This is great if you’re like me and you’re constantly changing page titles, h1 tags and filenames in effort to get the most out of your SEO. On a large site google can take weeks to entirely re-spider the site, especially if you’ve neglected your robots.txt file and have something like sendEmail?address=blah@blah.com in 100 variations on your site. Almost worse, is that it normally takes google ages to notice that these are gone once you’ve fixed this problem.

All these issues can be solved by posting a XML Sitemap to google’s Webmaster Tool.
“But wait”, you say, “I’m lazy and or confused. Isn’t there some tool that will generate this XML Sitemap for me on demand and output a neat little sitemap.xml file for me? Why of course there is. There’s even a website that will do it for you, although at the time of publication it wasn’t available. I used the free tool Site Map Builder. It was free as in beer, scanned my site real quick-like, ditched the JavaScript:function(); links and output a pretty little XML file for me to post to google. It’s worth mentioning that google has a python-based script that will do this as well, and I’ve seen some tutorials on adding this to a cronjob so that your site gets reindexed automatically and your sitemap.xml is auto-updated, but for most purposes, I think this GUI tool works just great.

I’ve had a look at:

• Constant Contact
• Sparklist
• Vertical Response

Constant contact I haven’t used that much, but I’ve used sparklist a lot. As of today I’m officially advocating Vertical Response. It’s the best. Seriously. If you look at the feature set, they’re all pretty similar, but when it comes down to it, implimentation is what counts, and Vertical Response takes the cake, for a number of reasons.

1. The built-in HTML editor is spot-on. All the services give you loads of templates and a basic WYSIWYG editor to manipulate them. Generally I think those things are pretty anoying. Few of them have the capabilities of Dreamweaver, which isn’t even a particularly amazing product in my opinion, and I’ve always just fealt they were more anying than anything else. However, Vertical Response’s built-in editor is quite good, a little slow, but it has most of the features you need. Sure I could just do it in my favorite text editor, but inevitably the client will ask you for a sleight  margin adjustment or a font change or something, and it’s just a pain to copy-paste back and forth. The Vertical Response editor is slick. You can tab between the HTML and the WYSIWYG editor. The icons make sense and basically the software just works how you think it should, rather than some proprietary way that doesn’t. A WYSIWYG editor that I have to “learn” in order to use, is just a waste of my time, and I’m not going to bother with it.

2. Their list management is great. It allows you to import with either “update” or “overwrite” mode. This is great if you have clients that like to keep their primary contact list in Outlook and like to send you CSV files to import. It also let’s you import custom fields and make lists based on matches for these, making segmentation a snap.

3. The implementation is totally slick. Help is always just a click away and there are video walkthroughs which are very professionally done. Everything works how you expect it to, which is the basic problem I’ve had with other services.

All the other stuff is there too. You’ve got your link tracking, your “view site in browser” option, your bouncebacks stats, email view metrics and all that.

Vertical Response has everything that you’d expect from a newsletter mailing service, with none of the usual quirks that always seem to plague these sorts of services. For example, in sparklist if you want to send a newsletter to every segment EXCEPT one, it creates a mailing for each of these segments. Okay that’s fine except when you want to make a change to the mailing, you’ve got to go through and change it on each mailing. What the hell! If you want to manually remove someone from your user list without losing their email entirely, there’s not a “no-send” option, you have to add them to a “block list”. Nice going sparklist, that’s really logical.

Vertical Response even had a few things I wasn’t expecting. The TEXT email version has a button that says “Copy from HTML”!! Okay it wasn’t perfect and I had to edit it a little bit, but nonetheless, good job VR!

I’m very satisfied with the service. Migration was a snap, just import a CVS or even an Outlook data file. It auto-detects duplicated and will output a list of failed addresses so you can inspect them by hand and remove that extra ‘ that somehow got in there. Puting users into segments took no time at all, and creating a mailing is done in a very straightforward walkthrough mode, which allows you can save and then come back to later.

And of course if you want to, there’s always the HTML source right there for you to manipulate. Saving you the tedious time figuring out how their editor works when all you want is to add a style=’margin: 5px;’ to an image. Vertical Response has finally come out with a product that takes the torture out of newsletter development. Finally! Thank the great Flying Spaghetti Monster that somebody finally got it right. It’s about time.