March, 2013 | BANTECH

Hacked? Time to check your online behavior

by Gargi Banerjee | Mar 28, 2013 | Website Development

(6 votes, average: 4.83 out of 5)

One of the most vulnerable moments of your online presence is when your website is hacked or your web identity compromised. And it can happen to anyone of us. Just for the record – hackers do not just go after established names, nor are the super successful sites on the internet safe from hackers. Not unless they continuously make an attempt to stay up-to-date and follow a stringent policy to stay clean and unviolated. So, we are discussing the ways to stay away from hackers. Is it possible? Well, to some extent, it certainly is. At least, we would (and should) do everything in our power to prevent being an easy prey to malicious attackers. Below, I have discussed how a few simple precautionary measures can save us hours, even weeks of misery. When we are hacked, it is because there is a loophole somewhere in the system, a loose-end, which the hacker exploits. It could be in terms of outdated software or plug-ins, unclean codes or even chained/ connected accounts. In fact, sometimes it could even result from the security questions we set to retrieve our passwords. We freely share the answers on the web through the various social networks we form. Information like birthday, mother’s maiden name, pet’s name, school, university and city where you were born could be all the hacker needs to violate your account and identity. SO now to prevent web identity theft or our websites being compromised by external attackers, the following steps could be a start. Of course this is not equivalent to having an expert diagnose your site for further fine...

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...

Hacked? Time to check your online behavior

Steps to safeguard your WordPress site

Dwindling page rank due to bad links – Disavow links immediately

Best Practices for a good Blog

Testimonial

CONTACT US