Social Media Advisors
We are Social Media Advisors, a Social Media Speaker, & Custom WordPress Site design.
It’s time for another installation in my Ask A Social Media Advisor Series. Today we are covering how to scale images you have already loaded into the media library of your Custom WordPress site.
Here’s a quick video showing you how to scale/edit the image size of photos:
Today’s Ask A Social Media Advisor question came from Pam Graham, and it relates to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how to generate good quality backlinks to her custom wordpress site.
Here are a few simple ways you can start to generate good quality backlinks to your site while only using white hat SEO techniques. These are safe strategies you can implement today and keep you out of trouble with the various search engines.
While some services like Facebook might add a <nofollow> tag, not all services do that and you can really gain some good links from that alone. Go back through all those various social networks you signed up for but never even completed your profile and make sure to get your links in to your website and everything else completed.
In the video I mention a few good places to get some nice backlinks to your site. Here are a few of those that take no time to set up:
In addition to services like the ones listed above, some blogs allow comments to be followed by search engines, so leaving comments that are valuable to the conversation and are not spammy can be a good source of links as well.
The final way to build powerful backlinks are by requesting to write a guest post on someone else’s site. I’ve been able to build some really good links by doing this for my site over the past few years. Not only do I write guest posts for others, I also LOVE having them from time to time on my site. In fact, I’ve had several guest bloggers here on this site over the past several years. If you would like to contribute, contact me about the possibility of being a guest blogger.
*Bonus Tip For Generating Backlinks: One simple way to generate good quality backlinks is by creating content on your site that others would want to link to. If you are a real estate agent and you are sharing valuable information about the current state of the market, there’s a good possibility a news source like the local newspaper or station might link to your blog post when covering the story on their site. Or, a business might link to your post if you share a nice review of their product or service.
If you begin to implement some of these different strategies above into your daily routine, it won’t be long till you are seeing the SEO benefits of backlinks into your site.
See other Ask A Social Media Advisor answers in this series:
When you build a Custom WordPress Site, one of your hopes is to make that site rank well in search engines and generate a good steady stream of traffic. As your site matures and the amount of content continues to grow, your visitor traffic should also see increase.
While you may be excited about this increase in traffic, one of the negative side effects that can happen is an increase in spam comments. Unfortunately popularity doesn’t just bring in potential business, but it can also bring along those annoying spammers.
Why do they bother with your site you may ask? Well, it’s pretty simple: Spammers comment on your site hoping to build quality backlinks to build up their own search engine optimization.
Here are three easy ways to spot spam comments in WordPress:
They realize either the owner of the WordPress site does not realize it is spam or they don’t really pay attention to their site anymore. Allow a few of these spam comments to index on your site and within no time you will get hit with thousands of spam comments.
So now that you know how to recognize spam comments, what do you do to block the spam and stop the influx of spam comments? The first thing that everyone should do when setting up a new WordPress site is install Akismet and get it activated. This is the default spam plugin that WordPress installs whenever you start a new site. Unfortunately, because of it’s strange name, most people don’t know what it is and never activate the plugin.
Then after their site is live for a few months and the comments start coming in and they are receiving so many a day they contact me and beg for help. Take a look at one of my recent clients WordPress comment spam problem:
Once you have Akismet installed and configured correctly, the next important thing to remember is that when a comment shows up on your blog that looks like it could be spam, don’t approve the comment. Also, don’t just hit the delete button. I know some clients that do this and they cannot figure out why they keep coming back. You must mark spam comments as spam instead of just deleting them. When you just delete comments the Akismet filter cannot learn who the spammers are. When you mark it as spam it notifies Akismet and you are doing your part to help the entire WordPress community against future spam comments from that person.
Another important step to stopping comment spam is to make sure your Akismet plugin is kept up to date. If you are running older versions of the plugin, you are leaving a door open for the spammers to get in. This is important to do with all plugins on your site for security, but especially important for fighting against comment spam.
An extra step that you can take to fight spam is to install one of the additional spam blockers in the WordPress plugin directory. I currently don’t run one, so I can’t give you any good suggestions on those. Instead I prefer to use the Disqus Comment System on my personal WordPress sites. When you use something like Disqus, Livefyre, Commentluv, or other comment systems it will also help to lower the amount of spam as they normally require a different type of login like a Facebook account, Twitter account, etc from the default name, website, comment fields. Spammers don’t like giving away their true identity and are usually too lazy to make another account, so they will just move on.
On a side note, one idea that has been asked to me by many of my WordPress clients is whether or not they should change their discussion settings so that they must approve all comments before they go live. To me, this is a very bad idea. Nothing is worse than a good conversation happening on a blog post and I want to jump in, so I write a thoughtful comment to be greeted by: Your Comment is awaiting moderation. That is like a punch to the gut and takes all the wind out of my sails. That being said, I wouldn’t use moderation.
So, in closing here’s the steps to deal with WordPress spam:
Hopefully after reading this post you have a better understanding on how to deal with WordPress spam comments. If spam comments on your custom WordPress site are out of control, and the things above do not seem to resolve your problems, feel free to contact me for help with a WordPress Site.
So I teased you in the title on how to handle your Custom WordPress site if spam comments get out of hand and reach 151,000+. I’ve had many clients that have several hundred spam comments in their WordPress site, but never one with over 150,000 till just a few weeks ago. When I saw this I figured it was time to make a quick video on how to delete spam comments in bulk from your site. You could go into the comments section and remove them manually, but that can become very time consuming when you have thousands to remove and can only do it 50 at a time.
So here’s a quick easy way to remove 151,000 comments at once:
As you saw in my example, this removed over 151,000 WordPress spam comments in under thirty seconds. It is a quick easy way to clean up your spam box and save you hours of time.
Happy Spam Fighting!
As I shared the other day, while I was out of the country, some of my sites got hacked which made for a rather labor intensive Thanksgiving. Once I got things on the sites all cleaned up and restored back to normal, I began looking to see what might have been the place they got into my sites. With the help of Sucuri, (affiliate) we found that one of the vulnerabilities of my site was through TimThumb.
What I had found is that some of the plugins/themes on sites that I had were using versions of timthumb that were out of date. Unfortunately, one of the down sides to using free plugins/themes is that sometimes the developer does not keep things up to date for compatibility and security. Just like for all of us, sometimes life gets in the way, or a new direction opens and other things get left behind.
So, I went on a search to see what was the easiest way to scan everything on your site & find a way to update. I came across a great plugin called Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner that does a great job of scanning & updating. Here’s a quick video showing you just how easy it is:
So, keep your Custom WordPress Site safer and use this plugin to accomplish it! Also, make sure you are are backing up your WordPress site on a regular basis. If you do not know how, or want someone to handle it for you, you can always check out the WordPress backup service I offer.
I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving holiday to it’s fullest extent by spending lot’s of time with friends and family, shopping their hearts out, decorating the home and lastly resting enough to sleep off the turkey coma.
For me, my Thanksgiving holiday was spent doing much less fun things. On Thanksgiving eve I logged into one of my sites and noticed it had a few updates that needed to be installed. So, as I normally do, I clicked button to install the updates and everything went downhill from there. Because the sites were not updated in over a month due to me being out of the country with limited to no internet access, the updates did not get installed in a timely manner and it allowed for my sites to get attacked/hacked.
Since the site was on a shared server, the attacks shut down 8 of my sites and took me several days of work to get them back up & running again with the help of Sucuri to clean up the malware. (affiliate) Granted, most of the sites that got attacked were not used for much other than testing things for my clients custom WordPress sites, but some of the ones affected were rather important to my online presence.
In particular, one site I was very upset to see attacked was the new product reviews site I built, New Shiny Object. This site reviews products that you may want to purchase and with it being just a few days from the busiest time of the year for shopping, I wanted this site along with all my other ones back up & running as soon as possible.
Most of my sites had a free backup plugin installed that keeps a copy of the content on the site alone & emails it to you. But, the design customizations, installed plugins, and SEO work does not get backed up in the file it sends. Luckily for me, the most important site was able to be restored quickly & easily because of my recent change in back up services. The new service offers the ability to backup not only the content of the website, but also a full backup of everything to an Amazon S3 cloud server.
A quick download of the file and install back to the server and that site was back online. The other sites on the other hand took countless hours of work on my behalf to restore settings, plugins, themes etc. So, instead of it taking hours like my other sites, New Shiny Object was back up & running in just a few minutes.
Back in July I soft launched the WordPress backup service to my clients as well because of the tremendous value I saw in it. I soft launched it to make sure that I knew what I was doing, and also to really test the system and make sure everything worked the way it said it should. Well, after several months testing around 15 clients and after the events of this past weekend, I think it is time to start offering this service to more and more people.
That being said, here is what the new backup service includes:
Pricing for this is being offered as either month to month or annually. If you have more than one site you would like to have backed up, your second site is less.
Wow, the past month has flown by. My trip away was beyond amazing & life changing. Not only did I get to make an impact on lives of others during the past month, but I also got to see some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been in the world. The photo to the right was one I took while in Cape Town, South Africa.
While I was gone I decided I would start my Thanksgiving early and start reflecting back on this past year and some of the things I’m thankful for from the past year. Since I had over 50 hours of time spent on airplanes over the past month, there was plenty of time for reflecting and planning for the future of the business too.
First, I looked at my goals coming into 2012 and what goals I accomplished. A big goal I had for 2012 was to increase my opportunities to travel the country as a social media speaker. In previous years, I was asked to attend maybe 5-8 conferences in a year to present. However in 2012, those numbers increased dramatically. This year I traveled to over 20 cities all around the country to share as a social media speaker. I would say this goal was definitely accomplished.
Another goal of 2012 was to help more people realize the value of WordPress for their website solution. During 2012 I was able to share with thousands how awesome WordPress can be through webinars, conferences, and company meetings. In addition, I also helped over 30 clients get their own custom WordPress site designed. Overall, the goals set for 2012 were pretty well met, or even exceeded.
Seeing how there are only a few weeks left in 2013, I figured while I had all that time on the plane without much else to do, it would be the perfect time to start planning ahead for the coming year and setting goals. Here’s a few of them so far:
Just like in 2012, one of my top goals is to secure more opportunities to present at conferences as a social media speaker. I’ve already began signing agreements for conferences in 2013. If you have an event coming up or a company you would like me to come speak to, feel free to contact me to discuss presentation topics, rates, times, etc. I want 2013 to be my busiest year yet of travel.
My next big goal for 2013 is to help even more people in getting started with WordPress. To accomplish this there are several things I’m implementing. First is the public launch of a new WordPress starter package I’m offering. I soft launched this product at the beginning of October at a conference and the responses were great. This low cost option is perfect for someone getting started with wordpress. It features a basic blog setup with design and all the plugins you would need to get your site running for a one time setup fee. You will hear more on this over the next few weeks. Of course, I will still be offering the custom WordPress site option for those who want something more involved than just a basic setup.
The third goal for 2013 is to help people protect their WordPress sites from being attacked. While I was gone on my missions trip, some of my sites were attacked and hacked. I’ve spent the past three days over Thanksgiving getting them all restored and back running. Just like the starter WordPress sites, I soft launched a WordPress backup service using Backupbuddy that I provide to clients on a monthly basis this past year. In 2013 I plan on offering the service to everyone to help keep their sites secure and safe. One of the worst feelings in the world is having your site go down and no backup in place.
Unlike the free backups I install when building a site, this one backs up everything on the site, not just the content. That includes the plugins installed, design customizations, SEO work, etc. In addition, it saves the backup of your site to an Amazon S3 storage cloud server so everything is safe from an attack on a shared server. In my instance, I had 8 domains on the shared server and all 8 were taken down by the attack. Currently I have around a dozen clients using this service and hope to increase that number dramatically in 2013 to keep everyone protected.
The next big thing I want to get back to doing more of is webinars in 2013. When I started the company back 3 years ago, it was one of the main things we offered. We offered at least 2-3 webinars each and every month. I pay good money each month for software and don’t always use it to it’s fullest potential. So, be on the lookout for more webinars in 2013. Some will be free, some might cost money to attend. I also hope to do more webinars in 2013 with special guests. If you have a topic or want to do a guest webinar in 2013 with me, feel free to contact me to discuss your topic and schedule. As they become available, I will post them to my upcoming classes page.
The final goal for 2013 is to write more. During the past year I became lax on blogging on my various sites. In 2012 I created a product review site that has set dormant for months now. I hope to begin contributing more there as well as adding several guest writers there as well. I also help to take one of my personal blogs that have set dormant and turn it into a place to start sharing more of my images I’ve been taking. Don’t worry, I also plan on adding many more tips, ideas, and helpful hints here to increase your business online.
Over the last year I’ve found myself really enjoying photography and want to share some of those images with others. I have not yet decided on which site I’m going to convert into more of a photo blog, but when I do, I’ll let you know. One thing for sure, I hope that in 2013 I’ll get back into the habit of sharing more quality content with my readers.
So that’s it, that is the game plan moving into the new year. I’ve got a bunch on my plate, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I look forward to what the new year holds and the things that are to come!
