From a commercial perspective, brand leaders are faced with a completely new challenge – how to adequately protect their clients data (though i guess many will sidestep the issues by taking no responsibility through privacy and data protection clauses).

 Looking globally at the issues of online security, no website or public ip network including cloud technology is safe – government, private or commercial!

With the recent changes to IP Addressing, whole new networks in public buildings, homes and businesses worldwide become open to hacking events for electrical items – imagine a country hacking the UK Electricity grid and shutting down businesses and street lighting etc.

I’ve worked in the IT industry for over 15 years as a Professional IT Consultant working with multi-national groups, SME’s and sole traders too and never before I have been so concerned about the need to protect online data.

A number of years ago, I was commissioned to provide SOX (Sarbanes Oxley) consultancy work for 2 major uk based aerospace manufacturing company’s and at the very heart of the policy models we developed, was the cost, integrity, ip and the importance of data.

Every aspect of the SOX model worked towards ensuring that the core data was available, accessible by layers and key-holders and was recoverable. In a typical network infrastructure, if hardware fails it can be replaced, if software fails it can be re-installed, but if data is corrupted, stolen or unavailable the cost to the business is significant and in some cases devastating!. I have witnessed first hand over 100 PC’s taken down by a virus in under 5 minutes – and every machine had to be rebuilt from scratch – in that particular instance the business could not function on paper!

All the man hours of a work force, over the entire history of every business, has contributed to creating that living, evolving data set – knowledge, experience, ideas, concepts, facts, figures, strategies, plans, goals, suppliers, costings, profit, salaries, staff records – everything is wrapped up in this highly valuable knowledge library. This is the core asset of any business, if your building is set alight and you have teh contingency to move your dataset, you can trade another day.

According to the VP of McAfee, global cyber attacks recently have been identified as possibly at a state level, where one country is deliberately stealing data for commercial and political gain. That’s some statement! It’s pretty frightening that this is the new era we live in, but i’m personally more concerned about the weakness of infrastructure that we use on the Internet.

But lets move away from the fears and concerns and looking closely at the solutions we need to adopt.

First is the way data is transferred across the Internet – web and email – all of this simply needs to be delivered via encrypted tunnels – that’s a very simply way for industry to start offering a greater degree of protection and privacy of the data that moves across the web.

Second is the web browser client / server model – this is the biggest flaw we have in the technology.  It has had significant advantages too in that it has become an ideal vehicle in which information from one site to another can be replicated, but we’re moving away from the phase of significant growth on the Internet, into what will become a more stable plateau of operating – whereby we improve the quality of what we have created thus far and copyright & ip ownership is upheld.

We need changes so that…

1. Every website cannot be decoded by others – prevent viewable source code
2. Every browser runs an encrypted session to a verified DNS server
3. Each website is coded in a unique way
4. There are tough penalty’s to deter hacking even at the script kiddy level
5. Bring more people into core open source projects rather than spreading resource thinly and leaving security as a post hack consideration
6. Every email is sent encrypted and verified by DNS having originated from a trusted source using certificate services for email clients
7. The DPA shifts more onus and responsibility into the hands of organisations to use robust security models or get fined!
8. Every e-commerce or data portal has a unique security configuration – by that I mean that software offers the variables on how the security infrastructure is modelled, so that hackers find it impossible to second guess what they are attacking

Knowing where we are today, and with the introduction of facial identification software being able to scan photo’s in Facebook, I’m opting out of using my real name and identity in all social networks and I advise you and your loved ones to do the same, until such times the technology provides the protection we all require and deserve.

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

2011 – The Insecure Web

From the context of using the data generated from this activity…

1. Is it really meaningful to search?
2. How could the data be utilised?
3. Is the only credible use for sharing in groups (circles)?

Let’s take a large corporation competing against a sole trader in the same market sector.

The corporation would have multiple locations, hundreds of staff and hundreds of suppliers too. It’s highly likely that staff will have fixed home pages set for their browsers and will make great use of the corporate site everyday. A high proportion of the corporate staff will also sign in with a Google account and +1 the site and any micro-sites and landing pages too. The competitors will also be periodically browsing the site, creating a good footfall but low conversions and unlikely to generate any +1′s. Suppliers would likely use the main company site also as a business portal and also +1 the site. Within the social context, this is shared in circles with peers and colleagues. So very similar to Twitter and Facebook Groups and Fan Pages, people share their knowledge of a website.

In the sole trader model, things are very much different and are scaled to place the business at a distinct advantage when compared to its corporate competitor but on equal footing to other sole traders.

So really, how meaningful is this data to someone at the search engine interface looking for a service or product supplier. If the data is used algorithmically to generate SERPS is that a true representation and fair for the individual performing the search. If that’s going to be the case, the sole trader won’t have the same capacity in the majority of instances to perform better than the corporation in SEO or in the social arena too, so is Google’s move just one that reflects the real world in terms of word of mouth?

The whole notion of SERPs is also on the move. The idea of having 10 SERPS results per page, is being tested by Google and could easily go, offering users a more dynamic and responsive single page that allows the searcher to narrow the results dynamically is likely to be heading our way any time soon.

Imagine if you searched on SEO’s for example and the result set came back with 18 million pages, if then you could narrow results quickly by a range of other criteria you could find what you want, quickly and easily without moving from that page.

Options in dynamic search

• Pages updated within a time span
• Pages with pictures or video or audio
• Pages with flash content or just text
• narrow results by business size – sole trader, SME etc
• By page date – when was it last updated
• By news or blog news
• By business location
• By company size or profit
• By numbers of employees
• By number of products or services

Now as soon as you put in narrow by popular pages (based on +1′s) you’re leading the searcher away from a true set of data. This is very similar to how SEO’s have spammed Technorati, DIGG, Google Maps, Delicious etc. etc. – it’s not a good or quality result set and biased, therefore the search experience suffers.  I think the search experience will always suffer as a result of SEO’s spamming, but it would be a shame to see the SE lower the quality of the search experience in order to chase it’s commercial goals of gaining social share.

It’s interesting to see whats ahead, but more importantly, the chess game we know as SEO is changing.

Your SEO game plan needs to be revised today.  Every business out there has to now incorporate how search will roll out in the months ahead and how that impacts what there are doing today in order to be successful in that new arena.

If you’re not responding today, you’re definitely loosing sales tomorrow!

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

Google +1 – The nature of search is changing

For years SE’s have been going on about the quality of search and during that time I have often spouted that a similar system to dewy decimal should be adopted to add order and discipline to SERPS and the search experience.

I still advocate we do just that, but for now I think that we should split the web into three distinguishable elements

1. Content that has a commercial bias – (for when you want to buy something)
2. Content that provides help and advice – (For when you need help in a task or project)
3. Content that is purely factual without bias or motivation to provide support – (When you need to search the raw facts from the fiction and not have persuasive bias within the content)

Wouldn’t the search experience be enhanced, if you could just tick a box that said ignore commercial pages? or only show commercial pages? Instead we still have to wade through content served which does not meet our search criterion.

It’s a simple and effective solution and could easily be user driven using Google +1.

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

Split The Web

I’m sure this statement doesn’t apply anymore as I see more and more exclusions to this rule.

Maybe the competitiveness between engines to sharpen their algorithm tactics moves the focus away from user experience and the quality of the indexes?

Some interesting facts about search engines and Facebook.

Google has indexed 1.7bn pages from Facebook, Yahoo has indexed 2.1bn pages and Bing has indexed just 199m!

As Microsoft runs the Yahoo index, if Google were to reduce the number of Facebook indexed pages, the share of Facebook activity would dramatically reduce as Google provides around 60% plus of search in the UK.

Google strategists looking to dominate more of the social context of the web surely must see this?

Most Facebook users run a separate browsing session to “google” stuff that’s on Facebook, because lets face it, the Facebook search system sucks! Even the inclusion of Bings’ web results does not help the search experience.

Good or bad, I do think that Google can single handedly shrink the social uptake of Facebook, whilst it continues to pursue its own social strategy.

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

Indexing Facebook – A search engine perspective

No I haven’t lost my marbles and no, I’m not talking about a one off exception to the “Google Webmaster Guidelines”.

See, I think the whole SEO industry and the general public has become obsessed with SEO Links.  Specifically, building links on external resources that point to their website.  This is bad news and it needs to stop! (The world is round – the world is flat – we need thousands of links).

In a lot of instances you’re completely wasting your time and money!

Now, many top dogs in the industry will probably say that I’m just spouting a load of rubbish here, that I don’t know what I’m talking about and they might skip over whats being said and move on quite rapidly going about their everyday business as usual and convincing others to create lots of links if they wish to be successful with SEO.

Article links have their own success stories, so let me propose that we concentrate here on directory links.

Directory search

Have you ever gone to a directory website to search for something – lets take the prize daddy of them all – DMOZ!  Quite frankly, it is an appalling representation of the web. Poorly maintained, out of date, biased by its own lack of editorial controls  – but besides that – Ask yourself, this being the most “ranked” hand edited directory of them all – do you favour this in terms of your Google, Yahoo or Bing search? No – a resounding “NO” from millions of people.  There are directories that do work for you – local and niche directories – just forget the mainstream generic ones!

I’ve built many new websites and taken them to first page results on highly competitive kw terms without the need to produce endless links from other sites.

Google sites “Authority” and “Relevance” – and these matter tremendously

A small number of high quality links (five or ten), with the right page rank and traffic volumes using the right keyword anchors, created over 6 months from complimentary websites and your new website will be off to a flying start!

You don’t need 30 links a day or 100 or 10,000! When someone clicks through on that link – you want the cleanest traffic you can get.  The right audience, complimentary sites that have visitors looking to buy what you sell – when they click through, they stand a good chance of converting on your chosen landing page and buy your product.

I was recently working with a “Marketing Manager” who saw fit to pay tens of thousands for low value links into a site we we’re optimising through a very well know “yellow” directory only to measure that the more links we recieved from their source the worst it impacted our organics.

If you want to build links and be successful doing so…. Think before you link!

Can I do less and achieve more? The answer is yes.

And when you’ve created that small handful of high quality links, spend the hundreds of hours you saved yourself by drinking wine or beer or by making really good, high quality pages that engage your audience.

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

You’re obsessed with links! – No SEO Links Required!

Good move to gain share as the search engines go to war with new service features and benefits!

I maintain, that putting the user first has to be the goal.  I still want to see some kind of logical index like dewey decimal and the capacity to filter commercial vs non commercial results. It’s always very annoying trying to conduct search and all you get is spam pages – full of adverts, overloaded tags and headers and no content – these pages are the junk mail of our industry and they belong in the bin!

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

Blekko Advantage

I’m finding it hard to understand just what line Google is trying to draw in the sand (and why did they choose to draw that line on such a sandy and windy beach?).

JC Penney, inadvertently (or otherwise) utilising paid links through their SEO Agency were by all accounts, able to utilise the paid for links for profit, for quite some time before the controversy broke out and they were hung, drawn and quartered by the NY Times and dropped off the google rankings.

Paid links and web rings are commonplace.  What is the distinction between white hat and black hat techniques in this respect? I often move sites onto unique ip’s and subnets specifically to avoid a search engine penalty when i wish to move link juice from one site to another – either to assist Page Rank / and/or traffic too.

I also have used paid for directory linking services from yell.com into sites.  If you pay the right level of fee (to appear at the top of sponsored listings), Yell will bombard your site with inbound links – One site I have been working on has over 5,000 inbound (low value) links from yell.com – will this become a penalty? If you pay Yell and they link into your site – is this too “paid links”?

Where and how are these lines drawn and to what degree are they automated within the algorithm?

The recent “Farmer update” has penalised sites like articlebase.com and other similar article writing websites! Why?

Are these really low content – nil content, low value sites?  I’ve been using article sites for years to write quality content articles that are seo rich, have the capacity to travel through rss in order that I get links spread far and wide and inbound targetted traffic from people who are interested in what I have to say.  Should these sites have been penalised by the algorithm change or should it be just the page that loses value?

Google has the post search heuristics to be able to determine quality content on a page – bounces, time on page, clicks, re-reads, exits etc and compare this data set to low value pages – which typically are those that are highly spammed with keywords and tags, very little readable content and inter-seeded with numerous instances of Google AdSense adverts! – Yes Google Adverts!

When you get to read a good webpage and it’s broken up vertically and horizontally with outbound ad links – A, It’s almost impossible to follow the thread of whats being said and B, Ad’s are not quality content! and C, The page then fails to be a good user experience.

Is it me? Or are the lines just too fuzzy now to be able to distinguish between good and bad?

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

I need some clarification please Google

It annoying to enter in a search term and get your results set presented to you alongside a number of optimised paid for adverts which are just inapproriate to your search.There’s companies out there using keywords for one subject that lead directly to another – offsubject keyword.  I’m an advocate of ppc, its a great method to drive traffic to a site whilst building your SEO Campaign.

Google needs to make an improvement to the PPC process and engage the power of the user vote into this. To vote, you’d have to be logged in under your Google account, you would be limited to placing just one vote and it would just be a simple thumbs up or down – just like you have in Facebook.

I think this would be a great improvement to ensuring higher standards of ad delivery within the Google network.

Anyone else have a better idea?

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

Inapproriate Search Results

This site has 30,500 pages indexed by Google. The domain expires on 30th March 2009 (hope they remember to renew) and 4 other sites listed on the hosting server!

A Right Royal Contradiction by DMOZ
———————————————
Direct from DMOZ -

“How do I get my site listed in more than one category?
You should submit your site to the single most appropriate category that is directly relevant to your site’s content. Please only submit your site one time. The ODP editors reserve the right to use their editorial discretion to determine which category or categories your site will ultimately be placed.”

This is the statement given by DMOZ on how to get your website listed in it’s world largest and renowed hand edited directory.

So why then (and many website owners will be interested to know this if they have had issues with multiple site submission with DMOZ) does royal.gov.uk have 89 seperate DMOZ listings?

I’ve often seen forum postings by very frustrated website owners who have waited 3 years to get appropriate responses from this organisation!

In this instance there’s no excuse why there’s one rule for the rich and famous and one for the minions!

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

A Right Royal Contradiction by DMOZ

For a long time, I’ve been an advocate of the integrity of Google’s policy thinking about SEO from the users perspective – always having their end goal in mind as searchers.  SEO fundamentally from Google‘s viewpoint and from SEMPO‘s conceptual model starts with providing the searcher with a quality response at the search engine interface. This is still a policy I adopt and follow too – it will always have my support, otherwise we would end up with the dire non-sensical index which is prevalent on live.com (aka MSN).

“This idea is the foundation block upon which

the Google Webmaster Guidelines are built”

According to this process of delivering quality SEO methods and techniques we are to assume that SEO is akin to a game of chess.  It’s a slow process of strategy, thought and intellect.  Each time your opponent makes his move, the whole game changes, you re-assess the board and you think of your next move.  I like this model! I like chess!

The last blog post I made was on the subject of trying to take shortcuts in SEO by buying in your links.  There’s a whole industry built upon this principle alone – which very soon is about to detract;  Not because of world markets and recession, but because of the core issue of integrity in delivering SEO.

SEO really aught to be about thought which then transposes into credible and honest actions and nothing else. It should not be about shortcuts, copying and duplication, it should hold fast a line of honesty if it is to be worthy and of merit to us all.

Millions of pounds wasted!

Global players in the digital marketing arena buy in links for their blue chip clients – major brands in the retail sector, on the high street, the car showroom and the B2B arena have all relied upon internet marketing agencies sourcing paid links – we’re not just talking a few thousand  – we’re talking millions of pounds being spent in this sector – and very soon this will be all for nothing.  Those millions will be wasted – and the agencies that delvered the campaigns will be struggling to find the “right” words to compensate thier blue chip clients.

Here’s the point – I have domains which are number 1 in Google – in sectors which are competitive – these domains (and there are three I can think of) are great examples of SEO keyword phrase rich portals which are set up with a specific need in mind.  They compete against domains with PR 4 and higher, they compete against domains with hundreds of links in but these domains win hands down in SERPS every single time and they have NO INBOUND LINKS!

Onsite or Offsite – which is best?

I get asked the question about which is best – onsite or offsite.  Neither is my answer – they both have a function, they have different qualities and they cannot be compared.  The objectives and the purpose is different.  The delivery and the scope is different.  Each is unique in it’s own right and each helps deliver a great SEO campaign for one of my clients.

Google’s suicide attempt!

Google has caught itself out by playing the SEO game using the shortcuts which it advises us all not to use!

Yes – Google’s introduction of reporting companies that have purchased paid links and those that have used them has gone full circle and landed Google Japan in the mire as they have followed the route of purchasing paid links in order to get themselves a few steps ahead in the search engine wars! Follow the full story here…

http://seo-kolkata.blogspot.com/2009/02/google-gets-pagerank-penalty.html

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

Google’s suicide act

SEO Standards

I was reading this week an article about introduction of standards into Search Engine Marketing and the SEO Community by Chris Boggs.

I whole heartedly agree that the industry has attracted a number of new players into the market place that are inexperienced and poorly qualified – but then hasn’t every industry?  Each industry develops its own mechanisms and processes for weeding out the men from the boys or the sharks from the virtuous.

In a very natural way, pricing determines what you are going to get.

Anyway, this post is not going to follow the route of a full discussion on the quality assurance mechanisms for the industry,  I just wanted to demonstrate a move Google has taken to rid the market of “Paid Linking” practices.

Paid Links – A good way to go?

A colleague of mine was blogging recently and said, sure -what’s the issue with paid links? All links are good  -surely? and I declined to comment.  Had I had more time and the inclination I should have gone on to point out what the actual issues are.

Like everything else in life – there’s no shortcuts:  SEO done properley requires effort.  If you’re looking for a shortcut to traffic generation, you want PPC.

The foundation of SEO is built upon the user experience at the search engine interface and the user experience when they get to the website they choose to investigate – the former always has to come first, otherwise, we negate the need for SEO.

What’s important to the individual at the search engine interface is that they get back a SERPS set that demonstrates authority on a given subject (key phrase).  We have all been there, searching for something and all we get back is a range of dross and no matter how complex the boolean operators we use to query, we still get advertising portals full of adverts and nothing about our chosen subject.

My Ideal

My ideal for a search engine is to follow the fine example of indexing by the International Book Publishing Industry and Libraries Services – ISBN Codes and Dewy Decimal!  If I could tell the search engine that i’m not interested in commercial sites as part of my search, then I would get closer to the results I actually want. Technorati has made a move with Blogging to get users to assess authority and they also have a rank system for blogs. Quite a useful concept.

Anyway, I digress again – Google has introduced “Report Paid Links” into it’s Webmaster Tools.

Webmaster Tools

When you login to Webmaster Tools on the right hand side of the screen is an option to “Report Paid Links”. This is a direct move by Google to identify who has purchased links and who has sold them. Don’t think that you can nobble a competitor either by reporting paid links when thats not the case.  The software Google deploys can identify a true case of paid linking just in the same way it has the sophistication to identify duplicate content of a paragraph of text across billions of web pages!

Google Says NO to Paid Links

That’s a great move for improving the quality of SERPS provided by Google and great for the industry too.

Great Result for the SEO Community

When you come to doing your next search in Google it’s now more likely that the sites at the top have a natural authority for being there.

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

Google Webmaster Tools Vs Paid Links!

There are two types of sitemaps.  One is a web page that people browse on a website to see an overview of the sites contents, the other is usually an XML file embedded into the root directory of the website (unseen to users) that assist search engines with what to index, how frequently and what priority to give to pages.

This website will tell you everything you need to know about the Sitemap XML protocol which has been recently agreed by Yahoo!, Google and MSN.

If you don’t have an XML sitemap, consider creating one and adding it to your website.

Everything you need to know about Sitemap at http://www.sitemaps.org.

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

XML Sitemaps – How to:

Good practice is to keep keyword density to around just 7% – anything more gets you penalised.

Check your Keyword Density in your browser from this web site: http://tool.motoricerca.info/keyword-density.phtml.

Post from: International Expert SEO Specialist - IESS Group Internet Marketing

Keyword Density Checker