Multiple Language Sites Done Right

Over the past year the Foremost Media team has completed over a half dozen multi language website development projects. At the start of each of these projects one of the most common questions we receive is "Should we build the site with all the languages on the same domain or you use local domains for each language (example.de, example.it,example.nl, etc.)?"

Google's Matt Cutts answers how webmasters should handle local content of a website.

One message that we got loud and clear form this video is that if your thinking about going the easy route and using an auto-translation tool to generate your translation websites Google might consider that spam.

According to Matt (Google) when ever possible, it's best to put your translated content on separate international domains. Doing this sends a clear message to the search engines about what language/country your website is targeted at.

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QR Codes Have Come Of Age

So how is your company using QR Codes?  Do you know what a QR Code is?  I recently read an article about how over half of the connections made to the internet on any given day in 2012 will be on a mobile device.  We have been using QR Codes in our written proposals for the last few months.  Below is an example of one of the little graphics we use in our presentations:

The time has come to take another look at these unique codes.  Your going to be seeing a lot of these guys!

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SEO Basics Episode 1 Keword Research | Foremost Media

SEO Basics Episode 1 Key Word Research | Foremost Media


Tune in and watch the Foremost Media team as we break down the steps involved in getting your site to rank well on the search engines. In this episode we discuss keyword research. Key word research is one of the first steps in the search engine optimization process and is often overlooked by webmasters. Jon Ballard breaks down some of the keyword basics and provides links to several tools used by our professional Search Engine Marketers to do Keyword Research.

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Have a Google Adwords campaign? Beware of "Invalid Clicks" or "Click Fraud"

Recently we had a client who we run a large Adwords campaign for that asked us, "Why are all of these credits to my account appearing on my statement for Google Adwords as "Invalid Clicks"? An "Invalid Click" is defined by Google as:

"Invalid click activity consists of any clicks or impressions that may artificially inflate an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings, and for which we decide not to charge the advertiser. This includes, but is not limited to, clicks or impressions generated by a publisher clicking on his own ads, a publisher encouraging clicks on his ads, automated clicking tools or traffic sources, robots, or other deceptive software"

So since we clearly aren't going through and clicking on our own ads to run our cost up, what does this mean? Clearly there are certainly going to be instances that people click the ads and accidentally double click them or maybe they click the ad and then bookmark your page, meaning the cookie that Google puts into their browser on that page turns into a "click" each time they go back to your page.

But then there's the darker side of it all. Our client sat down with us and went over his Adwords invoice and there were typical "invalid click" credits to his account for $.10-.60 at a time.  These are obviously from the innocent double clicks or something of that nature. Then we spotted a few credits that seemed extremely suspicious to us. Two credits between $100-150; a considerable amount of money especially considering daily budgets are rarely set any higher than $50-100/day.

This meant that someone, more than likely a competitor, was purposely going and clicking our clients ads hundreds even thousands of times in order to reach their daily budget, thus shutting down the ads for the day.  They could have been doing so in many ways: paying someone to sit there and click the ads (Yes, there are companies out there that pay people to do this), sitting there themselves and doing it, or paying for a bot to go through and automatically click the ads until they don't appear anymore.

The client was very upset by this (and rightfully so) and wanted to know what action he could take to figure out who it was and take further action if necessary. Google offers little help on this end due to privacy laws in finding out who or what (bots) was causing the invalid clicks. Basically we were left with the following answer from Google (This is only a synopsis of what Google sent us):

"WHO IS CLICKING ON YOUR ADS : We are not able to release any information on the users that are clicking on your ads. However, if you have access to your site's web logs, they will often contain information on the IP addresses of the users that are clicking on your ads. You can obtain this information from your webmaster. 

HOW GOOGLE DEALS WITH INVALID CLICKS : The security of AdWords advertisers is a top priority for Google. Please be assured that we will continue to monitor all clicks on your ads to prevent abuse. For more information about the steps we take to combat invalid click activity, please visithttp://www.google.com/adwords/adtrafficquality/overview..html"

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How secure are your passwords?

Hackers are getting more sophisticated all the time.   Let's look at a few common passwords and the maximum time it would take a hacker to figure out each password using a simple key search attack:

Passwords using just numbers (0123456789):

• 2-4 number passwords etc: Less then 1 Second
• 5-6 number passwords:  About 10 seconds
• 7 number passwords: 17 Minutes 

Passwords using the standard alphabet all lower case or all upper case (abcdefghijklmnopqurstuvwxyz):

• 3 letter passwords: Less then 2 Seconds
• 4 letter passwords:  Less then 46 Seconds
• 5 letter passwords: 20 Minutes
• 6 letter passwords: 8.5 Hours
• 7 letter passwords: 9 days

Passwords using a combination of numbers and letters all upper case and all lower case or all upper case ( 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqurstuvwxyz):

• 3 character passwords or less: 4 Seconds or less
• 5 character passwords: 1.5 Hours

 Passwords using letters and numbers with mixed upper and lower case combinations:

• 4 characters: 24.5 Minutes
• 5 characters: 1 Day
• 7 characters: 11 Years

Below is a list of some of the most common passwords used on the internet:

• 123456
• 12345
• pass
• iloveyou
• password
• abc123 

By avoiding common passwords and using a combination of letters and numbers in both upper and lower case you can greatly reduce your risk of getting hacked.  Throw in a unusual character like a $ or ! and your odds are even less of being hacked.  Most experts recommend a minimum of 7 characters as well.

Learn more about password strength here

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