Brendans Blog

During this online seminar, you will discover...

• How to generate business from the type of marke you want to deal with
• How to drive laser-targeted traffic from Search Engine systems
• How to grow your database of prospect clients online
• How to boost your Google listing through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

So the playing field has changed again. While the goal posts have not moved as much as they did last year with the 'caffeine' release, there are still some key points that the search engine giant is pointing out here.

The latest changes are discussed by Google here

I especially like the reference to cricket. But in all seriousness, what does this mean to you? Well Google are saying they want to show the most current and recent information, particularly for events and products. If you are serious about your ranking in Google (and who isn't) you just need to keep doing what you are already doing. Updating your content, and adding new content regularly. If you
haven't started this, get a blog added to your site, and design a plan to write on your blog as often as you can. Ideally every week.

In case you didn't know, we have a service where we take care of these blog updates for you. We call you on a set schedule, and a professional writer takes care of writing your comments into a proper article. All ready for Google to index. Leaving you with more time for important tasks.

Until next time,

Brendan Byrne

Google announced this week that they are changing the way they work out your quality score. This is part of the algorithm that works out how much to charge you per click, and what position to place your advert.

Google are taking more interest in the quality of the landing page that each advert is linked to, and adjusting your quality score accordingly. This will directly affect the position of your advert in Google, and therefore, the costs.

The best thing to do is to ensure your keywords are closely related to the associated landing page. This is what all good Adwords managers figured out a long time ago, it is just that now, Google are giving it even more importance.

If you would like us to review your Adwords or other pay-per-click campaigns, call our office on 1300 794 770.

We're back again this week with another video for you.

This week it is the 7 myths of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

There are lots of stories being passed around the business community about 'tricks' you can do to get to the top of Google.  In this video, we take a look at just 7 of them, and explain why they are not true.

This week was my turn to record a video, so I hope you like it - let us know what you thought on our blog, YouTube or Facebook.

If you would like to learn more, please call the office and speak to Jordan or myself.

As you might remember, Receptive Technologies has teamed up with Jordan Mullen from Web Based Marketing. Jordan has recorded a few videos that are well worth the couple of minutes to watch.

This first video is about how to generate more business from your website while putting your follow up on auto-pilot.



Also, if you would like myself to do a free web marketing audit on your website to explain how to generate more business online, go to the link below.

www.webbasedmarketing.com.au/freewebaudit

Adobe recently announced on their blog an update that will affect virtually all the websites hosted by Business Catalyst in Australia, and a large majority of sites they host out side of Australia. We wanted to simplify the announcement here, and summarise what you need to do if you have a website with Business Catalyst.

Firstly there is no emergency action you must take during the migration period.

However, there ARE actions that EVERY customer must take within the following 60 days.

1. The migration with occur at 1am, Sunday 20 February 2011 Sydney time. It is expected that there will be up to 6 hours where Australian based sites will be down, with a message "Site currently unavailable due to maintenance".

2. After this time, every domain name that you use to direct visitors to your website will need to have one of two changes made. These changes are well documented here: http://www.bcstatus.com/instructions 
If you are uncertain of who your Registrar is, visit this page and enter your domain name: http://whois.domaintools.com/ Once you do a look up for your domain name, you will find your DNS registrar in the 'Registrar Name' section.


Why are these changes happening?
The new datacentre is built using high-end industry standard hardware and server technologies. The main business benefits include:

• Improved Reliability: with built-in hardware and software redundancy for all critical systems, the new datacenter prevents downtime caused by single system failures and enables customers to continue running their online business without disruption 
• Increased performance: built using latest, state of the art hardware and server technologies, this new datacenter delivers higher performance and enables websites to load faster for a better customer experience 
• Higher capacity: three times more capacity than currently available and built-in expansion capabilities will cover growing customer demand for traffic and space

Am I being compensated?
Adobe have credited each site with 1 month free licence.


 

So Today is the day!

Business Catalyst is doing the email upgrades as I type, and you can now update your password.

Step 1
 login to your administrator access to your site. This is also available here:
http://www.receptive.com.au/admin

Step 2
Next, you should see this message at the top of your log in screen:

(Click Image for Full Size)

then you can follow the instructions in yesterday's blog post to complete your password update.

If you are an 'Email Only' user, there are also instructions there for you.

This is a notification that Business Catalyst will be making a major system upgrade that will require you to reset or change your password to continue using the system. If you are using hosted email i.e you can access your email account by going to mail.yourdomain.com; this migration may affect your ability to view existing emails in your inbox for up to 72 hours.

• What is happening: Business Catalyst is releasing a system-wide security and email infrastructure upgrade. Business Catalyst is migrating mail accounts from existing infrastructure to new mail infrastructure
• Migration Start Time: 8:00PM Friday 28 January 2011 (EDT) Check local times
• Migration End Time: 8:00PM Monday 31 January 2011 (EDT) Check local times
• Duration: 72 hours for full mail migration- although most accounts will be migrated in less time
• Customer Impact: All users are required to reset/update passwords after the migration begins. Users with hosted email will not have access to existing mail in their mailboxes until it is migrated to their new mailboxes.

Steps you need to take

During the next few days, upon attempting to login either through your current desktop e-mail client (using POP3 or IMAP) or through the webmail interface, your login credentials will stop working and you'll receive an "Invalid username or password" error.

Upon receiving this error, the steps you'll need to take are:

If you have access to the site's Admin Console (ie. you're an Admin user with email enabled):

1. Login in site Admin with the user account for which you wish to perform a password change
2. Go Home -> My Details -> Change Password form
3. Enter old password and new password twice, and save the changes

This will result in the password being changed for both Admin and email access.

Changing your password via the Webmail login interface (ie.you're an "email only" user)

1. Go to Webmail as per usual (eg: mail.mydomain.com)
2. At the login screen you'll see a message that requests you perform a password update: "For security reasons, you will need to reset your password. Please go here to change your password."
3. Clicking on Change password link will load a form where you can update your password.
4. Enter your e-mail address, old password and new password twice, then save the changes

Once you have updated your password, you'll be able to login to the webmail interface, or through your desktop email client using the new password.

Please Note: Upon logging in with your new password, you will not see your old e-mail in the web interface or via IMAP, as we will be migrating e-mail to the new service following password upgrade. This means that your e-mail inbox and folders will look empty. Please wait a few days until the migration is complete for the older emails to appear.

Business Catalyst (BC) are completing some upgrades to their system at the end of January 2011. This will provide clients who host email with BC with a larger inbox and better system integrity. As part of this upgrade, you will be asked to update your password. This is expected to begin from the January 28th.

This will be required even if you do not use Business Catalyst for your email.

If you encounter any issues in the days surrounding this move, when trying to access email from your mail client (Outlook, Entourage, Mac Mail etc) please visit the admin area of your website and follow the instructions to update your password.
You may access this admin area in a few different ways;
(replace “Yourdomain” with your website address)
http://www.YourDomain.com/admin
http://mail.YourDomain.com/
or you may be accessing your site from our login page:
http://www.receptive.com.au/admin

The advantages to the new email system:
Increased Mailbox size (from 100Mb to 2Gb)
Improved webmail interface.
Better control from your webmail account.
A more stable service for email.

Please consider following us on Twitter for fast notification as this upgrade is deployed. http://www.twitter.com/receptivetech

QUESTIONS?
What action will I need to take?
You email client (Outlook, Entorage or Mac Mail) may ask you for a password, after not needing it for a long time, then visit one of the links above, and follow the instructions to change your password. Once this is done, enter the new password to your email client. That's all.

I have not been able read my email. Why not?
If you have been noticing some issues over the last week with your email, this is the type of problems that are expected to be fixed by this update.

How much will this cost?
This upgrade to your service is being provided as part of your licence fee. There are no added charges for this upgrade.

Where did all my Email go?
During the change over process, some mail may seem to 'disappear' from your inbox. This is because you will be accessing the new inbox before the contents of your old inbox is copied to the new server. Be patient, all your email will appear in your new inbox over the weekend and we expect that by Monday all your email will be back in your account. We will notify you when the process is completed, and then you can contact us if you think there may still be email's missing.

If you have any further concerns, please email us or complete the contact us form on our website. If you are telephoning, please be patient, if it goes to messagebank, we will call you back as soon as possible, so leave a detailed message.

The wasted paper and energy in the delivery of the Yellow pages and White pages drives me nuts! You can now, reasonably easily 'un-subscribe' for three years.

www.directoryselect.com.au

Who knows what happens after three-years, I guess they start sending them to you again, hopefully they ask you again, but that would not be in their best interests now would it....

Save a tree, cancel your subscription today!

(Signed, the tree-hugging-hippy)