HTML Email
Until recently text-based email was the most popular way to communicate, however with the advent of html email you can now create and send beautiful graphics, create clickable links and use interactive forms.
HTML email can have the same appearance as a web page. You can include your favorite photos, create colorful newsletters or charts for your friends or business associates.
It’s now often used as a valuable tool in email marketing campaigns.
HTML email has now surpassed text-based email in popularity.
Read this survey on email format preferences and and programs.
Let’s first point out the pros and cons of sending html email before we get into how to create it. (more…)
If you are serious about improving search engine rankings, you need to check the keyword density of your web site. In order to do this you must integrate proper keyword phrases within your meta tags and web copy.
What is keyword density?
This is the ratio of a keyword or keyphrase to the total words (depth) on a page. It is one of the most critical aspects of search engine optimization. To improve search engine ranking, your keyword density must not be too high or too low.
Try to aim for a keyword density of 1% to 7%. To achieve 1% you would need to insert your keyword or keyword phrase once for every hundred words. If you only used your keyword once in one thousand words, this would result in diluting your keyword density.
Don’t try to stuff all your keywords together, separated by commas. Search engines may see this as spam, penalizing your rankings. (more…)
Web Site promotion should be the major part of your web site marketing plan. It’s not enough just to design a beautiful web site and put in on the Net. Promoting your web site has to be done constantly if you want to get a continuous stream of traffic to it. If you don’t drive traffic to your web site, your online business venture will soon fail.
1. Create a web site marketing plan – if you fail to plan then you default to a plan for failure. When designing your web site, create a plan on how to market it as well. Try to put yourself in your customers shoes when doing this. It’s too easy to just view your web site from your own perspective. You need to have a clear vision for your business, goals (short and long term) you wish to achieve and the strategies of how you will accomplish them.
2. Define your target market – many online marketers promote their web site aimlessly in a field which is too large i.e. they may use bulk mailing as one of their promotion strategies. Of course you may get some visitors but the chances are you will not make many sales. Why? You have not narrowed your field of
customers and targeted them. If you sold Cadillacs online for instance, you are not randomly going to market to every person on the Net. Your target market may be previous owners of cadillacs, or people who routinely purchase luxury American cars.
Getting targeted customers to your web site, will increase sales, because they will have more interest in your product or service than marketing to a general audience. (more…)
Reciprocal linking is catching on in popularity. It’s a way for website owners to share each other’s traffic, a simple “let’s trade links” deal that can help to widen your web audience.
Swapping links can also help you with your search engine traffic. Some search engines calculate the number of links to your site from other sites and use it to determine your ranking. As you know, a better position equals more targeted traffic!
Another way reciprocal links can benefit you is by drawing repeat traffic back to your website. If you offer a high- quality list of relevant links, visitors will return often because they know that they can quickly find what they’re looking for. (more…)
With so many cutting edge marketing and promotion methods coming into practice these days, it’s easy to forget the basics. A few good manners go a long, long way – an old concept but very applicable to modern Internet marketing and web site promotion strategies.
Introducing my new soap-box – the “Common Courtesy Strategy (CCS)” series!
When you first launch your site, the chances are that traffic will not start flowing immediately, and perhaps never – it’s not just how your site looks or operates that will ensure it’s success or failure. According to numerous sources I’ve come across during my research, the average web site only receives around 3 unique visitors a day! (more…)
All Hail The King
On the Internet Content is king and it always will be. This is because the Internet is the information superhighway and most people use it for information of some sort.
The information on a website is its content, generally the more useful and interesting content a website has the more successful it will be, because more people will want to visit it again and again, this is especially true if a website is constantly adding more and more content on a regular basis, be it articles, tutorials, news and opinion or whatever.
Content is what drives the web, OK, OK – what about the vast variety of products that can be bought on the web? (more…)
One of the standard elements of web page optimization is Keyword Density: up until very recently the ratio of keywords to rest of body text was generally deemed to be one of the most important factors employed by search engines to determine a web site’s ranking.
However, this basically linear approach is gradually changing now: as mathematical linguistics and automatic content recognition technology progresses, the major search engines are shifting their focus towards “theme” biased algorithms that do not rely on analysis of individual web pages anymore but, rather, will evaluate whole web sites to determine their topical focus or “theme” and its relevance in relation to users’ search requests. (more…)
Have you ever visited a web site and they ask you to link to their site…and that’s it?! They give you no reason to link. I have to be honest, I won’t link to a web site unless I get some kind of benefit. If you want people to link to your web site give them something in return. The following are some reasons I might link to another web site:
The web site offers a reciprocal link in return. It must draw the same targeted visitors as my web site. They agree to give me the same kind of link (banner, text, graphic, etc) in return. The link must also be in the same position on their web site as it is on mine.
The web site gives away free stuff for linking. They may give me a free membership in their online club or association, offer me a free ad in their ebook, submit my site to thousands of search engine and directories, free e-mail consulting, etc. (more…)
Search engine optimization has come full circle in the last couple of years. Back in the mid 1990s it was easy to achieve high search engine rankings. Just tweak your META tags and site copy with keywords and submit. Then, as more and more webmasters started to catch on to META Tags, it became more difficult to beat the competition. Many companies turned to spam tactics such as hidden text (the same color as the background of the page), hidden links (using 1 x 1 pixel gifs to hide them), doorway pages stuffed with keywords and cloaked content, all designed to be seen by search engine robots and not humans in an attempt to trick the search engines into giving the site a higher ranking.
Thankfully, over the past few years, achieving high search rankings has become fairer and more straight-forward. The search engines have given less weighting to META tags and more relevancy weighting to sites that are popular, of high quality and contain unique, relevant information. Most search engines have developed comprehensive spam filters that weed out the spammers from the legitimate sites and penalize sites caught trying to cheat the system. Google in particular has led the charge for quality over quantity. (more…)
The Basics
You have probably been to a site that had a section called a “Guestbook”. Many sites ask you to “sign their guestbook”, and many of these guestbooks also permit HTML code in the guestbook comments, meaning you or I or anyone can visit guestbooks on web sites all day long and systematically create links back to our sites from hundreds of other site’s guestbooks.
Naturally, some web marketers (probably the ones that think exit pop-ups are useful) think that by signing guestbooks and adding links by the hundreds they will improve their link popularity scores at search engines. Before you get excited and do a Google search on the phrase “sign our guestbook” (1.9 million BTW) and head off like a link monkey, here’s my take on the whether guestbook links are valid, ignored, or penalized, and if they have any impact on the success of a web site’s link popularity. (more…)
