Protect your SEO Optimized Online Store from Fraud

Many e-commerce retailers, especially those who operate worldwide, routinely receive fraudulent credit-card orders, a lot of the time from a very few rogue countries. According to merchant service provider Merchant Express, as many as 30% of foreign orders are fraudulent, mainly from countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Fraudulent orders in 2008 resulted in just under $4 billion in lost revenues for businesses in the United States. One way to counter this problem is to integrate a country IP block into your code.

Easily block a range of IP’s or an entire country by adding a few simple lines of code

Adding a few lines to your .htaccess file can block IP addresses you suspect of fraudulent activity from accessing your site.

Country IP blocks provides a great resource for finding the code you need to add to your .htaccess file. Simply choose the particular country and the necessary code appears below where you can copy and paste the code into your file – Remember, if you block an entire country, no one from within that country will be able to access your site, which quite possibly could block-out legitimate customers.

To deal with this, you can block those IP addresses you suspect of fraudulent activity only– even though this is a more time-consuming process, it means you do not have to discriminate who you deal with in business solely on which country someone is accessing you from. Simply review previous fraudulent orders and find the IP addresses they came from.

For instance, if you receive 10 orders from Afghanistan that are all fraudulent, it may be prudent to block that entire country. On the other hand, if you receive 100 orders and only 10 of them are bad, you can weed out the bad ones and block them, maintaining the good traffic.

Search engine optimization firm SEO Advantage^® can easily help you locate and block IP addresses that will only cause you to lose money.

About SEO Advantage^®

Led by Stone Reuning, SEO Advantage®, Inc. is an online marketing and search engine optimization firm that helps businesses turn their web presence into a powerful revenue generation medium. Our clients enjoy dominance on Google, Yahoo and Bing through a suite of unique pay-for-performance search engine optimization and online marketing services implemented by a multidisciplinary team of SEO engineers, copywriters and web designers. You'll find us referenced in books such as "Writing Web-Based Advertising Copy to Get the Sale" and the BusinessWeek bestseller "The New Rules of Marketing & PR," as well as the popular ebook "The Small Business Blogging Blueprint." Find out more today by calling us at 1-800-366-1639 or email us here.