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Pretty permalinks for your WordPress site

Steve — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 21:28:59 +0000

Awhile back, I posted about our support for “Almost Pretty” permalinks for your WordPress site on our network. Today, I’m happy to announce that we now support “Pretty” permalinks on your Word Press site. When you host with PepperStation, your website is supported by a number of servers behind the scenes. Recent upgrades to our servers and various dial turning and button pushing now allow us to support “Pretty” permalinks on your WordPress site.

So, if you currently have /index.php in your permalink structure, and would like to remove it, feel free to do so.

What are permalinks? Here is a little refresher from our previous post.

A refresher on permalinks -

Permalinks are the links you can share with others and the search engines for your blog posts. From a search engine performance point of view,links to your site or blog that contain keywords relevant to your page’s content,will boost the ranking performance of that page with the search engines. By default WordPress uses “ugly” permalinks which look something like:http://example.com/?p=N

These links while functional,do not have an added benefit of loading your link with keywords for viewer and search engine consumption. The preferred permalink is the “Pretty” or “Almost Pretty” variety which allow you to create and share links with keywords in them and look like this:http://example.com/yyyy/mm/post-name/

Read more about permalinks on the wordpress site at:http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

To create links for your blog containing keywords, log onto your WordPress admin and goto settings->permalinks. Select a common link structure that you wold like to use ~~and then modify it by adding /index.php to the beginning in the ‘custom structure’field~~. You will have a link structure that looks something like: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

That’s it, you are good to go and now have links that contain great keywords for your blog post.

Enjoy!
Steve

Making sure your email reaches the inbox

Steve — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:17:51 +0000

I’m happy to announce that we’ve made some improvements to our email system that will help your emails reach the inbox.

Did you know that on average 20% of legitimate emails never reach the inbox? Frustrating, I know. Recently, we partnered with an email sending service provider to help us make sure that your emails are reliably delivered.

SendGrid.com offers world class deliverability expertise to make sure your emails get delivered. SendGrid handles ISP monitoring, DKIM, domain keys, SPF, feedback loops, link customization and more.

We run all sources of our generated email through the new system. This includes transactional emails from our Spirit e-commerce accounts, notifications sent from our Recordit web-form service, emails generated from your website forms and word-press plug-ins, and finally, all of your POP/IMAP account emails. Additionally, all of these emails are also run through new spam checks, which will help keep everyone’s inbox a bit cleaner. So, a good day for email!

All of these updates happen transparently behind the scenes. You do not need to update any of your email programs or web forms to take advantage of the new services. Happily, it just works.

Enjoy!

Steve

Updated PHP and MySQL services

Steve — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 19:37:13 +0000

Just a quick service update to let you know that we have updated our PHP and MySQL servers.

PHP version is now 5.3.6

MySQL version is now 5.1.52

Furthermore, your MySQL databases are now kept on Amazon’s EBS, which basically means that data durability is better and the chance of a single drive fault causing problems is minimized. We continue to make hot copy backups of each database several times throughout the day (stored on S3) and have added a daily snap copy of our EBS backed storage to our backup processes. So, in the unlikely event of a hard crash, boy do we have some backups to choose from.

Enjoy!

Gmail now reads your email to deliver better targeted ads

Steve — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 03:45:07 +0000

Google quietly rolled out an update to their Gmail service that now reads the content of your email in order to deliver more targeted ads. Over time, the system will get ‘smarter’ and ads appearing in their service should become more relevant to the user’s interests and location.

The announcement was not made on the company blog, but rather as an update on their Gmail security center; no doubt because of the rising concerns folks have had over data security. Google, to their credit, insists that no humans will read emails and information collected will not be shared with third parties.

See the full Google announcement to learn more.

What are your thoughts?

VRCopilot – A Vertical Response partner tool

Steve — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 21:21:46 +0000

We’re excited to add a new service to our line up designed for any business, franchise, or agency that needs to manage multiple Vertical Response “sub accounts”.

Do you currently spend several hours or even days creating and pushing email templates or credits to your sub accounts?

Do you need to create emails that are highly customized with a variety of fields unique to your business?

If so, VRCopilot will take your breath away!

With VRCopilot you can:

Manage a custom profile for each of your Vertical Response sub accounts that can be merged into your emails.
Create emails and preview them merged with your client’s profile information. Feel confident that your emails are delivered as you intended.
Push emails to any portion of your client list.
Push or pull credits between your master account and any selection of your client list.
Create new Vertical Response sub accounts right inside of VRCopilot.
Save lots of time managing your client list and know what is going on.

VRCopilot gives you everything you need to get up and running quickly with your Vertical Response Partner account.

The simple setup only takes a couple of minutes and will copy all of your existing sub accounts via Vertical Response’s secure API.

If this sounds like it may be for you, start an account and see how VRCopilot can simplify your life.

Enjoy!
Steve

SEO features for your mobile website

Steve — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 20:02:16 +0000

We recently pushed up some features that will help maintain your SEO mojo. Search engines are always introducing new meta tags that help webmasters optimize their web sites’ SEO. One problem facing many webmasters is coping with multiple copies of the same or very similar content across several sites, or on the same site. There are lots of legitimate reasons why you could find the same content on more than one URL, but the effect is the same. You end up with multiple URLs competing for the same ranking. This dilutes your SEO mojo and can diminish your hard earned SEO efforts. Meta tags to the rescue! All of our mobile sites now all include features that inform the search engines how to index your mobile site’s content and not compete with content on your other sites.

Adding a mobile site to complement your existing site(s) makes great sense for a variety of reasons. That said, as with any new site, its impact on your SEO should be considered and planned for. We added two new features to our CafePepper mobile website service to help.

First, we made it a snap to exclude your mobile website from search indexing. This, of course, will prevent any duplicate content issues with the search engines and ensure your existing ranked URLs are not affected.

Second, we added the option to tell the search engines the ‘primary’ location for your content. This is the most flexible approach as it allows your mobile content to be indexed and tells the search engines a little more about your site and its content so that it will not interfere with the ranking of your previously indexed content. For the technically curious, this is done with a ‘canonical’ tag which you can read more about at this google post.

Either way, your SEO mojo is safe with your new mobile website. So, feel free to unleash, get creative and share all your favorite content on your mobile site.

Enjoy!

Why build a mobile website?

Steve — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 20:43:32 +0000

Since the launch of CafePepper, we’ve had lots of conversations about what mobile websites are and why it is important to have a presence on the mobile web. According to Pew Internet Research, 40% of adults are already searching the Internet for information via their mobile devices. When a site is not created to be viewed on a mobile device, the customer’s experience on the website diminishes greatly.

So, what does this mean for you?

This means that, ready or not, customers are already looking for you on their mobile device, and your website is most likely not providing the same great experience on their phone as it does your computer. Providing a mobile site made for the iPhone and other mobile devices can significantly improve your customers’ experience and drive your sales conversion.

According to BizReport, the time to act on a mobile site is now; “hopefully, marketers will begin to realize that if they want to attract the next generation of users then an ‘Internet presence’ alone isn’t enough. Today, a ‘mobile Internet presence’ is important, too.” (bizreport.com Jan 14, 2010). By ensuring your business has a website that can be viewed successfully on a mobile device, you know you are meeting your customer’s expectations in finding your site user friendly.

CafePepper enables you to create a mobile website quickly and easily, keeping your business ahead of the competition and your customers satisfied. Click here to learn more about how going mobile will grow your business.

“Web on the Go”

Steve — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:00:58 +0000

We had such a good time leading the training class “Web on the Go” for NAWBO Tucson yesterday! We discussed the mobile marketplace, consumer behavior, smart phone technology and building a mobile website. We look forward to our follow up workshop on October 12, 2010. In the October workshop, we’ll be continuing our discussion on the need for mobile friendly websites while providing a hands on site building workshop using CafePepper.

Welcome CafePepper!

Steve — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 03:47:52 +0000

This week we welcome an exciting new product to the PepperStation family: CafePepper! CafePepper creates fantastic web sites for the iPhone and other mobile devices. Powered by our trusty Spirit platform, CafePepper allows you to put your best site forward for the surging mobile phone market.

Why mobile? Two reasons:
First – Internet searches on mobile devices are skyrocketing!
Second - Because we were SO tired of looking at websites on our phone and not being able get the information we needed. A typical “full screen” website is not optimized for a mobile device, leaving us frustrated as we tried to surf the Internet on our phones. CafePepper makes creating terrific mobile sites easy and even a little fun with great features like click-to-call and click-to-map. We are super excited to offer this service that connects you with your customers on the mobile web and we hope you’ll be excited too.

Check it out! cafepepper.com . Let us know what you think!

Top Ten Things you should know about social media

Tammy — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:05:45 +0000

1. Social Media is the new “word of mouth” marketing.
2. Social Media is an opportunity for you to have two-way conversations with your customers.
3. You can find out what your customer thinks about your brand without the expensive focus groups and research – they’ll tell you… and each other!
4. While Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are the “Top Stars”, there are many other services on which you can connect to your customer as well!
5. Blogging is another form of social media – and a great way to generate traffic from the search engines!
6. Your content needs to be more than a sales pitch – use social media to give them information and gain their trust.
7. While social media allows you to be personal and professional with your customers, you should keep your personal and professional pages separate.
8. You can reach your customers with exclusive deals or information and should have a clear plan on how – make them feel like they are “in the loop” with their favorite products!
9. Be sure to let the world know you are on social media sites, via your website, publications, menus, advertisements – wherever you reach your customers!
10. You can start small, but you MUST start somewhere.

DID YOU KNOW that Facebook has 350 Million users and 100 Million of those are in the U.S.? The average user spends 55 minutes per day on Facebook – imagine capturing some of that time for YOUR business!

Stay tuned as we will be exploring these topics in more detail in the weeks to come.