When you get an e-mail from SEO Company with content similar to this:
“We submit your site on X00, 000 search engines and directories�”
Stay far away from companies which offer you to submit your site on thousands of directories and search engines.

Why?
What they do is: they use submission software and advanced scripts and they submit your site to different guest books, local search engines, search engines in other languages, post your URL in comments in different Blogs, FFA etc�You will not have any benefit from this.

FFA stands for Free For All, pages which are designed to carry a designated amount of links on each page. Have in mind that when comes to link popularity relevancy counts and links form this pages will not going to help you much. Add to this that FFA pages have very limited life span, you will get the picture.

When some SEO company claims that they can guarantee #1 on Google
Why?
No one can guarantee #1 on any Search Engine! (Except the owner of course)

I can guarantee you first place in the search results in my Greek Business Directory, since I am the owner, but there is no chance that ethical and honest SEO company will give you such a guarantee in real life.

Even the biggest companies in SEO industry do not give such a guarantee. There are companies who claim that if they don’t achieve specific number of top 10 positions, you get your money back. Take even this with great caution, and be sure to read their guarantee 2 times, including the small letters on the bottom (if there are any). Many of them will attempt to propose you non competitive phrases, which will give you no traffic and therefore you will have no benefit from this.

When SEO Company offers you to get paid on base on delivered traffic (Though THEIR domain)
Why?
Many SEO Companies offer to the prospective client’s deals on base on delivered traffic. This traffic to be measured easily, they propose new domain, or sub domain to be created, optimized and to deliver traffic though this domain. Be sure to ask which property will be that domain or sub domain.

If SEO Company told you that domain will be their property, your site will not be optimized. Here is what will follow: SEO Company will register domain name on THEIR name, and will optimize that domain for your keywords. They will redirect all traffic from that domain to your site.

You will be forced to pay monthly maintenance to that company and if you decide to stop their services, they will redirect their traffic to some other company in same industry. Keywords which worked well for you, will work well for your competitors too.

Fair and honest company might offer similar deal because of many reasons, but the domain from which the visitors will come will be YOURS, so if you want to change SEO Company, you will have the traffic directed to your site until the new company takes over, and your investment (optimized domain and the traffic) will remain your property.

In case that SEO Company doesn’t want to disclose the techniques which will use to rank high your website.

Why?
Legal and ethical SEO Company will give you very clear idea what they intent to do with your site, and will give you detailed plan of activities. You have to know that some SEO Companies use techniques forbidden by search engines and your site may get banned from the search engines because of this.

For example if your SEO company use thousands automatically created so called doorway pages, which are full of your keywords only and are useless to the visitors, your site might get banned because of this.

So be sure to ask your SEO Company what they intent to do, and which techniques they plan to use. Good SEO Company is always ready to educate their client to some level.

When SEO Company claim that you will see the results within 1 month
Why?
In this case, don’t walk away. Run!

If your site is brand new, it might take up to 3 months to get listed on major search engines. To get some results even in less competitive results, you should count that 4-6 months is the timeframe where you can expect to see first results. Note that if your website has 5-10 pages only, you will need much more content that this. SEO Company will have to add much new pages to your site, and that is time consuming task.

So, if the SEO Company claims that you will be on the top within a month, they have PPC (Pay per Click) in their mind, and that have nothing with Search Engine Optimisation.

By Zoran Makrevski

In search of the tools to make strategic decisions about paid search advertising, Atlas DMT, a digital marketing technology provider and an operating unit of aQuantive, released research demonstrating the rank of a paid search listing and its impact on conversions.

The Atlas DMT Digital Marketing Insight (DMI) is a follow-up to research released in July, which focused on how search engine rankings impacts traffic.

“Paid search’s success is undeniable and, while its popularity has grown rapidly, so have prices,” said Young-Bean Song, director of analytics, Atlas DMT & The Atlas Institute. “Every marketing medium has the fundamental trade-off between volume and efficiency, and search is no exception. Understanding factors such as rank on traffic and conversion provides marketers tools to better control costs, while maximizing targeted traffic and sales.”? Atlas’ two paid search DMIs provide conversion modelling and forecasting benchmarks for the top 10 rankings in paid search, and can be used to plan more strategic search engine marketing campaigns.

“Many have hypothesized that conversion rates might actually rise at lower ranks, theorizing that users clicking on lower listings are more qualified prospects, but this approach turns out to be neither entirely right nor wrong,” said Song.

The research discovered that conversion rates generally fall according to rank, and this was especially true for high volume keywords. However, when looking at low volume keywords (the bottom 80 percent of keywords based on click volume), in many instances conversion rates in the lower ranks converted at higher levels than the top ranked listings

For example, at Google, ranks 8 through 10 for low volume keywords had about 30 percent higher conversion rates than the top ranking. While at Yahoo’s Overture, low volume keywords showed sustained conversion rates across all top 10 ranks.

Utilizing data from Atlas Search, the industry’s first integrated search marketing and online campaign management system, traffic representing more than 41 million clicks and 400 thousand keywords during July and August 2004 were analyzed. The analysis took into consideration advertisers’ “primary” conversion metric, which for most represented online sales, but also included conversions such as lead acquisitions, account sign-ups and requests for information.

By John Borthwick

If an e-mail address in your list ceases to be valid, you remove it from the list. Simple enough, right? There are more subtle aspects of bounce management that you might not be acutely aware of, however. We hope this column sheds some light on them.

A bounce is a notification that your message, for whatever reason, didn’t make it to the recipient. Ideally, these bounces take the form of SMTP (define) codes, defined as a standard in RFC821. Using these codes, ISPs can communicate the reason for the bounce. Not everyone follows this standard, however, and accurate bounce handling may involve some keyword review of the replies.

Regardless of the bounce message’s exact wording, there are two types of bounces: hard and soft. Depending on whom you talk to, they might have more technical definitions; but here is the gist of what they mean.

A hard bounce means either the receiving server purposely rejected the message or the receiving server doesn’t exist. Examples of hard bounces are:

• The user doesn’t exist at the domain
• The domain doesn’t exist
• The message was rejected

A soft bounce typically denotes a temporary error with delivery and may be any response other than a hard bounce. Examples of soft bounces are:

• The e-mail server isn’t responding
• The user’s mailbox is full

Why Process Bounces?
It’s important to properly process bounces for a couple reasons. You don’t want to pay for e-mail messages sent to non-functioning addresses. If you don’t process bounces correctly, a mailing list’s natural churn will result in large portion of dead addresses on the list.

Monitoring bounces can help show a potential delivery problem. Perhaps an e-mail domain that represents a significant portion of your list has stopped responding. Perhaps your messages are being rejected. By monitoring bounces after every campaign, you can quickly correct any irregularities.

Most important, ISPs look at bounce information when determining whether they’re being targeted by a spammer. Spammers’ e-mail lists are of very poor quality. If an ISP detects a large percentage of invalid e-mail coming from one IP, the mail stream may be identified as spam and blocked.

Minimize Bounces
Here are some tips to help effectively deal with or minimize e-mail bounces:

• ISPs recommend retrying hard bounces no more than three times. In our experience, retrying a hard bounce only once after a period of two to four days is sufficient.
• Remove hard-bounced addresses from the list either immediately or after the retry attempt fails. Remove soft-bounced addresses from the list if the address repeatedly generates bounces over a period of four to five e-mail campaigns.
• Scan keywords when processing bounces to help deal with non-standard bounce messages.
• Use a double or confirmed opt-in subscription process to minimize incorrect and false addresses from the start.
• Use an e-mail change of address service to help combat e-mail address churn in your mailing list.
• Add an e-mail address update link to your e-mail and a profile update form to your Web site, enabling subscribers to update their address and preferences.
• Consider contacting bounced subscribers via postal mail or phone (if you have contact information and permission) to obtain their new e-mail addresses.
• To ensure subscribers enter their e-mail addresses correctly, include a script that checks for syntax errors upon submission. Additionally, consider requiring subscribers re-enter their addresses in a second box.
• Monitor bounce messages (particularly from key ISPs and domains) for signs of e-mail rejection. The message may have been rejected due to blocking or filtering and you may need to contact the administrator of the receiving system.
• Monitor bounce rates continually, and establish a benchmark. Analyze the cause, and take appropriate action when a message lies outside of the norm. Though average bounce rates can vary dramatically, if your rate continually rises above 5 percent, you may have list input or hygiene issues.
• Pre-test messages for potential spam-oriented content to help minimize rejections by ISP and corporate spam filters.

Until next month, keep on deliverin’.

By Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald