Go Hawks!
We are extremely pleased to congratulate our beloved Seahawks on their dominant win of the 2014 Superbowl; the most watched US televised event of all time! This month we are pleased to promote NWOutdoorLighting.com and provide you with a bit of background on Domain Names, Email, SEO and other topics for your benefit.
Featured Website
Please join us in congratulating Craig & Mary Peterson on their new websiteNWOutdoorLighting.com !
VSM Content Management
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See more of our portfolio at: www.efinitytech.com
Is Your Website Live?
In a typical year, two websites in our client portfolio go offline. Email may also go down, depending upon the cause. How do you know if your site is live?
Apart from manually checking your site regularly; it is difficult to know. There are third party services such as Pingdom, to which you can subscribe, which will monitor your domain on a frequent basis, which we do endorse. A number of things can cause your website to go down, including, unpublishing your homepage in VSM and letting your domain expire; these being the most frequent culprits.
In keeping with our goal to provide our clients with superior service; Efinitytech has instituted an internal monitoring service which checks for the presence of the homepage of every live VSM website on a daily basis. This will ensure that we know if your VSM site is not present for any reason. This service, essentially an indexing program, visits your domain and looks for unique code generated by VSM. If that code is found, we know that a VSM generated page is live on your domain. This gives us an opportunity to alert you, or remedy the situation and helps to minimize any disruption in service no matter what the cause.
Domain Renewal: When, Why, How Long?
Efinitytech monitors the domain expiration of every VSM website on a monthly basis. If we are your domain registrar, and if your domain is due to expire within a month or so, we will call and/or email and ask your preference of length of renewal and renew your domain for 2 years if we do not hear from you, for accounts in good standing. If your domain is registered with any other registrar, we have no control over your domain renewal and cannot prevent the domain from expiring. In those situations, we make a concerted effort to reach you.
Although Efinitytech does what we can to keep your domain from expiring; is that the best decision you can make? We do recommend 5 year renewals for improved SEO. Our friends in the search placement business include the time to expiration in their algorithms. This is understandable, as a short time to expiration implies that the organization is not necessarily committed to their domain and possibly their enterprise for the long term. Everything else being equal, the domain with the longer renewal will have a higher rank! So, what is the best strategy? If you are SEO focused and want to do the absolute best you can with things that are in your control; keep your domain renewed for 10 years, and renew it every year. A slightly less effective but more manageable process, rewew it for 10 years, and thereafter renew it for 5 more years whenever it reaches 5 years until expiration.
Domain Names & SEO
When performing searches; you may notice highly placed sites often with all or part of the search term(s) in the Domain. So what exactly does this imply? Does this mean that procuring several or more domains including your desired search terms and pointing them to your site will improve your search placement? In fact, only one domain, the primary domain carries search value from a search engine algorithm point of view. Search engines do not want to give sites preferential ranking simply because someone purchased and pointed additional domains to them. Indeed, if one improperly sets up multiple domains to appear to be live for the same site, today's algorithms will detect this as a "black hat" SEO practice and very likely result in blacklisting or severe downgrading of the site for search placement.
Multiple Domain Names do have value for brand protection and for marketing campaigns and can be very strategically valuable for these reasons.
Multiple Domains do not help with SEO. However, it is true that important key phrases or terms in your domain can be a benefit to your placement for those searches and therefore, it may be worthwhile to consider using a search oriented domain if that is very high on your priority list. In that case, changing your primary domain can be a benefit to your SEO.
Domains, Registrars, Name Servers, DNS & Hosting
Domain Registrars: Originally, there was a single domain registrar; Network Solutions. Domains were more expensive, around $32 per year in the early to late nineties. Then deregulation happened; and now domains are less expensive, in the $10 - $15 per year range. Let us just say that not all registrars are equal. And some well known registrars like GoDaddy can be a nightmare if your domain expires. So what exactly is a registrar? It is an organization which can secure a domain name and register it in the universal domain registration database. The domain registration establishes the owner of the domain and which Name Servers host the DNS, (domain name system) records. Name Servers must be established for any domain to be registered. Efinitytech is a domain registrar.
Name Servers: The name servers host the DNS records. The DNS records hold information about where different domain services are located; including where the website is hosted, where the email is served and the like. The location data is a set of IP, (Internet Protocol) addresses identifying the server where the particular service can be found.
Web Servers & Email Servers: These are special purpose computers, typically housed in secure facilities with high connectivity to the internet backbone. Web servers hold the website and pages which you can request a copy sent to you. Email Servers will accept, hold and forward emails to the appropriate party when requested by an email client, such as Outlook for example.
How does all this work? In non technical terms: For Websites when you click on a link or type a domain, in a web browser like Firefox, that request is routed through the Internet backbone to the Web Server with IP Address identified in the DNS record on the Name Server identified at the Domain Registrar. Then, the request, a copy of a web page, typically, is produced and sent to your computer browser for you to see. Email works similarly. The email request to send or receive is made to the Email Server at the IP address in the DNS record on the Name Server identified at the Domain Registrar. Then, the email, receive request is fulfilled or the message is routed to the designated Email Server, where it waits for delivery.
Fortunately you do not need to know how all this works; Efinitytech provides all of these services, as well as Design, Programming, Content Management & SEO, so that we can completely serve your business website needs.
Email, Spam & Blacklists!
Being an email provider is to be at war with spammers. According to SecureList.com in Q3 2013 over 68% of all emails were spam. Phishing and malicious content are growing substantially. Efinitytech subscribe to Blacklists which are maintained by various organizations to identify and enable blocking of email servers which may be compromised or which are sending large amounts of what appears to be spam. This can cause an entire email server to be Blacklisted when one single email account is compromised. We employ several levels of spam filtering and subscribe to several blacklist services. Occasionally one of our clients email accounts become compromised and send out a detectable amount of spam, this can result in our server appearing on a blacklist. We take immediate action to clear the problem and request removal from the blacklist.
Business Cards & QR Codes
Do you find yourself tediously typing in: Name, Phone, email, company, address, etc. from a business card when you meet a new contact? Have you thought about them having to do the same? If you have a QR Code of the right sort created and printed on your business card, it can be scanned by a smartphone and your entire contact information can be saved into their phone without them typing a single character!
We are delighted to have incorporated this into our new cards. Contact us to find out how.
