Here are some relatively simple steps that should help ‘toughen up’ your WordPress installation:

Don’t use the “admin” account.

Either change the username via MySQL

UPDATE wp_users SET user_login = 'username' WHERE user_login = 'admin'

*where “username” is whatever you want to call it.

Or, create a new/unique account with administrator privileges and delete the original admin account.

From WordPress 3.0 you can set the administrator username and password during the installation process, which is a good step forward.

Use secure passwords.

Use strong passwords to protect your website from dictionary attacks. WordPress will tell you when your password is strong (the admin interface for users has a password strength indicator).

Don’t restrict your strong passwords to the WordPress installation, do the same for FTP, SSH and MySQL as well.

Update the folder permissions on your WordPress files.

A good rule of thumb is to set the following permissions:

Files should be set to 644
Folders should be set to 755

If these settings are too restrictive, i.e. you can’t upload files, change the permissions to increase the privileges (e.g. 775 or even 777).

Remember, permission levels vary depending on your specific server configuration, but you can generally set them to the desired level quite easily via FTP or SSH clients.

For example, with SSH:

find [your path] -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find [your path] -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Move the configuration file (wp-config.php).

From WordPress 2.6 it became possible to move the configuration file up a directory and out of the WordPress root folder.

For example, if WordPress is located in the following directory:

public_html/wordpress/wp-config.php

You can move it to the following directory:

public_html/wp-config.php

WordPress automatically checks the parent directory if the configuration file is not found in your website’s root directory.

This makes it nearly impossible for anyone to access your configuration file as it now resides outside the website’s root directory.

Move the wp-content directory.

Like the configuration file, WordPress 2.6 added the ability to move the wp-content directory to another location.

Once moved, make two additions to the configuration file to identify the new location:

define('WP_CONTENT_DIR', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/blog/wp-content');
define('WP_CONTENT_URL','http://domain.com/blog/wp-content');

You may also need to define the new location for plugins:

define('WP_PLUGIN_DIR', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/blog/wp-content/plugins');
define('WP_PLUGIN_URL','http://domain.com/blog/wp-content/plugins');

If hackers can’t find your wp-content folder’s location, clearly it becomes far more difficult for them to hack it.

Stay current with all updates.

The main WordPress installation files, plugins and themes can be updated easily via the admin interface. Make sure you do so each time a new version of either are released.

For plugins, the plugin change log makes it easy to see what has changed and therefore ensure compatibility with your version of WordPress.

Remove the WordPress version information from your header.

Viewing source on most WordPress websites will reveal what version of WordPress the website is running.

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 3.0.1" /><!-- leave this for stats -->

This helps hackers find vulnerable blogs or determine ways to hack a particular version.

To remove, find the code shown below in your header.php file and delete it:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /><!-- leave this for stats -->

The wp_head function also includes the WordPress version in your header. To remove, include the following line of code in your theme’s functions.php file:

remove_action('wp_head','wp_generator');

Use secret keys.

A secret key is a hashing salt, which makes your website harder to hack by adding random elements to the password. These secret keys are found in the WordPress configuration (wp-config.php) file.

Visit the following URL to get the secret keys: https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/

Replace the following in the configuration file

define('AUTH_KEY','put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY','put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY','put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_KEY','put your unique phrase here');
define('AUTH_SALT','put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_SALT','put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_SALT','put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_SALT','put your unique phrase here');

With the generated keys (example only):

define('AUTH_KEY','*QCT0a,T+3hxeg)ti7k}#~<AQSmm&x+ff=*$d:)<-;+!a?yS{ArmuR-#*GyLCgI)');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY','[)|y._i~B5js,h3@4%M[<l:DJ&]Ou$2|n(e?DJ`+R4pk6um/6zS%6@@i{^N-6(4]');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY','@+l2X{3wvy/1K[zRm|P_r;WixJ:,>V&JL![gyJq ?b[Wf.W|U_MKutdrL*$l][-S');
define('NONCE_KEY','T$R>#*2)2kO?NIr&o|>[L>T5%YGd^yJ+eE$7wkcL-?1v]-X*{f`Pg)NZqKU}^e8R');
define('AUTH_SALT','<8JD%+O!t.F%]6RaO9L_MI<w2Lw_-Bc5u_(WDdPoO0D;j9zwu*?1i{%nH/RBjF6J');
define('SECURE_AUTH_SALT','oS|EP&Pm`bf8iG!C<X8#yFG%8J)x G+3M`wRBtp#]7)&hj}ZV/p> yh-BtbBRbTk');
define('LOGGED_IN_SALT','tW4|J/m|habEJ+BTvF0PfpuiOgf-6,dIav-5K|FTM$&Agy;FqDjp|5Ci7>nJFD/#');
define('NONCE_SALT','T-v&f++w!c%5zs2t8qH?,n,/WE&uWd--o4t{FL49/4e~|e+HV+.~A?JYZ1Ev<5)u');

You can add or amend the secret keys at anytime. This will invalidate all existing cookies and require users to login again.

Change the WordPress table prefix.

You can define the WordPress database table prefix in the WordPress configuration file. By default, the prefix is set to:

$table_prefix = 'wp_';

Change this to whatever you prefer.

If you already have a version of WordPress installed, you will need to manually amend the database table names in MySQL, or do a clean install and data import.

Force SSL on login and admin access.

Set the following option in the WordPress configuration file to force SSL (HTTPS) on the login and admin screens.

define('FORCE_SSL_LOGIN',true);
define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN',true);

Use IP lockdown on the wp-admin directory.

Create an .htaccess file in your wp-admin directory with the following lines of code:

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Access Control"
AuthType Basic
order deny, allow
deny from all
#IP whitelist
allow from 72.14.207.99
allow from 216.239.51.99

Where the IP address lines are whatever your chosen IP addresses are. Only users with these IP addresses will have access to the wp-admin folder and hence the admin part of the blog.

Resources:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php
• http://codex.wordpress.org/htaccess_for_subdirectories

If you have any more suggestions, that don’t necessitate plugins, feel free to comment.

Over the next 18 months Sweatshop is looking to dramatically develop its websites, road races and retail operation. We are looking for key personnel to take the business forward as we intend to treble the size of the company in the next 5 years.

Sweatshop has an exciting opportunity for someone to join the E-commerce team to help drive online sales growth for Sweatshop. The key responsibilities of this role are producing and managing email marketing campaigns, creating and editing content for the website and working on website development projects in conjunction with the Head of E-commerce and external web developers.

Email Marketing

• Working with the Head of E-Commerce and internal marketing and events teams to create regular HTML email campaigns for online customers, store customers and race entrants
• Set up and management of campaigns in email marketing software, including analysis and reporting of campaign success
• Creating and maintaining triggered email campaigns, including footwear guarantees, product reviews, mailing list sign-ups and abandoned shopping carts

Content Management

• Updating content on website including banners, pods, vacancies, store information, advice, blog
• Researching/writing/collating content for website including advice section and product information
• Planning and implementing the ecommerce content strategy to increase site traffic, offer added value to customers and increase brand awareness
• Merchandising the website to ensure products are displayed in the correct order to highlight new products and top offers
• Liaising with internal designers to ensure web imagery is changed regularly
• Amending website content to help with SEO, including page titles, metadata and content keyword density
• Working with external search company admin system to improve site search
• Updating content on company intranet

Technical/Data Management

• Assisting in the creation and maintenance of microsites
• Creating landing pages for promotions
• Producing project specifications for web projects that enhance customer experience and deliver new functionality
• Testing web developments created by external developers
• Analysing and reporting on website statistics and promotions
• Setting up online forms for competitions and ad hoc promotions
• Regular submission of product database to Google Base and working with other Google webmaster tools
• Running SQL queries to extract data for email and postal mailings
• Collating and cleaning mailing lists
• Updating customer contact details
• Managing opt-ins/opt-outs from email marketing system

Skills/Qualifications

• IT/web or e-commerce related degree (desirable)
• Good knowledge and experience of web and e-commerce platform technology
• Passion for online shopping and excellent understanding of customer journeys, user experience and design
• Demonstrable experience in the creation of HTML emails and rules to ensure deliverability
• Excellent knowledge and understanding of HTML and/or Dreamweaver
• Experience of working with image software such as Photoshop or Fireworks
• Experience of working with Content Management Systems
• Solid understanding of SEO
• Strong analytical and data management skills
• Web/email copywriting skills
• Experience of using web analytics software to gain insights on users and site trends and identify opportunities for improvement
• Ability to communicate with people of all levels and to interact with technical resources
• Proactive
• Organised, able to prioritise, manage workload and meet deadlines
• Good attention to detail
• Interest in running/sport (desirable)

Interested candidates:
If you’re interested and share the company values of ground breaking customer service, integrity, success, teamwork and the welfare of staff, write to:

Sarah Whatley, Sweatshop, 12 Station Road, Hampton, Middlesex TW12 2BX or
email HR@Sweatshop.co.uk ]]> http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/web-content-manager-sweatshop-co-uk-leading-specialist-running-retailer/feed 0 http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/an-introduction-to-the-semantic-web http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/an-introduction-to-the-semantic-web#comments Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:20:49 +0000 Simon http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/?p=3559 The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and most of it is not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them and on a map so I know where I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar? The answer, right now, is no.

But why not? Because we don’t have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps its data to itself; applications don’t like to share.

The original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents, however, the Semantic Web is about two things: It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

Tim Berners-Lee describes the Semantic Web vision as:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analysing all the data on the Web, the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A Semantic Web, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The intelligent agents people have touted for ages will finally materialise.

What are the ideas and technologies that facilitate this vision? Below I give an overview and links to a number of them:

Linked Data

Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as “a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.”

• http://linkeddata.org
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a general-purpose language for representing information in the Web.

The Resource Description Framework Schema (RDF-S) is a semantic extension of RDF that provides mechanisms for describing groups of related resources and the relationships between these resources.

• http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDF_Schema

The Resource Description Framework in Attributes (RDFa) allows authors to add meaning to web page elements. Using a few simple XHTML attributes, authors can mark up human-readable data with machine-readable indicators for browsers and other programs to interpret. A web page can include markup for items as simple as the title of an article, or as complex as a user’s complete social network.

• http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa

Friend of a Friend (FOAF)

The Friend of a Friend project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do. FOAF is about your place in the Web, and the Web’s place in our world. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online.

• http://www.foaf-project.org
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(software)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend_of_a_friend
• http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/

Web Ontology Language (OWL)

The OWL Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics.

• http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)

The Dublin Core set of metadata elements provides a small and fundamental group of text elements through which most resources can be described and catalogued. Using only 15 base text fields, a Dublin Core metadata record can describe physical resources such as books, digital materials such as video, sound, image, or text files, and composite media like web pages. Metadata records based on Dublin Core are intended to be used for cross-domain information resource description and have become standard in the fields of library science and computer science. Implementations of Dublin Core typically make use of XML and are Resource Description Framework (RDF) based.

• http://dublincore.org
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_core

Triplestore

A triplestore is a purpose-built database for the storage and retrieval of Resource Description Framework (RDF) metadata.

Much like a relational database, information is stored in a triplestore and retrieved via a query language called SPARQL. Unlike a relational database, a triplestore is optimised for the storage and retrieval of many short statements called triples, in the form of subject-predicate-object, like “Bob is 35″ or “Bob knows Fred”.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore

SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL)

SPARQL is an RDF query language, which can be used to express queries across diverse data sources, whether the data is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware. SPARQL contains capabilities for querying required and optional graph patterns along with their conjunctions and disjunctions. SPARQL also supports extensible value testing and constraining queries by source RDF graph. The results of SPARQL queries can be results sets or RDF graphs.

• http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparql

Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)

SKOS is a family of formal languages designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is built upon RDF and RDF-S, and its main objective is to enable easy publication of controlled structured vocabularies for the Semantic Web.

• http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Knowledge_Organization_System

Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL)

A PURL is a type of Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that does not directly describe the location of the resource to be retrieved but instead describes an intermediate, more persistent location which, when retrieved, results in redirection (e.g. via a 302 HTTP status code) to the current location of the final resource.

PURLs are an interim measure, while Uniform Resource Names (URNs) are being mainstreamed, to solve the problem of transitory URIs in location-based URI schemes like HTTP.

• http://purl.org/docs/index.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_Uniform_Resource_Locator

Thomson Reuters OpenCalais

OpenCalais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application.

The OpenCalais Web Service automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you submit. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning and other methods, Calais analyses your document and finds the entities within it. Calais goes beyond classic entity identification returning the facts and events hidden within your text as well.

• http://www.opencalais.com

If you have any more suggestions that should be included above, I’ll be happy to hear them.

The decision to utilise a sub-domain, sub-directory or even a microsite is simply an architectural decision, but one that is often compounded with a marketing decision. In general, sub-directories are used to describe what individual pages are about while sub-domains and microsites are used to describe what an entire site is about.

When to use sub-directories

• Sub-directories are useful for organising content into meaningful groupings with descriptive URLs. If you have a meaningful taxonomy, then sub-directories are a good way to make your URLs more search friendly.
• For relatively small websites, i.e. not the BBCs and CNNs of this world, keeping your content in one place will help your website build trust and authority. The more trust and authority a website is able to garner with the search engines, the easier it becomes to rank new and related content.
• For the less technically savvy, sub-directories are easier to manage than sub-domains since they are generally created as part of the website’s page hierarchy. Furthermore, many CMSs don’t support the ability to publish across different domains out-of-the-box.
• Google Webmasters tools allow you to set basic geo-location preferences to sub-directories. The idea is to create new pseudo-website listings that also include sub-directories. For example, the www.domain.com listing could have www.domain.com/uk for the UK, www.domain.com/es for Spain and so on for each geographic location.

When to use sub-domains

• Sub-domains are useful for organising content that is otherwise unrelated. Take Google for example, they have a news product at news.google.com, a maps product at maps.google.com and a email product at mail.google.com. Since they are fundamentally different from each other and Google’s main search product, they aren’t held under the same domain.
• Sub-domains allow you to target regional markets more effectively. Sub domains are easier to market to specific geographical regions. For instance you can assign an IP address to a sub-domain and set a geographical preference in Google’s Webmaster tools for each sub-domain (sub-directories can have their geo-preference set but can’t be assigned an IP in another country, which might also be a signal of geo-location). For example, the www.domain.com listing could have uk.domain.com for the UK, es.domain.com for Spain and so on for each geographic location.
• If you already have a well established domain and want to expand out into other areas not completely related to your main website’s activities then a sub-domain may well be a good option. At the same time, people associate the sub-domain with your main domain’s brand, which means it can be easy to build up momentum on a vertical related to your main site. This is what the web giants Google and Yahoo, Sky and the BBC do successfully, but smaller websites can do the same. You often see this when the third-party functionality is “plugged into” an existing site, such as a payment gateway, events and job boards.

When to use microsites

Like sub-domains, microsites have an important position in the overall debate.

• If you have a new product or service that you potentially want to sell off or brand completely differently from your main business offering, a microsite makes a lot of sense. Microsites are really just a stripped down website, but as the product or service develops, so will the website and associated brand and it will take on trust and authority of its own.
• Microsites offer the ability to completely separate your main brand from the new product, service or promotion. This is useful if you’re pushing a content piece that has little to no association with your site and you don’t want the potential branding confusion or commercial association to hinder link and user growth.
• Microsites can be powerful if you have an exact match domain name for a particular keyword you’re targeting. Google’s preference for and ranking exact-match domains is a very powerful tool to use for SEO.

In Analytics, as in general web terminology, a domain is the name of a website, such as simonwhatley.co.uk or google.com. You should create a separate Analytics account for each domain. A profile, on the other hand, is a set of specifications for tracking traffic on a single domain. You can think of a profile as a single set of rules for Analytics to use in processing the traffic on a domain. Since you can create 50 profiles in a Google Analytics account, multiple profiles are a good way to view your data through different lenses and isolate certain segments.

Profiles are closely associated with filters, which can be used to include, exclude or change the representation of certain information in a report. Filters aren’t necessarily required, but using them will help you define what data you see and how you see it. Since filters affect the way data is displayed in your profiles, it is important to get them set up as soon as possible. Filters added after your account begins collecting data will not affect your old data.

This is semi-advanced stuff, but just remember to leave at least one “real” profile where you don’t filter at all — I generally call this profile “No Filters”. That way, you can work on the others without making mistakes on the data that you are relying on to guide your website decisions.

Profiles and Filters

It doesn’t matter in which order you set up your profiles and filters, but you need to do them in the same sitting.

Here are some important filters I create by default:

1. Banner Adverts — Track visitors who enter your site via your banner advertising campaigns. You can use this profile to compare analytics provided by the website on which your advert is displayed.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
   • Filter Pattern: banner
   • Case Sensitive: No
2. Email Campaigns — Track visitors who click through to your site via one of your email campaigns. This is especially useful if you’re using email campaign managers such as Campaign Monitor and MailChimp that allow for Analytics tags to be automatically applied to email links.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
   • Filter Pattern: email
   • Case Sensitive: No
3. Direct Visitors — What are the numbers of visitors who directly type your URL into the browser address bar to get to your website? This is an interesting profile since many users automatically use a Google Search as a way to navigate to your website, even if they know your URL.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Source
   • Filter Pattern: direct
   • Case Sensitive: No
4. New Visitors — How many visitors are new to your website is the first step to working out how to “convert” more visitors.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Visitor Type
   • Filter Pattern: new
   • Case Sensitive: No
5. Returning Visitors — An important segment, returning visitors like your website and the content or products it provides.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Visitor Type
   • Filter Pattern: returning
   • Case Sensitive: No
6. Referrals — Where have people come from and in what numbers? Knowing that 1000 visitors came from xyz.com is important for any marketing strategy.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
   • Filter Pattern: referral
   • Case Sensitive: No
7. Internal Visitors — “Big Brother” is watching! This profile is not entirely necessary, but is useful for determining how people in your organisation are using your website.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Visitor IP Address
   • Filter Pattern: (Use regular expressions to set rules for different IP exclusion and inclusion scenarios e.g. 192\.168\.0.*)
   • Case Sensitive: No
8. Overall (External) Visitors — Similar to the “No Filters” default profile I have set up, this one serves as a sanity check for visitor numbers that are not part of your organisation.
   • Filter Type: Predefined, exclude, traffic form the IP addresses, match
   • IP Address: (Use regular expressions to set rules for different IP exclusion and inclusion scenarios e.g. 192\.168\.0.*)
9. Organic Search — Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages (SERPs) that appear because of their relevance to the search terms. Understanding how many visitors find your via organic results as opposed to paid results will help you determine where to concentrate your advertising efforts.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
   • Filter Pattern: organic
   • Case Sensitive: No
10. Paid Search — Commonly known as Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising, popularised by Google AdWords and Google AdSense. Websites that utilise these will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere on a content site.
    • Filter Type: Custom include
    • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
    • Filter Pattern: ppc|cpc
    • Case Sensitive: No
11. Organic and Paid Search — This is a sanity check profile to include all search engine traffic.
    • Filter Type: Custom include
    • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
    • Filter Pattern: ppc|cpc|organic
    • Case Sensitive: No
12. Social Networks — A late addition to my analytics profiles, but an important one nonetheless. The ubiquity of social networks as a communications medium and understanding traffic from such sources is as important as understanding visits from search engines. Social networks such as Facebook and more recently Twitter, include their own advertising platforms and as such understanding the traffic from these sources is important for marketing more effectively.
    • Filter Type: Custom include
    • Filter Field: Campaign Source
    • Filter Pattern: bebo|facebook|friendfeed|friendster|hi5|imeem|linkedin|meebo|myspace|orkut|plaxo|twitter
    • Case Sensitive: No
13. Social Bookmarks — This is largely the same as the social network filter, albeit I have chosen to separate out social bookmarking sites specifically.
    • Filter Type: Custom include
    • Filter Field: Campaign Source
    • Filter Pattern: del\.icio\.us|delicious|digg|reddit|stumbleupon
    • Case Sensitive: No

If there are inaccuracies in the above list, just give me a shout, otherwise, I’m happy to hear your own tips and experiences.

For a beginner, Google AdWords can be a little daunting to start with, so below I list some tips and tricks that have served and continue to serve me well whenever I setup and manage a campaign.

1. Don’t use broad keyword matching — At least not to start off with. What’s broad matching? “If you include general keyword or keyword phrases-such as tennis shoes-in your keyword list, your adverts will appear when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms.” With expanded matching it becomes even harder to know when your keywords will show, because Google will pick them algorithmically. Broad match is usually used by experienced advertisers looking to save time (usually with a long list of negative keywords) or by lazy advertisers, who may not have the time or the inclination to target their campaigns. Broad matching can also be the right way to go for parts of certain kinds of campaign, but wading straight into it can be dangerous.
2. Use dynamic titles in your adverts — Dynamic titles are easy, they don’t cost anything and they usually have a good effect on CTR and conversion rates. The phrase that the searcher uses in their search will come up as the the title of your advert. This saves you having to create an individual advert for each keyword and means that your ad will be more targeted. In the title field of your ad simply put {keyword:your default title here}. The default title is in case the search phrase is too long for the title field or if AdWords can’t display the search for some other reason.
3. Use global negatives to prevent advert duplication — If you’re selling something, you don’t want people finding your advert if they’re searching for free stuff. This sounds obvious, but do some searches and you’ll see it happening. Use the word ‘free’ in your campaign global negatives. You can also use this for other words you don’t want to turn up for. Using negative keywords is especially important if you’re using broad matching.
4. Turn off content targeting and search network — Do you know where to look at these adverts? If the answer is a resounding “no”, leave them alone until you feel confident that you know where they’ll be showing and that you can make them work — get comfortable with Google SERPs first. Conversion rates and CTR‘s change dramatically for each search property, not to mention content targeted adverts. Get acquainted with Google before you move on to the others.
5. Test different advert-copy and positions — How much of a difference will being in the first position, as opposed to the second, third or sixth position make, for your net profit? The answer is that it depends on your creative, industry and who else is bidding on your keywords. The bottom line is that you should know. Test your creative in each position and work out where it will be most effective, from an ROI point of view. Remember also that the AdWords ranking algo works on a CPC x CTR basis (it’s actually more complicated than that, but that gives an idea as to why out of two adverts with similar CPC‘s, one will be higher because of a higher CTR.) You can also test your creatives. Write several different adverts and set them to run evenly (Google will run the one which preforms best by default, but you can set them to run evenly in your campaign settings). The creative which gives you the highest ROI is the one you should go with. You should probably run this kind of test for more than just a day.
6. Optimise your destination URLs and landing pages — The landing page is the page which the person who clicked on your advert will see when they come through to your site. Don’t use your homepage as your landing page unless it deals only with selling the product you’re advertising. For example, if you’re selling widgets, optimise a page on your website with information regarding that widget, this could be a product page on your website, or a specific page for the advertising campaign.
7. Track conversion and ROI — Track everything. Google will track impressions, clicks and click through rate. Just because an advert has a high CTR doesn’t mean that it is making you money. Use Google’s own conversion tracking codes and link AdWords with Analytics. If you don’t know how each keyword is preforming, then you won’t be able to optimise your campaigns. Turn off the keywords that aren’t working well and invest more in the keywords which are.
8. Work out your CPA — How much is each sale costing you? Are your Google AdWords listings preforming as well as your Yahoo! listings? Your Bing listings? Your offline marketing? You should know how much you’re paying for each order, sale, download or enquiry on each channel — only then will you be able to set CPA targets to work towards and know which channel is best for you.
9. Don’t enter into bidding wars with your competitors, find a niche — It is easy to get into bidding wars with your competitors. You want to be number one and so does your competitor. The best thing to do is to take a step back, ten deep breaths and consider how important it really is to be in the number one spot. If you can justify it, fine but otherwise: let your competitor be number one, slot into the number two slot and wait. If you have a better product, your click-through rate will get you to the top – and you’ll still be paying the same as you were in the second position. More and more people are using automated bidding software. This software will update at a set interval to keep the ad in the desired position. Doing battle with this kind of software is even more frustrating and less rewarding than trying to outbid a competitor.
10. Set a weekly budget and stick to it — When you’re first starting out this is really important. AdWords is addictive, and like anything else addictive, it can quickly get out of hand. A keyword may convert like nobody’s business one day and die the next. Make sure you know a keyword is working — more importantly, know why it is working — before you invest more.
11. Geo-target your adverts — Geo-target your adverts to the relevant audience. It can be done when you set up a new campaign and in your campaign settings. If you want to show on google.com that’s fine, but remember that you can geo-target to individual countries and even cities (you can target regions in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and the Netherlands). The more targeted users feels that your ad is, the more likely they are to click on it.
12. Organise your adverts into logical groups — This will make it easier for you to know what is doing well and what isn’t — especially a year later. If you’re selling widgets have a campaign not just for widgets, but for each brand of widget, and then an ad-group for each widget model.
13. Keep a close eye on what your competitors are doing — Is your competitor doing something better than you? What keywords do you share with your competitors? Can you discern their strategy? Do they use automated bidding software? Do their landing pages have some magic which you should be emulating? This is the sort of information you can find out and the kind of information that you need to know.

If there are inaccuracies in the above list, just give me a shout, otherwise, I’m happy to hear your own tips and experiences.

This has several implications to the “Twitter ecosystem” as a whole and Jeremiah Owyang has broken down the impacts:

The entire article can be read on Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategist blog.

• You can micro-manage your audience (eg. customers only see product release information, and not events aimed at prospects)
• You can task different parts of the organisation with running separate channels
• You may choose different Twitter tools and clients based on the audience (eg. event coverage could be handled through Tweetdeck whereas you might want in-depth social media monitoring tools for crisis management)

(via Delphine Remy-Boutang, Social Media Marketing Manager at IBM)

The important message advocated by the above strategy is this: Twitter isn’t simply a broadcast medium for marketing messages — that is only one facet — it is a medium for user engagement and two-way conversations.

What are the Tweet-specific elements? According to Twitter:

• @reply — This is a Tweet which begins with @username. This is distinct from the presence of @username elsewhere in the Tweet (more on that in a moment). An @reply Tweet is considered directly addressed to the @username and only some of your followers will see the Tweets (notably, those who follow both you and the @username).
• @mention — This is a Tweet which contains one or more @usernames anywhere in the Tweet. Technically an @reply is a type of @mention, which is important from a parsing perspective. An @mention Tweets will be delivered to all of your followers regardless of is the follow the @mentioned user or not.
• @username/list-name — Twitter lists are referenced using the syntax @username/list-name where the list-name portion has to meet some specific rules.
• #hashtag — As long has there has been a way to search Tweets people have been adding information to make the easy to find. The #hashtag syntax has become the standard for attaching a succinct tag to Tweets.
• URLs — While URLs are not Tweet-specific they are an important part of Tweets and require some special handling. There is a vast array of services based on the URLs in Tweets. In addition to services that extract the URLs most people expect URLs to be automatically converted to links when viewing a Tweet.

Other important syntaxes found in a Tweet

• RT @username — This is known as a Retweet. Similar to @mention, this type of Tweet refers to when a Twitter user is forwarding a Tweet, from another Twitter user, to their own followers. In essence the Tweet is being re-broadcast (generally without any editing).
• D @username — This is known as a Direct Message. Direct messages are similar again to an @reply, however, there is only one recipient of the message. The D @username element must appear at the beginning of the Tweet and only the referenced @username will be sent the message.
• via @username — Much like retweets and therefore similar to an @mention, this type of Tweet refers to when a Twitter user is forwarding on a Tweet, from another Twitter user, to their own followers. The Twitter user forwarding the Tweet may have edited the original, but out of courtesy have mentioned the originator.
• QT @username — This is known as a Quoted Tweet. It’s not often used outside Japan but is in essence a retweet.
• ^ (Co-Tag) — Known as a Co-Tag or sometimes a cotweet, this syntax appears when more than one person has access to a specific Twitter user account. It is a form of signing. For example, if I were to contribute to a corporate Twitter account, I may sign-off as ^SW (my initials).
• cc @username — Very much like an @mention, the carbon-copy syntax is a relic of the email world, but is useful for highlighting to a specific Twitter user a Tweet, whilst not necessarily directing the content of that Tweet to them.

If you want — and this is the default setting for WordPress, themes and plugins — you can just download jQuery, put it on your server and link to it from your header.php file in the <head> section.

However, it is better to use the proper wp_register_script() function, which can be achieved in your functions.php file:

if( !is_admin() ) {
   wp_deregister_script('jquery'); 
   wp_register_script('jquery', ("http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"), false, '1.4.2'); 
   wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
}

The reason we use the wp_register_script() is to ensure that WordPress and its themes and plugins are aware that the script has been loaded and therefore not to load an additional copy.

I have also used the is_admin() function to prevent conflict and therefore errors, in the WordPress administrator.

Of course, this method is not only restricted to jQuery, you can do the same for other popular JavaScript frameworks such as Mootools.

Further information on the wp_enqueue_script can be found on the WordPress Codex.