| LED Digest 2376: Best Practices for Personalized Emails |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom www.GetWebContent.com/LED : the LED's Key Sponsor The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 27, 2007 Issue no. 2376 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ===================== <Moderator Comment> --== Best Practices for Personalized Emails ==-- ~ Janet Pickard "Any insight on how to market to these customers by autoresponder emails would be appreciated!" --== Dwindling Visitors, Decreasing Market? ==-- ~ Reg Charie "Did everyone in the virtual world just decide to stop using these terms?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Design Change Shortcuts ==-- ~ Richard Graham "The next problem is that SSI only works on pages that have a .shtml extension!" --== iFrame Exploit to Run Hidden Adverts ==-- ~ Veronica Yuill "Here's one example of how a hacker could introduce an unwanted iframe..." --== 301 Redirects ==-- ~ Michael Martinez "...you can get the new site crawled and let it start to rank without incurring any penalties." --== HTML Standards and Search Rankings ==-- ~ Lee Roberts "Nowhere does the law in the United States apply accessibility to businesses online." ~ Al Toman "To heck with standards. Let's just do it, cause we can." ========== NEW =================================== <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, It's been long overdue... I'm finally getting a site done for AudetteMedia. Right now we just have a holding page up so don't bother looking. Please do me a favor - tell me which logo you like best: http://www.audettemedia.com/logos.html Which logo? Let me know. I won't publish your comments, so feel free to speak openly. Also, do you know anyone skilled templating Wordpress sites? I'd like to talk with you about some design work. Wordpress? Contact me. Best wishes, Adam ------------------------ From: Janet Pickard Subject: Personalized Emailings I have a question I would like to pose to LEDers: I am using the contact management software ACT! It allows me to do a autoresponder series to my customers in my database. I would like to start doing a personalized follow-up emailing to those who purchased from me. I am wondering how many should we send to a customer (maybe 3). How far apart (3 weeks, 3 months, 6 months). What should I say in each email (thank you, how did we do, suggestions, special sale, special discount coupon). Any insight on how to market to these customers by autoresponder emails would be appreciated! Janet Pickard ChessCentral www.ChessCentral.com The Leader in Cutting-Edge Chess -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Reg Charie Subject: Disappearing Market? Hi LEDers. I have a question that has been bugging me for some time now. I have been doing SEO since before it was called SEO and have one site that ranks well for some very targeted phrases with some 2 million sites competing. A while ago my stats started showing me less and less visitors arriving using those terms. Now there are almost none. The niche is still there. The phrases are still valid and my listings are up in the #1 or #2 spots. Did everyone in the virtual world just decide to stop using these terms? My search traffic has dropped to about 35% when it was over 50. Thanks all Reg Charie www.dotcom-productions.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Richard Graham Subject: Design Updates Hello, To solve the "having to update every page to change the navigation" problem [ http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1769/55/ ] I've decided that Server Side Includes (SSI) is the best way to go. Thank you everyone for great replies both off list and on. Just in case there's anyone else out there who wants to do this I figured I might as well write it up for the LED. It worked out simple in the end. First of all I went to Download.com and got the "HTML Search & Replace" program. As I already had javascript menus on my site I did a search for... [note: preceding dots added to the tags -ed] <.SCRIPT xsrc="menu.js"><./SCRIPT> and replaced it with <.SCRIPT xsrc="menunew.js"><./SCRIPT> <!--#include virtual="menu.htm" --> Adsense etc. will go in the SSI, but I wanted to keep my navigation elements in a javascript file as SSI doesn't show up when you load a site from your hard drive i.e. no good for workshops or presentations. If anyone knows an easy way round this it would be great to hear. If you don't already have any javascript files on your site, you could simply search for... <.BODY> ... and replace it with... <.BODY><!--#include virtual="menu.htm" --> I did the same at the bottom of my pages so I have two includes. "HTML Search & Replace" made it really simple to do. The next problem is that SSI only works on pages that have a .shtml extension! I didn't fancy re-titling all my pages and didn't want to lose all my backlinks. But luckily my host came through and for the first time gave me a not too techie answer that I could understand. You simply add this line to the .htaccess of your home directory: AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .html .htm Now SSI works on all your normal pages! I think that was about it. Things seem to be working well and it's great to be able to test out adsense, adding in Google Analytics etc. really easy all just by editing and uploading one simple file And now that leads into my next question... [see Wednesday's issue] Be genki, Richard Graham www.genkienglish.net -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Veronica Yuill Subject: I-Frame exploit > There are a couple of ways you are open to hackers > - most commonly exploiting an IIS hole or exploiting > a web form on your site. - Mike Podanoffsky, LED Digest 2375 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1778/55/ Hi all I wish there were only "a couple" of ways hackers could gain access to sites -- our lives would be a whole lot easier :-) Here's one example of how a hacker could untroduce an unwanted iframe: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=1346 I don't know if this is what happened in this particular case, but if you accept user input and then display it on a page on your site (e.g. in a forum, guestbook, or blog comments), you *must* filter it for unwanted HTML or script tags; this is what happens when you don't! Regards Veronica Yuill http://www.larecettedujour.org/ -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: 301 redirects > ... we redesigned and re-architected an existing site... > the primary domain is staying the same... individual > page URLs will change as the client is moving from > a static to a CMS driven site. - Jeff Patrick, LED Digest 2374 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1777/55/ I wrote an extensive about about this for the VisInsights.com blog last week. Most SEOs pull the plug too soon, as far as implementing 301 redirects. If you modify the old site's internal navigation to link directly to the new site's content, you can get the new site crawled and let it start to rank without incurring any penalties. I have done this. When the search engines start to see duplicate content they'll pick one page over the other. But you can also use the "robots" tag on the page to tell the engines not to index the old pages any longer. When you've got the new site ranking, then you can 301 redirect everything. Matt Cutts suggested people try one section at a time in one of his recent blog posts. Michael Martinez http://www.michael-martinez.com/ -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Lee Roberts Subject: Standards > You failed to mention the United States, Canada, and > India (nor all the non-compliant content that is still out > there and won't change). I'm not ready to hold my breath > on W3C standards... - Michael Martinez, LED Digest 2375 It's interesting that you would suggest United States as a country that demands closer attention to accessibility. Actually, the United States has ruled in court more times than I can count that accessibility does not apply to the Internet for business Web sites. Canada's law is much like that of the United States. United States government Web sites are required to follow Section 508 guidelines. However, that only applies to new and updated Web pages that have been updated after the rule was put in place. It does not require the government to go back and update all Web pages to meet accessibility guidelines. I am on the Oklahoma Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Task Force and helped developed the accessibility guidelines for government Web sites in Oklahoma. Although I wanted stronger guidelines, the majority of the state Web designers wanted to make Web pages accessible after they had to work on them. This means thousands and even hundreds of thousands of Web pages are still not accessible because the Web pages did not require updating as of yet. Interesting concept & make a rule that applies to everything, but it only applies to something that requires updating at least 51% of the content. That effectively means there will always be thousands and even hundreds of thousands of Web pages that will never be accessible. Nowhere does the law in the United States apply accessibility to businesses online. I know a lot of the case law that's occurred and the Judiciary has always judged in favor of the business. According to the Judiciary the American's with Disability Act does not apply to online business. Their view is simply "it is a nice thing to do," but it is not required. In fact, the Judiciary does not want to establish law in this area and prefers that Congress update the American's with Disability Act to include online businesses. Until this happens the United States falls behind other forward thinking countries like the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom, Italy, and European Union have expressly set their rules for accessibility to require only businesses to be accessible. > The standards will always be arbitrary as long > as backwards compatibility is maintained by the > tools we use to access Web content. Neither you nor I can claim that because Internet Explorer supports archaic methods of writing HTML Web pages makes the standards arbitrary. If you want Internet Explorer to do a better job demand more from Microsoft. Perhaps more people using Opera or Firefox because they support standards better will cause Microsoft to improve their product. Supporting standards compliance has nothing to do with developing the standards. I don't use Safari and therefore cannot speak for or against its abilities. One of the things that I learned many years ago was that it is better to be part of the solution than part of the problem. This led me to assisting in the development of the standards for accessibility and other W3 standards. This only gives me a unique perspective from which to view things. It also gives me reason to defend the standards and possibly far more understanding why some people think standards are useless. Perhaps one day more people will decide for themselves to study the standards and practice them more often. Regardless of one's opinion of their value, the Web wouldn't exist without them. Regards, Lee Roberts Apple Pie Shopping Cart http://www.applepiecart.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Al Toman Subject: Standards > Most Web content is being produced by people > who don't follow those standards. Web browsers > and search engines maintain backwards > compatibility for that reason alone. - Michael Martinez "Those standards" include tagging an html document with beginning and ending html tags in which are properly nested tags such as head, title (sometimes), body, and even possibly meta tags and the doctype, heavens forbid! Framesets and iframes are part of the standards. How about the "p" and "br" thingy? They would like to be a part of the standards too! More correctly, when it comes to web design, most webmasters are like electricity and water, they take the path of least resistance. Perhaps a touch of "not knowing" but more of a touch of not wanting to learn and just being too dang lazy or just onto the money. I'm not sure about your brain, but my brain has infinite storage capacity (eat that, DELL) and a capacity and drive to learn. Yesterday, the W3C validator would pop up 3 errors, and 57 warnings. Today, I get by the W3C validator the first time except when I'm scripting at 2 a.m. or when using third party script within my web pages. It only takes about 500-900 web pages before one can comfortably validate one's web pages within a few seconds. Yup. I used to be a lazy-daisy too until W3C straightened my lil behind out. And, it's fun and rewarding. Reading the forums, posted by today's inspiring web designers is where the "pain" enters the picture. These kids often talk about validating their work and do the all to common "lol" thing when their web pages yield 3 errors and 57 warnings. They say, "oh well" and quit. That's the pain. Are you going to be the one who says, "cool" to these kids or are you the one who says, "sit down and do your homework, kid". It's your choice but I can guarantee that the "cool" kid ain't gonna have a crack at my client's web sites, more so in the future than today. As well, I took 2 years to simply learn about this SEO phenomena. Today, I can spot a "path of least resistance" seo'er (almost 100%, not quite) and most all seo'ers are. Again, ain't gonna touch my web sites. Besides, still trying to determine the standards in seo and I'm getting closer. As far as building houses, bridges, and nuke plants, why follow standards? So what if the fox blows your house down around your family, rolls your vehicle off the bridge, or illuminates you, 'glow-in-the-dark', nuker style. To heck with standards. Let's just do it, cause we can. Ah huh. Not here, baby! Al Toman ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by GetWebContent.com The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. Free no-obligation proposal: http://GetWebContent.com/LED The Archives: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/126/120/ Subscribe: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/52/77/ Unsubscribe, Change Email, or Hold / Resume Delivery: http://www.led-digest.com/content/category/4/17/86/ (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Personality is born out of pain. It is the fire shut up in the flint." - J. B. Yeats |
