Posted by admin on November 23, 2009 under 2-User Tips, 3-Tech Tips | 
This is not meant to be a ground-up overview or tutorial on search engine optimization. Rather, it focuses on fundamental strategies for SEO for a typical small-business site. I assume you understand the core terminlogy for SEO. If you don’t, you should first search out some tutorials on SEO.
Once you are ready to apply some SEO tags and structure to your site, I hope these tips will be helpful.
Search engines typically index pages in the following order:
- Page Title meta tag
- Page Description meta tag
- Page Keywords meta tag
- Page content
To take advantage of the meta tags follow these simple tips:
- Use a unique, accurate title and description for each page. Don’t use the same title or description for all your pages.
- Don’t overload your tags with a lot of extra words that don’t appear in your content.
- Google also compares the content of the page with the words in your tags. It looks for the same words and ranks the keywords higher if it finds more occurrences of the same words in the page content. For example if you have “landscape architect” in your title and as a keyword, use this phrase several times in your page content also. But don’t overload the page with the keywords, which Google considers “Keyword Stuffing” Google favors a keyword density of 1-3%. Here is one tool that analyzes keywords on a page. http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/
- Use descriptive “Alt” tags on images.
The rest of the story:
Having accurate keywords that users will actually search for is only the first part of successful SEO. It helps the search engines accurately index your page. But your page ranking is dependent on how many time users actually select your page on a search, as well as how many external sites link to your page. Here are tips for improving your search rank.
- Get your link on relevant sites. For example, get your link on news pages or blogs relevant to your industry. Write an article (that includes a link to your site) that appears in an online industry newsletter. Find online directories of services you provide and make sure your site is listed.
- Use a white hat service that can improve your ranking. Be careful, because if Google suspects you are artificially improving your ranking, it will actually lower or even blacklist your site. You can’t improve your ranking by selecting your own site over and over from your own computer - Google limits the counts it gets from one IP address.
We provide a service to enhance your page rank by optimizing your the key words on your site and legitimately increasing the number of search hits your site receives. If you would like more information, please contact us here.
Posted by admin on March 2, 2009 under 2-User Tips |
I don’t go crazy over PC helper programs. But I’ve found a few that I absolutely rely on, so I would like to pass them on. Here are 4 programs that I use constantly. I’ll review some others in a second post.
Roboform
The first program is Roboform. This program allows you to save and retrieve all your web passwords. You enter a single (strong) password the first time you use it forthe day. After that, any time you go to a website that requires a log-in and password, Roboform allows you to log in with a single click. You also have the ability to launch your password protected pages from Roboform. All the functionality resides in a simple toolbar on your Web Browser. Roboform also allows you to generate strong random passwords, create password protected notes, and save more than one profile or identity. One of the features I like about Roboform is that its data is stored in the My Documents folder, so the data is backed up when you back up your documents. Roboform stays active as long as you are logged in to your computer, but you can also set a timeout that requires you to enter your password after a certain time, for example 3 hours.
Xobni
I just recently found about about Xobni (inbox spelled backwards). This is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. It indexes all your email and allows you to very quickly and easily search by name or keyword. But that’s just the start. It will also allow you to view email threads and all the attachments related to a search result. It also will display the “network” of people you send and receive emails from by linking together all the CC:’s on your emails. It provides a variety of useful and interesting statistics about your email contacts - including average response time and a histogram of the time of day that they send you emails. It is a free program and seems to work unobtrusively within Outlook.
Stegano Safe
Steganos is a “virtual safe” used to store sensitive documents and data. It works by creating an encrypted file that acts as a virtual hard drive. So after I open the safe, I see a new hard drive (e.g. H: drive) on my system. You can have several virtual drives for different purposes, and drives can be as large as your system allows. I have used a 50 GB virtual safe successfully. I use a 20 character password, which the program deems uncrackable. One thing I like about Steganos is that it automatically closes the safe if you log off, sleep, hibernate, or shut-off the computer. The program also includes a “shredder” which will completely wipe a file from your hard drive, or clean the empty space on your hard drive by writing random information to it. This is an important sidebar - when you “delete” a file from you hard drive Windows only removes the file name from the directory. There are many programs that allow one to recover deleted files and they can also be used maliciously if someone steals your computer.
Mailwasher Pro
I don’t let any email come directly into my inbox. Instead I use a program called Mailwasher. Mailwasher checks my mailboxes just like Microsoft Outlook does. But instead of reading the entire email, it just displays the Subject and From address of each email. It also scans the first hundred lines of so of each email so that it can flag it as good or spam. A very efficient display shows all my pending email, color coded as good, or spam. One click flags an email as spam, or a sender as either friend or foe. If you flag an email as spam it “learns” the content of the email so it can flag similar mail. Clicking a button to process the mail deletes all the bad mail from my email server. I can then go into Outlook and manually download my mail. The downside to this process is that receiving email becomes a two step process - first to review and filter the email with Mailwasher, second to retrieve the mail with Outlook. However, at one time I was receiving 200 or more spam letters a day, so it was well worth it to keep my Outlook folders clean. My email server now has a spam filter which removes 95% of the spam I receive, so Mailwasher isn’t as much of a necessity. But I still prefer to screen the email before it hits my inbox.
Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement for any of the products, and I can’t be held responsible for your use (or misuse) of them. Please try at your own risk!
Posted by admin on March 1, 2009 under 2-User Tips, 3-Tech Tips |
I’ve recently had the pleasure of upgrading from Outlook 2003 to 2007, as well as assisting a client do the same. Neither endeavors went as easily as I would have liked!
On my installation, Outlook lost the ability to pull contacts into an email. If I opened a new email and clicked the TO button, nothing came up. Yet if I went into my contacts, they were all there. I did a search on this and found a lot a lot of similar woes. Most of the answers pointed to this Microsoft Bulletin:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287563/en-us
This document explains how to go into account settings and add an address book to Outlook, then go to your Contact List “Folder Properties” and click a checkbox to “Show this folder as an e-mail address book .”
Easy enough, except the first step didn’t let me make any changes, and in the second step the checkbox was grayed out.
Now the problem became really interesting - I searched on various phrases about the checkbox being grayed out and found many similar problems and no answers. After a lot of searching, and combing pages of results, I found this Microsoft Bulletin:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/829918/en-us
In short, there is no way to fix this problem, except to create a new user profile in Outlook. This bulletin explains how to create a new profile in Outlook. It was a relatively easy solution, except Outlook 2007 doesn’t let you export and import mail accounts so I had to manually re-enter my 6 or so email accounts. So apparently there is no real solution to this problem - recreating the profile is a nice way of saying “Start Over”.