A lot of business owners tend to get the wrong idea about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and how it can help their websites. Years ago, when every web page in your site was built by hand, your web developer had a dramatic impact on the search engine performance of your website. But today, the complete opposite is generally true – Content Management Systems (CMS) tend to have fantastic optimization for search engines BUILT-IN. This puts more of the burdon and responsibility of search engine performance on the website owner/author, and less on people actually coding up your website.

More details after the jump

Can more be done beyond writing good content to help your site’s traffic? Aren’t there little secret tweaks that can be done to your site’s code to make it come up higher in Google and other search engines? Well, sure. But it doesn’t work like it did in the past.  Years ago, you could focus on a dozen or so key strategies to optimize a website for search engines. But those key elements (i.e. page titles, heading tags, link titling, sitemaps, etc) are now just considered best practices, and are generally built-into the CMS that your site runs on. So it then becomes a garbage-in = garbage-out type of thing in regards to your content’s quality, uniqueness, and frequency of updates. Choosing the right mix of keywords, using analytics, and managing content in a more proactive way are crucial to your website’s performance, yet most companies are too lazy to do this work.

There ARE other things that can be done to help SEO, but they are tedious, take a lot of work, and may still not make your website come up higher. Why? Because instead of a dozen main things that Google and other engines look at, they are now looking at HUNDREDS of aspects of your pages, including traffic, age, inbound links, page speed, and off-page SEO factors that a small business owner can’t easily change. What is the easiest way to hit all of those attributes at once? Write good content. There is a lot more to it, but it isn’t just keywords any more. We tell our customers all of the secrets to help with this.

But business owners don’t want to hear that there isn’t some magical SEO trick. In their mind, there MUST be a magic silver bullet that will make their website come up high in Google results. All they need to do is find the right developer to make that happen. This myth is the reason why there are countless search engine optimization, search engine marketing, campaign management, and other firms out there that will take your money, promise the world, and they won’t back their services up with guarantees of any kind. It is simple supply and demand. And from time to time, these firms call us to work on their client’s websites, and in 5 minutes we can tell that they don’t know much at all about SEO. They are simply selling hype. And people are buying it, so they churn through their dissatisfied customers with no end in sight.

Mark my words, as we move from the Information Age (relying on geeks) to the Participation Age (creating your own voice online with content), search engines will continue to show “live” results for websites that have a pulse. So your website beterr be “alive”. Also, just because you might get some traffic with a higher search engine result, that doesn’t MAKE PEOPLE BUY. You still need a well-designed website that has the necessary design features and applications that help people to use your website. It takes time, management of the site, analytics, and a strategy.

We are great at SEO. It is built into all of our applications. But instead of looking for a keyword strategy that might get you a few more hits, we would rather help you to design an online marketing plant that will get you more SALES. Sales beats HITS any day of the week.

“we are able to stop over 98% of spam before it gets to our customer’s mailboxes “

Why email forwarding is bad
Unfortunately, customers are sometimes blissfully unaware of how they hurt their own email service. Here is how it happens… A new customer calls. Let’s call him “Jim”. Jim purchase a new domain name for his business. Let’s call the domain name “somecompany.com”. Easy enough. Jim can now have an email address that looks like “Jimbo@somecompany.com”. So after we register the domain name for Jim, we also setup a hosting account for Jim’s web site and any email accounts that he wants.

A sample scenario
Jim then asks us “is it possible to have all email that comes into jimbo@somecompany.com to forward to my home email account?”. In the past we would say “sure”, but not any longer. Let’s say that Jim’s home email address is jimbo@comcast.net, or jimbo@verizon.net, or jimbo@att.net, or whatever. After Jim gets his web site live, and his new email address is published online, it will at some point get picked up by a spambot, which puts his email address into a spam directory. Or, an even worse scenario, is if Jim asks “can you have ANY email sent to somecompany.com, and have it forwarded to my home account?”. The second scenario is called a “catch-all”, and is a much worsescenario than simply forwarding a single email address. If a spammer were to use a baby book of names to guess a bunch of addresses, like bob@somecompany.com, carol@somecompany.com, and so on, they could easily send hundreds or thousands of emails to Jim’s new domain name.

Then… other providers block the customer’s server
Let’s assume that Jim uses Comcast for his personal email service. I am not picking on Comcast, this example is true of any large email provider. Comcast wants to block any spam that Jim gets, just like how Delaware.Net wants to fight spam. Since Comcast has a LOT of spam to fight, they have spam-blocking servers that are smart enough to be alerted to large volumes of email that look like spam come from one source. That one source my be your catch-all domain, or that source of spam might be the server that is fowarding your email (and your spam) to your Comcast account. Comcast, Verizon, Yahoo, ATT, AOL, and most large personal email providers have systems like these.

“It’s important to note that ALL hosting companies get their email servers blocked
by other hosting companies from time to time. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens to all of them.”

When these systems see this spam coming in, they try to block it. What do you think they block? They block the IP address of the server that the spam came from – automatically. That means that ALL EMAIL SENT FROM THAT HOSTING SERVER IS NOW BLOCKED BY COMCAST. Including email from other customers on the same server. Not good. Jim’s seemingly simple request to have all of his email forwarded into one account just caused a very serious problem for anyone else that has email accounts on the same server as Jim. Basically, those other customers can’t email anyone that has a Comcast email address. If Comcast blocks an email server, then NO ONE else on that server can send email to Comcast. It’s important to note that ALL hosting companies get their email servers blocked by other hosting companies from time to time. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens to all of them.

Getting blocked for forwarding email is a huge headache for email hosting companies, because they have to (in this example) call Comcast, and ask to be unblocked. This takes time, energy, and money to make happen. It can take 5 minutes, or it could take 2 days. It depends on the systems that the blocking company has in place. Some systems are automated, and some are not.

So what is the answer to this problem? It’s amazingly simple. First, email hosting companies shouldn’t be auto-forwarding at all, since their customers can use one of the many popular email clients (like Outlook), that can check multiple email accounts at once. Outlook can also auto-filter the email to separate folders, giving Jim the separation he needs between his work email and he personal email.

We have finally removed all forwards and catch-alls from all of our email servers, and if someone ever asks to have their email automatically forwarded again, we will just point them to this article.

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