1. Go to HOME and choose “Add Account”

2. From the Auto Account Setup – Fill in the bottom bubble and click Next

3. Here, continue with the first bubble Internet E-mail. Click Next

4. In the Internet E-mail Settings, fill out the following:

1. You name – This is NOT your signature. It’s your display name for the email itself.
2. Your email address
3. Account type – IMAP for this example because we want to access our mail from other mobile devices. This is basically a “mirror” of your server mail.
4. Incoming and Outgoing Mail Server – See #5
5. Username – can be the whole email or just the first part before the @
6. Password
7. Remember password – checked
8. If you’re an advanced user you can add this account to your current .pst file. If  not, or you want each account to have its own .pst file, keep New Outlook Data File checked.

5. The incoming and outgoing mail servers will both be the domain.com name. Then click More Settings…

6. Choose the tab Outgoing Server and check the first box My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication and the first bubble. Then click the Advanced tab.

7. Fill in the following:

1. Incoming server (IMAP): 143 (unless you have an SSL for your domain you would use 993)
2. Outgoing server (SMTP): 587
3. Root folder path: INBOX
4. Click OK when done.

8. Click NEXT and Outlook should perform a Test. If all goes well, you should see a green check mark. If not, a red X will appear.

9. If Outlook successfully sent and received, the box will disappear. Click Next to finish. Outlook should create the necessary folders for you automatically.

10. If you get any errors or messages, please jot them down and call us at 455-1464 and we’ll help you fix these errors the best we can.

How did I just draw a comparison between updating a website and making a difference in someone’s life? Have you ever needed a phone number of a company, gone to the website, searched in vain for several minutes before getting frustrated and moving on? Ever searched for information on the web, clicked a search result and thought “This is NOT what I was looking for!”?

You (through your website) can make a profound difference in your customers’ lives. You can set their day off to bad start if they’re frustrated or give them the feeling of efficiency and accomplishment if they can get the information they need without struggling.

Take a little time each week to be sure users can accomplish their main goals on your site. If you’re a local restaurant or coffee shop, be sure your hours, location, menu, etc. are easy to find and easily viewable on mobile devices. If you have an online store, be sure shoppers can search for products easily, complete the transaction without hindrance, etc.

Whether you sell cabinets or pastries, provide consulting services or job opportunities – you and your company make a tangible difference in the lives of your customers and viewers.  Take that responsibility seriously and win customer loyalty. Make your slashes count!

Today, however, search engine queries can deliver anything you ask them for in fractions of a second. These resource pages and external links are no longer necessary, nor are they used by visitors. If this is the case, why are search engines still placing such a big premium on links in their ranking algorithms?

Realistically speaking, as a website owner, why would you want to link to another site and risk losing traffic to that very site? Because the search engines tell you to. Now, don’t get me wrong. There are perfectly legit reasons to link to outside resources. In this very article I’ve already linked to two such resources. Linking can strengthen your argument by providing validation of ideas, more information on a topic, tools to help you research an idea or solve a problem, etc.

Take Away – There is usually no need for a resources page (link farm, etc.) on a site.  Build links naturally by creating good quality content that people want to associate themselves with.

The question was posed: “What kinds of questions should I ask my SEO consultant to be sure he knows what he’s doing? Below is an excerpt of the result – questions to ask your SEO to be sure they know what they’re doing.

#1 – How will you choose which keywords to optimize on each page? Will you guess or do research? If research, what programs do you use? Will you be able to tell me the number of searches per month those keywords are getting?

This is important! MANY SEO’s optimize a page for words like “pensacola florida pool retail sellers”. This is fraudulent at worst and a bad idea at best because there are zero searches each month for that phrase. So even if your SEO consultant got you a number one placement in the search engines for that phrase – No One Searches For It! (A #1 placement won’t bring traffic to your site.)

#2 What is your inbound and outbound linking strategy? Link exchanges are a thing of the past. “Bad neighborhoods” have eliminated the benefit to link exchanges and link farms. What strategy does your SEO have for building links naturally? Also, avoid “run of site” links. These are links that are placed in the footer or another inconspicuous place on every page of a website. The search engines have gotten “smarter” when it comes to links. If it doesn’t look natural, it won’t help you – and could actually hinder your efforts.

#3 Will you provide me with monthly reports on your progress? All reputable SEO professionals should provide you with monthly reports on keyword placement in the SERPs as well as overall site metrics such as number of visitors, average pages viewed per visit, average time on site, and best sources of traffic. While no one can promise you a number one ranking (after all, the search engines control that, not SEOs) a professional SEO should want to show you the progress he’s making.

While there are many questions you should ask a potential SEO consultant, these are three that will give you a good understanding of their practices. Keep in mind that you should always steer clear of someone that tells you to “hide” keywords on a page (white text on a white background). This is known as blackhat SEO, or spamdexing and while it may give you a temporary boost – search engines are smarter than they used to be. The last thing you want is for your domain to get black listed and not show up at all.

A reputable SEO will follow search engine best practices and should be certified. With a little information and some time, you’ll be able to screen potential SEO’s and get the most value for your money. And yes – SEO is expensive – because it’s time consuming. With something like this, you get what you pay for.

Happy SEOing!

What is encrypting?

In this instance, encryption refers to utilizing a secure sockets layer, or SSL connection. An SSL connection allows the information you enter on a web page and submit to be encrypted, or protected, from unauthorized, prying eyes.  Most browsers recognize SSL connections, or secure forms, by displaying an https url instead of the standard http version. For example, Google’s standard url – http://www.google.com is the unencrypted url and the newer https://www.google.com is the encrypted page.

Why Should I Care?

If you are signed-in to Google and submit a search query, certain attributes of your query will no longer be passed to the sites you visit. Let’s say you want to order a pizza, so you go to Google, sign in, and then type a search for “pizza delivery in Spokane, WA.” When you visit the pizzeria website, information such as the city you are in, the search query you typed in, which browser you were using, etc. were passed on to the pizzeria’s analytics tracking program. This was a great benefit to business and website owners as they could run reports on where their traffic was coming from, and attributes of their customers. If they put up a new billboard in Spokane and traffic to the website increased in that city because people were searching for their company name, they could attribute some of that success to the billboard and calculate a return on advertising investment.

With Google now encrypting the search query on signed-in user queries, this information will no longer be available to businesses and webmasters. Google estimated in their news release that this would impact 10% or less of reporting viewable by businesses and webmasters. I assume this 10% number is based on the total percentage of searches performed by signed-in users.  What if certain businesses have a client base that are much more likely (than the national average) to be signed-in Google users? What happens to their ability to analyze website traffic data? Answer: They’re out of luck.

Privacy for Sale?

The real kicker in this announcement is that after all the concern for privacy being the reason behind the move to encrypted search, if the user clicks on an ad or paid result (the right column of search results pages and also the top couple of listings on some results page) the information that Google is encrypting on organic clicks is actually not encrypted on paid clicks. That’s right. If the business pays for the click, the information is passed. If they don’t, no data. So it’s not really about your privacy, it’s a business decision on Google’s part to monetize the “private” information. After all, privacy is when your information stays your own. Even with Google’s encrypted search, they still retain all of the private information, they just don’t pass it along to webmasters unless you pay for it.

Take Aways

Here are some quotes from industry leaders on the subject that seem to sum it all up. Peter Young, with Holistic Search Marketing, says, “To be honest the fact that it’s perfectly acceptable for PPC [paid] data to be tracked in the same circumstance that Google says it cannot pass organic data through for “privacy purposes” would suggest again this privacy is the least of their concerns. ‘You can have the data – as long as you pay us’ would appear to be the rhetoric here.”  Joost deValk, from SEO Book explains, “This is what I call hypocrisy at work. Google cares about your privacy, unless they make money on you, then they don’t. The fact is that due to this change, AdWords gets favored over organic results. Once again, Google gets to claim that it cares about your privacy and pulls a major public ‘stunt’. The issue is, they don’t care about your privacy enough to not give that data to their advertisers.”

The bottom line: If Google had just said it was a business decision designed to increase profits, most people would have understood that. They’d still grumble, but at least it would make sense. This false pretense of protecting privacy goes out the window Google if you’re going to give it away if you get paid.

Proof of Google's Webmaster Central Blog Being Hacked?

Clicking the user link on the posts takes you to mismo334′s (Joe Hewes) Flickr page.

Seeing as how it’s not April 1st, I doubt it’s a joke on Google’s part. I also can’t see how it could be intentional. No Google representatives have publically addressed what happened as of yet. So what’s up?

Share ideas below. We’ll update the post as more information becomes available.

Ever wonder why the number of pages indexed in Google (as shown in the Sitemaps section of Webmaster Tools) is different from the number of pages indexed in Google (as shown in a site: search of Google itself)?

<rant>Google forums and blogs, as well as other industry sources say that it could be because of the way Google stores data. You see, Google utilizes what are called data centers. According to the Webmaster Central Blog, “Occasionally, fluctuation in search results is the result of differences in our data centers. When you perform a Google search, your query is sent to a Google data center in order to retrieve search results. There are numerous data centers, and many factors (such as geographic location and search traffic) determine where a query is sent. Because not all of our data centers are updated simultaneously, it’s possible to see slightly different search results depending on which data center handles your query.”I understand “slightly different” results depending on what data center you hit when you perform the search. However, I don’t consider 1,000+ urls a “slight” difference.

Here’s a real example for demonstration purposes. A national professional services firm has over 6,000 pages on their website. According to Webmaster Tools, 2,659 of them are indexed. This seems to be the more trustworthy number, as many of the urls are intentionally blocked from the index using robots.txt. When doing a search in Google for “site:www.sampledomain.com” Google reports there are only 1,560 pages indexed.

Why would Google show two completely different numbers for pages in their index? I’ve spoken to other designers and SEOs about this issue and a common answer is that maybe the site has duplicate content that Google’s site: search filters out. Valid hypothesis, that. OK, so I perform another site: search and add the filter=0 parameter that shows all duplicate content that Google “filters out” of the results. This search shows 1,590 results. So the 30 pages of duplicate content aren’t the issue.

Another common hypothesis is that personalized search is impacting the results I’m seeing on the site: search. OK, so I add the pws=0 parameter to the url and come up with 1,590. Where are the additional 1,069 urls Webmaster Tools says Google has in its index? If they’re there, why can’t we see them?

According to this post, it’s crazy to even ask the question of why they don’t match! The Top Contributor’s answers as to why they don’t match: Different Data Centers (addressed above), Log In/Log Out of iGoogle (addressed above), the exact search query (correct above), Filtering (addressed above), and finally (not in the post) – estimating…

“The SERPs – the figures you see when you do a search… those are NOT accurate in many cases.
In fact – Google does tell you this ….. it clearly says ‘of about’ – it does not say ‘exactly’. To the point – as you click through the pages (using the pager at the bottom), the chances are damned good that the number you see quoted will change. It may start off on page1 saying ‘of about 1270′ … and yet on page2 it may say ‘of about 421′. So Click Through the Pager and watch the figures.”

Really? So, basically, Google’s numbers are “estimated” and not exact. I could live with that if they were even CLOSE to what Webmaster tools shows. It’s just a little hard to believe that Google could be that far off when metrics and numbers are such a key part of their algorithm (and available to them already via Webmaster Tools).

OK, so what do I think? I think that Google doesn’t want webmasters to be able to accurately research how their competitor sites are doing. One of the measures of SEO is number of pages indexed. If we don’t really know how many pages our competition has, it’s one less metric we can use to compete. Google did something similar with Page Rank several years ago. They started releasing updates to their Page Rank numbers about once every 6 months. Why? Probably so that webmasters couldn’t use that information to figure out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to SEO techniques. They want to make it hard for black hats and spammers to play the system. A very noble cause that I happen to agree with. However, Google should also acknowledge that removing this data, or showing incorrect “estimates,” makes it harder for legitimate sites to know how they’re doing and improve what needs to be improved.</rant>

I propose that in the interim, when logged into your Google account that is connected to a Webmaster Tools account (or accounts), that Google show you the “real” number of indexed pages. This would be an improvement even if you still wouldn’t be able to see true numbers for your competitors.

Regardless of what’s been said about you or your company, there are 5 rules of the road that will keep you from escalating the situation and making it a total disaster.

1.  Monitor your Brand – This should be obvious, but a LOT of people and business aren’t doing this. How do you monitor your brand? The easiest way is to set up separate Google alerts for your company, brand name, product names, and your name. Have it email you any mention of these on a regular basis. This will allow you to see (nearly real time) when other sites on the web are talking about you, your company, or your products. There are software platforms that can help with monitoring if your company or product line is too extensive for Google Alerts to be effective.

2.  Respond Quickly – So you’ve received a Google alert that someone has posted a negative review or comment about your company or product. If the negative statement is a real issue or constructive criticism, respond immediately. You want to become part of the conversation while it’s still relevant. Be honest. Admit if you’ve made a mistake and respond with how you’re going to correct it. Thank the person for their feedback – and ultimately, change the process that caused the problem.

3.  Don’t Argue – The worst possible thing you could do (well maybe not, but close) is to argue with the person posting the negative content. Even if they are dead wrong and the inherently evil, do NOT argue with them. It makes you look bad to customers and potential customers that see the post in the future. It’s OK to respond, but if you’re angry, write the post and wait 24 hours before posting. Read it again and have an unbiased 3rd party read it too. If you still think it’s a good idea, then consider posting. It’s also not a good idea to attack your competitors online. It makes you look like a bratty 3 year old.

4.  Be Transparent – Don’t respond to any comment anywhere online as “anonymous.” It’s like going to a town hall meeting to voice your opinion dressed in a full feathered chicken costume. Plus, it’s unprofessional. Even if you use a screen name instead of your real name, you should be transparent as far as the company you work for or represent. Under no circumstances should you ever “fake” a comment. Your readers will see right through it.

5.  Damage Control – If the negative content is egregious enough, you may have to actually do some damage control. If the attack is unwarranted and defamatory, you’ll need to contact the site where the information was posted (see their contact page or do a Whois lookup for the domain owner). The first step is to ask them to remove the defamatory content. If this is unsuccessful, you may need to get an attorney involved. Hopefully it won’t come to this, but if it does, stand up for yourself.

In summary, I’ll revive an old marketing saying from the 80’s. “Any press is good press.” The concept still applies. A contested post or even a customer rant can be a positive if you play your cards right. Embrace it and turn it into something that will work for you. Need an example? Think back to 2009 when a disgruntled United Airlines passenger posted a You Tube video outing the company for throwing his guitar across the tarmac. Did United Airlines argue or ignore it? No, they contacted the passenger and asked permission to use his video in customer service training. Did that un-do the negative damage the video caused the company? Absolutely not. But United wanted to learn from the incident and incorporate processes to be sure similar things didn’t happen in the future. You can’t control what people say, you can only control how you respond.

Face it, without telling your audience who you are and why you’re better than your competition, having a web site is nothing more than a web gallery for images or a quick electronic brochure. Web users have outgrown those types of sites and simply expect more.

Most companies have to use content to describe themselves, but I’ve found that a lot of business owners have a hard time describing themselves in 100 words or more. And that’s just the “about us” page. Of course, you may not be a marketing guru, but if you own a business, you should have some knowledge of your competition and some sales ability to sell yourself. If you honestly can’t come up with anything on your own, ask your best clients to describe why they like to work with you and what problems your company solves for them. That should be at least a starting point.

This is a basic guideline for most small businesses I work with. A web presence is a first glance at your business and with everyone having a web site these days, it’s very easy for a nice web layout to be shot down because of a lack of content.

If you absolutely cannot write content and your budget allows it, then you can hire a content writer or a search engine optimization specialist to write for you or guide you along the way. But don’t think you’re out of the woods, because you still have supply the content writer or SEO with important points about your company.

Here are some tips for getting started writing content.

1. Find your competition. Knowing who they are on the web will tell you how you can beat them. See what they offer that you can capitalize on better. Jot down an outline of their content. Read it over a few times to see what they’re trying to accomplish. This will also help you structure the content on the correct pages if you’re without a web developer. Knowing this information from your competitors will give you an ego boost to crush them.
2. Start with who you are. By knowing the above you should be able to talk about all you have to offer. Some things to think about:
   - How long have you been in business?
   - What are you all about?
   - Any big name clients if you’re in the service industry?
   - Pricing: You know your competition. Is your pricing better?
   - Affiliations such as the BBB, Local Chamber of Commerce, etc.
   - Does your company donate a portion of your sales to any organizations? Ever?
   - Awards given to your company?
   - Certifications your company has?
   - Why are you better than someone else in your industry?
   - What can you give me that I can’t get anywhere else?
   - How’s your customer service? Why?
   - Client Testimonials?
   You want to show that you are better than your competition in every way possible.
3. Get feedback from your employees or close customers about why they work for you or deal with you in general. Have them be completely honest. This will help know who you are in the eyes of others.
4. Type it all out. It may take some time, but the rewards will be well worth it to new customers or even existing customers referring people to you.
5. Watch out for the “WeWe” syndrome.  That’s when your content is all about you and not what you can provide. Stay away from too many sentences that start with We can or We provide, etc. If you want a sanity check, go to FutureNow’s WeWe Monitor.
6. Pass what you wrote around. Let people close to you  read and critique your work.
7. If you have a good relationship with your web developer, pass it to them and allow them to help you as well. Developers see this A LOT so they can help structure your content too.

Take Aways:
Content is king! Know your competition. Look at their web site, Facebook, or Twitter pages. Find out what makes you better than them. Sell yourself on paper. Type it all out; who you are and why you’re in business. Avoid the “WeWe” syndrome. Pass your work around, spend a few days giving yourself time to lice with the words you wrote. Work with your web developer and/or SEO professional on structuring.

Remember, what you put in is what you’ll get in return.

What is SEO?

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing web pages to increase the organic ranking of web pages in search engine results. Organic ranking is defined as the non-paid, main search results you see in Google and other search engines. Paid ranking is the area at the top or on the right side of search results pages that is usually a slightly different color (pink or yellow) and is paid per click by the domain owner.

Most importantly, SEO is a form of advertising. In addition to using conventional methods such as newspaper, tv/radio, or billboard, advertising budgets should include this method of advertising. As with any form of advertising, it does come with its share of risks. NO company can guarantee a first page rank in the organic listings. Google and other search engines rank based on a complex algorithm made up of thousands of ranking factors.

There is no “easy” way of getting number one search rankings. SEO is a work in progress, just like other forms of advertising. Once a site achieves its desired spot, the campaign should not be terminated and let stand - unless, of course, you are finished with the process and understand the possible consequences. Such actions could allow the search engines to think the site is outdated, causing the ranking to decrease over time.

SEO is not an overnight process. It can take several months to start seeing significant movement, depending on the starting point and the competitive landscape. Patience is the key when trying to optimize a web site. Too many times a campaign can be cut of before it had a chance to work. A good SEO professional should never give you a specific date in which you will achieve the ranking you desire.

SEO is not merely about meta tags, and content either, though those are important. Larger sites have to worry about duplicate content and url issues as well as what’s being displayed to the viewer. Newer sites can be developed with SEO in mind and should always be built from the search up.

SEO is not about constantly submitting and resubmitting to every search engine on the planet. If your site is linked via your developer’s site, Facebook, or Twitter for example, then Google will find you and all the major search engines will follow. Spending money to submit or constantly submitting your site is NOT necessary anymore. Also, submitting to every search engine on earth will only lead to more spam in your mailbox.

An Example of an SEO Magic Trick

SEO is not a magic trick. Some SEO’s use unethical, or “black-hat” practices to obtaining high rankings, which could end up getting the site banned or penalized by the search engines. These techniques eventually show their true colors and end up preventing the client from ever using a real SEO professional because they lost money and trust in the unethical professional they used.

Some SEO companies may sometimes charge a one time fee and then “set it forget it“. They often times optimize for keywords that can easily rank high in the search engines, but provide no traffic to the ranking pages. The problem is that the chosen keywords may yield anywhere from 0-3 searches a month. The SEO consultant knows that being in the first page is inevitable and then when achieved, they send the client to Google with those keywords to see they are on the first page. The illusion is nice, but the site may NOT gain the real traffic that was desired. The unknowing client believes the page was optimized, but really it wasn’t.

SEO Checklist

A true SEO consultant should always explain that no one can guarantee number one organic spots. If they do, steer clear of them as they will not help your company, and could do actual harm. Here is a checklist you should follow to know if your SEO is actually going to work for or against you and some tips to help understand how the process should be started.

1. Have Google Analytics installed on each page of the site. Analytics can provide insight into what’s working and what’s not in an SEO campaign. If you don’t have it installed, the SEO professional should alert you to this and it should be a high priority task.

2. The SEO consultant should ask you for a basic list of keywords YOU believe you should be ranked for. This list should include words that your customers would likely type in to find you. It should include some short phrases and some long phrases. This will help the professional understand your business and will also allow them to research the best possible keywords for you.

3. The SEO consultant should ask you for a list of competitors. This information will help the professional gauge who you want to beat. The consultant will research your top competitors and see what works for them and what they are doing wrong. This gives you a competitive advantage optimization wise.

4. The professional should create a customized SEO report. This report should contain a summary of the problematic areas of your site, as well as what is working well. This will show what needs to be fixed and the prioritization that’s needed. You may be charged for this report, but in the end you will have a detailed list of everything your site needs. These reports are not quickly created, and can be 10 or more pages when complete.

5. The professional may set up a meeting either in person or a conference call. The SEO consultant may meet with you briefly and discuss the report and the clear up the terminology that is not easily defined. This helps create a good working relationship and allows you to ask questions. It will also define how the project budget will be allocated.

6. Pricing list. Real SEO isn’t cheap, so unless you have a high budget, pricing packages can be created to help you build your campaign without breaking the bank. There are many levels of SEO, to include content writing, social media consultation, or pay-per-click campaigns, and not everyone can afford the top of the line services, so a list of packages can be created to help you understand what your budget will be used for, and over time it can be increased if needed.

Take Away.
– A real SEO campaign is not an overnight success or a magic trick and NO ONE can guarantee a top organic spot. The SEO company should be interviewed thoroughly so you feel comfortable with the process.
- Try to avoid “get ranked quick” schemes. Though they are cheap, the desired effect is not always what you may have hoped for.
- Do not fall into submitting and resubmitting to thousands of search engines or paying someone to do so. You can link your site through simple means like Facebook or Twitter and Google, Yahoo, and MSN will find you just fine.
- Have Analytics installed on your site. It will not only help you see where your traffic is coming from but it will help provide whomever you hire with some valuable information.
- Lastly, SEO is a form of advertising. Just like billboards, newspaper, or tv/radio.  Though your budget may be tight, what you put in is what you’ll get out.