Over the past 20 years, I’ve been asked many times, how much does a website cost? I get this question almost on a daily basis. So I figured I would share my opinions to help both web designers and customers looking for a new website or a website re-design. (more…)
Optimize your website in 2018 by having quality content and building links from high authority websites – these are 2 of the 200+ factors Google looks at!
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and has the aim of putting a website in the first position with Google. It’s like a strange race, as everyone wants to be first for their own keywords and people approach it in many different ways.
Google’s Andrey Lipattsev announced in March 2016 that on-page content and link building are joint first in importance in Google’s algorithm, with RankBrain (their artificial intelligence algorithm) third. This means that for a website to reach Google’s first page of results, it needs to:
There are at least 200 major Google ranking factors, see www.indigoextra.com/200-website-ranking-factors-google-seo, with some saying that there are actually over 10,000 factors in total, so how can you optimize a website for all these multitudes of different factors?
As Google evolves and particularly with the introduction of the RankBrain algorithm, optimizing a website for search engines has become closer and closer to optimizing it for human beings, with a few important differences.
Some factors Google look at are quality and length of content, the amount of time visitors spend on a page, whether visitors quickly click back, then click a different result in their search engine, does the number of visitors increase over time, does the page include at least one image, etc.
To optimize for these on-page aspects, it’s essential to write content that is well researched, a decent length and offers something unique to the people reading it. Don’t just think of reaching a certain word count, but be sure that you, or your SEO company, write content that actually engages the reader, that you yourself would enjoy reading and that includes something original. The unique text is a given, but unique content, with unique ideas presented in an original way, is what’s needed to grab your readers’ attention.
Similarly, with link building, the links that will give you the most benefit are the links that will also drive the most traffic to your website. A link from an original article in the form of a guest blog on a high authority site will drive a lot more traffic to your site than a link from an obscure social media portal no-one uses, whereas links from Facebook and Twitter are social media platforms that everyone has heard of and which will carry more weight.
It helps if some of the links include the anchor text that you want to rank high for, however, it’s important that the links are natural enough, therefore don’t be tempted to use keywords in every single anchor text – a healthy mixture of keywords, the URL, and phrases like ‘click here’ works best.
Finally, those other 200 or 10,000 factors we mentioned! Google RankBrain’s job is to sort through all the different factors and decide which ones are truly important, test them out and constantly refine them (over 500 times a year). They include things like having a responsive web design, so your site looks good on any device, ensuring that your page speed loads reasonably fast, making good use of meta tags and ALT tags and including illustrations or photos on your site.
If you focus on quality content and quality links, then you’re 2/3 of the way there and a well-designed website and guidance from an SEO expert will help you win the SEO race.
If you search for the rising demand of WordPress Themes, you can never stop saying “Wow.” Today, the web is overcrowded with the myriad of eye-catching and feature-rich themes. As WordPress is widely growing as a collaborative community, more WordPress Themes shops are opened. (more…)
With the continuously growing number of hacking attempts on eCommerce sites, finding vulnerabilities in your website to make it secure has become more important than ever. Given the fact hackers launch attacks on sites running on popular e-commerce platforms such as Magento (and others), you must take precautionary measures to avoid becoming a victim of such attacks.
Thankfully, Magento releases security patches to make a store protected against vulnerabilities detected in the system. So, if you’re running a Magento store, it is a good practice to update the store as soon as possible. Or else, you might suffer massive data loss. Besides, it is needless to say the damage a hacked site can cause to your reputation among visitors (and customers).
Magento rolled out two new security patches named SUPEE-7405 and SUPEE 7616 this year. But, sadly 80 percent of Magento stores still haven’t applied the patches. So, if you’ve discovered any security breach in your e-store make sure to install the latest available patches that could help improve the security of your Magento store. But in case you’re having difficulty in implementing the security patches, it would be better to take assistance of a reputed Magento e-commerce development company.
In this post, we’ve covered the installation procedure for the latest SUPEE-7405 security patch on your Magento store version 1.x. But, let’s have a brief overview of the patch first.
Introduction to SUPEE 7405
SUPEE 7405 security patch was released on January 20, 2016, and provide fixes for vulnerabilities like SQL Injection, Cross-site Scripting, Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF), etc. These vulnerabilities can steal your critical customer information or gain access to administrator sessions. This security patch has been made available for Magento versions 1.4.0.0 till 1.9.2.2, and 2.0.0.0 till 2.0.1.0.
Installation of SUPEE-7405 Security Patch
When it comes to installing the SUPEE-7405 security patch, you can accomplish the task with or without SSH. In this part, we’ll be discussing both these ways to install the patch in question.
Installing SUPEE-7405 With SSH
In case you have SSH access to your server, then begin installing SUPEE-7405 with SSH. Below are the steps you need to follow to perform the installation:
Step 1 – You can download the SUPEE-7405 patch from Downloads page:
https://www.magentocommerce.com/products/downloads/magento/
Or else, simply install the patch just like any regular Magento upgrade by making use of Downloader (which comes added with Magento 1.9.2.3 version).
NOTE: Before installing SUPEE-7405 patch make sure to install all other previous patches to keep your site secure from previous patches identified in Magento version.
Step 2 – Prior to the installation process, you must disable Magento Compiler from your system. To do so, go to System → Configuration → Tools → Magento Compiler. Once you’ve opened up the compiler makes sure to clear the compiled cache.
Step 3 – Next, you must verify the Magento version on which your store is running. You can easily check your store version by looking at the following code saved in Magento Mage.php file:
$ grep -A6 ‘static function getVersionInfo’ app/Mage.php
public static function getVersionInfo()
{
return array(
‘major’ => ‘1’,
‘minor’ => ‘9’,
‘revision’ => ‘2’,
‘patch’ => ‘2’,
}
The code determines that the version of your Magento store is 1.9.2.2
Step 4 – Upload the patch file into the root directory of your Magento install, and then execute it using the below given command:
sh patch_file_name.sh
In the above command, the filename could be something like:
PATCH_SUPEE-7405_CE_1.9.2.2_v1-2016-01-20-04-35-33.sh
Once, you run the above command a message will be displayed as following confirming whether the patch was installed successfully:
Patch was applied/reverted successfully
Step 5 – Lastly, you just need to verify whether your Magento store is functioning correctly or not. Also, you’ll have to flush the PHP opcode caches (like APC/XCache/eAccelerator). Keep in mind to flush the cache after applying the patch (or when you restart your web server).
Installing SUPEE-7405 Without SSH
Of course, applying a patch will become easy in case you have SSH access. But what if you don’t have such access? In that case, follow the below listed steps to install the SUPEE-7405 patch without SSH:
NOTE: Before you begin the installation process ascertain to upgrade your Magento store version to 1.9.2.3.
Step 1 – First off, make sure to install all the previous patches prior to installing the new one. Simply put, ensure to install the security patches SUPEE-1533, SUPEE-5344, and SUPEE-5994, to name a few.
Step 2 – Next, you’ll need to disable the Magento Compiler from your system. This requires you to navigate to System → Configuration → Tools → Magento Compiler from your admin panel.
Step 3 – Now, you must download all of the already patched files available in Github repo (or the ones mentioned in the below table). And then, upload those files in your Magento root directory.
|
Magento version |
SUPEE-7405 |
|
Magento 1.9.2.2 |
SUPEE_7405_Magento_1.9.2.2 |
|
Magento 1.9.2.0-1.9.2.1 |
SUPEE_7405_Magento_1.9.2.1 |
|
Magento 1.9.1.0-1.9.1.1 |
SUPEE_7405_Magento_1.9.1.1 |
|
Magento 1.9.0.1 |
SUPEE-7405-1.9.0.1 |
|
Magento 1.8.1.0 |
SUPEE_7405_Magento_1.8.1.0 |
|
Magento 1.7.0.0-1.7.0.2 |
SUPEE_7405_Magento_1.7.0.2 |
NOTE: Make sure to keep a backup of all the files that you are replacing.
Step 4 – Empty your cache. Also, flush the PHP opcode caches like APC/XCache/eAccelerator after patching. And at last, test the functionality of your Magento store.
Conclusion
Are you a Magento store owner and concerned about hardening your website security? Well, then you must update your version according to latest security patches as they come with fixes to deal with vulnerabilities detected in Magento versions. This post will guide you the process of installing the latest SUPEE-7405 security patch for Magento version 1.x.
Right now, someone somewhere is in the exact same boat as you – what with the weird WordPress error you are confronting. So relax, pal. You’re not alone. And that “fatal” error isn’t as apocalyptic as you think. (more…)
