|
CyberArtisans Newsletter Vol 1, Number 1 Welcome
to the first issue of the CyberArtisans monthly newsletter!
Our goal
is to present information that we hope will be useful to you as a web site owner.
This month's topics are search engine placement and those never-ending viruses.
Topic 1: Search Engine Placement –
Pros or Us?
Search engine placement is the general term for the
strategies (both technical and – some would claim – magical) used to
place your web site high in the search engines. That means? Where your site is
located in the search engines drives more or less traffic to it and – by
extension – more or less business to your company.
Change in “Search
Engine Theory” has been rapid and shows no inclination to stop. You may recall
being told something about META tags when your site was built. META tags are invisible
page elements that (supposedly) tell the search engines about your site. They
still exist, but some search engines no longer look at them, and some even penalize
you for having them! How could you know?
We spend considerable time
researching these issues because our clients ask. Search engine positioning has
gotten so sophisticated, we decided to ally ourselves with the pros – techno-dweebs
like us, but who really get into the search engine niche. Yes, we could do it,
but the pros probably do it better and they charge no more than we would to break
even.
What does this mean for you? We will still track your standing
in the search engines, and we will advise you as to which services we think best
fit your needs. You get the benefits of competition – prices have held steady
– even decreased. See more about what's happening with search engines and
our recommendations, http://www.cyberartisans.com/search_engines/.
Search Engine Placement – Sponsored Links
Have you noticed that the first couple of sites listed in some search engines
are labeled “sponsored link?” Sponsored links are paid links –
another form of advertising. Should you consider them for your company?. While
sponsored links have some things to recommend them, they also have some serious
shortcomings – not the least of which is cost.
One of the search
engine gurus has an idea for achieving the same result for less. It’s a little
complex to explain here, but you can find a detailed explanation of it and sponsored
links at http://www.cyberartisans.com/search_engines/pay_click.htm.
We think it's a great idea and are recommending it to our current clients.
Topic 2: Viruses
Have
you been seeing a lot of questionable email attachments lately? We have, too.
Here's how we protect ourselves – we recommend you do the same:
1. Run a recent version of an anti-virus package on your computer at all times.
The specific brand doesn't matter as long as it's something you will use consistently.
2. Have your anti-virus update its virus data at least once a week.
One of our clients recently got a virus 2 days after it was discovered on his
home computer. Unfortunately, his virus data was over a week old.
3.
Install a firewall, especially if you have a cable modem or DSL line. Our favorite
is ZoneAlarm (http://www.zonelabs.com),
free for a single system; about $40 for ZoneAlarm Pro for networked systems.
ZoneAlarm’s
neat mail filter changes the file extension (the .something ending on the filename)
of potentially dangerous attachments to something your computer doesn't understand,
like .zl9. If you open the email and absentmindedly double-click on the attachment,
ZoneAlarm pops up a dialog box asking if you REALLY want to do that. If you click
Yes, it will restore the original file extension and open the file. It doesn't
add much inconvenience, AND it makes you think before you open attachments.
4. Finally, back up your critical files. We keep our user data in a separate
partition on our hard disk. We back that disk up weekly by compressing it with
PowerQuest's Drive Image (http://www.powerquest.com)
and then burning it to a CD-R. This give us a separate storage location AND an
archive so we can find a previous version if we need it.
Thanks
for joining us this month. Next month we'll look at e-commerce – Should
you
take the plunge? Is there something you could be doing better?
Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers
http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110 | 
