There seem to be misconceptions about how e-mail servers work. People seem to think that e-mails work independently from the internet. In order for anyone to be able to send and receive e-mails regardless of the internet connection you’re using you need to have a good internet connection and speed.

Sometimes you’ll find that you are able to connect to the internet but when you click on “send and receive” you don’t get your e-mails. At this point you start to panic thinking your e-mail has been suspended or it is broken. Well sometimes it is suspended or broken but not everybody is aware that the path that the e-mails take while traveling through internet connections is different to that of the website servers.

In layman’s terms both your water pipe and electricity cables run underground, if the electricity cables break it doesn’t mean your water will stop running but if the water pipe bursts, it may affect your electricity. In this case if your internet connection is down, it will affect your e-mails because e-mails use the internet to travel from one address to the next; internet is the mails’ transport. You are asking yourself why don’t I get e-mails even though I have an internet connection.

You may have an internet connection but your signal maybe weak or your connection may be slow losing packets and data on its way to its destination. Because the connection is so bad the mail server takes about 60 seconds to open a session and push the e-mail through. If the 60 seconds are up and the session is still open then a second session is opened. By this time the two sessions are running simultaneously, which slows the connection even more. Every time that you click send/receive it opens the session and therefore delaying the time for the server to close the sessions.
Each session needs to be closed one after the other by the server before your e-mails will come pouring in again.

The best remedy is that as soon as you realise that outlook is hanging and none of your e-mails are coming in, you contact your server provider and find out if there are any internet connection problems that are delaying your e-mails before assuming the worse.

South Africa is currently experiencing severe degradation to international servers due to a cable break on the SAT3 international link. This affects everyone in South Africa because there are services that you will try to get to online but will not be available, hence your internet connection, depending on the routing that it takes may be affected leaving you with a slow internet connection. This means that a great many of us will have trouble either browsing the net or downloading our e-mails as effectively as usual.

According to Telkom, their technicians are presently working on the problem and will be resolved soon.

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The clear cut world of advertising and marketing has undertaken a dramatic turn as of late. Traditional marketing methodologies such as the likes of newspapers and other print media are losing market share daily to the more interactive customer-orientated online marketing solutions available. These audiences are both more versatile, accessible and more consumer targeted.

In order to try and keep ahead of this online competition, you need to make an effort in keeping up with the latest SEO trends with regards to your own website.

Mentioned below are a few trends to keep in mind when building a new website or maintaining your current one:

Content is (STILL) king

It does not matter which way you look at it, the quality of content on a website is still as important as it has been since the very beginning – whether you are building new websites or rebuilding old ones. The more relevant the content the better the overall ranking of a site and the higher the traffic and generally the quality of the traffic too. Well written content engages the audience and also promotes the likelihood of quality links from other sites.

HTML vs XML site maps

Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) mentioned recently the importance of html site maps in website structures. According to him if you only have time to do one of the two being HTML or XML, he suggests working on the HTML one as it both increases usability when people search the site for information, and allows Google to easily crawl and index the pages.

Determining Keywords Trends using the Google Trends Application

Implementing a successful result orientated SEO strategy for websites involves good keyword selection. This information can be extracted from the “Google Trends” application – http://www.google.com/trends

Different keywords and keyword phrases related to the content and industry can be entered into this application and the report generated will give an indication as to how often these keywords and phrases are searched for compared to past searches – which can be viewed as daily, monthly or yearly results. Using this application to improve your content can help generate more traffic to your website and improve your rankings on Google. By incorporating the words and phrases in your content that experience high volumes of searches, you are able to keep up to date with current keyword search trends and stay ahead of your competition.

There are a number of ways to use Google Trends information to improve your SEO results

1. Compare the performance of two or more keywords and use the one that performs better within the content of your site. This helps with ranking.
2. Check keyword performance across different user locations and filter the results accordingly. This will help with relevancy.
3. Google Trends gives a summary of keyword performance from 2004 to date. This will enable you to select keywords that have had a history of solid stable performance.
4. Google Trends provides information to identify why certain changes in general search takes place and this will also aid you when choosing relevant reflective keywords.
5. Google Trends provides information for keyword performance across the various languages.
6. Any drop in the traffic to your website can be investigated by checking the search trends results.

For more information on how DiscoverSEO can assist your business in extracting maximum value out of your web solution, contact us TODAY – (011) 807 6149 or visit DiscoverSEO – www.discoverseo.co.za for a free SEO evaluation.

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