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If you don’t use e-mail forms on your site, but you want to present yourself as a company with several “departments”, you can do that without setting up separate POP accounts. Cpanel offers a handy feature which creates e-mail “forwarders”. What this does, as the name suggests, is that it forwards e-mail addresses to another standalone e-mail account.

This also comes in handy if you have employees or partners who have their own e-mail addresses. With forwarding, you can automatically forward e-mail messages sent to sales@yourdomain.com to several e-mail accounts. This allows you to have several e-mail addresses for your website which can then be forwarded to one person or several people, all without the need for creating individual POP accounts.

Another handy use for this feature is allowing people to send messages to your cell phone or BlackBerry without revealing your cell phone’s number or e-mail address. All you do is set up an alias, say mobile@yourdomain.com, which would then forward to your cell phone’s address (assigned through your carrier) without revealing that address to prying eyes.

To set up forwarders, simply go into your Cpanel account and click that option under the “E-mail” section of the control panel. Cpanel will walk you through the process, step by step, and within moments you’ll have aliases (or forwarders) set up.

Why do this over setting up POP accounts? Maybe you don’t want to hand out POP/SMTP accounts to everyone, but you still want them to be able to access website e-mail. By setting up forwarders, you can accomplish that, and you maintain the ability to remove or add people at will.

So you have a website. It’s up and running. Now you need traffic. You’ve submitted your site to Google, Yahoo, and other search engines, but how do you make sure that your listing counts?

Meta tags.

What meta tags do is remarkable: they help you draw in visitors who are looking for specific things. The typical syntax of a meta tag is as follows:

Let’s take a look at an example of a description. This is what search engines would show to people as a brief synopsis of your website:

Here, you have the name of the business, and a brief slogan. This will help draw in customers, because if a potential buyer wants sprockets at low prices (and who doesn’t?), he’ll definitely click on a link with that description! And there’s your traffic.

Perhaps the most important meta tag is the one pertaining to keywords. These are the words that you want to draw people into your site with. The idea is to pull up your website when people search specific keywords. Here’s an example:

Separated by commas, there are several keywords, all of which pertain directly to the business: the type of product they sell, the reason customers would want to buy from them, and a value-added service: quick delivery!

There are many types of meta tags available, and you can use as many or as few as you wish, depending upon the needs of your website. When used properly, meta tags can increase your incoming traffic significantly, when compared to sites that don’t use meta tags (and surprisingly, there are some that don’t!).

If you need help, there are sites that can help you create meta tags, and then “validate” them, or verify that they are formatted correctly.

Meta tags can be a powerful tool for your website, whether that site is for your business, or your own personal pursuits. Using them correctly can increase your traffic, ad revenue, and rankings in search engines.