WordPress Security Tips To Keep Your Site Safe From Hackers
In this age of technology, it is important to have a digital presence in the form of a website. Whether you use it for publicity, to sell your goods or services or even as a means of earning money is entirely up to you. However, as you go digital, you always face the risk of someone hacking your website. When your website gets hacked, you might suffer a huge blow financially or even have your reputation affected. With WordPress being the most common CMS out there, we thought we should help you out with some WordPress security tips to keep your site safe from hackers.
Keep a Strong Password:
One of the most basic tips to prevent your website from being hacked is to have a strong admin password. A strong password isn’t connected to you in any way whatsoever. Of course, that makes it harder to remember, but it keeps your cyber identity safe.
To create a strong password, ensure that it is a long one (more than 16 characters), contains both upper and lower-case letters, and contains numbers and even special characters. Use a random combination of these to set up a strong password. Remember not to use any words or names in the password to make it even stronger.
It is also important to keep an admin username that isn’t easy to guess. Follow similar guidelines to ensure that the admin username is also a strong one.
Change the login URL:
It is generally quite easy to access the login page for WordPress websites by using the “wp-admin” or “wp-login” suffix. Keeping this default login page makes the job of a hacker a walk in the park. Thus, you need the change the login page to something more complicated like “my_newlogin_page”. You could also use the iThemes Security plugin to help you with this.
Ensure your WordPress is Up to Date:
A common trick that hackers use to get access to your website is to find loopholes in older versions of the software to get in. This is why all applications and software regularly receive updates to ensure that these loopholes are eliminated.
The latest update launched by WordPress is WordPress 4.9.1 Security and Maintenance Release, in late November last year. If you haven’t downloaded this one yet, go update it now!
Switch 2-Factor Authentication Login on:
In this feature by WordPress, the security of the website is increased significantly by adding another step to the login procedure. Every time you try to log in, you will be sent a one-time password (OTP) to your phone or your email. Once you enter this code, only then will you be able to log in to the website.
Thus, hackers will require not only your WordPress password but also your email password or your mobile phone number. The chances of this are considerably lower, which ensures higher security for your website.
Get your Website an SSL Certificate:
Whenever you see a website URL, you will see that it either begins with ‘http’ or ‘https’. The ‘https’ websites are the ones that are protected with SSL encryption. This encryption ensures that any data that is being transferred from the client (like your browser) to the server is encrypted. That way if hackers get the information, they won’t be able to make any sense of it. This encryption is especially important if you are planning to accept payments online or if you have multiple users logging into your website.
Be Careful about Plugins and Dangerous Links:
One of the features that makes WordPress so popular is the fact that you can use plugins to enhance the experience. However, since it is so popular, almost everybody is making a plugin for WordPress. Some of these plugins can be viruses or other kinds of malware that can severely affect your website.
Another possibility is that the plugin you are using isn’t secure enough and might lead to a cyber-attack as well. That is why you should ensure that all your plugins are up to date. It is also a good practice to download new plugins from known sources only that have a considerable number of reviews and downloads. At the same time, remember to delete old plugins and themes that you do not use anymore.
Add Users Carefully:
Running a website isn’t an easy job, and often you need multiple authors or editors to help you with it. However, this increases the number of liabilities since their accounts may be hacked or they might be a threat themselves.
Hence, before adding any new users, ensure they have a good track record and great reviews to back them up. Moreover, ensure that they are using strong passwords. It helps a lot if these passwords are generated using an application created for this purpose, like ‘Force Strong Passwords’.
Be Careful about the Directory Permissions:
If you are using a shared hosting environment, then multiple people can access the files or directories hosted by the server. Naturally, this increases the security risks, and thus it is a good choice to restrict access to these files and directories.
You can do this by changing the permission codes for them. Experts recommend that the directory permissions should be set to “755” and files to “644” to protect them. Ensure that you do not use the code “777” for any of the files, since this gives full access to others.
Keep the wp-config.php File Safe:
The best way to make the life of a hacker more difficult is by denying them access to the wp-config.php file. This file is crucial to the WordPress installation. The simplest way to keep it safe is to remove it from the root folder and move it up to a higher-level folder. The priority order will ensure that this file is still accessed by WordPress at the right time, which will keep things running smoothly.
Hide your WordPress Version:
Depending on how you have set your website up, the WordPress version number is easily visible to both users and viewers. If a hacker gets hold of this version number, it is like a safecracker getting blueprints to the safe he is supposed to crack. Several WordPress security plugins like “Wordfence Security” can help you hide this version number from people snooping around for it.
Create a Backup Regularly:
Following all the above tips helps a lot, but we cannot ignore the possibility that someone, somehow, manages to get past all these security measures and hack the website. At such times, it is good to have an offline backup that can’t be touched by hackers. This will help you start anew if the unpredictable does happen. Many WordPress plugins can help you do this. VaultPress creates a backup every 30 minutes, thus keeping your offline data up to date with minimal data loss (if any).
These are just some of the tips that will help you keep WordPress safe from hackers. As you can see, even these basic steps are quite a handful. Moreover, you always need to stay updated on new security measures to stay one step ahead of hackers. That is why we recommend hiring a professional service to help you manage your WordPress security. If you have any questions about the post or a specific part of WordPress security, feel free to ask them in the comments below.
What’s The Difference Between On-Page And Off-Page SEO?
Did you know that small businesses should allocate about 8% of their Revenues to Marketing?
That’s right, according to the SBA, a small business with under $5 million in yearly revenue should have a marketing budget consisting of around 7-8% of their yearly revenue. The SBA points out that in certain industries, a small business may even need to earmark up to 20% of revenue during its early branding years.
But wait, we’re not done with the small business math lesson yet. Research shows that in 2017, an average of 51% of all web traffic came from organic search.
If your small business marketing strategy is predominantly digital, you should be spending at least 3-4% on search engine optimization (SEO). The challenge is that most small business owners don’t know much about search engine optimization. You’re an expert in your industry, not SEO.
Although it probably won’t benefit you to learn how to SEO your site from top to bottom, you should know enough to talk the talk while shopping around for the right marketing services.
At the most basic level, you should understand the basics of on-page vs. off-page seo, and what each of these SEO segments encompasses.
At the highest level, search engine optimization can be broken down into off-page and on-page SEO. On-page SEO consists of factors that a website owner can directly manipulate on their site. Off-page search engine optimization refers to the digital signals outside of one’s website that marketers can influence indirectly.
There are notable differences between on-page and off-page optimization in SEO, which we will go over in the following sections. On a strategic level, off-page SEO is the more difficult and tedious of the two, so we’ll cover that first.
What is Off-Page Optimization in SEO?
Off-page optimization consists of the actions that can be performed outside of your actual website to improve your organic search rankings. These measures are meant to reflect your website’s social credibility and industry authority. Because these search engine ranking signals come from other websites, they cannot be easily manipulated.
Off-Page SEO Factors:
There are several off-site SEO factors, including:
- Backlinks to your website
- Brand mentions
- Social signals around your website
- Backlinks
- Think of rankings as elections of web pages in the search engine results. Your page has to get the vote if it wants to be on page one. In the world of off-page SEO, those votes come in the form of backlinks. Backlinks are hyperlinks from external websites that send users and search engine crawlers to your website.
Depending on their relevance and authority, backlinks can affect your organic rankings to different degrees. Think of the importance of each of your backlinks as being located on a Cartesian plane, where the X-axis is authority, and the Y-axis is relevance.
[image] You can have the most authoritative backlink in the world, but if it’s not relevant to your niche or industry, your pages will have difficulty ranking well. On the other end of the spectrum, if you have a highly relevant backlink from a site that doesn’t have any authority in your industry, you’re still going to find it difficult to rank.Your page rankings will not see much benefit if your links are one-dimensional on the relevance-authority spectrum.
Brand Mentions:
To many startups and small businesses, branding is a buzzword that only holds merit if you have venture capital money backing your organization. Bootstrap entrepreneurs tend to avoid paying for branding because it can result in exorbitant costs with very little ROI.
In this particular case, we have concrete evidence to verify that a brand mention may very well be one of the most critical off-page SEO factors for your site. According to Google’s Panda Patent filed in September 2012,
“An implied link is a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource. Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of an implied link without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implied link.”
When it comes to off-page SEO, brand mentions seem to be just as important as backlinks to your website.
Social Signals:
Since off-site search engine optimization is meant to reflect the authority of an entity in the real world, it makes sense that having social credibility in the digital world is a ranking signal.
To show that the use of social signals for organic rankings isn’t entirely theoretical, take a look at the US 2016/0246789 A1 Searching Content Of Prominent Users In Social Networks Patent. Without reading through everything, this patent indicates Google’s ability to augment rankings based on what your social media connections find valuable.
What does this off-page SEO signal mean for you? The more shares your content gets, the higher it will likely rank. Social shares also create nofollow links and generate real traffic, so even if you’re not concerned with improving your SEO, a social share will bring relevant traffic to your site.
How to Do Off-Page SEO:
Now that you know about the different types of off-page SEO, consider how they can be used in your digital marketing strategy.
Unfortunately, getting another website to link to your site or mention your brand is no easy feat. In today’s digital landscape, the most scalable off-page search engine optimization techniques are the least effective.
Most off-page SEO experts will leverage local or niche directories and guest blogging to build backlinks.
Local and Niche Directories:
Yext and BrightLocal are commonly used tools for local directory listing. You simply enter your business’s information, and the tools manage the footwork so that you don’t have to.
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When it comes to niche business listing sites, the process is typically more involved. For example, imagine that you’re doing SEO for law firms and you’d like to get listed on several lawyer directories. You’ll most likely have to enter your profile information manually on each site.
Building Backlinks with Guest Blogging:
When done correctly guest blogging is one of the most effective methods for building links to a website. The trick is finding websites in your industry that aren’t in direct competition with your own, and asking the site owners/managers if you can contribute a blog article for their readers.
They get free content to publish for their audience, and you get to cite any of your resources that you mention and link to within the article you contribute.
Here are some additional tips to keep in mind while guest blogging:
- Your article must be high quality – it is a reflection of your brand, and the publisher is more likely to keep backlinks for off-page SEO intact if your content is valuable
- Don’t be self-promotional – your article might be denied
- Don’t stuff your article with links
- Target sites that don’t compete with you – trying to get competitors to promote your ideas is usually a waste of time
- Use advanced search operators to search for sites that use “write for us,” “contributor guidelines,” or “guest blog” to promote their acceptance of guest authors
What is On-Page SEO?
On-page optimization in SEO refers to direct measures that can be taken on your website to improve its rankings in search results for related queries. Examples include using related keywords in the visible content and in meta tags like your page title, image alt, and meta description.
6 On-Page SEO Factors:
On-page SEO boils down to six main factors. There are more than six factors, but the six below will get you 95% of the way.
Page Titles:
Page titles are by far the most important on-page search engine optimization factor. If your site framework doesn’t have special functionality to create a unique page title, it will usually use whatever you set as the page name in the backend of your page.
If you’re using WordPress as your CMS (which I highly recommend), then you can easily use the Yoast SEO plugin to create a unique page title.
The HTML for your page title will be within the <head> tags, and will look like this:
<title>Your Page Title Here</title>
The page title is what shows up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and in the browser tab at the very top of your screen. For this reason, it’s important to optimize page titles for SEO and for user click-through.
Keep the page title length under 70 characters, and closer to 50 characters if you can. This will prevent your title from being cut short in the SERPs, while keeping it concise and appealing. It has been best practice to include your keyword near the beginning of the page title if possible. However, you’ll probably see better results if you create a title that is appealing to users and include your target keyword where it seems most natural.
Heading Tags:
After the page title, heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.) are the next most important on-page optimization factors. Use the page headings like you would an outline for a paper. Headings should follow a logical hierarchy without skipping steps.
It’s best to only use one H1 on a page. That being said, it’s also important that your web page is about one organized topic to begin with. This helps Google and other search engines identify and better understand what your page is about, and if your page deserves to rank highly for related user queries.
Some marketers without an understanding of technical SEO use headings for their styling characteristics. For example, content marketers sometimes use H2s when they want to emphasize text by making it large, despite that text not being important to the main content on the page. Avoid this practice, and instead use the cascading stylesheet (CSS) to style your text. This will help you avoid emphasizing text to search engines that should be taking a backseat.
Keyword Usage:
Keyword usage within the body of your page is important. I am not a proponent of focusing on using a certain keyword density, as was common practice in the early days of SEO. However, if your page is about a certain keyword topic, it’s only logical that you would use your target keyword and closely related terms within the body of the page.
Similar to the primacy and recency psychological principles, it is typically best practice to include your target keyword near the top of your page and the bottom of your page. You can use related keywords throughout your page to avoid keyword stuffing while still following on-page SEO best practices.
As an interesting aside, in 2016, one of my clients’ web pages was competing with another site’s page for a high-competition keyword. The keyword was not visible anywhere on the competitor’s page, and still they were ranked on page one, position two for this 1600 per month national keyword. The takeaway: though it’s best practice to use your target keywords in the body of your page, Google’s algorithm is becoming more and more advanced each day, and exact match keyword usage isn’t do-or-die.
URLs:
Including the target keyword in your page URL is a best practice. This used to be an important on-page ranking factor, but it’s speculated to account for less than 1% of your page’s SEO value today.
The biggest benefit of this practice is that when someone links to your page with a naked URL (the actual URL is used as the anchor text), the link anchor text will still include your page’s target keyword.
Image SEO:
There are three main pieces to image SEO:
- Optimized image alt Tag
- Image filename includes the target keyword
- File size is kept to a minimum without hurting user experience
An optimized image alt tag should include the keyword and be under 15 words. The true best practice here is to craft an honest description of the image while including your target keyword. With their image recognition technology, it is likely easy for Google to determine when someone is keyword stuffing in an image alt tag, and when someone is accurately describing an image for a good user experience.
Since there are limited ways to optimize an image, including your target keyword in the filename is also a good practice. This can be difficult to do when you’re optimizing images on a website that already has images without filenames that have been optimized for on-page SEO. You’ll have to save the images to your local machine, then upload them again with the keyword-focused name.
As a last step, you’ll want to compress images before uploading them to your web page. You can use a free online image compression tool for most .jpg and .png files. A tool like Tiny PNG is usually a safe bet, and Google also released an open-source file compression program called Guetzli in 2017. Guetzli is not as easy for marketers to implement since you cannot simply run the program with an online tool.
Meta Descriptions:
Meta descriptions are not visible on your web page, but will show up under your page title in the organic search results. Your meta description should be around 300 characters, with an absolute maximum of 320.
Many times, Google will choose its meta description from the visible content on your page that best aligns with searcher’s intent. This probably has the biggest effect on an eCommerce SEO strategy, as meta descriptions and on-page product descriptions play an integral role in the overall page’s SEO value.
How to Do On-Page SEO:
Many of the on-page search engine optimization factors above come with insight about implementing these components. When it comes to on-page seo and off-page seo, on-page is easier because of a site owner’s ability to make direct changes.
You can implement best practices on your target pages, and while blogging for SEO. You’ll just have to adjust your approach for the different searcher intent behind your keyword topics.
