9 Steps to Conduct an SEO Interview

Previously SEO was like Greek or Latin. But today SEO has become a household terminology even for IT novices. There are so many SEO Professionals popping up too. The challenge is to identify the right SEO professional for your requirement.

Based on your organizational requirement, the hiring policy may also vary. Firstly you need to set the objectives for which you need the requirement. Consequently you will derive the solution as to what will be the interview pattern.

Here is a generic step-by-step guidance for zeroing in on the right professional.

Step 1 to Conduct an SEO Interview

1Be sure that they have Search engine algorithm awareness.

To understand or outwit the search engine you need to analyze their algorithm first. Before that you need to develop a passion for search. Thus you need to ensure that the professional has good search expertise. For example, the professional should be aware of various search options

Step 2 to Conduct an SEO Interview

2Be sure that they know how to use Search options.

Most prominent search engines have enhanced search features. As far as Google, the leader in this domain, they offer features like Advanced search, trends, wagon wheel, instant, related search. The professional should be well versed with these offerings.

Step 3 to Conduct-an-SEO-Interview

3Check on their Exposure to SEO tools.

There are various SEO tools like Raven SEO, SEO powersuite, SEOmoz. The professional should have worked in at least one of these extensively. The reason being, if you are well versed to one of these you can easily play around with other tools too.

Step 4 to Conduct an SEO Interview

4Know about their knowledge of Analytics usage.

There are tools like Adobe Site catalyst, google analytics. These tools provide value added analysis of various parameters of your website performance like unique visit count, landing page data, navigation summary, entrance keywords and so on.

Step 5 to Conduct an SEO Interview

5Determine what type of tools they know how to use.

There lots and lots of free and paid seo tools that are of high value. To quote a few:Google keyword position checker – Determines the position of your website in search engines for a specific keyword. Page rank checker – Shows the Search engine ranking of your webpages.

Step 6 to Conduct an SEO Interview

6See if they can help you with Competitor analysis.

Unless you exactly know where you stand now, you can’t reach the top. So you need to analyze your competitor web page to track their keywords and backlinks and derive some calculated insights and plan your SEO procedure accordingly.

Step 7 to Conduct an SEO Interview

7Be sure that they can use Webmaster tools.

Most search engines provide unique and customized data to the webmasters of the websites that integrate with them. For example, google alerts its webmasters about crawl errors, malwares, updates.

Step 8 to Conduct an SEO Interview

 

8See if they have Knowledge about recent developments.

An ideal webmaster or SEO pro should know to read and interpret mails or signals from the corresponding search engines. Unless this procedure is done on a daily basis your growth is at stake. Google announced webmasters about their Panda and Penguin updates well in advance.

Step 8 to Conduct an SEO Interview

9Patience.

Last but not the least, you need to wait and make calculated SEO attempts in order to avoid being blacklisted by Search Engines. You should know that the saying, “Build your castle and people will visit”, is not applicable to SEO procedure. You need to perform White Hat SEO and wait for results. You wont show up for all your target keywords suddenly. It takes some time for your website to get indexed, crawled and get noticed. While there are lot more info that could be shared, this article ends here, for the purpose is to trigger your further thought process. Keep all these factors in mind while hiring your SEO expert.

9 Steps to Conduct an SEO Interview

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9 Tips To Getting Repeat Customers by SEO.

Tips To Getting Repeat Customers

SEO Tips – Here are my top 9 tips to getting repeat customers:

 

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.

4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.

5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.

8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

8. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.

9. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.

9 Tips To Getting Repeat Customers by SEO.

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How to Change the Number of Posts Displayed On Your WordPress Blog Page?

Have you ever wanted to change the number of posts displayed on your blog page? By default all blog archive pages show a maximum of 10 posts per page. Recently one of our readers asked us if there was an easy way to change that. In this article, we will show you how to change the number of posts displayed on your blog page.

If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.

First thing you need to do is login to your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings » Reading. Next change the “Blog pages show at most” number from 10 to anything else that you like.

How to Change the Number of Posts Displayed On Your WordPress Blog Page

Save Changes and that’s all.

Now your WordPress blog pages will display the amount of posts that you want to display.

It is important that you do not choose a number higher than 10 specially when you’re not showing excerpts. Mainly because the more posts you display on a page, the bigger the page size which means the slower it loads.

In the past, we changed our blog post count to 5, but we reverted back to showing 10 posts per archive page. We made this change because our users wanted to see more than 5 posts per page while they were browsing through our archives.

How many posts are you showing on your blog and other archive pages? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

We hope this post helped you change the number of posts displayed on your blog page.

How to Change the Number of Posts Displayed On Your WordPress Blog Page?

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How to Disable Gravatars in WordPress

WordPress Tips - Avatar allow users to give their online profiles an instantly identifiable persona. WordPress uses Gravatars as the default avatar platform. It allows WordPress users to have the same avatar displayed on any gravatar enabled website. However, in some cases you may not want to display gravatars on your WordPress site. In this article, we will show you how to disable gravatars in WordPress.

First thing you need to do is log in to your WordPress site and go to Settings » Discussion. Scroll down to the Avatars section and uncheck the box next to ‘Show Avatars’ option. You will need to click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.

That’s all you have successfully disabled Gravatar on your WordPress site. Your comments will not show user gravatars. You will also not see gravatars anywhere in WordPress admin area. User gravatars will not appear on Comments and Users screen, your gravatar from WordPress admin bar will also disappear.

Even though you have disabled gravatar on your WordPress site, you can still show them selectively if you need. For example, you can display gravatar in author info box, or display gravatar from user email anywhere on your site.

We hope this article helped you disable gravatar on your site.

If you liked this article, then subscribe to our YouTube Channel or catch us onTwitter.

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How to Disable Gravatars in WordPress

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How to Add Single / Double Line Spacing in WordPress

In most Word processors, you can easily add extra blank line spaces. All you have to do is press the ENTER key a few times. If you’re a bit more savvy, then you can change the formatting to create double spaced line after paragraphs, increase line spacing, etc. Now this becomes really frustrating for beginners when they start using the WordPress visual editor. Why? because there is no formatting button like MS Word. In this article, we will show you how to add single / double line spacing in WordPress.

Before we start, it’s important to know that line spacing is controlled by the WordPress theme you use. We will show you how to add line spacing in the visual editor, and then we will cover how to change the line spacing in your theme if you’re not happy with the results.

Adding Double Line Space

When you press Enter to add a line break, WordPress visual editor considers it as a new paragraph. This means that it will automatically add double line space granted that your theme has the styling for it (most good themes do).

So simply go in and press Enter after the line and then type something else in the next line.

By simply doing that, based on your theme styling, you should see a clear distinction between paragraphs (i.e double line spacing).

Adding Single Line Space

Now if you are writing something like an address, then you probably want it to be single spaced instead of double spaced.

In this case, you need to press SHIFT + ENTER key.

This will tell WordPress that you want to start a new line inside an existing paragraph thus it needs single line spacing vs double line spacing.

Modifying the Line height and Spacing

Sometimes even when you add the proper line spacing in the editor, it doesn’t display the way you want it to in your theme. This is when you need to make CSS changes. CSS is basically like the formatting feature in Microsoft Word.

Yes you will tweak a little bit of CSS code, but it’s not as scary as you think it is.

Open your theme’s CSS file. You can find it by going to Appearance » Editor in your WordPress admin area. You can also use FTP as well if you like.

In your CSS file, you want to look for .post p

This basically controls the display of paragraphs in your post content. Once you find it, you need to add or modify the line-height value. If you do not find the .post p tag, then simply create one.

.post pline-height: 1.5em;

The CSS rule shown above will change the line spacing of paragraph content to 1.5em. Em is a unit of width for typography. We are using .post class which WordPress automatically adds to the content area of all posts to make sure it only affects posts and not paragraphs used elsewhere.

Now this only changes the spacing of single spacing. If you want to change the spacing between each paragraph (i.e double spacing), then you would need to add padding.

.post p 
line-height: 1.5em;
padding-bottom: 15px;
 

Feel free to adjust the numbers to meet your needs.

We hope this article helped you add single / double line spacing in WordPress. If you liked this article, then consider subscribing to our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter.

How to Add Single / Double Line Spacing in WordPress

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How to Rearrange Post Edit Screen in WordPress

After using WordPress for a while, you may notice that there are some areas of the post edit screen that you do not use at all. Similarly, you will notice certain sections that you use more often, but they are not ideally placed on the screen. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could re-arrange your post edit screen to the way that helps improve your writing experience? Well you can. In this article, we will show you how to rearrange post edit screen in WordPress and improve your writing experience.

By default, when you install WordPress your post edit screen looks something like this:

It may look different depending on your theme and plugins. You may have extra meta boxes on the screen and additional buttons inside the Visual post editor.

All the default and custom metaboxes on the post edit screen can be minimized, hidden, rearranged. To minimize a meta box you need to click on the upward arrow icon next to the title of the meta box. To maximize it, click on the downward arrow next to the title of the meta box.

You can click and hold on a meta box title and then drag it to rearrange its position on the post edit screen. You can move it down and upwards. There are two areas where you can move a meta box. The right hand column or at the bottom of the post editor.

To hide additional meta boxes from your post edit screen, you need to click on the screen options button on the top right corner of the screen. A flydown menu would appear with the check boxes to hide or display the meta boxes on the screen. You can also choose to have a single or double column layout.

For an even cleaner experience, you can try the full screen editor. Simply click on the full screen button on the post editor or press ALT+Shift+W keys on your keyboard.

In full screen writing mode, all metaboxes are hidden and you have just basic formatting buttons at the top, your post title, and the post editor. Even the toolbar at top only appears when you move your mouse outside post editor. This is called distraction-free writing mode.

Play around with the arrangement and improve your writing experience. What’s even cooler is that each person can have their own arrangement without affecting the other author’s on the site. After all, we all work in different ways.

We hope this article helped you rearrange your post edit screen in WordPress to improve your writing experience. If you liked this article, then join us on Twitter and consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.

How to Rearrange Post Edit Screen in WordPress

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How to Add Caption to Images in WordPress?

WordPress Tips – Ever wonder how some sites add small texts below their images? Well that’s a caption. It comes in handy if you want to provide additional details about your image. WordPress comes with a built-in functionality to add captions to your photos. In this article, we will cover how to add caption to images in WordPress.

First thing you need to do is to upload an image. You can add images to WordPress by clicking on the Add Media button while writing a post/page. Once you have uploaded an image, you will see a form where you can provide the image information such as title, caption, alternate text, and description for your image.

The title and description boxes are not visible to your users. However, caption will appear with the image when you insert it into your post. Depending on how your theme handles captions, you will see something like this:

You can also add caption to images when creating an image gallery in WordPress. Once you have uploaded your photos, you can enter captions directly below an image, like this:

The captions will appear with your gallery images. The appearance of captions may vary depending on how your theme styling. This is how gallery captions appear in the default Twenty Fourteen theme:

Adding Captions to Multiple Images in Multiple Posts

If you post a lot of photographs on your site, then perhaps you would like to revisit your photos and add captions to photos in different posts. You don’t need to open each post in the post editor just to add captions to images. You can add captions by editing an image directly.

To do that, go to Media » Library. There you will see all your photos and images. Take your mouse over to an image you want to edit, and you will notice that a few links would appear below it. You need to click on Edit Image link.

This will open image in the WordPress image editor screen. You can add caption to your image here. You can also crop, rotate, and resize your images from edit image screen.

We hope this article helped you add caption text to your images in WordPress. If you liked this article, then please join us on Twitter or subscribe to our YouTube Channel

How to Add Caption to Images in WordPress?

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How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting?

Often overlooked, web hosting is one of the key component of every successful website. Choosing the best web hosting for your needs can improve your SEO and increase sales. There are various different types of WordPress hosting options available such as Free, Shared, VPS, Dedicated, and managed WordPress hosting. In this guide, we will help you choose the best WordPress hosting for your website.

Datasolu is the largest unofficial WordPress resource site that receives millions of pageviews per month. Having helped 100,000+ users and years of experience with WordPress hosting companies, we know the importance of choosing the best web hosting company. Our goal with this article is to offer insights on things you need to consider when choosing a WordPress hosting company. We will also share our list of top WordPress hosting providers.

How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting?

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Tips and Tools to Pick the Best Domain for Your Blog

SEO Tips – Picking the right domain name for a blog is an essential step to success. Think of a domain name as a brand to your website, and like any other product, a blog will be really hard to rebrand if you decide to choose another name. Some people underestimate the process of picking the domain, and we urge you to take it seriously and make the right choice. With that in mind, pick what you think is the best using the tips and tools we provide in this article.

What to Consider While Picking a Domain Name?

Picking a domain might sound hard at first, but it is not when you use the simple metric that we created for you which assist you in the evaluating process and make the decision much easier. Below are things you need to consider when registering a domain name.

Keywords

Keywords play an important role in a domain. Good keywords in the domain also assist in ranking higher in the search engine. But to get a good keyword name like webhosting.com is very hard to get these days without spending a hefty sum. But as new niche markets are coming out, the possibilities of keywords are increasing as well, so use your creativity and get a keyword in the domain.

Branding

In the quest for keywords sometimes we forget about our users and audience. Make sure your domain is catchy and easy to memorize so the user can come back to your website and not forget about it. Sometimes the most unrelated and catchy domains do best. Take Google for example. The word has nothing to do with a search engine, but now it dominates the web. So keep in mind about branding while registering the domain name.

Length, Hyphens, and More

The shorter the domain, the better it is because it is easy to memorize, but don’t just buy because of length. It wouldn’t be any use if you qvwmt.com because that does not relate to your niche. You may use hyphens in your domain, but try to stay away from those as much as possible because as the domain gets bigger, the value of it goes down. You need to avoid double letters domain because you it increases your chances of losing traffic to typos. So domains such as WordPresssetup.com you may want to avoid because it confuses the user.

Domain Extension

While we know that .com is the most popular extension for domains, don’t limit yourself to just that. Get the extension that suits your site the most. So if your blog is about an organization then get .org. If it is an informational site, getting a .info won’t hurt you either. But .com is a plus and mostly preferred because most of the users type .com without thinking about it.

Domain Registrars

There are hundreds of domain registrars on the web that are offering you domain registration and more. But like many other scams on the web, there are scam domain registrars that disappear every three months, and you get left hanging. Therefore we suggest you get a domain from one of these popular registrars that has been around and have earned a good reputation in the industry.

Dotster – One of the most reputable domain registrar in the industry. (Buy One Domain and Get one Free – Coupon: GetOneFree)

GoDaddy – One of the domain giants on the web. You can register your domains with them with full trust because we know they are not going anywhere.

Network Solutions – Another industry giant that offers reliable domain registration service.

Domainsite – One of the younger domain registrars but has a good support and the same options.

Tools to Register the Domain

With so many tools online it gets hard to choose between them. Some of them are completely useless, and some are actually very good. We have compiled a list of some of the most useful tools for domain registration.

1. Domai.nr

Domai.nr is an innovative web tool that helps you explore other TLD’s that have made popular websites like last.fm and del.icio.us stand out from the crowd. Of course, searches will also include popular top-level domains that are available but it is a very creative tool that you can use to come up with ideas.

2. Nameboy

Nameboy is a popular domain name generator. It is very straightforward web tool. This asks for a “Primary Word” and “Secondary Word” that describe the topic of your website, and based on your input, it suggests possible domain names.

3. Domains Bot

DomainsBot is a domain search engine that has an “Advanced” search feature so that you can conduct a more customized and refined search. For example, you can set the maximum domain character length to eliminate lengthy domain names from the results or exclude domain results that have a hyphen (-).

4. Dot-o-Mator

Dot-o-mator is a web tool that suggests site names based on prefixes and suffixes that you’ve entered (keywords). Alternatively, you can use a category of prefixes (like “Tech” or “Games”) and suffixes (like “Hardware” or “Web 2.0 words”) to generate suggested site names for you. It’s a helpful tool for, at the very least, obtaining inspiration for a site name.

5. Dyyo.com

It’s common practice to keep domain names as short as possible so that it can be quickly typed and also so that they’re easier to remember. dyyo.com specializes in helping you find 4-letter domain names to keep your URLs terse.

Some Other Tools to Consider

Expired Domains Search – Database for Expired Domains.

Domize – Domain Search Portal

Bust A Name – Domain Search

Tips and Tools to Pick the Best Domain for Your Blog

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How to Optimize Your WordPress Blog Posts

Often we notice that beginners install and activate the SEO plugins, but they never use it properly. We asked some of our users about it, and their response was “I didn’t know that I was suppose to be doing this”. Yes, we are talking about SEO meta data such as title and meta description. By using SEO functions properly for each post, you can definitely improve your search rankings. There is a lot you can do to optimize your blog posts, so they can perform better in search results. In this WordPress SEO tip for beginners, we will show you how to properly use SEO functions in WordPress posts.

We use WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to optimize our blog posts. Therefore, all screenshots will reflect that.

Choosing a Focus Keyword

A focus keyword is the main keyword that you are hoping people will look for and find your post. If your blog is in a competitive niche then chances are that you will be competing with many other established and reputable publications for popular keywords. In such situation, you can get more organic traffic by using long tail keywords. Always remember that your audience is humans not search engines. People don’t just type one keyword in search engines, they use phrases. Your focus keyword can be a phrase.

WordPress SEO by Yoast allows you to choose a focus keyword for your individual posts. It also helps you find similar keywords as you type your focus keyword.

Once you have chosen a focus keyword for your post, WordPress SEO will show you how many times you have used the keyword in different areas of your post.

Writing a Good SEO-Friendly Post Title

A good SEO friendly post title is human readable, contains your focus keyword and is within the 70 characters limit. However, it also needs to be catchy. When your page appears in the search results, a user will decide whether or not they want to click on it based on the SEO title and the description in the search snippet. The description part may change as search engines display the most relevant part of your article as the description. But the title will remain the same. Make sure your SEO title describes exactly what people will get if they clicked on the link. And finally, simplify your title, rather than using “A Comparison between Categories and Tags From SEO point of view” or “My thoughts on Categories and Tags” try something like “Categories vs. Tags – SEO Best Practices for Sorting your Content”. This title is not only catchy, it also contains the right keywords that people would be searching for.

Post SEO Meta Description

Some SEO experts believe that Meta description tag on a page has become irrelevant. However, many others would disagree. At WPBeginner, we recommend using meta description for all of your posts. A good meta description can explain a lot more about an article. Meta Description is also shown in social media sites like Facebook, Google+, and in Twitter via Twitter Cards.

Since now you know that people are going to be reading your meta descriptions, you want to make sure that it is helpful. You also want to make sure that you at least mention your focus keyword in the meta description for search purposes. The character limit for Meta Description is 155 characters. Try to stay within that limit or your meta description will be truncated after 155 characters. Try to use your focus keyword earlier in the meta description rather than later.

Categories and Tags

Categories and tags help you sort your content not only for your reader, but for yourself as well as search engines. Earlier we have written a detailed guide on how to use Categories and Tags in WordPress. Think of your website as a book. Categories are the table of content, and tags are the index part of the book.

Make Internal Linking a Habit

Once you have blogged for a while, you will have enough content that you would want people to read. With internal linking you can send new readers to check out your older relevant posts. Internal linking is a great way to develop context between your new and old posts thus passing relevant link juice. WordPress allows you to search for your old posts right inside the post editor. Press the link button in your post editor and click on “Or link to existing content”. This will open a search box. Search for older posts that you want to link to and it will show the results as you type. Select the post you want to link and press Add link button.

Each post you publish on your website has the potential to increase your search engine traffic. By adding meta data to your posts, writing good headlines, and cross linking between your older articles, you will soon start noticing an increase in your search traffic. We hope that you found this WordPress SEO tip for beginners helpful. Let us know, what you are doing to optimize your WordPress blog posts?

How to Optimize Your WordPress Blog Posts

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Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Tips

Seo TIPs - Getting a high rank on search engines through user keyword searches can be difficult, but with proper focus on writing your blog posts for search engine optimization (SEO), you can boost your rank for specific keyword searches and your blog’s traffic. Follow these tips to get the biggest results.

1. Check the Popularity of Keywords

In order to obtain traffic from keyword searches on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo!, you need to be writing about a topic that people want to read about and are actively looking for information about. One of the easiest ways to get a basic idea of what people are looking for online is to check the popularity of keyword searches on websites like Wordtracker, Google AdWords, Google Trends or the Yahoo! Buzz Index. Each of these sites provides a snapshot of keyword popularity at any given time.

2. Select Specific and Relevant Keywords

A good rule to go by is to select one keyword phrase per page then optimize that page to that keyword phrase. Keywords should be relevant to the overall content of your page. Furthermore, choose specific keywords that are more likely to give you a better search results ranking than a broad term would. For example, consider how many sites use the keyword phrase of “punk music.” The competition for ranking using that keyword is likely to be tough. If you choose a more specific keyword like “Green Day concert,” the competition is a lot easier.

3. Select a Keyword Phrase of 2 or 3 Words

Statistics show that nearly 60% of keyword searches include 2 or 3 keywords. With that in mind, try to optimize your pages for searches on keyword phrases of 2 or 3 words to drive the biggest results.

4. Use Your Keyword Phrase in Your Title

Once you select the keyword phrase you plan to optimize your page for, make sure you use that phrase in the title of your blog post (or page).

5. Use Your Keyword Phrase in Your Subtitle and Headlines

Breaking blog posts up using subtitles and section headlines not only makes them more visually appealing on a text heavy computer screen, but it also gives you additional opportunities to use your keyword phrase.

6. Use Your Keyword Phrase in the Body of Your Content

It’s important that you use your keyword phrase in the body of your blog post. A good goal to try to achieve is to use your keyword phrase at least twice in the first paragraph of your post and as many times as you can (without keyword stuffing – see #10 below) within the first 200 (alternatively, the first 1,000) words of your post.

7. Use Your Keyword Phrase in and Around Your Links

Search engines count links higher than plain text in their search algorithms, so try to create links that use your keyword phrase. Avoid using links that simply say, “click here” or “more information” as these links will do nothing to help you with your search engine optimization. Leverage the power of links in SEO by including your keyword phrase in them whenever possible. The text surrounding links is typically weighted more heavily by search engines than other text on your page as well. If you can’t include your keyword phrase in your link text, try to include it around your link text.

8. Use Your Keyword Phrase in Images

Many bloggers see a large amount of traffic sent to their blogs from image searches on search engines. Make the images you use in your blog work for you in terms of SEO. Make sure your image filenames and captions include your keyword phrase.

9. Avoid Block Quotes

There are differing opinions on this issue with one group of people saying that Google and other search engines ignore the text included in the HTML block quote tag when crawling a web page. Therefore, the text within the block quote tag won’t be included in terms of SEO. Until a more definitive answer can be determined to this issue, it’s a good idea to keep it in mind and use the block quote tag cautiously.

10. Don’t Keyword Stuff

Search engines penalize sites that stuff pages full of keywords simply to increase their rankings through keyword searches. Some sites are even banned from inclusion in search engine results because of keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is considered a form of spamming, and search engines have zero tolerance for it. Keep this in mind as you optimize your blog posts for search engines using your specific keyword phrase.

Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Tips

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5 Effective Ways to Improve the Security of Your WordPress Blog

Security is one of those problems in the online world, that people don’t pay much attention to.

I mean yes, it’s not everyday that someone breaks into your WordPress account, steals your data, deletes it and then disappears into thin air.But then again let’s face the facts – thousands of sites are being hacked right as you are reading this.

But hacking isn’t the only thing you should protect your online presence from. Stealing is probably a far bigger problem, especially in the blogging world where uniqueness is everything.

And even though Google and other search engines develop algorithms to tell where a piece of content originates from, it’s still not the best of feelings when you find your content copied on dozens of blogs.

[alert type="alert-info" block="false" close="false"]So, namely in the hopes to help you stay a little safer and focus on what actually matters (producing content), I have compiled a list of five effective ways to help you steer away from trouble, both in terms of hacks and theft:[/alert]

1. Add Links Against Copy/Paste

You don’t need any sophisticated tools to steal content. It is all as simple as copying an article and pasting somewhere else. And you even don’t have to worry about the formatting – that’ll be copied as well.

A bit too convenient for content thieves, don’t you think? 

Well lately I began using a great service, called Tynt. Although Tynt won’t disable copying of your content,  it’ll add an attribution link back to your blog whenever a piece of text from your blog gets copied.

The end result looks like this - Copied content + Read more at “URL of the article from which the text was stolen” 

You might say most thieves will simply delete that link, but chances are they won’t even notice it. I mean what most do is they simply copy, paste and publish.

Once you install Tynt, you will also get stats on how much copy commands have occurred for your site and which are your most copied posts. You can also track how much links you’ve generated with the read more links.

2. Setup Your Google Authorship

When there is duplicate content, in order to decide which one should get a lower ranking, in most cases search engines check to see which of the identical articles was published earlier. 

That however isn’t always enough, especially if someone with a blog with higher Page Rank happens to steal from you. In that case the stolen post might still end up getting more link juice.

That is where Google’s authorship comes into play. If you have your authorship confirmed, you are far less likely to have your content ranking lower than the same stolen and published on another blog.

So how do you set up your authorship? 

1. You need a Google+ Account


2. In the profile settings, you find “Contributor to”


3. You add a link to your blog there


4. Install SEO WordPress by Yoast


5. Go to Users –> Your Profile 


6. Scroll down to contact info


7. Add your Google+ profile URL

3. Make Sure to Disable Hotlinking

Chances are when someone copies an article of yours, the images in that article will also be copied. Once the thief publishes the post, the URLs of the images will point to your server. This will result in additional load for your hosting and hence lower performance for your blog.

The above practise of copying images directly is what  you call hotlinking.

And it doesn’t have to be someone stealing your content. People who don’t care about copyright might simply copy an image from your blog and use it for their own work.

So, how do you avoid those headaches? 

The answer is CloudFlare.

CloudFlare is a content delivery network. It improves loading times by caching your content, collecting information about the visitor’s location and sending the cached data from a local server.

The above alone plus the fact that the service is free (although they are additional premium features) , makes it an absolute must for every blogger…

In our case however, we are interested in the “Hotlink protection” checkbox that you can find in your CloudFlare profile. Turning it on is all you need to resolve the hotlinking issue.

You basically click on “Security Settings”, scroll down to “Hotlink protection” and click on the off button.

4. Upload Trusted Plugins Only

A hacker can easily gain access to your blog via a plugin you install. By installing a plugin, you basically grant it access to core files of your WordPress installation. That is why you should be careful when uploading plugins to your blog.

Here are the four considerations you need to make before installing any WordPress plugin:

• Is it featured in WordPress.orgplugins directory – if you can’t find the plugin here, it’s either premium one or it isn’t legitimate. Whenever there’s an option to download from there, don’t hesitate!


• What are the ratings – Pay attention to the star rating that the plugin has received and also the distribution of the votes. If the one-star ratings outweigh the five-star ones, there might be a security problem.


• Number of downloads – It’s best to look for a more popular plugin. A bad plugin simply can’t generate thousands of downloads, because it would be removed by the moderators of the plugins directory.


• Third-party reviews – As I mentioned premium plugins won’t be featured in this directory, so you have no way of telling if they are legitimate. When considering one such, make sure to look for reviews of people who have actually tried it. You can also go to CodeCanyon – a great directory for premium plugins and a good way to tell if a plugin is legitimate.

5. Use Those Two Security Plugins

Aside from the advice I shared in the above paragraphs, there are also two WordPress plugins that I’d like to introduce you to. They have one thing in common – both are designed to keep hackers away!

Admin username changer – Chances are you are stuck with the default username “admin”. And since fresh WordPress installations create an account namely with this username, that’ll be the first one hackers will use. Problem is usernames are normally unchangeable. That’s where “Admin username changer” comes into play. All it does is it adds a new tab in your dashboard, from which you can change your username to whatever you’d like.

Limit Login Attempts – Another plugin, intended to keep threats away from your WordPress login page. That one allows you to limit the number of times a user (based on a cookie or IP) can unsuccessfully log-in to your blog. You can also set up notifications when that happens and monitor the IP addresses. 

Final Words

Those are the steps I follow to protect my WordPress blog from unsolicited access and to reduce the damage from content thieves as much as possible (unfortunately there’s no sure-fire way to avoid your content being stolen).

Now I’d like to hear your comments guys! What are your ways to secure your WordPress-powered blog? Do you use any security plugins? What else can you add to the list? Please take a minute to share your two cents!

5 Effective Ways to Improve the Security of Your WordPress Blog

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9 WordPress Plugins You Should Install If You Just Started Blogging

Data Solutions Online – Recently I published two articles, about my move from Blogger to WordPress. Today’s post still has something to do with that move, as it will cover some of the more important WordPress plugins you need to add right after setting up WordPress.

There are tons plugins for WordPress users available out there. I am certain many of you wouldn’t even be using the service if there wasn’t such a variety.

After creating my self-hosted WordPress blog, I tried more than forty different plugins. Although not all of them worked properly, most proved highly useful!

Below is a list of the top nine, divided into categories: 

WordPress Plugins to Improve SEO

WordPress SEO by Yoast

On-site SEO is an important ingredient to a well-optimized blog. Letting the search engines know what your article is about right away is almost as important as a good link building campaign.

The WordPress SEO plugin helps you do just that! To start using it you simply add a focus keyword – the keyword that the tool will monitor. With a rating system (located below the post editor) you learn just how well you have optimized your post for that specific word:

As you can see the plugin allows you to see keyword density, readability score (very useful metric), image optimization, etc.

An additional feature gives you the ability to add specific descriptions for when you share your post on Google Plus and Facebook. Those will overwrite the meta description, which is generally used.

Additionally what you get with WordPress SEO by Yoast is a fully functional XML sitemap. This means that you don’t have to worry about your posts and pages not being indexed. You also don’t need to resubmit your sitemap or ping your content. That is done automatically.

Download WordPress SEO

WordPress Plugins to Improve Loading Speed

CloudFlare

The so-called CDNs (stands for Content Delivery Network) are becoming ever more popular these days. And there’s a good reason! Attaching your WordPress blog to one of those, enables you to take care of HTML, CSS and JavaScript optimization. Plus your blog is loaded entirely depending on the visitor’s location. All of this makes for reduced server requests and better loading times. 

CloudFlare is namely a CDN. To start using it, you first sign-up here and follow the instructions. The second step is to add the CloudFlare plugin.

One way to know if CloudFlare is working, is to open up Pingdom (a great service to test your site’s loading speed), put your blog’s URL and click “Test Now”. Once the process is completed, scroll down to see all the loaded components. Search for “cloudflare.min.js” (it should generally be the second file in the list).

If it is there then CloudFlare is working.

W3 Total Cache

Talking about WordPress plugins, one that you simply can’t go without is W3 Total Cache. The sole purpose of this add-on is to improve browser caching. That is aimed towards all visitors who have already been on your blog.

What browser caching does for you is it saves all of the scripts and images to your browser so that they don’t have to be loaded with every visit.

If you are a tech-savvy person, you will find lots of useful options within W3 Total Cache’s interface. Best thing to do if you aren’t one is to leave the default options, as they work pretty good.

NOTE: If you have both CloudFlare and W3 Total Cache, you need to open up W3 Total Cache’s settings and scroll down to “Network Performance and Security Powered by CloudFlare”, click enable and fill in the required details.

Download W3 Total Cache

WordPress Plugins to Improve User Experience

Broken Link Checker

That one is here for a good reason! Broken Link Checker gave me a HUGE helping hand in fixing all the broken links after my move from Blogger to WordPress.

Here we have yet another easy-to-use WordPress plugin that works on a semi-automatic mode. It is simple – the tool starts looking for broken links whenever your WordPress dashboard is opened. You can access the list of dead links by going to Settings –> Link Checker –> General (tab) –> Found # Broken Links.

From that point on, it’s your turn. You have to replace the broken link with the original. An added bonus is that you don’t have to change each instance of the link – all are replaced automatically. 

NOTE: For maximum efficiency while on the General tab click on the Settings tab. For the timeout setting insert 4 seconds.

Download Broken Link Checker

WP Google Fonts

If you have basic CSS knowledge, you will know about the so-called web safe fonts that you can use on your blog. Web safe fonts however are not ideal.

Those fonts often times look differently on different computers plus they can get boring…

WP Google Fonts is a great way to spice things up a bit. Once you install it, you gain access to Google’s own font directory, which has over 500 different fonts for you to try.

On the above image you can see how it all works. You simply select the font you’d like to use (you can preview the fonts here) and choose with which element you’d like use it.

Download WP Google Fonts

nRelate Related Content

There are lots of ways to keep visitors longer on your blog and thus reduce bounce rates. There is the option to display recent, featured or popular posts in your sidebar.

One of the best ways however is via a related content plugin. Those kinds of plugins are placed beneath the articles and provide posts to further educate on the same topic.

So…

I tried several related content WordPress plugins. There was quite a battle between nRelate and LinkWithin. I actually used the latter for quite a while on Blogger, but often encountered glitches.

In the end I decided to give nRelate a shot…

The good thing about nRelate is that it offers the user various templates. You can check each and every one out and see which looks best on your blog.

Additionally you can add slight visual modifications. To do that, you identify the elements’ class names with a tool like Firebug and you simply list them in your main stylesheet. Don’t forget to add !important to overwrite existing CSS properties.

Download nRelate Related Content

Advanced Recent Posts Widget

As I said, recent posts might not be the best way to get more pageviews. Fact of the matter is that they do help though.

When searching for recent posts plugin  you will come across lots of options. I went for Advanced Recent Posts Widget, because it’s fairly popular and has a high rating on the WordPress plugins page.

Once installed, the plugin can be found in the widgets area. There are lots of different options to suit your taste and help you get as much people as possible to click. You can include excerpts, comment count, thumbnails (you can also adjust dimensions) or only display titles.

NOTE: You can style the CSS by copying and pasting the CSS file from the plugins’ directory to the theme’s directory in your WordPress installation and applying the changes there.

Download Advanced Recent Posts Widget

Other Useful WordPress Plugins

Triberr

Have you already gotten into Triberr? Triberr is a great service that allows you to connect with like-minded individuals and then share each other’s posts on the popular social networks. I have written two articles (take a look at my Triberr review post) about it. If you haven’t yet signed up, there’s no better time than now!

What the Triberr plugin does for you is to automatically submit new blog posts to Triberr with the post’s image (which otherwise isn’t possible). The plugin also allows you to approve articles directly from within WordPress’s dashboard.

Download Triberr Plugin

Affiliate Link Cloaking

As I have mentioned in previous entries on this blog, affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money blogging. One thing that scares people away from viewing your product however, are the links themselves. They just look ugly.

So, what Affiliate Link Cloaking does for you is simple – it shortens those links, using your domain name. For example my shortened Tweet Adder affiliate link looks likehttp://www.reviewzntips.com/tweet-adder. 

Aside from that, you also get analytics data for your shortened links. That can be quite useful, as it can help you test different link placements and different anchor text combinations.

Download Affiliate Link Cloaking

Final Words

These are by far my favorite WordPress plugins! On to you – which are your favorites and why do you like them? Let us all know by leaving a comment!

9 WordPress Plugins You Should Install If You Just Started Blogging

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