Spam - why to keep your site clean
Spam techniques are to the web what cold calling is
to marketing as a whole.
The techniques used were once a legitimate marketing
method that were soon misused en masse and became a pest to your customers.
The only difference with the web, is that it has its own self appointed
spam busters – the search engines.
From the marketing point of view, it makes sense for
search engines to take a firm stance against spam – their product
is offering quality results to their users and spam reduces this quality.
This article will look at what spam is and reasons
why to keep your site free from spam.
Email spam
Unsolicited emails. Junk mail.
You all know what this is and how annoying it can be.
Don’t do it.
From a marketing point of view, email spam is effective
due to the low cost to do it and the huge number of people you are contacting.
But, it will only serve to soil your brand image and you can achieve a
much higher sales conversion rate by building a quality website and conducting
an effective web marketing campaign.
Any email lists you have should be entirely opt in.
That is, users should have to elect to receive emails from you. A point
to note here is that have a check box at the bottom of your form that
is selected by default is not entirely opt in. Yes, people can unselect
it at this point, but a lot won’t.
In terms of sales conversions, your opt in email marketing
campaign will be much more effective if all of the users asked to be on
the list. Put it this way – what would you rather tell your boss?
You got a 2% conversion rate on 10000 emails, or a 20% conversion rate
on 1000 (just example figures)? It’s the same number of sales, but
in the second case, about 9000 people would have probably deleted your
email the second they saw it.
What’s the point in that?
A small tip – if you receive junk emails, do
not click on the “unsubscribe” link. This just tells the sender
that the email address is active and they will sell your address on in
another list, so you can receive tonnes more junk emails. This is email
spam at it’s finest.
Other spam
I’m not going to detail the technical specifics
of what spam is. People will just abuse this information. This is the
same reason that search engines don’t detail the specifics.
If you want a better idea of what search engines consider
to be acceptable, then you should check the terms and conditions for each
one.
A few techniques that are caught by the main searches
and will result in your site being penalised (dropped out of the results
for periods of time or for good, depending on the level of infringement)
are:
Duplicate content on different sites. This is copying
your existing site onto other URLs in order to dominate the results for
a certain key phrase.
Using hidden text (aka invisible text) to add keywords to your site (text
the same colour as the background). This was tried years ago (the search
engines rank your site based on the keyword density of your text), but
is heavily penalised now that the search engines have caught on.
Many others!
A general rule of thumb is if what you do is of benefit to your users,
then it is OK. If it is for the purpose for getting an unfair advantage
in the search engines, then it is spam.
Design your site for your users – not the search
engines
By creating a good site that has useful content for your users and is
free from spam, you can effectively create a resource that will rank well
and receive quality traffic from the search engines.
You can use spam to market your site! Yes, that’s
right – use spam to market your site without fear of a penalty from
search engines.
How do you do this?
Stand up against it.
By having stringent policies against spam and by ensuring
your users that their information is safe with you and will not be passed
on to third parties, you can raise their confidence in doing business
with your site.
This does not mean having a small piece of text and
the end of your terms and conditions that your users will probably not
read have anyway! You should have this information clearly formatted at
the point at which users submit their information to you. And it doesn’t
hurt to have it at the beginning of the form as well.
A dedicated page to your commitment to against spam
that your users can easily find will increase your credibility straight
away.
Your sites credibility is one of your USP’s (unique
selling points) – in fact it is one of the strongest.
Low consumer confidence in the web (thanks to spam!)
is one of the main reasons that web based sales are not higher than they
are today.
Your site's credibility should be central to your web
marketing campaign.
Best of luck!
>>
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