Web Moves Blog

The Failure Of The SEO System – Part 2
I frequent a number of search engine optimization forums on a daily basis and the one thing I see more of than anything else are optimizers who will quickly tell you that this method is evil, or that method is spam, or this other method is cross-linking. The search engines each have their own policy pertaining to these methods, and most are in the form of ‘guidelines’. Note the emphasis on the word guidelines, as I want to make it clear what they really are.

A guideline is not a hard and fast rule, it is there to set a basis only. Some engines say to ‘avoid’ this method or that one, but they do not come right out and say not to use it at all. This is because that while the method is abused by some, it has it’s value by legitimate relevant usage. The key word here is relevancy. The search engine care more about the relevancy of their listings than anything else. They want the surfer to find exactly what it is he or she searched for. That is the bottom line. The rest is semantics.

The search engines do not generally penalize you for using what some search engine optimizers will tell you is an evil method, besides actual pure spam of course, if you are using it to promote relevant search results.

Some Basic Examples
Some optimizers will tell you that you should not link to a restaurant web site from a retail hardware web site, quoting the phrase of, it is not relevant to your web site. However this is not the type of relevancy the search engines care about. The only relevancy that affects their listings is that the link text (anchor text) is relevant to the web site the link points to. These optimizers neglect to tell you that.

Some optimizers will tell you that cross-linking your web sites is the devil’s work at play. Again, the search engines only concern is with relevancy. As long as you maintain relevancy in your links, I have yet to see bans or penalization for those reasons. When it does happen, it is generally due to a competitor being able to write a very good report to the search engine and usually includes other factors that contribute. There are forums that share email templates for reporting competitors to the search engines in a well written, professional sounding manner with it’s members. The funny part is these forums preach ‘ethical’ SEO.

In Summary
It is not the methods that are bad. It is the way some people use those methods that makes them bad. But alas, this is not what too many misguided people preach. Be careful who you listen to. It is very easy to be pushed the wrong way by people whose only wish is to impose their morals and thoughts into your thinking.

Author Bio:
Aaron Turpen is the proprietor of Aaronz WebWorkz, a full-service online company catering to small and home-based businesses. Aaronz WebWorkz offers a wide variety of services including Web development, newsletter publishing, consultation, and more. http://www.AaronzWebWorkz.com

Web Strategy For Success
Building a successful web strategy is both an art and a science. To simplify the process, we break it down into five steps. You need to attract the right visitors to your site, engage their interest, build their trust, lead them to take action and measure the results.

Building a successful web strategy is both an art and a science. To simplify the process, we break it down into five steps. You need to attract the right visitors to your site, engage their interest, build their trust, lead them to take action and measure the results.

1. Get the right people to your site. If you’re not attracting the right visitors you’re not building your business. Rather than relying on any one method, consider a variety of techniques to bring targeted traffic to your site including:

– Search Engine optimization
– Pay-per-click campaigns
– Email marketing and email newsletters
– Links to related, non-competitive businesses
– Real-world promotions, advertisements and PR

2. Establish your credibility.
Just as you would in the real world sales environment, start to build rapport with your visitors as soon as they arrive. Establish your credibility. Show that your company understands their needs and offers the products and services to meet them.

Your site must have a professional look and feel that reflects your company and marketplace. The copy should speak to your visitors in an appropriate “voice” and emphasize the benefits– “What’s in it for me?”

3. Give your visitors what they need.
Provide appropriate information and options at the right time. How do people make the decision to buy your product or service? As much as possible, your site should support the personal and psychological variables of your potential clients. Offer alternatives for those who:

– already know what they want
– have an idea of what they want, but need more info
– are browsing and need direction

4. Motivate them to take action: conversion rates.
This is what it’s all about. Conversion is the process in which you persuade visitors to take the action you want them to take: signup for a newsletter, submit a form, or make a purchase. How can you improve your conversion rate?

Make the action steps obvious in your copy– its color, style, and position on the page. Minimize elements that detract from the action step, and provide reassurance with your privacy policy, guarantee, and testimonials. You might even consider a FLASH demo or web audio to guide visitors through the conversion process.

5. Measure the results.
With web analytical tools you can learn what’s working and what’s not. When you’ve identified a problem area, make revisions or updates– but be methodical. Change only one thing at a time so you can figure out if it actually helps.

Author Bio:
Barry Harrison is the author of “REDiTIPS” eMarketing Newsletter and a partner in Resolve Digital, Web Strategy for the Real World.

Introduction
Did you realize there are only three types of online promotion?… This statement may seem odd and even untrue in your mind, but I am speaking in more general terms than you might be thinking.

Let me explain.

The three types of promotion are Junk, Active and Passive promotions.

Junk promotions are money pits
Junk promotions are those that seem to produce results, but by their very nature are really only illusionary promotions.

For example, let me begin with FFA (Free For All) pages. You might find yourself subscribing to a submission program that tricks you into believing you are submitting your links to tens of thousands search engines.

According to the Open Directory website, they have only approved 1705 search engines and directories for inclusion in their database (http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/).

I like using the DMOZ directory as an example because submitted links are tested by human beings with integrity, for the honesty used in site description. Search Engine Watch and other search watchers tend to show fewer than these 1705 engines, primarily because a lot of the engines provide very little value.

Yes, you can submit your URL to a FFA page, but FFA�s usually only permit 100 or 1000 links on their page at any one time. So, if ten thousand people are submitting a link to an FFA page on a daily basis, then the average life of your link is between seven minutes and 144 minutes. I suspect the actual number of submitters is much higher and the results are much worse. Given that few people surf FFA pages, the chances of your submission being of any real value is practically nill!

Most of the people telling you that you can submit your site to tens of thousands of search engines are truly only submitting your site to FFA pages! Beware of the false promises.

Another junk promotion method is Safe Lists. A safe list is a mailing group that is signed up to be received by people who want to submit their own ads. Now, most safe lists have thousands of subscribers who are able to submit their ads daily or weekly. The person signed up to receive the list will receive anywhere from twenty to 140+ messages a day from the list. These messages will be received by people only interested in promoting their own thing who do not have the right motivation to open, let alone read Your Advertising. As a result, thousands of messages go out daily or weekly that will never be seen by anyone but the sender of the ad. Where is the value in that? There is none.

Active promotions
Active promotions are the type that require you to go out on a daily basis or a weekly basis and put out your advertisements. With active promotions, you will either place your advertising or you will not sell your products or services. Your choice is simple — work or starve.

Examples of active promotions include Pay Per Click Search Engines (PPCSE�s), Direct Email, Ezine Advertising, Solo Ezine Ads, Newsletter Publishing, Ezine Ad Swaps, Classified Ads, Auctions, Site Sponsorship and Banner Ads.

Some people are able to utilize these methods very productively, while others are destined to drop their money into the bottomless pit of failed Internet promotions.

Passive promotions
Passive promotions are those promotions that can continue to provide results for you long after you have invested the work to make them available to the Internet community.

Examples of passive promotions include: Link Exchanges, Articles, Ebooks, Content Exchanges and Writing Testimonials for others.

Let�s look at articles as a solid example of my point.

You are reading an article that I have written to promote my own business. This article is timeless and therefore could have been written five years ago and still have been as valuable as it is today.

Due to the fact that the article is timeless, it can and will be placed in newsletters/ezines and their accompanying online archives, on websites and in ebooks for many more years to come.

As a result, this article will continue to serve me well beyond the time in which I wrote it and submitted it to publishers and webmasters for public consumption and publication.

This is the best example I can give you of an excellent passive promotional method.

Avoid the money pits
Many try and even fewer succeed to conquer the Internet and to produce their dreams of online wealth.

My hope is that you will be one of the people who conquer the challenges before you and to make a nice living while working online. It will take drive, determination, study plus trial and error, but you can make it work for you.

Please continue to educate yourself so that you can avoid the money pits – instead, strive to find the money barrels. It can be done. I am living proof.

Author Bio:
Stone Evans owns the Home Business Resource Directory where you can find everything you`ll ever need to start, run and grow a home based business at: http://www.Home-Business.com

Why MSN Won’t Buy AOL
You may have seen the online headlines this week “MSN in talks with AOL execs to buy AOL from Time/Warner.” At first glance you may think “wow that would make MSN pretty powerful.” After all, while AOL’s customer base is shrinking, it is still substantial. MSN’s reach is expanding, especially as the portal continues to grow in popularity. By merging these two client bases, Microsoft would have an impressive number of paying portal customers. Whether one portal was dropped in favor of the other would remain to be seen, but they could end up with about  of the world’s internet portal customers.

So you are probably wondering: why won’t this happen? One word: Competition.

Microsoft has already faced a barrage of anti-trust lawsuits filed by various US and global governments citing its apparent monopoly on the computer software/operating system market. In fact, in the most recent ruling against them by the EU, the company was fined many hundreds of millions of dollars for stifling competition in the European Union. Or course, Microsoft will appeal and likely settle out of court for an undisclosed amount of money, all the time preaching their innocence.

But that stifling of competition is why Microsoft will not buy AOL. In fact, they likely can not buy AOL because of the assets the company has. If you look at it in these terms you begin to understand.

Let’s start with browsers. AOL owns Netscape. Sure, it isn’t much of a player anymore, but for Microsoft to buy this company, they could effectively put Netscape out of business. Not that Microsoft didn’t already do that with the settlement they reached last year with AOL.

There is also ICQ and AIM, both instant messenger platforms are owned by AOL. MSN could shut both down with the purchase. AOL also owns Mapquest.com, a competitor to Microsoft Mappoint and they own Winamp.com, which is a direct competitor to Windows Media player.

There are also a few others, like MovieFone.com, CompuServe and the ODP (DMOZ.org) which aren’t necessarily direct competitors to MSN or Microsoft, but would be a loss for the internet if Microsoft purchased them.

So when you consider that AOL is a direct competitor of Microsoft and/or MSN in more than a dozen different markets, you can see that even if they did make an offer, it’s highly unlikely that such a merger would be approved by the various regulatory boards located on American soil. Not to mention the various world governments and other organizations which would lose sleep over such a merger. This is why I don’t think Microsoft could make a play for AOL.

But consider this option. What if (and this is probably more of a long stretch than an MSN/AOL merger) Microsoft and Google formed a temporary alliance and bought AOL and its assets and divided them among themselves. Google could get control of those properties which they don’t already compete in (such as AIM or ICQ, Mapquest and Winamp) while Microsoft could get the portal and its customers.

This scenario is probably more of a stretch than the one where Microsoft buys AOL. But as we’ve found in the past, with search and search engines you just never know.

Author Bio:
Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning Specialists

Failure of the SEO system
I see people daily preaching about how web site owners need to pay upwards of $7,500.00 or more for a marketing consultant who also practices search engine optimization. The reason given for this is that any SEO can get you top rankings, but that will not help you sell your products. They preach that searchers have no trust, they say that getting a #1 position for your relevant keywords will only bring visitors, not sales.

To an extent this is true. But the fact is, this is said so you will pay the fee they ask. They know their service, they know their prospect’s mindset, and they do a fine job of turning you into a new customer.

You know your products or services better than they possibly could. You know your customers better than they ever could. This stands true of any industry or business model. Make that work for you!

Instead of shelling out the dinero, why not sit down and lay out the groundwork for a plan of action based on what you know about your business and it’s customers. What do they want to see, how much detail do they want to see, and above all, what does it take to close the sale.

Once you know all of this, the rest is merely laying it all out on the web site according to your plan. It sounds easy, and it really is not, it takes hard work on your part. But you are not relying on someone who claims that they will research your business and be expert enough in a matter of days to sell your product line.

Do not fall for the hype
Once you have a web site that you are confident will convert searchers into sales, it is time to make sure you have searchers finding your web site. These same marketing consultants will tell you that you need them for this also. They will tell you that you need to concentrate on the lesser search terms that will bring in lesser amounts of traffic. They will tell you that this method will bring you better quality traffic because it targets the visitor better. Bull! The fact is these marketers know that they do not have the ability or the means to target the more competitive search terms and keywords. They use this method so that they can show you good results using the lesser keywords, to keep you ignorant and happy in your newfound traffic. I say ignorant, because they will not tell you that you could in fact have twice to three times the targeted traffic if you used someone who was a true professional.

Professionalism
There are different definitions of a marketing professional, but for this purpose we are talking about search engine optimization professionals. There are many who call themselves professionals, but who will not go after the competitive keywords and phrases. They are the ones who will tell you it is better to be happy with less traffic, and thus, less sales. They do not practice search engine optimization, because they do not know how, or are not willing to do that much work. The true SEO will make sure that you get the absolute most that you possibly can for your money spent.

There are some well published so called professional SEO’s out there that are excellent at promoting themselves. They can make you think their way is God’s way with an almost religious zeal and grand speeches about what is ‘ethical’.

In summary, watch out for self hype, do not think you have to pay someone $7,500.00 or more to get less than the best rankings, and do some research on the marketer you choose to use. Google searches are often an excellent way of seeing the real story behind marketers.

Author: William Cross

What Is RSS?
By now you have probably heard lots of talk about RSS news feeds or XML news feeds. In fact, if you look at our home page you will see that we offer a link to our own XML news feed. So you’ve probably been wondering – what the heck is an RSS news feed?

Quoting the official RSS v1.0 specification: “RDF Site Summary (RSS) is a lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format.” And in case you are wondering, RDF is short for “Resource Description Framework – a metadata standard.”

So what does this mean? Well, take a look at our XML feed. If you open it in your browser, it doesn’t make much sense. Unless you have a browser capable of displaying RSS you won’t see too much that is interesting. But, if you have a program which can display the feed, it does look much better.

Take a look at a flash application I found which displays XML properly. On our site, I built a sample page which displays the feed. What this handy little application does is display the feed according to the parameters I specify. I tell it how many items of the feed to display, as well as whether to display the title and description, or just the title. Depending on the application which you use to display the feed, you can control many other elements including the font size and color, whether to put boxes around the text, even what color the boxes should be.

So by now you are probably asking yourself “that’s kinda cool, but why would I want to do that?”

Well there could be many reasons. Primarily it is a way to increase traffic to your site. Since it can be difficult to spread your message, consider how much easier it is if someone else displays your feed on their site? Now you can spread your message more effectively by letting other sites display the feed for you. Many sites (like Yahoo!) offer their users the ability to display RSS feeds on their home page. On my Yahoo! home page, I have a couple RSS feeds linked, so that I can see what’s new on other sites.

There are also sites out there to which you can request that your feed be added to their database of feeds. That way you can make your feed available to millions of other web users who may be looking for information on topics on which you are an expert. One such site is called Syndic8. Here you can find thousands of feeds. Imagine getting your site listed here and having others freely display links to your site via the feed.

Also, search engines are getting into indexing feeds. Yahoo! for example has indexed the feed from searchengineposition. Now when we are found for our keywords, our XML is also listed in the results, increasing the chances of other sites using our feed as a source of information on their site. Some applications also have the ability to display XML feeds. Microsoft Office 2003 for example can import an XML feed into Excel.

And maintaining the feed is quite easy. I simply open it up in notepad and edit it whenever a new article is posted. It takes me about 30 seconds to update it, and it is instantly updated on any site displaying our feed. And since we control the output of that feed (because it resides on our site) we don’t have to worry about anyone changing it to suit their needs. Sure they can change the number of items displayed but they can’t change the wording in the feed. That’s the beauty of this format. You can control what is seen. The more compelling your articles (or whatever you are supplying via the feed), the more likely that someone will click on one of your links. Maybe you are starting to see why this could potentially be a good source of qualified traffic?

It takes a little getting used to the format of an XML feed – there are very specific rules one must follow to ensure that the feed is in the proper format – but once you get used to it the update process is very smooth. There are also free tools out to help you validate your feed to ensure it will work properly. Feedvalidator.org is one I use occasionally if our feed doesn’t display properly.

So if you have ever wondered about XML or RSS feeds or were considering employing them on your site, I hope I have provided you with some more information to help you make the decision.

Author Bio:
Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning Specialists

Strategies For Finding Topics To Write About
What possibly could I have to write about? I never was good at it anyway. It doesn’t matter how hard I try, I just sit and stare and stare at a blank screen.

Sound familiar? Don’t worry. We all have gone through this. It happens to me periodically. If you experience this at any point, it is a good signal that you need a change in creative direction. Here are a few tips to help you find topics to write about and get your creative juices flowing.

I personally like to write with pen and paper. For one, I can take it anywhere. Well, o.k. with a laptop you can take it almost where ever you wish as well. But, when the battery is gone and there is not a single electrical outlet in sight, I will still be sitting there writing until I get my fill.

You periodically need to change your scenery. This always helps me. If I am at a block, I get up, take pen and paper and head out of the house. I frequent outdoor cafes when I can. The openness and fresh air helps me think. You can also just try a different part of your house.

I try to at least keep a notebook, or sticky notes somewhere within reach at every point in the day. Why? Ideas usually come to me when I am not at my desk. One of the best ways I have developed to find new topics is to spend what I call “routine task time” thinking about recent articles I have read. Routine task time is the time you spend washing dishes, cleaning, driving home(of course pay attention to the road here as well!), etc. Make use of this time if you can.

Write down any idea that comes to mind. Don’t worry about whether is seems reasonable at the moment. You will edit and refine later if need be. More than likely you will throw away half of the ideas you come up with. You’ll find however that these ideas bring out other topics that you may never have thought about.

Go to the web. I can’t stress this enough. Need new topics? See what other people are writing about. Try www.CNet.com, or any other internet / technology or business website to find the new hot topics. Are you writing about hobbies? Check out the top hobby sites. Don’t hesitate to use the internet and what others are doing to keep your writing up to par.

Writing articles for your own E-Zine or to be published elsewhere for advertising is the most powerful resource for promoting your online business. Practice it, develop it, prune it. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed. This is the most prized resource that you can pull from to succeed online.

Author Bio:
Dan J. Fry is an independent researcher and owner of e-Kinetic.com, a site devoted to providing resources for small budget home businesses. He has a PhD in Physics, two daughters and two cats. Subscribe to his free E-Zine on home business resources at e-kinetic@GetResponse.com or by visiting his site at http://www.e-kinetic.com. He can be reached at mailto:comp@e-kinetic.com.

Been Banned By Yahoo?
It is interesting to watch the varied reactions to the new Yahoo! search. As a spectator I can sit back and take it all in and form my own opinions. I can then apply my ideas to my clients and watch them succeed. One such topic of interest of late is Yahoo!’s policy on spam in the index.

To quote what Yahoo! considers unwanted:

“Some, but not all, examples of the more common types of pages that Yahoo! does not want included:

• Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
• Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page
• Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
• Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
• Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value
• Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
• The use of text that is hidden from the user
• Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
• Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity
• Pages built primarily for the search engines
• Misuse of competitor names
• Multiple sites offering the same content
• Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
• Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience
• Yahoo!’s Site Guidelines are designed to ensure that poor-quality pages do not degrade the user experience in any way.”

As you can see, there is a lot of grey area here. While most points are pretty straight forward, some like “Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value” could include dynamically generated database driven pages (like a storefront or e-commerce site) while “Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity” could include sites which use legitimate link building strategies to help their rankings.

So what do you do? How do you know if your site falls into these categories? In other words, how do you determine if your site may be considered spam?

I would suggest taking a critical look at your site. Does it follow the guidelines listed in their help section on pages which Yahoo! does want included in its index? For example, are they original? Built for humans primarily? Contain useful information? These are all questions you need to keep in the back of your mind as you assess your site.

If you have concerns that perhaps you could be violating some of these rules, perhaps you need to look at what is needed to ensure you are in full compliance with Yahoo!’s recommendations. I would strongly suggest you do this review. If you do get removed from the index because of the spam policy it could be very difficult to get re-indexed according to Yahoo!’s own spam police.

So should you convert your dynamic site to static?
The simple answer is no. There is no need to scrap that content management system you’ve likely spent months and years developing. Perhaps simply adding more useful content to some of the pages is all that is needed. By following Yahoo!’s own rules you should be able to reconstruct some of your pages to ensure they don’t get banned.

Does this mean you should quit doing link building or remove your links page?
I don’t think you should discontinue link building, but if you are doing reciprocal linking, take a look at the site to which you are linking as well as those sites linking to you. You may need to reassess the quality of your link partners using the same tests you put your own site through.

With regards to your link partners, again, assess them for quality. Are they in related industries? Are they worthy of linking to? That is, do they also follow the Yahoo! guidelines? If not then perhaps you will want to consider temporarily removing their links from your site. You may even go so far as to contact them and suggest they perform their own analysis of their site based on the new Yahoo! rules.

So what if you think you have already been removed for this reason?
There is an email address (webmasterworldfeedback AT yahoo DOT com) to which you can send a request for review. This is only a temporary fix, as they plan on implementing a full review process in the coming months.

Also keep in mind that Yahoo! search is still in its infancy. As time goes on it will get better. Perhaps their filters are over filtering sites which are legitimate, but it should get better with time. They can’t anger too many people early on, as they are trying to build a competitive search engine. If they start alienating webmasters or legitimate site owners they risk losing search customers to other engines such as Google or MSN.

Author Bio:
Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning Specialists

Search Engine Advertising & Keyword Matching
Search engines seem to be all the rage these days. Internet users want easy accessibility to various sites for shopping, entertainment, business, etc. And the best way to do this is with the help of search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Overture.

So, how do advertisers get their listings on these ever-popular sites? Google and Overture, the two major players in search engine marketing, offer two ways–organic (natural) or paid listings. We’re going to explore the latter and how you can make it work for you, particularly with respect to keyword match types.

Google Match Types
Google AdWords is Google’s own advertising system, allowing advertisers to “create your own ads, choose keywords to tell us where to show your ads and pay only when someone clicks on them,” boasts its site. It is basically a way to purchase Google’s search engine keywords.

In order to get users to see your Google ad placement, you must first determine what keywords you will apply in relevance to your ad. Google has four different keyword matching options, each with their own stipulations as to how you can target different sets of users. General keywords generate the most impressions but often result in fewer clicks. On the other hand, by changing your matching options you can better target your ads. The options are as follows:

Broad Match: The most basic and common option, you include your keyword/keyword phrase (usually best to go with a phrase because users generally search for 2-3 words) in your keyword list. Say you list tennis shoes…your ads will appear when a user searches for the words tennis and shoes in any order. Furthermore, your ad will appear when a user searches for plural terms or similar variations.

Phrase Match: When you enter a keyword in quotation marks like “shower curtains” your ad will show when a user looks for this exact term in this order. It can also be viewed when someone does a search for green shower curtains, but not for curtains for shower. Phrase matching is obviously more targeted than broad match and is more flexible than exact match, the next option.

Exact Match: This is the most targeted option of the four. You surround your keyword in brackets-[jewelry cleaner]-and subsequently your ad will only show when a user searches for jewelry cleaner, in this order and without any other terms. Undoubtedly, this is extremely targeted. You are likely to receive more clicks than impressions.

Negative Keyword: Perhaps you sell dog collars of all colors–except green. You can set your keyword for dog collars but add the word green as your negative keyword. In other words, simply type in -green. If someone wants a green dog collar, he/she will not see your ad.

Overture Match Types
Search engine marketers should note that while Google and Overture offer similar services, they apply different terms. So, be conscious of this fact when distinguishing between the different options.

Overture allows you to bid differently for each match type. There are currently three of these options, but Overture also allows for negative keywords, like Google.

Standard Match: This is the equivalent of Google’s broad match option. If your bidded search term is diamond ring your ad will appear when someone types that exact phrase, singular/plural variations of the words, or misspells any word/s.

Phrase Match: Overture will preserve your search term in its exact order but will also allow for other terms to be included in the query, as well. E.G.- The bidded search term is golf shoes. If a user enters “golf shoes in size 10” your listing will show.

Broad Match: True to form, your listing will appear when your search term is used in the broadest form. For example, if a user types in “car used in James Bond movie” and your term is used car…your listing will appear.

Regional Targeting
It is important to note that there are also regional targeting options for advertisers. Google recently implemented this feature and it is sure to gain momentum. Regional targeting allows advertisers to not only specify a particular country, but states and regions, too. This option can benefit advertisers that are trying to reach people in particular areas.

If you are selling your product or services but can only provide them to a very specific area, this is a very effective option to implement. Prospects in your targeted area/s will see your ad even if they enter very general terms.

Determining what keywords you will use is an extremely difficult task. Both Google and Overture have keyword tools to assist you, but it still takes time, strategy, and good ole’ playing around to figure out what words are the most effective.

Search engine marketers need simply to put themselves in the shoes of Internet users. What terms do they commonly use? What combinations?

With some fine-tuning and research, any advertiser is sure to gain from paid search listings.

Author:
By Loren M. Baker  of the Search Engine Journal

The basics of a mailing list structure
The short and sweet of it is that a mailing list is nothing more than a plain text file that contains email addresses. Sometimes these *flat files* also contain first and last names, as well as other additional and optional information.

A *flat file* is a term used to describe a storage file that is not a database. Generally, the flat file is a plain text document without the .txt or other file extension attached to it.

If a flat file contains more than one piece of data, then each additional item is separated from the next by commas or other delimiters. The pipe key (shift – back slash) or the tab key serve as the next most popular delimiters used in flat files.

Each new record will appear on a new line. The new line is signaled by the carriage return in the file.

Examples showing the use of delimiters & the reason for considering delimited files
Note: These examples show two leading spaces in front of each record. In real life data files, your records should not contain the leading spaces.

Mailing List Example A:

tom@domain.com
dick@other-domain.com
harry@third-domain.com

Example A permits the mailing list owner to only send an email
to a defined address.

Mailing List Example B:

tom@domain.com,Tom Jefferson
dick@other-domain.com,Dick Nixon
harry@third-domain.com,Harry Truman

Example B permits the mailing list owner to send an email to Tom Jefferson at tom@domain.com . Addressing the mail directly to Tom Jefferson encourages Tom to pay close attention to your email, since he knows that you have acquired his real name in addition to your email address. Most personalized emails will never be thought to be a s/p/a/m message by the person who receives it.

Mailing List Example C:

tom@domain.com|Tom|Jefferson
dick@other-domain.com|Dick|Nixon
harry@third-domain.com|Harry|Truman

Example C is the most versatile of the three examples. In some cases, it makes sense to personalize the list owner’s messages. Whereas, Example B will permit you to address someone by first name or first and last name — depending on how you direct subscribers to sign up — it does not always serve the more personable style of mixing and matching the first name and the combination of the first and last name as provided for by Example C.

Utilizing delimited data in your mailings
Depending on the software that you will use to initiate your mailing, you will be directed to show where you want the additional data fields in your mailings.

The range of software available makes it nearly impossible to quantify the various methods to get your personalized data into your mailing. As such, I will only define an example to show the basic idea of how to do this.

Personalization Example:

To: #FIRST# #LAST# &ltj#EMAIL#>

Dear #FIRST#,

Welcome to my example of a personalized mailing.

According to our records, your subscription information is as follows:

Name: #FIRST# #LAST#
Email: #EMAIL#

#FIRST#, we appreciate your attention to this information
as we feel it will help you better utilize the tools of
the Internet in your activities. In the end, the more
knowledgable you become, the more likely that the Internet
will become a more useful place for all of us.

Sincerely,

Your Publisher

As you can see, it can be far more useful to you and your purposes to address your subscribers as individual human beings with individual desires. As all of the sales teachers in the world will tell you, the one word that humans enjoy hearing most is the sound of their own name. Even in print, people appreciate being spoken to directly as an individual person.

Delimited files give you the power of utilizing multiple data resources connected to your individual records.

Methods of mail delivery
There are two basic methods of delivering your email to your mailing list. The first is by direct email, and the second is by a website interface.

Direct Delivery Method –

The direct mail method is the most complicated method from the programming perspective. If you are using a mailing list management company such as YahooGroups or Topica, then they will have done the hard work for you. If you are managing your own mailing list, then you will need to jump through some hoops to get your infrastructure set up for the direct mail method.

You will need to set up your server to take any incoming mail to a specific address and to process that email through a mail handling script. The script will search for and verify your posting password, and then the script will reformat your message for direct delivery to your mailing list.

Using this method, you will actually address your outgoing email to a specific email address, often accompanied by a posting password. The posting address may appear in this kind of format:

mailing-list-name-[password]@your-domain.com

Website Interface Delivery Method –

From the technical perspective, this is the easiest delivery method to construct. It only requires the publisher to visit a webpage, fill out a form, and click the send button.

Clicking the send button will take the placed information and send it to the mailing script. Once again, the mailing script will take the given information and format it into an outgoing email message for direct mailing to your mailing list.

Actual mailing list delivery process
Whether you are using the direct mail or website interface method to get your data into the mailing script, the next step is the same. It is important to note that by the time you reach this point in the process, the outbound delivery is completely out of your own hands. Now is the time for the server to deliver on its part of the process.

Your mailing script has taken your input and put it into a direct mail format. Once that is completed, it is time to mail the information to each and every email address in your list.

The basic message structure is kept in its own variable. This variable will not change during the entire mailing process.

The basic message structure is then copied into a second variable, and the final preparation is done on that message as each individual mailing is prepared.

The software will read each record in your flat file or your database, and then the personalized data will be exchanged for the #FIRST#, #LAST# and #EMAIL# as it appears in your message construct. Once the personalized data is swapped for the variables in the text, the message will be delivered to the defined email address.

This process is repeated for each record in your mailing list.

Depending on how busy the server is and the size of your list, the mailing process could take two minutes or even twenty minutes.

A suggestion for the actual delivery of your message
Having learned the hard way, I do highly recommend that you set up your posting address as a special email address that you do not use for everyday business.

The reason is simple. With each and every mailing, you will find a certain level of attrition in your mailing list. People change email addresses everyday without unsubscribing from mailing lists; people lose their email accounts due to unpaid ISP bills; and people exceed the size limits of their mailboxes. People quit the Internet and die. That’s the reality of life on the Internet.

But with some fore planning, you can prevent a nightmare in your own email box. Lists that I have managed have experienced as little as two or three people, and as high as a 5% attrition every month. The list that I managed that had the 5% attrition rate also had 20,000 subscribers. As such, I was receiving 1,000 bounced emails every month with that one list.

I did not utilize a special address for my mailings at that time, and as such, I was losing track of important messages under the barrage of bounced email messages. This is the only reason I suggest the use of a special limited use email address.

Another list I managed later had an attrition rate of about 4% with 100,000 subscribers. With this second list, my secondary email address was receiving 4,000 bounced messages every month.

If you are using a mailing service such as YahooGroups or Topica, they will handle the bounced messages for you, so there would be no concern using your primary email address with those messages.

The process of subscribing & unsubscribing & the selection of the email server in the process
For the average mailing list, the process of adding or deleting an email address is as simple as going into the file or database and removing the record.

It must be noted that while there are several email servers available to webmasters, there are two servers that are used far more often than the others.

One email server software is called Sendmail. For the longest time, this was the most often used email server. It is still in wide use today.

The second email server software is called Qmail. Qmail is most often used by e-commerce mass mailers. Simply, Qmail offers more flexibility and speed and fewer bugs than Sendmail could ever dream of providing. It is also easier to customize.

If you visit a website and ask to be unsubscribed from the website’s mailing list, and the website notifies you that your name will be removed from the list within 48 to 72 hours, then you should assume that the website is utilizing Qmail as their mail server.

On the surface, this 48 to 72 hour window might seem like a scam — it is not. Qmail actually sets up an outgoing email and then queues that message for a later delivery. Qmail does this because it is usually set up on a very high volume mail server. By queuing the message for later delivery, the server can actually continue to process outgoing mail as long as the resources to do so are available for the task. If the messages were not queued for later delivery, multiple requests to deliver mail within a certain limited time period could crash the mail server. A crashed server is always bad news.

The site who is promising removal within the next 48 to 72 hours is actually telling you in advance how far ahead they have already queued outbound messages. Any piece of email that is already in the queue cannot be stopped from being delivered. Therefore, if a message exists in the queue with your address already on it, then there is nothing the webmaster can do to stop that mailing. Instead, all they can do is to let you know that you will no longer receive mail from them on any email that is sent to the queue from this point forward.

In conclusion
With this tutorial, you should now have a better understanding of the nature of a mailing list and how it works. For some of you, I will likely have provided too much information. For others of you, I will have not provided enough.

Either way, if you are looking for help in setting up your own mailing list, most web hosting companies that you might use to host your domain will have already provided an option to you for your mailing list management.

However, it must be noted that not all mailing list software is equal to the other. I have used some really bad software packages, and have yet to explore the full range of what is available to you. I do not have an actual recommendation for you as to a good software to use. What I can do for you is to provide a good starting point for locating that software you will need to run your mailing list efficiently:

http://cgi-resources.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/Mailing_Lists/

By using an already developed mailing list manager, all you will need to know is how to install the software on your server and how to set the file permissions on the package files. Be sure to read the installation files that are provided with your new mailing list software. The creators of this software will tell you exactly what you need to know to get their software packages up and running.

Final precautions before sending your first email
One final but very important note. I strongly recommend that you select a mailing list management package that will install on your webserver. Additionally, notify your webhosting company that you will be running a mailing list through your account. And, for the purpose of self-preservation, always keep up-to-date backups of your website and your mailing list.

Some webhosts are very leery of letting their customers run a mailing list from the customer’s site. With all of the s/p/a/m accusations floating around, it can sometimes be a dangerous proposition to run a mailing list. Many smaller webhosting companies fear the rogue webmaster who will get their servers shut down for s/p/a/m. This is why it is so very important to notify your webhosting company of your plans to run a mailing list from your account. Make sure your webhosting company is aware of your intentions, and be sure to know where they stand on the possibility of s/p/a/m complaints. My webhosting provider takes the time to actually investigate a complaint before actually pulling the plug on any of their customers. For webhosting, I use http://www.site5.com .

Additionally, I am very serious when I say that you should never run a mailing list from your desktop. Local ISP’s are far more worried about the s/p/a/m issue than the webhosting companies are. Given that so many of us live in locations where we only have one, two or three ISP’s to choose from, we would run the significant risk of losing complete access to the Internet if we were to run a mailing list from our desktop.

Good Luck in your publishing endeavors.

Author Bio:
Bill Platt owns The Phantom Writers, a company committed to helping people to establish an Internet presence & promote their businesses through the use of Free-Reprint Articles and Press Releases. Articles are distributed to 6,000+ publishers & webmasters as part of the package. http://thePhantomWriters.com Do you write your own articles? Let us distribute them for you.