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Two easy ways to make your WordPress blog mobile friendly (and why you should do it)

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Are you a blogger who uses WordPress to power your blog?

If so, you should know that it’s now more important than ever for your blog to be mobile friendly if you want to attract visitors to it and keep them there after they arrive.

According to Google, there are now more people accessing the Internet via mobile devices than with traditional laptop and desktop computers.

For this reason Google is now using a mobile-first indexing scheme, which basically means they’ll use the mobile versions of your blog’s pages as the primary pages when determining where those pages will fall within the search engine results pages (SERPS) for any relevant search terms.

If your blog doesn’t yet have mobile pages (i.e. it isn’t mobile friendly), pages from other blogs and websites will be given preference over yours in the SERPS if all other ranking factors are more or less equal.  [Read more…]

How well is your blog ranking in Google’s search results? Find out right now!

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If you’re a blogger you surely know how important it is for your blog posts to rank well in Google.

After all, traffic is the engine that drives all success in blogging, and there’s simply no better source of traffic than Google’s organic search results.

Most bloggers check their Google rankings by typing the keywords and key phrases they’re trying to rank for into Google’s search box and then scanning the list of search results to see where their blog posts show up.

If all is well they’ll find one of their blog’s posts listed on the first page. And if all is REALLY well their post will be in the number one position!

That’s indeed a tried-and-true method for discovering your blog’s Google rankings, but it can be quite tedious and time-consuming if you have a lot of search terms you want to check.

And it’s even worse if very few of your target search terms are showing up on page one of the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) since you’ll have to slog through page after page of the SERPS until you find where your URL is ranked.

[Read more…]

Scam alert: Beware fake “Domain Name Renewal” notices

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Do you have a blog or other type of website that you’ve registered a domain name for?

If so, you need to know about a scam targeting domain owners that’s making the rounds yet again.

As you know, when you registered your site’s domain name you were required to supply your postal mailing address and email address as part of the registration process.

Both of those addresses are part of the official registration info that can be publicly accessed by anyone on the Internet by running a simple “Whois” query on your domain name.

Well, scammers are “scraping” the postal addresses and/or email addresses from the “Whois” info for every domain they can find and sending the domain owners realistic-looking, but scam invoices for renewing the domain.

There are several clues that can help you identify most paper domain renewal notices as nothing more than scams:  [Read more…]

ATTN Bloggers: Beware insecure and malicious WordPress plugins

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Are you a blogger who uses WordPress to power your blog?

If so, you probably have several plugins installed that add extra features or functionality to your blog.

To be sure, WordPress plugins are wonderful things. They can add all kinds of useful and attractive bells and whistles to your blog and make it more enjoyable to use.

What’s more, installing a high-quality security plugin can help protect your blog from hackers. And believe me, your blog IS being attacked by hackers on a daily basis, whether you realize it or not.

Unfortunately, all of the above being said, some plugins can also put your blog and all of your hard work at risk.  [Read more…]

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