One of the most powerful tools available to all webmasters is the opt in mailing list. Most people visit a web site once and never return: but a mailing list is a method of keeping in-touch with readers and increasing the chances of having them return to the website.

When most people think of newsletters, they think of the dozen or so newsletters they send to junk-mail each day.

Every online business needs to provide a valuable service to generate and retain customers. Satisfied customers return and purchase again and again, and in many cases they recommend your business to other potential customers.

Internet marketing is driven by the amount of effective traffic your site receives. As more and more traffic is developed for your site, you have an opportunity to entice visitors to subscribe to your mailing list or opt-in list.

There are two types of web sites on the Internet. The die hard SEO managers still favor static pages, because they are easier to crawl and more visible to search engines, and it is fairly easy to add a few hundred pages to a website by copying and pasting or creating a template. The new trend is to use content management systems like Mambo or PHPNuke, but these dynamic systems can cause optimization problems.

The most valuable commodity on the Internet is privacy. People are becoming wary when signing up for a mailing list, as there always seems to be a flood of spam after signing up for an email list. A double opt in may be the solution, as it prevents a third party from signing people up for newsletters. It also prevents spam robots from harvesting valuable information from a web site.

The blogsphere is clogged with blogs about comment spam, but what exactly is comment spam? The first thing a blogger needs to establish is a clear definition. It is a form of spamindexing - in another sense, it is a form of splogging. This type of splogging hi-jacks blogs to advertise something instead of creating a fake website to promote it. The objective is to build links and increase their web pages rank.

This is the magic question (and if the answer was common knowledge there would be little need for SEO marketers). There are many factors that determine how often a web sites content needs to be updated. If the web site is optimized for Google, a canny adviser would suggest adding a forum and blog so the content is updated weekly. These rules can be relaxed for MSN or Altavista.

Social Networking is the fastest growing trend on the Internet. The concept behind Social Networking is to put the job of driving traffic to websites into the hands of real people instead of search engines or pay-per-click programs. As the Internet becomes more human, personal comments from web site readers become vitally important.

There are several reasons why a web master should not overlook this fast growing SEO tool.

The Internet is full of Saturday Morning Bloggers. These bloggers ignore their blogs all week, then they post a few dozen articles in their blog and then spend a few hours adding comments to other blogs. This is a great way to spend a Saturday, but it provides very little SEO marketing benefits.

Search engines need a steady flow of comments.

Bloggers are painfully aware of website owners who try to improve their websites rank by adding links to blogs. There are several strategies for combating this problem. The first and most obvious method is to avoid free blogger sites. These are favorite targets for comment spam.

Bloggers who own their own software can add a no-follow tag. The rel=nofollow tag does not stop the spam, but it does stop robots from following the link.

All bloggers want readers to post comments. Why?

Comments offer the blog both social and SEO benefits. Comments increase the percentage of text on the page. They increase the keywords, and hopefully, include a keyword anchored link to a webpage or blog with the same content and keywords.

This increases the pages rank.

But, rank in itself is of little importance to a blog.