A cookie is usually a small text file that is saved by your computer’s web browser. The website’s web server can read and access the cookies that it set through your computer’s web browser (but not any cookies that belong to other sites), which makes the cookie useful to website owners for various – keeping track of purchases you have made in an online store, or tracking how many visitors visit a website on a given day, for example.

One of the most common uses of the cookie is to simply store a unique identifier in it (usually a randomly sequence of letters and numbers) that allows the web server to recognise that when you take an action on the website (for example, clicking on a link) that it was you that did this rather than someone else.

• A cookie can be used to gather statistics, allowing website owners to understand what people clicked on in their visit, how long they spent on pages, and so on;
• A cookie can be used to deliver a personalised browsing experience tailored by your previous actions – this is often seen with personalised adverts on some sites – if you’ve searched for “cheap flights to south africa”, some sites may continue to show you information matching that earlier search;
• It can be used for security purposes, for example when buying the latest bestseller from Amazon, or paying for that winning bid you had in eBay.

Why are some people concerned about cookies?
If you run security scans on your computer, you may have heard about ‘Tracking Cookies’ or you may have been prompted to remove them. Not all (and possibly none) of these ‘Tracking Cookies’ are anything to be concerned about, but some may be and it is these particular tracking cookies that have primarily caused some people to be concerned about cookie use.

A ‘Tracking Cookie’ is a cookie that tracks where you go on a website. In almost all cases this will be limited to tracking your movements on a particular site, such as how you got there and at what point you left. No personally identifiable information is kept. Unfortunately, some other tracking cookies have been going much further than this, and this is why some people have concerns about these types of cookies. Rather than tracking down individual website owners whose websites behave badly, all websites in the EU and UK have to comply with the new law.

This just gives you a brief overview of what cookies are & why they are used, and what has led to the new law I write about in a later post.

The post What is a “cookie” & what’s it used for? appeared first on The Simple Blog Company.

A couple of clients … and my mum … have asked me what is “cloud computing”, or “the cloud” – and when the penny drops after a simple explanation, you realise how complex & scary simple concepts can sound!

So, what IS “cloud computing” ?

Basically “the cloud” is just the internet! So if you remind yourself it’s really just “internet computing”, where you are running programs on the internet rather than on your computer, it might feel a lot easier to grasp.

To use one of these services, you will usually have to sign up to an account on a website, and in some cases download an application (e.g. Dropbox) to make things work even more effectively.

What are the benefits?

1. Number one has to be FLEXIBILITY! You can access your stuff anywhere, from almost any internet-enabled device (laptop, smart phone, desktop). This makes remote working and growing your business quite simple.
   And you buy what you need, and upgrade if you need more.
   One example is having your email available online all the time (for example, with GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc.) rather than being tied to a single computer.
2. Cost – you can do a lot more with your information for a lot less, as many of the basic services are free. And upgrading to premium services is usually pretty cost effective too, especially for small businesses.
   It can also mean, especially for smaller businesses, that you don’t have the expense of expensive IT equipment just to get started, and you are only paying for what you use. And monthly subscriptions smooth out your cashflow too.
3. Security – you can store your information online in an encrypted format, and it can only be accessed by logging in with a user name (or email) and a password. And your data is backed up by someone else – fewer headaches!
   (Caveat : too often, people use the same password across multiple sites, so if one site gets hacked, your whole life could be exposed – so follow my useful tips to make your passwords harder to guess.)

What are the possible downsides?

1. Do make sure that you choose a reputable provider for whatever service you are purchasing – they will have access to very personal data and you want to know it’s looked after, backed up and most of all safe!
2. You need to take responsibility to ensure you understand the fine print of the terms and conditions, so that there are no problems if you choose to move your data to another provider. You need to remain the legal owner of your content, and be able to migrate it when you choose.
3. If you don’t have a fast internet connection, it could be a bit slow with file uploads & downloads.

Many businesses can use applications “out of the box”, whereas other businesses might choose to have applications developed to integrate with other services – it really depends on your business needs. But whatever you do, do check some of the services out so you can make informed decisions!

Examples of cloud services I use:

Evernote:

What if you could collect, in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio memos, photos, key documents, and more? And what if that repository was constantly synchronized, so it was accessible through a Web browser and through apps on your various computers and smart phones? Well, such a service exists. And it’s basic level is free. It’s called Evernote. (Source: Walter Mossberg, allthingsd)

Dropbox:

Dropbox (free to $19.99 per month) is the simplest, most elegant file-synchronization tool we’ve ever used. The premise behind Dropbox is it gives you access to your files no matter what computer or device you have at hand. The service stores files with strong encryption on multiple servers and lets you get at your files quickly, easily, and for the most part elegantly from virtually any Internet-enabled device. Dropbox is both a downloadable product, with a version for every major operating system—Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry—and every user also gets a Web account with file access, too, just in case you’re on a computer that doesn’t have Dropbox installed. Dropbox works equally smoothly on Windows, Mac, Linux, as well as mobile devices. (Source : PCMag.com)

GMail:

Google’s email offering, GMail, gives you access to your emails any time, any where, as long as you have an internet connection. There are a lot of other webmail providers (Hotmail, Yahoo etc.) but if you take into account all the other free Google Apps you get with a Google account, it becomes a compelling case for Gmail.

TeuxDeux (pronounced “To Do”!) :

There are many online “To Do list” applications, but I really like the simplicity of TeuxDeux. And it automatically rolls over unfinished tasks, so no excuse, you can’t forget!
(Now I just have to remember to actually check TeuxDeux daily!!)

And a few others: Flickr for online photo sharing; Google Docs for MS Office-style documents you want to store online & share with others; and Spotify for music playlists…. and there are MANY more!!

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The post A simple guide to The Cloud appeared first on The Simple Blog Company.

Today’s post is an article by Ana Hoffman of Traffic Generation Cafe. Thanks for these useful tips Ana!

A day doesn’t go by that I don’t receive an email that tells me how I can finally afford to buy a bunch of high-quality high-PR links for peanuts.

Or the ones that tell me that, if I only use their SEO services, my site will be guaranteed to make it to the first page of Google for practically any keyword.

Nonsense.

Those kinds of claims warrant this email.

Google search engine ranking myth #1:

If an SEO expert approaches you saying that he can guarantee you will get the top search engine ranking for your chosen keyword, laugh in his face (or at least your computer screen).

I doubt it that any SEO expert owns search engines, has control over them, thus he can’t guarantee any result.

He can however assure you that he will use all his expertise to try to increase your traffic generation through top Google search engine ranking.

Google search engine ranking myth #2:

Pay $100 and some SEO expert will get you 100 links to PR 5-8 pages.

Impossible! It costs an arm and a leg to get links to high-ranking pages, $100/month and up.

Actually, there are only five ways I know of to get links to high-PR pages:

1.  Talk them into putting a link on their site for free (!).
2.  Get them to enroll in your affiliate program.
3.  Provide them with unique content that they WANT to put on their sites.
4.  Put them on low PR pages and wait for the PR to rise.
5.  Have such a fantastic site that people voluntarily put links up and tell others about you.

So hope this info will keep you away from the temptation of hiring all the wrong people to “take you to the top”.

Learning to do it yourself is your best bet – that way even if you hire someone eventually, you’ll know whether they are doing a  good job for you.

Warmly,

Ana

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The post How not to get swindled by "SEO experts" appeared first on The Simple Blog Company.

Anyway, on to today’s topic: I’ve been commenting on blogs for a few years now, and I remember seeing that a few of the commentators had their pictures showing next to their comments, but most did not, including me! So here’s what happened …

I heard about Gravatars (“Globally Recognised Avatar”).

Here’s how it works:

• You sign up for a free account at http://en.gravatar.com/
• Enter your primary email address on the sign-up page, check for the confirmation email, click the confirmation link, and your account has been created.
• Now you can upload your photo (a square image – 80 x 80 pixels is ideal) which will be associated with your primary email address web-wide.
• You can add other email addresses and associate them with different photos/images if you like.

Once you’ve done this, whenever you post a comment on a blog which has “Gravatar” activated (and a lot of them have nowadays), your picture will appear next to your comment if there is one associated with the email address you use in posting the comment.

That’s all there is to it.

Simple

I suggest that you go and set up your gravatar right away – it will help people to recognise you online.

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Are your products protected?!

If you sell digital products online, or sell webinars that you later use as part of a product … anything that is downloadable is potentially vulnerable to theft if you don’t take the right precautions!

If you use a digital download service (such as e-Junkie) then you’re OK – you can stop reading now, and grab a cup of coffee while the rest of you stay at your computers

And if you just send PDFs as part of an email autoresponder series, for example … same applies. Go on, grab a coffee!

Those of you still reading should be the ones who have “secret” download pages for your products, probably with unintelligible URLs to make guessing them tricky.

If you sell digital products, you’re inevitably going to find that some people will pass on the files to mates – and there’s not a lot you can do about that, really.

But what you CAN prevent is your download pages, so carefully hidden from view within your site, from being found and indexed by the search engines, for the world to find at the press of a search button.

Here’s the thing: you need to make sure your pages are NOT INDEXED!

Some themes very handily have page settings that you just check, job done!

 

Robots Meta

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But a large number of themes do not have this enabled, so you have to fix things in other ways. (note: this is for self-hosted WordPress sites only.)

The setting you want to ensure complete security for your download pages is”noindex, nofollow”

And this is what your source code will look like after saving the settings:

Nice

You can now relax!

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The post Are you protecting your assets? appeared first on The Simple Blog Company.

It’s all very well having loads of technical know-how and marketing tips, or knowing a fair bit about social media or SEO, but sometimes being in business on your own can just be tough! And having someone to chat to, to call for help or bounce ideas off is a blessing.

I got the idea for today’s post after Skyping with my friend Val in the US. We became friends in London when we worked together back in about 2001 or 2002. We stayed friends after we no longer worked together, meeting for coffee & a chat, and talking about everything from computers to photography and cats. We couldn’t let that stop when she went to the US!! And so we both still regularly run ideas past the other, and exchange great website links and ideas. And if one of us is feeling a bit down because we lost a client or got stuck with something, we’re there at the end of a Skype chat. (And that’s just on the business side of things…)

This also made me think of other who have supported me in my business over the years:

• my business coach Tony Brooks, who knows the right questions to ask to really make  me think (and squirm!) and challenge myself. I look forward to this year with him helping me with my goals and accountability.
• my life coach Lusanna Hoddell, who I worked with from 2007 to 2009, who helped me through the transition from “suffering” after being made redundant, to working through the “stuff” in my mind that I needed to move past to confident about starting my own business.
• networking friends who over the years have been there to chat to, exchange business ideas with & be friends with.
• More recently, my wonderful Twitter friends who let me know I’m on the right track with my blogging by sharing the good stuff – thanks!!!
• People like Faith Barnard and Michelle Shaeffer and Michele Scism who take large amounts of their own time to create blogging challenges that help connect people and promote our business … and learn … huge amounts!
• And Val for saying I’m an inspiration to her
  

So if you’re finding life as a business owner a little lonely, reach out to people who are there to help – coaches, friends, bloggers… peoples hearts are huge!

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The post Support in business is essential appeared first on The Simple Blog Company.

Have you ever had someone say to you that there’s something wrong with a site (or even your site?!) and yet when you check it out, everything looks just fine?

Often the reason for this is that you’re using a different browser to that “someone”, but we seldom think to check that basic fact!

Recently a client complained that there were some weird grey dots around the blog posts on her site, but I couldn’t find the darn things… until *light-bulb moment* I thought to try a couple of other browsers! And in Internet Explorer I could see those weird grey dots too…

That was great – if you can see a problem, you can often fix that problem!

There’s a very handy tool that will do a lot of the hard work for you: go to http://browsershots.org , select a few browsers under “Windows” and “Linux” (I normally only check the “Big 4″ – Firefox, IE, Chrome & Safari), fill in your website URL and click “Submit”. (If you choose too many browsers it takes too long.)

I selected 17 browser options (different versions of Firefox for example, under Linux and Windows), which took quite a while (I would allow about 1/2 an hour for this)  – you can just let it run in the background. Remember you only need to do this on the odd occasion if you’ve made some big changes to your website’s appearance – not something you have to do every week!

A few notes:

• the images are in landscape, so may appear a bit “stretched”, so just check that the main things appear to be OK.
• If you have a pop-up optin form (like I do) it may obscure some of the screenshots!

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The post Stopping "the uglies" …. appeared first on The Simple Blog Company.

The WordPress plugin that I use is “Google XML Sitemaps” – and after you install it and build your first site map “manually” [i.e. by pressing a button under Settings --> Google XML Sitemaps ... how easy can it get!!], the site map will be automatically updated when you add new content or edit pages or posts on your WordPress site.

As a bonus, it also then notifies Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com about changes to your site map (i.e. your website). You can also set it so that certain pages are excluded, under the “Excluded Items” – this is really handy for pages you don’t want indexed, such as download pages that aren’t password protected, or perhaps your privacy and other policy pages.

• Installation: go to “Plugins –> Add New” , search for “Google XML Sitemaps”, install it & then go to “Settings –> Google XML Sitemaps” to configure it for your requirements.
• For those of you without WordPress sites: you can create a site map for free at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com & use FTP or File Manager to upload it to the root directory of your website.

If you want to see what the search engines will see, you can view your site map by going to “http://yoursitename.com/sitemap.xml” and review the list of pages and posts there.

Graphical representation of a sitemap

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The post Helping the search engines find YOU! appeared first on The Simple Blog Company.