When thieves come knocking on the door, chances are you won't be home. While you may be thinking your best deterrent are your friends Smith & Wesson, they won't do much good if nobody is there to use them. Thieves aren't stupid. If you want to make sure thieves never show up in the first place, check out the tips below.

1. Secure your doors with multiple locking mechanisms. Yes, it is an annoyance to carry multiple keys but why make it easy for the bad guys? Make sure the locks are difficult to pick and please remember that a lock is only as good as the strength of the door frame.
2. Do not leave keys under mats, under flower pots, on top or doorframes or in one of those $3 magnetic key carriers that fit under the frame of your car. Thieves know about these places and are more clever than you might think when it comes to locating a spare.
3. Do not put your name and address on your key ring. You might as well put a sign on your front door that says “TAKE ME”.
4. Consider an alarm system. When I say alarm system, I am referring to a loud horn or blast that goes off when someone invades your territory. This is especially effective if you have neighbors who will also hear the alarm but even in a more remote area, the alarm will annoy and dissuade the burglars from sticking around.
5. Add internal locks to critical storage areas. This includes your emergency food storage area, crawl spaces, and your freezer.
6. Learn to think like a burglar. Walk around your place, and, pretending you are a bad guy, think about points of entry. Take a look at you home from the street. Are you advertising all of the goodies inside? If you were a burglar, which home on your street would you hit?

What you want to do when you're protecting your home is 1) make sure your home doesn't make an easy target and 2) make it seem like it's not worth the effort. Break-ins are typically fast snatch-and-grabs, and if a criminal thinks they'll spend too much time trying to get around your deadbolted lock, they typically won't even bother.

They'll just move on to the next house that looks unprotected. While your high-tech security system sticker may be a good deterrent in some cases, skilled criminals will see these as signs that you make a good target.

If you are willing to pay that kind of money, you must have something worth protecting. So get the system, but leave the sticker off of the window, and don't have the keypad visible from any of the windows.

For more tips like this, and to read the original article, check out Activist Post.