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Step 1: If you already have any email accounts set up, you will first open the Email app, navigate to the Settings menu, and choose Add Account. If you’re starting fresh with no accounts, you will go straight to Step 2 as soon as you open the Email app.

Step 2: You will be prompted to choose your email provider. Tap “Other”.

Step 3: Type in your email address and password in the provided fields, then tap “Manual setup”.

Step 4: Choose a protocol. If you don’t know the difference or it hasn’t otherwise been specified, choose IMAP.

Step 5: Enter your account information. Type your full email address in the Username field. (Double and triple check that you’ve spelled it correctly and haven’t accidentally typed any extra spaces or periods!) Type your email account password in the Password field. In the IMAP server field, type “mail.bliznet.com“. Port should be filled with 143 by default, but if it isn’t, type 143. In the Security type field, select “TLS”.  Authentication mode should default to “Auto”. Leave the IMAP path prefix field empty. Tap Next.

Step 6: Continue entering account information. In the SMTP server field, type “mail.bliznet.com“. In the Port field, type 587. In the Security type field, select “TLS”. Make sure there’s a check mark in the “Require sign-in” box. Authentication mode should default to “Auto”. Type your full email address in the Username field. Type your email account password in the Password field. Tap Next.

Step 7: These are extra settings for how you want your Email app to behave. If you’re not sure, simply tap Done without changing anything.

Step 8: The finishing touches! “Give this account a name” is used to differentiate accounts if you have multiple accounts set up on your phone; you can name it whatever you want, since only you will see it. “Your name” is the name that will appear on emails you send from your phone, so other people will see this. When you’re done, tap Next and you’re finished!

Switching Accounts

If you have several accounts configured, you may have to switch between them, or you can choose Combined View to see all of your email at once.

Step 1: In the main screen of the Email app, tap the Folder menu at the top of the screen.

Step 2: Select which account you’d like to use, or choose “Combined view” to see all of your email in one place.

Step 1: From your home screen, tap the “Settings” icon.

Step 2: On the “Settings” screen, scroll down and tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”.

Step 3: On the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” screen, tap “Add Account”

Step 4: On the “Add Account” screen, you will be prompted to choose a mail provider. Tap “Other”.

Step 5: On the following screen, tap “Add Mail Account”.

Step 6: On the “New Account” screen, enter your email account information. “Name” is the name you want people to see when they receive email from you. “Email” is your full email address. Password is your email account password. Description is the account’s name that you will see in your own email app. When finished, tap “Next” at the top right corner.

Step 7: You will be prompted to enter server information. In the “Host Name” fields (one each for “Incoming Mail Server” and “Outgoing Mail Server”), enter “mail.bliznet.com”. In the “User Name” fields (one each for “Incoming Mail Server” and “Outgoing Mail Server”) enter your full email address, and your email account password in both “Password” fields. (You may need to scroll down to see the “Outgoing Mail Server” fields — see the second screenshot below.) When you are finished entering your information, tap “Next” at the top right of the screen and you are finished!

Part 2: If you are unable to send email…

Once you have set up your account, the default outgoing mail server settings may not work for your specific situation. Here’s what to do in this case.

Step 1: From your home screen, tap the “Settings” icon.

Step 2: On the “Settings” screen, scroll down and tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”.

Step 3: On the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” screen, tap the name of your email account.

Step 4: On the following screen, tap your email address.

Step 5: On the following screen, scroll down to “Outgoing Mail Server” and tap “SMTP”.

Step 6: On the following screen, tap the name of your Primary Server (should say “mail.bliznet.com”)

Step 7: On the following screen, verify that your User Name and Password are entered correctly and the settings are as follows:

Host Name: mail.bliznet.com
Use SSL: On (green)
Authentication: MD5 Challenge-Response
Server Port: 587

Then tap “Done” at the top right and you are finished.

Step 1: Open Outlook and enter the “Account Settings” screen. In Outlook 2007 and older, open the “Tools” menu and click “Account Settings”. In Outlook 2010 – 2013, open the “File” menu and click “Account Settings”. Then click the “New…” button.

Step 2: You will see the following screen:

Select “Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP, or HTTP” and click “Next”.

Step 3: You will see the following screen:

Put a check mark in “Manually configure server settings or additional server types” and click “Next”.

Step 4: You will see the following screen:

Select “Internet E-mail” and click “Next”.

Step 5: You will see the following screen:

Enter the information as seen here, replacing “Your Name” with your name and “your@emailaddr.ess” with your email address. Once you have entered your information, click “More Settings”.
We DON’T recommend using IMAP in Microsoft Outlook. If you would like the benefits of IMAP, then we recommend using our web-based mail app instead of Outlook.

Step 6: On the “More Settings” screen, click the “Outgoing Server” tab. You will see the following screen:

Put a check mark in “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication”, then click the “Advanced” tab.

Step 7: You will see the following screen:

Change the “Outgoing server (SMTP):” to 587 and “Use the following type of encrypted connection:” to “TLS”. Put a check mark in “Leave a copy of messages on the server” (NOTE: If you skip this step, then other devices [e.g. smartphone or other computers] will NOT be able to receive mail that you receive in Outlook.) Click “OK”.

Step 8: You will see the following screen:

Click “Next” and then “Finish”.

You are now ready to use your email!

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I have recently begun using HTML 5 instead of XHMTL 1.0. The spec for HTML 5 is still a long way off from being a W3 “recommendation,” but I decided to switch to it because of “microdata”. Microdata, or Rich Snippets as Google calls them, are a way to mark up the information on your web site to be more machine readable, such as products or addresses. For example, you can use it to tell search engines that a portion of your page pertains to a specific product, pointing out exactly what makes up the name of the product, the price, its image, and so on. The following code example is pretty typical for an individual product’s info (obviously simplified for this example):

<div class="product">
	<div class="name">The Web Site Maker</div>
	<div class="price">$99.99</div>
	<div class="description">This is the incredible Web Site Maker. No longer
		do you have to get your hands dirty. This software contains a single
		button. Push to receive web site.</div>
	<img src="web-site-maker.png" alt="The Web Site Maker" />
</div>

However, a search engine doesn’t necessarily know what all that means. Google’s pretty scary and can probably decipher all that, but, with microdata, we can help by marking exactly what each bit of info means. As follows:

<div class="product" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
	<div class="name" itemprop="name">The Web Site Maker</div>
	<div class="price" itemprop="offers" itemscope="itemscope"
		itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer"><span itemprop="price">
		$99.99</span></div>
	<div class="description" itemprop="description">This is the incredible Web Site
		Maker. No longer do you have to get your hands dirty. This software
		contains a single button. Push to receive web site.</div>
	<img itemprop="image" src="web-site-maker.png" alt="The Web Site Maker" />
</div>

What is this itemscope and itemtype stuff, you may be wondering. These are attributes new to HTML 5, and thus the reason for switching to it. These attributes are legal on nearly any element and are used to mark up our data. The itemscope attribute is used to mark an element as the container for a particular item—in this case, a product. In the example, it means everything inside the element with the itemscope attribute is information about this particular product. It’s within the “scope” of this product. As an aside, you may notice that itemscope “equals” itemscope in the example. This is only because I am using the XHTML flavor of HTML 5. If you were using the HTML variant, you could just use itemscope on its own without the ="itemscope" portion.

After itemscope comes itemtype="http://schema.org/Product". As the name implies, it specifies the type of item for the machine reader to expect. “Product” is one of a plethora of types you can use, a list of which can be found at Schema.org.

Moving on, itemprop="name" obviously specifies the name of the product. “Name” is a property of the “Product” type. The Schema.org web site shows in detail the properties of each type, usually with examples, under their schemas section. Some properties, however, are more than a simple text value. Some are actually an itemtype of their own, such as the price of the product. It is not merely an itemprop="price" with a number inside, but an “Offer” type. So it is necessary to again add the itemscope and itemtype attributes. I also had to add an extra element—the span—inside the price div so I could apply the “price” property, a property of “Offer”.

The rest of the example is just made up of some additional itemprop attributes. After you’ve marked up your information, you can use Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool to make sure it’s marked up correctly.

If you’re already using some form of XHTML, it should be a pretty simple matter of changing the doctype and replacing your <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="mime-type; charset=utf-8" /> (or whatever you may be using) with a simple <meta charset="UTF-8" /> to convert to valid HTML 5. It’s not necessary to use the new elements such as header or section. Your old div elements will work fine. It’s probably not even desirable at this point to utilize the new elements thanks to the inability of Internet Explorer 8 and lower to display them without a hack.

Welcome to the future. I hope you can start using microdata (AKA Rich Snippets) to make the web a more semantic place. Don’t forget to check out Schema.org for all the supported types and their properties. Have fun, web wizards!

<!--[if !IE]>-->
<object data="movie.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="725" height="235">
	<param name="movie" value="movie.swf" />
</object>
<!--<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE]>
<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="725" height="235">
	<param name="movie" value="movie.swf" />
</object>
<![endif]-->

Definitely a pain, but I’ve found no other way around it.

Also in my search for a solution, I discovered that our old pal Internet Explorer does not let you append anything but param elements to object elements in Javascript. That was pretty frustrating. Don’t try that. It doesn’t work.

A lot has changed when it comes to gaining links to your website. More importantly a lot has changed on what is considered a good link or a bad link. With the economy in the tank, we are getting more and more calls for help with search position and increased traffic. Some of the calls are from potential clients that have never paid for any type of link building or site optimization, but a good percentage is from small business owners that have either been a part of Link Exchange programs or have purchased links in the past and now they are finding out  it is not working for their website any more. If you are not familiar with the Google or Bing guidelines for links then you should read Google’s position on link exchanges and Links: the good, the bad, and the ugly – Part 2 from Bing.

Paid Blog Networks

So what do you do if link exchange software doesn’t work any more? How about all the fuss about these blog networks? That’s a question we have received a few times. First let me tell you about blog link networks where you pay a monthly fee and publish as many posts as you want, with links to your website. Your posts are distributed throughout a “network” of blogs. The claim is link diversity and unlimited potential. Don’t waste your time! This type of network is popular because they pay out good commissions, that’s it! These networks are easily detected which means they are easily discounted by Bing and Google and could be considered a bad neighborhood. You will waste a lot of time writing or you will pay additional fees to have the writing done for you, and you get nothing or near nothing in return. That time and money would have been better spent putting an article on a popular article network or sending out a press release. While neither of those methods are high value they generally have some value, unlike the so called Nirvana of subscription blog networks. With generic category based blog networks with no specific theme and some of the worst content ever written, you will get zero benefit. Once your post is pushed off of the main page or the main category page, which usually happens in a day or two, any value is lost. At that point your time, effort and money live on a page buried in a site that nobody, including Bing and Google, gives a rat’s ass about.

Example of a Blog Network where you pay per month to post as many times as you want. Just look at the quality.

(The examples we showed here have shut down since this post’s writing, meaning everyone who paid to be on them has lost their investment, for whatever it was worth.)

If you think this type of site is not easily detectable, let me show you how I found them: Google This and then look for nonsensical domain names as the title. See the similarity? Most of these are from one of the most popular subscription blog networks out there. Notice every post has a single keyword link buried in the post? It gets worse, look at almost any post that is over 90 days old and copy a unique sentence, then search for the quoted sentence on Google, and 90% of the time the article can’t be found. The only people making money here is the owner of the blog system and their affiliates.

Let me say that there might be a paid blog network that actually works, but it would need to follow a few rules. I just pointed out one of the most popular networks that in my opinion is a waste of money and just ripping people off. If someone really wants to create a blog network that works, it would need to follow at least the following 4 rules:

1. At least 75% of the posts need to be commercial quality information without any paid links embedded in the article.
2. Every subscriber’s post needs to be reviewed by an editor for “real value”.
3. Each blog needs to have a theme and specialize in one particular subject.
4. Each blog in the network needs to be optimized and promoted as a “real website” with good content.

That said, you are most likely still violating Google’s guidelines if you pay to post your link on those sites. I’m not judging, just pointing out the risk involved.

How To Build Links

So how do you get quality links to your site? You need to create information and multimedia that people need and are willing to link to. Then you need to contact relevant websites and convince them that they should link to your content. If you are a product reseller, you should get your vendors to link to you as an authorized dealer. If you are a member or sponsor of any organizations, you need to get them to link to you as a such. You could do some guest blogging, but be sure the value of the link you get is greater than the value you would get from posting the article on your own website. You can also use article marketing, press releases, and directory submission but it’s just for diversity and extra exposure, alone they are not the answer.

Let me know if you agree, disagree or what I missed. I look forward to your comments. | Read the original Link Building 2010