Category: Website

Please Link to my site emails

Paul

From time to time I get emails asking me to link to there sites because of one thing or another. I have no problem linking to sites that I think have valuable information, but when I get email to link to sites that are really new I have a problem.

[ad]In the email he talks about how his business got scammed out of 6,000$ dollars and how he just created the site four weeks earlier due to how out raged he is that his business got scammed for so much money.

As you may have noticed this site that still remains unnamed because I am uncomfortable with adding the link to my site. Now I won’t say anything bad about [intlink id=”4110″ type=”post”]creating a site[/intlink], and I am sure it was something like the [intlink id=”1417″ type=”post”]Check cashing scam[/intlink] I came across a few months ago and talked about.

So I wanted to talk about how to get people to come to you site:

  • Submit your Site to search engines —  This is the first step to getting people to find your site.   Some sites to submit to for free are Pingomatic, Ask.com, and Yahoo.   These are the three that I suggest starting off to have Search engines finding your site.  All other search engines will come to your site over time.

  • Create informative posts —  This is also very important creating posts that people will link to your site is the most important step to building your website.   If you create posts people have heard about on other sites your site will not be put on the front of Google searches.   If you don’t have links coming from other sites, you will not get any search engine visitors to your site.

  • Don’t ask to be linked in the early stages of a new site —  That is just asking for web owners to ignore you and not link to your site.   if they see it is a new they will not want to support it because of the possible spam retribution that will happen with Google if they are a spam site building links.  This is why it is more important to build your links naturally and not beg for links.

  • Link to other sites —  This is sometimes called the “Buddy system”.   Linking to sites will most likely cause the site to link back and sometimes throwing out links to sites also help you build links to your site.

Although these are just a few ways to increase readership and visibility towards your website population.   You can find more ideas and information ways to build your website at Seobook.com, which has some great ideas to generate links to your site.

Adblock No more!!

Paul

If you are a returning visitor to my site you may notice that Adblock Plus isn’t blocking my advertising.

bypass-adblock

Let me start off saying I use Adblock Plus and enjoy it when it comes to those Annoying Pop ups and Pop unders that happens when you visit sites that aren’t that bright.  Even those annoying ads that come and speak to you saying you have won something.   These types of ads I am so glad to block.

When it comes to my site, I have worked hard on creating this content and it will help me pay for the server and domain name.   I fully understand why people want to block ads but on the flip side I also know about how they can help support a site.

Often times, I turn Adblock Plus off for places like HULU to make sure they stay free.   This is one way I can support having free shows is watching ads because there might be something I could be interested in.   This is how I show respect for advertising publishers.

I know how hard these places have worked to get people to use there service and respect the idea of having the service paying for it through ads.

I have learned how to prevent Adblock Plus from blocking my site and I intent to keep doing it.    As you know these ad blocking programs tend to break the site from showing properly.   This is one reason I decided I should bypass Adblock Plus and I will be doing more later on to tweak it.   I however won’t be doing those annoying ads on my site, that is just tactless, in my eyes.  These ads will not be POP UP or POP UNDERS.  They will not be to flashy and annoying, but they will be there.

I ask if you like a product on my site to buy it to show your support, this will keep the site running.   I hope you understand, and thank you for your patronage.

Securing Your WordPress blog

Paul

In the last few blog post we talked about:

This post we discuss securing your WordPress blog and creating even more of a WordPress Firewall, as I call it.   You don’t know what bot or person might be lurking around your blog to get access to installing malware or worse off taking control over your blog for there own nefarious reasons.

Photo by: Terry Mun Photo by: Terry Mun

Now since you have installed WordPress and have it working now what do you want to do blog?  Blogging will be coming later in this series but for right now we want to take a good look at removing your Default Admin user.   Like the default routers admin profiles and password this makes it even easier for a hacker to try to find out the password.  Although You should never use a simple password.   You should always use numbers and letters in random order to make a really strong password and have it at least 8 characters long.  The longer it is the better off you at preventing unauthorized access to your blog and your blog posts.

Prevent access to Wp-admin and or image directory from bots.  This can be good you can also use this in combination to disallowing every IP but yours to help prevent people from gaining access to your pictures or you admin login page.   This is all preference and how secure you want to control access to admin page.   I feel if you have good security in place you should be in good shape.   If you don’t have a permenant or static IP and have a rotating IP you can however increase your security by password protect the wp-admin directory from unauthorized people.

I’ve also been using a few plugins to help protect your admin page from hackers, they can help prevent unauthorized access by limiting how many times you can attempt an a login:

  • Login Logger – keeps track of recent logins to WordPress for all users, as well as all failed logins. It records username, time, IP address and how long since each login attempt as well as time since last active for each user.

  • Limit Login Attempts – Limit the number of login attempts possible both through normal login as well as (WordPress 2.7+) using auth cookies.  By default WordPress allows unlimited login attempts either through the login page or by sending special cookies. This allows passwords (or hashes) to be brute-force cracked with relative ease.

I have talked about [intlink id=”3698″ type=”post”]Wordpress security plugins and other things[/intlink] you can do to better protect our WordPress blog.   I would suggest looking at that and make sure you harden your security for WordPress so that you don’t have a problem with hackers.   Although these are just a few you should go check out the WordPress article from the creators of WordPress and also consider using some of those recommendations to keep your WordPress blog secure.

On the next blog post we will talk about Blog themes and how they help your audience.   We are almost done but do stay tuned.

Setting up WordPress

Paul

In the last few blog post we talked about:

Now we can talk about setting up WordPress, although this probably won’t be a long topic.  I feel it is necessary to help people feel less stressed in setting up a blog.   Most of my family don’t have a clue how I set mine up, and I am thinking they are uncomfortable because this is foreign to them.   I intend to try to easy everyone’s stress levels by explaining it in a more relax atmosphere.

As most people will know I started my blog 3 Years ago, and haven’t stop blogging sense.   Some would call this what a blogger does.   I call this an experience, because what I’ve learned over the last three years is priceless.  As you can tell when I started my blog I was clueless about how to blog.   Over the 3 years I’ve learned a lot and a glad to be part of the blogging community.   It’s been a long process but a really fruitful one.

Photo by: Terry Mun Photo by: Terry Mun

Now I am wanting to pass the experience onto new users on.  Most people will expect a website management to be hard.   Creating a website even harder, here I will talk about installing it.

One way to install WordPress is through some Hosting providers website tools they offer to install WordPress for free.   They basically use a script to install WordPress.   Usually they are a version behind the last release of WordPress, now since WordPress has also integrated upgrades you can easily upgrade after your install the older version.

The other way is just as simple, You can install it using an FTP upload.  Now I am so glad WordPress has a tutorial for this.  I had to use it at least once in the three years to install WordPress.  You would however have to download the WordPress zip file and make a sub directory, calling it WORDPRESS and extract into that then upload that whole directory to either your main or sub directory.   If you’d think it is hard, I would argue it isn’t.    This way only took me 10 minutes at best to upload and install.

Anyway you choice is a quite a simple setup, If you follow the instructions and tutorial step by step.   There should be no problems.   Although no matter how good you are there have been problems in the past with installation and that might need to be dealt  by the hosting provider technical support.   Each hosting provider should have a way to contact them to resolve and you should not hesitate to call them for technical support they are there to make you succeed.

In the next blog post we will talk about Securing You WordPress Blog and why.

Picking The Hosting Provider & Setting your Domain

Paul

In my Previous Post we talk about the process I am going to use to guide you through it. So we already see what we need to do. In this Post we need to talk about Hosting and Domains.

When it comes to hosting a website it all depends on who you want to go through. Here are a few Hosting Providers that I recommend:

  • Hostgator ($4.95 a Month)

  • FatCow (Yes that is a Hosting Provider. Starting as Low as $5.50 a month)

  • IxWebhosting (Starting as Low as $3.95 a month)

These three hosting providers have programs to help you install WordPress.   For those who want to understand what a Hosting provider does, these are basically servers who host your blog content. They all have their own way of helping the customers.

They each will have a different way of setting up WordPress so you may have to look around their site for the specific details, but that is coming up in a future blog post. I will be walking you through using Godaddy.

Photo By: Terry Mun Photo By: Terry Mun

Now you’ve picked and bought who your hosting provider is. Now we need to pick your domain. Most all hosting providers I have recommend can also buy domains for there customers. So depending on the Hosting Provider you pick can help speed up the process.

Once you have a hosting provider with a server, you now have to buy a domain or I like to call it a brand-name. You should have a list but if not you can still make the list. This process of trying to find the right domain name can take the longest because some of the domains or all of the domain name on your list could be taken by another person. So you will need to go through the list on your web browser and put each one in at a time. For this example, I would recommend just using a [Listname]”.com”, working your way down to the bottom. See if it is taken if not this domain may be bought creating a new list of available domains that you might want to use. Just remember the domain might not be there much longer so You will have really short period of time before it could be taken by some other person.

Once you eliminated the ones that are used you can now figure out if your want to use one of the unused domains for your brand-name or if you want to start another and see if you can’t find a better one. This step is can usually be the ones that take the longest because there is a high chance the first list is usually no good but not always it just depends on what your brand-name is going to be.

Once you’ve picked the domain that you want use, it is time to go back to the hosting provider you choice and go about buying the domain. Each Provider is different some will charge you a setup fee for the domain others will be free.

Lastly You’ll want to make sure the domain is linked to your hosting server. The way you’d do that is go to login into your hosting account and checking the DNS Settings, or some host providers call it CNAME Records. This tells the Domain name that if you type it into the browser to go to a certain IP. This is where your hosting your provider provides and will most likely be part of registration confirmation.

On the Next Post I will talking about Setting up WordPress.