Welcome to the official Goldstein Media blog. We frequently post about all types of Internet-related topics ranging from Social Media, Internet Marketing, and Viral Marketing to the latest in Web Design and Development. You’ll see that there is a trend with our posts and we hope that you find them informative and helpful.
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SEO Ultimate for WordPress (Plugin) – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – If there's one complaint about WordPress, it's the strictness of the platform when it comes to SEO. Sure, you can do quite a bit with the software right out of the box, but there's a lot more that 'could' be done. Fortunately, plugins such as the All-in-One SEO Pack have helped to fill the void, but others are fast entering the marketing including newly released SEO Ultimate), an "all-in-one" WP Plugin that is really very powerful.
Things You Need to Know About Twitter Security | WebProNews – There has been more than one story in the news recently about Twitter accounts being hijacked. The most recent examples of note include the accounts of Britney Spears and famed blogger/entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki. These issues have highlighted some potential dangers of using the service, or really social networks in general.
Bing Snags Small Gain From Google | Epicenter | Wired.com – Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has nibbled at Google’s dominance of the U.S. search market, grabbing a one percent gain in search share for the software giant since Bing’s introduction early last month, according to web monitoring firm StatCounter.
Programmer’s Notepad – A coding program/editor for Web designers and coders . Open Source and Freeware
We all want to rank high in the search engine rankings. But often we just don’t know how. Wordpress, the premier open source blogging software, is pretty good for SEO out of the box, but like all things it can be better.
Enter SEO Ultimate, from SEO Design Solutions. This plugin is the key ingredient to get your site properly SEOed in Wordpress. Below is a video the developer produced showing off his product:
Title Rewriter – Lets you format the <title> tags of posts, pages, categories, tags, archives, search results, the blog homepage, and more.
Noindex Manager – Lets you add the noindex meta robots instruction to archives, comment feeds, the login page, and more.
Meta Editor – Lets you edit the meta descriptions/keywords for your posts, pages, and homepage. Also lets you enter verification meta codes and give code instructions to search engine spiders.
Canonicalizer – Inserts tags for your homepage and each of your posts, Pages, categories, tags, date archives, and author archives.
404 Monitor – Logs 404 errors generated on your blog.
Try it out. I like it so far. If you are still stumped and need some help please give us a call to setup a one-on-one consultation.
Google’s Matt Cutts answered a great question today on the search giant’s Webmaster help YouTube Channel.
The question was: “How does someone begin to SEO their site on a small budget in an overwhelmed industry such as real estate?”
One of the key points Cutts pointed out was to make your site different from all the rest. Make it useful and memorable and that will help your rankings. Check out the video below.
These are my links for June 26th through June 28th:
Billy Mays, TV Pitchman, Dies – Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com – In a week unusually rife with celebrity death, it’s a little spooky to note that the king of pop, Michael Jackson, and the king of pitchmen, Billy Mays, were born within about six weeks of each other in 1958.
19 Twitter Desktop Apps Compared – Twitter (Twitter) has become an integral part of our social media lives, marketing strategies, and business objectives. We have multiple accounts, hundreds of followers to watch, Twitter trends to track, hashtags to follow, and a frequent need for continuously updating search results.
What Bing, Twitter, and Facebook Mean for SEO | WebProNews – Google is traditionally the main area of focus when it comes to search engine optimization. With the search engine giant so far ahead of the game in terms of search market share, it's not hard to understand why.
Facebook Status Updates Going Public | WebProNews – This week, Facebook announced some coming changes to your status updates. Soon, just like with Twitter, you’ll have the option to make them public—but not just to everyone on the world’s most popular social network, but everyone around the world. (You know, with Internet access.)
Here are some tips the Googlers gave to make sure you site is safe:
What can you do?
This isn’t an easy problem to solve – the bad guys are attacking a wide range of sites and seem to be able to adapt their scripts to get around countermeasures. Google is constantly under attack by spammers trying to create fake accounts and generate spam profiles on our sites, and despite all of our efforts some have managed to slip through. Here are some things you can do to make their lives more difficult and keep your site clean and useful:
Make sure you have standard security features in place, including CAPTCHAs, to make it harder for spammers to create accounts en masse. Watch out for unlikely behavior – thousands of new user accounts created from the same IP address, new users sending out thousands of friend requests, etc. There is no simple solution to this problem, but often some simple checks will catch most of the worst spam.
Use a blacklist to prevent repetitive spamming attempts. We often see large numbers of fake profiles on one innocent site all linking to the same domain, so once you find one, you should make it simple to remove all of them.
Watch out for cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities and other security holes that allow spammers to inject questionable code onto their profile pages. We’ve seen techniques such as JavaScript used to redirect users to other sites, iframes that attempt to give users malware, and custom CSS code used to cover over your page with spammy content.
Consider nofollowing the links on untrusted user profile pages. This makes your site less attractive to anyone trying to pass PageRank from your site to their spammy site. Spammers seem to go after the low-hanging fruit, so even just nofollowing new profiles with few signals of trustworthiness will go a long way toward mitigating the problem. On the flip side, you could also consider manually or automatically lifting the nofollow attribute on links created by community members that are likely more trustworthy, such as those who have contributed substantive content over time.
Consider noindexing profile pages for new, not yet trustworthy users. You may even want to make initial profile pages completely private, especially if the bulk of the content on your site is in blogs, forums, or other types of pages.
Add a “report spam” feature to user profiles and friend invitations. Let your users help you solve the problem – they care about your community and are annoyed by spam too.
Monitor your site for spammy pages. One of the best tools for this is Google Alerts – set up a site: query along with commercial or adult keywords that you wouldn’t expect to see on your site. This is also a great tool to help detect hacked pages. You can also check ‘Keywords’ data in Webmaster Tools for strange, volatile vocabulary.
Watch for spikes in traffic from suspicious queries. It’s always great to see the line on your pageviews chart head upward, but pay attention to commercial or adult queries that don’t fit your site’s content. In cases like this where a spammer has abused your site, that traffic will provide little if any benefit while introducing users to your site as “the place that redirected me to that virus.”
Has your site ever been hacked? Have you ever fallen for a fake profile? (You can admit it, we won’t tease you.) Share your experience in the comments.
These are my links for June 24th through June 26th:
SEOmoz | A Bad Day for Search Engines: How News of Michael Jackson's Death Traveled Across the Web – First and foremost, let me extend my best wishes to the family and friends of Michael Jackson. I can only imagine the pain of losing a close friend and then having to watch it play out on a global stage. He made an extraordinary impact on the world and although not perfect, he is a teacher even in death (as evidenced by this post).
Custom Domain Extensions Coming – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – Internet infrastructure service provider Afilias announced it has been selected by Big Room Inc. as the registry services provider for its application to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for a new .eco domain during the upcoming new top-level domain (new TLD) application process.
Cross Browser Compatibility Test – Your customers are accessing your Website using different versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome.
Google’s Matt Cutts did a video for the Webmaster Central YouTube channel yesterday answering a question on over-optimization of a Website. In essence he said no, the you can’t over use the NOFOLLOW tag, but often times in the search for better placement on the search engines people tend to spam a bit. They over use their keywords and make their site not user friendly. So in the end there are ways to hurt yourself in the search engines but only if you take a more black-hat approach to optimization.
These are my links for June 22nd through June 23rd:
Link Value Factors | Wiep.net – In the style of SEOmoz' Search Engine Ranking Factors, this page includes the opinions of 17 well respected, international SEO and Link Building professionals on nearly 40 factors that possibly influence the value of a link. My opinion about each factor has been included into every score as well. Although not every possible influencing factor, nor every possible opinion has been included, this page covers the majority of the factors and is pretty accurate. At least, in my opinion.
LinkedIn Turns Industry White Papers Into Ads – Enter LinkedIn. It knows what industry you work in and your job title, making it easy to guess what kinds of white papers you might actually be interested in. The business networking site is testing a new feature that turns white papers into ads and presents them to the narrow group of professionals most likely to want to read them. LinkedIn members can get white papers for free, and in return sponsors get qualified leads.
You&A With Matt Cutts – Getting down to business with Matt Cutts and getting some insight
100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Twitter Research | Select Courses – Twitter has exploded into a must-track resource for news, rants, consumer reports, public health, shopping deals and emerging trends. But if you’re looking for something or someone specific, how can you expect to carve out a niche and listen in on just a single thread of conversation? Our list of 100 tips, tools and resources for Twitter research will help you keep it all together.
Between the Lines, in addition to the opinions expressed on this site/blog, aggregates and links to other blogs and sites. Opinions are those of individual bloggers and sites.
The team over at Google in charge of the Webmaster tools and Web spam prevention, 
