Finding content

It appears that the first step to make search engines like your website is to:

1. Make sure all the pages can be found.
2. Make sure all the content can be read.
3. Don’t do things that make them ignore you.

Since we took the Corporate Design Template from Microsoft, which supports Menus, Breadcrumbs, Sitemaps, WCAG 1.0 and doesn’t use Flash, we figure that ByStorm.com is pretty much covered on #1 and #2.

As far as #3, it seems to be more related to people who are trying to trick the search engine into giving them a higher rank. There are a bunch of ways to ‘attempt’ this, like links farms, keyword spam, hidden text, etc…

Since we believe in ‘doing the right thing’, #3 isn’t a big concern.

There is a nifty biff command that will show how many pages Google thinks a site has: ‘site:bystorm.com –pppppp’. Basically, all the command does is ask Google to show all the pages that don’t have the letters ‘pppppp’ on them. When we use it, all our pages, documents and even this blog shows up.

So Google is finding us, but just doesn’t think we have anything interesting to say. We’re to attack that next.

Where are we on the SEO Quest?

Before you start any project, it's important to know where you are starting from, so here is what we’ve done so far.

1. Actually read 'Search Engine Optimization for Dummies'
2. Hired WSI to help
3. Talked with an SEO expert
4. Moved our videos to YouTube and started trying to do other ‘Web 2.0’ stuff
5. Changed most of the website content to be more focused on solutions instead of geeky technology
6. Create this blog, since 'you have to have a blog'

While studying, we ran across an article (http://www.wordtracker.com/attachments/keyword-research-guide-1.pdf) that explains what our problem seems to be. On page 8, they show 3 cartoons, and it’s obvious that we’re ‘Pedantic Pete’ since we ‘utilize the correct terminology’ and our goal needs to be ‘Clever Colin’ and ‘use the words people use to search’.

It makes sense, we just need to: Optimize the website to target the words that people are searching for.

But what words are people searching for? Not only that, how can little ByStorm Software compete with the massive marketing budgets of Quest, McAfee and Symantec?

So off we go into the very exciting world of keyword research to find that ‘Diamonds in the Rough.’

”It took me forever to find you guys!”

We hear that more than we would like to admit. But it’s true, the only way you can find our company and products is:

1. Click on an paid ad.
2. Be referred to a ByStorm product directly, either by a technical forum like Expert Exchange or by someone who has actually used and liked our products.

Since customers need to be able to find us before they can buy our products, we figured that we had better solve this problem...and so begins our ‘Quest for the SEO Holy Grail --- The top entry on Google.’

I’m going to use this blog to chronicle our attempts to get the coveted spot on Google and based on what I've read, it's much harder than I thought.

Publish Post

More tomorrow.

"Now, where is that spam I got about guaranteeing 1st place position again?....Under 'junk e-mails' , sort by title...."

Protecting the Audit trail

I was on a phone call with a potential client, and they were indicating that one of their concerns was how to protect an audit trail from being altered.

Many auditing products store their audit trial in a commercial or external database, like SQL Server or Oracle. While handling gobs of uniform data is exactly what a database is very good at, it isn’t good for audit trails. Audit trails need to be written ‘forward only’ and not be alterable.

Commercial and external databases are powerful tools and provide ways for the data to be entered, sorted, displayed, deleted, altered, etc. Commercial databases also have database administrators (DBAs) and system administrators, which have complete access over all aspects of the database, including any audit log stored in them.

When we designed FileSure, we considered these issues along with the cost and maintenance requirements of using a commercial database before deciding to go with a file based engine. By using a file based engine, we were able to encrypt and compress the audit log, thereby protecting it from altering or even viewing from any source other than FileSure itself.

Auditing Noise pt. 3

One of the reasons that auditing noise is such a problem is that you can’t easily designate exactly what you’re interesting in and are instead forced to ‘watch everything’.

For example, let’s say you want to record people reading Acrobat (PDF) files in a certain folder. To make it more interesting, you also only want to record when they do it after-hours.

To do this with native tools, you could turn on file auditing on every PDF in the target folder, but that’s very cumbersome if there a lot of files or if new files are being created. The other, less onerous, option would be to turn on auditing for the entire folder. The problem with that approach is that you will pick not just PDF files but everything else in the folder too.
Both options have an additional problem of catching the unwanted accesses that occur during normal business hours.

FileSure allowing you to accurately define what you’re interested in with a combination of rule filters; in the above example, you would define a file filter like ‘D:\folder\*.pdf’ and then define a time slot filter to indicate when the rule should be active. You could make it even more targeted by excluding certain users, groups, process or even non-interesting files patterns.

Auditing Noise pt. 2

Some activities cause lots of auditing records to be generated and, most of the time, it's just noise. For example, a 'Find in Files' will open and read every file that is being searched, which could be thousands of files.

We define this as an Audit Storm.

An audit storm occurs when the same user generates 100 or more file operations within 30 seconds. Another example is when a user copies several folders that contain many files.

To limit this noise, FileSure can automatically avoid an audit storm by temporarily excluding that user from the auditing rule until the storm is over, and then reactivating that user account in the rule.

By filtering out audit storms, FileSure is able to reduce the amount of noise that gets recorded.

Auditing Noise pt. 1

One of the major problems with any auditing system is Auditing Noise. FileSure's approach to addressing this problem is to "collapse" duplicate events within a certain time frame. By default, if the same user opens the same file, with the same program, requesting the same rights within 60 minutes of the first request, the second will be ignored.

In our conversations with Auditors, they said that if the same user accesses the same file in the same day, it only needs to be recorded once. FileSure is more granular than that by default (same file, same user, same program, same access within an hour) and can even be configured to be even more so, down to the point that only duplicate events will be ignored if they occur within the same minute. The default of 60 minutes seems to be to more that’s satisfactory for most companies.