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High Search Engine Rankings for Website’s Success

Posted by Vishal Vasu | Posted on 07-10-2010

Tags: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Submissions

A survey conducted by market research firm TNS revealed that 75% of all online shoppers said that company size was not a factor in having their online shopping needs satisfied. Only 15% said they preferred to shop with large retailers (Source: TNS).

More than 80% of all Internet users find new web sites through search engines (Source: Georgia Tech/GVU Users Survey). That means that about 650 million people use search engines to find web sites. It is very important to do the right things in the right order if you want to have high search engine rankings. It is not enough to submit your web site to search engines and to wait for the results.

Search engines use a variety of factors to rank web sites. You have to work on all factors if you want to achieve good results. Here are few of them:

Find the right keywords for your web site: The right keywords are not always obvious. It is very important that you target the right keywords before you start with your search engine optimization work.
Optimize your web pages for these keywords: Optimizing your web pages for your important keywords is crucial if you want to have high search engine rankings. Optimizing one or two pages is not enough. Search engines analyze all pages of your web site and they put these pages in a context. It is important that the combination of your web pages shows search engines that your web site is relevant to a special topic.
Submit your web pages to all important search engines and directories: After optimizing your web site for several keywords, you can submit your web site to search engines and Internet directories. Although search engine submission is not as important as it was (many search engines will find your web site through links on other sites), it can still help you to get your web site listed faster.
Get links from other web sites and make sure that these links contain your keywords: Links from other web sites are extremely important if you want to have high search engine rankings. Your web site must have good incoming links to get high search engine rankings. High search engine rankings are always the result of optimized web pages and good incoming links.

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Basic Steps to Secure Wi-Fi

Posted by Vishal Vasu | Posted on 22-09-2010

Category : General

Tags: IT Security

Recently I was in a corporate building visiting my client. While waiting in the reception, I flicked my smartphone’s Wi-FI on and was surprised to find a list of unprotected wireless connections which I could connect to without any authentication. The best part was when I was able to get a lease from a DHCP of an internal network’s IP address which actually allowed me to use UNC and access shared folders in the network. WOW – now that’s what I call a potential security breach in that company. Yes, there have been tales floating around of successful “war driving” through corporate buildings and parking lots just to find out open and unsecured Access Points which allows a competitor or a techie hired by a competitor to enter the corporate network.

Essentially, for a wireless network to be practical in enterprise networks, it needs to satisfy several requirements that are best addressed in a wired network.

Security policies differ from companies to companies but there are certain definate core requirements essential to secure wireless networks. The requirements of wired and wireless access have a great deal in common. From a security perspective, the main difference is that a wired network is assumed to be safe from eavesdropping whereas in a wireless network, it is assumed that all bits are open for all to hear. Here are some security items that should form a part of your core wireless security checklist:

Authentication and Policy: This helps to keep prying eyes out of your network. The rule is, allow the right people in the network and keep the unauthorised people out. Moreover, once a user is authenticated, items like which network resources need to be protected and to what degree, who should access the resources, etc. should also be identified.
Change Default Router Settings: The first thing to do is to login to your router’s administration page and change the password of the administrator account to something more secure. By default this is accessible from http://192.168.1.1 using username as ‘admin’ and password as ‘admin’ or ‘password’. This will prevent others from accessing the router and you can easily maintain the security settings that you want.
Hide SSID: Always ensure that the data sent over the wireless network is not being intercepted. A wireless signal serves as an open invitation to those unwelcome individuals who—at a minimum—want a free ride on the Internet, but who could also steal corporate information and damage the organization in other ways. Most Access Points and routers automatically and continiously broadcast the network’s name, or SSID (Service Set IDentifier). This makes your Wireless LAN visible to any wireless systems within range of it. Turning off SSID broadcast for your network makes it invisible to your neighbors and passers-by. Do remember that Wi-Fi scanning tools like inSSIDer (Windows) and Kismet (Mac, Linux), which are available freely on the Internet will still allow anyone to find all the available Wireless Networks in an area even if the routers are not broadcasting their SSID name. But again, every bit of inconvenience for those prying eyes helps.
Enable Network Encryption: In order to prevent other computers in the area from connecting to your wireless network, you need to encrypt your wireless signals. There are several encryption methods for wireless settings, including WEP, WPA (WPA-Personal), and WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access version 2). WEP is basic encryption and therefore least secure and can easily be cracked using tools like AirCrack. A better way to protect your WLAN is with WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access). WPA provides much better protection and is also easier to use, since your password characters aren’t limited to 0-9 and A-F as they are with WEP. Enter a passphrase to access the network; make sure to set this to something that would be difficult for others to guess, and consider using a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters in the passphrase.
Use MAC Filters: Whether you have a laptop or a Wi-Fi enabled mobile phone, all your wireless devices have a unique MAC address (nothing to do with Apple Mac). Unlike IP addresses, MAC addresses are unique to specific network adapters, so by turning on MAC filtering you can limit network access to only your systems (or those you know about). In order to use MAC filtering you need to find (and enter into the router or AP) the 12-character MAC address of every system that will connect to the network, so it can be inconvenient to set up, especially if you have a lot of wireless clients or if your clients change a lot. MAC addresses can be “spoofed” by a knowledgable person, so while it’s not a guarantee of security, it does add another hurdle for potential intruders to jump.
Disable Remote Administration: Most WLAN routers have the ability to be remotely administered via the Internet. Ideally, you should use this feature only if it lets you define a specific IP address or limited range of addresses that will be able to access the router.

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How does Ethical SEO help Increase ROI of your Website?

Posted by Vishal Vasu | Posted on 02-06-2010

Category : Websites & Web Marketing

Tags: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Submissions

So you have a website and have made investments in getting it online on the Internet. But does it give you the results that you had thought of? Is your website adding up to your business or is it reaching out to your target customers?

After establishing a great website, however, you need to drive interested consumers to your site in order for it to have an impact on your business bottom line. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, can be useful in bringing more targeted customers to your business website and SEO can help improve the conversion rates as well. Conversions are interpreted differently by individual marketers, advertisers, and content creators. To online retailers or e-commerce websites, a successful conversion may mean the sale of a product to a consumer whose interest in the item was initially sparked by clicking a banner advertisement. To content creators, a successful conversion may refer to a membership registration, newsletter subscription, software download or other activity.

All commercial websites can increase their ROI by focusing on the following:

Increasing Relevant Traffic to the Website
Increasing Conversions

A long term SEO plan to generate organic traffic from Search Engines is the most important because it is Google and the other major search engines that are the portals of choice when seeking specific information.

What is ROI and how can it be Improved?

Return On Investment (ROI) is a direct relationship between the total amount you spend and the total amount you earn from a certain internet marketing campaign.

Generally speaking, Return On Investment (ROI) is a performance measurement used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment and to compare the efficiency of one investment to the other or over a certain period of time.

The two most important factors to improve your Return On Investment (ROI) are:

Professional Search Engine Optimization
Website Conversion Rate Optimization

Let’s understand these in detail.

Professional Search Engine Optimization is probably one of the best internet marketing strategies to improve your Return On Investment. Basically, the idea here is to generate lot of organic traffic which will simply give much more exposure to the website for a long period of time. Once the initial cost of Search Engine Optimization services is paid, you do not need to pay much money to keep the achieved results.

A good Search Engine Optimization campaign can contain the following items or a carefully selected combination:

Keyword research, analysis and selection
Copywriting the main website pages and the landing pages
Link building exercise to improve the link popularity
Social Media Marketing to create more brand loyalty

On the other hand, Website Conversion Rate Optimization is a technique to increase your Conversion Rate, which leads to more targeted visitors and more sales from your targeted traffic.

A good Website Conversion Rate Optimization campaign can contain the following:

Find the Unique Selling Points (USP) and make them clear and obvious in the website and landing pages
Improve the website design to be more search engine friendly
Improve the website usability and accessibility to make navigation and finding information, products or services easier
Improve the content on the website to clearly present the benefits of products or services to be more convincing and compelling to your visitors
Improve landing pages to accurately match your advertising campaigns and the keywords used in them
Track the campaigns and analyze results to improve performance