Heartbleed and Clio Security

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Last week there was a significant announcement that a core feature of Internet security was vulnerable to being compromised. The feature is known as OpenSSL and the name of the vulnerability is known as Heartbleed. You can read more about it here.

Unfortnately this affected Clio a Law Firm Practice Management service that I have talked about many times. The good news is that they have fixed the vulnerability and the even better news is that they announced it to everyone on the Clio blog.

I made a quick video explaining the vulnerability and how Clio fixed it and their recommendation that you update your Clio Password just to be on the safe side of things.

In a perfect world there would never be situations like this but in the real world things happen. The most reassuring thing for me as a Clio Consultant and for my clients is that Clio resolved the issue quickly and made a public announcement about it.

Law Practice Management Software Clio gets funding from Bessemer Venture Partners

Law Practice Management Software Clio gets $20 Million in Funding

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Big news in the law practice management software realm today as Clio announces it has closed a Series C funding with Bessemer Venture Partners for $20 Million. This will be used to expand their features and hire talent to make things happen. I have been working as a Clio Certified Consultant for almost a year now and have been very impressed with the system. I made a quick video talking about the announcement and my first interaction with the Co-Founder Rian Gavreau:

It will be very interesting to see what happens next as Clio spends some of this cash!
Disclosure – I am a Clio Certified Consultant. If you are interested in trying Clio out they offer a Free 30 day trial, click here to check it out.

Video thumbnail for youtube video How long should the content on my web page be? - Roger Williams Media

How long should the content on my web page be?

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I get asked by clients and colleagues a lot about how many words there should be on a webpage. This question is generally focused on organic search engine rankings and how to get more traffic. Sometimes it also focuses on the aesthetic appeal of the page. These are valid concerns but should not be the primary one that motivates you to create a web page.

Watch Roger talk about “how much content you need” in a Video

I did a Google Hangout talking about this, its only 18 minutes long and gets into the details as to why and how:

My suggestion is to focus on whether your content fully answers the question that the page wants to answer. If you can answer this question in 500 words thats great but keep in mind that the average english speaker talks at a rate of about 150 words per minute – h/t Quora That means that in 500 words or less than 5 minutes you are expecting to completely answer someones question about your service, how it applies to them, and how you can help. If thats enough then go with 500 words. My bet is that you are going to need a bit more content to get your points across completely.

Once you answer the question then you can be concerned about aesthetic appeal which is a part of conversion optimization. This is the process where you format the text with bold or italics and create

  • lists
  • allowing
  • users
  • to
  • skim
  • the
  • content

for what they need.

Dont expect that they will need all of the content but don’t leave anything out as that might be just the piece they are looking for.

Finally if you can answer the question and optimize for conversions then the organic traffic will follow.

External Resources

Here are some great posts from Neil Patel on the subject:
How Content Length Affects Rankings and Conversions
7 Simple Copywriting Tweaks That’ll Shoot Your Conversion Rate Up

Video thumbnail for youtube video Google Hangouts on Air for Small Businesses - Roger Williams Media

Google Hangouts on Air for Small Businesses

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Google Hangouts on Air are Google’s answer to webinars except you can broadcast them to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. If you own or run a business you should consider doing a regular Hangout on Air which you can schedule ahead of time and invite people to. Watch this video to learn more:

Also here is a great article going into more detail:

How to Use Google+ Hangouts for Your Business

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors 404′s and WordPress

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Happy New Year everyone! I hope 2013 was awesome and that you have big plans for 2014!

I want to start the year off by writing a post about a problem that I ran into while optimizing a client website recently. I am going to get into the habit of posting here when I find a solution to something that took me a while to figure out. In this case it had to do with Google Webmaster Tools and 404 Errors caused by the default WordPress settings.

Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools - Crawl Errors
As a website owner you should already have an account setup at Google Webmaster Tools. If you need help here is a great post by Kristie Hines on setting up Google Webmaster Tools.
The first thing you should check is the Crawl Errors section. This is where Google tells you when it cannot find a page on your website; this is also known as a 404 error. You want to fix these errors quickly by either creating a page that you may have deleted or by creating a 301 redirect that tells Google and everyone else who is looking for that page to look at the new page you have identified. If you need help with how to setup 301 Redirects I suggest the Redirection plugin for Worpdress.

As you add a redirection for any 404 error that you find in Google Webmaster tools you can click a button that tells Google you have fixed that issue. Do this for each one to help let Google know things are resolved.GWT-Mark-As-Fixed-Button

Strange 404′s caused by WordPress

Google Webmaster Tools Errors Page Archives
One problem that WordPress users may run into with Google Webmaster Tools is 404 errors for pages ending with /feed/ or /page/ at the end of URLs that are valid. This confused me until I found this post from Dan Kern at Kern Media with an extensive list of how to best setup the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin. If you are not using this plugin for SEO on your WordPress website you should right now.

Yoast SEO to the Rescue

Dan’s post on how to set the plugin up is a really helpful resource for understanding a lot of the features of the plugin. The main takeaway here is that you want to enable the “Noindex subpages of archives” and all for options under the “Clean up the ” section in the Titles and Metas part of the plugin. Selecting these checkboxes and hitting save will make these 404 errors go away.
Yoast seo setup settings

I hope this helps in your quest for total optimization! I would love to hear any thoughts or other ways of fixing this type of problem.