Almost everyone is aware that mobile usage has been on the upswing for the past few years, and more and more search activities are being conducted via smartphones. Since consumers are going to handheld devices to find products and services, it behooves companies to target the mobile market and focus on the unique opportunities to be found there.

Enter Pure Oxygen, a real pioneer in the field of mobile ad optimization. The firm provides consumer brands and marketers independent analysis, tools, and strategy to improve results across mobile web, search, social, sms, apps, and more.

They have created a tool for checking out webpages on mobile devices, the Mobile Site Analyzer, currently in beta, which checks content for optimal delivery on multiple platforms including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Pure Oxygen also provides consultation services for more sophisticated analysis of mobile friendliness, and they help increase conversion rates and ROI derived from mobile channels.

There’s a surprising number of companies which are ignoring mobile optimization and ad targeting — apparently expecting their regular internet marketing via SEO and PPC advertising to automatically distribute their marketing message via mobile as well. This is a very poor assumption, since traditional internet media does not automatically translate onto mobile platforms, and there’s a plethora of mobile-specific channels which would fail to be exploited under this lack of strategy. For instance, mobile apps can be a terrific source of referrals and promotion, but they must be properly engineered and could be offered through iPhone app store, Android/Verizon app store, and Amazon’s appstore.

I recently pointed out how Google is treating mobile-friendly sites differently than sites without mobile optimization, and this has significant implications for websites’ performance as mobile usage continues to grow. For many local companies desiring to appear and rank in local search results, the need for mobile optimization borders upon necessity — it could well be, ahem, “oxygen” to them!

Anyway, congrats to Brian on the launch of Pure Oxygen Mobile! I think this new venture is targeting a great niche, and will provide just what many companies need.

Search engine optimisation(SEO) and Pay per click (PPC) marketing are being accorded increasing importance as affordable means of tapping the market potential by reaching a targeted audience on the web compared to the traditional TV and/or newsprint advertising which are more expensive and the results are hard to measure. It is all the more imperative that SEO practitioners adopt more white hat creative methods to improve the visibility of their clients’ sites.

1) On page optimisation:
The search engine algorithms in place today are way more sophisticated than what it was a few years ago. This makes SEO such a dynamic field that SEO techniques which worked well no so long ago have lost their charm in the present.

With the incredible level of testing and research being done today by the likes of the amazing team at SEOmoz, the only on page factor worth its salt in terms of pure SEO value and ranking on the SERPs seems to be the title tag. The alt tag is making a comeback. The header tags have diminished in their SEO value and are now more useful to describe the information hierarchy on a page. Some of the other factors like well formed URLs and internal linking can help but to a certain extent.

All in all, in my opinion, I would conservatively attribute the impact of on page SEO factors to be between 30% and 35% when it comes to ranking well on the SERPs. The majority of the action clearly takes place outside the website and hence outside the sphere of influence of what a site webmaster can tweak on her site.

2) Top Quality Content:
Content is the currency of the web. The more unique it is and higher its value in disseminating valuable information, the more powerful it is and gets traded heavily on the web by being passed around.

Even top shelf companies who are a force to reckon with in their domain of business get so clouded in their vision of their industry that they either get too technical in their content delivery or just are not in tune with the demands of their market. Everything evolves in life and so do consumers as they search for products/services using search terms that are not technical or even colloquial.

All that needs to be done is to do a keyword research to find out what prospective customers are searching for. A look at Google Trends, Amazon and Twitter will also reveal what search terms are hot in a particular industry and pretty much the talk of the town at a given point of time.

The next thing to do would be to go to industry specific forums related to the keyword and read posts wherein users are asking questions related to the industry using these popular keywords. You must remember that not everyone who surfs the web is looking to buy a product/service. Everyone has some problem or the other and people are looking for solutions to solve their problems.

What starts off as a search for general information leads a user to looking for more specific information, then research and review of the products/services available and culminating in the purchase of the relevant product/service.

The content developer/webmaster can focus on topics that target these most searched keywords and develop content that provide solutions/advice to the pressing problems in that industry in sync with the targeted keywords.

Every piece of content written on the web does not have the propensity to go viral. Creating viral content is one of the most bandied terms on the web. It is not easy. You can get it right only after many attempts. So it is wise to dwell on topics that are popular in the present term (and relevant to your niche) and develop content towards that end.

You would be wise to avoid the curse of duplicate content within your site. This can arise due to two versions of the domain in existence, namely http://www.site.com and http://site.com You can also have the case of multiple distinct URLs leading to the same content. Canonicalization can help reduce this problem.

In the case of scrapers stealing your content and getting indexed first where they appear to be the original creator of content, I am sure Google would be able to find out over time as backlinks to your site’s content would be a strong signal for it to recognise the true owner.

If you post on your blog, the blog and ping feature should alert the bots straightaway. You would be well off tweeting the post/article on Twitter. Google scours the Twitter landscape for new content and is sure to pick up your tweet thus confirming the ownership of the content.

In my experience, I have found that personal experiences invoving trials and experiments in a particular niche that lead to well defined results seem to be quite popular and have a good chance of getting great link love. Readers on the web are discerning and can easily separate the chaff from the wheat. I have dwelt at length on unique content and its seo implications in a previous post.

3) Social Media:
Let us be honest about this. Social media is not suitable to all businesses selling products/services. It is very powerful tool to leverage in businesses like travel sites, music and video sites etc. Twitter is the darling of the cybermasses today and undoubtedly has captured the imagination of millions of users worldwide.

The general belief is that to sell products or services on Twitter, one must have lots of followers. This means the same person has to follow others in order to make the others follow her. She ends up with thousands of followers and in turn follows thousands. When she has a critical mass of followers, then she can promote her services/products. I totally disagree with this.

I bet you will agree with me that when you have thousands of followers, you will not have the time to read all the tweets and follow links. Your twitter screen will be utter pandemonium with messages trickling in every minute or so. If you are struggling to keep up with your tweets, imagine the plight of your followers. They are in the same boat as well. There is no focus and it is a virtual free for all. It is well nigh impossible to get any message through to your followers in this scenario.

Judicious use of social media involves building relationships. If you are in the field of manufacturing baby nappies, then there must be like minded people out there in the hundreds (and not millions) who will be interested in your product. You would be well off building a good laser focused community on Twitter or Facebook or any other popular social media platform to leverage your position as a domain leader in the baby nappies industry and then disseminate information and/or sell products/services to an interested community.

4) Backlink Profile:
At this point of time, links are a singular source of authoritative signals to the search engines. If your site has an impressive backlink profile as a result of hard work put in over the years by you, the website owner or due to outsourced link building efforts of an industrious SEO professional, it has a huge impact on your site’s ranking on the SERPs of all the major search engines as it is not easy for a site owner to manipulate this.

Again. all links created are not equal. This may sound cliche but it is very much true. The key today to a successful link building campaign is the the number of unique domains linking to your site. The higher the domain diversity, the more powerful is your site’s influence in the rankings on the SERPs.

It is equally important for a site to link to its other authoritative peer sites as this strengthens the notion of the site’s good neighborhood aspect. It is also natural to invite some spammy links in the process as a site owner does not have control over who links to her site.

Some of the other important factors to consider are:

• Variation in anchor text of incoming links
• Smattering of domains ranging from strong to weak provides for a natural linking landscape
• Synergy in topicality of linking domains

In conclusion, the real time response of the web through social media and instantaneous response from users by way of blog comments etc gives anyone the opportunity to streamline the operations of their domain of buisness (niche) and helps them understand what their specific market is demanding which makes provision of what is required all the more easier.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company that offers both natural search and paid search to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

There is a crying need for unique quality content nowadays. Copywriters are in demand and I have come across cases where journalists in leading dailies and magazines have kicked their full time jobs and taken to writing content for the web. But the uniqueness of the content has come under the scrutiny of the major search engines.

What exactly is unique content?
In one of his Whiteboard Fridays, Rand talks about uniqueness of content and the way content can be categorised into 3 major types. He cites the example of a search in the travel industry which throws up very similar results on the top results in the SERPs.

Most of the content is from the same source of User Generated Content (UGC). From the user experience perspective, the content on the sites are almost the same leading to a stalemate. This is where fresh updated unique content can surcharge the user’s energies and rev up her interest in the product or service she is looking for.

By unique content, it is not just laying out content in correct grammatical form in a unique style to escape the content duplication filter of major search engines. It is the inherent value of the content itself and the ideas portrayed therein that makes the content unique.

If you are an expert in a certain industry and you have worked in the trenches and have a lot of knowledge of the inner workings of the industry, then the ideas expressed and the tone and quality of your content will show that you are indeed a domain expert.

This is most importantly recognised by other users who can clearly decipher you are indeed an expert. This is reflected by a spike in the visitors to your blog to read your posts and the increase in subscribers to your blog feed.

If you state clearly in your article or post that the content is free to be circulated provided there is a credit at the bottom through a link back to your site, the merit of your content will ensure that it gets circulated well and truly over the cybersphere.

It is common to find, especially in the field of affiliate marketing, site owners who have no clue of the specific niche the product is in, getting content creation outsourced to create an ebook or articles with its variations which in turn are used for promotion to gain inbound links and ultimately sales. The lower the costs of outsourcing, the more fluff that gets dished around the web.

Search engine algorithms today are superior in analysing the uniqueness of a given piece of content. They look at the navbar, the sidebar and footer links and the content itself to analyse its uniqueness. Gone are the days when a customised introduction and conclusion to an article made it unique. It is a lot harder now.

You can create all the content that you want but it is the search engines that determine its uniqueness and include it in their main index or banish it for lack of quality and the poor amount of inbound links it garners to have a low Pagerank threshold that prevents it from getting retained in the main index.

What kind of content should you adopt for your site?
When you have an idea for a website, that is when you have to determine the type of content that will suit your site. You cannot change horses midstream. Rand talks about the three widely prevalent types of content on the web today.

1) Editorial Content:
This refers to the content that is built by a human with a clear idea as the basis, then logic and reasoning that is initiated by a good introduction and great body copy that expresses the idea in lucid fashion and a healthy conclusion. The style and expression is unique to each writer. Good examples are a site owner blogging on her site coming up with unique content on a regular basis that keeps readers engaged and also garners great inbound editorial links from her industry peers and the linkerati in general. This type of content is ideal for smaller sites.

2) Machine Built Content:
If you have a burning ambition to domionate your niche or industry, then machine built content can be handy in satiating your desire. This involves collecting data from reliable sources and pushing them into a fixed well formatted content structure by way of an xml file and stored in databases. Content pages are generated on the fly in response to user clicks on the site.

The biggest problem here is the pattern that is obviously common to most machine built content sites. The on page factors like page titles and h# tags are unique on each page. But the content follows a fixed pattern with subtle changes in data as in case of statistical information. Most major travel sites employ this technique.

It is a scalable and saves time and money. But it does not make the cut when it comes to the search engines analysing it for its , you guessed it right, uniqueness. A content duplication filter can definitely prevent such a page from getting indexed.

From an SEO perspective, if the domain on which such content resides is a trusted mature domain with good standing, then it would not be a major issue. For newer sites (typically less than a year old) trying to establish themselves rapidly, it could be a major stumbling block.

3) User Generated Content (UGC):
This is the most valuable type of content any site owner could have on her site. But it does not come easy. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a bustling community and incentivize the contributors to make the content creation happen. Some of the popular examples are Wikipedia, Reddit and Digg.

This is a powerful and scalable technique but it is not easy to get a network of dedicated users scaling it up to the higher levels of content creation.

You can consider using content from each of the above mentioned categories or a nice blend of them to create unique content that can satisfy visitors to your site and keep them engrossed longer on your site pages. The amount of time spent by users on your site is certainly a factor the search engines could consider to determine the quality of your site content.

Most times, I hear site owners clamouring for links and/or aspiring for higher positions on the SERPs. One of the major factors that can propel a site to the top of the search engine summit is unique quality content. This arises from personal experiences of the blogger and the successful practice and implementation of the actual content that is being preached by her in her day to day blogging activities.

Once justice has been done to this crucial part, then it is only a matter of time before users identify the good quality advice offered on your site and the twittering and digging of your posts akin to the Web’s word of mouth propels your site into the limelight which is top rankings on the SERPs.

The number of inbound links from a variety of domains of different hues (domain diversity) and the naturally worded anchor text in the inbound links to your site are proof enough of the confirmation aspect of your post’s nature from unbiased external sources in the most natural form erasing any doubt about the duplication of content in the eyes of the search engines.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland seo consultancy offering both organic seo and paid search marketing services to their clients in both New Zealand and Australia.

Natural Search Performance of Top Yellow Pages Sites in Google
(Click to enlarge)

One specific recommendation I make in the “Brave New World For Yellow Pages” article at Search Engine Land is to perhaps partner with sites which could expand information on many business listings. The three sites I mentioned, ShopLocal, NearByNow or Where2GetIt, all have some rich data which could easily be leveraged by a major IYP site into many, many more search engine referrals. Companies such as these could provide specific product inventory info for many local stores, along with comparison tools allowing price-conscious consumers to zero in on cheapest local providers.

Doesn’t it seem strange that an online yellow pages site hasn’t already provided product inventory information for shops?!? Well, they have, or at least some of us did in the past, perhaps before the concept’s time had truly arrived. At Superpages.com and BigYellow.com, we partnered very early on with a company which did this, called StoreRunner — a company which subsequently died during the infamous dot-bombs. We also partnered with some others, including MySimon, which is still around.

Superpages has an even newer incarnation of similar stuff in their current online shopping section which combines display of products from spidered online sites with similar products from eBay and product reviews from elsewhere. (Though the section is pushed down some in prominence on the site, and is perhaps not as well-supported as other sections.)

Yet, the local shopping app-killer needed by online yellow pages remains elusive. I don’t think any of them really connect the dots in a major way between more comprehensive product/services information about businesses with the business listings.

As a consumer, if you could use a yellow pages to search for actual products, model names and comparative prices in the stores in your local area, wouldn’t that be a step up from merely finding addresses and phone numbers? Wouldn’t it be great if you could consistently peruse menus from local restaurants while deciding which one you’re going to for dinner? (Amazon.com once experimented with scanning in menus from restaurants around a major city!) Yet, the costs and time in connecting this information to many businesses’ listings and business profiles has made most yellow pages companies avoid truly stretching to meet the challenge.

But, it’s not impossible. ShopLocal, NearbyNow, and Where2GetIt have all done this in one form or another.

The company which achieves a mixture of: robust business directory, combined with social media & reviews, combined with increasingly extensive product/service info about businesses — that’s the company which could win big in the local search arms race.

WordCamp is a mini-convention for WordPress and blogging enthusiasts. Some of the content is WordPress-centric, but other content is applicable to bloggers in general, such as how to promote your blog and other stuff.

I’ll be speaking on how to use social image sharing services for promotion. Social media sites such as Flickr allow people to publish and share their photos with many other people, and the site is well-constructed in terms of search engine optimization, so posting images there helps get media distributed all over. Using Flickr can help one gain more attention, inbound links, and overall search rankings.

I’ve spoken on using Flickr for promotion and optimization before, and I’ve written on details of image optimization here a number of times.

I’d further recommend blogging to everyone – I first started blogging here on the Natural Search Blog as a guest, after Stephan Spencer invited me, and it eventually changed my overall career path. Be sure to check out Stephan’s articles on blog optimization, btw, since he’s pretty much the top authority out there on the subject.

There’s still a few seats left for Dallas WordCamp – sign up before they’re all gone!

With the advent of Rich Snippets in SERPs, I think I can safely declare that Microformats have now hit mainstream! Google is now presenting listings of pages with hReview microformat with slightly more attention-getting “bling”:

This will undoubtedly result in slightly higher clickthrough rates for those listings.

Any day, Google could add in special display treatments for pages that sport hCard or hCalendar microformatting, so companies that haven’t implemented these simple, semantic mark-up protocols will have missed the bus!

Be sure to check out Alan Rimm-Kaufman’s blog post on how Google Rich Snippets may soon give advantage to pages coded with hProduct microformat — internet retailers should pay attention. (As a side note, I previously helped some lucky internet retailer 500 sites optimize their store locators by adding hCard Microformats through GravityStream, back when I still worked for Netconcepts — so, at least a few IR 500 sites have enjoyed Microformatting before!)

Yet, a great many sites continue to miss this vital key to relevance, and they wonder why they fail at ranking for their most apropos keywords. Keywords for which they’d otherwise have a very good chance at ranking upon!

W3C calls the TITLE the “most important element of a quality web page”

Yesterday I reviewed another major retailer website which had their brandname embedded in their page titles — and nothing else. Thousands of product pages all had identical TITLEs! This company could’ve had top three rankings on a great many competitive keyword phrases had they only customized their TITLE tags very slightly.

The W3C calls the <TITLE> tag “the most important element of a quality Web page.” Google has apparently paid attention to that, and all of the search engines have placed especial weighting upon the words found within page titles when evaluating the topics for which a webpage is associated.

It makes sense, when you think about it. A title should be a super-concentrated blurb that tells a user what a page is all about. In search engines, the title is often also displayed as the link text for each of the pages listed in the search engine results page listings. Informative titles appearing in SERP listings will get clicked upon more as users are reassured that the page they’re clicking upon is what they’re actually seeking. A page with an informative title will get clicked upon far more likely than a vague or unrelated page title.

I heard Googler Amanda Camp once mention that she’d recommended to a friend of hers to customized a page title, focusing it upon the main topic keywords for the webpage, and it immediately began ranking in the very first position for the keyword phrase.

And, I’ve seen it many times myself — engineer a good, simple, appropriate, keyword-rich title tag, and your page can  zoom its way above all the other nonoptimal page listings for the very same term.

• Publish high-quality, well-captioned images;
• Have pages which already have good PageRank (use traditional SEO to achieve);
• Create a Google Video Sitemap;
• Update business listings in Local Business Center;
• Submit your feed to Google Product Search;
• Create a high-quality company blog;

As you may recall, I’ve written before about how dealer locators are terribly optimized and how store locator pages can be optimized. A great many store locator sections of major corporate sites are not allowing search engine spiders to properly crawl through and index all the locations where they may have brick-and-mortar outlets.

Most large companies seem fairly unaware that their store locators are effectively blocking search engine spiders and are making it impossible for endusers to find their locations through simple keyword searches. I’ve also listed out a number of top store locator providers which produce locational services like this for many Internet Retailer 500 companies.

Read on for details on our results…

In the last two months, we’ve optimized the store locator sections of two different GravityStream client sites, resulting in major improvements in rankings and traffic for both.

For client #1, their store locator section was already moderately passable for search in the sense that they’d constructed the section so that spiders could easily crawl through and index their pages. However, they’d failed to really tweak the individual page elements that could “sing to the search engines” about what the pages’ core content was really about. For instance, the Titles and H1s of the pages were all identical for all the various locations where they have stores across the country, and some of the page content was ineffectual, such as a lack of good Meta descriptions and image ALT content.

We fixed all those items, making each store profile page uniquely titled to make it apparent to the search engines as to what the content was about, and we further kicked it up a notch by rendering the store address and phone content in hCard Microformats.

The results were fantastic!  In 136 local search combination queries, these store locator pages improved in their rankings in 80 of the queries. (This company only has about 30 locations in the US market.) The majority of the improvement was in rankings in Yahoo! and Microsoft Live searches — this is primarily because their pages were already ranking well in Google (#1 position in most cases), apparently due to Google’s superior capability at identifying authoritative content and associating it with the keyword search terms effectively.

But, in 11 cases, our changes allowed the company’s store pages to move up in Google’s SERPs, too, popping into position #1.

Some of the ranking improvements were very dramatic, allowing the site’s pages to improve in rankings by anywhere from 10 to 20+ positions.

The test search combinations were typical searches that consumers could be expected to make when looking for this company’s stores, using the company’s brandname:

• BrandX in Dallas
• BrandX Dallas, Tx
• Dallas BrandX
• BrandX Texas
• BrandX in Texas

This particular company has a fairly well-known brand name, making it natural for users to search for the store by tacking locality parameters into the search phrase when looking for the store locations. Also, it’s our general philosophy that companies with unique brand names can and should be able to rank well for their brand name searches, and our results as shown by these test queries back this up.

For client #2, the GravityStream optimization of their store locator pages was even more dramatic.

Client #2 is a very well-known nationwide retailer with stores in most major metro areas, and their store locator section, provided by a third-party, was constructed in such a way as to bar any of their dealer location pages from being indexed at all. (The location pages were all behind a search form, which is one of the all-time classic major barricades to search engine spiders.)

Through GravityStream, we created a linking structure to expose the content, and generated location pages for 107 cities in the US with optimal formatting. This is just the beginning for this client, however, since they have many more locations available. But, we wished to ramp them up slowly to insure a natural progression and to iron out any potential kinks before widening to expose more content.

We tested on 107 representative local queries (similar to client #1, we searched for combinations like “BrandX in Boston MA”).

Only a small fraction (about 4) of the pages have been slower to get crawled/indexed, so client #2 now has about a hundred pages showing up in SERPs which they’ve never had exposed before.

• 47 of the search queries put the new store locator pages in Position 1 in Google!
• 83 of the search queries put the new pages on Page 1 of Google results!
• This company’s pages are in a great many cases now outranking top yellow pages company pages and other retail directory pages which were previously the only pages representing their brand for local search queries.
• Although this company does submit a feed to Google Maps, there were a number of common local search queries where Maps results didn’t appear in the onebox on the results page, as one might otherwise expect under Universal Search. This indicates that organic SERP listings continue to be a necessity in many cases.

Achieving position number one for many keyword searches where you’ve never enjoyed rankings whatsoever is just the sort of thing we like providing to our clients.

Our GravityStream system is provided as a sort of web service to companies. Large, complex sites partner with us by installing proxy code on their server, allowing GravityStream to dynamically fix technical elements and to inject human-tweaked keyword content to insure best potential for ranking in search engine results.

Unlike many search marketing firms, we are so confident of our work that we charge clients based on the number of clickthroughs we drive to them from search engines, and we discount their brand name keywords on the assumption that they should be already getting their branded search traffic already without our assistance.

Those of us cooking up cool functionality in the GravityStream labs have even more stuff that we’ll be deploying on behalf of our clients this year, so stay tuned for more developments.

Not long ago, I wrote an article on how some local directory sites were using subdomains in an attempt to achieve good ranking results in search engines. In that article, I concluded that most of these sites were ranking well for other reasons not directly related to the presence of the keyword as a subdomain — I showed some examples of sites which ranked equally well or better in many cases where the keyword was a part of the URI as opposed to the subdomain. So, in Google, subdirectories were already functioning just as well as subdomains for the purposes of keyword rank optimization.

I’ve seen a lot of sites which had varying degrees of quality in their subdomaining strategies. If you do have subdomains, you should ideally insure that they contain primarily unique content not reflected on your other domains — each subdomain should contain page content that does not also live on other subdomains or else it can appear that you are attempting to spam the search engine indices.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are very clear on this subject:

“Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Most large corporate websites have some level of accidental duplicate content, but if you deploy dozens or hundreds of subdomains with all dupe text, it will appear that you’re purposefully trying to spam the search engines — don’t do it.

If you are considering how to structure your URLs and site content for natural search marketing, I’d say you might be better off just using a simple format of descriptively keyworded directories and subdirectories rather than keyworded subdomains. This is often easier to manage, and it looks a lot more natural/reasonable from the search engines’ perspective. There’s lower likelihood of accidentally mirroring/duplicating your content, too.

Don’t freak out if you have a few subdomains — this is also natural. Many major websites host different site sections and applications on subdomains, and some have external providers delivering content on separate servers — it’s very easy in those cases to assign a subdomain to the third party that’s providing service for you. As long as you’re not duplicating the main content of your pages on the subdomains, this is fine.
Finally, I’ve had a number of people ask my opinion regarding foreign languages — which is better, subdomain or subdirectory.

I actually prefer using separate top-level domains (“TLDs”) for this purpose, since it allows you to send a very clear signal to the search engines that particular content is intended for various countries. For instance, your French language pages could be delivered on .FR domains like: www.example.fr

However, if for some reason you don’t wish to use foreign TLDs for your alternate language pages, you should not worry overly about using separate subdomains versus directory/subdirectories. “french.example.com” will likely function just as well as “www.example.com/french/” in my opinion. I believe that translated versions of pages are NOT counted as duplicate content because they essentially contain very different text. Yes, the information may be duplicated, but the text content is not, and pages in two different languages are far less likely to both come us as relevent for the same keyword search.

So, for foreign language pages, I recommend separate TLDs for best performance, or else use whatever approach is easiest for you to set up and maintain.