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25 Oct 2013

Beware of Fake SEO Companies

These days the amount of unsolicited emails that are being received by Businesses advertising Website Design or Search Engine Optimisation is becoming as bad as telemarketers claiming they are with Telstra or Optus trying to con you to switch phone companies.

The easy way to pick the dodgy operators quickly is to look at their email addresses.

If the email was sent from a free email service such as Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo for example – do not reply to them – do not trust them.

Every reputable Website and SEO company in the world will only send emails from their domain name servers. For example, emails from Redback Web Solutions will always have an email address ending in redbackwebs.com.au such as info@redbackwebs.com.au.

Any internet business that hides behind a free email service smells of distrust immediately. If you reply to an email from one of these addresses, you can almost guarantee that you will end up on a whole stack of mailing lists increasing the amount of spam that you receive.

Personally I hate it. Redback Web Solutions would receive at least 5 or 6 of these emails a day. As a Company that specialises in Web Development and Search Engine Optimisation, sending spam email to Redback Web Solutions trying to sell SEO services or Website design is like trying to sell sand to the Arabs! Plus they clearly these companies or individuals haven’t done any market research – even though they claim in their emails that they have carefully viewed our site.

If you are going to re-develop your website, or start a marketing campaign – then only choose a reputable company that is actually based in Australia. Not India, not Singapore, not the US, not the Phillapines!

Here are some additional tips on identifying spam emails and and a link on how to whitelist important businesses so that their emails dont end up in your junk folder if you improve your email security.

How to whitelist Redback Web Solutions.

 

Protecting Against Spam Emails

Spammers collect email addresses and verify that each address is a valid address before they start sending unsolicited or spam messages. To reduce the possibility of receiving spam emails, there are things you can do to protect your email addresses and accounts, on your computer. The following tip will help you and your company combat the amount of spam you receive

Tips for End-users on Handling Spam Emails

Dos

  • Check the privacy policy of websites or companies before you provide any personal information when filling out web registration forms, online surveys, etc.
  • Look for options in websites or emails that allow you to unsubscribe from receiving further emails, offers or other marketing information.
  • Be careful when subscribing to free email account services, especially when filling in the account profile. Check the terms and conditions of the email service.
  • Use the anti-spam solutions offered by your ISP, or install email filters to reduce the amount of spam email you receive.
  • Whenever feasible, use separate email addresses for different purposes. For example, use one email address for public newsgroups or chat rooms, and another for personal email messages.
  • Avoid using an email address that contains simple dictionary words, or common names. Spammers can use brute-force techniques to guess valid email address at a specific domain using words from dictionaries, or combinations of common words.
  • Install and enable anti-virus software, and keep it up to date using the latest virus signatures. Enable real-time detection to scan for computer viruses, malicious code for active processes, executables and document files that are being processed.
  • Install and enable personal firewall software.
  • Apply the latest security patches/hot-fixes from product vendors to your operating system and/or the applications installed in your computer.
  • Be cautious when opening emails and email attachments, especially when receiving emails from strangers.
  • Simply delete emails from unknown senders or dubious sources because if you reply or click on any link in the email message from an unknown source, you are confirming to the unknown sender that your email address is a valid one.
  • Check the “sent” folder or outgoing mailbox of your email programme (or webmail account) to see if there are any outgoing messages that were not sent by you. If there are such messages, your computer may have been hacked and used by spammers to send emails from your account. You should disconnect from the Internet immediately and scan your computer with anti-virus or anti-spyware software (make sure the software’s signatures are up-to-date).

Don’ts

  • Do not disclose your personal information too readily, including your email addresses.
  • Do not publish your email address on public websites, contact directories, membership directories, or chat rooms.
  • Do not be caught out by the spammers’ favourite tricks, such as the use of subject headings like “Remember me?” that try to trick you into thinking you should know the sender.

Tips for Companies/Organisations on Handling Spam Emails

Companies can implement a variety of methods to reduce the amount of incoming spam, such as protecting company email addresses, using filtering software and adopting well-defined security measures for employee workstations and email servers.

  • Establish and enforce clear information security policies, and educate staff not to respond to spam emails. By responding to spam emails, employees are actually confirming their company email address as a valid address to spammers.
  • Restrict the use of office email addresses for personal messages or participation in newsgroup or chat rooms by employees.
  • Use a web-based contact form on the company website. Ensure that site visitors use the form to contact the company, instead of via a company email address that may be vulnerable to spam harvesting.
  • If you need to publish a business email address on your site, consider writing it in a way that makes harvesting by spammers more difficult. For example, write the email address as “info[at]xyz.com.hk” instead of “info@xyz.com.hk”, and consider adding a statement stating that the company does not wish to receive unsolicited emails, such as “No spam, please”.
  • Use anti-malware software and solutions at your email gateway and at individual employee workstations to filter spam and virus infected emails.
  • Install email filter software at the server level if your company has its own email server. Filtering software can screen incoming messages before they are delivered to staff.
  • If your company uses a web-based email service from an ISP, they may provide you with a number anti-spam settings. To reduce the risk of mistakenly blocking non-spam messages, also consider adding a holding folder to the filtering system, so that messages can be reviewed before deletion.
  • Adopt good security measures such as server hardening to protect your email server and web server from being hacked and used by third parties to send spam emails.

What can you do if you receive a spam email?

  • Ignore and delete spam: this is the simplest and most effective way to handle junk emails. Never reply to a spam message.
  • Report the case to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) attaching the header of the spam email. Most ISPs have service terms that prohibit subscribers from using ISP services for spamming activities. Depending on the policy of your ISP, a spammer may be warned, have their service suspended or even terminated;
  • Report any suspicious activity to your Internet Service Provider. If the spam emails contain suspected fraudulent or illegal information pretending to be sent from an identifiable organisation such as a bank, you may also complain to the related organisation.
  • Consider discarding or shutting down your current email address and creating a new one if your email account becomes clogged with spam messages.

Beware of Email Scam

In cases of email scam, the fraudsters hacked into the victim’s email account, checked the victim’s business correspondence with business partners. They sent an email to the victim using the same or similar email account of his business partner and claimed that the payment bank account had been changed who further requested the victim to deposit the payment for goods into the fraudster’s designated bank account.

  • If you receive any suspicious emails, you should confirm the identity of the purported business partners or the authenticity of the requests by means of telephone before remittance so as to prevent from being deceived.
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24 Oct 2013

Why is Social Media Optimisation Essential to Your Success? [Infographic]

Social media optimisation is a marketing strategy that’s simply too important to ignore. Social networks are growing steadily and they are providing small businesses an opportunity to reach out to a bigger audience. In today’s online world, you would need to be thriving socially if you want your business to get more customers and crush your competition. Not convinced with the power of social media? read more

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24 Oct 2013

Anatomy of a Social Buyer: Use Social Media Optimisation to Understand Your Customer & Get Sales

Social media optimisation is a known business necessity. Owners understand that for their venture to withstand the competition and survive in the current economic environment, they need to be on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. They need to update fan pages, upload photos, and interact with their audience. After all, 67% of all Internet users use social networks, according to Pew Internet research. Indeed no online marketing strategy is ever complete without it. But at the end of the day, its sales—not likes, retweets, or repins—that keep the business going. So the question now is…

“Do businesses actually get sales from social media?”
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10 Oct 2013

Responsive Web Design: Prevent Potential Sales Loss with a Mobile Friendly Website

Many business owners today tend to ignore the importance of having a mobile friendly or “responsive” website. Without realizing it, they may be losing prospective leads and sales because their website is not designed to load properly on mobile devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Here’s why you should not be one of them, and how you can make your website responsive:

Watch the video:


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10 Oct 2013
09 Oct 2013

Responsive Web Design: How Businesses Risk Losing Customers by Ignoring Google’s Recommended Mobile Friendly Configuration

Mobile Internet users are expected to outnumber desktop users by next year. It is therefore no surprise that Google is paying close attention to this development. And so should you. Because if your website is not yet “mobile responsive,” you may be turning away prospects who browse your web pages via smartphones, tablets, or laptops. And frankly, mobile users are prospects you wouldn’t want to lose.
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09 Oct 2013

Is Your SEO Service Provider Compliant with the Dreaded Google Penguin & Panda Updates?

Most people think of cute animals when they hear the words “Penguin” and “Panda” but for many search engine optimization service providers, these two words are to be feared. Google’s Penguin and Panda are algorithm updates that play separate roles in improving the overall experience of online users.

While algorithm updates should be primarily a concern for companies providing online marketing services, business owners who use SEO services should also know about them. That’s because if your SEO service provider happens to violate Google’s SEO guidelines, these algorithm changes will drastically affect your website’s ranking and your business will suffer the consequences. So before it’s too late, read our guide on the dreaded Google Penguin and Panda updates and what they mean to your business.

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08 Oct 2013

Go for Mobile Responsive Web Design

Getting More Leads and Sales, Not Just Fancy Cosmetic Redesign

Implementing responsive web design means opening up your online storefront to mobile visitors, effectively increasing your chances of getting more leads and sales through your site. While it may come as a mere fancy redesign to some business owners, you should realise that this change is geared toward marketing more than cosmetics. Making the decision to have a responsive site means giving your business more opportunities to grow, especially for the long haul. read more

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08 Oct 2013

SEO Goes Natural & Social with High Quality Content

How to Comply with Google Panda and Penguin Updates

Doing effective SEO has evolved into a more “natural” and “social” process. Algorithm updates, particularly Google’s Penguin and Panda, are continuously changing the course of conducting search engine optimization. Penguin targets bad links while Panda goes after poor content. Google, through their algorithm updates, has reiterated that website owners and search engine optimization practitioners must create a better experience for users. And that trying to manipulate rankings through keyword over optimization, link schemes, and black hat methodologies will only harm your website — and your business.
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24 Sep 2013

Keyword Rich Articles for SEO

The struggle between easy to read grammatically correct articles and quality keyword seeding should not exist at all.

Search Engine Optimisation ArticlesSearch engines such as Google are able to figure out the relevance of the content on your website to a user’s search query. Therefore, an article filled with a jumble of keywords for the sake of listing keywords, will have lesser relevance than a well-written article containing fewer keywords, and will rank lower.

Website owners who need SEO articles regularly require grammatically correct keyword seeded articles from SEO writers like Brisbane SEO Company Redback Web Solutions. The more we read and write about how the major search engines function, and how they list relevance with a high search result ranking, the more we strive to place quality content writing above keyword saturation.

By having relevant articles on your website outlining your products, ideas or services, you get more chances you have of directing the right kind of surfer traffic to your website. Of course, this will mean a decrease in bulky less relevant traffic, however, as a search engine user, it is very annoying to see search results that have no connection to what I need to find.

Admittedly, many web masters incorrectly prefer a stack of bulk traffic over highly relevant web traffic. The more the merrier they say – so to speak. In our experience, surfing the web without any purpose becomes tedious, and it gets even more tedious as your experience search engines grow. Nowadays, I specifically surf the web with a purpose in mind – knowing exactly the sort of information or product I am looking for, and try to find it quickly on page 1 or the search results.

It always helps to find what I need faster if the descriptive content of the website is relevant to my search. Having a nicely composed descriptive article about the idea or object I am seeking will make the website more useful to me. If the website has been informative and usable, I will more than likely return there again to see if there is something else that I need.

In having very relevant and descriptive articles, your website satisfies two totally different necessities. The most important necessity for you would be a high ranking website in the search results. The lesser, and often sometimes unnoticed necessity, is that of having satisfied your customer.

The more relevant that your content is, the more chances you have of being able to direct good quality traffic (your target market) to your website. The percentage of people who actually click through and buy your product will definitely increase as opposed to a decrease in just passing through or wrong turn traffic. In counterpoint, the more relevant that your traffic becomes, the higher your sales figures go up.

Targeting traffic that isn’t really interested in your website serves very little if any purpose at all. I definitely don’t remember the name of a website that has nothing of what I need. Memory retention of the name of a website by people is very much minimal unless it has served the purpose the visitor wanted. Furthermore, to be redirected to an irrelevant website by a search engine is very annoying. Websites that bombard their content with nothing but keywords are now getting penalised and banned by search engines so they avoid sending people to the wrong place.

How would you feel if directory assistance gave you the wrong telephone number? Naturally, the supervisor at directory assistance will reprimand the operator who gave the wrong number. It’s the same thing with search engines and websites. Search engines are trying to provide Internet surfers with good quality service in order to gain more traffic. The more traffic they have, the more expensive their advertising space can become. When a webmaster abuses their system so that  traffic is directed to his website, the search engines react in a negative way towards this site.

For expert content creation and website design that the search engines love – have a consultation with Redback Web Solutions today about creating you a Mobile Responsive Website with Great Content.

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