Email can sometimes be an afterthought. You got free email service with a domain purchase/website hosting package? Cool! You’ve always wanted your own bigboss@bossenterprises.com email address. But have you ever thought of what kind of email service you’ll be receiving? And if you had the choice of choosing between POP3 email service or IMAP, which would you go with?

It’s important to know the differences between the two, because they really dictate how you will be checking and working with your email.

Post Office Protocol (POP3)

POP3 is versatile in the fact that you can log into your POP3 email, download each of the messages, and go offline and still be able to read each individual message. Think of it like a post office box – when you run Outlook (or any other email client like Mozilla’s Thunderbird) it “grabs” the email and pulls it from the server. This can be a drag because if you wanted to check it on your phone or from another computer, there would be nothing to “grab.” It’s an older protocol, and as more and more information is emailed between people, POP3 can sometimes have real issues downloading emails with larger files.

Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP)

When you check your email using IMAP, you don’t have to download the entire email. You can just take a look at the header and decide whether or not you want to download the message. This can significantly cut down on the time it takes to check your email (especially for those on slower Internet connections). Synchronization is much easier in the sense that you can check your email from a mobile device and make changes, and when on your computer those changes will have taken effect. This takes some finagling (and quite a bit of extra time!) if using POP3 where you need to leave a copy of the message on the server. IMAP does require you to be on the Internet to check your email, so you can’t log in, download the messages, and log out.

Two Protocols Enter, One Remains?

So which is better? You’ll find fans of both POP3 and IMAP, and as such, it really depends on your style. If you’re always connected to the Internet from multiple devices, IMAP may be the way to go for easier organization. More casual fans of email service may like how straightforward POP3 can be. It really comes down to your preference and understanding of how each works.

Web hosting for your online business shouldn’t be an afterthought. In your search for a company to host your business website, you may instantly think of a few criteria and compare different companies and plans:

• Is the hosting company reputable?
• Is the company an industry-leader?
• Have they gotten good reviews?

Whatever may fit into your initial checklist, you’re probably missing one of the most important aspects of having full control over your small business web hosting:

The Control Panel!

Now wait, come back!

I know some less tech-savy people can get turned off by having full control over your website hosting. It’s a little frightening. It’s important to remember: they don’t always look like this:

Taking some time to navigate within the control panel will give you more and more familiarity so it will eventually look more like this:

Another perk of having a control panel that you have access to includes the fact that if you need changes done, you can do it. You don’t have to call tech support, submit a support ticket, or email an email address that may (or may not be) be monitored – just log in and make the change. This is especially important for business websites, as you may need something updated, an email address created, a database backed-up; any multitude of needs.

There may be a slight difference in price between the option of having control panel access or not for some web hosting companies. Whatever that price may be, having full control over your web hosting with a control panel is entirely worth the split cost.

This March, Google made changes that affect the importing of Google Analytics data into Google Analytics. This affects people who maintain multiple Analytics accounts within a single Google Account. Many webmasters do this as they service multiple clients.

As of march 4, 2009, you can only link one AdWords account to one Google Analytics account. If you maintain multiple Adwords accounts, the data will no longer import into your Analytics accounts.

Transfer Data: So if you have multiple websites with Analytics in a single Google Account, how do you separate them? How do you move the historical data to the new account? Well, according to Google that is not possible.

Google Support: “You cannot transfer data of your profiles from one profile to another nor can you move profiles from one account to another.”

The answer is to create a new account and start over on recording your data.

Export Data: Analytics does allow you to export any of your reports into PDF, comma separated values (CSV), tab separated values (TSV), or Extensible Markup Language (XML). To export a report:

1. Navigate to the report you’d like to export (not the Dashboard). Analytics will only export the report with the settings currently showing on your screen.
2. Click Export, above the report title.
3. Select one of the four export format options:

• PDF – portable document format. You’ll need the free Adobe Reader software in order to view this file.
• XML – extensible markup language.
• Excel – Microsoft Excel-formatted spreadsheet.
• TSV – tab separated values. This format can be read in most spreadsheet applications or text editors.

A lot of attention is paid to web hosting for a domain – if your website goes down, if you exceed your bandwidth, paying your monthly (or annual) bill on time, etc. But what some people seem to forget about is the registration for a domain.

How long is your businesses’ domain (e.g. webdesignseo.com, dougwilliams.com) registered for?

If you don’t pay special attention to the expiration date of your domain’s registration, you could be left with an expired domain. Which is disastrous from a search engine optimization standpoint.

The reason being, when a domain expires, the registrar owns the domain. You may get a grace-period to renew the domain, but once expired, the registrar owns the domain and typically puts up a parking page to monetize. Which makes sense, you no longer own that domain. It’s their domain, and they’re going to make money on it.

If your website gets crawled and indexed with this parking page, say “buh-bye” to any rankings you may have had.

Check Your Domain’s “Lease”

Domains can essentially be equated to apartments in the sense that, in normal circumstances, you cannot outright own one. You must lease an apartment. The same goes for a .com, .net, any other dot-anything.

If you don’t know when your “lease” is up for your domain name, use one of the following registry WHOIS look-ups to verify when your expiration date is:

.com, .net, . tv – VeriSign
.org – Public Interest Registry
.us – NeuStar

Get an understanding of when you need to renew your domain’s registration and who is responsible for it before your hard work and Internet marketing budget go down the drain.

The domain industry can be confusing for someone who doesn’t understand the relationship between registrars, resellers & registrants. If you’re not 100% sure who hosts your website or which company handles registration for your domain, you could be in trouble when the domain’s registration expires.

Here’s a quick overview on the key points of domain ownership.

• Check where your domain is to be ready for a pop quiz: When switching web hosts, you need to have administrative access to the account responsible for domain registration. Checking the WHOIS for the domain will tell you which company handles the top-level registration (the registrar like GoDaddy or eNom) and the registrant (who owns the domain). Check out popular WHOIS sites like Ajax Whois or WHOIS.net.

• In which cellar does the reseller dweller?: Resellers sell domain registration using registrars. For example, if you bought your domain with a company named Domainer 101, and they use GoDaddy to register domains, your domain will appear to be registered with GoDaddy. Sometimes Domainer 101 will put their WHOIS information on the domain to dictate ownership. If you’re not sure which reseller you purchased your domain registration with, the registrar can help you figure it out and point you in the right direction.
• The DNS nameserver is your domain’s life preserver: Think of DNS nameservers as being traffic cops for web users. When a person types your website into a browser, the DNS nameserver guides them to the right web hosting account.

The most important thing is to be aware. Take some time and document which company is responsible for your domain’s registration and which company you get web hosting services from. While it’s easier to work with a company that offers both web site hosting and domain registration, it’s essential to know every company that is responsible for keeping your website online.

Locating the right domain name is very important for the branding of a business and the business website. These are my favorite sites for researching and finding domain name. This is the process that I will go through in selecting a domain name for a business website.

Keywords
My first step is to identify keyword phrases that are getting good traffic. There are a number of good research tools that are free.

1. Google Adwords Free tool based on PPC data
2. WordTracker Free tool based on search data

Locate Domain Names
I have two research tools that I will use to search using the keywords I want.

1. DomainsBot: Reasearch based on keyword phrases. Advanced features let you select based on many parameters including maximum number of characters.
2. NameBoy: Generates possible names based on Keywords and displays results in an easy to scan table showing results for all possible TLD’s (COM, NET, ORG, etc.)

Other Domain Research Tools

1. Buy and Sell Domains: Sedo is the leading marketplace for buying and selling used domain names
2. Expiring Domains: DropScout shows domains expiring (Pending Delete) in the next 6 days. Search by age, PR or number of characters.
3. Whois Search: Very complete set of whois info as well as screenshot, history and SEO information
4. Free Domain Appraisal: This is a free service and the results are always on the high side. This is still a good quick estimate.
5. Internet Archive: What websites have been on a domain name in the past.

When it comes to buying the domain, I recommend that you come you come to one of my websites DougWilliams.com or Dwassoc.com

Spam in all its forms is a costly problem to business. Spam is considered to be unsolicited junk messages that are usually designed to sell or promote something. Spamming can mean using unethical tactics to get high search engine rankings. Spam continues to plague the Internet in the forms of email spam, spam blogs (splogs) and comment spam.

Email spam is a time waster to businesses. Most use extensive filtering software to eliminate email before it arrives. As an example, at our web servers, out of 25,000 incoming emails, 20,000 were tagged as “definitely spam” and deleted before being delivered. Secondary filters identified and filtered an additional 3500 spam email. This means 94% of all incoming email on our server is actual spam and only 6% was legitimate emails.

Spam problems have made traditional email newsletters much less effective. They either don’t make it thru to recipients or people are overwhelmed with spam and don’t read them. Business Blog Marketing is now a much more effective way of reaching and communicating with your audience. They can either find you thru searching or subscribe for delivery by email or their feed reader.

Spam blogs or splogs, automatically extract information from RSS feeds and re-publish the posting. These are low-cost automated sites that usually make their money by getting viewers to click on ads on the splog site. These damage the original blog poster by stealing content and they are a problem to blog readers because they contain random links and content that turn out to be junk and a waste of time to visit.

Comment spam is a major problem like email spam where automated bots place promotional comments on random blogs in an effort to promote a product, service or website. Much like email spam, spam filters remove a high percentage of this nuisance.

Spam is the scourge of the Internet. Filters, blacklists and penalties from the search engines help keep this in check, but these are still major issues we must deal with.

It is a war out there! Spammers are sending junk emails and people are protecting themselves with stronger and stronger spam filters. As a business web hosting company, we help set up spam filters. We also and answer questions as to why our clients emails are not making it through. So what are some things you can do to help legitimate email get through and not tagged as junk email?

So what kinds of things do spam filters look for?

1. Messages with multiple images.
2. Messages with highly formatted HTML
3. Using excess capital letters or punctuation
4. Using certain phrases such as free, trial, money, as seen on TV, and so on.
5. No subject line or a Re: and no subject
6. Certain types of attachments

Images
Spammers will use images as “Web beacons.” They will contain bits of code that will secretly send a message back to the sender that they have reached a real email address. As a receiver, you should set your email program to not allow automatic downloading of pictures and you shouldn’t download pictures from an unknown source.

Do not reply to spam
unless you’re certain that the message comes from a reliable source. This includes not responding to such messages that offer an option to “Remove me from your list.” You may be notifying a spammer that he has reached a real email address.

Attachments
Sending any type of attachment may cause some email filters to reject your email or discard your attachment. In particular, don’t send .exe and .bmp files as they can have viruses included in them. Attaching an Access database file is almost always rejected as is any other program files. These should always be zipped first and then sent.

Doug Williams, Internet Marketing Consultant

What is it?
Spammers can either send unsolicited bulk emails from a temporary email account or they can hack into another computer and send it from there. Anti-spam services like SpamCop receive reports of spam and create an “email blacklist” of reported spammers by IP address. People who run email services and systems, configure them to reject emails that come from a “blacklisted” computer.

Now there are well over 100 email blacklists. There are two basic types, those that blacklist a single IP address and those that blacklist a large block of IP addresses.

The blacklist of a single computer is much easier to be removed from. You will be asked to show that you have repaired the security breach that allowed the spamming or show that the offending account was removed from that server.

The “Guilt by Association” type of blacklist that lists a large block of IP addresses is a much tougher one to fix. The companies that prepare the blacklists know that it is easy for an unethical spammer to rotate through a block of IP addresses, so they blacklist a large block… up to 1000 IP addresses. Now this catches many thousands of innocent email senders that get their emails rejected because of someone they don’t know or even have any relationship with.

How to Avoid?
The best way is to only purchase hosting services through someone who has a zero tolerance policy toward spam. We learned our lesson. Like many Internet marketing and web design firms, we supply hosting. Ours is a very high quality business class hosting with all the support, bells and whistles.

Even though our hosting has a zero tolerance Spam policy, we housed our computer in a data center that had a lenient Spam enforcement policy. We spent an enormous amount of time fighting these “Guilt by Association” blacklists.

About one year ago we moved to a new data center that had a very strict zero tolerance Spam policy. In the last year, we have not had a single blacklisting incident. Although this data center cost us twice as much, we have saved a tremendous amount in technical support costs. Lesson learned: Cheaper hosting is not suitable for hosting business websites.

Doug Williams

The web server (computer) is where your web site’s html files, graphics, etc. reside and is known as the web host. A Web Hosting Service provides Internet users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the web.

Web hosting is typically includes email services, databases such as MySQL and statistics packages that track volume, how visitors arrive and what pages they view. Web servers typically use one of two primary operating systems. Apache (Linux) accounts for approximately 60% of the market and Windows (Microsoft) accounts for about 30%. There are a number of other players that make up the remainder. Apache (Linux) is frequently referred to PHP hosting.

Businesses need assurances of uptime and reliability. These frequently are missing on inexpensive hosting providers. Business web hosting should include regular data backups, 24/7 monitoring, and email filtering for virus and Spam. Other important features are FTP access, multiple power backup systems and multiple Internet feeds are present.

Web hosting companies typically offer other services such as domain names and digital certificates. Some will offer other web services such as web design, content changes and web programming.

At Doug Williams and Associates we offer a full range of business web hosting, design and programming services. We offer PHP database and web application programming. In addition we offer Search Engine Optimization and marketing consulting services so business owners can have a single source for their web marketing and maintenance needs.