Why the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act Should Scare You

NASHVILLE, TN – In this age, most of us have information all over the Internet. Facebook knows way too much about me, Amazon knows what I buy, and Southwest knows where I fly. Barnes and Noble knows what books I read, and my bank knows all my purchases. That said, I think we’d all agree that Internet security, in theory, is a good thing. But some legislation that creeps around Congress seems to do more harm than good.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act passed in the House of Representatives on April 26. The vote wasn’t even close; it was 248 to 168. CISPA now waits for debate in the Senate.

Courtesy of leaksfree.com

So what’s this bill all about? You may remember our recent coverage of SOPA and PIPA, which dealt with copyright infringement. CISPA deals with privacy, and it could mean that the government has the authority to track our every move. It’s proposed as an amendment to the National Security Act of 1947, and it attempts to combat cyber threats.

One vital difference between the current bill – CISPA – and the older bills – SOPA and PIPA – lies in how the companies are treated. SOPA and PIPA put the burden on businesses like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to stop their users from sharing copyrighted information. In contrast, CISPA doesn’t threaten these companies. Instead, these companies can hand over our information to the government without a warrant. And further, we as individuals won’t know what information is being shared – it’s proprietary.

Time Magazine published a breakdown of those who do and who do not support CISPA. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Financial Services Roundtable, Facebook, Microsoft, AT&T and Verizon Wireless are among the supporters, although Microsoft later voiced concerns over the bill’s language. It’s no surprise that these companies are for the bill, as it’s not threatening their business. Imagine sending a text to your friend. AT&T will have the right to send that text directly to the government, and someone somewhere is aware of your actions and thoughts. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.)- the author of CISPA- many Republicans, and some Democrats also support the bill.

President Obama has threatened to veto the bill if the time comes. The bill’s biggest opponents are Ron Paul (R-Texas), the Obama administration, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Congressional Privacy Caucus co-chairmen Reps. Joe Barton (R-Texas) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.).

Barton and Markey proposed an amendment that would have restricted the government from using the bill’s powers for anything other than thwarting cyber threats, The Hill reported. The amendment did not pass.

“If this piece of legislation had a privacy policy, it would be ‘You have no privacy!’” co-chairman Markey said in a statement. “In its current form, this legislation would allow companies to share personal information about consumers with other companies, even if that information has nothing to do with cyber security.”

What people are concerned about is what the bill does not say. The bill doesn’t say clearly what a cyber threat is. The bill doesn’t give many limits as to how or when the government can watch our browsing history. Many people worry that this bill may intend to thwart cybercrimes, but instead it will give the government and corporations free reign to monitor our every cyber move.

The hacker group Anonymous uploaded a YouTube video calling American citizens to action. The video urges us to protest CISPA and its supporters. Between May 1 and June 30, Anonymous blocks off dates to protest specific companies. Protestors are asked to go to the business’s closest location or the busiest location in town. Walmart, Target, Intel, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, Chase Bank, Visa, Bank of America, CVS, Coke, Pepsi, American Express, MasterCard and McGraw-Hill are among the businesses targeted for their support of CISPA.

“Remember, you have the right to protest if you care about your freedom of speech, your right to privacy, and your government censoring you,” a computer-animated voice reads in the video. “Supporters of CISPA, you should have expected us.”

Do you agree with CISPA? Do you feel the basic idea – to thwart cyber threats – is important, but that this route isn’t the answer? Let’s talk

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Unsolicited SEO Offers – 7 Tips To Decide Whether You Should Accept Them

Unsolicited SEO Offers to improve your website ranking -my in-box is full of them. I get about a dozen offers a week to improve this site by a professional SEO company. Some weeks I even reach two dozen offers. Should I be tempted? Would it add any benefit to my site? Should YOU accept such unsolicited SEO proposals?
The funny thing is, I do offer SEO services myself – multinational SEO, to be exact. SEO translation, to be extremely precise. I have however not even seriously tried to promote my blog. Yes, in some forums I include this site as my signature, and I also comment in some blogs providing this site as a link. But most of it is no-follow, so little link juice can be expected. SEO for this site is base mainly on content, content, content and a few SEO plug-ins for my WordPress site. Does it increase in the SERPS? Yes. Does it increase its page rank? Yes. Does it score well for the keywords that I intend to target? Quite well, thank you. Could it score much better it I did some serious promotion? No doubt. So why do I not do it?
The main problem is that I have no time. I already have more work than I can handle. I am not a big SEO company, just one single person (and not interested in hiring staff and running a company). So why should I attract more visitors? More clients? I write for FUN! A nice side benefit is that I get customers that are impressed with what I write, customers that recognize quality when they see it and are willing to pay me what I ask for after waiting until I have finished with a previous customer. But perhaps I should still invest in additional SEO? Perhaps should you?
Now, your site may not be written for fun. You make a living about of it – most of my customers do. SEO is important, not just so as to get on the top of the SERPS, but also to attract traffic, to get customers that buy your products and services. Probably you NEED that traffic. OK, I have more work than I can handle. But that may not necessarily be your case. So if somebody writes to you offering you SEO services, should YOU accept them?
I have made some small statistics of the last 38 mails that I have received offering me SEO services (38 because that’s what I had in my mail trash or spam box). Now, most of the sites were quite nice, very attractive and professional looking. But, amazingly, I did not find any of the sites in the top SERPS for major SEO keywords.  As I know that’s a very competitive market, perhaps it would be unfair to judge the sites just based on that. I checked Page Rank (PR) instead. Yes, I know it’s not very reliable as a measure, but it still holds some indication of the authority of the site. The results were really amazing:
Unranked sites: 3 (8%)PR0 sites: 17 (45%)PR1 sites: 12 (31%PR2 sites: 5 (13%)PR3 sites: 1 (3%)PR4 or higher: 0
The very first question that comes to mind if how “experts” with sites that have a lower page rank than mine (which I have not cared very much in promoting, mind you) are going to enhance the ranking of my blog. Because there are two possibilities: One, that they are in a similar situation as I am, that they have so much work that they do not actively promote their own websites. But then you wonder why, if they have so much work, they do have to ask you for work. The second possibility is that those guys are beginners that are looking for customers, which is something that seems to be the case for all unranked or PR0 sites, plus some of the others. They set up a nice website, and start sending spam e-mails, offering their services. Now, there are a lot of start-ups that can do a good job. But you should proceed with caution, because an amateur can wreak havoc with your site. Bad SEO can be worse than no SEO at all.
So how should you handle these SEO offers? E-mail marketing is a legitimate marketing technique (as long as it does not simply spam customers), and even serious SEO companies perform it. But a generic mail stating that they can improve your ranking  should be viewed with caution., no matter how legitimate it looks. But how to distinguish serious offers from beginners or just people in for a quick buck? Just a few hints:
Check their website, specially regarding loading times, pages and completeness of the links. It is amazing how long some of these pages take to load (lousy SEO) and very often the links don’t even exist (For example, I just got an offer from seosite.com – there is only one page, and all the menu links are non-existing!)Look for content. Don’t be distracted by fancy presentations and lots of graphics. For example, internetseosolutions.com has a very colorful presentation, the site looks nice, but if you scratch there is…. absolutely nothing.  The only link that works is the “Contact us” which opens your mail program.Check the age and owner of the site offering your the SEO services (use any Whois solution, though I personally use DomainTools).

What Every Business Should Know About Image SEO

SANTA MONICA, CA — What’s in a picture? Martin Missfeldt’s illustration spotlighting the importance of optimizing pictures on TagSeoBlog.com is certainly worth a thousand words. But in order for any image to get the traffic that it might very well deserve, it has to be optimized correctly.

When basic image SEO is done correctly, an image like the one above can be an extremely valuable addition to a website (after all, I used an image Google search to find this image). According to Danny Dover, the lead SEO of SEOmoz.org, an image is only as good as the text supporting it. Dover delves further into his image SEO expertise in his video discussion on a recent SEOmoz.org Whiteboard Friday. In fact, Dover points out that search engines need text to help the images serve their intended purpose, and that well-developed sites tend to pay attention to image SEO. This newfound knowledge is a wake up call to this writer to implement those changes from this day forward, and I’m sure that it had the same impact on the plethora of other bloggers and SEO analysts who have read it.

“Besides just being useful for people, images are also, it turns out, useful for search engines. I think part of the reason behind that is that pages that are well developed tend to also have images on them because it helps portray information in a way that textual based content can’t do,” Dover says.

Click here to be directed to Dover’s video tutorial on the basics of Image SEO, in which he gives useful advice regarding image SEO. Here are a few pieces of Dover’s words of wisdom:

1. Alt Text: This is the text that will pop up if your image fails to display, either because of someone’s browser or the image disappearing. From an SEO perspective, you can save face, because alt text tells Google what that image was. Dover has a quick tip: keep them below about 140 characters.

2. Filename: The filename is also information for search engines and other technologies, but alt text is stronger for SEO purposes, especially when backed up with a filename.

3. Surrounding Text: This is often overlooked, but the text around an image gives Google an idea about the image itself. The surrounding text can either be a traditional caption, or it can just be the paragraphs around the image (like the picture in this blog).

4. Inbound Links: As with all SEO efforts, inbound links are very important. Dover has very specific advice: “It wouldn’t necessarily be inbound links to the image URL, although it could be, but what I mean in this context is links going to the page that has the image embedded on it. Just like in normal SEO, the anchor text of those inbound links and where they’re coming from and how many of them are, are all really important factors for image SEO and then SEO in general.”

5. Human Categorization: Human categorization comes from the early stages of developing recognition software. Google would hire people and they’d say, “label this.” In fact, Google was semi-famous for creating this game. It was called Google Image Labeler, and it would show you an image of, say, an apple, as Dover explains further.

“They would ask you in Family Feud style, which is a game show here in the United States, to list words that are associated with that object. You’d say something like apple, and you’d earn points if someone else also said apple. Maybe it’s red, Fuji, or Grandma Smith, or whatever it is. So other words that are associated with the image. And that way they could train their software to start to understand what general shapes and ideas mean within images,” Dover says.

While categorization has evolved, an eye for detail is still best done by the human eyes. But, at the end of the day, image SEO is the most effective as part of an overall SEO effort that is important to reach your desired customer base, according to Ali Husayni, the CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google.

“You may not have the budget for a full-scale SEO campaign if you’re just starting out, but some time with an SEO consultant to get you started may be within your budget and well worth the expense,” Husayni says.

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