Website security is one of the most important aspects of running a website. Particularly if you are using a CMS – content management system – because open source systems like Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal are often updated and if you don’t use the latest version you could be vulnerable to a security leak or a hack. If you’ve ever had it happen then you know the dangers. for your quality sites.
Google Webmaster Central wrote a great blog post today about hacking and website security. I heartily recommend reading this post and you should make an effort to stay abreast of the latest security techniques for whatever system you are using.
HTML-based websites are not immune either. They can be hacked just as easily as any other, especially if you have a lot of code, widgets, or other applications on your site. If you use open source widget creators, Javascript, or add applications to your site for your users, those things can be entryways to a hacker sneaking in to use your site as a spam headquarters, malicious malware drop, or cookie hijacking.
While most webmasters and website owners probably have nothing to worry about, you should take every precaution to oversee your site’s security. It’s an important issue…sometimes its not all about search engine optimization!
Premium WordPress Themes – Live Chat Tracking
Ever wonder how many of your phone calls are converting to sales? Wonder what percentage of your website visits result in direct phone calls and what percentage of those convert to sales? Well, thanks to a partnership between Google Analytics and Mongoose Metrics, you can know that.
The service acts through a tool-free 800-number provided by Moongoose Metricks, which is also tied to your Google Analytics account to enable the tracking. The hitch is you need a different toll-free number for every keyword you want to track. Whether or not that expense is worth is up to you, but the toll-free numbers are supposedly affordable. The service starts at $35 per month.
A similar service being offered by Google Analytics is tracking for your live chat sessions. This service is provided by LivePerson in partnership with Google Analytics. Wow!
Both of these services seem very valuable for your search engine optimization efforts. If you’ve been looking for a way to track conversions for your live chat sessions and phone calls, now you have it. For more information on both services, check out this blog post at the Google Analytics Blog.
Premium WordPress Themes – Other Nefarious PITAs
Has your website been hacked? Do you have an onerous scraper stealing your content. Or maybe you’ve been trolled or otherwise snizzled upon (don’t ask me what it means, but it sounds nasty doesn’t it?)? You can take care of those pesky little pains the arses (PITAs) once and for all just by adding a little snippet of code in your .htaccess.
Before I tell you what the code is, let’s review what an .htaccess is. It’s a little text file that allows you to overwrite some directions within your directories. You can do all sorts of things with your .htaccess including forbidding robots from crawling your site, redirecting some URLs to others, and protecting some pages with passwords. It’s a useful document.
You can create an .htaccess if your server is Apache-based. If you are on an NT server then the .htaccess won’t help you.
The first deny order (123.456.78.90) is explicit. It tells web browsers to not allow a certain IP address from viewing your website. The second order (098.76.54) tells web browsers not allow a whole block of IP addresses from viewing your website. You might use that one if you’ve noticed a family of spammers, scrapers, or hackers infiltrated you. Sometimes you’ll shut one down only to get hit by another. Blocking whole IP addresses might take care of an entire server if you need to.
To create your .htaccess, open up Notepad and save it as a blank document. Then you can write in any code you need to in order to make the changes that you want to make.
Premium WordPress Themes – Navigation Patterns
Google Analytics has a cool feature that I thought I’d share with you. It allows you to see at a glance where your visitors have been on your website. You can follow their navigation from entrance to exit, seeing each page’s bounce rate and entrance and exit links at a glance.
Here’s how you access this feature in Google Analytics:
- Log in to Google Analytics account
- Click on the account and website you want to analyze
- Scroll down to the Content Overview box and click “view report”
- Click on the Navigation Summary link
Here you can see what percentages of your visitors entered any particular page on your site and what percentage came to each page from previous pages. You can also see how many visitors exited from each page and what percentage went on to view other pages as well as which specific pages those visitors came from and went. This data is available for each page on your website.
At the top of your stats, below the graph, you can see how many page views each page had for the time period you are measuring. This is good information to not only make improvement to your website but also see how effective your search engine optimization efforts are over a period of time.
This information is very valuable in telling you how each page on your website relates to other pages. It can also tell you whether your ’s structure is working for you. Are people leaving your most important landing pages without visiting other pages on your website? Are they coming to your most important landing pages from other pages on your site that you didn’t anticipate? Perhaps you can find a way to capitalize on that information.