Shane Sparks, Judge on America's Best Dance Crew cuffed at his North Hollywood house and taken off to the Van Nuys jail, where he's being held on $590,000 bail.

Shane Sparks is charged with 9 acts of alleged molestation with an underage girl.

There’s quite a big split in the SEO and website development community about the importance of submitting an XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing. XML sitemaps do help websites that’s got a structural navigation and crawl-ability problems.

Most people in the SEO world needs to apply every possible advantage to a website to get better rankings.  Others will focus on fixing complex structural issues and allow crawling to happen naturally. While an XML sitemap will not directly improve your search engine rankings, it does allow search engines such as Google to see any SEO based changes more quickly.

XML sitemaps have replaced the older method of submitting your website URL to search engines. You can now submit your XML sitemap directly to the search engines, or you can wait for the search engines to spider it.

Sitemap types

Complex websites should always have two kinds of sitemaps.  One visible to your users for easy navigation to anywhere on your website and one for the search engines. An HTML sitemap is what you will use for the visible one for your users and a XML sitemap helps the search engines to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed and to crawl your site accordingly.

What is included in a XML Sitemap?

• Links (URL’s) to all the pages on your website.
• The relative importance of each page on your website.
• The date each page was last modified.
• How often each page is expected to change.

When to use a XML sitemap

• On large dynamic websites that are poorly linked making them difficult to index.
• On websites using large amounts of Ajax and Flash where the web crawlers have difficulty accessing the content.
• For poorly coded websites (can name a few).
• Any website that changes their content frequently like blogs, forums, CMS (content management systems).

XML sitemaps doesn’t directly affect SEO results but they do communicate important information to the search engines to help them index your website. My advice – always include a XML sitemap as part of your Website Development and SEO program.

Written by AntonRSA on December 8, 2009

Black Friday Postmortem

If you are like many Americans, you were either camped out in front of some retail store long before the sun even came up or you were stationed in front of your computer scouring the internet for the best Black Friday deals.

Unfortunately, due to the current economic crisis, many toy product manufacturers have lightened up on the gas pedal by not producing as much as in previous years. Many manufacturers fear there will be a shortage of buyers and an over abundance of left-over toys and products.

This may be bad news for many parents, but even worse news for the $22 billion U.S. toy industry that is already suffering from stagnant growth.

Good news for Amazon.com. They had a huge spike in online sales and they continue to see the growth.

Here are some of Amazon's popular items still available for purchase.

Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, Global Wireless, Latest Generation)

         

Motorola Droid A855 Phone (Verizon Wireless)

Transformers Movie 2 Combiner - Construction Devastator

STEVEN by Steve Madden Women's Intyce Riding Boot,Black,9 M

"Did You Know?" - Video Pick

With its catchy theme music, you will see the substantial growth in the world as far as business and online marketing possibilites. Enjoy!

How to market your business with Facebook


A growing number of small businesses are making Facebook an indispensable part of their game plan. They are using it to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information.

“You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are,” said Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era.” “And with 300-million people on Facebook, and still growing, that’s increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services.”

Start small
For most businesses, Facebook Pages – rather than individual profiles and Facebook groups – are the best place to start. Pages allow businesses to collect “fans” the way celebrities, sports teams, musicians and politicians do.

There are now 1.4 million Facebook Pages and they collect more than 10 million fans every day, according to the site.

Businesses can easily create a Web presence with Facebook, even if they don’t have their own Web site.

But most companies still should maintain a Web site to reach people who don’t use Facebook or whose employers block access to the site. Facebook pages can link to the company’s Web site or direct sales to e-commerce sites like Ticketmaster or Amazon.

Facebook offers an array of tools and networks, and it’s easy to wander down too many paths. Shih recommends that newcomers start by asking themselves a simple question: What is your basic objective? Is it getting more customers in the door? Building brand awareness? Creating a venue for customer support? Once you have set your goal, you can strategize accordingly.

Shih suggests that businesses ask friends and family to become fans of their pages so that they display a respectable crowd of supporters when they debut. Pages can grow organically by word of mouth — the average Facebook user has 130 friends on the site — or by advertising or promotion.

You can enliven your page with photos, comments and useful information. As you grow more comfortable, you can add videos or business applications. Flaunt your personality.

“The pages that are most successful,” said Tim Kendall, the director of monetization at Facebook, “are the ones that really replicate the personality of the business.”

More than selling
Buy buy buy messages won’t fly. The best practitioners make Facebook less about selling and more about interacting. Engage with fans and critics.

Listen to what people are saying, good and bad. You may even pick up ideas for how to improve your business.

Keep content fresh. Use status updates and newsfeeds to tell fans about specials, events, contests or anything of interest.

Get the demos
Facebook enables small businesses to engage in targeted marketing that they only could have dreamed about a few years ago.

Facebook users fill out profiles with information like hometown, employer, religious beliefs, interests, education and favorite books, movies and TV shows — all of which can help advertisers deliver messages to specific demographic slices.

As you create an ad, you can add demographic criteria and keywords and see how many Facebook users fall into your target audience and modify it accordingly to get the most bang for your buck.

Advertisers can elect to pay per impression or per click, set maximum budgets and schedule the ad to run on specific dates.

A coffee shop can display advertisements only to local people whose profiles or group affiliations suggest they like coffee.

According to Kendall, ads can also aim at people based on social exchanges, like a person who sends a message to a friend, “let’s get together for coffee” or who posts a status update about just having awakened and needing some java.

Cupcakes!
Charles Nelson has an MBA and owns a growing national chain of stores. Yet this 40-year-old entrepreneur checks Facebook with the frequency of a college student, up to 30 times a day, via his laptop or Blackberry.

He and his wife, Candace, own Sprinkles, a cupcake bakery that relies on social media in lieu of traditional advertising. Nelson considers Facebook marketing essential.

“People are out there talking about your business everyday, whether you’re looking or not,” he said. “This gives people a place to come and speak directly to us.”

Every day Sprinkles posts a password on Facebook that can be redeemed for a free cupcake. Since April, its fan base has risen tenfold to 70,000.

His advice: Make it relevant to the customer, keep it fresh and remember that the return on investment may come slowly.

The latest versions of the five major most web browsers (Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome 3.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0, Opera 10.0, and Apple Safari 4.0) went head to head under six performance indicators: JavaScript speed, average CPU usage under stress, DOM selection, CSS rendering speed, page load time, and browser cache performance. Each web browser was tested three times under an unprimed cache (except for the browser cache performance), and their average value reported in the results.

Click to enlarge:

Download the Data

If you’d like to download the raw data, you can grab them as a CSV below.

• web-browser-performance-data.csv (CSV, 2.0KB)

Benchmarking Tools

• SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark
• SlickSpeed (jQuery values reported)
• Numion stopwatch
• CSS Rendering Benchmark
• Resource Monitor

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Sean Hurley of 96Robots for inspiring this study.

Emails are a great way to reach people, to keep reminding them that your site still exists and that they really should keep checking you out. After all, the people who receive your emails should already be familiar with you, they will have opted to receive emails from you, but now you have to make sure they pay attention to what you’re sending them.

But, you should keep in mind that every email list is different. You should see what works for your readers and avoid what I call the Amazon effect: just because it works for someone else doesn’t mean it’s right for you and your company.

Start with best practice and good ideas, and then tweak your processes to see what works best for your own email campaigns and keep refining your strategy.

1. Get into the inbox

Before anyone can respond to an email, they must first be able to get it (logical enough, right?). If you haven’t taken the steps to ensure you don’t fall at the first hurdle, it’s not even worth clicking "send".

Know about the CAN-SPAM act

Everyone knows about spam and how much of a nuisance it is, so in 2003 the CAN-SPAM act was passed in the U.S. and it set out the guidelines that most spam filters today enforce.

If you can’t be bothered by reading the entire CAN-SPAM guideline, here’s a brief guide to what you need to do to ensure you don’t fall foul.

The seven main points of the bill are:

• Don’t use false or misleading header information.
• Don’t use deceptive subject lines.
• Identify the message as an ad.
• Tell recipients where you’re located.
• Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.
• Honor opt-out requests promptly.
• Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.

What does all of this mean? It means that you are to make sure that the email is accurate and honest, includes a postal address, an unsubscribe method, and a text version. You also have 10 days to unsubscribe anyone from your email if a recipient requests it.

The Sender Policy Framework

Many filters also make use of the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to verify the sending server. You can see how to setup and SPF record at the Sender Policy Framework overview page.

Don’t just assume that because you’ve done everything, your email will get through – you should check it and perform thorough testing! Any decent piece of email campaign software will give you the ability to test an email as spam–you should use this feature.

2. Make a good first impression

Once you’ve gotten into an inbox, it helps to make a good first impression. When designing an email, always think about what people are going to see first. There are many previewing options in email clients, so the principal of fold design is still very applicable to HTML emails.

There’ll also be a lot of people with images turned off by default, so make sure your background color is sensible and that your image alt attribute can be read and is descriptive of the image it represents. If an image is used for text replacement, make sure the text from the image is equal to the alt attribute.

Given that people use a huge variety of different email clients, there’s a chance that some people may not get a decent look at the email you send at all, so make sure there’s a link to a web based version at the very top of the email. People aren’t going to search through your email to find a link to a web/alternative version and it’s your responsibility to make it as easy to locate as possible. A simple "having trouble viewing this email? Click here." link should do it.

The preview pane from Outlook shows a GAME email newsletter. Notice the "Can’t see this email?" link is at the top is obvious even when the images are off.

3. Use your brand

Your emails shouldn’t be a stand-alone form of promotion and communication, they should tie into everything else about your company and brand.

Colors, logos, and fonts should be carrying over into your email designs. Some emails will even go so far as to maintain the look of the company’s website, complete with header and primary navigation links.

The header from an ebuyer email (top) and the website (below). The branding is consistent, as is the style and feel of the menu bars.

Brand loyalty can be very powerful and the trust that being recognizable and identifiable gives can be priceless. As readers will already be familiar with your brand, make sure they instantly know this is something from you — something they can trust.

You’ve invested time and money on company branding and identity; don’t ignore the value of that in your emails.

4. Provide text versions

The days of sending text-only emails are pretty much long gone as far as email campaigns go — sure, we still use it everyday, but your email campaign should be saying something a bit more special.

You should have already put your text version into your email so that you can get past spam filters, but your job isn’t done there.

A note about mobile devices

A text version is becoming more important as people increasingly read and view content on their mobile phones. Mobile device users often read the text version through a text-based email client so make sure to test for this growing occurrence.

5. Personalize your email messages

Personalizing an email can be a great way to connect with your readers and get a little more attention. An email with the subject "Winter offers for Dave Smith" is more noticeable when the recipient is skimming through their inbox than "Winter offers".

But be careful, people glaze over emails with too much marketing-speak and hard sell. Being overly familiar can be a real turnoff to some people, so don’t feel that you have to use this in every email – use it appropriately and when the occasion suits it.

Personalization doesn’t stop at just putting the recipient’s name in the email. For example, Amazon is a well-known master of personalizing emails to your browsing and buying habits. You can go further and target people’s responses to previous email campaigns as well: you may decide that people who have read the last few emails get different versions to those who have never opened them.

The kings of personalized content. An Amazon email sent to people who had previously purchased certain items.

Remember to keep these personalization techniques up to date: if you have a separate list of people who haven’t read any of your recent emails, then make sure you update it immediately before you send your email off.

6. Give people a reason to respond

Think back to any recent emails you’ve actually responded to, where you’ve actually clicked a link or at least paid a bit more attention. I’ll bet that at least one of them had some form of offer, incentive or competition.

If you give people a reason to read your email–a reason to respond–then more than likely, they will.

The incentive doesn’t have to be grand and expensive: a percentage discount off postage on your ecommerce site or a free download for email subscribers can do wonders to the percentage of people who read your emails.

This can be a great tie-in with personalizing an email. For example, a recent email that I got was a free P&P (postage & packaging, otherwise known as free shipping and handling) offer on my birthday, which, of course, I took advantage of straight away.

Competition on a Prestige Guitars email.

7. Use calls to action

Many people forget that email design is very similar to designing for the web. You don’t quite need to forget everything while you’re reminding yourself how to layout with tables again.

Calls to action are the same as they would be on any web page, make them prominent and their intent obvious, big buttons, highlighted offer codes, just as you would on a web page, and remember: if people click on something, they expect to be taken where it tells them it will.

Prominent calls to action in Travel-ticker.com email.

Structuring the email well can help, have headings stand out, and for lengthy emails, a summary at the top of the email can be useful. For web based email clients, you can even use internal page anchors to jump to the appropriate content.

8. Content is king

As with everything on the internet, you need to have good content, the entire point of you sending the email is to get your content into somebody’s inbox!

So make it good, take your time with it, and make sure it gives people some form of value when they read it. I know people who subscribe to the myfonts.com emails because they like reading them and find the information provided in them valuable.

An added bonus? Good content will be forwarded, new people will sign up, and you’ll grow your email database and its reach with little effort.

So all those articles you’ve read to make your website worth reading? Dig ‘em out because you’re going to be needing them.

A focused email from Onitsuka Tiger for a new product launch.

9. Determine what your goal is

Before you put your email together, it’s a good idea to have a little pondering session about what it’s supposed to accomplish. If it’s focusing on a product launch then maybe a simple "splash email" will be best, but if it’s a lengthy newsletter, then it helps to organize the news items in order of importance to you and to your readers.

Think about what you want the reader to do. Do you want them to visit your site? Do you want them to forward the email to a friend? Do you want them to take advantage of an offer you’re promoting? Your objective determines the way to write and format your emails.

With any email, it also helps to have tied-in web content, so if you touch on a subject, then you might also provide a link to a more in-depth blog post for readers who want to get more details.

10. Get data for analytics

You wouldn’t launch a website without Google Analytics, so why send an email without analytics software? The only way you will know what works is to find out what people do with your email. Do they open it? Do they click on links? Do they mark it as junk mail? Do they forward it to their friends?

Statistics from Campaign Monitor interface

As a minimum, you should be tracking:

• Email opens
• Any links clicked
• Bounces
• If anyone marks it as junk

Then get your stats together and ask yourself what each of them tells you. If people aren’t opening your emails then you need to look at your subject lines, make them more inviting, and split test (also known as A/B testing) them on future campaigns.

What are people clicking on? Are they clicking on your prominent calls to action or are they clicking on links to your articles and blog posts? Where I work, we’ve sent emails and found that our new portfolio items were clicked a lot, so in the next email, they were made more of a feature.

Bounces are good for checking the integrity of your email list and the methods by which you acquire your emails. If you get many bounces from an email user, then it may be time to update that contact.

If people are marking your email as junk, you have determine why. You’ll normally get a few people accidentally marking it as junk mail, but if people do perceive your emails as junk, you may need to rethink your content or subject lines. After all, these folks should have opted in to receive the email, and if they haven’t, then you’ve probably found your answer right there.

I would recommend noting down what email clients your readers are using so that you can make sure your emails display correctly in the most popular clients. For instance, if a large majority are using web-based clients, then you can add a few things like background images. If they are using clients with a preview pane, then you should think about the section that will be seen first in the pane. This will also give you insight on what email clients you should be testing and previewing your email messages in.

This is where it helps to get good email campaign management software. Campaign Monitor, Mail Chimp and Dotmailer are all popular solutions, but it is worth looking around and finding a provider that suits your sending volume and budget.

Share your email tips

Do you have tips and anecdotes with your own efforts in email campaigns? Do share your opinions with us in the comments!