Technical problems, errors and surprise releases are all regular features in the day to day management of a website when you’re an SEO. There’s no doubt that maintaining a quick, error free and well optimised site can lead to long term traffic success. Here are some of my tips for regular checks you should be doing to stay on top of your website to maximise your search engine performance.

General Error Checking

General errors can crop up continually with any website and left unchecked, their volume could spiral out of control. Working on improving and resolving large numbers of 404 and timeout errors on your site can help search engines minimise the bandwidth used to completely crawl your site. It’s arguable that minimising crawl errors and general accessibility issues can help get new and updated content into search engine indexes more quickly and often, a good thing for SEO!

If you want to get smart with error handling and other crawl issues, start by getting a Google Webmaster Tools account. Take a look at “Crawl errors” found via the “diagnostics” panel after you’ve verified your site:

Paying particular attention to the “Not found” and “Timed out” reports, it’s wise to test each error with a http header checker online or using a Firefox plug-in such as Live Http Headers or Http Fox. I find that drilling down into the first 100 or so errors, you tend to find a common pattern with many that lead to only a few fixes being required. I like to focus on 404 error pages that have external links first to get maximum SEO value from legacy links.

It’s important to note that sometimes, there’s more to an error report than just the URL listed in the console. I’ve found issues such as multiple redirects ending in a 404 error which is important information to brief your developers, potentially saving them a lot of diagnostics time.

As a side note, be careful how you interpret the “Restricted by robots.txt” reports. Sometimes, those URL’s aren’t directly blocked by robots.txt at all! If you’ve been scratching your head about the URLs in the report, run the http header check. Often, a URL listed in this report is part of a chain of redirects that ends or contains a URL that is blocked by robots.txt.

For extra insight, you should try the IIS SEO Toolkit or running the classic Xenu’s Link Sleuth Crawl both of which can reveal a number of additional problems. Tom wrote a nice article on Xenu and amongst his tips, setting the options to “Treat redirections as errors” is one of my favourites. As well as internal crawl error checking, a site of any size should try to avoid redirects via internal links. From time to time, using Fetch as Googlebot inside Webmaster tools or browsing your site with JavaScript and CSS disabled using Web Developer Toolbar with your user agent set to Googlebot can also reveal hidden problems.

Linking Out to 404 Errors?

Linking out to expired external URLs isn’t great for user experience, and implies perhaps that as a resource, your site is getting out of date. Consider checking your outbound external links for errors by using the “Check external links” setting in Xenu.

Canonicalisation

You spent time and effort specifying rules for canonicalized URLs across your site, but when was the last time you checked the rules you painstakingly devised are still in place? Thanks to the ever evolving nature of our websites, things change. Redirect rules can be left out of updated site releases and your canonicalization is back to square one. You should always be working towards reducing internal duplicate content as a best practice gesture, and without solely relying on the rel=”canonical” attribute.

Checking the following can quickly reveal if you could have a problem:

• www or non www redirects (choose either, but always use a 301)
• trailing slash (choose to leave out like SEOmoz, or in, like SEOgadget but don’t allow both)
• Case redirects – a 301 redirect to all lower case URLs can solve a lot of headaches or title case redirects if you want to capitalise place names like some travel sites do

“Spot checks” of Front End Code, Missing Page Titles and Duplicate Meta

Just every now and again, it’s nice to take another look at your own code. Even if you don’t find a problem that needs fixing, you might find inspiration to make an enhancement, test a new approach or bring your site up to date with SEO best practice.

One quick check I find useful is under “Diagnostics” > “HTML suggestions” in Webmaster tools:

Duplicated title tags or meta descriptions or both can reveal problems with your dynamic page templates, missed opportunities or canonicalization issues.

Site Indexation

Site indexation, or the number of pages that receive one visit or more from a search engine in a given period of time, is a powerful metric to quickly assess how many pages on your site are generating traffic.

Aside from the obvious merit in tracking site indexation over time as an SEO KPI, the metric can also reveal unintended indexing issues like leaked tracking or exit URLs on affiliate sites or huge amounts of indexed duplicate content. If the number of pages Google claims to have indexed on your site is vastly different to the site indexation numbers you’re seeing through analytics, you may have found a new problem to solve.

Indexed Development / Staging Servers

Is your staging or development server accessible from outside your office IP range? It might be worth checking that none of your development pages are cached by the major search engines. There’s nothing worse than discovering a ranking development server URL (it does happen!) with dummy products and prices in the database. You just know that customer is going to have a bad time on a development server! If you discover an issue, talk to your development team about restricting access via IP to the staging site or consider redirecting search engine bots to the correct version of your site.

Significant / Recent Changes to Server Performance

Google have put a lot of effort into helping webmasters identify site speed issues and it could make a lot of sense to keep a regular check on your performance if you’re not doing so already. There are a few useful tools out there to help you speed up your site, starting with Google’s “Site performance” reported located under “Labs” in Webmaster tools:

It’s good to check out the “Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)” report found under “Diagnostics > Crawl stats” in Webmaster tools, too:

Tackling search engine accessibility issues like errors and canonicalization problems is a really important part of your SEO routine. It’s also a favourite subject of mine! What checks do you carry out regularly to manage the performance of your website? Do you have your own routine? If you manage a large site, or many large sites, what "industrial strength" tools or automated processes do you gain the most insight from?

This is a post by Richard Baxter, Founder and SEO Consultant at SEOgadget.co.uk – a niche UK SEO Agency specialising in helping people and organisations succeed in search. Follow him on Twitter and Google Buzz.

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Just got a email from my Facebook rep about a new policy change going in tomorrow on ads:

Hey Jeremy,

Our policy team just made a change that I don’t think will affect you at all, but I figured I should give you a heads up anyways.

We’ve received significant negative feedback over the past few weeks about ads promoting free offers which, in reality, are not free to the user.  As noted in section 8 of the Facebook Ad Guidelines, “Prices, discounts, and free offers: Ads cannot be deceptive or fraudulent about any offer made. If an ad includes a price, discount or ‘free’ offer the ad must clearly state what action or set of actions is required to qualify for the offer.” In addition, advertising is not permitted on Facebook where the business model or practice is deemed unacceptable. Some business models and practices that may violate this policy include unclear billing or participation practices. For these reasons, ads promoting deceptive free offers run contrary to Facebook’s ad guidelines and overall advertising philosophy and are no longer permitted to be advertised on Facebook.

The policy team is giving advertisers by end of day Thursday (3/11) to delete these ads and is requesting that you do not submit any new ads promoting these types of offers. Ads that remain active will be removed. They have also cautioned that advertisers who continue to create ads that violate any policy or generate strong negative feedback may have their ads disabled or face account penalties up to and including the loss of beta tools and permanent loss of advertising privileges.

As always, let me know if you have any questions about this change.

I have not seen this published “officially” anywhere on their site but thought I would pass a long the heads up.

Get a sneak peak at the all new ShoeMoney System

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

FaceBook Advertising Policy Change Taking Effect Tomorrow

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OK, so there are a million and one different resources out there explaining how to make money online. Many of them are vague and repeat some mantra similar to “Follow your passion.” That’s all well and good, but that’s not very specific. I know the real trick, and I’m willing to share it with you. I’m going to break it down into 10 easy steps. Here they are:

1. Pick a niche that you’re knowledgeable about.

Some people might say this is your passion, but I say it’s just something you know a lot about. If you like it – that’s a bonus. If you know a lot about accounting, but want to be a pro pool player, you can blog about both. If you suck at pool, blog about accounting until you get better at pool.

2. Build content for that niche.

I find that this formula works really well:

1. Write ten (well written) articles that focus on that niche. Make insightful posts (especially ones that are controversial). Controversial posts get a lot of readers and inbound links.
2. Write two articles about your self and why you’re an expert in that niche. This will connect your readers to you. I find that if you put a photo of yourself on those posts, the traffic is much higher too.
3. Write four guest posts similar to the original ten articles you wrote for the niche. It really helps if you ’sum up’ the original ten articles across the four guest posts and link back to them.

3. Make a space online to publish that content.

This space can come in many forms (Facebook fan pages, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress, etc). I prefer Wordpress, but you aren’t limited to just that platform. If you don’t know anything about making websites, just start a website at Wordpress.com and start publishing content. When you build that space, please, please, please change the default theme to something your readers will enjoy.

4. Schedule content for release.

The twelve articles you already wrote should be scheduled to come out on a regular basis: 3 a week for four weeks. It’s important to remember that these will not be your only posts, but they will make up the meat of your content. You can always post what you had for dinner last night, or some breaking news. Those ad-hoc posts are what give your blog a personality.

5. Drive traffic to your blog from related niche sites and blogs.

You should send you guest posts out to everyone in your niche once a week, so you have one guest post each week for four weeks. Those guest posts will be INSTRUMENTAL in generating traffic to your website. Make sure you also regularly comment on those peoples’ blogs as well. If they have a top commentators widget for their blog that doesn’t have “nofollow” attached to it, try to make it onto that list.

6. Use social media to build a following.

Use the following social media sites to drive traffic and build a following.

1. I recommend you start a twitter account specifically for the blog. This will allow you to monitor that blog’s specific following as opposed to mixing them in with your main account. Use your main account to promote the blog if you have enough followers. You want to build your twitter followers as much as possible so that when you release new content on your blog, they’re getting it in their twitter feed.
2. Start a Facebook fan page and promote the site to all of your friends. Use the same principles as you did with Twitter. Facebook’s traffic is much higher quality that Twitter, but a much lower volume. It’s harder to get fans, but when you do, they convert well.
3. Submit every article that you write to Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Be sure to try and get them dugg as many times as possible, so ask all of your friends to digg/redd/stumble it.

7. Interact with your users.

Be sure to comment on your blog and respond to every @reply on twitter. Engaging users keeps them interested and makes them feel important (because they are!). Whenever someone comments on your blog, respond to them immediately – especially if they have something insightful to say.

8. Monetize.

Most people want to monetize their blog right away, but that’s a really bad idea. Ads tend to drive people away when they’re right there in their faces. My number one rule about monetization is: keep advertising off the site until 1000 unique hits a day. While you’re working your way up to 1000 uniques a day, try some LIGHT contextual advertising with affiliate links to products you talk about. Definitely do not do more than one affiliate link per post. That may even be too much, depending on your audience. Don’t do step 9 until you reach this point.

9. Get sponsors and have a contest.

Why did I say “don’t do step 9 until you reach [1000 uniques a day]“? Because you’ll have almost no chance of getting sponsors until you reach this point anyways. You can also host your own contests and eat the cost, but if you do, your investment and risk increases significantly. Do contests for other blog posts about your blog, comment contests, twitter contests, etc.

10. Repeat steps 2-10 once a month until you can move on to your true passion.

Using this method, you can usually spend about 2-3 days at the beginning of each month writing your posts that really build the meat of your blog. You can the slow release that content over time to give you a little more freedom. Be sure to fill in some of your posts with bleeding edge current news throughout the week.

Conclusion

This guide is a really basic way to make money from a blog, starting at concept, all the way through success. Many of these steps are expounded upon on my blog. There are definitely some great advanced concepts for driving traffic and building incredible blog posts. Write what you know about, give value, and be responsive. Notice that I didn’t even mention making money until step 8. If you jump the gun, you’ll piss off your readers, and your site will never take off. Have any questions? Put them in the comments or email me.

This has been a guest post by James Thompson of jtGraphic.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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This is a reminder post. The free PPV webinar with Super Affiliate Jonathan Volk starts tonight at 10PM EST (7PM PST). If you haven’t registered for it, I highly recommend you do so now. The seating limit of the webinar software is 1,000 and we’re pretty close to that number now.

Jonathan’s guests include PPV experts David Ford and Corey Bornmann. Corey is the owner of AffPortal, an invaluable toolset that literally has changed the way people build their PPV Campaigns. David is the owner PPVPlaybook’s Coaching Forums and has helped hundreds (maybe thousands) of students learn how to become masters of affiliate marketing with PPV.

This webinar will include more information about PPV, how to use it, and will even have time for Q&A. Free Q&A with the gurus of PPV is worth it alone. They will also be going over the following:

1. What is PPV Marketing?
2. What are the benefits of PPV traffic?
3. Where can you find PPV traffic?
4. What is the potential of PPV?
5. What is Automatic Niche Research and how can you benefit?
6. What makes a good PPV landing page?
7. How can PPV campaign building be automated?
8. How can you learn more about using Pay Per View Traffic?

The webinar is open to anyone who has downloaded Jonatha’s new Affiliate Marketing 101 guide. If you have the guide, you’ll be receiving an email with the webinar information. If you haven’t downloaded the guide yet, then you can get it here.

Even if you can’t attend tonight’s webinar you should still download Affiliate Marketing 101. It’s one of the best affiliate marketing guide I’ve ever read. And it’s FREE!

I hope to see you at the webinar tonight. Make to sure to say hi if you see me!

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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Last week the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) announced it is considering cutting Saturday delivery. It’s about time. In fact, the mail doesn’t need to stop being delivered on Saturday, it needs to stop being delivered completely.

In a recent TechCrunch article, entrepreneur Marc Andreessen
suggested that traditional media outlets “burn the boats,” meaning they should stop publishing print versions of their publications.  We need to do the same thing when it comes to sending mail.

The Problems with Mail

Mail kills 5.2 million trees every year.

Mail is wasteful and inefficient. News outlets that have been covering the story about the potential of eliminating Saturday delivery have been missing the point. This issue isn‘t about the impact no mail delivery on Saturday would have. Instead, it is about asking the question: Is mail a viable communication method anymore? We are a society that has long thrived on innovation. We have been willing to stop using methods of communication once they have become antiquated; consider the elimination of telegraphs.

Last year, Mike Volpe
wrote an article about the waste and environmental damage caused by direct mail advertising. Today, let’s think bigger.

While the United States Postal Service is self-funded, it operated at a loss of nearly 2 billion dollars last year. The 2009 operating budget for the United States Postal Service was 79.2 billion dollars. Think about the impact that nearly 80 billion dollars could have if it were directed at improving digital communications infrastructure like rural broadband Internet access or improved technology in pubic schools. As Americans, we have allowed printed mail to hold us back from more efficient and innovative communications opportunities.

In the last quarter of 2009 (October 1, 2009 – December 31, 2009), the USPS delivered 21,218,826 pieces of first class mail. First class mail consisted of less than half
of all mail delivered during this time. If we think conservatively and say every first class piece was only one piece of paper and one envelope, then as Americans we wasted more than 42.4 million sheets of paper in only 90 days. This paper usage does not even begin to account for the 260,000 vehicles the postal service has on the road and the fossil fuels they burn every day.

Building USPS 2.0

Delivering messages has never been easier, and the content in them has never been more important. As a society, we don’t need to kill the United States Postal Service. Rather, we need to transform it into United States Postal Service 2.0. In an economy built on innovation and intellectual property, the countries with the best infrastructures to support their growth will achieve economic success and stability. What if your mailman, instead of delivering mail every day, was trained to support the digital messaging systems and pipelines of the U.S.?

Imagine a world where 656,000 employees
of the USPS were focused on issues like network stability and protecting citizens from spam and illegal content. The United States Postal Service is the second-largest civilian employer in the United States. Committing resources on that scale to digital communication would transform our society.

By creating USPS 2.0, the United States government (aside from the obvious environmental savings) could build a digital communication network supported by a purpose-driven organization that would position the United States far ahead of other nations.

Getting Back to Storytelling

The foundation of great inbound marketing is compelling content and great storytelling. In the world of direct mail and junk mail, our culture has lost the real reason people actually used to send letters — to tell stories. In shifting away from printed letters, some of the team members of the USPS could be trained to help businesses and individuals better tell their stories. Imagine that a few years from now, instead of going to the post office to mail a letter, you take your daughter there to learn how to edit a video she will be sending electronically to her grandparents.

Think about a world where blue post office boxes are turned into wireless access points and post office buildings become places of storytelling and real-time information sharing.

Direct and junk mail that nobody reads is wasteful. Betting on a dying form of communication is just as wasteful because it robs America of an opportunity to lead a world driven by digital communication. Let’s stop sending pointless direct mail ads that don’t work and fail to prove return on investment. Let’s stop flooding mailboxes with bills and statements that most people already view online. Let’s band together and say “no” to mail and “yes” to USPS 2.0!

Who is coming with us?

Photo by: Ed Siasoco 

Webinar: Rethinking Marketing

Want to learn more about how you can use inbound marketing to grow your business? Download the free webinar to learn how to turn your website into an internet marketing machine.

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Boring presentations suck.

Don’t you hate it when you attend an event and feel like the speaker is completely wasting your time?

Conferences are expensive and networking time is too valuable to waste by sitting down and listening to a bad speaker. With South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) coming up, our team wanted to solve this problem. 

Introducing Speaker Grader!

Speaker Grader is the newest free tool to join the Grader family.  It rates speakers at conferences via votes gathered from Twitter.

It is easy to get started with Speaker Grader. While attending a presentation, send a tweet that contains all 3 of the following:

1. The @speakertwittername
2. The #eventhashtag
3. Your vote, which is either #upvote if you think the speaker is doing a good job or #downvote if you are unhappy with the presentation. 

Optional: Any other feedback you wish to include in your tweet is fine, but make sure the first three items are also included.

So a sample tweet for SXSW would look something like:

“I #upvote @GaryVee for speaking with passion at #sxsw.”

Using Speaker Grader is as simple as sending a tweet; no sign up or login needed.

Please make sure to check out
Speaker Grader during SXSW to see who is being voted as the best and worst speakers from the event.

One more thing…

As a way to reward people who take the time to grade speakers during SXSW, we will be giving away Apple iPads.  More specifically …

The most active Speaker Grader voter each day will win an iPad!

Note: Individuals are only eligible to win once. The most active grader at the end of each day (11:59 p.m. Central Time) of the conference will win an iPad. 

Get SXSW News:

HubSpotters will be live-blogging SXSW, covering the hottest presentations and announcements. For the latest HubSpot SXSW coverage, please stay tuned to http://blog.hubspot.com/sxsw.

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The changing nature of social media marketing and optimization create the need for tools whether for research, marketing and promotion or analytics. Here are 11 social media and SEO tools you might find useful:

• howsociable.com – Social visibility score
• knowem.com – Profile building tool
• Social Media for Firefox – Build a powerful social profile on social news & bookmarking sites
• semrush.com – Find competitor organic search rankings
• Google Insights – Keyword demand trends
• Page Inlink Analyzer – Analyze inbound links, their Delicious bookmarks & keyword tags
• majesticseo.com – Historical back-link tracking
• trackur.com – Social media monitoring
• socialmention.com – Real-time social search & scoring, social keyword research
• bit.ly – Search friendly URL shortening with analytics
• analytics.postrank.com – Track social engagement with combined Google & social analytics

Below are screen shots of each tool with a more detailed description of how you might use them.

HowSociable is a useful tool to quickly gauge the social presence of a particular keyword or brand name. Agencies like TopRank Marketing will use this kind of tool (customized) to take snapshots of customer social presence metrics for social media optimization programs. For each social site polled, you can clickthrough to see specific mentions.  This is a characteristic of more advanced social media monitoring tools, but for those that want a quick glimpse, HowSocialble is easy to use and the price is right, just like these free social media monitoring tools. However, if you want more comprehensive brand search and monitoring, then a paid social media measurement tool is worth the investment.

KnowEm is both a free and a paid service that will help you easily and quickly check whether your brand terms or other keywords have been registered as social profiles on a wide variety of social media web sites. Everything from blogging platforms to social news and bookmarking services are included. If you don’t want to complete all those profiles yourself, you can pay knowem to do it for you.  Companies invest a lot in building their brand, so this tool is helpful both for creating off site promotion channels as well as guarding against brand name squatters.

Social Media for Firefox is the only browser addon in our list and can be a handy tool to identify upcoming news items that are gaining popularity on certain social news and bookmarking services. A big part of building a more influential user profile is to be a consistent source of submissions for articles that become popular. This addon helps identify articles that are becoming popular on services like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon giving you a heads up to submit to other services.  The logic is that if a news item becomes popular on one service it has a good chance of becoming popular on others.  Relevance, timing and focus are key as is patience for this kind of tactic.

SEMRush is an interesting tool for identifying the keyword visibility, both organic and PPC, on Google for pretty much any domain name you might be curious about. Your own or competitors for example. A common question for marketers is, “What are my competitors optimizing for?”. This tool helps uncover that insight and in combination with other standard and social keyword research, can be very helpful insight in a social media optimization program.

Google Insights for Search is a handy tool to research trends in popularity of various keywords on their own or in combination.  Filters for search type, geographic location, industry or topical category and timeframe allow you to refine some pretty useful information about what’s in demand.

Eric Miraglia ’s Inlink Analyzer is a back link analysis tool based on Yahoo’s Site Explorer that not only counts and displays source links to a particular URL, but it also shows if the source links were bookmarked on Delicious and what keyword tags were used. This kind of insight can be quite useful for understanding the relationship between social keywords and link popularity. It would be nice if there was a CSV export option.

Majestic SEO is easily one of the most powerful and useful link analysis tools available. There is a free version that gives you link acquisition counts over time and if you are a site owner, you can get full reporting for your site once you validate it.  If you use the paid service, you can get the juicy link details on your competition.  This tools is useful for finding high impact links for standard SEO but it’s also useful for finding out which social media sites your site or competitors’ site are getting  the most links from.  Also, which of your own social destinations (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc) are getting inbound links and from where.

Andy Beal’s Trackur service is a very easy to use social media monitoring tool that offers a free version that will satisfy many beginners in the social media optimization space.  Social media monitoring services are keyword based, (queries and negative or exclusionary) and that means some very useful information about how popular certain keyword concepts are on the social web. Of course you can use it to monitor what people are saying about your brand, identify a certain measure of influence and where they’re saying it. But seeing social keyword popularity trends can be quite useful for taking advantage of real-time marketing opportunities.

SocialMention is a free real time and social search tool that offers an array of search options (just blogs, just forums, just bookmarks or all) and output in the search results. You can get an indication of basic sentiment and the top social keywords associated with your query. As a free service, you don’t setup an account and save your search results, but you can easily download them into a spreadsheet. This is probably one of the most useful, free social search tools online.

Bit.ly URL shortening is very handy since they’re included as a default service on Twitter and many other Twitter applications. Bit.ly is rock solid reliable with uptime, which is pretty critical when you’re relying on their URL redirect to send traffic to whatever it is you’re promoting. You can also get basic statistics for each URL that your shorten to show how productive the site is where it was shared.  In today’s succinct social web with Twitter, status updates and micro-content, being able to conserve space with a reliable URL shortener is very helpful. Stats on top of that make this a “go to” URL shortening service.

PostRank offers a nice measure of engagement at the individual document level and if you pay attention, you can get that data on any web site in their database, not just your own. You can easily see what content on your competitors blogs are getting popular and where.  If you sign up for the PostRank Analytics service, you can incorporate Google Analytics data with social engagement metrics. These are essential comparisons in a social media optimization program and can help you understand where to plan your time on the social web.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO and Social Media Marketing tools. What low cost or free tools have you found to be effective for social media optimization tasks?

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Note: This post will make you smile, possibly even laugh. It won’t however teach you much about SEO. You’ve been warned.

Last week I attended SMX West in Santa Clara, California and took a couple flip video cameras along. I thought it would be fun to do "man on the street" interviews, somewhat along the lines of Jay Leno’s "Jaywalking" episodes on The Tonight Show. Another great idea I had was to employ the help of Dana Lookadoo from Yo! Yo! SEO to help with the interviews. Little did I know she’d be so great at it (ok, I lie. I knew she’d do much better than I would!). She did so well in fact that our video editor, none other than my (awesome) husband Rudy Lopez, mainly only used Dana’s interviews. A rockstar in the making!

Rather than keeping you from this awesome video any further… I present to you: SEOmoz "Man on Street" – A Who’s Who in Search Marketing.

Thanks to all our great participants!

I also had great intentions of getting several Whiteboard Friday’s with some of the speakers. Unfortunately I ended up just toting a mini whiteboard around with me all week instead. I’m sure I looked like quite the winner with my whiteboard in hand. I wonder if people think all mozzers are required to carry a whiteboard around just in case they get the urge to record a Whiteboard Friday. heh.

Thanks for watching along! I hope you had as much fun watching, as we had putting it together. Again a HUGE thanks to Dana Lookadoo and Rudy Lopez for all their help.

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warning: there are lessons and even actionable advice in here, but it is buried inside a story. I write stories because I love you and don’t want to bore you and because if you laugh then chances are that you’ll remember the educational bit, too. There’s actual research that this works – it is not just because I am in love with bloviation but hey, tomato tahmahto.

I have big love for tech. You could not pry my dishwasher out of my house without bloodshed and death, most likely yours. And the internet? Don’t even get me started. I want to french-kiss the web. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s my job or at least my blog’s mission statement.

Still, I’m more of install (or pay someone to install) and hope-it-works kind of gal. I want the fuss without the muss.

And I have this theory about tech: some key pieces of hardware and software make a huge difference and everything after that amounts to tweaks and hacks. But the good tech, like a great love, (initially) inspires awe, affection, and respect and make your life much better on a daily basis. You think: how did I ever live without you, front-loading washer? We wasted so much time.

And then, after the infatuation fades, you get on with your happily functioning and newly-enhanced life and start taking your love, machines, shockingly-white-whites and programs for granted.

I like it like that. I like low-maintenance relationships (don’t tell anyone) and I LOVE that electricity just works and I don’t have to think about it. I like finding the right things, that work, and let them do that in the background. Nearly invisible function is hawt.

WordPress is one of those key pieces of tech that made a big difference in my life. It is like a long distance lover. I don’t quite understand it and I should probably spend more time with it but damn I like it a lot. It does me right, mostly virtually.

Actually, let’s be honest: I LOVE WORDPRESS. My blog is my boyfriend. I adore it. I spend all my time with it. Because of all the fabulous people who love me up in the comments, my blog sates my unabashed lust for attention – which, in turn, has started saving me from terrible IRL relationship decisions.

(Wordpress is saving the world from needy girlfriends. Someone call the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.)

So the thought of someone getting their sweaty, malicious hands on my boyfriend blog and doing dirty things to it makes me nauseous.

It happened to a friend of mine, Kelly Livesay. One of her blogs was hacked and posts and theme modifications deleted.  It happened to journalist Helen Mosher. If you Google her name, the first search result is now “Cheap Viagra Online”. This is not – perhaps obviously – what she intended for her blog. It happened to Robert Scoble, who lost two months of blog posts and gained a very serious sense of personal violation.

And that sense of violation is exactly the prompt for this post: the movie The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo completely FREAKED ME OUT (capitalization absolutely appropriate and required).

Do you know The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? It is the first of a trilogy of books by Swedish author Stieg Larsson who completed this epic series and then promptly dropped dead. It is a gripping book and it almost killed me, too. I read it in five hours.

And then I got my hot little hands on the movie. Lisbeth, the main character and dragon-wearer, is one tough chick. You don’t want to mess with her. She’ll hack you.

Because that’s what she does. Lisbeth is a freakishly talented hacker. She works as an investigator and conducts her investigations from the convenience of her laptop. She gets into your computer and reads your naughty e-mails, your work memos, your sexts, your bank statements, your browsing history, and then uses that information as she sees fit, for her clients, or herself.

And if you’re on her side – I mean, who doesn’t want her to catch the lady-killing villain? (the villain) – then you’re with her, all the way, as she uses her scary powers for good.

So: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Wrenching read, haunting movie. Great entertainment, especially if you’re looking for a new reason to become deeply paranoid about all the ways people can screw with you online.

Robert Scoble’s not kidding when he says that he feels his virtual house was burgled. Thanks to this paranoid movie, I now feel his paranoia pain and I’m deeply worried about my boyfriend blog.

Still, I don’t  understand the point of hacking blogs, so I asked my friend Dave Doolin (Website In A Weekend), who knows Serious Stuff about WordPress, code, programming and How Things Work.

Kelly Diels: What’s the point of hacking a blog? Why would someone want to break into a blog and make it say BUY VIAGRA! instead of just building a sex blog to sell Viagra?

Dave Doolin: Honestly, I’m not really sure, but I’ll hazard a guess: it’s cheaper to spray spam by the trillions than it is to create your own site and work at building traffic. It costs next to nothing to hire people to send a e-mails, so even a really tiny conversion rate generates profit.

Kelly Diels: So how do we keep hackers out of our blogs? On your site, you recommend that bloggers change “Admin” to something specific and then delete the Admin user, so I did that, and Amanda Farough told me to make a unwieldy, ridiculous password that is actually a sentence with random capitalization and characters.

Dave Doolin: Yeah, those two things are a good start. You do want a long, complicated password. The other thing that everyone should do is read the WordPress Development Blog and Other WordPress News. They’re both in your dashboard, and they’ll keep you up to date on the latest hacks and security threats.

(I studiously ignore those two boxes in my WordPress dashboard but now, as of right this minute, I’m going to pay attention.)

And, now that I’m paying attention, I checked in once again with Amanda Farough, who is my designer/developer/chief-cupcake-sharer/coder-extraordinaire. She takes care of my site, because, as I mentioned, I like my tech to work but I’m not really inclined to make it work myself.

Kelly Diels: So, Amanda, what are we doing to keep my site secure? And by “we”, I mean you. What advice do you have for bloggers to keep their blogs on the unhacked side?

Amanda: Here’s my security short list:

1. Change your .htcaccess to protect your database name and password by adding the following line of code: <FilesMatch ^wp-config.php$>deny from all</FilesMatch>. In the event of someone hacking your blog, they won’t be able to determine where your tables are, protecting you from losing everything.
2. WP-DB-Backup is your new best friend. Get it emailed to you once a week or, if you’re really paranoid, once a day (note: Dave Doolin said we should do it once a day and I heart paranoia. That’s totally where I’m living right now. Thanks, Dragon Tattoo conspiracy). Don’t trust your server or your email server. Save copies of the database to your local drive as soon as you get the email. That way, you’ve got two copies: one on your email server and the other on your local drive.
3. Update Wordpress every single time you’re prompted to. These releases are the blogger’s equivalent to driver updates: they fix holes in security, functionality, and usability. If you’re running 2.8 when we’re on 2.9.2, then run that update. You’ll be glad you did.

And that – according to my friends in the know, because trust me, I didn’t know – is the short story of how to keep your blog safe and out of the sweaty, dragon-tattooed hands of malicious hackers itching to delete your hot copy and sell us sex aids in your name.

WordPress Security Summary:

• Get rid of your Admin user account
• have a long, complicated password
• keep up to date on WordPress tips and news by reading WordPress
  Development Blog and Other WordPress News
• BACK IT UP, baby
• Protect your database name and password
• UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

__________________________

Join the Dragon Tattoo Blog HUNT - an internet wide scavenger hunt tied to the feature film launch of bestselling book The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Win great prizes – free movie tickets, books, movie soundtrack, posters and more. To join the contest, start at the beginning of the HUNT by visiting www.dragontattoofilm.com/contest for full details and the first clue. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is in theaters near you starting March 19th.

THE NEXT CLUE:

This site explores everything Apple, but don’t tell Steve Jobs because this weblog is officially unofficial.

Kelly Diels writes for ProBlogger every week. She’s also a wildly hireable freelance writer and the creator of Cleavage, a blog about three things we all want more of: sex, money and meaning.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Blog Security: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Scares Me Into Taking It Seriously.

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A 40 year-old unsolved murder mystery. Strange cryptic codes in a bible. Sweden, sandwiches, and many, many cigarettes. The badass-est female protagonist since . . . forever. And an author who has, posthumously, caused quite a ruckus in the book world and in the minds of conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Yes, I’m talking about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. If you haven’t heard of it, the rest of us are inviting you to come out from under your rock. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest) is topping bestseller lists as we speak and the theatrical release of Dragon Tattoo hits the U.S. next week.

I had the good fortune of screening an advanced copy and, of course, my mind went blog, blog, blog. Because that’s what blog obsessed people like us do. So here are the blogging lessons I learned from this tattooed ‘girl’ . . .

Gasoline feeds a fire, but first there has to be a spark

At one point in the movie, a man lies under a car. Having just flown off the side of the road, both he and the car are demolished, gasoline is spilling out everywhere . . . and he waits, watching, trapped. Finally there’s a spark . . . and then fire, total combustion.

So often we have all of the ingredients, right? The design is just right, the writing is perfection, the research says that there’s a need for the content . . . but then, nothing.

No traffic, no comments, no buzz. No combustion. What’s missing?

There has to be a spark.

Maybe it comes in the form of a new partnership, a referral, or an outside event (like a shortage of light bulbs) that makes your product (candles) suddenly burst into high demand.

Maybe you have a life-changing event that triggers your passion. Maybe you read a book that causes something to click in your brain or your heart.

And then, there’s no stopping the heat.

Nothing more, nothing less

Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, is a woman of few words, but they’re always the right ones. She communicates through her gestures, carefully chosen words and even her silences. To some people around her, this is maddening. But others totally get it and they pay incredibly close attention to her. They listen closely . . . and they also watch.

As a blogger, what you don’t say can be as important as what you do say.

Do you find the positive in challenging situations, gleaning lessons and inspiring others? Or do you bitch and moan, spreading negativity?

Do you stick to your topic? Or is your blog scattered, full of everything under the sun?

Do you promote everything that could be remotely related to your blog? Or do you bow out of a big launch that, for one reason or another, isn’t quite right for your readers?

What is the significance of what you leave on the blogging room floor?

Document everything

In the movie, as Blomkvist and Salander try to solve the mystery, they are aided again and again by the record-keeping of other characters, the police, the newspapers, and themselves.

It’s the last, ‘themselves,’ that holds the lesson.

Working to uncover this decades-old secret, the investigators look for the needle in the proverbial haystack. With so much unknown, their path to discovery lies in documenting every thought they have, literally pinning them to the wall for examination — and never, ever brushing aside even one moment of insight or possibility.

Ideas for blog content, joint venture partnerships, promotions, ebooks — and even tweets and Facebook updates — often shoot through our brains at a fast and furious pace.

Blogging fodder is everywhere. It’s in the conversation you have with the souvlaki guy outside your building every day at lunch, it’s in the color of the car that just drove by, it’s in the ad that you saw for hairplugs.

If you don’t grab these ideas as they fly by, they will keep flying. Trust me.

Write it all down. Nail it to the wall. Even the thoughts that seem impossible, unreachable, or just plain ridiculous.

The clue to your own success will lie in your own observations and insights. Don’t lose them.

It’s hard to be brilliant all by yourself

The story’s protagonists bounce their ideas off one another — and often hear brilliance in their partner’s ramblings.

Blogging is about community. Who can you bounce ideas off? Who might hear your mumblings and, in turn, grab you by the shoulders and tell you that you’re actually onto something? Who can you help by being a sounding board?

You might have someone’s missing piece in your back pocket.

Like a tattoo, things are permanent on the internet

Lisbeth has many tattoos, including a dragon covering her entire back. Getting ink like that is a serious commitment. Yes, you can have laser surgery to get a tattoo removed, but from what I can tell, it never completely disappears. A scar is left behind. And I’m told the process is neither pleasant nor easy.

If we really want to get deep here, we can go so far as to say that your memory of the tattoo can never be removed.

Blogging is also a commitment. We commit our time, we commit our creativity, we commit our resources. And every time we hit ‘publish’ we commit to our ideas.

The internet is a pretty permanent place and it’s hard to ‘take it back’ once the words are out there. Yes, you can go to the trouble of having something uncached — but again, it isn’t pleasant or easy. People will remember your post, they may have even printed your words on paper. We’re time-stamped and cached, linked to and quoted, and even scraped.

Be as sure as you can be each and every time you share.

Don’t underestimate anyone

Played perfectly by Noomi Rapace, Lisbeth is mysterious, tattooed, and pierced. She’s also tiny, often mistaken for a skinny, 14 year-old boy and underestimated because of her small size.

But she’s able to fight off grown men — both physically and mentally — time and again. I believe the appropriate term here would be scrappy ass-kicker. And it works to her advantage. She has surprise on her side and she’s impressive, even to those who don’t particularly like her.

With a blogosphere more crowded than a Twilight premier (and some days with just as much screaming), it’s a phenomenal idea to stand out.

It’s the old case of man bites dog. What can you do, how can you say it, where can you share it so that it lands like a snowman in a cranberry bog? (That is: with a splash, much coolness, and bright by contrast.)

Lisbeth is also the underdog. To be honest, she’s the runt.

But a few people look beyond that (or don’t even see it at all) and take a chance on her. It helps her, of course, but it also helps them. They don’t see her size, her income, her appearance, her odd personality, her history. They see her skill, her brilliance, her dedication, her inherent goodness.

How many Top 10, 25, 50, 100 lists have you seen that tout the best bloggers, the best writers, the twitterati?

Sadly, many people get caught up in these lists and think that these people are the only ones to do business with or read, because they look good on paper. But we all start somewhere.

Chris Brogan just wrote that it took him 8 years to get 100 subscribers on his blog — and look at him now.

As bloggers we can only help each other and the quality of the blogosphere by discovering new talent, sharing what we know and giving people a chance.

No matter how small and skinny . . . no matter how many tattoos.

About the Author: Julie Roads invites you to join the Dragon Tattoo Blog HUNT — an internet wide scavenger hunt tied to the feature film launch of bestselling book The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

You can win great prizes — free movie tickets, books, movie soundtrack, posters and more. To join the contest, start at the beginning of the HUNT by visiting www.dragontattoofilm.com/contest for full details and the first clue. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is in theaters near you starting March 19th.

THE NEXT CLUE: Rachel Bilson & Christina Ricci are celebrity supporters of this national network that fights violence against women. Their strong volunteer program just goes to show that when kindness RAINNS, it pours.

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