Email might have been hacked! Ouch!

Boy we have heard this alot in our lifetime, "My email is not working!"  Well recently we have heard the following, "People are trying to send me emails and I don't get them."  Here are a few remedies.  1.  Check your Spam folder.  2.  Make sure they are using your correct email address and did not accidentally put an extra character in it.  3.  We need to make sure that certain providers are not blocking your mail for different reasons.  Recently we ran into a situation where a customer had their email account hacked and this is what happened. 

Account listed [deleted this]  have been hacked recently and used to send large volumes of spam from the server. This occurred because the accounts' passwords were either hacked or stolen through malware or a trojan and the accounts need to be secured as soon as possible or this spam will continue to be sent from the server. The accounts should have their passwords reset to a much stronger password using the server's own password generator or removed from the server, if the account is no longer being used.  Currently, we do not have any further information on how the passwords were stolen as the hackers were logging in directly through a mail client, which means they already had the passwords in their possession and there is no evidence of a brute force attack occurring. 

If this has resulted in blacklist issue(s) for your server, we are working to get these removed from public blacklists. However, there are certain private blacklists, such as those in use by many ISPs, that we cannot publicly query to see if the IP address is listed, so our detection tools will not show those listings. If you have bounce backs from such lists, please provide them as soon as possible so we can investigate and get those removed as well. Please note that blacklist issues do take time to resolve and are not immediately fixed simply by securing the hacked account identified above. Now that we've stopped the source of the spam and are working to get any publicly known blacklisting issues cleared up, email delivery will improve; however, it will not occur immediately nor in the span of a few hours. It typically takes a few days to clear up, sometimes longer depending on the source of the blacklist. We are working to get these cleared up but we do ask for your much appreciated patience in advance while we work on it as we are solely reliant on 3rd parties honoring our removal requests, and it is entirely up to them to either honor or deny those requests. We truly understand how important this is to get this fixed and we greatly appreciate your time once again. Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns.  How important it is to protect our passwords from the outside bandits!

Importance of keywords for your website

I want to quickly write to you about a subject called the Golden Rules of Keywords.  It's a common subject taught, but rarely understood.  Very simply put, this is important so you can drive the right traffic to your website with ultimately the goal of turning your traffic into leads and then into customers after you have provided them a bid.  I tell people all the time that if there is no traffic on the highway your billboard will never be seen.  So with this in mind I will give you the Golden Rules of how keyword research works.
 
There are 4 rules:
 
Relevancy
 
Traffic
 
Competition
  
Commerciality

 
Keyword Research:
 
What is a Market
A community of people that share common interests or themes.  This group of people often have their own language which is slang, acronyms and terms.
 
For an example 
1.  there is a market of people that are "homeowners looking for flooring"
2.  their area of interest is the flooring within their home
3.  their language includes things such as floors, flooring, need new floors, carpet, etc.
 
Within this market is a Niche
 
1.  A niche will include members of the "homeowner looking for flooring" looking for a wide variety of topics related to flooring.
2.  This niche will include topics related to carpet, marble flooring, tile flooring, wood flooring, etc.
 
Each one of these different type of niches will be of specific interest to the "homeowner looking for flooring" market
 
a community with its own interal language

Keywords are what is typed into a search engine to explore a niche
 
 
"It takes the same amount of time to build an UNSUCCESSFUL business as it takes to build a SUCCESSFUL business."
 
The main reason people fail is they do not do the online market research upfront.  Instead they rush in, choose a random niche, random keywords, (or no keywords at all) and hope for the best.  This is usually a recipe for disaster.
 
The companies that succeed online take a different approach:
 
1. They research carefully
2.  Target specific keywords
3.  and follow a specific plan
 
 
When you first submit your website to Google  a "googlebot" or "spider" visits your website and looks at the following elements of your webpage:
1.  Content 
2.  analysis of links that point to your site
 
As your webpage develops more authority will be gained
 
 
It is better to be online and be ready when the leads are available.

Picture Upload to Picasa Photo Gallery

Instructions for picture upload are following:

1.  Visit picasaweb.google.com

2.  login with the following:

yourgmailaccount

your password

3.  click on "My Photos" tab at top middle (this will show all photos)

4.  click "upload" at top middle of page

5.  Choose to add photos in "add to an existing album" or change the name to add new name

6.  Final step "select photos" (in middle of page) to add the photos.

How to Add Photos once your into Picasa

1.  Login to your Picasa Web Album - 
2.  Click on the appropriate Album to where the photo should go.  (If your not sure you can always move the picture later.)
3.  Click Add Photos
4.  Select where your photos are at on your computer and upload.  If you want to add multiple photos hold down the CTRL and click the photos to upload more than 1 photo at a time.
 
After your photos are uploaded
 
6.  Click on a photo
7.  Below the photo add a caption to describe the photo.  You must be descriptive and think what a user would search on the Internet to find this picture.  Use adjectives, the location in the format (i.e Los Angeles, CA)
8.  Next, on right side find the "Tags" and click the + to add words that descibe the photo.  Use words (not sentences) separated by commas.
9.  Next, on right side find the "Photo Location", click add location and put the address or the city, state where this photo is located.
10.  Save 
 
Your done for now.

What is a GoogleBot?

What is a "Googlebot"

"Googlebot is Google's web crawling bot (sometimes also called a "spider"). Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.

We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Googlebot's crawl process begins with a list of webpage URLs, generated from previous crawl processes and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links (SRC and HREF) on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index."

Definition of the long tail keyword

Here is recent response to an email that focused on "long tail keywords"

Hope your having a great week.  I understand your thinking regarding the "long tail" keywords as it applies to SEO.  My experience has been there are many debates regarding the value of these "keyword strings" know as "long tail keywords."  Although each of these words are not designed to receive the amount of traffic a shorter phrase keyword like "kitchen remodeling" would receive, these phrases should NOT be devalued.  As you stated in your email; phone calls and lead generation ultimately is a measuring stick of how successful we are, but we need to account for the time in building an infrastructure that will provide not only short term benefits, but long term as well.  Benefits of longer keyword phrases include the following:

• generally typed by the person that has done the majority of their research and is in the final stages of a buying process.  
• long tail keywords created in mass can create significant search volume
• long tail keywords typically have less competition than generic keywords creating a better chance that your page will be clicked on
• long tail keywords are more specific so the page can be created to be more specific, thus providing a better destination and experience for the person doing the search (ultimately the goal of Google).  This creates less waste of irrelevant searches, higher CTR and a higher quality score (for use in PPC).  
• ability to deep link from other pages with your domain to other pages, thus creating a dependence on a bigger sample of pages and not relying on the home page solely.

As you can see in the chart below, this represents how keyword word length equals number of searches 

Below is a graph that demonstrates the average CTR (click through rate) of searches with the different word counts.

Below is a graph that demonstrates the average conversion rate based on the different word counts

*All charts provided by Calculate Marketing

How to nurture your website!!

Here is the way I look at things when it comes to handling your company and your marketing on the Internet, and it is so much like raising a child.  You have 3 choices.

1.  Raise the child and nurture it ALL BY YOURSELF.

2.  Hire a caretaker, daycare, nanny or maid to assist in raising it ALONG WITH YOU.

3.  Just ignore it and hope that it gets raised on its own.  

Your website, marketing and exposure works the same way.  Think about which option works best!

Google plan to link user data spurs privacy concerns

Google plan to link user data spurs privacy concerns: Google announced a plan Tuesday to link user data across its email, video, social-networking and other services that it says will create a "beautifully simple and intuitive" user experience. But critics raised privacy concerns like those that helped kill the search giant's Buzz social networking service.

The Title Tag of Your Web Page

A title tag on your webpages is an important consideration to remember as it will assist you in converting your customer.  Many people think that the title tag is a "ranking factor", but traditionally it does not carry that type of weight.

The Value of Titles and Descriptions

I apologize for talking a bunch of mumbo jumbo here, but this is a good post to refer to regarding the value of meta tags and title tags and is an excerpt to a customer question:


I spent about 6 hours today digging into the full meta tag set and other tags (like title tags - which is not technically a meta tag) and aligning with Google's newest Rich Snippets and updated Markup Language suggestions (I will refer to as Google requirements) and have determined that the value of computer science is of the utmost importance here.  Many are not aware that by tugging on one element there is going to be some give in other elements and if we are not careful on how hard we tug or think about what we are tugging on, we may just tear the whole thing down.  This has been a huge concern as we are not only getting ranking on our pages, but we must be careful how we tweak and continue to do so carefully so our results improve and not digress.  In working on the meta tags I uncovered more than what xxx suggested and feel comfortable that we have covered alot regarding the meta tags and xxx's requests (which have great merit by the way).  I anticipate the newer updates to be programmed within a few days as they have been reassigned.  I had the time to dig into all 7 pages that affect the landing pages, not just the couple xxx brought to our attention.  In going over the suggestions from xxx we have had to create 3 new SuperTags to handle the descriptions and titles correctly.  Unfortunately there is not an existing company to try to emulate so we have created new code that I believe will work.