From your perspective, this all sounds pretty normal and from all the research you have done on prospective website designers and your new website, this seems like the right question to get you to the top of Google. It’s all about keywords right??

Well as far as on-page SEO (search engine optimisation) is concerned, primarily yes.

But, there is a lot more to it than just the keywords.

• have you go the right keywords?
• do you know what the keywords are used for?
• were any alternate keywords suggested?
• was any of this explained, or where you just asked for a list of words?

I hear too many shocking stories from new clients, friends and acquaintances regarding the development of their new business website and the fees they have been charged by their web designer for SEO work as an optional extra, over and above the cost of their new site. Good SEO work is going to cost extra, but the shocking part of this regular horror story is the fact that the extra work done, in most cases, cannot be classified as SEO, well not in 2012, nor 2011 or even 2010 for that matter. Some of the methods we have seen of being used haven’t helped with search engine rankings in years.

Here are some common SEO requests, from horror stories we have heard, that should make you question whether you are going to get what you paid for:

• Please supply us a couple of keywords for your website.
• Please supply a description for your website.
• We need a list of keywords for the META Keywords on each page of your site.
• Or even worse, not even making any of the above requests.
• Or the biggest no-no of them all, let’s get the design of your site done and worry about the SEO once it is launched.

Although some of these questions are actually valid, in their current format they are nowhere near comprehensive enough, nor are they really valid without explanation or further investigation and follow-up reporting. The biggest mistake made is the use of keywords that are either highly competitive or don’t actually receive any traffic in the popular search engines.

What questions should you be getting asked, regarding your website SEO?

To get the ball rolling and get your SEO off to a good start your SEO consultant or web designer needs:

• a good understanding of your target market, their demographic and their geographic location
• to begin SEO planning, research and implementation during the conceptual stage of your site mapping / structure design
• to request a list of valid search phrases / keywords that your target market would use to look for your business, products or services within search engines such as Google and Bing
• to investigate these keywords and report on which keywords are actually used in the popular search engines, which of these keywords will generate targeted traffic to your website and to isolate the ones that are too competitive.
• to work with you on the structure of the website, ensuring that the site structure is customised to target each page with relevant keywords and without over optimisation.

This is only the start of the on-page SEO journey for your new website. After analysing your target market, keywords, competitors and site structure, this information needs to be implemented into your new site. Post site launch, tools and services need to be configured to monitor the effectiveness of your keywords, the traffic to your website, your search engine rankings for your keywords, and the effectiveness of your site’s design and content in regards to visitor interaction and conversions.

This may sound like quite a task, but without the implementation of a good SEO plan for your new website, your website will just be another one of those stagnant, unvisited sites on the net. Websites are not cheap, so for such a large business investment, you cannot afford to ignore the need for a solid SEO and internet marketing plan.

To receive FREE “SEO Checklists for Your New Website” please enter your details below

Or contact the AUS-IP Services Internet Marketing team for a professionally customised internet marketing and SEO plan for your site.

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The initial fan page layout included a 125px by 125px profile picture inset, inside the cover photo. With some fancy Photoshop work, it was possible to include the profile picture into the cover photo, giving an eye catching custom graphic to catch the attention of any Facebook fan. Not even a month after the migration to the timeline layout, Facebook modified the profile picture size with little to no notice, causing many custom layouts to be affected. The new profile picture size was enlarged to 160px by 160px.

Although this size change made the profile picture on fan pages the same size as that on private profiles, the layout is still slightly different. We have put together two FREE Photoshop templates for creating customized cover & profile image layouts for both fan pages and personal profiles.

Click on the links below, to download you FREE Facebook Fan Page Layout Template and we would be appreciative of a like on our Facebook Page

Download: Facebook Personal Page Template

Download: Facebook Fan Page Template

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After much reading and research we have discovered the quickest and easiest way to request and install a SSL Certificate form an Enterprise CA. Using the certreq.exe command from the command line of Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2, we are able to generate the SSL certificate request and output it as a “CSR” file, which you can then upload to your certificate authorities website, or just copy and paste the contents. Following that, once we have received our new certificate, we can accept and import the new certificate ready to select within the Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration. And believe it or not, this will take us no more than 5 minutes, excluding the time it takes your CA to process your certificate request.

Step 1: Create a request.inf file

Open your favourite text editor and enter in the code displayed below. Edit the subject line to suit your certificate requirements. Pay particular attention to the following attributes in the “Subject” line:

• CN – this should be the FQDN (fully qualified domain name) for your certificate. This is usually the public DNS name for your server, but in some cases it may just be the local intranet DNS name, depending on your network design and configuration
• OU – this is your Organizational unit name, normally being your company name
• C – this is your Country Code for the certificate. Click here for the list of SSL Certificate Request Country Codes

Your certificate authority may require some other key attributes within the certificate request, so it is best to check into their request requirements.

Contents to include in your request.inf file:

;—————– request.inf —————–

[Version]
Signature=”$Windows NT$”

[NewRequest]
;Change to your,country code, company name and common name
Subject = “C=US, O=Example Co, CN=something.example.com”

KeySpec = 1
KeyLength = 2048
Exportable = TRUE
MachineKeySet = TRUE
SMIME = False
PrivateKeyArchive = FALSE
UserProtected = FALSE
UseExistingKeySet = FALSE
ProviderName = “Microsoft RSA SChannel Cryptographic Provider”
ProviderType = 12
RequestType = PKCS10
KeyUsage = 0xa0

[EnhancedKeyUsageExtension]
OID=1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.1 ; this is for Server Authentication / Token Signing
;———————————————–

This request.inf file meets Comodo’s certificate request requirements and it should be suitable for most certificate authorities, but once again it would be best to check their individual requirements.

Once you have this code entered into your text editor and you have updated all the relevant information to suit your requirements, save the file into a convenient location that can be accessed easily from the Windows Command Prompt. Save the file as “request.inf”. For this example we will be saving the file in the root of our servers C: (ie: c:\request.inf)

Step 2: Generate the Certificate Request

Now we are onto the quick and easy stuff. Open up your command prompt either from the start menu or by running the command “cmd”. At the C prompt, run the following command

certreq –new request.inf request.csr

This will generate a certificate request in PKCS10 format and save it into the root of our C drive as “request.csr”. From here you need to request your SSL certificate from your CA using either this generated file or its encrypted contents.

Step 3: Installing the Certificate

Once you have received your certificate from your CA, save the CER file into the root folder of your C drive. Take note of the certificates name, as you will need it for the following command. Once again, open the Windows command prompt and run the following command, where something_example_com.cer is replaced with the filename of your newly received certificate.

certreq –accept something_example_com.cer

This will install the certificate into the Windows Certificate Store, where it is accessible from your server’s Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration.

Step 4: Configuring Remote Desktop Services with your new SSL Certificate

Now let’s put our new SSL certificate to use.

• Open “Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration” from “Administrative Tools”
• Double click the relevant RDP connection in the connections section as shown below
• On the General tab, you will see the Security information and options, along with a “Select” button to allow selection of your SSL certificate. Click “Select”
• Now select the newly imported SSL certificate and click “OK”
• Click “OK” once more to close and accept the changes in the TCP Connection Properties window

Congratulations, your certificate is installed and live. The changes take effect immediately, except for currently active RDP sessions. Users need to log out of their session and reconnect to begin utilising the new certificate.

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In normal circumstances such a solution would require the installation and configuration of an onsite terminal server with a starting price no less than $10,000. Such a solution would then be dependent on the head office internet connection for both continual access and speed. In most of these deployments this was not an option as it was absolutely cost prohibitive. In the other cases where budgets and cash flow would allow for internal infrastructure upgrades, it was decided that a cloud solution was more cost effective, more reliable, more secure and a much more viable option.

These implementations successfully facilitated two very popular accounting systems with little to no usage limitations compared to that of a local installation. MYOB’s AccountRight Premier and Winward Software’s System 5 were two of the most recent deployments.

The deployments of MYOB AccountRight Premier facilitated all MYOB reporting functions with conduits to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Not to mention the ability to email reports, invoices, statements and orders etc. without the dreaded email security prompts that majority of MYOB users are faced with.

Our recent deployment of System 5 required the use of the Pervasive SQL v11 as backend database. Although normally a relatively resource intensive database engine, this was not a problem for the AUS-IP SecurApps platform. This system is currently facilitating up to 10 concurrent users in multiple geographic locations. With each independent site requiring the ability to print, point of sale receipts and shipping labels to local receipt and label printers. All of these solutions are leveraging AUS-IP’s powerful SecurVault data backup service for data security and disaster recovery.

Although only two of many popular accounting systems have been outlined above, the SecurApps platform has the ability to facilitate many other popular accounting systems including Quickbooks. Contact AUS-IP’s friendly staff for assistance with reducing your IT costs and moving your infrastructure to the cloud.

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I received an urgent telephone call from a client today. She had inadvertently deleted a folder within her outlook PST file. The folder in question was an extremely important folder with all correspondence associated with a specific email account. This email account is the principal account for an additional company this particular client takes care of. This resulted in almost all the email associated with this business being totally lost, as the folder was also accidentally removed from the deleted items folder too.

Pursuing our preliminary analysis, we found that the email data backup process has not been executed in quite some time. The backup operation was taking a long time to complete, so the client hadn’t actually ran the process for many months. Approximately 8Gb of email data in 2 PST files, together with numerous other folders of user data.

Numerous retrieval attempts were carried out using multiple methods of recovery over a period of several hours. Yet none of the lost email was able to be reclaimed. This was quite a pricey exercise for the client. This particular client lost one or two hours out of her hectic schedule attempting to find the data herself as well as a further couple of hours loss in productivity while our staff attempted to recover the data while using her laptop. After this, more data recovery attempts were carried out offsite in order that the client could get back onto their system and get back to work. All efforts at recovering this data failed. Pursuing the recovery process the client will get a bill for over $300 for the attempted retrieval of the unintentionally deleted email folder.

Had this client decided, some months before to employ a Hosted Microsoft Exchange service or an online data backup service, this entire scenario could have been resolved with a basic data restoration. Both of these solutions would have protected the valuable email data as a result of automated backups of the data. The money spent on the attempted recovery of the data could have paid for almost an entire year’s subscription to either an online backup service or a hosted Microsoft Exchange service. Not to mention the lost productivity and the fact that this business critical data was lost forever.

It is extremely simple and cost effective to use cloud computing services, such as online backup services and hosted Microsoft Exchange services. Cloud services such as these, can save you time and money and will also value add your existing IT systems without the need for additional hardware or software purchases.

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The variety of functionality advancements in Exchange 2010 were further refined with the release of service pack 1, which also considerably enhanced the products offerings to managed exchange providers and end users. Microsoft’s development priorities have evolved in recent times and are aligning with the requirements of cloud providers offering multi-tenant environments designed for ASP’s. Below are a number of the key enhancements included in Exchange 2010 for hosting providers and clients, when compared with what was originally offered through hosting providers having an Exchange 2007 backend.

More advanced web access – introduced into Exchange 2010 has been a significant advancement in the Outlook Web Access of Exchange 2007. The Outlook Web App included in Exchange 2010 has mimicked the look and experience of Outlook 2010. Outlook Web App features a broader selection of user interface options, favourites inside the navigation pane and improved search capabilities. These are just a few of the key improvements, not forgetting the range of minor feature improvements. The Outlook Web App looks and drives much like Outlook 2010 together with right click functionality, shortcut key inclusions and much needed performance improvements. These developments enhance the consumer experience as web access is no longer, actually web access, it is as Microsoft have named it an “Outlook Web App”.

Easier Client Setup – Configuration of client software to gain access to Exchange 2010 is easier than ever, not too dissimilar to that of Exchange 2007. Although support for Outlook 2003 has been eradicated through the omission of Public Folders, the customer deployment and setup of Outlook 2007 – 2010 and Outlook 2011 for Mac is simple. Client software is configured utilizing the the rather transparent Auto-discover service, in which the consumer only requires their email address, name and password to setup access to their hosted exchange 2010 account. Clients can now have a mobile device, desktop or laptop configured with their Exchange 2010 managed mailbox within a few minutes.

Simple online account management – the installation of Exchange 2010 SP1 offered the Outlook Web App Administration Console, a web console for client management of their managed exchange account. The Outlook Web App Administration Console enables client account administrators to create and manage user mailboxes, distribution lists, external contacts, resource mailboxes. As well as some other account management features such as resetting user passwords, managing roles and auditing and finally mail rules, journaling and delivery reports. The suite of tools provided in the Outlook Web App Console, provides the managed exchange client greater control over their own account using a simple online web console, helping reduce the necessity for hosting vendors to deal with simple tasks for the client.

More resilient disaster recovery architecture -Exchange 2010 mailbox data is now far more resilient with the introduction of Database Availability Groups. DAG’s have improved the clustering and disaster recovery architecture of Exchange, enabling hosted exchange administrators with a more expansive range of methods to plan for network environment disasters as well as periods of extreme load. These improvements give hosted exchange customers piece of mind that their information, being located online, is more secure with multiple levels of disaster recovery and the service can be offered in a more dependable way with site resilience and high-availability by means of server clustering.

While comparing Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2007 you can realize that Exchange 2010 comes with a much better solution for the managed environment. With Microsoft’s direct attention to multi-tenant / hosting environment benefits and features for not only the ASP, but principally for the client including easier client setup, less complicated plus much more functional web access, online account management and higher availability, an Exchange 2010 hosting environment should really be your choice as a company searching for a managed exchange vendor.

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Imagine, every day each of your staff members or work colleagues sits down at their PC to see 30, 40 or even more new emails in their inbox. After 15 to 30 minutes or even more has passed and they have finally sorted through all the emails to discovery they only have 4 or 5 legitimate new emails.

Now think about roaming users with access to their email on mobile phones, PDA’s, iPads and laptops. All those new spam emails have been distributed to multiple devices per user. This is also only considering the emails that are received through the night. SPAM email is delivered 24×7, so you and your staff have to periodically deal with this painful email throughout the day too.

That is a whole lot of daily productivity loss, which turns the daily chore of dealing with SPAM from a nuisance to a very costly exercise. There are many ways of preventing spam email, but there aren’t many solutions that actually work.

Desktop software or Endpoint solutions – cannot deal with spam mail until it has been received by your email client software. These solutions normally only quarantine the mail into a spam folder where the end user is still required to manually delete the quarantined mail. Although endpoint spam software is not all that expensive (per seat), it can equate to an expensive solution when licensing is purchased for each desktop PC and laptop in the organisation. This solution does not eliminate the load on your network and also adds additional load on the desktop PC or Laptop. Desktop solutions don’t really save any end user time either, as your staff still have to manually deal with the quarantined emails.

Onsite server solutions – are marginally better than endpoint solutions as they do stop the spam emails from reaching the end users. These solutions require you to have your own onsite mail server, such as Microsoft Exchange, so for a lot of smaller organisations an onsite server solution is not applicable. This solution, being onsite, does not eliminate excess internet and network load due to the spam traffic. It also adds additional load and overhead to your mail server. An onsite server solution also requires additional IT support and maintenance to keep the software up to date, functioning and protecting against the most current email threats.

Onsite gateway appliances – are the pick of the bunch, when it comes to your own onsite solution, although these appliances are very expensive and cost prohibitive for most organisations. They also require your business to have internal mail servers and infrastructure. Like the above solutions, all the spam email is processed onsite, so no network load is eliminated from your network or internet connection. This solution, although it eliminates the overhead from your mail servers, it still requires quite a lot of upkeep and maintenance from IT support staff.

Managed Email Content Filtering Services – are the ideal solution if you want to stop SPAM before it reaches your network and users. A managed email content filtering service is scalable from one user to hundreds or even thousands of users per organisation unlike all the previously mentioned solutions. Being a managed service the content filtering gateway is kept up to date, maintained and you are ensured of the best spam and email security protection at no additional support cost to your business. Being a hosted offsite solution there is no load on your internal IT infrastructure at all, as all the email processing is taken care of on your managed service provider’s datacentre infrastructure.

Managed email content filtering services such as AUS-IP’s SecurMail are also provided at no upfront hardware, software or infrastructure cost. These services are also charged at a monthly rate and you are only charged for the amount of users or mailboxes utilising the service, making a service such as SecurMail a very cost effective solution. Services such as this, offer many more fully inclusive additional features over and above just SPAM protection and prevention.

Such email content filtering features include:

• anti-virus and malware protection
• file attachment type filtering
• image analysis for pornographic material
• email archiving
• email encryption
• inbound and outbound email filtering
• disclaimer stamping
• SMS notifications
• and the list goes on

The selection of an anti-spam solution for your business should be pretty straight forward. SPAM is not only a time waster it is expensive and putting up with the influx of such email is just costing your organisation more and more daily. Don’t spend a fortune on implementing your own infrastructure. Use a Managed Email Content Filtering System and stop SPAM in its tracks.

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Blackberry Enterprise software is quite a resource hungry software suite and can be very tricky to install. Once your Blackberry device is connected to Microsoft Exchange via Blackberry Enterprise it is a very powerful collaboration tool. With instant access to email, contacts, calendar and tasks you can keep up to date with your busy work schedule.

Many Blackberry users don’t have a Microsoft Exchange server and therefore cannot utilise these wonderful features. But, in today’s world of cloud computing services there is a cost effective way to access all the business focused features of your Blackberry Device. Hosted Microsoft Exchange services are very affordable and now with AUS-IP’s SecurXchange supporting Blackberry devices, you can not only benefit from all the features of Microsoft Exchange for a small monthly fee, you can also integrate your Blackberry device using SecurXchange‘s hosted Blackberry Enterprise service.

Setting up your Blackberry device when using a hosted Exchange environment like SecurXchange is quick and simple. Quickly and easily setup your Hosted Exchange 2010 account, easily import all your existing email data into Outlook and activate your Blackberry device using the activation email sent to you. It couldn’t be simpler. You could have your Blackberry handheld synchronised with all your email data within minutes.

If you were to setup your Blackberry device with all these features using your own IT equipment and support staff, it would take days maybe even weeks to purchase, install and configure your exchange server. After that installing, configuring and activating your Blackberry Enterprise software would take, at best, another few hours. The whole process has now cost you at least $10,000 and you have a whole lot more hardware and software that your business has to pay to service and maintain.

There are so many benefits of using your Blackberry device to its fullest, yet in most cases it is cost prohibitive. Yet utilising a hosted Microsoft Exchange service with hosted Blackberry Enterprise services, gives you all the benefits without the cost and headache of setting up your own IT infrastructure.

It should be a pretty simple decision.

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Google Places listings include:

• Business address/s
• Telephone contact details
• Website URL listing
• Email address listing
• Google Map inclusion
• Company Description
• Payment Types,
• Business Categories

Not to mention, a section for other information that can be used for any sort of additional business information. This is quite a comprehensive list of inclusions for a FREE listing, especially when compared to Yellow Pages, who charge for anything more than a company name, address and phone number.

You Google Places listing is automatically placed on a Google Map and is searchable by your selected listing category. With Google Maps becoming a force in street directories, in-car navigation systems and mobile phone mapping systems, your free listing is bound to market your business name, services and location to the general public.

Best of all, it is not compulsory to have a website when creating a listing in the Google Places directory. This is a massive bonus for those smaller companies who don’t see any benefit in having a web presence, yet they want to be found in the most popular business directories.

The repercussions of the free Google Places business directory will be huge, not only will small businesses get more exposure, the expensive directory services such as Yellow Pages will surely have to re-assess their pricing structures and offer more cost effective listings for small businesses. The world of online advertising is quickly overwhelming print advertising and corporations like Google are definitely ruffling the feathers of traditional print advertising directories.

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AUS-IP Services have taken the leap into managed security solutions and spent a lot of time on software research and development, investigating Anti-Virus products that fit the scope of managed cloud services. SecurAV is the end result of AUS-IP’s extensive product development and testing for a comprehensive endpoint security solution.

The main criteria for a managed service is:

• secure multi-tenancy
• a simple user management console
• simple user deployment
• centralised software updates
• centralised client policies and configuration
• comprehensive reporting capabilities
• lower Total Cost of Ownership for the end user

Taking into consideration the above criteria and after rigorous software testing, AUS-IP have proudly partnered with Symantec, to offer a revolutionary Cloud Managed Anti-Virus and Security Solution for business computing environments. The new service, named SecurAV, offers protection for Desktops, Laptops, Servers and Virtualised environments.

The SecurAV service, backed by Symantec Endpoint Security Solutions, not only supports the latest operating systems, it also supports the latest in server technologies and comprehensively protects against endpoint security threats.

SecurAV reduces IT security management costs and simplifies the protection of endpoints with centralised policy management, centralised update deployment, comprehensive security reporting, customisable policies, security risk notifications and security performance notifications.

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