E-mail is still considered the best way to reach a large number of people online. Online marketers still prefer the ability of email marketing to reach existing and potential customers in an effective and inexpensive method. However, the many advantages of email marketing also gave way to increased spam volumes. In a recent study by Return Path, an enormous growth on spam volumes drove Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to implement stricter filtering and email deliverability. That is why email marketers are working harder to maintain a higher sender reputation to decrease the chances of spam. Sender Reputation contributes to the business’ ability to deliver email to its customers. The Return Path study also reported that most legitimate businesses have lower sender reputations, averaging on 68% delivery rates with sender scores of 60-89. The 2012 Return Path Global Sender Score Benchmark Report showed (below) that among the trillions of emails being sent every year, majority of them are spam. There are three key components with which Sender Scores are calculated. 1.            Complaints. These are the percentage of recipients from an IP address that mark emails sent as “spam”. Complaints are considered the most important indicator affecting email deliverability. 2.            Unknown Users.  These are the percentage of emails sent from an IP address to non-existent or no longer active addresses. 3.            Spam Traps.  ISPs created spam Traps to catch spammers. The 2012 Return Path Report also revealed that:

• Social networking, banking, retail and corporate services have the highest complaint rates. Those four were the only sectors that exceeded 3% complaint rates on average.

• Social network senders have the highest frequency of spam traps. • Social networking and gaming had the highest degree of unknown user rates. Recommendations: Your email deliverability reputation is important in reaching your customers online. Neglect it and you will fail establishing a good communications channel with your customers. You must remember that even if your emails are delivered, it doesn’t guarantee that all your emails are landing in their inbox. Below are some recommendations on how to improve your Sender Score. • Know your Sender Score. If you want to improve your sender score, you must first know what it is. Email Marketers could use Return Path’s tool, http://senderscore.org in order to assess sender reputation. • Reducing complaint rate. Email marketers should keep their complaint rates low. In order to do this, you could: a) sign up for feedback loops with your ISP(s) and; b) analyze your complaints to locate patterns of subscriber discontent. • Practice the basics of list hygiene. Organize and manage your lists. Remove unknown users, collect clean data and plan a win-back strategy to deal with inactive subscribers. Having said all this, email marketing and email campaigns can be a complicated task to manage and maintain because of the many different lists and email spam checks you need to make. The Northern Office – Innovative Marketing can provide you with solutions to ensure that your emails are filled with good content and are getting high open rates. For further information, email The Northern Office at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call (045) 499 1082.

Posted by John Joe Morgan

Content curation is a process where in you filter all the different information you find on the web and make use of them on your own site. Filtering content minimizes the time of searching through masses of tweets, blog posts or different news feeds. Content curation helps companies avoid mediocre web content by linking them with helpful and entertaining information. This allows you to attract more of the right kind of traffic to your site. The only problem withcontent curation is that it doesn’t drive people through their decision making process about your products and services. Here’s some things you can do to integrate content curation into lead generation. Think out of the Brand. If you cut too narrowly on your own product or topic, you may miss a chance to attract new audiences or to get engaged with an influencer just outside your sphere. Keep in mind that customers have very limited time, think beyond borders and add value to their lives and build relationship with them. Keep it fresh and Simple. The more relevant and high quality your content are the more value Google sees your website. Update your site 24/7 and keep the connection between your content. Find reliable Curation Sources. Twitter and Facebook streams are familiar so you can curate right away. Twitter services like Formulists make it easy to pay closer attention to people we engage with and RT frequently. Select few sources first and discover how it can broaden your reach. Cite Sources. There is no crime in curating content but don’t forget that they are not originally your ideas. Give credit to your sources and thank the people for their collaboration with you. Display Originality. Even if your content is curated, balance it out with original information. Don’t just rely on the ideas presented by the curated content rather improve the original content and express what you want to deliver in order to generate awareness of your own product. Customize yet Organized. Content curation is a way of using content marketing; it is built on targeting of specific persons. This can mean customizing content for a range of audiences that are quite technical or usually business focus. Ask for specifics, organize ideas and be straightforward. Content Curation can be a part of Content Strategy but don’t let Content Value Suffer. The Northern Office-Innovative Marketing uses relevant content to attract, engage and acquire audiences. For more information send your emails to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 045 499 1082.   Posted by John Joe Morgan

WordPress is recognized as the most widely used Content Management System with over 72.4 million different sites all over the web as of March 2012. In an average month, 352 million people view more than 2.5 million pages on WordPress. With such a large number of users and developers, it shows that WordPress is truly a reliable blogging tool that can offer lots of wonderful features to users. While WordPress has an astounding set of features to offer such as good SEO quality, automatic filters, good security and clean permalink structure, security problems can still occur especially when you try to modify your WordPress by including plugins, adding themes and performing hack activities that could cause problems to your site. But of course, you can’t avoid doing these activities especially when you want your site to be appealing and functional. But as much as possible, you wouldn’t want it to end up being vulnerable to hacks. That is why security precautions must be done. To start with, let us try to see some factors to consider for the better security of your site: 1. Username and password. It is essential to have a strong username and password. All admin users should come up with a proper custom name. It is best to delete the default admin and create a new one. Picking a secure password also increases the security of your site. To ensure the strength of your password you can refer to WP’s password strength meter and make sure you see the green color which indicates a strong password. 2. Plugins. Plugins contribute a great deal of factor on how your WordPress operates so make sure to be very careful when it comes to installing plugins. Try installing useful plugins that could increase the security level of your site such as Antivirus plugins, online backup plugins, hide login, bulletproof plugins and security checker plugins. Make sure that your plugins are always up to date. Delete those that you do not use. 3. Updates. It is important to consistently update your site. WordPress regularly creates security fixes and other new features for your site’s better functionality. If you don’t update, you won’t be able to have the fixes and features of the latest versions. Worse, you will be making your site more vulnerable to hacks. So whether it’s your plugins, themes or your entire WordPress software, always update. 4. Secure Hosting. If you are using your site for business or brand purposes, it is understood that it is essential to invest money. It is best to find a good hosting provider that applies the needed security features and support on your blog. With paid hosting, we are talking about better features, better customization tools and more advantages. Paid hosting is surely well worth your investment. 5. Database Backup. Always be ready in case something bad really happens. Backup your database regularly so you won’t lose everything in case of a crash or a hack. There are three ways to do back up: First is doing it manually, second is paying for a backup service and third is using a plugin that does the backup. It is really important to have a backup of your entire site. Remember, better safe than sorry. For more information on how to secure your WordPress site, e-mail The Northern Office Innovative Marketing at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call us at (0)45 499 1082 today.   Posted by John Joe Morgan

Developing your website is a complicated task. You have to make a good impression with everyone who’s going to visit your site.

From concepts to content and designs, managing a website takes a lot of work and you have to interact with your audience. It takes a lot of patience and time to make it appealing and engaging to the visitors so your effort won’t go waste. Here are some tips to make your visitors stay and make their visit worthy:  

Give them an UPDATE. This will be a good indicator that the site is active. Keep in mind that your status update should be timely and relevant. It leaves a big impact to the visitors if your content is useful. This is a good way to connect with your visitors by making them feel valued; a simple, clear and straightforward post can move your community in many ways.

Comment Box. Never ignore the fact that a comment box exists whether positive or negative give time to read and answer them nicely, take it constructively and improve if it calls for it. You share almost everything in the community, once they are in they can express their opinions and concerns which can make or break you but don’t take them for granted because these might be the ways on how your site can be successful.

Social Media. Almost everyone has their Social Network accounts. Don’t be afraid to boldly ask your visitors to add your business page on Facebook or your Twitter account. Give them a concrete reason why they need to add you and meet your Social Network community, this way you let them know how you deal with different people. Just be sure to make it clear and easy for them to keep your website in their sphere of on-going focus.

Email. Online Chat. Video Conferences. Technology offers no reason to reach out to your visitors aside from the benefits of getting to know them closer. This is also the best way to introduce who you really are behind your posts. This can develop trust and mutual friendship between you and your visitors. Keep it real and don’t be afraid to share ideas.

Bookmarking. It is usually taken for granted. Make your visitors come to you often by asking them to bookmark your site.

Offer something FREE! This will grab their attention. Just like game shows and promotions people keep coming until they earn their prize! Offer a simple coffee treat or maybe coupons, something that can drive more visitors to your site. Picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures are really appealing; add a caption and that’s it. Humans are easily attracted by beautiful images but make sure they are appropriate and they convey what you want to express.  

At The Northern Office (TNO), we know the value of using proper techniques in engaging more visitors to our client’s website. Let TNO drive more visitors to your site. Call us at 045 499 1082 or drop your queries at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. today.

There are various ways on how to improve your search engine rankings. These days, online marketers are big on quality content and social media marketing. But at the end of the day, visibility boils down to one thing - Technical SEO. It is about ensuring the search engines can easily find and categorize every page of your site.

Here are four, helpful tips you can use to achieve higher online visibility.

Check for proper server response codes. Higher site ranking means knowing a little bit about server response codes. There is a long list of server response codes but you just have to know a few. You just have to make sure that your server is delivering a 404 for a broken link, a 200 for a page that’s fine, and a 301 for a redirect.  Server response codes show the process of finding and sending the file to the user went every time a page is requested. The same codes are sent back to crawlers so it is really important to learn to know these.

Get rid of duplicate content. Duplicate content negatively affects site quality and crawl efficiency that might eventually result to decrease in site rankings. You simply need to get rid of it. Duplicate content include multiple URLs pointing to the same page or very similar pages, printer friendly versions of content and session IDs. There are a few ways to correct this. Like for example, whenever a content on a website can be found at multiple URLs, it should be canonicalized (rel=canonical) for search engines.

Look for unreachable pages. You need to find pages that were not properly removed. This is to prevent people from stumbling on pages that you have already detached from the website. Yes, this is a tedious task that you must do.  One thing you can do is to search the server log files for every unique URL loaded over a 6-month period. Pages that you have blocked might show up in your log file even if they’re blocked.

Find spider traps. A spider trap is basically a series of links or pages on a website which cause search engine spiders to get caught in a loop creating an infinite number of pages which don’t exist on the site. This can cause you a problem on the indexing of your site. Such issue may happen when you have dynamic content on your website such as calendar or a dynamically generated web structure. Getting rid of spider traps is not only allowing search engines to index your site easily but also prevent GoogleBot from hitting files that has issues that may eventually crash your server.

The Northern Office – Innovative Marketing is an independent marketing consultancy firm that helps businesses  build and maintain high search engine rankings. Using our web development services, we can help you build remarkable online brands. Call us at (045) 499 1082 to schedule a free consultation or visit our website www.thenorthernoffice.com to know more about us.