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Here are 10 actions you can do to improve the security of your private PC / mobile / tablet. Implementing them will make it more difficult to steal your private data from your device’s drive or one of the websites where you have an account.

These tips are addressed to an average ‘Joe Bloggs’, but some of them might require being familiar with computer technology. If you are uncertain about any of these please ask in comments or ask someone more familiar with IT.

1. Encrypt the *whole* hard drive

Full disk encryption will protect from unauthorised access to your data, for example when your device is stolen. It will also protect you from so called ‘Evil Maid’ attack, where someone has access to your unattended device.

Software:

• TrueCrypt for Windows
• FileVault2 for MacOS
• BitLocker for Windows (built-in)

It is worth to take care of regular backups (also encrypted) as for encrypted hard drives even changing a single bit of information may result in having all data inaccessible.

Some hard drives support encryption at hardware level in which case no additional software needs to be installed.

2. Keep your software up to date

It can protect you from most of the mass attacks like:

• Opening a specially prepared PDF file
• Entering a malware infected website

Every software has so called bugs. They are being found and updated constantly. To make sure you are not vulnerable you need to apply software updates on regular basis.

Turn on automatic updates for all of the programs that you are using. This is especially important for web browsers.

If you have to manually download an update do it from manufacturers website over HTTPS protocol (otherwise someone who is on your connection path could infiltrate downloaded data).

Useful software:

• Personal Security Inspector (PSI) for Windows
• Linux: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

It is also worth to review permissions you gave to the external applications on your accounts:

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications
• Google: https://accounts.google.com/b/0/IssuedAuthSubTokens?hl=en

3. Use unique passwords for every service and turn on 2 factor authorisation

This tip will protect you from unauthorised access to your data (online accounts). In most cases the attacker will get access to your account X because he/she managed to break into Y where you had an account registered with the same e-mail / login.

It is also quite common to workaround the logon form by using password reset form. For that reason do not set your reminder question that is very easy to guess (Q: ‘Favourite colour?’. A: ‘Black’).

Two factors authorisation will protect your account when your password has been taken over. In order to gain access to your account the attacker will also need your mobile phone.

The attackers can check over 5 million passwords per second. Therefore to delay the brutal force attack, the password should be:

• non-dictionary (passwords like: qwerty, qazwsx, john123 are not good as they are present in brutal force dictionaries).
• not template based – do not use a pattern in your passwords (ThisIsMySecretFacebookPassword) – if your password is overtaken than the attacker will easily get access to your other accounts passwords.
• long and complicated

Same rules apply to answers to password recovery security questions.

Generate and keep your passwords in a passwords manager like KeepAss (available for Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android). This way you only have to remember one password – to your manager.

Two factors authorisation can be enabled in:

• Facebook
• Google Gmail
• Dropbox
• Twitter

4. Increase the security of your web browsers

This step will prevent from your Internet traffic being hijacked and identity stolen. Your web browser is most likely an application you spend most of your time.

Google Chrome has the advantage of sandboxing but it sends some statistics data to Google – this can be limited in application’s settings.

Turn off Java plugin as well as any others that you do not need.

Turn on “click-2-play” function for your plugins. This will prevent any Flash applet from starting without your acceptance. To activate a movie applet on Youtube you will have to click on it. For chrome:

• Settings -> Show Advanced Settings -> Content
• Settings -> Plugins -> Click to play

Set up your cookies into “No third party cookies” mode – this will protect your privacy from marketing tracking.

Install useful extensions:

• NoScript (JavaScript blocking for Firefox)
• NoScripts (JavaScript blocking for Chrome)
• HTTPS Everywhere (enforces encrypted connection where possible)

5. Use VPN when you connect through a foreign network

Using a VPN will protect you from hijackers and MITM attacks (man in the middle). When you are using free hotspots and WiFi networks with WEP encryption, every other network user can see your whole Internet traffic. If you do not use encrypted protocols (HTTPS), your passwords are easy to be stolen.

The attacker can also set up a fake and unsecured network with same name (SSID) as the one you previously connected. Your device will connect with it automatically which will allow him/her to attack you.

Any certificate errors that come up when you try to establish connection with a secure website and any messages notifying you about the change of fingerprint should be treated as MITM attack and you should not accept such connection.

Always use VPN when connecting with untrusted WiFi networks. You can buy VPN service or do it yourself. If you have an SSH account, log in to it with the following:

1	ssh login@server -D 9090

Once you have the above set up a SOCKS proxy in your browser on port 9090. Note your non-www traffic is still vulnerable to hijacking. To prevent this you will have to enforce system-wide SOCKS connection. It is also important to know that the traffic is only encrypted back to your SSH server. If someone is listening to your SSH server, he/she will be able to see your unencrypted connection on the exit.

Another alternative to VPN is TOR network.

6. Use a firewall

This will help you protect from being overly exposed to the Internet. Without a firewall all the services enabled on your computer are accessible to any Internet user.

Block all incoming connections to your computer – it will make no difference to your Internet usage as long as you are not running a WWW server or have any other services running that you want to share. If you have to you can enable appropriate ports to other Internet users with a simple rule on the firewall.

Consider installing software that will limit your outgoing traffic. You can use LittleSnitch for Mac OS or ZoneAlarm for Windows.

7. Use an antivirus and non-admin account

A good antivirus will protect you from well known viruses and using a privileges-free user account will not allow malware to gain total control over your system.

You do not have to buy an antivirus software – many companies have free editions and they are as successful as the paid ones.

Do not use an administrator account for your daily work.

8. Consider what you put online

This will help you avoid an online faux pas and leak of secret data. Everything you put online or send via email to even 1 selected person needs to be considered as publicly visible to everyone.

The mailbox of your trusted recipient might become public due to an attack. A private gallery on Facebook can become available to everyone due to a temporary error on the website. Such situations have already happened in the past.

Everything you put online has a big chance of staying there forever, no matter if you wish so or not.

9. Make your BIOS password protected

It will help you in case your device gets stolen. The attacker might not be able to start your PC from LiveCD / USB and will not get access to your hard drive.

Please remember that the hard drive can always be physically unmounted and if you did not encrypt it (see point 1), then there is nothing stopping unauthorised people from accessing / stealing your data.

There is no BIOS in Mac computers, but you can set up a ‘startup password’.

Unfortunately BIOS password can be reset in most cases when you have physical access to computer’s motherboard.

10. If you did not choose the encryption of your whole hard drive…

Well, in that case nothing protects you in the case of your device being stolen:

• your private data is no longer private
• your identity can be stolen
• your very private pictures might get posted to your Facebook
• etc.

You can however attempt to locate the thief if you have installed on your computer / mobile phone a friendly troyan:

• http://preyproject.com (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS)
• FindMyiPhone
• Android Device Manager

The post 10 Tips To Improve Your Online Security appeared first on SEO Consultant London (UK).

1. Analysis – What have they been doing? Has it been working?
2. Strategy – What should they be doing? Short/Mid/Long term strategy.
3. Technical – Identify some quick wins and what they could do to fix them. What are the fundamental technical areas the website is struggling? Why are these errors happening?
4. KPIs - How will we judge the success of implementing these fixes? What should the client expect?

How would you measure success of a campaign for this brand? What would be your strategy?

The post SEO Technical Audit of Toyota UK appeared first on SEO Consultant London (UK).

Resources breakdown for the campaign:

SEO Priority Calendar – TM Lewin

How do you plan for a successful and ROI focused SEO campaign for large brands?

The post TM Lewin – SEO Campaign 2013 appeared first on SEO Consultant London (UK).

Three offers unlimited broadband for £15 a month. This is pretty much one of the best offers on the market I have experienced. On top of that you get 300 texts and 3000 minutes which is more than sufficient for my needs. On the drawbacks I am missing the ability for international calls. Secondly broadband terms and conditions do not allow for any other usage than on your mobile device.

Unfortunately a few days ago they started blocking tethering. Internet was working fine on my Galaxy phone, but I could not open any website on my laptop. For a few days I was frustrated, I knew there is nothing to complain to Three as they would tell me tethering is not accepted by their T&Cs.

But for me this is part of the ‘unlimited broadband’ offer understanding. In fact when I am sold a service that is advertised as unlimited I expect it to be so. Therefore whether what I am doing is ethical or not remains subject of dispute. Furthermore I consider my laptop as a mobile device too.

Anyway I cannot work without broadband, and based on my previous experience with networks and ISP I started analysing how a mobile operator can distinguish what device I am using. I tried to encrypt all the traffic with VPN which seemed to be working fine, but eventually was blocked also. Clearly Three did not want to allow me to encrypt the traffic and wanted to know exactly what I was doing.

It was quite obvious and finally I found solution to my problem. The only way Three administrator was able to block the traffic was by monitoring the ‘User Agent’. Every browser sends a ‘footprint’ when it connects to any web server. So when I am on Windows using a Firefox browser, the string identifying me as a Firefox user would be something like ‘Mozilla/5.0 Windows NT 6.2 WOW64 AppleWebKit/537.11 KHTML, like Gecko Chrome/23.0.1271.97 Safari/537.11’. It clearly says I am on a Windows platform. It is fairly easy for any system administrator to add a iptables rule to router’s firewall using string module, for example like this:

1

iptables -t raw -A PREROUTING -m string --algo bm –string Windows -j DROP

A quick test confirmed my theory that changing User Agent helps to have full connection again. Now I can enjoy truly free broadband once again. After this brief introduction here is a simple step by step guide on how to omit Three tethering block:

In Chrome:

1. Enter developer mode (Ctrl+Shift+I)
2. Enter settings (bottom right icon)
3. Go to ‘Overrides’ tab
4. Select ‘Other’ from ‘User Agent’ dropdown and enter something like: ‘Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; ; ) AppleWebKit/ (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/ Mobile Safari/‘

Now you appear as an Android device.

In Firefox:

1. Type in ‘about:config’ in the address bar and click that you know what you are doing
2. In search box type in ‘general.useragent’
3. You should now have Firefox settings related to useragent
4. Right click and create a new string value called ‘general.useragent.override’
5. Type whatever mobile you wish to appear, e.g. ‘Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16’

Now you appear as an iOS device.

Congratulations, for system admin you are an Android/iOS device. Enjoy your broadband! Do you know any other cost effective mobile broadband access methods?

The post How to Omit Three Tethering Block? appeared first on SEO Consultant London (UK).

Content Marketing

Yes, this is not anything new. Content marketing existed for a long time and most (good) SEO guys will be using it in their campaigns. Effectively it all starts with high quality content, doesn’t it? My main point is that in 2013 it will become even more important to focus on good reputable content in first place. Google is currently fighting very aggressively cheap and low quality content and links (7 Panda and 4 Penguins we faced in 2012 – am I counting all of them?). Well ok, name it spam fighting but how many interesting blogs and websites were left behind? The gap between good and average bloggers is becoming higher than ever. Either you follow up this trend and learn how to create quality content or you stay behind the competition.

Multi channel approach

First of all and probably the most important one is that SEO will be more and more challenging and will require utilisation of multiple channels to achieve online success. Social media, content strategies and PR will all have to go together to develop cutting edge and effective SEO strategies.

Social Media and AuthorRank

If I was to name the most important change in SEO in 2012 it was mostly about adjusting to ‘Search Plus Your World’ algorithm update. It required a completely different model of thinking, rankings stopped being as permanent and tangible as they used before. Now you could expect completely personalised search results for each logged on Google user and this exposes us to brand new challenges. One of the most natural follow up was an increased industries interest in Google+. This seemed to be encouraged by Google with authorship implementation and author image being displayed next to snippet. It was all preparation for what will play a more and more significant role as a damping PageRank factor: AuthorRank becomes a way for Google to link content with its original author. The more reputable authors are more likely to create quality and valuable content.
The topic of PageRank dumping factors is not new and there were some interesting research publications in this area (PageRank for ranking authors in co-citation networks).

Microformats

We have already seen how important it began to be able to present your content with microdata markups. Rich snippets show clearly that Google wants and will encourage developers to put them in place. And yet it is well worth it: Rich snippets do present themselves better and get much higher click through rates. Why is Google doing that? With microformats it is much easier to group data together and understand relationships between various objects in the internet.

Link Building in 2013

As long as the general direction for Google is a growing focus on social media I believe 2013 for most SEOs will be still built on activities around link building. Citation rule will remain in place, but more and more attention will be required on obtaining authority links. The understanding of authority links will undergo a shift as well – authority links will be now no longer based on pure old-school SEO parameters like domain or page authority. Social signals will start playing a crucial role on how valuable a link is. Back links from pages with many social shares or many clicks through will have more impact than others.

Co-Citation rule and significantly reduced impact of anchor text

Up to now all link building activities were focused on building diversified portfolio of back links and especially after Penguin update ensuring broad coverage of partial match variations of main phrases. Next year might bring yet another challenge with Google pushing strongly co-citation. There are predictions co-citation will eventually replace anchor texts completely.

From other important changes there will be an increasing focus on local search and brands.

What do you think will change in SEO next year? Do you agree or disagree with the points above? Please share your view in comments.

The post What will SEO be like in 2013? appeared first on SEO Consultant London (UK).

This is a premium domain that will suit many Internet Marketing projects like a viral marketing tool, facebook marketing ebook, facebook application and will quickly turn into a large revenue stream. It might even fit a specialized development company building facebook apps!

It is an exact match keyword domain with 22,200 global monthly searches! Imagine the traffic you can get plus all the long tail variations. Think about a landing page with a high conversion rate and number of leads, signups, sales it will generate.

I am selling it with a pre-installed OptimizePress which will allow you to create a highly converting landing page, squeeze page, pre-launch or lead generation website in minutes. Obviously you can set it up on anything else, OptimizePress is left just for your convenience as it was the framework I planned to use.

The domain has been registered in 2011 and I am selling it as I do not have time to complete this project and my priorities have slightly shifted towards some other projects.

There is no reserve price - the market decides on the value! This will quickly become a moneymaker, so do not miss this bargain deal with an enormous revenue potential.

Check it out here: http://bit.ly/IRDjXX

The post FacebookTarget.com Premium Domain 22,200 Exact Searches/Month appeared first on SEO Consultant London (UK).

One of the popular terms we hear today in terms of developments in information technology is the Web 3.0. Web 3.0 is stated to be the next era of the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web has gone through different stages since it was invented decades ago. These stages are divided into Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Although there is no hard and fast line dividing these three eras, many experts believe that the Web 2.0 era lasted till 2010, and we have now entered the Web 3.0 era. Many experts also state that we are in the process of transcending into the Web 3.0 era.

Many people have made futuristic predictions about Web 3.0 applications, and how it will change the way we share and retrieve information online. Web 3.0 brings many possibilities and new changes, which will make the Internet more accessible and easier to use. Some of these predictions are seen today, and some are still in the process of being realized.

One of the major predictions for Web 3.0 applications is the use of artificial intelligence. It is expected that applications and programs in the future will become much smarter, and will rely on artificial intelligence to provide a richer experience. It is expected that search engines will become a lot smarter in the future which will make them much easier to use, and also more helpful. Search engines will be better capable of understanding our search requirements, and will offer search results which suit our exact preferences.

One of the major predictions related to Web 3.0 application is the Semantic Web. Actually, many experts believe that Web 3.0 is actually a part of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web experience goes beyond the web experience we have today. It means that online programs and applications will be able to understand natural language, instead of machine readable language. This means that we will be able to ask questions from search engines just like we ask our friends in real life, without having to make our queries more search engine friendly.

It is also predicted that Web 3.0 applications will provide a 3D experience for users. Already, we see the world moving towards 3D technology, and Web 3.0 will make full use of this new technology to provide a more realistic experience to users.

Another futuristic prediction for Web 3.0 applications is that they will be centered more on individuals, and will provide a customized experience to everybody. Websites will keep track of your preferences online, and will provide you with a personalized web experience whenever you log on to the websites.

Moreover, Web 3.0 will allow more collaborative applications, which means that it will be easier to share information online and connect with other users.

The post Futuristic predictions of Web 3.0 applications appeared first on SEO Consultant London (UK).

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Social Media Campaign

Here is a screenshot, confirming social media can be the most effective seo strategy. The website showing up below has only been promoted through a social media campaign. In less than 24 hours since publication, it is ranked #2 on google.ie and #5 on other search engines.

EDIT: Now it is no longer social media only promotion: Faunarooska Cave

The post #2 in less than 24 hours with Social Media only appeared first on SEO Consultant London (UK).