Even if your web site does not hold any national security document you should take the security of your web site seriously. This is especially important if you are selling products on your web site.

There is evidence, as shown in many published reports, of in excess of 89 million data breaches of identity records. These occurred in the year 2007 alone. Go to the Identity Theft Resource Center and do some reading. The facts will throw fear into your heart. Businesses can now use companies that are specialists in handling financial information, and leave all the worries to them. A sales webpage will use links on sales pages for ordering which redirect straight to PayPal, 2CheckOut, or other payment services. When using this method, credit card numbers and all personal information from the customer is no longer dealt with or exposed.

But that does not leave you totally in the clear. If you are selling a digital product that the customer can download immediately after the purchase, you need to ensure that the product is protected. There are many ways that web site owners inadvertently leave their valuable products unprotected - making them available for free to anyone who knows where to look.

Here are the 3 most common errors:

1. Easy to guess filenames.

If you have named your electronic book 'AdWords Secrets', do not include either 'Adwords' or 'Secrets' in the name. The location www.example.com/AdWordsSecrets.pdf is the first thing a user might try to access your work.

At least add a version number or a date into the filename, e.g. AdWordsSecrets_v42.pdf or AdWordsSecrets_20070707.pdf. This will make it much more difficult to guess the filename and the URL.

2. Indexing the product itself or the download page is the function of search engines.

It can be very difficult these days to keep the content on your website secret, as search engines have become so adept at spidering content on the web. Even without a public link, a search engine may discover your secret product download page and index it. When this occurs, your product download page will be visible to anyone using that search engine, and they will be able to access your product for free.

It is important to frequently survey what information the search engines have on your site. Most of the larger purveyors have an operator command, e.g. site: example.com, which will detail everything about that location that a web spider has crawled over and stored.

3.Txt robots constructed poorly.

robots.txt is a text file that you can place on your web server to guide search engines to what content they are allowed to index and what is off limits. While this may prevent most search engines from indexing your secret web pages, it opens up another vulnerability: any curious web surfer is able to view your robots.txt file. If the file explicitly forbids search engines from looking in the /downloads or /report directories, then it's very likely that's where the secret files are stored. With this knowledge the web surfer can more easily find your product and download it for free.

You need to strike the right balance between protecting certain files and directories in robots.txt while not revealing too much about the structure of your web site.

Digital products are a great item to sell online. Be sure that you are getting paid for the items you have put the time into creating by using the guidelines listed above. These will help you be successful.

Nick Dalton is an Internet security expert who regularly writes articles for Internet business entrepreneurs at http://www.TipsTricksToolsTechniques.com/. His latest published report is called The Digital Security Report.