This morning I followed my usual schedule. I woke up, fired up my laptop, checked my blogs for any new comments, checked my feeds for any new posts and then opened my email client. As I was wading through the numerous emails (I have five different emails that I go through) I came across this email from a blog that I commented on yesterday:

"Hi there 4620,

Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog. I hope i was able to help you with whatever you were looking for, if found my site to be interesting i would be more then happy if you consider subscribing to my RSS feed."

Emailing can be the only personal interaction that you have with your readers. Sure they hear you talk in your posts but when you email them you’re talking directly to them. The problem with sending out a bad email is that it can actually send them away, and not bring them to your site. Here are a couple of tips to create a good email.

Make it Personal
One of the most important things about an email is keeping it personal. In the email that I received the first line was “Hi there 4620″. This doesn’t make me want to read the rest of the email. Because they didn’t use my name I immediately wanted to stop reading. This could easily been fixed by either a) use my name or b) don’t use anything. If you’re going to use a bot to email people make sure it does it in a friendly way.

Give them something else
If you’re replying to a first time reader (which was the case for my email), give them something else to read. Provide a few links to your recent articles and tell them whats coming up. You could even provide a link to your RSS subscription. This makes the email more interesting and helps the reader see what kind of content your site has. It also helps convert a one-time reader into a potential life-time reader. Giving links to your different articles also makes the email a little more interesting. Plain text if often fairly boring so the addition of links and interesting article titles will make a previous plain email into a more interesting one.

These couple of tips can help your emails become more personal and more interesting. More importantly they’ll help make sure that you never write an email like the one that was sent to me.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that's often overlooked by companies or pushed to the backburner when funds are running out.  Unfortunately this is a big mistake and will hurt the company in the long run.  While not optimizing your website for search engines can be bad, hiring unethical SEO companies can be even worse than not doing anything in the first place.

Search Engine Optimization: The Good

Search engine optimization can help bring a steady stream customers to your website.  If you've set up your site properly, search traffic is a continuous stream of users that have searched for something that your site has to offer.  From my experience it's the best kind of traffic, often staying on my sites much longer than traffic from ads.

Optimizing your site for search engines doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg or take years to achieve.  Obviously if you're trying to rank high for extremely competitive keywords its going to cost more money and take more time but even doing simple things like making sure each page has a proper < title > tag, well layed out headings tags and linking to your website properly is better than nothing.

The Bad

Often when the money runs out, so does the SEO.  For some reason, developers always leave SEO last, and then either charge more to include it or just leave it out all together.  This is a huge mistake and can make a website all but useless.  I'm not trying to say all websites are pointless without search engine traffic but a lot of companies rely on that traffic for sales.

Many web design and development companies will offer SEO services along with their design services but will never follow through.  These companies will promise that your website will hit #1 in [insert search engine name] within the first week.  Promises like these just aren't practical.  SEO isn't a science it's an artform.

The Ugly

Unethical SEO might get a website in Google fast, but they will get it out of Google faster. Ethical SEO takes time but will give better results over a longer period of time.

Unethical SEO practices can includ: Placing unrequited links on website pages, creating landing pages for the sake of just drawing the search engine goodies, paid links on high ranking pages without relevant content, spamming pages, etc. All of these activities are black-marked by Google and will get the practitioners a negative ranking.

In the end, it's often better to not optimize your website for search engines than it is to go about doing it in an unetical way.