Are your promotional emails SPAM?

In September of 2007, the government introduced The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act, 2007. This Act applies to any email, text, or instant message that markets or promotes products or services of a commercial nature.

Do your promotional emails comply with the law? Under the Act, individuals who SPAM can be fined up to $200,000, and organisations up to $500,000.

www.antispam.govt.nz

How do I get more people to visit my web site?

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation

The more people that visit your website, the more possibilities there are for sales and a larger turnover of business. It's that simple. The problem is: there are more than a billion websites on the Internet and it's easy to get lost in the crowd.

There are two primary ways people will load up your website in their browser. They'll type in your URL directly (having read it somewhere, like in your advertising or on your business card), or, more often than not, they'll come to you via a search engine (e.g. Google) - but they'll only find your website if it's ranked high enough.

When searching for something, a search engine will often spit back a list of results that numbers into the millions. Even searching with several terms (thereby narrowing the search parameters), can still produce a list that runs into the hundreds of thousands.

If your website isn't in at least the top 100 results, it's unlikely anyone will be visiting.

So, how do I get a higher search engine ranking?

You can get higher up a list of search results through Search Engine Optimisation - by optimising your website for the search engines.

Search engines continually spider the Internet, collecting and updating information about websites, which they index and add to their vast website-databases. Not surprisingly, search engine companies are highly secretive about the algorithms they use to rank pages - to prevent people using tricks to skew results in their favour.

The one thing you can be sure about is: search engine spiders will examine your website's pages, both their content and their metatags.

Is there optimisation software I can use?

A good CMS (Content Management System) should have some form of SEO tools built in, or at least available as a plug-in module.

A good SEO programme will enable you to thoroughly analyse your website (keyword frequency, and so on), and suggest ways to fine tune it for spidering by search engines.

An SEO programme should also offer some facility for comparing your site to those of your competition - if your competitor's website is ranked higher than yours, the programme should enable you to determine why.

Will Silverlight dim the Flash light?

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Google Chrome

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