As most of you know I live in Spain and for some important services, like Google Search Engine, I’m geolocated in my country to receive a more accurate information.

What is Geolocation? This term refers to a real world geographic location of the user due to some important data like the IP of the user. The objetive of this feature is to give the user information related to his geographic enviroment.

This is good for the consumer but what happens with sellers, merchants, marketers and other people who want to target people from other countries? How can they take a look at the competence of other country if they are geotargeted into a different one?

Easy to answer: Web Proxies. Probably some of you don’t know what a proxy is. It is a computer server. You connect with this server and then your request pass through this computer. This way it seems that the proxy is the machine which makes the requests. If you live in Spain, my case, and you connect to a USA proxy then for every request it seems that you are in USA, do you understand? As a result when I use a Web Proxy that is in USA then I can use services like Search Engines as if I were in USA and I’d receive the information targeted to a resident of that country.

After testing with some Web Proxies I found one very interesting to use with these three countries: USA, Canada and UK. This tool is WordProxy202:

After selecting the proper country you have an address bar where you can write the URL you want to visit:

I think that it can’t be easier. This is a “must have” tool for SEO and Marketing.

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Few days ago the version 2.6 of WordPress was released. There are no big changes from the 2.5.1 to the 2.6, at least not noticeable ones like when we moved from 2.3.3 to 2.5. So it is time to upgrade your WordPress blogs if youd didn’t upgrade yet. If you are not an experienced user with WordPress perhaps you feel a bit scary about this process but it has nothing to fear about it. Check out this article about How To Upgrade Your WordPress To The Latest Version, and also you can take an eye at my Free WordPress Guide.

Why You Should Upgrade?

If your current version (not the latest one) works properly and you are not an experienced user surely that you are wondering this question…Why should I do it? Well, in spite of working well and apparently without problems normally every piece of software, every system has hidden bugs, sometimes bigger ones and sometimes smaller ones, and most of them are vulnerabilities, the ones that can provide access to the system. Imagine that your house has the back wall made of papier-mâché, you know, that material that looks like stone but it is paper indeed. At first glance there is not problem due to: first, the wall is hidden because it is at the back side, and second, it looks like stone. Who would know that your house is completely vulnerable? But would you sleep calmly knowing that your house back wall is made of paper? Sooner or later a thief will discover that there is free access to your home. And the richer you are the more thieves you’ll have around your house looking for a way to enter inside and steal your worth properties.

With software (yes, WordPress is software too) happens the same. If there is a bug inside sooner or later an skilled hacker will gain the access to your system. This is the reason why periodically there is a new version of an specific application. These new versions solve bugs detected in previous ones so it is dangerous to have outdated software. And the more important your blog is the closer you can be investigated by dangerous people that want to know if you have outdated your WordPress of any of your plugins to exploit a bug of a specific version. It happens from time to time that a big and well known blog is hacked, even with the latest versions of everything. We can’t avoid all crimes but we can improve our defenses.

What do you think now? Are you still lazy about upgrading your WordPress?

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Everybody should know how important is to have all the stuff upgraded to the last version. Normally the most important objetive of upgrades is to solve security problems and this is the main reason to be up to date.

If you have WordPress surely you know how to install it, in other case you have here my WordPress Guide. But perhaps you have never updated your WordPress and you are not sure how to do it. Don’t worry because it is simpler that you think. Here are the steps you must follow in order to have you WordPress blog protected against security bugs:

1. First of all you have to make a backup of your database. If you don’t know how to do it take a look at my article about the WordPress Database Backup Plugin.
2. Download the last version of WordPress, you have it available here.
3. You should deactivate all of your active plugins. The reason is for possible compatibility issues. Before doing it it’s a good oportunity to upgrade them to their last version.
4. Now you have to upload all the files and folders of the new version to your blog folder except the wp-content directory and the wp-config-sample.php file. Don’t overwrite of modify your wp-config.php file, ok? Keep this file as it is in your server because it contains the information needed to connect with the database. You also have to keep your wp-content folder because as it is because it stores all your plugins and themes so in case of overwriting it you could lose your own modifications in case that you have made some.
5. Before v2.5 you had to write the URL http://yourblog.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php in your navbar to start the upgrade process but after that version WordPress detects that there are files of a new version and it automatically shows the upgrade page, you just have to follow the simple instructions, there is only one step which upgrades your database scheme but you only have to press one button.

And we have finished! You have your WordPress blog upgraded to the last version. Check out that your blog works properly. Now you have to reactivate again your plugins but it is advised to do it one by one, this way if there is any compatibility problem you’ll know which one doesn’t work with the last version of WP.

There is something else. It is available a plugin that can do all these steps for you: WordPress Automatic Upgrade. I don’t use it because I prefer to have the total control over the upgrading process, but most people that use it like this plugin. If you decide to install and use this plugin I recommend you to deactivate the automated mode. This way you must to start the upgrading process manually but you can chose when to do it, I mean when you know that the new version has been tested by other users and it is safe to use it. Why I recommend this? Because sometimes a new version comes with some undetected important bugs and it is preferable to wait for a version that have that problems solved. Don’t worry because it doesnt happen frequently, but for example when the v2.5 was released it came with some serious problems and I waited to the v2.5.1 to upgrade.

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Most os us know how important is to have some knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get more exposure out there in the search engines. But like you and me when we started here, there are newbie people that don’t know even little tips to start applying right now in their very new posts. I’m gonna tell you some easy guidelines to start with SEO.

First tip: Optimize the title of your pages.

First of all, if you use WordPress and I hope so, you must configure the title of your pages to the most optimized way. You know that every post you write is a single page and the title of your posts is part of the title of that page. By default WordPress places first your blog’s title and then your post’s title so you have to invert them. I mean something like this:

• Binary Ant Dot Com » Blog Archive » Plugin All In One SEO Pack (bad way)
• Plugin All In One SEO Pack | Binary Ant Dot Com (good way)

This is easy to do with the All In One SEO Pack plugin. I wrote a post about All In One SEO Pack and Optimized titles that you should check it out because is one of the essential plugins for WordPress. Also try to avoid useless words like “blog archive” in the example above.

Why is it important? Because the less words you have in the title the more weigh every word has, and also it works better to place first the ones that are more relevant to the content.

Second tip: set Meta Tags like description and keywords for every single post.

Every single page must have this meta tags according to the respective content. This point is easily achievable with the All In One SEO Pack too. I have another post about How To Set Meta Tags For Your Posts With All In One SEO Pack that you should read too.

Third tip: write good titles for your posts.

When I say good titles I mean in SEO terms. You have to put keywords in it but you have to select the best ones. Which ones are best? the ones that have less competition. You have to make some searches about the topic to find the ones that could work better. For example, imagine that I’m going to write a post about cooking recipes so lets make some searches in Google:

• cooking recipes: Results 1 - 10 of about 6,810,000

It seems to be a bit of competition there so let’s narrow it. We have to be more specific on our keywords. Imagine that most recipes are about spanish cooking:

• spanish food cooking recipes: Results 1 - 10 of about 329,000

Great! Now we have twenty times less competition. Have you got the idea? Good.

Fourth tip: give more weigh to your keywords.

You have to repeat them inside your content. I’m not telling you that you have to write them twenty times all along the post, but you have to place them three or four times and at least once in the first paragraph. Also is very important to bold them because it is supposed that bold words are important for the content so the search engines put importance on them.

Fiveth tip: internal links are important.

Did you see what I did in the first and second tip? Those links to older posts are internal links. The more links you have pointing to a page the more relevance that page has to the search engines. External linkbaiting is crucial but internal is quite important too.

Ok, that’s all to start working on your Search Engine Optimization, easy steps, aren’t they?. Start with these guidelines and I assure that you’ll have good results, and they won’t take you much time.

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Hi friends, today is Friday, on of the best days of the week after Saturday. Just few lines to remind you that I’m running a very easy contest and you can win one 125×125 ad in my sidebar for the whole month of August, you have the rules here: Six Ad Spaces On Contest This Month Of July.

I think it is worth to take part in it, week by week I’m climbing the Alexa’s rank and my current position is 285.667 I broke the 300K barrier! I hope to get soon to the Top 100K, It’ll take me some weeks but I assure you that I’ll be there.

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