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Above The Fold in Email Marketing

Email Marketing is the new buzz word within the online marketing companies. Email is the means to reach numerous subscribers with multiple great messages and promotions. A common overlooked aspect of email optimization is the Preview Window. The preview window refers to the portion of your Outlook that displays your email once you click on the email. As you know, emails extend beyond the preview window causing you to scroll to have to read it. Well, similar to Search Engine Optimization, in email optimization we try to place great content “Above The Fold” to gain the readers interest.

Here are some elements to place above the fold:

• Tagline
• Name of Publication
• Name of Company/Logo
• Headlines
• Link to Website
• Date
• Volume or Issue #

Avoid placing long stories, third party advertising or too much advertising for your products Above the Fold.

Addition To Sitemap Protocol

There has finally been an enhancement to the standardized sitemap protocol developed by Google, Yahoo and MSN – Autodiscovery. Autodiscovery gives siteowners the ability to easily share their sitemaps with all search engines at once, avoiding the overhead of manually submitting them to each search engine.

The protocol works as follows. Add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap:

This is an important addition, yet not the end all be all for sitemaps. I know MSN had stated they have not yet planned on viewing this protocol but will in the future.

Tags: Google, MSN, sitemaps, Yahoo

Advice From SEO Allstars

With the help of numerous SEO gurus, including Danny Sullivan, Eric Ward and Rand Fishkin, there is a Search Engine Ranking Factors List. It’s hard to criticize anything that these SEO’s have to say since the many of them introduced the world to SEO. Without further ado, here are the Top 10 Positive Factors:

• Keyword Use in Title Tag
• Global Link Popularity of Site
• Anchor Text of Inbound Link
• Link Popularity within Site’s Internal Link Structure
• Age of Site
• Topical Relevance of Inbound Links To Site
• Link Popularity of Site In Topical Community
• Keyword Use in Body Text
• Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
• Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

My only addition to these factors is having the keyword in the domain name. I believe link development is necessary to get your site out of the ‘sandbox’, but once it’s out, having the keyword in the domain name is highly effective. Now the Top 5 Negative Factors:

• Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
• Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
• External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
• Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
• Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links

So if your site has ANY of the negative factors, you should look into changing it, or contact us and we can discuss it further.

The Future Importance of SEO

Well, SEO has been and most likely will always be seen as black magic. But the importance in this industry is growing with each and every day. From large scale businesses to Mom and Pop shops, SEO will benefit your website more than you could imagine. It will bring you traffic, brand your company, and even give you reputation. This cartoon just reminds me of how important Search Engine Optimization is in our everyday lives, and my instinct is that SEO will play a larger role in my child’s life!

Protect Your Web Assets

Protecting your website is as essential to SEO as developing an SEO strategy. One simple mishap could easily counteract all your hard work. So today I’m going to list a few things you can do to protect your online assets.

1. Password Protect Your Website Logs To Avoid Referrer Spam
2. 301 Re-direct Non-www To www Or Vice Versa
3. Don’t Give 200 Code For 404 Error
4. Don’t Give 200 Code For Wildcard Subdomains
5. Write Proper Code – Prevent SQL Injections
6. Avoid 302 Hijacking By Removing Unnecessary 302 Re-directs

Pay Per Action, Finally!

Pay per action? Google finally discovered their click fraud techniques concerning cost-per-click (CPC) were costing them more in lawsuits then anything else.

Here’s a little background for those who have no idea what CPC is. Google has placed sponsored links on their own webpages as well as offer webmasters an opportunity to make money by placing advertisements on the webmasters’ sites. Advertisers pay Google a fee when someone clicks their ad, either on a Google page or another webmasters page. So as you can see advertisers only get customers who clicked their link (therefore the web surfer MUST be qualified)…WRONG. People abused this system, and its easy to see how simple click fraud initially was. Just find your competitor’s pay-per-click advertisement and click it all day to cost them money.

So a great way to combat this fraud is only paying the host of your advertisement when the customer purchases a product or signs up on your site. That’s the basis behind Google’s new PPA advertising product. PPA requires an additional level of complexity in the ad network as well. Previously, Google delivered a user to a website, and sent a bill for the click. Now, Google needs to verify that an “actionâ€? has occurred by receiving confirmation back from the advertiser.

This is great news for the small businesses who can not afford to deal with click fraud. Kudos Google!

Tags: pay per click, ppc

Link Development Interview With The Best

Here’s a great interview with 4 of the best in link development; Rand Fishkin, Eric Ward, Todd Malicoat, and Roger Montti. The questions ask by Rae Hoffman included:

1. What are the factors you would take into account before buying a link from a directly contacted site (not a link broker or seller)?
2. In sectors where links are particularly tough to come by (retail, B2B in boring industries, etc.), what are content tactics you’ve taken to appeal to relevant sites in those industries (specific examples would rock)?
3. What is the current climate with paid links, and how can I navigate the paid links landscape so that I come out smelling like a rose on the other side?
4. Automating the link acquisition process: How far do you recommend going with it? What are the benefits and pitfalls of automation?
5. Name 5 specific techniques (queries, tools, process, or starting points) you would use to get links for a statewide real estate agent.
6. What are the top 3 over-rated and under-rated criteria for determining how valuable an individual link will potentially be to your site’s search engine rankings?
7. If you were in control of the search engine algorithm at Google, what are the top three changes you would make specific to how Google values/counts links?
8. What’s the most common mistake you see people making in their link building activities?
9. How do you think that nofollow links and redirected links are treated by the various search engines and do you see any value in obtaining these types of links?
10. So many people complain about competitors who are ranking solely on reciprocal links. Do you believe reciprocal links still works as a complete strategy or do you believe age, trust and grandfathering (for lack of a better word) are taken into account? How important do you feel age is to a link?