Avoiding the spam folder

All too often marketers find their emails ending up in the junk folder. There are lots of reasons that this can happen but a common cause is the content of the email.

All ISPs use content filters to remove and block emails that contain certain known spam words, things like viagra, software, replica watches. Due to the sheer number of spam emails that are sent every single day, some good emails get caught.

Top 5 Free SEO tools

There are many different tools you can use to help with your SEO, some free, some paid. In this article we take a look at our top 5 free SEO tools that help get the job done.

1. Google Keyword Tool - A good website is nothing without keywords driving highly targeted traffic to it. To do that you need to do your research. This tool allows you to get an idea of the volumes both locally (your country) and globally.

2.Google & Bing Webmaster Tools - These tools allow you to see the information about your site that's provided by the search engines themselves. See crawl errors, keywords, links to your site and submit site maps.

3. SEOmoz - A great SEO resource in general. Some of the tools they provide are free, especially useful is the on page keyword report

4. Google Analytics - Check traffic sources, number of new visits, bounce rates, conversion rates and much more.

5. SEO Book - Another site with lots of good information about SEO. Free tools include keyword list generator, keyword density analyser and link suggestion tool

Need some help with your SEO? We'd be happy to help, contact us today to find out how we can help improve your websites SEO and deliver the results your deserve

Yahoo moving organic search results to Bing

Yahoo is now ready to move it's organic search results to Microsoft search enging Bing.

This transition will start on 3rd August for the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain

1. Test everytime you send a campaign - Test subject lines, creative, calls to action
2. Manage your reputation - unsubscribes, bounce rates, how people unsubscribe and subscribe to list - check true deliverability
3. Include your email sign up on every page of your website
4. Offer an incentive to sign up for your newsletter, a free report, a download, a discount off first purchase
5. Segment your email list, don't just email your whole database, age, gender, purchasers, top buyers, birthday/anniversary, lapsed, abandoned shopping cart, limited time offer
6. Look at the results of every campaign, stats like open and click through rate are important, did lots of people open the email but no one click or did the campaign get lots of clicks  - did these turn into conversions?
7. Send MIME multipart emails - Both Text and HTML emails at the same time, your subscribers email provider will determine which will be delivered.
8. Make sure your content is relevant and timely, delivering what your subscriber signed up for.
9. Test your unsubscribe mechanism and other links within your email - do this on every campaign
10. Spend time on your subject line, it's going to help get your email opened. Don't mislead your subscribers - make the subject line relevant to the copy

You may, at some point need to delete a web page from your site.

This isn’t difficult to do but it’s important that you update your website to reflect the change.

Failing to update your website will result in 404 errors, possibly causing visitors to navigate away from your site.

The Description Tag

The description tag is a meta tag that Google and other search engines can use to display information about the content of a particular page on your website. Google call this the snippet.

The description tag appears under the title tag is the search engine results page.

Avoiding the email churn

If you have an email list you will at some point suffer from email churn. Depending on the list and whether you marketing B2B or B2C it will be between 10-30% every year.

This means that you constantly have to add new subscribers to your email marketing lists.

However there are a few things you can do to keep email churn to a minimum.

Email Deliverability – Reputation.

 If you sent a customer a piece of mail in the post, you would expect - unless the postman had an off day, that that piece of mail would get delivered.

When you hit the ‘send’ button on your campaign your email goes through a number of different processes that determine whether or not your email is actually delivered to the inbox.

Getting into the inbox is not as easy as you may think, there are a number of different factors involved, some are under your control and some aren’t.

Welcome to our articles section, we'll be posting lots of different articles on web design, search engine optimisation and online marketing.

These will be everything from the basics of SEO through to how to maximise and grow your email marketing list.