6S Marketing Blog

Is Your Business on Facebook?

ChrisO — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:24:58 +0000

6S to Race in the Canary Derby

This Saturday June 27th, the 6S Marketing Team is racing in the Canary Derby, a soap box race fundraiser in support of the BC Cancer Foundation. Check out the pictures and videos of our progress and donate online.

Facebook

Do you currently advertise on Facebook? Does your business have a Facebook presence? We are Facebook marketing experts and for a small budget, we can help you leverage this powerful web site.
Find out more about our Facebook marketing services.

5 Reasons Why We Love the New Google Adwords Interface

In case you haven’t noticed, Google has really ramped up development lately especially on the Adwords side of things. The new Adwords interface provides a number of great new options that increase productivity and general ease-of-use.
Learn More…

Is Your Site Being Used by Hackers?

Open redirects are one way for hackers to take advantage of your website as it allows them to manipulate the functionality of a website, rather than one tiny security-related flaw.
Read More…

Ideas on Tap Was a Success

More than 600 people attended the June Ideas on Tap at the Commodore Ballroom. Check out the photos on Flickr our read the event summary.

Are you following 6S Marketing on Twitter?

Stay up to date with everything 6S by following the 6S Marketing Twitterers.

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Webmaster Site Reviews by Matt Cutts

Kelly Robertson — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:00:21 +0000

Matt Cutts made an appearance at the Google IO Conference, May 27 – 28th, 2009 , and did live site reviews talking about ranking factors, as well as usability factors. A few revelations: Google considers you more reputable if you link out to reputable sites – Microsoft and Yahoo don’t like deep directory structures, but Google doesn’t care – and some great insights into how the duplicate content filter works. Matt’s presentation is an hour long, but there’s a lot of good information included.

Some highlights:

provide mulitple ways to get to a page – static html links
Google can crawl through JavaScript – not every search engine can
URL’s should be static and easily crawled

Check out the full presentation here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/webmaster-site-reviews/

Google Analytics Hacked?

Kelly Robertson — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:52:17 +0000

There is an article out right now that’s sending companies around the world into a frenzy. The article covers accounts of company websites with the default Google Analytics implementation script, being replaced with a string of characters that do not belong.

We must stress that this hack is not a Google Analytics security issue, it is not an Apache or PHP issue either. It is a server security & maintenance issue.

How to determine if your GA code has been exploited:

Go to your website, view the source code of a page containing GA code.
If the typical GA code contains a string of code that does not normally belong, your site has been infected. Look for something like:
“document.write(<”+”i”+”f”+”ram”+”e”…

For more specifics on the actual exploit visit: http://blog.immeria.net/2009/06/google-analytics-targeted-by-hackers.html

Although the explanation of the exploit has been discovered, there is still uncertainty about how the code is being altered. The injection of the exploit is on weak security settings on Apache HTTP servers and unencrypted FTP passwords being used on tools used for editing sites. Once a machine is infected, all commonly used tools are harvested to collect more unencrypted passwords.

Google suggests the following resources to look at if your site has been hacked:

“Common” Tag Supported by Yahoo!

Kelly Robertson — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:00:35 +0000

Yahoo! announced a few days ago that they are supporting the “Common” tag, a microformatting tag that is much like the meta keywords tag, except far more difficult to implement. Why would Yahoo! support something as cumbersome and easily exploited as this?

Yahoo! believes that semantic tagging is the future of the web and will allow the development of more intelligent applications for distributing content around the net. Critics are already asking why this tag has been supported when it is more complicated to implement compared to other widely supported tags, such as the rel-tag, which is quite similar already. And no word on whether Google will be supporting this microformat.

Where the common tag will be particularly useful when it comes to web content tagged with names that can have various meaning. For example, if a piece of content is tagged “jaguar” is it referring to the car, the animal or the operating system? The new Common tag will add semantic meaning to tags which means it will make it easier for machines to understand content that is tagged with the Common tag; allowing web content to be more discoverable and enabling more useful applications to be developed for searching, browsing and aggregating content across the web.

The tag was recently developed by several companies including Yahoo!, Freebase & Zigtag to name a few. For more information about the Common tag, visit the Common Tag official site.

Is Your Site Being Used by Hackers?

Kelly Robertson — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:17:30 +0000

Is your site being easily abused by hackers? It turns out, some insecure web software allows people to freely use a website with open redirects to mask their hacking attacks.

Open redirects are one way for hackers to take advantage of your website as it allows them to manipulate the functionality of a website, rather than one tiny security-related flaw. The hacker will use your site as a “landing page” and use links pointing to your site to redirect them to their site instead. This may have a negative effect on SEO for your website if the link the hacker uses is coming from a “bad linking neighborhood”, which you do not want your site associated with.

Some examples of redirects that are easily used by hackers are:

Scripts that redirect users to a file on a server. If you use a CMS that allows you to upload files, make sure links go directly to the file, and are not redirected like so:

mywebsite.com/go.php?url=
mywebsite.com/ie/ie40/download/?

Internal site search results pages often have redirects such as: mysite.com/search?q=user+search+keyword&url=
Affiliate program tracking URL’s to track clicks and other statistics like: mysite.com/coupon.jsp?code=154655&url=
Login pages often redirect the user back to the page they were just trying to access. URL’s such as: mysite.com/login?url= are often quite vollunerable.

How do you know your site is being abused?

Type into Google: site:http://www.mysite.com to see if anything pops up that is unfamiliar.
Use the top search queries report in Webmaster tools to see what the top search queries that are leading traffic to your site are.
Check the top content report in Google Analytics for URL’s that do not belong on your site.

So, what to do if your site is being abused?

Here are a few things you can do to ensure your site is safe from hackers:

Ensure the redirect will check the referrer. This is done by changing the code of the redirect.
Disallow off-site redirects on your site
Create a list of all outgoing links in your code, and make sure the redirect being used is a safe destination.
Use the robots.txt file to exclude search engines from the redirect script.
Remove URL’s in Webmaster Tools or use the verified spam report to report suspicious links coming into your site.

No related posts.

Fundraising for the Canary Derby

Jenn — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:30:38 +0000

The cart’s almost done and race day is fast approaching and now it’s time for us to ask you for your help! We’re no where near our fundraising target and need your help to reach our $5000 goal. All donations will be used by the Canary Foundation of Canada to support early cancer detection research. The Canary Foundation of Canada is supporting this work at the BC Cancer Agency, right here in Vancouver. Please consider making a donation to our team to help reach our fundraising goal of $5,000.

Way’s to support the 6S Marketing Canary Derby team.

Visit our fundrasing page on the Canary Derby website. This is perfect for any personal donations!
Sponsor us. Yes you heard that right. Always wanted to see your company logo on a Nascar but never knew how to get it there? Well now’s your chance. Imagine how awesome your logo would look flying down Deer Lake Park being driven by a Princess while decked out like Mario Kart. This sponsorship space can be yours for a $500 donation. Want a bigger logo? We can do that too. Become a premium sponsor for $1000. Please email me at jlowther@6smarketing.com for team sponsorship opportunities.

Canary Derby Interview with Techvibes

Kelly Robertson — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:31:41 +0000

6S Marketing was interviewed today by Techvibes, an online community for technology professionals, about their participation in the upcoming Canary Derby. The derby is taking place on June 27th, at Deer Lake Park in Burnaby.

The Canary Derby is a “soap box” derby for the Vancouver Technology Community to help the Canary Foundation and BC Cancer Foundation raise money to support early detection of cancer research within BC.

Each team that participates will design, build and race a soapbox car and fundraise for the event. 6S Marketing has the goal of raising $5000 for the Canary Foundation; any donations to the Canary Foundation on the behalf of “Team Mario Kart” a.k.a 6S Marketing are more than appreciated.

Interview with Techvibes

Techvibes: “Why did 6S join the Canary Derby this year?”

6S: “One of the pillars of the 6S Marketing philosophy is to remain active and involved in the community. The team regularly participates in and sponsors charity or community related events year round and all of our team members are encouraged to put forward causes important to them. Our approach to community involvement is to bring the 6S spirit and energy to each and every event that we attend or support. We take pride in using our skills, in both a professional and personal sense, to help out whenever possible. The Canary Derby was a perfect fit for us, as it raises money for an important cause that we are passionate about and is also a light-hearted and fun event! We all felt strongly about signing up this year…and not just because we wanted to win!”

Techvibes: “Give us the low down on the 6S “Team Mario” Kart”

6S:

“We’re in it to win, for both style and speed. Why choose only one, when you can conquer both! “
“Our driver is “Kelly “Kells Belles” Robertson. She was part of the pit crew for French Formula One racer Jean Girard before transferring over to legendary NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby’s team, where she eventually rose up the ranks to become a full fledged driver. Kelly’s message to all the other teams out there: “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”
“Our cart was built by all the folks at 6S Marketing, graphics and decals by Ron Fiedler at Barnstorm Creative, wheels provided by Ben Hsu at Fountain Tire, and roll bar by Josh Lorencz of J&R Customs.”
“The theme for our car is Mario Kart! Princess Peach, Donkey Kong & Mario will be making appearances”

Techvibes: “Any challenges for the other competitors?”

6S:

“Rogers – you may have the fastest wireless network, but on race day the only numbers you’ll dial are dropped calls. “
“Webnames – watch out that your cart doesn’t 301 redirect into the side of the road. “
“Aquatic Informatics – come race day, we’ll make sure that your cart sleeps with the fishes.”

And remember, there’s still time to sponsor “Team Mario” with sponsorship space on the Kart itself. How awesome would your logo look flying past all of the other Karts in the Derby? Contact Jenn Lowther (jlowther@6smarketing.com) for more information.

Hope to see you all out at Deer Lake for the Canary Derby!

5 Reasons 6S Loves the New Adwords Interface

Quentin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:53:09 +0000

5. The New Adwords Network Tab

Google’s new interface makes managing ad performance across the search and content networks much easier with the introduction of the network tab. The network tabs generates the Placement Performance report directly into the adwords interface. Broken up by your automatic and managed placements, the table looks exactly like the Placement Performance report and most importantly is easy to use.

Directly from the new interface you can add a URL into your managed placements or exclude the placement all together. Once added to the managed placements list a green Added icon will appear beside the site URL.

4. CTR and Click Charts

The new graphing option allows you to compare up to two metrics at the campaign and ad group level over any desired time range. As much as we love rows of numbers, a little visual representation goes a long way.

3. “All In One” In-line Editing Interface

Google promised faster campaign management, clearer insight into performance, more control over the content network and they have pretty much delivered all with their new Adwords interface.
Though tricky to get use to at first and not without its bugs, Google delivers on its promises making the new interface much more manageable and time saving. The in-line editing allows you to make changes without having to jump back and forth between pages. At the keyword level you can change the CPC bid and match type all without leaving the page. The same goes for editing ad copy, and the interface utilizes a pop up ad editor instead of loading a new page.

Even though the new interface takes a bit of getting use to but with a little practice the new in-line editing is a welcome improvement over the old interface.

2. Adwords Search Query Terms

The search query term report is now built directly into the Adwords interface. At the keyword level, select your desired keywords and click “See Search Terms”. You can then choose to view selected or to view all keywords in the ad group. Then a list of search terms that triggered your ads for the selected keywords will pop up including metrics such as match type, click through rate and conversions.

The great thing about this new feature is that you can then make changes to your account directly from the pop up report. For example, if you want to include a new search term you can add it to your campaign by selecting the term and click add as keyword. Along with adding the new keyword you also have the opportunity to set a specific CPC bid and match type as well. You can exclude any keyword as negatives directly from the new report.

1. Adwords Filters and Views

Worthy of an entire post on its own, we are very enthusiastic about the new Adwords filters and views feature!

The new filter option can be used at the campaign, adgroup, ad and keyword levels. Choose to filter accounts by CTR, Cost, Conversions, Clicks, Impressions or a combination of metrics! A definite time saver, the new filters and view option earns its spot at the top of our list.

Secondly, a personal favorite is the keyword level filter “Segment by Search Terms Match Type”. This filter takes all your broad match keywords and displays how many times that query was triggered through broad, [exact] or “phrase match” saving valuable time on testing all 3 matches.

Overall we at 6S are loving the new interface, come back and check for further updates as new features are unveiled.

Largest Ideas on Tap So Far

Kelly Robertson — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:48:51 +0000

Thank you to everyone who came out to the Commodore last night and made the third Ideas on Tap a great event! The largest Ideas on Tap so far, attendance was in the range of 600 – 700 techies who came out to hear the 5 guest speakers do their 60 second elevator pitches.

You may have also seen Princess Peach & Donkey Kong walking around raising money for the 6S Marketing Canary Derby go-kart team, which raises money for the early detection of cancer. Thank you to all who purchased 50/50 tickets; we ended up raising over $500!

The highlight of the night may have been the Elastic Path ice sculpture “Booze Luge” , which supplied ice cold martini’s to the attendees all night. Thanks Elastic Path!

Live blogging was supplied by Miss604, a.k.a Rebecca Bollwitt, check out her Ideas on Tap live blog post here.

Stay tuned to the Ideas on Tap site & blog for the next Ideas on Tap event – date to be decided!

Vanity URL’s Available On Facebook

Kelly Robertson — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:53:41 +0000

This Friday, June 12th, Facebook is opening up Vanity URL’s to everyone – on a “first come, first served” basis.

Currently, Facebook member URL’s are made up of numbers, profile.php?id=1010101010, by using Vanity URL’s, Facebook members will be able to create their own URL’s, or choose from suggestions made by Facebook based on the users real name.

Not only will this help you identify yourself from all of the other people on Facebook with the same name, your profile will be more search engine friendly in the sense you can optimize the URL of your Facebook profile, if you so choose. This will be beneficial for online personalities wanting to increase their online presence outside of their Twitter or LinkedIn profiles showing in the SERPS.

There has been talk on Facebook since March of allowing users to create their own user name URL’s, they even played with the idea of charging for them. However; Vanity URL’s will be free to all users on Facebook.

Vanity URL’s will be available Friday, at 9:01 PM (Pacific), 12:01 AM Saturday (Eastern). And remember, it’s “first come first serve,” so if you have a popular name, you’ll need to beat everyone else to the punch.

For more on Vanity URL’s, visit the Facebook blog