DMA Annual Conference — New Orleans, LA
As consumers rely more heavily on spam filters, the e-mail marketer’s dilemma is nearing a breaking point. Soon only 50% of your consumers will receive your e-mails! What are the major factors influencing your own deliverability challenges? This session will reveal ways to assess your vendors’ network reputation, best practices for designing spam filter-friendly e-mails, how to get whitelisted with major ISPs, and where e-mail marketers go from here.
Topics include:
- Understanding whitelisting criteria for ISPs such as AOL and Yahoo!
- Secrets to monitoring your own spam record — and your e-mail vendor’s
- Tactics for making your e-mails filter-friendly while complying with the law
Filed under: Email Marketing Seminars
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Auckland Chamber of Commerce e-Nabling Business — Auckland, New Zealand
A workshop featuring practical tips and solutions for integrating the latest email marketing and search engine optimization technologies into your marketing mix.
Filed under: Email Marketing Seminars SEO
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There’s a brand new meta search engine on the block called Jux2. Its premise is to find the overlap between the top 10 results across two major search engines. So far I’m really impressed with it. It even has a toolbar for Mozilla FireFox.
Jux2 conducted some tests to determine just how much overlap there is in the top search results on Google versus Yahoo! The results of their tests are very interesting. Such as:
- Analysis of Google and Yahoo! search results on the 500 most popular search terms found that, on average, Google and Yahoo! shared only 3.8 of their top 10 results. Furthermore, 30% of the search terms had 2 or fewer overlapping terms, and only 17% had 6 or more overlapping results among the top 10.
- The overlapping set of top 10 results between Google and Ask Jeeves was even smaller: 3.4 out of 10. And between Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, smaller yet: 3.1 out of 10.
- Analysis of 91 random searches on Google and Yahoo! found that the two engines share only 23% of their top 100 results. Furthermore, only 4.8 of Google’s top 10 results even made Yahoo’s top 100. And only 5.4 of Yahoo’s top 10 made Google’s top 100.
For me, Jux2’s findings were a good reminder that the algorithms of the major search engines are markedly different, more so than one might imagine. So a metasearch engine that compares and contrasts two partially overlapping sets of search results makes a lot of sense. I think I’ll try Jux2 for a while and report back on my experiences.
Filed under: Blogs SEO
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Today I had the pleasure to hear web content guru Gerry McGovern speak at a full-day workshop in Wellington, New Zealand. He’s got to be one of the very best speakers I’ve ever heard! His course material, his sense of humor, his thought-provoking insights, and especially his Irish accent — had everyone in the audience mesmerized. Here’s a sampling of the day’s take-aways:
- Action vs. reaction: If a site visitor’s action results in a reaction from your web site that has a wait time exceeding that of the action, the visitor will become frustrated. That frustration will build as more . For example, clicking on the File menu tab only takes a second, so the time it takes for the menubar to appear underneath should take no more than a second.
- 80/20 rule of content: For many sites, less than 20% of the site content accounts for over 80% of the pageviews. With Microsoft.com it was 1% of their content accounted for 99% of the pageviews. In fact, 35% of their pages had never been viewed! That’s well over a million pages of content that people at Microsoft worked hard to write ? for nothing. Focus your efforts on the copy that will be read, not on the copy that won’t.
- Columns: Readers use their peripheral vision to keep track of the beginning of the next line down while they are reading across a line. So with text that has a long linewidth, it becomes difficult to read. Gerry recommends a three column format, with 20% or so of the width going to the first column (use this column for navigation), 60% or so dedicated to the middle column, and another 20% or so for the right hand column.
- Call for action: Always end your pages with a clear action for the reader to take. Never leave the reader hanging, wondering what to do next. The center column at the end of the body copy is a critical piece of real estate for these calls for action.
- Links in copy: According to Gerry, links in the middle of body copy distracts the readers making it difficult for them to read the paragraph, and it connotes “hey, click on me… the rest of this text is really boring!” Instead of embedding links within the body copy, consider using the right hand column for the related links. If there are important links there that take the reader to the “next step,” also repeat them at underneath the body copy in the center column.
- Simplicity: Einstein purportedly was quoted as saying “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Apply this idea to your web copy. Keep your copy as short and simple as possible. People tend not to read long copy on the web. With a 300 word page, 50% will read it to the end; 500 words, 20%; 1000 words, 5%. Gerry recommends headings of 4 to 8 words, summaries of 30 to 50 words, sentences of 15 to 20 words, and paragraphs of 40 to 70 words.
- “Kill your darlings”: William Faulkner once said this. If there’s a particular expression or way of saying something that you’re particularly fond of, delete it from your copy, because you’re probably overusing it.
Gerry covered so much more than this, but it would take a book to cover it all. Oh, wait a minute… there is a book covering it all. Buy Gerry’s book, Content Critical.
Filed under: Blogs Copywriting Keyword Research Usability
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Many ecommerce sites have session IDs or user IDs in the URL of their pages. This tends to cause either the pages to not get indexed by search engines like Google, or to cause the pages to get included many times over and over, clogging up the index with duplicates (this phenonemon is called a “spider trap”). Furthermore, having all these duplicates in the index causes the site’s importance score, known as PageRank, to be spread out across all these duplicates (this phenonemon is called “PageRank dilution”).
Ironically, Googlebot regularly gets caught in a spider trap while spidering one of its own sites - the Google Store (where they sell branded caps, shirts, umbrellas, etc.). The URLs of the store are not very search engine friendly: they and are overly complex, and include session IDs. This has resulted in 3,440 duplicate copies of the Accessories page and 3,420 copies of the Office page, for example.
If you have a dynamic, database-driven website and you want to avoid your own site becoming a spider trap, you’ll need to keep your URLs simple. Try to avoid having any ?, &, or = characters in the URLs. And try to keep the number of “parameters” to a minimum. With URLs and search engine friendliness, less is more.
Filed under: Blogs Ecommerce SEO
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WCCE Annual Winter Conference — Madison, WI
Building a trusting relationship with your Web site visitors starts with the common sense approach known as “permission marketing.” The idea behind permission marketing is to get the customer or prospect to volunteer to receive your email newsletters and special offers. This is also known as opt-in. These “hand-raisers” are a lot more likely to not only tolerate receiving your emails, but also to respond favorably to them.
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American Marketing Association webcast series — online
E-mail marketing is about to undergo a massive transformation due to both new California anti-spam legislation, which takes effect January 1st, and pending Nationwide legislation. The risks of non-compliance are significant - from $1,000 per e-mail up to $1 million per incident. You need to be prepared.
What you may not realize is that these changes also offer opportunities to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Join Internet Marketing Expert Brian Klais, GravityMail’s Vice President of e-Business Services for an important and informative presentation covering:
- A laymen’s overview of the new spam laws in both California and Nationwide
- Important implications for marketers
- Strategies for complying and thriving in this new legal environment
Filed under: Email Marketing Seminars
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“Stephan Spencer has been a steadfast supporter of our work, particularly in the initial phases. He provided, through Netconcepts, our website facility gratis and was always available for consulting on matters of communication website improvement. I consider his technical knowledge is of the highest level in the field.”
