News/Blog

Congratulations to all the companies in New Mexico Business Weekly’s list of Top Women-owned businesses published this week.

Three of our clients that made the list this year:

• DJ Heckes of Exhib-it Tradeshow Marketing Experts
• Melanie Burns of Achievement Gallery and Flair Events
• and Yashoda Naidoo of Annapurna’s Ayurvedic Cuisine and Chai House

We wish all of these smart business women ongoing success.

When you spend so much of your time working with clients helping them build successful websites, it’s hard to find the time to work on your own site. That has been our dilemma for a number of years. Our old site has served us well, but today we are extremely proud to be able to launch our new website. The new website has been an ongoing project that we’ve been working very hard on. In between client work, we’ve put in the time and effort necessary to show off what we’re capable of. It’s really a thrill for me to be able to work with our talented staff on a daily basis and to be able to show off their hard work.

This new website would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of our creative force, our talented designer Azadeh Azarian. In addition with the support from our search engine expert Barbara Warne we hope that even more clients will be able to find us in search engines when searching for a reliable and creative web design company.

We hope you like our new website. Feel free to post your feedback as a comment to this blog post. We look forward to hearing from all of you.

Karim Ardalan

President

MIS, Inc.

As you may have heard, we have moved to our own office! Our new office is centrally located and should make it much easier for our clients to reach us.

Our new address is:

MIS, Inc.
8501 Candelaria Rd NE, Suite F1
Albuquerque NM 87112

Please update your records accordingly.

We are now at the corner of Candelaria and Wyoming in the Fidelity Professional Center. Please come by and see us sometime.

These are some characteristics of a good business website:

1. The look and feel (first impression, navigation, general appearance)
   1. Professional design - not too busy or complicated.
      The first thing a viewer sees is the “design”. It needs to reassure the viewer that he/she is dealing with a professional business. But it also needs to allow viewers to get the information they are seeking.
   2. Navigation needs to be simple and to offer the viewer access to the pages they want or need.
      The design needs to work with the “buttons” or “navigation”. Sitemaps are good for the search engine but viewers often do not use them. So from the home page and from all other pages, a site needs to offer the viewer the main pages the viewer is most likely to want or need.
   3. Naming your pages.
      It doesn’t hurt if you name your pages (like about.html or faq.html) with keywords (for a site about dogs: about-dogs.html or dogs-faq.html).
   4. The presentation of the text needs to be considered.
      Text needs to be large enough, with enough contrast to its background for your target audience to read easily. Headers and subheaders need to introduce and break up the text.
2. The text (”content is king”):
   1. Text that is about the viewer’s needs and your credibility..
      Text is the way people will find your site and the way you answer the questions that your viewers have about what you can do for them and why they should choose you over all the others in the universe that can offer them the same kind of product or service. The most important text in the website (for the search engine and the viewer) is the text on the home page, which will determine if a viewer goes into the site or within a few seconds goes back to find another site to do business with. Do not make the text a “Mission Statement” but about what you will do for the viewer (potential customer).
   2. Use the words that the target audience is searching for.
      A site that doesn’t use the words people are looking for is unlikely to be found in the search engines. And usability studies have shown that a site that uses the words someone thinks they want will keep that person longer than if they use words that are similar to the words someone has in their mind. Main places to use those words are in the title, the headers, the subheaders, the body text, lists, and the links to other pages. There are ways of researching what people are searching for.
   3. A site needs fresh content on a regular basis.
      A blog can add fresh content. Or you can constantly add information to regular pages, etc. Google likes sites that add information on a constant basis - not radically changing the information that is there but adding to it.
   4. Establish credibility.
      Unless you are IBM, Amazon, or Disney, many, if not most, of your viewers may not know whether you are a legitimate business or just out to steal their money or their email address, etc. Include contact information (preferably also a street address and phone number) in the footer of every page as well as on the contact page. You want to quickly tell viewers how long you have been in business, etc.
   5. Answer the viewer’s questions quickly and easily.
      If you don’t tell your viewers that you do what they are looking for, they will use their back button to find a site where they do not have to guess whether the site offers them what they need. You can do an FAQ page (make sure the list of questions is at the top).
   6. To measure how a site is doing, a site absolutely must have “statistics“.
      Statistics should include how many people came to the site, what pages they accessed, what search engine or other site they came from, what words they searched for to find your site in the search engines. Without this information, you do not know the basics of how your site is doing.
3. The Search Engines:
   1. If you do all the above things, you will be “optimized” for the search engines, but in addition, there are the following points:
      1. Buy your domain name for more than one year (Google will actually notice).
      2. Submit to the major search engines, of course.
      3. Get links from as many other places as possible.
      4. Have a links page so you can recommend other related sites and maybe get them to recommend you on their links page.
   2. With a new domain you will usually get into Yahoo and MSN long before Google will pay any attention to you. Google doesn’t trust new sites. A new site usually doesn’t come up decently for a competitive term for at least six months and often for a year. In that time, you may want to consider Pay Per Click.

The day after we wrote this, the New York Times came out with an article entitled How to Make Your Website Sing for You that made some additional points:

• “‘Users spend 30 seconds reviewing a home page,’Mr. Nielsen said. ‘A business must encapsulate what they do in very few words.’”
• “If a site does not answer a user’s questions about a business, then you have scored one for the competition.”
• “’The most important rule in Web page design is to eliminate unnecessary design,’ Mr. Flanders said. He recommends not adding large, spinning graphics that take a long time to download.”He also advises business owners not to add introductory splash pages that force a viewer to watch a video or animation.”
• “In the end, getting a prominent placement in a search engine is the only way to ensure that your site will be seen by those who can increase your business.”

In order to get traffic you should follow these steps:

1. Make sure everything you publish, write, etc. lists your website address: letterhead, business cards, ads, signature file on all email you send off (almost all email programs will allow you to specify a signature file that will automatically add itself to the bottom of all email you send off and will have your name, address, website address, phone number, fax number, email address and maybe a slogan.
2. If you have the time visit forums and list servs where your target audience “meets”. Check the posts until someone asks a question that you can answer. Post your helpful answer. If the forum or list serv doesn’t allow you to link to your own address, they may allow a signature file. Check for their rules on these things.
3. Check other websites in your field that are not in direct competition with you. Check to see if they have a link page. If they have a link page, add a link to them from your website and email to tell them that and to ask for a link back - also ask if they want to send you a few words of explanation to go with your link to them. Send them your full link, the words that should be clickable and a few words of explanation (if they allow that to others on their link page).
4. If you have more money than time, consider pay per click.
5. Add a blog to your site. Google subscribes to blog post notification services and likes websites that have blogs that are continually updated.

Here are some ways you can reduce the amount of Spam messages you receive:

• Do not put your “real” email on your website. We can set up an alias email for you that is used on the website and goes to your regular email behind the scenes. This may not help that much if your current email address has already been picked up by the spammers.
• Have the email you do put on your website encoded. Even though it is an alias, people may make a note of the address listed on your website and you do not want to change it very often.
• Use an alias email (that goes to your regular email addreess) for any contact type form and do not use that alias anywhere else so it can be thrown away if it starts getting lots of spam — and the address used by the form will be picked up.
• Whenever you post on any website, or sign up for anything online or offline, or if you belong to a list serv or get a newsletter use an alias email address that redirects to your “real” address – most of our website customers can have unlimited alias addresses. These can be thrown away later if they are picked up – remember where you used your aliases so you know who might be giving out your email address and who you might want to notify when you change an alias.
• We have server side spam filters which will quarantine suspected spam but if you do that you must check the quarantine folder or your whole email box may get full and all email after that will bounce. Or we can set up the spam to “Tag and Deliver”. Or you can get an email program (Firefox has one) that learns what is spam and changes the color of suspected spam so you don’t have to think about it too much. (Warning: you can learn to trust these too much and lose legitimate email.) Almost anything you do can lose legitimate email even seeing every email and guessing what to throw away…
• If you want to get rid of your spam and start over you can change your email address but to do this right takes notifying everyone you know about the change, putting an autoresponder on the old address for many months, continuing to check the old address for those months to make sure you aren’t missing someone who is suddenly writing you after years or who forgot that you told them you are changing (and while checking that email deleting the junk so that box doesn’t get full). And even after all this someone will try to reach you years later at that old address… But this will allow you to start spam free and if thereafter you only use your real email address to respond to people you want to be in touch with, you can be relatively spam free for a long time. But even that kind of protection may not be forever. Spammers are always learning new tricks.
• In other words there are no easy answers. But sometimes one just has to do something.

If you have questions about aliases or anything else, let us know. Call (505) 341-3060 or email me

If you’re in the business of serving customers then your website content should reflect that. If your website is all about how great you are but doesn’t say anything about your customers then you might be sending the wrong message to your audience.

There is a website that offers a free tool that will analyze your text and tell you if your text is focused more on you or your customers. It’s called the ‘We We Calculator.’ I tried it using the text on our homepage and I’m happy to report that we got an excellent rating! We talked about our clients twice as much as we talked about ourselves.

You should try it out with the text on your website too and see what you get.

We We Calculator

Ever wanted easier control of at least one page on your blog? Want better ranking in Google and the other search engines? A blog may be an answer for you.

We can create a page in your site that looks like all your other pages. It can be called “What’s New”. And we can give you control of the content in this page. It would be as easy to add content to this page as to write an email. You just go to a password protected website, put in your username and password, and then type a title, and an entry (just as you would for writing an email). Your post is then dated and posted to the page (in the format you see here). You can also edit past entries.

Once you make a post, the fact that you have added to the page goes out to anyone who has signed up for the “Feed” and it also goes directly to Google and Yahoo and maybe other search engines. The search engines know this is brand new information and they will pay attention.

You should commit to adding information at least once every two weeks. Once a week would be better. And the post should consist of mostly information that would be of interest to your target audience but not just about your business or site. It should have a more general use. Google recognizes information that is promotional, and it isn’t as interested in that. As a business owner, etc., you have information in your head that your possible customers would like to know. Giving away information helps you in the long run. Something useful to the kind of people you want to appeal to. Show them how much you know, help them do things, and help yourself in the search engines at the same time.

Effective July 1, 2006 the New Mexico Gross Receipts Tax (GRT) has been changed for many locations in New Mexico. The new GRT rate for Albuquerque is 6.875% (up from 6.75%).

You can see a rate schedule by location  by going to:
<a href=”http://www.state.nm.us/tax/pubs/gr_rates_jul_06.pdf”>http://www.state.nm.us/tax/pubs/gr_rates_jul_06.pdf</a>

Please contact us if you’d like us to help you update your shopping cart to reflect these new rates.

From time to time we would like to share with you some information on various scams, viruses, etc. that are going around and that relate to your website, domain name, search engine listings and email address. There is a lot of them and this will just cover the ones that we have been reminded of recently.

1. There is a fax scam going around. It is two pages. Cover sheet says, “SAO Listing Service”. Second page says “Annual Internet Advertisement Listing” and the price is $79.95 a month or a year. It looks like an invoice. But in small print it says “This is not a bill. This is a marketing offer.”
2. A second fax scam is much like the first one. Internet Corpoaration Listing Service’s fax claims you paid them last year and now you owe them for this year. They tell you what your account number is and this year is just $35. But don’t bother.
3. And another fax from something called The Official Internet Registry & Optimization Bureau. Says they have been doing this for you for some time and this is a semi annual website marketing and monitoring bundle. We got it and I know we never hired them. They just send bills and someone pays and they make money just by sending out invoices via fax.
4. There is an email going around with a title like “Follow up - New Update to fix Windows File Errors”. They want you to run a diagnostics test. Don’t do it.

Whenever you receive unusual emails or faxes on Internet Marketing, etc. and you are unsure of what they are or whether they would be useful to you, feel free to use us as a resource. And if you want Internet Marketing, call us. Those of you with Full Service Website Hosting plans should ask for your yearly search engine and promotion meeting on how to get your website more traffic. MIS is here to help with all your website needs.