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By Les Scammell, September 8, 2009 10:47 pm

I can tell you from personal experience that being hacked is not a nice experience. I was fortunate, or unfortunate depending on your view of things, that I suffered a double hack. The first to one of my WordPress blogs (not this one fortunately), the second  was to the same site but was a malware attack.

When I say fortunate, the malware attack was reported and my site shut down by my webhost. It was a tough job tracking down the actual malware but it alerted me to check through everything else. That is when I found the WordPress attack.

What is even more galling is that I could have prevented it with just a few minutes work. If you have a WordPress blog I hope you read the notices on the Dashboard page. There have been a lot of notices about attacks on older versions of WordPress. Upgrade to the latest version ASAP is my recommendation.

As to my site, my second piece of advice is also just as simple. Change your passwords frequently and make sure the passwords are easy for you to remember but long enough to be hard to hack. Include a mix of capitals, lower case, numbers and symbols. I got lazy and was using a six digit password which, on reflection, was easy to hack. Not now I can tell you.

It is very easy to take your blog for granted. We sail along posting each and every day – most of don’t give much regard to passwords or upgrading our sites. The latest versions of WordPress make upgrading much easier. My message to all:

Don’t take your blog or site for granted – make security at least a weekly priority. If you don’t, somewhere, sometime, when you least expect it, someone will come along and knock it out – you could potentially lose the lot. It’s your site – it’s in your hands.

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By Les Scammell, September 7, 2009 2:18 pm

There are a lot of WordPress plugins around these days and finding the best ones for your blog can be difficult. Here are four plugins that may add a little more to your blog.

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TweetMeme Button

If you’re a Twitterer and Tweet your posts then this little plugin is a must. It adds the TweetMeme button to your posts so your readers can re-Tweet the post if they think it is worthwhile. The button is also included in RSS feeds.

There is very little setup required – just upload it to your plugins folder on your site and activate. photo credit: NevilleHobson

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Cookies For Comments

This is an anti spam plugin that works by sending a cookie when a page is loaded. If the cookie is not present then the user is not able to leave a comment.

A cool little plugin if you are getting spam that is getting past Askismet. Bots tour around leaving comments, however, they don’t take on cookies and with no cookie, there is no comment. The downside, if your reader has cookies disabled, they will not be able to leave a comment either.

Upload and activate – couldn’t be easier. photo credit: Mrs Magic

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Post Teaser

This has the potential to be a neat little plugin. It truncates your posts on the home page and leaves a teaser. You can set the number of words to the teaser (default 100 words). It places a read more option and provides post data such as word count, image count, and an estimated reading time.

There are a couple of issues to watch. If you have graphics within the teaser section, it will make a mess of your site (just look at mine here). If you set the teaser to 100 words, place any graphics outside that 100 words.

Another issue that is worth remembering is that many visitors want to see the complete post when visiting your home page. Hopefully this will convince them to click through and so reduce your bounce rate. It would have been nice to have an option to leave the first post in full and place teasers for all other posts.

Upload, activate and edit the length of the teaser – or just leave it at the default 100 words. photo credit: Andy Woo

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WPtouch: WordPress on iPhone, iPod & Android

This is a neat not so little plugin that provides a slimmed down version of your site for iPhone, iPod and Andoid users. There are a few options you can tweak including the skin. If your site is a little heavy for mobile browsing, install this plugin.

Upload, activate and edit the settings. Great for sites that include content relevant to mobile searches.

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By Les Scammell, September 2, 2009 10:09 pm

What Is A Table Of Contents

As you can see from what I have included here, a table of contents (TOC) is just that, a list of what is in your post. However, it is not just any list. This list is created through the use of header (H) tags. Header tags have a range of H1 through to H6 – you can always find that one of those tags will suit your theme. The title of each section in this post is published using the H4 tag. This has been done in the past using anchors and hand coding the TOC – not any more!

Why A Table Of Contents

Generally speaking, you probably don’t need a TOC in a majority of posts. However, if you have a particularly long post then you should divide it into sections. For SEO purposes, each section should have a heading using a header tag.

There is another benefit to using a TOC. People like to scan a post before reading. With a TOC, they can scan the post above the fold. Add to that, if you check my TOC, by clicking on one of the titles in the list, the cursor will jump to that section. That’s pretty handy for your readers.

How To Create A Table Of Contents

To create a TOC in WordPress, you will first need to install a plugin. Table of Contents Generator WordPress plugin is the one I am using here and these instructions cover this particular plugin. If you do a search there are others around.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, create your post. The TOC is generated from the use of header tags so include a couple of header tags throughout your post.

Once you have completed your post, place the cursor at a point where you want the TOC generated and use the (!–TOC–) command – note, replace the ( ) with < > symbols.

And there Any SEO Benefits Too

It seems there may be SEO benefits with Google taking on page navigation links as mini site links. Site links or internal links help the search engines find your content. For on page navigation, what you could be building is a set of long tail keywords – one for each heading in the TOC.

My thanks to Ann Smarty on Search Engine Journal for her post titled “how to add intra-page navigation to your blog posts“.

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By Les Scammell, June 29, 2009 12:25 am

Do you have a WordPress blog and at times have titles that are a little long? Are there times when a sub heading could be a nice addition? If so then there is a little trick to modifying your post’s title that you may find useful.

This post has a modified title. Because of the way the style sheet is setup, the various H tags act very differently to each other. You could add your own styles to the style sheet if you knew how (and I will write about that in another post), or you could just modify the titles when you need to.

I wrote in an earlier post about modifying H tags within a post. A similar set of commands can be used to great effect in the title. In the title to this post I have used the command:

[h3]Modifying WordPress Titles On The Fly[/h3>]It’s A Pretty Neat Trick

When doing it yourself, be sure to replace the square brackets with the code placeholder tags <>. You can also use the BR tag to wrap the text to a new line when you need to.

You will need to play around with your H tags to see what sort of effects you get. What it is does do is create a different style of heading for your post titles. It can certainly make them look more interesting.

A word of caution – if you have the post url rewrite on so that the post title is written to the url, you want to consider using a plugin like the Platinum SEO Pack or similar that allows you to rewrite the title. You can then strip the code away for a clean url – otherwise, you are likely to see some strange url’s for your pages – certainly not SEO friendly urls.

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By Les Scammell, June 24, 2009 12:39 pm

WordPress has a lot of features and functions built in that most people rarely use. Themes themselves come with a style sheet that pre-sets many of the functions that could be used. One of those functions is the heading tag. These come in the form of H1, H2, H3 and H4.

There are suggestions that if you use these tags for headings in your posts you can increase the headings value when it comes to SEO, for example, having a heading that includes your keyword or keyphrase. Use one of those heading tags and you are telling the search engine it is important.

However, I often find that headings are set for the site and do not always sit comfortably within a post. They are too big, too small or the wrong color. What many writers don’t know is that each heading tag can be modified on the fly so that it does suit your post. Take a look at the following examples:

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Now let’s see what happens when we modify them:

Heading 1

Heading 1

Heading 1

To achieve this result, you need to start with heading tag – for example the h1 tag – these are inserted between <>. To modify this tag you need to use the correct formatting command. These are also inserted between <> tag holders:

font size=”-1″ or -2, +1 +2 etc

You can adjust the size to suit your post. The size of the text in my posts means the H1 tag is far too big – by using the size=”-1″ option it looks much neater and suits the size of the text around it.

font color=”red” or blue or black or white

In the last example shown, I used the font size=”-1″ color=”blue” combination all within the one tag placeholder <>.

A typical command would like the following – to make life easier I have used [ ] instead of the <> to make it easier to read. Remember to replace the square brackets when you try these commands.

[h1] [font size="-1" color="blue"]Your text here[/font] [/h1]

The last two pieces of the command are particularly important. They effectively close the command at that point which means the formatting wont flow through to the rest of your site.

There you go – it’s quick, it’s easier, and you can do it on the fly whilst creating your next super post.

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By Les Scammell, November 15, 2008 1:33 am

Yesterday I looked at some of the issues that may help you rank better in Google. Today I will follow up on a few more observations. These are all taken from a Q&A session with Matt Cutts and others from Google – in effect, Google are starting to spill the beans on how to gain higher rankings.

A little more on links today. First, for a long time the general advice has been to get links from .edu and .gov sites. According to the Google team, don’t bother. They have no more value than any other link, in fact they will often have less value since few people link into them. Continue reading 'Listen To Google To Rank Better – Part Two'»

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By Les Scammell, September 14, 2008 4:35 pm

My Radical Blogs is heading towards its first birthday – I cannot believe it is nearly a year old already. When I look back at my early work I notice a big change to how I write compared to today. Over the next week or two I am going to spend a little time going over what has, and hasn’t, worked for me; what I have liked and disliked; which posts where popular; and which posts I though were good but failed to spark much in the way of comments.

Today’s review is a mix of the posts that proved popular by way of comment numbers, along with some of my favorite posts. It has been a strange year. I started off a little aimless, took aim with blog reviews which I enjoyed doing, but found most bloggers a little apathetic to them. From there I lost track, and a little focus, particularly when I started writing on other blogs. This has left me a little time poor. I think apathy is a double edged sword. Lack of reader numbers and comments leads to more apathy, the results being less post, poorer quality, and fewer readers.

I have plans to change all that from the beginning of next month having finally decided on the direction I intend to go. As readers, you will either appreciate it, or not. How does that song go – “It’s my blog, and I’ll write how want to” (to the tune of it’s my party – anyone remember it?).

My favorite posts, and some of yours – lets get to them – there were so many. I spend some time learning WordPress inside out and back to front. As I picked up tips and ways to improve my blog, I passed them on. One of the most visited was How to optimize your WordPress blogs for speed, a post that brought numerous comments. I regularly talk about plugins and what has or has not worked along with any workarounds if I find them. This post on Plugins By The Bucketload was extremely popular, at least for the links to everyone else

The most popular posts were the lists. People are right – we all love lists. The first one was a good one showing you how you could Forget Adsense – Here Are 140 Alternatives To Consider.  Another income related blog that brought some traffic was How I Quadrupled My Blog Income, I don’t know why, but visitors enjoyed it.

I also discovered interesting facts about making money online, for exampl, Your Tip N Run Visitors Are Costing You Adsense Dollars, a look at Google and how traffic affects Adsense.

Other list posts that were popular included 100+ Bookmarking Sites To Drive Your Traffic – or drive you crazy - it certainly drove me crazy. Directories can be great for backlinks and increased PageRank so I sourced Free Directories With PR4+ Ranking - enough to keep you going for a week.

That’s my brief roundup of posts from the last 12 months.

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By Les Scammell, July 28, 2008 10:29 am

I have installed a new plugin to see if it can improve the number of comments I receive. I may even start writing posts worthy of comments now .

The plugin is keyword luv. If you haven’t heard of it before it is quite clever. Instead of leaving your name and url etc, to benefit from the keyword luv you will need to enter your name with an appropriate keyword.

Before I go any further, I think you should think very clearly about your comment link. Most people just enter in their homepage url. This is a waste of a comment link. Find a page you want to promote and that you would like to see rank well in the search engines – remember, search engines rank pages, not sites.

Use the url for that page when leaving a comment rather than your home url. If the url is long, simply copy and paste it. Now that you have the page you want the link juice to flow to, select the most appropriate keyword for that page.

Now, when leaving a comment here or on any other keyword luv site, enter your name with the at symbol then the keyword. EG – les@keyword – then enter the page url, then leave your comment. Now you have keyword rich link to one of your pages. These links are worth far more than a none keyword link to your front page (almost worthless for SEO purposes).

Having said all this, I still moderate comments and will throw out worthless or spammy comments. Leave a good comment and it will stay. I will generally try to visit your site and return the favor. If you have any trouble with the keyword luv plugin let me know.

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By Les Scammell, July 21, 2008 12:47 pm

WordPress 2.6 is not too bad although it still has some design issues that I don’t particularly like. I come to those a little later.

If you are using the Joost de Valk plugins Google Analytics, robots meta or RSS footer, then you may find there are issues. Your first step is to ensure you have the latest copies of these plugins. Your plugin option from the dashboard will help to auto update these plugins.

Once updated and activated, you will need to go to each of these plugins and reset the values. For me, the RSS footer plugin has lost all its information so I will need to re-enter it all. If you receive this via RSS or email you may notice the footer a little empty at present.

If, like me, you use your footer to carry messages, or for me to carry links to promotions for subscribers, losing that information can be embarrassing and lose you subscribers. The robots meta and Google Analytics will also create problems that you wont know about.

If you use those plugins then update and check the settings. Thanks to Joost de Valk from Yoast.com for letting everyone know through his blog. Sometimes it pays to subscribe to those who write your plugins or themes.

What I don’t like about WordPress 2.6

WordPress 2.6 is not too bad, a tad better than 2.5. However the one thing that is really annoying me at present is in the widget control options. If you have created text boxes and want to switch them from say left to right side bars, there is no option to simple drag and drop from one to the other. In fact you have to remove it from one sidebar and as soon as you do, you lose all the script within the text box.

The only way to move a text box from one side bar to another is by copying the contents, removing the box from sidebar, saving, selecting the second sidebar, then adding a text box and pasting the code in. Don’t forget to save again. That is a lot of steps compared to WordPress 2.3 where you could drag – drop and save – job done.

Poor design WordPress – so far I am happy with the rest – if anything annoys me I will let you know.

Have you checked out PeperJam as an advertising option. I am really happy with them so if you are looking to advertise on your blog, sign up and get $10 free when you run one of their ads on your blog. Use this link to get started.

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By Les Scammell, July 16, 2008 11:11 pm

Well, having just updated my WordPress to 2.6 I must say it is not smooth sailing. If you have upgraded then i suggest you check your permalinks. Just click on any of your posts and make sure they open up in their own page.

A lot of blogs are finding that the permalinks are not working after the upgrade. If your blog is affected, you will need to go into the permalinks options – settings/permalinks from your dashboard – near the bottom of the page are two new additions – categories and tags. Just enter some text in each – the words categories and tags will do – save and if you have wp-cache enabled, clear the cache and try the links again. It should be fine.

Otherwise, the upgrade seems to be working fine – however your the reader so you can tell me if you notice anything unusual. A few neat things about 2.6 – you will see a bubble on the Plugins link telling you of any updates pending – that is handy. Before switching themes you can preview in private before sending it public – that is handy.

Let me know if you come across any problems with the update.

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By Les Scammell, July 13, 2008 3:41 pm

The upgrade to this new theme is almost complete – a couple of little quirks I need to iron first. At least WordPress makes it a little easier. If anyone knows how to get the comments activated on the static pages let me know. That is my biggest problem for now.

Upgrading to a new them is not just switching themes in your WordPress themes section. There is far more to it than that. I picked up a few tips from a post at Blog Marketing Journal titled WordPress Tips To Help With Site Maintenance.

If you have registered for third party entities like Feedburner, MyBlogLog, Google Analytics and so on, you have to be sure you transfer every snippet of code from one theme across to the next. There is at least one easy way to do it. Perhaps someone should create a plugin that handles all these snippets for you.

The easiest way I found to transfer from one theme to another is to have two WordPress theme editing windows open at the same time. One window with the current theme and the other window with the new theme. From there it is just a matter of checking each file and copying and pasting each snippet of code into the new themes files.

Make any other changes you need then send it live. Let me know what you think. There are still a few little tweaks I want to make – otherwise I am pretty happy with it. WordPress is still my preferred platform at present.

Don’t forget to sign up for my feeds by RSS or email to receive free ebooks each week.

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By Les Scammell, July 6, 2008 12:30 am

Updating a site is never much fun and I still haven’t finished. If you can recommend a good provider of WordPress themes let me know. I want something similar to this – a little lighter on code, faster to load, and perhaps lighter in color. The one thing I want most themes don’t seem to have and that is comments enabled on pages. If I have to pay – so be it.

As to upgrading – what is your opinion – dark themes such as this one, or the new look ‘white’ themes that seem to be cropping up everywhere? Please do let me know – I am in two minds.

While your here, check out the video – kinda how I feel after doing some updating that didn’t quite go well – ever notice it takes 1 minute to create chaos and hours to reverse it??????

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By Les Scammell, May 13, 2008 12:20 am

WordPress is, despite some of my earlier posts, still my favorite blogging platform. I still haven’t come across anything that I consider better or easier to use. I particularly like the range of plugins that available – there is a plugin for just about anything you can think of.

Here are another two plugins I have found and that I find very useful. This first plugin I had heard about and even had recommended to me but it has only been recently that I actually downloaded it and used it.

WordPress Automatic Update Plugin.

As the name suggests, this is a plugin that makes the transition from one version of WordPress to the next so much easier. The upgrade from 2.3 to 2.5 is very easy – no long winded uploading or deleting or fiddling around. If you haven’t upgraded to 2.5 yet, download this plugin first – it will make your life so much easier.

This second plugin is more in the way of making your blog even more search engine friendly.

WordPress Tweaks

This WordPress plugin has a range of tweaks that you can use to improve some of the functions of WordPress. It can certainly make your WordPress blog a little friendlier to the search engines. Some of its functions include:

• Remove “nofollow” from comment author links
• Remove “nofollow” from comment body links
• Open external comment links in new windows
• Open external post links in new windows
• Show post excerpts (instead of full content) on archive pages
• Add “nofollow” to the “Register” and “Login” links

The show post excerpts is particularly useful for preventing ‘duplicate content’ issues with the search engines. Adding some of these nofollows is again a little housekeeping that makes your site a little friendlier to the search engines.

I hope you find these plugins useful. If you have any decent plugins you can recommend, let me know in the comments  = my comments are set to do follow – my fingers are set to delete when its spam.

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By Les Scammell, May 8, 2008 7:16 am

If you are an Adsense publisher then you need to take care in your quest for increased visitor numbers. Some visitors may actually be costing you money, and I am talking about a sizable percentage.

Your income per click may come down to as low as 0.05c per click ‘across all of your Adsense sites’ when they could be earning as much as 0.80 or more per click.

The income you receive per click can be affected by poor click through rates. The optimum click through rate (CTR) is  between 4-9% or higher. If your CTR drops below 2%, Google will often tag your site as a poor performer and only pay the lowest possible rate. The problem is, you will receive the lowest possible rate for all Adsense units on that account.

This means that although you may have a very good site receiving 4%+ CTR, that site will still only receive the smallest per click price if one of your other sites is performing below the 2% thresh-hold.

Visitors  I label as ‘tip N run’ are those that arrive on your site through social media. Stumblers, diggers and Entre Card visitors are notorious for not clicking on ad units. Stumblers will stumble to the next site, diggers will return to digg and EC users click through to the next EC card holder. If you are reading this from one of those sites, when was the last time you clicked on an ad unit? You are shopping, you are visiting so it is only natural that you wont click these ads.

These visitors are all increasing your visitors numbers, however the number of clicks on ad units each day is staying the same. This has the effect of dropping your CTR – your CTR is, in simple terms, a mathematical equation that divides the number of visitors by the number of clicks. The more visitors, the lower the CTR.

Some promotions work better than others. Through the use of Entre Card my CTR has fallen to about 1% so I have been getting only 5 cents per Adsense click. Prior to this I was receiving around 40 cents per click. Buying traffic through Better Traffic (see ad at top of sidebar) has seen my CTR increase to just below the required 2%. At a cost of $15 per month I am making a marginal profit. If I can lift the CTR to above that 2% thresh-hold my income will jump dramatically.

You need to keep an eye on your CTR through your Adsense account. If a site is really performing badly then it may pay to remove the ads from that site. The lost revenue may well be made up by the sudden jump in per click income on your other sites.

Once all sites on your account get above the Google thresh-hold CTR the, income per click goes up. If you are blogging on a high paying Adsense niche, then you may be losing big dollars in the quest for extra visitors. Check each CTR level for all ad units on your sites. It only takes one poor performing unit to kill all of them.

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By Les Scammell, May 3, 2008 11:31 am

If WordPress charged for their blogging software they would most likely be seeking bankruptcy right now, or be ripe for a Microsoft or Google takeover. The latest version of WordPress 2.5, to put it mildly, sucks!

I would like to put on record right from the start that I am a WordPress fan – I like the software and the relative ease of use. Although I have only been in the blogging world for 6 months, I have used several different platforms including Drupal. Hopefully I can continue my happy association with WordPress, just not with release 2.5. Fortunately I didn’t upgrade this blog so I can continue to operate in a happy blog environment. I did upgrade three of my other sites and so far the experience has not been great.

There has been a lot of discussion about the WordPress 2.5 release and the lack of support on Andrew Boyd’s On Blogging Australia site – the discussion makes for interesting reading so I wont go back over those issues. If your interested I suggest you click on over and have a read.

My title says it all really. WordPress 2.5 would be a commercial failure. Proof of this can be seen by the relatively quick patch release that fixed around 70 – yes seventy issues. Talk about product recall big time.

I think WordPress as an organization has become stuck in a mindset that says ‘this is free software’.  The reality is, free or not, they should be taking a commercial approach. At present, part of their ‘mindset’ seems to revolve around having specific release periods which seem to be scheduled for 3 or 4 times per year. Commercial software goes through an annual release and thats it.

Having regular scheduled upgrades is a great motivational tool, particularly when you are relying on unpaid programming support. You can still achieve this motivation whilst have longer release time frames.

The beta testing phase was far too short and did not leave any time for ‘fixing’ issues prior to its release. The more workable timetable could see annual releases, say in January each year with beta versions released for testing in July. This would enable three months of testing and feedback followed by three months of fine tuning prior to the following release. To have 70 issues that needed ‘fixing’ is testament to the lack of beta testing.

WordPress needs to undergo a cultural change within the organization that can relate to users on “commercial” rather than a “free” basis. WordPress has been, arguably, the best platform available for self hosted blogs for a long time with millions of blogs using the software.  The problems that users are now facing is providing real motivation for alternatives to update and promote their software.

Once users find viable alternatives, they will slowly move away from WordPress – and as has been shown in the past with other software, a dribble soon becomes a flood and WordPress will be left with a small dedicated group of users and developers and a poor reputation.

I hope WordPress can open its ears a little more, listen to what the users are saying, and return to a more user friendly blogging environment. I would like to think I could continue using this software for as long as I need it. Sometimes, we can be too smart for our own good and this time around, WordPress got it wrong. Fair enough – let’s get it right and move on.

happy blogging – les