photo credit: Mr Moss
There is danger everywhere on the internet. We must be vigilant all the time. How do I know this??? Unfortunately through personal experience.
I was the victim of an email phishing scheme and I got caught…big time!
I got what I thought was a legitimate email from Hostgator which hosts all my blogs. It turned out to be a phishing email and I gave them my username and password. Within a few hours all my blogs were being re-directed to a Russian site that was either spreading a virus or some other trash. My virus program caught it before it harmed my computer.
Once I figured out what was going on I called Hostgator and they went through each of my blogs and removed all the malicious code. A great big thanks to Hostgator!!! They were all over it in a flash!!
So now all my blogs are safe and happy…and my blood pressure is once again normal.
The day after all this happened I got an email from my bank asking me to confirm my account information. Being paranoid I called my bank and discovered that the email was a phishing scheme! Imagine if I had answered that one…I’d be broke now!
So the moral of the story is to be very very careful when giving out personal information on the internet. If you have any question about an email you received contact whoever supposedly sent it and verify that it is from them. It may take some extra time but it will save you more time and perhaps money in the long run!
So go forth upon the internet and be careful…be very very careful!
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In a previous post I talked about changing your permalinks to help with SEO and making your visitor experience easy. Do do that I told you change the default permalink to /%postname%/. That will put your post name in the URL.
In this post I want to take it a step further. Your blog should have categories set up. If you don’t have categories go to your Dashboard and under Posts go to Categories and add them.
To improve your SEO your categories should be the same as your main keywords. And to improve your SEO even further you can add your categories to your post URL.
Go to Permalinks under Settings just like you did before. But now I want you to add the following in the Custom Structure:
/%category%/%postname%/
Doing that will add your category and postname to the post’s URL.
Simple isn’t it. And it will make the search engines like you all the more.
And as always if you have any questions about blog setup let The Blog Builder Guy know and I’ll do my best to help you out.
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photo credit: drexston
One problem that you may encounter is that your post title may be too long and you don’t want a correspondingly long file name. So what are you to do? Simple…change the post slug!
The slug is what you would like your post to be called. The option to change this is right under the post title box.
Simply click on the Edit link and change the title to whatever you wish and then click OK and that’s it. I told you it was simple!
And as always if you have any questions about your blog setup let The Blog Builder Guy know!
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Permalinks are what WordPress likes to call page links. These make it easy for people to link back to your blog post and they tell your browser exactly where to go.
But from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) point of view the default permalinks aren’t very good.
Here is what a default permalink would look like:
http://www.yoursite.com/?p=89
p=89 means that this is your 89th post (you’ve been busy)
What we really want the link to look like would be something like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/carpet-cleaning-tips/
Now what you have here is a keyword phrase “carpet cleaning tips” and a link that tell you and the search engines exactly what the post is all about. It gives pertinent information.
So how do we go from p=89 to carpet-cleaning-tips? Simple!
From your WordPress Dashboard go to the:
Settings tab and select Permalinks.
That takes you to the Permalinks menu where you will see Common Settings.
At the bottom of the list is Custom Structure. Hit the radio button and in the box write:
/%postname%/
Click Save Changes and you are done!
Now your post title will be part of your URL. And your readers and the search engines will be happy because they know what your post is all about.
If you have any questions about blog setup let The Blog Builder Guy know and I’ll do my best to help you out!
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