SMS for Internet Marketing

Why it makes sense?

• SMS can be delivered very quickly to very large number of people at once
• # of people who have access to their cell phone to use SMS is very large
• Potential that people will read your message is very high
• SMS is not as costly as other means of marketing

Because of above mentioned characterstics of sms marketing, I think SMS marketing will be more effective than any other form of marketing. I think SMS marketing will soon outbid the use of email marketing because of these qualities. However, if you plan to choose sms marketing as the means of marketing for your site, you should consider following things in order to maximize the outcome.

Things to do when SMS marketing:

• Only follow permission based marketing
• Personalize message
• Clear and Concise message
• Do not Spam

Promote Your Blog or Feed by Adding Google Button

See the “Add to Google” button on this page at the right navigation panel? You can do so and increase your site visibility by letting people add your feed to their Google Homepage or Google Reader Page. This is a good way of promoting your site. If you don’t have a blog in your site, you can create it. I suppose, this will also help all of your site or blog pages get indexed in Google quickly too. To create your “Add to Google” button, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/add.html and give your feed information. You can do the rest by following the page.

If you want Googlebot not to index your page

There are times when you don’t want to eat; there are times when you don’t want to travel and there are times when you don’t want to do something that you would want to most of the times. Similarly, there are times when you don’t want Google to follow one or some of the pages of your site. Let’s say, you have created a temporary page within your site, or you have contents in a page that you will be moving to some other pages. Then, probably it is not the best idea to let Googlebot follow or crawl through that page. However, you do want to Googlebot to index all other regular pages.

Basically, you can prevent Googlebot not to index a page by using “NOINDEX” tag. This tag is appropriate, when you want Googlebot to follow some links but not all. However, use of “NOINDEX” tag may not be that appropriate as it requires a lot of updates when you change something. Optionally, you can use “NOFOLLOW” tag on the parent page if you don’t want Googlebot to follow any links. The use of “NOFOLLOW” or “NOINDEX” can be done as below inside the head tag:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOFOLLOW">

Using “NOFOLLOW” tag is quite simple. However, it is not the safest way to prevent Googlebot from following links, especially if your page that you don’t want to be indexed is linked from a third indexed page.

Therefore, you will be better off using “NOINDEX” tag instead. Another way you can control is by using file ‘robot.txt’, which has instruction set for bot about how to behave on that site.

URL Rewriting – Is it really necessary?

In the past, Search Engines including major ones like Google, Yahoo and MSN had hard time understanding and indexing pages that are dynamically generated. In such dynamic pages, a single page can deliver multiple page contents depending upon what the user has input. For example, the dynamic url http://www.xyz.com/abc/def.asp?x=12&y=adf&z=45 delivers one page content while http://www.xyz.com/abc/def.asp?x=2&y=adf&z=34 delivers completely different content even though both of these links are using the same file ‘def.asp’. Search Engines in the past were not smart enough and thus would consider both these links as one file and indexes just one. However, SEs now can understand and parse all these types of links regardless of their complex structure with querystrings. It is considered that all major Search Engines can now handle dynamic urls up to 3-4 querystrings. So, you will be okay and be assured that your site will be indexed properly even if your site is dynamic. However, static pages are always good over the dynamic pages. So, why not take the advantage of static pages by URL rewriting? URL Rewriting, Mod-Rewrite in Apache server, is the process to convert dynamic urls to static urls. By having static urls, you will make the urls friendlier and easier for end users, In addition, static urls I think rank better in search engines than dynamic ones.