The attack was concerning due to the botnet’s processing power to test around 2,000,000,000 passwords per hour, typical security precautions for blocking the IP was not successful as the hackers were using 90,000 IP addresses but there were a number of steps you can take now to prevent it happening in the future.

My 10 Step Process to Protect WordPress

Step 1 – Change your user name from the default “Admin” to something more unique and harder to guess such as “cmssitename”

Step 2 – Pick a strong password that is atleast 10 characters with a mix of numbers, letters and characters, I suggest using a platform such as LastPass to generate and store your login details.  It’s also important to make the password details unique for your MySQL, FTP and Web hosting account just encase someone manages to guess them such as “CmSP@$$W0rd”.

Step 3 – Use services like CloudFlare, Incapsula or ModSecurity to ensure your website loads faster via CDN, offers DDoS and common web exploits along with web analytics to monitor your traffic stats for web crawlers, visitors, threats and bots. These platforms can help reduce the impact of brute force attacks such as the recent Botnet attack we discussed at the start. Most of these providers do offer a free entry level version and you can pay for additional features depending on your requirements.

Step 4 – Make sure your WordPress version is updated regularly to the latest version to reduce the number of known vulnerabilities, the new versions offer a single click upgrade on most hosting platforms. You might want to confirm the update will not break your Theme or cause problems with plugin functionality, this will only usually affect if you are doing a large update in versions or have a highly customised WordPress site, speak with Melbourne IT support staff or your web developer if you are unsure.

Step 5 – It’s very important to make sure your plugins are also updated regularly but if you manage multiple sites consider using a platform like ManageWP that can make updating a number of WordPress plugins & themes scale-able. Most people won’t need the advanced functionality for a single website but they do offer a number of wonderful features such as reliable backups and monitor your website for malware and viruses with Sucuri.net integration.

Step 6 – Pick a decent webhosting company like Melbourne IT that is serious about security and applying software updates & patches to their servers on a regular basis.

Step 7 – It’s important to keep your WordPress platform neat and tidy, de-activate and uninstall any old plugins if you are no longer using them, there is no benefit clogging up your CMS with old files.

Step 8 – It’s important to monitor your website using a platform such as Jummple Security, Pingdom, Uptime Robot as they will often be the first to flag if there is a major problem with your website.

Step 9 – Lock down your WordPress with security plugins like Better WP Security or BulletProof Security or WP Security Scan these also help fix a number of common vulnerabilities and make it harder for hackers to ruin your day.

Step 10 – Backup your database regularly just incase the worst happens, there are plugins like WordFence that allow you to verify and repair your WordPress install.

Bonus Step – If you are fairly comfortable with WordPress you should consider following Automatic’s official Hardening WordPress guide.

Be Prepared!

There are a lot of proactive steps you can take to ensure your house is in order before it’s too late, as WordPress becomes one of the dominate CMS platforms there will be an increased number of attacks targeting those who are lax with security.

Researching and zeroing in on the right keywords is probably the most important part of SEO, because having the right keywords on the site goes a long way towards attracting targeted traffic to your website.

Even if your website has all the latest bells and whistles, without the right keywords or, worse, no keywords at all, you will not receive the desired traffic.

Let us have a look at the various steps in undertaking keyword research.

Why perform keyword research?

The right mix of keywords is absolutely essential to helping your site rank consistently well in the proper search engine listings. Once a search engine has indexed and classified your website with the keywords found, the search engine will display it in listings when searchers trigger the same keyword or phrase.

Furthermore, that initial categorization tends to stick because, with over 108 million unique websites out there, the search engines seldom re-visit and take note of changes to your indexed sites.

Select keywords relevant to your industry or profession

Start by selecting a more prevalent keyword for the industry as a whole. Analyze what works for rival sites. Get a handle on the popular search terms with keyword analyzer software, hosted web analytics or the utilities available from the search engines themselves. If all these sounds like Greek to you, have an SEO professional take you through the process in detail.

Identify your competitors

Successful keyword research often hinges on defining the competition as thoroughly as possible. Make sure to identify all direct and indirect competition that offer the same product or pretty close substitutes.

Use the right keyword research tools

Keyword research tools are used to find out how many people have conducted a search for a particular term. They also reveal keywords or synonyms you may have overlooked.

It is worth keeping in mind that the natural impulse to go with the most popular keywords – to maximize reach – can also propel you into a bidding war for “click-throughs”.

Final words

The keyword research phase is undeniably the most important phase in SEO. For sustained success of your online business, make sure you invest considerable thought and effort in choosing the ones that are most likely to reach out to your potential customers. If you can do that, half the job is done.

If you would like more information on our SEO services and how we can help your website rank for keywords, speak to Melbourne IT on 1300 654 677.

• Australians spend on average 25 minutes and 43 seconds on Facebook per visit
• 91% of online adults use social media on a regular basis
• 28% of customers share deals through social media
• 67% of customers will ‘like’ a Facebook page to save 25% or more

View our infographic for other interesting statistics and our tips to help you get started on social media.

If you would like help setting up a custom Facebook page, speak to one of the social media marketing consultants at Melbourne IT on 1300 782 883.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become a fundamental process for any website. While it can be applied at any stage, optimisation will be a lot easier if the capabilities are installed from the get go!

Did you know that the type of CMS (Content Management System) you have for your website may not have SEO specific functions? This is quite often the case if your CMS doesn’t allow basic optimisation to be done on all of your website pages. This could include simple things like not being able to change the headings of content, the title or even the description of a page. These are all quite basic optimisation changes, but it’s important to realise that they can actually have a significant impact on rankings, so you should ensure that they are always able to be edited.

One thing I have noticed is that people tend to get excited about a new website, which is understandable, but they can also forget to consider exactly what they are going to do with it on an ongoing and prolonged basis. They can be surprised, annoyed or even angry when told that a certain thing can’t be done with their website, and a commonly voiced response is often something like, ‘but it’s a brand new website’! It’s hard to explain to these clients that they have unfortunately thought of SEO at the wrong time. I can’t emphasise this enough – if you are considering a new website, make sure SEO has been discussed and that it’s in the developer’s mind right from the very beginning – this will save you from a lot of unnecessary headaches down the line.

If, on the other hand, you have had your site for a long time but don’t think you need to consider an upgrade at this stage, that’s fine! If you are able to update the aspects of your pages as mentioned above, improving your rankings is more than doable. There are a few important questions that are worth asking yourself: Have you checked out your competitor’s sites recently? Is the content on your website really up to date? Is it engaging and readable? If you find that your site is ranking well but it’s just not getting as many conversions as you would have thought, or if you simply need help to boost your rankings, perhaps it’s time to consider giving your website a facelift – and remember to incorporate SEO right from the start!

The most important thing to remember is that SEO should not be an afterthought; it should be ingrained in the development of your website from day one. Having all the correct optimisation attributes in place right from the beginning will make everything much easier – not only for yourself, but also for anyone you may end up recruiting to help you improve your website ranking down the track.

A couple of SEO notes to remember:

• SEO is for  organic rankings, which basically means that it relies on Search Engines to compare it to other sites (as opposed to PPC, which is direct advertising – we’ll talk more on that at a later stage)
• SEO relies on fresh and unique content

Did you consider SEO from the start of your website? Have you had any issues with SEO with an existing site? Let me know what and we might have some solutions for you.

As the adage goes, practice makes perfect. Any webmaster worth his salt will eventually reap the fruits of his labours if he practices Search Engine Optimization (SEO) endlessly and optimizes the site by accepting Pay-Per-Click (PPC) placements. Master these valuable lessons below and you will soon have both SEO and PPC mastered.

Page Optimization

1.    Optimize your pages for some, not all keywords. Choose the 5 or 10 most relevant keywords and go with them rather than trying to cram 100 keywords into a single page.  Readability of body copy, the single most vital element for visitors, will suffer.

2.    Determine and dominate the appropriate niche.  You have heard it said, rifled marketing delivers more customers (and cash flow) than random shotgun blasts.

3.    Target your keywords. Every niche has keywords that suit. Optimizing for a highly-focused list of keywords will help you rank better in search engines results. For example, target ‘architectural books for sale’ instead of something broad and general like ‘books’.

4.    Optimize for minor keywords as well. Guerilla marketers know this.  Start optimizing with them, the returns on your efforts could be more satisfying.

5.    Have a coherent theme for your site. If your site is a mixture of several themes (dating, finance, health, computers, etc.), this seriously undermines its value. You need to concentrate on one theme and stick with it.

6.    Watch your Click-through rate (CTR). A low CTR is a sign that your ads are irrelevant to your audience. There are many reasons for this, but the most common one is that your site is not optimized for relevant keywords.

7.    Use monitoring tools. Monitoring tools can help you diagnose problems and even suggest solutions. Even if everything is going fine, use monitoring tools to understand why. You will need this info when things go bad.

8.    Server downtime. A reliable host goes without saying.  Presence is your lifeblood.  The odd downtime may be tolerable, but more than once yearly means it’s time to move on. Speak to Melbourne IT about reliable web hosting with servers in Australia.

9.    Link selling. If you are discouraged by your Pay-per-click income, do not resort to link selling in order to utilize “wasted” space.  It is believed that search engines will catch on and pull down your search rank.

10.    Keep an eye on the competition. If the ads on rival sites are more expensive than yours, try to optimize for the keywords that could attract those ads.

11.    Avoid black hat methods. This includes keyword stuffing, or spamming the social bookmarking sites.

Best Practices for PPC

1.    Minimize ad clutter. Fewer ads will increase their likelihood of being noticed, triggered and contribute to your ad revenue share.

2.    See what advertisers bid on. One valid method of keyword research is to see what rival advertisers bid on and then optimize for those words.  Just remember that a price war can be cutthroat.

3.    Get prominent positions for Pay-per-click ads. This is about visibility. Remember, audiences do not naturally search for ads.

4.    Check that ads display properly. This may be due for technical reasons, coding issues, or poor contrast.

5.    High traffic does not mean more Pay-per-click revenue. It can happen that high traffic does not produce a proportionate increase in click-throughs, especially if there is a mismatch between the featured ads and the actual audience.

6.    Avoid ads from competitors. Most Pay-per-click networks allow you to filter out unwanted ads.  Do this to block all ads from rivals.

7.    Consider alternative Pay-per-click networks. If your Click-through rate is very low and you are certain that your site is optimized for the right keywords, maybe your ad network cannot provide relevant ads.  Consider switching to another Pay-per-click network.

8.    Consider other types of advertising. If you get no tangible results after trying three or four other Pay-per-click networks, maybe you should switch to other placements that yield better returns.

9.    Pay-per-click and Search Engine Optimization rankings are unrelated. If you share the popular delusion that running Adsense ads on your site will help you rank better in Google, that is just plain wrong.

If you need assistance with SEO or PPC, speak to an eBusiness consultant at Melbourne IT today on 1300 654 677.

Blogging is a great way for small businesses to engage their customers and website visitors and help improve their SEO.

Not only does blogging improve your SEO by creating unique content which is loved by Google and Bing,  it also helps with consumer engagement and sharability across social networks.

Blogging can be one of the most successful and enjoyable social tools that a business owner can implement. If you have a member of staff who loves to talk shop and lives and breaths your business, then get them to write articles for your company blog.

The person must be enthusiastic about the subject matter as this will shine through completely and the readers will become way more attached to your brand and be more likely to share across their network. When readers become fans and share your content you have moved from ‘owned media’ to ‘earned media’. Earned media refers to how a business using the media they own (website and blog) can earn extra attention online (through users sharing their blog posts). And blog posts are by far the simplest way of doing this.

Blogs also give you a platform to making announcements about new products, features, new campaigns or telling customer stories. They are far more engaging than a quick status update. You can even use them to rattle your readers a little, prompting them to comment and engage. When customers engage, this often boosts how Google ranks your site – the more natural comment and links, the higher up you can go!

So how does blogging boost SEO? It’s not by stuffing your blog posts with keywords that’s for sure. It’s because of the way that people search on Google: using naturally worded sentences. The way that people write a blog is naturally worded and this captures those hits. The more blog posts and comments you have, the more likely you’re going to be found in search engines. If you update your blog regularly, it’s also quite likely that you’ll start getting noticed by industry bodies and become rather respected in your field.

So get your business blogging today and watch your ranking climb.

By the way: all our web hosting plans come with WordPress ready to be installed from your hosting Control Panel.

• Because they are already a customer (58%)
• To get access to discounts and promotions (57%)

To maximise the reach and effectiveness of your business Facebook page, read our tips on what you should and shouldn’t do on Facebook.

If you would like more information about social media marketing and how we can help you design a professional custom Facebook page, speak to Melbourne IT today on 1300 782 883.

There are a class of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialists that lure unsuspecting webmasters with promises of quick indexing by search engines and high page rank, all without the expense of paid search. In the fairly tight circle of Internet marketing, they have come to be known as “Black Hat” SEO practitioners (as opposed to “White Hat” professionals).

The Black Hat SEO’s craft

Black hat SEO is unorthodox, at best, because it seems to rely greatly on gray areas, manipulating the formulas search engines use to rank websites against the related search terms entered by web surfers. Knowing that links count in drawing inferences about the popularity of a site and betting that more is better, unethical black hat SEO companies might send out variations of the same blog post to over a hundred known bookmarking sites, trusting that a few interested souls will click on the link and hoodwink the search engine into classifying his site as suddenly a popular one.

This is done with the full knowledge that one is “spamming” the bookmarking sites, much like sending out spam (unwanted) email in the thousands or even millions and being a nuisance to most just to play the numbers. It is not illegal, but counts as abuse and wastes space on third-party sites.

Getting their just deserts

Sooner or later, the search engines will get wise to this and may proceed to penalize the site.

We have included below some typical black hat SEO techniques, so one does not fall into the trap and incur the ultimate penalty from search engines – being banned from search results.

The black list: Types of spam

Black hat SEO deploys two kinds of spam indexing techniques: content or link spam.

Content spam

The black hat artist alters the structure, underlying code or content of a webpage, so that the search engine counts embellishments that are pointless to human visitors. There are five types of content spam:

Keyword stuffing: This involves overloading a page with keywords beyond what might be expected for meaningful content.

Hidden or invisible text: To avoid exceeding a limit of, say, 6% keyword density in visible content, the excessive keywords are concealed in the background or by hiding them within HTML code.

Meta Tag: Unrelated keywords meant to troll for visitors who leave anyway as soon as they see the site is irrelevant to their search.

Gateway or Doorway Pages: Low-quality webpages with virtually no relevant information.

Scraper sites: Contains nothing but advertising.

Link spam

The most notorious of these are “link farms”, sites that contain nothing but dozens of links and no intrinsic value. Other link spam techniques are page hijacking, spam blogs, mirror websites, and cloaking.

A word of caution

Black hat SEO techniques may yield short-term gains in terms of higher page rank, but in the long run, everything can be undone through a vigilant search engine simply reversing everything and leaving a webmaster worse off.

If you need help with your SEO, speak to the SEO consultants at Melbourne IT. We ensure that we only employ white hat SEO techniques.

The global domain name market is essentially split into two segments: the primary and secondary markets.

The primary domain market includes all domain names that have not been previously registered, or have been registered in the past but have since expired. In other words, these are domains that are not currently registered by anyone and are open to the market for purchase.

The secondary or ‘aftermarket’ domain market, involves domain names that have already been registered by a company and which may or may not already have a website on the Internet. The secondary domain market consists of auction houses which allow buyers and sellers to negotiate on domain name prices anonymously. Typically, secondary domain names can be more expensive, as there can be a higher demand for them. US-based research company Zetetic revealed that for the first time, the value of secondary market transactions exceeded US$100 Million in 2006. Additionally, the average price was US$5,582, up 13 per cent over the previous year’s US$4,954.

How does the secondary domain market work?

If a domain name is already registered and an entity is interested in purchasing that domain name, they have the option of bidding or negotiating with the seller (for example, the registered holder or current owner of that domain name) on the price.

For example, the domain hardware.com is registered to Bob Smith, but Alex Jones is interested in registering this domain name for his business. Via the auction house, Alex Jones is able to anonymously place a bid on the domain (hardware.com) and negotiate on an agreed price.

Multiple buyers; One domain name.

With multiple businesses wanting to secure the same domain name for their respective companies, this will create a high demand situation and the value of the domain name will rise based on the bids from prospective buyers.

Below are some critical factors that fuel the secondary market.

Eligibility criteria
The reality of global domain names is such that many popular domain name extensions are registered on a first-come-first-served basis, without any form of moderation. Registrants worldwide can grab any Global Top Level Domain or gTLD (for example, .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info). Also, many Country Code (ccTLD) extensions like .co.nz for New Zealand and .co.uk for United Kingdom, can also be registered without restrictions. Such an open and unregulated market naturally creates competition.

Global market
The nature of the Internet means that businesses are competing for names on a global scale. In the traditional, offline business world, a start-up would typically register their company name locally. Internationally, there could be two or more businesses operating in their respective local markets under the same name. For example, two separate companies, one in Australia and the other in New Zealand, may both coincidentally trade as Jane Smith Florist without this creating any conflict to naming rights in their respective countries. But these two businesses may decide that with the World Wide Web, they want to acquire online market share and develop websites to reach the International market. So even though they are two separate entities, they could potentially compete with each other to register the domain name janesmithflorist.com.

Generic domains and Web Marketing domains
Occasionally, some of the more expensive secondary domain names are “generic domains”, also known as “keyphrase” domains. These types of domain names have been quite popular, as they include keywords that the business is targeting in the domain name and were often used for search engine marketing or search engine optimisation (SEO).

Below are two examples of generic (or keyphrase) domains:

Business Type: A sports retailer of soccer boots
Business Name: David Smith Sports Pty Ltd
Main domain (eg. website address): davidsmithsports.com.au
Keyphrase domain: www.soccerboots.com

Business Type: A travel agent who specialises in food and wine tours to Europe
Business Name: Nedlands Travel Centre
Main domain (eg. website address): nedlandstravelcentre.com.au
Keyphrase domain: www.foodandwinetourseurope.com

Opportunities and risks
Large companies all around the world run the risk of having to spend a lot of money to “recover” domain names they wished they had registered in the first place. For example, in New Zealand, Telecom NZ paid an undisclosed sum tipped to exceed AU$1mil to buy the domain name ferrit.com from a US based Registrant. They wanted to redirect this domain name to its main website ferrit.co.nz and avoid losing any web traffic.

Small businesses may not be prepared, or have the cash to pay this sort of money, and they risk missing out on website traffic that the preferred domain name would have generated. If you’re thinking of setting up your own business, it’s a good idea to first check whether your preferred domain name is available. View the infographic – What comes first: your business name or domain name?

With the introduction of secondary market domains by reputable registrars like Melbourne IT, this means that businesses now have an opportunity to obtain a domain name, even when it has already taken, by purchasing the domain from its existing registrant. The involvement of reputable and leading registrars into the secondary market has helped in the development of an established industry, where buyers and sellers can operate confidently and avoid the risk of becoming the victims of scams.

How can I tell if a registered domain name is FOR SALE?

To check if a domain name is for sale in the secondary market is easy, simply visit Melbourne IT’s domain registration page.

Available as a Premium Name (centre page, in yellow section) then this means that you can purchase the domain name off its existing registrant (or owner). Melbourne IT can help you carry out this transaction.

To learn more about Melbourne IT’s Premiun Names and the secondary market call 1300 654 677 and speak to one of our expert consultants, or book a call back.

• Sending the same message to everyone
• Not customising the email design and content for mobile readers – did you know that about 44% of people check emails on their smartphones every day?
• Not linking back to your website
• Sending too many emails
• Not tracking email campaigns

For more information, please see the full infographic below.

If you would like to get started with email marketing, try Melbourne IT’s email marketing system Promotions Manager free for 30 days.