Creating a newsletter that people will read is all about building trust in a website and brand. The key to success is really simple, interesting content sent to people who want it. In addition to this simple principle, there are easy ways to reward subscribers for their attention that keep them reading the newsletter.

The Basics of a Good Newsletter

The basics of a newsletter involve two items:

• Unique content
• People who want to read it

That means people should not go out and buy a list of email addresses and start spamming away. Instead, put a subscribe box on a website and ask people to subscribe. Ask customers on the phone if they would like to be on the newsletter. The key is to get the customer’s permission to subscribe them by asking them directly or via a subscribe box. This not only makes the customer more likely to read the article, it also creates an email list of highly targeted customers who are interested in hearing what businesses have to say.Once there is a decent number of people on a newsletter list, begin sending out the newsletter consistently. Consistency is key because it promotes any business as having their ducks in a row and allows businesses to stay in front of their customers.

Giving Customers Incentive

One aspect of the newsletters that is often overlooked is examining the incentive for a customer to join the newsletter. No, hearing someone’s amazing literary skills in an email does not count as a good enough incentive for most subscribers. Pens or other give away items are nice, but are a one-time benefit to the subscriber. What subscribers want is great content coupled with discounts, product updates and exclusive deals that they can take advantage of because they let businesses advertise to them. The customer explicitly gave permission to the company to advertise to them, reward them by giving them something they will use in every email.

Need Help Getting Results?

Onepax has helped many websites get the customer attention they desire. Using a methodical and persistent approach with newsletters, we achieve the goals of our clients one month at a time and build results that last. Contact us today for more information.

Other Reading

Seth Godin has a great article on newsletters and how different online email services actually punished their users for using their free products.

Google recently completed a major update to the search algorithm that is used for ranking results. In addition to the change, Google also performed a full update of PageRank. What does this mean for a website?

PageRank and Your Website

Google PageRank has a major effect on websites by acting as an amplifier for the content on the page. To understand hthe impact of this change, let’s take a look at a simplified example to understand what this means. Lets assume we have a webpage that is about electric motors and we want to market this online.

Google first takes a look at the website and measures the saturation of a specific keyword on a website. This is a measure of how many times a word appears in relation to the rest of the words on the page. A weight is then applied to each instance of the word that is found, depending on where it is located in the page. Google tends to give higher weight to keywords in heading tags (H1, H2, H3) or in the page title. Once these numbers are calculated, Google then assigns the specific keyword a score of how important the keyword is on the page. This score let’s Google know how to compare the importance of the keyword against other websites. A simplified formula for keyword importance is below:

Keyword Importance = (Keyword Saturation) x (Keyword Weight)

Keyword Saturation = (Number of times phrase appears in text) / (Number of all words)
Keyword Weight = (Calculated based on position)
See Onepax Keyword Extractor for an example

Let’s assume that my webpage is targeting the phrase “electric motor”. The keyword saturation is 5.26% and the calculated weight is 10.5% from the Onepax Keyword Extractor. This will yield a keyword importance of 55.23. (multiplying as if they were numbers, not percentages)

Now that we know what the keyword importance score is, we can multiply by the PageRank for the web page. Assume the page the keywords we measured has a PageRank of 3 out of 10, we multiply the keyword importance score by the PageRank. This yields an overall keyword importance of 165.69.

Page Keyword Importance = (Keyword Importance) x (PageRank)

This is a large summarization and estimation of how Google works and for the most part, it is accurate in measuring who will appear first in many search engine rankings.

Change Impact

Now that we understand how PageRank affects specific keyword performance on a web page, an update of PageRank can either has a positive, negative or no effect (assuming no change) depending on how many links a web page has. Since PageRank has a multiplier effect, it’s easy to surge in the lead or fall behind in online rankings.

Need Help Getting Results?

Onepax has helped many websites get the search engine rankings they desire and maintaining them. Using a methodical and persistent approach, we achieve the goals of our clients one month at a time and build results that last. Contact us today for more information.

Webmasters often compromise usability to protect the employees of an organization from spam. Yes, employees in the organization will receive less spam, however it makes it much more difficult for users to contact the company in the way they are comfortable with. One such example is clicking on an email address and sending a message directly from the link. The downside to this approach is that a link placed on a page in a native format will often expose the email address to robots on the Internet that crawl websites looking for email addresses.

URL Encoding

A little used technique called URL encoding can help protect email addresses from robots and also allow users to interact with a website in the same manner that are accustomed to. This technique encodes the url in a format that just about any modern browser will interpret as a regular email address link.

How it Works

URL encoding works by storing characters in an expanded format by using ASCII codes with HTML special character encoding. For example, these two email addresses are equivalent as a web browser sees them.

Normal Email Address

foo@bar.com

URL Encoded Email Address

foo@bar.com

Encode Email Addresses Tool

Use the Javascript form below to URL encode email addresses to help protect them from spam bots. This form does not store any email addresses. Onepax does not make any guarantees about this tool and by using the tool, you agree to use it at your own risk.

Email Address to Encode:

Encoded Email with Link

Getting blacklisted by Google can often be a game breaker for many small to medium businesses that rely on Google to provide a steady stream of terrific customers. If a website is removed from Google or even worse, blacklisted, the effects on business can be dire.

What is the Google Blacklist?

The Google Blacklist is a collection of cryptographic hashes that represent the URL’s or websites that are deemed to be phishing or contain some form of malware. The purpose of this list is to warn users in the event that they visit a website that is in a “bad community” and not safe for novice users. The end result is to protect browsers on the web by integrating this blacklist directly into Firefox, Google Desktop and other web browsers. It’s a great step forward to help protect web users.

How do I know if i am on the blacklist?

Right now Google does not have an easy way to determine if a website is blacklisted since their current interface is an API only. Once integration with Firefox is complete, users should be able to check blacklist status directly in the browser. If enough people post comments on this post for a tool, Onepax might develop a tool to check blacklist status.

How can I stay off this list?

Obviously the first step is to ensure that the website is not hosting malware software on your website. Although there is no authoritative list on malware, programs like Ad-Aware have a great list of known malware. The other tip is to ensure that the website does not appear to mimic an authoritative website like a bank or financial institution. Even if these guidelines are followed and end up on the list anyways, Google may have blocked the website by accident.

Need help getting off the Google Blacklist?

Onepax has helped many people get un-banned from Google and back into good standing by using a methodical and repeatable approach. If you website has been blacklisted by Google, let us put our expertise to work to help get your company back into good standing with Google.

In order to ensure that your website can be correctly crawled, using the correct tool can ensure that your website can be crawled correctly by search engines.

Lynx Web Browser

The Lynx Web Browser is a tool originally developed by the Distributed Computing Group within Academic Computing Services of the University of Kansas. It use has grown over the years and has recently found fame with web designers working with search engines like Google. Although it’s user interface is primitive and simple, it’s quite useful in showing how a search engines views a website.

Analyzing Searchability

By using Lynx to view your website, you can quickly and easily see how search engines view your website. This image shows how Google sees the Onepax homepage by using the free Lynx Viewer by Delorie.com. By looking closely at the image, one can see that Onepax.com appears nicely as text in Lynx, all links have descriptive titles and can navigate even without pictures. By using Lynx on your own website, you can quickly asses if your website can be correctly crawled by Google or other major search engines.

The End Goal

Your goal as a website designer is to ensure that your website can be viewed by users even when images are not present.  By doing this, your increase usability which allows your visitors to find content, you get more attention from search engines since the website can be correctly spidered and you open up the website to the whole world of Lynx users. This is a clear win-win-win scenario that puts your website in good standing with the visitors, search engines and Lynx users.

The Google Site Status Tool is a great option for webmasters who want to do a quick check on their website for several potential problems such as:

• Whether the website is indexed or not
• The last time Googlebot visited the website
• Crawling issues, if any exist

If your a VoIP user like me, chances are you don’t have an explicit policy installed on your router for ensuring that your voice data is a higher priority than other data. This excellent post by the user Celeron shows users how to configure QOS on Cisco routers. This configuration ensures that when your outbound links get full, it will prioritize VoIP traffic over other traffic to ensure your phone calls are uninterrupted.

Sample Config

!
class-map match-all voice-traffic
match ip rtp 10000 10000
!
!
policy-map voice-policy
class voice-traffic
priority 200
class class-default
fair-queue
policy-map shaper
class class-default
shape average 350000 3500 0
service-policy voice-policy
!
interface
service-policy output shaper
!

The practice of keyword stuffing often leads to webpages that are bloated, illegible and often useless to real visitors. But why do people do it anyways?

What is keyword stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is the practice of repeating a keyword over and over again in webpage content and meta tags. For example, if I wanted to rank well on Google for “Rubber Ducks” I would put Rubber Ducks as many times as possible on my web pages. That way, Google will see the page as important for that keyword.

It drives traffic… For a while

Stuffing delivers traffic to the website for a short period of time, but it comes at a steep cost. After the initial boost that is accompanied with keyword stuffing, there is a quick drop to follows. Google often gives users the benefit of the doubt by letting them stuff keywords onto the page and rewarding them to a certain extent. However, once the keyword has been stuffed too many times, Google begins to see the page as spam due to the excessive use of the keyword. The page then quickly looses its value and is drops from the search results.

Give your visitors what they want

Keyword stuffing, keyword stuffing, keyword stuffing, keyword stuffing, keyword stuffing, keyword stuffing…

That wasn’t so great to read, was it? Your visitors are going to stuffing as it shows that your website has little real content to provide. If your website cannot provide value to your visitors by creating good honest content, your website stands to little reason to attract links from other websites.

Reference Guidelines

Google Webmaster Guidelines
Yahoo! Webmaster Guidelines

1. Construction Signs

Construction signs are a dead giveaway of a beginner in online marketing and web design. Only those who are inexperienced will use the man shoveling dirt icon to signify that a page is currently under work. Instead, design like a professional by not adding content until it is finished. That way, a professional image can be portrayed at all times.

2. Useless Wizbang Gadgets

Sure, I think the cool rotating clock of characters is a cool idea. But it doesn’t add any value to a website other than entertainment. Instead of adding useless features, focus on adding features that drive value.

Website No-No’s

1. Macromedia Flash Landing Pages (These do nothing to help other than wow a customer.)
2. Music on a webpage. (Especially if you can’t turn it off!!)
3. Cute little animated characters.
4. Overuse of color.
5. Visitor Counters (That’s why we have statistics packages)
6. Guest Books (Replace with a email form)

3. No Navigational Organization

Website with little or no organization can be very difficult to navigate. If a visitor cannot find what they are looking for, having a website losses its value. Having a defined structure and navigation will not only help visitors find content, but also increase the chances of having a positive impression.

An important design tip to keep in mind when creating a navigation plan is to organize information around how customers think about a product. Many times companies organize information about how they categorize products (Cisco is a major example of this) instead of how customers think about products.

4. Over-Use of Macromedia Flash

Many clients ask for a Flash landing page. It’s use is primarily intended to create a sense of awe before entering the rest of the website. However this can be deceiving in many ways.

Bandwidth Intensive

Flash introductions are very bandwidth intensive and users with dial-up access will probably have a hard time loading the website and probably move on.

Search Engines Can’t “Read” Flash

Search engines at this time cannot effectively read content embedded within flash. What that means for a site that makes extensive use of Flash is that they will fail to have good rankings for search on Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Proper Use of Flash

Flash is an extremely powerful technology for quickly conveying information to customers about complex products, services and technologies. A properly placed Flash demonstration can create a professional image and explain a product or service in a clear and concise manner.

5. Spelling & Grammar

Spelling and grammar are seemingly harmless mistakes that can really poke its ugly head at the worst possible time, when customers are getting their first impression. Not only will they see that the website doesn’t seem professional but that it lacks the polish that is expected from a professional company.

Professional Services

Make sure that your website doesn’t suffer from the same design flaw too. Contact Onepax today for a free consultation.

Before search engine optimization became a booming business, PageRank was the preferred method of determining how important a specific link was. You may recognize this as the little green status bar you see in your web browser when you download the Google Toolbar.

Now that Google has become such a target for online marketers, Google’s coveted PageRank has now starting to lose it’s value. Google’s entire search foundation still operates on the principles of links and continues to have a heavy influence in search engine rankings. Website that have more links are therefore more popular. Since amassing a large amount of links is very difficult to do, website that have many of them are often favored by Google simply because the founders of the site would have to make a major investment in ensuring their content is up to par.

Top Tips for Linking Strategies

Links that are relevant

Links to your site should be related to your product or service. You certainly wouldn’t advertise baby shampoo at a tattoo parlor, so why would you do the same thing online? Directories such as Yahoo! and DMOZ are a great place to find relevant links. In addition, try looking for links on industry related websites.

Attract links from websites that can drive traffic

Getting links to your website also includes generating traffic. A real world example of a bad link would be like putting a billboard in a remote location. No one will ever see the billboard. Consider the link the same as that billboard, you want it to be placed where people will see it. A great place to find sites that drive traffic is to search on Google for your specific industry and try and find websites that appear in the top ten results.

Attract the traffic you want

Attracting traffic is easy, however attracting the right traffic is very difficult. If you sell a product, chances are you want to attract only customers who are possible candidates for using your product. However if your links are too broad, you may not be able to selectively pick out your customer from the rest of visitors. Make sure that your links are targeted and well placed on websites that your target customer is likely to visit.

Professional Link Building

Onepax has the experience necessary to ensure that your website can grow year after year. Contact Onepax today for a free link building assessment.