Lately there has been a big uptick in hacked social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram. Due to the difficulty in getting support on these platforms, it’s often very difficult to restore access to your account after a hack. Fortunately, Facebook and Instagram offer a feature called two-factor authentication (2FA for short) that significantly increases the security of your account, making it much harder for unauthorized users to login to your account. While Facebook and Instagram have been popular targets lately, two-factor authentication is a great tool to secure your accounts on other sites as well.
Advice
External Hard Drives vs. Network Attached Storage
We get a lot of questions about storage and backup drives, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on external hard drives (EHDs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) boxes. This information is for anyone who is looking for external storage devices for their computer. There are pros and cons to both options, so these are things to consider before you make a purchase.
5 Steps to Great Image SEO
Images are very helpful in supporting your website content and making your site interesting to visitors. Images can also be a great tool for SEO, but only when they are used correctly. Below are five important considerations when adding images to your web site and blog posts. I actually learned a few things myself in researching for this and will be using some of the tips below to step up my own image SEO game!
This is the second part of my SEO series. In the first post of my SEO series, I explain how to identify keywords that you want to use in your web site content. You will use those keywords when adding images to your site, so make sure you’ve identified your keywords first. But remember, as I discussed in the previous article, you should always work your keywords naturally into your content (and your image SEO strategy) so that your web site doesn’t come off looking spammy or unreadable.
6 Ways to Simplify Your Life With Dropbox
One of my favorite apps on my phone and computer is Dropbox. I just have a free Dropbox Basic account, but it’s been so valuable to me, I just had share why I love it. I have found a number of uses for the app that save me time and simplify my life. If you are already a Dropbox user, you may already know about some of these uses, but others you may have never considered. If there are other ways you like to utilize Dropbox, leave a message in the comments, because I’d love to hear about them!
Boost Your SEO With Keywords
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big topic, and there are a lot of aspects to a great SEO strategy. As a small business, one of the easiest and most effective things you can do to improve your SEO is to write good content and use relevant keywords in a few important places throughout your site. You may know about some places to use keywords on your site, but many sites aren’t taking advantage of all the important locations for keywords. Or you may know where to put keywords, but not how to come up with the right keywords or how to use them strategically.
3 Free Apps to Organize your Computer
When I get a new computer, there are several things I install right away, like Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Cloud. I also install a few free apps you may not be familiar with, and they help me keep my computer organized and find what I need. These apps can be used by anyone with a computer, but my comments below about each are especially geared toward photographers and other creatives. I hope you find these apps helpful! If you try them, I’d love to hear what you think and if they’ve helped you or saved you time.
UPS Battery Backup
A UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) is a battery backup for your electronic devices, such as computers and related equipment. I find that a lot of people don’t know what a UPS is, so I thought I’d write a brief article about what they are and why you want one. In previous articles, I’ve covered how to protect your files with a good backup strategy, how to protect your accounts with strong passwords, and how to protect your WordPress web site with proper security. Now you’ll learn how to protect your equipment with a UPS battery backup.
Securing a WordPress Web Site
It’s no secret that WordPress is the most popular content management system available for web sites. In fact, about a quarter of all web sites are running WordPress. As a result, WordPress is a popular target for hackers, who have automated tools that search for WordPress sites with vulnerabilities. Once they get in, hackers often deface web sites or use them to host their own malicious content. A web site hack can be devastating for your business, so it’s important to keep your web site secure from the most common WordPress attacks. The steps below will help you secure your site and protect it from hackers.
Password Security
This is a topic that’s important for everyone who uses a computer. Computer security has been in the news a lot in recent years, with high-profile hacks of user login data at companies like Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Apple, and Adobe. Hackers are getting increasingly aggressive and sophisticated in their attacks, and everyone is at risk. I worked in the Information Security industry for 8 years, so this is a topic with which I am all too familiar.
One of the most common ways that individuals become victims of a hacker is poor password security practices. While you may not feel like you are a very interesting target, hackers don’t care who you are. If they get access to a password database containing your login and they can crack your password, they have automated programs that will try to use that password on a slew of other web sites, trying to access your bank, credit cards, email account, web site, and anything else that they can.
This isn’t just paranoia from a former IT security geek. With so many different web sites where people manage every aspect of their lives online, we are more vulnerable than ever, and the hackers are incredibly determined to access accounts, many times with dire results. Often times, these hacks result in identity theft and bank or credit card fraud. Other times, web sites and email accounts are used for sending out spam and viruses. Either way, you don’t want to fall victim to an attack.
Back Up Your Files
The start of a new year is always a great time to make sure your computer backups are in order. If you aren’t currently backing up your computer, I’ve outlined a strategy to get backups started, and if you are backing up your files, there are some good tips in here to make sure all your bases are covered. People often think they’ve got everything backed up, but then their drive fails and they’re devastated to find out that they lost important files. If there’s anything that 20 years in the computer industry has taught me, it’s that all hard drives will fail at some point. It’s not a matter of IF your drive will fail, it’s WHEN. And drive recovery is very expensive and often cost-prohibitive (several hundred dollars at a minimum).