Author Archives: Daniel Page

Coding Screen

Java Is A Security Risk: Here’s How To Deactivate It

The Problem

For those who aren’t aware, Java is a programming language that requires installing a piece of software called the Java Runtime Environment on machines that run Java code. Many people use Java to create applications that run in browsers however to do this, browsers need to have a plugin installed.

Unfortunately, over recent months there have been numerous security problems discovered in Java, some of which will allow malicious third parties to infect machines running Java with malware via the browser.

Java’s owners, Oracle, have been slow to issue patches to fix the security vulnerabilities, and researchers are discovering new zero-day exploits with alarming frequency.

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SEO is Long term Commitment

The Truth About SEO: It’s a Long-Term Commitment

There exists a misconception among many business owners that SEO is a process that once done is done forever. This can lead businesses to fail to extract the maximum benefit from their online presence. If we truly consider search engine optimization a continuous process, businesses might be losing out.

Their competitors likely have a more aggressive and nuanced approach. These competitors are refining and adjusting their strategies constantly. Consequently, the businesses with a less dynamic approach risk falling behind.

We’re going to take a look at three major reasons why business owners should consider SEO as an ongoing part of their marketing and promotion.

First we should define our terms. In this article we are conceiving of SEO as not just optimizing for keywords and traditional link building. Since the Panda and Penguin updates, high-quality content has become the bedrock of effective SEO strategy. SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand.

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What Can Google Wallet For Web Content Do For Bloggers

Monetizing can be a bit of a puzzler for bloggers. For those who blog for its own sake rather than for SEO or content marketing purposes, turning posts into money generally relies on an advertising model.

Advertising is how most commercially viable blogs fund themselves. Using AdSense, or some other third party advertising provider, they display advertising and hope to get a sufficient amount of clicks to generate a decent revenue.

Unfortunately click-through rates are pretty low, often as few as 1 in a 1000 visitors click, which means that even a very popular blog with visitors in the hundreds of thousands can fail to make a livable income from their work. Continue reading

External hard disk

Backup Your WordPress Site to Amazon S3: The Ultimate Safety Net

There’s nothing more heartbreaking for a website owner than having put dozens or hundreds of hours of work into perfecting their WordPress site, only to have it trashed by hackers, hardware failure, or a simple administrative mistake.

WordPress is enormously popular, with good reason, but as with any complex software it’s susceptible to malicious individuals and user errors. Always back up your WordPress database and other assets so you can easily restore your site if disaster strikes. By reinstalling and importing your data, you can quickly return to the state your site was in before any issues occurred.

Most decent hosting companies will keep a backup for you, but as the saying goes, if your data doesn’t exist in three places, it doesn’t exist at all. Having a backup available that you fully control can be very useful.

There are many services and extensions that will help you with backing-up, but we’re going to take a look at how to back up to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

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SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best Of December 2012

As 2012 rolled to a close, the SEO and content marketing world was inundated with predictions and prognostications of what is to come in 2013. This month’s content curation round-up is going to include a lot of crystal ball gazing. It’ll be interesting to come back here in a year’s time and see who was right, who was wrong, and who was so wrong we can point and laugh at them.

SEO and Content Marketing

Essential Tools for SEO

During this session we’ve had some rather technical articles about SEO, so it’s time for a short breather. We’ll do this by taking a look at some of the tools that are useful for search engine optimization.

7 Ways to Resuscitate a Boring Links Post

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WordPress Site's Speed

Is Your WordPress Site’s Speed Affecting Search Rankings

Rocket
WordPress Site Speed

It’s a cliché to say we live in an age of impatience, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Internet users expect immediate information delivery. Research indicates they won’t wait long.

Bounce rates increase with page load times. Slower loading pages lead to more users clicking the back button. These users will then return to the search engine. They will likely choose the next link, which could be a competitor.

Google, in its effort to direct its users to the sites most likely to satisfy them, uses page load times as one of its signals for determining ranking. All else being equal, you could be losing ranking to a competitor because your site loads less swiftly.

There are various strategies site owners can implement to make sure that their users get the pages they want as quickly as possible, and we’re going to have a look at some of the most important ones here.

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Old Bridge Collapse

Five SEO Strategies That Can Hurt Your Ranking

Seo Target

Seo Target

Google is secretive about its ranking algorithms. They are a complex mixture of over two hundred carefully weighted signals that contribute to deciding where on the search engine results pages a particular page appears.

People don’t like complexity and secrecy, especially when their income depends on the information that’s hidden. They yearn for quick and simple solutions, and so naturally there arises a group who will sell them spurious peace of mind. In our industry, that place is occupied by the bad SEO, who promises a quick-fix ride to the top of the SERPs, often employing many of the methods we’re about to discuss. No SEO worth his salt is going to rely on these techniques, or promise an easy and simple solution to the problem of ranking well.
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Rescue

Resource Round-up: The Best of SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Marketing This November

As usual, this month we’ve trawled the wilds of the Internet to bring you what we think is the most informative, timely, and useful content. Enjoy!

Search Engine Optimization

  • Remarketing with Google Analytics is about building targeted audiences. Remarketing with Google has become more popular in the last six months. I think this trend will continue into 2013. Once you get the hang of it, it is relatively easy to set up and manage.
  • SEO Variables You Need To Know – Search engines use multiple variables to determine how good a website is and how relevant it is to a user’s search query.
  • Guide to Rich Snippets – Infographic – High rankings in the SERPS are no longer enough. Rich snippets are part of increasingly enhanced SERPs designed to help people make decisions before they click.
  • What’s the Difference Between SEO and Content Marketing? – The main reason creating content just for Google is missing the point is because that’s not what Google wants you to do.
  • Building a Video SEO Strategy – The core tactics of technical Video SEO are pretty easy to pick up. You can read through the bulk of what there is to know about getting rich snippets, optimizing for YouTube, and driving links back to your site within a couple of hours.
  • When you launch a new website, should you focus on SEO or PPC? There are many ways to attract targeted traffic. It’s often hard to know which method is best. SEO and PPC are two popular ways to drive traffic. But is one better than the other?
  • 9 Best WordPress SEO Plugins – A great roundup of plugins to help your site get to where it belongs in the SERPs.
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Social Login button

The Pros and Cons of Social Log-in Buttons

Facebook Social Login Button
(Attrib: Flickr/Rob Enslin)

When it comes to website design, speed and simplicity are key. It doesn’t take much for users to become confused or frustrated and abandon their intended action.

This is especially true for user registration. If you ask users to enter a lot of data, they might leave. Even asking for a little data in a confusing way can make users abandon the process. For websites, this abandonment means lost conversions.

Social logins offer a method of drastically simplifying this process.

Social logins use your existing social media login information. This allows for a single sign-on. The user picks a social network. They choose which network to link to their new account. Then, they approve the login using that network. That’s the basic process. (This doesn’t include times when specific data needs to be collected.) As a result, social logins can make registration much easier.

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Boost Seo

Guest Blogging: Boost Your SEO or Waste of Time?

Guest blogging took off in a big way this year. It’s an increasingly popular way to spread brand awareness and an excellent adjunct to other inbound marketing strategies.

That said, the answer to the question in the headline is ‘No’. You should not be guest blogging.

That is, you shouldn’t be guest blogging if you think that any of the following are true:

  • Article banks are a great source of guest blog content.
  • Guest blogs don’t need to be of the same quality as the content on your own blog.
  • The same article, or a spun version, can be used for multiple blogs.
  • Guest blogging is a cheap way to get inbound links.

Take a look at this video from the estimable Matt Cutts if you’re curious why we have such a downer on guest blogging.

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