Did you recently get an email about a “dispute” for your “trademarked domain” in another top level domain?

I have seen a lot of these types of notices received by our customers, boldly urging the owner of a .com domain about the “pending purchase” of a similar domain with another country’s extension – such as “mycompanyname.cn” (a China extension).  The verbiage is a bit sneaky, sounding as if someone is just on the edge of buying your domain if you don’t do something quick!

Be wary of these – they are scams.  Most likely, no one is on the verge of buying your domain name.  In fact, you probably have no interest in owning a domain name that is located in another country where you may not even do any business. A couple of my customers did attempt to reply to the message asking for more information, only to receive a more urgent and stern reply (in a threatening tone).  My recommendation is to ignore the email and delete it.

I often forget how beneficial press releases can be for a company.  You can report nearly anything in a press release, such as a change in your company’s services, a new product, a new employee or owner, a new client or contract, or an award you have received.

What better way to spread a press release quickly than through your established email lists?  Since press releases are not necessarily on a consistent recurring schedule, I find it helpful to use a flexible email marketing service like Vertical Response that offers a pay-as-you-go option.

After you announce the release to your email contacts, forward it to the Chamber of Commerce, local trade organizations, and other media outlets.

The trend of late is a revisit from “your account has been updated” emails.  These emails may be phrased to tell you that a recent security patch has been applied to your email service or website, or something similar.  Then you will be asked to open an attached file to remedy the problem or officially apply the “security” fix.  Beware – and definitely hesitate – before opening any attachment.

In most cases, your web hosting or email hosting provider will never ask you to open a file to deal with any sort of technical support issue.  If you are unsure, simply pick up the phone and call your tech support team, or email them directly in a fresh email message (not a reply to or forward of that suspicious message).  If you enjoy WEBii.net service, these emails are absolutely NOT from us – we will never ask you to open a file to address anything with your email services.

This is a recycled tactic used by hackers and spammers to gain some sort of control over your computer or your information.  The file is most likely a malicious software.  The message may even say it is “from” your own website domain.

A good rule of thumb is to only open attachments that you are expecting from parties that you know.

Sometimes a little bit of javascript is necessary to control certain features in a website, such as a simple slideshow element on a page, which was a better choice over the heavy Flash animation.  But as organic SEO becomes more prominent, we must learn to minimize the presence of javascript among our web page code, and strive for “clean” search-engine-friendly code.

Instead of including your javascript directly on the web page, link to it as a source.

In the head of the page, create the script tag, but instead of including the script code within the container of the script tags, link to an external javascript file.  For best organization, store your javascript file in a /js folder (or /scripts or something similar).  Your linked tag will appear in this format:

<script language=”javascript” src=”js/filename.js” /></script>

Now, as your page code is read, this is referenced on one line and the search engines (or other resources) do not need to wade through a long javascript to get to the important meat of your website – the content.

A creative and effective way for your business to help out non-profit organizations and charities is to use your company’s online resources.  Consider some of these ideas:

• If you don’t already have e-commerce features on your site, you can easily set up a pay pal account to accept online donations without having to purchase complex a shopping cart system.
• If your site currently incorporates e-commerce, add an option at check-out to include a donation into the purchase total.
• Use your social media outlets to share your support of your organization and let others know how they can help.
• Link your organization’s website to your own site and social networks to help out their SEO.
• Have an online contest.  For example, whenever your company’s facebook page reaches 1000 fans, you will donate $X to Organization X.

By using these and other tactics, you will not only be supporting a good cause, but you’ll be building your online presence and improving your site’s SEO in the process!

Still racking your brain to come up with a quick way to build links to your website and increase your online exposure?  Fact: YouTube consistently ranks as a Top 5 Search Engine; last month alone it was used by 125.5 million Americans.

YouTube, like every search engine, uses its own algorithm and delivers unique results… video results.  To access the 125.5 million Americans using YouTube each month, you must have video content on the web.  This doesn’t have to be an elaborate short film by any means– it can be as simple as a slide show, webinar, or a quick infomercial.  If you want to get more creative with your search marketing strategy, try releasing a viral video!

You should use the same principle SEO tactics with YouTube that you would with more tradtional search engines.  When submitting content to YouTube, be sure to sign up for a director’s account.  This will give you more room to describe your business and you’ll also have the capability to put live links in video descriptions.  Video content is a great and relatively easy way to get top-ranking search results, so what are you waiting for?  Grab the video camera and GO!

Authorize.net.

In our years of e-commerce development we have worked with a variety of payment gateways to integrate a business’s credit card processing service with a web site.  Authorize.net is currently one of the most popular gateway services available, making it very easy to install for almost any shopping cart.  Most software already has a module available to integrate with this service, which saves both your development team and you time and money.

Have You Heard?

After years of speculation, it’s official: Google’s Matt Cutts stated that Google’s indexing formula ignores the ‘keywords’ meta tag.  What does this mean?  The meta keywords tag does nothing for your position on Google.  However, they are still used by many other search engines and directories, so don’t be too hasty and delete them from your web pages.  As I have mentioned before, having some extra meta tags in your site code is not going to harm you, so it is not a “bad” idea to keep up with your meta keywords.

Twitter is one of the hottest trends on the internet right now. For those of you not in the know, it’s what is called a microblogging service. It’s basically a page that stores any number of text updates, limited to 160 characters maximum. It’s almost like uploading SMS messages for everyone to see, allowing you to follow what your friends and acquaintances are up to 24/7.

You may have even seen little Twitter “badges” on people’s websites. These are little modular paces of code that will display your latest tweet right on your own webpage. It’s a pretty neat widget to have if you have a personal page, or own a business and want to keep your customers updated on your latest specials, but don’t want them to navigate away from your web page.

Putting a Twitter badge on your website is actually really easy, because all the hard stuff is done for you already. After you’ve setup your twitter account , visit this website: TwitStamp.com

Once you’ve customized and fiddled with your shiny new Twitter badge and you deem it satisfactory, simply scroll to the bottom where it says “Use it”. Click the first field that says “HTML”, copy the code, and paste the code, exactly as it is, into your website’s HTML page.

The next time you reload your page, you’ll have a widget displayed, just like it is now, after I inserted the HTML into this blog post.

As you can see, there are a variety of ways in which you can customize your badge, so have fun with it, keep it relevant, and Tweet on!

You don’t need to be intimidated by the internet. It’s merely a collection of interconnected websites, and websites are actually very simple things. They are files that people can access through Internet Browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome. See? It’s not so scary when you break it down to its simplest elements.

You will need to do 3 things to make a website and publish it online: Create your Website Files, Purchase Web Hosting Space and Register a Domain Name, and Upload Your Files to a Web Server.

1) Create Your Website Files:

The website files are what visitors see when they visit your website. Basic websites are constructed with HTML code, but if you don’t know how to code HTML, there are programs that build websites in an environment similar to word processors (I.E Microsoft Word) and can generate your HTML files for you. Adobe Dreamweaver is a popular program, but if you’re looking for a free solution, Mozilla has a free HTML editor named SeaMonkey. (You can use any program you want, these are just recommendations).
Download and install the SeaMonkey program on your computer, then open the program.

In the SeaMonkey program, go to File > New > Composer Page.

Starting a New Web Page in SeaMonkey

This is where you can build your web page. Once you’re finished with a page, make sure to Save it. It will automatically save as an HTML document, with the file extension “.html”.

Great! You’ve now created your website files, and they’re saved on your computer. Now you need to find a company to host your files on the internet.

2) Purchase Web Hosting Space and Register a Domain Name:

A Domain Name is the name that will point to your website, such as “example.com” or “example.net”. Web hosting companies have servers that specialize in storing websites for people to access over the internet. Purchase some web hosting space from a company that offers the domain name as well, because it will greatly simplify the process. Some hosts even offer free domain name registration with the purchase of web hosting space. Example: Webii.net

Once you’ve purchased hosting space and a domain name, make sure to ask the company for your “FTP connection information” so that you can move onto step 3.

3) Upload Your Files to your Web Server:

In order to upload the website files that you created in step 1 to the web hosting server space that you purchased in step 2, we’re going to use something called an FTP program. There is a great, free program called Filezilla (made by the brains behind the Firefox web browser), and you can download it here: Download Filezilla

Download the the appropriate file depending on your operating system, install Filezilla on your computer, and open up the program.

In order to connect to your web server, you’ll need the following information, available from your web host: FTP Hostname, User Name, and Password. You can enter this information into the fields at the top of the Filezilla program and click “quick connect”. You should now be connected to your web server.

Connecting to your Web Server

Once you’ve connected, you can use the left window pane to navigate your computer’s files, and you can upload files from your computer to the web server. Ask your web host which directory contains your website files. You will upload the HTML files that you created on your computer onto the web server, into that specific directory.

Now, try visiting your domain name in a web browser. You’re on the web! You see? Publishing a web site onto the internet is easy. Making a web site that looks good? Now that is a different story.