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Businesses can see increased traffic to their websites by getting the basics of SEO web design right, according to an industry commentator.

Chris Lake, the editor-in-chief of E-consultancy.com, thinks that while there are many ways to attract traffic, for businesses with a limited marketing budget it’s the basics that are most important.

He said: ‘Read up on how to make your site search-engine friendly, and if you can afford it, look at employing a search agency or a search expert in-house.’

Mr Lake also believes that businesses should embrace Web 2.0 technologies to make sure there are as many links back to their site as possible.

‘There are lots of examples of companies attracting large numbers of visitors by producing videos or blogs that end up being picked up on the licks of YouTube, Digg and Yahoo Buzz,’ he said.

One such example is the ‘Will it Blend?’ campaign by the makers of Blendtec Total Blender.

A series of adverts featuring items being dropped in the company’s industrial strength blender (to find out if they will blend) became a huge hit on YouTube and in turn gave the company’s brand more exposure.

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If you have been living under a rock for the past year or so, you wont be aware that on the web, one of the best ways of generating new, direct traffic to your website or blog is via Social Media marketing. The blogosphere and twitter trail is all a buzz with the term, which can seem dauntingly new and intimidating to marketers with traditional experience. Hopefully this guide should help to summarise how to interact online, and what services to use.

An idiots guide to Social Media Marketing

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SMEs have been advised to increase their sales by selling through a website.

StartupCo, a support group for businesses, says this form of selling is a cost-effective and non-time consuming way of boosting sales.

A web presence can offer a low investment growth opportunity to businesses, with potentially high returns on those investments, the group said.

Managing director John De Groot said: ‘The absolute key is the ability to generate enough traffic to the website to get the best sales end result.’

He added that SMEs should not allow security fears to deter them from embracing e-commerce but advised them to reduce any risk by using reputable providers of online shopping carts, merchant accounts and payment encryption systems.

According to a report by IMRG Capgemini, online sales in February were up 46 per cent on last year’s figures, peaking at a record high of £3.23 billion ($4.2 billion).

Last week, the Internet Advertising Bureau said that advertising through video websites was a ‘powerful branding and messaging tool’ for SMEs.

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Microsoft warned companies on Monday that a flaw in the way Windows searches for Web proxies could allow an attacker the ability to reroute traffic through a malicious server.

The security issues occur when a Windows computer attempts to find a proxy server using Microsoft’s Web Proxy Automatic Discovery (WPAD) technology and the organization’s domain name starts at the third level or deeper, such as somecompany.co.jp, the software giant stated in an advisory. The WPAD search first attempts to find the server using the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), and if it doesn’t find the server will try the next higher level of the domain name. For example, a search for a proxy server in somecompany.co.jp will look for servername.somecompany.co.jp and then move on to servername.co.jp, which could be a malicious server outside the company’s network.

“At this time, we are not aware of attacks attempting to use the reported vulnerability, but we will continue to track this issue,” Tim Rains, a spokesman for the Microsoft Security Response Center, said on the teams’ blog. “The advisory contains several mitigations that customers can use to help protect themselves from attackers.”

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