Email Spoofing

Sometimes you get a bounced message that you didn't sent in the first place and the reason for that is that someone has spoofed your email address. They are usually hoping that you'll click some link in the email to figure out what's going on and then, yippee, you're taken to some annoying, perverse or otherwise malicious website.
The article linked above describes spoofing in more detail if you're interested.

Importance of the Meta Title Tag

Go to your website and look at the top* of the browser, to see what words are there for each page on your website. That's the "meta title" and, generally, you should have a different keyword phrase plus your company name (or location if relevant) for each page on your website. It's very important relative to search engines.
* In most cases (Internet Explorer or Firefox), it's the dark blue bar at the top of the window; the same bar that has the minimize and close icons on the right side.
I don't know how AOL or Safari screens display it, but I assume it's in a similar place.

Setting Up Outlook to Retrieve Mail

To set up Outlook to retrieve mail from your website (mailserver), click the title of this posting to go to our help page. The instructions assume you already have an Outlook default email account set up that sends and retrieves mail from your ISP (Internet Service Provider).

The goal of these instructions is for you to be able to retrieve mail from our mailserver rather than having it forwarded to your ISP email address.

The benefit of doing this is that our spam filter has a chance to do its work if you leave mail on it until retrieved. This is not the case if your mail is automatically forwarded to your ISP email address.

Click the title above to see the instructions with screen shots.

SEO - and Vanity

It's probably human nature to make your website the starting page for Internet Explorer or Firefox, etc. But that really skews your statistics.

If you go to your home page 5 times a day, that's 150 "visitors" that show up every month in your website's statistics that aren't the kind of visitors you're interested in.

So, as much as you may love looking at your creation, I recommend only visiting your own website when you must. And when you do need to or just want to look at it, try going to Google and searching for it with one of the terms which you think will put you high on the list. It's a great, fast way to see how well you're doing. Or not.

Keyword

"Keywords"

There are a lot of misconceptions about keywords, but before I get into them, let's understand the history.

HTML has "meta" tags. These are not visible on the actual web page that shows on the screen. Their function is to give information about the web page to the browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.). Meta tags also provide information to search engines.

The Meta tag for keywords lets you list words that are relevant to the particular web page. Originally, this helped in searches for sites/files, but very bad people started using the keyword tag for evil purposes. They might, for example, include their competitor's name in their keywords tag in hopes of getting visitors looking for the competing product. Or porn sites would stuff their keyword tag with innocent, but popular terms, in hopes of getting visitors who would then stay on their sites.

Due to this misuse - which became rampant (there are a lot of unethical people out there), most search engines now ignore the Meta Keyword tag or give it very little weight in deciding what a web page is about.

So... feel free to use the tag - appropriately, but don't make the mistake of thinking it's important. If I use it at all, these days, I rarely bother to put more than 10 words in it.

The Meta Description tag, however, is extremely important. I'll talk about that next.

Gotta get to work now, though.

SEO - The First Step

SEO or Search Engine Optimization means working on a website to improve its ranking in searches. There are numerous components of SEO, from using the right text for a particular web page to laying out the website so that the search engine bots (programs that "read" web pages) identify your business, product or service correctly.

The first step in SEO, though, is always deciding what term or terms you think customers will use when searching. I strongly suggest that you not rely on your thoughts (or mine) alone. None of us uses the same words for every situation or thing.

Think about how people across the country refer to soft drinks: soda, pop, soda pop, soft drink, or if you're like me, it's Coke® (no matter what you're drinking).

So even though you may think you sell widgets, the rest of the world may call your product thingamajigs or whatchamacallits How do you handle that so you rank well for all 3 variations? Ideally, you have enough pages on your website that you can have one emphasize "widgets" while another emphasizes "whatchamacallits" and so forth. If not - and you don't want to add new pages to your site, you should emphasize the most commonly used word (there are ways to determine that) and simply mention the other words where you can.

I'll continue this mini-education on SEO next week, but here are three things to remember.

1. Don't try to make your home page rank well for every product/service you offer or every term you can think of.
2. Probably half your visitors don't enter your site via the home page.
3. Google and other search engines do not share how they rank websites. They give guidelines but they don't share their trade secrets. Successful SEO is equal parts intuition, experience and following the guidelines.

My experience (a few examples)*:

• Search for "Dallas wedding venue" #5 is my client:
  (The Lawton Estate)
• Search for "wedding coordinators Austin" #2 is my client:
  (Belynda Barkley Montgomery Weddings)
• Search for "letter plaques" #1 is my client:
  (Marie Ricci Collection)
• Search for "children's name plaques" #2 is my client
  (for Mercy's sake, inc. Children's Furniture)
• Search for "gourmet cooking class texas" #1 is my client
  (The Pan Handle Gourmet Cooking Tools)
  

*These were the results today. That's another thing to remember about search engine results. Results change. New sites come online, old sites go away, sites get redesigned, etc.
That's why, if you're serious about staying in the top 10, you should either be spending a few hours every month working on it or pay someone to do it for you.

Happy Memorial Day.

Can your customers reach you?

Today I had a call from someone who wanted to get in touch with a Truly Texan mall member. The company in question doesn't have a phone number on their website. That happens fairly often. And since I don't give out client information that isn't on their website, the best I could do was suggest this person use the email link on that website to contact the owner.

Not having a phone number on your website may protect your privacy, but it doesn't do much for:
1. your sales, or
2. your credibility.

I have a couple of rules I follow when making an online purchase. I never buy from a website that doesn't have a phone number. Nor would I buy from a website that doesn't have some sort of physical address - at least a city and state.

And these days you can buy prepaid cell phones that are cheap and use them to be your answering machine for your business. I'd bet that increased sales would more than pay for the phone over time.

Setting up Complex Inventory in PDShop Pro

If you use PageDownTech's shopping cart (the ASP.net version in this case), you might find this useful when setting up your product database. While I think they have a great little cart for the price, their instructions are sometimes less than useful.

This explains how to set up products in your database that have inventory-affecting options. This would include any clothing that comes in sizes, colors, designs, or perhaps items like art prints that are available in different color frames that you need to track in inventory.

Overview:
Only "items" can be tracked by the inventory part of the software. So to sell a product like a t-shirt that comes in different sizes and colors, you have to treat the t-shirt's options (colors, sizes, whatever) as "items."

Important: When you create these "items" that are going to be used as options for a product, they can only be used for that particular product. So don't think you can create a product called Medium and then use it for all your t-shirts. Keeping this in mind, you can see why we suggest using a naming convention as shown in our example.

EXAMPLE
Our example will be a t-shirt that comes in different sizes and colors.

1. Set up the parent item with an ID of Tshirt1. Don't worry now about the options (sizes & colors), but enter the descriptions, pictures, category, etc. In "inventory" enter the total of all sizes and colors you have.

2. Set up another item. This is going to be your first size and color option and let's say it's pink and size small. So give it a product ID of: Tshirt1-sp.
Enter Pink-Small for the Product name
Enter the appropriate number in the Inventory box.
That's all you do. No price, no description. . . just what I said above.

3. Repeat step 2 for each size and color, using product id's like Tshirt1-sb (for a small, black t-shirt), etc.

4. Go back to the parent item. Add an Option Group: Color and Size

5. Add an Item to the Option Group. In the popup window, enter the option you created earlier, such as Tshirt1-sp (or some part of the name if you don't remember what you called the options).
One or more items will be listed. Choose the appropriate one.
If necessary, enter a price adjustment, such as $2 increase for XXL sizes.
Save.

6. Repeat step 5 for all options (colors/sizes). Be sure to set one of the options as the default. You can also assign numbers to each option if you want them to show up in a certain order..

You're done!

And while I'm talking about this company, I sure wish they would add a customer forum. I would recommend the software to more clients (depending on their needs) if ongoing help were more available. And a customer forum is the best way to do that. But it seems they prefer customers pay extra for support after the initial 30 days or whatever it is (which is too short - whatever it is).