Aosoft Blog

Use Your Free Aosoft Web Site Statistics.

Optimizing a website to gain higher search engine rankings, referred to as SEO, is the hottest marketing tool for businesses right now. So hot, in fact, a business owner can easily spend thousands of dollars per month paying a company to analyze traffic, create link campaigns, or develop content. When analyzing a web site, there are scores of guidelines and tools a professional will employ in order to help achieve top search results. Chief among these tools is web site statistics software.

Web site statistics software, or Web Stats, basically presents aggregated information about your web site activity. Common bits of information include:

• How many visitors you have had
• How many web pages have been visited
• What your web site’s busiest hours, days, and months are.
• What the most popular pages are
• How long visitors stay on your site
• What pages visitors entered and exited on
• What search terms brought them to you

And so on. Aosoft makes it easy, and free, to activate your statistics software. Just a few clicks of your mouse and you are logging information about your visitors.

Now What?

So, what do you do with Web Stats information once you have it? You analyze it, of course! Easier said than done, right? Not necessarily. While deeper web statistics analysis can be difficult and can cost a lot of money or time, there is certainly valuable information that the savvy individual can understand and use to their advantage.

Here are some examples based on information you might find from the free web stats Aosoft offers.

Let’s say your statistics indicate that 25% of your visitors are entering your site on one particular page, that they are staying for less than 30 seconds, and that 90% of those visitors are also leaving your site from that same page. This should tell you that a good number of the visitors to that page are, for some reason, not liking what they see. At this point, even though you don’t know why they are leaving, you have enough information to try a few things out. Some of these things could include:

• Look at the page yourself and attempt to determine what might be causing people to leave.

• Have friends or colleagues visit the page and give you their impression.
• Implement other technologies to capture the visitors attention:
  • A chat script to instigate conversation
  • A feedback or mail form for the visitor to use
• Highlight a particular event, special offer, or sale.

Another scenario uses the statistics of high traffic times. In this example, your statistics indicate that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday between 10am and 3pm are your highest traffic times. As such, you may consider posting a special offer if people take an action during those times. Something like:

Thursday Lunch Special!!

Buy 1 Widget between Noon and 1, and get a second Widget Free!!

Basically, you should get creative and try out different ideas. With campaigns like this, there is little to lose if it doesn’t work, and if it does work…. SHEBANG!!!! New sales and new opportunities to communicate with customers.

These are but a few examples of things that you can do with the information from your free web site statistics. And remember, you can always call our team of professionals at Aosoft and we will be happy to discuss your statistics information or help implement better ways of serving your Internet presence.

While we do not typically suggest that users employ password authentication for SMTP, sometimes it is necessary.  Such as in the cases when outlook randomly gets 553 errors.  If you have to, here are the steps.

• Select the Tools menu then select Email Accounts. The Email Accounts dialogue box will appear.
• Select the radio button for View or Change Existing Email Accounts  and click Next.
• Your should see your email accounts.
• Click on the email account you would like to modify and click the Change button.  Internet Email Settings will appear.
• Click the More Settings button in the lower right-hand corner.  The Internet Email Settings dialogue box appears.
• Select the Outgoing Server tab.
• Click the radio button titled My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication, and select the radio button titled Use same settings as my incoming mail server.
• Click OK at the bottom.
• Click the Finish button.

Often, we are asked, “I sent an email to someone that I have been emailing for years and it got blocked by their spam filters.  Why?”

Or….

“I sent an email to someone and when they replied to me, my spam filters identified them as spam.  Why would it do that when I sent the original email?”

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On Linux/Apache servers, each user has access to a powerful tool called “.htaccess”.  When you create an .htaccess file and populate it particular code, you have a great deal of control over your hosting environment.  Everything from rewriting and redirecting web requests to password protecting a directory or document.  We will continue to update this article with snipets of commonly used .htaccess code.

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What is Backscatter?  Backscatter refers to the mass number of e-mails received when a spam message forges the “From” address.  You have likely seen them come in to your inbox by the dozens:  Messages that indicate the intended recipient does not exist and the original message has your e-mail address in the “From” field.  You, of course, did not send out these messages so, why are they bouncing back to you?  The issue is not with you or your hosting provider’s mail server.  The issue has to do with administration of the mail server that the spam message was sent to originally.

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Troubleshooting e-mail issues often requires seeing the full headers of an e-mail message.  E-mail headers contain all the information about the journey an email takes from one computer to another.  Below are instructions on how to harvest the e-mail headers from many of the most popular e-mail clients.

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- Open Outlook

- Go to Tools

- Choose Accounts

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-Click Tools.

-Click E-mail Accounts. This will open up the Email Accounts window

-Click the Add A New Email Account button, and Next. This will open the account type window.

POP3 and IMAP are email protocols. POP3 will download your email messages to your computer. IMAP will leave your messages on the email server. Most people choose POP3.

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As we are all aware, spam is quickly becoming a crisis, if it is not already. It is currently estimated that spam accounts for more than 90% of all e-mail sent over the Internet. Given that e-mail is the most widely used technology on the Internet, this impacts the productivity of almost everyone who uses e-mail. So, what do you? This article will attempt to outline some of the reasons that you might receive so much spam and ways to mitigate the flow of spam into your inbox.

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It is pretty simple to add a new account to the Thunderbird mail client.

Click the “Edit” menu then “Account Settings”.

Click “Add Account”.

Click “Email Account” then “Next”.

Fill in your name and e-mail address, press Next.

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