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If you are an internet marketer, you probably have quite a bit on your plate already.   You have spent a great deal of time putting together a good website or blog and are really concentrating on how to deliver your product or information.   Unfortunately, there are a certain breed of people out there in cyberspace whose self appointed mission is to break into your vault and create havoc.

If you are using WordPress as a platform to blog from, here are a few tips on how to secure WordPress

Keep WordPress Updated and Backed Up

Older versions of WordPress still have many vulnerabilities that are widely known in the hacker community.  To their credit, the WordPress people are always doing their best to plug security holes and are updating constantly.   So your first line of defense is to keep your blogging platform updated.

Medical Tip:  To avoid increasing your blood pressure, always be sure to make a backup of your blog before installing any updates.   Its a good idea to regularly to keep your WordPress backed up regularly anyhow, since any number of things can go wrong.

Another tip is to delete the meta tags that tells the world of the version of Wp you are using.  This info is usually in the header file.

Keep Your Plugins Hidden

One of the great things about using WordPress is the plugins. While they greatly increase your blogs capabilities, they too contain certain bugs and vulnerabilities that are exploited by hackers.   So be sure to keep them updated also.

It is easy for anyone to see what type of plugins you are using by visiting the wp-content/plugins folder.   To keep potential intruders from finding out the plugins that you use, create an empty  ‘index.html’  file and place it in your plugins folder

Its also a good idea to check your plugin folder and make sure the plugins there are the ones you want.  Some hacker, once they get into your files upload their own plugin.   So if you see something that you are not familiar with, delete it.

Here is a  Free WP plugin that keeps track of the attempts to login to your site.   Many hackers use brute force to try and get your password.   So, if there are too many of them coming from the same IP address within a short period of time, the plugin will disable the login function for that IP range.   Login Lockdown:  bad-neighborhood.com.  Click on login lockdown and you will be taken to the download page.   Be sure to check out their other plugins to.

Change Your Passwords

This is an easy hack that is often exploited.  You can have a more  secure blog by making up a crazy, difficult password.   Even change it monthly if need be.

But not only your WordPress login.  Don’t forget your hosting account and your ftp passwords as well.

Headache tip: Be sure to write your passwords down immediately and keep all your them all in a safe place.

Secure the /wp-admin/ directory

Your  most sensitive Wordpress information is stored in the /wp-admin/ folder.  By default, WordPress leaves that folder open, so people can access these files to make changes  if they know what they are doing.

To secure this folder:

Place an .htaccess file inside the /wp-admin/ folder to block the access to all IP addresses, except yours.

Here is the code you need to put in the .htaccess file:

AuthUserFile /dev/null

AuthGroupFile /dev/null

AuthName “Example Access Control”

AuthType Basic

order deny,allow

deny from all

allow from xx.xx.xx.xx

allow from xx.xx.xxx.xx

Now, ff you ever find your site being redirected to another website you will need to:

Check For Hidden Code

This requires a bit more knowledge of the inner workings of WP on your part, so don’t mess with it unless you know what you are doing.

Browse your theme files

Log into your WordPress control panel, go to the theme editor, and look inside your theme files.   See if there are any lines of code that are not supposed to be there, or that contain a PHP code that you don’t recognize.

Check your database tables

Some hackers upload fake images to your “Uploads” folder and activate them with a plugin call.   To detect this you need to open PHPMyAdmin, browse the “wp-options” table, and edit the “active_plugins” record.

On that record you will see a list of all the plugins that active on your blog.   Delete any that seem unusual or that you aren’t using

Browse your site files through FTP

Log into your FTP account and browse through the folders on your site.   You are looking for any files that have a strange name or that look suspicious.    If you have another WordPress blog installed on another site, compare the structure of the files to make sure they match up.

Tip to avoid a heart attack:  Remember: Backup, backup, backup, before you star messing with anything!

Be Fearless

Billy Ojai

In this article I am going to talk a little about the WordPress Blog Platform, its main features, advantages and benefits. WordPress has proven to be one blog platform that came to stay and compete with big blog services like Blogger from Google. Unlike most blog services provided by big online blog providers, WordPress is open source and offers flexibility, personalization and security since it can be hosted on your own web host and you don’t have to worry about waking up the morning logon your blog and see some message like “Your Account Has Been Suspended / Deleted” without any notice and all the content gone, certainly one of the worst things that could happen to an internet marketer. WordPress allows you to customize your blog according to your niche, product or service, using tens of applications, themes and plug-ins available with what you can create whatever you imagine.

When choosing a WordPress theme there is one very important issue to be considered, if you are going to use a free or a premium one. It’s quite easy to find a lot of free themes by simply Googling “free WordPress themes” and adding some more keywords according to what you’d like to find. Free themes can be good but sometimes you have to be cautious about hidden traps; the problem with free themes is that many times they do not offer a good quality of coding, several built-in advertising, lack of support and it is not unique, you can usually check how many times a theme has been downloaded beside the download button.

Otherwise, Premium themes can be excellent and definitely worth the money when you can rely on a technical support and have a layout designed specially for you and suitable to your purpose. After choosing and implementing your theme, the next step is to add some plug-ins that will be useful for you depending on what you intend to post on your blog, this is totally customizable and you can check and download some indispensable plug-ins at the WordPress web site.

That said, if you are serious about your blogging you should consider using WordPress along with a premium theme, you will have better support, customization, uniqueness and no ads. WordPress functionalities can be easily customized using plug-ins that allows you to add extra services and to interact with your visitors; they will eventually help you to manage your blog better.

No matter how great your web design is, your website/blog is incomplete without plug-ins. There are different kinds of plug-ins that work for different websites and hence we have sorted out the top ten plug-ins that are indispensable to your WordPress website.

1. Kaltura Interactive Video Player Plug-in
This plug-in allows the upload and import videos directly from the player as well lets others add their own videos. It is so flexible that users can add comments and annotations that can have text bubbles and subtitles and edit the videos as they like. Users are also allowed to report abuse to any offensive content, they can rate the video and these can be shared and embedded with any widget as well.

2. All in One SEO Pack Plug-in
This particular plug-in plays a key role in optimizing the blog you have on WordPress. It does so in way that the posts written by you and the pages are indexed for the search ability of the search engines. The All in One SEO pack plug-in is so effective that it singles out pages individually and increases their visibility.

3. WordPress Database Backup
Just like it is necessary to keep a back up of the data we work on, similarly it is important to save a back up of the database we work on. Say for example, you have installed a system where in your email allows the option of attachment along with it. Now, if you do not have a database backup plug-in installed for your website, you will lose this feature and you may have to re-install it which is time consuming.

4. Akismet
Your website just cannot do without this plug-in. The primary feature of this add-in is to filter all the spam/junk comments, links and keep them away from your website. It is known as Automattic Kismet.

5. Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin
This is a vital plug-in for your WordPress website - the Feedburner Feedsmith Plug-in helps in redirecting the clicks made on your standard website to the feedburner RSS feeds that allows the subscribers.

6. Max Blog Press Unblockable Popup
This plug-in is very useful in letting people know about your latest updates through the newsletters. The best thing about this is that it comes as a unblockable pop up that obviously cannot be ignored. So, people are bound to notice it.

7. Google XML Sitemaps
The best way to navigate through your website is sitemap. Getting this plug-in means that no matter what changes you make in the website, addition/deletion of pages and this plug in informs Google about it and it gets updated automatically.

8. WordPress Auto-Tagger
As the name suggests, whatever posts you put in your blog/website, the plug-in selects the apt tags for them by analysing the popular ones on Yahoo and other search results related to your website content.

9. Redirection
Redirection plug in comes along with WordPress basically to take care of the 301 redirections, errors like 404 and basically manage any aspect that your website is lacking in. This plug in proves useful when you are trying to migrate pages from some old webpage.

10. RSS Includes Pages
If you want your pages to appear in the RSS feeds, simply go ahead and get this plug-in for your WordPress website or blog.

Do you think that your WordPress blog is not faring well on the World Wide Web? There could be many probable reasons for it; the primary one being that your WordPress blog is not properly optimized for search engines.

Today, thousands of new blogs get posted on the Internet every day. However, only some of them become successful and drive heavy web traffic. Here are some SEO tips using which you can you can optimize your WordPress blog and make it more search engine friendly.

1) Alter the Permalink Structure: Set your permalinks optimally for SEO. The permalink of your WordPress blog, by default, is clumsy and not optimal, and usually the URL reflects p67 etc. However, it can be easily edited by clicking on the ‘Settings’ tab and then ‘Permalinks’ menu on the dashboard of WordPress. You can then customize it as abc.com/category/postname. Now, your blog post category and title would be visible in the URL rather than a long numeral series.

2) Optimize your blog for keyword phrase: Before you post a blog, you must do some extensive keyword research with the help of Google AdWords Keyword tool and find a low competition keyword phrase with a long tail. Focus aptly on the keyword density and remember to use it in the title keeping a density of 3-4% through the blog content.

3) Add a Comprehensive SEO Pack: Install this All in One SEO pack that enables you to optimize meta tags & keyword tags along with their description, add a custom title for your blog site.

4) Bookmark each blog post: Take the help of social bookmarking websites such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon etc. as this would enable you to promote your blog effectively and bring in heavy web traffic through lots of back linking. You can also OnlyWire and submit your blog posts to multiple bookmarking sites simultaneously.

5) Apply Google XML Sitemap plugins: Install XML plugins so that all your blog posts and web pages are indexed easily by search engines. You can also use these plugins for generating a sitemap for you blog site.

6) Optimize the home page of your blog site: Use a keyword research tool and figure out good keyword phrases for your home page and remember to include the keyword phrases in the meta description, Title tags and the running content of your home page. These relevant keyword phrases can fetch you hundreds of searches per day.

7) Practice link building: You can easily give a remarkable boost to the search engine rankings of your website with link building thereby driving in considerable web traffic to your website. Use article submission to multiple directory submissions, article marketing, forum postings, blog comments, media coverage, press releases, emails, newsletters, social bookmarking etc. for link building.
Optimize your Blog gifs/Images: You can optimize your images by using keywords in the ‘Alt’ attribute and ad keywords in the names of the images. Also, input the image description in the image title tag.

Now that you know the basic SEO tips to optimize your WordPress blog, you must optimize the same at the earliest for instant web results on major search engines. Besides these SEO tips, your WordPress blog must be hosted on a secure server that has a decent uptime and offers you 24 × 7 technical and customer support service so that your WordPress blog is accessible to the visitors all the time and your SEO efforts can fetch excellent results. Currently, there are many good web hosts performing well in Web Hosting business such as LimeDomains, HostGator, Network Solutions etc.