Hey all, sorry for the vague title but all are in my topic :)

We launched our new website last year and have enjoyed pretty good results thanks to a lot of hard work and targeted marketing (clean mail list where we offer a weekly special, involvement in the targeted community etc)

However for some time, a few of my emails from this domain (mark@webdomain.co.nz) have been popping into customers and suppliers spam folders, not many but enough to be annoying. We use gmail to manage the email but don't use google apps.

My 2 questions are:

1: If I use google apps and let google handle all our email via the domain and update the MX records (whatever that means) will this reduce our emails going into spam?

2: Will using google apps help our validate our domain as far as google search is concerned and help with our rankings? I notice recently our website has slipped for some of our recently well placed search terms.


I know I need to hire someone to take on some of the SEO work but would like to do all I can to attempt to help keep some of the costs down. 

Happy to post the actual website in question if it helps and I'm allowed to.