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.

September 10, 2012October 31, 2016

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.

September 4, 2012October 31, 2016

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.

August 30, 2012October 31, 2016

How to use social media to prove that you shouldn’t be trusted

A share appeared in my LinkedIn feed titled “10 Simple Steps to Building Trust and Getting Readers to Take Action”. I read the article but couldn’t believe what I saw. The author based none of his steps on actual results, didn’t follow his own advice and stated things that were just plain wrong.

For example, when someone makes a pronouncement like his opening “Getting exposure to your blog or website is the number one ingredient for a successful business.” I look for reasons to agree or disagree. He gives none. Lacking any input from him I would disagree by arguing something like “making sure your customer gets what you promised is the number one ingredient for a successful business”. I can give you many, many examples of successful businesses that get no exposure to either a blog or a website whatsoever. That means his “is the number one ingredient” might really be “can, in some cases, be a useful ingredient”. He should have followed that up with “… and here’s why” but he didn’t so we really learned nothing.

In light of his opening statement I began to look for what it is that he might know about “successful business”. It appears to be nothing at all. He identifies himself to be a student. He doesn’t have a business.

This post might be less distasteful if he could have said anything in the first person so that it was clear his points were personal opinions and were not based on facts either observed or researched. Instead he keeps to the third person impersonal which is a voice that is meaningless unless some kind of reasons for making the statements are listed. There are none.

As for following his own advice, his point “Use the Same Profile Picture on all Social Media Sites” is laughable since his Twitter portrait is different from his blog portrait. Ever hear the old saying about practicing what you preach?

Since he is emphatic about responding to negative comments “Learn that Criticism is to be Accepted Not Disputed” I tried to post my opinion to his blog. He did not approve my post as submitted.

If his points weren’t so elementary and disjointed he might be seen as explaining some, but not all, of the elements of personal branding. As I don’t need to explain to you branding is one of the most important aspects of your online presence. Since he didn’t mention branding at all he should not be given that much credit.

Social media is big news. Many people are looking for answers. There are no answers in this post. It should not be trusted.

August 28, 2012October 31, 2016

How important is SEO in lead generation?

The Samurai Business Group is one of the finest sales management training companies around. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to take their Black Belt Sales Training course and it gave me a string of epiphanies about the buying process and how marketing and sales fit into that process.

I have the pleasure of talking with both of the founders, Bob Lambert and Dan Kreutzer, on a regular basis. We frequently touch on various problems of interest to most people in business. I consider both of them to be trusted advisors.

Samurai has this to say about prospecting for leads:

5 Active Activities on Prospecting include:
1. Quality Introductions (QIs)
2. Referrals
3. Alliances
4. Networking
5. Targeted Direct Mail/Phone

This is ordered to represent the most likely activity to result in a sale (QIs) to least likely. It is a good thing that numbers 4 and 5 can be helped by SEO because large numbers of interactions are necessary to achieve a lead, let alone a sale. Networking in particular must be seen to include not only search engine results but the entire ecosystem of online interactions. A business can begin to analyse metrics that include how many visits to the company website result in a lead or a sale.

What the list doesn’t suggest is how important validation has become in both the development of leads and getting a sale. Almost every buyer consults a range of online resources before making a buying decisions in nearly every type of transaction according to the research funded by Google in the pamphlet “Zero Moment of Truth”.

If we look at the process for achieving success with quality introductions, referrals and alliances we see that the validation process that is now so common in the buying process would be incorporated here as well. Wouldn’t you Google a potential alliance partner or referral?

SEO increases the number of qualified visits to your website. The specific number of visits necessary to reach your goals will vary but, in the case of website visits, more is always better. These visits are better yet when properly qualified to how people look for what you offer which is the point of SEO by sem[c].

This report shows the relative effectiveness of SEO against social media and pay per click:

August 27, 2012October 31, 2016

Redirects, soft 404s and their effect on SEO

Redirects are what happens when you try to go to a page and you go somewhere else or are “redirected” to a different page. There are a lot of reasons that this might occur. The page may have been removed. It could have been incorporated into a different page. The domain name might have changed. There’s a long list of legitimate things cause this. Most web servers will redirect to a “Page Not Found” or a “404”. This happens and doesn’t have major SEO consequences although it’s not the best for user experience.

The dark of side of redirect is why it is of concern to search engines and can have a negative effect on your SEO. Spammers took advantage of a type of redirect that used javascript to send a visitor from one site to another (and either spam or malware ridden) site. This type of redirect was inadvertently added into one of our client’s site by a graphic designer for what he thought was a great idea but it wasn’t. Google delisted the site entirely for all of the search terms that they had previously been on the first page in first position for.

According to Wikipedia: “The practice of employing fake 404 errors as a means to conceal censorship has also been reported in Thailand^[11] and Tunisia.^[12] In Tunisia, where censorship is reportedly severe, people have become aware of the nature of the fake 404 errors and have created an imaginary character named “Ammar 404” who represents “the invisible censor”.^[13] “

Another type of redirect that has negative consequences is a “soft 404”. This can happen when the web server doesn’t send you to the page you requested and sends you not to the designated 404 page but to some other page which still isn’t what you requested. Our client’s custom ecommerce storefront created nearly 500 of these “soft 404” errors that Google reported. Needless to say their movement towards optimization was slowed until this problem was solved.

August 21, 2012October 31, 2016

Social Media can be a part of successful search engine marketing

There should be no question that social media can be an integral part of search engine marketing. Social media content is content afterall. At sem[c] we have been cross-linking our clients’ social media and websites for years. The prime business goal for a business, that will do the work necessary to best utilize social media (and it’s a lot of work), is to have good, real, frequently updated and optimized content on their website and an active and very interactive social profile. Each will drive traffic to the other. In both cases the strategy is based on the fact that sales are positively influenced by the amount of qualified traffic looking at your content. Each type of content serves a distinct and different purpose. Each type of content has costs and benefits.

You should think of your website as a repository of everything there is to know about your business. You should assume that by the time a prospect interacts with you they will have read everything on your website that is important to them. You really want to be in the short list of possibilities when a prospect is looking for what you sell. To be successful at this you need to develop a contemporary looking website with good, original content. The SEO process as practiced by sem[c] will help you to do this in a way that will get you found AND make it clear to a prospect what’s in it for them. A link to your social media will allow the prospect to see what other people are saying. The costs are monetary: website development, hosting, domain name and time: content generation and organization.

You should think of social media as both part of the validation process when prospects are investigating your business and a potential source of traffic to your website when a prospects finds you via their social network. If someone gets interested in your business because of one your mutual friends they will want to know more and will visit your website. The great thing about social media is that it has little in upfront technical costs. The real cost comes in time. To get the most value out of your social media you will need to create content in an attractive way. The goal is to get people to react to that content which allows you to interact with them. This is the most important task in maintaining social media and it works even in the case of “negative” comments. In fact, like in the old saw that there is no such thing as bad pr, any comment in your social media, no matter how bad it is, can send a powerful message about your business.

Social media can be a great tool in your online marketing toolkit.

August 15, 2012October 31, 2016

New site launched!

Search Engine Marketing Chicago, Inc. is pleased to announce the launch of its new site design at https://searchenginemarketingchicago.com/. The new design was created in WordPress and is based on the Bizway Theme!