National Safety Council: Ten Ways to Keep Your Home Burglary-Free
Tips for home safety and security include: Pretend you're a burglar who's scoping out your neighborhood. Look for any feature of your property that offers opportunities to an intruder. For example, a ladder left outdoors offers potential access to second-floor windows. Leaving your garage door open while you do yard work can also tempt criminals; design your yard with security in mind. Arrange sight lines so neighbors can see into your yard. A solid fence promotes privacy but makes it easier for criminals to work undetected. Consider a chain link fence instead; add outdoor lighting to all potential entry points of your house. Regular incandescent lights mounted on a wall or pole work well for many homeowners. Or install high-pressure sodium lights or mercury vapor lights. Both are energy efficient and illuminate a larger area than incandescent bulbs. Other options include photoelectric lights that provide automatic lighting after dark, and motion detector lights that click on when their sensors detect nearby activity. Install deadbolt locks and solid doors for added home security.

Home Security Tips from a Burglar
This article details burglary tricks of the trade straight from the minds of convicted burglars. It is reported that most burglars take more than 8 minutes to go through a home. Article discusses the importance of chain locks for home security, deadbolts, cleaning up outdoor clutter, using lighting to maintain home security, keeping the garage door opener with a trusted friend or family, and hiding exterior phone lines when possible.

Crime Doctor's Burglary Prevention Page
This site is written by Chris E. McGoey, also know as The Crime Doctor. Mr. McGoey begins his article by asking: Are you really safe once you get home and lock your door? Your home should be your castle, but is it? According to McGoey, burglary is the most common threat to your home. He quotes F.B.I. statistics as saying that a burglary occurs every 15.4 seconds in the U.S. The majority of burglaries occur during the daytime, when people are at school or away at work. The summer months have the most burglaries and February has the fewest. The majority of burglaries are committed by males under 25 years of age who are looking for small items that are easily converted into cash. How can you protect yourself and your family from this terrible crime? Start by getting good locks. This means dead bolts for all outside doors. Use a wide angle peephole and do not open the door to see who is there. What is the point of locking your door if all a burglar has to do is knock and you open the door for him? Put a wooden stick in the track of your sliding glass door. Use screws (partly unscrewed) to prevent the sliding door from being jimmied up out of its track. Burglars dislike alarm systems and barking dogs. There are dozens of additional hints, tips, tricks and pieces of advice for making homeowners and apartment dwellers feel more safe and secure within their castle walls.

Is Your Home Burglar-Proof? by Channel4000.com
The psychological trauma of being burglarized can stay with you for the rest of your life. That's why it is imperative that you take a few minutes to learn some simple ways of making your home less attractive to burglars. Remember, burglars are opportunistic, for the most part, which means they will break into the easiest target. By taking just a little time to make your home just a little less appealing to a burglar, you could save yourself from a lifetime of trauma. For example, remembering what many police officers refer to as the "3/7 rule" could stop many burglars cold. This means that all shrubs near the house are shorter than 3 feet high, and the lowest branches on any trees near the house are 7 feet off the ground, making it much more difficult for burglars to make use of them. One thing that most people never consider is exposed phone lines. How easy is it for a burglar to walk up and snip your phone lines, making contact with the outside world almost impossible? Crushed rock beneath a window is much more noisy than soft grass and tends to make burglars shy away. These are only a few of the many suggestions this site has for making your home less attractive to burglars.