Hotweazel.com Blog

Not everyone who visits your website or provides you with their e-mail address will visit your site every time you add new content. You may begin offering a new product or service, one that you want your established customers to know about, and creating a new page describing it may not be enough.

The best, and easiest, way for you to keep the lines of communication open with your customers or clients and provide them with a flow of information may be to produce a newsletter that can be sent to them at little cost. Your newsletter may be an occasional one, it may be a monthly one, or any time period you choose. You pick the time period that works best for your business, and there’s no reason not to have special editions that work much the same way as announcements.

With a newsletter, you can keep your earlier clients and customers informed about changes at your business. If you have a new product or service that you’re offering, if you are having a limited-time promotion or are phasing out something that you feel your customers may wish to take advantage of, a newsletter is the perfect way to alert them about these changes. You can use it to introduce new personnel or contact information, it’s an excellent way to mention updates, or you can even use it to indicate a temporary closure for moving or vacation purposes.

Your customers will enjoy receiving your newsletter, which will remind them of your business. Their earlier pleasure or satisfaction will be remembered, and it’s possible that they will refer you to others or send them your newsletter. However, if your customers wish to stop receiving newsletters from you, they have the option of easily unsubscribing. Constant Contact and iContact are two e-mail marketing companies we recommend based on ease of use and pricing.

Establishing and maintaining a relationship with your customers doesn’t need to be time consuming, but it is a very effective way of increasing your profits.

What is the Google sandbox?
When a website is brand new, it doesn’t take long for the Google robots to find it and begin cataloging the pages. Although Google has learned about the site and has indexed its pages, it won’t show up when a search is performed. What’s believed to happen is that the website is held off to the side, out of the listings, in a sort of limbo. Google knows about the page and site, but doesn’t display them, and this is called being in Google’s sandbox.

Why does Google have this sandbox?
Google’s credibility and desirability as a search engine depend on its producing high quality results. One of the reasons for Google’s success is how easy its search engine is for people to use and quickly get to quality web pages that answer their questions. There may be millions of web pages that mention the capacity of modern freight trains, for example, but when someone performs a search for that information, the pages that Google thinks answer those questions best appear on the top of the list.

Google, to maintain its standards as a search engine, seems to have instituted the sandbox in 2004 as a way to avoid placing brand new websites on its results pages. While anyone can create a website loaded with keywords and link to it from many other websites, Google holds off on displaying the page until it has established its legitimacy. Trusted or established websites, therefore, are more likely to be displayed while your new website is nowhere to be found.

How can I tell if my website is in Google’s sandbox?
If you study your site’s visitor or activity statistics, you will see the Googlebot visiting your website. What you won’t see while your site is on “probation,” or in what’s called the Google sandbox, is your page showing up on Google’s results pages if you search for any of your page’s keywords. You can confirm that the Googlebot has successfully found and indexed your page by searching for the actual domain name, but while the home page of your site will show up, none of the interior ones will be listed.

How can I get my webpage out of the “sandbox” and onto the SERPs?
As of this time, there’s nothing you can do but wait. After what Google considers to be a reasonable time, about six to eight months, it feels that your site is trustworthy and will begin displaying results for all of your pages. Google has been indexing and cataloging your pages from the first time its robots visited, it just wasn’t displaying those results when someone searched.

When you examine your site’s activity logs, you’ll notice many robots visiting, and you should remember that MSN, Yahoo!, and other search engines do not appear to have a sandbox. While Google may immediately display your pages, other search engines will, and you should be able to find your site listed when you perform a search on Yahoo!, Ask.com, MSN, and other search engines.

Whenever someone searches on Google, the results are displayed on a Search Engine Results Page, or SERP. The web pages listed on the very top of the page, the ones in a different color, are paid or sponsored links, but under those, the web sites and pages Google feels give the best answer to the search are listed.

Through the use of page rankings, Google attempts to provide its users with the best, the most relevant, and the most consistently referenced pages about the search query. The higher the page ranking, the higher on the SERP the website is placed, and higher rankings result in increased traffic.

Although they aren’t displayed, the pages are ranked numerically. To achieve the numbers, Google determines how important the page is through a number of factors, not all of them publicly known. One criteria used, however, is the number of other pages that link to it.

If each page that links in is thought of as casting a vote, Google adds up the number of votes to determine the page ranking. When it tallies the votes, however, not all votes are equal. A page that Google considers more important will weigh more than one Google feels is less reliable, much like the way a national film critic’s opinion may be worth more than one whose column is only in a small, local newspaper. If trusted and highly regarded websites have links to your pages, your Google page ranking will be enormous.

There are other factors that affect a page’s pagerank, but the value based on incoming links is one of the higher. Google, and others, consider it to be a worthwhile and valid test because simply having many incoming links isn’t as highly valued as having “good” ones. This page ranking reduces the prevalence of server farms, where numerous websites are created simply to link to each other and increase each other’s page rankings.

Outgoing links are also considered, and links from your site to ones that Google doesn’t think very highly of can actually reduce your page’s ranking. Internal links, those from within your own site, can be counted and included in the “vote” totals, and the more pages your site has, the better the results can be.

Welcome to our blog! Hotweazel.com is a web design company based in Los Angeles, CA. We provide everything from hosting to search engine optimization (SEO). But that’s not all we do. We build lifelong relationships with the majority of our clients, pour a little of ourselves into our work and and deliver smiles daily. You may visit our web design portfolio to view some of our past and recent work.

The objective of this blog is not only to educate our current and potential clients but to provide answers to questions one may have about websites and SEO and to share relevant news and updates about our company.

Believe it or not, it can potentially be harmful to setup your e-mail account (@yourdomain.com) to forward all incoming mail to Gmail, America Online (AOL) or any other ISP (Internet service provider). This feature will not only forward all your legitimate incoming mail but also any sp@m that is received in that particular account as well.

The majorities of ISPs offer a “this is sp@m” button to report any unsolicited mail. With only a few reports, your server may banned from sending e-mail to any of their registered users. When these companies receive your forwarded sp@m messages, all that can be determined is that your server sent it!

If you would like to properly access your e-mail through your Gmail account, please read the following article explaining how to “fetch” POP3 e-mails rather than forwarding them: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21289