AshPointLane.com

We've deployed all the features mentioned in the previous blog post. Here's a recap:

Search

Blog search is finally in Beta, and we've incorporated some popular Ask 3D features. For example, related searches are displayed in the right-hand column next to results. All of classic's features are still there, but with newer styling.

Flickr View

Selecting a Flickr feed and viewing it in quick view now uses the Flickr API to show images at their maximum resolution.

Add Page

Beta's old add page was spartan, to say the least. The new Add page has package tracking, weather feeds, and a new feature: Packs. You can now add popular categories of feeds with a single mouse click.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Authentication & Identification

To ensure that Gmail can identify you:

* Use a consistent IP address to send bulk mail.
* Keep valid reverse DNS records for the IP address(es) from which you send mail, pointing to your domain.
* Use the same address in the ‘From:’ header on every bulk mail you send.

We also recommend publishing an SPF record, and signing with DomainKeys.

Subscription

Each user on your distribution list should opt to receive messages from you in one of the following ways (opt-in):

* Through an email asking to subscribe to your list.
* By manually checking a box on a web form, or within a piece of software.

We also recommend that you verify each email address before subscribing them to your list.

The following methods of address collection are not considered ‘opt-in’ and are not recommended:

* Using an email address list purchased from a third-party.
* Setting a checkbox on a web form or within a piece of software to subscribe all users by default (requiring users to explicitly opt-out of mailings).

Unsubscribing

A user must be able to unsubscribe from your mailing list through one of the following means:

* A prominent link in the body of an email leading users to a page confirming his or her unsubscription (no input from the user, other than confirmation, should be required).
* By replying to your email with the word ‘unsubscribe’ in the body of the message.

To help ensure that your messages aren’t flagged as spam, we also recommend that you:

* Automatically unsubscribe users whose addresses bounce multiple pieces of mail.
* Periodically send confirmation messages to users.
* Include each mailing list they are signed up for, and offer the opportunity to unsubscribe from those in which they are no longer interested.
* Provide a ‘List-Unsubscribe’ header which points to a web form where the user can unsubscribe easily from future mailings (Note: This is not a substitute method for unsubscribing).

It’s possible that your users forward mail from other accounts, so we recommend that you:

* Explicitly indicate the email address subscribed to your list.
* Support a URL method of unsubscribing from your mailing list (this is beneficial if your mailing list manager can’t tell who is unsubscribing based on the ‘Reply-to:’ address).

Format

* All bulk messages you send must be formatted according to RFC 2822 SMTP standards and, if using HTML, w3.org standards.
* Messages should indicate that they are bulk mail, using the ‘Precedence: bulk’ header field.
* Attempts to hide the true sender of the message or the true landing page for any web links in the message may result in non-delivery.
* The subject of each message should be relevant to the body’s content and not be misleading.

Delivery

While Gmail works hard to deliver all legitimate mail to a user’s inbox, it’s possible that some legitimate messages may be marked as spam. Gmail does not accept ‘whitelisting’ requests from bulk senders, and we can’t guarantee that all of your messages will bypass our spam filters. To make sure our users receive all the mail they’d like to, we’ve provided them with a method for sending us feedback about messages flagged as spam — users have the option of clicking a ‘Not spam’ button for each message flagged by our spam filters. We listen to users’ reports, and correct problems in order to provide them with the best user experience. As long as our users don’t consider your mail as spam, you shouldn’t have inbox delivery problems.

There are two important factors that, under normal circumstances, help messages arrive in Gmail users’ inboxes:

* The ‘From:’ address is listed in the user’s Contacts list.
* A user clicks ‘Not Spam’ to alert Gmail that messages sent from that address are solicited.

If you send both promotional mail and transactional mail relating to your organization, we recommend separating mail by purpose as much as possible. You can do this by:

* Using separate email addresses for each function.
* Sending mail from different domains and/or IP addresses for each function.

By using these tips, it’s more likely that the important transactional mail will be delivered to a user’s inbox. Our guidelines are meant to help you build a good reputation within the Gmail system, resulting in continual delivery to Gmail inboxes.

Third-Party Senders

If others use your service to send mail (for example: ISPs), you are responsible for monitoring your users and/or clients’ behavior.

* You must have an email address available for users and/or clients to report abuse (abuse@yourdomain.com).
* You must maintain up-to-date contact information in your WHOIS record, and on abuse.net.
* You must terminate, in a timely fashion, all users and/or clients who use your service to send spam mail.

Ok, so it’s probably not possible to own all 10 listings on the SERPs for your brand name, but you can certainly try.

First off, why should you care about having more than one result for your company name? From a branding point of view, it lends great credibility. Multiple results on various web properties conveys that you’re “out there” and actively engaged with your customers in many forms. From a public relations view, it’s a great way to potentially push negative press (customer complaints) off the first page.

By utilizing the hugely popular sites of the day, it’s not impossible to own at least 5 out of the 10 top spots on Google. Here’s my list for the top web properties you should have a presence on.

1. Your Website (duh!) - If you don’t yet rank for your own company or brand name, don’t read any further in this post. You’ll want to first focus on some basic SEO tactics.
   
2. LinkedIn - The most popular business professional networking site. Your profile page should rank highly for your brand name.
3. Press Release Sites - I’ve seen press releases ranking on the first page for years after their initial release. These provide an ongoing source of branding and traffic about previous newsworthy events. PRWeb.com will get you the best results.
   
4. YouTube - Post a short informational video about your company. Google loves YouTube content, so your video may instantly rank first page for your brand.
5. Facebook - Facebook now displays a limited public profile, so it can be indexed by search engines.
   
6. Myspace - Declining in light of Facebook, but still possesses great social networking capabilities. Make sure your profile page contains your brand name prominently.
7. Squidoo - Create a Squidoo hub for your brand and link it up with your RSS feed, YouTube videos, and Flickr images.
   
8. Hubpages - Similar to Squidoo and a Google favorite.
9. Wikipedia - Not every brand is worthy of Wikipedia entry, but it’s worth a try.
   
10. Technorati - Claiming your Technorati space should be the first step after creating a blog.
    

In addition to having a presence on the sites above, try using these tactics to create a Google indented listing.

About Palmer Web Marketing

PWM is a web marketing consulting firm specializing in helping small businesses achieve their online goals with ethical SEO services, email marketing, and web usability consulting. For more information on services, please contact us.

Need a second opinion on your website? Palmer Web Marketing's website review services will give you the insight you need.

“How can I SEO my product pages?” - It’s a good question that I hear frequently. After all, who has the time and resources to build links to hundreds, even thousands of individual products on an eCommerce site? Who has the time to write compelling, keyword rich copy for all these pages as well? Obviously, product page SEO must take a different approach. First, let’s start with the problem:

Why Product Pages Get Screwed:

1. Nobody links to them
2. They are buried deep within the site architecture
3. They usually contain crappy, recycled manufacturer product descriptions

In this post, I’ll share the process I use to optimize product pages for long-tail search.

1. Reduce the Number of Clicks from Your Greatest Source of PageRank: First and foremost, if you want your product pages to rank highly, your internal linking structure needs to reflect that desire. If it takes 5 clicks to reach a product, you’re telling crawler bots you don’t think very highly of it. My top recommendation for implementing this is displaying as many products as reasonably possible on your product listing pages. In my experience a/b testing, product category pages with more items always win out. (who wants to click those tiny 2, 3, 4 pagination links anyway?). In addition, it prevents the Googlebot from having to crawl through them as well.
2. Determine Whether the Product is Better Suited for Branded, Non-Branded, or Solution Search: For each product, ask yourself this question: “Will people be searching for this item by brand name, by a generic name, or will it be a solution oriented search?” For example, suppose you were selling running shoes. Here 3 possible target keyword phrases:

Generic	Running Shoes
Branded	Nike MayFly shoes
Solution Oriented	Shoes for running faster

3. Create a Unique Title Tag: Once you’ve completed step #2, place this keyword phrase in the title tag. A heated debate rages regarding where (or even if) the site name should be included in the Title. While I believe there are exceptions to any rule, I strongly believe the site name belongs behind the product’s name and keywords for 2 reasons. First, if a potential customer searches for your target keyphrase, they’ll be looking for that phrase, not your site’s name. Second, odds are search engines consider the order of keywords in the Title when determining the relevance. If all your product page Title start with your site name, it may look slightly boilerplate-ish.
4. Create a Unique Product Description: Too often, product descriptions are a neglected afterthought of online merchandising. Why not just show a few snazzy pics? After all, a picture is worth a thousands words right? While I would never mitigate the importance of good photography, pictures sometimes fall short on communicating specific product details, features, and benefits. If your company has sales people, ask them to write the product descriptions for you, as if they were selling the item face to face with a customer. Getting back to SEO, I don’t generally recommend stuffing keywords in product descriptions. It looks tacky and sounds awkward.
5. Don’t Forget the Meta Tag Keyword & Descriptions: Yes, they still work. Not for endless keyword repetition, but for showing that you took time and effort and care about your product pages. Typically, I will populate the meta keyword tag with the product name, brand, and any other relevant keywords. In the description tag, I simply pull the product description from the database, stripping out any unnecessary html formatting.
6. Display Product Reviews: How do product reviews help you in SEO? Interestingly, customers tend to describe products in ways that you would never think of. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a customer review and thought, “Heck, I never would have described it that way!”. Sometimes, I even take the customer’s lead and optimize the Title & meta tags around a product review.
7. Display Product Tags: Just as you would tag a blog post or a Flickr image, let customers tag your product with words they find relevant. As mentioned in step #6, you may find they think of keywords you didn’t. Checkout Amazon’s product pages for an example of how tagging works.
8. Don’t Forget the Alt’s: Take every opportunity you have to convey information about the content of your product pages. For the product images, populate the Alt text with product name, brand, or other keywords identified in Step #2.
9. Give Special Attention to Your Top Products: Identify what you consider to be your top products and highlight them on your landing pages with the most PageRank. Create anchor text that points to these product using the keyword phrases you’ve isolated in Step #2.
10. Track the Results: So, how do you know if the steps above are working? Personally, I like to monitor the number of total search visitors to product pages divided by the total number of product pages indexed by Google. Over time, you should see this number increase.

Yes, SEO-ing product pages can be overwhelming. If the thought of individually optimizing hundreds, maybe thousands of items makes you break out in a cold sweat, slow down, and take it one step at a time. Over a period of several weeks or months, this daunting task can be completed. The end result will be worth the effort.

Like the ideas listed above? Get 3 of your own…

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing provides modern, effective, & affordable internet marketing consulting services. For personalized Do It Yourself SEO recommendations, checkout MySEOPlan.

Need a second opinion on your website? Palmer Web Marketing's website review services will give you the insight you need.

If I were to rank the effectiveness of each marketing avenue for most businesses I’ve worked with, here’s how they stack up.

1. Word of mouth
2. Email Marketing
   
3. Organic SEO
4. Paid Search
   
5. Display Advertising

In many ways, items 2-5 are easy. They have well-established best practices to follow. Word of mouth advertising, or viral marketing, is a different beast. How do you stimulate this activity among your customers? Is it possible to create this type of genuine buzz, or must it come organically?

This question reminds me of the in-house debate among SEO’s over the most effective link building strategy. Do you build, buy, or beg for links or do you create powerful, unique, and engaging content that transforms your site into a natural link magnet?

If viral marketing was as simple as throwing up a YouTube video or creating a Tell-a-Friend page, everyone would drop traditional paid advertising methods such as search, email, or display ads. Obviously, a truly successful viral marketing campaign depends requires more.

Simpleology gives a brilliant break-down of the 2 main types of word of mouth marketing.

Incentivized Word of Mouth

This type of WOM marketing attempts to stimulate viral marketing through incentives, usually monetization. An example would be a refer a friend program that allows customers to earn store credit by getting friends to buy.

Inspired Word of Mouth

Inspired WOM marketing, in contrast, occurs naturally and without incentives. This can be as simple as one soccer mom telling another about the great experience she had at a hair salon, or an influential blogger who reviews a product he or she had a great a experience with.

Customers who engage in inspired WOM marketing typically aren’t just customers, they’re raving fans. Their passion may be based on the product, service, or the entire experience. In all likelihood, the customers that are engaged in this type of WOM are your top 1,000 fans.

So how does a company create genuinely inspired WOM?

Back to the Basics

In reality, I believe the most successful viral marketing comes as a result of only 2 things:

1. Creating products that are actually worth talking about and or…
2. Providing legendary customer service that consistently exceeds expectations

The simplicity of this formula is great news for many e-tailers, who will never be able to create a successful viral marketing campaign. For example, how does a website selling printer cartridges stir up viral buzz? Simple, they just do what they know best. They run their business with excellence and by providing an outstanding mix or products and service.

Why do so many viral marketing campaigns fail? Because they’re trying to create something from nothing. They’re attempt to create buzz results in hyped up, blatant, and sometimes tacky advertising tactics.

In contrast, consider Starbucks, who recently closed their doors for 3 hours in order to refocus on customer experience by learning to make better coffee.

Like Starbucks, many online retailers need to get back to the basics, take a “coffee break”, and refocus on what they do best. When this happens, inspired word of mouth will follow.

Need a second opinion on your website? Palmer Web Marketing's website review services will give you the insight you need.