How can you tell if the email you received regarding SEO is legitmate?

• A professional business will rarely use a free email account such as AOL, Yahoo, Gmail etc. They may use them for personal accounts, but when representing their company, they will use their website email  such as Joe@ACME.com to help further their name recognition.
• Serious businesses won’t approach you with a short text email. They will use an email service such as Constant Contact that will have a  graphically pleasing look prominently displaying their logo, tag line and a can’t resist offer. After all, if their goal is to get new customers wouldn’t they want to make a good impression?
•  These emails will also have an opt-in and/or opt-out link to conform with anti-spam regulations in various states. If you don’t see that any where, the email is a scam. A business that wants to improve their image would not risk getting black listed with all of the major hosting companies.
• If they guarantee to get you on the first page of Google – it’s too good to be true. There is no way to guarantee that your site will be on the first page within a specified time period, or ever.  If that were possible, that person would not be wasting time sending you emails, they would be collecting millions of dollars from Wal Mart and other companies with larger advertising budgets than you have.

These guidelines are true, not just for SEO, but any business that may approach you through your email. If you are curious to find out more, don’t click on the email to reply as it might have a virus embedded. Instead, do a search on the company in the email address. If you get to a real website, then make your judgement from there.

Go to http://www.google.com/places/ to begin.

Just one word of caution, the email you use is likely to get abused by spammers, so don’t list your most valuable email address with Google Places. You can get a special email account just for this purpose from your hosting company.

• Informational posts that display from  newest to oldest,
• Archives of older posts,
• Display of post author and date,
• Comment section.

Blogs don’t have to look like blogs. They can be customized to look like a traditional website by restyling the look and modifying the features. Why would you want to do this? There are many advantages to using a blog for your website:

• There is an administrative area that allows website owners the ability to edit their website content  without knowing how to program, including posting images, and videos
• Website content can be categorized for easy searching and organizing your website content as your site grows
• When set up correctly, blogs are very search engine friendly
• There are numerous widgets than can easily be installed to do such things as display contact forms, calendars, photo galleries, polls, countdown clocks, you name it

All of Nockpoint’s web design packages include a free optional blog to either be embedded in a traditional website, or to be installed as the main website. For more information,Click Here

• Help Search Engines do Their Job
  Search engines want to provide their customers with the best answers to the information they are seeking. When writing up your content, try to think of important points your customers would want to know. If you have several customers asking similar questions, then you should definitely address these questions on your site. Make sure your site is submitted to all major search engines, as well as a site map for Google.
• Quality Coding
  A professionally programmed website will improve your rankings. We program our sites to be accessible, and follow the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendations as a rule.
• Local Services
  Check your local community websites to see if they are willing to add a link to you. Many will do it for free, some may charge you.
• Social Media
  If you are selling a product or marketing an event, it may be worthwhile to set up accounts with some of the more popular social media such as Facebook, and Twitter.
• Email Campaigns
  Develop email lists of prospects in order to provide them with newletters, notices, and events about your company. Make sure this is done with consideration by conforming to anti-spam guidelines using opt-ins and opt-outs.
• Traditional Marketing
  Don’t forget the obvious such as having your website listed on all of your printed material, getting a plug for your site with organizations you donate to, and telling all of your friends and aquaintences.

We offer a number of services to help promote your website.  Learn more on our Content and Marketing page.

• Audio Editing
  We can crop audio clips, add royalty free sound effects, add royalty free music backgrounds, or have a professional record your script.
• Video Editing
  We can resize and scale your videos, add background audio, and provide royalty free images for your slide presentations.
• Photo Galleries
  Send us your images and we will optimize them for a custom slide show with your choice of transitions. We can add watermarks or provide other methods of security to help protect your images from being downloaded or copied.

Click Here to View Prices

But what about visitors coming to your site from a mobile phone or other small device?  Most visitors won’t have the patience to pan back and forth for very long, so are they going to see what you want them to see before they leave?

The question is, do you plan your website to have lots of eye appeal on the big screen, or do you make it compact so your mobile visitor can find your phone number without giving up.

Fortunately, you don’t have to make that decision, because you can do both.  The latest browsers allow different styles to be defined based on the device accessing the page. For example you may want a splashy introduction video on your main website for those with large screen monitors and fast connections, a still image in place of the video for those with slower connections, and simple text and buttons only for mobile phone connections. You could also define styles for every size in between, as well as printing and rss feeds if you wanted to be a perfectionist. But in most cases 2 to 3 styles are sufficient.

So what happens if someone comes to your site using an old browser? No problem, because we define a style that old browsers will default to. Contact us for more information.

We do not have minimum time requirements. If an update takes 5 minutes you are billed for only 5 minutes. Most website redesigns are based on an hourly fee.  You can pay as you go, or you can save money by choosing a pre-paid Maintenance Package.

For larger projects, such as a total website redesign we will provide a custom quote.

Click Here to View Our Website Maintenance Packages

• Get a spam filter for your email account. Your hosting account offers Postini for $12/yr per account. I have this myself, and only get a handful of junk mails daily. You can add the spam filter at anytime.
• Usually the email accounts hit the hardest are ones that are published directly on the site. Don’t post your most used email account that you don’t want to part with anywhere on the site. It is better to have a generic email account on the site that is forwarded to your regular email. This way if it gets too bad, the address can be deleted and replaced with a new one without affecting your personal accounts.
• Encourage employees to not use their business email address when joining social forums, filling out surveys, or any other online activity that is likely to harvest email addresses.
• Have a “Captcha” widget added to your website forms. Most spam is propagated by automated “bots” . These are the input boxes you see on forms that require you to answer a simple question, or to type in words that are partially obscured or distorted.  Adding a captcha to all of your forms will help to cut back on spam by making it difficult for the bots to respond.

If you are familiar with setting up accounts for outlook, you can use the following settings:

Set up for a POP3 account
User name: full email address ie Joe@yourwebsitename.com
Incoming Mail server: mail.yourwebsitename.com
Outgoing Mail server: mail.yourwebsitename.com (check the box “server requires authentication”)
POP3: port 110
SMTP: port 26 (outlook usually uses a default port 25 so make sure this gets changed or you will be able to receive email but won’t be able to send)

If you are not familiar with setting up accounts follow these steps:
To add an email account to Outlook (xp):

1. Open Outlook. Click on Tools and choose Email Accounts.
2. Click on View or change existing email accounts and click Next.
3. If you attempted to create any email accounts but were unsuccessful, you can remove them from here. Otherwise, click Add.
4. Choose POP3 and click Next.
5. For User Info, type your name and full email address. For Logon Info, type your full email address as the username, and your password.
6. For Server Info, type mail.yourdomainname.com for both SMTP and POP3. If you are unable to connect to the SMTP server, your ISP may be blocking port 25 from 3rd party use. Contact your ISP if this occurs.
7. Do not click Test Account Settings. Simply click Next.
8. Your account will be shown in the list of email accounts configured in Outlook. Click Finish.
9. In Outlook Express, click Send/Receive.

Adding an email account to Outlook Express (Version 6.0):

1. Open Outlook Express. Click on Tools and choose Accounts.
2. In the Internet Accounts Window, click Add and choose Mail.
3. Type in your Name and click Next.
4. Type in your email address and click Next.
5. Choose POP3 as the incoming mail server. For the server names for both Outgoing and Incoming, type mail.your-domain-name.ext. (ie mail.yadayadayada.com)
6. Type in your full email address as your account name. Also type in your password and click Next.
7. Click Finish on the Congratulations screen.
8. Click Close to close out of the Internet Account window.
9. In Outlook Express, click Send/Receive.

Note: If you are unable to connect to the SMTP server, your ISP may be blocking port 25 from 3rd party use. Contact your ISP if this occurs.

Video How-to for Outlook 2010