Spam Spasms & Spamocidal Mania

Below is a letter I wrote to the following organizations:

S.H.U. (Spam-Haters Unanimous)

N.A.A.P.W.H.S. (National Association for the Advancement of
People Who Hate Spam)

P.W.H.P.W.D.H.S. (People Who Hate People Who Don’t Hate Spam)

P.F.W.S.H.I.A.L.C. (People for Whom Spam-Hating is a Lifestyle
Choice)

S.A.P.W.R.R.R.H.S. (Society for the Advancement of People Who
Really Really Really Hate Spam)

P.W.H.S.S.M.I.M.L.W.S.C.O.T.E. (People Who Hate Spam So Much It
Makes Little Wisps of Steam Come Out of Their Ears)

And, of course: Spam Haters In The Business of Internet Resource
Directory Services.

DEAR FELLOW SPAM HATERS,

I’m writing to suggest that we combine forces in order to
present a common front in our righteous war on unsolicited
commercial email:

Spam!

I suggest we disband the myriad sites and organizations now
opposing unsolicited commercial email in order to form a single,
unified organization:

The Spammish Inquisition!

And I further suggest we elect me, Linda Cox, as our leader. Our
Grand Inquisatrix!

WHAT ARE MY QUALIFICATIONS?

You think YOU hate spam? You don’t even know what hate is!

I hate spam so much that I… well, just a LOT! That’s how much!

If I hated spam any more than I already do, I think my head
would burst into flames and spin like a top! Can you say that?

Don’t think so.

I don’t mean to say that I don’t hate other things, too, like
pedophiles and Nazis and that drunk guy who backed over my cat
when I was seven.

But spam… hooboy!

SQUISH ‘EM LIKE BUGS!

I believe we should have a constitutional amendment allowing
cruel and unusual punishment in the case of spammers. Maybe that
tummy thing like the Japanese do when they get depressed.

As with drugs, mere possession of bulk emailing software should
result in the immediate confiscation of the computer it was on,
as well as any nice clothes, jewelry, or lawn statuary that
might have been purchased with spam profits.

Just thinking about sending spam should be illegal, like joking
about bombs in an airport. If I get to be Grand Inquisatrix,
I’ll have my own force of men-in-black dudes to sniff out
spamsters and be really mean to them and call them names until
they promise to be good little Netizens again.

It’s for their own good.

IN CLOSING…

Having looked at the Websites of some of the anti-spam
crusaders, I know that I am not alone in my revulsion, disgust
and utter skin-crawling contempt for spam.

Like them, I have turned a blind-eye to more mundane problems
like hunger, illiteracy, disease, country music and poverty so
as to focus on the true menace plaguing our cyber-society.

If you wish to support my crusade, you may do so by sending me
$99, and as a free gift I’ll send you a CD with the email
addresses of 40 million Netizens eagerly awaiting news of your
latest product or service.

Way to Block Spam - Bayesian Filter to Fight Back Spammers

The most prolific and path breaking innovation of last century had been the developments in the communication field. It literally changed the business working, product marketing, support services and most importantly, the advertisement campaigns.

But just like all goods things comes with a price, so was the communication. It brought in the problems of Spam Emails. Automated mailers with mass mailing capabilities, growing marketing dependencies on this tool have seen the large losses in terms of time and money.

There have been many ways of targeting spam mails like blacklisted domains, banned IPs, words in subject and many more. The spammers have always found out a way to change their identity. But here is the catch. The spammers are being paid to send the message. They can change their Domains, IPs, subject lines, but how much they can play with the contents? And that’s where content based filtering comes into focus. Now we can understand that by targeting and focusing on message body, there is a better chance of filtering spam emails.

Apart from the usual spam emails, the new menace has been created by the “phishing emails” targeting primarily eBay and PayPal accounts. These emails come as a “Last Warning”, “Attention Required”, “Password Change Required” or “Your account is suspended” among many more. These mails appear to have come from eBay or PayPal and provide a link to their own page.

These pages are designed just like the original pages and the unsuspecting user ends up providing his/her sensitive information like username/password or Credit Card Information to these duplicate pages. Here I would like to add one piece of advice to all users that you should always see where the link is taking you by seeing the tool tip and then if sure, follow the link.

The role of content in marking the mail spam or not spam has been achieved using the Bayesian filter. Together with the Black List of spammers and White list of trusted emails ids, is the best technique to counter the spam. The most interesting fact is that Spam Filter with Bayesian algorithm is a self learning filter.
The more you use, the more secure you shall be within a matter of few days.

The spam filter integrate easily with popular emails clients such MS outlook and Outlook Express. With due course, up to 98% of the spam mails can be stopped from entering your Inbox. The Spam Filter for Outlook Express and Spam Filter for Microsoft Outlook, with the features of White List/Black List and properly used Bayesian Algorithm will help prevent spam mails, phishing mails and fraud mails from bothering you further.

There has been a considerable increase in the spam mails containing Non English Characters also. The Bayesian Algorithm based Spam Filter also must have the capability to parse non English characters and mark as spam mail.

To get rid of continuous spam mails, phishing mails, fraud mails and Non-English mails, you might like to try Official Spam Filter for Outlook Express 1.2 and Official Spam Filter for Microsoft Outlook 1.2. Official Spam Filter has the capability to seamlessly integrate with MS Outlook and Outlook Express.

For more information, visit http://www.officialspamfilter.com/spam_filter_features.htm

Author is the Admin of Official Spam Filter where you can find software to fight Spam, integrating with MS Outlook and Outlook Express.

How Spammers Fool Bayesian Filters - And How to Stop Them

Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just don’t work anymore.

Examining spam and spam-blocking technology can illuminate how this evolution is taking place and what can be done to combat spam and reclaim e-mail as the efficient, effective communication tool it was intended to be.

One method used to combat spam is Bayesian Filtering. Named after Thomas Bayes, an English mathematician, Bayesian Logic is used in decision making and inferential statistics. Bayesian Filers maintain a database of known spam and ham, or legitimate email. Once the database is large enough, the system ranks the words according to the probability they will appear in a spam message.

Words more likely to appear in spam are given a high score (between 51 and 100), and words likely to appear in legitimate email are given a low score (between 1 and 50). For example, the words “free” and “sex” generally have values between 95 and 98, whereas the words “emphasis” or “disadvantage” may have a score between 1 and 4. Commonly used words such as “the” and “that”, and words new to the Bayesian filters are given a neutral score between 40 and 50 and would not be used in the system’s algorithm.

When the system receives an email, it breaks the message down into tokens, or words with values assigned to them. The system utilizes the tokens with scores on the high and low end of the range and develops a score for the email as a whole. If the email has more spam tokens than ham tokens, the email will have a high spam score. The email administrator determines a threshold score the system uses to allow email to pass through to users.

Bayesian filters are effective at filtering spam and minimizing false positives. Because they adapt and learn based on user feedback, Bayesian Filers produce better results as they are used within an organization over time. They are not, however, foolproof. Spammers have learned which words Bayesian Filters consider spammy and have developed ways to insert non-spammy words into emails to lower the message’s overall spam score. By adding in paragraphs of text from novels or news stories, spammers can dilute the effects of high-ranking words. Text insertion has also caused normally legitimate words that are found in novels or news stories to have an inflated spam score. This may potentially render Bayesian filters less effective over time.

Another approach spammers use to fool Bayesian filters is to create less spammy emails. For example, a spammer may send an email containing only the phrase, “Here’s the link…”. This approach can neutralize the spam score and entice users to click on a link to a Web site containing the spammer’s message. To block this type of spam, the filter would have to be designed to follow the link and scan the content of the Web site users are asked to visit. This type of filtering is not currently employed by Bayesian filters because it would be prohibitively expensive in terms of server resources and could potentially be used as a method of launching denial of service attacks against commercial servers.

As with all single-method spam filtering methodologies, Bayesian filters are effective against certain techniques spammers use to fool spam filters, but are not a magic bullet to solving the spam problem. Bayesian filters are most effective when combined with other methods of spam detection.

The Solution

When used individually, each anti-spam technique has been systematically overcome by spammers. Grandiose plans to rid the world of spam, such as charging a penny for each e-mail received or forcing servers to solve mathematical problems before delivering e-mail, have been proposed with few results. These schemes are not realistic and would require a large percentage of the population to adopt the same anti-spam method in order to be effective. You can learn more about the fight against spam by visiting our website at www.ciphertrust.com and downloading our whitepapers.

Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry’s largest provider of enterprise email security. The company’s flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting http://www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.

Safeguarding Your Personal Information From Identity Thieves

An identity thief doesn’t just steal your credit card and personal information to start buying crazily in your name. He gets new cards, opens new loans, and leaves a long trail of unpaid bills in your name. He even uses your identity to commit acts of terrorism or other crimes. What are you to do?

Identity theft occurs more frequently than you would like to believe - and is committed frequently by someone you know. This is what happened to Linda Foley, a magazine writer, who learned that her own employer had swiped her identity to open cell phone and credit card accounts. Now Foley, along with her husband, fight back as the Co-Executive Directors of the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) in San Diego, California.

Can This Happen to You?

After Bridget J. Thomas learned that her identity was stolen by a bank employee at a branch 300 miles from the one she used, she was shocked. And that was just the beginning of her nightmare! When the thief was caught, she was working at a different bank in a different state. After her arrest, collection agencies continued to hound Ms Thomas.

Setting the Record Straight Might Not Be All That Easy - or Quick!

Setting the record straight is the tip of a nightmarish iceberg that can take months - even years to accomplish – often with undue pain and suffering for the victim. In serious cases victims spend an average of 600 hours and $1,400 in out-of-pocket expenses to repair their credit. Until they can prove their innocence, they are more likely to be:

• charged higher rates for insurance and fees for credit cards,

• rejected for student loans or home mortgages,

• arrested for crimes they did not commit.

• unable to get or keep a job,

A Call From A Collection Agency Or A turndown For A Loan Is Often the Only Tip-off That Your Identity Was Stolen.

A thief needs only one thing to open the doors to his windfall - your Social Security number. Unfortunately it is routinely used by government agencies, health care providers, utility companies, merchants, employers, and financial institutions. Often, your Social Security number is publicly available. That’s how General John M. Shalikashvili, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, became a victim. His Social Security number and those of many other military officers were published in the “Congressional Record” and were later posted on the internet. Thieves used their identities to open 273 new credit cards accounts and run up a bill of over $200,000.00 in charges.

Develop a Form of Defense

To stop identity thieves in their steps, there are several things you can do. You can begin by freezing access to your credit file. By doing so, you cause your file to become off-limits to anyone who does not know the secret PIN (Personal Information Number) of your choosing. This sets the wheels in motion to protect you from the bad guys - anyone who attempts to apply for credit in your name. It causes their application to be rejected; although your credit cards won’t be affected. And if you want to apply for new credit or let a bank, store, or agency run a background check on you, you can get a credit thaw. For example, if you decided to shop for a big-ticket item, like a car, you might thaw your history for auto dealers.

Other Things You Can Do - Starting NOW!

• Periodically check your credit report for suspicious activities. Americans are now entitled to a free annual credit report from each of the three bureaus: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.

• If you elect to shop online, use a credit card rather than a debit card. With a credit card, you have the extra protection of maximum liability of $50.00 for unauthorized purchased.

• Learn more about “phishing” email scams, and other schemes, frauds, and cons to separate you from your identity and your money. For more information about these scams and about resources at your disposal, go to http://www.ProtectingYourIdentity.blogspot.com/

In the Event You Do Become A Victim

Here are some steps to take:

• Act fast and prepare yourself for an uphill battle uncooperative and unsupportive credit card and law enforcement agencies. For guidance and support, I suggest that you turn to organizations and agencies like ITRC (www.identitytheftcenter.org), the Federal Trade Commission (www.FTC.gov), and others.

• Call the fraud dept. of one of the three credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion, and request that a fraud alert be placed on your credit reports. (The other two credit bureaus will automatically be notified.) The alert lasts for 90 days and requires creditors to call you before opening new accounts in your name; however, a word of caution is in order here. There are no legal requirements to honor alerts and merchants who are eager to make a sale may ignore them.

• Close your credit card accounts and change the passwords on all your financial and banking accounts.

• File a police report. Although credit bureaus won’t extend a fraud alert without it, be aware that local police departments may be reluctant to provide a report. Many may lack the resources to properly investigate the crime.

• Mail copies of the police report to all three credit bureaus with a cover letter demanding your complete credit file.

• Call every credit where you know a bogus account has been created and have them close your file immediately. Demand copies of all fraudulent applications for credit and billing statements. Creditors don’t want to divulge that information, but they will if you enclose a copy of a police report and forward your request it in writing via certified mail.

Conclusion:

Face it, identity theft is a growing problem affecting everyone in some way or another. With the increase popularity of internet usage, it has become easier for cybercriminals to steal our identity. In 2002 alone, the victim total due to identity theft climbed to 10 million, a new high. The cost to the economy was up an astonishing 41 percent to $52.6 billion, according to The Identity Theft Survey Report, available from the Federal Trade Commission at the website (www.consumer.gov/idtheft/). Each year these totals are climbing with no apparent sign of slowing down.

What are your chances of becoming a victim of some form of identity theft? According to the Federal Trade Commission is one in ten.

“So what am I to do?” you ask. My recommendation is that first you educate yourself with information and resources at your disposal. Next, purchase identity theft insurance. Find more information at http://www.ProtectingYourIdentity.blogspot.com

Known as The Master Blog Builder, Etienne A. Gibbs, MSW, helps small business owners and non-profit organizations improve their customer relationship marketing. Often he comes across cases that are red flags calling identity thieves to come in. Hence, he started “Protecting Your Identity” blog. Contact him at http://www.MasterBlogBuilder.com/ for more information.

Sick Of Wading Through Spam?

It’s a nightmare isn’t it? You fire up your email system first thing on Monday morning to be greeted with hundreds of new messages.

“Great”, you say, “I’m so popular!”

But no - your email has been added to thousands of spammers’ lists, that’s all.

After exploring the seedy underworld of human growth hormones, get rich quick schemes and offshore investment accounts you’ll find you don’t have much energy left for anything else!

So - put a stop to the madness.

Can The Spam!

I found a great service provided by some clever people over in Australia.

It’s called SpamTrap and it does what it says on the tin.

You can sign up for a free trial and then it costs you a small sum to have the service on an ongoing basis.

There are other solutions to this growing problem but I find SpamTrap easy to use, no messing about and most important of all – it works!!!

I went from receiving approximately 200 spam messages a day on one of my accounts to receiving maybe one or two - and that’s on a bad day.

So How Does It Work?

The guys at SpamTrap will tell you more but at a basic level their nifty bit of software can recognise virtually every form of spam and ‘learns’ what is junk and what isn’t.

All email that is flagged as spam is stopped before it reaches you and if you’re the paranoid type you can take a look through it to make sure nothing legitimate makes it into the bin.

But, from the hundreds of emails I checked (initially) the SpamTram robots hadn’t made a single mistake.

Excellent Spam Blockers And Killers

SpamTrap - http://www.spamtrap.net.au

Block All Spam - http://www.blockallspam.com

Clean My Mailbox - http://www.cleanmymailbox.com

SpamArrest - http://www.spamarrest.com

Michael Cheney is Author of The Website Marketing BibleTM. Take the Free 7-Part Course “Internet Marketing Made Easy” and get your free sampler of ‘The Bible’ here: http://www.websitemarketingbible.com/marketing/

How a Server Spam Filter Saves Time, Money and Downtime

A server spam filter is a software application that scans
incoming email messages, identifies SPAM based on preset
configurations and isolates the unsolicited email so that it
never reaches the email inboxes of the personal computers in the
computer network.

SPAM is the slang term that is commonly used to describe
unwanted, unsolicited commercial email or junk email. It is not
an acronym so it doesn’t actually “stand for” anything.

SPAM email generally consists of commercial email that is
delivered to recipients who did not request information from the
company or individual who sends it.

Receiving loads of unsolicited commercial email can put a drain
on businesses and individuals because they have to sort through
email, eliminating the unwanted email messages, which is
sometimes a time consuming process that can seriously inhibit
productivity as well as being incredibly frustrating.

Time is money and wasting time to manually delete SPAM messages
is not a wise thing to do.

Additionally, sometimes SPAM email contains viruses which can
result in downtime for computer users as well as being a threat
to the stability of a personal computer or computer network and
the data stored within.

Scam artists also send unsolicited email as a part of phishing
schemes which are intended to collect personal information for
identity theft purposes, and other similar fraudulent reasons.

With a server spam filter, you can automate the process of
eliminating spam at the receiving source - the server level -
before it ever reaches the personal computers in your network.

This is a recommended task to automate because it saves personal
computer users loads of time as well as protecting the personal
computers and the network from damage which can result in
downtime and lost data.

If the SPAM messages are not delivered to individuals in an
organization, then the fear of someone falling for a scam and
compromising financial or other confidential data is eliminated.

Because anti-spam technology is not perfect, it is a good idea to
have a network administrator check the mail messages that are
filtered out periodically to make sure that the server spam
filter is not catching messages that are not actually SPAM.

When this happens, the email capture is sometimes referred to as
a “false positive”, meaning that the server spam filter
positively identified a message as SPAM when it was actually a
valid message that should not have been filtered out.

Some anti-spam programs have an option where identified SPAM can
be sent to a computer user’s junk email box so the computer user
can actually go through the filtered out messages at their
leisure to make sure that bona fide messages have not been
falsely identified as SPAM.

If this process is used and false positives are identified, the
computer user needs to notify the network administrator so the
configurations in the spam filter can be adjusted to allow
receipt of email from the specific sender through the server.

Undoubtedly, it is a good idea to install a server spam filter in
order to save your company time, money and heart-ache that can be
associated with system failure.

When reviewing your options, do realize that all anti-spam
products are not created equal. There are varying features
regarding the way that SPAM is identified and the way the system
is administered.

Some filter out email messages based on keywords used in the
messages, some are pre-programmed with blacklisting of known
spammers, and most all have configurations that can be customized
by an end-user or network administrator.

It is a good idea to review several alternative products in
detail and to determine which products best meet the needs of
your company.

Searching the internet for spam filter reviews is a good way to
learn more about individual software packages, their features and
their functionality.

Copyright Christopher J. Enders. Are you at the end of your rope,
fed up and confused by all the scrambled internet marketing
advice you’re getting? Whether you are new to internet marketing,
or a website owner who wants to make more money from your
website, learn the proven strategies that will sky-rocket your
internet business at http://BiznessTips.com.

RSS Feeds, How to Make Search Engines Fall in Love With Your Web Site!

As most Internet marketers know, writing articles can be very beneficiary to get more visitors to their web site. What not all of you might know, are the benefits of using other peoples articles to improve your search engine ranking. So let’s find out how that works. This article shows you in a few steps how to implement RSS Feeds on your web page, using these steps the right way will not only improve your web sites content, it will also make the search engines want to come back over and over again! Since the search engines just love fresh content, why not provide it to them?

What are RSS Feeds?

RSS according to most people stands for either, Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It is a part of the internet meta language XML. These days it is used mostly to syndicate articles. When you create RSS Feeds they can be used by other web sites to promote them in their web sites environment.

#1 Reason to use RSS Feeds on your web site.

The best, and by far the best reason to use RSS Feeds on your web site is the fact that it makes the chosen content alive. What I mean is, you can choose several feeds on any subject you need, choose the amount of articles you want to display on your web site, and it gets automatically updated when someone submits a new article.

Different Ways to Implement RSS Feeds.

There are a few options available when you want to implement an RSS Feed on your website. It would either be HTML, Java or php. The only correct way to implement it, as far as I know, is with php. With HTML the content can be read by the search engines but since HTML is static it will not be updated automatically. For sure you don’t want to do this by hand every single day!!Using Java script would mean that the article content does get updated, the only downside with this would be… The search engines won’t be able to read the article content. Now,this wouldn’t do you any good would it? So php it has to be, when putting an RSS Feed on your web site with php, it does get updated every time a new article is submitted and it will be read by the search engines.

THAT’S WHAT I CALL A WIN/WIN SITUATION!!

How to use php on your web site.

Ok, we are clear about the main reason why to use php. At this moment I can almost hear some people say: I have no idea how to do this!! Relax, neither did I.. You will see it’s really simple, let’s just start at the beginning.

1.

You will need your own domain with a host which does support php. You can check the availability through your control panel provided by your hosting company. Otherwise just ask your hosting provider.

2.

Once you’ve got your web site on a host which supports php, you will have a bit of work to do. The page extension on the page where you want to display the RSS Feeds needs to be changed from:
“http://www.mydomain.com/index.html” to “http://www.mydomain.com/index.php“

3.

When you have several pages on your web site and some of them link back to the page you have just changed, make sure that from now on you let them link back to the new index.php instead of index.html.

4.

The hardest part is done!! Now you need a way to create rss feeds. A perfect web site which will write a piece of code for you is http://www.feeddigest.com Here you can just fill in which feed you would like to use and it will be written in php coding within seconds. You can find a great variety of feeds just by performing a search for RSS Feeds on any major search engine.

5.

Copy and paste the piece of code created by www.feeddigest.com wherever you want the articles to appear on to your web page. I would suggest to use a single table just for these articles. If you don’t know how to do this, just check the source of my homepage and search for php. You will find it fitted in a table. After finishing this just go and look at your newly created website.

Congratulations!!

You have improved your web site content which will certainly be visited more often by every search engine.

Harrold Swalve is working full time online helping other people to find the best work at home jobs. Let him help you prevent wasting valuable time when setting up your home business!! Just visit his website at http://www.pocketmoremoney.com or email:info@pocketmoremoney.com

The Cybermagic of Whitelists

Before we start getting deep into the meat of this article it’s important to explain some standard terminology to make sure the rest of this article makes sense.

• An IP address is a number which identifies your location on the Internet.

• A blacklist is a list of IP addresses which your antispam software uses to block incoming spam.

• A whitelist is the exact opposite of a blacklist.

A whitelist is a predefined list of IP addresses that are allowed to send email to and receive email from each other. Blacklists exclude known and suspected spammers. Whitelists can be used to exclude everyone except known IP addresses. Think of it like this. A whitelist is a like having a phonebook which is owned by a small group of people who only wish to speak directly to each other. They don’t want just anybody ringing them. Not only that but the entire group need to approve new phone numbers before they appear in this exclusive phonebook.

To send email to a whitelist you must be approved by the owner of the whitelist. This is a lot like the double optin systems used by legimiate ezines and mailing list owners. Whitelists are the nightclub bouncers of the virtual world - if you ain’t on the list you ain’t getting in. Simple but very effective.

A real world example of a whitelist would be if two companies wanted to exchange email only with each other. These companies could implement a whitelist that contained the IP address for just the two email servers that want to send email to each other. That would mean that any email coming from an IP address not on the whitelist would be returned to sender. For companies they can ensure that employees are only dealing with work related email and not chatting with their friends.

The benefits of whitelists are many but proper management of the whitelists is equally important. Misuse of whitelists will only lead to more headaches for everyone involved with missing email, irate customers and IT departments doing overtime just being the tip of the iceberg.

This article was provided courtesy of Spam-site.com which reviews and tests spam blockers for the business and end user.

Taking the Easier Route to Generating RSS Subscribers

RSS is certainly still far from being user-friendly, which is especially evident once you try and left-click on an RSS subscribe button.

In most cases your browser will simply display the XML code of the RSS feed … which does not go far in making internet users comftorable with RSS.

Heck, if you didn’t know what RSS was and clicked on an RSS button only to get a page full of code you don’t understand, would that aid in turning you in to an RSS user?

Probably no. And much worse, you’d probably never consider clicking on one of those buttons again, at least not any time soon.

Consequently, if as a marketer you’re trying to generate RSS subscribers, simply using an RSS subscribe button is the worst way to go for you and for the RSS industry as a whole as well.

So, what alternatives are there?

a] CREATE AN RSS PRESENTATION PAGE

If you’re trying to generate RSS subscribers from your site and are targeting audiences that might not be farmiliar with RSS, you need at least a basic presentation of what RSS is on your site, and you need to link to that either directly from the RSS subscribe button or from a location right next to that button, like you can see on the MarketingStudies.net example.

On this page you should explain in easy-to-understand terms what RSS is, how your visitors can use it and how they’ll benefit, and then provide links to some RSS readers and again links to your RSS feeds.

This page will be instrumental in telling your visitors about RSS and helping them subscribe to your feeds.

And of course, the feeds themselves and the RSS presentation page should be promoted in prominent locations on your website, especially directly below your e-mail e-zine subscription box and, if you’re publishing topic oriented feeds, next to their respective topics on the site, just as Lockergnome.com is doing.

B] TRANSFORM AN RSS FEED IN TO XHTML

Having a link to an RSS presentation page right next to your RSS subscribe button does aid visitors in learning about RSS and helps them to subscribe, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of a user actually clicking on an RSS feed button. That will still result in the visitor getting heaps of code he really won’t know what to do with.

Going one step further, you can use XSL Transformations to make sure that the feed can in fact also be displayed in a browser (without making it useless for an RSS reader as well) … and that with some additional information and instructions, such as a brief overview of RSS and a quick explanation on how the user can subscribe to this feed via an RSS reader.

I don’t want to get technical here, so to see what I mean simply click on this link (via FeedBurner):
http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2

This is basically an RSS feed, which has been transformed in order to be displayed in a Web browser with some additional information, but can still be subscribed to via every RSS reader as well.

Some feed maintanance and publishing services such as FeedBurner already provide this functionality “out-of-the-box”, without you having to do practically anything. All you need to do is register for their free service, enter your feed and then get this link, which you will place “behind” the RSS subscribe button on your site, as a link, instead of a direct link to your RSS feed.

If you don’t want to use a third-party service like FeedBurner, you can actually do the XSL Transformations by yourself. More information on how to do this is available at Wikiedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xslt).

c] TAKING THE MIDDLE ROAD: SMARTER SUBSCRIBE BUTTONS

If you don’t want to use a third-party service such as FeedBurner or if your RSS vendor does not provide this functionality or if you don’t want to be bothered with doing XSLT by yourself, there is actually an alternative you can use.

David Battino at MacDevCenter.com (http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/wlg/7821) just wrote a simple piece of code you can use instead of the typical link to your RSS feed behind the RSS feed subscription button, which will, after you click on the link, display a simple message saying that in order to subscribe to the feed you need to copy and paste this URL in your your RSS reader.

This certainly doesn’t go very far in making RSS more user-friendly, as the notification really can’t be used to explain what RSS is and why your visitors should use it, but it at least saves the visitor from getting the XML code in his browser and hating RSS before he or she even find out what it is.

The simple code to do so is http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/wlg/7821

Also, do not forget about using buttons like Add To MyYahoo!, since many MyYahoo! users for example don’t know what RSS is, but they will use this button to subscribe.

d] TARGETING EXISTING RSS USERS

If you’re targeting existing RSS users or at least users that won’t be put off by a long list of names they won’t be able to understand, using the free script from Methodize.org might be the solution.

When the user hovers his mouse above your RSS feed subscribe button, the script will display a long list of RSS readers that the visitors can use to directly subscribe to the feed. By simply clicking on the appropriate link, the user will quickly subscribe to the feed with the RSS reader he is currently using.

There’s also a “What’s this” link at the bottom of the list, but still many visitors will be put off by long list of RSS reader names they won’t be able to understand, before even being motivated enough to click on the “What’s this” link at the bottom.

But still, if you’re targeting a more technical or internet oriented audiences, this just might do the trick.

The script is available from here: http://www.methodize.org/quicksub/

e] USING RSS AUTODISCOVERY

RSS Autodiscovery is a very nice feature that allows certain RSS Autodiscovery-enabled browsers to find a feed on your site and promptly offer the subscribe option to the visitor.

While most browsers still do not support this, FireFox for example does.

Using RSS Autodiscovery can’t substitute the other options above, but it will serve you well for the small part of your audience that’s using RSS Autodiscovery-enabled browsers.

How to use this?

Simply place the following piece of code in to the HEAD section of the HTML code of your webpages:

[link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”http://rssdiary.marketingstudies.net/index.xml” /]

And don’t forget to replace the [ and ] characters with < and >.

f] STRONG COPY

No matter how many times we write this, it still needs repeating. The best way to get your visitors to subscribe is to entice them to do so with strong copy that provides clear and valuable benefits, explaining to the visitor exactly why he needs to subscribe to exactly your RSS feed.

Get more RSS marketing tips and tricks, and find out immediately how you can power your online business with RSS and use it in all of your marketing. Request the free 28-page Business Case for RSS report, with easy-to-follow instructions, examples and advice on how to get the most out of RSS in the shortest possible time. Get the free download here: http://rssdiary.marketingstudies.net/case/index.html?src=sa21

RSS Can Feed Your SEO Efforts

Buried within U.S. Patent Application # 20050071741 (aka The Google Patent) is the following paragraph:

“Documents for which there is an increase in the rate of change might be scored higher than those documents for which there is a steady rate of change, even if that rate of change is relatively high. The amount of change may also be a factor in this scoring. For example, documents for which there is an increase in the rate of change when that amount of change is greater than some threshold might be scored higher than those documents for which there is a steady rate of change or an amount of change is less than the threshold.”

When search engine optimization experts read this, it merely confirmed something they already knew…that even well-optimized content needs to be periodically refreshed in order to maintain top search engine rankings. However, if you are an SEO working on a contract, you might not have perpetual access to a client’s website. Optimum rankings will likely not hold up if the site stays static. RSS (an acronym for “Really Simple Syndication”) feeds are an excellent way to continually freshen website content without having to make periodic content updates.

“RSS is used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content.” (from Wikipedia)

Most people reading this article understand the concept behind RSS and have seen examples of feeds on different websites and blogs. Easy-to-implement RSS feeds are available for any imaginable topic and having one or more feeds on your website will certainly enhance your visitor experience. However, RSS can also enhance your search engine rankings as well.

Savvy SEO’s know that they can boost site optimization efforts by creating RSS feeds containing top search engine results for the keyword / keywords they are targeting and adding them to the client website MSN, Yahoo News, and Gigablast all offer easy to use RSS feeds of their search results. Many of the blog search engines also offer RSS feeds of their results. Before placing a search engine feed on a website, be sure to check whether use of the feed on a website is restricted in any way…some of the feeds can only be placed on “non-commercial” websites.

My experience is that placing a “keyword-targeted” feed on your webpage will greatly enhance your ability to achieve optimum keyword density for your targeted term(s). What’s more, assuming relevant content is available, a news feed is preferable to a search engine feed for SEO because news feeds are updated more frequently. Another valuable tool that I recently discovered is a service called RSSMix (http://www.rssmix.com) that can seamlessly blend together multiple feeds into one. That means if you are targeting several terms in your optimization effort, you can create one seamless feed featuring each term instead of using different feeds.

In some situations, it might be undesirable to show feeds over which you can not control the content. Fortunately, the remedy is simple. You can restrict the domain of the feed so that you are only showing results from an authoritative site (e.g. a government site). Or, you can only show results from your own site if appropriate. Restricting the domain thusly should not affect the SEO value of displaying the feed since the keyword densities should remain constant.

If you are adding RSS to your website for SEO, there is one important rule that must be followed: DON’T USE JAVASCRIPT! Javascript solutions are common and easy to implement. However, the javascript content won’t be indexed by the search engines and your page will not get SEO benefits from the feeds. ASP, PHP, and HTML alternatives for RSS are readily available.

RSS is one of the hottest phenomenons in the webmaster community today. RSS that benefits SEO is a topic that’s been very much overlooked. Implementing RSS into websites has become much easier so that even non-programmer hacks can do it with ease. RSS should be viewed as an SEO Best Practice for any website that will remain very static and should be strongly considered as a part of all SEO projects.

Cube Management provides sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies in the technology, manufacturing, healthcare and business service sectors. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results.