What can spammers do to my website?

Websites are not always completely hacker proof. Hackers are sometimes able to get into the server where your website is being hosted and make small changes to the content of your site which can be invisible to the untrained eye. They can also use spam bots to make posts that seem to be made by an actual person. The following can be done to your website:

1. They will insert links to their own sites within the written content of your website using the keywords and phrases that are most important on your site. To ensure these links are not noticed by the site owner they will add styling code so that the keywords they used as links on your site appear to be regular text and not a link to their own site. When Google and the other major search engines crawl your site and see these links it appears to them as though you are advocating their website. This can be very damaging to your site. Not only will the search engines view your website as spam, but it will also affect your search engine rankings for important keywords.
2. They can redirect your website to their website. When visitors go to your site from the search engines they will be redirected after a few seconds to their own site. They can also make it difficult to allow your visitors to return to your site once they have been redirected to the spam site by placing code that does not allow them to go back to the previous page.
3. They will find websites with blogs and forums that do not have proper anti-spam applications built in. This allows spammers to place links within their comments on blog posts giving them a free link to their site. These links have nothing to do with your site and can be damaging to your search engine rankings if they go unnoticed.

How can I protect my site from spammers?

There are several ways to find out if spammers change your web pages:

1. LinkVendor provides a free outbound link checking tool that allows you to see if there are any unknown links on the pages of your site that may be redirecting to a spam site.
2. Akismet and Disqus are free tools that help to prevent spam from reaching your blog posts.
3. Do a Google search for “site:yourdomain.com”. This will allow you to see if any of the titles and descriptions of your website pages have been changed or if there are new pages you did not create. If you are unsure of a page, click on the link to ensure that visitors are only being directed to your site.
4. Ensure that the proper security measures have been implemented on your server and are up to date.

1. All in One SEO Pack – All in One SEO Pack is a powerful suite of SEO options for your website. It allows you to customize description tags and title tags to better suit Search Engine Optimization. To date it’s had over 9,600,000 installations. In addition to allowing you to configure each and every post or blog, it has general settings to do global optimization on the pages you don’t customize. Install it today!!!
   
   
2. Web Ninja Google Analytics – Installing and configuring Google Analytics manually is a thing of the past. Web Ninja Google Analytics will configure your entire site with your Analytics account. Now you might be thinking… great, there are plenty of other Google Analytics plugins out there that do the same, true however, Web Ninja Google Analytics brings the reports to your dashboard. No more logging in to Analytics to see how your website is doing, this will show you a global overview of how your entire site is doing and, when on the page view of WordPress, it will show each pages Analytics so you can quickly and easily determine what’s working and whats not.
   
   
3. Page Tree – Is one of my favorite plugins for large business websites that contain a lot of pages with good page structure. Normally, it can take a few minutes on a large site to find what you are looking for if browsing through the default WordPress pages list; now with page tree, it gets ride of a lot of the WordPress bulk and makes a quick and simple list supporting page hierarchy of the pages you currently have, making it a breeze to find what you are looking for.
   
   
4. Filter Rewrite Rules -  Not widely used, and maybe that’s because of it’s name or people aren’t exactly sure what it does, but from a tech point-of-view, I think it’s a must have. Filter Rewrite Rules changes the way WordPress stores the page URL’s. By default, WordPress creates large bulky databases to store this information when most of it’s not needed. This plugin reduces the size of your database immensely which is important for any website that needs to be transferred or plans to be busy. When your database is smaller, your website tends to run faster. In addition, one of my biggest issues when transferring the site is that these URL’s create problems when important and exporting SQL. This plugin fixes all those little issues you may have.
   
   
5. Contact Form 7 – This is a must have plugin for anyone who wants to take their business seriously. With out a method to contact you via the web, what would you be doing on it? Contact Form 7 is the easiest contact form software I have found to setup contact forms. We use this plugins for every contact form on our website. It’s highly customizable and granted, there are contact form plugins you can customize even more than this one, but no where near the simplicity this one has to offer. It works great with Really Simple CAPTCHA which will reduce the amount of spam you’d normally get.
   
   
6. Inline Editor – Looking to see how your content looks immediately with out having to save the content as you type? Now you can. Inline Editor allows you to edit pages from the page its self. You no longer have to use the control panel to edit page content. We found most our client prefer to use thing plugin because it makes every page editable and you get a WYSIWYG editor built in to the pages. Sometimes this plugin can be slightly buggy, but for the most part, it makes editing your pages fun and easy, even for the most non-tech savy person.
   
   
7. Google XML Sitemaps – You’ve probably heard this time and time again, but if you haven’t I’m glad to be the first one to tell you. Google XML Sitemaps are one of the most important things you could have to let Google know about your website and where all your pages are located. Using this plugin, it pings Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and other search engines every time you add new content and the plugin updates your sites XML. This insures you content gets added to the search engines faster than any other method. I’d recommend getting a Google Webmaster account with this plugin so you can link the two.
   
   
8. jQuery Colorbox – One of the most annoying things you can do on your business website is link to an image and it opens a new browser window or goes directly to the image removing the rest of your site content. Using jQuery Colorbox, it will make sure all your images open in a new on screen window so the user doesn’t leave the site. It has the ability to open other websites, videos, and more all with in your site in a popup feel effect. All the user has to do is click off the screen and the content disappears. See our Portfolio for a great example of how this plugin is used. Use this plugin to keep your website looking sharp.
   
   
9. Quick Cache – This is another must have WordPress plugin. With about 250,000 current installs, it reduces your website load, increases performance and speed. It has many options to save parts of your website to the users computer (cache) and some raw files to the local server so it doesn’t need that many database queries. If you read above, database queries can slow your site down, so by reducing the database queries and saving images and other cache objects to the users computer, your site will run much faster. This is a great plugin for any type of website, business or not.
   
   
10. Disable Updates – Many of our clients get annoyed by WordPress always notifying them of new updates for themes, plugins, and core software. With Disable Updates installed, it will shut off all notifications. Now some people may think this is a bad thing however, many times when updating plugins, core functionality, or themes, it may break a lot of the features on your existing site. If you have anything customization from your developer, this can be a very bad and costly thing. The website developer may turn this off every few months to see if he/she would like anything upgraded. This plugin goes great with the idea of, “if its not broken – don’t fix it” thus – don’t update it.
    
    

Information Point uses many other plugins both custom and public. We feel the one’s listed above will get your business off to a great start. Are you looking for a custom plugin or need help with your WordPress site? Give us a call, we have great rates to help improve your site and online presence.

For more information click here.

1. Choose topics that are befitting to the services you provide and ones that you are passionate about. In doing so you will keep your audience riveted and coming back for more.
2. Try choosing a topic that is not extremely common. If your topic is too common, try writing from a different point of view or focus on very specific topics. For example, there are plenty of sites that talk about new cell phones however, few may specialize in one brand of phone and even fewer will focus on a specific model. The key to success is to finding a specific topic with a broad audience.
3. Using pictures will give your blog a more professional appearance. You can find high quality images at a reasonable price at istockphoto.com or for free on Flickr which may require the permission of the up-loader.
4. Remember to link to sources you used when writing a new blog article. This is a great way to promote your blog and receive reciprocal links. When the people or websites you linked to see that you have done so, they may be very likely to link back to your blog from their site.
5. Always proofread your blog articles before you post them, checking for spelling and grammatical errors. This will help to make your blog look professional and will increase your chances of websites linking back to you.
6. Categorize your posts to keep your blog organized so readers can easily find other useful information.
7. Actively participate in discussion forums related to the topics you are writing about. Find what people are asking questions about the most and then direct the readers to your blog with the answers to their questions.
8. Allow your audience to share your blog articles with other people using delicious, furl, or other social bookmarking services. Download AddThis to have a smart button on your blog posts that makes it easier for users to bookmark your posts. This will help to bring more relevant traffic to your blog.
9. Allow your viewers to subscribe to your feed so they are automatically notified every time you update your blog.
10. Write blog articles frequently and make sure you are always writing about new topics. this is the best way to keep your followers intrigued and coming back for more. We recommend at least two or three times. The search engines love seeing new information on topics so writing on a regular basis is very beneficial.

We have been providing their network services along with i-Remote Backup (offsite data backup) for several months and luckily we have been able to ensure their data has been stored safely from the last backup.

We want to make sure our clients are aware of this service as it is extremely important to keep an offsite backup of your data in case of unfortunate and unexpected events.

We also want to make sure our network clients servers are protected. Our network department  offers complete network packages consisting of maintenance/service time, offsite data backup (i-RemoteBackup), and server and desktop monitoring (i-NetworkMonitor) combined for a monthly discounted price. For more information, please refer to our website: ipoint-tech.com

For more information regarding the recent fire: www.coloradoan.com

Special Offer for i-RemoteBackup services – $50 setup of the i-RemoteBackup service on one server/PC if you sign up before November 30, 2011. (normally 199.00).

If you would like to sign up email Bill at wbleich@ipoint-tech.com and he will send you the information necessary to get started.

The following is a sampling of the new features on the website geared toward our current and prospective clients:

• Ability to increase and decrease font sizes on all information in the content area.
• Ability to easily request a services quote on nearly every page.
• Enhanced drop downs using CSS and JavaScript.
• Additional page links in the header to make navigation easier.
• A search engine in the menu bar to quickly find items of interest.
• A more powerful blog allowing us to syndicate to Facebook and Twitter efficiently.
• A homepage with easy to find links for services and information.
• A vibrant footer consisting of our latest tweet, language translations powered by Google, and newsletter signup.
• A convenient way for clients to access project management using their email and password.

If you would like iPoint to convert your website into an easy to use Content Management System, such as WordPress, give us a call. It is an easy transformation and we can keep the look you already have or give your site a makeover.

Google has recently released a widget that you can add to any html page to list products and sell them. The key benefit of this is the easy integration of selling merchandise from your website as well as the easy management of products and inventory from a Google Docs Spreadsheet.

The way that it works is that whenever the spreadsheet in Google Docs is updated it automatically updates the website with price changes, new products, shipping cost and many other features instantly.

f you are looking to find a way to sell a couple products online, the Google Store Widget is a good solution that is very affordable.

Another key benefit is that Google Checkout handles all of the payment processing so that you don’t have to worry about SSL or a Merchant account.

Check out Ipoint’s demo store.

Flash movies can be a great thing. They can help catch eyes that are otherwise bored with static looking pages, and they can help tell a story better than plain text. However the use of flash must be tempered with the ability to rank in search engines.

This article describes some of the considerations and recommendations when using flash on a website.

Information Point Technologies of Fort Collins, would like to welcome Adam Luz as Web Department Manager/Project Manager. As Web Department manager Adam will oversee the day to day operations of our Web Design and development team, as well as our Search engine and web marketing divisions.

Coloradoan March 25, 2011 -

Contact:

Peter Fardal- Director of Sales and Marketing
Information Point Technologies, Inc.
135 W. Swallow Rd. Bldg A
Fort Collins, CO 80525
Phone: 970-266-0703
http://www.ipoint-tech.com
pfardal@ipoint-tech.com

Local Fort Collins IT firm expands and acquires Media Tech Productions, LLC.

Fort Collins, CO — November 15, 2010 — Information Point Technologies, Inc. is proud to announce it has completed the acquisition of Media Tech Productions, LLC web design department and ISP/hosting services.  iPoint has also launched its new Customer  Relationship Manager (CRM) solution – i-OfficeManager.

Information Point Technologies is a full-service computer consulting firm, providing Computer Network, Web Design, Web Marketing, Social Media Management and Database Services to businesses throughout northern Colorado and beyond.

iPoint is proud to announce it has completed the purchase and acquisition of Media Tech Productions web services department and hosting clients. “After several weeks of transferring clients to our servers, we are proud to announce we have transitioned all of the clients and hope to continue our business relationship well into the future.” says Pete Fardal, Director of Sales and Marketing at iPoint. Pete also mentions that during the transition iPoint upgraded its own service offerings to include a more robust and secure email and hosting system, providing higher quality services without raising prices. Pete added “iPoint will transition all its current clients to the new system in the coming months.”

iPoint’s newest product has recently launched- i-OfficeManager is a web-based customer relationship management (CRM) application that allows a business the ability to collaborate and share contact information, sales leads, client history and notes. iPoint can also customize this application with modules specific to a businesses needs. Because i-OfficeManager is a web-based application, it means there is no software to install, manage, or update.