Month: September 2012

Posted on

A cautionary tale on WordPress security and SEO

WordPress security and SEO: a cautionary tale

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great way to be very clear about what your business does. The opposite of SEO is being confusing instead of clear.  What could be more confusing than advertising someone else’s business instead of your own?

This is what neglecting your WordPress update can lead to:
This example is part of what a client’s website looked like after it was hacked. The website had nothing to do with any kind of financial service least of all “payday loans”. Everything about it had been modified crudely.

If being hacked this way wasn’t bad enough Google tacked a “This site may be compromised” warning on search results that showed the website with the “new” commercial offerings:

Since there were a number of facility websites within the hacked company website Google picked up and showed the hacked results instead of the actual company information for all ten businesses:

These WordPress hacks happen.  Unfortunately they can happen in many different ways. As a result they can be very difficult to completely correct because in some cases code has been hidden within the website files that will rewrite the unwanted text over and over until it is found and eliminated.

In this example a developer had modified a theme to give the site a unique look. He cautioned the business to NOT update WordPress because the updating process could break the look of the site.  This turned out to be very bad advice. One of the most important reasons to update both WordPress and your plugins is to improve your website’s security to make it less likely that it might be hacked.

How your website looks in Google and other search engines is an important part of your business marketing. Once people are credibly warned to not visit your website it is less likely that they will return.

WordPress is a powerful tool for getting your message out to the world. It’s up to you to properly care for it.

Posted on

Do you want to be confused about SEO?

It’s really easy. All you have to do is believe articles like the one I ran across on LinkedIn recently. It was given credence by appearing on the Ad Age website. It’s title proclaimed that it was about Google’s “Penguin” update and how it would lead to something the author referred to as “new SEO“. (SEO is the acronym for search engine optimization)

It’s important to first focus on the fact that the author can’t know very much about any of Google’s updates because all such information is a trade secret that is carefully guarded by Google. Despite his lack of actual knowledge about Google’s algorithms the author conflates his opinions to improperly and insultingly define SEO (search engine optimization) as doing something to “fool a crawler into indexing borderline junk content to get high rankings”. Doesn’t an article falsely claiming to know something about Google’s Penguin update quality as “junk content”? In fact, isn’t his practice an example of “link baiting” which is the creation of “borderline junk content” to lure sites into linking to the material? I think that “yes” is the correct answer to both these questions.

It’s no surprise, then, that this author, speaking as a content creator, extols the virtue of content creation and how it represents something he calls “new SEO“. Unfortunately for his argument content has always been an important part of search returns so he is saying nothing new but thinks it appropriate to bash SEO anyhow.

Google has succeeded by doing search better than the other search engines. We can count on Google to continue to improve their performance. Yes, content is important and there are more ways than ever to produce content with the increasing importance of social media. Since SEO is the art and science of making it clear what your business does it will adapt.  It must be forever new and a single update to Google’s algorithms is unlikely to cause catastrophic change as this author purports.

Posted on

How can you get your website to be better at lead generation?

Every business needs to generate leads. Leads become customers and if you don’t have customers you don’t have a business. Consequently we see a lot of material online purporting ways to improve lead generation . However, if we look closely at the advice it is not clear how the recommendations could be supported by results which probably explains why they are not.

A post on LinkedIn claimed to identify the elements of a “great lead gen landing page”. It was posted by a prominent marketing company and cited another online source. Let’s start with their top three:

1. A concise headline. Was A/B testing performed with a concise versus a non-concise heading?  What does that even mean? An example would be fascinating as would the raw numbers in the difference on leads from each. Wouldn’t a headline that addressed what visitors were looking for be more persuasive than something that is simply concise? What process should be followed to identify a concise, or even better, a pertinent headline?

2. An image or video. Was testing performed with and without images for a variety of business types?  What was the difference in raw numbers of leads by business type? This suggestion is a no-brainer for physical products but illustrating services in a way that makes sense to visitors is not so simple.

3. A core benefit statement. Many businesses get tripped up on this because they state what they think is a core benefit rather than doing the research to discover the benefits that most people are searching for. What is the process for crafting an effective statement?

The point of this exercise is that your landing page needs to be customized to the needs of your best prospects. There is no “one-size-fits-all”. A careful search engine optimization (SEO) process can give the direction you need to properly craft your landing pages. By starting with the proper research as we do at sem[c] you will know how people are looking for what you are offering. Only then can you start tailoring your landing page to their needs.