Anti-Spam Tips, Tricks and Secrets

How to avoid spam, how to filter spam, and how to complain about spam:

• Stop Spam with Disposable Email Addresses (disposable email address will forward all mail to your real address)
  
  Don't Use Your Primary Email Address to Sign Up for Anything. Many Web sites require you to sign up to access their services. You never know what will happen to the email address you give to the site.
  
  - Hackers may break into the network and steal the email address,
  - it may leak to the Web due to some mishap, or
  - it might even get sold to spammers.
  
  As soon as you get spam through a disposable address, you disable it, and all messages (and all spam) sent to the disposable address bounce back to the sender instead of your Inbox.

• Change the default (catch-all) address (where all email will be delivered if the mailbox specified does not exist) for your account to ":fail: no such address here."
• Report Spam with SpamCop (http://www.spamcop.net/)
  
  Complain about spam the right way easily with SpamCop, which does all the analyzing for you and generates a perfect complaint email, too.

• Hide Email Address from Harvester Bots / Spiders and Disguise Your Email Address in Newsgroups, Forums, Blog Comments, Chat
  
  Make it more difficult for spammers to get your address by obfuscating it when you use it in your Website, newsgroups, forums and the like.

• Ignore Delivery Failures of Messages You Did Not Send
  
  If you wonder why you are getting delivery failures for messages you know you did not send, the cause may be a worm or a spammer, and it's probably not on your computer. However, if you do get a lot of delivery failure messages, you may have a worm on your computer.
• Use email filter such as Spam Assassin. Spam Assassin is an automated mail filter that uses a wide range of heuristic algorithms on mail headers and message body text to identify "SPAM" (unsolicited email). Once identified, the mail is tagged as "SPAM" for later filtering using the user's desktop mail client. For more info visit http://www.spamassassin.org/

• Use a Good Anti-Spam Program
  
  Employ one of the great anti-spam tools (e.g., POPFile Spam Filter & Thunderbird) that filter junk mail using all kinds of clever strategies.

• Don't Believe Spammers When They Say "You Requested"
  
  There are two words that you will find in almost any unsolicited bulk email: you requested - Don't believe it.
• Anti-Phishing Protection - Watch for increasingly common email scams - also known as “phishing” - which try to fool you into handing over your passwords and other personal information.

• Assume Mail from Unknown Senders is Spam
  
  Send messages not from somebody in your address book to the Junk Mail folder. You can also use challenge/response spam filters.

• Watch Out for Those Checkboxes
  
  Make sure you don't opt in for emails you don't want, and watch out for checkboxes when you submit any form on a Web site.
  
  SOURCE: http://email.about.com/od/spamfightingtips/tp/popular_tips.htm

Compiled by Ron Elli, Ph.D. - SOURCiS

Organic SEO or Pay-Per-Click Advertising

When people hear about online marketing, they often think of two of the more popular methods that a company can use to enhance its visibility on the Web:

• organic search engine optimization and
• pay-per-click advertising.

But which is best for you?

Organic Search Engine Optimization
Organic search engine optimization campaigns offer several distinct advantages over pay-per-click advertising campaigns, as many recent studies have shown. What follows is a brief listing of some of the findings.

• Propensity to Click - Study after study indicates people are less likely to click on paid search ads rather than on results from organic search engine optimization. For example, one study found that search users are up to six times more likely to click on the first few organic results than they are to choose any of the paid results, while an eye tracking study showed that 50 percent of users begin their search by scanning the top organic results. Majority of eye activity during a search happens within a triangle (Golden Triangle) at the top of the search results page.
• Trust - Studies are beginning to indicate that the trust level for organic results is much higher than that of paid results, and that paid results are looked upon as a nuisance by some searchers.
• Value of Visitors - Organic search engine results tend to be seen as non-biased, and they therefore are able to provide visitors that are more valuable. The overall conversion rate, or the rate at which searchers take a desired action on a site, is 17 percent higher for unpaid search results than the rate for paid (4.2% vs. 3.6%).
• Pay-Per-Click Costs Rising - Meanwhile, pay-per-click costs are rising steadily. Between October 2004 and December 2005, average keyword prices rose from around $25 to just under $55.10 And the cost of keywords can increase by as much as 100 percent during the holiday season.
• Long Term Results - While a pay-per-click campaign may produce results more quickly than an organic search engine optimization campaign, organic search engine optimization campaigns can give you results that last.
• Relevance - Users also have rated organic search engine results as more relevant than paid results.

Source: SitePro News - By Scott Buresh

Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Compiled by Ron Elli, Ph.D. - SOURCiS

How good is your website?

A website is your business' public face. Big businesses can look like mom and pop operations and mom and pop operations can look like General Motors. The design of your website should not be taken lightly, its budget should not be an afterthought, and the designer you hire should be someone who understands more than code. Your Web-designer should be a multimedia-marketing advisor, someone who can counsel you how best to deliver your marketing message, and someone who can go beyond technical issues.

Below is a set questíons you can ask yourself.
1. Does Your Website Have A Purpose?
2. Is Your Website Focused?
3. How Functional Is Your Website?
4. Does Your Website's Construction Balance Competing Concerns?
5. Does your website honestly reflect your business personality?
6. Is your Web-presentation integrated into your overall marketing plan?
7. Is content king on your website?
8. Is your website an experience?
9. Does your website have a distinctive look?
10. Do you list appropriate contact information on your website?

Contact SOURCiS Website Design