SEO Blog

Get Off Facebook, Now! - September 30th, 2007

More and more companies are blocking access to Facebook and other social networking sites via their networks. According to a ScanSafe report on web security the amount of business that are blocking social networking sites has risen by 17% over the last 12months.

So why? Well apart from staff spending too much time on these sites when they should be working. Companies are recognising security threats that come with the social networking phenomenon. Malware issues are bound to arrive within environments with large amounts of network users as well as attracting malicious attacks from hackers using social networks to obtain IP addresses and personal information.

On the flip side I have heard of incidents with friends of mine who have had their social network profiles scrutinised as part of a recruitment process. Other uses include business to business networking in some senses, although I haven`t come across this as of yet.

From my point of view it all comes down to having a clear and precise network and Internet usage policy that is communicated to staff in a manner that they understand. If this is in place then security issues can be decreased, bandwidth can be saved and it can take the hassle away from monitoring things that could otherwise be avoided.

Martin
Natural SEO Project Manager

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Posted in Search Engine Optimisation|1 Comment »

Useful .htaccess Rules - September 30th, 2007

Here are a list of useful .htaccess rules that can be used with your web development.

Create a custom Error Message

Add the following line of code to your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/error-page.html

This enables you to create a customised 404 error page, this is the page that appears if browsers go to a page on your site that no longer exists.

The next .htaccess instruction is very simple but can also be very useful,

Change your Default Home Page

Many Servers will use either index.php or index.html as the primary page when some one types in your domain; the following instruction allows you to chose whatever name you want for the default page.

Add the following line of code to your .htaccess file:

DirectoryIndex filename.html

This could be useful if you want to run a blog like wordpress from the route of your website, but also would like a stand alone page before hand.

The last .htaccess modification is to enable static pages (.html) to use PHP functions within them.

Use PHP in a HTML Page

Add the following line of code to your .htaccess file:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

If you want to use PHP in .htm files simply change the .html to .htm.

Neil
Head of SEO

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Posted in Search Engine Optimisation|No Comments »