Notes from a wireframe world

After it was reviled that there was a huge security hole and a lack of support for applications developers, In what could be the death knell for Apples iconic iPhone, The things explode on you!

Yes that’s right, both iPhone and iPod catch fire and explode.

Their can only be one fitting tribute to Ted Kennedy, one of his speeches. And what better speech than one calling for unity and universal health care.

If you’re a hacker, ID theft person, or spammer please don’t read this, everyone else please do so!

Yesterday David Naylor a security consultant highlighted a huge issue with twitters security, basically it doesn’t check for XSS when you post messages via its API’s so, you can post viruses etc. via it.

Well twitter responded and said it was fixed.

It hasn’t been, as this twitter account (note it’s safe to visit, it’s just an example) shows.

So what you may think? A pop-up box isn’t an issue, true, however as David says.

“If I was going to be mean, I could have made that JavaScript steal your login cookie and send it to us. Or maybe to someone else? Perhaps I could drop a few trending hashtags in there and see how many people look at my tweet. Or worse – why not use Twitter’s own handily-available API to, I dunno, post a few tweets?”

In short, it could have done anything he wanted, installed software on your PC (or Mac) posted tweets from you, got you to follow him… anything.

Selecting the right keywords, words you will ensure are in your pages so search engines find them, can be at best a hit and miss adventure, how do you know the words you select are going to be the ones the majority of people looking for your site are going to search for?

And even if you pick words people are looking for, how do you know if they will find your site? Thankfully Google of all people, provide a free and easy to use service that you can use to do just that.

Firstly point your favorite browser to https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
This is designed as a tool to pick the right adwords for your campaign, but we can use it to find good key words as well.

OK put in some words you think are useful, words that will you think people looking for you site will use, then click on the “Get Keyword Ideas” button, then open the CSV files (links to them appear at the bottom of each keyword) and sort them in order of number “Global Monthly Search Volume“ once you’ve done so delete anything with less than about 100,000 searches per month.

Then open up a new tab/window and do a google search for each key word. When the results are returned, you will notice near the top of the screen on the right hand side something along the lines of “Results 1 – 10 of about 203,000,000 for social media. (0.12 seconds) “ copy and paste the number of searches into the cell after “Global Monthly Search Volume” and repeat for all your key words.

Now finally you will be in a position to see what keywords are useful to you, and which are not

For each key word divide the “Global Monthly Search Volume” by the number of Hit Google finds for that keyword, the higher the result, the more chance there is some one will find your site via that keyword, there are of course a lot more things you can do to improve your ranking, and I’ll go through some of them in the next article