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January 2012

Week 44 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Jan 27, 2012 1:27 PM
by Gustavo Jabbaz

This past week: I've taken the top 8 most clicked tweets from last week. Hootsuite conveniently arranges them in their quick reports. As always YWD focus is the SMB (Small Medium Business) with good tips and what not to do in the cyber world. The list below reflects that, including much talked about McDonald's faux pas on Twitter.

Funny -> McDonald's Twitter Campaign Goes Horribly Wrong #McDStories
I though it was funny, an honest mistake using hashtags. I think some people just took this story and made it bigger that what it was. Live and learn, even with careful planning things can go wrong, and McDonald to their defence handled it very well.

The new darling of SocialMedia, lots of fun check it out -> How to use Pinterest's pinboard for the Web
This was part of last week's roundup, but during the past week it has been the second most clicked link. It just shows the growing popularity of Pinterest. Brands are starting to use this new social network in very interesting ways. If your business deals with anything that is visual or can be represented visually join the hype; drop me an email and I'll send you an invite.

Into Link Building? A long and very comprehensive list -> Link Building Techniques – The Complete List
I'm sure you heard of link building applied to your SEO before. This is a complete list of all different methods to achieve this. Good to know even if you are not working on the SEO of your website, you will know what they are talking about.

Google+ gets 625,000 new users per day Are you still thinking about it? -> Your essential guide to Google Plus
There is some discussion as to the validity of this number, but one thing for sure it's growing. If you care about search ranking it is a must and most important it is a pretty good platform for sharing content.

Stats on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+ Tumblr and Digg -> The SMB Social Media Cheat Sheet
Infographic, good data to have for quick reference.

A positive view on Google's new way of search -> Google Search Plus Is Shaking Things Up a Bit
Again a very popular tweet that made it into last week's roundup. I see this as great news, all that SEO and search ranking techniques of the past were a lot of guess work and most time just a lot of nothing. Now, as the content and website owner you have more control on the page rank for your website. Better yet, you can control your page rank for the right target audience.

Blogging or thinking of blogging? here are some good tips -> 6 Tips for Being A Good Blogger in 2012
Blogging is the best way to generate meaningful content for your audience, it creates traffic, adds credibility to your business and attracts the right people for your product.

We just revamped the social bookmarks manager in YWD -> 9 Tips for Integrating Social Media on Your Website
In an age of content sharing not having social bookmarks on the pages of your website is just counter productive. I'm sure there was some thought and effort to produce the text and imagery of your site. The best way to make sure everyone knows about it is through word of mouth; so why not make easier to the visitor to tell their friends? And as I mentioned on the tweet, this is easy to do in YWD take a look: Social media bookmarking and other widgets

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media.
Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter

Getting found on-line what you need to know about URLs

Jan 27, 2012 11:43 AM
by Gustavo Jabbaz

Your business web address, Domain or URL is how your audience finds you in the internet. It not only drives traffic to your website, but is also responsible for getting emails to your own email account (provided you have an email account with your business domain, which you should. Why, well credibility for one reason but that is another post).

At YWD we complete domain transfer and registration for our clients as needed, and we can do it for you too. We make sure your website and email are accessible with your business web and email address.

We have found that many of our clients have a very limited understanding of how a domain name works, this quite understandable since it is very complicated. If you are one of those people who ever wonder what a DNS (Domain Name System), CName (Canonical Name record), ARecord and IP adresse is, this post is for you.

A web site address usually looks like this “www.yourwebdepartment.com” or sometimes looks like this “yourwebdepartment.com” (this bit is the domain proper) and some times you see it like this “blog.yourwebdepartment.com”; this is a subdomain. I know it seems strange, but www.yourwebdepartment.com is actually a subdomain of yourwebdepartment.com.

A while back the people managing the internet started using “www” in front of the domain name to differentiate websites from domains for emails, and things like discussion boards and newsgroups. After that it kind of stuck with everyone.

Getting back on topic, the domain name is what gets registered on the internet. Once registered a record of ownership (though you need to pay yearly to maintain it) is stored in a server, or more specifically on a collection of redundant servers. This record then points to the Name Servers and these servers have the DNS for your domain. The DNS is the most useful part of this, it has the location of your website and email on the internet.

So far we have the domain registered in one set of servers and the DNS on another set of servers. Usually the Domain and DNS are with the same registration company, these companies are called registrars. YWD is a registrar so is Godaddy, Network Solutions and EasyDNS.

What you can manage with a DNS

ARecord, this is where the domain name or yourwebdepartment.com points to and IP address (a set of numbers that computers can locate each other), you can also point a subname to an IP address as well.

CName, this is where the subdomains are created and they can only point to a domain or another subdomain (for the subdomain option it can also be of different domain as well).

MX Records, here is where the email address is set, and unlike the the other two above, the MX Record can use and IP number or a subdomain for the email server address. To learn more about email read my post: “Help, how do I set up my email?”.

Are you now an Domain name expert?

At YWD we have been setting up Domains for years, much of this is second nature to us, taking on this service to help our clients is easy for us. So how did we do explaining it? Did this help? Do you have more questions? I would love to hear what you think.