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 June 11, 2009 under 3-Tech Tips |
After one of the many times my Vista Business 32 laptop locked up, it didn’t recover too gracefully. On bootup I got the infamous “One of your disks needs to be checked…” errors. That was the good news. The bad news was that chkdsk would not complete running on startup. During stage one, I got the message: Deleting corrupt attribute record …. from file record segment … Readable file record segment 60195 is not writeable.
No matter how I tried to run chkdsk, it would not complete. I ran a disk sector test and the hard drive came out clean. I ran Norton Disk Doctor and it did nothing. Extensive googling on the error yielded little, so I tried googling on various parts of the error phrases.
In the end, it turned out the solution was pretty simple. Apparently, even when running chkdsk on startup, the C: drive may be locked. So I booted to the recovery CD, which had a command prompt option. Then running good old-fashioned chkdsk C: /f from the DOS prompt fixed my drive.
Posted by admin on May 30, 2009 under 3-Tech Tips |
I had several different wireless problems with my Vista Business laptop. These ranged from dropped connections to the computer completely losing control of the wireless adapter. I tried several different solutions gleaned from different websites and forum posts. Here is a summary of some of the configuration changes I made. The result that my wireless connectivity is pretty stable. I wish I could say that for the rest of my Vista Experience!
- Change your Power Savings Options
Go to Control Panel/Power Options
Click “Change Plan Settings” for your selected plan
Click “Change Advanced Power Settings”
Expand “Wireless Adapter Settings” and “Power Saving Mode”
Change both battery and plugged in settings to “Maximum Performance”
- Disable IPV6
Unless you know that you need it, you can disable it. Here are the steps:
Go to Start/Control Panel/Network Connections
Look for the Wireless Network Connection
Right Click it, and select Properties
Uncheck the Selection for Internet Protocol Ver 6
- Modify Adapter Roaming Settings
While you are in the adapter settings for Number 2, click the Configure button
Go to the Advanced tab, and look for Roaming Agressiveness
Change the setting to Medium-Low
- Make Sure you have the latest wireless adapter drivers
Don’t count on Vista finding the driver for you. You will need to go to the website of your computer manufacturer, and find the driver download section in the Support pages. If you are uncomfortable installing the driver, go back to the store you bought the computer.
If you can’t get your Vista machine to obtain an IP address at all, you might want to check this article on Microsoft’s support web site - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233. If the article number has changed search for “Windows Vista cannot obtain an IP address from certain routers” when you go to support.microsoft.com
If you have other solutions you would like to add, please leave a comment!
Disclaimer: These are commonly known solutions and I will not be held responsible for your attempts to follow them. If you are unsure of your ability to modify or undo configurations on your computer, contact a professional to do it for you!
If you found my post helpful and it saved you time or money, please contribute by making a small donation. Even a dollar or two adds up!
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”.