These days, emails bearing outrageous claims about Viagra or Cheap Rolex watches automatically raise suspicions and trip our spam filters. But spammers are getting more sophisticated, particularly when targeting business owners or website administrators. They are using a range of techniques to make their emails seem more legitimate; both to baffle recipients and to escape spam guards.

The underlying purpose of the email may be marketing related, that is to generate more clicks or potential clients; or it can have more sinister purposes – either of the phishing type, or for distribution of malware. Time to get your spam savvy on!

How to identify spam

1. The ‘Errors in your website’ type notification

These emails alert the receiver to a ‘problem’ identified with their company website. If the email is not from your website host, domain registry or other service provider, then get suss.

Look closely at emails claiming to have identified web issues such as under performing search engine optimisation, social media activity or lack of website responsiveness for mobile sites.

Techniques used to validity include:

A basic assessment of your site which finds an opportunity where your site can be improved.

These are often generic assessments but have some personalised details – such as your company’s website url for example, which makes any information which follows appear relevant to your site

Screen grabs of Google searches or other data (with poor pixelation so it’s difficult to tell that whether these are related to your site or not).

One that we have seen a bit of lately uses a screen grab of a small part of a company website which is then photoshopped into a picture of iPhone screen. The aim is to get someone panicking about how their website displays on a mobile device. The reality is the site could never actually appear the way it’s represented in the example. This guy needs to hone his technique – although we fully appreciate why it has worried some of our clients.

Glowing testimonials and claims about how the company has single handedly improved its clients’ search engine rankings and profits by 800%, for example (well, we all know to take this with a grain of salt!)

Other clues which indicate it could be a potential harmful piece of spam:

2. Contact details don’t add up

The Spam Act requires that a sender includes contact details, and we’ve come to expect that in any legitimate communication. But why would someone who works for seowonderworld.com* have an email address kkrvy78@tecnet.as*?

3. Obvious spelling and grammatical errors

I mean for starters, there’s no way you want someone as sloppy as that messing with your website!

As there is a risk of malware with any of these mass produced emails, resist clicking any links – even if there is one to unsubscribe. If you want to do your own research on a company, open a new window in Google and search the company’s name.

It’s always true that there are many things you can do to improve how your website performs. But businesses that spruik their wares via unsolicited emails are violating The Spam Act. If they are prepared to use dodgy ways to offer their services, we need to be wary of what they are offering.

If it seems to be from a legitimate business, is it still spam?

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) defines spam as follows:

The Spam Act refers to spam as “unsolicited commercial electronic messaging”.

To be covered by the Spam Act, the message must be commercial in nature – for instance offering a commercial transaction, or directing the recipient to a location where a commercial transaction can take place.

There are a large number of commercial electronic messages that can be sent legitimately.

They are only considered to be spam if they are sent without the prior consent of the recipient – as unsolicited messages.

A single message may be spam. The message does not need to be sent in bulk, or received in bulk.

So the best thing to do with any unsolicited emails? Ignore them, and mark them as spam. They’ll get tangled up in the net sooner or later.

*these are examples only.

Featured image credit

Heidi McElnea

Heidi manages written communications for the various digital and print design services offered by Orion Creative. It’s a colourful blend of website and social media content, email marketing, e-learning, copy for print and scripts for voice overs.

There’s so much noise about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that it’s tempting to ignore it. Even if it means sacrificing the traffic that good SEO might bring to your company website. But don’t give up, here we’ve stripped it all down and have compiled a list that won’t do your head in (or inflict pain on your credit card).

How does SEO work?

Every minute of the day, many thousands of Internet users are entering words or phrases (search terms) into search engines such as Google. This can span from being very specific “best price on road bikes in Sydney” to something more general, such as “bikes”. Search engines like Google use robots called ‘crawlers’ (it’s a lightning-speed crawl though, taking only a fraction of a second) to search and find appropriate websites based on the search term entered. The crawlers compile a list of sites to show the user, ordered by how relevant the search engine believes they are to the particular search terms or query.

In order for search engines to find your site and match it up to the relevant search terms, you need to make sure that your business’ website and content clearly communicates what it is about. You can think of SEO as a way of making sure its chances of being found in searches is at its highest.

Easy SEO: How?

One of the ways Google assesses the credibility and relevance of your website (and determines whether it will show it to anyone) is by analysing its domain authority.

Google for example, uses a combination of factors to form an opinion of how important and credible your website is and therefore how often it will choose to show your site in search results. Try this test.

1. Assess

Go to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ to analyse your score. Note that this is not the only website you can use, there are a number of tools which can provide this analysis for you. Open Site Explorer is just one that will offer you limited access for free).

Once you arrive on the site, enter the domain name of your business and then click Search.

What is your domain authority score? If it’s significantly below the 50 mark, it’s a clear indication that it needs a boost. But don’t panic, the good news is there are a few fairly simple things you can do to improve the health of your site’s domain authority.

2. Remedy

Google looks to the web community for advice on a site’s credibility. Open Site explorer will also show you which sites link back to yours (the paid version also gives you an indication of social media mentions).

A hyperlink (URL) from a reputable website back to yours is a credible source, particularly if the ‘anchor text’ (the words that are clicked on) are positive and relate back to the keywords that you are targeting. Have a look at these two examples.

If you want a good deal on laptop computers, visit the IT solutions website.
If you want a good deal on laptop computers, visit the IT solutions website.

While both examples make perfect sense, the benefit of the second is that Google can clearly see why the website is getting a link. That’s the value of good anchor text!

Easy SEO tips

Now that you understand what SEO is, how it works and how to check your current status, we’ve put together a simple checklist for you to review when tuning your website’s SEO:

Fine tune anchor text – check that there is a link to your website from any online source that lists your company. This includes any social media profiles and even email marketing. Have a look at the anchor text. Could it be more descriptive?
List to get links – have you listed your business in appropriate directories? Many of the general directories (such as Truelocal, Aussie Web, Startlocal, Hotfrog) have free listings which give you a link back to your site. Your own industry will have specific opportunities for making connections; many of which you’ve probably already made simply to raise the profile of your business.Remember to avoid link building schemes, or ‘spamming’ your website wherever you can. It’s been done so much before that Google has updated its algorithm to reduce the value of such links and penalise sites which misuse link building.
Social media mentions – is your website getting a mention on Facebook or Twitter? It is difficult to tell exactly how Google takes social signals into consideration, but social media activity can show a strong correlation with a higher domain authority. At any rate, social media activity often drives more traffic to your site, which is the number one goal.
Get started – it takes time for a website to be indexed by search engines, to grow your website’s domain authority and to work its way up the ranks. If your website is relatively new, it’s best to get started as soon as you can on looking at ways to make it more visible to search engines. And if you don’t have a website, well, web design companies such as Orion Creative can help with that.