What is SMTP Path Analysis?

Do you have a major problem with junk mail? Do you want to put an end to junk mail once and for all? Well, that does not seem to be a bleak possibility now. Researchers from IBM and Cornell University have come up with an anti-spam technique called "SMTP Path Analysis". It is an amazing technique for checking the information embedded in email messages regarding the route it has taken across the internet. But this is not seen by the user who recieve an email message. It can be used to trace the path taken by the message between different mail servers. The algorithm of this technique learns from the string of IP addresses that are included in the spam and real email headers.

The best thing about this technique is that now a good guess about the email message being spam or real can be made. The algorithm studies the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) data and this information is then added to email message header as it is passed between servers on the internet. As a result of this, whenever a new message comes, SMTP is able to judge whether the message is junk or legitimate. Though not being able to work efficiently on its own, this technique works pretty well in conjunction with other content filtering tools.

Isn't this great news to all people harassed by unwanted email messages?

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The Power of Title Tag in SEO

Would you like to read a book without a title? How would you react to a movie that doesn't have a title? Would a titleless article excite you to read on? Think of a lesson taught in the class that doesn't have a title. Similarly every web site must have a relevant title tag to guide the search engines in determining the contents of every page on the website. Think of the recipe or preparation of a dish without knowing the name of th dish. If you want your site to be seen and visited by people when they make a keyword query by typing that keyword in the search engine, it is important to have powerful and purposeful title tags for each web page.

Length of a Title Tag

Ideally a title tag should be in between 50-80 characters including hyphens, spaces and other characters. Too long a title tag can derail you from the focus or the major service, product you want to focus on. Even the search engines don't consider indexing a very long title tag that has too much information crammed in one long sentence. If you have multiple services and products to offer, you can always mention them in the title tags of other pages of your site.

Use of Title Tags

There are many purposes for which the title tags are used, the most important and foremost being ranking of your web pages.The search engines pay most attention to the title tag while determining the contents of your site. Also it helps you target your visitors by the search engines by getting dispalyed in web search results. Even for linking to your site, website resource librarians, directory editors, and other webmasters use title tags. The title is also displayed in the browser window of the visitors at the top viewable part of the browser screen.

Benefits of a Well Written Title Tag

A good and relevant title tag acts like a well directed trailer of a movie. If the trailer is good, relevant, and exciting, the chances of people coming to see the movie will be much better. A well crafted title tag makes it much easier for the webmasters, editors, and web resource librarians to access it. But obvious, a relevant and understandable title tag also means more traffic for the site, and better conversion rate. Even for the search engines, a smartly and intelligently created title tag means greater chances of your site being ranked higher in search engines, and that again means hitting your target audience and converting them to prospective customers and buyers of your products and services.

Have you ever heard of a sound foundation on which the building is constructed? If the foundation is shaky or not solid, imagine the plight of the building then. Treat your title tag as the foundation of an impressive, powerful and attractive website and pay extra attention to it. Just imagine the end of that story the begining of which only is pathetic. So make the begining speak about the story itself. Make your title tag do the talking, so that people feel egged on to read the body of your website.

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Website Designing Techniques That Hamper Higher Rankings

Web designers may create websites using the best, latest and most sophisticated techniques available, but while putting their heart and soul in designing them, they forget one very important thing - SEO. Why is a website created? Not just to showcase your web designing talent, but the usability and visibility of the site to the users. And if the site is not seen by users,there is no question of it being used or visited. In fact, even the expertise and hard work of the web designer will also be appreciated only if the site is seen by people or spidered by the search engines. Hence, wisdom lies in designing a site keeping in mind the target audience and the search engines who will index it on the basis of its relevance and purposefulness. Using the the following designing techniques should be minimal or not at all, if you want your site to appear in top rankings:

Flash- Search engines don't read Flash files that are loaded from a stationary HTML page. That means no text embedded in this software is read. The way out is to either place hypertext links at the end of a few HTML pages linking to each other and to the homepage. This will aid the search engines to read the inside pages. Or you can put the flash file on each of these pages to avoid them being seen by physical visitors. This way flash file will be loaded and seen only when these pages rank and get clicked by visitors.

Frames- Again, frames obstruct the search engines to read website text. Frames lead to confusion for both the search engines and the visitors. If you can't avoid using them, then put meta tags in the frames programming and in no frames programming area.The most important thing is to have good amount of content in the no frames programming area along with invisible links to stationary HTML pages. This will make the search engines read, identify and index content from these pages. So, your site will appear as a no frames site even with frames.

ASP, Cold Fusion- Active Server Pages (ASP) and Cold Fusion Sites reduce the impact of a site on the search engines as they are dynamically created and the search engines find static HTML main page and static inside pages more attractive for ranking high. Cold Fusion jumbles up the whole site together, thus making it difficult for the search engines to change or index all such pages with .cfm extension.

More than just home page- Search engines are looking for good and relevant content in sites to attract visitors to them. So, if your site has just a homepage and no inside pages, chances are you may not get spidered and indexed by the search engines.

Too much Javascript- More the javascript for roll-over effects, longer the time taken to load that site. So, advisable is to put javascript in external .js files.

Confusing Directory Structures- Creating seperate folders for every inside web page with just a link can confuse and hamper the search engines to index your site as many spiders don't index very deep into the website. Make it as easy as possible for the search engines to find every page of your web site within seconds.

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Are You Earning Return on Investment (ROI) From Your Online Marketing?

You may be spending a lot on online marketing campaign to make your products and services shine and sparkle on the web. But the million dollar question that arises is whether you are earning and generating revenue from your marketing campaign or not. If the answer is negative, then you need to pull up your socks and make the following suggested changes in your online marketing schedule and ideas to start earning the much required return on investment (ROI).

A well executed marketing plan including your company's goals, objectives, and sales can make all the difference to your reaping marketing ROI. It also takes into account your target markets, audiences and strategies. Strategies will further involve all marketing initiatives, publicity, marketing channels that convey your marketing message in the best possible way and maintain your brand awareness and popularity. So first work out the marketing/sales objectives and then strategies and tactics should be planned accordingly.

Try to make a solid market for your brand, products or services even if it means employing some cutting edge market makers. You may be missing out on potential market opportunites by not sniffing for trends or looking out for what competitors are doing. All you need to do is to monitor and keep track of your markets as well as the industry news for trends influencing your markets.

There is something called buzz marketing, viral marketing, and word of mouth marketing, all of which can help market your products, services and brand along with paid advertising. This is called smart and intelligent use of Public Relations and alternative marketing methods.

Web marketing including opt-in e-mail newsletters, blogging, article writing can also help market your products and services. Web based marketing techniques are not only inexpensive but also have a wider and quicker reach and popularity.

Measuring your marketing plans and programs is as important as executing them. Because that will act as a yardstick whether your marketing efforts have gone futile or reaped benefits. This will also help you analyze what went wrong where in your marketing program if it failed. And if it was a success, again you get to know the things that you ought to repeat for getting similar results.

So, start oiling the wheels of your marketing program using these strategies, and watch your returns on marketing investment, speed up like never before.

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Cloaking:Part III

In the previous blogs( Part I and II ), we discussed about cloaking and its benefits according to some webmasters. But in this blog, we will discuss about the disadvantages of cloaking.

Hiding your search engine optimization strategies is fair enough, but the problem is that cloaking hides much more than that. It can be used to steal your site's content and hide it behind a secret script. Spam techniques like redirection can also be hidden from the view of the visitors/users. We all know how effective and powerful good meta-tags and optimal keyword placement are in improving search engines rankings. Along with these two factors, link popularity too plays an important role. But the fact remains that if the web pages are cloaked, and never visited by users, then how can they attain good popularity. And the most important fact is that search engines don't like cloaking. In fact many major search engines have already decided to ban cloaked websites permanently from their respective search engine databases.

Now that does not sound too promising or good proposition at all. It is advisable to webmasters that it is better to indulge in ethical and legal SEO practices and study their website design to improve rankings and increase sales, instead of employing risky and dangerous techniques like cloaking.

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