Did you know that approximately 144.8 billion emails are sent daily across the globe? According to Mashable, the average knowledge worker spends 11.2 hours a week reading and answering emails, consuming about 28% of each workday. In the time it takes to read this sentence, 20 million emails were written. Needless to say, email is an integral part to the functioning of almost every business around the globe. But those stats just refer to the “typical” 8-5 workday – how many people really work those hours these days? In exchange for a more flexible schedule, many people have to be “on” around the clock, outside the office. They must be able to access their data from anyplace at anytime. Can your employees do this? With more and more workers demanding increased email accessibility, universal access is now less a luxury than a requirement.
Here at Hostway, we offer a solution for providing your employees access to their email anytime, anywhere. Hosted Exchange enables you to have Microsoft Exchange without the expense of investing in your own server farm to run it.
Choosing Hostway to provide your email communications offers five major benefits:
Act now and take advantage of two great offers: a free 30-day trial of Exchange and free Outlook software, the world’s most popular email and calendar management system. Don’t wait – call 877.798.6239 or click chat to speak to one of our representatives today!
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is all the rage. It’s all about getting YOUR page on the front page of Google, Bing, Yahoo and other popular search engines so potential customers can find you first and fast. But how do you go about ensuring that your site is listed first among your competitors’?
First and foremost, it’s important to have a lot of links on your site – and to be linked to from other sites. But remember, not all links are created equal. Links to and from sites that are already highly ranked are more valuable than links to and from low-ranking sites; links to and from content-rich sites are more valuable than those to and from static or content-light sites.
Second is the use of keywords or search terms on your site. Do your research and figure out what terms, phrases and words your customers are most likely to enter into a search engine to find sites like yours, then incorporate those terms into your copy. The more, the better. Remember though, content is king, and you don’t want to just throw in keywords randomly. Sites like Google have gotten pretty good at figuring out that trick and look for search terms in natural language use.
Third is time. Sites that stick around over time, drawing large amounts of traffic and gaining regular backlinks appear more trustworthy than brand-new sites with few brand-new links. In Google’s eyes, links into a site convey trust in that site, but as I said, not all links are equally valuable. Google’s ranking algorithm looks at the link profile of a site as a whole, considering not only the number of links, but also their quality and age. So the longer your site exists, and the longer you have trusted links and backlinks, the higher your ranking.
Finally, create partnerships with related sites that complement your own content and link back to them. This will help increase your number of backlinks and also add additional value for your customers by giving them more reasons to visit your site – plus you can get additional visitors from your partners’ sites.
But without a doubt, content is king. It’s where your search terms live, and ultimately, it’s what decides whether or not your customers will stick around (and whether or not they will order from you). Refreshing your content on a regular basis and expanding your site will increase the number and breadth of search terms on your site and keep your customers coming back for more. Adding interesting content – articles, white papers, video, podcasts, images and other rich media – is what drives up impressions and time on site, key metrics you’ll want to use to measure how well your site is doing. And customers often have their own sites and will link back to yours, increasing your backlinks and driving up your position on Google. This is, after all, where this conversation began.
Although the term "cloud" is seeing increasing use, it's necessary to clarify what portion of "the cloud" is of interest to a particular audience. For small and medium businesses (SMBs), there are generally two areas of relevance in the evolution of IT services to the cloud. The first is the application layer, commonly referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS). The second is the infrastructure layer, known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). (more…)
According to Gartner analysis, $150 billion in cloud-related revenues is expected by 2013. The move of company data towards “the cloud” is not slowing, and more companies are wrestling with the “is the cloud secure?” question. (more…)
By Melissa J Luther
Older Web sites seem to have an advantage when it comes to search engine rankings, but a site’s age alone is not a primary factor in its ranking. (more…)
by Melissa J Luther
You are collecting analytics data on your Web site, but there’s just so much of it, and you have so little time to analyze it. (more…)
By Melissa J Luther
Have you seen those little square images, made up of more little squares, that have been showing up in magazines, newspapers and on Web sites? (more…)
By Jen Brister
Small companies need concrete ways to determine their progress toward business goals. (more…)
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There have been serious concerns about Facebook making news recently. (more…)
By Jen Brister
Your company website is one of the most important aspects of your company's brand. (more…)