When running a web site, it is important to realize that malware can ruin a site’s reputation, harm your long time and new customers, and generally make your site a problem. Because of this, a number of major web service providers have jumped on the bandwagon of providing services for webmasters that want to ensure their site is free of malware, and clean it up if any malicious code is found. Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft all have entries in this market with different capabilities.

Yahoo!’s offering is known as SearchScan, and it provides anyone making a search on yahoo.com with warnings about sites. This is an extension of McAfee’s SiteAdvisor system, allowing Yahoo! to detect malware while spydering a site. There are 3 different classification for sites, Browser Exploints, which result in a site being banned from the search engine, Dangerous Downloads, ranging from viruses to trojans, and Unsolicted email, where sites scanned are known to practice spamming. If your site appears with either of the two later warnings, and if it is banned from Yahoo! do to browser exploits, you need to do a full scan of your site for malware, because otherwise you will risk losing a great deal of traffic. The service does not provide any corrective tools of its own.

Google provides users with a similar service, Safe Browsing Diagnostic. To use this tool, simply check your URL in the following format: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://yoururl.com. This allows you to get a report on your site, whether it is suspicious, how recently it was flagged, and when the last malicious code was seen. This provides you with the opportunity to learn more about what could have flagged Google, providing you with more details than the Yahoo! system. The software also knows whether you have simply executed malicious code or whether you hosted malware, allowing you to know whether a user uploaded a virus or you hosted one by accident. These details are useful because they tell you whether your site is currently a risk to browsers, whether you should put tighter controls on how users interact with your site, etc. Unfortunately the system doesn’t give you any more detail, so if you want to remove infected files, you will need a standalone, server class anti virus application.

Finally, the most recent addition to this field has been Microsoft’s Live Search webmaster tool. This application provides you with the ability to search URLs for malware and links to malware. This is important because it means it will detect if somewhere you send your customers to contains viruses. This additonal layer of security is extremely useful, and its couple with a detailed reporting system, letting you know what pages contain malicious code and download these reports to your computer. While this system is perhaps the most detailed, they do not integrate it with the actual Live Search service, and as such this means you will not be flagged for having such content. And, while the report may tell you what files are infected, only antivirus software can reliably purge malicious code from your site.

In the end, it is a combination of these search engines that will reap you the greatest benefit while looking into the security and safety of data and visitors on your site. By using all three options, you will have a good idea what is wrong, where it is located, and that will help you determine what tool you use to solve the problem. Diligence in protecting your customers is important because if you get a reputation for being dangerous, you will drive away site visitors quickly.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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When running a website, its extremely important to maintain a large amount of optimized content on your site. If you offer a large number of PDF files on your site, that content is being read, but it isn’t providing you the same amount of benefit as a well formatted HTML page. Getting a PDF file search engine optimized is yet another way that you can take advantage of content you already have on your site to bring higher page rank. Setting this up simply requires a little bit of editing.

First, when creating a document you will turn into a pdf, you should include the heading tags you would usually use on your website. This is because this data will be carried over, giving these phrases and sentences preference and helping to saturate your keywords. Once you have the content created, assemble the rest of the PDF and export it. You can now edit the metadata within the file using Adobe Acrobat.

Acrobat actually stores metadata in two differen places, so it is important to use both. Within the software, you should enter pertinent seo data in the Document Metadata menu, as well as the Document Properties section. Both of these areas include the basic fields, an HTML title, a field for author, subject, and keywords. It is important to include data in both, but you should avoid using the same information, as duplicate content is often penalized by search engines. The document metadata section includes a number of additional fields that are less important due to the fact that they are not looked at by search engines. So, once you have your PDF equipped with the important keywords, a keyword in its title, and a good description, youre ready to save it and upload it to your site. Optimizing everything may seem like a lot of work, but pagerank is key to becoming successful, and every little bit helps.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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With all the focus on the recent election, it is interesting that one of the least discussed parts of the Obama campaign’s path to victory was their smart and efficient usage of emerging technology, harnessing a broad swath of internet tools to help his campaign. From the beginning of his campaign, he used resources on his website to manage organization and fundraising, and it was this capacity that allowed him to compete in a long and hard fought primary election. The rapid pace or his fundraising and the large number of volunteers the campaign brought out were all in part due to his embrace of internet technology.

Obama’s website started out fairly standard, as far as political sites go, it was modeled after Howard Dean’s success in small donor, web-based fundraising. Soon after, the team introduced a social networking style site, offering the ability to connect to other Obama supporters, and introduced the ability to easily and quickly communicate. Access to volunteers was important, allowing the ground organization to reach out to Obama supporters in every state during the primary. With fundraising came greater resources, and it was through this the Obama campaign expanded their efforts.

By the end of the election, they were regularly using text-messaging to motivate voters, and the campaign had introduced an application for the iPhone that included a number of tools to help voters canvas for Obama. In each precinct, volunteers and paid staffers worked with software provided by Central Desktop, giving them professional quality organization. The usage of social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace helped build enthusiasm among young voters, something that turned out to be a good investment of time, considering Obama won young 68% of young voters. The campaign regularly posted videos to sites like youtube, and generally harnessed the power of its supporters creating media online.

The convergence of social networking tools, making resources available to supporters, and raising money online, all helped Obama win, creating a formula for electoral success that many politicians will replicate in the future. Truly, one of the most important parts of future political campaigns will be information technology and how it can motivate voters.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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Search engine optimization is extremely important to the process of setting up a site or revisiting your website’s design. Indeed, it is true that most websites will not succeed without an appropriate plan to harness search engine optimization, short of getting lucky. This means that you need to consider SEO at all phases of development for your site. You need to focus on the most important aspects of search engine optimization: keyword usage, inbound links, unique content, etc. By building SEO into the design of your site, you can start reaping the benefits of your efforts as soon as your site is spidered.

If you’re building your site for the first time, there are a number of things you can do to benefit your search engine performance. First, decide whether you will be using one domain for your site. While it may cost more to host your site (or in this case sites) across multiple domains, you can reap substantial benefits by hosting a number of different websites, perhaps each serving a different function or selling a different product. One of the most reliable ways to receive good rankings on search engines is to have lots of inbound links. Having multiple domains where you host your sites means getting a head start on this process. As well, you can benefit greatly by using search engine optimization on your html filenames. By including your keywords in filenames, you can reap additional benefits from using them.

Choosing keywords is an important step in the process of developing your site, and this means you need to analyze the effectiveness of the keywords you have already chosen. Also, look at your competition; see what keywords they are using. Go after the weaker ones first, where you can get more rank, faster. By targeting keywords and using them heavily, you can start drawing traffic, this will allow you to build up your search engine rank gradually against larger sites.

The key to getting your site to take off is having a large amount of unique content. For this it is recommended you add a blog, resource center, or other area where you can keep a large amount of unique text. If you can provide expert commentary on a topic, any topic, you can garner inbound links that will provide you with a major boost. As well, posting your site to directories can garner you better search engine results, though it will likely require more inbound links than from sites with more content and less links.

In the end, search engine optimization allows you to improve the connectivity of your site. But without a way to monetize your site, a good product or a reliable advertising revenue scheme, your site will never be more than a hobby. Make sure you have a business plan and a good product, otherwise your work will be in vain.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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