<strong> and <b> / <em> and <i> - Which is for what?

A question that has been bugging me all day today when I was conducting some SEO work today was is the <strong> and <em> tag any different to the <b> and <i> tag. The conclusion I have come to after researching the topic is that you use the <strong> and <em> instead of <b> and <i> tag when you are trying to emphasize keywords on a page as readers treat the two tags differently. They achieve the same visual effect however the <strong> and <em> tags are "logical" tags. This means that they are for when the developer wants to add emphasis to particular words or phrases. A reader for a user with disabilities may say the word louder for example. The <b> and <i> tags are for visual layout effects on a page and do not have the same effect on a reader or add any weight to your keywords in the search engines. I suggest when crafting a page and that if you want to format something purely for visual effect then you use the <b> or <i> tag, as they will reduce you page size very slightly, hence increase load time. This post by Nikki Pilkington also states that there is no effect in the SEO world.

http://nikkipilk.sc10.co.uk/blog/2008/09/30/tip-49-the-bold-and-the-beautiful/

Improve Your Businesses Wireless Security

A business wireless network should be a network that is safe from hackers and unauthorised users. Here are some steps to secure your network from such intrusions;

Create a Wireless Security Policy
Create a policy that specifies who can use the network, and how to protect the network This is one below is taken from a Cisco template I found on a website;
- Acceptable use policy, to specify what types of network activities are allowed and which ones are prohibited.
- E-mail and communications activities, to help minimise problems from e-mails and attachments.
- Antivirus policy, to help protect the network against threats like viruses, worms, and Trojan horses.
- Identity policy, to help safeguard the network from unauthorised users.
- Password policy, to help employees select strong passwords and protect them.
- Encryption policy, to provide guidance on using encryption technology to protect network data.
- Remote access policy, to help employees safely access the network when working outside the office.

Educate your Employees
Educate your employees and get them involved in protecting the network. Use informational posters and training about security, passwords, and privacy to help you keep your business information and communications secure.

Secure the WLAN
- Use strong encryption: When you install your network, set up the strongest wireless encryption you can. WEP encryption is adequate, but WPA and WPA2 are better options.
- Secure communications: Encrypt data that travels on the network, and authenticate users to be sure you know who is using the WLAN.
- Change the default network name to something that is hard to identify so it is unrecognisable.
- Use MAC address control lists combined with encryption to restrict user access.
- Be sure that management ports are secured with non default names and passwords.
- Hide the access points to prevent tampering.
- Use video surveillance cameras to monitor your office building and site for suspicious activity.

Protect Your Company from Outside Threats
Protect wireless devices with the same security you use for the your company network. (i.e. firewalls, VPNs, and antivirus software)

Protect Your Wired Network from Wireless Threats
Install wireless intelligent protection switching (IPS) devices to prevent unauthorised, "rogue" access points and other wireless threats.

Review of Untangle UTM

Recent open source start-up Untangle has launched one of the first open-source unified threat management software platforms (UTM) for network security, targeted at small to mid-sized businesses. The Untangled Gateway Platform was built around more than 30 open source projects, including SpamAssasin, ClamAV, and Snort, and competes with proprietary systems from SonicWall, Barracuda and WatchGuard, among others.

Untangle is aimed at SMB appliances and is geared toward 250 users or fewer, and is meant to work on one server although not released as an enterprise product it is targeted at SMB’s who previously may have used a combination of open source projects.

There is an enterprise-scale version slated for a 2009 release with the free version including a spam, virus, spyware, phish and attack blocker, as well as a web filter, protocol control, open VPN, intrusion
prevention, firewall, router and web reporting.

The paid version of Untangle includes active directory integration and advanced policy management, as well as remote access portal and configuration back-up.

Pricing for up to 10 users is US$25 a month, and it's double for up to 50 users. From 51 to 150 users it will cost US$150 a month, and for more than 151 users US$250 a month.

For more information go to
http://www.untangle.com/

Technology Tips Blog - Update - Dec 2008

Just a quick post to let you know that I have been moving around some of the page elements and navigation on the website to make it easier for readers to get around and discover the content on the blog. Moving the tag navigation closer to the top of the page I thought made sense as it makes it easier to find relevant topics on the website as well as adds the ability for users to subscribe via email to new posts, become followers of the blog and bookmark post on social media websites. Please sign up as a reader as a form of your appreciation for updated tips and site content. Just to let you know I have a guest called James Kambourian, a good friend of mine and a network administrator with management skills who will be featuring some posts in coming in the coming months and if I get a good response to his posts then I he will become a permanent feature on the site, so I will appreciate your feedback in coming months. Over Christmas time I will also be giving away some copies of software to some lucky readers so please leave comments on the blog as these are your entries into the draw for the software. Im still striking a deal with the software provider though as to how many copies they will be providing me so I will keep you posted on this one. It is likely to be a piece of software that has been featured on the technology tips blog recently though just to let you know.

Search engine optimization and web site marketing summary

Search engine optimization and web site marketing is about making small modifications to parts of your web site and performing a number of actions. When the task is viewed as a whole it might seem like allot to take in and complete. To make this task easier for you to complete I have broken down each important elements I consider important to web site SEO and marketing. If you follow and complete the following actions on your web site you should notice a considerable difference to the ranking in the search engines and an increase in traffic.

Create unique, accurate page titles
- For your home page list the business name and the main focus areas of your site. (i.e. business name - main focus1 - main focus2 - physical location)
- For other content pages list the business name and the main focus area of the page.
- Note that the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results as a link.
- The title tag should not contain any of the words Google disregards. These are words like 'and', 'not', 'a', 'the', 'about' etc which are too common for Google to take any notice of.
- Use your main keywords in your title.

Use the "keywords" meta tag
- The page's keywords meta tag should contain short concise keywords relating to your site content and contain no more than 250 characters
- Keyword information influences what keywords you site appears under in the search results.
- Use unique and relevant keywords that relate to your pages title, meta description and page content.
- Keywords should be unique for each page
- Weight is given to how near your keyword is to the beginning of your keywords list.

Use the "description" meta tag
- The page's description meta tag should be a sentence or two or a short paragraph of approximately 250 characters.
- Description information appears under a page's title and above a page's URL in a search results.
- If your site is listed in DMOZ then the page description from here is sometimes used.
- Write a description that informs users of the pages content and contains keywords relevant to your page.
- Descriptions should be unique for each page.

URL structure of the web site
- Create descriptive categories and file names for the documents on your web site.
- Create URL's that you can remember from memory and friendly to read.
- URL's to pages are displayed as part of a search result so include keywords to name folders and relevant pages.
- Create a simple directory structure
- Never have more than one URL for your home page.
- Provide one version of a URL to reach a document

Web site navigation is important
- If you have enough pages around a specific topic area create a page describing these related pages (e.g. root page -> related topic listing -> specific topic)
- Create a naturally flowing hierarchy making it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site.
- Use mostly text for navigation by controlling most of the navigation from page to page through text links. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site.
- Use "breadcrumb" navigation - A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. This create more keyword links on your pages and improves useability.
- Put an HTML sitemap page on your site and make the link to it a text link so that it will be indexed easily. Make sure that is easy to find for users.
- Create an XML Sitemap file to your page and submit to Google and Yahoo.
- Consider what happens when a user removes part of your URL as you don't want users browsing your directory structure. You can add an index.html page in each directory to forward the user to a formatted page containing links back into the body of the web site.
- Have a useful 404 page that has a customised look and feel

Be aware of the Google Sandbox and Supplemental Index
- The Google sandbox is part of the Google indexing algorithm that considers the age of a domain.
- Do not expect high listing in the search engines for more than 6 months even if you are doing everything right as older domains are favoured.
- If you site is in the supplemental index this means that your site has been classified as a site that contains duplicate content
- Simple Way To Probe Google's Supplemental Index - site:www.yoursite.com *** -sjpked

Offer quality content and services
- Creating compelling and useful content that will influence users on your web site so that users will link to your pages.
- Encourage users to link to you site through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means.
- Use relevant language for you target audience.
- Write easy-to-read text and stay organised around the topic.
- Create content primarily for your users, not search engines and make the content relevant to the title and description of your page.
- Do not create duplicate web sites with the same content, these sites decrease your site ranking as search engines do not value content that is duplicated
- Content throughout a site should not also be duplicated.
- Aim to keep content duplication to a minimum; make sure that at least 70% of the sites content is original.
- To give you an idea of what keyword density to use, if you have less than 250 words on the page, just use one keyword and use it no more than three times total.
- To target specific keywords in your content bold the first keyword and italicise the second or third use of that keyword.
- Keep your content fresh and updated to keep bringing Google bot back to your site on regular intervals.

Include an RSS Feed
- Create an RSS Feed associated with your site or product
- It is vital that you take advantage of this technology to get your content broadcasted across the web and around the world.

Include anchor text on you links
- Choose descriptive and concise anchor text.
- Format your links so they're easy to spot on the page. (i.e. make they a different colour to the body text, preferably blue as this is the default colour for a link)
- Think about anchor text for internal links too and keep the anchor text consistent when linking to these pages.

Use rel="nofollow" for links
- Setting the value of the "rel" attribute of a link to "nofollow" will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn't be followed.
- Using this attribute will allow you to prioritise which pages are indexed.
- Use this attribute on outbound links to other web sites that are not that relevant to your websites content.
- To nofollow all of the links on a page, use "nofollow" in your robots meta tag.

Include heading tags and format the page appropriately on each page
- Use <h1> for your main topic and <h2> for the sub topics included on your page
- Use headings sparingly across the page. (i.e. One use of <h1> tag and a few uses if <h2> tag)
- Use bullets where possible as visitors can quickly scan them. Search engines also prioritise bullets instead of long paragraph text.
- To maximise the results for your keywords optimization efforts focus on one or two keywords only per page.

Optimize your images for search engines
- Use the alt attribute to describe the image including a keyword where relevant (note: do not bother doing this for images that are used a spacers etc)
- Make the image file name relevant to the image including a keyword where relevant.
- Use brief, but descriptive file names and alt text.
- Store images in a directory of their own.
- These tips make it easy for images search engines to include your images.

Use of robots.txt
- This ensures that relevant sections of your web site are indexed.
- Use secure methods for sensitive content. (i.e. Logon mechanisms as robots.txt will not prevent users from accessing confidential material included on your web server)

Inbound and outbound linking
- Try to get as many links as possible to your web site from other sites listed in the search engines.
- The quality of your inbound and outbound links far outweigh quantity.
- The oldest method of gaining inbound links is to request them.
- Find the highest page rank sites linking to your site and your competitors' sites and try to get additional links from these web sites.
- Run monthly link campaigns and snatch up the best identified web sites.
- Run regular checks on what pages are still linking back to your site. Also make sure they did not move you from a high page rank page to a lower one.
- Eliminate any penalised sites you link to as this has a negative effect of your search engine rankings.
- Check your search engine ranking and your competitor's for each of your keywords every week. Do this for Google, Yahoo, MSN and Alta Vista at the minimum.
- One of the most effective methods of gaining back links is to provide an article for other companies to use containing links to your web site.
- Use PPC advertisements to achieve inbound links to your site.
- Linking to yourself from other sites that you might own is an acceptable practice. Don't set-up web site that simple link back to yourself though.
- Add a button to your site such as "Add This" so that users can use social bookmarking sites to link back to your web site.

Promote your web site in the right ways
- Include a blog about new content or services.
- Use social media sites to promote your web site.
- Putting effort into the off-line promotion of your company or site can also be rewarding.
- Reach out to those in your site's related community.
- Add your business to Google's Local Business Center this way your site will be added to Google Maps.
- Press releases are one of the mainstays of any marketing program and work wonders to drive large amounts of traffic.
- Create an affiliate program (This means that the affiliate - the person who placed your link on their site - gets paid a small percentage of any sale made)
- Avoid link farming, duplicated content, cloaking, spamdexing, and other attempts to fool search engine crawlers as this will get your site penalised.

Use web analytics services
- Get insight into how users reach and behave on your site and make common navigation paths easier on your web site.
- Discover the most popular content on your site so you can further improve these areas.
- Measure the impact of optimizations you make to your site.

In future blog posts I have decided that I am going to go into more detail for some of these specific areas covered. These future posts will explain how to complete each of the items listed in each of the main areas of SEO and marketing, so stay posted. If there are other areas that you believe I have missed on this list let me know and I will amend the post as I would like to include everything that makes for a successful web site.

TwitterFox - Firefox extension

If you have not heard of Twitter yet it is a micro blogging tool that allows you to write 140 characters at any point in time. For more details on it please read my previous blog post which will give you some background on what it is. Well I have been using Twitter now for quite a few months and enjoy its ability for me to post useful comment and sometimes not so useful comments off to my followers. Something that I have found very useful is a Firefox extension called TwitterFox. This is the primary method I have been using it to post my tweets and interact on Twitter. If you live inside the Firefox web browser then TwitterFox is a great way for you to post, receive replies, direct messages and generally keep updated on the people that you are following. The extension is very lightweight and adds a tiny icon to the status bar of Firefox. I have been through quite a few bits of standalone pieces of software as well as a number of other Twitter downloads including the majority of the ones listed on the Twitter website (http://twitter.com/downloads) and found this one to be the fastest and most reliable. The URL to the extension is below;

http://www.naan.net/trac/wiki/TwitterFox

Firefox Wallpapers Galore

Firefox users, lovers and fanatics will love this link. The link below is to the most comprehensive listing of Firefox themed wallpapers for your desktop that I have found. Anyone with any other links to wallpapers that are not on this page please post away. This is just a short post but as you can see from the page I give a big shout out to Nikesh for putting this page together.

http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2008/07/100-firefox-wallpapers-that-will-blow.html

Speed up your page load times with a simple trick

Here I have for you a simple image trick to make your pages load faster. This might sound simple but it is something that i notice allot of web developers overlook when adding images to pages, whether it is because they are lazy or just didn't think about it, this is a fact. Every time you web page loads the browser looks for the width and height of an image. This is specified through the attributes width="236" & height="657" which allows your browser to instantly know, through your HTML / XHTML code, how big the image is and where to place it. What happens behind the scenes now is that you browser will load your page text before the graphics. If your graphics do not have width and height attributes set then as the browser reads the HTML / XHTML and gets to one of the images with no attributes, it causes the browser to have to perform a function to work out the actual size of the image, which hence slows down the load time a little bit. So the trick to making you pages load quicker is to make sure that all of your graphics, even the small transparent gifs and bullets have a width and height set. After some testing that I have done on a dial up connection you can really notice the difference. Give it a try.