Website security basics - Q&A for business owners

If you’re a business owner or manager who is concerned about website security and you’re not sure where to start, here are some basics for you.

NOTE: This is NOT a comprehensive website security guide…these are just some typical questions with quick answers. If you want more in-depth info, contact me and I’ll point you in the right direction.

Q. What are the most common website security threats?

A. There are three common website security threats:

1. Vandalism or theft by an insider. Disgruntled or former employees are the biggest security threat to a business website. Most businesses use the same password for a lot of their computer “stuff”, including access to the company website. If you don’t change all your passwords after your let someone go (or if you don’t cancel all of their access), you risk problems.
2. Malicious software. People can sometimes download malicious software that can be used to steal passwords, “hack” into websites or computers, etc. Most of the bad software in the world (known in the industry as “malware”) is found on disreputable and or unsavory websites. Most anti-virus software will detect and stop these types of programs, but not always. Pornography and gambling websites are notorious for installing malware and they should be avoided. The solution to this issue is to keep your virus software up-to-date and stay away from websites that aren’t business related when using a company computer.
3. Automated hacking attempts. There are thousands of “bots” that are constantly crawling the web looking for vulnerable websites. While there are a lot of different techniques, the main techniques are fairly easy to block. This is where your web developer comes in – if they use secure software to power your company site, your website will be impervious to most automated hacking attempts.

Big picture – a good web developer can help keep your website secure, but security starts with managing access and keeping your company computers “clean.” Change passwords when employees leave and make sure your business computers are only used for business.

Q. What does “SSL Encryption” mean and why is it important?

A. SSL stands for “secure socket layer.” In very simple terms, it’s a dedicated connection between two computers that no other computer can access (like a virtual tunnel). Encryption is useful for protecting important personal data (like credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.). When you combine SSL with encryption, you have an incredibly secure web connection. You need SSL encryption if your website collects information from individuals that is personally identifiable and/or valuable.

Q. How do I know if my website is secure?

A. The word “secure” is defined differently by different people. Some people view security as an absolute – if there is any possible vulnerability, some IT pros will say a website has security issues. By that strict definition, almost every website is insecure. Many website security “experts” will use this rigorous definition of security to sell website owners excessive or unnecessary services. However, before you worry about how secure your website is, you need to determine your risk factors. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is on my website that people will want to steal? If your website is nothing more than an online brochure (which defines our website, for example), your security risk is low. No one is going to try and “hack” your site unless they think there is something valuable inside…so nothing valuable = little or no risk.
2. Would anyone want to deface or vandalize my website? If you have a very high profile website (think CNN.com) or a website that polarizes people (a political organization, for example), your security risk is high. Vandalizing a popular or politically significant website is a way for a hacker to draw attention to themselves or prove how dangerous they are. However, if you’re just a little Denver Internet marketing company (or similar low-profile business), it’s unlikely anyone wants to invest the time to vandalize your site.
3. What’s the worst case scenario? Is your website mission critical, i.e. will your business grind to a halt without it? If someone manages to steal your data, could you end up in court? If the answer to either of these questions is “yes,” you need to be very concerned.

As a general rule, 95% of the websites on the internet have little or no security concerns because they have few risks.

Q. What questions should I ask a web developer about my website’s security?

A. Make sure they can speak intelligently about the following issues:

• Cross-site scripting attacks: Abbreviated as XSS, this is an incredibly common method of hacking websites. If your website has a place where visitors can enter text (like a contact form, for example), your site could be vulnerable. There’s an easy XSS security test you can do yourself, but most web developers know about this vulnerability and block it easily.
• SQL injection attacks: This is another vulnerability that is easily blocked. If your website uses a SQL database, it could be vulnerable…so ask your developer. If they don’t know what a SQL injection is (and if they’re building you a website that will use a SQL database), that’s not a good sign. By the way, SQL is pronounced as “sequel”…so when someone says “sequel injection” this is what they’re talking about.
• Ask them about their security experience: If you have a high-risk website, you need a developer that has developed and successfully protected high-risk sites.

Q. What are your website security tips for small business owners?

1. Use good passwords and keep them secret. They should be 6-8 characters (or more), they should have both letters and numbers, and some of the letters should be capitalized.
2. Manage access. When you hire employees, when you work with contractors, etc., issue them their own passwords instead of sharing your own. When you fire them, revoke their access.
3. Watch your clicks. Don’t download anything you’re not 100% confident in and don’t open any email attachments from anyone you don’t know.
4. Keep your virus software up-to-date. This is a no-brainer really, but a lot of people skip this step. Out of date software means your computer is vulnerable to malware…malware that can steal your passwords, infect your website, etc.
5. Get help if you have risk factors. Remember, if your website has a high profile or if there is data that people might want to steal, you need help from a website security expert. It’s much cheaper to pay someone to help you secure your website now than it is to recover from an attack later.

Like I said, this is just a basic primer. If you need more info, comment below and I can point you in the right direction.

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

In a nutshell, here’s what World Food Day is all about:

• Officially it’s the anniversary of the formation of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, but it’s not really about the UN.
• World food day is about issues in the production and distribution of food.
• World food day is about nutrition for people everywhere.
• Personally, I think it’s about recognizing just how fortunate we are. Sort of a preview of the not-to-far-away Thanksgiving holiday.

Frankly, I don’t think my ignorance of World Food Day makes me special. I’m going to guess that most people will wake up tomorrow and have no idea. I don’t know what any of us should do exactly, but here are some ideas:

• Volunteers of America has a Meals on Wheels program for the Denver Metro Area

• Denver Rescue Mission provides food and shelter to local homeless people

• You can make a micro-loan to someone in a developing nation on Kiva.org. The loans – usually $25 or less – can be used to buy animals, farm implements, etc.

Personally I’m a big fan of Kiva – it’s a great concept that a business person like me can really embrace. I’m going to make a microloan or two tomorrow. It’s a small gesture, but it might just help out a little.

Whatever you do – or don’t do – I think it’s important to recognize the fact that food shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Here’s to World Food Day.

2009 World Hunger Map from wfp.org

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

OlsonIRSTaxAttorney.com - the Olson & Hardman Tax Consulting website

OlsonIRSTaxAttorney.com is a great example of a simple and direct business website design. All of the essentials are there, the presentation is clean, and navigation is simple. The color scheme was chosen to represent Jana’s love for the outdoors here in Colorado.

Olson & Hardman specialize in IRS tax issues, specifically negotiating with IRS collections in regards to unpaid taxes, tax liens, tax penalties, and a bunch of other stuff that I doubt I will ever fully understand. Jana Olson, my contact at Olson & Hardman, is as sharp as a whip and very pleasant to work with. I can say with confidence that if you have a tax problem you will be well served by calling Jana.

As a matter of fact, in addition to her work as a tax attorney, Jana also provides business formation services and tax advice. When I formed Spork Marketing, LLC, Jana was the person who helped me chose the right company type and file all the paperwork…so I’m happy to recommend her personally.

Also, if you need a legal website designed and search engine optimized give us a call – we’re looking for a hat trick!

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

Denver Bankruptcy Attorneys Wink and Wink

The website features search-engine-optimized web content and a rather fascinating custom flash animation element that shows a handful of historical figures that have filed for bankruptcy.

In addition to the creation of a custom designed search engine optimized website, we also produced a marketing video for Wink and Wink.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was a pleasure working with attorneys Michael and Gailyn Wink on this project. Be sure to check out their new “He Said She Said Married Colorado Lawyers Talk Bankruptcy” blog.

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

Denver IT Services custom website

IT1 Services is a veteran-owned company that specializes in network setup, maintenance, and repair, general computer services (like repairing and maintaining personal computers, workstations, and servers), and IT1 can also set you up with te hardware and software you need to run your own computer network, web server, etc.

Be sure to call Brett at IT1 Services – (303) 751-6740 – for your IT service needs. Visit http://www.denveritservices.com for more information.

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

Why your blog should be pinging

To know what a ping list is, you need to know what a ping is. Generally speaking, a ping is one computer asking another “Can you hear me now?” to make sure the connection between the two is active. When it comes to blogs, pings are designed to alert other computers to new blog posts.

Put another way: If the Internet were a small village, a “ping” would be the equivalent of ringing the bell at the main church in town. “Pings” are designed to draw attention to your blog.

When your blog sends out a ping to other computers, these computers (known as servers) respond by sending over a “bot” (bot is short for robot, also known as a web crawler or a spider). The bot will read and record the contents of your new blog post and then share all or part of your post with the rest of the world.

This process of reading and recording is known as “indexing” in the world of SEO (very important term).

SO, a “ping list” is a list of websites that will accept pings, a.k.a. a list of ping servers. Ping servers are also known as update services.

The main benefit to using a list of ping servers is that you increase the likelihood your blog post will get indexed quickly - quick indexing is obviously nice if you’re blogging about something newsworthy.

Now that you know what pings, ping servers, and ping lists are, here’s our recommended ping list (right-click and “save target as” to download the text file).

If you have a blog powered by Wordpress, here’s how you can use this list:

Finding the "Writing" setting on your Wordpress dashboard

The crude illustration above shows you where you can find the “writing” settings for your blog.

1. Download our ping list above, open it using Notepad (or similar) and copy all the addresses (select all, then right click).

2. Login to your blog’s dashboard, expand the “Settings” menu, and click on “Writing” (see above).

3. When the writing settings page opens up, scroll down to Update Services. You’ll see a big empty text box with one ping server listed (http://rpc.pingomatic.com/).

4. Click inside the text box below “Update Service,” right click and select “Paste.”

5. Save the new settings.

Now, whenever you publish a new blog post, 34 ping servers will be notified (instead of just 1). Isn’t technology wonderful?

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

1. Most of the Denver Nuggets logos over the years. I’m not a huge fan of the old ABA logo “crazy miner” (I like it for it’s kitsch value), but the newer logos are quite nice.

Denver Nuggets logos over the last few years.

They’re good because they’re bright, easy to recognize, and easy to read. You can learn more about the history of the Denver Nuggets and their logos here. Of course, all of these logos are registered trademarks of the Denver Nuggets and the NBA.

2. The Colorado license plate logo. Few logos are more recognizable than the Colorado license plate. It’s symbolic value is pretty plain, and it’s simplicity is part of it’s charm.

3. The Coors Original logo. OK so it’s busy…too many colors, too much text, too detailed for a can of beer or a label on a bottle. But don’t you just like it? The retro theme matches up well with the image Coors is trying to project with their old-fashioned “banquet beer.” I’m no branding expert, but it makes sense to me.

The Coors Original logo is too busy, but I like the obvious retro flavor.

4. The CH2M Hill logo. Some might say it’s “vanilla” – sort of boring and the geometric shapes are really simple. But if you look at this logo carefully, you might see that it looks exactly like any number of fancy new “Web 2.0″ websites. The CH2M Hill logo’s emphasis on gradient color fills and soft yet clean edges deserves recognition as being “before it’s time.”

CH2M Hill's logo embodied "web 2.0" design before "web 2.0" existed.

5. The Colorado Division of Wildlife logo. It doesn’t get much simpler, and frankly at first glance it seems sort of plain to me. Yet when you look at it closely, you have to appreciate what it’s “saying.” The bighorn sheep is arguably Colorado’s most amazing animal, and the centerpiece of the logo. The block lettering states very clearly that the CDOW is authoritative, but it’s not at all aggressive or intimidating. It’s not perfect (what logo is, really?), but it’s very nice – and I like it because it reminds me of Colorado.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife logo is authoritative without intimidation, and you have to respect the life-like quality of the cartoon sheep.

Shameless plug – be sure to check out the section of our website with logo design tips for Denver businesses.

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

Put another way: Not only can placing videos on YouTube get you noticed, it can also help your website rank.

Here’s how you can build your presence on YouTube and get some links too:

1. Upload a video to YouTube. It’s my firm belief that video will soon become a standard component of all online marketing efforts. Video works for a lot of reasons (I covered the ROI of online video fairly extensively a few months back, from the value of one view on YouTube to tracking video calls to action), but there’s one important aspect of online video to consider when it comes to SEO:

Online video is an indicator of a website’s quality. Quality websites are more likely to have video than “spam” websites. Therefore, all things being equal, a website with video should rank higher than a website without video.

If that makes sense to you, it’s time to start thinking about getting business videos online.

2) Place a link prominently in the video description. There are two places you can get links from a YouTube video:

Link to your website in the yellow highlighted areas for a solid SEO boost

The first place to gain a free link on a YouTube video page is in the video description text (top right in the image above). The recommended best practice is to place the actual link in the very first line of text when you upload the video. This is the best link available, and it’s reserved for the person originating the content.

The second place to gain a free link is in the “Statistics and Data” section of the video page. These links are sort of hidden, but if you click on the little arrow to the left of the title, you’ll see a few sections of data including one that says “Links” – see below.

Links that appear in the "Statistics and Data" section of every YouTube video page.

These links point to any website that has embedded the current video on one of their pages. The first website to embed the video gets the best link placement, so if you’re the first to discover a popular video and embed it on your site, you might enjoy an SEO boost.

3) How these links can help with SEO. Think of link-building with YouTube as a popularity contest:

• I upload a video to YouTube. I place a link to my site in the text description. I immediately embed the video on my website. If I do both of these things, I’ll get two great links to my website (the text description link + the “first to embed” link).
• Others who like my video will embed it on their website.
• Each embedded video is considered a link to (or vote for) my video’s YouTube page.
• The more my video is embedded, the more links point to my video’s YouTube page.
• Each link to my video’s YouTube page increases the value of any outbound links on the page.

Put simply – if I upload a popular video to YouTube and I link back to my website, I can gain a great link.

4) NoFollow is just a guide. A lot of SEO’s are likely going to raise their hands and point out that any link on YouTube is “nofollowed.” True. You can read a post I did on SEOMoz about nofollow to see why that doesn’t necessarily matter in this case. If the video is related to your business and popular, you’ll get a good link regardless of the “nofollow” tag.

5) Rinse, wash, repeat. More videos on YouTube = more links to your company website.

Pretty simple.

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

Cheap Internet marketing tip - Social networks are almost free

Here’s how to go about it.

1. Find your niche(s). There are two schools of thought when it comes to social networking: Big fish in a small pond, or small fish in a big pond? You can participate on a huge network (like Facebook) and shoot for the big score, or you can participate on a small network and market to a highly targeted niche. While I recommend niche network participation ahead of big network participation, the reality is that either can lead to success as long as you work at it.
2. Take your profile seriously. One of the biggest sins in social networking is an incomplete profile. Fill out every box, answer every question, and put some time into it. Incomplete profiles make you look like a spammer.
3. Use a real picture. Don’t use your company logo as your profile logo – social networks are about people, not logos.
4. Act like a human being. Success in social marketing is all about relationships. Don’t talk about yourself or your business to excess, be nice, help others, and try to contribute to the community.
5. Give it time. The best social networks are built one person at a time. Focus on building a relationship with everyone you contact and don’t rush it.
6. Don’t worry about numbers. A close relationship with 50 people is better than no relationship with 500 people. This really goes back to my first point – I think the best strategy for success in social marketing is to build relationships in a small niche related to your industry.
7. Don’t spread yourself to thin. When you first start building a social marketing presence, you might be tempted to get involved in dozens of networks. Unless you’re a social marketing superstar, you probably don’t have the time or energy it takes to really build out dozens of good social profiles.

As you can see, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Social marketing is “cheap” in the sense that it doesn’t cost money…but it’s not really “free.”

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

The animated introduction for LeggWorkMarketing.com

The introduction animation for LeggWorkMarketing.com is a clever use of cliche’s created by our client Maureen Legg. Maureen’s sense of humor is reflected in the fun we had with the most important page of her website.

It’s important to note that, while the homepage features a flash element, we were very careful to support users that don’t have flash and/or javascript installed, ensuring that the site was still search engine optimzed. (SEO web design is very important to us.)

The design of the remaining pages of the website is quite a bit different than the homepage.

The portfolio page of LeggWorkMarketing.com

We selected a different design for the remainder of the site because we wanted to ensure fast load times and universal usability, something that a completely flash based website isn’t necessarily capable of.

Learn more about Maureen Legg and Legg Work Marketing.

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.