Direct Marketing Association research data shows that email marketing generated an ROI of $43.62 for each dollar that was spend on email campaigns in 2009. Shop.org’s State of Retailing Online 2009 survey of retailers dug out the fact that E-Mail is the most mentioned successful tactic overall. A 2009 survey of US B2B marketers by MarketingProfs and Forrester Research found that 39% planned to increase email budgets. All the above highlights that Email marketing just works. Yes, it works but we need to get the basics right.
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Usability rules the roost in web development. As Edward Tufte, Information Design Guru would say “the most common user action on a website is to flee“. It is all the more important that your online presence has what it takes to be simple, usable and communicate persuasively your core message.

A bad website is akin to a grumpy salesman (Jakob Nielson), yet lots of websites fail miserably on the usability stakes. Simplicity is the key to a good customer experience, the moment you take away ease of use, users /customers are not going to come back again.
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Thesis 1.6 has hit the websphere and as expected, there are high value add design features and controls that makes it the most popular and widely used templating frameworks in todays times. Thesis is SEO compliant right out of the box and gives you slick control over the presentation layer. For the average blogger who would not be conversant with PHP to a great degree, Thesis capabilities facilitates experimentation with design and font without altering any basic code. And if you do know to code, the possibilities with Thesis Hooks are limitless.
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Is your site suffering from keyword cannibalization? It does happen sometimes when the same keyword or keyphrase is targeted on multiple pages of the website, that can possibly have a negative effect on your rankings. What happens is that the search engines are served multifold choices for the patricular keywords and hence is forced to pick and choose whichever it feels is the best fit. This is a classic case of limiting to a great degree the search potential of your website. It is poor form really, putting all eggs in one basket and not being able to levearge the long tail of search.
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When a visitor is headed to your blog or a custom landing page, the first factor that can arrest his eyeball is your headline copy. It is the crux, the defining parameter that can make or mar his digital footprint on your site or a conversion goal. It is not an easy task though, yet you can still bridge the gap towards writing effective headlines if you can follow these basic building blocks to crafting that elusive stunner.
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The recent announcement of a Twitter Google agreement to integrate Twitter’s real time search results and Bing’s Twitter Search beta services as also a deal with Facebook is a definitive pointer to the road search is headed on the web. In fact, Google’s Social Search on the anvil would not just have Twitter as the sole social media element but also all the social networks linked with your Google Profiles.
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