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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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Businesses are missing out on the benefits that Web 2.0 technologies have to offer them, according to an expert.

Many executives think Web 2.0 is a drain on their resources but in fact is a way of engaging with partners and customers and is simply an extension of email, according to the chief executive of IT Governance, Alan Calder, who was speaking in CIO magazine.

‘There is a genuine need for CIOs to enable people to use this technology to benefit the firm,’ he told CIO magazine.

‘No matter what policies a company has in place, people will tell other people what it is like to work there, whether it is through Facebook or a blog and everyone has a computer at home today.’

Banning use of the sites is also effectively saying to young people who use the sites that they are not wanted, and senior management had to understand that the technology is ‘embedded in the way of life’ of younger people.

‘Young workers feel that Web 2.0 technologies such as Facebook, YouTube, blogging and Flikr, are key to how they do their job,’ he said.

He did sound a note of caution however, warning that businesses need to be careful with the technology, for instance with the posting of litigious comments.

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Users of Mozilla Firefox are vulnerable to phishing attacks because the pop-up dialogue box for password entry in the latest version of the web browser can be spoofed, a leading security researcher has warned.

Aviv Raff claims a vulnerability in the way that Firefox displays authentication dialogs allows cyber criminals to obtain username and password information by deceiving users into thinking they are giving their details to a reliable source.

In an advisory, he wrote: “Mozilla Firefox allows spoofing the information presented in the basic authentication dialog box. This can allow an attacker to conduct phishing attacks by tricking the user to believe that the authentication dialog box is from a trusted website.”

Mr Raff has posted a video on the popular video sharing website YouTube to show how criminals can exploit the vulnerability and he is urging Firefox users not to provide any usernames and passwords to any sites using the basic pop-up dialogue box method of authentication.

Last month Mr Raff highlighted a security loophole in Google’s Toolbar browser utility that allowed phishers to spoof a URL in a dialog box that popped up when users tried to download new toolbar buttons.

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Google officially launched Google Gadgets as an ad unit yesterday after about three months of pilot testing. Google’s AdWords platform now supports Google Gadget content in addition to existing text, image, and video offerings. The gadget ads feature an entirely new widget analytics platform for tracking gadget success and interaction, an open caching proxy hosted by Google’s geo-distributed servers, and the introduction of YouTube as a video hosting and transcoding platform free from any Google branding.

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