Advita Energy Blogfather
Advita EnergyJanuary 27th, 2012
Social Apps: The Devil in Disguise?Social Apps: The Devil in Disguise?
Social network applications are leaving an open door to our most personal of details.
Tending to the crops on your virtual farm, finding out who views your profile and sharing your favourite movie trailers may seem like harmless ways to use social networks but oblivious users are accepting application requests without considering who they are allowing to access their personal data.
Having apps connected to your Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter profiles provides an open-door for the third party behind the app to access your profile and all of your personal data within.
UKFast technical director Neil Lathwood explained the risks that this security flaw poses for social networkers: Having all of these apps to entertain us is great, but many people do not realise that by using these apps they are effectively inviting people to use their personal data in whichever way they want. We really need to start considering the consequences of having all of our data readily available to unknown third parties.
Facebook acts as a narration of our lives and with the introduction of the new Timeline feature, more people are filling the gaps in their profiles, adding illnesses, significant events and employment details to name a few. This information is incredibly valuable to identity thieves and cybercriminals.
As revealed by UKFasts security experts last year, the information that we share on social sites provides cybercriminals with the clues that they need to guess passwords and break into online accounts from social media to online banking.
Lathwood continued: With Facebook predicted to pass the 1 billion users mark this August, the site is a prime target for criminals to mine data from. Users must be more savvy with whom they are sharing their personal data or risk cybercriminals accessing more than just their Facebook or Twitter accounts.
Facebook launches its latest innovation this week Timeline Apps which has caused further security concerns. The permissions protocol linked to the apps, frictionless sharing says that apps only need initial approval to post on your timeline and profile. This means that the app can continue to make posts on your behalf without asking for permission.
UKFast has issued the warnings as part of the build up to European Privacy and Data Protection Day on January 27, an annual event designed to raise awareness of data protection and online security.
Lathwood said: Data Protection Day is the perfect time to raise awareness of the risks that we inadvertently take online. We can monitor the apps that have access to our profiles using websites such as http://mypermissions.org/ which take you directly to the permissions page of the site where you can manage these apps.
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UKFast is one of Europes fastest-growing technical companies as ranked by Deloitte and the Sunday Times Tech Track. In the last year CEO Lawrence Jones has been named North West Entrepreneur of the Year, while his team has collected the Greater Manchester Award for Innovation. In addition to being listed as one of The Sunday Times best companies to work for, UKFast also won the UK IT Awards Employer of the Year in 2010.
Previous accolades include being named the ISPA UKs Best Hosting Provider four years consecutively. UKFast has over 400,000 web domains on its network and over 4,000 clients across all industries. Clients include Virgin, Microsoft and UKTV. UKFast is a member of the Cloud Industry Forum.
For more information about UKFast visit: http://www.ukfast.co.uk
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
10 SEO Search-Ranking Myths
SEO myths become larger every year. Some are based partially in reality, and others have spread because its often difficult to prove what particular SEO action caused a resulting search engine reaction.
For example, you might make a change to something on a page of your site, and a few days later notice that your ranking in Google for a particular keyword phrase has changed. You might naturally assume that your page change is what caused the ranking change. But thats not necessarily so. There are numerous reasons why your ranking may have changed, and in many cases they actually have nothing to do with anything that you did.
Mixing up cause and effect is one of the most common things new SEOs do. If it were affecting only their own work, it wouldnt be so bad, but unfortunately, the clueless often spread their misinformation to other unsuspecting newbies on forums and blogs, which in turn creates new myths. Its always interesting to see how people are so willing to believe anything they have read or heard without ever checking it out for themselves.
Myth 1: You should submit your URLs to search engines. This may have helped once upon a time, but its been at least 5 or 6 years since thats been necessary.
Myth 2: You need a Google Sitemap. If your site was built correctly, i.e., its crawler-friendly, you certainly dont need a Google Sitemap. It wont hurt you to have one, and you may be interested in Googles other Webmaster Central Tools, but having a Google Sitemap isnt going to get you ranked better.
Myth 3: You need to update your site frequently. Frequent updates to your pages may increase the search engine crawl rate, but it wont increase your rankings. If your site doesnt need to change, dont change it just because you think the search engines will like it better. They wont. In fact, some of the highest ranking sites in Google havent been touched in years.
Myth 4: PPC ads will help/hurt rankings. This one is funny to me because about half the people who think that running Google AdWords will affect their organic rankings believe that they will bring them down; the other half believe they will bring them up. That alone should tell you that neither is true!
Myth 5: Your site will be banned if you ignore Googles guidelines. Theres nothing in Googles webmaster guidelines that isnt common sense. You can read them if you like, but its not mandatory in order to be an SEO. Just dont do anything strictly for search engines that you wouldnt do anyway, and youll be fine. That said, the Google guidelines are much better than they used to be, and may even provide you with a few good tidbits of advice.
Myth 6: Your site will be banned if you buy links. This one does have some roots in reality, as Google likes to scare people about this. They rightly dont want to count paid links as votes for a page if they can figure out that they are paid, but they often cant. Even if they do figure it out, they simply wont count them. It would be foolish of them to ban entire sites because they buy advertising on other sites.
Myth 7: H1 (or any header tags) must be used for high rankings. Theres very little (if any) evidence to suggest that keywords in H tags actually affect rankings, yet this myth continues to proliferate. My own tests dont seem to show them making a difference, although its difficult to know for sure. Use H tags if it works with your design or content management system, and dont if it doesnt. Its doubtful youll find it makes a difference one way or the other.
Myth 8: Words in your meta keyword tag have to be used on the page. I used to spread this silly myth myself many years ago. The truth is that the Meta keyword tag was actually designed to be used for keywords that were NOT already on the page, not the opposite! Since this tag is ignored by Google and used only for uncommon words in Yahoo, it makes little difference at this point anyway.
Myth 9: SEO copy must be 250 words in length. This one is interesting to me because I am actually the one who made up the 250 number back in the late 90s. However, I never said that 250 was the exact number of words you should use, nor did I say it was an optimal number. Its simply a good number to be able to write a nice page of marketing copy that can be optimized for 3-5 keyword phrases. Shorter copy ranks just as well, as does longer copy. Use as many or as few words as you need to use to say what you need to say.
Myth 10: You need to optimize for the long tail. No, you dont. By their very nature, long-tail keyword phrases are uncompetitive; meaning that not many pages are using those words, and not that many people are searching for them in the engines. Because of this, ranking for long-tail keywords is easy simply include them somewhere in a blog post or an article, and youll rank for them. But thats not optimization.
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Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
The Best Blog Platforms and How to Use Them Successfully
The Best Blog Platforms and How to Use Them Successfully
Blog marketing is a wonderful way to connect with your audience, to provide valuable and useful information to prospects and customers, to sell your products and services, and to drive traffic to your website. However, before you begin to blog or even start to set one up, you have one very important decision to make. Which blogging platform will you use? Here are a few tips on how to use blog platforms successfully.
The Big Three and Beyond
A blog platform is essentially a product which a blog or website is based on. In many cases theyre the service you use to host and publish your blog. In the blogging world, there are three big players with a host of smaller platforms. The big three are:
* Blogger, now owned by Google
There is also MoveableType.org, which is an open source publishing platform. Another is Joomla, which offers blogging capabilities but is considered more of a website platform than a blogging platform. There are many other website hosts which offer blogging functions; however, theyre not traditional platforms.
When you choose a blogging platform, youre looking for a few key ingredients. Youre looking for:
* Ease of use - If you have to jump through hoops and read a 1000 page manual to get a blog up and running, youre not going to want to do it. Intuitive interfaces and easy to find information are essential.
* Functionality - It needs to be user friendly for your customers and prospects, and that means easy to navigate and easy to use.
* Features - You want your blog to be able to do what you want and need it to do, including sell products and services, host contests, take feedback and so on.
* Price Always a consideration.
* Customization - You want to be able to make your blog look and feel exactly like you want it to without a ton of work, time and money.
* Reputation - You want a platform thats going to be around for years and years to come so you dont have to switch your blog to a different platform.
Before you choose a blogging platform youll want to spend some time determining what you want your blog to accomplish. If for example you want to optimize your blog for the first page of the search engines, youre going to want a blog that is easy to optimize and maybe has search engine optimization plug-ins. This means making a list of your requirements before you even begin comparing blogging platforms.
Another important thing to consider is where your blog is going to be hosted. TypePad and Blogger are both hosted blogs, meaning your URL will be http://www.yournamehere.typepad.com/.
The same is true for Blogger. WordPress gives you the option. You can host your blog on WordPress or redirect it to another host so your URL is whatever you want it to be.
Read everything about your blogging platform before you go through the work to customize it and set it up. Some hosted blogging platforms do not allow advertising, for example, and if thats something you want to do, then youll need to consider those restrictions before you sign on.
The good news is that blogging is free and unless you hire a professional designer to customize it then your start-up expenses are nominal. (Theres a $10 fee to redirect a WordPress blog to another host.) Choosing your blogging platform just takes a little time and research.
Happy blogging!
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Article by Adam Bauthues. And now I would like to give you free instant access to a secret blogging video, that shows where I do all of my blogging and why. Visit: http://projectmarketer.com/empower.php today, or come by my Blog to see it in action at: http://www.EmpowerNetwork.com/kadmon.
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
Learn more juiciness like this at: http://www.dougburson.com/. Tola Ajayi is a writer by trade and he enjoys writing on a wide range of topics.
* Typepad
* WordPress
