chat sessions so you can ask questions while I show you how to integrate the systems.

The Agenda

Here is the agenda for the session.

Why integrate WordPress with twitter
Tools to automate the process
WordPress Post to Tweets
Tweets to Posts
Promoting blog posts on twitter
Promoting your archives on twitter
Twitter welcome page
Q & A

It’s Free For This Week Only

This is the first of my new weekly group coaching sessions, and I will be providing this first session free of charge to give you a feel for the group coaching format.

Limited Spaces

This is not some internet marketing scarcity ploy, but my webinar software has limited slots available so sign up as soon as you can to avoid disappointment.

Join Now

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/136183426

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Webinar: Integrating WordPress and Twitter

Plugin Review: wp-malwatch

2010-08-27T14:36:19Z

A plugin I have found recently is wp-malwatch, and it has quickly gone onto my must have list of plugins. Let me tell you about it and urge you to get it installed on your system.

What is wp-malwatch?

It’s like an anti virus scanner for the files on your WordPress install. So if someone has hacked your site and installed malware code on your system, wp-malwatch will help you find it.

Installation

wp-malwatch is much like any other plugin, you can either search for it and install it or download it from here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-malwatch/

Configuration

Once installed there are a number of config options, plus one special hint I will give you.

To configure the plugin goto the wp-malwatch-> configure option.

bizarrely, not all of the options are enabled, I say switch everything on. See the screen dumps.

Keyword scan – this check inside of your WordPress files for particular strings, as you can see from the screen dump I have added base654_decode. An increasingly popular way to hide hackers code is to encrypt it, if you see files with base64_decode and huge strings, this is probably malware code.

Hidden files scan – hackers often setup hidden files which contain suspect code, this option will find those files.

.htaccess scanning – another trick is to add malicious re-directions to .htaccess files, wordpress normally has these files, but you should be wary of the contents of these files, and any additional .htaccess files you find

uploads directory – this is a favoured technique to hide php script files deep within your upload file structure, this is not an easy thing to find, but this excellent plugins searches for the miscreants. This has found issues on a couple of my clients sites and saved me hours of searching.

File pattern scanning – like virus signatures, some hack attacks have specific file patterns, these are the known attack signatures.

Locale scanning – the file locale.php is often targeted by hackers and rogue redirects added, this needs to be scanned

Running the Scan

A widget is added to the dashboard home page of your site, or you can run the scan from wp-malwatch->detailed report.

IT WILL RETURN HITS DON’T PANIC

The plugin will now return a list of files which are suspicious, review each file, and view it’s contents.

False Positives

WP-Malwatch errs on the side of caution and brings back anything matching your search patterns, which is good, but requires that you have the ability to review and understand what it has returned. There will be some false positive results.

For example there will be a .htaccess file in the root of your site, this will be flagged up.

Remove Malware Files

If you have been infected, I recommend re-installing a clean version of WordPress, and any plugins or themes that have been infected, and deleting any files which should not be there for example in the uploads directory.

Then change all of your passwords; database, ftp and WordPress users.

How Often should Your Test Your Site

I recommend once a week, it does not take very long. A function I would like to see on the plugin is an automated weekly or monthly check that send you an email of the results, but hey you cannot have everything in a free plugin.

My Results Are Freaking Me Out!!

If you need help translating the results of wp-malwatch to see if you have been infected, why not book a coaching session with me and I can take you through the results.

Image by jlwalker

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Plugin Review: wp-malwatch

Lightweight WordPress Visitor Stats

2010-08-06T10:32:00Z

If you are anything like me, you like to look at the stats on your site. Which posts are popular, where your visitors are coming from. I want to tell you about a nice lightweight stats package that I use to give you this information at a glance.

Google Analytics

I have google analytics installed on my site, and I will use this less than once a month. It gives you very detailed and in-depth stats about your sites, and I DO recommend that you use GA, it’s free and easy to install, but for at a glance day-to-day stats I want something less detailed and easier to use.

WordPress.com stats

I have the wordpress.com stats plugin installed on my system. This plugin was developed for hosted wordpress.com blogs, but has been made available to the wider WordPress community.

You install it like any other plugin, and it gives you a dashboard widget and a more detailed site stats page.

The plugin can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

API Key

The stats program uses your wordpress.com api key, the same one used by Akismet. To get an API key visit wordpress.com and sign up for a free account, then go to the dashboard and retrieve your API key.

It is not he easiest thing to find, have fun.

So what does it give me?

Using WordPress .com stats I can get an “at a glance” overview of my sites performance. I can then drill down on the various stats to get more details information. My at a glance screen gives me

Total site visitors for the last 30 days
Top ten referrers (where the traffic came from) for yesterday and today
Top ten posts or pages for yesterday and today
Top ten search engine terms for yesterday and today
Top then click aways (useful for people watching affiliate sales) for yesterday and today
Recent incoming links

For me this is more than enough information to get a quick overview of how my site is working, if a new blog posts is resonating with people, if my marketing is bringing people to my services page.

Check out these screen dumps for an idea of the graphs and stats http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/screenshots/

You can click into any of the stats and get more detailed over time results.

Give It A Go

It is not the most powerful stats package out there, if you need details such as bounce rate or segments from where your visitors are coming from you definitely need something like google analytics, but a quick check to see if people are reading your stuff, and wordpress.com stats will suit you down to the ground.

I’m keen to know which other stats packages people use, drop me a line in the comments if you are using something not mentioned.

Image by kevinzhengli

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Lightweight WordPress Visitor Stats

1Shopping Cart and WishList Member

2010-08-05T16:25:43Z

This post will be of interest to those of you using the WishList member plugin (WLM) and the 1Shopping Cart (1SC).

1SC has announced that they have changed the way their recurring payments work, and this will enable a much tighter integration with WLM.

The Current problem

1SC only provides what WLM call a simple integration. This means that there is no notification back to your site if the 1SC recurring payment is cancelled.

When someone cancels a membership, you need to manually remove them from the WLM system, as you can imagine if you have a decent sized membership site this overhead can be quiet a burden.

What 1Shopping Cart Are Saying

Here is the notification I was sent from 1SC

Professional Cart Solutions is extremely pleased to announce the release of the long anticipated re-write of our Recurring Billing engine.

Our engineers have been diligently working on improving this feature over the past year, and now we are ready to launch!

The V2 Recurring billing engine will look and function exactly the same as the current and familiar tool, but watch for the following enhancements:

Faster, more reliable processing
Receive recurring orders on both the Desktop and Mobile Notifiers
Access to recurring orders through the API
Ability to retrieve notifications of recurring orders through the API

We will begin migrating users to the new recurring billing system as of August 10th, 2010; your account will be migrated on or after that date. Note that this change will be seamless and there will be no disruption to your recurring billing.

For those who have been inquiring about an integration between our system and WishList Member, you will be particularly happy to know that this release is the final step in their integration with our service.

Due to impending changes in the policies of major credit card providers, we must also inform you of the deprecation of the “Update Payment Information for all Recurring Events” feature. This is comes as a result of a decision by the Payment Card Industry deeming any non-customer initiated payment changes as unacceptable.

When Will THis Integration Happen

I don;t have any details from WLM on the time the re-code will take, what I recommend is that you keep any eye on the news page from WLM http://wishlistproducts.com/category/news/

You should also keep an eye on your WLM dashboard, this will alert you when new versions of the plugin are available, they do not update through the normal plugin route because it is a premium product.

Hat Tip

A big hat tip to Jenna Avery for giving me the heads up on this update.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

1Shopping Cart and WishList Member

WordPress and Your Hosting Setup

2010-08-06T13:55:28Z

I’m on holiday this week (or vacation as you say in Americaland) so here is a guest post from Jonas Bates . He works for webhostgear.com, a well-respected web hosting guide.

Blogging and WordPress Hosting

Does your business have a blog? If not, it may be the only one left that doesn’t. Blogging is a key part of any Internet marketing strategy, and many companies are benefitting tremendously from a combination of blogging and WordPress hosting that keeps fresh content associated with your business and directs traffic back to your primary website.

How to Make Blogging and WordPress Hosting Work for Your Business

The Internet is all about fresh content. As the saying goes “content is king.” To get people to your website, you need something new. To bring them back, you need to keep people talking. A blog can serve both of these purposes. Even if your main site needs to stay static by necessity (because you have a lot of offers, for example), your blog can always be changing, and can be a great source of link building too. Don’t shortchange the power of the blog.

But What About the WordPress Hosting? Where Does That Come In?

WordPress hosting is simply the easiest and most effective platform for blogging. A WordPress blog with a WordPress host is easy to set up, easy to use, and easy to optimize. You can have a WordPress blog hosted on a non-WordPress server, but why would you? WordPress hosts
are already set up with the right operating system, the right programming language, the right everything for a functional, efficient, eye-catching WordPress blog. There are already plenty of great WordPress features to choose from, and since WordPress is an open source application,
new ones are popping up all the time. WordPress is compatible with any web hosting.

Benefitting from Blogging and WordPress Hosting

Once you have your WordPress blog set up with your WordPress host, use it! Don’t let all that functionality go to waste. Make sure you’re posting every day, or at least a few times a week. If necessary, get some of your employees to contribute. As soon as people realize you’re not updating that blog regularly, they’ll stop coming back, and that can cost you big. So set it up and start blogging!

Image by tomandemma

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

WordPress and Your Hosting Setup

Changes At WPDude.com

2010-08-06T10:27:07Z

Hello, I know it’s been a bit quiet here for a couple of weeks, I just thought I would pop my head over the parapet and let you know what’s been going on.

It’s Been Super Mad Busy

I’ve have been booked solid with client wordpress technical support work, I haven’t had time to speak to my wife never mind write blog posts for you lot. Sorry about that, it’s just one of those things a small business growing has to deal with.

As a result there has been a big change at wpdude HQ …

Enter Remar Caballero

I have recruited someone to help me with the technical support work, his name is Remar, if you drop in a request for technical support there is a good chance you will be in contact with him, please welcome him into the fold I know he is going to be a big help to me, and give me a chance to remember what my kids look like

Group Coaching

Something I have wanted to do for quiet some time is get my coaching practice up and running again. I’ve concentrated on the fixing of people’s WordPress problems instead of teaching them how to do it themselves, this will change in the next couple of weeks, if you pop over to WordPress Coaching and leave your email you will be the first to know all about my new group coaching sessions.

I’ll be writing a separate blog post about group coaching soon, it’s going to be cool.

More Blogging & Social Whatnots

A lot of my time will be released to do things such as writing more blog posts, getting more social and generally being around to answer questions. I’m looking forward to that.

PS I’m serious about the group coaching, it’s going to be excellent, get on the mailing list.

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Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Changes At WPDude.com

WordPress Maintenance Plan – Introduction

2010-06-23T11:05:30Z

Over the past few weeks I have been asking you what you wanted as a free information product to help you manage your WordPress site. If you missed the posts they can be read at What Free WordPress Help Do You Need and Your WordPress Core Problem.

The overwhelming result was detailed instructions on how to do the various maintenance tasks a WordPress site requires.

I’ve been working through the problem and it is pretty big, so to help me break it down into smaller chunks, I am going to publish this as a series of blog posts and videos, then I’m going to package it up as a pdf with worksheets to download as a real information product once I’m done.

In part one of this series I would like to take you through an introduction to WordPress maintenance tasks. I need as much feedback as possible, please leave comments if I have missed any items you want to know about , also if you are happy with the way the course looks let me know.

WordPress Maintenance An Introduction

This series of blog posts will take you through the various maintenance tasks required to keep your WordPress site running efficiently and securely. This is a very practical series of posts, I will explain in detail why a maintenance task needs to be performed, how it is performed, I will also show you how to do it via a series of screen cast videos.

Why WordPress Needs So Much Maintenance

You may be asking yourself why WordPress needs so much maintenance? Why is it constantly changing and why new items are being added. In short why am I getting this maintenance headache?

WordPress is not a static product. It is in a state of constant development. This development is to add new functionality, to fix bugs and to close security loopholes. This is why the WordPress core files need attention on a regular basis.

Plugins are a big part of WordPress, they offer extensions to the WordPress core functions and solve almost every problem a WordPress site owner may have. These plugin updates need to be factored into your maintenance plans.

As WordPress develops so themes develop to take advantage of new functionality. You may find that your theme requires an update, this is yet anther maintenance task you need to consider.

WordPress also suffers because of its popularity. It is an easy target for hackers. There are millions of WordPress sites, and many of the site owners are not trained in computer security. As a result hacks are being made on outdated code, plugins with loop holes etc. Many of the updates and maintenance procedures required are to block loopholes and monitor for attacks. You need to do this or risk a hacked site and all the pain and embarrassment that causes. Ask your self this questions

“What would be the implications to my sites readers and customers if I was suddenly pointing to Viagra sites after a hack?”

The rest of this introduction will take you through the various on-going maintenance tasks required to keep your site up and running.

Backup and Recovery

Backups are a crucial maintenance task of any computer site, not just WordPress, but you would be surprised how many people do not do backups, or do not perform full backups.

The flip side of this coin is that people have taken good backups, but have no idea how to recover the files and sql commands they have archived.

I will teach you the following things in the backup section of this series

What to back up
How to back it up manually
How tO use backup plugins to automate this process
Creating a backup schedule
How to test backups for efficacy
How to recover your archive

WordPress Core Updates

As mentioned, WordPress is not a static system, it is constantly evolving with new updates to add functionally, fix bugs or close security loopholes. A major maintenance task is the update of the core WordPress system files and database configuration.

In the core updates modules I will take you through:

Knowing when to update
Manual updates
Automatic updates the safe way
Fixing a problematic update
Rolling back to a previous version

Plugin Updates

Plugins are one of the very best parts of WordPress. There is a huge active community of developers writing add ons for WordPress so that almost all problems a site owner can have are solved by the installation of a plugin.

This huge benefit comes with a maintenance overhead. Just like WordPress core files, plugin developers are releasing upgraded functionality, bug fixes and security patches. This all required maintenance. If WordPress changes the way their core system works, this needs to be reflected in your plugins too.

In the plugin maintenance section I will take you through

Finding out when to update your plugin (hint it’s not only when the plugin tells you to)
Manually updating plugins
Automatically updating plugins
Batch updating plugins
Troubleshooting plugin updates
Rolling back plugins

Theme Updates

Theme update are probably the least frequent maintenance update you will need to perform. In this section I will take you through:

Finding out when a new version is available
Installing your new update
Copying any theme changes you have made
Rolling back to an old version

Managing Users

If you run a multi user site, you may build up a large number of users, sometimes these users are no longer contributing to your site and as a result they pose a security risk and should be deleted.

I will teach you how to

Find inactive users
Removing and accrediting their posts to a live users

Managing Security

Security is an overlooked aspect of maintenance by most WordPress site owners. This is because they don;t have a huge level of experience with IT security. In this module I will take you through

Initial security audit
closing the Loopholes
On-going security checks.

System Audits

There are two other maintenance tasks I recommend on a less frequent basis and they are plugin audits and database audits.

Plugin Audit

This is a review of your currently installed plugins, can you remove or deactivate any of these items to reduce the overhead on your system? I will teach you how to:

Find unused plugins
Deactivation Test
Deleting Files

Database Audit

As we add plugins, themes and other add ons to our WordPress site, new database tables are created. As you database grows so the overhead on your site grows. A minimal database is the best way to work, I will take you through

Auditing your database tables
Finding which ones are not required
Gracefully arching and removing this unwanted data.

Maintenance Schedules

In the last part of the course I will bring it all together with a maintenance schedule, when to do the various maintenance tasks.

Your Feedback

As you know I am completely open to feedback on this free product I am creating for you. If I have missed anything please leave a comment and I will add it to the mix.

Image by Usefulguy

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

WordPress Maintenance Plan – Introduction

WordPress Maintenance Packages

2010-06-21T11:30:34Z

I’m soft launching my new on-going maintenance program, full details are available at WordPress Maintenance Package.

Can it be any softer?

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Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

WordPress Maintenance Packages

How To Change Your Domain Name

2010-06-17T09:59:11Z

In a previous post I wrote about migrating your WordPress hosting companies. Another common task I am asked to do it to change the domain name of a site but keep it on the existing hosting account.

Here is my how to on changing your WordPress site’s domain name

Why Change Your Domain Name

There are a number of reasons you may want to change your domain name, your company may change it’s name, your may be re-branding, you may have forgotten to renew your domain and lost it (you know who you are ), you may be building the site with a temporary domain name but for whatever reason, it can be edited once your site has been built.

Before You Start

There are a couple of things you need to do before you start a domain name change.

Take a full backup – things can go wrong so you need a point in time to restore back to

Make sure the domain is pointing to your current installation, the test will be to attach to the new domain, you should be re-directed to the existing domain.

This is an intermediate to advanced how to.

There Are Three Ways To Do This

There are three ways to do this change, you can edit the general settings of your site, edit the wp-config.php file or directly change your database. They are ordered in ascending order of difficulty.

Edit General Settings

Scroll down to settings ->general and you will see two options with domain names WordPress Address and Blog Address.

To change the domain name, simply change the URLs in these two areas.

BE WARNED: As soon as you do this, your blogs address will be changed, if you do not have the new domain configured correctly, you will not be able to login.

Edit wp-config.php

The second way to change your domain name (and easiest to fix) is to set two new entries in your wp-config.php file.

Edi this file using the ftp client of your choosing and add the following two lines

define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://example.com/wordpress’);
define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://example.com/wordpress’);

These entries correspond to the two URLs from method one. Enter your new domain name and save the new wp-config.php.

When you attempt to access the old domain you will be re-directed to the new one. If you are having problems, simply remove these two lines and you will have access to your old domain.

Edit The Database Directly

This one is a bit more advanced, but if you are happy editing your WordPress database with tools like phpmyadmin then this is another way to change your domain name

Navigate to your options table, it may be called something like wp_options and find the two entries siteurl and home. Edit these database entries with your new URL sand save them to the database. Test as in the previous methods.

Save The Google Juice

If you have put a lot of time and effort into your content on the old domain name, there is agood chance you want to retain old links in Google. Fortunately WordPress does a good job of this, it will do a 301 redirect from your old domain name to your new one. A 301 redirect tells the search engines to change their index links to the new URL it is redirected to.

To test everything is working okay, type in site:yourdomain.com and click on a couple of links, if they go through and then redirect to your new URL everything is working great.

Search And Replace

Once you domain is working correctly, it is probably a good idea to search and replace your entire database to make sure any entries in blog posts etc are changed to the new domain.

I have already written about this in my WordPress Search And Replace post.

Wrap Up

It’s relatively painless to change your domain name, so don’t think you are stuck with a domain name you don’t really want.

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Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

How To Change Your Domain Name