If Content is King, then surely Relevance is Queen!

Written by Jason Hulott


There has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing inrepparttar search engine world of late and there are lots of conspiracy theories as to why these things happen.

It is easy as a webmaster to get caught up in these webs of intrigue.

You get email notes about them, you view so-called experts' thoughts on bulletin Boards - hey you probably even read things in newsletter articles!

Well I hope so anyway....

The big driver for webmasters currently appears to be content and link building.

While link building is important I don't believe it makes Queen. Maybe a Prince. Content and links DO go hand in hand but, without relevance,repparttar 131731 Kingdom is doomed. Sorry I will stoprepparttar 131732 analogy now! :-)

If your site is about finance, then finance content is best supported by finance link exchanges. Relevance!

If your site is about finance, then finance content supported by casino link exchanges from a PR8 site while inrepparttar 131733 short term may help,…but allrepparttar 131734 signs are saying this is not a long term strategy.

Okay,so what isrepparttar 131735 best strategy?

Keep EVERYTHING relevant. It is that simple.

Make sure that you only swap or link to sites that are relevant torepparttar 131736 content on your pages. Yes I am suggesting link exchanging on pages of your site not a links page.

Links pages seem to be being abused. There are rumours that pages called links, resources or partners are not passing page rank. You could be wasting your time building links that are not giving you any benefits!

Email Marketing - the end is nigh!

Written by Robert Palmer


Consider if you willrepparttar resources,repparttar 131728 time andrepparttar 131729 financial investment given to attracting new web traffic. Banner advertising, link exchanges, search engine ratings, affiliate schemes andrepparttar 131730 list goes on. Yet when it comes to retaining a customer’s future business or even a return visit, we simply hope that they will opt-in to a newsletter mailing list and everything will be okay.

Of courserepparttar 131731 truth of opt-in email marketing is far from okay. For a start, people, especially private individuals, frequently change their email address. For many people, email addresses are a disposable accessory, which should be replaced every few weeks whenrepparttar 131732 Spam starts rolling in. I don’t know about you, but I have enough trouble keeping up withrepparttar 131733 email changes of my friends and family, let alone a list of a few thousand customers and potential customers.

Typing “email marketing” into Google will return literally thousands of software products and services all promising to make your email campaign more successful and slick. Of course it doesn’t matter how much or how little you expend on your email newsletter, it will still be one subject line of possibly hundreds, all screaming for attention.

 Average email click through rates fell from 5.4% in 1999 to just 1.8% in 2003 (Source eMarketer)  27% of emails never get opened and of those that are opened only 23% are read thoroughly (Source: J Neilsen)  Average open rate for B2B emails has fallen by 42% since 2001 (Source eMarketer)

Although such statistics make grim reading, worse is yet to come. Some industry experts are predicting a total collapse ofrepparttar 131734 email infrastructure withinrepparttar 131735 next five years due torepparttar 131736 shear volume of traffic. A technology dating back torepparttar 131737 1960’s, email was developed as a means for geeks to communicate with other geeks, about something they had seen inrepparttar 131738 alt.freakygeek newsgroup. It was never designed to cope withrepparttar 131739 demands of mass marketing which have been inflicted upon it sincerepparttar 131740 arrival ofrepparttar 131741 WWW. So with that in mind, it is something of a miracle and a credit torepparttar 131742 technology of yesteryear that it continues to work at all.

Recent research commissioned by Yahoo revealed thatrepparttar 131743 average British PC has nine “sick days” a year, two more thanrepparttar 131744 average for human workers. Six of these days are lost battling against Spam, while a further three are taken up combating viruses.

The Yahoo findings went on to reveal that nearly half of British computer users find dealing with junk e-mails more stressful than traffic jams andrepparttar 131745 majority want service providers to act.

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