Consulting | Jason Palmer, CPA, CITP

Google Analytics for WordPress

June 28, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

Google Analytics for WordPress answers the age-old question, “I built it, did they come?” Every web server creates a log file that tracks details about the visitors to a web site. The challenge becomes getting access to that file and then having the tools to process the raw data to get meaningful information. It all sounds very complicated and it was, but not anymore. Furthermore, traditional web visitor log file analysis was very generic and not optimized for Content Managed Web sites such as WordPress.

Is there an easier way? Yes, Google Analytics for WordPress. (Note: Google Analytics can be implemented on any web site even though the scope of this article is specific to WordPress.)

Google Analytics for WordPress is a plugin that instantly reports back the activity on your site to the Google Analytics Engine for analysis and reporting.

Information includes Analytics on:

Content – The parts of the web site that had the most activity.

Social – Determines the interaction with Social Media platforms such as Google +1 and many others.

Mobile – Activity/Visitors using devices such as iPads, Tablets, and Smartphones.

Conversion – Response rate to Ad campaigns, direct response, and eCommerce – as applicable.

Advertising – How well social, mobile, search and display ads are working at bringing traffic to the site.

To view the information being communicated to the Google Analytics Engine, you need to sign up for a Basic Account, which is free, at the Google Analytics website at http://www.google.com/analytics. (If you already have a Gmail or other Google Site account, you can simply activate Google Analytics for your account.) Once you have an account, you need to perform a few simple steps to validate your web site domain (i.e. JasonPalmer.com ) to prove to Google Analytics that you are authorized to collect information on the domain. You can do this by manually entering your Google Analytics account number also called the “UA Code” in to the settings section of the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. Or, if you are using Google WebMaster Tools, you can authenticate the site via an entry in the Zone file of the Domain Name Server (DNS) that is Authoritative for your domain. (Note: If you understand the term DNS, and you know who you are, this will be the easier method. For those that do not, Google WebMaster Tools will be discussed in another post shortly.)

Once everything is fully configured and connected, it may take up to twenty-four hours for Google Analytics to start creating reports from the collected visitor data. These reports will be extremely beneficial in helping you understanding the activity on your web site. The reports will break down your visitors by geography, language, location; are they new or returning visitors?; the frequency of their visits and how long they stay on the site; which web browser and operating system did they user – (Internet Explorer or FireFox or Safari) and are they Mac, PC, Android, IOS, etc.; source of traffic such as Google or a Social media site; analysis of the content for speed, page visits, page response time; internal search; and numerous other variations on the major reporting areas listed.

Learn more about Google Analytics for WordPress at:
– http://yoast.com/wordpress/google-analytics

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin at WordPress.org:
– http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress

All in One SEO Pack (Search Engine Optimization) for WordPress

June 27, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

The All in One SEO Pack for WordPress makes Search Engine Optimization for your site in to an automated, mechanical process while still allowing advanced configuration for the purist.

Each page of a site needs to be properly formatted with “Meta Data”, (which is “data about data”), that includes information such as the Page Title, Description, Keywords, Category, and Site Name in a format that a Search Engine can quickly recognize and properly index. So, how do you do it? Use the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress.

Imagine if a Public Library had no card catalog and all of the books were just placed on the shelves with nothing printed on the outside cover. You would have to open each book, look inside, and memorize what was on each page.

Without Meta Data, in essence, the short “Cliff’s Note’s” information describing each page, a web site looks like a large disorganized pile of paper and the Search Engine has to read each page in its’ entirety and guess how the pages should be organized and indexed.

When you use the All in One SEO Pack Plugin for WordPress, you and the plugin determine and automatically add this Meta Data information to every static and dynamic page on your site so that the Search Engines see the organization, description of the pages on the site, and other key meta data as exactly as you intended.

For example, one set of meta data tags are those containing the web page title and description. This title and description meta data are usually what the Search Engine will display, word for word, in the results listing for a given page. The All in One SEO Pack for WordPress enables you to explicitly set the content of these tags as well as a number of others giving you complete control over what is displayed in the Search Engine results.

Although through the advanced options of the plugin you have the ability to fine tune a number of settings, for beginners, the All in One SEO Pack works right out-of-the-box. Just download and install the plugin and let it do its’ magic.

There are three items in the plugin settings that you should configure manually:

The “Home Title” is the site title displayed in the top bar of the web browser. For example, if you look at the top of your web browser, you should see it says, “Jason Palmer – Technology Consultant”.
The “Home Description” which is the site description, recommended not to exceed 160 characters, is almost exclusively used by the Search Engines and is what will be displayed in Search Results for the home page of the site. For JasonPalmer.com the description is “Complex Solutions to Complex Problems.”
The “Home Keywords” are descriptive words about the site. It makes sense to research various key words through the Search Engines to see which ones are most applicable to the content on your site. Keywords that describe the services offered at JasonPalmer.com include: Management Consulting, Technology Consulting, WordPress How-to.

In addition to setting these three Meta Tags for the Site Home Page, the Search Engine friendly Post Title, Post Description and Relevant Post Keywords each must be set for each individual post as well for SEO to be effective.

The All in One SEO Pack plugin is available in both a Free and Pro version, both of which can be installed on an unlimited number of sites – the key difference being the elimination of Advertising and the availability of Priority Support with the Pro version.

Learn more about the All in One SEO Pack Plugin at:
– http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Purchase the All in One SEO Pack Plugin for a one-time fee including lifetime upgrades and support at:
– http://semperplugins.com/all-in-one-seo-pack-pro-version

VaultPress Completely Automatic Backup for WordPress

June 26, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

VaultPress is the logical response to the expression, “It is not a question of if your WordPress site will crash and you will lose all of your data, it is just a question of when.”

A WordPress site, like any other web site is susceptible to hacking, a virus infection, or just a plain technical glitch that in a matter of seconds can erase hours or months of work. Backup, Backup, Backup is something that everyone is reminded to do but seldom does on a regular basis.

Traditional thinking says to backup your site once per day. In some cases the Site Hosting Company may do this for you. If the site is an active one with visitors posting comments or articles and media being added throughout the day, can you really afford to potentially lose the last 24 hours worth of content?

The VaultPress plugin is a realtime, continuous backup solution that will grab a copy of every post, comment, media file, revision and dashboard setting, every time a change is made to your site.

The Basic VaultPress plan, starting at just $15 per month includes: Realtime Backup, Automated Site Restore (for just files or the Database), Archiving of your site at a point in time, Statistical Information, a Backup Activity Log, Full Site Disaster Recovery (for when things go very bad) and Concierge Support Assistance to help you get started or in case of crisis.

The Premium VaultPress plan is $40 a month and includes all of the basic plan features plus various security scanning features and a slightly more seamless site migration solution for moving the site between servers (usually only for changing Web hosting companies.)

There is an Enterprise VaultPress plan at $350 a month that might be appropriate for very large and very active sites that have thousands of visitors daily and requires a rapid response and recovery time in case of a site failure.

The greatest thing about VaultPress is that it will backup a WordPress site of any size and can be installed and configured in about five minutes. Download and install the VaultPress plugin, add in the license key and that’s it. Within minutes VaultPress starts to backup the site. And every time any change is made, VaultPress initiates a process to backup that change.

I use it for JasonPalmer.com and it is the easiest and most seamless backup solution I have ever deployed.

Learn more about VaultPress at:
– http://www.vaultpress.com

WordPress and ScribeSEO Search Engine Optimization

June 25, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

When writing an article, the author usually has a target audience in mind and members of that audience are human, and therein lies the problem. Along the lines of a reverse “Turing Test”, we need to optimize our content not only for readability by humans but also by search engines as we never know if the reader is going to be human or machine. Furthermore, the language of search when people are using a search engine is somewhat different than that which we use colloquially. The ultimate test of the correct keywords to focus on is those which are the most popular search terms entered by billions of people every day.

This is where the ScribeSEO Search Engine Optimization Plugin, comes in to help. ScribeSEO helps you find the keywords that are used when people are looking for the kind of content you are providing. Then, it analyzes the writing style of your post and makes suggestions on how to make minor changes so that the Search Engines enjoy reading it too. Finally, ScribeSEO provides link building tools so that you can build back links from other sites as well as cross-link content within your own site and identify other sites that might want to promote your content as well.

ScribeSEO Search Engine Optimization Plugin analysis covers a number of areas to create the SEO Score:

First, it looks at the Title of your site: number of characters, number of words, primary keywords and do those keywords appear at the beginning of the title?

Second, it looks at the Site Description: again number of characters, primary keywords and do those keywords appear at the beginning of the title?

Finally, the Body, for number of words, keyword density, number of hyper-links, are these hyper-links towards the beginning, and the Flesch Reading Ease Score for the “readability” of your article.

The person who originally told me about ScribeSEO tried to prepare me for my first automated analysis by saying that writing optimized content for the Search Engines might take some time to master and get used to. So imagine my pleasant surprise when I analyzed my first organically written article and received a 100% on the SEO score by ScribeSEO. (Office Applications in the Cloud – Google Apps for Business and Office365, click here to read.)

You mileage may vary but realistically, ScribeSEO gives you plenty of feedback on your article so that it is pretty easy to make the subtle changes to optimize for Search Engine readability. Candidly, many of my posts score over 90% consistently with the only shortcoming being keyword density or positioning of the hyper-links to referenced content. (This is probably due to my preference of using the noun instead of a pronoun which eliminates ambiguity and enhances readability.) Only my most technical of posts, the ones that are predominately “tech notes,” score lower.

Another great feature is the suggestion of Tags for your articles as well as a full discussion of SEO Best Practices which provides a number of guidelines and tips so that you can start to learn to optimize your writing style. It also displays a proforma “Search Engine Results Page” showing what the result of someone searching for your content might see in the results listings of a search. Lastly, ScribeSEO provides heavy analysis of current keywords, suggestions on how to change keywords in the article to be more prominent, and alternative keyword suggestions for maximum impact.

ScribeSEO Search Engine Optimization Plugin has a number of affordable pricing plans and various discounts are available.

Learn more about ScribeSEO Search Engine Optimization Plugin at:
– http://www.scribeseo.com

Footnote: ScribeSEO analyzed and rated this post at 100% “Search Engine Optimized.”

WordPress, Anti-WebSpam, and the Akismet Plugin

June 24, 2012 By Jason Palmer 1 Comment

One of the great things about WordPress is the ability to get immediate feedback. Readers can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own sites as well.

Imagine how excited I was to see that within hours of my first official WordPress post on my newly launched site, I had a comment. In fact, on a fairly consistent basis, within hours of most of my posts, I had received comments. Wow! Is this Internet thing great or what? What is it they say, “If you publish it, they will come?”

And come they did, but “they” were BOTS (Computer Programs acting like people) and not actual people. This weekend Google honored what would have been the 100^th Birthday of the famed British mathematician, Alan Turing (born June 23^rd, 1912). (See the Google Doodle here.) His invention of the “Turing Test”, which is designed to test if a human can tell if the responses received from a series of asked questions are from another human or if they are programmed responses from a computer, was the inspiration for today’s article. The true purpose of this test described in a 1950 paper was to answer the question, “Can Machines Think?” (Entitled, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, click here for background)

At first glance, many of the comments received seemed perfectly legitimate. Sentence structure and grammar were correct and contextually relevant. On closer examination, even though the comments were complimentary in nature, they were also very generic and could have been written about any post. Other clues that the comments were not sent by humans, but by machines, were that the sending email addresses were mostly made up of random characters and all from free email services. The final clue was the link provided by the purported author of the comment. (When you make a comment on a WordPress Site, you enter your name, email address, and optionally, a link back to your own site.) None of the links went to legitimate sites. Some went to sites that offered fraudulent software license keys at extreme discounts, others were to doorway pages setup strictly to generate revenue from Google Adword impressions, and some went to discount offers for well know pharmaceutical sold through questionable channels.

WordPress has a number of features to make sure that only legitimate comments appear on your site. The first and most powerful is that all comments can be moderated by the Administrator. On the WordPress Dashboard, a little message cloud appears showing the number of comments awaiting approval by the Administrator. If you have a low traffic site, moderating the comments manually and without the assistance of a WordPress Anti-WebSpam Plugin may be sufficient.

However, if you would a little help from technology inspired by Alan Turing, you can let a “machine” determine if the comment is from a human or another machine. This is where the Akismet Anti-WebSpam plugin can help. Akismet provides a monthly subscription service for commercial sites (free for personal sites) that applies hundreds of tests to each comment and returns an up or down answer to the question: Is this comment WebSpam? The result of the Akismet tests properly tag the comment and place it in the correct Comment Queue for your further review giving you a head start on your comment moderation tasks.

The Akismet Plugin is installed by default with every installation of WordPress. However, you must visit Akismet.com to register for a subscription, free or paid, to get an activation key so that all of the comments to your site are submitted to the Akismet engines for review.

Learn more about Akismet
– http://www.akismet.com

Learn more about Alan Turing
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
– http://www.alanturing.net/

Learn about the Turing Test
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

Building JasonPalmer.com in WordPress

June 23, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

So how is JasonPalmer.com built? Even though I have the technical skill to build and design a web site from scratch, I wanted to focus on creating the content, not the technology. I wanted a site that had a professional “look and feel” and that I could add features to without requiring any custom programming. And, most importantly, it had to be an extensible platform that I could put up in minutes and hours, not days and weeks. The answer was WordPress.

Installing the WordPress platform took less than ten minutes. For many web hosting packages, adding in a WordPress site is a “one-click” install, and then just a few minutes to answer some basic configuration questions like: Web Site Name, Time Zone, and Preferred Date Format – along with setting up the Admin user and password.

Next, I decided to purchase the Genesis WordPress Design Framework and Theme Pro Plus Pack from StudioPress.com and selected the “News Child Theme.” The advantage of this commercial package is that it is already Search Engine Optimized, offers a Turn-Key Design with dozens of built-in Widgets (similar to WordPress Plug-In’s) that extend the functionality of the design (think fancy menu bar options), and it is unlimited use, which means I can use it on any site I create. (Individual Themes can be purchased as well and are very competitively priced.)

Within approximately four hours I was able to build JasonPalmer.com in its’ entirety with all of the static content (everything you see in the top menu bar) and begin to post my first dynamic content article (blog and categories sections.)

Anyone can easily put a web site up at Bitnami Web Hosting and Amazon Web Services for Free (for the first year.) See how you can do that too by reading my post on the subject here.

Technical Disclosure Note: Although I am an expert in the installation of WordPress and Web Hosting, you do not need anywhere near my capability level to experience a similar outcome of being able to install and configure WordPress with a Theme of your choice and be “up and running” within one day with your new web site.

Official WordPress Site:
– http://www.WordPress.org

Genesis Theme Framework from Studio Press
– http://www.StudioPress.com

WordPress Content Management System Platform

June 22, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

The biggest misconception about the creation of a web site is that professional expertise is an absolute requirement to produce a commercial quality experience for the visitor. To put that myth to rest, “There’s an App for that” and it is called The WordPress Content Management System Platform. WordPress is web software that provides a complete off-the-shelf, ready to go site that one can easily manage completely through any web browser such as Internet Explorer, FireFox, or Chrome.

WordPress is billed as being a personal publishing system, which enables users to create, post, and manage content – things that you write about, details about yourself or your company, product information, photographs – in short – any kind of content you see on any other web site can usually be managed in a WordPress site without “professional” help.

It is called a Platform because it provides a framework to which one can choose from thousands of little pieces of code called “Plug-Ins” to extend out the feature set. Plug-In’s are created by army of independent software developers in the WordPress Community.

Web Designers can create ready to install “Themes” which allow users to seamlessly change the look and feel of a website using templates without altering any of the content of the site as easily as one changes their shirt at the click of a button. (Click here to see a number of Free Themes available.)

Examples of Plug-In’s include Search Engine Optimization tools, Site Backup, Event Calendars, Weather Reports, Picture Gallery’s, Ratings and Surveys and much more. (Check out the WordPress Plug-in Listings here.) Many users will only need just a few Plug-in’s and WordPress includes some popular one’s by default. However, there are thousands to choose from to do things that previously required the expertise of a programmer to create custom code.

Since WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems, many Web Hosting companies offer it by default as part of their packages. In fact, there are a number of companies that are dedicated to hosting WordPress sites exclusively. Price is no longer a barrier as WordPress hosting is available for less than $5 a month for small sites.

Learn about WordPress
– http://www.wordpress.org

WordPress Plug-in Listing
– http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins

WordPress Free Theme Listing
– http://wordpress.org/extend/themes

Becoming the “Jason Palmer” on Google

June 21, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

Anyone who meets me would never confuse me with any other Jason Palmer. In fact, people say that I make a strong first impression that makes me virtually unforgettable – all good of course. You may read in to that as you will but it is along the lines of “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. And that brings us to a new series of articles on becoming “the” Jason Palmer on Google.

For the past twenty-five years of my career, I have been virtually invisible. To use a term of art, I was “off-the-grid” and nowhere is that more apparent then if you try to find me in a Google Search. Much of my consulting work has been for high profile accounts where being below the radar and discrete is good form. Almost all of my work has come from referrals where I am a well-known quantity prior to the introduction, and my credentials and references, if even asked for, are more than sufficient for me to be essentially hired before I actually meet the client. You could say in my field that I am a little like the “A-Team”, if you have a job, and you can find me, I can definitely help you. And there in lies the issue: Since most of my work comes from referrals, you have to know someone who knows me to find me.

To that end, approximately two weeks ago I decided to start to make myself visible on the Internet – Google specifically. There is no magic bullet but there are specific tried and true techniques that I will be sharing to demonstrate that one can go from invisible to highly visible in a reasonable period of time. In fact, the very first article I posted, if you search the proper two keywords, (M451 Error 13 – click here to see the proof), will appear as the very first listing in a Google Search. That is actually pretty impressive – if you are looking for one of my serious tech articles or what I call “Complex Solutions to Complex Problems.”

However, that simply demonstrates that I have highly specialized knowledge to solve a very specific problem with a very specific solution. It does nothing in particular for making me “the” Jason Palmer on Google. Search “Jason Palmer” (click here), and I am buried amongst a sea of “Jason Palmer’s” not appearing until the third page – at least as of the date of this post.

So, how am I going to become “the” Jason Palmer on Google? The answer? Incrementally. First if you look at the title of my site, I am not just “Jason Palmer” but “Jason Palmer – Tech Consultant.” My name is not so unique that there are not many other “Jason Palmer’s” but by adding the “Tech Consultant” tag line, I can narrow the field. This change alone, along with two weeks worth of daily posts allows someone to put in “Jason Palmer Tech” (Click here and see) and put me on the first page of Google.

It’s a start.

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