There are two words that I would like to cover today. They were prompted by an article written by SEO-speedwagon. The two terms are Index and Crawling.

Crawling: “is the process of an engine requesting — and successfully downloading — a unique URL.”

What this means: Google, Yahoo and other search engines have the ability to surf the internet. To surf the internet they use a small program called a spider or robot. What these spiders or robots do is read different pages that they come across. They follow links to find the page that they read and that is one reason why links are so important. When they arrive at a page the spider starts at the top and reads all the content on that page. If a spider follows a link to a specific page and receives an error then the spider cannot crawl that particular page.

Index: “is the result of successful crawling.”

What this means: Once a spider or robots has read everything on a particular page it adds all of that information to what is known as its index. A search engine index is very similar to that used in a book. It is a quick reference guide as to where the information is and what it may be about. Once a page has been successfully indexed and made available when a search is performed the page will appear in the Search Engine Results Pages.

Problems that may be encountered when a spider is crawling pages are, it may be blocked by a robots.txt file or the server could be switched off or coding on the page may stop the search engines from reading the page correctly. There is normally a delay in time between a successful crawl and the page being displayed in the results of a search engine. This delay depends on the site and can be as little as a few minutes, for some sites that the spiders trust and access regularly for example a news site. For a new site without any page rank it could be anything up to a week before the page is available in the search results of Google and other search engines.

But do you know that there is a certain type of computer “virus” that can make you money?  Let me reassure you that I am not going to advocate any “black hat” practises, or weird conspiracy theories about Microsoft and virus propagation.

I was at a marketing presentation the other week, and we asked the audience, a group of fellow small business owners, what they would most like to see covered in our Newsletter.  There were a couple of answers to that question, one of them was, ‘I want to know how I can get my information to spread across the internet as an email attachment’ (apologies to I.P. for my rewording of his question).

The answer to this question is “Viral Marketing”.  The use of the words “viral” and “virus” in the IT world have in the past had negative connotations. The term “virus” is used to describe these programmes, because of their ability to multiply themselves across the internet, much as a real medical virus multiplies in our cells and spreads across our bodies.

So what then is viral marketing?  It is a marketing campaign that multiplies itself across the internet.  It is not a paid marketing campaign based on ad placement, it spreads from one internet user to the next. It does not do it by taking control of your address book and hijacking you, a viral marketing “ad” is replicated when one person LIKES the ad, and sends it on.  Unlike a chain letter, a successful viral marketing campaign is anything but lame and annoying, it is entertaining.

Do you remember back around 2000, 2001 there was a Budweiser ad that every one was emailing around (WASSUP??)  It was entertaining, so people sent it on to their friends.  But at the same time it raised every body’s awareness of the Budweiser product.

So how can you get yourself a successful viral marketing campaign? 

Firstly, you need to decide who your audience is and what kind of viral ‘genre’ they are going to respond to AND want to share with their friends.

A couple of genres are:

1.  Inspirational – can often be a slide show of lovely pictures with inspirational sayings.  Appeals to people because it affirms their values.

2. Humorous – can be one funny picture, a slide show of funny pictures, a funny written piece of work or, increasingly, a video.

Successful viral marketing rarely talks about product benefits.  It often seeks to create an emotion (ie happiness) and then attach its product to that emotion.  Its main aim is to raise brand awareness.  That doesn’t mean that you can’t sell benefits.  But don’t become boring.

Once you have picked a market, and decided what kind of media they might respond to, you need to get your piece of media organised.  Either slide show, simple email, video, audio etc, bearing in mind that although video has most impact, some people still cannot down load it very fast and therefore may not watch it.

Then you need to mail it to people.

Who?  Well your database of customers is a great start.  They should be people who do not mind receiving emails from you.

They will then hopefully forward it to their friends.  Once you have sent the email, it is out of your hands and it is up to the piece of media to be compelling enough that they send it on.

Sending a whole heap of emails can be time consuming, and can also get you black listed as a spammer, so if you are uncertain about how to go about it, drop us an email.  There are easy ways to manage it.

Spam email is a horrible and painful problem. It is not unheard of to have hundreds of emails come into your inbox while only a handful are relevant. There are software programs that can help to combat spam and do a pretty good job of reading between the lines and stopping at least 40% of spam. However it does take setup and a bit of time to train email spam detection software.

Here is an article on SEOmoz about 5 tips to combat this email spam before it starts to happen.

A few good suggestions about how to combat email spam are:

• encrypt the email address instead of having a standard mailto:user@domain.com
• don�t have a generic email address
• use on line forms if you can there are free scripts like Matts, as well as companies offering online formmail

Unfortunately email spam seems to be here to stay and the best we can expect is to learn how to deal with, making it as difficult as possible for spammers to get through and waste our time.

]]> http://www.websitetips.com.au/2007/02/combat-email-spam-before-it-happens/feed/ 0 http://www.websitetips.com.au/2006/12/rss-feeds-and-the-dream/ http://www.websitetips.com.au/2006/12/rss-feeds-and-the-dream/#comments Tue, 19 Dec 2006 03:05:16 +0000 Rory Mackay http://www.websitetips.com.au/2006/12/19/rss-feeds-and-the-dream/ Communication has always been the life blood of success. It was the Athenian runner that ran all night to bring news from the battle of marathon. Upon his arrival and his report of the news that they had won the battle the messenger promptly died.

The stock market lives and breathes on information and its timely access. Business decisions are made with more clarity and success when the information is available and the CEO�s of the large companies understand this, demanding information now, right now!

This culture has filtered through our world and information is the most marketable commodity on sale today. The highest prices paid are those for information with huge corporations being built on the collection and dissemination of this information.

The first opportunity to spread information was the letter. When the Dutch East India Company traveled between Europe and India letters were left under a rock at the tip of Africa in the hope that another ship going the other way would pick up the mail and then spend a few more months as they sailed slowly to their destination to deliver the letters.

Pony post was another step in the communication evolution as riders would throw a satchel full of mail over their shoulder and gallop the gauntlet of Red Indian arrows to deliver the news and information.

As our world grew in technological competence so communication became easier. The wire the telephone and then email. Electronic communication was launched with the ability to instantaneously send communication around the world and back again.

Along with the ability to communicate so quickly came a host of problems that sprang up. One of the major problems was caused by unscrupulous people that send unsolicited email which we have labeled as spam. This spam fills our time and buries us in pointless advertising and more information then we can understand. It takes time to filter through what we want to read and what is junk which needs to be deleted.

Fortunately the same wonderful intellect and technology that brought us all this communication time sapping mess has come to our rescue and has delivered us RSS feeds.

Now that I have spun out the history that has led to this new technology let me explain what a RSS feed is. RSS is an acronym for about 3 different sentences describing what it is. So I am not even going to say what they are as it is the propensity of geeks to dream up words and acronyms for what they dream up in the middle of the night.

But how does this new technology affect each one of us and how do we use it.

What a feed is is the ability for some one that has information to place it into a format that is readable by a particular type of software. These readers can then take the information that you would like to receive and allows you to receive that information. The beauty of the feed is that you do not share your contact details with any one. There is no way for the person who is sending out the information to know anything about you, and it is as easy as one click for you to get rid of the information that they send you.

So how does one get a RSS feed. The first thing you need is a reader. The easiest one to use is google reader. There are however heaps of readers out there and most browsers provide a feed reader including Mozilla and Internet Explorer.

Now that you have picked your feed reader you need to go and find the feeds that provide the information that you are looking for. When you come across the internet site that has the information that is relevant to what you are interested in then look for the little orange button with what looks like impulse waves rippling across its face.

When you click on this button it will take you to a page where you can select the reader that you have decided to use. Suddenly you have Real Syndication happening to your PC with out the spam and with the confidentiality. And what is more; you can upload it to your iPod, PDA etc and walk around the street be on the train or where ever reading your new feeds.

It will probably take you about quarter of the time it took you to read this article to set up a RSS reader and a feed that you like. The beauty is you now have an anonymous method of receiving all the information you would like. The question from here is how much information can you handle; and how long will it take before the bad people figure out how to break your reader and spam you again. In which case I think I will probably give up like the runner from marathon.

Technorati Profile