Perhaps it’s the buzz around the launch of Google Plus, but some other hot topics seem to have gone off the boil. Perhaps the most lively this year was the effect of the introduction of the Panda algorithm to grade the quality of web pages. An interesting development on this seems to have happened without too much comment as yet.
This is a guest post by Mariana Ashley
In any search engine optimization (SEO) guide, they will tell you to do keyword research, using Google Adwords. Most guides won’t give you any more detail than that. “Just type in your keywords and Adwords will give you keywords,” or something to that extent, is the general gist. In actuality, keyword research is much more complicated and requires a complete understanding of the function of your site as well as your potential readership. There are a variety of steps that go into keyword research.
Adam Bryant has an intriguing article in the New York Times covering Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss. As a Google-phile rather than a Google-phobe, it covers a topic that I am delighted is being covered by Google.
A Marshmallow Challenge might seem to be an unlikely topic for this blog, but it is a topic on today’s Ted Blog that is amusing and stimulating. It is a talk by Tom Wujec and it is all about collaboration, innovation and creativity. He is a Fellow at Autodesk and is the creator of the marshmallow challenge.
He describes it as one of the fastest and most powerful techniques for teams to improve their capacity to generate fresh ideas, build rapport, and master the skill of prototyping – all of which lie at the heart of team innovation.
The challenge is disarmingly simple. The teams get 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of masking tape, one yard of string and one marshmallow. The rules are straightforward:
If you explore the website, you will see some of the creative solutions that teams have used around the world.
This post is also a challenge in another way. Like the other SMM blogs, this blog is currently structured according to the LMNHP (Look Mom No Home Page) approach. It is early days and the key measure of how useful this approach is will come from rankings of posts in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
The Marshmallow Challenge has produced no less than 390,000 items and the TED blog post today will encourage many more. It will be interesting to see, given that competition, how high this blog post can rise for a Google search for ‘Marshmallow Challenge’. We will keep you posted.
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AWeber provides a fine email newsletter marketing service, so you might question whether what Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO) writes in an article on Email Deliverability Tips may represent a slightly biased view of the situation.
Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.
Having found that my own email newsletter delivery system has encountered even worse problems than that, I can state that Tom Kulzer is not in any way exaggerating. This article sets out what I found and what you need to do. It all concerns an email version of the SMM Newsletter, which was sent out monthly.
This has been delivered to just under 1,000 subscribers for many months. Originally it was a text newsletter but for some months has been an HTML newsletter. It is issued using the Pimex Mail Express newsletter software. It was sent out in blocks of 20 with a 5 second gap between blocks. Suddenly this month something triggered the Shaw Spam filtering system and although it appeared to have been sent, it never got to its recipients. Explanations and solutions follow.
Although it describes a multi-delivery email message, you should note that some of these problems can affect single email messages that are junked on the way to their recipient, even if they wish to receive the communication.
You should be clear that there are two definitions of Junk Mail. You may believe it is mail that you do not wish to receive. Your email delivery system has a different definition and different email delivery systems have slightly different definitions. Each has a computer algorithm that applies a host of factors to determine whether any given email message should be deemed Junk or not. Part of it is determined by who is sending the email message and part by its content. In some spam filtering systems, particular senders can be whitelisted. In other cases, this is not possible, for example Gmail.
The key parameter in the system used by many ISPs, the Cisco IronPort SenderBase Security Network, is the Reputation of the individual IP. This is determined by the Senderbase Reputation evaluator.
The Reputation can be shown as Good, Neutral and Poor. Only the first Good reputation gives an assurance that email will be delivered. For both the other categories, mail may be caught in a Junk trap. The Reputation for the SMM IP (70.70.29.11) at the time of writing is Poor. By ensuring no continuing transgressions, a weak reputation may gradually be restored. There are other databases that may be consulted. SpamCop is another but that has no indication about the SMM IP.
The SMM IP (70.70.29.11) is used for only minimal email apart from the batch of emails once per month. The ISP tech support felt that this highly bunched up activity might have triggered the Poor Reputation value. This could have the appearance of virus or trojan related email activity. 500 emails per hour may well be a possible acceptable limit although it is probably prudent to have no more than say 200 going out per hour. This is undoubtedly affected by whether each is a simple text message for a few hundred bytes or multimedia or HTML messages that could be 25 kb or much, much more.
In testing different variants of the SMM Newsletter to try to avoid the Junk trap, some interesting facts emerged. It should be noted that each ISP or service receiving an email message may have different degrees of stringency. Indeed with the Shaw email service you can select the level of spam you are willing to tolerate. It turned out that Gmail treated as Junk what was acceptable to the medium level of stringency for Shaw.
The fact that an email is HTML is perhaps the biggest factor affecting how a message will be assessed in Junk terms. Another is the quality of the URLs (hyperlinks) that may appear within the message. Initially a URL shortening service had been used for the link to the online version of the SMM newsletter. The domain for the URL shortener turned out to be on a URL black list (https://admin.uribl.com/) and this was sufficient to cause the email to be Junk for Gmail (although not for Shaw). Another black list service is to be found at http://www.surbl.org/ and you can check particular URLs you are not sure about at http://george.surbl.org/lookup.html
One way of avoiding that problem is to use your own URL ‘shortening’ service. The shorter URL for the SMM Newsletter is http://www.otherbb.com/n.htm The page n.htm does not exist. Instead a 301 redirect is arranged in the .htaccess file on the domain to transfer automatically from n.htm to the actual online newsletter.
Given that the IP being used for transmitting the SMM Newsletter is still rated Poor by some services, the decision was made to use a text version of the Newsletter with a minimal number of URLs included and using the 301 redirect approach for the link to the actual online Newsletter. Even so there were 1% of bounces due to possible spam content of the Newsletter, although there was no questionable content in the Newsletter.
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Another way of avoidng these Junk concerns and many other concerns of publishing a successful email newsletter is to use one of the commercial services. One which is highly rated by its users is that provided by AWeber (for which I am an affiliate). If you would like to check out what is involved, why not sign in for that Free Test Drive in the form on the right. You won’t regret it. The service provides all you could possibly need.
Whether you’re looking to get your first email campaign off the ground, or you’re now ready to dig into advanced tools like detailed email web analytics, activity based segmentation, geo-targeting and broadcast split-testing, you will find that AWeber has all you need to make email marketing work for you.
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This is a guest post by Ben Johnson of Logoinn, custom logo design service provider based in the UK.
Have you ever wondered when and why people felt the need to create logos to stand out from others? The history of logo designing dates back more than 2,000 years when the Ancient Greeks used to have ciphers on their coins. They carved in different designs on different coins just to give them an identity and recognition. This practice proved to be very effective in distinguishing between coins from different regions. The importance of logo designing became even stronger in the pre-industrial era, when many people began to get involved in barter trade. At that time, everything that was sold or bought carried a signature stamp that differentiated one trader from another.
The next evolution was that people expanded their trading activities and set up companies for their trading. Just as traders felt the need to identify themselves, companies also wished to have instant recognition.
Logos have stood the test of time and if anything, there is now an even stronger need for logo designing. IBM is a great case study to see how one company has adopted this idea of creating an identity and instant recognition for itself and how much this logo has been modified over time.
IBM is perhaps the most recognized name in the field of IT products and services. But, people may not realize that it was not IBM when it started its operations in 1888. Its name then was the International Time Recording Company (ITR), whose major products were mechanical time recorders, invented and patented by William L. Bundy. This is ITR’s initial logo with its initial letters, ITR, inscribed on it.
In 1891, ITR decided to make changes in its logo again and came up with this. The changes they made were quite complex and the logo was not easy to understand at a glance. Nevertheless this logo lasted for 20 years till they made a merger with another company.
Later in 1911, ITR was merged with the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and as a result the company had to modify the logo. Clearly companies must alter their logos to reflect the changes they are undergoing and the evolving IBM is a really good example. When one company merges with another company, they need to create a new identity to signal the change to the rest of the world.
However, in 1924, the company wished to signal an expanded business role. The ornate, rococo letters that formed the ‘CTR’ logo were replaced by the words ‘International Business Machines’ which were written in more contemporary sans-serif type font. The design of it was arranged to have the look of a globe, which confirmed the company’s intention to be ‘International’.
Over 20 years later in 1947, International Business Machines (IBM) decided to eliminate the globe from its logo. Besides this, they also had a major change in their business; they expanded from the punched-card tabulating business to the new world of computers. The typeface of this logo was called Beton Bold. The logo was cut short to IBM alone.
After 9 years, in 1956, Thomas J. Watson appointed Tom Watson Jr. as the CEO. As soon as he took over, he decided to change the logo of the company. He hired Paul Rand, who was a famous logo designer. He asked Paul to make subtle changes to the current logo and make it more solid, grounded and balanced. He wanted a logo, which would be an evolution of their logo and not a design which would look entirely different.
So, IBM retained the basic design of their logo and made a subtle change of filling black color in place of white in the letters to give it a solid look. Later Paul Rand decided to design another logo with horizontal stripes on it which depicted ‘Speed and Dynamism’. He also changed the color as well.
After that the logo has remained basically the same, with just a color change. It was blue previously, and this is now changed to black. However, there have been no design alterations in the logo.
There are several lessons that can be drawn from the evolution of the IBM logo design. There are countless other companies who have also gone through major alterations in their logos. Any business owner must realize that your logo needs to be refreshed from time to time in line with changing business goals and objectives. Only in that way can the world have the best image of your company and what it offers.
The way logos evolve is a fascinating study. If you are struck by other examples of how particular company logos have evolved with time, why not add your thoughts in a comment.
John Brandon asks this morning whether interest in Google Chrome is already waning. He feels that:
People use IE because it comes pre-installed and does mostly what they need it to. Walk into an office and glance around — you will see a lot of IE. Those who know better use Firefox because it is more stable, more secure, and faster. Where does that leave Chrome? I think as a third option for early adopters. But those who just need to get work done, who use Gmail and are too busy to mess around with bugs have probably all switched back to Firefox.
Just after the launch there was an initial flurry of interest. Mark Evans commented that a number of people had checked it out with some like Walter Mossberg liking it and others like Alec Saunders suggesting it was all a shell game. Mark Evans even questioned, What Took Google So Long?
Some experts such as John Andrews even warned that ‘under the hood’ there was a Google Chrome Bait ‘n Switch. That was because of some unfortunate language in the Agreement that all users had to agree to. Google beat a hasty retreat on that one but it still left a negative impression for some.
By now, everything in the garden should be lovely. However like John Brandon, I am still left with the question as to whether this browser really has any natural customers. Clearly the power users find it lacking, yet the novices may well find its apparent simplicity somewhat baffling. I am still trying to get the Omnisearch field to accept searches with other search engines. I should be able to type ‘Yahoo cheeses‘ and get a search on Yahoo for cheeses. Perhaps the problem as PCWorld explains is that I am using Windows XP.
Type ‘google fish sticks’ to search for fish sticks on Google. The same syntax works for Yahoo, Amazon, Live Search, and other sites that are already recognized by Google or that you add. This feature, though nifty and promising, proved inconsistent in the early going: It worked for me most of the time on a Windows Vista PC, but two of my colleagues who were testing Chrome on Windows XP machines had trouble getting the feature to work.
It is all very well to have an ultra-simple browser like this, however a user manual is always obligatory. The only one I could find is the Power User’s Guide to Google Chrome. That title is an oxymoron if ever I heard one.
Firefox 3.0 Looks Much Better Full Screen. That was written by Geoff Fox of PC Magazine and I think he has got it exactly right.
If you are a Firefox user and have upgraded to Firefox 3.0, then just hit that F11 key to see what he means. If you are working with a 1024 x 768 screen, then the effect is particularly good. The whole screen is taken up with the window content of the webpage you were visiting. If the page is particularly long, then you may have a scrollbar down the right-hand side. The rest is exactly what that website owner was hoping you would see. There are no toolbars along the top or a status bar along the bottom. It is all just visual content.
If you do wish to see which tabs are open, then just move your mouse to the top of the screen and the tab bar will appear. If you were working with the Navigation toolbar visible, then this toolbar will also appear at the top above the tab bar. All the other toolbars you may have had visible still remain hidden in this Full Screen view.
If you are hooked on having these bars permanently visible along the top, then Percy Cabello has some advice for you on how to Tweak Firefox 3 full screen mode. That will make the tabs and navigation toolbar a permanent visible item in your Firefox 3 Full Screen mode.
I very much prefer keeping that clean simple look. Indeed by an approach that I am about to describe, I will suggest to you how you can stay in Full Screen mode probably 95 percent of the time. I work fairly extensively on the Internet. However if I analyze my behavior on any given day, I am probably working within a very restricted list of web pages or URLs. The problem is that from a Full Screen mode webpage, I cannot access my Bookmarks Toolbar.
I raised this problem with my colleagues on the Cre8Asite Forums, in a topic which was titled Maximizing The View Window. There was a suggestion that the Bookmarks or Favorites could be put on a web page. This in turn raised the possibility that such a HTML file could be held on my local computer, which gives the most rapid and reliable access. The following image shows some of the final product. It’s a Demo version of my new computer-resident Home Page.
With what is there, I can work most of the time in the Full Screen version and rarely need to put all those toolbars back. You can download it, if you wish to check the code or modify it to create your own, from this link: Home Page Links Demo.
Some of the features you will note are the clock at the top right, a Google search field and a Quote Of The Day. Below that arranged in a table are some of the links I use for much of the day. When working for a specific client, I often add a few links that are specific to that client.
For those who are novices with HTML, it is a very simple matter to modify the code to remove or add a link. You just open the homepagelinksdemo.htm file in Notepad or something equivalent that can handle text files. The HTML code for a table entry looks like the following:
<td><a href="http://www.mysite.com/">My Site</a></td>
To change the link, put the new URL between the ” ” and add the appropriate name between the > and <.
When using such a Home Page, it really becomes very handy if you arrange that opening a new tab shows that Home Page. This can be achieved by using the New Tab Homepage 0.4 Firefox Add-on.
If you wish to select a link on this Home Page, <control>T opens up a new tab with the Home Page showing. Clicking on a link on that Home Page opens the URL in the same tab. Throughout you are working Full Screen. If you no longer want that web page, <control>W will close that tab.
I’m finding this increases my effectiveness and viewing pleasure significantly. Try your own local Home Page and perhaps you will be equally impressed. Unfortunately a similar set-up does not work so smoothly for Internet Explorer. The security features blocking ActiveX controls prevents single click opening of new web pages. Often two clicks are required to remove the blocking feature. The only sensible suggestion for Internet Explorer users is to switch to Firefox.
The previous two articles in this series have suggested ways to combat the ever-increasing hack attacks that WordPress blogs are receiving. In this final article, we will discuss some real-life examples and what can be learned from them. As a disclaimer, it should be noted that some hackers are very skilled and are continually improving their methods. These are anecdotes from the past and the future will undoubtedly be very different.
For specific details of typical hacking exploits, the following accounts are particularly good:
The methods used in these cases are probably all the work of one hacker, by nickname goro, who may well have been one of the commenters on the first of these three posts.
We will not go into the specific details here (since they will undoubtedly evolve), but rather discuss the bigger picture associated with these exploits. In the case of the hacking done on the SMM blogs, there were some clever refinements. The mechanism inserted on the domain generated hundreds of random, unique blog post web pages, which included links to online pharmaceutical web pages. Since the websites were well ranked in Google, many of these hundreds of blog posts were served to the search engine spiders as they made their visits. After a period of hours, the mechanism then stopped. This may have been to avoid a huge spike in traffic, which would have been more easily detected.
During the last two or three months, Google has been giving much more rapid visibility and higher ranking to blog posts in its regular web search. In the latter part of January, blog posts appropriate for particular keyword searches would appear within a small number of hours in the regular web search. The algorithm may well be using the RSS news feeds associated with the blogs. This gave particular prominence to the blog posts generated by the hacking mechanism. They would almost always appear among the top five positions on a search for particular online pharmaceuticals and often in the first position. Presumably this gave a significant economic advantage to the hacker.
Although the hacking mechanism was removed within 36 hours, the false and now non-existent blog posts still persist in the Google index over 3 weeks later. In some cases the cached versions of the false blog posts are still available.
An interesting parallel development during this time is that Google Blogsearch now has a delay of a few days in displaying new blog posts. Until recently such a new blog post might have appeared within an hour or two, since it was triggered by the pinging of the RSS news feed. Whether this is a reaction to a large volume of blog posts generated by hackers one can only surmise.
Hopefully this series of articles has sensitized you to the dangers of hacking. This should prompt you to maintain a constant vigil so that any hacker intrusions will be spotted rapidly. You should also as Wayne Liew suggests regard WordPress Upgrades as a Must. The continuing improvement in security may not serve to keep out hackers but at least it may encourage them to attack an easier prey.
If your WordPress blog is hacked, it can be quite a challenge to find out what has been changed. Sometimes the hacker may have modified files deep within folders that are not normally touched in upgrading, such as the images folder or the wp-content folder. Checking the size in bytes of particular files compared with versions in the most recent backup will reveal suspicious differences. Sometimes the .htaccess file may have been modified to create additional and inappropriate mechanisms. In such cases, you’ve got to make sure that you eliminate all such additions to the website. If you have backed-up a clean version of the website recently, it might be better to take down the website and replace it with a clean version.
Related:
Blogs Take Center Stage For Marketers And For Google
How to Remove WordPress.net.in Spam Injection
Previous articles in this series:
WordPress Blog Hacked
Guarding Your WordPress Blog
Customer service should be a key department. It’s where potential customers, or prospects, may get their first impression of the company. It’s also where existing customers may confirm that they have bought from the right company or may get disillusioned. Surprisingly it’s often at the bottom of the totem pole.
You would think that companies in telecommunications should be the best examples of how to do it well. Tom Fishburne was so affected by his experience that he drew a cartoon about it. Yes, customer service can be a joke.
On the other hand, Shep Hyken, an expert in customer service, finds one of his clients is doing customer service as it should be done.
I had the wonderful opportunity to work with Verizon Wireless and their call centers. Their goal is to answer the phone within a surprisingly short period of time, and they usually do. That strategy, along with a focus on “one call resolution” helps create loyal customers. Why? Because, they create a pleasant experience, which creates confidence, and ultimately can lead to customer loyalty.
How can customer service from telecommunications companies so often be so bad? As Kim Stevenson recounts:
The American Customer Satisfaction Index numbers for 1Q07 were released May 15th. The punch line for telecommunications companies is: cable and satellite TV customer satisfaction remains low. Wireless carriers are improving and at an all time high but remain one of the lowest scoring industries.
Related: Your Call Is Important To Us – Roberto Rocha
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