USA based Telephone Support is open M-F 9am to 5pm (PST).
You can reach our USA based support by calling 530-283-5554 or by filling out the form below.
Are you a member?
If you are a current member of a participating member organization that is using Chamber Nation, EcTownUSA, Donation Automation or our Membership Management System then you qualify for free members support services.
We want to help!
The support services we provide at no cost to current members are as follows:
- How to login and use your system to extensively promote your business or organization.
- Ideas on how best to position your company messaging by using our interactive TCS system.
- Ordering a custom domain name for your mobile and/or main TCS website.
- Uploading photos to create scrolling tours of your business.
- Creating ads on the My Ad Cloud system through a computer or through your mobile device.
- How to use the news manager for stories on your company for local distribution.
- Posting press release(s) for local media distribution through your member organization.
Helpful resources and tips for members
Free Photos for TCS Pages and My Ad Cloud Postings - These websites provide outstanding images that can be used in our web-tools.
www.PhotoXpress.com
www.sxc.hu
www.freedigitalphotos.net
www.freephotosbank.com
Google Search for More: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=free+photos
www.PhotoXpress.com
www.sxc.hu
www.freedigitalphotos.net
www.freephotosbank.com
Google Search for More: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=free+photos
Google Keyword Tool - This tool will help you determine the best words to use during your optimization process:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Google Webmaster Tools - Check to see if your website is listed on Google
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/?hl=en
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/?hl=en
Logging Into the System -
Can't seem to figure out how to log into the system?
To log in to the system you need to visit your Chamber of Commerce or membership organization website and choose the member log in link there. If you don't know your user name and password... simply use the lost password function using the email you used to sign up with the Chamber and you will receive your access right away.
If you need any additional assistance please contact us.
Can't seem to figure out how to log into the system?
To log in to the system you need to visit your Chamber of Commerce or membership organization website and choose the member log in link there. If you don't know your user name and password... simply use the lost password function using the email you used to sign up with the Chamber and you will receive your access right away.
If you need any additional assistance please contact us.
Member Optimization Issue with Area Search Engine - Many members have asked why they cannot find their business on the Area Search Engine that is powered by Google.
The reason is that althrough we submit your records and TCS advertising to Google it does take time for the national Google index to pick up the changes you have made. To be sure that your optimization is working before Google actually indexes your advertising system, we suggest that you visit the MEMBERSHIP DIRECTORY at the organization you belong to and test the search from that page using the SEARCH BOX.
The indexing is instant from within the system and this same information will be showing through Google soon.
If you need assistance of guidance please submit a help ticket from the choices above.
The reason is that althrough we submit your records and TCS advertising to Google it does take time for the national Google index to pick up the changes you have made. To be sure that your optimization is working before Google actually indexes your advertising system, we suggest that you visit the MEMBERSHIP DIRECTORY at the organization you belong to and test the search from that page using the SEARCH BOX.
The indexing is instant from within the system and this same information will be showing through Google soon.
If you need assistance of guidance please submit a help ticket from the choices above.
Expand your Chamber Nation system into Facebook! - DTI from New York has created an excellent guide on leveraging Facebook for your business. The link to the booklet is below for your review.
We appreciate this Chris: http://www.directive.com/facebook.pdf
We appreciate this Chris: http://www.directive.com/facebook.pdf
The most visual free service to Capture, Organize, and Share anything you find on the web. -
Emil from the Aventura Chamber in Florida suggested this program for Chamber Executives and Members to use while optimizing their new advertising system: http://simplybox.com/
Emil from the Aventura Chamber in Florida suggested this program for Chamber Executives and Members to use while optimizing their new advertising system: http://simplybox.com/
This Book "Growing Your Business" Ties Into the Software We Provide
The book "Growing Your Business" can be downloaded here and this will help you optimize your system.
http://www.ectownusa.com/MarkLeBlancGrowingYourBusinessBook.pdf
The book "Growing Your Business" can be downloaded here and this will help you optimize your system.
http://www.ectownusa.com/MarkLeBlancGrowingYourBusinessBook.pdf
Adding Photos
If you are looking for a tool that will allow you to gather photos for your advertising system because the format or the size is not right we highly recommend using www.SnagIt.com and it is FREE for the first 30 days.
Since we use that here we can also provide you with guidance when needed.
If you are looking for a tool that will allow you to gather photos for your advertising system because the format or the size is not right we highly recommend using www.SnagIt.com and it is FREE for the first 30 days.
Since we use that here we can also provide you with guidance when needed.
Monthly Tele-Seminars with Mark LeBlanc
If you would like to participate
please go to:
http://MarkLeBlanc.ChamberNation.Com
If you would like to participate
please go to:
http://MarkLeBlanc.ChamberNation.Com
Recent training classes held in Corvallis Oregon
Ideas on search engine optimization
Ideas on Search Engine Optimization
Submitted Apr 21 by Support Staff
This content and much more can be located at:
http://www.monash.com/spidap4.html#relevancy
Search engines use automated software known as spiders or bots to survey the Web and build their databases.
Websites are retrieved by these programs and analyzed. Data collected from each website are then added to the search engine index. When you enter a query at a search engine site, your input is checked against the search engine's index of all the websites it has analyzed. The best URL’s are then returned to you as hits, ranked in order with the best results at the top.
Keyword Searching
This is the most common form of text search on the Web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.
What is a keyword, exactly? It can simply be any word on a website. For example, I used the word "simply" in the previous sentence, making it one of the keywords for this particular website in some search engine's index. However, since the word "simply" has nothing to do with the subject of this website (i.e., how search engines work), it is not a very useful keyword. Useful keywords and key phrases for this page would be "search," "search engines," "search engine methods," "how search engines work," "ranking" "relevancy," "search engine tutorials," etc. Those keywords would actually tell a user something about the subject and content of this page.
Unless the author of the Web document specifies the keywords for his document, it's up to the search engine to determine them. Essentially, this means that search engines pull out and index words that appear to be significant. Since search engines are software programs, not rational human beings, they work according to rules established by their creators for what words are usually important in a broad range of documents. The title of a page, for example, usually gives useful information about the subject of the page (if it doesn't, it should!). Words that are mentioned towards the beginning of a document (think of the "topic sentence" in a high school essay, where you lay out the subject you intend to discuss) are given more weight by most search engines. The same goes for words that are repeated several times throughout the document.
Some search engines index every word on every page. Others index only part of the document.
Full-text indexing systems generally pick up every word in the text except commonly occurring stop words such as "a," "an," "the," "is," "and," "or," and "www." Some of the search engines discriminate upper case from lower case; others store all words without reference to capitalization.
The Problem With Keyword Searching
Keyword searches have a tough time distinguishing between words that are spelled the same way, but mean something different (i.e. hard cider, a hard stone, a hard exam, and the hard drive on your computer). This often results in hits that are completely irrelevant to your query. Some search engines also have trouble with so-called stemming -- i.e., if you enter the word "big," should they return a hit on the word, "bigger?" What about singular and plural words? What about verb tenses that differ from the word you entered by only an "s," or an "ed"?
Search engines also cannot return hits on keywords that mean the same, but are not actually entered in your query. A query on heart disease would not return a document that used the word "cardiac" instead of "heart."
Refining Your Search
Most sites offer two different types of searches--"basic" and "refined" or "advanced." In a "basic" search, you just enter a keyword without sifting through any pulldown menus of additional options. Depending on the engine, though, "basic" searches can be quite complex.
Advanced search refining options differ from one search engine to another, but some of the possibilities include the ability to search on more than one word, to give more weight to one search term than you give to another, and to exclude words that might be likely to muddy the results. You might also be able to search on proper names, on phrases, and on words that are found within a certain proximity to other search terms.
Some search engines also allow you to specify what form you'd like your results to appear in, and whether you wish to restrict your search to certain fields on the internet (i.e., usenet or the Web) or to specific parts of Web documents (i.e., the title or URL).
Many, but not all search engines allow you to use so-called Boolean operators to refine your search. These are the logical terms AND, OR, NOT, and the so-called proximal locators, NEAR and FOLLOWED BY.
Boolean AND means that all the terms you specify must appear in the documents, i.e., "heart" AND "attack." You might use this if you wanted to exclude common hits that would be irrelevant to your query.
Boolean OR means that at least one of the terms you specify must appear in the documents, i.e., bronchitis, acute OR chronic. You might use this if you didn't want to rule out too much.
Boolean NOT means that at least one of the terms you specify must not appear in the documents. You might use this if you anticipated results that would be totally off-base, i.e., nirvana AND Buddhism, NOT Cobain.
Not quite Boolean + and - Some search engines use the characters + and - instead of Boolean operators to include and exclude terms.
NEAR means that the terms you enter should be within a certain number of words of each other. FOLLOWED BY means that one term must directly follow the other. ADJ, for adjacent, serves the same function. A search engine that will allow you to search on phrases uses, essentially, the same method (i.e., determining adjacency of keywords).
Phrases: The ability to query on phrases is very important in a search engine. Those that allow it usually require that you enclose the phrase in quotation marks, i.e., "space the final frontier."
Capitalization: This is essential for searching on proper names of people, companies or products. Unfortunately, many words in English are used both as proper and common nouns--Bill, bill, Gates, gates, Oracle, oracle, Lotus, lotus, Digital, digital--the list is endless.
All the search engines have different methods of refining queries. The best way to learn them is to read the help files on the search engine sites and practice!
Relevancy Rankings
Most of the search engines return results with confidence or relevancy rankings. In other words, they list the hits according to how closely they think the results match the query. However, these lists often leave users shaking their heads on confusion, since, to the user, the results may seem completely irrelevant.
Why does this happen? Basically it's because search engine technology has not yet reached the point where humans and computers understand each other well enough to communicate clearly.
Most search engines use search term frequency as a primary way of determining whether a document is relevant. If you're researching diabetes and the word "diabetes" appears multiple times in a Web document, it's reasonable to assume that the document will contain useful information. Therefore, a document that repeats the word "diabetes" over and over is likely to turn up near the top of your list.
If your keyword is a common one, or if it has multiple other meanings, you could end up with a lot of irrelevant hits. And if your keyword is a subject about which you desire information, you don't need to see it repeated over and over--it's the information about that word that you're interested in, not the word itself.
Some search engines consider both the frequency and the positioning of keywords to determine relevancy, reasoning that if the keywords appear early in the document, or in the headers, this increases the likelihood that the document is on target. For example, one method is to rank hits according to how many times your keywords appear and in which fields they appear (i.e., in headers, titles or plain text). Another method is to determine which documents are most frequently linked to other documents on the Web. The reasoning here is that if other folks consider certain pages important, you should, too.
If you use the advanced query form on AltaVista, you can assign relevance weights to your query terms before conducting a search. Although this takes some practice, it essentially allows you to have a stronger say in what results you will get back.
As far as the user is concerned, relevancy ranking is critical, and becomes more so as the sheer volume of information on the Web grows. Most of us don't have the time to sift through scores of hits to determine which hyperlinks we should actually explore.
The more clearly relevant the results are, the more we're likely to value the search engine.
This content and much more can be located at:
http://www.monash.com/spidap4.html#relevancy
Submitted Apr 21 by Support Staff
This content and much more can be located at:
http://www.monash.com/spidap4.html#relevancy
Search engines use automated software known as spiders or bots to survey the Web and build their databases.
Websites are retrieved by these programs and analyzed. Data collected from each website are then added to the search engine index. When you enter a query at a search engine site, your input is checked against the search engine's index of all the websites it has analyzed. The best URL’s are then returned to you as hits, ranked in order with the best results at the top.
Keyword Searching
This is the most common form of text search on the Web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.
What is a keyword, exactly? It can simply be any word on a website. For example, I used the word "simply" in the previous sentence, making it one of the keywords for this particular website in some search engine's index. However, since the word "simply" has nothing to do with the subject of this website (i.e., how search engines work), it is not a very useful keyword. Useful keywords and key phrases for this page would be "search," "search engines," "search engine methods," "how search engines work," "ranking" "relevancy," "search engine tutorials," etc. Those keywords would actually tell a user something about the subject and content of this page.
Unless the author of the Web document specifies the keywords for his document, it's up to the search engine to determine them. Essentially, this means that search engines pull out and index words that appear to be significant. Since search engines are software programs, not rational human beings, they work according to rules established by their creators for what words are usually important in a broad range of documents. The title of a page, for example, usually gives useful information about the subject of the page (if it doesn't, it should!). Words that are mentioned towards the beginning of a document (think of the "topic sentence" in a high school essay, where you lay out the subject you intend to discuss) are given more weight by most search engines. The same goes for words that are repeated several times throughout the document.
Some search engines index every word on every page. Others index only part of the document.
Full-text indexing systems generally pick up every word in the text except commonly occurring stop words such as "a," "an," "the," "is," "and," "or," and "www." Some of the search engines discriminate upper case from lower case; others store all words without reference to capitalization.
The Problem With Keyword Searching
Keyword searches have a tough time distinguishing between words that are spelled the same way, but mean something different (i.e. hard cider, a hard stone, a hard exam, and the hard drive on your computer). This often results in hits that are completely irrelevant to your query. Some search engines also have trouble with so-called stemming -- i.e., if you enter the word "big," should they return a hit on the word, "bigger?" What about singular and plural words? What about verb tenses that differ from the word you entered by only an "s," or an "ed"?
Search engines also cannot return hits on keywords that mean the same, but are not actually entered in your query. A query on heart disease would not return a document that used the word "cardiac" instead of "heart."
Refining Your Search
Most sites offer two different types of searches--"basic" and "refined" or "advanced." In a "basic" search, you just enter a keyword without sifting through any pulldown menus of additional options. Depending on the engine, though, "basic" searches can be quite complex.
Advanced search refining options differ from one search engine to another, but some of the possibilities include the ability to search on more than one word, to give more weight to one search term than you give to another, and to exclude words that might be likely to muddy the results. You might also be able to search on proper names, on phrases, and on words that are found within a certain proximity to other search terms.
Some search engines also allow you to specify what form you'd like your results to appear in, and whether you wish to restrict your search to certain fields on the internet (i.e., usenet or the Web) or to specific parts of Web documents (i.e., the title or URL).
Many, but not all search engines allow you to use so-called Boolean operators to refine your search. These are the logical terms AND, OR, NOT, and the so-called proximal locators, NEAR and FOLLOWED BY.
Boolean AND means that all the terms you specify must appear in the documents, i.e., "heart" AND "attack." You might use this if you wanted to exclude common hits that would be irrelevant to your query.
Boolean OR means that at least one of the terms you specify must appear in the documents, i.e., bronchitis, acute OR chronic. You might use this if you didn't want to rule out too much.
Boolean NOT means that at least one of the terms you specify must not appear in the documents. You might use this if you anticipated results that would be totally off-base, i.e., nirvana AND Buddhism, NOT Cobain.
Not quite Boolean + and - Some search engines use the characters + and - instead of Boolean operators to include and exclude terms.
NEAR means that the terms you enter should be within a certain number of words of each other. FOLLOWED BY means that one term must directly follow the other. ADJ, for adjacent, serves the same function. A search engine that will allow you to search on phrases uses, essentially, the same method (i.e., determining adjacency of keywords).
Phrases: The ability to query on phrases is very important in a search engine. Those that allow it usually require that you enclose the phrase in quotation marks, i.e., "space the final frontier."
Capitalization: This is essential for searching on proper names of people, companies or products. Unfortunately, many words in English are used both as proper and common nouns--Bill, bill, Gates, gates, Oracle, oracle, Lotus, lotus, Digital, digital--the list is endless.
All the search engines have different methods of refining queries. The best way to learn them is to read the help files on the search engine sites and practice!
Relevancy Rankings
Most of the search engines return results with confidence or relevancy rankings. In other words, they list the hits according to how closely they think the results match the query. However, these lists often leave users shaking their heads on confusion, since, to the user, the results may seem completely irrelevant.
Why does this happen? Basically it's because search engine technology has not yet reached the point where humans and computers understand each other well enough to communicate clearly.
Most search engines use search term frequency as a primary way of determining whether a document is relevant. If you're researching diabetes and the word "diabetes" appears multiple times in a Web document, it's reasonable to assume that the document will contain useful information. Therefore, a document that repeats the word "diabetes" over and over is likely to turn up near the top of your list.
If your keyword is a common one, or if it has multiple other meanings, you could end up with a lot of irrelevant hits. And if your keyword is a subject about which you desire information, you don't need to see it repeated over and over--it's the information about that word that you're interested in, not the word itself.
Some search engines consider both the frequency and the positioning of keywords to determine relevancy, reasoning that if the keywords appear early in the document, or in the headers, this increases the likelihood that the document is on target. For example, one method is to rank hits according to how many times your keywords appear and in which fields they appear (i.e., in headers, titles or plain text). Another method is to determine which documents are most frequently linked to other documents on the Web. The reasoning here is that if other folks consider certain pages important, you should, too.
If you use the advanced query form on AltaVista, you can assign relevance weights to your query terms before conducting a search. Although this takes some practice, it essentially allows you to have a stronger say in what results you will get back.
As far as the user is concerned, relevancy ranking is critical, and becomes more so as the sheer volume of information on the Web grows. Most of us don't have the time to sift through scores of hits to determine which hyperlinks we should actually explore.
The more clearly relevant the results are, the more we're likely to value the search engine.
This content and much more can be located at:
http://www.monash.com/spidap4.html#relevancy