TIPS & TRICKS: DOING THE WEB THE RIGHT WAY

Here are a bunch of random things you may want to consider in terms of being smart about using the power of your online presence:

DO NOT advertise your email address! Ever seen a flower truck drive by that doesn't have a web address, but does have an email address, like: areallycoolflorist@yahoo.com? THAT, my friend, is a person who has no idea how to use the internet. No one responds to email addresses. Get a web site...and USE it!

Use "anchor text" when getting links to your site - If you swap links with another site, or buy links on another site, purchase a descriptive phrase such as: Nashville Family Dentist (no matter what your domain name is). The search engines care a lot about the language that is used when linking to you. This will help result in free traffic from the search engines to your web site.

Make sure your web site navigation is clear - No one likes visiting a web site, only to have a hard time finding what they want when they get there. If you sell snow globes, make sure there's a prominent link near the top of every page that says "Buy Snow Globes" or "Shop for Snow Globes". Don't make people guess! The best way to test? Sit several friends down in front of your site (individually, of course) and ask them to figure out how to buy a snow globe on your site. You'll learn a lot this way (unless, of course, you don't sell snow globes!).

Get the right kind of email address to use for business - Google Apps now makes it possible for you to have an incredibly effective, convenient, accessible email address based on your domain name...i.e., yourfirstname@yourcompanyname.com. Best of all...it's FREE and it has great spam protection! Read more about it from a layman's perspective here. This is a far superior solution to email addresses from Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail.