Gargi Banerjee | BANTECH

Steps to safeguard your WordPress site

by Gargi Banerjee | Mar 21, 2013 | Website Development

(5 votes, average: 4.80 out of 5)

WordPress is among the most commonly used Content Management Systems (CMS) today. Billions of web pages are built on this open source framework and millions of users access them every day. With such a commonly used framework, there are risks of these sites being attacked by hackers with malicious intent. And today I am sharing a few best practices that are common precautionary measures, but could prevent unnecessary hours and money lost on recovery, not to mention the loss to business. Though they may not absolutely prevent an attack, they will certainly delay such an attack as long as it can, with all possible entry points strictly sealed for the hacker. And should one ever get access, you will be back up in no time, with relative ease. WordPress being an open source platform, you are free to download it from the web. Remember to download it only from the official WordPress website, and trust no other link. And while doing so, do not install it on the root directory, which is the most obvious choice. The idea is to hide the indexes – remember not to store your index.php file and .htaccess file in the admin folder. Save the files in a different folder with an ambiguous name so you can make it obscure for malicious programs/intruders to identify the index file. If you have kept the administrator’s user name as ‘Admin’, it’s time to change it. That’s what the hacker will choose. Always keep a personal username, which is not as generalized as Admin or My Admin. In fact it is a better practice to use a...

Dwindling page rank due to bad links – Disavow links immediately

by Gargi Banerjee | Mar 14, 2013 | Search Engine Optimization

(5 votes, average: 4.60 out of 5)

The page rank of your site is indicative of its performance against your chosen keywords. It is important to state that link building, as hyped as it may be, is actually one of more than two hundred ways to determine the relevancy of a site. It is important, but there’s more to take into account and work towards to improve your ranking. At a point of time, not very long ago, a site’s page rank massively depended on link building. In fact, for laymen, SEO was synonymous with Link building. For a fairly long period of time, sites which linked to a high number of external sites and similarly, contained back-links from others sites, fared well in terms of Google page rank. And then doomsday struck – link building was used and abused to such an extent that now Google amended its algorithm to emphasize on other aspects of search engine optimization. Link building now can potentially harm your page rank, and in practice, if you link to a site which has a lower page rank (or a lesser page tracks back to you), then you kind of share the (lesser) site rank. This simply means your page rank diminishes. If you think carefully, then this is also indicative of the end of link building era. So, while you will continue to look for very selective links, meaning willing to be linked to sites with a higher rank, those sites will not be interested in linking with you! From a search engine’s perspective (read Google), while its spiders crawl a site, if it finds an external link, it will...

Best Practices for a good Blog

by Gargi Banerjee | Mar 7, 2013 | Search Engine Optimization

(5 votes, average: 4.60 out of 5)

Blogs are a great tool today to enhance a website in terms of Quality. And the Blogger plays a vital role. There are three elements about the Blogger that can make a blog popular among its readers. You have a good understanding of what you are saying, so people take your opinion about the subject matter seriously. You put facts on table simply, and put forth your personal views to a certain degree without being too over bearing You engage your readers through your blog – either by unfolding facts in multiple portions, so they keep coming back to read the next part of the story, or you ask questions, seek personal thoughts and invite comments. The last point, especially, is quite common, and you will be successful if you pose the right questions, and can generate the right platform for a meaningful discussion or positive argument in support of and against your personal views on the topic. Here are some areas you may want to focus on, while you talk about subject of interest. 1. Readable text – useful content. Today, content is king. Whatever your purpose of writing and maintaining a blog may be, you want to reach out to maximum number of readers and increase your audience base. And therefore your strategies to market your blog have to be search engine friendly. It is ultimately the search engines that are going to take you to your readers. This pretty much explains the hype over new and fresh content. Fortunately or unfortunately, over the last few months, the emphasis of major search engines have experienced a paradigm...

Dynamic Keyword Insertion in a PPC campaign – Pitfalls

by Gargi Banerjee | Feb 25, 2013 | Search Engine Optimization

(5 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

An option widely used and abused, Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) can do more harm than good to your PPC campaign, if not paid attention to. For beginners, a DKI is a trick of the trade to boost your Pay per Click program, by replacing keywords of search items fed by online users. A feature offered by Google Ad words, it works something like this: you have the option to choose a few keywords for your ad title which, if found a match with the user’s search query, will replace and auto populate your ad title to show exactly what the user is searching for. This means, when displayed (correctly), the user will find an ad which has his query on your ad title content. Now that is excellent, as it is more likely to invite an immediate click. And this in turn will get you more clicks, and more visitors to your site, thereby increasing your site’s quality score. What’s more, if there is no match, it allows you to display a default keyword so that it still picks up the ad. So what’s the flip side? Well, that’s the point of our discussion. To begin with, there’s more than one area of concern. While PPC campaigns can be good money earners provided your SEO expert has full control over the entire program, it can also play havoc, should it be left unattended. To understand how to better manage it, let’s note what are the elements that determine the dynamic keyword insertion. First, it heavily relies on the Ad group to which your ad belongs to. Meaning, it should...

Have a query, Facebook it!

by Gargi Banerjee | Feb 14, 2013 | Website Development

(5 votes, average: 4.60 out of 5)

If you have heard the latest piece of news from Facebook, then you know what I mean. At a time when critics started hinting at a slowdown of Faceboom (beg your pardon, I meant Facebook boom), Mark Zuckerberg has come up with his much anticipated announcement of the Graph search, which seems to have taken the social web in a frenzy. Received with a lukewarm response, this was a disappointment for Facebook fans, who almost anticipated a more elaborate application, or perhaps a Facebook phone. In the midst of mixed reactions on the feasibility of this new ‘search’ tool competing the market giant – Google, it has none-the-less been successful in at least drawing attention of the crowd that will eventually decide its success. The news comes at a time when, despite claims of reaching the 1 billion milestones, there are reports of dwindling footfall in its UK market by 600,000 users. On the 15th of January, Zuckerberg made the announcement of Graphic search, a Facebook application integrated within the social networking site, which is expected to redefine popular search engine performance. The most outstanding difference, Mark explains, is that popular search engines run a given query and accordingly generate links to web pages which most likely have the answer. In case of Graphic search, it will not be the links, but users will get the actual answer to the question. The algorithm behind notwithstanding, the result will be completely based on the mountain of data fed by the billion users of Facebook. This also indicates that every individual will have different outcome to identical search keywords. The reason...

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Steps to safeguard your WordPress site

Dwindling page rank due to bad links – Disavow links immediately

Best Practices for a good Blog

Dynamic Keyword Insertion in a PPC campaign – Pitfalls

Have a query, Facebook it!

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