Month: November 2009

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Put Testimonials and Ratings to Work for You

The first time you visit a website for a firm that you are considering purchasing products or services from, you will typically check to see if they have reviews or testimonials. This is a great place to see what others who have worked with the firm have said about their experience.

Testimonials are worth their weight in gold when it comes to establishing consumer confidence in your product or abilities. I strongly recommend that every business work hard to solicit testimonies from existing and past clients. I routinely hear from clients, “what if someone says something bad what should I do?” My first response is, if the comment is bad wouldn’t you want to know about it so you could fix the problem and then change how you are doing something to be better?

Here is an example of a 4.5 star rating comment we received that we posted on our website as we felt that the testimony created legitimacy for the other 5 star ratings on the page for our writing service.

“The quality has slowly improved over time as our writer has gained experience with the topic. Our suggestions and criticism were taken well and understood perfectly. Some of the articles are quite inspired, and the embedded YouTube videos and images really make the blog stand out. Overall, it’s really better than I expected.  I will be using your service for another project/website very soon.”

Although this testimony appears possibly not glowing look carefully it addresses that we took criticism and improved to cater to the customer’s needs that they are already considering using our services for other projects. By not editing the comment, we give legitimacy to other 5 star comments on the same page.

“I’ve had a wonderful experience with you. I am really excited to check out my new blog postings. They have helped my sites search engine rankings within 2 weeks. I love how organized you are and how efficient your system is set up. I feel very taken care of and I don’t feel that I have to worry about much.”

Remember however, when it comes to testimonies, you are choosing to show them on your website or not. If you get a bad comment, I would contact the customer immediately to work actively to repair the problem and relationship. I would not place a negative comment on my own website. Sometimes a comment after the resolution of a problem can be even more valuable to your business.

That being said, if you sanitize your comments and edit wording, the comments you place on your website appear fake. For me, I post customer testimonies warts and all. When I post a testimony that is not a perfect score of five stars it gives legitimacy to the other ratings on the page. I will however never publish on my own site a negative rating that hurts confidence in my abilities. That being said I have never gotten a negative rating from a clients – I work very closely with them and work hard to provide exceptional service. I use my rating system as a double check of my service to make sure I am staying on course and focused on my customer’s needs.

You can view all our ratings pages here to get an idea of how you may want to use ratings for your own website:

Blog Writing Ratings

Google AdWords Service Ratings

Web Design Service Ratings

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Lack of Can Spam Compliance Can Cost You

It does not benefit you to not follow the federal Can Spam act. Not only can you have a financial penalty if prosecuted, but you can waste time and money trying to send to a spammy list.

If your e-newsletter list has been created by getting email addresses off of websites, from organization directories, or harvested from publications you read or subscribe to you are in violation of the federal Can Spam act. Your names fit into the “harvested” category. Many clients simply say “no one will catch me” and they decide to play the odds. Yes, it is true they may not be caught, but they may end up spending more money than they bargained for in trying to email to this type of list.

In several cases clients that came to us did not truthfully divulge where their large 6,000 member lists had come from. In both cases they paid money to us to set up subscriber accounts with a service to use to send out their mailings. One client purchased over 10 hours of additional time to scan his printed subscriber lists to create a digital version. In each cases after the first mailing the professional e-newsletter sending services shut down the accounts. One closed the account outright, and two forced these large lists to become double opted in. This means that a confirmation message was sent out and anyone who did not respond would never receive mailings again. Out of the nearly 6,000 that were on these lists under 100 responded that they wanted the mailings. So in essence with a spammy list the customer just threw money out the window in trying to send email to a harvested name list.

The lesson to be learned here is that a spammy list does not do you any good. You may end up spending more money trying to send to this type  list and still end up being shut down. It is simply not worth the effort or risk.

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To Pipe Or Not To Pipe – That’s | In Meta Tags

Confused about using | in your meta tags?
Confused about using | in your meta tags?

What I am talking about here is whether you should use pipes or | to separate your keywords in your Meta title tag. Some SEO gurus swear by it and others blow it off. I have used pipes and not used pipes on websites and do not have a strong preference one way or the other but for my own website I do not pipe the Meta title tag.

That being said for mature sites where we have a narrow list of keywords I have used pipes and gotten excellent improvement in organic placement. The best tip I can offer is: if your site is new don’t pipe. If your site is mature and you have had good placement previously but have dropped lately, try pipes to get a boost that may help you organically.

The big key on whether to use pipes or not is the nature of your keywords. If you need a wildcard match or have a number of phrases and word combinations that you want to place on then I would stay away from pipes. You only have 80 characters or so in the title tag and so need to use every character well. If your phrases are only one to three words and you have only one or two try piping the title tag to see what happens.

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Robo Spam Can You Do Anything to Stop It?

You’ve seen it the gobbledy gook on the form that comes to your inbox from your website contact form. There is literally no way to stop this new generation of spam short of introducing a captcha field on your contact form. 

A captcha field is one of those auto generated boxes filled with a combination of letters jumbled together. Only people can read them not spam robots, so they defeat the use of your online contact form by robo spammers. One of the biggest issues that real users have with sites that use captcha is that sometimes the letters and numbers are not easily readable and can create problems especially for those that are visually disabled. Case in point is the captcha used on many Google pages. If you can read it let me know. Worse yet is the audio link that tells you what the captcha says. The speaker has a very heavy Indian accent which makes understanding what the letters and number are impossible.

The bottom line is this is you use a contact form on your website, you will probably get robo spam. It is not an issue of a poor web host or a problem with your spam filter, it is simply the new generation of spam that gets to you because it uses your website’s contact form script to send you the spam thereby getting past ISP filters.