Lifeline Blog

Are you ready to fail with Twitter? Here are some guaranteed ways to trash your reputation. This isn’t a walk-through, pick any of the methods below, and you have my personal assurance that your company will be annoying people and loosing sales in no time!

Automated responses with sales pitches

Always try to sell, especially at first sight! Everyone that follows you on Twitter does so because they want to buy your products, even if they aren’t quite sure what you’re selling. Set up a bot that replies back to your followers with a line like “Are you looking for an affordable car insurance? I’m sure you are! Check out http://yoursitehere.com. Thanks for following!” It works, trust me!

Absurd claims

This is probably the easiest way of failing with Twitter. Open up your Twitter account (or favorite desktop client) and start writing about how you make $175,233.79 a month with your bulletproof method. Pay utmost attention to the figure: it has to be impressive (six digits is a good start, pros can go for seven) and shouldn’t be rounded, so that it looks as real as possible. Don’t write “$180,000”! $175,233.79 looks much more credible.

Retweet each and every line the “big fish” posted

If you sell cellular phones, follow Apple, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and other players and re-post all their tweets. Simply add a “LOL”, “WOW” or “Nice” before the “RT:”. Repeat it for a while and Steve Jobs himself will call you up and offer you a groundbreaking deal on the new iPad 2. Professional retweeters might also get invited on an Oprah show, so keep up the work!

Follow as many people as you can

Don’t fall for all that hype that you need quality content, an authority site and a strong online presence to build up your Twitter followers base. That’s for newbies, you’re far beyond that! The only reasonable way you can get a million followers is by following ten million people, that’s how the pros do it! And who cares what their interests are? Even Donald Trump could benefit from your cool trick on how to get an extra hundred thousand visitors per day! Oh, and remember to unfollow and follow back everyone who hasn’t followed you – they must have missed the chance. Repeat this 20-30 times a day until they come to their senses. They will most likely apologize for not following you in the first place.

Set up many accounts and tweet about the same service

If they didn’t like it the first time, maybe they’ll fall for it once they hear the same line from more sources. It’s all about building credibility – if a lot of people say your service is great then it must be, right? When Twitter bans all your accounts, make sure you appeal and dispute their decision. Write on all webmaster forums about how Twitter messed up your business. No one likes bad publicity, they will re-instate you.

Any of the above tips can help you wreck your social media efforts, but if you combine two or more then your (lack of) success is guaranteed!

Most sites have several pages you want to keep out of the reach of search engines. For example, there is no need to clutter Google’s results pages with your login pages or other  private pages. You can easily “tell” spiders the pages they are to stay away from with a robots.txt file.

A basic robots.txt

When a crawler visits your site, it first looks for a robots.txt file placed in the root of your domain that instructs it on which pages it should ignore. Such a file is made of one or more records, and each must contain a line to address a certain user agent followed by one or more Disallow lines. The syntax is therefore trivial – you don’t need to learn more than these two directives. For example, a robots.txt file made of

would tell Google Bot not to crawl neither http://yourdomain.com/login.php nor http://yourdomain.com/admin.

Wildcards – not so wild

User agents may be matched by a wildcard. Instead of having a User-agent: spidername section for each crawler, you can instruct them all to follow the subsequent Disallow lines by using User-agent: *. The star symbol matches any number of characters – so “spider*” can stand for “spider A”, “spiderFromSomeSite” or “spiderFromThatOtherSite”. A question mark would match one character, so “spider?” will work for “spiderA”, “spiderB”, but not “spider X”.

Follow the syntax strictly

Robots.txt can be picky with syntaxes, so make sure you follow the structure:

• Don’t mix and match. User-agent comes before Disallow, it won’t work if you put them the other way around.
• Don’t use more than one URL in the Disallow line. “Disallow: /path1 /path2 /path3” won’t work; you are to put each path under its own Disallow rule.
• Keep case sensitivity in mind. “/path1” and “/Path1” are two different URLs.
• Inline comments don’t work. You might be used to placing comments after a “#” sign at the end of the row from Perl, PHP or shell scripting. With robots.txt, each comment has to be on its own line. For example, “Disallow: /admin # don’t index /admin” might confuse some spiders who will be looking for a “/admin#don’t” folder.
• There is no “Allow” directive. As outlined in the beginning, the syntax of a robots.txt file is as easy as it can get. To allow spiders to index every file, simply place an empty Disallow line.

Beware of sensitive information

As a final note, remember that you shouldn’t use robots.txt to keep spiders from accessing overly sensitive information. Just because a standards-compliant web spider won’t access it, it doesn’t mean a malicious one (or even a human user) can’t or won’t. Such a setting is a no-no:

Sensitive information such as users and passwords should be placed outside your htdocs path. Just because Google won’t crawl your passwords.txt file it doesn’t mean a malicious user won’t open up /admin/passwords.txt in a browser and read your “hidden” content.

If you are or plan on doing in-house mailing, there are a handful of tools and services you shouldn’t go without.

DNS Stuff

DNS Stuff is truly a must-have for all do it yourself email marketers. It features a wide range of tools meant to check if your DNS and PTR records are set up properly, alerts you by email or SMS the instant your IPs are blacklisted by major anti-spam networks and allows you to troubleshoot and diagnose your email servers when they fail. If you are maintaining your own mail servers, you can’t live without it.

They offer a 7 to 14 day free trial so you can fully test their platform and see if it suits your needs. To learn more about the services and products offered by DNS Stuff have a look at https://www.dnsstuff.com/products.

SenderBase®

SenderBase is the world’s largest email monitoring network. It provides a nice service for monitoring email volumes per domain, allows you to look up the reputations of various networks, has statistics on top virus and spam senders and can tell you whether your network poses a high threat and is likely to be blocked by spam filters.

SenderBase is backed up by more than 100,000 contributing organizations world-wide, which equates to an unmatched view of how email gets sent around the Internet. It is a free service, courtesy of IronPort Email and Web Security.

MX Toolbox

MX Toolbox comes with a series of tools that allow you to do various lookups on a domain. You can check the IP or host name for reputation, get the DNS MX record for the domain, check SPF or TXT records, get the IP address block information for the domain (useful for learning who the uplink is).

A feature you will find particularly useful is the up-to-date blacklist checker that puts to shame a majority of RBL checkers out there. It lists only the services that spam filters use these days – and does a pretty great job too.

Next to these free services, you will also enjoy a series of paid ones: MX Toolbox offers email archiving, hosting and delivery services as well. You can have a look at their premium products here: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/Public/Content/Products/.

As you probably noticed, some are commercial and a few cost a lot. If you aren’t ready to spend that kind of money on your mailouts, it might be better to outsource your email campaigns. Don’t expect to simply invest a bit and pull tenfold worth of revenue almost right away, even if you have a large list. It can take you months to segment your list to get the optimal ROI. I have already explained the pros and cons of each in an article last year, why don’t you go back and have a look at it?

In theory, to rank better than your competitors you will need to build more inbound links (quality ones, quantity does not necessarily prevail here), next to some readable and good-flowing content. If you have read my previous articles on Lifeline Design you should know that my experience has taught me magazine-style content doesn’t outrank “normal” writing style and you don’t have to hold a PhD in English literature to hold the top spot for competitive keywords.

There are several tools out there that will help you analyze competitors’ backlinks. I briefly mentioned some of them in the second part of the SEO for newbies tutorial, I will elaborate a bit on them and mention a few more. I will further assume you run an auto repair shop in Hamilton, Ontario and you are competing for the keyphrase car repair services Hamilton.

The first result that pops in the query on Google.CA is this:

Depending on your geographical location, you might get different results, as I explained in the article on local factors that influence search engine ranking placements. Let’s see how you can find out who is linking to Paul’s Automotive Service.

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If you haven’t done a lot of web design but want to learn how to do it properly, this article might be a good start. It will shed some light on common mistakes newbie web designers sometimes make and and teach you how not to make poor decisions when you are designing.

Stick to the rules

Odds are that you, as an inexperienced designer, won’t be able to come up with a new type of interface that will shake your visitors and make them go wow, while remaining usable. Stick with the standard trends. Being unique and standing out in the crowd when it comes to interfaces isn’t always an advisable thing, unless you really know what you’re doing. Rules are meant to be broken, but only when you have the knowledge and experience to pull it off.

Focus on conventions

This is somewhat derived from the point above, but should be mentioned separately. The average web visitor is used to conventions (and they love them, whether they know it or not.) – so you, as a designer, should give them what they want. Titles at the top, sidebar with one or two columns at the right and the content next to the left border is a safe standard when you are learning the ropes.

Get inspired, but don’t steal

When having doubts, it’s okay to have a look at how the “big fish” have dealt with your problems. It’s okay to get inspired from a great site’s appearance and try to do something of the kind – just make sure you are putting a new work together, rather than copying exactly. The reason why I’m telling you to take a look at some of the bigger websites is that those companies have invested quite a lot of time and resources in developing them and should (Though not always) provide you with good inspiration.

Less is more

There are hundreds of millions of websites out there. Don’t simply assume that a new visitor has all the time in the world to read what you have to say and find spend minutes browsing through overly-complicated page structures. Don’t annoy your visitors, or you will lose them. Keep your interface simple, learn about basic usability principles and apply them thoroughly. You will find lots of insightful tips on this blog and more coming in future articles from this series.

Write with user experience in mind

Site usability isn’t all about the design. The content itself can make the overall browsing experience more pleasant. Break your ideas into paragraphs – no one likes to read chunks of text the size of a Dostoevsky novel. Use bullet points where applicable. Make use of headings.

Your visitors scan more than they read

… and there’s nothing you can do about it. Steve Krug explains in his great book “Don’t Make Me Think” how you must make things as intuitive as possible so you will minimize the required thought  from your visitors’ perspective. Have them find what they want as quickly as possible, or they will get bored and might eventually click away or hit the Back button.

This concludes the first episode on usability tips. In the next parts we will focus on several design-specific elements.

The antiques store, Caresa Antiques has contracted Lifeline Design to build them an online store. This store will feature online purchasing of their unique one of a kind Antique inventory.

The Burlington BG’s, A Burlington gymnastics club has selected Lifeline Design to redesign their website.  The new site will feature online registration and an event calendar.

A local Brantford Golf Course, Fescue’s Edge, has contracted Lifeline Design to redesign their website.

Even in the age of Web2.0, email campaigns are still being used to get the word out there. However, as the trend moves towards mobile and social media, your email efforts should blend smoothly in the marketing mix. Here are some tips that will help you stay on top of the competition.

Offer relevant content

Content was and always will be very important. Send your readers PDF white papers, MP3 and video courses and, in general, anything that will cater to their interests and bring an added value. In other words, you are to give them reasons why they should stay subscribed. Not all media can be embedded in an email, but one of the purposes of email campaigns is to generate click-throughs. Send them to a download link on your site where the content can be accessed.

If your blog or service isn’t laser-targeted on a certain niche, you may want to segment your list and deliver a personalized message that focuses on your readers’ specific interests. For instance, if you run a general news site you may have readers who are solely interested in Business and Technology and don’t care about your Politics section.

Review your design periodically

Your HTML newsletter shouldn’t just reflect your company brand and values, but also present content in an intuitive and easy to follow manner. The design of your email should be in line with common usability principles: important content and eye-catching phrases go at the top, legal disclaimers and unsubscribe information at the bottom and so on. Don’t mix and match, there is not much room for innovation here. However, you should audit your design every once in a while and see if it follows industry trends.

Co-ordinate your email campaigns with your marketing strategy

While the main website should be the centerpiece of your marketing efforts, it’s alright to promote your other Internet presences. Your newsletter should encourage your readers to join your Facebook page and to follow you on Twitter. As long as you promote engagement and encourage readers to join in conversations, things should be alright.

Use reliable delivery services

If your emails don’t reach the mailbox then all your marketing efforts are useless. It doesn’t matter how well designed your newsletter is or how specially crafted a message you designed – it’s all useless if the email is flagged as spam. Use a reliable email service provider or stay away from email marketing altogether.

The art of emailing is evolving and you should keep up with the new trends. Do it properly and you will reap the benefits.

So you’ve built up your site, filled it with very good content, built a few quality incoming links and still haven’t had a visit from Google? If that’s the case, then something may be wrong.

Before we get started, we are talking about your site not being indexed at all (i.e. the query “site:yoursite.com” in Google yields no results) as opposed to not ranking for your designated keywords. Ranking depends on a whole lot of factors and there might be certain keywords where you hardly have a shot at being in the top 10 results in your lifetime.

Misconfigured robots.txt

Some popular CMS’es have a Disallow: * directive in the robots.txt when you first install them, and you will have to switch it off manually. Having a bare-bone site or default installation show up in Google results is equated by some with being caught with your pants down – it’s not wise to allow spiders to crawl your site until you are ready to launch it to the public. Make sure your robots.txt allows crawlers in – this is one of the most common reasons why no spider visits your page.

Banned domain

If you have purchased the domain from an online marketplace (“a man in a white van”) as opposed to having registered it yourself, it could be that the domain has been previously banned by Google. Since the ownership has changed, you can have the name cleared out. Log in to Google Webmasters Tool, authenticate your site and follow the steps to request a reconsideration.

You just need to wait a bit longer

Depending on the amount of incoming links you have built, it can take spiders up to a week to visit your site for the first time. Don’t freak out if your site didn’t get indexed within the first 12 hours. You may start panicking if you don’t see any results in two weeks or more.

Way too many pages

Putting up way too many pages from the very beginning can lead spiders into believing you are a spammer. And it makes sense if you think about it, who builds a site with a million pages and launches it all of a sudden? Pages should be built gradually, more than a few thousand of them overnight is probably too much.

Flash or Javascript links

Even though Google is known to be able to crawl Flash links, don’t rely on it. Make sure you provide a text-only version of your site – at least while it’s still brand new and you need spiders to get a good grasp on what it’s about. Same goes for Javascript-only links, as well as Java or Silverlight plugins.

The above are probably the most common reasons why your website doesn’t get indexed within a reasonable time. Under normal circumstances it shouldn’t take more than a few days until you get at least the front page spidered so wait a little while before you start to worry.