The crucial factor here is to keep track of your search engine statistics.  These will tell you how many people have come from the various search engines and how many of those became customers.  But it’s not enough to know how much traffic you’re receiving, you also want to know how you’re doing in the rankings. There are two ways to do that:

Manual Searches

Dead easy, simply log on and look. First enter your URL to make sure your site has been approved and listed. That can take a little while. Once you can see that you’re online though, you want to see how you’re ranked in each keyword. To do that, you can simply enter each keyword into the search engine and browse the pages until you find your listing. Works, but takes a while.

Computerized Searches

I’ll be honest with you: it’s been a long time since I did a manual search. If you’ve got just ten sites and you want to check ten keywords for each once a week, you’re going to lose at least a day’s work a month. That’s too much for me. I use WebPosition Gold. I tell it which keywords to check where and it gives me an automated report. Simple.

When you look at your statistics, pay particularly attention to which keywords are bringing in the most traffic. In general, the higher you are, the more traffic you receive and the more sales you make. But that isn’t always true. It might pay more to be fifteenth on a keyword that gets a million searches a month than first on a keyword that gets just a thousand. And if you’re fifteenth, you’ve still got room for improvement.

And it’s the improvement that’s the key. If you see that your link is stuck at the bottom of a list somewhere, try adding more links, putting that keyword in more pages or adding keyword-rich content. If you can see where you stand, you can figure to where to go.

3.12 A Word About Spam

Email Spam

Email spamming is done when you send out emails (in any quantity and in any manner) to people who did not request that you send them any emails.  It does not have to be commercial email in order to be considered spam.  It can be political, pornographic, or what have you.

When you send out emails to people they should have opted to receive emails from you in accordancw with the CAN-SPAM Act.  Also, if a person buys a product/service from you, that does not entitle you to then send them your newsletter or any other non-order related emails form that point forward.  Any non-order related emails sent to customers who did not opt to receive emails from you other than order related emails would be considered spam by most people, however many large retailers tend to do this.  It can be considered acceptable as long as you offer a way for the recipient to opt out of the emails, but it is still not recommended that you do htis.  On the other hand, if during the checkout process you offer the customer to opt-in to receive your emails and the customer chooses to opt-in to receive your email offers/newsletters, this is OK.  They opted to receive these emails from you so this would not be considered spam.  HOwever, you are required to give them a link where they can opt out at any time. This link should be provided within every email you send out to your list.  This link is usually placed at the bottom by most marketers and that is perfectly accepted email marketing practice.  More on this below.

Now what if a customer opted to receive email offers or your newsletter and later they decide that they do not like the content in these emails?  Is this considered spam because they merely decided they do not like your email offers or newsletter?  No, it is not considered spam, even if they accuse you of spam.  They opted in to receive these emails.

To keep yourself in the clear and to make your subscribers happy, you need to provide a way for each and every subscriber to unsubscribe (or opt-out) of their subscription.  This can be pretty messy and can prove to be very time consuming, though, that's why it is always wise and highly recommended that you use an autoresponder/email marketing service to send out your email offers and newsletters. 

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