SEO efforts paying off

The continuous SEO efforts from Pacific Fox are paying off, we are listed number 45 for the term “business directory” on
Saturday, 16 February

And number 41 for the term “search engine” on
Saturday, 16 February

Number 33 for the term “australian search engine” on
Saturday, 16 February

Number 28 for the term “australian business directory” on
Saturday, 16 February
Number 7 on Yahoo for the same term.

We are very pleased with these results after just 3 months of hard work.

Quality Controlled Search Engine / Business Directory

Did you know that clickfind™ is a quality controlled search engine / business directory?

Search Engine SEO Tools

We’ve published a few new Search Engine SEO tools that can assist with;
- checking your keyword density
- suggesting search engine keywords
- show your link popularity
- display search engine position

The SEO tools can be found at:
- keyword density checker  http://www.clickfind.com.au/keyword-density-checker.cfm
- keyword suggestion tool http://www.clickfind.com.au/keyword-suggestion-tool.cfm
- link popularity tool http://www.clickfind.com.au/search-engine-link-popularity.cfm
- search engine position checker http://www.clickfind.com.au/search-engine-position-checker.cfm

A secure search engine in ColdFusion

Well, it’s official! We’ve got a hacker safe site… (for now anyway)

I’ve always been pretty careful in regards to security when it comes to programming, web server setup etc.

We’ve had our site checked by members of CFAUSSIE before we launched it. There were two issues that came up. One was reported by Steve Bentley who really did an awesome job in discovering the hole.

We’re not scared to put our site out there and let people try and break it, I believe it’s the only way to go if you want to run a successful and high traffic Australian Search Engine. It’s better to discover the security holes before launch and fix them, than discover them after launch and get a bad name.

OK, even though we had the site checked by members of the ColdFusion community, I still did not feel a 100% safe about it all. So, we’ve become a member of www.scanalert.com and had our site and server scanned for thousands of vulnerabilities. It’s not cheap becoming a member of ScanAlert, but I reckon it is well worth the money if you want to be notified about potential security holes (if any) before anyone else discovers them.

Everything went as planned, even our own methods of securing the site and reporting worked, the scan was requesting a high number of pages within a time frame that can only be automated. This gets detected by our application, we get notified, the IP gets logged and also banned from accessing further content. We’re planning to eventually integrate this with the web server so it puts the IP in the access denied list.

The scan report from ScanAlert is pretty comprehensive, if they find something they’ll also help with explaining and fixing the hole. It so happens we had a couple of low alerts. The alerts range from Low to Urgent and in between is Medium, High and Critical. The low alerts were things like allowing ICMP request, which we have to; because we also have the site monitored externally, if and when it goes down we like to be notified!

Another alert had something to do with cookies not being set over a secure channel. I will have to read up a bit more about that one. Not sure how that would work since we can’t put SSL over the whole site.

 I’ll report more about this when information becomes available.

Australian Search Engines list – one way links

Everyone knows (or should know) that the best search engines and directories
are the ones that deliver fast, relevant results to search queries. But
which ones are the best to submit your website to to gain one way links?

Google Gadget Top 50 search engine keywords

We’ve just written our first Google Gadget. Nothing fancy, needs some major styling, but it’s nice to see it work, and it was so easy to do.

End of year search engine statistics

We thought we’d release our Internet traffic results for this year – (between you and me) that’s only one month of traffic, since we launched in Dec.

Anchor text optimization SEO

We’ve just launched some new advanced SEO functionality on our Australian Search Engine, and it’s quite exciting.

We’ve been working together with some SEO experts and have taken some ideas on board, one of them being “Anchor text optimization”.

When we designed clickfind we decided to go for a very controlled environment and look and feel – making all the pages look the same, so that information will only be the deciding factor for users.

A disadvantage of this is that users are not able to control the text that links to their website. Anchor text plays an important part in SEO, and we’ve therefore implemented some advanced functionality that allows the user to specify up to 3 words they want to use for the anchor link text.

To make sure it does not get abused, we will monitor its usage and have limited the words to a maximum of 3.

Existing users of clickfind will find this functionality under
- My account
- Business listing
- Advanced SEO
- Anchor link text

Any questions or suggestions, please let us know