Newsletters and search engine marketing

Today we start a three part article series on the use of newsletters in web marketing. This is definitely relevant from a search engine marketing perspective, for several reasons.

Newsletters may obviously be used as a sales instrument in themselves -- normally by including ads. However, their main task is to attract visitors to the website, which -- of course -- is the objective of search engine marketing as well.

Newsletters are often forwarded by subscribers, making the site more widely known. Some of the recipients of these mails are webmasters themselves, and they may find your content relevant to their own site. A link may follow.

Running a site is hard work. If you want visitors to return to your site, you will have to provide them with valuable content. A newsletter helps you develop a routine for adding content to your site. You will of course include the same text on your site, giving the search engine spiders the kind of content you know they like.

Each and every one of Pandia's newsletters are, for instance spidered by Google.

So how do you do it? Read on!

Part 1: Search engine marketing benefits of an email newsletter

Written by Pandia Guest Writer Garrett French

Link building

(October 2004) Links remain, for now, a principle means by which Google determines both value and relevance of a site for given search terms. If you regularly publish articles that benefit your audience then the helpful, web-participatory members of your audience will link to them from forums, their blogs, their websites and possibly other newsletters.

You won't necessarily have control over the link text they use (Google keeps track of the terms – link text – people use when linking as a means of determining what's actually on a page), though if you keep your article titles keyword rich you may have some luck in influencing the link text choices your audience makes when they link to you.

Remember to encourage people to link to your article (it's also wise to include a "send this article to a friend" function). To further encourage linking consider providing some code for readers to copy and paste.

Email newsletter archive: Content semantically related to your business

Your email newsletter archive, as it grows, creates a pool of information that's semantically related to your products or services. The words and phrases in your articles relate directly to what you sell, and as you add more pages to the archive, you increase the chances that one of the pages from your website appear when someone searches for your keywords in the search engines.

It's vital that you maintain search engine marketing best practices while creating your archive. This includes, but is not limited to, creating keyword rich URLs (use the article title, which should be keyword rich in its own right), making all archive pages static rather than dynamic, using your keyword rich article title in archive page title tags, and using keywords in all the link text.

Remember to include at least one link to your home page or related site page from every page in your email newsletter archive.

Google wants a larger and more useful index than Yahoo, AskJeeves and Microsoft. Help them populate this index with your useful articles and you will end up making more money.

Regularly post article blurbs on your home page to lure Google's Freshbot

Google's Freshbot returns more frequently to regularly updated pages. This means that if you update your home page with a blurb or two from your most recent article Freshbot will notice and begin to crawl your front page regularly.

These regular visits mean that Google will become aware of other site changes too, and means that your presence in the Google index will be fresh. As you roll out any search engine optimization tweaks on your site you'll see faster changes in your rankings due to the Freshbot's visits.

Once you've established the Freshbot's regular visits you'll have a major advantage over your competitors when Google updates occur and there are any changes to on page optimization best practices.

Your readers will reward a consistent publication schedule by increasing their open rates (assuming you're providing solid content).

Next week's article will look at suggested styles and content for your newsletter.

Go to part 2

Garrett French is the Marketing and Communications Manager for MarketSmart Interactive and the Managing Editor of Search Engine Lowdown. He drives MarketSmart Interactive's web presence - and thought leadership - through search industry participation. Call 919-433-3139 or email Garrett.French @MarketSmartInteractive.com to discuss how MarketSmart Interactive can build your business.

More search engine news...