How secure are your Web applications? Unless you conduct application vulnerability testing throughout the lifespan of your applications, there’s no way for you to know about your web application security. That’s not good news for your security or regulatory compliance efforts.Companies make significant investments to develop high-performance Web applications so customers can do business whenever and wherever they choose. While convenient, this 24-7 access also invites criminal hackers who seek a potential windfall by exploiting those very same highly available corporate applications. The only way to succeed against Web application attacks is to build secure and sustainable app...

AOL, once considered a pioneer in internet technology, has fallen on hard times over the years, unable to devise an effective branding strategy. A failed merger with Time-Warner, a non-focus on search while Google built an empire (the AOL search engine eventually began serving up Google results on its portal site), and declining dial-up business are all contributing factors to the ongoing difficulties of AOL and its search engine.However, AOL seems to have a new branding strategy in mind for the AOL search engine, which would revamp its services and target specific niches. And while many “analysts” claim that it is already a failure before the results are in, it is too soon...

Roughly a year ago, local search engine optimization was all the rage - the new frontier in search engine marketing. For a while, it seemed that everyone was interested in the local search angle - even multi-national companies. However, for many companies selling products or services to the entire United States, or even globally, it seemed like a non-starter. Companies that counted on people looking for certain products or services that did not require close proximity to the company’s location were unaffected. As far as local search engine optimization goes, things have changed a bit since then - at least for some.Some time ago, Google introduced a “geographic box” at ...

As of this writing, there are five top Internet search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and Ask.com, and while Google and Yahoo! get a lot of the press (particularly lately), the Ask.com search engine is a rather interesting engine that deserves a closer look. This article will cover some of the highlights in its 12-year history, from its start as Ask Jeeves to its innovations, as well as the most recent developments behind the scenes.The BeginningIn 1996, “Ask Jeeves” was founded by David Warthen, who had founded EyeGames - a children’s video game company, and Garrett Gruener, a venture capitalist. At its start, the concept of the Ask.com search engine was to allow se...

Until recently, there were five major players in the search engine world: Google, MSN, AOL, Ask.com, and the Yahoo! search engine. These top Internet search engines quickly could be narrowed down to four, however; AOL uses the Google algorithm and will yield nearly identical results. Further narrowing is rapidly occurring - Ask.com seems to be stepping out of the spotlight to focus on specific markets, and in early March 2008, Microsoft began attempting to purchase the Yahoo! search engine. If there are just two top search engines with which to be concerned, what does this mean for your business and for SEO as a whole?What’s Going On with the Yahoo! Search Engine?As almost anybody w...

c|Net download.com voted as most popular PDF Splitter & Merger products on the web. Well over 32,658 downloads of this utility. Over 3,279 customers since the launch of this product.This application (utility) was designed for simple user experience where PDF files can be split into 1 or many sub-pdf files based on page range(s) or simply selecting the pages required.Further more, this utility comes designed to support the need to merge several pdf files and order them prior to the merge activity.The PDF Splitter & Merger (www.Pdfsplit.com) has been on the market since 2005 and is among the most popular utility applications for the enterprise, small business and individuals. The ut...

It’s a common question that companies who are considering hiring a search engine optimization company often face - is this something that we can do in-house? More importantly, can we do this in-house and get the same results that an expert search engine optimization company would provide?As this article will demonstrate, clearly the answer is “yes” to both questions. However, as this article will also demonstrate, getting the types of results that an expert at search engine optimization can provide will cost you - often more than outsourcing.For the purpose of this article, I’m ignoring the multitudes of companies that decide to dump the job on somebody already in...

If you are a merchant that processes credit cards, then you are probably already well aware of PCI compliance, but you may not be sure how web application security fits into the picture. You may also have heard that starting in June 2008, section 6.6 of the rules for PCI compliance will go from a “best practice” to a mandatory requirement (if not, it’s time to pay attention!), but you might not know what this means for your business. The fact is, in a perfect world you already have in place what is necessary to be compliant with not only section 6.6, but PCI rules as a whole. This is because ideally, you would have handled your web application security practices from the...

As any good search engine optimization company knows, in search, more so than any other medium, you have a very short window of opportunity in which to engage your prospect. The only way to get a solid competitive advantage in this arena is to utilize various techniques in order to make sure that you are giving a prospect exactly what it is that he or she is looking for. Otherwise, your prospect will simply click the back button and visit one of your competitors - a process that only takes seconds.One way to gain a competitive advantage, of course, is to work on the website itself. Any search engine optimization company worth its salt will also be involved in conversion testing on your ...

If the buzz is to be believed, Sam’s Club is now a search engine optimization company that is targeting the local search market aggressively. The fact is, this isn’t something new; it’s just recently come to the forefront. Sam’s Club has partnered with a company called Innuity to offer a program that is primarily targeted at small businesses looking to get noticed in the local search results. Many people are screaming that this is a “worthless” service - but I disagree. It’s not worthless, but it also isn’t close to the service a comprehensive search engine optimization company can offer. Let’s take a closer look - with the caveat that...

Have you ever been surfing the web and come upon Internet advertising that provides a direct solution for something that you’ve been researching lately? Did you think that it might be related to your computer cookies, or did you chalk it up to serendipity?The fact is, it almost certainly wasn’t a coincidence. Behavior-based Internet advertising is a relatively new and very powerful way for advertisers to get their message in front of potential buyers that they know to be qualified. The question is, how do they know that the surfer is qualified?The advertisers know this because the Internet advertising network is tracking the surfers’ online activity. With tracking, ad...

Nearly all search engines utilize spiders (which are also known by their original name, robots) to go out and scour the web looking for web pages. These search engine spiders then bring the data back to be indexed by the engine. Since roughly 1996, individual meta commands have existed that can be used on individual web pages to modify how these search engine spiders behave. The most useful of these commands are fairly universal and respected by almost all search engines. What follows is a list of some of the more popular spider commands and instances in which you might want to use them. meta name=”robots” content=”index”This meta command is one of the most common ...

In response to the proliferation of other frameworks used to create rich Internet applications such as Flex from Adobe (formerly from Macromedia) and AJAX-based frameworks, Microsoft Silverlight was recently introduced. All three of these applications, as well as the others on the market, enable a web developer to create an interface on a web page that is much more robust than traditional HTML-based pages once were. Extending the limits of HTTP/HTML, these technologies use proprietary rendering engines running within the browser, and XML as the major language with which to communicate with servers. Microsoft’s entry into the arena of rich Internet applications represents the company...

Adobe CS3 (Creative Suite 3) is a suite of products that combines traditional Adobe programs with programs that Adobe acquired and has since rebranded from Macromedia. The suite includes Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks, as well as Illustrator and Photoshop. All of the programs in Adobe CS3 that were formerly Macromedia have been streamlined and given Adobe-like functionality. The entire suite now works seamlessly as a complete family of Adobe programs for designers and developers.DreamweaverAdobe CS3 includes an upgraded version of Dreamweaver, formerly a Macromedia program. Not only is Dreamweaver now more readily compatible with other Adobe programs, but it also has the addition of th...

There are many keyphrase tools out there, but any quality search engine optimization company should know that they are in no way replacements for true market research. When one is embarking on a campaign of marketing on the Internet, it is important to select keyphrases that represent an understanding of one’s audience. In this article, we’ll discuss two crucial aspects of keyphrase research that your search engine optimization company should be taking into consideration: knowing the prospect and knowing the company.Knowing the ProspectThere are many powerful and specific keyphrases available from which a search engine optimization company can choose to bring traffic to your s...