Once the malicious email (with your domain) lands in your recipient’s inbox, and if they are opened, all sorts of malware may be unleashed on their computer and network. This will cause a lot of problems for them as well as for you.

So what can you do about it?

Enter Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (aka DMARC). DMARC is an email authentication mechanism. It consists of two parts – a verification component and a policy component.

However, DMARC does not work alone. It requires two set of information from the authorised email server – the Sender Policy Framework (aka SPF) and Domain Key Identified Mail (aka DKIM). These three records residing at the Domain Name Server (aka DNS) will help email-receiving servers to determine the authenticity of the mail and how to handle the email thereafter (i.e. allowed the email to pass through, put into a spam or junk folder, or simply rejected it).

The technical implementation of DMARC, SPF and DKIM has several business benefits which brand and business owners should take note of.

#1 Prevents Email Spoofing

It is easy to send off emails with fake domains. This is due to the lack of an authentication mechanism in current mail servers. Cybercriminals are aware of this loophole and are taking advantage of it.

Cyber criminals also knows that a familiar email is more likely to be opened than one from a stranger. Customers and business associates who have come to trust you and your brand are more likely to trust the email and its the content, thinking the email is legitimate.

DMARC, together with SPF and DKIM, blocks out cyber criminals’ email spoofing attempts through a system of verification and authentication. They ensure that only authenticated emails land in the inboxes.

#2 Business Protection

If a fraudulent email is successful in its mission, and causes damage to another organisation, the victim company may seek legal redress from your company for “allowing” the incident to happen. Your company’s progress and productivity may be impacted as you get embroiled in a civil suit. If the matter is picked up by the press and make known. This could put a dent in your business as customers and associates might stay away for fear of being the next victim. Their may be financial and reputation impact, eventually affecting revenue.

#3 Avoiding the Spam/ Junk Folder

Before deploying DMARC for your domain, receiving email servers have no way of authentication your emails. Hence, your emails may find a home in your recipient’s spam or junk folder.

With DMARC deployed, the chances of emails landing in the inbox are higher. This is crucial for transactional or important emails, where you do not wish them landing in a spam/junk folder. This may cause some inconveniences and even confusion for the receiving party, resulting in a poor experience with your brand.

#4 Improved Marketing RoI

If you are running a marketing campaign, you want your emails to reach as many inboxes of your target audience as possible. It doesn’t help your marketing effort with your marketing emails landing in your recipient’s spam box. This severely impacts on your marketing metrics, projecting a lower return on investment (aka RoI).

With DMARC together with email marketing best practices, emails performance can be properly tracked, reflecting the true RoI of your marketing campaigns.

#5 Avoid being Blacklisted

With SPAM laws in place, Internet Service Providers (aka ISPs) and Email Service providers (aka ESPs) are setting up blacklists to list down domains and IP addresses that are misbehaving (i.e. spamming).

Mass mailing also consumes precious bandwidth. This cost ISPs as they have to purchase more bandwidth to accommodate more traffic. On the part of ESPs, they themselves do not wish to be penalized by ISPs and placed on a blacklist. Hence, they have their own blacklist to weed out non-compliant customers.

Once on any blacklist, it may take weeks if not months to be removed from it. Also if you are not diligent enough to quickly remove yourself on a blacklist, you may quickly be listed on other blacklists. This will adversely affect your sender score and domain reputation.

#7 Better Sender Score

In the world of finance, there is a scoring system called the credit score. The purpose of the credit score is to determine the credit worthiness of a borrower.

Similarly, in the world of emails, there is a similar system called the sender score. Through this system, ESPs are able to determine whether your domain has a good or poor email track record. A number between 0 and 100 is assigned to domains. The higher the score a domain has, the better would be the preferential treatment by major mailbox providers. You want to have a sender score of more than 70.

Internet and email service providers rely on various metrics to determine a domain’s reputation – sender score is one of them. It has a high weightage. You do not want your domain to have a poor sender score.

#7 Identify Email Senders

These days many applications are being used across the organisation. You have sales using a CRM, marketing using email marketing systems and various analytics solutions, customer support using ticketing support systems to help customers with their issues etc. For the purpose of better tracking and reporting, some of these applications are able to send off emails through their application.

During a DMARC deployment, before a DMARC policy is enforced, DMARC can surface all IPs that are sending off emails with your domain. From there, you can white list certain IPs and blacklist any unauthorized IPs at work. Without DMARC, you are allowing nefarious elements to continue their malicious work.

From the above, the benefits of deploying a DMARC policy are overwhelming. If you need help with your DMARC deployment, do not hesitate to reach out to us.

However, times have changed. Today,  there are several laws in place that require activities that involve the gathering, use, storage, and disposal of personal data to comply with privacy regulations. These laws are not to be taken likely, and it affects everyone.

Even before privacy law kicks in, a domain may be blocked and blacklisted by Internet service providers if the domain has a history of spamming. What this means is that your email might even not even reach your audiences if these service providers have their way. No one likes spammers.

Besides regulatory requirements and being on a blacklist, mass emailing via traditional email clients is an inherently unproductive activity when it comes to marketing.

For starters, a marketer has no insights into the effectiveness of the activity. They do not have a view of whether the client has opened or even viewed their emails. There is no insight into whether this channel of marketing is an effective one. Without this simple insight, a marketer is just shooting in the dark. This lack of information leads to a lot of marketing challenges.

Without the ability to understand their audience behavior, a marketer is unable to do any segmentation. Without proper segmentation, customers might receive emails that are not relevant to them. This makes for a poor customer experience when they receive emails with marketing messages that do not resonate with them. You might even be reported as a spammer and get your emails channeled into a spam folder.

One of the critical technical limitations of traditional email services is that it does not allow emails to be scheduled.

Studies have shown that at certain times of the day, more time is spent reading emails than at other times. If there is a need to send emails over the weekend or after office hours, you might need to hire someone willing to do the job or deploy a system to resolve this issue.

The scheduling feature in email marketing tools comes in handy too for many other occasions like reminders if you are providing regular services, birthday greetings, anniversary notes, etc. Automating such repetitive tasks saves a lot of time. From the client’s perspective, they would be happy to receive such celebratory greetings. If not, at least you would look upon favorably over your competitors who are not doing so. Hence, an investment in an email marketing system pays dividends even after a sale is made.

Behavioral studies have shown that a buyer would likely make a purchase only after repeated exposure. Automating a series of emails with different messages sent off on different days would be most helpful in this nurturing effort. This increases the likelihood of a sale for your brand.

Knowing that it costs up to five times or more to sell to a prospect than to an existing customer, businesses are constantly seeking ways to cross-sell or upsell to their customers. Being able to tag a subscriber in the email marketing system would allow businesses to have a better idea of how to increase spending with your brand. Businesses can now put in front of their customer complementary solutions that they might need.

By crafting the automation once, the same automation could be re-used for all customers buying the same product. This saves a lot of time.

Thus an email marketing is not only necessary in today’s privacy-conscious world but brings a host of benefits pre and post-sales.

There are many email marketing applications in the market, and they are all not created the same. They have their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Through understanding you and your business, we would be able to advise an appropriate system that works for you.

Speak to us today for a non-obligation discussion!

Once a site is blacklisted, its presence on search results can be drastically reduced or even removed altogether, cutting off traffic and credibility in an instant. For entrepreneurs, marketers, and content creators, understanding how these blacklists operate is not just a technical concern but a fundamental safeguard for protecting brand reputation.

What makes the issue of a search engine blacklist particularly challenging is that it often happens quietly, without immediate notice to the site owner. Many discover the problem only after experiencing a sharp drop in visitors or receiving alerts from users who encounter warnings before accessing the site.

By learning what triggers these blacklists and how to avoid them, website owners can shield themselves from unnecessary setbacks and maintain the digital trust that drives growth.

Why do search engine blacklist exist?

For a search engine, a good user experience is important. Protecting its users from harmful websites is one such good user experience requirement.

Websites that have been blacklisted will display a strong message such as “This site may be compromised“, or have a red screen enveloping the entire website.

If your website is on a search engines’ blacklist, not only do you lose organic growth, but more importantly, you lose both reputation and goodwill. All goodwill with the current domain will be lost; your website ranking will drastically drop on search engines. The business consequences can be devastating—lost sales, broken trust, and a long road to recovery.

In extreme cases, you might even have to rebrand your business and get a new domain name. All goodwill and organic traffic will be lost and you need to rebuild everything. That takes a lot of effort and time.

You might have to embark on a costly rebranding campaign to inform your audience of your new website.

How do websites get on the search engine’s blacklist?

There are various reasons why a site is blacklisted.  

Blackhat SEO tactics. For the purpose of ranking higher on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP), some SEO specialists might adopt practices to duped them to rank the page higher. Tactics like cloaking, excessive link exchanges are some of them. You can read more of some blackhat SEO tactics.

Spammy website. A site can be spammy due to malware putting out spammy content. This might result in unhappy site visitors and this doesn’t go down well with Google if the site gets discovered.

Website spreading malware. In some instances, your site could be used to download malware to unsuspecting users. Once this is picked up by the search engines, users will be shown a red screen to warn users from proceeding further. Your website will be quarantined and eventually blacklisted.

Website that plagiarizes. If a website is stealing content from other sites and making it it’s own. The artificial intelligence capabilities of the search engine can quickly and easily pick it up. Being blatant about it and you will soon get blacklisted too.

The sad and truthful part is that you might not even know that you have been banned by the search engines.

It has been reported that typically a malware could be residing on a website for 3 to 6 months without the website owner’s knowledge. Things start to surface when either you are notified by your web host or worst still by your customers and potential prospects.

It is not the search engine’s role to remove malicious code. That will fall onto the lap of the website owner. If you have Google Search Console in place, you could get a warning.

Take a proactive approach

Instead of a reactive approach, which is challenging and detrimental, we would recommend a proactive approach – have an alert mechanism, link your site up with Google Search Console, and implement an anti-malware solution.

We believe as a site owner; you should be the “first to know” of anything that is happening on your website (including the presence of malware) instead of the search engines or anyone else. News, especially negative ones, when made public, can be hard to manage and might spin out of control, resulting in negative publicity.

Reputation is priceless. Why risk it?

One way to avoid it is to deploy an alert mechanism. Once an alert is triggered, you can start your own internal investigation and quickly rectify and contain the problem.

Next is to have a good anti-malware solution to nip the problem at the bud. If anti-malware is in place on your site, it would be able to pick up the malware and tackle the malware before it can do its damage.

We can help you to get you ready and avoid trouble with the search engines.

If, however, you are already on the search engine’s blacklist, you can head to Google Search Console to take the necessary actions to remove the malware if any is present. Next, you would need to check on all login credentials and remove infected files manually. Or if you have an uninfected backup, you can restore it. Just confirm there is no malware in the backup.

Once you have taken the preliminary effort to make your website “good” again, you can then initiate a removal request through Google Search Console. These might take days.

Let us know if you need any assistance in the above area.

If done well, SEM could establish you as an authority in your niche, and eventually, bring more business for you.

For starters, in this post, we will limit our content creation to writing for a blog. It is more involved than most might think.

In the physical offline world, you just need to create a story fit for human consumption. However, a post in the online world, have also to satisfy search engine ranking criteria, and fend off competition.

On the web, there are many blogs with similar content. Besides paying for ads, how can you rise above the crowd? While ranking higher in a Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is essential. However, we shouldn’t be too fixated on ranking top of the list. The holy grail is the click through to your website, this is what we should be actually focussing on.

Let’s go back to basics and understand how a customer’s purchase journey. From there, we can get some clue as to how we can get them to visit our website.

When a user searches on a particular topic, many results will appear on the SERP.

Assuming you are one of the links that appear on the page, how would you get the user to click on the link that leads back to your page? That is the first hurdle you need to overcome. If the link is not clicked, it doesn’t really matter how good the article, it is not going to be read by that web surfer.

Fortunately, there is more than one way to increase the likelihood of that click happening. In this post, we will confine ourselves to optimizing the content for that precious click.

The first step is to brainstorm on some keywords and key phrases that your visitor would likely most likely input in the search engine bar.

With the keyword list, you have generated, you next check the volume and competitiveness of each keyword or phrase.

Once you have narrowed down to a few keywords, you go back to the search engine and enter your keywords.

On the search engine results page (SERP), Ignore the results from paid Ads, you need to look at the top listed sites, and understand why they are ranked higher?

After reviewing your competitive results, you would be able to craft a more persuasive, captivating headline that would pique the visitor’s interest to want to click it.

Once you get that precious click, you want to look at providing useful, relevant content. The content not only has to be human friendly but also search engine friendly. The latter is what we termed as on-page SEO.

In the next paragraph, we will look in detail where being friendly entails from the content perspective.

Human friendly

By being human friendly, your article has to be easy to read. As a baseline, your blog post needs to be appropriately structured. There must be a good flow and proper use of English.

Spelling errors should be kept at a minimum or ideally non-existent. These errors could negatively impact the credibility of the author.

Using synonyms will prevent your post from sounding repetitive.

Using similes will make your words be more vivid and come alive.

Using metaphors will make complex concepts easier to grasp.

Just like in a mini-series, deploying appropriate hooks in your content will keep your audience reading on.

Whenever possible, having mixed content formats (i.e., using images, videos, infographics) will make your post more interesting for your audience.

Before you launch that post, there are several things you need to check, they would be grammar, spelling errors, and plagiarism.

Remember, at the end of the day, if your blog is not human friendly, your visitor would quickly abandon your site and head for another website, potentially a competitive one.

Search engine friendly

If your website is not search engine friendly, your ranking on search engines will slowly drop. This, in turn, will cause your organic traffic to be reduced to a trickle.

There are over 200+ ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. Some are more important than others.

Using the right keyword and strategically placing them in your post is one ranking factor.

However, you must not overdo it with keywords as overstuffing your post with them can get you penalized and even blacklisted by the search engines. You definitely don’t want that to happen to your site.

Using related keywords will allow search engines to better understand the context of the post, and display the page accordingly.

Take, for example, someone is interested in the animated movie – “Cars”, he will type the word “cars” in the search bar. If the website doesn’t have any related keywords to put the move “cars” in the context of the animation movie, the search engine would most likely return a page on automobiles (i.e., car models, car brands, car dealership, etc.). This is not what the user would want. Hence as a website/blog owner, you need to inject related keywords to help the search engine what your site is all about.

The length of the posts also plays a part in influencing search result pages. Your various posts need to have the appropriate length. A post of 300 words would be an excellent baseline to start.

While the list above is not exhaustive. You can now better appreciate the various steps that go into creating a human and search engine friendly post.

Remember, all your readers have choices and their arrival on your page is cerntainly not entirely by chance.

You have worked hard (i.e., doing your research to create compelling headlines) to get your visitor onto your page. You reward your reader with quality content, and hopefully, in return, they can reward you by becoming a fan of your webpage.

All of this can only happened through well-conceived planning and preparation.

With can help you with your content creation, shall we have a conversation soon? Contact us today!