WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES phần 9 pptx

Building incoming links Above all else, there is one primary tactic for building search engine karma: incoming links.. 4.The search engine value of the referring site: If the site does n

Always give descriptive supporting text to outbound links This is handled through theanchor text (the words between the <a> tags) and the value of the title attribute Thiscontent boosts the ranking opportunities of the site benefiting from the link, which in turnwill help the originating source For example:

<a href="http://erl.wustl.edu/" title="Electronic Radiology Laboratoryinvestigates digital imaging technologies for radiology departments">

Electronic Radiology Laboratory</a>

External strategies

Once a website’s markup and structure have been cleaned and polished for optimization,it’s time to pursue the external strategies that will give the domain the support it needs tohelp reach the first page of search engine results Implementing external strategies cantake just as long (if not longer) as internal strategies, and will likely be the focus of theSEO campaign for a long time, simply because of the iterative cycle of fine-tuning andmeasuring

Grabbing a high ranking does not happen overnight In fact, for especially competitivearenas, patience is not a virtue—it’s a requirement

Building incoming links

Above all else, there is one primary tactic for building search engine karma: incoming links

Google was revolutionary in the respect that its PageRank system largely based its results

on the popularity of the site, which essentially boiled down to how many links were ing to the domain Since then, every search engine has copied this model

point-Today, the secret ingredient to Google’s ranking system is mired in millions of lines ofhighly secure algorithmic code, stored on black boxes in rooms where only the most priv-ileged employees have access There is not much the world knows about this secret sauce

But the one thing experts, pundits, and casual passersby do know is that a website’s

rank-ing is based on more than just the quantity of incomrank-ing links—there is a subset of tests

that determine each external link’s value:

1.The anchor text: This is the text that is contained between the <a> tags It should be

relevant and descriptive; for example, <a>staffing for nurses</a> is a lot morevaluable than <a>click here</a>

2.The title attribute: The title attribute describes the link in question; it reinforces

the anchor text with a phrase that lets the user know exactly where they areheading—for instance, <a href="http://www.rockstarmedicalstaffing.com"

title="Rockstar Healthcare Staffing provides staffing for travelingnurses">staffing for nurses</a>

3.Context of the link: A link sitting within relevant material is seen as more valuable

than one floating out in space Context also goes beyond surrounding text Forinstance, a link coming from a medical staffing blog or directory is a lot more valu-able than a link coming from the designer’s portfolio site: the first is pertinent, thesecond is peripheral

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4.The search engine value of the referring site: If the site does not perform well in

search engines, it is not recognized as an influence, and its link is worth less thanthat of a high-ranking referrer This is easiest to qualify in terms of PageRank A sitewith a PageRank of 5 is worth far more than a PageRank of 4, and getting a fewlinks from sites with PageRank of 6 or more can do wonders

5.Age of link: Believe it or not, search engines look at not only the age of the site as

an indication of authority, but also the age of the link

Not every link is going to be perfect In fact, the chance of meeting all of these criteria isslim, and there are times when you will have to settle for whatever you can get A lot ofcompanies may not have immediate access to highly ranked sites from which to aggregateincoming links, so they will have to start small, building a referral network through somefootwork The following subsections give some places to start

Directories Directories are a great place to start in an SEO effort There are many to work

with, they are generally reliable, and the message can be controlled by the submittingcompany Directories are manually edited by a real human, meaning that duplicate orspammy sites do not get listed, but it also means that the submission process can takeawhile Some directories are free, while inclusion in others requires payment

The most well-known directory is Yahoo, and was the company’s founding model until itbecame apparent that search was the future There are a zillion other directories on theWeb,17each claiming some type of niche or specialty, and almost all are pining for sub-missions in an effort to build their own search engine status

For SEO campaigns, there is one place to start: dmoz.org, shown in Figure 13-7 This is thehome of the Open Directory Project (ODP), where an army of editors oversees the largestcollection of website listings under one roof Dmoz is commonly used by major searchengines for descriptions and other information—in Figure 13-5, both MSN and Yahoosource www.nhai.com’s description from the ODP, not the description provided in the site’smetadata

Press release and article sites Almost every company produces some volume of content

that is intended for public distribution This includes articles, press releases, how-toinstructions, and more Traditionally, this content has been relegated to the corporate site,waiting for people to stumble upon it through a search While it is good practice to hostthis material, distributing the text via the broader Web helps cast a net of content that notonly builds interest and name recognition in the authoring company, but builds a network

of incoming links as well

17 www.seocompany.ca/directory/free-web-directories.html is a good list of directories;www.best-web-directories.com is also a good source

Figure 13-7 The ODP attempts to catalog the Web through a manual editorial process.

Take press releases Certainly every public company writes and publishes them—they are astaple of the investment media’s diet While it’s a good practice to publish press releases

on the website for casual browsers to discover, and while there is a chance a release mayget picked up by an online or printed publication, the wait-and-see model is anything butefficient Complement this effort with proactive publishing on external press release web-sites, such as the following:

PRZOOM (www.przoom.com)Free-Press-Release.com (www.free-press-release.com)

PR Leap (www.prleap.com)Press Method (www.pressmethod.com)OpenPR (www.openpr.com)

ClickPress (www.clickpress.com)UKPRwire (UK only) (www.ukprwire.com)Pressbox (UK only) (www.pressbox.co.uk)Some of these require the creation of an account, but almost all will allow a link back tothe corporate homepage These are positive incoming links The content is relevant toyour site, and most of these sites rank well in search engines by themselves

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In addition to press releases, a company might staff writers that regularly produce try articles, from industry commentary to breaking news to instructional media Althoughthis is great content for the host site, there are many third-party websites dedicated torepublishing article content; authors can submit their material to be picked up by otherwebsites Full copyright is retained by the original writer, and each article is accompanied

indus-by a link back to the corporate website every time it is republished

For instance, say you worked for Rockstar Healthcare Staffing, and you wrote an articleoffering advice for nurses thinking about signing on with a staffing agency This is greatcontent, applicable industry-wide You publish it on Rockstar’s website, and it attracts afew visitors from Google Seeking to take advantage of the content, you submit the mate-rial to a few article sites like GoArticles18 and Article Dashboard,19 and the piece getspicked up several times, resulting in a pile of links back to your domain

The math is simple If an article is submitted to one site and gets republished 25 times,that’s 25 links back to your site:

(1 article) ✕ (1 site) ✕ (25 reprintings) = 25 links

It does not take much imagination to make that number grow exponentially:

(10 articles) ✕ (10 sites) ✕ (25 reprintings each article) = 2500 links

Considering there are literally hundreds of article websites,20this can be a very effectiveway to quickly create a network of inbound links

The industry circle Few companies operate in isolation Every industry has its collective of

forums, directories, news boards, media sites, alliances, blogs, and more Look around atthe sites people look to for expertise—the centers of information—and see if they offerthe opportunity to link to related companies

The first place to look is within your own industry alliances Many businesses list theirstrategic partners on their website in a centralized directory, as you can see in Figure 13-8.These listings are almost always free—provided for the benefit of the visiting prospect—but with the expectation that a reciprocal link will be provided

When marketing within the industry, always think about ways to publish a link Forinstance, when posting to a forum, add a signature with the corporation’s link Manyforums are ranked highly because of their cycle of fresh and unique content, and thesesmall but numerous links can add up over time

18 www.goarticles.com

19 www.articledashboard.com

20 www.wilsonweb.com/linking/wilson-article-marketing-1.htm has some of the top articlesites, and www.styopkin.com/article_submission_sites.html has a list of over 500 more

Figure 13-8 Many professional companies list their strategic alliances with a link back to the

Links from other sites within a company’s industry count for a lot No one knows howmuch emphasis search engines place on site-wide topicality, but the suspicion—if nothingelse—is that the significance will only grow in the future

Submitting to search engines

While a lot of effort goes into building incoming links, not much can be done about ally submitting sites to search engines the old-fashioned way MSN and Ask do not evenprovide the opportunity to manually suggest a URL; they rely on their searchbots to find

actu-and index websites Because of this, the single best way to get sites listed in any search

engine is to build the network of incoming links

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Google and Yahoo, on the other hand, still provide the opportunity to submit a website.21

There is no guarantee that a site will be picked up from this effort, but it certainly cannothurt the process The key is to follow the directions for each explicitly—the systems aresensitive to spamming and will mercilessly blacklist a site that even smells of devious tech-nique For Google especially, it is a very good idea to also create an XML site map, asexplained in Chapter 4

Directing search engine traffic

Over time, many websites build certain directories and pages that should not be indexed

by search engines because the content is not for public consumption For instance, manyhosting packages reserve the folder cgi-bin for Perl scripts, which is a server-side lan-guage used for contact forms, forums, and more Other sites might contain private forumsfor members only Many websites also include a basic statistics page located behind a redi-rect like www.company.com/stats There is reason to shield all of these from search engines.There are two primary methods to dissuade spiders For individual page control, therobots meta tag works best; for directories, the robots.txt file effectively directs searchengine behavior

Robots meta tag

Like the other meta tags described earlier in the chapter, the robots meta tag is placedwith the <head> tag of an HTML document However, instead of describing a document’scontent, it acts as a traffic signal to search engine spiders, instructing them on two impor-tant directives:

1 Whether to index the content: This is accomplished using either index or noindex

as values inside the content attribute

2 Whether to follow links on a page: Similar to indexing, this is accomplished with the

follow or nofollow values inside the content attribute

Consider the following example:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

In this instance, search engines are told not to index the page and not to follow any links.The tag also understands other values, such as all (do everything) or none (do nothing).The default behavior is to index all content and follow all links, so the robots meta tag isunnecessary unless you need a search engine to restrain itself The following example tells

spiders to index the content (the default), but to not follow links.

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />

21 Google’s can be found at www.google.com/addurl and Yahoo’s at http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

Google also provides developers with a meta tag specifically targeting the Google bot Called the Googlebot robots meta tag, it provides a few more options applicable tojust Google’s services Here is a possible example:

search-<meta name="googlebot" content="nofollow,noindex,noarchive,nosnippet" />

nofollow and noindex work the same noarchive prevents Google from archiving content

in its cache, and nosnippet prevents it from retrieving a blurb with bolded terms Bydefault, all terms are positive, so the tag should not be included unless there is a reasonfor Google not to do something

Robots.txt

Where the robots meta tag is good for directing search engines for individual pages, arobots.txt file can provide global information for the site, as well as specific directories

When a search engine first crawls a page, it actively seeks the file robots.txt (which must

be all lowercase), which is nothing more than a plain-text file It should only exist in theroot directory; versions found in subdirectories will be ignored

The file uses two variables: User-agent (defining which user agents are applicable to therules) and Disallow (defining what directories should be passed over) The followingexample enables all search bots to access the entire site:

User-agent: *Disallow:

This is the default behavior, and the same as supplying an empty robots.txt file Use thefollowing to prevent all user agents from accessing any part of the site:

User-agent: *Disallow: /Note the slash after Disallow; this represents the entire domain To prevent all user agentsfrom accessing specific directories, create a unique Disallow entry for each subdirectory:

User-agent: *Disallow: /stats/

A robots.txt file should be included with every website, even if it’s blank to indicate totalaccess It helps alleviate ambiguity with search engine spiders.

Summary

SEO is critical for every business that wants to compete on any level of the Web When acompany does not appear at the top of the list for critical search strings, there is a lot ofpotential business being left on the table, which is there for the taking for a rival that rankshigher However, in order to be successful in organic SEO, a thorough and well-devisedstrategy is required, from identifying the best keywords and phrases to conducting regularreview and analysis of the campaign’s performance The actual tactics of organic SEO arenumerous but incredibly effective Focus on internal improvements first, especially inregard to metadata and content, and then build a network of quality incoming links.Patience and diligence are absolutely required in this field—those expecting instant oreven predictable results will become frustrated quickly

1 4 OUTBOUND MARKETING

Anyone who has spent more than an hour in Marketing 101 knows that customer tion is far less expensive than customer acquisition Over time, the cost of maintainingprofitable relationships with an existing customer base is far less than the buckets ofdollars poured into the marketing cannon aimed at reining in new customers In fact, thedifference runs anywhere from three to ten times, depending on the study you read.Once a customer becomes a customer, they can be a gift that keeps on giving If providedgood products and services at a fair price, most people will have no inclination to switch;people like what they know, and a company that consistently delivers the goods will getrepeat business It is amazing to see how many companies, when drawing up their market-ing plans, utterly fail to remember this.

reten-The worst offenders are business-to-business (B2B) marketers Consumer industries likeretail and travel have mastered the art of customer retention, from buy-one-get-one-freecoupons to elaborate direct response campaigns But despite huge investments in directmarketing,1many companies still struggle to leverage the massive business opportunitysitting within their own customer base This is not for lack of will or capital Rather, it’s alack of understanding of how the world at large perceives marketing attempts by a com-pany with whom they have already conducted business

Customer marketing takes several forms Some, like working with an inside sales team,have little to do with the online world; others, like outbound marketing, rely completely

on the Internet as the delivery medium

The Web has opened a lot of opportunities to direct marketers Outbound marketingavenues like e-mail and RSS are relatively new platforms for reaching people, and if usedcorrectly, can reap tremendous returns down the road Unfortunately, a medium like e-mail is so littered with government regulation and so abused by irresponsible, maverickspammers that it’s often difficult to sift through the reams of advice to find true bestpractices

This chapter will clarify what constitutes good outbound marketing, with a spotlight on e-mail and RSS There is much to be said (and much that has been said) about these means

of communication—enough for an entire book, easily—but we’ll focus on corporate B2Bmarketers

E-mail newsletters

When e-mail started to garner widespread adoption, it was not long before the world ized its capabilities as a mass media delivery platform A moderate amount of computerequipment could blast hundreds of thousands of messages in minutes, which was a virtualmiracle compared to the expensive and comparatively glacial speed of traditional printeddirect mail In one head-to-head test with direct mail and e-mail advertising, the actualcost of the e-mail campaign was a quarter of the printed version, but a higher number of

real-1 According to the Direct Marketing Association, B2B spending on direct marketing advertisingwas $77.4 billion in 2005

generated leads from e-mail pushed the cost per lead for the digital medium to a fraction

(about 1 percent) of the cost per lead of the printed medium.2

Today, the thrust toward e-mail marketing continues to drive marketing campaigns Astudy by Datran Media saw 83.2 percent of marketers cite e-mail marketing as the mostimportant advertising tactic, and 78 percent of B2B marketers claim e-mail marketing isincreasing.3These results are not isolated Study after study shows companies of all sizesand markets turning to e-mail as the favored marketing device

E-mail marketing offers users convenience and a personal connection to the publisher

Instead of visiting a website, they are receiving content in their inbox that they can sume and explore at their leisure Many people subscribe to multiple newsletters, andaccording to a Nielsen Norman Group study, 69 percent of people look forward to receiv-ing at least one.4In fact, the same study reports people’s general unwillingness to unsub-scribe because of emotional ties they form with the newsletter

con-As the medium matures, best practices come to light For businesses, e-mail can serve twovery important goals: advertising and keeping in touch with the customer base Both fieldshave been mercilessly studied and dissected E-mail is an easy thing to measure—because

of the precise metrics and powerful tools available to marketers, it is easy to refine paigns to a finely honed point

cam-This chapter’s primary focus is staying in touch with customers—typically through e-mailnewsletters—and how this marketing channel can be a cornerstone of the overall promo-tional effort if executed well

Newsletter content

Traditionally, newsletters have been used for a myriad of purposes Their content can beanything from brief blurbs of general interest to in-depth articles, with a focus on cus-tomers, prospects, investors, and more Some newsletters are sent to everyone for anyreason; others are reserved for an exclusive audience Typically, content revolves around afew key themes:

Corporate updates: This can be anything from new hiring announcements to

photos of the company picnic to important financial updates

Industry news: Certain companies are very dependent on their industries, and

fluc-tuations and trends within the market are important to monitor and analyze Acompany that brokers commercial power, for instance, has to keep a close eye ongas prices and electricity indices

3 MarketingSherpa Email Benchmark Survey, November 2006

4 Nielsen Norman Group, “Email Newsletter Usability” (www.nngroup.com/reports/newsletters/

summary.html)

Product and service announcements: Newsletters are a great avenue for

announc-ing new product releases or service offerannounc-ings, especially when used in combinationwith other media and traditional advertising

Regular features: Newsletters published on a schedule might have tips and tricks,

employee profiles, interviews, or other content that appears within a regularcolumn

In-depth article teasers: Rarely are full articles published within a newsletter; the

format simply does not support the extended text Instead, article excerpts are vided, along with a link to the complete version hosted on a website

pro-Advertisements: These can be for internal products or third-party products A hard

drive manufacturer, for instance, might allow a non-competing partner company—such as a cable manufacturer—to advertise within its newsletter

Every company will tailor its newsletter content to fit the interests of its readership.Consider the regular e-mail newsletter published by Clovis, featured in Figure 14-1 Thecompany, a staffing and recruiting firm, sends out a monthly newsletter to candidates onits mailing list The material is relatively simple; the left contains current job opportunities,the middle is used to address the readership, and the right contains special announce-ments, such as a referral program and relevant articles hosted on other sites

Strong subject lines

An effective subject line for the e-mail newsletter can dramatically increase the open rateamong recipients, just as a poorly phrased one can ensure the message receives theprompt attention of the Delete key Because the software used to deliver e-mail can trackmany metrics about the messages, this area has been combed over many times by mar-keters, statisticians, and developers

After the From field, the subject line is the most important factor in deciding whether ane-mail gets opened Unfortunately, writers are working within very claustrophobic param-eters: with only about 30 to 40 characters and a few seconds to make an impression, thesubject line has to be short and compelling There’s little room for messing around.The best tactics are sincerity and transparency Do not obfuscate, exaggerate, or composeflowery haikus, because they simply won’t work Direct and factual text is best The fol-lowing subject line will get a good open rate:

Servers R Us – Newsletter for August 2007

By contrast, the following subject line will practically guarantee a low open rate:

Crazy data center guys talk about recent happenings!!!

The company name is critical, and works best when it’s placed in front E-mail newslettersare “soft” selling devices; they’re focused on building and maintaining relationships, somucking up the reader’s inbox with a bunch of heavy-handed marketing language is not agood policy That being said, if users subscribe to an e-mail newsletter designed for pro-moting sales, discounts, or special offers, then people will expect this type of subject line

The key is meeting expectations of the recipient.

Figure 14-1 This e-mail newsletter contains basic but topical and useful content.

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Writing style

Copywriting for e-mail newsletters is a bit different than printed media The infinite cal space of e-mail does not limit the content length; if the author wants to type in the

verti-unabridged version of War and Peace, the medium would support it Despite this

flexibil-ity, the paradox of e-mail is the importance of keeping content short (The printedmedium is the opposite—the readability facilitates longer, denser passages, but the physi-cal restrictions of paper keep content length in check.)

When authoring e-mail content, brevity is the name of the game As sad as it is, few maketime to read elegant, descriptive prose The sound-bite world of interactive mediademands content be composed in small, chewy chunks that are easy for a distracted brain

on the go to digest Think newspaper meets PowerPoint meets blogging, and consider thefollowing when writing newsletters:

Short, punchy paragraphs: Newspaper writers excel at crafting brief but

hard-hitting paragraphs that drive a point home and then move on Sometimes they areonly one sentence They rarely extend more than four or five lines, and then nevertry to force fit more than one idea

Bullets: Indented, bulleted text grabs the eye and reinforces the importance of the

content People respond well to lists as the bullets and numbers focus their tion on the juicy bits

atten-Typographic emphasis: Bolded, italicized, and highlighted text works well to

emphasize inline concepts just like this, as long as the treatment is employed

judi-ciously Too much and the text will look like graffiti on a New York subway car (Andnever underline text unless it’s a link.)

Headers: Long, unbroken passages of text simply do not read well on the Web.

Headers are used to break up copy into mentally manageable portions These donot have to be particularly bold, but they have to be styled differently enough tohelp wandering eyes find the next section

These ideas might look familiar since the concepts also apply to most general websites, bute-mail takes the idea of abbreviated content further by reducing text into a tighter space.For instance, newsletters do not usually contain full articles, but rather short, teasingexcerpts that offer a link to the full text somewhere on the main corporate website Theadvantage is twofold The newsletters are kept short and manageable, and the number oflinks pointing to the primary domain is increased

Link excessively

Ideally, a corporate newsletter serves a marketing purpose Instead of assigning a writer tochurn out content with no end rationale, companies should always be thinking about howthe content serves the greater promotional principle For most businesses, that meansguiding people back to the mothership website

Well-designed and well-written newsletters link profusely Sometimes this means articleexcerpts point people to the full text, as discussed in the preceding section Other timesit’s a starburst or similarly eye-catching graphic that links to a contest, promotion, or sale.Still other times the link drives people to a third-party website because the company pub-lishing the newsletter thought it was valuable enough to share

Link everything Sometimes people will find themselves on a regular page of the website,sometime they’ll arrive on a custom-designed landing page No matter what, always openlinks in a new window using the target attribute, like so:

Thankfully, the subscription process is binary; people are either subscribed or not

Managing this simple transaction does require some planning, with particular focus given

to usability and speed

Subscribing

The single best place to aggregate subscribers is the homepage of the corporate website

Since this page receives the bulk of both new and returning traffic, it makes sense to mote the newsletter in the spot most likely to reel in the most e-mail addresses Figure 14-2shows an example of the subscription opportunity in a prime corner of the site

pro-The Nielsen Norman Group study on e-mail newsletters, mentioned in the previous tion, states that usability success for these processes is fairly high: 81 percent for subscrib-ing and 91 percent for unsubscribing While this is strong, it could be better

sec-Providing a direct input field and submit button on the homepage is most effective Itunderlines the simplicity of the process, and encourages impromptu subscriptions—users

do not have to leave the page or scour the rest of the site, which will happen if only a link

in the main menu (such as Subscribe to Our Newsletter) is provided Do not add any otherfields to the subscription form—asking people for their name, phone number, place ofbirth, and most embarrassing childhood memory only complicates the process and freaksout would-be subscribers

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5 www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm

Figure 14-2 This company uses the prime real estate of the homepage to collect subscribers.

Many companies employ double opt-in functionality When a person enters their

e-mail address, they are sent a confirmation e-mail, usually containing a link back to the corporate website that confirms their interest in receiving the newsletter Double opt-in provides two key benefits First, the process prevents people from subscribing others’ e-mail addresses Second, it confirms the e-mail address that was entered is correct and active When purchasing lists (covered in Chapter 15), marketers will pay

a premium for addresses that were gathered through a double opt-in process.

Although the homepage is the most visible place, and usually the most successful in lecting subscribers, the opportunity should be offered in as many places as possible, such

col-as the contact page, a dedicated subscription management page, or within a persistentconstruct like the footer or navigation

Managing the subscription

For many companies, simply harvesting e-mail addresses and blasting a newsletter is notenough They offer users a subscription management feature, which is a committed area

of the website that allows people to edit newsletter preferences This section mightinclude any or all of the following options:

Change e-mail address: Users should be able to change their e-mail address at any

time Newsletters administered with basic functionality often require a person tounsubscribe with their old e-mail address and then resubscribe with their new one,but this is inefficient

Invite a friend: A simple field allows someone to send an acquaintance an invitation

to subscribe to the newsletter It’s important to note that this should not subscribe

the recipient, only invite them.

Add additional contact information: For people wanting to create a profile for

per-sonalization and additional benefits, provide input fields for login password, name,phone, title, and whatever else your organization would like

Change format of e-mail: Commonly, newsletters are sent in either plain text or

HTML Some e-mail readers do not support (or do not correctly render) based e-mail, and some people simply prefer plain text If you provide both, allowpeople to switch to one or the other

HTML-Unsubscribe: This is the most important feature, and is covered in the following

section

Building an e-mail newsletter management center requires a fair amount of programming,but for businesses whose newsletter comprises a significant amount of their marketingeffort, it’s a worthy investment A percentage of subscribers will, admittedly, never touch

it But for those who do, providing them explicit control over their profile and subscriptionoptions will only build loyalty to the newsletter and company

Unsubscribing

Enable users to unsubscribe from the newsletter as easily as they subscribed Rememberthat people who wish to unsubscribe might not be leaving forever; as we discussed in thepreceding section, many will unsubscribe only to resubscribe with a different e-mailaddress Because of this, focus on building the unsubscribe process with simplicity, usabil-ity, and speed to avoid leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths

Typically, unsubscribing occurs in two media: the website and the e-mail itself On the site, if there is any central subscription administration page devoted to the e-mail news-letter, it should have a field for entering an e-mail address to remove from the list Using

web-e-mail, a person should be able to reply to the message with a word such as remove in the

subject line to remove them from the list This latter example is sometimes referred to asthe reply/remove technique

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The footer of every e-mail should have explicit directions for unsubscribing Ideally, itshould offer three methods:

Reply/remove: This is the most important and by far the easiest for recipients.

A link to an unsubscribe area of the website: This could be a generic unsubscribe

page, a subscription management page, or a custom link with the e-mail addressencoded in the URL that automatically processes the unsubscribe request and thendisplays a confirmation like the one in Figure 14-3 Sometimes hyperlinks withinthe e-mail do not function, so make sure the actual link is displayed for people tocopy and paste into a browser address bar if needed

A physical mailing address to send unsubscribe requests: This is not likely to

hap-pen, but people can ask to be removed from the mailing list through physical mail,phone, or fax, and the company is legally bound by the CAN-SPAM Act to honorthe request within ten days

Figure 14-3 Users should always receive a notice when

their unsubscribe attempt is successful

As the person moves through the process of removing their name, always be sure toremind them of what e-mail address they are about to unsubscribe Some newslettersactually publish this in the footer (“This e-mail has been sent to theguy@theplace.com.”),but it should be reiterated before the reader commits In addition, a confirmation e-mailshould be sent to the unsubscriber; this verifies the address was successfully removed, andensures it was the right person removing the address

Newsletter design

E-mail newsletters fall into one of two categories They are either created as plain text orthey are built with HTML If plain text, the design parameter is simple: keep lines of text toless than 60 characters and you’re good to go For HTML-based e-mail, the design processgets quite complicated, and at times, outright bewildering

An e-mail removed from a mailing list cannot ever be used again until that person opts back into the list It also cannot be used for any other e-mail published by the company The removal is permanent In fact, if you buy a list of e-mail addresses, the purchased list must be cross-checked against your own suppression list to ensure that

no one who has opted out of your previous mailings will be hit again Monitoring your suppression list is critical to maintaining CAN-SPAM compliance.

Modern web browsers are fairly predictable Most are built around a few common dering engines, and companies like the Mozilla Foundation, Apple, Opera, and evenMicrosoft make a concerted effort to keep their software up to date with web standards.

ren-When a website displays correctly in Firefox, for instance, there’s a reasonably goodchance it will display correctly in any other browser

One would think that this modern era of standards compliance would enable designers tocraft lean, beautiful, interactive, CSS-based e-mail designs that render perfectly in all mailclients Unfortunately, that is anything but the truth The disparate, meager, and inconsis-tent rendering capabilities of contemporary clients will drive any developer to bang theirhead against the wall

The reality is that e-mail clients have always lagged behind their browser brethren—theirinterpretation of HTML is, by any standard, outright primitive Even more amazingly, somenewer clients like Gmail and Outlook 2007 actually perform worse than their predecessors

by removing support for CSS Mix in the fact that there are dozens of clients spanning a

maddening difference of age—none of which follow any common standard—and thegolden road of e-mail design suddenly crumbles into a twisting, poorly lit alley replete withpotholes and menacing characters

Where does that leave designers? In a nutshell, mired in development practices that wentthe way of the dodo more than five years ago Non-standard, table-laden code is thenorm CSS is scarce and inefficient Images have to be approached carefully, and kept to aminimum

Despite this adversity, intrepid designers have pushed the medium forward, leaving behind

a trail of best practices culled from their endless tests

Structure

Believe it or not, table-based layouts are back in a big way Just when progressive, loving designers thought it was safe to float a div, along comes an army of e-mail clientsdragging along rendering engines that make Netscape 4 look cutting edge Not only mustdesigners use tables, but the tables must be simple, without heavy nesting Figure 14-4shows a common two-column design, and how those tables are divided up

standards-As you can see, the structure begins with a wrapping table (set in gray) that has one cellset to 100 percent width Because many e-mail clients ignore background colors set to the

<body> element, the background color should be set in this table

Within the wrapping table, another table houses the three primary areas of the e-mail: theheader, body, and footer All of these tables and cells should be set to a fixed size in pixels

E-mail readers afford far less room to view content, so the optimal width is 500 to 600pixels—much narrower than a typical web page

Notice the layout only uses three actual tables This slim markup reduces load time Whileweb pages can afford to be built with complex, layered tables, e-mail is best kept to simplestructures, especially when they need to have hard-coded display information like width,cell padding, and cell spacing Using CSS to define widths will have unpredictable results,and CSS positioning is absolutely out of the question, unless of course you enjoy the sound

of Lotus Notes laughing at you

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