Companies STILL conducting unethical opt-in subscriptions

It's been some months since I last posted to this blog. Okay, I lie - it's been over a year - but with my weekly/fortnightly postings on the Vertical Leap Search Marketing Blog I don't have as much time or available left-over subject matter as I'd like! However I noticed something last weekend that I felt I should share with you which was more appropriate to the blog accompanying MoonKlash than VL.

I recently purchased a new car (well, a ten year old MG ZS, so not exactly 'new' but I like it just the same. It's shiny and has a spoiler and a sunroof, so I'm happy). As my last car was sadly written off in a five car pile-up, my insurance was looking to be quite expensive so I did a little shopping around. Eventually I found my way to Admiral via Money Supermarket. The quote was straightforward however it wasn't possible to complete the payment process online - there was no form, so instead I had to call them.

The conversation didn't last long - about five minutes - however the line was very crackly (possibly a problem with our handset rather than theirs). The thing that surprised me was that after five minutes of confirming each and every detail I'd entered into the price comparison website, I was asked: "Is it okay for us to contact you?"

After five minutes of Yes/No/Yes/No I very nearly said 'Yes' just to get it all over and done with, especially as I'd had difficulty hearing half the questions I'd been asked. However this question just seamed stupid. 'Is it okay for us to contact you?' Well what's that meant to mean? Do you want to call up for a chat? If I say No, would that mean you couldn't call me if there was a problem with my insurance? So I asked: "What do you mean? Contact me why?" The answer, of course, was predictable and exactly what I knew it would be: "Can we email you special offers?"

Now, I may be being a little fussy here, but "Is it okay for us to contact you" and "May we subscribe you to our mailing list, after which we'll spam you to hell and back" are two very different things, and I'm surprised that companies like Admiral Insurance still continue to follow unethical subscription practices. Possibly the telephone operator was inexperienced or didn't ask the questions how he was trained, but that simply goes to re-enforce my believe that email opt-in's should never be handled over the phone unless it's a number you call especially with that intention.

When I worked at smartFOCUS on Email Reaction / smartMARKETER eChannel, we always ensured our clients followed ethical subscription problems. We had to, otherwise recipients would make spam complaints about the mailings they received, deliverability would suffer and emails would get blocked. Anyone found not behaving would be 'encouraged' to clean up their act or we'd no longer be able to support them.

To me, Admiral's approach is wrong on two important counts. Firstly the phrasing: 'Can we contact you.' There's no explanation as to what this means, it's just a cheap trick to get you registered. Secondly the subscription mechanism - phone. At smartFOCUS, if we received spam complaints it was common practise for us to ask our clients how and from where this address had been obtained, and in some circumstances ask for proof that the recipient had opted in. So do Admiral really record all conversations as proof of an opt in? The technology is available but I doubt they do! Does this mean that Admiral register people to their mailing lists without proof of an opt-in? Probably. Does this mean they'll get sued? Possibly not. There used to be a rule that meant you could email someone with whom you have a business relationship, so that's probably their get out clause. However, whilst this may limit the risk of legal action, they are still almost certainly going to find a lot of their emails get blocked when people make spam complaints. Emails to people that do want to receive them won't get delivered because Admiral choose to spam those that don't want them using a very dubious registration process.


Good Luck smartFOCUS
In other news, and on the note of smartFOCUS, Email Vision have acquired smartFOCUS. You can read the official story here, however the blog post by Pete Austin, one of the founders, is far more interesting. To all my former colleagues I wish you well, and hope everything goes smoothly - smartFOCUS had one of the most hard working, dedicated and professional teams I've worked with and I hope the changeover goes well for everyone involved.

News! YouTube! Behance!

Hi there all!

Things may appear to have gone quiet on the MoonKlash front but don't worry - I'll be writing some more articles soon. Unfortunately, due to work and personal commitments (and a broken internet connection) I've not had the opportunity to do too much lately however I've got lots of stuff planned for the near future so don't go away!

Although there haven't been any new blog entries lately, there have been a few exciting developments such as MoonKlash projects on the Behance network, demonstrating my past work.

And even better, I've just launched my new YouTube page! To mark this occasion, for the first time ever, the original test animation for Splidge & Splodge is now online! So go and watch it now!

All this work has highlighted to me how badly www.moonklash.com needs a facelift and I've started planning the new site for a launch later this year (with the new logo as displayed on my YouTube page).

Anyway, that's enough for now but check back soon as I've some exciting blog entries planned where I'll be looking at the language used in customer care, where marketers lack of technical knowledge lets them down, SEOing up my site (part 2) and lots more!

Outta here for now...
Stu.

Back from holiday

Howdy peeps, just a quick message to let you know this blog has not died, I've just been on holiday enjoying sun, sea and cocktails in Lanzarote. Normal service will shortly be resumed!

Impact of Gmail hack attempts on email marketing.

As Gmail tighten up their security following the recent hack attempts on their webmail service in China I take a look at the impact this may have on email marketers.

Last week, one of my first calls was from a worried client who had sent some test emails to his Gmail account ahead of the rest of his campaign but had found none of the images would display. On testing the same creative to other mail clients we couldn't replicate the problem - was there a problem with Gmail?
This is one of those occasions where politics have indirectly had an impact on email marketing. With the release of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft changed the their warning about displaying secure and non secure content. These days, if you access a secure website (https), but that website attempts to load content such as images from an non-secure location (http), you're given a slightly annoying warning:

Internet Explorer has given a warning about mixed content types for as long as I can remember, however in Internet Explorer 8 we're encouraged to block non-secure content. This is the opposite of earlier versions where the default option was to view everything.

So how is this, politics, and email marketing related? As has been widely documented, recent attempts to hack Gmail accounts in China resulted in the company reviewing its international strategy. Google also appear to have tightened up their security and have updated user settings so that on logging on, as a default, you'll now connect via https. This setting can be changed in the Gmails settings page after logging in.

If your email campaign has linked graphics (rather than embedded), chances are that your server won't be using a secure connection. If your email recipient attempts to log in to Gmail using their secure URL (https://mail.google.com) and your email contains images linked from a non-secure location then Internet Explorer 8 will give the warning above. If the recipient simply clicks the default button (Yes), they will inadvertently block non-secure content and whilst your HTML will display just fine, your images won't.

And this could well have other ramifications - if Google are defaulting to secure connections, what other mail providers will follow? Chances are that this would have happened anyway, but now it seems inevitable. So with rapid adoption of Internet Explorer 8 amongst users not quite so technical savvy as the rest of us you may need to invest in an SSL certificate for your server. That, or start embedding images in your emails instead of linking to them, which may have other pitfalls.

Of course, the smart people amongst you may already have done away with Internet Explorer completely. But are those the people you're targeting in your campaigns?

Why I chose Blogger over WordPress and other blogging tools

Blogger vs WordPress vs the alternatives: The reasoning behind my choice of Blogger from Google as the platform behind MoonKlash Blog rather than the many alternatives such as WordPress.

Whilst some people may argue, WordPress is considered by many to be the best blog tool available freely on the net, and for a good number of reasons:

• You can install it in your web space and customise it;
• You can use any template;
• There is a great selection of plugins available;
• With certain tweaks it's easy to ensure you blogs are fully optimised in a way that search engines will like;
• You retain ownership of your entries, whilst other blogging tools such as Googles offering can claim your content as their own.
• Many, many more reasons which deserve an article of their own.

Whilst all of the above is true, this does rather assume you will be running your own installation of WordPress (downloaded from http://www.wordpress.org) rather than using the hosted version (available from http://www.wordpress.com). And if installing your own copy, you need to have access to PHP web space and a database.

Rather regrettably, my web hosting package is limited to basic HTML only. Yes, I know that's not all that great, but I pay an excellent price for this (nothing with no advertising). Rather than swap my website showcasing my digital creative media projects for a rushed replacement and actually start paying out my hard earned cash, I've decided to go for a full redesign later in the year and migrate to WordPress then.

"What about the hosted version of WordPress?"

Most of the WordPress advantages I've listed above are applicable only when installing the downloadable version of WordPress within your web space. If you use the free hosted service from www.wordpress.com, you are limited in the templates you can use, the plugins you can add, and a lot more.

"Doesn't your web hosting company offer a blog tool you can incorporate into your web space?"

It does indeed, and for the thirty seconds I tried it I have to admit it looked great having my blog integrated into my proper website. Then I sighed and deleted the code. Why? My web host loads my blog into my page by using a client-side javascript include. From an SEO standpoint this is useless: spiders won't see the blog because it doesn't exist within the page fetched from the server, it will only appear in your web browser. Blog entries will never be indexed on my domain and won't show up in the SERPS. Placing my blog on a subdomain means at least they will be found and will use my domain name. I can always carefully redirect my subdomain when I move my blog to its new location.

"There are other blogging tools available"

There are, and I briefly looked into these but Blogger won me over because it allows me to set it up using moonklash.com, because I can use my own templates, and because there are a nice selection of other features I like. For now Blogger fulfils my blogging needs and is the winner, however as time goes by this will be something I review.

I plan to follow this entry up later in the year when I start shopping around for a different web host, and I'll also be offering further analysis into the blogging tools that are out there on the world wide web. Follow me on twitter if you'd like to be alerted when I revisit this topic later in the year!

SEO - Where did I go wrong?

In this blog I look at search engine optimisation, the mistakes I've made in the past and what I did to improve my rankings.

I've been designing websites for over a decade and, looking back, I now realise I didn't know much about search engine optimisation when I began. This is largely due to the fact I was originally self-taught - looking at other peoples source HTML to learn how something works is great for obtaining ideas but can lead to picking up some very bad habits. In this blog I take a look at where my SEO went wrong.

The current incarnation of my website showcasing my digital media projects was designed a number of years ago and did fulfil its original purpose. The website was only intended as an online C.V. - something I could direct people to when I was looking for work, but not something that would be stumbled across by accident. Last year I started talking to some great guys in the SEO field and this led to me looking back through my HTML to see how well I'd optimised my site. I was very disappointed. Here's what I learnt and the changes I made to fix the problems I'd found.

Firstly, not being too worried about the site being found, I didn't have any backlinks. There was a brief period when I submitted the site to major search engines regularly, but as everyone knows, that's pointless. This is something I've still not addressed - I'm optimising the site as an exercise rather than because I need to and so I've not yet taken the steps to go hunting for relevant sites to link with.

My page design is a bit of a problem. Every page is structured using tables rather than styles, which is perfect when designing HTML emails but not so much for websites. Having said that, whilst there's always been a big argument for using styles rather than tables, these days it's well documented that search engine spiders can read tables without any problems: the issue you may encounter stems from the fact that the search engine may be less able to determine the importance of the text it finds there. I've not addressed this as doing so would mean a major redesign and so I'm waiting until I have more time, at which point I'll also install WordPress and incorporate blog.moonklash.com properly within the main site.

Whilst every page had its own subheading and descriptive introduction, none of this was optimised for relevant keywords. And whilst I'd used CSS for said subheadings, I'd not bothered applying relevant tags (such as heading tags), relying solely on the styles. Which is great for human eyes, but not for search engines try to determine the significance of a piece of text. An easy but time consuming thing to fix, I trawled through my pages, placing text in the correct tags rather than relying purely on CSS so that the search engines could understand which parts of the page were the most significant. Page segmentation is also important and I had to ensure that all of my correctly tagged text was positioned on the page appropriately.

Something I've not mentioned is keyword analysis, one of the most important tasks to be conducted before optimising a website. Just a quick reminder - I wasn't that worried about how well the site showed up on the search engines, I was only making these changes as an exercise in improving the site design. Therefore to save a bit of time I cheated a little here. I didn't perform the same levels of analysis as I usually would and simply anticipated what the long tail could be (something you should never do if you are serious about optimising a website properly). I changed my link text and the heading of each page to incorporate certain relevant additional keywords I thought people would be searching in combination for. For example, Graphic Design became Graphic Design with Adobe Photoshop.

For the title tags, I used a convention along the lines of:
Website name .:: Relevant Keyword 1 | Relevant Keyword 2 | Keyword by Author

So the title of my web page covering my web design and seo past projects became:
MoonKlash .:: Web Design and HTML with Search Engine Optimisation | Creative Design by Stuart Clark

You may feel that this was a bad choice for the title tag - you should ideally put the most relevant keywords at the start of the tag, not the website or company name. But remember that the purpose of this site was to be found if I told someone it existed, and "MoonKlash - spelt with a K" is the keyword I was giving out.

I had masses of javascript at the top of every page, leaving the content buried way down in the HTML. This was one of the things I really focussed on improving, using side-wide search and replaces in Dreamweaver to erase the javascript and point to external js files instead. Luckily I'd not made my links javascript only - whilst I have some drop down menus, the main links are still readible by spiders and can still be followed.

Potentially more troublesome, I decided to rename my files and change the directory structure, so that each page had a relevant filename and wasn't considered of lower relevance for its place in a subfolder. This could have been tricky if it wasn't for Adobe Dreamweavers automated link search and replace when making changes like this. And it was now quite quick for me to update the minimal Javascript links I had as these were stored in external js files rather than in the head of every page. Easy!

So where to next? Well, there's still a lot of changes that I need to make, but as the purpose of this website isn't it's prominence on search engines but to act as my portfolio and demonstrate what I do I'm going to leave it until I have time to conduct a full redesign. Not because I need to improve my search rankings but because if my website is found I don't want it to put people off!

 

The results of my review

These changes were made in May 2009. It's now January 2010, so it's easily time to see how well I did.

• Searching for Stuart Clark, I don't rank at all, but there's a lot of competition, I have no backlinks, I didn't really optimise for Stuart Clark alone and so I'm not surprised.
• Searching for MoonKlash I have the first listing on google.co.uk but that's to be expected as it's a unique name.
• Searching for Stuart Clark Animation I have the first listing on google.co.uk, that's nice.
• Searching for Stuart Clark Graphic Design I'm still number one - happy days!
• Searching for Stuart Clark Maya I have the first listing. Happy days are here again!
• Searching for Stuart Clark Web Design I have the first listing on google.co.uk. Another happy day? Has summer started?
• Searching for Stuart Clark SEO I'm still number one!
• Searching for Splidge and Splodge I have the second listing on the first page of google.co.uk. My first result without my name in, pretty pleased with that!
• Searching for Art, Flyers & Graphic Design with Adobe Photoshop, I have the second listing on the first page of google.co.uk. As the first listing is Adobe I'm pretty pleased!

Not bad for a website with a non-existant pagerank, especially considering I was on the second page for a lot of the above before optimising my website!

My web design and search engine optimisation projects

Online resources

Here's a few of the tools I used when conducting my SEO review:

SEO Browsers

SEO Browsers are great tools which help you view your website as a search engine spider would see it. They help you visualise and understand why text content is so important, why you mustn't rely on images, javascript links or flash. I've mainly been using the seo browser from Domain Tools, but unfortunately this doesn't appear to be accessible as I write this. Here's an alternative browser for viewing your site as a spider from seo-browser.com I've just discovered, which actually looks far more powerful. For me, these demonstrate that I need to put far more content on my home page and change the order of my text to place the most important keywords near the top of the page.

 

Vertical Leap

A great bunch of people in the SEO field, there are some fantastic free SEO tools on the Vertical Leap website you may find useful. In particular, I made great use of the broken links report recently when pushing for an update on a corporate website I was involved with.

 

GSiteCrawlerSite map (for pinging)

GSiteCrawler is the software I used for creating an XML sitemap and pinging it to search engines, however it should be noted that this hasn't been updated for a while and so there may be better software out there.

 

My Brain

Not available on the Internet, this is an offline resource only.

Welcome to my blog!

In this blog I look at search engine optimisation, the mistakes I've made in the past and what I did to improve my rankings.

I've been designing websites for over a decade and, looking back, I now realise I didn't know much about search engine optimisation when I began. This is largely due to the fact I was originally self-taught - looking at other peoples source HTML to learn how something works is great for obtaining ideas but can lead to picking up some very bad habits. In this blog I take a look at where my SEO went wrong.

The current incarnation of my website showcasing my digital media projects was designed a number of years ago and did fulfil its original purpose. The website was only intended as an online C.V. - something I could direct people to when I was looking for work, but not something that would be stumbled across by accident. Last year I started talking to some great guys in the SEO field and this led to me looking back through my HTML to see how well I'd optimised my site. I was very disappointed. Here's what I learnt and the changes I made to fix the problems I'd found.

Firstly, not being too worried about the site being found, I didn't have any backlinks. There was a brief period when I submitted the site to major search engines regularly, but as everyone knows, that's pointless. This is something I've still not addressed - I'm optimising the site as an exercise rather than because I need to and so I've not yet taken the steps to go hunting for relevant sites to link with.

My page design is a bit of a problem. Every page is structured using tables rather than styles, which is perfect when designing HTML emails but not so much for websites. Having said that, whilst there's always been a big argument for using styles rather than tables, these days it's well documented that search bots can read tables without any problems: the issue you may encounter stems from the fact that the search robot may be less able to determine the importance of the text it finds there. I've not addressed this as doing so would mean a major redesign and so I'm waiting until I have more time, at which point I'll also install WordPress and incorporate blog.moonklash.com properly within the main site.

Whilst every page had its own subheading and descriptive introduction, none of this was optimised for relevant keywords. And whilst I'd used CSS for said subheadings, I'd not bothered applying relevant tags (such as heading tags), relying solely on the styles. Which is great for human eyes, but not for robots. An easy but time consuming thing to fix, I trawled through my pages, placing text in the correct tags rather than relying purely on CSS so that the search bots could understand which parts of the page were the most significant. Page segmentation is also important and I had to ensure that all of my correctly tagged text was positioned on the page appropriately.

Something I've not mentioned is keyword analysis, one of the most important tasks to be conducted before optimising a website. Just a quick reminder - I wasn't that worried about how well the site showed up on the search engines, I was only making these changes as an exercise in improving the site design. Therefore to save a bit of time I cheated a little here. I didn't perform the same levels of analysis as I usually would and simply anticipated what the long tail could be (something you should never do if you are serious about optimising a website properly). I changed my link text and the heading of each page to incorporate certain relevant additional keywords I thought people would be searching in combination for. For example, Graphic Design became Graphic Design with Adobe Photoshop.

For the title tags, I used a convention along the lines of:
Website name .:: Relevant Keyword 1 | Relevant Keyword 2 | Keyword by Author

So the title of my web page covering my web design and seo past projects became:
MoonKlash .:: Web Design and HTML with Search Engine Optimisation | Creative Design by Stuart Clark

You may feel that this was a bad choice for the title tag - you should ideally put the most relevant keywords at the start of the tag, not the website or company name. But remember that the purpose of this site was to be found if I told someone it existed, and "MoonKlash - spelt with a K" is the keyword I was giving out.

I had masses of javascript at the top of every page, leaving the content buried way down in the HTML. This was one of the things I really focussed on improving, using side-wide search and replaces in Dreamweaver to erase the javascript and point to external js files instead. Luckily I'd not made my links javascript only - whilst I have some drop down menus, the main links are still readible by search bots and can still be followed.

Potentially more troublesome, I decided to rename my files and change the directory structure, so that each page had a relevant filename and wasn't considered of lower relevance for its place in a subfolder. This could have been tricky if it wasn't for Adobe Dreamweavers automated link search and replace when making changes like this. And it was now quite quick for me to update the minimal Javascript links I had as these were stored in external js files rather than in the head of every page. Easy!

So where to next? Well, there's still a lot of changes that I need to make, but as the purpose of this website isn't it's prominence on search engines but to act as my portfolio and demonstrate what I do I'm going to leave it until I have time to conduct a full redesign. Not because I need to improve my search rankings but because if my website is found I don't want it to put people off!

 

The results of my review

These changes were made in May 2009. It's now January 2010, so it's easily time to see how well I did.

• Searching for Stuart Clark, I don't rank at all, but there's a lot of competition, I have no backlinks, I didn't really optimise for Stuart Clark alone and so I'm not surprised.
• Searching for MoonKlash I have the first listing on google.co.uk but that's to be expected as it's a unique name.
• Searching for Stuart Clark Animation I have the first listing on google.co.uk, that's nice.
• Searching for Stuart Clark Graphic Design I'm still number one - happy days!
• Searching for Stuart Clark Maya I have the first listing. Happy days are here again!
• Searching for Stuart Clark Web Design I have the first listing on google.co.uk. Another happy day? Has summer started?
• Searching for Stuart Clark SEO I'm still number one!
• Searching for Splidge and Splodge I have the second listing on the first page of google.co.uk. My first result without my name in, pretty pleased with that!
• Searching for Art, Flyers & Graphic Design with Adobe Photoshop, I have the second listing on the first page of google.co.uk. As the first listing is Adobe I'm pretty pleased!

Not bad for a website with a non-existant pagerank, especially considering I was on the second page for a lot of the above before optimising my website!

My web design and search engine optimisation projects

Online resources

Here's a few of the tools I used when conducting my SEO review:

SEO Browsers

SEO Browsers are great tools which help you view your website as a search robot would see it. They help you visualise and understand why text content is so important, why you mustn't rely on images, javascript links or flash. I've mainly been using the seo browser from Domain Tools, but unfortunately this doesn't appear to be accessible as I write this. Here's an alternative browser for viewing your site as a search robot from seo-browser.com I've just discovered, which actually looks far more powerful. For me, these demonstrate that I need to put far more content on my home page and change the order of my text to place the most important keywords near the top of the page.

Vertical Leap

A great bunch of people in the SEO field, there are some fantastic free SEO tools on the Vertical Leap website you may find useful. In particular, I made great use of the broken links report recently when pushing for an update on a corporate website I was involved with.

GSiteCrawlerSite map (for pinging)

GSiteCrawler is the software I used for creating an XML sitemap and pinging it to search engines, however it should be noted that this hasn't been updated for a while and so there may be better software out there.

My Brain

Not available on the Internet, this is an offline resource only.