Case Study: Is Lycos InSite Pro Paid Inclusion Worth It? Last Update: Sunday, March 06, 2005. In this article I will show you the results of my test with the Lycos InSite Pro paid inclusion site submission program. I recently tested the Lycos InSite Pro paid inclusion system. InSite Pro offers guaranteed inclusion in the Lycos web index within 48 hours of submission, and full refresh of my web pages every 48 hours. Lycos InSite Pro offers two packages: * 1-250 Pages: $189.00/month * 251-500 Pages: $279.00/month I opted for the $279/month plan. I have about 500 pages of content across my network of sites and wanted all of them indexed in Lycos. The Results Lycos currently do not provide keyword, impression or click-through stats, although they do intend to offer them in the near future. So I checked my traffic stats according to my WebTrendsLive reports. I was shocked to find that Lycos only sent 41 visitors in the first 2 weeks of indexing my site. During the same period, Google sent me thousands of visitors. So I wrote to Lycos and asked if they could provide access to click through stats for my account. I wanted to double check, just in case my stats were wrong. They couldn't. So I also asked what I could change in my pages to get more traffic. Here's their helpful reply: Every entry in the Lycos index is created by automated software called a "spider." When a Web page is submitted to Lycos, the spider examines the full text of the page and determines relevant keywords based on its composition. The spider will pay close attention to the components of the URL, the TITLE tag, headings and subheadings, frequency of word use, location of words on the Web page, and the distance between words. If your Web page contains frames, our spider will be able to index the text in the <NOFRAMES> section only. We cannot examine the pages within your frame. Once our software has extracted this information, an abstract is created and stored in the Lycos index. Our search software ranks the search results by considering a combination of the factors listed above. Web pages with fewer than 100 words of text are less likely to be found in a Lycos search. Read that again in case you missed anything. Note that the Lycos spider pays close attention to the URL. So if you ever wondered if search engines took into account keywords in URLs, you now know the truth. Another important point is that your pages should contain 100 words or more, otherwise it's unlikely to be found in Lycos. For some unknown reason Lycos doesn't like my web pages. There's nothing new in their reply that suggests I have not optimized my web pages in the correct manner to achieve top rankings in Lycos. Thankfully, Google does like my pages, so I don't intend to change my pages just to cater to the Lycos ranking algorithm. 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Buy and Sell your text link ad space for FREE. Why pay a company a percentage of your income every month when you can sell it here for FREE? Text link marketing is here to stay and we are proud to offer this service for no charge to you. What is the catch? Read on... About The Author: Michael Wong is an internationally recognized internet marketing expert, and the author of a leading SEO book, numerous marketing articles, and reviews of marketing software and ecommerce software. Publishing Rights: You may republish this article in your web site, newsletter, or ebook, on the condition that you agree to leave the article, author's signature and photograph, and all links completely intact. Full instructions on how to copy and upload my photo to your server. Top 13 Tips To Creating A Professional Looking Newsletter Last Update: Sunday, March 06, 2005. In this article I show you my top 13 tips on how to create professional looking newsletters. 1. Design Scannable Newsletters According to recent study by usability expert, Jakob Nielsen, about 50 percent of readers skimmed or partly read the newsletters. Only 23 percent of readers read the newsletters all the way through. The remaining 27 percent were neverd. So make the text easy to scan by: # using short paragraphs # using bullet points # including plenty of white spacing between topics # highlighting topics with uppercase or bold text in HTML newsletters 2. Insert Line Breaks Improve the readability of your newsletter by formatting it with hard line breaks at 60/65/70 characters per line. You can use a text editor, such as TextPad, and set it to insert hard carriage returns at the end of each 65-character line. 3. Include Newsletter Title In The Subject Field Include your newsletter title at the beginning of the subject field. This will help the reader differentiate your newsletter from junk emails. It will also allow them to filter your newsletter into a separate folder with the use of filters. 4. Make Your Subject Field Sell! Advertise the most enticing story of each issue in the subject field. You literally have seconds to grab the readers attention, so make it count. 5. Include A Table Of Content Include a table of contents at the top of the newsletter. This will allow readers to scan the topics to see if anything in the newsletter catches their interest. 6. Fix Long Links Long hyperlinks may be broken when you format emails using hard line breaks at 60/65/70 characters per line. To fix this problem, deselect word wrap after you have inserted the carriage returns. Then manually edit the links to ensure they are on one line. When the email is sent, a link may still wrap onto two lines. But now it will be clickable. 7. Avoid Spam Filters That Flag The "Unsubscribe" Word Do not use the word "unsubscribe" in your removal notice. A number of spam filters flag emails containing that particular word as possible spam. The reason is many spammers now offer "unsubscribe" functions that don't actually do anything. 8. Avoid Spam Filters That Flag Chain Letters Some spam filters are flagging emails that asks readers to forward the newsletter on as chain letters. Avoid using the word "forward" and any of the following words in the same sentence, "all, anyone, every, friends, many, others, people." Instead of "forward," try using "pass," "share," or "send." 9. Reduce Remove Request Emails There are two methods to reducing the number of remove email requests from your subscribers: * Include a removal notice at the top and bottom of the email. * Place the bottom removal request at the very bottom of the email, rather than a few paragraphs from the bottom. 10. Design User-Friendly HTML Newsletters Most people use an 800x600 screen resolution, but the email preview pane is usually much smaller than the full screen. So format your HTML table widths at 500-600 pixels at the most. Better still, use a relative (percentage) width table, which will allow your newsletter to be resized when viewed in different sized windows. 11. Create AOL Friendly HTML Newsletters AOL try to protect their users by eliminating potential security hazards. As such, AOL email clients do not support the following HTML objects: * ActiveX * Audio * External Style Sheets * Frames and IFrames * Java * Meta Refresh * Scripts: JavaScript, Perl, VBScript, etc. * Tooltips * Video In addition, the following HTML tags are the only ones supported by AOL email clients: * Big: Big * Body: Body * Bold: B * Break: BR * Center: Center * Font: Font * Header: H1, H2, H3 * Hyperlink: A * Italics: I * Paragraph: P * Small: Small * Strong: Strong * Subscript: Sub * Underline: U 12. Include AOL Clickable Links AOL users can't click standard hyperlinks or email links. For links to work in AOL email clients, you must format them using HTML. This is why you sometimes see both standard and HTML formatted links. For example: http://www.Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com <a href="http://www.Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com">AOL Link</a> <a href="http://www.Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com">AOL Users Click Here</a> joe <a href="mailto:joe">joe</a> 13. Spell Check Your Writing Last but not least, always spell check your newsletter. Text editors, such as TextPad, include a spell check function. If yours doesn't, then copy and paste the text into Microsoft Word (assuming you have it). Make sure you have the "Check spelling as you type" option switched on. To set this, select "Options" under the "Tools" in the top menu bar. Then select the "Spelling & Grammar" tab. Under "Spelling" check the "Check spelling as you type" check box and click "OK." Word will underline all of the words that contain spelling errors. Alternatively, check your spelling using SpellCheck.net, a free online spell checker. 
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