Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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Use Feedburner For Blog Feed Tracking

Feedburner has been around for a while and just last year Google bought this interesting free tool. That should tell you something right there, when Google buys something, it has increased perceived value.

Feedburner allows you to make your RSS or Atom feed generated by your blog or e-newsletter user-friendly. Providing it in a format that matches the feed reader of your subscribers. It can turn an Atom feed into an RSS 2.0 feed or other version of RSS feed. It will track your activity and subscriptions with the new PRO tools that are now free to all, and will even allow you to send your blog posts as emails to subscribers.

Previously I have been leery of losing my domain tag on my feed address, but I have decided that the information and ability to track performance is more important than keeping my domain name tag on my feed.

Feedburner is easy to implement with WordPress and New Blogger auto-install widgets. So if you haven’t checked out Feedburner, now’s the time to take the leap and to know more about your news feed, reach, and subscribers.

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Advertising Globally on Google AdWords

Here’s a quick tip for you on using global advertising on Google AdWords.

You can blow through your budget at an unprecedented rate when you advertise globally without any controls. It is far better to set up your architecture in this manner to be able to control your spend more effectively and in the global regions that really work for you.

First identify using your website analytics software where your traffic comes from and see if this meshes with your sales in the real world.

Second, group global areas into separate campaigns. Typically I will use a US & Canada market, an Asian market (includes Australia) and a European Market (includes Europe the Middle East and most of Russia). Then using my own time zone, I calculate the best times to show the ads in the grouped time zones. Typically I do not want my ads to show in the middle of the night in any of these markets as this is a way to encourage poor quality clicks. I want my budget to be spent in prime time. I am using ad scheduling to choose the best time zones. Remember in your control panel you enter your zone, but converted to the new time zone. I use this tool to help me arrive at those figures. http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html

Third, I assign campaign budgets by region. I have found that this is a crucial step towards effective advertising. Additionally you will be able to evaluate clicks and conversions to adjust your spend as your program progresses.

With a little bit of advanced planning you can have AdWords global advertising work effectively for you.

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Website Best Practices

Here is my short list of best practices that all website designers and website owners should consider while their site is under design. If you website is already up you may want to consider any items that you don’t have covered in your next website update.

1. Include a privacy and legal policy. In today’s world, you need to make sure that you have yourself covered. If you are marketing to prospects and clients using email you must have a privacy policy in place. If you are doing pay per click advertising, Google will be looking to see if you have a link to your privacy policy on your landing page. Having one may even improve your quality score with Google AdWords.

2. Consider having your navigation be text based. Don’t hide your navigation in JavaScripted rollovers. Search engine spiders cannot read JavaScript. If you feel you absolutely must have this design element, provide alternative text navigation at the bottom of your page. Consider instead styled text using cascading style sheets to give many of the same effects but with the benefit of search engine readability.

3. We’re seeing a lot of activity in social bookmarking right now. It is a smart idea to add this to your new website as I feel that this interaction with readers will eventually improve traffic to your website and may even be a factor in the future for organic placement.

4. Make sure your website is feed enabled. That means that if you have a blog, install in the head tags the link to allow IE 7 and Firefox to autosense your blogs feed.

5. Make sure to include a site map in the footer links of your website or on your sidebar. Most sites over 10 pages will benefit from this. Arrange your site map by topic or mimic your site architecture. The links on your site map can even be to specific paragraphs on your pages using anchors. Don’t just list your pages.  For example if your About page contains team information and your services, in your site map have a separate link to each paragraph. Your web master will know how to do this using links and anchor tags.

6. Consider providing links to important content in your footer. When someone is at the bottom of the page by having navigation right there, you make it easy for people to work their way around. At the very minimum provide a link back to the top of the page so they can access your navigation quickly.

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Top Outlook Tips

We’ve got some great tips to help you get the most out of Outlook. Here are links and descriptions to our top tips for Microsoft Outlook 2000, Outlook 2003, and even Outlook 2007.

1. How to set up multiple email accounts In Outlook
These simple instructions take you set by step on how to input multiple POP3 and IMAP mail accounts to let Outlook download them all to your computer.
Link: http://www.mccordweb.com/newsletters/instructions/setting-up-multiple-emails.php

2. How to create address member groups in Outlook
These easy to follow instructions show you how to set up address groups in Outlook to send emails to many members with one click.
Link: http://www.mccordweb.com/newsletters/instructions/address-member-groups.php

3. How to set up a vacation message in Outlook
Follow these instructions to learn how to set up and out of office or vacation message in Outlook using rules.
Link: http://www.mccordweb.com/newsletters/instructions/vacation-message.php

4. Stop spam with message rules in Outlook
Hate spam, you can get a handle on it with these tips. If you have Outlook 2003 or 2007 you may want to consider instead using the Junk Mail definitions instead of this option. Additionally consider tagging mail you get as junk mail by right clicking on the message to add the sender to the blocked mail folder. Outlook will learn over time which items you consider junk mail.
Link: http://www.mccordweb.com/newsletters/instructions/stop-spam-message-rules.php

5. How to add a signature in Outlook
Here’s how to set up a signature in Outlook. Right now the rage is to include an image in your signature, make sure before you do that to understand that some people you send email to will not receive your image intact, they may receive it as an attachment to the message so it’s best to do an image if you like, but also include text in the signature to assure that all receivers will know who sent the mail without having to click on an image as an attachment which they may not do.

Here’s another tip for website owners. When you post instructional information on your website like this, you are creating what is called link bait. It can be a huge traffic and link builder for your website. Not only do you provide interesting and helpful content for your readers but you build traffic into your website over time.
Link: http://www.mccordweb.com/newsletters/instructions/signature-change.php