North Carolina internet usage statistics

Get internet usage facts by county from this North Carolina website

Looking for some stats on internet access or broadband usage throughout North Carolina? I came across a helpful website the other day hosted by the State of North Carolina. You may want to check out http://www.e-nc.org/.


If your business is new to the internet, the site provides a beginner manual you can download for free at http://www.e-nc.org/pdf/e-business_manual.pdf. Download and give it a read!


I found the site helpful for getting a view of how "wired" our North Carolina counties are and this could give you an idea of your local web market!"

Find local customers with your website. Optimize your title tags!

Your web site title tags can help generate local leads

Is your business in Wilmington, or Raleigh or even here in Winterville, NC and are you NOT getting the type of business you'd love to have from your web site?
Take, for example, www.greenvillehardware.com (not a real site). If the title bar (the blue bar with the white words at the top of your browser when you view a website) reads: "Greenville Hardware" you'd certainly get visitors who typed that into their search engine. But you'd lose everyone who typed "where to buy lawn sprinklers in Greenville, NC."

Title tags make or break a website. Google, Yahoo and MSN heavily-rely on them when they rank your site. You can't see them until you open your web page. They're in the programming code (open your page, use View>Source if you are using Internet Explorer). Find the title tag. This is the important first step in optimizing your site!

Titles should be different for every page on your website, not contain any "silly" words like "best," "excellent," or "superior," and limited to 150 characters, including spaces.

I'd suggest if you want your site to draw local traffic, make sure you include your city and county name in your title tag and good, brief description of what that page is all about. You should see better results in the near future.

We'll talk about description tags in another post.

Someone is using my email address to send spam!

One quick step to foil email hijackers

Spammers have a wide variety of tools to harvest email addresses from the web. One morning, you wake up, check your email only to find in your dismay that someone has just sent 1,000 junk emails using your email address!

What to do?

First, log into your email account on your web server or contact your hosting companies tech support department and tell them to change your email password immediately. Pick a good strong password using combinations of capital letters, numbers and letters.

This is a bad password: bobandnancy

This is a better password: Bob$A12ndNancy

Next, contact your web site developer. Have them encrypt all the forms on your web site that contain email addresses. If you don't know how to do this, or are not sure what this means, leave a comment to this post and we'll help you out

Lastly, don't panic. These two steps will help. If you continue to have issues, contact your web hosting company and if that doesn't work, consider changing hosting services to a more secure server

Case Study : Pat Taylor & Associates of Greenville

In the midst of a real estate downturn, a Greenville realtor turns to aggressive internet marketing

Pat Taylor & Associates in Greenville, NC has beefed up her www.pattaylorhomes.com traffic by using an internet marketing stragegy that blends fresh content with timely articles, local promotions and a feature-rich site that is easy to navigate.

Pat's website plan involved focusing on selected keywords and re-structuring her site for maximum search engine rankings without employing "pay-per-click" campaigns. She has also incorporated www.craigslist.com as a listing service for her homes for sale in greenville. Traffic has risen 42% over the past four months to a stable 550 visitors per month. Pat's volume of telephone and email inquiries has risen as well.


The site was previously hosted and designed by a local graphics artist, but discontent with its content and results led Pat to contract with Digital Business Services in Winterville, NC for a global web site redesign and search engine marketing strategy.


Her site includes links to the Pitt County MLS, her own listings, the Greenville NC listings and the national RE/MAX listings. Visitors can find informational articles on home financing and download real estate documents.

Memorial Holiday 2008

North Carolina Web News says thanks to all of our service men and women currently in Iraq or Afghanistan and to all those who served the United States so well in conflicts across the globe. We hope those abroad come home safely as soon as possible to their loved ones.

North Carolina Web News Mission

Web development and internet marketing news and information for the North Carolina business owner.