Wordpress Dashboard

Although WordPress is SEO friendly , you can improve it by tweaking it.. If you’re not familiar with the term SEO, it stands for search engine optimization.  SEO are methods used to increase organic traffic. SEO not only increases search engine visibility but traffic too.

Before you start writing posts, by updating these settings, you can increase the traffic to your blog.

• Ping list – A ping list automatically notifies search engines and directories that your blog has published new content. By having an up-to-date ping list, hopefully, you will get indexed faster and receive more traffic. Since ping list change over time, I am not going to add one here. To find a current ping list, google ping list and the current year.  To update your ping list, go to Settings>Writing>Update Servics and paste ping list.
• Tagline – The tagline gives a quick description of what your blog is about. When WordPress is freshly installed, it has a default description that says “Just another WordPress blog.” You will want to change this to a tagline that describes your blog and the keywords you’re trying to rank for.
• Permalinks – A permalink is the url to your blog post. When setting up your WordPress permalink settings, you should choose custom and enter /%postname%/. In this structure, the permalink uses the title of your post for the permalink. To get the best SEO results try to keep your title no longer than four or five words and have your keywords in the beginning. To change your permalinks setting go to Settings>Permalink.

By implementing these easy-to-do settings, you will enjoy more traffic and probably more money.

Stop Hacking

Once you have wordpress installed, the first thing you’ll want to do is stop hackers. Unfortunately, many bloggers don’t take it seriously enough until they have been hacked. However, then it’s too late. Unless you know coding and what to look for and have your blog backed up, it will be a literal nightmare. More than likely, you will probably have to pay a website developer to clean it up for you.

According to Sucurri, a leading provider of web-based integrity monitoring and malware detection solutions, most WordPress sites are hacked because they either had outdated versions of WordPress or outdated plug-ins. Furthermore, recently, they have been seeing many sites hacked through brute-force attacks. Considering this, there are several easy stops to make your website more secure.

• Make sure you have antivirus, spyware, and malware programs installed on your computer and run them frequently. Hackers can compromise your wordpress sites through an infected computer.
• Backup your WordPress files and databases regularly – If you do this, when your site gets hacked, you can just delete the public_folder, and all databases from your server and restore a backup that was prior to when your site became infected.
• When you first install your wordpress software, don’t use admin for a username. If you have already used it for a username, you cannot change it from the WordPress dashborad. To change it,  log into your cPanel.  Go to Databases>phpMyAdmin>Select domain>wp_users>edit>user_login.  For the value, delete the old username and enter the new username. For display_name, enter whatever name you want to appear to the public.
• Remove log-in from your sidebar. In most themes, you can simply go to Appearance>Widgets. Once in the widget area, drag the Meta widget from the sidebar over to inactive widgets. Once this is done, to access your log-in page, you’ll have to type yourblog’s url/wp-admin in the address bar.
• Install updates for your wordpress software, themes, and plug-ins as soon as possible. Delete any old plug-ins you’re not using.

By being proactive, you can save yourself alot of grief later on.