WebProNews reports that cyber phishing and brand hijacking are on the rise. The sad fact here is that these cyber fraud schemes are targeting smaller companies online than what they used to. It really means that no business is immune from attack, including yours. And I see this problem only growing worse.

There are really two sides of this issue. Phishing scams pray off the naivete of e-mail users. It used to be that the phishers would send out e-mail blasts to random users. Now they send out personalized e-mails to specific users of a particular site whose brand they are attempting to hijack – for instance, Amazon or eBay. This scams the e-mail user.

The second side of the scam involves the brand hijacking. The company whose brand is being hijacked is a victim in a way that the victim of the phishing e-mail is not. The phisher cons the e-mail user into divulging account details or personal information like credit cards but the brand loses credibility when the end user (the e-mail user who was scammed) views her victimization as being perpetrated by the brand that was hijacked.

It’s a two-victim crime. So how can you protect your brand from being a victim of cyber phishing and brand hijacking?

First, you’ve got to protect your site users’ personal information with vigilance. Always use secure firewalls and encryption for personal information being transmitted between you and your users. Secondly, conduct all financial transactions inside of a secure area of your site and take every precaution necessary to ensure phishers do not get their hands on your site users’ personal information.

One of the most important things to do before you make your website live is to test it in every major browser available. Of course, there are so many browsers on the market today that you can’t test in all of them. But you can test your web pages in the most important ones. Here are five browsers you should definitely test your web pages in before you publish them:

• Internet Explorer – The most popular Web browser. But don’t just test for the latest one. You’ll need to test for IE6, IE7 and IE8.
• Mozilla FireFox – The is the most popular open source browser on the market. More people use IE, but most web developers use FireFox. It’s the second most popular browser online and you shouldn’t do anything without testing your pages in FireFox.
• Safari – This is Apple’s Web browser for the Mac. You want your pages to look good on the MacIntosh? Test them in Safari.
• Google Chrome – Not very many people are using Google Chrome, but it is Google’s Web browser. It is the fastest browser on the market so there’s a good chance it could grow in popularity. You should test your web pages in it before you publish them.
• Flock – Fewer people use Flock than use Google Chrome, but it is billed as the social media browser. Enough people use it that you shouldn’t ignore it.

If you want your web pages to look right in the most popular browsers you should test them in those browsers.

If your website allows people to add content, leave comments or fill out forms of any kind then I highly recommend that you use some kind of spam catcher to prevent spammers from introducing dangerous content to your site visitors.

It’s a sad fact that most spam is generated by bots, not humans. Therefore, if you allow a doorway for their malicious content then you are likely to be an easy target and you’ll receive more spam comments than you can ever filter through and kill on your own. That’s why you need CAPTCHA.

CAPTCHA stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.” There are a variety of these tests online, but they all have one thing in common: They are easier for humans to fill in correctly than bots.

Because CAPTCHAs are difficult for bots to fill in, they filter out the bot generated spam comments so that you don’t have to. That doesn’t mean you won’t get any spam. You’ll still get human generated spam, but there is a lot less of that than the bot generated spam. Get the CAPTCHA. You’ll thank me later.

Link structure is important for a website. It does more than just lead your site visitors from one page to another. The way you build your website does two things, primarily.

1. First, it tells your site visitors which pages are most important. If you have five pages that link from off your home page and each of them have five pages linking off of them then that tells your site visitors that those five pages linking from the home page are a higher priority than the other pages. Otherwise, you would have made them all equal.
2. Another thing that your internal links do is provide the search engines with a crawl path. Each of your pages, if linked from another page on your site, will be crawled by the search engines and indexed according to their content. By building your site structure a certain way you tell the search engine robots which pages to crawl first and which ones to crawl more often. You also give them clues as to which pages are most important for each of your keywords.

Keywords within your links are very important. You want the majority of your links pointing to a particular page on your site, no matter which page they are linking from, to use the same anchor text. Anchor text is the word for the words you use to link with. For instance, if you place the words “small business” around the a href tag, the tag used to signify a hyperlink, then that is your anchor text.

Your site’s link structure is very important for ranking purposes. It’s also very important for driving traffic to the pages you want traffic to go. Many new webmasters overlook link structure when building their website and this is a huge mistake. It’s one of the most important things to consider.

If you’ve been around the Web for very long then you might have heard the term “mashup”. What’s it mean?

A mashup, simply put, is the aggregation of content from two or more sources. It usually exists on a single web page, but it can also exist within an application such as a widget or through an RSS feed. Any Web 2.0 technology is capable of integrating into a mashup or presenting a mashup, or both.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you want to integrate your blog with content from another website in your niche owned by a partner firm and an association article directory within the same niche. If you obtain the developer APIs or XML code from the two sources you want to integrate with your blog into a mashup, you can create a brand new way to present all of the content mixed together and present it on all three of your websites or on a completely different website altogether.

So what are the benefits of doing this? The first benefit is increased traffic to the content included in the mashup. By using the content in a new way you may be able to get that content before new eyes and parlay that into increased traffic to each site integrated into the mashup. The second benefit is links. Each mashup links backs to the original content and if that mashup is presented on a separate web page from the original content then it provides back links that search engines use to determine your total search rank value.

Mashups can be fun and they’re fairly easy to develop. They certainly have their benefits.

If you hear a web designer discussing the difference between SEO and website design and you don’t hear any clues that perhaps the two are interrelated then don’t hire that web designer. I’m here to tell you that too many web designers don’t have a clue about SEO. You can tell by a quick examination of their websites.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Website design and SEO do go together like honey and bee.

For one thing, your website’s navigation is very important to both SEO and design. In terms of design, the navigation of your website ties it all together. It essentially tells your visitors how to interact with your website. But in terms of SEO, those internal links are very important. The number of links on each page, the anchor text used to link from one page to another, and even the placement of the links on the page are all very important.

But there are other considerations with web design as well. For instance, photos and videos can be used to enhance a website’s design, but if you don’t do them correctly you will miss opportunities to enhance your SEO. And there are other technologies like Javascript, Flash, and stylesheets that affect both design and SEO.

When it comes to SEO, website design is one of the most important things to consider. And when it comes to website design, no good designer will forget about SEO. They just go together.

This may sound like a chicken and egg question, but which should come first – content or design?

Different people will tell you differently. Talk to many designers and they’ll tell you design should come first. Web developers usually fall into the same category. On the other hand, content writers usually tell you to write the content first. Two against three, so I guess the writers lose. Huh?

Well, not so fast. The writers actually have a good point.

When you write content you write for a specific page. You should do your keyword research first – before content writing or design – and determine what your site will be about. But if you design your site before you write any content then you could very well set yourself up for some design issues that need to be fixed down the road. It’s best to write your content so that you know what size containers you’ll need. If you don’t, you could end up with containers that are too large or too small and trying to write content that fits into the containers. That content will likely not sell well.

The most important thing on your site is content. It should dictate to everything else, not the other way around.

If you find yourself the victim of repeated hacking into your WordPress blogging platform, try deleting your Admin account and establishing a new account with a different name. Hackers often try to guess the passwords of CMS and software account names. The Admin account name is the WordPress default and as such is the most targeted for hacker attempts. Delete it and a part of your problem goes away.

Notice that I said “a part”. Deleting the Admin account won’t solve all of your problems, but if your hacker is using the tactic that was prevalent with the 2.8.3 version of WordPress then it is likely that your Admin account will be a target of a hacker attempt.

Another tactic hackers have used, and this one is much more sneaky, is to set up a Subscriber account and use a bot to turn that account in an invisible Admin account. This allows the hacker to change your Admin settings without your knowledge. Hackers will often then insert JavaScript code into the files of your WordPress themes and it will be difficult to clean up because as Admin the hacker can do anything he wants to your files, including altering them. Here’s how to combat that:

• Delete all suspicious-looking Subscriber accounts in your Admin user area
• Delete any account using the username Admin or a variant
• Set the security settings to all of your folders, in the cPanel area of your hosting account, to Read – uncheck the Write option

It’s important, if you are deleting accounts – especially the Admin account – to move all posts made under that account name to another account holder. So set up an alternative account under a different username before you delete your Admin account. And use a password for all of your accounts that is difficult to guess. No single name passwords. Add some capital letters, special characters, and make it long.

How do you build a website that is user friendly?

First, let’s define “user friendly”. All it really means is that you’ve built a website that allows your visitors to easily find what they are looking for. Have you done that?

User-friendliness boils down to two things:

• Did you answer your users’ questions?
• Is your site structure easy to follow?

Internal site navigation is one of the most important things for a website. If your visitors do not see a logical layout of your website then they will leave and not come back. It’s important that you layout your pages in a logical fashion to make it easy to find information.

But each page must also be laid out logically. Optimize each web page around a single keyword or phrase that highlights a user question. Then try your best to answer that question.

If you can do those two things – build a website with a logical link structure and optimize each page around a user question where you answer the question on that page – then your site will be “user friendly” in the best kind of way.

There are two people who are essential for your web development team. Do without one of them and you’ll almost ensure your website fails. The first person you should employ on your website development team is a web developer. I’m talking about a developer, not a designer.

While a web designer can be a good asset, a web developer is essential. The developer will have a more in-depth understanding and knowledge of website code than a designer. The designer is all about looking pretty. Your web developer is concerned about site attractiveness, but he is also concerned with functionality. If he is any good at his job, user friendliness is always at the forefront of his mind.

While your web developer is concerned about your site visitors’ experience, he may not understand SEO all too well. That’s his weakness. And it’s also the reason you need to employ that second person on your team. The SEO.

The SEO is very important because he is going to help your web pages rank for their important keywords. Occasionally, your SEO and your web developer are the same person, but if they’re not then they need to be able to work closely together so that they develop a website that is both functional and optimized for web traffic. Ideally, your website will meet these three objectives:

1. Functional
2. Attractive
3. Well optimized

If it falls behind on one of these objectives then there is a weak link on your web development team. Where is it?