Archive for June 8th, 2010
June 8th, 2010 | 
Author: The Reign Of Spam Continues
Spam has turned into an outofcontrol monster. The amount of junk email being sent in cyberspace has spiraled out of control. Some people receive several hundred unsolicited messages per day! For the purposes of this article we are going to examine the different methods employed by internet marketing geeks to steal your email address and whether or not anything can be done to put an end to spam once and for all.
Most of the marketing messages I receive in my inbox are sexually explicit but I still like to look at them because some of this junk is actually quite entertaining. My personal favorites are offers to purchase discounted Canadian Viagra ads for pornographic websites bogus workfromhome programs or quotes for 50 year mortgages. A lot of spam usually goes straight into my bulk email folder but quite a bit of it ends up in my inbox.
How do these idiots get your email address in the first place? One way they can get it is through optin email. When you order something online as part of the subscription or service that you signed up for you may have inadvertently or unknowingly agreed to receive offers via email from that company in the future. As a result said company begins to send you offers via email. This is perfectly legal as long as the company provides you with a way to unsubscribe from their mailing list. If they do not provide you with a means to unsubscribe then the emails they are sending you are considered spam.
To make matters worse spammers will often sell your email address and any other information you submitted to them to hundreds of other companies who are looking for leads or mailing lists. Before you know it your email address has been circulated far and wide to almost every online business imaginable. Once this happens there is almost no way to protect your email address ever again.
Another common way senders of spam get their hands on your email address is by first purchasing a list of email addresses from someone else and then sending a joke or an interesting cartoon to everyone on the list and ask that you forward it along to all your friends and relatives. Once you forward the message the spammer actually has a program that can copy the list of addresses that the message has been forwarded to and send it back to him or her. So now that person not only has your email address but also has the email address of every one you forwarded the message to. Using this tactic email marketers can grow their list of email addresses exponentially.
Another popular technique is known as harvesting. This is accomplished by writing a simple programming function that searches through every web site listed on a search engine for a certain keyword and then quickly scanning each of those sites for any email addresses that are posted there and subsequently sending them back to the spammer. An example of harvesting would be a program written to scan every website listed on Google for a certain keyword such as real estate agents and then recording every email address that is found on the web sites that come up in the search and emailing the entire list of email addresses back to the harvester. Using this technology it is possible to acquire thousands of email addresses in an hour or less.
Harvesting has become a legal dilemma because the email marketing community feels that it should be allowed to harvest email addresses that are posted on public websites because in their opinion if someone has posted their email address for all to see then other people have the right to contact that person and ask them questions or send them offers. However web sites where email addresses are posted have threatened legal action against anyone that copies addresses and uses them to build mailing lists or send spam. Unfortunately these web sites really have no way to prevent this email theft and it will only get worse in the future.
Spam is here to stay so I say enjoy the ride. Spam will continue to reign supreme in your inbox and it will only get worse in the future. If you want to avoid it then you might want to consider prayer because only the hand of God can put an end to spam at this point.
About the writer: Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com a service that helps programmers make free HTML forms.
Online Search Engine Optimization Tips
How do you get the most out of your web site? Setting up and maintaining your web site isn’t at all difficult and if there is anything you need to learn you can find out everything you need to know on the Internet. Without too much effort and a lot of time you can create a beautiful web site filled with images and great content.
So…how do you get people to visit your site?
Just because you know that your web site is great it doesn’t mean that everyone else does. There are thousands upon thousands of web sites floating around out there in cyberspace and everyone has a piece of the pie. For everything there is there exists a web site. Every single type of business that you could name has its own web site on the Internet. How are you supposed to get yours to stand out above so many others that are out there?
How do you get traffic?
Internet users know that search engines are your key to finding what you want. Search engines are a friendly little Internet tool that does the work for us. All we have to do is think about what we’re looking for in the vaguest of terms. For instance you’re doing a research paper on the wives and daughters of King Henry the eighth of England. So you go to a search engine and type in the keywords “Henry VIII and wives.” Just like magic the search engine instantly presents you with a list of web sites filled with information about King Henry and his many wives.
As most everyone knows those sites that appear at the top of the list get visited most often. The top of the list is definitely where you want to be so that potential visitors will see your web site proudly displayed among the best. But in order to appear at the top of list you need to know something about search engine optimization.
Which leads to the burning questions: what is search engine optimization? It sounds sinister but really search engine optimization is simple and easy. The following is a list of tips that will help you with search engine optimization. Using these tips your web site will appear closer to the top of that list and you’ll get more traffic on your site:
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Simple easy to spell keywords
Internet users don’t want to take a lot of time with anything. They aren’t going to spend a lot of time looking at the bottom of a search engine list and they aren’t going to be that specific or exacting at least not in the first search with the keywords that they use. Keep your keywords as simple as possible. Commonly misspelled keywords should be featured on your site under all possible spellings to maximize the possibilities of getting hits to your site. Long complex and hard to spell words don’t get searched out very often so be sure to use as many short simple keywords as possible. -
Lots of links
Search engines love links so include as many as possible on your site. Both internal links links that link to pages within your own site and external links are good. The more links you have the better your chances with the search engines. -
Lots of content
The more content you have means the more possible keywords you’ll have on your site. Search engines look at sites for content and their rankings are based upon that content so you’ll want to have plenty of it. Keywords without content is nothing and search engines don’t give good rankings to sites that have lots of keywords but very little content. Even if you content isn’t the greatest it won’t hurt your chances with the search engines.
About the writer: Charles Preston is the president of Click Response. Click Response offers small businesses a search engine optimization service that guarantees 1st page ranking at an affordable price.
