Eatigo and Redmart recently experienced data breaches (1.1 million accounts affected at Redmart straitstimes.com/tech/personal-data-from-11-million-redmart-accounts-stolen-lazada Updated October 31st, 2020 and 2.8 million accounts November 1st, 2020 straitstimes.com/tech/personal-data-from-28-million-eatigo-accounts-stolen-put-up-for-sale-online )

Oh no, now people will know what my most ordered items on Redmart are. How am I possibly going to explain adding bags of salted egg crisps to almost every single order I’ve made? 

Or perhaps you’ve used (and more distressingly, reused) a password you had thought was secure? Now everyone will know my favourite drink is KopiOGao123 or that my favourite dim sum is SiewMai@YanTing. 

With data breaches becoming more commonplace, how do you go about securing your online identity?

What’s stopping someone from reusing that password to try and access your financial accounts? This is the reason why you do not reuse passwords on sites. And it is this very prevalence of password reuse which should worry us when we are alerted of a data breach.

If you’ve used the same password for i-banking, PayPal or worse the same e-mail address tied to the services. Change your password this instant.

Let’s face it; we aren’t going to remember 30 super long random passwords. I sometimes have trouble remembering what I had for lunch the day before. And because of this, you start reusing passwords, using shorter passwords made of fewer words, fewer symbols. All it takes is one site to be hacked and access to a bunch of other sites is compromised as well. 

Sure, one can compartmentalise and use different passwords for banking than for e-mail than for social. But there has to be a better way. 

Here’s where a password manager like NordPass can fill the gap. 

What is a password manager?

Essentially, it’s an encrypted vault which manages a whole bunch of passwords for you. It generates secure passwords for websites, so you no longer have to come up with your combinations. You still need a secure password known only to you to lock down that vault. But I’d much instead remember one relatively hard to crack password than two. For the truly paranoid, you could always pair it with a YubiKey as a layer of physical security.

How can a Password Manager help secure my account?

Using a password manager is the first step towards the security of your account. It is a convenient app where you can find your passwords when and where you need them, in addition to this it also:

• Helps you generate strong passwords with a built-in password generator;
• Saves your complex passwords, so you don’t need to reuse them on multiple accounts. It’s one of the most common reasons why accounts get hacked. Use unique passwords for all your accounts;
• Keeps your passwords in an encrypted vault, which is protected by zero-knowledge architecture. Meaning that your data is encrypted before it leaves your device and reaches the password manager’s servers in this case, LastPass. You are the only one who can access and manage your login credentials. The LastPass team can’t.
• Allows you to set up 2FA to add an extra layer of protection to your account.

What else can you do to lock down your logins? 

Enable 2FA wherever possible. I prefer using a 2FA token like AUTHY, SMS isn’t infallible as there have been several SIM swap attacks. Which aren’t as prevalent in Asia, but you never know with these things.

Yes, it might be a single point of failure but (in my opinion, it’s better than having lots of many weak links and hoping websites don’t get compromised)

For the tech-inclined, you could go old school and load up a VeraCrypt encrypted vault or encrypted disk image on macOS, and store passwords in a text file there. Making sure you only mount it when you need it and dismount it clearing memory after. Or perhaps set up BitWarden (an open-source password manager), but who’s going to set up and manage the server and ensure that that doesn’t get compromised or is running 24/7? 

Disclaimer: Some of the links are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you. I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. 

Some people use their favourite food and address as their password combination. Mine would have been HokkienMee29 What would yours have been? Comment below and who knows I might send you a spiffy new YubiKey to lock down your digital persona. #BadPasswords #ReducePasswordReuse

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) gives you online privacy by creating a private connection from your ISP or free cafe Wi-Fi connection to a secure machine hosted elsewhere. 

In essence, once you’ve connected to the VPN server. All communications are sent through this machine. And it seems as though your connection is originating from that computer’s IP address.

Do you need a VPN? I connect through VPNs if I’m travelling and accessing someone else’s Wi-Fi network. You never know how secure their systems are, and I prefer adding my layer of encryption to the connection. After all, I wouldn’t want to leave my banking statements or medical records at a crowded cafe for everyone to see. If you do not secure your connection, you run the risk that hackers, governments, your internet service provider, website, employer or others can store and make use of such information. A VPN shields your data from all these groups, but routing your traffic through the VPN provider inevitably means that the VPN provider (if malicious) could potentially store and extract the very data you are trying to keep private.

Thus you must pick a reliable VPN provider who’s been audited by a 3rd party. You could very well set one up yourself, but you’d have to make sure that the servers are maintained, and security patches kept up to date. 

There are numerous reasons why people use VPNs. The top reasons being: 

• Privacy
• Browsing without censorship
• Accessing Geo-restricted content.

So which VPN service would we at Webworth recommend?

We recommend NordVPN and ExpressVPN. Both of which have multiple servers globally for accessing geo-restricted content. 

Why NordVPN?

NordVPN has a 30-day money-back guarantee. They support WireGuard protocols which are proven to be faster than OpenVPN. NordVPN’s CyberSec Suite feature also provides adblocking and extra malware protection.

NordVPN also has a massive network with 5,390 servers in over 55 countries and offers speciality servers for P2P, double encryption and dedicated IPs. If you are looking for a service to get around restrictions on Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, you’re in good hands. 

NordVPN offers a kill switch feature and the ability to VPN into Tor. 

Why ExpressVPN?

ExpressVPN also has a 30-day money-back guarantee. 

Their network isn’t as extensive with 3,000+ servers in 160 global locations. 

We turned to our researchers in Asia again to test out ExpressVPN’s ability to bypass censorship. We’re happy to report that it consistently bypassed the Great Firewall of China, so it’s a top pick for regions with heavy censorship, too.

ExpressVPN offers a useful kill switch feature, which prevents network data from leaking outside of its secure VPN tunnel in the event the VPN connection fails.

Why Free VPNs are a terrible idea

VPNs cost money to run. They require a computer, a reliable internet connection and electricity. You can either pay for a premium service with money, or you pay for free services with your data. 

The next time you feel like using a free VPN, have a closer look at the privacy policy. More often than not, there is a lack of transparency or they are explicitly sharing user data for their own gain.

Not only that, but you are also willingly routing all data through computers owned by a 3rd party. Suppose they aren’t charging you for the use of their systems, or monetizing user data. What’s in it for them to provide access to a resource which costs them money?

Keep in mind that we may receive commissions when you click our links and make purchases. However, this does not impact our reviews and comparisons. We try our best to keep things fair and balanced, in order to help you make the best choice for you.

SEMRush – One of the first tools we used, I loved the way content was laid out. Very intuitive, navigable, and you get an excellent overview with their charting dashboard. Pro-tip, purchasing through our partner gives $20 hosting credits each month (for each tier) at TheCloudHost.net You’d be getting hosting for your SEO tuned site included! The hosting credits are as close as you’re going to get to a discount for SEMRush.

SEMRush has an SEO Writing Assistant, but like Yoast, we feel that it’s a little limited. Most companies have one page targeting many variations of a keyword or phrase, and we prefer having a talented copywriter with a brief knowledge of SEO practices to handle the content.

Marketing insights, enter a competitor’s URL and you get insights into some of the ads they are running, how they are tagging the ad, which landing page they are directing traffic to. HOW. COOL. IS. THAT! Much cheaper than buying the competitor’s intern a few drinks to loosen some lips.

ahrefs – We LOVE ahrefs, possibly due to the fact it runs out of Singapore, and we use it almost daily. It comes from a href HTML tag which you use to link to other sites. I thought they have a great product and service name. There’s just so much you can do with it. Figure out where your competitors are linking, track what keywords you are ranking. Figure out which pages are performing well and find out what potential content gaps you may have. And that’s just scratching the surface of it.

ahrefs indexing of competitor data (organic and search and paid ads) are pretty spot on too. We found a few Appsumo competitors who were targeting AppSumo com as their paid search term, and further segmenting people through specialized landing pages. From what we gathered, they are doing pretty well scaling up their ads with this simple targeting, segmenting and retargeting method.

There are other more technical tools available which we will save for a later date. Keep an eye out for the Cora post. They do a more thorough job of finding the link and content gaps between your website and the current sites in the top 3.

I was asked over dinner what SEO is and if I could explain the basic concepts behind it. This post is just my interpretation of Search Engines (Google) and my attempt at explaining SEO to the layperson.

Google is essentially a giant searchable database of sites on the internet. Imagine you had a library of every word ever written or published all in one place, having all that data means very little if you do not know where to look.

I believe that Google wants to make sense of large amounts of data and figure out which content best addresses a specific query. They’re continually asking what content would give the greatest utility and value for each specific query. Their core focus hasn’t changed, but their end product has morphed through the years as the raw materials (the content they index) has evolved through the years.

First you have to get the site indexed, and getting links from social profiles can be a pretty easy way to do that. Since social platforms are crawled by the search engine spiders (bots), any sites multiple networks link to are an indicator to Google that, ‘hey this is a new site with some buzz, maybe I should add it to my index.”

I think there are many smaller algorithms at work.

There’s likely one to analyze the on-site factors (content, layout, ease of use). Another for social signals (are people talking about the brand and site? are they linking and sharing posts). Another for user experience (does the user have to click through a whole bunch of popups? or do they have to wait 30 seconds for a particular page element to load). And another for utility, are people getting the answers they require from the query? Do they go on to purchase something or fill out a form to get more information? Or do they abandon the site and look for answers elsewhere. And then there are off-site links. How many authorative sites are linking back to you.

In each case, if any other site with similar content performs better, they’d get the leg up in rankings.

For on-page factors, ceteris paribus, if site A has content in a structure, Google understands and prefers, such as structured schema. It would likely rank higher than a site which didn’t have any schema entries.

For social-signals, ceteris paribus, if site A had more people talking and sharing links to an article than a similar piece on site B. Google would most likely recommend users check out site A over site B

For user-experience. If site A presented everything in a mobile-friendly format, and Site B required mobile users to pinch to zoom in and out to get content. People would likely get frustrated and not bother giving Google an indication that site A would better serve people.

Then there are off-page links if established high traffic sites are linking to you. E.G. You get featured on reddit.com, and it starts trending and 10% of people reading an article click on and find out more about the site. Or you get a feature on Forbes or Entrepreneur magazine. That’s a pretty reliable indicator that your site has relevance and it should be showing up in the search engines. It’s akin to a Bourdain effect for food, having an authority lend credibility and rave about you can and usually will slingshot you into the limelight.

I believe that all these algorithms churn out different values, and they work independently, then a master algorithm factors in these scores and ranks the sites accordingly. They could then change the weight given to any particular value and see how that impacts overall utility by website visitors. If they upped the value of the User Experience, does that lead to great time spent on the site or greater frustration?

In a recent mastermind meet-up, several other agency owners were lamenting about their newer clients who would often forward emails they’ve received from firms in India who tout their SEO services for pennies on the dollar.

A sample email reads:

1. Quality over Quantity

1,000,000 links with 400 clients? That averages out to 50,000 links per client. Manual or not. I would question the value of those links. Here’s what’s most likely happening on their end. They’re using something to automate those links. X-Rumer, GSA Ranker or SENuke. These programs do not work in the long run, it may work for 6 months but you’ll get slapped with a penalty so hard that it just doesn’t make sense. They’re most likely sending you links from over spammed blogs where thousands of fake profiles are commenting to get a link back to their page. The links above and below you may very well link to more adult orientated sites or objectional material. Do you REALLY want to be known to associate with such sites?

Always go for quality and bring VALUE to the site visitor. It’s simple really, and we’ve tried to apply the principles of value investing to our Search Engine Optimization Practice. We want to provide whoever is visiting our site with utility and value. The site has to address what the visitor is searching for sufficiently; it has to answer their search. (eg. If I searched for Dog treats and a site on chocolate coated dog shaped treats for kids came up first. It’s pretty easy for Google to infer that the site isn’t relevant or of value, if 90% of the people are leaving immediately.)

2. Low-quality links can do more harm than good, focus on Ethical Link Building

Stay away from any agency which touts a massive number of backlinks. It’s akin to getting convicted for a crime and losing the right to vote. SERP disenfranchisement, except that your site is likely going to be sandboxed by Google, and YOU paid someone $500 to do it. Ethical link building often involves having to reach out to individuals who are authorities in their niches to write about you. Think of the leading blogger in your niche, even if you were to pay them $500 most likely wouldnt post just any article up.

3. Focus on Content

Provide content, most successful businesses that can scale realize that they can’t do everything themselves. Providing content demonstrates your expertise in the subject, and you know what you are talking about. But more often than not, they will want to outsource anything which isn’t a core competency to you. It’s about protecting the Queen Bee Role while demonstrating that you have the chops to do the job while they focus on what brings the most value to their clients. Tip to educators out there, a taste of the coursework you do. The tests you administer and the structure of your lessons. You’ll set yourself apart from the crowd, allow potential students and parents to understand what goes on in your classes/courses.

Did my SEO do a good job?

Stop by ahrefs.com and input your website. Check out the number of links you have. Does it seem unnaturally high? Navigate to “Anchors” and see how many links you have with your exact match keywords if any of your anchors account for more than 10% of your entire link profile. It’s quite likely you’ve been SEO-ed by some old methods and agency.

Good SEO is not cheap. It takes time to see results, and quality work should not be rushed. You need to nurture your backlink profile slowly. Unless you are getting national coverage, any sudden spikes in your backlinks will undoubtedly seem unnatural.

What Exactly is a Like Ladder then?

For the uninitiated, like ladders is a post on Facebook, inviting you to leave a link to your business Facebook page in the comments. The concept is simple: everyone new to the thread is supposed to like the other pages which have posted before posting their own. And through this, you swap likes. It’s the modern-day equivalent of a chain-letter.

What Could Go Wrong?

Sounds harmless enough, doesn’t it? You like a few pages and, hopefully, you get a few hundred in return? And if the thread takes off, you could potentially see hundreds of likes! The rationale behind it is pretty straightforward: More likes equate to more fans, more fans and comments leads to better visibility! Or does it?

Rules of Engagement

See, Facebook has shifted focus from raw numbers to engagement and quality and audiences. Audiences are built around similar likes and profiles. So what happens when you manage to convince 200 people who aren’t actually interested in your product to like your page? That’s right, you’re diluting your core audience. You’re making it harder for Facebook to send you eyeballs which are actually interested in your product or service.

What happens when the individuals who have liked your page unlike your page after? Or simply unsubscribe from your page’s updates? Facebook factors these signals into their algorithm as well.

True Fans ROCK!

Having 1,000 engaged fans is better than 100,000 disinterested followers. (Remember that Instagram “influencer” who couldn’t sell 7 t-shirts with 2 million followers?) Focus on the 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly recommends.

If I can’t climb the Facebook Like Ladder, what should I do?

Imagine you’re introducing yourself in person at a conference and go from there. Include something which makes it personal. It can be a digital graphic which showcases you, the person behind the business. Mention where you’re from, the name of your business and explain what your company does. Get people to engage with your post, and you just may get some genuine likes from an individual who needs your services or product.

People can tell when they are being sold to, and we shut off immediately. (Side note: Gary Vaynerchuk has a book out: Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook ) Interact with people who comment, drop little bites which bring value. The person who was asking a question may not be purchasing from you or engaging you for your services. But someone else who comes along may just think “Hey, this person really knows their stuff. I don’t mind getting them to address my problems.”

Determine what the cause was: Manual or Algorithmic penalty?
Now, this would take a bit of digging, pull up your Analytics tool and find out if the drop in rankings and traffic coincides with any significant algorithm change Google’s implemented. Panda, Penguin & Fred can give you a hint as to what lead to the drop in ranks. But take note that the impact can take days or weeks to take effect. Removing toxic links will do little if the penalty relates to a site not being mobile responsive when mobilegeddon rolled around. So as always, your mileage may vary.

If it’s bad links, find bad links
Here at WebworthSEO, we use four different backlink research tools (ahrefs – also headquartered in Singapore, Moz, majestic and linkresearchtools) to list and categorise the links currently pointing to your site. There are a lot of backlink analysis tools out there, and while they all try to catalogue every backlink, there are some who slip through the various bots. Clients who have potentially toxic link profiles will have them disavowed. We have clients who want to distance themselves as much as they can from activities which may be seen as spam.

What makes a link toxic, and how do I determine which links to disavow for site recovery?
The quick rundown of it is, it all comes down to the quality of the link. If the link is originating from a site which are flagged as potentially harmful, you can be pretty sure that it will count negatively to your rankings. Think of it this way, someone who shares the same name as you gets listed on the FBI most wanted or the no-fly list, wouldn’t you want to get ahead of that and inform the airlines/employers/friends that you had nothing to do with that?

& Disavow bad links in the Site Recovery Process
Sifting and sorting through the links is the most time-consuming task when it comes to site recovery. Think of it this way; these outsourced SEO services run a script 24/7 which generates 1,000s of dubious backlinks for your site. And as with any automated tools, research tools included, the results are hugely dependent on the algorithms which determine if a link is toxic or clean. Categorically disavowing all links could mean removing potentially useful links.

It’s getting increasingly easy for anyone to create a website these days. Shopify, Squarespace, Wix & ConvertWorks have been instrumental in letting small businesses establish an online presence for cheap. Page builders like WB Baker, Divi and Elementor, have done the same for WordPress, allowing people who don’t understand a line of HTML code to create some beautiful layouts without having to deal with any CSS.

But web page builders come at a cost; they pretty much limit you to what you can edit and change. This can help with making sure that you or the intern you hired to create your site on Wix doesn’t mess up the layout too badly. But it also severely limits your options on how you present your content, not to mention how the metadata is presented to the search engine spiders.

We advocate using WordPress with a well-coded theme which isn’t bloated with a lot of unnecessary scripts. Increasingly, even we have started using page builders like Elementor. It saves us a huge chunk of time customizing layouts for clients and with the time savings. We spend just a fraction of it cleaning up the code to ensure fast load times. Take a look at our main SEO agency site for an example of a GLOBALLY fast loading website.

Google has stated time and again that up to 53% of people will abandon loading a website on mobile if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. With 60% of all traffic starting off on mobile. You want to make sure that your site loads fast. With mobile in mind, build your site around these limitations.

1. Mobile screen dimensions
2. 3G connections

Typically a Divi designed site can upwards of 140 requests and that’s before adding in things like Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Facebook remarketing pixels or any website chat/intercom system.

The last preflight check you should be doing for your site launches would be to try to get all pages to be at or under the following.

1. 80 requests at maximum
2. Load under 2 seconds on mobile
3. Be under 1mb in total page size.

Testing your website
At WebworthSEO our goto tool is GTMetrix.com it provides a quick actionable report.

For a quick global view of how your site is faring we like performance.sucuri.net

For a more detailed look at individual pages, we use the following tools from time to time

1. Pingdom
2. webpagetest.org
3. Google Page Speed Insights
4. Google Lighthouse (this is a chrome extension)

My websites are slow; what can I do?

1. Upgrade Your Hosting

A good host can address many of your issues. Hosting can generally be broken down into 3 categories.

• Shared Hosting
• VPS Hosting
• Dedicated Hosting

Shared hosting

The cheapest of the lot, if you signed up for the Domain + Hosting offer from GoDaddy. You’re most likely in a shared hosting environment. This cheaper option can cost you in the long run though, as you’re likely house on the same IP as hundreds of other sites, some of which may or may not host objectionable content. That said there are some shared hosts which do not oversell and overstuff their servers. Two of which are www.thecloudhost.net and SiteGround. They are also the pricier options when it comes to shared hosting, but the service and performance they provide is second to none.

VPS Hosting

Virtual Private Server Hosting is when a Dedicated server is partitioned into several virtual servers. Some virtualization technologies allow resources to be oversold as well. Not all VPS hosts are created equal. A good VPS host would typically run upwards of US$40 a month, and pricing varies by the resources you need to be allocated to it.

Dedicated Servers

These are generally the fastest of the lot, no other website is sharing the same resources (except for maybe the network), but unless you’re hosting a streaming site, there’s generally no way you’d saturate a 1GBPS or 10GBPS connection. Getting them from GoDaddy would cost you anywhere from US$199 and up each month. But we’ve managed some for our clients at US$109 a month.

2. Optimize Your Images

Most novice web designers make the mistake of uploading the highest resolution images they can find. I’ve done that too back in 2003. But one quickly realises that having a huge image load on a site only to be scaled down to a tenth of the size adds unnecessary weight to the webpage.

First, scale down images to the actual size they will be used when displayed on your webpage. There is no reason to upload a 4000×3000 image when the final image displayed is just 400×300 that’s 99% of data transmitted for nothing.

After that scale down your images. GTMetrix provides optimized images through its optimization engine. You can also use a plugin like ShortPixel, which automates image compression for you.

3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

If your website has a global audience, implementing a CDN reduces load times by a considerable margin. A CDN is a worldwide network of computers which caches and serves static content (think images, text, javascript, CSS and videos) and loads from their servers to the site visitor’s browser.

While some CDNs are notoriously expensive. We had a client come to us with a US$1,300 monthly bill on AWS CloudFront, which we reduced to US$190 on BunnyCDN monthly.

We are in love with BunnyCDN their Pay as you go plans mean that most smaller sites can benefit from the global networks without having to pay through the nose.

4. Cache your websites

WordPress is a great CMS, but having to retrieve simple content from a database will add additional load time to your website. Always cache content when possible. Caching creates a static version of your site to be served. While you’re at it, reduce unnecessary CSS and js queries.

We use a white-labelled version of Swift Performance and can lock you in at a US$30 a site if you are interested.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Google wants to present sites which give a good user experience to site visitors. If your page takes more than 10 seconds to load, would you think the end user would give uploading the site? On the same note, if the Google Bot had to index two sites, one loading in 1 second, the other in 10 seconds. Which do you think it would rank higher with everything else equal?

tl;dr: Keep websites going fast,

WhatsApp recently announced that they are rolling out WhatsApp Business in their blog post. With 1 billion users already on WhatsApp, it’s likely vital that you get your business set up and verified on WhatsApp business. We will likely see integration with A.I. powered chatbots.

It’s still currently in closed beta but if you or someone in your business is geeky and wants to give it a spin. Head on over to their closed pilot application form

It’s a new channel for your business to better connect with your client. Can’t hurt giving it a spin right?

You and your team have worked hard to get those 5-star reviews, so why not show them off? If you’ve got it to flaunt it right? Everyone needs a little social proof these days. It’s human nature to be drawn to a business which has plenty of positive reviews. I think that these make excellent little motivators for your frontline staff. If you can directly link a positive review to the acts of a particular staff member, why not show some recognition for a job well done?

How do you create a Small Thanks with Google Poster?
Google’s made it pretty straightforward.

• Head to https://smallthanks.withgoogle.com
• Enter your business name (+ location if there are multiple listings) in the search field (your listing needs to have a 5-star review)
• Select one of the generated poster examples, or you can “customize your own”

Here’s a visual guide to the above.

Getting your poster from Small Thanks with Google

Generated Assets/Posters for Estia’s Little Kitchen by Small Thanks with Google

Generate Asset Small Thanks with Google – Estia

That’s all there is to it!

You can even use these assets as image posts for Google My Business Posts, Instagram or Facebook.