Companies that offer these services pretty much do everything for you in terms of opt-in and opt-out processes.  Using such services can even prove to "save your life" in the event a customer decides to report you to your ISP for spamming them, even though you are not spamming them and they opted to receiving your emails.  The fact is that there are folks out there that just don't understand what spam is.  They think that just because they don't like your emails (even though they agreed to receive them) that these emails are spam.  This is false.  Since they opted in to receive your emails and since you also give them the option to opt out at any time, this is not considered spam according to the US-enacted CAN-SPAM Act. 

If a person like this decides to wrongfully report you for spam, using a reputable autoresponder service will help you prove to your ISP that they are wrong because the reputable of these autoresponder services keep records of the folks that opt-in and opt-out of receiving your email newsletters.  Often, they will keep records of the time and date the subscriber opted to subscribe to your list as well as their IP address and from which one of your sites at which they signed up.  Having this info readily available will help you in combating any false claims of spam against you.

Two of the most popular autoresponder services that come highly recommended by most marketers are A.Weber and Get Response.  Both are relatively inexpensive services and you can use both of them for an unlimited number of websites and newsletters.

Search Engine Spam

You can spam search engines by stuffing your site with keywords, submitting them numerous times or filling your pages with links.  However, doing so will most likely just get you blacklisted.  Don’t do it -it’s just not worth it!

It used be accepted practice to create doorway pages (duplicates of a home page filled with different keywords) but search engines won’t accept even these anymore.

If you want to use more keywords than you can fit on your site, create a second page that is totally different from your homepage but which is still based upon your product or service.  By doing this, you can expand upon a topic you merely touched on in your homepage.  A great example of this is to write articles on the benefits of your services using a different set of keywords than you use on your home page.  This is considered legitimate content and is definitely allowed by the search engines.

To sum up this chapter, you were given a detailed view of many of the proven and effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.  SEO is a very important aspect of traffic generation, and when done carefully it can do wonders for your website's search engine rankings and for your profits!

In the next chapter, we'll discuss Internet marketing through advertising.