Subscribe to eSecurity Diva
 Subscribe via RSS Feed


 

« June 2008 | Main | August 2008 »

July 2008

July 23, 2008

5 Musts and Don'ts for Effective SEO

Last month I told you about our monthly educational podcast series focused on helping you generate better results from your Web stores. You may remember our first one, "Converting Shoppers to Buyers." This month the focus is on practical tips to help you increase results from your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

SEO, as well as the rest of the alphabet soup of acronyms in the search marketing world, can seem very difficult and confusing. But, it's a very important marketing channel for all Websites and even more for e-commerce businesses like yours, so I thought this would be a great topic for our monthly podcast.

Stacy_williams_headshot_color_08__4 The search marketing firm we use, Prominent Placement, has helped us make a lot of progress with out SEO strategies - in a very unintimidating way. So we asked Stacy Williams, managing partner, Prominent Placement, if she would be willing to share some practical best practices with you too. Stacy has been focused on search marketing for more than 10 years - well before most of us had ever heard about it! So she is truly a pioneer and expert in this arena.

Below are a few of the takeaways I learned - mostly what NOT to do - but I encourage you to listen to the podcast so that you can capture the tips that make the most sense for your business.

  • If it is seems too easy it probably is! For example, you may run across link farms or automated ways to drive more inbound leads to your site - avoid these. It is worth the time and effort to build quality, relevant inbounds links to your Website.
  • Don't try to trick the system. A common way some companies try to trick the search engines is by including invisible links or hidden text on their Web pages. If the search engines haven't detected this yet, they most certainly will. Search engines will punish bad behavior by dropping your site's ranking, removing all other listings except for your company name or even black listing your site completely.
  • Flash is ignored by the search engines. A little flash on your site is fine, such as a small video included on an html page. The search engines will simply skip over the flash element on the page and crawl the html. Don't create your entire site in flash or use it as a splash opening to your site - the search engines won't find it.

In the podcast you will also learn the top five "musts" of effective SEO and how to stay on top of the ever changing trends. There is a lot of information out there, but Stacy does a great job of recommending reliable and quality resources you can reference.

Check out the podcast and let me know what you think, by commenting about this blog post. You can access the podcast by visiting https://www.controlscan.com/podcasts/effective_seo.php. I hope some of the recommendations described in the podcast will help you increase the effectiveness of your SEO strategies!

‘Til Next Time,

Joan
The eSecurity Diva

Posted at 07:44 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

July 14, 2008

You’re Breached! What Would You Do?

Six months. That’s how long it took for one of the nation’s oldest retailers to commit to coming clean about a hacking incident that compromised at least 51,000 records.

Mont_ward
The retailer, Montgomery Ward, was recently quoted in an AP story saying it would contact the people affected by the incident, believed to have taken place back in December. That commitment only occurred after the reporter asked a Montgomery Ward exec if he was going to let the victims in on the secret.

Surprisingly, 44 states have some form of notification mandate when such occurrences arise. Regardless, research firm Gartner believes unreported breaches probably outnumber the reported ones. Fear of negative publicity is the No. 1 reason why so many are swept under the covers. Remember the firestorm resulting from the breach at TJX?

It appears that common point of purchase (CPP as it’s called in the trade) analysis led the victims and the AP to the discovery. According to the story, an investigative firm focusing on payment card theft noticed in June that alleged hackers were offering the sale of some 200,000 payment cards in online chat rooms frequented by assorted cyber criminals. Data was also available on the card holders’ security codes, expiration dates, addresses and phone numbers.

However, Montgomery Ward knew about the incident in December. The company followed Visa’s “guidelines” to a T. That included a report to the U.S. Secret Service. But according to the story, the guidelines did not include notifying customers.

Only 15 percent of identity theft victims learn they are breached from the company responsible for it, according to the Identity Theft Research Center. That means the rest find out the hard way.

It appears many companies would rather roll the dice on being caught by states rather than being proactive about disclosure which, to some extent, is understandable. After all, backlash from such an event could prove fatal for a small company. It’s also fully understandable (not in Ward’s case) that firms often don’t even know they’ve been breached, particularly the ones that don’t have security and PCI compliance partners.

I’m curious. Imagine for a minute your company’s database or Website has been hacked. Now imagine the breach was substantial, perhaps compromising 80 percent of your customers’ records. What’s the best way to handle such a crisis, knowing full well that negative publicity could be catastrophic? What roles should the credit card companies, processors and merchants play in this unsavory process?

‘Til Next Time,

Joan
The eSecurity Diva

Posted at 07:00 AM in Breaches | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)