We have to enter them ALL time.  For every website, for our email, even at our bank.  We use passwords so often, that we forget just how important they are.

Until we get “hacked”.

I got that call today.  A friend’s email had been “hacked”.  Someone had taken over his email account and sent a message to everyone in his address book.  Just what was the message?  That he was stranded in London after having been mugged.  And, that he needed some cash to get home, asking all his friends to wire some money to him.

My friend found out that his email had been hacked when he started getting phone calls from his friends, checking up on him.

But, not only had this email gone out from his account.  The “hackers” had also deleted his entire address book, and forwarded all his email to a new address.  Now he was seriously messed up.

That’s when he called me.  Asking for some help.  I gave him some advice and then gave him “the talk“.

Of course, that’s the talk about the importance of strong passwords.  The problem with passwords is that we have to use them so often that we forget just how important they are.

For my friend, the problem most likely came from the fact that someone “guessed” his password to his email.  He wasn’t “hacked”, he didn’t have a virus, someone just got lucky and guessed his password.

So, just what is a strong password?

The answer is simple – long, complex, and hard to remember.

The problem, of course, is that if it is long, complex, and hard to remember – then we probably won’t remember it either.  Sort of a bummer, huh?  Well, here’s a few tips to making “good” passwords:

1. Use a combination of lowercase letters, uppercase letter, numbers, and symbols.
2. Avoid using a dictionary word.  No matter how clever you think you are being, a dictionary word will get hacked.  I promise.
3. Switch vowels for symbols or numbers.  The idea here is that any time you would want to type a letter E, use the number 3.  Instead of the letter O use the number zero.  You can also number the vowels and replace them with their corresponding numbers.  So, the letter A becomes 1, E becomes 2, I becomes 3, etc.
4. Longer is ALWAYS better.  Your password should be at least 8 characters.  But, I often suggest using a lot more than that.  Do you have a favorite song?  Why not use the first line to the chorus as your password.  Yes, the entire first line. So, if my favorite song is “Pride” by U2, my password might be “In the name of love!  What more in the name of love?”  While, that obviously has dictionary words, it would be a pretty strong password.  Use spaces, correct capitilization, and punctuation.
5. Avoid using just one password.  I know we all want to keep it simple.  But, if you use the same password for everything, then if someone happens to guess your password, then they have access to everything.  Try using several passwords.
6. Use a password manager program.  If you need help (and who doesn’t) consider using a password program.  My favorite is LAST PASS.  With Last Pass, you only remember ONE password.  You use all the tips above and create one master password that is stored on your local machine only.  No one can get it on the internet.  Then, last pass will make up a new, very complex, random password for every site you visit that requires a password.  Last Pass will do all the hard work of remembering which password goes with which site.  You only remember your master password.  The only danger here is that your computer is physically stolen.  And, while that could happen, the odds are pretty slim.  And, the thief would still have to crack your master password.  And,  if you followed my advice above, that would be  extremely difficult.

For a while now, those of us here at EH Design & Consulting have been working with Eimer Group International to develop a world-class fitness site – currently located at www.eimergroup.com/fitness.

Lately, one of the technical challenges on the Eimer Group site has been allowing users of the site to embed videos from the site onto their own site.  This is the same service that YouTube / Vimeo / Viddler / etc. all offer.

But, developing the service from scratch has some technical challenges.  Just last week, we were able to work out those challenges and develop a simple system that allows users to embed the videos.

Here’s a few features / decisions we went with:

1. use iFrames instead of Embed / Object tags.  This will make the videos more likely to work on mobile (non-flash) devices.  While we are currently using flash videos, in the near future when we make the shift to H.264 videos, the videos will continue to work on mobile devices
2. only “embed” once – we give the clients three “embed” codes (technically iFrame codes, but it’s easier to call it embed).  They have an embed for code for video 1, for video 2, and for video 3.  Once they insert these code, they never have to update them again.  When new videos are posted to the fitness sites, these iFrames are updated automatically.
3. allow office staff to enable or disable the embed feature as needed.  Finally, we wanted to make a way for the office staff to turn on or turn off this feature for individual users.

With all that said, here’s the simple result – one line of code embedded as an iFrame.  Enjoy!

If you spend any time listening to all the newest and latest buzz words on the internet, then you’ve probably heard the term RSS.  It started cropping up a lot more regularly a few years ago and made a lot of noise.  But, as with many things, interest in RSS has sort of died down.  You just don’t hear about it much anymore.  As a matter of fact, most people don’t really know what it is.

But, I’m convinced that the proper use of RSS feeds can be a great way to find new business leads!  Let me explain.

First of all, let’s explain just what RSS is and the problem that it solves.

Suppose I have interest in several different topics – such as Web Design, E-Commerce, and Social Networking.  And, I want to know all the latest news on these topics.  How would I go about getting this information?  Well, one answer would be to repeatedly visit various web sites that have news and  information about these topics – checking if anything new has been posted.  But, the problem is that this can get very, very tedious and very time consuming.  The second option is to hope that these websites have a NOTIFY ME of updates option – meaning I would get an e-mail whenever something new has been posted.  Now this might sound like a good idea, but the problem here is that most of us are regularly bombarded with e-mail.  And, the thought of getting new e-mails every time a change has happened on all the web sites is not a good thought.

The solution?  Use RSS Feeds.  RSS Feed look a lot like your inbox – but they are separate.  And, they are a GREAT way to know when you have a new item.

Here a snapshot of my current RSS Feeds:

As you can see, I have 6 current feeds I am monitoring.  And, whenever a new item is added, I see that number – the same way I see an unread message.  It’s an awesome way to keep on track of things.

For those of you using MS Outlook, here a screen shot of what RSS Feeds look like in Outlook.

For me, I use RSS Feeds to stay on top of many different issues.  But, there are two core types of RSS Feeds I find myself using all the time:

1.  TWITTER SEARCH

I always have at least one twitter search RSS feed being monitored.  For me, I go to search.twitter.com and search for something of interest – such as Web Design – then limit it to within 50 or 100 miles of my locations.  Then hit submit.  Twitter will deliver a result page for me of everyone who has mentioned “Web Design” in a tweet that is within a 50 or 100 mile radius of me.  This is obviously extremely useful.  But, what is even more useful is to save this search as an RSS Feed.  This way, any time a new tweet appears in my area, mentioning my key term, it will show up in my RSS Feed, just as a new message would show up in my inbox.  Within minutes, I’ll know that someone in the area talked about my keyword – and, now I can join in the conversation.

2.  GOOGLE ALERTS

Google Alerts are an amazing way to stay on top of terms that are of interest to you.  You simply visit google.com/alerts and set up a google alert.

For example, you can set up an alert so that you will be notified every tim eGoogle finds a new page about “web design”.  Now instead of being sent an e-mail (which just clutters up my inbox), I choose to save the alert as an RSS Feed – essentially creating a new inbox ONLY for these google alert items.

So, my RSS Feed for “Fort Wayne Web Design” looks something like this:

There’s a LOT of other creative ways to make RSS Feeds work for you.  Have questions?  Comments?  Thoughts?  Leave a comment or contact us today!

If you’ve been following my blog at all, you know that I have been working hard over the past couple of months at getting my web site to appear at the top of Google, MSN, and Yahoo for the key search term of “Fort Wayne Web Design.”

Well, my site continues to move up the rankings.  Here’s the latest results:

1. Google – I’m currently number 5 on the site.  If you search for “Fort Wayne Website Design”, I am currently number 2 and show up number 5 in the local listings.  So, the big questions – what’s causing the difference?  Why am I higher for “Fort Wayne Website Design” than for “Fort Wayne Web Design”.
2. MSN – I’m currently number 1 on the site.  I’m not totally sure what is different about MSN’s sorting process, but I seem to have a much easier time getting to number 1 on MSN than on Google.
3. Yahoo – I’m currently number 4 on Yahoo.

So, all in all this is really good news.  The “Fort Wayne Website Design” versus “Fort Wayne Web Design” thing on Google is a bit perplexing.  Also, it looks like over 200 people a month search for “Fort Wayne Web Design”, but there isn’t enough data on “Fort Wayne Website Design”.  So, obviously, it’s much less than 200.

So, has all the work paid off?  Well let’s look at traffic.  According to Google analytics, I have received almost 32% of my visitors from Google.  The number one term?  You guessed it – “Fort Wayne Web Design”.  It’s still not a ton of traffic, but it a narrow space.  I compared that to November 2008.  Back in 11/2008 I received 16% of my total traffic from Google.  And, the search terms were all over the board – just really random stuff – fort wayne chat, lotus jump, how to do maintenance, etc.  So, I’m definitely making progress.  The next question is – how many of these visitors have moved into actual clients?

That’s really my next step – start looking at what these visitors are doing on my site and working to generate a higher contact form conversion.  I’m not sure I have all that figured out yet on Google Analytics.  But, I will.

To that end, I’ve created and subscribed to an RSS feed of all my contact form submissions.  While I could just go back and look at my e-mails, a nicely formatted RSS feed, showing up in my MAIL program seems like a really easy way to be able to quantify how many people are contacting me.

Right now, my concerns / thoughts are:

1.  Is my contact us form to low on the contact us page?  Is there too much text?  Are people missing the form?

2.  Should I have more ways to contact me – perhaps a request quote form or get more information form?

Don’t worry, I’ll keep you posted with anything I learn.

I’ve just started working with LOTUSJUMP (http://www.lotusjump.com) for SEO.  Here is a screenshot of my first look at what it suggests I do for Optimization.

By the way – on the previous post – forgot to include my third SEO term:

3.  Fort Wayne eCommerce

OK, here’s the screenshot:

As you have probably read from my recent posts, I’ve been spending a lot of time recently trying to optimize my own website recently.  

I’ve been doing OK on my own, and now thought I would give a new tool a chance.

The new tool is put out by a company called LotusJump (http://www.lotusjump.com).  The trial has two basic purposes: 

1.  See if I can improve my own SEO

2.  Evaluate the value of the service provided by LotusJump

So, here’s the three words I have currently in the lotusjump SEO:

1.  Fort Wayne Web Design – which gets about 210 monthly searches

2. Custom Web Development – which gets about 2,900 monthly searches

Here are my current page results for each:

For “Fort Wayne Web Design”:

AOL: page 2 – #11
GOOGLE: page 2 – #11
LYCOS: not found
YAHOO: not found
MSN: page 1 – #8
NETSCAPE: page 2 – #11

For “Custom Web Development”:

AOL: not found 
GOOGLE: not found 
LYCOS: not found
YAHOO: not found
MSN: not found 
NETSCAPE: not found 

So, I’ve got plenty of room for the second term, also a little bit of room for improvement on my first.

I’m going to try it for 30 days and give you the result.  Consider it a running test…

I’ve been using a tool by Market Leap (marketleap.com) to help me evaluate where my site is on various search engines.

Using the search term “Fort Wayne Website Design”, here’s what I’ve found:

AOL Search: 9 (page 1)
Google Search: 9 (page 1)
Lycos Search: 1 (page 1 – obviously)
MSN Search: 2 (page 1 – again obviously)
Netscape Search: 9 (page 1)
Yahoo Search: 1 (again, still page 1)

So, I feel pretty good about the results.  I’m still wondering why I can’t seem to creep into the top results for Google Local (which appear at the top of the page when using Fort Wayne Website Design as the search term).

If you look back at “take 2″ and “take 1″ – you can see how I have done at getting google traffic.  Now that I am feeling better about my ranking on key terms, I decided it was time to look at my referring trafic again.

Here is a brief screenshot from Google Analytics:

You can see that now the traffic (albeit is pretty small) that is being referred from Google is much more “on target”.  Now I am seeing terms like “website design fort wayne”, and “eh design” and “fort wayne web design”.  These terms, obivously, are much more on track with what I want.

A couple of weird things - 

Of course, it is Google - 

When I search for “fort wayne web design” in Google – designedbyeh.com comes up at #9.  But, when I search for “web design fort wayne”, designedbyeh.com comes up at #11 (page 2!).  

The only real problem with following 2 numbers is that that moves me from page 1 to page 2 – a big deal.

Also, I still have to figure out how to appear in the top 10 in local results.  Let me know if you have any ideas.

Finally – it’s also obvious that the SEO is starting to make a difference. Here’s a chart from the wp-stats:

OK, if you have been reading my posts at all, I have finally cracked into page number 1 on Google!

My keyword / search phrase is “Fort Wayne Website Design”.  And my current results are:

Google: #7
MSN: #1
Yahoo: #1

 So, that seems like a pretty good results.  I’ll be watching my blog stats (I’m using both Google analytics and WP-Stats) to see if this means any more traffic.

Questions and issues that remain to be solved:

1.  Why don’t I appear in the top 10 LOCAL results in Google?
2.  Why do I appear #1 in Yahoo and MSN, but only #7 in Google – I need Google to be Top 5
3.  Is this a good search term?  Should I optimize for something better?  Should I “ADD” another option – i.e. try to stay #1 on the current term (“Fort Wayne Website Design”), but add another term?

So, I’ll be watching, reading data, and asking questions over the next month to see what the answers are.  Keep reading, I’ll have answers in the future.

I just read a great blog post over at Occam’s Razor – the blog by Avinash Kaushik – analytics evangelist for Google.

The post goes on about the three kinds of innovation: incremental, incremental with side effects, and transformational.  

It’s a great read.  Check it out:

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/10/redefining-innovation-incremental-side-effect-transformational.html