Jax Blunt

The absolute basics of SEO.

8th June 2013 By Jax Blunt 1 Comment

There’s an awful lot of nonsense spouted about search engine optimisation, as if it’s a difficult topic. It’s not. Here are the basics of SEO as I see them. Your mileage may vary.

A post should be 300-500 words. Good content is written for people, but works for search engines too. A good post summarises the topic in the title, and in the first paragraph, talks about in the main text and summarises in the final paragraph. It’s the tell them three times principle – tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them.

Stick to the point – don’t wander or go off topic. This gives you naturally keyword rich text. (If you’ve got something else to talk about, write another article!)

Use a good platform, like wordpress, which lays the article out well for you. You can use a plugin like wordpress seo from yoast, which will check your text for you and make sure you’ve got the words you need in the right places. WordPress also promotes good site navigation, allowing your readers, and visiting spiders to find all your content easily.

Lift relevant content into your current article by deep linking to related articles. This promotes your authority as having a bank of material on your topic.

And after that, it’s about the promotion, which is where the social media and social search is increasingly coming in. You need to set up authorship, so that search results have that smiling face in them. Brands/ businesses probably also ought to have a page, (facebook and g+) so that they can have a unified presence, but authorship is about individuals.

There’s also something possibly coming in about author rank, which is about authority of that author, but that’s not confirmed yet, so may or may not be worth worrying about. If you’re doing content building and authorship well, author rank should flow naturally out of it.

People will tell you it’s all about the backlinks. Once upon a time that might have been the case, though that can be argued. It’s increasingly less so. Good content will promote inlinks and sharing, which will do the same thing anyway.

So there you go. The basics of SEO coming down, as always to good content, presented well.

How to improve your page load speed using pingdom.

29th April 2013 By Jax Blunt Leave a Comment

Why would you check your page load speed in the first place?

If you’re like me, you hate hanging around waiting for a page to load. So have you considered checking how speedy your own blog is? There are some simple tests you can do to check what’s going on – one resource I’ve used is called pingdom, and it highlighted a quick and easy fix I could do that improved my page load time.

I tested my lovely personal blog Making it up – it’s quite a busy site and so I think it’s important that’s it’s reactive.

First test result

Not bad, but I might be able to do better. So I check through the results and find a warning.

Take action

I’ve got a missing file – icon-dot.png. And as it’s called from my theme it’s going to affect every page on my site. Not good. Very easy to fix though – I go and look for it and put it back where it should be.

And retest.

I’ve gone up two percent against the rest of the test base. Dropped my load time from 2.51s to 2.36s. Not a huge improvement, but if you’ve more than one problem you could easily get a much more exciting result.

Just to confirm:

That’s the miscreant file, returned to its proper position. You can see its little load bar is looking much better.

Pingdom is a great tool for testing out the page load speed of your website – and often you can find little problems, easy to fix, that will make a big difference.

(To be fair, I’d already done a variety of other interesting improvements to help with load time, but I’m letting them bed down properly before I write them up. You’ll probably want to check back to see how I get on – why not subscribe to my RSS?)

WordPress under attack – how to protect your site from the admin account hack.

14th April 2013 By Jax Blunt 8 Comments

There’s an Ars Technica article flying around right now about a massive attack on wordpress sites around the internet attempting to build a super botnet. The attack is working by targeting a particular user account that the vast majority of sites have, including this one.

According to CloudFlare’s Prince, the distributed attacks are attempting to brute force the administrative portals of WordPress servers, employing the username “admin” and 1,000 or so common passwords.

User access to wordpress relies on knowing three things. A user id, a password, and a login location. This attack is assuming that there will be an administrator account with the user id admin, and is then firing a brute force attack trying to decode the password. Advice to change your password is not necessarily going to help – it might be that your password of choice is one of the 1000 common ones being used as mentioned above. If you go for a long password with a mixture of letters, number and characters you’re going to be much safer. But if you get rid of the account called admin, you’re going to be immune to this particular attack at least.

First thing to do, check if you’ve got an admin account. Go into your dashboard, select users> all users. You should see something a bit like this. (As ever, click to see it larger.)

As you can see, I do indeed have an admin account. It will have a strong password – we have a rule that passwords must be at least 8 characters with a mix of numbers, letters and characters. But I’ve decided we’re going to get rid of it anyway.

Step one – create a new administrator level account. If you’ve only got one email address to play with, you’re going to have to take it out of the existing admin account before you can create the new one. Make sure you give the new account a strong password that you can remember.

Step two – log in with the new account. Delete the existing admin account. You might be worrying about what will happen to posts associated with that account – don’t. You’ll get this dialog up with the choice of who to attribute them to. Pass them to your new user.

And there you go. You now have a wordpress installation without the admin account currently under attack across the internet.

Of course, that’s nowhere near the only thing you can do to protect your beloved blog/website, but it’s an excellent starting point. If you want to go into more detail, you might want to explore a security plugin like this one which will, among other things, allow you to rename the admin account without going through the process I’ve detailed here. And the other thing that’s important to do is keep your theme and plugins updated. Like I’m just about to.

If you’ve found this article helpful, please feel free to share it, and subscribe to my blog. Thanks for dropping by.

sneak preview

14th April 2013 By Jax Blunt Leave a Comment

This is a test post. All will become clear shortly 🙂

Terminology untangled – anchor text and links, or how to make them work for you.

16th February 2013 By Jax Blunt Leave a Comment

I think we’ve got to a point now, if you’ve made it to this website, where you know what a URL is. (I’m not talking about what it stands for, which is Uniform Resource Locator, but what it is.) It’s that thing you type in the address bar to get to a website – it starts with http:// and includes the domain name and so on. And most people know if they want to add a link in to their post, they need to copy that in. But do you know how to make it look pro? WordPress gives you a tool for it. If you’re in the visual editor it’s right there, looks like this When you click it you get this little box

Now, it’s fairly obvious that you put the place you want to link to in the top slot. But what’s the title all about? Well, that comes up if you mouseover a link. It’s used by some screenreaders, but absolutely shouldn’t be stuffed with SEO stuff, so don’t even go there.

Now you might notice that there’s some text in my paragraph that’s linked there. I did that by selecting the text *before* I clicked the link tool. And the text that is hyperlinked is called the anchor text – it’s information about what the link is going to be about. So, if you want to link to someone’s blog, for example, you might write about Not different but interesting, then select that text, click your link tool, insert the URL and away you go. You’ve got to admit it looks better in the flow of your post than having http://notdifferentbutinteresting.wordpress.com hyperlinked? And it tells the reader (and the search engines) what you think that link is about. Wins all round. Give it a try next time you want to put a link in. (Note blogger has a similar tool. The dialog is a bit better though:

So it’s got a place to type in the text, makes it plain what you’re putting in linkwise, and even mentions rel=nofollow. If you want to do that on wordpress, you’re going to need a plugin or the text bit of your editor. Let’s cover that, and why you might want to use it, in another post.)