If you haven’t put together a Google+ Page for your business yet, we highly recommend establishing your presence on G+ now…it IS Google after all and these pages are showing up in search engine results!

The first page of general settings

The page manager admin section. Click to expand...

Check out Google’s “Owners and managers on Google+ Pages” help section for more information!

If you’ve never tried Google+ or if you tried it a few months back and gave up on it, come on back! Google+ offers a very rich experience (hint – use the G+ search feature to find gold) without a lot of the unnecessary extras you find over at Facebook.

If your business wants to get in on the action and doesn’t know where to start, just give us a call at 866-598-1561 and we’ll help you out. We do recommend getting a personal Google+ account setup first; it’s VERY easy.

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on Google+

First of all, don’t panic! If it’s the first time you’ve ever gotten the disk space warning message from us, it will most likely be warning you that you are using 80% of your allocated disk space, so your site’s won’t be dead in the water quite yet. The warnings start at 80% and go up to 98%, warning you about one of two things; email or actual disk space (sometimes, you’ll get both, but I’ll explain this in a bit).

Your hosting account with us includes cPanel; a disk usage tool is included so you can see what's eating your disk space.

It’s important to read the email to see exactly what it’s saying so you can take the proper course of action. What you don’t want to do is ignore the email and carry on…it’s telling you some very important information that’s key in maintaining the functionality of both your website and your email service.

Let’s clear the air on this disk allocation stuff and figure out what it means. Our typical business hosting account gives or allocates to you 1000mb (1gb) of disk space on our server for your use. This space is used to host your website files, any databases you may need, and all of the email accounts you create with your domain name. We’ve been hosting small to medium sized business websites for a number of years and have found that 1000mb is usually more than enough disk space for the average website; typical sites average around 40-50mb’s in size, if that. You could always just upgrade your hosting plan and get more disk space, right? Sure, but adding more space to your account will only buy time, not solve the problem. Save your money and read on; we’ll show you some reasons why your site may be running out of space and briefly describe how to address those problems.

IMAP Email: The Number One Suspect

This email account is consuming over 600mb of disk space! This measurement tool is found by clicking the Disk Usage icon in you account's cPanel. The website itself, found in the public_html directory, uses just 65mb according to this chart.

With our hosting services, you create your domain-based email (myemail@mydomain.com) and typically access it one of two ways, either POP or IMAP. These methods are chosen while setting up your established email account in your favorite email application (Outlook, Apple Mail, etc):

• POP basically means that the email is not kept on the server. New emails wait on the server until your email application (Outlook or Apple Mail, for example), checks and downloads it. Nothing is left on the server (this is the typical setup).
• IMAP means that the email is kept on the server so it can be accessed from multiple computers. Sent, Junk, Drafts, and the Inbox folders are typically stored on the server (you can always add others as needed).

Email accessed using POP is almost never a problem because the email usually never stays on the server long enough to matter as long as your email application checks mail at regular intervals. The IMAP method; however, doesn’t do anything with the email until instructed otherwise…it just remains on the server. It’s not just the unread or read email that stays on the server, but, depending on your email application settings, it can also include your sent mail, drafts, and archived mail. Left to its own devices, your email on the server can accumulate to the point where it either fills the allocated space for the email account or, if setup with an unlimited quota, consumes all of the free space in your hosting account. If the email account fills up, that email address stops working, but if your hosting account fills up, not only will your email stop functioning, but your website may fail to work.

Keeping up with IMAP email is easy! Regularly purge the deleted & sent mail folders on the server (the two biggest offenders), and store email you want to save locally on your own computer. Some of these tasks can be setup via the options in your email application (sent mail can be stored locally instead of on the server automatically, for example). If you do this simple maintenance a couple times a month, your email will rarely consume too much disk space.

Media Files: Close Cousin of IMAP Email
Photographs, movies, presentations, and any other type of media file can quickly eat up your hosting account’s disk space. If not carefully managed, they can also soak up space in your email as attachments. If you’re putting media files on your website, optimize them first! Don’t upload photographs straight from your camera to your website unless the upload tool is actually reducing the file size while they are are uploading. Often, an unoptimized photograph’s file size can be measured in the megabytes or more and uploading a whole series of such photos can blow through your free disk space quickly. Photos of 300kb or less are best (including those in your presentations). If you’re uploading photos to your hosting account so that they can then be processed by something else, don’t forget to delete the photos when your processing is done. The same can be said for movies; run them through some optimizations before upload or consider uploading them to Youtube and simply embedding them on your website.

Maintain Your Site
Your website is your business, your livelihood, and your responsibility. You maintain the front-end of the site, but don’t forget to maintain the “back-end” of your website. Every website hosting account we offer is self-managed and comes with the easy-to-use cPanel hosting control panel that allows you to not only manage email accounts, but also setup databases, make website backups (ULTRA important!!), and much more…take advantage of it! Don’t know how? Just contact us and ask; we’ll show you how! If you pay attention to the maintenance of your hosting account, you’ll never face those panic-inducing disk space emails again…we promise!

cPanel's disk usage section makes it easy to identify directories that contain space-sucking files! Here, you can see that the email directory is taking up a lot of disk space.

We promised some photos of the new offices and, for awhile now, we’ve had those on our Facebook page. If you’re not into Facebook though, no worries, we have them here for your enjoyment!

Click on photo for full-size version.

The new office! The old office was just to the right in this photo.

The lobby of our new offices.

The reception area of the new office.

Looking down the hall from the lobby.

Looking back to the front of the office.

The all-important kitchen in the new office!

More of the new kitchen.

This is John's office.

The restroom.

Moving on down the hallway...

The printer and scanner room.

A spare office.

This is Ray's office, looks like we caught him red-handed!

This is Scott's office...er mine. Still need to hang some pictures on the wall!

Looking back up to the front of the office.

A panorama of the lobby...at least a try at it!

Panorama of our lobby sign...curvy...

Our new address, effective May 27th, will be:

Regency Interactive
3301 Nash St. NW, Suite C
Wilson, NC 27896

We will be posting pics of the new digs once we’re all settled in.

I should note that our move next door will have no impact on our hosting operations or our phone numbers!

Though not offered to all advertisers yet, opting in to this feature will cause Google to dynamically generate a toll free phone number that is then placed beside your ad.  This “dynamic” number will forward to the phone number associated with your company.

When a call is made, that “action” will be reported in your AdWords account. This will allow us to provide a specific number of conversions based on prospects calling the dynamic phone number.

The beauty of this program is that it’s currently in “beta” development, which means there are NO CHARGES associated with people calling the dynamic phone number.

Google has a nice overview video you can view HERE.

If a prospect takes no action with the phone number and simply clicks your link then normal Cost Per Click charges will be applied.

What Google’s hoping is that they can show substantial conversions and eventually charge for this feature. We also think that they are trying to minimize the amount of advertisers that put their 800 numbers in their ad.

You can see an example of Google’s Call Metrics in action below.

Note the toll free number beside the link!

If you have any questions about this new “beta” feature or want to know if your AdWords account qualifies, contact us today!

Phishing email scams are an everyday occurrence; however, if you are smart about things, you can avoid the perils of these emails. Our advice? Never click on a link in an email unless you absolutely, without a doubt, know it to be safe. If an email is urging you to login to your account on some well known website to check something, and helpfully provides a link to do so, don’t click it! Instead, just visit the site directly via your browser and login to check up on things. Common targets for phishing scams are banks, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter, and just about any other big name website.

To read more about the latest Google AdWords phishing scam, view SEO Roundtable’s article here.

What’s a HEAD element look like? The very basic code of a webpage is below; the HEAD element is highlighted in blue:

<html>
<head>
<title>The Page’s Title</title>
<meta name=”Description” content=”The page’s subject matter is briefly described here.” />
<meta name=”Keywords” content=”Keywords relevant to the page’s subject matter are placed here.” />
</head>
<body>
Page content
</body>
</html>

Your website’s HEAD elements will probably be something like the above example, but hopefully with much more content! In our example, the HEAD element contains a few meta tags as well as a title tag; with one exception, these are some of the most important tags in basic search engine optimization. We’ll take a look at these next.

The TITLE Tag. The <title> tag should be considered one of the most important tags your page can have and what you have in your page’s title can make a lot of difference with search engines. First, the <title> tag’s basic function is to give the browser some material to place in the browser’s title bar. For example, if you look at the top of this page while you’re reading this article, you’ll probably find “What’s In Your Head? Examining An Important Web Page Element” among the text displayed at the very top of your browser’s window, tab, or both (depending on your browser). Second, the title tag serves as a basic descriptor of what’s on the page for search engines and will usually show up on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) as the lead element in a listing (with keywords relevant to the search request BOLDED to draw attention):

The title tag at work in a search engine result listing (the large blue text). None of our keywords are bolded as this is just a sample of what this article would look like.

What should you have in your TITLE tag? Your company name? Your company’s mission statement? For the maximum impact with search engines, you’ll want neither…unless your company’s name is using keywords relevant to the specific page’s content. The title tag must be short and ideally under 70 characters in length (counting spaces). Why? Search engines will trim off anything over their particular limit and 70 characters is pretty much the average. This means you’re much better off spending that character budget on relevant keywords rather than reminding visitors about your company’s name (which they should be aware of if viewing the page); the browser’s titlebar is one of the least human-viewed bits of a webpage anyway, so you might as well design it to be attractive to search engines.

With the above in mind, design your title tag to briefly and accurately describe the page’s subject while using relevant keywords to do it. Placing the keywords near the front of the title is preferred and will help give the page a much better chance with search engines. Create unique title tags, using this approach, for each and every page on your website; no two page titles should be the same. Doing this will provide an appealing view of your website in the eyes of search engines. Yes, this is quite painful if you have a lot of pages, but you know the saying, “no pain, no gain”…it runs true here.

The Description Meta Tag. Another key tag in the HEAD element is the Description Meta tag. While not a given, the description meta tag, for a web page, is generally used to describe the link being shown in SERPS. Think of the description tag as a billboard for your listing in the SERPS. It’s importance to actual rankings is debated; however, you still want to design this tag to accurately describe the page’s subject matter while doing it in a manner that draws a searcher’s attention like a bee to honey (no, really!). Strategically placing relevant keywords is important (they often get bolded in search results), but keep in mind that your copy here should be easily understood by humans (i.e. no gobbledegook). As with the page title tag, each page’s description meta tag should be unique and limited in size (around 160 characters in this case).

If you forget to place description meta tags on your site’s pages, the search engines will generally pick some text from each page to represent the page in search engine results (they’re looking for relevant content). This is common on blogs and on pages covering a wide variety of topics, and it’s not really a bad thing. However, if you want to control the focus of the page and center it around a few key phrases/terms, it’s better to design your own description tags.

The Keywords Meta Tag. We still hear it often and many people ask about it, so it bears repeating – Google does NOT use the keyword meta tag in web rankings. Your website will do just as well without a keywords meta tag as it would with one. That being said, having this tag on your pages might help with the smaller, less sophisticated search engines out there.

Common Pitfalls With Title and Meta Description Tags. There are a few pitfalls that websites can fall into with their title and meta tags and you should take whatever steps available to avoid them:

• Boilerplating – Boilerplating is our term for title and meta description tags that are duplicated across every page of a website. This is usually driven by a single configuration file, an include file, laziness, or an option in a CMS or e-commerce system. Avoid it like the plague! This practice is common among small sites or custom-built CMS systems where time and resources may be limited. Search engine results with your listings will look bland and rather monotonous, offering nothing of real value to searchers while your competitor, who took the time to give each of their pages unique tags, presents a colorful, interesting landscape that search engines find irresistible. You do want to attract visitors and/or conversions right?
• Keyword Stuffing – Some websites will treat their title and description tags like auxiliary keywords meta tags. This is a sure way to dissuade both search engines and searchers from visiting your site. Strategically use keywords in page titles and description meta tags while accurately describing what’s to be found on the page, don’t overdo it.
• Getting Carried Away – Step away from the keyboard! There’s no need to write a novel in your title and description tags and if you do, it’s not helping. Take that creativity and direct it to the page’s content where your site’s visitors can enjoy it.

We’ve only covered a few of the tags you can find in the HEAD element of a web page that matters to SEO. There are some other important head element tags; however, they are topics in and of themselves and not all of them have to do with SEO. The key here is that you should ensure your website is at least using the basic tags within the HEAD element to their fullest as they represent some of the most important and simplest to use SEO tools for any website. If you don’t know what’s in your site page’s head elements, there’s a good chance you’re not seeing the results you expect or demand.

By the way, if you want to get your head examined (your page’s head elements that is), be sure to check out our SEO programs; we can get you on the right track!

Keyword-stuffed domain names were a big fad a couple of years ago and there’s many still hanging around; it’ll be interesting to see what the fallout ends up being.

Have a look for yourself:

We do not believe that this will have much, if any, impact on our clients who have one or two keywords in their domain name. This change, whenever it occurs, will likely be hitting those drug-advertising spam sites very hard.