South Florida Web Marketing Blog

En Email from the PlayStation(R)Network

Valued PlayStation(R)Network/Qriocity Customer:

We have discovered that between April 17 and April 19, 2011, certain PlayStation Network and Qriocity service user account information was compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into our network. In response to this intrusion, we have:

1) Temporarily turned off PlayStation Network and Qriocity services;

2) Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened; and

3) Quickly taken steps to enhance security and strengthen our network infrastructure by rebuilding our system to provide you with greater protection of your personal information.

We greatly appreciate your patience, understanding and goodwill as we do whatever it takes to resolve these issues as quickly and efficiently as practicable.

Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.

For your security, we encourage you to be especially aware of email, telephone and postal mail scams that ask for personal or sensitive information. Sony will not contact you in any way, including by email, asking for your credit card number, social security number or other personally identifiable information. If you are asked for this information, you can be confident Sony is not the entity asking. When the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services are fully restored, we strongly recommend that you log on and change your password. Additionally, if you use your PlayStation Network or Qriocity user name or password for other unrelated services or accounts, we strongly recommend that you change them as well.

To protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss, we encourage you to remain vigilant, to review your account statements and to monitor your credit reports. We are providing the following information for those who wish to consider it:

- U.S. residents are entitled under U.S. law to one free credit report annually from each of the three major credit bureaus. To order your free credit report, visit www.annualcreditreport.com or call toll-free (877) 322-8228.

- We have also provided names and contact information for the three major U.S.

credit bureaus below.  At no charge, U.S. residents can have these credit bureaus place a “fraud alert” on your file that alerts creditors to take additional steps to verify your identity prior to granting credit in your name. This service can make it more difficult for someone to get credit in your name. Note, however, that because it tells creditors to follow certain procedures to protect you, it also may delay your ability to obtain credit while the agency verifies your identity.  As soon as one credit bureau confirms your fraud alert, the others are notified to place fraud alerts on your file. Should you wish to place a fraud alert, or should you have any questions regarding your credit report, please contact any one of the agencies listed below:

Experian: 888-397-3742; www.experian.com; P.O. Box 9532, Allen, TX 75013

Equifax: 800-525-6285; www.equifax.com; P.O. Box 740241, Atlanta, GA 30374-0241

TransUnion: 800-680-7289; www.transunion.com; Fraud Victim Assistance Division, P.O. Box 6790, Fullerton, CA 92834-6790

- You may wish to visit the website of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission at www.consumer.gov/idtheft or reach the FTC at 1-877-382-4357 or 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20580 for further information about how to protect yourself from identity theft. Your state Attorney General may also have advice on preventing identity theft, and you should report instances of known or suspected identity theft to law enforcement, your State Attorney General, and the FTC. For North Carolina residents, the Attorney General can be contacted at 9001 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-9001; telephone

(877) 566-7226; or www.ncdoj.gov. For Maryland residents, the Attorney General can be contacted at 200 St. Paul Place, 16th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21202;

telephone: (888) 743-0023; or www.oag.state.md.us.

We thank you for your patience as we complete our investigation of this incident, and we regret any inconvenience. Our teams are working around the clock on this, and services will be restored as soon as possible. Sony takes information protection very seriously and will continue to work to ensure that additional measures are taken to protect personally identifiable information.

Providing quality and secure entertainment services to our customers is our utmost priority. Please contact us at 1-800-345-7669 should you have any additional questions.

Sincerely,

Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Network Entertainment

by Lee Smith

There has been so many changes in the way web sites are ranked by the search engines, that even those that do web based marketing are having a tough time keeping up.

The real secrets to web marketing and SEO is to work on your content, establish a nice layout that makes your website easy to read and to conduct the basic optimization techniques to every web page.

Your Content

Writing in a clear uncluttered manner, that allows your message to tell a story.  Talk about the product in a compelling way and be sure to answer the who, what, where, why and how.  Then always, follow the content with a call to action. Sometimes if your content is long enough, you may want to place it in there twice.

The goal is to write at a High School level, not like you are writing a master thesis for your PHD.

Your Layout

A clean layout that balances content and white space is one of the most effective ways to showcase your service or products. When a web page looks cluttered and has so much on it, that the page looks complicated and confusing, this will turn off the average visitor.

The next issue is your menu. How your menu is setup, can make the user happy or frustrated about finding information they came to your website searching for.  Always make it easy for the visitor to navigate your website to locate information.

Your contact page also is a serious point of concern. It has been found that the less information someone has to type into your contact form – the better and more likely they will use it. If you can get a name, e-mail address or a phone number from visitors – you are doing great!

Your Optimization

As Search Engines develop more sophisticated algorithms for determining rankings, keeping to the standard guidelines of how to optimize a website is important to every web page.

Each web page should have:

1. A clear Title, using the product or service and the company name
2. I still use Description, though some of the search engines, have made this less important as a factor
3. The Keyword Metatag is no longer used due to all the stuffing of this tag. The Search Engines dropped it use. If you do want to use it, I would just add the keywords you are targeting for that page for informational purposes only.
4. H1 Tags for the title on the page
5. Alt Tags for adding text descriptions for the images
6. Bold your keywords and hyper link them to interior pages (not every keyword – remember balance)
7. Spell check the content and correct any grammar

The above is a fundamental list for optimization, but it is a core base to work with

A few more thoughts

Be sure to submit your website to the top three Search Engines. Once they are submitted, the search engines will visit your website on a regular basis to see if you have updated your website.

Add content on a monthly basis. Fresh content is considered the food the search engines are looking for. A well written article can be rewarded with high rankings and thus a boost of web traffic to your website.

Watch your competition, see what they are doing and get ideas from every place you visit.

Your website is not a static brochure, but a living, breathing, and developing marketing tool that needs regular attention. Put in the time and it will reward you.

Lee Smith
Smitty’s Holdings, Inc.
Web Designer and Marketing Engineer

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Here’s a trending User-Agent detection misstep we hope to help you prevent: While it seems completely reasonable to key off the string “android” in the User-Agent and then redirect users to your mobile version, there’s a small catch… Android tablets were just released! Similar to mobile, the User-Agent on Android tablets also contains “android,” yet tablet users usually prefer the full desktop version over the mobile equivalent. If your site matches “android” and then automatically redirects users, you may be forcing Android tablet users into a sub-optimal experience.

As a solution for mobile sites, our Android engineers recommend to specifically detect “mobile” in the User-Agent string as well as “android.” Let’s run through a few examples.

With a User-Agent like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 3.0; en-us; Xoom Build/HRI39) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/534.13
since there is no “mobile” string, serve this user the desktop version (or a version customized for Android large-screen touch devices). The User-Agent tells us they’re coming from a large-screen device, the XOOM tablet.

On the other hand, this User-Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRG83) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1
contains “mobile” and “android,” so serve the web surfer on this Nexus One the mobile experience!

You’ll notice that Android User-Agents have commonalities:

While you may still want to detect “android” in the User-Agent to implement Android-specific features, such as touch-screen optimizations, our main message is: Should your mobile site depends on UA sniffing, please detect the strings “mobile” and “android,” rather than just “android,” in the User-Agent. This helps properly serve both your mobile and tablet visitors.

For questions, please join our Android community in their developer forum.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Posted by David Byttow, Software Engineer, +1 Button
Monday, March 28, 2011

We all know what it’s like to get a bit of help when you’re looking for it. Online, that advice can come from a number of places: a tweet, a shared video, or a blog post, to name a few. With Google Social Search we’ve been working to show that content when it’s useful, making search more personally relevant.

We think sharing on the web can be even better–that people might share more recommendations, more often, if they knew their advice would be used to help their friends and contacts right when they’re searching for relevant topics on Google. That’s why we’re introducing the +1 button, an easy way for Google users to recommend your content right from the search results pages (and, soon, from your site).

+1 is a simple idea. Let’s use Brian as an example. When Brian signs in to his Google Account and sees one of your pages in the organic search results on Google (or your search ads if you’re using AdWords), he can +1 it and recommend your page to the world.

The next time Brian’s friend Mary is signed in and searching on Google and your page appears, she might see a personalized annotation letting her know that Brian +1’d it. So Brian’s +1 helps Mary decide that your site is worth checking out.

We expect that these personalized annotations will help sites stand out by showing users which search results are personally relevant to them. As a result, +1’s could increase both the quality and quantity of traffic to the sites people care about.

But the +1 button isn’t just for search results. We’re working on a +1 button that you can put on your pages too, making it easy for people to recommend your content on Google search without leaving your site. If you want to be notified when the +1 button is available for your website, you can sign up for email updates at our +1 webmaster site.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll add +1 buttons to search results and ads on Google.com. We’ll also start to look at +1’s as one of the many signals we use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, including social signals from other services. For +1′s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality over time. At first the +1 button will appear for English searches only on Google.com, but we’re working to add more languages in the future.

We’re excited about using +1’s to make search more personal, relevant and compelling. We hope you’re excited too! If you have questions about the +1 button and how it affects search on Google.com, you can check the Google Webmaster Central Help Center.

Posted by David Byttow, Software Engineer, +1 Button