Companies Forced to Fight Phishing

Phishing is the name given to a new scam on the Internet where the scammer poses as a legitimate business and tries to get you to give them confidential information. I have personally received many of them recently from (presumably) Citibank and Paypal. Both organizations have an address where you can report these scams.

"Trower's search illustrates the lengths that businesses are going to in order to stop a form of fraud that uses their good names to steal. A 1,200 percent increase in attacks since January has forced the companies not only to redouble their efforts, but to change the way they use the Internet to communicate with their customers, each other and law enforcement officials."

This article also says that, "A year ago, each attack against EarthLink generated about 20,000 customer support calls at an average cost of $127,000 per incident, Trower said. At the time, the company battled approximately three new attacks each week. "

There is an interesting test in the article that shows you ten different messages that you might receive and lets you vote on whether you think it is a scam or not. It is a good way to test your understanding of how to identify a scam.

The basic defense is to never click on a link in an email that you are not sure of. Any message from a business you recognize that asks you to click on a link is probably a fraud. A legitimate messge will usually ask you to log in to your account (in the normal way you would get access to your account!) to provide any information that the business needs.

Be wary of these scams! They do look tempting, and a mistake can be made very easily,and it can be costly!

"Content remains king. "

HoustonChronicle.com - It's the Internet, stupid (Unfortunately, the Chronicle has removed this article from its site, so I cannot link to it for your reference. If you have access to a print copy of the November 21, 2004 paper, it was in the Outlook section. In the future, I will make a copy of the article that can be read after it is taken down.)

I was surprised to see the quote above in the Chronicle Outlook section today in a piece about the Internet and its impact on the latest election. This is the theme that we have been hearing in our clinics for many years now, and I did not expect to encounter it on a Sunday morning.

What the article is about is the continuing increasing influence of the Internet in another aspect of our lives, in this case, political decision-making. From my point of view, that is, as someone trying to learn how to use the Internet to promote businesses, the message reinforces my belief that we have not yet tapped the potential of the Internet as a medium of communication.

For we marketers, the challenge is to keep up with the spread of the Internet into more and more homes and businesses, and into the consciousness of the people we are trying to reach. The increasing reliance on the Internet for different kinds of communication broadens our potential reach, and we just have to learn better ways to utilize that reach to tell our own stories.

MSN Search Engine Tip:Inside "Near Me" Search

"In order to ensure the address is parsed properly you should format the address as in the following example:
1 Microsoft Way Redmond, WA, 98052
Notice the capitalization for the city name and state. Also, make sure the city and state are not separated by any html tags."

One of the new features introduced in the new MSN search engine is the "near me" option. This is an effort to help searchers find local businesses, and will be important to many webmasters.

This article is from the MSN blog and gives a definitive answer to how to work with this feature. The point made in the article is that you have to have your address on the page or pages that you want to have found when the searcher selects the feature. For most businesses with a local impact, this should probably mean on every page, for example, in the footer. Pay particular attention to the recommendations for the format of the address.

I would also suggest, as an additional precaution, that you find a way to include the zip codes near your location somewhere on your site, just in case searchers include their own zip codes in their searches to find businesses near them. I am not yet aware of the search engines including any kind of feature for "approximating" zip codes by finding codes near the one searched for. Some of the mapping sites do include this kind of proximity searching to give you distances to businesses (although I don't think they do it on the basis of zip codes).

Half Of Top Advertiser Web Sites Don't Fully Optimize!

"The role of the Internet in business-to-business sales and communications continues to expand. According to eMarketer, 71 percent of business leaders use the Internet to gain information about industry sectors. As part of the study, Oneupweb listed four key trends it believes will compel these companies to use search engine optimization. These are: the growth of business-to-business online shopping; the role played by search engines in research-driven business-to-business purchases; the overall growth of the online marketplace; and the growth of search engine optimization itself, which will make optimization all the more important as businesses jockey for position in certain sectors. "

In an article that points out the deficiencies in optimization for major web sites, the author closes with encouraging news about the importance of optimization to the marketplace.

What this report seems to indicate is that the top sites are spending their money on PPC ("Pay Per Click") marketing instead of on site optimization. This is great news for us because it means that we can compete effectively with the big sites for positions in the organic results listings. As we have cited in other reports, searchers exhibit a 60-40% preference overall for what they find in the organic listings! This preference shifts to 70% for users of Google!

Microsoft Unveils Its New Search Engine -- at Last!

"After months of speculation and two 'preview' releases, Microsoft unwraps its new MSN search engine, the first major competitor to join Web search major leagues in nearly a year"

The MSN engine is out now, in beta, and this article provides a review of its features. At this time, MSN is claiming 5 billion pages indexed, but yesterday when I checked Google, they were claiming 8 billion. (A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you have a lot of web pages, but Google still has more!)

There are some interesting features cited for the new engine, but it is hard to say how they will impact the optimization trade. One feature I noted is the emphasis MSN is putting on localizing their search. I tried a search for my site under "internet marketing class", where I did not rank with MSN. When I turned on the "local" feature, however, I came up right near the top!

I was interested to read something in this article about how MSN is going about localizing the results. This is the first description of their process that I have come across. Not sure yet how to use that information in building more effective web sites, but we will figure it out!

One & two word searches still have value!

"Despite some evidence of more sophisticated consumer search habits, a vast majority of clicks in search results come from one- or two-word queries, according to a new study. "

We talk a lot in our clinic about the value of longer keyword phrases for optimizing your pages, but don't forget that there is still a lot of traffic out there on the simpler searches! It is harder to rank (in most cases), and it is true that the searchers are higher up in the "purchase funnel", but bringing people in on simpler phrases still generates traffic and adds to your recognition factor. If the searcher noticed you on the simple search, they will recognize you when they do the more complex search and are further into the funnel.

"The iProspect study found consumers are slowly gaining sophistication. One-word searches dropped from 51 percent of search referrals in 2002 to 39 percent in 2004. Two-word search referrals increased in the same period from 37 percent to 49 percent."

Flash sites still will not perform on search engines!

"The options for Flash sites today, though, remain limited. Shaw and Markel agreed that sites should avoid Flash if search engine optimization is a top priority and if the multimedia and interactivity features of Flash are not necessary."

This article features a group that is trying to "reform" Flash sites so that search engines will index them, but they are fighting an uphill battle. As the article says, "It's a trust issue at this point. The search engines need to trust that the content they're searching is the same as the Flash [sites] are displaying."

Our advice remains the same, don't use Flash on your front page or on pages that you need the search engines to find. Reserve it for pages buried in your site that you use to display specific material that your users will want to see AFTER they have come to your site and decided that it meets their needs!

MSN (finally) launches its engine (in beta).

"Microsoft is also offering search features designed to leverage the company's other online assets. One, called Direct Actions, enables a user to type in the name of a musical artist, song or album and then be linked immediately to Microsoft's MSN Music store.
But Internet search experts and industry analysts said that Microsoft still had far to go to be viewed as a serious competitor to either Google or Yahoo."

The consensus opinion (among all sources reviewed so far) is that MSN is not close to being a threat to either of the majors (Google & Yahoo/Inktomi) for some time to come. One interesting thing to note, confirmed by other articles on the web, is the way all the engines are reaching out to tie in relevant content from other resources. This article describes MSN linking directly to the Microsoft Music Store. A9, the engine introduced recently by Amazon, has major tie-ins to purchasing opportunities. Google has announced several tie-in arrangements with Yellow Page providers.

What does this mean to we small marketers? For the near future, no change, that is, stay close to Google and Inktomi, and keep your links recruitment program actively working. For the longer term, these trends may suggest seeking out more placements in some of the sources that are being "tied-in", for example, it may increase the value of being listed in yellow page listings on the web. If you have product you can sell through Amazon, it might add value to your site (it would anyway, but this movement may increase it.)

Stay tuned!