NetSpeak Technologies

A big part of any business’ website is going to be SEO. (search engine optimization) SEO can help search engines to find your website more easily. Search engines are free and will have continual benefits for as long as the site is up. Let’s be honest, the chance of your business coming up as number 1 on Google is slim but its still important to give your company any boost you can. In this post I wanted to share a couple of tips that should help on this matter.

Landing pages can look cool and give your business and edgy feel but, they can kill your rankings. Search engine crawlers will examine your pages and categorize you accordingly. The home page of your website needs to have as much relevant data on it as possible. Using your main domain and an empty page just to enter your site disconnects your domain with whatever you will be using it for.  Most search engines can’t look past landing pages.

Links are very important as well. There are many companies who will use images to make links and buttons on their site look unique. However, this can do more harm than good. Remember search engines can read text but they cannot decipher images. Using text will help search engines understand that your link contains relevant information which will help your ranking.

Try typing in Samsung 46 inch into Google. What did you notice? Very few of those results took you to the front page of a website. Most of them brought you directly to the product. This brings me to my next point. Be descriptive, the more information is on a page the more chance potential customers have of actually landing on it. In this day and age the internet has made shopping and gathering information so fast that most people don’t want to navigate through a website to find what they want.

It’s also good to familiarize yourself with meta tags. They are information about a website in order to help search engines categorize them but be careful, abuse of them can actually hurt your ranking.

SEO is a huge topic to attempt to tackle in one blog entry. If you are trying to reach the number one spot on Google you can be certain a lot of others in your field are doing the same. Each of these only plays a small part in your overall rank but remember take advantage of every competitive edge.

SEO best practices, business, compete, design, edge, SEO, web developement

Keeping in communication with both your potential and current customers has been and still is a vital aspect of business. Sending newsletters, notifications, and general letters just to let customers know you care, should be a general practice for all companies.

However those SPAM filters that protectour inboxes from day to day can at times act like a duel edged sword, filtering out some good mail with the bad. “How do I show the ISP’s that I am not a spammer?” you may ask.  The answer is by using best practices to protect your Digital Reputation.

What is a digital reputation?

Your company is represented by what you send. Reputation has more importance on it than content filtering did in the past. Just like you own credit rating can affect your ability to make certain purchases your online reputation will follow you around for a long time and affect what you can and can’t do.

How is reputation built?

Your digital reputation is built and changed each and every time you send and are based on a number of factors such as; Your email system, the server it’s being sent from, links and text within both the email and the header, the ISP’s gateway server, bad email addresses, span complaints, spam traps, the mailing volume, unknown users, blacklists, list management practice, IP authentication and reputation, co-registration, unconfirmed opt-in, unsubscribe rate, and 3rd party redirects.

In Order to be a low risk sender with a good reputation you must continually assess the changing standards and your email marketing standards. A few ISP’s will now actually allow you to access information about how your sending look to them.

In a shared environment you share a reputation with everyone you’re sending with. Would you let someone share you social security number? Of course not! When picking a service to email from I would be wise to take in consideration the standards the company sending company upholds.

About now most people would be thinking “Wow is there anything I can’t do to positively affect my digital reputation?” It does take some time but you can build up a good reputation. All of these standards must be looked at as a protection and not a restriction. With out them each of us would receive so much email each day that you wouldn’t be able to easily find anything of interest to you.

Integrity should be a big part of every business. If that integrity carries over into collecting and sending emails, then with a little help from YourHost.com you can have high deliverability and successful email campaigns.

Happy Sending

Brandon McKinney

Email best practices, digital, Email, Marketing, reputation, sending