Submit your site to the main search engines…

Create and [...]]]> Here are some free tricks and tools to help get your site at the top of search engine listings and to help drive more traffic to your site.

Submission

Submit your site to the main search engines…

• Google: www.google.com/addurl
• Yahoo: search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• Microsoft Bing: www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
• Independent Web Monitoring: wwww.dmoz.org/help/submit.html

Sitemap

Create and submit a sitemap. There is a free tool to create sitemap for tour web pages at www.xml-sitemaps.com

Keep in mind that this tool creates your sitemap but you still have to submit the sitemap that is created.

Contents

Look at the text in your web site. Does it contain the words that users may use to find your site? If not, correct it.

Keep in mind that images are not searchable. So if you only have your product or service information in a graphic image, you must also use actual text with the same info.

Image Names

If you have many images of your products, naming them to reflect the actual product can help search engine placement results. Even though the image is not searchable, the image name is.

Keywords

Keywords are hidden in the pages of your site. They do not display on the screen. However many search engines, except Google, still use these keywords to product search results.

Page Ranking

For Google, page ranking is used as a high consideration for placement results. How do you improve page ranking? Get links on other sites that link to your site. The other sites must be related to what you are promoting. If you sell shoes, having a link on a site that sells cars won’t help you.

Description Meta Tag

This is hidden information in your pages, but is very crucial to getting good placement. For best results, each page should have a different description.

Title Meta Tag

Just like the Description Meta Tag, the Title Meta Tag is important. The title does show on the title bar of the browser window. Don’t be concerned about it being an “English like” statement. The main concern is that it contains keywords that represent your business. Each page should have a different title for best results.

Try it the next time you are stuck fixing a problem.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx

The great granddaddy of program monitors, Microsoft’s free Process Explorer just hit version 14. If you’ve never used Process Explorer, you’ve never seen what’s really going on under Windows’ covers. [...]]]> Windows: Process Explorer
Download: Process Explorer
Purpose: Monitor and manage running programs
Platforms: Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7; Windows Server 2008, 2003
Cost: Free

The great granddaddy of program monitors, Microsoft’s free Process Explorer just hit version 14. If you’ve never used Process Explorer, you’ve never seen what’s really going on under Windows’ covers. If you have used Process Explorer, this new version boasts a couple of new tricks and a much-needed makeover for the CPU and memory monitor.

PE shows you all running processes and subprocesses and with a click or even a mouse-over, divulging details about what’s really going on. Want to know which program has a file locked? Click Find, Handle, or DLL; type some part of the file name; and click Search. To release the file, right-click on the process and choose Kill Process Tree. Curious about the origin of all of those svchost.exe programs running on your machine? A simple mouse-over shows you what command line started the program.

See every process that’s running; its handle, process ID, and controlling DLL; the amount of CPU it’s using; and much more. PE also tells you everything about CPU cycles, memory usage, and I/O.

While there are many photo resizers floating around, there’s one I come back to again and again. Wiseval Photophant handles batch resizing, format conversions, watermarking, and renaming with just a couple of clicks.

If you want to [...]]]> Wiseval Photophant
Download: Wiseval Photophant
Purpose: Image resizer/converter
Platforms: Windows 7, Vista, XP; Windows Server 2008, 2003
Cost: Free

While there are many photo resizers floating around, there’s one I come back to again and again. Wiseval Photophant handles batch resizing, format conversions, watermarking, and renaming with just a couple of clicks.

If you want to resize or rename one photo at a time, you have many options; for example, the free version of VSO Image Resizer works well. But if you want to change a bunch of picture files, Photophant’s the way to go.

You can choose from one of the predefined sizes (800 by 600, 1,024 by 768, and many more) or set up your own custom size; convert between JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, and TIFF formats with compression techniques that you specify; rename as a group (”Four Generations_” turns into “Four Generations_1″, “Four Generations_2,” and so on); and add a watermark in the location and with the opacity that suits you.

The altered pictures go into a different folder from the original, so nothing gets munged. It’s fast, high quality, and amazingly easy to use.

File undelete has been a mainstay of the PC utility market since the days of DOS. As far as I’m concerned, there’s never been a tool that performs file undelete better than Recuva (pronounced “recover”). It’s fast, [...]]]> Windows: Recuva
Download: Recuva
Purpose: File undelete
Platforms: Windows 7, Vista, XP; Windows Server 2008, 2003
Cost: Free

File undelete has been a mainstay of the PC utility market since the days of DOS. As far as I’m concerned, there’s never been a tool that performs file undelete better than Recuva (pronounced “recover”). It’s fast, thorough, and free.

When you throw out the Windows Recycle Bin trash, the files aren’t destroyed; rather, the space they occupy is earmarked for new data. Undelete routines scan the flotsam and jetsam, then put the pieces back together. As long as you haven’t added new data to a drive, undelete (almost) always works; even if you’ve added data, there’s a good chance you can get most of the deleted stuff back.

Recuva’s repertoire goes beyond Windows. Use it to undelete data on a USB drive (see screenshot below), a camera’s memory card, or even an MP3 player. It’s certainly the most important PC utility a camera owner can have.

Microsoft’s free SyncToy originally appeared as part of the Windows XP PowerToy package. SyncToy has been improved regularly. The latest version takes advantage of Ray Ozzie’s Sync Framework. SyncToy 2.1 has been around [...]]]> Windows: SyncToy
Download: SyncToy
Purpose: File synchronization
Platforms: Windows 7, Vista, XP; Windows Server 2008, 2003; 64-bit version available
Cost: Free

Microsoft’s free SyncToy originally appeared as part of the Windows XP PowerToy package. SyncToy has been improved regularly. The latest version takes advantage of Ray Ozzie’s Sync Framework. SyncToy 2.1 has been around for almost a year, and it works amazingly well.

To use SyncToy, pick two folders. Let’s call one “Left” (for reasons manifest in the screenshot below) and the other “Right.” Here’s what you can do:

• Synchronize: New files, along with files that have changed since the last Synchronize, are copied between the Left and Right folders. If a file has been renamed or deleted in one, it’s renamed or deleted in the other.
• Echo: New and changed files are copied left to right, with renamed and deleted files on the left renamed or deleted on the right.
• Contribute: Same as Echo, but deletions on the left are not deleted on the right.

“We have been toying with a variety different ways of getting hardware onto the network,” says Steve Stasiukonis, managing partner of security services firm Secure [...]]]> One group of security professionals is using Trojan horse access points cloaked in printers and other office equipment to infiltrate clients who want their defenses tested.

“We have been toying with a variety different ways of getting hardware onto the network,” says Steve Stasiukonis, managing partner of security services firm Secure Network Technologies. “You can put your box inside a printer tray and glue it shut, and who will notice if there are one or two or three power cables coming out?”

In many cases, attackers can dress in the uniform of an IT supplier and drop off a printer for a company to test-drive, Stasiukonis says. Once the device is connected to the network, the penetration testers have a platform behind any perimeter defenses from which to attack.

Turning printers into beachheads to attack networks is not a new idea. For more than three years, researchers have shown that the controllers embedded in printers — in many cases, small computers that run Windows or Linux — can be compromised. Since those first reports, however, printer manufacturers have paid more attention to the security of their products.

A variant of the attack, presented by Errata Security at the Defcon hacking convention, uses an attack-tool-laden iPhone mailed to a target company to get inside the firm’s network defenses.

Cloaking attack hardware inside printers trades requirements: Rather than compromising the embedded system remotely, attackers will have to have some physical presence. While both attacks are fairly uncommon, attackers move to strategies that work. For that reason, information security managers should make sure they know what is on their networks, says Stasiukonis.

Prices are down and you can get a significant discount if you forgo buying a physical disc, instead downloading the software, acquiring a trial version on a new PC, or installing it from [...]]]> VERSIONS & PRICING

Prices are down and you can get a significant discount if you forgo buying a physical disc, instead downloading the software, acquiring a trial version on a new PC, or installing it from a previously purchased CD. In any of those scenarios, you’ll be able to purchase a card with a product key that you’ll use to activate the software.

The version lineup is pared down, with only three editions to choose from at retail (versus five available for Office 2007).

If you spent a fortune on Office 2007 and were hoping for a break on the new version, forget it: Microsoft is not offering upgrade discounts this time around.

• Office Home and Student. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNoteCost with disc: $149. Cost with Product Key Card: $119.
• Office Home and Business. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OutlookCost with disc: $279. Cost with Product Key Card: $199.
• Office Professional. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access. Cost with disc: $499 Cost with Product Key Card: $349.

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