Yearly Archives: 2009

Stop Sending Junk E-Mail

Posted on by

Stop sending junk e-mail is good advice for anyone, but you may inadvertently be sending junk e-mail when you don’t intend to.  If you find that surprising, read on because you’re in for some major surprises.

None of us likes junk e-mail, which is e-mail that we have not requested.  If you wish you can add a spam filter to your e-mail service and weed out what you do not wish to receive.  For example I use K-9, which learns as you teach it what you regard as spam and what you believe is acceptable.  I find its performance excellent and it does a fine job in filtering out over 40% of my incoming e-mail, which is spam.

What you may not realize is that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) has already filtered out some other spam e-mail that you never saw.  Indeed any e-mail message passes across a number of ISPs in travelling from the sender to the receiver.  That means that other ISPs on the route may also have cut out some spam e-mail by their definition of spam.  They do this to help their clients but also to act as a deterrent to others who may wish to tie up their bandwidth with automatically generated floods of spam messages. 

What exactly is their definition of spam?  In fact the answer will always be complex and it is most unlikely that you can get a clear answer.  What follows is based on some extensive work done over 6 months ago.  In the interim, despite further analyses, the situation is no clearer.

Your IP Reputation

The first and probably most important factor in determining what constitutes spam is the Internet Protocol (IP) of the originator of the e-mail.  There are a number of services that evaluate the reputation of the originating IP.  One such is Senderbase.org. If you evaluate my own IP, 70.70.29.11, you will see it has a Poor reputation. 

You can find out your own IP by using a service such as WhatIsMyIPAddress.com. The reputation of your own IP might be rated as either Good, Neutral or Poor.  Even with a Good reputation, there is no guarantee that any given ISP will not reject your e-mail message as spam or junk e-mail but the odds are low that this would happen.

In the worst case, if you have indulged in deliberate e-mail spamming then it is possible that the IP address of your mail server is currently listed on the SpamCop blocklist.  This is a sure-fire guarantee that your e-mail messages will likely not get through.  In this case, you will need to read the SpamCop FAQ  for more information on getting de-listed from this SpamCop blocklist.

There are two other tests you may wish to do on your IP to determine how reliable it may be as an originator of an e-mail message.  The first is to do what is called a Ping test which determines how well your IP communicates with other IPs.  You may find that even with a neutral reputation IP, no pings are reported, which is not a good sign.

The problem is compounded when the your e-mail message must pass across several ISPs.  To get an indication of what is involved you can do what is called a TraceRT test.  This will give you an indication of the places your e-mail message must pass through to get to its final destination.  Remember that each ISP may possibly delete your message if it seems that it could be a potential junk e-mail.

Your own e-mail service will have a certain policy on what e-mail messages it defines as junk and what e-mail messages it allows to pass through to its e-mail clients.  In some cases you may be able to modify the default policy and allow either more or less junk e-mail messages to get through to your Inbox.  If you are aware of the IP of a source of messages that you wish to see then you may be able to whitelist the source with your e-mail service provider.  However in practice this does not always work.

Is Your E-mail Message Spam?

The reason why the reputation of the IP is not an infallible indicator of junk e-mails is that the message itself is also analyzed.  A simple text message will usually get through from a good reputation sender.  Anything more than that may be questionable.  Here are some of the reasons why e-mail messages are deemed to be spam:

  • The same e-mail message is sent to a large group of people, particularly using the blind copy approach to hide their e-mail addresses
  • He e-mail message is in HTML
  • He e-mail message contains a large number of links to other websites
  • The e-mail message contains images
  • The e-mail message has attachments such as Word document files.

Whether any given message is deemed to be a junk e-mail message will depend on a combination of factors above and the reputation of the e-mail originator.  Different e-mail services will be more or less stringent in approving these rules.  For example the Google Gmail service is fairly strict in this regard.

Making sure your e-mail message gets through

There are a number of factors you may wish to consider to ensure your e-mail message gets through to as many as possible of your intended audience:

  • Ensure your originating e-mail address has a good reputation.
  • Limit the number of attachments to your e-mail messages and ideally avoid them altogether.
  • Avoid too many images in your e-mail messages
  • Avoid creating large numbers of URL links in your e-mail messages
  • If your audience accepts this, use text messages rather than HTML messages

Monitor How Many E-Mail Messages Get Through

Given that no e-mail message is guaranteed to get through, it is useful to monitor whether all your messages get through or whether a certain proportion of your audience does not receive them.  If this proportion is unexpectedly high, then you may need to change the content of your messages or the e-mail address you use to send them.

The more of these you can cover, the greater fraction of the audience that will see your message..  However there are never any guarantees and the ideal is that your recipients should also whitelist your originating e-mail address.  Even that is not surefire so in critical situations, it is better to seek some confirmation that your readers have indeed received your e-mail message.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Hold Me Tight And Engaging Websites

Posted on by

Beatles’ fans will remember an early song from the Liverpool favourites when they hear those evocative words.

Hold me tight is a straightforward and direct message so what does that have to do with websites?  The link may escape you but read on and all will become clear.  The progression of ideas runs as follows

Hold Me Tight

Hold me tight is also the title of a book by Sue Johnson.  It sets out the key principles involved in the EFT approach that she has developed over thirty years.  Sue Johnson is a professor at the University of Ottawa.  She is also the Director of both the International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy (ICEEFT) and the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute Inc..

The book covers a most important topic and here we pick up on only one small sliver of the knowledge she covers.  A key reason why two people in a relationship may get at cross purposes is that the couple are hardwired to react instinctively if they feel that their relationship is threatened.  To fully understand, you should read her book, but the essence is that this threat of losing that key relationship triggers an extremely rapid primal fear instinctive reaction.  This occurs in the amygdala, which is part of the limbic area of the brain.

This is the area in which the fight or flight reaction is triggered when threats occur.  You might almost say that this is unthinking reaction, since it occurs unbidden and instantaneously.  Any primate or indeed any mammal has this possibility of being affected by such a primal fear of losing a connection with a significant other.  It starts at birth with a link between a mother and child and is always a feature of our human nature although linkages may change over time.

Her thesis is that subsequent actions and reactions are all affected by what happens in those first microseconds of primal reaction.  Although our reaction to a given website will rarely involved anything as gripping as a primal fear, it is not too much of a stretch to believe that reactions to a web page are not just affected by what is logically perceived.  Perhaps they can be affected by how our emotions affect that perception.

Three Brain Synergy

The words of Sue Johnson to an extent are in sync with the approach suggested by Fritz Glaus and Stephen Goldberg, cofounders of Three Brain Synergy.

They suggest that each human being in a sense has three brains, which have been labeled ”head brain”, ”heart brain”, and ”gut brain” by the neuroscientists.  The head brain is concerned with logical reasoning, the heart brain deals with emotions and the gut brain deals with those instinctive reflex actions generated by the limbic area of the brain.

Humans will react in any given situation based on how these interacting parts of their brain function are interacting.  Sue Johnson’s work is building on the same foundation.  In both cases the gut brain, or the limbic area, may have already triggered a certain sense which then affects and perhaps limits the actions that the other parts of the brain can consider and act on.

Blink For Fast Reactions

Malcolm Gladwell has written persuasively on the notion that people can react to websites in milliseconds in deciding whether to stay and interact with the website or flee elsewhere.  The specific trigger may not be as primal as the fight or flight reaction but undoubtedly it can be very rapid.  Given that it happens, we should not discount the notion that our reaction to a given web page is not just a logical, intellectual response to seeing what the web page displays.  Our emotions and even our gut reaction may modify or distort what our thinking brain is perceiving.

Engaging Websites

The most reasonable description of our reaction to a web page must be that the perception is made up of our logical, emotional and even gut reactions to what is on display.  This will also be affected by our expectations of what we might see in opening that web page.

If we wish to have engaging websites where visitors interact with the web pages by pursuing the calls to action, then we cannot just rely on a logical analysis of what appears on the web page.  As so often, we must approach this in a visitor-centric manner.  What is the visitor expecting to see and what will their three brains working in concert perceive when the web page opens in their browser.

Identifying exactly how a given visitor is perceiving the web page may be challenging.  Not everything will be necessarily perceived consciously.  Some aspects may be instinctive and unspoken.  All one can do is stay open-minded to the possibilities.  What may appear to be an illogical reaction may be explained by some emotional factor.  This three brain synergy explanation raises some interesting challenges for the search engines and what they are attempting to do.  Google might hope to deliver the most relevant web page to a keyword search query.  If that relevance should really be based on a tri-brain perception, how can a spider using only logic deliver the most relevant page.  The answer will be suggested in a follow-up post.

Conclusion

In the end, one can only hope that the visitor’s total reaction is in line with the objective we had for that particular web page.  Hold Me Tight is in many cases a worthwhile goal to shoot for.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Blogging For Maximum Google Visibility

Posted on by

Blogs versus websites

If you are concerned to bring lots of traffic to your online property, then there’s no discussion about which is the better choice.  A blog will perform very much more strongly than a website for reasons we will shortly discuss. Indeed if blogs had come along before websites, there would now only be a small fraction of the websites we see on the Internet.

Blogging is Proactive

The biggest reason why blogs outperform websites is that blogs are proactive while regular websites are reactive.  A blog can signal to Google or the other search engines the instant that new material has been added.  On the other hand, if you change a web page,  Google will only be aware of the change the next time one of their spiders happens to check out that specific  blog post.  That factor alone has an enormous impact on the search engine visibility of blog posts.  However the specific visibility of any particular blog can be improved or diminished by more detailed decisions on particular features of the blog.

By observation, this search-engine visibility of blog posts is greatly speeded up now with the adoption by Google of its new search infrastructure, ‘caffeine’, during the summer.  You can check this by doing Google Alerts on keywords in your post and seeing how rapidly these are triggered. It really is most impressive.

Ways to improve your blog visibility

Two particular practices can materially improve blog posts visibility.

  • Regular blog posts, even if short
  • Add links to blog posts to interconnect

Regular blog posts have a number of important benefits, all of which ratchet up the search engine visibility:

  • The RSS news feeds are pinging the search engines more frequently
  • Web pages that change more frequently encourage the search engine spiders to crawl the web pages more frequently

The other useful way of strengthening important blog posts is to add links to them from other blog posts.  Although internal links are probably not as important as external links, they do provide paths for spiders to follow and will encourage more thorough indexing.

What to avoid with your blog

Although blogs do have this inherent search engine visibility, it is possible to severely handicap how visible the individual blog posts will be.  The key parameter here is the number of times a new blog post appears on the blog front page.  It turns out that the extremes reduce the impact of individual blog posts.

  • Having a static ‘Home page’
  • Having too many blog posts on the ‘front page’

With a static home page, new individual blog posts only appear as singles or as entries within category or tag pages.  Although they may be no less visible to humans or search engine spiders that follow the news feeds, general readers visiting ‘the blog’ may never click on a link to spot the latest web page.

If one goes with the default home page of a blog, where say 5 or 10  blog posts may appear in sequence, then again the potential search engine visibility of the individual blog posts is reduced.  By showing only say 3 or even only the latest blog post, that content gets the added advantage of recency coupled with the greater ‘PageRank’ strength of the home page.

Conclusion

Sometimes these ‘big picture’ questions about the basic blog site architecture get forgotten,  However by making some right choices, the overall search engine visibility of the total blog content can be significantly improved.  That is something no blog owner should casually overlook.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Technorati Tags: , ,

Hyperlinks Get Even More Respect

Posted on by

Hyperlinks have never really got the respect they deserve.  Without them the Internet would be impossible.  The word is often now shortened to link and this word is often bandied around without thinking about the mind-opening implications bound up in that hyperlink word.

The term “hyperlink” was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson.  The Wikipedia explanation describes what he had defined

Hyperlinks are the basic building block of hypertexts. For example, some key words in a wiki such as Wikipedia are highlighted, and provide links to explanations of those words at other pages in the same wiki.
In directed links, the area from which the hyperlink can be activated is called its anchor (or source anchor); its target (or destination anchor) is what the link points to, which may be another location within the same page or document, another page or document, or a specific location within another page or document.

He also coined the word hypertext and the associated word hypermedia.  He bemoaned the fact that the latter had not taken off and instead became what we often call interactive media.

The hyperlink concept is really very powerful.  However Microsoft, as it has done with so many great ideas, did not leverage that power.  It is true that files or documents in the Office Suite of programs always have the hyperlinking capability.  So you will find:

  • Word hyperlinks
  • Excel hyperlinks
  • Powerpoint hyperlinks, and   
  • Outlook hyperlinks

Adobe also to an extent slowed down the wider use of hyperlinks since it is only recently that you can now create a PDF document with their software with active hyperlinks.

Luckily the hyperlink concept is much too powerful to be sidelined by this somewhat lukewarm support.  What really caused the hyperlink concept to take off was the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.  No longer would a hyperlink merely connect you with some other point in the same document.  You could now connect with some online website that could be half way round the world.

The other powerful influence was that the two Google founders latched on to the notion that hyperlinks confirmed the popularity or authority of web pages.  They then they used this concept within their search algorithm.  Since for a given Web page they were interested in hyperlinks pointing to that web page, they used the term Backlink instead of hyperlink.  If they had only stuck with the term hyperlink, then again the concept might have gained more general understanding.

The strength of hyperlinks is confirmed by what was written in 1999.  As the ClueTrain Manifesto authors pointed out, almost everyone was hyperlinking and this was a movement that could not be stopped.

However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

Ten years later, the strength of hyperlinks and the World Wide Web they made possible cannot be denied.  Most website owners acknowledge the mutual networking benefits they receive and include hyperlinks to other relevant sites that their visitors may wish to visit.  This summer there was even a question whether the BBC had finally changed policy and was using hyperlinks to external sources.  The answer is unclear but the eventual outcome will undoubtedly include external hyperlinks.

The latest word from Google points to an even greater support for the hyperlink concept.  The Google Webmaster Central Blog is now encouraging webmasters to include named anchors to define sections of their webpages and tips on how to do this best.  This will mean that a keyword search could actually rank most highly a hyperlink to a point within a document that is deemed to be most relevant.

As the Official Google Blog explains, the aim is to enable users to get to the information they want faster. Searchers will now find additional links in the result block, which allow users to jump directly to parts of a larger page. This is useful when a user has a specific interest in mind that is almost entirely covered in a single section of a page. Now they can navigate directly to the relevant section instead of scrolling through the page looking for their information.

We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors. The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won’t see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.

If you have such web pages, this should ensure greater visibility and higher rankings for sections of your information-packed pages, so this is something to carefully consider. As a small test, you may wish to see how these internal web page links for Therapeutic Riding Associations and for Associations for the Disabled rank in Google searches for those terms. Once indexed, they should rank highly in related searches. Those hyperlinks certainly deserve some serious respect now.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Leads Generation With Google Squared

Posted on by

I missed the original memo from Google, but I find Google Squared from Google Labs somewhat mind-blowing.

Their announcement in June gave the following details:

Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If you search for [roller coasters], Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed.

While gathering facts from across the Internet is relatively easy (albeit tedious) for humans to do, it’s far more difficult for computers to do automatically. Google Squared is a first step towards solving that challenge. It essentially searches the web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way.

If you click on any fact, you’ll see the sources Google Squared gathered it from as well as a list of other possible values that you can investigate. So even if your square isn’t perfect at the beginning, it’s easy to work with Google Squared to get a better answer in no time. Once you’ve got a square you’re happy with, you can save it and come back to it later.

If I had seen that, I might not have grasped the full potential. However the latest news indicates that Google Squared has quality improvements and allows sorting and exporting.

At launch, your first square could include at most 30 facts or cells. With today’s update, squares display four times as much data — up to 120 facts. For example, instead of seeing only five companies and six categories, now you’ll see a table with 20 companies and up to six attributes.

The quality of the information is also better, because we’re ranking based on both relevance to your query and whether we can find high quality facts. Now we’re actively filtering out items (rows) and attributes (columns) from the initial square if we haven’t found enough accurate data. Perhaps more interesting, we built Squared to learn from edits and corrections, so as people have been improving their squares, Google Squared has gotten better for everyone.

We’ve also added the ability to sort columns, so you can rank, group and compare items. Squared will even convert units in the background to make sure the data is sorted properly. We’ve also added the ability to export data from Squared to a Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file, which should make it easier to do interesting things with the data.

Google Squared is extremely useful if you want to find a list of potential company leads. Suppose you are a wine distributor and you want to develop a list of restaurants in Langley, BC. Just do a search with Google Squared for Restaurants in Langley, BC. The result is a spreadsheet of key factors for the entries including telephone numbers.

Langley BC Restaurants

You can download this as a CSV file and open it in Excel or you can transfer it to a Google spreadsheet within Google Documents.

Try it! I think you’ll be impressed.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Technorati Tags: , , ,