Site-Creators

Email is a quick and convenient way of correspondence, but without the proper etiquette it can be interpeted incorrectly and/or reflect poorly on your business. Applying some basic formatting rules and etiquette you can be sure that your emails will represent you and your company in the best possible light.

• Do not disclose email addresses of other recipients unless there is a need to do so, and when necessary add the secondary recipients to the CC: field
• Address the recipient propely, as you would a mailed letter
• Do not use all capital letters, as that is known as shouting, an expression of anger
• Allow your words to adequately convey your tone, avoiding excessive bold, itallic, underline, capital letters and excessive punctuation
• Check your spelling and grammar
• Include your company logo and contact information without distracting background images
• Do not use an old email from an unrelated topic to start a new topic – and keep your replies to an existing topic within the same email thread for easy reference
• Use an appropriate subject line
• Do not use email to deliver bad news
• Zip up large files and advise the recipient of your intention to send the same
• Do not forward private messages to others, this is taken as ‘talking behind ones back’
• Make sure your email address is set up properly in your email program so it displays properly
• Avoid over use of the return receipt feature
• Avoid the use of acronyms and smilies
• If you are unable to respond to an email in a timely manner quickly respond and let the recipient know that you received their email and you’ll respond as quickly as possible.
• Remember that your email is an extension of your business

The first step in proper email etiquette is to protect the email addresses of those that you send email to.  This means not sending email to a large group of people in a fashion that each person can see the other’s email. You can achieve this anonymity by utilizing the BCC: field of the emails that you send out.

By addressing the email To: field to yourself and putting all of the recipient’s email addresses in the BCC: field the only email address that each person sees is yours and theirs. You can either manually address each email with your address in the To: field or you can create a contact in your address book, storing your address and naming it “friends”, “undisclosed recipient” or something similar.

The need for email privacy is becoming more and more prevelant with the increased spam.

We are releasing our SEO eBook today. It is approximately 30 pages of SEO how to’s, with detailed information explaining the terms used is search engine optimization, the robots.txt file and good website maintenance. The book will sell for $26, though for a limited time will be on sale for $18.

Jeanne Meier explains the basic techniques that so many people have hired to employ. It has so much information that you might want to read it twice. =)

Jump over to our eBook tab to get more information.

It seems that these days blog posting for website promotion tops the list. I agree, there is no better way to promote your site than to get some backlinks out there. Visiting blogs and similar CMS sites that allow you to post a link to your website is extremely helpful to your marketing plan. Just make sure that the sites you post on are equipped with ‘dofollow’.

Another interesting form of site promotion that I have found are affiliate websites. These are websites that provide the goods or services, labeled under your name.  Simply register a domain name and sign up for an affiliate account, it’s that easy. Once your affiliate account is established and you host your site you can include a link or two back to your site, ensuring  a permenant, trustworthy back link. [Most provide a premade website for you to use]. Remember that sites of similar nature receive a better grade in the search engine’s algorithm than sites that are not related. The great thing about an affiliate account is that it also earns you revenue when people visit it, so it has a two sided benefit.

A couple of affiliate accounts that I am familiar with are:

Website Templates:  Sells website templates that are professionally designed. Site-Creators is an affiliate of this company (Template Monster). They offer the largest collection of web templates on the web so marketing is rather easy.

STD Dating: Sells online dating services specializing in people with STD’s, sugar-daddy sites, same sex dating and more. Their database already contains thousands of members so marketing is minimal. 

There are lots of affiliate websites available on the net. If you know of any that you’d like to share we will add them to the list.

When optimizing your website pages it is essential to focus on each page individually. You want your pages to stand independently.

Make sure that your page title, keywords and description represent the content of each respective  page. Google will display the first 66 characters of your page title in the SERP’s, ending with a full word – Longer descriptions are parsed to ensure that the last word displayed is a complete word. Your description is limited to approximately two short sentences or 150 characters.

It is also a good practice to maintain the same theme throughout your site, inclusive of your company name, address and phone number on each page. These are also items that search engines look at.

Never use the ‘one size fits all’ search engine optimization services that blanket your site with the same keywords and description for each page.

Several webmasters will use one main domain name and others as pointers, this is a common practice. Some will have one hosting account and house different types of websites on it, while posting backlinks to their other sites on each.

While using this practice it is important to realize that your shared hosting shares a common IP address block as well. This means that the search engines to not lend as much credibility to your backlinks because it’s obvious that the referring link is coming from the same hosting account.

If this is your practice, it is important to use dedicated IP’s for each hosting account; preferably from different webhosts or a webhost that assigns different Class C IP Addresses. Personally I recommend using a host like IX Webhosting, that offers up to o8 dedicated, class C hosting accounts for nearly the same price as Hostmonster, Hostgator or Lunar Pages (for Windows Hosting).

When reviewing your site for SEO, commonly overlooked are your directory and file names. These are just as important as your domain name and page title.

Remember to keep consistency across your directory and file names. Other than your index page, you do not want to have pages named index-1.html, index-2.html and then our-company.html and products.html.  You want to keep these consistent and preferably related to the content of each page.

Make sure that your directory names and file names correspond appropriately to your site. If you use the system of naming your directories by page title and each file within them as index.html, make sure to continue this. If you just name your file names by the page title, continue this. Stay consistent!

The success of any website is proportional to the traffic that it generates. Given this information, it is good to know where your traffic comes from.

Statistics show that 70% of website traffic is generated from search engines, and 89% of search engine traffic stems from the Big Three….

60% = Google
20% = Yahoo
9% = MSN/Live

The remaining 11% of the traffic makes up the smaller search engines, including AOL, Ask, DogPile, etc. These smaller search engines get their data from Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live. With this information, it is a safe bet that once you are listed among the Big Three, your site will be listed in the smaller search engines as well, and there is no need to submit to them individually.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not as complex as many webmasters believe it is, and we will be posting tidbits of information, along with tips, tricks and how to’s here in our “Recent-Articles” area to help you get started on optimizing and marketing your website.

This article is probably a little shorter than what many will be, but the site is still new yet. Please make sure to bookmark us and check back often. We have an RSS feed too. =)

If certain websites seem to be giving you trouble, not displaying correctly, not allowing you to log in, not allowing you to view photo galleries, etc. – Now there is a way that you can check to see if it’s your computer or the website causing the problem. You no longer have to wait for a tech support rep to tell you to “clear your cache” and “delete your cookies”….. ough!

Microsoft has provided us with a version of Internet Explorer called, “Internet Explorer, no add ons”. This is a stripped down version of Internet Explorer that has no bells or whistles; it is not meant for daily browsing but it’s wonderful for finding out which side of a website a problem is occurring on. Should you encounter a problem with a site that does not want to load or certain areas are not working right for you, try this.

Go to your ‘Start’ button, go to “Accessories” and into “System Tools”. In the “System Tools” folder you will see “Internet Explorer no add ons” – select that and a new browser window will open with a little warning window, like this:

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With this version of Internet Explorer, go back to the website that you were experiencing difficulty with and try to do the same thing that it would not let you do previously – If you were trying to post on a message board and it would not allow you to post, try to make a new post using this bare bone basic version. If you are able to navigate the site with this version of Internet Explorer, then you have narrowed your problem down to it being an add on.

Now it’s time to close this version out and go back to the “real version” and begin experimenting with disabling the add ons that might be causing the problem. Internet Explorer comes prepackaged with several add ons already, and many sites install their own so this might be a chore. You can safely disable any and all of them, just know that when you need one you will receive a pop up message stating that the website you are viewing requires ‘x’ add on, asking if you would you like to enable it.

To disable (or enable) add on, go to “Tools” –> “Internet Options”, when the window opens, click on the “Programs” Tab.

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Click on the “Manage add-ons” Button, and this window will open, displaying all of the add ons installed in your Internet Explorer:

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As you highlight each add on you will see radio buttons underneath (in the gray area at the bottom of the screen) where you can enable or disable each add on. Once you are done, click “OK”, and then close the subsequent window to return to your Internet Explorer. Open a new browser window to check your new settings (to see if the add ons that you disabled fixed your problem).