Newsletter is a great way to connect with your existing site users and attract new signups. I will discuss some of the essential points that are considered important from Newsletter optimization point of view.

First step of newsletter is to research important keywords, phrases that will be matter of interest for your target user base. You need to develop the newsltter topics and the article contents with the keywords . Try to keep a safe keyword density of 2-4% for the newsletter page.

SEO of Newsletter

• All HTML coding must use in-line styles and not CSS
• The code must pass W3 validation
• Make each newsletter relevant and interesting enough— do proof read test for grammatical, spelling mistakes, links.
• Target less competitive keyword phrases
• Add keywords in the URL, title and initial paragraph of content
• Primary call to action must appear in the top left of the newsletter so it is visible to clients who preview the message.
• Update title attribute for each anchor link
• Add crosslinks to imporatnt related pages of your website
• Add links to previous newsltter web editions
• Links to important social bookmarking sites
• Unsubscribe link on e-mail newsletter and manage newsletter web page.
• Always post web version of newsletter in resource area of your website

Newsletter Design Elements

• Template width must be around 650 pixels
• The templates should not be larger than 100KB with sample images and text included
• The template must include the following
  • Company logo and contact details
  • Forward to Friend
  • Join us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Unsubscribe details

Technical Requirement

• Use of valid e-mail header, valid return-path (where bounces are sent)
• Reverse DNS — it’s crucial to ensure we have RDNS set up for every IP we deliver email from. RDNS involves a receiving mail server looking at the IP address your email is coming from and then checking to see if there is a registered domain associated with it. It’s a requirement for most receiving mail servers and whitelists.
• The templates must display correctly in the most common email clients including Outlook, Eudora, Opera, Hotmail, Gmail, Live and Yahoo mail
• The newsletter should successfully pass testing through Spam Assasin

Newsletter management

• Process all bounce – Keep track of all soft bounces. As soon as an email address soft bounces 3 times, consider it permanent and remove them from list.
• Study and take help from sites like http://www.email-standards.org/, http://postmaster.live.com/Services.aspx, http://postmaster.aol.com/, http://www.spamcop.net/anonsignup.shtml and more such sites to keep abreast of mail issues and design issues of newsletter.

Newsletter Tracking

• You can easily track who reads email, clicks links and arrives at your landing pages by using tracking code or web based tracking like Atomic Mail Sender.
• You can track page statistics like how many are viewed by placing a transparent image at footer of the message with a unique file name. Each time that image is loaded is a time that your newsletter is opened/viewed. You can write code to view that analytic code statistics or from web analytics software.

<img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com/track.asp?id=” width=”1″ height=”1″/>

• You can track click-throughs by giving every link in the newsltter a unique variable that is counted when they get to your site.