Drive Traffic to Your Website With Articles by Kelly Archibald

Many people begin their online road to riches dream by starting up a website and trying to sell a product they have created themselves. They may have written an e-book, recorded a cd of original songs, or knitted some lovely potholders with pictures of cats on them.



Enormous volumes of hype have been published with the claim that the internet is an easy, if not mindless, way to riches. The internet is now a global advertising grid, and millions of people surf each day for things they would like to buy, learn about, or discover. They search for the needle in the electronic haystack that suits their fancy for the moment. Shopping online has now become reasonably safe.



The first problem is, how will shoppers with a credit card and the urge to shop find your website? A count as of January1, 2005, suggested there may be as many as 11.5 billion public webpages published. That was just over a year ago at the time of this writing, so that number can only be much higher today. To expose your little website selling cat potholders to prospective customers may take a little a little work.



Search engines use complex algorithms (mathematical formulae) to determine if the content of a website matches its owners claims. Self-proclaimed experts who follow this route for exposure must research every day to ensure their success. The search engine companies themselves keep their algorithms secret to avoid unscrupulous marketers taking unfair advantage of the whole internet shopping and surfing experience.



So what is a potholder seller to do? Search engine experts can charge upwards of $25,000 to guarantee that your site might be the first to be found when someone enters a search. That’s a whole lot of lovely cat potholders. Some very easy and free methods are available to drive traffic to your website. One of them is writing simple articles. You’re reading this one right now, aren’t you?



Hundreds of “article directories” exist on the web just for this purpose. The main and simplest thing people search for on the internet is information. People want to know about something, and often a good place to find a snippet of information is in an article directory. Thousands of 500-1500 word articles have been written and published on the internet, and people love to read them. If they are short and informative, they will become popular to read, and not too time consuming.



Then once your website is up on the net, write a brief, helpful article about your product. Target the style and content of your writing to suit your friends and customers, and also yourself. The average newspaper is written for a grade 9 level reader, and tabloids are written for a grade 6 level or lower. Writing on the internet runs the whole gamut of education. Explain a problem that needs to be solved, and at the end provide a solution. Sales copy is more involved than this, but an article should be entertaining, or fit the parameters of a possible search.



The most important part of the article, besides the content and the attention grabbing headline, is a live link to your website in the author’s bio at the bottom. More often than not, the reader will click the link, if it is live, to see what other information might be available on that particular subject. This link must lead straight to your potholder website. A reader is less likely to copy and paste your website address into their browser if another similar article is listed in the directory.



Write a short paragraph stating your expertise with cat potholders, and invite the reader to visit your website. This will be your “author’s bio”. If someone does read the whole article, they are often curious who wrote it, if it covers the subject they are interested in. Most article directories will accept html code in the bio box.



Search for the words “article directory”, and make a list of as many as you can. Most directories are free to read and submit your articles to. Registration is usually necessary, with your email as the username. Get another free email address to use specifically for article submission to avoid any trouble with spam.



After you have submitted your article, it may take a few days for publication. Check back to the directory to see if your article is published and your link is working. Then do it all again. The articles will stay published forever, or as long as the directory exists. Over time, people will continue to read your article, and click back to your website. If you submit your article to 20 directories, and 40 people interested in cat potholders read it, that’s 800 more potential customers from one article. If you have the time to write 20 little articles, and submit them to 40 directories, and 40 people read each one over time, well you do the arithmetic.



Article submission is one easy, quick and guaranteed way to direct some website traffic your way, and at almost no cost. Give it a try, you’ll be amazed.



Kelly Archibald.



You are hereby cordially invited to visit the The Online Success Portal for more tips on internet business. We don’t have any cat potholders, but can help you sell them.



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SQL -injection attacks: what every website designer must be know:expanded version including resources

Recently when going through the student projects on web design I came across codes similar to the following many times.

$Result =Select * from members where username=’$x’ and password= ‘$y’;

This is typically a code used for user authentication, in which username and password are collected into variables $x and $y .The students and many web designers assume that such queries are safe and the system is well protected.

But such queries give raise to a kind of attack popularly known as SQL injection attack.
The user may give admin as the user name and the string nothing ' OR '1'='1 as the password. So what happens? The query becomes

Select * from members where username=’admin’ and password= ‘nothing ' OR '1'='1’

This returns a positive number of rows since the condition ‘1’=’1’ always holds.
The attacker coolly gets into an admin account. Also he may enter more dangerous commands like insert, Drop etc. into SQL and cause havoc into your database.
Also this is not special to any programming language. Almost all server/client side programming is prone to this. Also an SQL can be injected to user registration, searches, and similar things.

Another common type of SQL injection attack is by injecting the SQL into the URL directly.
How to prevent this?

Database level:
A user must have only the bare necessary privileges to the database. This is called “the principle of least privileges”
Don’t give the connecting user privileges such as drop, delete etc on databases unless it is absolutely needed. This will ensure that damage to the database is minimized.
Programming level
Do not pass the query string generated by the user directly onto the database. First
Pass it through a security layer which checks for unwanted characters, replaces a spurious commands etc. and blocks the query if it is suspicious. For example the security layer may find that in the above login script there are unnecessary Quotes and block it. You can design an abstract security layer, which works for all types of databases and stop attacks.

This is only an elementary exposure to the technique of SQL injection. There are many specific articles dealing with the problem for different databases. Some interesting links are given below.
General
For a brief introduction to SQL-injection and general methods to overcome it, please read the following article. The comments after the article are also interesting.
http://lwn.net/Articles/177037/

SQL server
An advanced treatment of different methods of sql injection ,like different methods, prevention can be found in the following article . Many examples using Sql server are also given, I recommend this as a must read article for any web programmer using SQL-server.
http://www.ngssoftware.com/papers/advanced_sql_injection.pdf

The article http://www.sitepoint.com/article/sql-injection-attacks-safe also gives you very good reading..

The following paper looks at the sql injwection from a different perspective.

MySQL
http://www.wellho.net/resources/S161.html provides many articles on mysql security, including sql injection. I strongly recommend that you read these before going to code a website in mysql.


http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/MySQL/SQL-Injection-Attacks-Are-You-Safe/
is also a mustread article.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/security-guidelines.html
Gives you security guidelines any mysql programmer should know. It can be read after the previous article.


http://shiflett.org/articles/security-corner-apr2004
Gives you php code which will help. The comments and discussion that follows are also enlighting.

DB2
http://www.db2mag.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17602334
Contains an article about the topic and related. This discusses DB2 security in detail.
Also I recommend the following article to be read by people who use DB2 databases.
http://www.db2mag.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=18901175

Ted J. Wasserman of IBM( the creators of DB2) explains DB2 security in the following article.This is detailed article and includes sql injection.
DB2 security, Part 8: Twelve DB2 security best practices

ORACLE

SQL Injection and Oracle, Part One is a simple article on sql injection in oracle. Be sure to read that.Advanced SQL Injection in Oracle databases
Presents a paper on the topics and related ones.



I will try to add as many new things as and when I am free. You are also welcome to add links by posting comments

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