AGIS | Web Development & Marketing Blog

Found a great article on working on long term relationships relative to Search Optimizaton and results.

To build trust you must first gain permission to communicate with your potentials clients. Here are a couple of ideas how do connect/educate and build a relationship with your clients.

1. Offer Subscriptions
2. Ask them to sign up on your email list
3. Blog Readership
4. White Paper Downloads
5. Helpful Tools
6. Twitter/Facebook/Social site engagement
7. RSS Subscriptions

Six steps to building that longer term relationship.

1. Ask for permission
2. Create stepping stones
3. Make your customers successful at something i.e. makeing a sale or increasing click through rates
4. Segment and treat them special. Give them something of value the can’t get anywhere else
5. Provide learning content
6. Be respectful of peoples time

If you focus on longer term relationship vs the One Night Stands you will win in the long run and gain repeat business.

We often get questions asking, why does a website need SEO Optimizing? Your site looks great, reads well, so everything must be fine, right? Not necessarily. It is hard to describe a Search Engine process that involves an algorithm that must be mind boggling and for the most part is a secret. Plus, beyond the basic Keyword Search the process involves Quality Rankings for the site based on traffic and links from other quality sites and so on, that can determine your position.

The first thing I try to tell a customer is imagine taking all the words and phrases in your copy or links from your home page (the most important page to a Search Engine), jumble them all around, then reading  this mish- mash, can you determine what your site is about? Also, if you throw out all the generic words that could apply to most things or most any site, is there anything left?

How does SEO Optimizing help with this aspect of your site? SEO Optimizing starts by adding or improving your; Head Tags, Links, Titles, Descriptions and Copy.

Take the example above. Let’s assume after SEO Optimizing your copy is either good or with some minor tweaking has been improved. You should now have at least some descriptive Keywords and Phrases that help explain what your site is about. SEO Optimizing of your copy has likely increased the density of important words of phrases, so highlight those in your mind.

With your Meta Descriptions added or improved, you can now highlight, or highlight more, those words or phrases that are also in the Description. Same goes for the Title. Now, highlight further anything that is a Link or with a List Tag and strongly increase anything included in a Head Tag.

Throw out the words with no highlighting and rank the rest based on the weight of the highlighting. What you have left is simple example of what a Search Engine will take away from your site. Chances are if you do this before SEO Optimizing and then after you will see a vast improvement in your rankings for Keywords and Phrases important to you, from seemingly minor adjustments.

As luck would have it for you, AG Information Systems has a wide variety of plans from Basic to Advanced. Check out AG Information Systems‘ SEO page and request more information. With so many sites dependent on Search Engines for 75% or more of their traffic, can you really afford to let your competitors rank above you?

It is fairly simple to have mail Forwarded in both Helm and Smarter Mail. You can set it to store or delete upon Forward. The tricky part is if you wish to Forward to more than one recipient. This needs to be done in Helm and if you don’t have access to Helm controls contact us to do this procedure for you.

Although Helm has a nice easy section called Multi-Recipient Addresses, it won’t allow Forwards from an ACTIVE email account. This is set-up for outside senders who might email support@ or marketing@ so that those emails could go to various people in the organization without having to set up email accounts under those names or for deleted accounts of people who may have left the organization.

This is also how we will trick Helm into allowing us to Forward to Multiple Addresses for a temporary period when we might not want to delete the actual email account, say if someone was out on extended leave or a long vacation. 

First we set up a Multi-Recipient Addresses Forward for a non-existent email account say IAmAway@MyCompany.com. The @MyCompany.com must be your email domain name. Have the IAmAway@MyCompany.com Forward to the addresses you wish, for example we will use bob@MyCompany.com and jim@aol.com. Notice that the Forward from has to contain your domain but the Forward to could be to any email account. Then just go to the active account you wish to have the Forwards coming from, say jane@MyCompany.com and initiate a Forward to IAmAway@MyCompany.com.  

Now when an email comes to jane@MyCompany.com it will Forward to IAmAway@MyCompany.com which will then trigger the 2^nd Forward to bob@MyCompany.com and jim@aol.com.

It seems like a lot of effort and extra work, I agree, but that is the easiest way to Forward automatically from one active email account to multiple accounts. Don’t ask me why it doesn’t allow for it without these extra steps. 

Contact helpdesk@ag-is.com or go to http://www.ag-is.com/Corporate/Support.aspx if you have a hosting support contract and you need assistance.

We get a lot of questions about how could a spammer get your email even though you are careful or how did you get an email which seems to have been sent by you or your company but is actually spam. 

Although the methods spammers use are as numerous as bad drivers on the road, I will only cover a few here, perhaps some of the less obvious. 

We will take the example of John Q. Public at U. S. Marketing. Emails: johnp@usmarketing.com and jpublic@usmarketing.com 

Undoubtedly, U. S. Marketing has a website, www.usmarketing.com. Since spammers can crawl the web just as search engines do, they now have access to a potential source for an email address, @usmarketing.com, since many companies use the same domain for their web site and email. 

If there are any contact us pages or bios on the web site, with email addresses, the spammer now has those addresses, since the crawl program just has to look for an @ sign. The crawlers also look for @ signs anywhere on the net. Is your email in any social media blogs, business directories or almost any electronic form accessible on the web? 

So, now the spammer has a domain and potentially some email addresses. But they do not need specific email addresses to send spam. They can create potential email addresses by running through many combinations and variations. How about williamp@ or johnp@ or maybe even stumble on jpublic@. 

OK, so they have some emails and 1000′s of potential emails. The spammer doesn’t have to send all those emails to know which ones are valid, though they could, they can test them without actually sending an email, sort of like pinging. Bingo, now they know both johnp@usmarketing.com and jpublic@usmarketing.com are valid emails. 

How do they get you to open their email? Since they know the address (they are sending to it, aren’t they?) they can add a few tricks. First, for the most part, they can make it seem like it is sent from any address or display name they want. The from address or the display names are among the easier things for them to fake. Often your own email program will add the display name from your address book. So, if they make it seem like it is to johnp@usmarketing.com from johnp@usmarketing.com Outlook, or whatever program you use, might display your full name in the inbox, even though the spammer does not know your full name. 

Another trick would be to send it from info@usmarketing.com or support@usmarketing.com or any potential general account a company might have. If they chose the johnp@ as the address to send it to, then they also know your first name is John, so why not add your name to the subject, Hey John, open me. Tricky, huh? 

Well those are just a few of the tricks and, having said all that, I will now help them out a little by posting this and telling everyone to go to our website at http://www.ag-is.com. Who knows, maybe they will crawl my post or a search engine will pick it up and they will crawl that link.

On November 9, 2010 Google announced Instant Previews as yet another upgrade to its search results pages in an attempt to provide more information to support “stickiness”. It’s as simple as a small icon that looks like a magnifying glass next to the search results, which users can click to see a “preview” or “snapshot” of the linked website. These “previews” or “snapshots” may also include search terms in orange highlight where they appear in the resulting page. Google indicated on Tuesday that the enhancement increased user’s satisfaction with search results by 5% in internal testing. “We realized early on that this kind of experience would only make sense if it was lightning fast. Not long ago simply downloading an image could take 20 or 30 seconds, and even today many websites take 4 or 5 seconds to load,” Raj Krishnan, Product Manager wrote in the Google Blog today. “With Instant Previews, we match your query with an index of the entire web, identify the relevant parts of each webpage, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customized to your search—usually in under 1/10 of a second.”
This enhancement follows the launch of Google Instant in September, 2010 which completes search results while it’s being typed into search box, with the goal of significantly reducing time spent searching. You can try Google Instant Previews prior to its launch in the next few weeks in Google Labs or click here for more information.

Google Instant Preview results page example