If you own many websites, chances are that you’ve had one or several of them compromised at some point and that’s never a pleasant experience.

In this post, we’ll take a look at the exact steps you can take to secure your WordPress websites, as quickly and easily as possible.

Risks

If you’ve been lucky enough to never have had any security issues with your website, you might be wondering: “how likely is it that I’ll get hacked?”

Especially if you have smaller sites, it may seem like they wouldn’t make interesting enough targets for hackers, so you  don’t really have anything to worry about, right? Wrong, unfortunately. My first ever site that got hacked was on a simple little blog that hadn’t been around for more than a few months and that barely got 40 visitors a day. Not a prominent target by any means.

The first thing you need to understand is that there doesn’t have to be any reason for an attack. You don’t have to have made enemies in hacker-circles, you don’t have to have a big, popular or controversial website. An attack can happen out of the blue, for the simple reason that your site is easy to hack. And that’s the number one rule: the easier it is to hack your site, the more likely it is to happen.

In this post, we’ll look at the two most important factors for securing your WordPress site:

1. Backing it up, so that it can easily be restored, in case it does compromised.
2. Adding security measures to make it more difficult to hack and therefore less likely to be attacked.

A WordPress site consists of two main components: the database, which stores all your written content and settings and the files on your server, containing all of your images, plugins, themes etc.

Database Backup

Install the WP-DBmanager plugin, which you can set to automatically create backups of your database at specific intervals and email them to you or store them on your server. In addition, you can also use this plugin to restore your database from a backup file.

Here’s a video showing how to use the installation, setup and restoration features in WP-DBmanger:

Files Backup

The easiest backup solutions are those that come with your hosting provider, but depending on your provider they might not offer all the features you'd want. Our recommended hosting provider for getting started is Hostgator. Hostgator provide a weekly automatic backup on all their shared hosting accounts, as long as you have fewer than 100,000 files stored on the server and less than 20GB of space used.

If you install multiple WordPress websites on one account, it's likely that you'll exceed the file limit at some point. You'll see something like the following in the sidebar of your cPanel dashboard, when this happens:

When you are below the thresholds for files and disk-usage, you'll always have a backup available, but it can be up to a week old and there's only ever one backup stored. It's a good solution, but it's not perfect.

You can manually create backups by going to the backup wizard in your cPanel. This will create a file for you to download, in a few easy steps. You can also use this same wizard to restore your files from an existing backup file.

Our recommended high-end hosting provider, StormOnDemand, comes with it's own, fully customizable backup solution. Here, you can have daily backups created and you can store them for up to 90 days. The service is pay-by-use and the rates are very low.

If you are using a different service or you want to extend the limited backup functionality of a shared hosting account, the SiteAutoBackup service is worth taking a look at. For any cPanel hosting account, you can create automatic, daily backups very easily and you can store them for up to 31 days. The pricing starts at $2/month, so you don't have to break your bank for this added bit of security.

With the above, we've made sure that even if you get a WordPress site compromised, you'll never be more than a few clicks away from restoring all your files and data. The next step is to do what we can to ensure that restoring a backup will never even be necessary.

Updates

Since you're familiar with the Internet, I'm sure you are aware that there are sites and forums/communities on pretty much every topic imaginable. And so there are also sites and communities that are all about documenting and discussing online security flaws and how to exploit them. Someone might read up on such an exploit and then do a quick search to find a site to try it out on. If your site meets the criteria and happens to show up in the search results, that's all it takes for it to become a victim of a hacker attack.

The most commonly exploitable issues with WordPress as well as WP plugins are usually addressed with updates and luckily, WordPress makes updating very easy, via dashboard notifications and one-click-updates.

Always update to the latest WordPress version and always keep your plugins up to date. If you're running an older version, it will still contain all the bugs that have been fixed in the newer version and some of those bugs might be potential security loopholes.

If you run many different WordPress websites, it can be difficult to manage, as you'd need to log in to each dashboard separately, to perform the updates. If you want to make this process easier, take a look at manageWP (hosted service) or WP Mass Updater (Windows desktop software).

When installing new plugins for your site, check to see when they've last been updated and whether they've had multiple versions in the past. As a general rule, a plugin that is updated regularly is less likely to be a potential security risk than one that had only one release, years ago and was never updated since.

Passwords

Any and all security measures are futile if someone can simply log in to your site as an administrator or log into your hosting account, with malicious intent. Because of this, it's very important to use real passwords for all of your accounts.

If you use passwords like 123456, password, letmein, qwerty, your birth date or anything similar, you're simply asking for trouble. You might think that that goes without saying, but I know that some people are reading this and thinking "how did he know my password?" (here's how).

I recommend using LastPass, a free and awesome password management app. Create one truly secure master password for your LastPass account and then have it auto-generate secure passwords for you, for every account you use. The downside to this is that with any password manager, you'll have a single point of failure: if someone gets access to your password manager, they have access to everything. This is still a far smaller risk than using non-secure passwords on your accounts or writing down your passwords to remember them, though.

The only alternative I'd recommend would be to use memorizable, secure passwords by stringing together random words and remembering them as visual representations. You'll still need some discipline and a good memory to do this, if you're going to use different passwords for all your critical accounts (as you should).

Bottom line: replace all your insecure passwords with secure ones, right now.

In addition, also make sure that your admin username is neither "admin" nor the same as your display name. If your username is either of those, that's one less thing a hacker needs to figure out, in order to breach your website. In the WordPress admin menu, go to "Users" -> "Your Profile". Here, you can set a nickname to anything you want and you can set the display name on your site to be your nickname:

Secure FTP

FTP clients are extremely useful for managing the files on your server, but on a standard FTP connection, all of the communication between your computer and your server is un-encrypted. This means that, among other things, your username and password is sent in plain text and could, theoretically, be intercepted.

The solution is to use an SFTP (secured file transfer protocol) connection.

The general procedure is very simple: make sure you have SSH (secure shell) access enabled on your hosting account, set your FTP client to use SFTP and use your main username and password to connect (i.e. the password you use to log in to your cPanel account - logins for individual FTP accounts don't work via SFTP). Here is the same in more detail:

SSH Access

If you are using Hostgator, log in to you client and billing dashboard and click on the "View Hosting Packages" link in the sidebar menu. Then, click on the "Enable Shell Access" link:

If you are using StormOnDemand, SSH is enabled by default. If you're using a different hosting provider and you don't know how to activate SSH access, a look at the knowledge-base or a quick support request should get you sorted.

FileZilla

Next, download and install the free FileZilla FTP client (available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux). Launch it and open the site manager (File -> Site Manager).

Use the following settings:

1. Set the host to your registered domain for the hosting account, preceeded by "ftp." or enter your server's IP address.
2. If you are using Hostgator, enter "2222" as the port. On StormOnDemand, leave this field blank.
3. Select the SFTP option for the Protocol drop-down menu.
4. Select the logon type "Normal".
5. Enter your cPanel username and password.
6. Click on connect.

That's it, you now have a secure FTP connection to your hosted files!

BulletProof Security Plugin

BulletProof Security is a comprehensive WordPress plugin that creates htaccess files to protect all of your critical files and folders. It protects from many types of code injection attacks, it hides your WordPress version number and it also makes recommendations for how to change folder permissions in your WordPress files.

Here's a quick video, demonstrating how to use the plugin:

CloudFlare

CloudFlare is a service that was already mentioned and recommended in the post about how to speed up WordPress based websites. It's primary purpose is to act as something like a content distribution network and caching tool and most of it's features are all about increasing your site's loading speeds. However, another feature of CloudFlare is that it automatically blocks requests from known malicious sources. It mostly blocks spam bots, harvesting bots and botnet zombies. Especially with the latter, CloudFlare adds a layer of security to your site.

To take advantage of this, simply sign up for CloudFlare (it's free) and install the CloudFlare plugin (also free) on your WordPress site.

Conclusion

Follow the steps above and you'll be presenting any potential hacker with a tough nut to crack, making it likely that they'll go look elsewhere, for victims. However, also keep in mind that you can never make a website 100% secure. Making attacks impossible is, unfortunately, impossible. That's why above all else, good back-up practices as described in the first section of this article, are the backbone of a secure site. With regular backups, even if things do go wrong, you never risk losing all of your valuable content and the hard work it represents.

In this review, you’ll find a comparison of six different WordPress plugins that are all designed to help you get feedback from your website visitors. The six candidates are: smartFeedback, ninety Feedback Plugin, Creative Feedback Form, Usernoise Pro, Avia Feedback Box and TotalFeedback.

Video Tour

Videos speak louder than words (that’s a saying, right?), so here’s a video tour of all six plugins:

Click to View Video in a Larger Window!

Plugin Details

Here are some details about each of the plugins:

smartFeedback

The smartFeedback plugin places a “Feedback” tab on the left side of the screen, on every page of your site.

On click, a simple feedback form opens, where users can add comments in any number of categories (e.g. bug-reports, ideas, praise) that you can freely define.

The feedback form is aesthetically pleasing, but not customizable in any way. I also missed any way for customizing the feedback tab created by the plugin. You can neither deactivate it on specific pages, nor change the color, size or position of it.

ninety Feedback Plugin

The feedback plugin created by ninety is quite similar to smartFeedback. It also creates a tab on the left side of the screen, which opens a  modal box, where visitors can leave feedback.

Instead of a selection of different categories of feedback, ninety invites your visitors to communicate their mood, via a selection of emoticons – a feature that I believe was inspired by a similar one found in GetSatisfaction.

A potential problem with this plugin is that the feedback tab is gray and not eye-catching at all. While you can customize the text, you can’t change the color. If your site has a grey or other light background, many visitors might simply not notice the feedback tab at all.

Creative Feedback Form

Like it’s competitors, Creative Feedback Form adds a feedback tab to your site, but it takes the concept one step further by adding a small community element. Whenever a user opens the feedback form and selects a category, they will see previous entries made to that category, by other users. The existing suggestions can even be voted on.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to comment on the existing suggestions.

The feedback tab as well as the form itself is very customizable. You can choose between different color themes (none of which are particularly appealing) and you can choose the position of the tab. You can also change the wording or even entirely translate all of the text elements into a different language.

Usernoise Pro

Usernoise is a free WordPress plugin, which adds a feedback form, similar to smartFeedback, to you site. Usernoise Pro is an update, which adds a community element to this feedback form.

The community feature is better implemented in Usernoise Pro than in the Creative Feedback plugin, since it not only allows voting on topics, but also allows comments. In terms of design and usability, it’s also ahead of it’s direct competitor.

The community features are so well done that I wish there were a way to display them on a page, on your WordPress site. The fact that they are confined to the small modal window is their only drawback.

Avia Feedback Box

Avia Feedback Box is the plugin I use for the recently introduced Votebox on IM Impact.

Avia creates something like a hybrid between a feedback form and a forum. In contrast to the other plugins reviewed here, this one is placed on a specific page and it doesn’t create a feedback tab that is shown on all of your pages. The advantage of this is that it’s not constrained to a small box and thanks to it’s voting, commenting and annotation features, it encourages community interaction more effectively than the other plugins.

Avia Feedback Box comes with a light, a dark and a “blank” skin, to choose from. One issue I’ve noticed is that it seems to lose all previous entries and settings whenever it’s deactivated and then reactivated.

TotalFeedback

TotalFeedback offers a different and potentially much more focused way to get feedback from your visitors. Instead of displaying a form that users can fill out with any ideas, suggestions or complaints they may have, TotalFeedback pops up a small box with a mini-survey consisting of one question and a limited set of possible answers.

Theoretically, it’s possible to just use it as a feedback form with a question like “tell us your thoughts” and a custom text field, but used as a surveying tool, it has a lot more potential.

Using TotalFeedback, you can have different polls showing on different pages of your site and you can even have them triggered by different actions, such as a visitor scrolling down 50% of the page. Unfortunately, the visual style can not be changed, so if the form happens to be a similar color to the background on your site, you’re out of luck.

Conclusion

Most of the plugins in this roundup do their job well, but some have a better job-description than others. Simply having a feedback form on your site can be useful in many ways, but if all you do is invite open feedback, how many replies do you need before you can make a smart decision based on them?

In terms of being useful for marketing, the winners of this roundup are Avia Feedback and TotalFeedback.

Avia has a strong focus on community and instead of just gathering everyone’s random thoughts, it helps you find the most in-demand ideas, suggestions and questions, via it’s voting system. And it does so without limiting the possible range of suggestions you’ll get.

TotalFeedback is for laser-focused research. You can pinpoint users who spend a specific amount of time looking at a specific page, for example. A tool like TotalFeedback is extremely valuable on a sales-page, as it gives you an opportunity to ask your prospects about their buying decisions (or lack thereof) directly. In addition, it does great reporting on on all the feedback it collects.

If, for some reason, you want something closer to a “normal” feedback form, my recommendation goes to Usernoise Pro.

This post is partially in response to a question I was asked after publishing my post about fonts and the importance of making your text as easily readable as possible. Of course, it’s nice to know which fonts to use and what size the text should be, but how do you actually change these settings in your own WordPress theme?

Watch the video below to find out:

Download Video

I recommend you watch the video in full-screen mode.

Links and Resources:

• Get the firebug plugin here
• Get firebug lite for Chrome here
• Read about my recommended fonts and text sizes here
• Read about my other design recommendations here
• Get awesome WordPress themes here

That’s all, folks! I hope firebug will be as useful to you as it has been to me.

Overview

So let’s cut right to the chase: wpMassUpdater is a Windows-based automation software that automatically updates multiple WordPress installations. It updates the plugins as well as the WP version itself and all you need to do is create one simple file with a list of all your WordPress sites.

The basic updating process is exactly the same as if you went and logged in to each of your sites and clicked the “update” buttons yourself. The software simply opens the pages in a browser, logs in and simulates the button clicks for you. This means that you can feed wpMassUpdater with one simple file and then leave it running in the background until all your blogs are up to date.

Why Update WordPress?

Most affiliate marketers have anywhere between a few dozen and a few hundred websites they call their own. And with WordPress being as popular as it is, chances are that you’ve got as many WordPress installs as websites. Whenever a new version of WP is released, there are two options: 1) ignore it and leave all or most of your sites un-updated or 2) groan and start updating all of your sites, or at least the most important ones.

Outdated WordPress installations can cause compatibility issues, but that’s not really tragic. As long as you aren’t installing new themes and new plugins, you won’t run into any compatibility issues. The bigger problem is a security risk. Most WordPress updates fix a security loophole or two and the older your WP installation, the more likely it is that it will be exploited somehow.

I personally never took this very seriously (“my sites aren’t big enough to be worth hacking”) until one of my sites got hacked… After hours of reinstating backups and trying to fix the problem myself, I had to resort to rolling back to a server-backup which was several days old, plus paying someon 100 bucks to sweep up the remnants of the malicious code. Casualties: several hours of my time, $100 and one blog post. Very frustrating.

So that’s it, basically. I like to keep my WP stuff up to date and wpMassUpdater now does that for me.

How is This Different from Fantastico/QuickInstall/SimpleScripts?

Fantastico, QuickInstall, SimpleScripts and probably a few others offer very easy installation and in some cases updating of WordPress. I personally like using Fantastico. For installations, it’s perfect. For updates, not as much as they often seem to lag behind on the updates. More importantly, though, it only updates WordPress itself, not the plugins. If you keep updating via Fantastico, you’ll start getting issues with the plugins, as they become outdated and stop working with the newest WP version.

At the end of the day, wpMassUpdater is a very simple way of dealing with a time-consuming problem I had and it costs next to nothing, so I obviously jumped on it. Only drawback: It’s Windows only. If you’ve had the same problems with keeping WP up to date, take a look as I think you’ll like this.

Cheers,

Read on to find out.

Overview

The first thing you need to know about this plugin is that it integrates with Google Website Optimizer and that’s a good thing. Like Analytics, Website Optimizer is a very powerful tool that you get to use for free, courtesy of Google (and their hunger for data). The thing is, GWO doesn’t usually play nice with WordPress and while there are integration options and even free plugins to help integrate the two, most of them still have some severe limitations.

So, let’s see if WP Split Test Optimizer can justify the asking price, compared to what free Optimizer plugins offer.

WP Split Test Optimizer Video

Here’s a video detailing what this plugin does and how it compares to the free ones that are available.

To recap, the WordPress Split Test Optimizer plugin has two advantages over free plugins:

1. It’s slightly easier to set up and manage. This isn’t a huge advantage, but it’s nice to have.
2. It allows you to very easily track clicks on particular links as conversions. This makes the plugin very useful for affiliate marketers. Unless you’re a coding Ninja, Website Optimizer is otherwise almost useless for affiliate marketing.

Conclusion

This plugin is being sold for $47 and while it definitely works as advertised and is a good product, I guess the main question would be: is it worth the price, compared to the free plugins available?

I’d say that depends mainly on how good you are at coding and how valuable your time is. To me, spending 50 bucks on a plugin like this is a much cheaper solution than spending hours fiddling with code (trying to get click-tracking to work, for example).

In general, if you want to start split-testing and you like to use WordPress, then this is a good solution. If you want to do more advanced, multivariate split testing and don’t mind spending more money on it, then my first recommendation is Visual Website Optimizer. For more “causal” use, WP Split Test Optimizer is the better choice, simply because it’s a solid solution and comes with a one-time price.

Click Here to Get Your Copy

WP Twin Overview:

What Exactly, Does It Do?

There’s actually a ver useful illustration of how WP Twin works, on the sales-page for WP Twin. So let me just grab that and comment it:

You start out with a blog that you want to clone and a fresh WordPress install on a new domain or directory (this can be on a completely different site, different server etc.). You then upload one of the script files into your original blog folder and open it up. This is very easy to do and takes just seconds, with an FTP connection or via your hosting account. When you run this file, you’ll simply be able to push a button to “clone” your blog and it will create a clone file for you, that you can save to your hard-drive.

Then, you copy another script file into the directory of your new WordPress install (again, takes just seconds) and run that. You upload the twin-file you got from the previous step and, once again, push a button to deploy the clone.

That’s it. Depending on the size of the blog you are cloning, this can take anything between a few seconds and a few minutes.

What you get is a perfect copy of your original site in the new location. WP Twin doesn’t just copy over some files from one location to another. Here are some things that I noticed, that make it more than just a copying tool:

• Automatically changes all internal links properly. So, if you had an internal link on the old site like this http://oldsite.com/interesting-page/, on the clone site it will automatically be: http://newsite.com/interesting-page/
• The above also applies to link-redirects. I was using a link-redirect plugin on RichQuickReview, with tons of links set up (alas, GhostURL didn’t exist yet, when I set them up). All of the link “cloaks” or link redirects were automatically updated for the new, IM Impact domain. I didn’t have to touch a thing.
• Automatically carries over all themes, all plugins, all theme-settings and all plugin-settings from the old to the new site. I had over a dozen plugins with customized setups running on one of the sites I cloned and they all worked perfectly after cloning, without needing to deactivate and reactivate or reconfigure any of them.
• Automatically carries over any subscribers or members you have, with any membership script.

And What’s the Point?

Ok, so it makes perfect, hassle-free clones of WordPress sites. But what for?

For me, WP Twin was perfect for the move from RichQuickReview to IM Imact. So, if you’re rebranding or otherwise moving domains, this is a very helpful tool. Apart from that, it can be a great time-saver for anyone who sets up WP sites routinely. If you build niche sites (especially those of the micro-niche variety, where you have to build tons of them), you probably have something of a ritual you go through after installing WordPress. You change the settings to match your preferences, upload and install your favourite themes, upload and install your favourite plugins, configure the individual plugins and so on and so forth.

WP Twin eliminates almost all of that, because you can create one “template” with all your settings and plugins ready and then simply deploy that on every new site you set up.

In addition, it can also be used to create backups of your sites. This, however, needs to be done manually with the standard version of WP Twin. Automatically scheduled backups are available as an upgrade for an extra $47.

Conclusion

I’m very happy I had WP Twin for the site move and it’s saved me at least a few hours in setting up various sites for marketing purposes as well as sites for my link network. Is it an absolutely “must have” essential tool? No, certainly not. It’s useful for anyone working with WP a lot, but it’s not something you should buy if you don’t have a clear idea of how you’re going to use it.

The only downside I can see is the price. I feel that at $97 it is a tad over-priced for what it does.

If you have a use for blog-cloning and the 100 bucks don’t hurt your bottom line too much, I give it a thumbs up.

Click Here to Get Your Copy

Cheers,

Are the Themes Any Good?

In a word: yes.

In a few more words: the visual design of the Elegant Themes collection is, without a doubt, top tier.  All of the themes are really well designed, most of them look absolutely stunning and in terms of usability, page structure etc.  there’s nothing to complain about.

Apart from the eye-candy, I was also pleasantly surprised by what the themes have to offer “under the bonnet”.  Every theme comes with an easy to use and feature-rich options menu, accessible in the WordPress admin area.  The options let you easily modify and change several aspects of the theme’s appearance, switch between different colour schemes (if available), set up ad space and AdSense areas, tweak SEO settings and much more.

Here is a Screenshot of part of this options menu, called the “epanel”:

Another thing worth mentioning: I am very happy with the loading speeds of all the Elegant Themes I have tried so for. Even with animated galleries and lots of pictures (like you see here on RQR), the pages build up fairly quickly.

Elegant Themes Short Codes

Another remarkable feature offered with every Elegant Themes theme are the so called “short codes”. These are simple snippets of code that can be very easily integrated on any post or page and let you add all kinds of awesome styling to your pages.

With the short codes, it’s really easy to create awesome looking slideshows, text-boxes, tabbed content and much more. All in all, they help turn Elegant Themes into a very flexible site-building tool and the “arsenal” you get with an ET subscription goes far beyond the scope of just a few skins that make your blogs look nice.

Are They Suitable for Money-Sites?

So, the themes may be good, but are they also suitable for sites geared completely towards monetizaton? I can only see one potential problem with using Elegant Themes for money-sites: they aren’t ugly.

As you may know, for certain types of sites, particularly if they are monetized with AdSense or banner ads, it’s beneficial to use an ugly theme.  Essentially, if your website is ugly, then the ads on it will be the most compelling thing to click on.  This definitely won’t happen with Elegant Themes.

Apart from that, some of the themes on offer are actually very interesting from a marketing prospective, because they can be used as a flexible CMS for websites that don’t actually look like blogs.  If you’re promoting affiliate products or your own products, then some of these themes are definitely worth taking a closer look at.

What it comes down to is that it simply depends on your market and how you intend to monetize a website.  What I can tell you is that even though I originally only signed up with Elegant Themes to get this one theme that you are now looking at on RichQuickReview, browsing through the ET gallery gave me some new ideas and I have since set up several websites using their themes.

The Marketing Lesson

Elegant Themes has a very interesting business model, which works like this: you sign up for a membership to get access to all of their themes, future updates and support.  There is no way to buy only one single theme but you can keep any themes you are using, even if you cancel your membership.

What’s special about this is that the membership costs only 40 bucks a year.

The question I asked myself when I saw this offer was: if I were this guy, would I offer (currently) 46 high end, premium themes plus support for only 40 bucks a year?

And this is in a market where, for example, the Thesis theme is selling like hot cakes, costing $87 for a single-site licence and competitor Woo Themes is selling smaller packages of themes starting at $70.  Not to mention that buying even one single premium theme that has the kind of quality design and flexibility that elegant themes offers, will usually cost more than 40 bucks.

At first glance, it just doesn’t make sense for Elegant Themes to put such a low price tag on what they have to offer.

However, it seems to be working out just fine.  I don’t know any exact sales numbers but I can tell you that there are more than 22,000 members registered in the ET forums.  It’s safe to assume that not all of those are still active and paying members, but even if everyone were to quit before the second yearly payment, this amount of members still represents quite a tidy bit revenue.

What’s the lesson here?  Making a really, really good offer can pay off.

$40 is kind of a no-brainer and I was willing to pay that amount just to get hold of one of the themes.  The other themes on offer and the good support won me over and I don’t see a reason to cancel my membership.  If you can make an offer that gets around 20,000 people thinking along those lines, well, then you’re making a good living.

Cheers,

Read on and watch the video below to find out just that.

Overview:

SEOPressor installs like any plugin for WordPress does. Once you’ve set it up, it has two funcions: Automation and “Consultation”. Here are those two features in more detail:

SEOPressor for On-Page SEO Automation

For “normal” or manual blogging use, the plugin can automatically add bold, underline, and italic text-decoration to your keyword throghout a post or page (in this case, you specify the target keyword for each individual case). It can also add the keyword to the post or page title and it can add it as an alt-text to any images you include in the post.

If you are familiar with the principles of on-page optimization, you’ll recognize these as some important factors that search engines pay attention to. The text-decoration is one factor that helps search engines determine what keywords to rank your page for, the page title is perhaps the most important on-page SEO factor and image alt-tags can also help keep all of your content relevant to the target keyword.

For auto-blogs, you can also enter one or several keywords and set SEOPressor to automatically text-decorate those keywords as they appear in each new post.

On-the-Fly SEO “Advice”

The second major feature this plugin brings with it is that it keeps track of all on-page factors for any post or page you create or edit and presents you with a “score-card” and suggestions for improving your SEO. Here’s an example of what that looks like:

As you can see, it’s telling me which factors I’m getting right and where there’s still room for improvement. It also keeps track of the keyword density on the page (i.e. how often does the target keyword occur compared to the total number of words) and warns the user if the density is too low or too high.

I particularly like this feature because I’m too lazy to calculate keyword density myself, but I’m aware that it shouldn’t be too high. So, before using SEOPressor, I was always a bit nervous about this factor. Can I repeat the keyword again or do I need to change the sentence around, so that I can use a different word? Is this too much or too little? Now, each time I hit “Save Draft” or “Update”, the scorecard refreshes and I see exactly where I’m standing.

Here’s a video with a quick demonstration of how SEOPressor is used. I also briefly talk about the actual test-results I got with it, so make sure you watch this:

Complaining

Of course, no review on IM Impact would be complete without me complaining about something, so here goes:

1) There are one or two suggestions that SEOPressor makes, that I don't agree with. For one, it advocates "Page Rank Hoarding", by adding a "nofollow" tag to your external links. I don't agree with this for several reasons, not the least of which is that it's bascially "unethical". You want others to link to you with dofollow links, right? So, don't attach nofollows to your links. I'll explain more about why I'm against PR hoarding in a separate article.

2) Many WordPress themes automatically place your post title in H1 tags. SEOPressor will still tell you that you don't have your keyword in an H1 tag and that you should add one, in this case. Not tragic, but not optimal, either.

3) At $97, the price for this plugin is too high. The plugin is useful and well made, but it doesn't feel like it's worth 100 bucks. For my own products, I really believe in over-delivering and offer more than what the customer expects for the price they paid. With SEOPressor, I feel it's the other way around and it feels like you over-paid for what you're getting.

SEOPressor: Conclusion

Overall, SEOPressor does what it's supposed to do: It helps you with on-page optimization which in turn helps with getting your pages ranked. On-page SEO is an important factor, but it alone will not get your pages ranked in the top spots for any keywords worth pursuing. It will, however, make your journey to the top quicker.

In my opinion, whether you should purchase SEOPressor or not comes down to your budget: If $97 is a large investment for you, then I can't recommend getting it.

If you use WordPress on a regular basis and have several sites out there that are already generating good revenue, then SEOPressor could be a good investment. It's a very neat tool and it's just nice to have the ongoing feedback while you create or edit posts. Use it on sites that are already making you money and you'll make your investment back in no time.

Get SEOPressor Here

Have you used this plugin? Do you have any further questions or comments regarding SEOPressor? Let me know in the comments!

Cheers,

Overview

*This is part of the big reason you should get this plugin right now.

The other part is that all the profits made from selling this plugin during the limited time it’s being offered for just $9.70 (regular price: $47) are being donated to asthma research. So, not only is this a great deal, it’s also for a good cause!

Videos

I made two different videos about the WPSyndicator plugin. The first one is basically a sales-video for the plugin that I made to straight-up promote it (by the way: affiliates don’t get a cut on this. ALL the profits go to charity). While I don’t usually post anything with a sales-angle here, the video can still help you understand exactly what this tool does:

The second video is simply a demonstration of how to install the plugin, how to syndicate a post and I also show you the results on a few of the sites, so you can see what exactly the Syndicator sends out:

Conclusion

The plugin does what it says on the box: It syndicates your posts, creating backlinks automatically. It does take a little time to set it up with all of the different accounts, but once that's done, it really is a one-click solution. Bottom line: It's probably the easiest way I've ever seen, for buidling a handful of backlinks and giving a small "SEO boost" to each one of your posts.

The low price and charity donations will end in the third week of July, so get in on this right now and help a good cause: Get The Plugin Here.

Cheers,

I don’t really want to go in-depth on this, so let me just say: if you use or want to use any kind of tables on a WordPress site, do yourself a favour and get the plugin.