First, a quick primer. According to Wikipedia, Microsoft Exchange Mail "is a messaging and collaborative software product developed by Microsoft. Exchange’s major features consist of electronic mail, shared calendars and tasks, and support for mobile and web–based access to information." From PC Magazine: "Google Apps is a collection of online applications and utilities from Google which includes email, instant messaging, calendar, word processing, spreadsheet and Web authoring applications". This article focuses on the Google Apps Premiere edition features which compete with Exchange Mail.

Companies with IT departments, servers and email administrators have the advantage of using email systems such as Exchange Mail, which allows email, calendars and contacts to be stored on the server, and accessed from any desktop, laptop, and now PDAs such as Blackberries and Treos. Third party email hosting companies provide Exchange Mail services as well, but at considerable expense. And PDA support and enterprise spam filtering usually incur additional monthly fees. This can all add up to $15–$25 a month per email account. (The free and inexpensive services such as Hotmail and Yahoo Mail do not allow you to use your own domain name as part of your email address, so I am not counting those as possible small business alternatives.)

New on the scene is Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, which allows Microsoft Outlook to connect to Google Apps services.

For small businesses which would like to use their own company domain names for their email accounts and want to be able to sync their mail, contacts and calendars across all their desktops, laptops and mobile devices, Google Apps Premiere is a less costly choice than Exchange Mail. However there are many caveats, as well as significant technical issues, which in my opinion do not yet make it a viable alternative.

I have been testing Google Apps Sync. It is only available with the Premiere edition, which costs $50/year per email account, paid annually. Here are some of my findings:

• The Google Apps plug–in for Outlook does not have all the features of Exchange Mail. For example, data not currently supported by Google Apps includes Outlook tasks, notes, follow–up flags and distribution lists.
• Setting up the Google Apps Premiere service requires technical expertise, such as being able to update domain records through the domain name registrar, setting up email accounts on the Google Dashboard, and carefully following instructions for using the Google Apps plug–in for Outlook. Any mistakes can cause serious disruption in the email flow.
• After using the Sync feature to upload my two gigabytes of email to the Google Servers, and then sync the server data with my new Outlook account, only the empty folders were displayed. None of my emails came through. I checked Google’s Help Forum and found numerous entries by others with this and other serious sync issues. The synchronization totally failed even after repeated tries. In short, the Sync feature simply did not work!
• Regarding PDA support: As of this month, according to Google’s website, Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) connectivity is supposed to be included with the Premiere edition, but it is still in beta testing. I decided to suspend testing on other PDA platforms after my above findings.

There are more problems, but the above observations are enough for me to conclude that Google Apps is not yet competition for Exchange Mail, no matter what the cost savings. Even if this service were free, it would not be enough to stop me from recommending Exchange Mail.

Perhaps in a year or so Google may have a contender in Google Apps, but today Microsoft still owns this market. If you’re interested in using an Exchange Mail hosting service, please feel free to contact me for more information.

The look and feel and the informative content of a web site are the obvious methods of communication we see online, but to really make a web site speak, it also needs tags (aka metadata). Tags are the messages to browsers and search engines which should be included in a page’s HTML code. These messages are also seen by the viewer in the browser window title bar, in search engine results, when a user hovers over a graphic, and are used by electronic readers for the blind. The tags which can help your web site "talk" are the title tag, the alt tag and the meta tags: keywords and description.

The title is seen at the top of the browser window and also in search engine results:

Along with a real site map on your web site and relevant incoming links, the title tag plays a huge roll in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you look at your web site and see that you have the same title on each page, you are missing out on a low–cost and very effective SEO opportunity. We wrote unique titles for each page of a client’s web site and within three months important keywords which had not been working for them were getting page one rankings in Google’s organic (unpaid–for) results.

Each graphic on your web site should have an alt tag for SEO reasons and to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Google does assign higher relevance to a well–coded site and this means alt tags should be used. It’s also a good opportunity to add keywords to your site as the content in these tags can come up in search engine results. (To determine if your web developer used alt tags, open your web site in Internet Explorer, hover over a graphic, and if a little description pops up, that’s the alt tag content.)

The keyword meta tag is less important as it is unlikely that Google is currently using them for indexing web pages. However, Yahoo! and other search engines do. The keyword meta tag should include a list of key words and phrases one would hope searchers are using to find your site. Keywords are not displayed to users.

The description tag reminds us that using search engines for marketing requires two steps. First your site’s pages must appear high in result lists, but that’s only half the battle because then you need that click. This tag should be a sentence or two written to tell a search engine user that your site contains the good information which they seek. It needs to be compelling so it stands out in a list of search engine results and inspires the viewer to click to your page.

For most of our web development clients, SEO is a vital component of the work we do for them. Many web site developers promote their SEO tricks, but really, what it comes down to is a site which communicates well. Tags are not tricks; they are the language by which web sites talk to browsers, search engines, search engine users, users without sight, and your potential customers.

For a small business, a magazine cover story is a great opportunity. However, there is a big problem if your name is Lou Bermingham and your web site address is loubermingham.com, but throughout the entire printed story your name and address are incorrectly spelled "Birmingham". This is the story of one of our clients.

Lou is an artist for whom we built a web site last year. On the day the magazine with the article featuring him was published, Lou realized their spelling error and called us to see if we had any ideas to help the situation. He was concerned that readers would not be able to find his site with a simple Google search and any potential interest in his art might be lost. Right away we purchased the domain name loubirmingham.com and set up a redirect to his correct site. We also made some changes to his site’s meta data which could help with this spelling error in the future, after his site had been re–indexed by search engines.

But what we really needed was to have Google index Lou’s site immediately, so we recommended a small investment in a Google AdWords campaign which would initiate a site index and get him on the first page of a Google search so he would not miss one person searching for “Lou Birmingham" or "Bermingham".

Within hours we launched the campaign and hits were being generated through the Google ads!

We intended to run the campaign for a month, but because it was so successful and cost so little, Lou has kept it running. Now, a few months after the interest caused by the magazine story has died down, Lou is getting about eighty AdWords click–throughs per month to his web site, as well as around 200 organic (unpaid–for) clicks. And because the campaign is already set up, we can easily make adjustments as Lou’s business changes or when his next exhibit needs to be promoted. The accidental and successful AdWords campaign was a success!

Adwords campaigns are great ways to drive visitors to your site as well as initiate an index of its pages by Google. You can pick a monthly budget and also the demographic area where your ads are displayed so you only pay for clicks from people in your target market. We manage small campaigns like Lou’s and larger, more complex campaigns and provide a summary of the monthly statistics for our clients in order to continually improve the results.