A common piece of advice is to build links to other sites to place well in search engines.  While there’s no doubt that quality links to your site will improve your rankings, getting those links can take some significant effort.  Advanced sites looking for slight edges definitely need to build links, however, entry-level sites to SEO likely have more effective uses for their time.

Most site owners receive the automated emails asking for link exchanges.  As you might guess, these tactics are extremely ineffective.  The alternative is segmenting by market or competitors and making inroads into targeted sites.  While that is effective, it takes a lot of time.

There are some automated ways of generating links like directory submissions.  While these are typically not the most relevant sources they will influence your website ranking.

The best tactic for most sites without dedicated SEO resources is link building over time.  Make link building a part of your regular business activity.

• Talk to current partners about linking to your site.
• Make sure any chamber or association you belong to has a listing that links to your webpage.
• Any content or articles created should include a by line link to your site.
• Link any external listings to individual pages that pertain to the listings topic.

When link building is built into activities that you are already doing, it doesn’t take a lot of extra effort and builds extremely relevant and targeted linking.

Never assume you know how you achieved success online.  Theories are fine but every theory that we intend to take action on needs backed up with data.  Running online marketing campaigns on presumptions will lead to erratic results and makes it impossible for consistent gradual improvement.

Recently I was working on an ongoing online marketing campaign to promote events.  One event in particular got a surge of registrants.  The owner of the company was thrilled.  He then declared that the success must have come from the new list of email addresses that had been added to the subscriber list.  These new arrivals were 200 (roughly) people that had opted in to receiving promotions at a trade show.  The event had 40 registrants (roughly) so if they all came from the new list that would represent a 40% conversion.  A phenomenal number!

A problem arose when a follow on promotion was developed and sent there was no response.  All 200 people had suddenly lost interest. In fact 10 unsubscribed, a 5% attrition rate.  How had things gone so poorly?

Upon analyzing the initial email only 1 of the 40 registrants came from the new list of email subscribers.  The other was a mix of people who found the event through internet sources and long-standing email subscribers.  The second email did poorly because it was based on a false presumption.

My theory (haven’t proved it with data) is that the new list responded unfavorably because they got an email and then a quick follow on email presuming they were interested.  Immediately getting two emails and assumptive “sales” language led to a distinctly negative response.  They feared they were opting in to a SPAM list.

It turns out that the email subscribers that registered for the event had, on average, been receiving promotional emails from this company for 3 years.  The spike had more to do with the topic and presentation than a fresh list of names.

Don’t take action on presumptions.  It costs time, money, and future opportunities.  It’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so, that can cause the most problems.  Use your email and web data to confirm your theories before acting on them.

Note: These numbers are rounded to easily illustrate the point and provide some anonymity

Increasingly email and conversion experts are advocating multimedia.  They point out how video is engaging and can quickly grab a visitor’s attention.  Metrics also support the claim.  Here’s what’s lost in translation.  Doing multimedia takes more time, money, and/or energy.  So while multimedia is advantageous, you need to decide if it’s worth investing in, or whether it’s something you want to graduate into.

For instance doing a video email campaign will likely show improved open and click through rates over a static one.  However if the email campaign is in its infancy and only has 100 subscribers, the extra cost of producing the videos probably isn’t worthwhile.  The key to making a decision on doing multimedia is factoring in the return on your investment.

For instance if the email campaign above has a 20% open rate and of those opens it has a 5% click through rate, then we know that 1 person takes action on every email (as an average).  Let’s pretend research showed that a video email campaign in the same industry and similar business size resulted in click-through rates tripling.  If the average action results in a $5.00 sale, then the subscriber list likely needs to grow significantly to justify the investment into multimedia campaigns.  However, if the average result is a $20,000 sale, then we’d be foolish not to begin a video campaign.

Multimedia has shown to increase conversions in email and on the web fairly consistently.  However, like most business decisions we need to weigh the pros and cons.  Spend some time with your web and email metrics to see if adding multimedia is a worthwhile endeavor.  It’s very possible that you’ll want to graduate into the technology, just make sure the numbers agree.

SEO tactics change quickly.  Learning all the nuances of cutting edge tips and tricks today will likely be outdated in a few months and certainly within a couple of years.  SEO tactics are a moving target and truly takes dedication and diligence to keep up with emerging trends.  That’s not good news for someone that wants to optimize their site but is discouraged by the ever evolving details of SEO.That is why I have three SEO constants that any website should implement.  These three things likely won’t put you at the top of search engines but it will at least get you placed in the rankings.

3 Constants of SEO:

•  Set Your Title Tags – These title tags appear on the browser window.  Use the tags to say who you are and describe what you do.  Keep it short and set uniquely specific tags for every page on your website.
• Create Quality Content – It’s critical to have good content on the site.  If users find their way to the site, why should they stay if the content is poor?  They won’t, and neither will the search engines.  Set a method for adding content through things like a blog, article archive, or report library.
• Update Content – The web is alive.  You can’t set a website and forget it.  Evolving content will provide search engines with richer keywords and keep your information current.

Of course there are many other tactics and nuances to SEO.  However, these three things are a good start for beginners or people that only have resources for the basics.

Social networking from a business perspective does not change what is said.  It changes how it is said.  Unfortunately without a social networking strategy it also means how many times is it said.  The biggest drain on time and resources in social networking is repetitive effort.  Twitter is starting to integrate itself with other social networks leveraging itself as a potential social network hub.

Several months ago LinkedIn set up Twitter integration.  This was a valuable extension of the blog linking that was first featured.  Facebook is also integrating with Twitter to allow tweets as status updates.  As more and more social networks interact, it provides a strategy of a single update populating all the social networks that a marketer participates in.  This is a powerful tool in social networking to make one update visible across multiple networks.

Of course the reverse is possible making status updates tweets but the simplicity of Twitter makes it an ideal engine to power social network updates.  It forces marketers to make quick points and move interested parties to a different site.  This link is likely an organizations web page which offers more information as well as conversion opportunities.

Read up on Twitter integration.  It’s an outstanding way to keep all your social networks up to date, without spending inordinate amounts of time doing it.

This is a bonus tactic.

Personalize your email campaign.  All campaigns should have at least a name (which shouldn’t be a problem if the list is being built and maintained properly).  However personalization shouldn’t stop there.  Advanced personalization increases credibility and conversion rates as it begins to take a personal stake in a recipients interests.

Personalizing can vary greatly from campaign to campaign.  Good personalization is built on segmentation.  Here are some common segments:

• Topics - Are there subcategories of information people can opt-in for so that they get specific content to an identified topic?
• Industry – Can the content be customized by industry served so that it has laser specific content?
• Geography – Is there a location breakdown where people can get only localized information presented in local dialects and sayings?

These are just three examples but start to present how messages can be personalized.  Once subscribers belong to very specific groups, the amount appearance of one-to-one communication starts to be seamless.  When done flawlessly recipients stop viewing emails as a commercial or “group” email and see it as a personal interaction.

Nothing lasts forever.  That’s as true for email subscribers as anything else.  An email opt-in is not a lifetime commitment.  Opt-outs should be a foregone conclusion as subscribers should have a simple way of removing themselves from communications.  However, many email marketers are reluctant to scrub their email lists of inaccurate or bouncing emails.  Maintaining your email list will help keep costs down and improve delivery.

Most Internet Service Providers take bounce rates into account as a SPAM signifier.  Therefore, quality email service providers will have an interest in clean lists.  However, don’t rely on a reprimand from your email service to prompt you into cleaning the list.  Make it a routine.

Depending on your email service’s billing practice it can save money.  Removing emails that bounce means less overall sends which reduces costs for per email billing.  Removing bad email addresses has the potential to drop under subscribers thresholds and drop rates to a lower tier for per subscriber billing.

A monthly or quarterly review of bounce rates is a good idea.  The larger the list the more frequent the review should be.  Bounce rates will grow over time.  It is not a sign of a poor performing email campaign as these recipients aren’t even receiving the message.  It’s a signifier of the transience of email addresses.  Plan on 20% of your email list going bad every year.  That is the rate that the average person changes email addresses.

Cleaning up an email list is an often overlooked necessity.  Many email marketers resist cleaning the list because they like seeing a lot of email addresses in heir subscriber list. They see it as a sign of success. Be honest with yourself.  Anyone can create thousands of fake email addresses and point to it as a sign of a thriving campaign.  The point is to communicate a valuable message to an interested audience, not gather email addresses.  Remove the bad email addresses so that you get an accurate sense of how the campaign is performing and a realistic view of who is paying attention.

Test your email communications! It should go without saying but we can get overly comfortable creating our messages. That comfort level can become negligence and testing can get overlooked. This is always a costly mistake. Be diligent in testing emails and set a checklist to confirm that the email is ready to send.

Every decent email marketing program offers a function to send a test email. Send the email to your account. Then a checklist is the best way to hold yourself accountable to checking an email communication thoroughly. At minimum it should include:

• Proofread the subject line for clarity and spelling errors.
• Proofread the communication for spelling and grammatical errors.
• Survey the layout for design errors or display issues.
• Click all links to ensure they function correctly and redirect to the appropriate webpage.

Certain email campaigns might have a few more line items but if these four items are correct then the email is ready to send. If a second set of eyes is available it’s a good idea to have a proofreader. The person creating the email often gets too close and has problems identifying problems.

Make a habit of testing your emails. Typos and display issues will not get recipients to engage your company. Testing is the only way to ensure that you detect your errors, rather than your audience.

Send frequency is an important aspect of email marketing. Defining a send frequency serves two purposes:

• It sets a production schedule.
• Provides communication delivery expectations to recipients.

Setting a production schedule is critical. The #1 biggest killer of email marketing campaigns is that the person running the campaign didn’t set a production schedule. When an email marketing campaign is run without a frequency schedule it is usually chronically late or has no discernable pattern. Inconsistent production decreases interest in the communications and builds frustration in producing them. Once this trend starts it’s only a matter of time before the email campaign is scrapped.

Delivery expectations are important for recipients. There is no set rule for send schedule. A general rule is that there should be at least a monthly communication but no more than weekly. This applies to the majority of email campaigns. Having said that, there are successful newsletters that are produced quarterly and for sophisticated email marketers, multiple emails a week cause no negative impacts on results. Having a send schedule helps define consistency and builds credibility. A communication that is always off schedule gives the impression that they are produced haphazardly and not a high quality.

Set a frequency schedule and define production actions that need to take place to meet that schedule. Sticking to it will ensure high quality communications that recipients are expecting.

All email recipients won’t respond to the same offer. That seems like simple common sense but many email campaigns ignore the advice. The person running the email campaign (or their boss) has a single item or event they’d like to promote and the email campaign pounds it to a pulp. For those people that aren’t interested in that particular promotion, they are never given a chance to interact. Intermix multiple promotions within the email campaign so a varied group of recipients have incentive to take the next step.

We’ve previously covered several common promotions: products, services, events, etc. It’s a good idea to include a few options in an email campaign. Ideally the options would span categories so that recipients have a chance to review products or specials but also get event announcements. At minimum, the single item should change. If there is one product offered over and over, sooner or later the email list will grow immune to the communications.

Varying the offers to recipients serves two purposes:

• It hits a wider demographic. Subscribers to email marketing campaigns usually have a host of reasons for opting in. Varied offers takes that difference into account and casts a wider net on what the individual might react to.
• It prevents list exhaustion. Even if a recipient is interested in a single promotion, they won’t continually be. Changing options keep recipients more engaged because they are seeing new promotions available to them.

Think of your email marketing campaign like a television station. You can’t show the same episode of the same show over and over without people tuning out. Mix up the promotions so different demographics find what they want and stay engaged with the communications.