Austin Web Development & Design | SEO, Social Media, Search Engine Marketing & Optimization in Austin, Roundrock, Central Texas

Dec 3, 2009

Several security vendors are reporting a large malware campaign taking advantage of interest in H1N1 vaccinations.

The e-mails claim to link to a Web page for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention where users can register for a new “State Vaccination H1N1 Program.” However, anyone who clicks on the link ends up with the Zeus Trojan, a prevalent piece of malware used to steal data off of compromised machines.

Security company AppRiver detected the campaign around 8:15 a.m. (CST) Dec. 1, and a hour later was filtering about nearly 18,000 e-mails per minute.

According to Symantec, the domain used in the e-mail links has the format of online.cdc.gov.[RANDOM CHARS].[TLD NAME].im, such as online.cdc.gov.yhnbad.com.im.

“As is usually the case with these campaigns, the URL that is supposed to be a document actually leads to an executable file,” blogged Hon Lau of Symantec. “This one is named vacc_profile.exe and is detected by Symantec as Infostealer.Banker.C. Incidentally, the URL is also ‘personalized’ with the e-mail address of the recipient to make it look that little bit more authentic and less like mass-mailed spam.”

The subject lines of the e-mails vary, but some of the ones that have been observed are “Governmental registration program on the H1N1 vaccination” and “Your personal Vaccination Profile.”

If you have any doubt about the authenticity of the e-mail, don’t click it. Information about H1N1 can be found here on the CDC Website.

Internet Marketing Austin – SEO Austin

Nov 27, 2009

As the name suggests, SEO is optimizing a website for Search Engines. The reason to do so is to get found by people who use search engines to find information, look out for services, purchase products online etc etc. As search engines are programs, they have a set of parameters that decide which websites are to be displayed on search results. Nowadays search engines are so advanced that they index or crawl almost all websites, but the question is who will be displayed on the top results for a certain query.

Almost 70% of people do not go beyond 1st page for a certain term query. Out of these top 5 search results get 90% of the traffic. Now, with billions of people using search engines worldwide, it has become a new marketing avenue for professional companies. To make themselves, the most “popular” search engine, SE’s ranks the websites according to the relevance and utility of a particular website for a certain keyword query. Different parameters are used to ascertain the relevance of a website, which depends and vary from engine to engine. And SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a process that works around those parameters to make a particular website rank on the top SE results.

SEO is broadly classified as ON PAGE and OFF Page SEO

ON PAGE
On page SEO is something that is done on the website only like proper Title of pages, Analyzed Meta Information, Linking strategy, Content of website, Site architecture, Usage of programming language, proper usage of images and tagging. This all is the first step for SEO and is done after careful and technical analysis of keywords.

OFF PAGE
This includes making your website popular over the net. As a thumb rule, “the more the relevant, informative and similar sites linked to your website, the better optimized your site will be” This is not so simple as it seems, you have to be very careful in choosing the sites that link to you (if you do it yourself) OFF Page is generally accomplished by various processes like :

• Link Building – Asking other relevant websites to link back to you.
• Directory Submissions – Submitting your website in relevant directories
• Article Submissions – Writing and submitting articles in article directories.
• Social Bookmarking – getting site popular by getting the site content/informative section bookmarked on     social bookmarking sites like Digg, Squidoo, Technorati, Del.ico.us
• Social Networking – making site popular by getting site linked with people( people who have some kind of     relation to nature of website we want to optimize) on popular social networking sites like myspace, facebook, orkut.
• Blogging – creating similar blogs maintaining them and getting link backs from them.
• Forum Commenting – Getting into conversation with people on similar discussion forums and leaving link over     there.
• Buying links – buying high Page Rank Links
• Press Releases – Submitting press releases and links in them

These are just the basic tasks broadly classified, the exact methodology if formulated only after carefully examining the website we want to optimize and for what keywords. And BEWARE wrong methodology can penalize your website, as search engines are very smart to sniff that someone is deliberately promoting their website. So it has to be gradual and natural.

Seo Consultant Central Texas – SEO Austin

The Central Texas IT Guy

Web Development Austin, SEO Austin, Austin Search Engine Marketing, Internet Marketing Austin, Web Design Austin, Roundrock Web Design, IT Support Central Texas, Social Media Central Texas

Spammers Spread Trojan with H1N1 E-Mails

Spammers Spread Trojan with H1N1 E-Mails

What is (SEO) Search Engine Optimization?