Tools for Improving Readability

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If you create user-friendly content, you understand readability. If usability and user-interface is important, then readability should be a top priority.

When your content is readable, it’s easier to consume. If usability and UX is important, then readability should be a top priority. User-friendly content may even improve your search ranking.

Website readability is governed by two components – Writing Style and Typography.

Writing Style Tips for Improving Readability

  • Use section headings to split up long articles
  • Highlight important words and phrases by using bold and italics
  • Use bullet points to make lists easier to read
  • Avoid jargon; use simple words
  • Avoid the passive voice
  • Proof-read your work and use spell check to avoid glaring grammar mistakes

Typography Tips for Improving Readability

  • Choose a main content font that is easy to read on all devices
  • Make sure the font size is large enough
  • Use a dark color font on a light background
  • Don’t use dark backgrounds if you want people to read your content

Online Tools for Improving Readability

The Readability Test Tool

This online tool will check your writing under well-established readability formulas. E.g., the Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease and the Automated Readability Index.The Readability Test Tool also furnishes statistics about your text. It shows you the number of complex words and average number of words per sentence in your work. Try to lower these two metrics when you’re editing for readability.

The Readability Test Tool

Grammark

Spelling errors and grammar mistakes make for hard, distracting reading. Grammark can help find grammar and spelling issues. It will also point out wordiness, vague language, and other problem areas.

Grammark

 

Hemingway Editor

This online editor helps you write clearly and concisely. The tool highlights complex sentences and phrases, the use of passive voice, and adverbs. Hemingway Editor gives you a dynamic readability grade as you write. It also displays information such the estimated reading time of your article. In the screenshot below, I pasted an article from the Washington Post. As you can see it scores very low on readability.

Hemingway Editor

Contrast Ratio

Design is a big part of readability and text legibility. Good foreground/background color contrast ratio is key to reading comfort. This is an open source tool for calculating the contrast ratio of two colors. It can help you choose good colors for a pleasant reading experience.

Contrast Ratio Easily calculate color contrast ratios. Passing WCAG was never this easy

 

How to Schedule Your WordPress Blog Posts

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If you’re like me, you tend to write in spurts and starts. Not every day is a blogging day, but once I begin blogging I will usually commit a good percentage of the day towards those efforts. This quick tutorial will show you how to schedule your wordpress blog posts so that all four blog posts you create the same day are published on different days.

Why Schedule Your Blog Posts in WordPress?

Each website has a specific time or day for peak traffic. Now if you live in a different timezone than your readers, then it can be a problem. Imagine having your peak time as 3 a.m. Scheduling posts can be very handy for this.

The other situation is if you are going for a vacation, but you don’t want to abandon your blog.

If you schedule your WordPress blog posts, you don’t have to worry about either of these scenarios. This function allows you to stay ahead of yourself by finishing up articles in advance and have them ready. You can prepare for a busy week ahead of time and schedule articles to be published automatically.

How to Schedule Your WordPress Blog Post

Once you are done writing your blog post, before hitting publish, you need to look at the option right above the publish button that reads “Publish immediately”. Click on “Edit”. Set Date and Time and click Schedule.

Follow these easy steps and you can know schedule your WordPress blog posts.

What is Reddit and Why Should You Care About It?

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Every once in a while, a new internet site or technology becomes all the rage.

It’s like striking gold. Initially, it’s kept a secret and supported by the local community, but as soon as it becomes known, everyone wants a piece of it.

Reddit has become the latest internet marketing gold mine.

Marketers are trying to leverage the massive platform to build brand awareness and drive traffic to their websites. For example, Ryan Luedecke was able to use Reddit to make $2,200 in revenue for his new beef jerky company. But for every Ryan, there are many more who don’t understand how to harness the power of Reddit.

What Reddit is and why you should care about it

Reddit.com is a website that was started in June of 2005. Despite the fact that it’s just 10 years old, it is one of the biggest sites on the internet. It’s global Alexa rank is 24. This means that it gets the 24th most traffic of all the millions of websites. To give you some perspective, Google, Facebook, and YouTube take the first three spots. Amazon is 7th. Amazon China is 73rd. The New York Times is 99th place.

Reddit is an aggregator site. Users submit links to other websites, which can then be voted and commented on. Reddit has almost 20 million unique visitors and about 150 million page views per month.

The most interesting part of Reddit is that it’s different from the majority of large sites. Most other sites are strictly controlled by a team of moderators or editors. Reddit, on the other hand, is controlled by its users.

How does Reddit Work?

The first time you visit Reddit, you’ll probably have no clue what’s going on. It looks complicated, ugly, and chaotic, but its functionality is great.

I’m going to break down some of the most important concepts that you’ll need to know to successfully market your business on Reddit.

Concept 1: Karma

Everything on Reddit is driven by “karma,” which is the individual positive and negative points (called upvotes and downvotes) given and received by each member of the site.

reddit-karma

Everyone can vote on every link or discussion posted on the site. Everyone’s vote counts for the same amount, so it’s essentially a democratic process. An upvote means that you believe it’s a good post, while a downvote means the opposite.

Submissions with the highest score (upvotes minus downvotes) rise to the top. However, there’s one more factor that controls the flow of submissions: timing. Newer posts don’t need as high of a score as older posts to rise up in the rankings. This keeps the content from growing stale. 

Concept 2: Subreddits

The way Reddit works is that it’s divided into thousands of different categories called subreddits.

The URL structure looks like this: 

           “http://www.reddit.com/r/[subreddit name]”

For example, if you were interested in nutrition, you would go to:

           “http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/” 

In the worldnews subreddit, you will see submissions only about worldnews.

As a user, you have two main options. You can either visit each subreddit you’re interested in individually, or you can subscribe and unsubscribe from subreddits that you are and aren’t interested in.

Concept 3: Groupthink

Strange things happen when you pool many similar people together. There is a very distinct average type of Reddit user:

  • 20-30 years old
  • Male
  • Liberal
  • Likes technology/gaming
  • Values intelligence (hates seeing “old news” on Facebook/Tumblr, etc.)

Upvotes and downvotes are supposed to identify good and bad posts. However, they are often used to express opinions. For example, someone who is politically liberal might downvote a submission that is pro Fox news.

Since the content is entirely controlled by users, they shape Reddit by their opinions and beliefs. This naturally attracts more like-minded people and fewer that are different.e. 

Why does this matter to you? When a large number of people get together, groupthink is inevitable. The same topics are discussed over and over again with little else because people don’t want to go against the grain. If you do, you get downvoted.

Concept 4: Reddit for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Reddit can be useful for link building, but building links should not be your primary goal.

First off, Reddit is a highly authoritative site. It’s has over 702 million backlinks. Another good thing about Reddit is that it’s set up to prevent spammers, which is good for marketers like me and you, who actually try to create valuable content. 

To prevent people from just mass-posting links across the site, not all links on Reddit are made dofollow. All links are automatically nofollow on Reddit until they get a certain number of upvotes.

Since spam posts will either get downvoted or won’t get any upvotes, they never become dofollow and therefore have zero or very little value. 

Submissions to most subreddits can be either a text submission (html) or a direct link to a page. The same rules apply to both text submissions and links. If the overall submission receives a few upvotes, all the links in the text will also become dofollow. 

Now you understand quite a bit about how Reddit has the potential to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website and how it works. 

The trick to Reddit is that there is no trick. You have to genuinely contribute and become a member if you want any results from your time.

Master Google Photos

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To put it simply, Google Photos – even with its quirks – is a revelation. Within minutes of playing with the free product, I knew I was going to cancel my SmugMug account. I also knew that I would probably never look at Amazon Photos again. If you use the free version, Google will compress your photos (down to 16 megapixel – still quite large). The paid version is inexpensive (100 GB is $1.99/month. 1 TB is $9.99/month).

The appealing features include unlimited storage for photos and videos, some neat user-interface tricks that make the thousands of photos that we all now take easier to navigate, and, perhaps most importantly, smart image recognition technology that makes your library of photos almost endlessly searchable. Google Photos promises to turn the haphazard collection of images you generate daily into sortable batches of meaningful photos.

We still have a lot of exploration to do, and some pain points are already evident. For example, migrating 50GB of my photos from SmugMug to Google Photos was a headache. I had to download in increments from SmugMug (55 zipped files in all) and then unzip and upload folder by folder to Google Photos. It took about 4 hours.

It’s also worth noting that all of this has been done before in some form or another. Facebook has great facial recognition. Flickr can identify content in your photos and place them in broad categories. Google’s real accomplishment here is stringing everything together more or less seamlessly. Plus, you’ve already got a Google account. No new accounts! Just sync everything you take on your phone and this stuff all works like magic.

IMG_3362-ANIMATION

Twelve Steps to Make Yourself a Google Photos Master

Step 1 – Share and Unshare

One of the best features introduced by Google Photos is the ease with which you can share an image or group of images through a link. Anyone with the link can see the selected pictures though, so you might want to review them regularly and delete the ones that are no longer required—choose Shared links on the web menu to do this.

Step 2 – Test Out the Search Capabilities

This is one of the most amazing things about Google Photos. Google Photos’ intelligent search function is more intelligent than you might think. As soon as you click inside the search box in Google Photos on the web you’ll be given some suggestions, but you can look for almost anything: Try “truck”, “wine”, “ice”, “dog” or even “selfie”, for example, or a photo type like “panorama” in your queries. It doesn’t get it right every time, but it looks like it learns from its mistakes. Because the search capability is so powerful, you no longer have to organize your photos in folders.

Step 3 – Send Videos to YouTube

Google Photos handles your videos too—it will store an unlimited number of them if you’re happy with a maximum quality of 1080p. If you have the paid version of Google Photos, the quality isn’t restricted but there’s a maximum video size of 10GB. Head to the YouTube upload page and there’s a new option to import clips straight from Google Photos into your YouTube channel, where you can title, tag, and share them as required.

Step 4 – Backing up Photos from Other Apps

This is where Google Photos really earns its chops and, in my experience, is much smoother than Apple’s icloud. Google Photos does a quick and clean job of sending pictures you snap on your smartphone or tablet to the cloud, but you can also do the same for apps like Instagram and WhatsApp on Android. From the Android app, open the app menu then tap Device folders to choose which folders to include or exclude from the back-up process.

Step 5 – Select Multiple Pictures at Once

Most of us will have a ton of digital images on our devices and Google Photos offers a few tricks to make managing them more straightforward. For example, inside the mobile app you can press and hold and then swipe to select multiple pictures—it’s almost as easy as using a mouse and a keyboard to drag across a bunch of photos.

Step 6 – Make Stories from Your Photos

Stories in Google Photos are like guided albums with captions and a particular flow to the pictures, but you need to go through the mobile apps to create them. Tap the Create icon (a plus symbol) then choose Story—from there you can select the relevant pictures, add captions and locations, and change the cover photo.

Step 7 – Remove Geolocation Data

The location data stored with your pictures helps Google link pictures together based on where they were taken, but you don’t necessarily want to include this data when you share photos with others. Head into Photos settings on the web and enable Remove geo-location in items shared by link to do exactly that.

Step 8 – Import Photos from Computers and Cameras

The mobile app for iOS and Android have been getting most of the attention—that’s where we take most of our photos after all—but you can upload photos from the desktop and memory cards too. Download the client for Windows or Mac, specify the folders you want to back up to the cloud, and Google takes care of the rest.

Step 9 – View Photos and Videos in Google Drive

Go into the Google Photos settings on your computer and you can choose to view photos and videos stored in Google Drive through the Photos interface: This doesn’t actually move them over, so if you disable the feature the images disappear from view in Photos. This is only really useful if you already have a lot of your content stored in Google Drive.

Step 10 – Download Photos to your Desktop

In Google Drive’s settings on your computer, you can create a folder showing your Google Photos and then install the Google Drive desktop client as well—everything uploaded from mobile and stored in Photos then gets saved to your local Google Drive folder. (If you also have the desktop uploader installed, you may end up with some duplicates.)

Step 11 – Check Out the Assistant

Google knows some of us take a ton of pictures of the same thing from slightly different angles or in slightly different lighting just to be sure we got it. Most of those repeat photos land in the dusty corners of our hard drives, never to be seen again. Assistant finds those repeat photos and puts them to use by automatically creating photosets, collages, and animations.

Even better: It detects images that are similar and, when possible, stitches them together to create panoramas. While you may not have had the presence of mind to snap a panorama, Assistant will pick up on those overlapping images and create the panorama you never thought to take.

DSC_6152-PANO

Step 12 – Create a Video with Music and Share it in Minutes

This is perhaps the most powerful feature of Google Photos. What used to require a special photo or video editing program and at least an hour of your time now takes minutes to create. The Google Assistant actually created this one for me – https://goo.gl/photos/9bJtewdmj9wEz6yK8

 

How to Make Google Chrome Run Faster

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Google Chrome is by far the best internet browser. It is the most secure and has the most features and, as of May 2015, is used by approximately 64.9% of all people browsing the internet from a desktop or laptop computer. Apple’s Safari accounts for just 3.1% of the market.

As great as Google Chrome is, there are ways to make Google Chrome run faster.

Step 1 – Access Google Chrome’s Secret Settings

Google Chrome allows you to use unofficial “beta” browser features called “flags” while they are being tested. These features are strictly experimental and may break or disappear while you are using them. To access these settings, simply type chrome://flags in your browser bar. Hit Enter and you will be taken to the flags page and shown a warning:

chrome-flags-screen

Step 2 – Use Find to Make Things Simple

The Chrome flags page is not presented in a user-friendly format – probably because it is not intended for mainstream users. To make things much easier for you, type Ctrl+F to open the search bar in the right-hand corner. Then, in future steps on this post, just type the search term into the search bar and let search find the content on the page.

Step 3 – Set Maximum Tiles to 512

Basically this feature will increase the amount of RAM (memory) that Chrome is allowed to use and this should immediately speed up your browsing. By default Chrome uses 128MB of RAM. In the search bar that you just opened in Step 2, type Maximum Tiles and hit Enter. Once you’re brought to the Maximum Tiles row, click the drop-down menu and change Default to 512.

max-tiles-512

Step 4 – Change the Number of Raster Threads to 4

This modification will change the rendering speed of images in Chrome. Search for Number of Raster, and change the number of raster threads to 4.

raster threads

Step 5 – Relaunch Chrome to Make Chrome Run Faster

In order for these changes to take place, you need to relaunch Chrome. At the bottom of the chrome://flags page, you will notice a “Relaunch Now” button—click it, and you will quickly see how Google Chrome is faster.

make-chrome-run-faster

How to Export Email From Outlook 2010 to Excel

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Outlook, like most Microsoft programs, is full of hidden features that stay hidden and out of touch most of the time. A client recently asked how to export email from Outlook 2010 to Excel. This seems like a lot of steps, but if you follow them you’ll see that the entire process is quick and easy.

How to Export Email From Outlook 2010 to Excel

1. First, you need to move or copy all the emails you are interested in into their own folder.

2. Now go to the Outlook File tab.

3. Click “Options” in the left hand menu.

4. Outlook 2010 file menu

5. An Options dialog will pop up. From the left hand menu, Choose “Advanced” .

6. Advanced menu in Outlook 2010

7. Scroll down to the Export section on the right and hit the button marked “Export”.

8. Outlook 2010 Export Option

9. In the dialog that pops up, select “Export to a file” and click Next.

10. Choose file format “Comma Separated Values (Windows)” and click Next.

11. Select the folder all your emails are in and click Next.

12. Pick a location and name for the new spreadsheet you want to create and click Next.

13. Click the “Map custom fields” button.

14. Decide which fields you want to export or just leave it as the default (everything).

15. Click finish and your file of exported email addresses will be created.

16. The file format will be CSV (“xxx.csv”) which is readable by Excel and can be saved as an Excel spreadsheet inside Excel.

LastPass Hacked, Change Your Master Password Now

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LastPass – my favorite password manager – has been hacked. This is the bad news. It’s time to change your master password. If you have LastPass, do this right now before you finish reading this post. The good news is that passwords you have saved for other sites should be safe.

LastPass announced on their company blog that they detected a server intrusion. While encrypted user data (your stored passwords for other sites) was not stolen, the hackers did take LastPass account email addresses, password reminders, server per user salts, and authentication hashes. The latter is what’s used to tell LastPass that you have permission to access your account.

According to LastPass, the authentication hashes should be sufficiently encrypted to prevent anyone from using them to access your account. However, the company is still prompting all users to update their master password that they use to log in to their LastPass account. If you use LastPass, you should do this immediately. If you share that master password with any other services, you should change it there, too. Finally, if you haven’t enabled two-factor authentication you should do that immediately here.

LastPass Security Notice – Updated June 16, 2105:

Was my master password exposed?
No, LastPass never has access to your master password. We use encryption and hashing algorithms of the highest standard to protect user data. We hash both the username and master password on the user’s computer with 5,000 rounds of PBKDF2-SHA256, a password strengthening algorithm. That creates a key, on which we perform another round of hashing, to generate the master password authentication hash. That is sent to the LastPass server so that we can perform an authentication check as the user is logging in. We then take that value, and use a salt (a random string per user) and do another 100,000 rounds of hashing, and compare that to what is in our database. In layman’s terms: Cracking our algorithms is extremely difficult, even for the strongest of computers.

Am I at risk if I have a weak master password?
An attacker could try to guess your master password, then use your per-user-salt and authentication hash to determine if their guess was correct. Typically, an attacker would try a list of commonly-used passwords or dictionary words (such as 12345678, password1, mustang, robert42, iloveyou). They would have to do this for you specifically, since your “per-user” salt is unique to your account . Because your password is hashed thousands of times locally, and this hashed value is again hashed 100,000 times before being stored server-side, guesses will be very slow. If your master password is weak or if your password reminder makes it easy-to-guess, then the attacker could significantly reduce the number of attempts needed to guess it correctly. Then the attacker would have your master password, but not your data, since your data vault was not exposed. If the attacker attempted to get access to your data by using these credentials to log into your LastPass account, they’d be stopped by a notification asking them to first verify their email address.  We require this security measure for any attempt to access your vault from a new device/location, unless you have multifactor authentication enabled.

Were passwords or other data stored in my vault exposed?
No, your data is safe. Encrypted user vaults were not compromised, so no data stored in your vault is at risk (including form fill profiles, secure notes, site usernames and passwords). However if you used your master password for any other website, we do advise changing it – on LastPass as well as on the other websites. Note that you should never reuse passwords – especially your LastPass master password!

What should I do now?
Our security and processes worked as designed, and customer data was, and is, protected. Because we are requiring verification for any new IP address or device, your account is secure. You will be prompted to update your master password when you login. Not all users will see the prompt immediately, but your account is safe and you can update when prompted. For added security going forward, we recommend enabling multifactor authentication. Also, be wary of phishing emails asking you to disclose your master password, payment information, or any other personal information. Never, ever disclose your master password or any confidential information, even to someone claiming to work for LastPass.

Why did I hear about this in the media first?
Emails have been sent to all users regarding the security incident. Notifying millions of users via email takes time. Therefore, we also announced the security alert to our blog and our social accounts in real-time, and the media quickly picked up the story.

I reset my master password, but now I can’t get in!
If you forgot or mis-typed your new master password, please revert your change: https://lastpass.com/revert.php and login again with the previous master password. Then you can try another change (and be careful of typos!).

I don’t remember my old master password.
Please try password recovery: https://lastpass.com/recover.php on a browser where you’ve used LastPass before. For more information about account recovery, see: https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/account-recovery/

Need to Rent a Car? Try Silvercar

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Headed somewhere on vacation this summer? If you’re going to Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Ft. Lauderdale, L.A., Miami, Phoenix, or San Francisco, you should definitely check out Silvercar. Unlike other car rental companies, Silvercar has just one make and model of vehicle – a silver, Audi A4. Pricing is based on demand so if you adjust pickup and drop-off times slightly, you can get a different daily rate.

Why Choose Silvercar?

  • You get a silver Audi A4 instead of a Chevy Malibu
  • Free GPS
  • Free in-car Wi-Fi
  • Free satellite radio
  • Free car seats – baby, toddler, or booster

How Does It Work?

This is where Silvercar is life years ahead of other car rental companies. That’s because once you’ve got your profile built and have booked a reservation, you don’t actually have to talk to anyone to get the keys to your car or get on the road. You can walk right up to the cars in its designated parking area, choose the car you like (they’re all identical, so there’s not that much choice involved), and unlock it by scanning a QR code in the driver’s side windshield.

There’s a similar process for closing out your Silvercar rental. Just drive the car through the gate and it automatically knows that you have returned. Once you’ve pulled in, the car wirelessly signals back to the home base how much gas is left in the tank and determines the cost of refilling it based on market rates. That way there’s no exorbitant price gouging on gas upon return, although there is a $5 service fee attached when refilled.

Just as there was no need to talk to an attendant when checking out a car, there’s no need to do so when returning it. Silvercar automatically recognizes when the car has been returned, and simply creates an invoice on the fly that will be sent to the associated email address.

Rent with Silvercar and Get $25 Back

Use the referral code “GSEIDEN” when you sign up with Silvercar. When you complete your first rental, you’ll get $25 back.

Why Websites Get Hacked

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I spend a fair amount of time working on new websites as well as fixing websites that have been hacked and this question always comes up:

Why would anyone ever hack my website? I’m just a small business owner.

Depending on who you are, websites get hacked for different reasons, but there are a few specific explanations.

Automation is key

Websites attacks that target small businesses and smaller websites are fully automated. The benefits of automated attacks provide hackers the following benefits:

  • Mass exposure
  • Reduction in overhead
  • Tools for everyone regardless of skill
  • Dramatically increases the odds of success (for the hacker)

The majority of these attacks are automated and follow a specific sequence:

  1. Reconnaissance
  2. Identification
  3. Exploitation
  4. Sustainment

While thinking about how these attacks occur, it’s important to address the two types of attacks: attacks of opportunity and targeted attacks.

Attack of Opportunity

Almost all small business website attacks are attacks of opportunity. This means that it’s not one individual or group that is trying to hack into your specific website, but rather a coincidence. Something about your site was caught in the trailing net as they crawl the internet looking for hacking opportunities. It could have been something simple like having a known plugin installed, or maybe displaying the version of a platform (displaying the fact that you’re using an outdated version of WordPress, for example).

According to Sucuri, a website security company, it takes about 40 days for a new website with no content or audience to be identified and added to a bot crawler. Once added, the attacks can begin immediately without any real rhyme or reason. It can be any website; the only commonality is that they are all connected to the internet.

These web crawlers then begin to look for identifying markers. Is the website running WordPress, Joomla, Drupal? If so, is the website running any software with known vulnerabilities or bugs in the code? If the answer is yes, the site will be marked for the next phase of attack, exploitation.

The sequence of events can happen in a matter of minutes, days, or months. It’s not a singular event; it’s ongoing and occurs continuously as the bot crawlers are scanning for vulnerabilities. Once your website is on the list, it will just keep on trying until it succeeds. This is why it is so critical to have someone actively managing your website and – at a bare minimum – updating software.

Targeted Attack

Targeted attacks are often reserved for big businesses, but not always. Think of the NBC hack in 2013 or the Forbes hack in 2014. There are many examples of these attacks lately but it’s obvious why there’s an uptick in this trend. Even though it requires much greater hacking skill, the payoff to the hacker can be huge. A very common type of targeted attack is called a Denial of Service attack in which the attacker works to bring down the availability of your site by overloading it with traffic.

Hacking Motivations & Drivers

Now that you have a better understanding of how these attacks happen, let me unpack some reasons why websites get hacked.

Economic Gains

The most obvious reason why websites get hacked is for economic gain. These are attempts to make money by your audience, either by getting them to click on something or download something.

Drive-by Downloads

A drive-by download is the act of injecting your website with malware and hoping to infect as many website visitors as possible. Think of someone visiting your website and then calling you because they installed a fake piece of software that you supposedly recommended on your website. Then their bank accounts were drained. Scary and very real and devastating.

Black Hat SEO

The other type of strategy are black hat SEO campaigns. These are not as devastating, but can be more lucrative for the hackers. This is the game of abusing your audience by redirecting them to pages that generate affiliate revenue.

System Resources

The business of farming system resources is a huge motivator for hacking groups. Botnets are nothing more than interconnected systems across the internet; these can be desktops, tablets, and even servers and they can be tethered together to perform tasks like Denial of Service attacks simultaneously. These attacks that target your system resources are dangerous because they can happen completely behind the scenes without you knowing what’s going on until you get a notice from your host – or worse, a huge bill – exceeding bandwidth.

Hacktivism

The point of these website attacks often comes down to awareness and frequently consists of a hacker defacing your homepage. This form of attack can be combined with others, but more often than not they are somewhat benign and create more embarrassment to the site owner rather than affecting their site visitors.

Pure Boredom

Unfortunately boredom seems to come into play and often there is no real reason why websites get hacked.

Conclusion – Your Best Defense is Knowledge

It is easy to be overwhelmed by all of this, but we believe that your best defense is knowledge and if there’s any real take-away here, it is that you should

  1. hire someone to manage and maintain your website
  2. update whenever updates are available

Remember, security is not about the elimination of risk. Security is risk reduction. Take what you know and use it to lower your chances of getting hacked.

Increase Search Traffic with Google’s Next Update

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Increase search traffic with Google’s next update. On April 21st, 2015, Google will roll out an update that makes mobile friendliness a larger part of its algorithm. This is a really big deal.

Why? Because Google is saying the mobile update will have a bigger impact than its Panda update.

Should you be worried? Yes!

Neil Patel’s blog on Quick Sprout gives you 3 steps to help you take advantage of this update. Be proactive and help yourself so you are not caught with your pants down.

Don’t Get Caught with Your Pants Down: 3 Steps to Increase Your Search Traffic with Google’s Next Update