By Scott Van Achte, Senior SEO, StepForth (c) 2008 In Part 1 and Part 2 of How to Optimize for Google I discussed general website optimization, links, and Google webmaster tools. In Part 3 we will look at a number of other considerations which play a role in successful rankings in Google, and also touch on some tactics which are best avoided. Non WWW Redirects It is also highly recommended that if your site utilizes an XML sitemap, to include a call to this sitemap within the Robots.txt file. Simply add the following line to ensure that the major engines (including Google) can find your sitemap:
Completing Optimization: Other Considerations
Redirects
If you need to use redirects on your site, it is very important to use the correct one. If a page is moving to a new location, or being removed all together, it is very important to have this page redirected to either the new location or the next closest page using a Permanent 301 Redirect.
While rare, if a page is being moved to a new location for a short term, with the intent of it returning to the original location, then and only then, will you want to use a Temporary 302 redirect. For more information please see Redirects: Permanent 301 vs. Temporary 302 .
To help eliminate page rank split, and provide your site with a little extra value, implement a non-www redirect. What this redirect will do is change the URL to include the "www" whenever a URL is accessed that does not include it. This can help to consolidate links to the correct page and give your site some additional strength. For more help on Non WWW redirects please see: How to 301 Redirect Non-WWW to WWW URL's
HTTP Headers
Check your page headers! If you have implemented any form of redirect on your site including mod rewrites, check your HTTP headers. You may be surprised at what you find. Some forms of redirects may use a 302 code where you really want a 301. By checking your headers you can ensure all is well, and troubleshoot problems. On our website we have added our own HTTP Header Checker for your convenience.
Home Page URL
Never have more than one URL for your home page. If your home page is available and displays on more than one URL, then utilize 301 redirects on all but the main URL you want to focus on - in most cases "http://www.domain.com/". All your links pointing to the home page should direct to the exact same URL otherwise you will split the value of your home page into multiple duplicate URL's.
Google sees "http://www.domain.com" and "http://www.domain.com/index
In theory having your home page split like this could bring with it duplicate content penalties, however, I have yet to see this actually happen - that said, it is best to avoid the risk all together.
XML Sitemap
XML Sitemaps are great for ensuring that Google and the other engines are able to spider your entire site. While an XML sitemap will not directly impact your search rankings it can help as Google is more likely to see any SEO based changes more quickly, which in turn can have an impact.
Robots.txt
This is the first file all search engines look for every time they visit your site. While placing a blank robots.txt file in your root folder will not help with search rankings, it will help reduce 404 errors appearing in your log files.
Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap
Potential Blockages
If you are finding that your site is simply not being indexed it is possible that you are blocking the spiders in one way or another.
Start with checking your main site navigation, if you are using Flash or some other fancy form of navigation that could be your problem right there. Next check your HTTP headers to ensure that your home page is returning a 2xx code which indicates that the clients' request was successfully received. Finally take a look at your Google Webmaster Tools for any noted errors. If you are blocking Google, chances are you will be able to uncover the issue with these steps.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can be quite damaging to your rankings. Ensure that all content on your site is unique. Never steal or "borrow" content from another site, and never cut and paste large portions of text from one page of your site to the next. By keeping all pages of your site entirely original you stand the best chances of getting a thumbs up from Google.
Fresh Content / Regular Updates
Update your content. In highly competitive markets, sites with old static content can often slip away. Keep your content fresh and updated to keep bringing Google back to your site. If they find new pages and updated pages with every visit, they will come back more often.
Site Age
The age of your site can also have an effect on search engine rankings. While there is little you can do (short of keeping the same domain) to help on this matter, remember that the longer your site is online, the better its chances for success. It pays to select the perfect domain right from the start and not to change domains mid-stream. Older sites that stand the test of time add a level of authority in Google's eyes. New sites seldom see rankings for competitive terms in their first year.
Note: Site Age is determined not by the date the domain was originally registered by rather by the date Google first discovered content on your site.
Load Time
Load time can have an impact in your Google AdWords Quality Score but it is unknown for sure if it can also impact your organic search rankings. It is best to keep your load time to as little as possible. If it is not already a part of the Google Algorithm, it likely will be soon. Besides, it is also best in order to give your site visitors the best experience possible.
Server Up Time
This can be a rather significant issue. If you find that your web hosting company has a history of down time, change hosts. If Google comes to visit your site once and it is down, not to worry, they will come back, but if Google visits your site often only to find that it is unavailable, you can find yourself with drastically depleted rankings.
Google Local
If you have a traditional brick and mortar store, consider submitting to Google Local . While this will not directly impact your regular organic rankings, you may find your site ranking above the organic results with a "local business results" map listing. This tends to be most common when your business is near the geographic center of a city, and when the search phrase uses a geographic modifier.
W3C Compliant Code
There is much speculation as to if W3C compliant code can have a positive impact on search rankings, and the majority believe "maybe" with some saying "yes". Regardless, it is definitely a good idea to have your site be W3C Compliant if at all possible. Not only may it help you in terms of search rankings, but having compliant code can decrease load times, and help to ensure cross-browser compatibility, all of which are good things. If at all possible, it is recommended that sites be made to be compliant.
Many experts who took part in the SEOMoz "Google Search Engine Ranking Factors" lean towards it not being a big contributor, however, it may be an issue if Google has difficulties indexing a page properly.
A code validation service is available at validator.w3.org .
How to Optimize for Google: Part 3 of 3
How to Optimize for Google: Part 2 of 3
By Scott Van Achte, Senior SEO, StepForth (c) 2008 Optimizing for top Google rankings includes a number of factors. In Part 1 of 3 we discussed onsite optimization. In Part 2 we will touch on incoming links as well as using Google Webmaster Tools. First to get an idea of how many links you may need, take a look at the top 10 ranking sites in Google and record how many links Yahoo is noting for each site. (This is because Google does not display anywhere near all the links they have noted). The average of this count is often a good indication of how many links your site may need. There are also a number of places you can get links that have basically turned south, and are not generally recommended. These include signatures in form posts, guest books, and other typically free links. Stay away from sites that cross link with obvious spammers. These networks of SPAM sites are not ones you would want your site associated with, and if you achieve links from enough of these sites it can adversely impact your rankings. Even more important, NEVER link to any of these sites - as that will certainly tie in your connection to them and give Google reason to discount your rankings.
LINKS
Links are very important in today's Google rankings, but just how many links you need will depend on both the competitiveness of your target phrases, and the quality of the incoming links themselves.
Essentially the number one rule of links is to keep it relevant! Topical relevance is very important in order for inbound links to give your site the most value. If the page that links to you is relevant that is good, if the entire site linking to you is relevant, that is better.
There are many different ways to get links to your site including the age old reciprocal link trade, directory links, article based links, and links from press releases.
Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal linking has seen its value drop considerably over the past few years, however, if the site you are trading with is relevant you can still receive value from these links.
Paid Links
Google frowns on paid links, however that is not to say that they don't work. Often you can find highly reputable and relevant websites which are offering paid advertising spots. If these links are coded to link directly to your website without passing through any tracking redirects, you will in many cases see value in the form of both direct traffic and increased link densities and rankings.
Articles
Writing and distributing industry specific articles is a great way to help boost both your link counts and site traffic; for examples of such content see StepForth's SEO Blog News articles. Consider writing articles on a regular basis and submitting them to some of the more popular services such as EzineArticles. Be sure to include a link to your site from somewhere within the article, or at the very least within your bio. Try to use a target phrase as part of the anchor text for additional value.
Press Releases
If something of importance has happened to your company such as a new product launch, or other notable achievement - essentially anything news worthy, put out a press release. Submit this press release through services such as PRWeb or PRNewsWire. Again, be sure to include a target phrase as part of the anchor text.
Forum Posts
Forum posts can help to marginally raise your link counts; however, with this one you must be careful. Only add a link to your site in your signature if both the forum allows it, and you are a respected member of the forum. If you are a solid contributor and your posts have depth and meaning, and the forum is highly relevant to your site, then having a link in your signature may give your site some juice. Posting wildly to random forums will in most cases get yourself banned, and will be both a waste of time and potentially make you and your site look bad.
Guest Books
In nearly all cases, do not post your link to guest books. If you happen to stumble upon a guestbook that is highly relevant to your site, the other comments are relevant to your site, and you have something useful (and again relevant) to say, then perhaps consider it, but typically focusing on links from guest books is considered SPAM and is best avoided all together.
Blog Comments
Having a link from your blog comments is not necessarily a bad thing. If you find a relevant blog post of use, and have something relevant and constructive to say, don't be afraid to enter your link into the "URL" field of the form, but don't try stuffing links into the comment itself.
Link Farms & Bad Neighborhoods
These are sites that allow you to simply post your link no stríngs attached. They are mostly long scrolling pages with countless links. Stay away from them. If you see one, run in the other direction. These links are bad, will not help with your rankings, and in some cases can actually damage your rankings.
DMOZ, Yahoo and Other Directories
Directory based links can be of significant help, especially if they are from highly reputable directories, the two biggest being DMOZ.org and the Yahoo Directory.
Getting a site into DMOZ is like Gold. Google loves links from DMOZ and your site will reap the benefits. The big catch however is actually getting your site into the directory in the first place. Find the perfect category for your site and check to see if it has an editor. If you see a link "Volunteer to edit this category" try and find another relevant location. Pages without active editors take much longer to get listed into. Once you find the perfect directory submit your site every 4-6 months until listed. If you are lucky you will get in eventually.
Yahoo Directory is seen as an authority in the eyes of Google, and getting your site in will help your link reputation. This link does come at a price of $299 per year, but will play a role in helping your website achieve top rankings.
There are a number of other valuable directories out there that can help you with your search rankings. Before submittíng to any directory the key is a combination of relevance and authority. If the directory is relevant and active, it may be worth considering.
GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS
Google Webmaster Tools can be very useful for your optimization efforts. It may not directly help you obtain higher rankings, but can help you trouble shoot if you are experiencing problems. It will also allow you to remove URL's that you don't want indexed and set various preferences such as your domain, crawl rate, and geographic target.
XML Sitemaps
This is the most common reason people use Google Webmaster Tools - the submission of their XML sitemap. While you can use your robots.txt to have Google find your XML sitemap, by submitting it directly to Google you can check up on the spidering status.
Error checking
Webmaster Tools is also quite useful for checking on various error URL's that Google may know about. Under the Diagnostics > Web Crawl you can view any errors that Google has to report on your site. By cleaning up any errors you can help boost your chances of rankings.
Links
From inside Google Webmaster Tools you can get a much clearer look at what sites Google is noting as having links to you, and give you a better indication of the need, if any, to raise your link counts.
WWW Preference
Be sure to select your domain preference under Tools > Set Preferred Domain. In nearly all cases you will want to select the version including the "www" .
SUMMARY
Inbound links play a significant role in successful Google rankings. By focusing on relevant links, as well as by diversifying where you get those links from, you can build a solid foundation for your search rankings today and into the future.
Stay tuned for Part 3 (of 3) where I will discuss other considerations including redirects, HTTP headers, and a number of other factors which play a role in successfully conquering Google.
How to Optimize for Google : Part 1 of 3
By Scott Van Achte, Senior SEO, StepForth (c) 2008
In today's online world search engine rankings can make your business succeed, and while rankings in Yahoo and MSN are very valuable, their combined market value is still less than that of Google. This makes achieving top rankings in Google that much more important.
In this three-part series on How to Optimize for Google we will touch on a number of important aspects for top Google rankings including website optimization, links, Google Webmaster tools, and a number of other considerations.
The focus of Part 1 will be with on page website optimization.
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THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
This article is not about keyword research so I will not spend too much time on this topic, however, I felt it was important to at least brush on this slightly. If you are interested in reading more, please see Keyword Research for Organic SEO.
Make sure that your targets are achievable. If you select the wrong keywords, it can make your entire optimization experience essentially a waste. Choose keywords that are attainable but yet still provide a reasonable search frequency for your industry. Your phrase selection should also be targeted to bring qualified traffic to your site.
Using the hotel industry as an example, targeting the word "hotel" would make very little sense but by narrowing it down to "Victoria BC hotel" you now have less competition, and a more qualified audience. Keep your targets in perspective and go after the obtainable rankings.
WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
There are many on-site factors that play a role in your search engine rankings. Here are a number of those factors and what you can do to increase your chances of success.
Title Tag
The title tag plays one of the most important roles in search results at Google, and is almost always the heading Google chooses for each of its listings. Placement of your target phrase is best used near the start of the tag and repeated again in the middle or near the end. Three uses of your target phrase may be helpful in some instances, as long as it is not too overwhelming. For best results each page on your site should have a totally unique title tag.
It is also important to remember that because Google will use this title as the main heading for your listing, you will want to keep it attractive to potential searchers. Try to also add a call to action, or other wording to help make your listing appear attractive to searchers.
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To help illustrate the fact Google takes this tag into consideration, simply do a search for your target phrase and take a look at the titles of the top 10. I tried a search for a rather broad term "hotel" and saw that all 10/10 listings had it in the title tag, and 6/10 had it as the very first word. A quick scan showed that the entire top 30 either had the word hotel, or hotels in their title tags.
If you do only one thing to your website, make sure that all your title tags are relevant, unique, and contain your target phrase for each page.
Meta Description Tag
The Meta Description tag is still occasionally used by Google as the description which appears in the search results themselves. While this used to be a more common practice Google tends to use it most often on sites with very limited content, or those which are flash based. I have seen it still used for content rich sites, however this is less common.
The Meta Description tag still has an impact on search rankings. Your best bet when using this tag is to keep it short and sweet with your target phrase close to the start and not repeated more than 3 times. Like the title tag, each page on your site should have its own unique description tag.
Meta Keyword Tag
When it comes to Google this tag is useless, and won't influence your rankings. There is some speculation as to whether a spammy keyword tag can however, have a negative effect on Google rankings. As a result, if you do utilize a keyword Meta tag for the smaller engines, it is best to keep it clean and play it safe.
Density
Keyword density plays a role in overall rankings; however, it is not as cut and dry as it once was. Once upon a time there was a magic number that when used could almost guarantee top rankings.
This is no longer the case. Today the ideal density varies from industry to industry, phrase to phrase. To find out what density you should aim for, take the top 10 or 20 search results and see what percentage those sites are using. In most cases you will find that the majority of these sites have a very similar density to one another, and this average density is a good estimation of what you should aim for.
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Body Text and Keyword Placement
The location of relevant text on your site will help establish the overall importance of your target phrase. While you do not want to overwhelm the engines and site visitors with a bombardment of target phrases at the top of the page, try to sprinkle in some instances as close to the top of the page as possible.
Synonyms
Be sure to include various synonyms for your target phrases within your body text on your site. Google will use these synonyms to tie in the overall relevance of the page for your main target phrases, which in turn can improve your odds.
To find possible synonyms you can use a thesaurus, but the best way is to search Google itself and see exactly what they consider to be similar. Simply search in Google for your target phrase preceded with a tilde, such as "~hotels". Next scan through the search results for any text Google has bolded. These are all words that Google considers to be related. Using the "~hotels" example Google brings up phrases such as 'travel', 'tourism', 'accommodation', as well as various hotel chain names such as 'Hilton Hotels'.
Keywords in Domain
There is still some speculation if having a target phrase as part of your top level domain (TLD) is of use to search rankings. From my experience, yes, there is value here, although, nothing like it was several years ago.
If you are starting off in the online world and are contemplating which domain to go for, consider one that uses your target phrase, assuming that it is both relevant to your business name, and uses no more than a single hyphen. While multiple hyphens in a domain can be successful, they are very common with highly spammy websites, so it is best to not take that route if possible.
While having a keyword located within your domain can provide some ranking juice, I would not suggest heading out and doing a domain swap. In most cases you would be better off working on your existing site than starting from scratch with a new domain.
Keywords in page specific URL
Using keywords for specific page URL's can also help add a little bit of value to your site, providing you use them responsibly. Consider using a keyword as a directory name and as part of a file name where it naturally makes sense to do so. If you have a website that focuses on tourism and includes local hotel listings, you may want to consider the following structure for your page on the Hilton:
MyTourismSite.com/Victoria
Heading Tags
Placement of target phrases within heading tags helps to establish the importance of those given phrases. That said do not over do it, or abuse it. Only place target phrases within a heading tag if it makes sense to do so, and don't flood a page with numerous tags. Heading tags are not as critical as they once were, but still a good contribution to a well optimized page.
Link Anchor text
This is the actual text you clíck on as part of a link. When full or partial target phrases are used within your text links they help pass on some value to the linked page for those phrases. This is also true when considering surrounding text. When the content around the link is also relevant, the link holds slightly more value.
While a link that simply states "clíck here" or "www.domainname.com" does have its place, they provide considerably less value than a link that would use "discount hotels" as its anchor.
Image Alt Text
While image alt text still plays a minor role, its biggest part is within the use of image based navigation. If you have an image linked to another page, the alt text will be attributed much the same way as standard link anchor text is.
Image Alt text should always be short and to the point and should accurately describe either the image itself, or the page the image is linking to. Do not use alt tags as a place to stuff keywords.
Inline Links
These are links that are found mid sentence or mid paragraph as opposed to a simple listing of links as found in a menu or possibly on a sitemap. Links found mid paragraph tend to pass on a little more value from the surrounding text and can provide more relevance to the linked page.
Site Navigation
It is absolutely imperative that your website be fully spiderable by the search engines. This may seem obvious, but often webmasters overlook Google's ability to crawl a website. Google has become very advanced in what links it can follow and how it can spider a website, but there are still some things that can cause significant roadblocks.
- Flash: One of the most commonly made mistakes is the use of flash. If flash is used as a sole means of site navigation then you can count on Google not viewing your internal pages, and having a significant disadvantage in terms of site rankings.
- Java Script / DHTML: These days most Java Script and even DHTML menus can be spidered by Google, however, this is not always the case. If your site utilizes any kind of fancy navigation and you are wondering why Google has not indexed your internal pages, check out Google's Cached Text version of your page. If you do not see any text links, then your navigation may be invisible to Google.
- Images: Image based navigation has been safe for many years now, but if your site uses this form of navigation it is essential to have brief, relevant alt text on all your buttons. This alt text will act much like standard anchor text for text based links. This is not only for the purpose of search ranking value, but take a look at Google's cached text version of your page. If you have image based links that do not have alt text, those links do not appear. This doesn't mean Google won't follow them, but for anyone viewing your site on a text based browser, your links will be invisible to them.
URL Structure
Avoid long elaborate URL's with extraneous characters. While Google has reached a point where they can index massive URL strings, it is best to avoid them if at all possible. For dynamic sites consider utilizing mod rewrites to significantly clean up the URL to not only make it more search engine friendly, but more user friendly as well.
MyTourismSite.com/?locid=
stands a better chance if cleaned up to read:
MyTourismSite.com/victoria
Six Quick and Simple Ways to Dominate Google Rankings!
By Mike Small (c) 2008 The reason Google is the most successful search engine in the world is because they provide the best search results; pages ranked by tangible value. That tangible value is a combination of content and links, with links being the more important factor (they assume any pages linking in will only link to good content or risk their own ranking.) 1.) Link Deep and with Relevance 4.) Follow the 1% Solution 6.) Get the Best Links Possible
Here are a few tips that will help you take full advantage of Google's love of linking...
So why is deeper better and what's this about relevance? Google figured out that a link to a homepage is only good if that homepage has the information the visitor needs. If a person clicks a link for "amazíng chocolate chip cookie recipe" and ends up on the home page, which has nothing of the sort, Google discounts it as a wasted link. On the other hand, if the link leads to the page containing info on the "Amazíng Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe," even five levels deep, the link has huge value to the visitor and to Google.
Want some proof? You already have it if you've ever used Google's AdWords pay per clíck service. They will not even accept PAID links to pages that are not the most relevant for their visitors, regardless of what you are willing to pay per clíck. Now that's saying something!
2.) Use Absolute Links Internally
It sounds complicated but it's not. Absolute links are those with a fixed full URL. There's another kind, called "relative" links that skip the first part of the domain and remain "relative" to the file structure. Let's take a look at the difference...
Here's the absolute link to the Google Ads page from Google's homepage: "http://www.google.com/intl/en
Here's what it might look like as a relative link: "./intl/en/ads/"
Long story short; absolute links help your SEO efforts and relative links don't.
3.) Use Keywords in Anchor Text
Use relevant keywords in your link anchor text (that is the text within the hyperlink.) Forget about "Clíck Here" like you see on so many sites. Not only does that not help your ranking, it actually lowers the relevancy of your real keywords because Google believes that if a word is important enough it will likely be used as part of a link to get the visitor where they want to go.
Make no more than 1% of your page text into links (both outbound and internal.) That is, if you have 500 words on the page there should be no more than 5 text links total. And don't overuse the same keyword text for the links. So if you have three mentions each of three different keywords, try to use each just once in a link. Then use similar text for any remaining links.
Example: If "chocolate chip cookies" is your main keyword phrase you might use "chocolate chip cookies" as the anchor text for one link and then "my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe" for another link.
It's also a good idea to use 10 Links Max per page whether you have 1,000 words or 10,000 words on that page.
5.) Add a Link Failsafe
This is really simple and almost nobody does it. Links get broken more often than we like. Sometimes it's because we moved a page and sometimes it has nothing to do with anything we consciously did (especially with blogs.) The solution is to create a custom 404 page (Page Not Found) that looks just like any other page on your site and has a simple note like "We're sorry we cannot find the page you are looking for. However, if you love cookies of all kinds we think you'll find exactly what you want by clicking on one of the following links..." Then of course you have a navigation system for them to follow.
This is extremely important yet often overlooked because it can be such a difficult and time consuming job. If you take nothing else away from this article, please take this... Finding the best possible inbound links is the single most important thing you can do to make the number one spot on Google.
Here are three tips to help minimize your time and effort while giving you results SEO experts charge an arm and a leg for.
A.) Get listed in directories.
Submít your site to the top directories like Jayde.com and DMOZ.org. Once they link to your site you will have great relevant inbound links and some instant credibility with Google.
Here are some great free directories in order of value, starting with the best... dmoz.org, jayde.com, webworldindex.com, turnpike.net, and directoryvault.com. Yahoo is important but charges $299 for commercial site inclusion.
B.) Use "Special Commands" to do the legwork for you.
The best linked sites can easily be found with a simple search command called "allinanchor:" Here's how to use it. Go to Google and type in "allinanchor:keyword goes here" (no quotes and no space after the colon.) Now hit Enter and you'll see the sites that have the highest relevancy for keywords used in anchor text. Look for any that you know are competitors and outrank your site.
Now take the URL for any of these and use this command "link:www.theirdomain.extension" (again with no quotes and no space after the colon.) This will show you all the sites linking in as well as internal pages linking back in.
In short, these two special commands give you an inside look at exactly how the competition does what it does with the results they get. This is huge!
C.) Use good SEO software whenever possible.
If you can afford to spend one or two hundred dollars to save huge amounts of time and get professional results, it's well worth it. Like many SEO professionals whose livelihood depends on results, I've been using SEO software to get top search engine placement for years. The best ones not only help you identify great link partners but will even help you contact them and make sure they don't cheat you in any way. I use SEO Elite and am still amazed by all it can do.
If possible, get a tool that also does rank checking and reporting. Once you begin you'll want to check rankings every so often and an automated tool will save you a ton of time. Oddly enough I bought SEO Elite primarily for rank checking then discovered it was worth its weight in gold as linking tool as well. So whatever tool you use, get as much out of it as you can. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Mike Small is the founder of the free SEO (search engine optimization) site SEOpartner.com and author of numerous search engine optimization books and whitepapers including the SEO Notebook.
10 Silly Mistakes Even Internet Marketing Experts Make
By Gobala Krishnan
Some of you may have seen something like the image above if you visited my blog in a few days- my domain got parked by GoDaddy. In fact I managed to renew it just in time before the domain expired and was put under GoDaddy’s expired domains market, which would mean that I will have to pay USD1,000+/- to get it back. Luckily for me, I had to pay only regular domain renewal fees.
In my case it was not a typical rookie mistake. I DID put my domain on auto-renew ever since I bought it but the problem is last month the credit card I’ve been using for over 5 years expired, and I was issued a new card. This meant that any recurring payment using the old card will fail as the new card has a different security number (at the back of the card).
To make things worse, during the renewal date I was in Indonesia for a 5-day holiday and had almost no Internet access. I went online for a couple of minutes but there were so many emails, I must have missed the warning notice from GoDaddy.
All things said, it was still rather silly on my part.
This brings me to an interesting topic - silly things we do as marketers.
Here’s a list of them, tell me if you’ve done any of it before:
- Anti Domain-Auto-Renewal - As I mentioned in the story above. I’ve lost one or two domains before from this but those domains were not critical to my business. Still, the guy who got it just put up a “domain parking” page with loads of ads and is probably still getting some cash out of it.
- Bad English Domains - I’ve done this with 2 domain names. The funny thing just as you hit the “Order” button you suddenly realize the spelling error but it’s just too late and you’re stuck with that domain for a year.
- See Only, Don’t Buy - I once spent $230 a day in AdWords and got up the next morning to zero sales. I realized not too log after that the order link was broken - and I felt like a total idiot.
- Neighborly Love is Bad - I once wrote the wrong address for my Aweber commissions, resulting in the checks being sent to my neighbor. Luckily for me, he had already move out by then and I retrieved my check from his mail box after checking my Aweber affiliate profile.
- Who Moved My Affiliate Checks? - Sometimes people move around. I moved from apartment to house to apartment (5 times) in the past 4 years and I’m pretty sure there were some miniscule affiliate programs I signed up with that finally sent me a check - just to the wrong address!
- Wrong Paypal Address - I did this once, send a huge sum of money to the wrong person. The I had to file a dispute and only through the grace of the receiver did I get my money back.
- Come See My Download Files - In Cpanel you can choose to disable indexes of your directories. This way when someone types in yoursite.com/images they wont be able to see a listing of all the images. Most importantly, if they type in yoursite.com/download and you have no index page there (htm/html/php) they will be able to steal your products. If you have a WordPress blog, try typing in yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins and you will see what I mean
- Premature Ejaculation- I’ve sent out an email for an affiliate product that read “Product X Is Live Now” only to realize that it would a good 12 hours before that happened. In my case you could forgive me because converting between time zones can be confusing.
- Backups Are For Wimps - It’s soo easy to delete stuff, and by “stuff” I mean anything from your website files, your e-book source MS Word files, your database (MySQL databases are very easy to delete, just one click) and even your important emails with your login details. Then you realize you didn’t create a backup and you’re screwed. No choice but to spend another 15 days re-writing the same ebook.
- [yourname, [fistname], Who’s Name? - How many times have you sent out an autoresponder broadcast email and got the variables wrong? Instead of getting “Hello Gobala” you get “Hello [firstname” - this always happens when: (a) You have more than one autoresponder service and each uses different variables, and you “copy and paste” carelessly (2) you typed in the variables manually, and you made a typo, oops!
Well there you go, 10 silly mistake even Internet marketing veterans make. I made all 10 of them, how many have you got?
SEO Copywriting Tips for Google, Yahoo and your Prospects
By Angela Charles, President, (c) 2008 Pilot Fish It might not seem logical, but a web site that's well-written for human consumption with a little SEO help usually is also well-received by the robots of search engines like Google and Yahoo. SEO Copywriting Tips – How to Write Great Web Site Content Types of Content to Consider for Your Company Web Site Advice on Adding PDFs to your Site See what types of content they provide that your site could emulate (not copy). Other On-Page SEO Copywriting Tips I've created quite a to-do líst of SEO Copywriting Tips, but when done properly, your SEO copywriting efforts will help yield long-term results in the way of top placement on Google and Yahoo and, most importantly, increased opportuníty to reach new potential customers.
So, what does "well-written" mean? Here are some tips to good SEO copywriting for Google, Yahoo and site visitors.
Part of the SEO copywriting process is project planning. It's important to take the time to consider what information people would want to know about your company. Here are some types of content well received by Internet visitors and search engines:
Search engines have become more sophisticated in being able to index varying file types. PDFs work fine for information that site visitors might want to print out and keep. But, if you use PDFs, make sure they open in a separate browser. Also, add a link to your home page somewhere on each PDF; otherwise, site visitors that enter your site from a search engine via the PDF won't have navigation to take them to the rest of your site.
Where to Get Ideas for Good SEO Content
Type your top keywords into Google and Yahoo and see what sites and pages come up on the first or second page of results. This will give you a good idea of some of the content that search engines like. More specifically, take a look at:
Once your content is written, it's time to place it on the page. Here are some additional details you'll need to be concerned with to complete the SEO copywriting process:
Angela Charles is president of Pilot Fish, an Akron, Ohio, search engine optimization and web design firm specializing in industrial clients.
Search Engine Optimization is Only the Beginning to Marketing Online
By Mason Curry (c) 2008 Search Engine Optimization is Not Always the Answer For example, take the word bike. If a person uses Google by searching for the string 'buy bike', a page from Ebay will usually be listed before any of the major bicycle makers. It goes without saying that any of the major bicycle dealers have spent a great deal more time targeting keywords related to bikes than a site that manages hundreds of thousands of different products. The answer to this problem is the nature of this article. Do Not Jump Right into Getting Links Sites that do nothing more than link to other sites may look like a great option but a site without content is not very popular with the search engines. They need to provide something to internet surfers in order to be important. If they are not important to the search engines then a link from them should not be important to you. Link marketing is based on quality links not the amount of links. I advise staying away from these sites all together. Next, it goes without saying, sites with illegal and inappropriate content are never a safe bet. Ezine Articles Related forums
Search engine optimization has a purpose. Keyword targeting lets search engines link their users to your website when they look for your keywords. They will not do this satisfactorily without optimizing your site with proper web design techniques. Unfortunately, however, it is more complicated than that. Have you ever wondered why Google will almost always place Ebay on the first few pages when anything is entered into the search field accompanied with the word buy? The word buy has been targeted from more sites than you could count so what makes Ebay special.
Can My Website Compete?
The answer is to increase the importance of your site in the eyes of the major search engines. Ebay gets searched before many other sites because it has been decided by the search engines to be more popular with internet users. So what I am offering the little guy is a way to do what Ebay and the other 'big dogs' have done to become popular.
The world of search engines boil down to the stereotypical high school hierarchy. Search engines pay more attention to those that are popular. In high school, teens usually become popular by having popular people associate with them. The online world is no different. But how do search engines know that popular sites are associating with you? That is an easy one - they link to your website. The three biggest search engine players all crawl the web indexing links to and from all the websites that they have found. They create a ranking system based on many factors, but the most substantial one is how many sites link to you. It could be argued that an optimized site is key, and my opinion expressed here is based on the assumption that your site has been built with proper design techniques. It is also assumed that you have well written content based on your main products or ideas. If you feel that your website does not currently qualify as well written or properly designed, I recommend that you rectify these issues before attempting to build your popularity as it may turn out to be a waste of time.
There are many tempting ways to get other sites to link to you that are very unsavory. I choose to address these first. These include:
Getting a Good Start with Link Marketing
Most of us do not have a lot of expendable income starting out so I do not spend much time explaining the options that involve paying large sums of money. In my experience, webmasters with that kind of money contact a company to handle this for them (I have had enough of them as clients to know). I intend on putting out another article to cover this option more in depth, however this article only covers the less costly options.
There are 3 cheap ways to get get some link popularity:
Ezines are online magazines. Ezine articles provide two great benefits. First and foremost, they allow you to link to your site from your article or resource area. Also, they provide a chance to show off the knowledge you have in your field. Although this is essentially a free way to get a quality link, it does come with some work. You must be able to write a content rich article on a topic related to your site. Most Ezine sites do not mind giving you the opportuníty to get your name out there but you need to provide them with a well written article that offers something to their users. Searching for ezine databases on any major search engine should provide you with a líst of great sources for this linking method. Be sure to consult the guidelines of an ezine site in which you decide to submit articles.
Forums are another great opportuníty to get your site out there without paying up. Again, it does take some time. Find forums that cater to questions about your field. For instance, if you sell natural supplements for joint pain, search for forums related to arthritis. Find strings that are talking about different options for arthritis or ask about what works. This opens a perfect opportuníty to link to your site. It is important to know that most forums are not keen on letting sales pitches post for long. The trick here is to provide quality information on these posts. You could compare your arthritis product to others, you could even provide a plug for a competitor (attempting to prove yourself superior, of course). This makes your post look less like a sales or link pitch and helps make the internet more content driven like it was intended to be.
Banner/Link Exchanges
There are usually two main ways you can get a banner or link on another site without offering any content. You can pay them a fee, or you can propose a trade. Like the other two options, only target sites that are related to you in some way. Exchanges require a little research on your part. You want to search for your potential link partner to see that they are worth the trade. A easy rule of thumb is to check their pagerank compared to yours. You can use this free tool to compare at CheckPageRank.net. Put your web address in and look at your pagerank as well as theirs. If you are paying for a link and they have a pagerank of zero it would be wise to save your money. If you are trading links, use your better judgment. If they have a quality site it may be worth the exchange in hopes that their site takes off and they can share a little of their success with you.
Take note that a link from no single site will boost your website's importance significantly. Every quality link helps a little bit so you need to practice all methods for some time before you see the results you want. Stick with it and be patient.
Mason Curry is Lead Designer for Vexart Studio Web Design.
Search Engine Optimization is Only the Beginning to Marketing Online
By Mason Curry (c) 2008 Search Engine Optimization is Not Always the Answer For example, take the word bike. If a person uses Google by searching for the string 'buy bike', a page from Ebay will usually be listed before any of the major bicycle makers. It goes without saying that any of the major bicycle dealers have spent a great deal more time targeting keywords related to bikes than a site that manages hundreds of thousands of different products. The answer to this problem is the nature of this article. Do Not Jump Right into Getting Links Sites that do nothing more than link to other sites may look like a great option but a site without content is not very popular with the search engines. They need to provide something to internet surfers in order to be important. If they are not important to the search engines then a link from them should not be important to you. Link marketing is based on quality links not the amount of links. I advise staying away from these sites all together. Next, it goes without saying, sites with illegal and inappropriate content are never a safe bet. Ezine Articles Related forums
Search engine optimization has a purpose. Keyword targeting lets search engines link their users to your website when they look for your keywords. They will not do this satisfactorily without optimizing your site with proper web design techniques. Unfortunately, however, it is more complicated than that. Have you ever wondered why Google will almost always place Ebay on the first few pages when anything is entered into the search field accompanied with the word buy? The word buy has been targeted from more sites than you could count so what makes Ebay special.
Can My Website Compete?
The answer is to increase the importance of your site in the eyes of the major search engines. Ebay gets searched before many other sites because it has been decided by the search engines to be more popular with internet users. So what I am offering the little guy is a way to do what Ebay and the other 'big dogs' have done to become popular.
The world of search engines boil down to the stereotypical high school hierarchy. Search engines pay more attention to those that are popular. In high school, teens usually become popular by having popular people associate with them. The online world is no different. But how do search engines know that popular sites are associating with you? That is an easy one - they link to your website. The three biggest search engine players all crawl the web indexing links to and from all the websites that they have found. They create a ranking system based on many factors, but the most substantial one is how many sites link to you. It could be argued that an optimized site is key, and my opinion expressed here is based on the assumption that your site has been built with proper design techniques. It is also assumed that you have well written content based on your main products or ideas. If you feel that your website does not currently qualify as well written or properly designed, I recommend that you rectify these issues before attempting to build your popularity as it may turn out to be a waste of time.
There are many tempting ways to get other sites to link to you that are very unsavory. I choose to address these first. These include:
Getting a Good Start with Link Marketing
Most of us do not have a lot of expendable income starting out so I do not spend much time explaining the options that involve paying large sums of money. In my experience, webmasters with that kind of money contact a company to handle this for them (I have had enough of them as clients to know). I intend on putting out another article to cover this option more in depth, however this article only covers the less costly options.
There are 3 cheap ways to get get some link popularity:
Ezines are online magazines. Ezine articles provide two great benefits. First and foremost, they allow you to link to your site from your article or resource area. Also, they provide a chance to show off the knowledge you have in your field. Although this is essentially a free way to get a quality link, it does come with some work. You must be able to write a content rich article on a topic related to your site. Most Ezine sites do not mind giving you the opportuníty to get your name out there but you need to provide them with a well written article that offers something to their users. Searching for ezine databases on any major search engine should provide you with a líst of great sources for this linking method. Be sure to consult the guidelines of an ezine site in which you decide to submit articles.
Forums are another great opportuníty to get your site out there without paying up. Again, it does take some time. Find forums that cater to questions about your field. For instance, if you sell natural supplements for joint pain, search for forums related to arthritis. Find strings that are talking about different options for arthritis or ask about what works. This opens a perfect opportuníty to link to your site. It is important to know that most forums are not keen on letting sales pitches post for long. The trick here is to provide quality information on these posts. You could compare your arthritis product to others, you could even provide a plug for a competitor (attempting to prove yourself superior, of course). This makes your post look less like a sales or link pitch and helps make the internet more content driven like it was intended to be.
Banner/Link Exchanges
There are usually two main ways you can get a banner or link on another site without offering any content. You can pay them a fee, or you can propose a trade. Like the other two options, only target sites that are related to you in some way. Exchanges require a little research on your part. You want to search for your potential link partner to see that they are worth the trade. A easy rule of thumb is to check their pagerank compared to yours. You can use this free tool to compare at CheckPageRank.net. Put your web address in and look at your pagerank as well as theirs. If you are paying for a link and they have a pagerank of zero it would be wise to save your money. If you are trading links, use your better judgment. If they have a quality site it may be worth the exchange in hopes that their site takes off and they can share a little of their success with you.
Take note that a link from no single site will boost your website's importance significantly. Every quality link helps a little bit so you need to practice all methods for some time before you see the results you want. Stick with it and be patient.
Mason Curry is Lead Designer for Vexart Studio Web Design.
All Optimized and Going Nowhere?
By Jennifer Horowitz (c) 2008 It happens sometimes. Here are some of the common reasons you may not be indexed: Already Indexed: The major engines won't tell you if you're listed; it's up to you to find out. The method to discover if a page or domain has been indexed varies from one engine to another. Don't assume you're not indexed just because you searched through keywords and you didn't come up in the first few pages of results. You could still be indexed and end up at the bottom of the heap. Free Sites: Because of all the "junk" submissions from free web sites like Geocities, many engines choose not to index sites from such domains or limit the number of pages they accept.
Index Time: It hasn't been indexed yet. The amount of time before the engine indexes your site should be listed on the search engine's submission page, but these aren't always accurate or may be out of date. On the average, index times range from one to eight weeks depending on the engine. Some engines like AltaVista and Inktomi provide paid options if you wish to be indexed more quickly.
TIP! Time frame and expectations: Allow up to 4 months, if you are number 10 and want to be number 1, then it may just be time that is needed - but if you aren't showing up at all, then you need to look at keywords, content, title, description and keyword tags.
Roadmap from Home Page: Some engines have been known to drop pages that cannot be traveled to from the home page. HotBot has been rumored to do this. Think of your site links as a series of roads from one page to another. If there's no road from your home page to the page you want indexed, a search engine may decide the page is unnecessary.
External Links: Some search engines like Google and HotBot have been known to refuse to index Web sites that don't link to any other sites. Or, they may index your home page but refuse to index any other pages unless there are links from another domain. Or, they may index you for a while but then "prune" their database later because you didn't achieve any external links after a certain period of time.
Frames: Content inside of HTML frames can cause problems with submissions because the search engine may index the main content of the page, but not the surrounding menu frame. Visitors to your site find some information but miss the associated menu. It's generally better to create non-framed versions of your pages.
Spider Blocks: Search engine spiders cannot index sites that require a registration or password, and they can't fill out forms. This also applies to indexing of content from a searchable database. The solution is to create static pages that the engines can find and index without performing a special action on your site. Depending on your database system, there are both utility programs and companies that can assist you with this.
Guilt Through Association: If your Web site shares the same IP address as other Web sites on your host's Web server, you may find your IP quietly banned because of something someone else did. Ask your hosting service if your domain name has its own unique IP assigned to it. If not, ask them to move it to its own IP to avoid being penalized because of someone else.
Dynamic Pages: Dynamic pages with URLs containing special symbols like a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) are ignored by many engines. Pages generated on the fly from a database often contain these symbols. In this situation, it's important to generate "static" versions of each page you want indexed. Fancy scripts and code on a page can hurt your rankings. When it comes to search engines, simple is better.
Large Pages: If your site has a slow connection or the pages are very complex and take a long time to load, it might time out before the spider finishes indexing. To avoid this, limit your page size to 50K or less. A good rule of thumb is that: page size + cumulative image sizes on the page = 50K-70K. If it is greater than that amount, visitors with dial-up connections will leave before the page fully loads.
Unreliable Hosts: It pays to have a reliable hosting service. If your web site doesn't respond when the search engine spider visits, you won't be indexed. Even worse, if you are indexed and they pay a visit when your site is down, you could be removed from the database. Spam: If you use questionable techniques that might be considered an overt attempt at spamming (i.e., excessive repetition of keywords, same color text as background) an engine may ignore or reject your submissions.
Redirects: Redirects or meta refresh tags sometimes cause the engines to have trouble indexing your site. If the engines think you are trying to "trick" them by using "cloaking" or IP redirection technology, they may not index the site at all.
Proper Directory Submissions: When submitting to a directory site like Yahoo, Open Directory, LookSmart, and others, a live person reviews your site. They decide if the site is of sufficient "quality" before they líst it. These directories can help you get listed with other engines, so make sure you give your directory submissions the attention they need.
Page Limits: Search engines will only spider so many pages of your Web site. This could be a few dozen or three or four hundred depending on the engine. Google is one engine that tends to crawl deeper into your site. How deep they go may depend on factors like your link popularity. Sites with higher link popularity are deemed "worthier" of more thorough indexing.
Random Errors: Sometimes the engines simply lose submissions at random because of bugs and technical errors. Mistakes happen - remember, they're managing a database containing hundreds of millions of pages.
Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing and co-owner of EcomBuffet.com . Since 1998, her expertise in onlíne marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients increase revenue and achieve their business goals. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on Search Engine Optimization and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications. Jennifer can be reached at Jennifer@ecombuffet.com.
Get Your Blog Google-Ranked In 30 Days or Less, Part 1
By Frederick Townes (c) 2008 Blogs have been around long enough to become standard elements of the web landscape. They're easy to construct and manage, they create fresh, user-generated content and, if well-executed, blogs draw crowds and the attention of search engines. 50. Build a blog or move to Wordpress. Wordpress is a blog platform that's open source (free), robust, extensible and easy to use. Add Feedburner, which equips site owners to broadcast RSS feeds and develop user metrics. Next, synch up Google Analytics and a sitemap plug-in to simplify populating the blog and developing useful, actionable metrics. Also, make sure your blog is pinging www.technoratti.com and other social-ranking sites like www.digg.com. 44. Remember SEO basics. Use provocative, keyword-rich title tags, meta keywords and descriptions, and only link to high-quality sites. Never over do it. Keep your posts relevant, natural, accurate and, above all, current. 37. Don't use duplicate content. The only duplicate content that appears in your blog posts are quotes, and they should be identified with quotation marks.
Whether starting out with a new domain name, or a domain that's been around for a decade, you can rank your blog on Google if you just do what Google wants you to do. So here are 25/50 tips to get your blog ranked by the world's biggest SE.
49. Don't worry about page rank. PR is highly over-rated as a yardstick of online success. Connectivity within a web community and expansion through content syndication and guest blogging are more critical to building site credibility than page rank. PR will take care of itself over time if you do it right.
48. Make a difference, or at least have a clear purpose. Differentiate your content on every post. Cover lots of editorial ground.
47. Use a conversational tone. Dry, starchy academic writing is strictly for the textbooks. Write words that people "hear" instead of read.
46. Provide a "Tell Your Friends" link on your blog. Birds of a feather do, indeed, flock together. So, if one of your regulars shares an interest in philately, chances are s/he has other friends with an interest in stamp collecting.
45. Study the competition. They're studying you. Check out spyfu.com to do a little undercover work on search analytics employed by competitor sites and their visitors. You can't touch the content but you can't copyright an idea, either, so pick up some new paths of thought from others in your site's arena.
43. Don't stuff blog post titles with keywords. It's a form of keyword stuffing and spiders hate keyword stuffing. The ratio in headlines should be 40% keywords, 60% non-keywords.
42. Submit your URL to blog directories. There are "best of the web," and paid directories, like Yahoo, and free directories like the Open Directory project at www.dmoz.org. Every directory listing is another link to your site and another way visitors can find you. Just google them to find more.
41. Create blog categories that contain keywords, i.e., Ecommerce, SEO, Affiliates, etc. for use with a "site hosting" or "site design" blog.
40. Content quality counts. Research topics about which target readers want to learn. Write something new, useful and relevant. And don't forget to regularly update older posts. Things change fast on the web so last year's "next big thing" is this year's hackneyed cliché.
39. Vary topics, content length, relevancy and posting times. However, be consistent, as well. Keep blogging. It can take time for a blog to catch the notice of a search engine spider.
38. Get guest bloggers. Add links from their blogs and establish your site's link community. There are people within your web neighborhood with opinions and good information. Contact them to invite submissions to your blog and your site in general.
36. Call posters by name. If Bob M. from Athens, Georgia, posts to your blog, recognize his contribution with a "Thanks, Bob" at the end of your response.
35. Make friends with other bloggers in your commercial, business or NFP space. Ask to become a guest blogger, or seek endorsements from the "names" within your site sphere.
34. Send a personal note to posters. Not all bloggers have the time to do this but if you can send a personal email thank-you note to a poster, you've increased the chances of that poster becoming a member of your site community.
33. Encourage viral link building. Take a stand. Introduce the coming paradigm shift in web commerce, provoke controversy. It sells. Just ask Ann Coulter.
32. Ensure the blog is optimized for Technoratti. Claim your blog, set an avatar and pings, use tags where appropriate and be sure to ping various blog tracking sites.
31. Don't place ads on your blog, yet. If you feel you must (you're seeing nice PPC revenues), determine that your site's HTML is optimized to position those ads at the bottom of each blog page.
30. If your blog isn't pulling, have the code reproduced so it's as semantic, accessible and code-to-content optimized as possible. Also, hire a code expert to position content above ads or any other content in the site markup.
29. Ignore Alexa. A lot of new site owners rely on Alexa for site metrics but remember, Alexa is a popularity metric since only Alexa toolbar users contribute data – and that's a less-than-universal test population.
28. Build credibility. Publishing authorities on your site's topicality usually does the trick. Once blog credibility is established, identify trends, solve new problems and gradually expand the topic range of your blog.
27. Buy or build a screamin' hot blog design and submit it to design galleries. Hire a site/blog designer, or bring your vision to fruition. This enables your blog to appear five or six demographic iterations from your home site, expanding the site's reach outside the immediate site community. This creates new marketing channels fast.
26. Develop some friendly contacts on social media sites and participate in the community. Ask contacts to promote your blog content. Also ask for contributors. People love to express their opinions.
To learn even more about making the most of your site blog, check out Get Your Blog Google-Ranked In 30 Days Or Less, Part 2. You're going to love it.
Frederick Townes in the owner of W3 EDGE Web Design. W3 EDGE is a Boston web design company that specializes in search engine friendly design, Internet marketing and conversion optimization. Contact them today for a quotation and more information on how to make the most of your online presence.
The 10 Step Plan To Successful Email Marketing
Author: Matt Jackson When website owners and marketers talk about online marketing, they often refer to SEO and PPC. Email marketing can sometimes be overlooked despite being one of the most powerful methods to reach potential customers and to keep existing customers coming back for more. Perhaps a factor in this is that direct email campaigns are commonly associated with spam emails, but careful list management ensures that this need not be a problem. There are a number of stages to a successful email marketing campaign and by nailing as many as possible you can improve your results. The key to success, though, most commonly lies in the planning stage – if this is your first foray into email marketing then be prepared to treat it as a test run. The more direct email marketing campaigns you run, the more opportunity you have to optimize the process and improve your results. Here are ten of the most important steps to an effective email campaign. 1 – Determine Your Ultimate Goal This might sound obvious, but having a clear goal in mind will help to concentrate your efforts. There are many effective uses of an email marketing campaign from increasing brand awareness to pushing a new product or seasonal promotion. Each of these uses typically demands a different campaign with its own style and its own components. Increasing traffic to your website is not usually a bottom line target. The reason for increasing traffic to a website is normally to improve sales and increase profits. In the majority of cases, it is more desirable to attain greater sales through fewer visitors, than having a site awash with visitors but with a poor conversion rate. A prolonged and careful email marketing campaign will naturally help to improve brand awareness. Your readers will naturally remember your name and the products or services that you sell as they gain more and more exposure to your marketing emails. Similarly, as long as you produce relevant and useful emails, your potential customers will grow to trust you making it more likely that they will purchase from you now or in the future.
2 - Your Opt-In Email List
There are a couple of key aspects to this section. YOUR opt-in list will generate better results than the use of somebody else's list. If you have taken the time and put in the effort to grow your own list, then the members of that list will already have some degree of awareness for you, your products, and your website.
Developing your own list can take time and money. To get a head start it is possible to buy or rent email lists from others. In these cases it is particularly important to pay attention to the second important factor – the list MUST be an opt-in list. Every member of that list must have opted in to receive marketing communication from you and they MUST be given adequate opportunity to opt out of future communication.
Particular care needs to be taken with your list management techniques to ensure that you are not deemed as being spam. If you purchase lists or partial lists then members that opt out need to be recorded separately. If you purchase another list that includes the same name and you subsequently email that person without their express request to be re-included in your list then you face the very real possibility of being flagged as sending spam email.
3 - Establish Performance Tracking Techniques
Tracking the performance of any advertising campaign should be foremost in your mind. This is the only true method of determining its worth and is the only way you can optimize your advertising to generate the best possible results. Web analytics are an absolute must-have, and with the wealth of affordable and even free choices available today there is no reason not to have a good analytic package in place.
Tracking code can also be placed into an HTML email. You need to operate a degree of caution when implementing code into HTML emails, because it could lead to your email being blocked by over zealous spam filters. If you can use hyperlinks that include tracking code, and your analytics package includes referral data, then this can generate the majority of the information you require.
The more information you can gleam from an advertising campaign, the better. You will be using these results to fine tune future advertising campaigns, so too much information is better than too little. If in any doubt then consider using an email marketing management service to conduct the tracking on your behalf.
4 – Ready Your Website
Directing visitors to your website is only a portion of the battle ahead. Once a reader clicks through the links in your email, you then need to be confident that your web pages are optimized to complete the sale. Conversion rates need to be high on the pages you direct traffic to, but you also need to target the traffic to the most appropriate pages and vice versa.
Consider the anchor text, or link text, that you will be using in your email. If you are encouraging readers to learn more about a product then don't direct them straight to the purchase page unless that page includes the inferred information. Similarly, if you have pre-sold your readers so that they are poised and ready to buy, and your CTA (Call To Action) indicates that this is the next step then you can navigate readers through to a more direct sales page.
Introducing a new product or a new concept will usually take more information than you can provide in a single marketing email. If necessary, add a page or multiple complementary pages, to your website. Direct readers to these pages so that you can combine the use of your email marketing and your optimized and informative content to really persuade and hammer the message home hard.
5 – An Effective Subject Line
The subject line of your email is the first thing your readers will read, and you need to ensure that it won't be the last. Human spam filters can be just as difficult to avoid as software spam filters, even for genuine email. You should certainly avoid the use of typically spammy subject lines and opt for a more effective approach.
There are many ways to write an appealing subject line. A newsworthy subject line will often grab the attention but only works effectively in limited cases. Otherwise, try to evoke an emotive response from the reader. The strongest emotions include greed, love, and even hatred or controversy. With these latter two it is again important that you exercise appropriate caution otherwise you may alienate your readers against this and future marketing emails.
Intrigue and appeal work very well. An intriguing headline will draw your readers into the main body of the content and the subject line will have then done its job effectively. Never mislead in the subject of your email but do try to peak your reader's curiosity to the extent that they can't help but open the email and read it fully.
6 - Email Body Content
Finally we reach the main body content of the email. That it's taken to point six to do so is an indication of how important the planning and preparation stages are. The subject line has hopefully driven a good portion of your list to open the email, and those readers should be intrigued enough to want to read more.
Research shows that the more personalized the message, the more likely it will be to succeed. Start with a personalized greeting and use a friendly, even conversational tone, throughout the message. Inform readers of what they need to know but do so informally and in as friendly a manner as is possible by email.
The email absolutely has to be grammatically and factually correct, and must not contain typos. These types of errors can be an instant turn off for readers. Run a spell check. Twice. And then check it manually and have somebody else check it again for you. At the same time check the links and ensure that they do indeed direct to the proper pages.
Include a Call To Action, or CTA, rather than just a link. A CTA is a direction that points your visitors to perform your desired action. This could be to click a link, make a purchase, or even forward the email to friends. The CTA needs to be clearly defined an, obviously, as effective and accurate as possible.
7 - Hyperlinks To Your Site
The entire point (although probably not your ultimate goal) of your email is to get readers to click on links and visit your website. Include two or three links in the body of your email and make sure they are relevant without being too obvious. Lead readers to click the links rather than directly point it out and find something more effective than “click here” to use as your anchor text.
Two to three links is the ideal number. Too few links and your email won't prove effective at driving traffic, while too many links will detract from the actual content of the email. If your email is very short then offer two links, or offer three links within longer messages. Contextual links (that is, those that appear within the body of the email rather than at the end) are usually significantly more effective.
Check and double check that links work and direct to the correct page. Once you've done this, have somebody else check them too. The number of marketing emails that have failed because of broken or incorrect links is alarmingly high and this is not a trap that you want to fall into.
8 - Choose The Best Time To Send Your Email
The time you send your email can have a significant impact on its effectiveness. During the night, most people's emails fill up. In a lot of cases, this can mean that your reader will be faced with tens of emails in the morning, many of them rubbish. This leaves a very real chance that they will simply ignore or delete your email without noticing who sent it, what it is about, or whether they have any interest in reading it.
Consider your target market and when they are most likely to be sat in front of their email. Those with a global market may find this more difficult because of the time difference, but otherwise bear this in mind too. Not every website or marketing email is geared towards residents from the same country.
9 - Test Email
Initially, send a test email to yourself, friends, family, or colleagues. This is more to determine that it arrives looking as expected. Once you have done this and are happy with how your email looks, you should then move on to send a second test email to a small selection of your list. This gives you ample opportunity to make any last minutes changes or tweaks according to how this small test run performs.
You might even consider sending several tests out to different groups, if you have a large enough list. This enables you to test the subject line, content, and product price, by making alterations before each test run. Be sure to test the different components separately, though, so that you can determine what needs changing and what works well.
A test email also gives you chance to check that you are set up and able to track the results and any other information you want to track. A good email marketing service will do this by default, because the test email can prove to be one of the single most effective ways to improve the performance of a one-off email shot.
10 - Monitor, Optimize, And Start Again
Being careful not to send emails too frequently, you should send regular communication to your list. An unloved list will be more likely to unsubscribe and readers become most responsive after approximately seven items of communication from you. Monitor results, check bounce rates, and look for ways that your campaign could be improved.
Once you've found the best ways to improve a campaign make the improvements and begin the procedure again from the beginning. This process of monitoring, optimizing, and starting again will help to increase exposure, improve brand awareness, and generally improve results and profit levels.
Why Your List Is So Important
A list can last you a lifetime and it is possible to continue selling to the same list members over and over again. In fact, once a list member purchases from you, and presuming that everything goes smoothly during and after the sale, they will be more inclined to purchase from you in the future. You will have won their trust, gained their favor, and they can be relied upon to help you with extra sales in the future.
Look after your list and your list will look after your profits.
