DJ Traffic

Even if you do not have any national security documents on your web site, it is very important to take your web site’s security seriously. If you sell products on your web site, this is especially important.

A typical setup is that you have one or more sales pages for your product and when a prospect clicks on an order link they are redirected to PayPal, 2CheckOut or some other payment processing service. This setup is good for several reasons, the most important being the fact that you avoid having to deal with credit card numbers and other sensitive customer information. So far in 2007 there have been published reports of more than 89 million identity records exposed from data breaches. See the Identity Theft Resource Center for some really scary reading. Leaving data theft worries to companies who specialize in handling financial information is a great strategy for most small businesses.

But you are not quite out of the woods yet. As a vendor of a digital “soft product” that can be bought and downloaded straight away, you have to guard against digital shoplifting. There’s lots of ways that people in your position leave their website goods on display, unattended - leaving people to make off with them without paying, if they know how.

We present the three most frequently occurring mistakes:

1. Easily guessable filenames.

If you have named your electronic book ‘AdWords Secrets’, do not include either ‘Adwords’ or ‘Secrets’ in the name. The location www.example.com/AdWordsSecrets.pdf is the first thing a user might try to access your work.

You should add a version number or date into your filenames ex: AdWordsSecrets_v42.pdf, etc. This makes guessing the filename and the URL of the file more difficult.

2. Search engines indexing the download page or the product itself.

With an increase in efficiency of today’s search engines it has become quite difficult to keep any website a secret from search engines. Even without public links accessing your product download page there are other ways for a search engine to discover it and index it. After it has been indexed anyone using that search engine will find your product download page information in their search results, making them able to download your product without charge.

You should regularly check what each search engine knows about your web site. In most major search engines you can use the site: operator, e.g. site:example.com, to get a listing of all the pages on your web site that have been indexed.

3.Txt robots constructed poorly.

If you place the text file robots.txt on your web server it will guide search engines to the contents they should be indexing and let search engines know what content should not be indexed. This prevents search engines from indexing the web pages you want to keep hidden, but since any curious web surfer can see the robots.txt file, they may be able to more easily identify your products. If a web surfer notices that you are not allowing search engines to look in the /downloads or /report directories, they’ll know that these directories may contain the items they want.

You need to strike the right balance between protecting certain files and directories in robots.txt while not revealing too much about the structure of your web site.

Using the internet to transact commerce with items of a digital nature is a marvelous opportunity. To ensure that you receive payment for your hard work, consider these items and your own natural instincts.

Internet security is an ongoing effort. Stay up to date with tips from Nick Dalton at http://www.TipsTricksToolsTechniques.com/. You should also read his acclaimed report: The Digital Security Report for in depth advice on protecting your digital products.

- Nick Dalton.

Tags: access, avi, book, Business, content, information, Internet, Internet, Links, product, search, security, server, site, Source, website

Related posts

• Web Hosting Services Are Not Created Equally
  Without the services provided by web hosting companies, accessing websites, blogs etc. would be considerably harder. Sometimes it is part of the service an internet service provider supplies as part of their package when you sign up with them and can be supplied at no charge. What happens is a hosting company allows another person or company to have (either paid or for free) a certain amount of space on a device called a server where other people can then view whatever you want them to, including a website.
• Make Things Easier With A Web Hosting Directory
  These days, no matter how good your product or service is, the one thing that makes all the difference between success and failure is visibility. Having a website can make that difference, but getting started can be a bit confusing and a bit overwhelming,at times. First and foremost, you need to choose a web hosting service.
• Why Small Business Companies Ignore Internet
  A Site's promotion can be classified into two main categories that is online and off line. There is however some things that one should keep in mind like advertising source that is being used should include the web address as well. The advantage of this way is that, here the expenses will get minimized but one should keep in mind that changes can be done over time and incorporated with the next publishing of any company material or advertisement. Then only the results would be best.
• The Comprehensive Information Source
  If there's anything you want to know, all you need to do is log on to the Internet. It's filled with information and provides so many resources which are readily available. These include articles, guides, definitions, explanations, essays, tutorials, ebooks and much more, all offering comprehensive information on wide and varied topics of common interest.
• Search Engine Marketing - What is Social Marketing?
  Social marketing is a new form of advertising that is just starting to become popular. Often social marketing is a favorite of small businesses because it is virtually free although in order to use it to drive traffic to a website the company still needs to use traditional search engine marketing and search engine optimization techniques. It is build around the idea of link strategies and using personal networking to drive website traffic. Before the widespread use of social networking sites social marketing really wasn't a viable option for most mainstream businesses but now the popularity of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook has made social networking and social marketing very popular. Link strategies that are often used in social marketing involve creating free accounts on these popular social networking sites and then using search engine marketing techniques to increase traffic and network with others who interested in the same topics or with customers. Using search engine optimization to create search engine marketing content on your social networking profile pages can help get your profile listed in search engine results pages and you can use search engine marketing articles to help gain readers and friends across the net.

Tags: access, avi, book, Business, content, information, Internet, Links, product, search, security, server, site, Source, website

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 1:11 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.