Posted on June 7th, 2007 by Dhirender
Contrary to popular belief among marketers, message content is not a major cause of deliverability challenges for most email marketers. This finding is a result of testing the content of more than 1,705 unique emails, using EmailAdvisor’s content scoring tool. The content scoring function is based on the content scoring rules of the widely adopted Spam Assassin open source project. The emails tested had an average content point score of 1.04 well below the filter’s generally accepted spam identification level of 3.0 or higher.
The two frequently triggered Spam Assassin rules that generated content filter point scores of significance were:
* Heavy use of images, which can increase spam scores up to a full point and render poorly in email clients with image blocking enabled
* Sending messages with a “From Name” composed of numbers or symbols rather than an actual name. [Read more]
Get the complete report (pdf)
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Posted on June 4th, 2007 by Dhirender
3 common myths in SEO busted:
1. Does High Spidering Frequency Equal High Rankings?
2. Does replacing Graphic Images With CSS-formatted Text help?
3. Do Web 2.0 sites rank better than non-2.0 sites?
In the end, all SEO professionals must test, test, test. It takes time, patience, and objectivity to accurately test and analyze results. Unfortunately, in our I-want-it-yesterday Internet world, time is often a luxury. Objectivity is sacrificed when people want to believe so badly that their designs and methodologies are correct.
Read more …
(thanks for the link Gautam)
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Posted on February 24th, 2007 by Dhirender
* A fully animated search engine
* A search engine that pouts
* A disaster as far as UI goes
* Inhumanly dumb
* Microsoft’s strategy to kill Google and own search
and so on … That’s Ms Dewey the Flash based experimental interface for Windows Live Search. Like her or hate her, you could definitely not have missed her. Played by Actress Janina Gavankar, Ms Dewey has a wisecrack for every search term … whether or not relevant to the term.
Bandwidth hungry, taking ages to load, and displaying the search results in a little box on the left, this can hardly be the search of the future in terms of the results, and the presentation of the results - I would expect a visual interface that explors inter-relationships between the results.
However, with the almost humanly dumb interface, Ms Dewey has already surpassed Wisenut and Kartoo on Alexa making it a success as far as virals are concerned.
So, will this remain a viral for Miscosoft, or is the way towards being the Google killer they would want it to be?
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Posted on February 21st, 2007 by Dhirender
We’ve all heard about PageRank - the algorithm that made Google the behemoth it is today. Now go over to check out the Visual PageRank (check the results for this blog). This gives you the pagerank of all the links on the page whether external or internal.
Filed under: SEO | No Comments »
Posted on February 21st, 2007 by Dhirender
While Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps to improve visibility in natural or organic search results. It is more of a long term strategy to improve rankings in search results, and hence requires continual emphasis over the long haul. This, thus serves as a long term strategy for building brand credibility which delivers qualified visitors over the long-haul without relying on a media budget. An interesting statistics is that about 80% - 85% of the free traffic on the internet is referred from a search engine.
On the other hand, Search Engine Marketing or especially PPC advertising on the other hand, allows firms to present targeted ad messages with specific calls-to-action. Contextual PPC advertisements are viewed by prospects at the very moment they are looking for information, and in most cases, the advertisers only pay for clickthroughs (in some cases even leads/ sales). PPC campaigns are cost-effective, highly controllable, deliver results immediately, and hence work to get traffic/leads/ sales in the short term.
Other Reads
Search Marketers Spent $9.4 Billion in 2006
Search Marketing Shows Strength in 2006
Why Links Matter: So Simple a Monkey Could Understand It
Filed under: SEM, SEO | No Comments »
Posted on February 21st, 2007 by Dhirender
A good tool to check Back links (or other sites linking to your site), is the Backlink Checker (check out the results for this blog). While nothing beats the data thrown up by Google Webmaster Tools, in terms of providing the most comprehensive statistics, the Backlink Checker gives you something that currently even Google Webmaster Tools does not - the PageRank of the pages linking to you. This is a great tool to view the quality of back links that your site has.
Other ways to check backlinks are the link:url command in Google (results for this blog) or Yahoo Site Explorer (results for this blog), or the link:url command in MSN Live (results for this blog). Alternatively, go to Link Popularity to check how many back links you have in the various search engines.
Filed under: SEO | No Comments »
