Tips Guides

By using a proxy site, you have the opportunity to increase both your privacy and your security when you are online. Please do not assume that the Internet is a safe and anonymous place because it is not. Everything you do online leaves a digital footprint. Not only are records kept of your activities, viruses, adware, spyware and all sorts of nasty bugs exist that could potentially damage your Internet connection and/or computer.

Before surfing the Internet make sure that you have adequate anti-virus protection installed. Also make sure that you firewall is set to enabled. Once both of these are done you can then start browsing behind a proxy site. This will give you a greater degree of anonymity and will allow you to stay more safe and secure. Free proxies are available all over the Internet so it should not be difficult finding one.

If you have some spare cash you may want to think about investing some money into using a paid service. Ok, this may be costly but it should enhance your browsing experience even further. Using a paid service often allows you to take the level of protection to a higher level; encryption. Encryption allows sent and received data between two devices to stay jumbled up. This means that if anyone one was to intercept the data then all they would get is gibberish, not the actual data being transmitted.

Encryption programs use algorithms to determine how data is transmitted. The algorithms may also change from time to time, further increasing your privacy.
A paid option is probably a more reliable option but do not always assume that just because it is a paid service it is necessarily better. So how to you find a secure proxy? How do you know that the proxy can offer maximum protection? Well there are a couple of basic things you can do to ensure that a proxy is a healthy.

If you can ascertain that the proxy has been around for a while then that can definitely add to its credibility. Proxies that just come one day and disappear the next are a cause for concern. Also, try and find out where the proxy is being hosted. If it is being hosted in places like Panama, for example, this is a great advantage to you. Panama has strict laws in place for data protection and does not pass any information to foreign governments or bodies without a court order from a Panamanian judge.

Your IP address is shielded when using a proxy. You IP address is your unique identifier and every single computer connected to the Internet has one provided to them from their Internet Service Provider.

Browsing behind s proxy allows for anonymous surfing as only the details of the proxy are recorded, not yours! This ensures 100% privacy and the only way anyone could find out your IP address would be to ask the owner of the proxy site. This would be difficult if the proxy was located offshore and even more difficult if it was located in a country with strict privacy laws in place.

Wayne lives in the UK with his family. I hope this article has been useful and you can use it to increase you privacy and security when surfing online. I own a free anonymous proxy server that you are welcome to use. It provides information and products on privacy and access to proxy websites and networks that you can use.

Always keep in mind that a proper organic way of optimizing your site will take longer than to Sp@m your way to the top rankings BUT you will stay at the top for a long time without running into the risk of being dropped completely form the Search Engine Index!

Cloaking
Cloaking, also known as “stealth”, is a technique that serves one set of information to Search Engine spiders while displaying a different set of information to human visitors on the website. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. Cloaking is a form of the doorway page technique.

Keyword Stuffing
At one time, Search Engines were limited to sorting and ranking sites based on the number of keywords found on those documents. That limitation led webmasters to put keywords everywhere they possibly could. Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization technique. It occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the Meta tags or in content. This repetition of words in Meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer value these tags. In particular, Google is known to delist (ban) sites using this technique and/or lower the rankings of these sites.

Hidden Text
It is amazing that some webmasters and even SEOs continue to use hidden text as a technique. Hiding text out of view of the visitor is done in many different ways. Text is colored in the same shade as the background thus rendering it invisible to human visitors but not to search spiders, Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) “Z” which positions text “behind” an image and therefore out of view of the visitor and/or CSS absolute positioning that positions text very far from the page center. All of these are common techniques to hide text. Most of these hidden text techniques can be detected by major Search Engines and pages containing hidden text are known to be devalue page rankings.

Hidden Tags
There are a number of different sorts of tags used to perform a variety of functions, for example comment tags, style tags, alt tags, noframes tags, http-equiv tags etc.. For example, the “alt tag” is used by site-readers for the blind to describe a visual image. Inserting keywords into these tags can be very helpful if used with reason but many webmasters and SEOs continue to improperly use these tags and stuff them with keywords. This can lead to a drop in rankings or even banning of the website.

Meta Tags
Most Meta tags are not relevant today. The unethical part is that some SEO firms actually charge for the creation and insertion of Meta tags as if it were the primary optimization technique. We only use the description and keywords Meta tags (though we are dubious about the actual value of the keywords tag), along with relevant robots.txt files. All other identifying or clarifying information should be visible on a contact page or included in the footers of each page.

Misuse of Web 2.0 Formats (ie Wiki, social networking and social tagging)
A relatively new form of SEO sp@m is emerging with the misuse of user-input media formats such as Wikipedia. Like Blog comment sp@mming, the instant live-to-web nature of Web 2.0 formats provides an open range for SEO sp@m technicians. However, many of these techniques will likely be short-lived as it is only a matter of time before algorithm changes remedy these efforts.

Fortunately for all ethical and professional SEOs, Google’s ongoing upgraded algorithm appears to be on the cutting edge of SEO sp@m detection and prevention.

Gregory Smyth is the CEO of Inetasia Solutions Limited . Gregory has taken the company to great heights with its various e-business solution products, which have become a backbone infrastructural tool that have powered websites for numerous high profile companies.

Web Based CRM is Software as a Service (SaaS) providing Customer Relationship Management functionality on the internet. Instead of buying the software licenses and installing the application on the company infrastructure, customers acquire a subscription to a system which can be accessed via the World Wide Web. Once the subscription fee is paid, customers can directly log into the web based CRM solution.

The crucial benefit of this software delivery model is the fast deployment of the application without having to go go through a costly and lengthy installation process. The absence of company-owned hardware also leads to lower capital investments and reduced operational costs (no need to hire costly system engineers to maintain the hardware infrastructure).

Finally, the cost of the implementation project will also typically be lower. However, this statement must be taken with a grain of salt. In the majority of cases, the business requirements are the most important drivers of the IT project cost. Web Based CRM software allows for fast access to the standard solution provided by the vendor. In many cases (and depending on your business), the standard implementation will not be able to fulfill all business needs.

In this case, additional customization of the On Demand CRM will be required. The more customization, the higher the project budget. So, take this into account when writing the business case.

Web Based CRM software supports many functionalities. The most common ones are SFA, lead management, opportunity management, partner management, customer service and support, contact center management, performance management and e-commerce. Additional more niche functionalities are E-Learning, Quality management and self-service vendors.

The last trends indicate a growing interest in Analytics and extensive integration of internet marketing services. The increasing interest in analytics, by the way, is not limited to web based CRM. The rise of analytics is a general trend in business software where higher levels of transparency are demanded by management on every level: strategic, tactical and operational.

The integration of internet marketing services such as Google’s advertising service Adwords cannot be seen as a surprise. E-commerce and internet advertising are growing year by year. Google has become the number one place where customers go to find information to satisfy their needs and desires. This reality opens a lot of perspective for business. That is why the integration of internet sales and marketing services into web based CRM software is crucial.

The most important web CRM vendors are SalesForce, RightNow and NetSuite. These vendors have designed and implemented their online solutions with the internet in mind. Industry behemoths like Microsoft, SAP and Oracle (with Siebel) fairly recently added an On Demand offering to their portfolio, which in some cases is a web port of their traditional CRM suite.

Now, how to choose the right web based CRM software? The answer to this question depends on a number of criteria: what functionalities are required by your organization? How many users need access to the application? How mature is your IT organization? What is your back office system? How critical is the application? And many more …

Before selecting a customer relationship management solution I would definitely recommend to start with a free trial, which will allow you to try the service before signing-up.

Cedric Rinolda is IT Project Manager and Architect specialized in the implementation of business software. He writes opinions on the evolutions in the world of Software as a Service. Learn more about web based CRM software and choosing the right CRM vendor at his blog.

SAS 70 stands for Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70. It is an auditing standard that was adopted by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and is widely recognized in the auditing of service organizations. An auditor performs an audit on a service organization and that audit is conducted in a way that is compliant with SAS 70. It is that standard statement that says a service organization has been through an extensive audit

This extensive audit measures is that the organization has total control and has safeguards in place that does not compromise any data that they process for their customers. In other words, the job of the audit is to evaluate every aspect of the service organization that handles customer data or could result in a possible leak of customer data.

SAS 70 is necessary for the following reasons:

- It serves as a guide to service organizations when disclosing to their customers how it is they protect their information and how well they do it. The audit results are organized in a report that is easy to follow.

- It is not a checklist audit, but serves as a guide to independent auditors to form an opinion on how well the organization is utilizing their internal controls. There are certain standards that must be met during the audit.

- Provides a set of standards in which the auditor can perform a financial statement audit.

All of the information that is gathered is compiled into two types of reports. These reports are called Type I and Type II.

Type I report

A type I report takes the organizations description of their own controls at a certain point in time and describes those descriptions. The report includes the report by the independent auditor, which is simply the auditor’s opinion, and it includes the organization’s descriptions of their internal controls. There are parts of the report that are optional such as tests that are performed by the auditor and the auditor recording the results of those tests. Another optional area is the inclusion of any other information that the organization provides the auditor about its controls.

Type II report

The type II report is similar to the type I report in a lot of ways. The main difference is that it is mandatory for the auditor to perform tests and record the results of those tests. This is optional with type I. All of the other areas of evaluation remain the same and the inclusion of additional data by the organization is still optional.

How the organization benefits

The organization benefits from SAS 70 because it is receiving an unbiased opinion from the outside regarding the security and the effectiveness of its financial and customer-related controls. In turn, the organization can then work on any areas of weakness, which means that the customers can feel more secure about who they are doing business with. This builds a trust with customers when they know that their financial and/or personal information with the organization are secure. It lets them know who they can turn to when they need what the service organization has to offer.

Also, a service organization that has regular audits performed is an organization that has a long business life ahead of it. As stated before, customers will turn to a secure organization to do business. That means the organization is ensuring itself a long life as long as regular audits are performed to ensure the security of their internal controls. Keeping up with their controls can also save them money from having to eventually bring their controls up-to-date.

Managed Hosting Provider providing state-of-the-art data centre offices. We are SAS 70 and CICA 5970 and Certified, which is the highest available standards for measuring and improving data center operations and management.

There are many reasons in which a data center can fail. It can be quite frustrating, so it is important to know what those reasons are so that you can prevent them or know what to do when they happen. Because a lot of data centers exist on a site separate from the computers that are retrieving data from them, it is important that data centers continue running.

When they go down, all computers pulling from them from various places around a single country or even the world are not going to be able to retrieve any information. Such is true for customer service jobs in which customer information must be retrieved from a secure data center that resides elsewhere. If that data center is not operating, money is lost because employees are unable to do their jobs and customers become very unhappy that their situation cannot be resolved.

Reasons why data centers fail

Some of the reasons why data centers fail can be prevented and then there are some ways in which they cannot. However, it is important to do what is necessary to ensure as few outages as possible.

Here are some reasons for failure:

- The “wear-in” phase - This is the point in time in which the data center has just become operational. It is typical that certain things may fail as they are trying to become fully operational. It is like a toddler learning how to walk. The data center has to walk too, so it is good to let it run with minimal use and gradually build until it has gotten its legs. This involves comprehensive testing as the system usage increases in order to fix problems before they become a problem.

- The “wear-out” phase - This is when the data center is reaching the end of its life. Regular maintenance and care will slow this process, but major parts will eventually wear out. It is ideal to consistently monitor the system in order to predict failure and avoid catastrophe.

- Power failure - Power failure is devastating to anything that relies on it for operation. It is especially devastating to a data center. That is why it is important to have a generator or two ready to take over in case the power goes.

- Generator failure - Generators need care too and they need to be tested. Power goes out and generators take over in order to keep the data center running. Generators have been known to go out and cause data center failure.

- Metal whiskers - If the data center hardware is sitting on a metallic surface, then that metallic surface could grow zinc whiskers. These have been known to cause short circuits, especially in data centers. There are also tin whiskers that grow out from tin and they too cause shorts. Silver whiskers that grow on silver electrical contacts and gold whiskers that develop on gold plated services are also known to cause short outs. Large fans that suck the whiskers in can be used and the elements that produce them can be replaced.

Prevention is key

Prevention is the key to keeping your data center up and running. If any of these elements occur, it is good to stay calm and do what needs to be done to keep the problem from occurring again. If you have experienced generator failure, you may wish to invest in a backup to your main generator. If you’re building a new data center, be sure to use flooring that does not produce any type of metal whiskers that can short out your hardware. By being vigilant, you can ensure that your data center uptime will be at or near 100%.

Providing a network of state-of-the-art data centres. We are CICA 5970 and SAS 70 Certified, which is the highest available standards for measuring and improving data center operations and management.

Please note, we neither encourage nor endorse or suggest the use of any of the techniques discussed in this article. What we can tell you is that we definitely do not use them and our clients’ sites continue to rank very well on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Always keep in mind that a proper organic way of optimizing your site will take longer than to Sp@m your way to the top rankings BUT you will stay at the top for a long time without running into the risk of being dropped completely from the Search Engine Index!

Link Farms
Link farms and Link Farm Sp@m - aka FFA (free-for-all link sites) were born when more and more webmasters learned that inbound links could heavily influence website rankings.

A link farm is a group of web pages and websites that all hyperlink to every other page and website in the group. Although some link farms were created by hand, most were created through automated programs and services. A link farm is one of the worst forms of sp@mming Search Engine’s index (sometimes called sp@mexing or sp@mdexing).

However, you always have to keep in mind that the Search Engines (actually the people working on the Search Algorithms) evolve with the times! Therefore Google quickly devalued and eventually eliminated the page rank value and ranking positions it assigned to pages with an inordinate collection of links, non-related links and with signs of artificial link building (too many links in a too short a time frame). Nevertheless, link farms still exist as uninformed webmasters and many unethical SEO firms continue to use them.

Mini-Site Networks
In the early stages of the Google Page Rank algorithm, mini-site networks were created to exploit vulnerabilities. Domain names were cheap and the infrastructure costs VPS (Virtual Private Servers) or dedicated servers were cost effective, making it an attractive option.

Many mini-site networks were designed to act as leader pages just as if they were much larger sites. Many topic and/or product specific sites are created, with the goal of linking back to the main site. Each of these mini-sites would use a key phrase rich URL and be especially designed to meet the requirements of specific major search engines. Several SEO firms created artificial link density by weaving mini-site networks from multiple clients together.

In the early stages of the Google Page Rank algorithm this unethical method heavily influenced Google’s perception of the importance of the main sites. However during the summer of 2004 Google did penalize several very prominent SEO firms for using this technique and banned many of their client sites.

Leader Pages
Leader pages are a series of similar pages designed to target 1 or 2 specific keywords and meet requirements of different search engine algorithms. Some people took this a step further and created a page for each phrase and for each search engine. This is one of the original SEO tricks dating back to the earliest days of search when there were almost a dozen leading search engines sorting less than a billion documents. Leader pages are a form of the doorway page technique.

At present, it is considered sp@m by the major Search Engines as they can see multiple copies of what is virtually the same document. Besides, this technique is no longer practical as on-site optimization has much less of an impact on your rankings than proper off-site optimization and Search Engines consider a far wider range of factors to calculate your sites quality score than the arrangement or density of keywords found in a unique page.

Gregory Smyth is the CEO of Inetasia Solutions Limited . Gregory has taken the company to great heights with its various e-business solution products, which have become a backbone infrastructural tool that have powered websites for numerous high profile companies.