Friendly to search engines and safe from hackers…

Remember, your blog is your home.  When you invite someone to your home.  You do your best to provide them with a clean, comfortable, friendly, safe and secure environment.  It is the same with your blog.  It is absolutely important to start out on the right foot with your site.  You want your site to be friendly but safe and secure.  It must be friendly to search engines.  In other words, you want to do as much work as possible for the search engines so that your site can be easily found.

You also want to be friendly to the user.  You want to give as much content— valuable content— related to what the user is looking for.

You want to be friendly from a social media standpoint.  This can be done by providing every possibility for a person to share your site.  Actually, you need to make the site easy and convenient to share.

On the other hand — although being friendly, your sight must be secure.  Once the site becomes popular, it can be victimized by hackers.  Even more commonly, there is the problem of spammers.  There are robot programs out there that post thousands of meaningless comments, just to create back-links for the sender.  So when we create our website– we can create it with built in programs that make it friendly and secure…

How do you secure your site and make it friendly?

WordPress has quite a few plugins that can help make your site search engine friendly.  You can also install plugins that will make your site social media friendly.  Besides making your blog friendly, there are also plugins that will make your blog secure against spammers and hackers.

Watch the video below, as I demonstrate how to install these plugins.

Making Your Site Friendly and Secure by Installing Plugins

Installing Google Analytics Video1

Installing Google Analytics Video2

All in One SEO Pack      Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.

Broken Link Checker   Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found

cbnet Ping Optimizer   Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer. (Note: this plugin is a fork of the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin, with registration/activiation functionality removed.)

Exploit Scanner              Scans your WordPress site for possible exploits.

Facebook Like                 This plugin can make your blog social media friendly.

Google Analytics for WordPress  This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog, adding lots of features, eg. custom variables and automatic clickout and download tracking. With this program, you can see the progress of your site— by examining the statistics, you’ll be able to see how friendly your site really is.

Google XML Sitemap for Images  This plugin will generate a XML Image Sitemap for your WordPress blog. Open the settings page to create your image sitemap. (Helps make your site search engine friendly)

Google XML Sitemap for Mobile   This plugin will generate a XML Mobile Sitemap for your WordPress blog. Open the settings page to create your mobile sitemap. (Helps make your site search engine friendly)

Google XML Sitemap for Videos   This plugin will generate a XML Video Sitemap for your WordPress blog. Open the settings page to create your video sitemap. (Helps make your site search engine friendly)

Google XML Sitemaps   This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. (Helps make your site search engine friendly)

Login LockDown            Adds some extra security to WordPress by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range. Distributed through Bad Neighborhood.

Redirection             Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors

Robots Meta           This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

SEO Friendly Images   Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.

SEO Slugs   Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve SEO

Shareaholic | email, bookmark, share buttons    Shareaholic adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts. See configuration panel for more settings

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam   

Topsy Retweet Button    Topsy

W3 Total Cache    The highest rated and most complete WordPress performance plugin. Dramatically improve the speed and user experience of your site. Add browser, page, object and database caching as well as minify and content delivery network (CDN) to WordPress.

WordPress Database Backup  On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Tools → Backup to get started

WP Security Scan  Perform security scan of WordPress installation.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin  Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. Now with Now with thumbnail support built-in!

On my next blog we’re going to continue where we left off on making our website friendly, but this time specifically in respect to being comfortable and user friendly.