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SEO for Large Websites Part II

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

In our first blog post of this 3 part series named SEO for Large Websites Part I, we touched on the importance of defining ranking objectives (from the onset) to allow the theme to resonate with continuity and planting the seeds of relevance that will eventually becomes pillars of stability for eventual rankings.Now, in Part II, it’s time to move on to the following metrics (that are equally as important) to round out the summary of what a optimal blueprint would look like for creating a robust SEO campaign for a large website (which ultimately has different needs than a smaller website).

How to Lose a Prospect’s Attention in 5 Seconds or Less

By Kelley Robertson in Featured

When you make contact with a new prospect-either by telephone or in a face-to-face meeting-you have an extremely short window of time to connect with them. If you fail to achieve this they will quickly tune you out. Here are several things you can do to lose your prospect’s attention in the first five seconds of the conversation:

1. Start a telephone conversation with, “Hi, how are you?”
2. Open your conversation by introducing yourself, your company and what you do.
3. Make small talk about “stuff” you see in their office (awards, plaques, photos, etc).
4. Give them an overview of your products and services.
5. Explain how your product or service will benefit them.
6. Tell them what other companies you have worked with.
7. Show them the awards and accolades your company product has received.
8. Give them a brochure that outlines your key products or services.

Unfortunately, most sales people fail to effectively open the sales conversation with a new prospect. Most of the sales calls and meetings I have been subjected to over the years have started with one or more of the above. However, the moment your prospect senses that you are trying to sell them something that they don’t need or want they will tune you out and look for a way to disengage or disconnect from the call. They don’t care about you. They don’t want to know about your company. They don’t want to listen to you talk about your products or service. They want a solution to a problem. They want to know how you can help them improve their business. Here is how you do that.

Focus your attention on the prospect!

It may sound simple but most sales people don’t get it. They still believe that selling means talking at great length about their company, their product or their service. However, truly effective salesmanship is all about asking the prospect the right questions and demonstrating that you can help them solve a particular problem or issue. That means you need to direct ALL of your attention on their situation and resist the opportunity to talk about your company or your offering.

If you are making cold calls you can accomplish this by modifying your opening statement or voice mail message. State a specific problem they are likely facing (based on your experience or research). For example,

“Mr. Big, if you’re like other companies in ABC industry, I suspect that you (fill in the blank with the problem). If this is the case, call me at 800-555-1212 and I might be able to suggest a solution. By the way, it’s Kelley calling and my number is 800-555-1212.”

This also applies to face-to-face meetings as well. When you meet with a new prospect for the first time, the last thing you want to do is to start blathering away about your product or service. Instead, open the conversation by asking, “Mrs. Prospect, many of our clients are currently experiencing (insert the problem here). How does that compare to your company’s situation?” This demonstrates that you are knowledgeable of their business and/or the industry and it gives your prospect the opportunity to tell you about their chief concerns.

Over the last fourteen years I have learned that most people will tell you anything you want to know providing you give them a reason to do so. Launching into a product demo does not achieve this but showing interest in their business does. The key is to develop and ask high-quality questions.

Several years ago I worked with a company who regularly participated in industry trade shows. I observed them at one show and noticed that their sales reps simply talked about the products that people showed interest in. Not surprisingly, their closing ratio was low because in most cases they gave information that was not relevant to that prospect’s situation and that they talked to people who had little or no motivation to buy. After some training, they began asking people a few high-quality questions to determine the people who had problems, challenges, and were seriously interested in their products. They were instructed to let “tire-kickers” look around and focus their time on people who had pressing concerns. At the end of the show their sales were slightly higher but they also had a list of highly- qualified people to follow up with and many of these individuals ended up buying from my client.

Here’s the bottom line. The more time you spend talking about your product, the less inclined a prospect will want to continue that conversation. The more you focus your attention on their situation, their problems and demonstrating how you can help them improve their business, the more you differentiate yourself from the competition.

You only have few moments to connect with a prospect so keep it brief. Keep it focused. Keep it about them. And you will keep their attention.

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Kelley Robertson, author of The Secrets of Power Selling helps sales professionals reach their targets and quotas in any economy. Receive a FREE copy of 100 Ways to Increase Your Sales by subscribing to his free newsletter at www.Fearless- Selling.ca. Kelley conducts workshops and speaks regularly at sales meetings and conferences. For information on his programs contact him at 905- 633-7750 or Kelley@Fearless-Selling.ca.

How To Search Engine Optimize (SEO) an AJAX or Web 2.0 Site

By Daryl Quenet in Featured

One of the three major pillars of Search Engine Optimization is a website’s content, and onsite content optimization. All of the major search engine ranking algorithms have components that relate to the content that is contained on the website. Typically these components relate to Keyword Densities, number of words, content location, and sometimes age of content. In regards to the code that the content is contained in that falls under the topic of structure and not content, and will not be discussed in this article.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is an advanced web development method which can be used to create more responsive and interactive dynamic websites. AJAX accomplishes this by making object request calls back to the web server without having to refresh your browser, these object calls are then processed and are typically used to update the content of the page on your website that is currently being viewed. For the sake of this Article I’m going to ignore the XML component of AJAX as the search engines never view any of the XML data. Websites that use Javascript to manipulate content without using AJAX will also suffer from the issues described.

Internet Marketing: The #1 Marketing Mistake Made By 75% of Online Business Owners

By Donna Gunter in Featured

Every day, my inbox is filled with emails promoting yet another new marketing strategy or promising results that will cure all of my marketing ills. Most of the strategies are flash-in-the-pan — here today and gone tomorrow because the next new strategy has been discovered. A few newer strategies have proven to have staying power over time, like social networking, which took a long time to grow on me. I’ve learned the hard way not to be an early adopter of new marketing strategies — I tend to sit back and watch the fallout to see if something is worth my time and energy.

As I reflect back on my early years in business, I often felt like a dog chasing my tail. I used to run and run quickly in one direction chasing one marketing idea, and then reverse course, chasing my tail in another direction when hearing about the next “greatest thing.” What resulted from my helter-skelter marketing? Not much. I was going in too many directions at once and trying to keep too many balls in the air to create a truly successful marketing plan that really helped promote my business.

Here’s the marketing secret I wished I’d learned early on: Adopt the marketing strategy that best fits with your gifts, talents, and interests, or in other words: Do what you’re good at. Yep, it’s that simple. I knew that this was good advice for pursuing a career or starting a business, but I never realized how well it applied to marketing my company.

Roughly 4 years into my business it suddenly dawned on me that I had always been a good writer. Supervisors, teachers, friends, and colleagues had often complimented me on my writing, but I dismissed the praise because I found writing to be a taxing chore that gave me a massive headache. It wasn’t until I learned how to write for myself in my own voice, rather than structuring my writing to meet the criteria of others, that I truly began to enjoy putting pen to paper (or, words on a screen, if you will).

This love for writing made me a natural for my now-favorite marketing strategy, article marketing. Why do I love it? Because it’s easy for me — sometimes scarily easy. However, I discovered that having a skill for a strategy isn’t enough to be successful. Even at this point my marketing continued to be hit-or-miss. There was still something missing from the mix.

After hearing a great talk by a coaching colleague about how he structured his time, I finally realized what was the key compoent missing from my marketing strategy — and the missing component was the same for the bulk of the other entrepreneurs sitting in the room with me. The #1 marketing mistake made by the majority of online business owners is: Lack of consistency. Once you determine where your talent lies and how you can integrate that into a workable marketing plan, then you need to commit to implementing that plan consistently over time.

Could it possibly be that simple? In a nutshell, yes. I committed to publishing my ezine every Thursday morning. I committed to writing one new article each week for the ezine. I committed to syndicating one new article each week through my article submission service. I committed to repurposing my ezine content to my blog. I committed to making 1-2 new posts on my blog each week. This is only the tip of the iceburg describing what I do for marketing, but consistency was the catalyst that propelled me to a successful online marketing strategy that I’ve been implementing now for 5 years.

My results? I no longer chase after clients — they find me online. 100% of my business comes from my web site, internet marketing, or word-of-mouth referrals — I do no in-person networking at all any longer. My web site screens out those clients who aren’t a good fit and invites those who are. I enjoy running a thriving business from my home office with only a 5-second commute. I create a work schedule that works best for me and my husband, which gives me the flexibility to leave my office early if I want and catch a matinee with him without having to submit a vacation request form to my supervisor. I am happy and healthy and no longer have recurring bouts of colitis and depression from working in a miserable situation. I make more money now than I ever made by working for someone else.

Take inventory of your skills and abilities, and see how you can easily integrate those into a marketing strategy that will be easy for you to implement. Once you decide on your strategy, commit to implementing it consistently over time, and enjoy your results!

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Online Business Coach and Internet Marketing Strategist Donna Gunter helps baby boomers create profitable online businesses that they love. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, at ==> TurbochargeYourOnlineMarketing.com

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14 Steps to Good Business Website Design

By Neil Holley-Williams in Featured

How important is Website Design? Your Website needs to look professional and trustworthy in order to create buyer confidence. A poorly designed Website will cost you sales.

So where do you need to start ?

1. Choose a Domain Name.

A domain name is the web address of your website (i.e. www.bizhelp24.com). All websites must have a domain name before they can go live on the Internet.

If you have an advertising budget to promote your business, then it is beneficial to choose a domain name that is the same as your business or gives people an idea of what you sell. Alternatively, if you do not have a large budget, it may be more beneficial to use a domain name that includes a ‘keyword’ so that when people search for something specific your site has a better chance of being found.

For example if your site is about relieving back pain, a domain such as ‘www.backpainrelief.xxx’ will be more likely to show up in searches.

Either way, you need to use a name that benefits your long-term business aims, and not something that is restrictive. E.g. ‘wellheeled123.com’, might be a clever name for a business that sells exclusive shoes. But if that business then diversifies into other products, the website name is no use anymore.

2. Design Your Home Page.

The Home Page is probably the most important page. It’s the first page your visitors will see, so you need to make a good impression. On this page, you should communicate who you are and why you have a website. You want to make sure that your message is clear and not lost in many long paragraphs. Try to divide your text into sections that you can mark with headers in a larger font or using bold text. Don’t underline text as this can make it look like a link.

One of the most important aspects of the text on your home page is the “Call to Action”.

“Call to Action” is the text that tells your visitors what you want them to do next. Do you want them to call and schedule a consultation, visit your shop, or just browse the other pages in your website? Make this command prominent by changing its color or increasing the font size.

Also consider uploading an image or two onto your Home Page. A colorful image will help to captivate your visitors and they will be more likely to continue browsing your site.

You need a simple Home Page that clearly communicates your website’s purpose and goals.

3. Design Your About Us Page.

The About Us page of your website should be used to reveal a little more about yourself or your business. Consider any additional details that might be important to your customers.

You should also consider having a Map of where you are located. Having a Map on your About Us page creates a very professional feel for your website and makes your small business look big.

If you do not operate out of a physical location, think about other things that your customers would find interesting about your business. Perhaps you have an exciting company background that you could share or more details regarding the services you offer.

Whatever you decide to write, remember to keep the text in short paragraphs.

4. Design Your Contact Us Page.

You are now getting very close to having designed a good 3-page site. The last element that all websites should have is a Contact Us page.

Include the best way to contact you directly on this page. Make your phone number or email address prominent on the page, perhaps with different font styles.

Make sure to keep this page simple though, as you don’t want your customers to get distracted by other content. Ensure each page in your site has something valuable to offer. Don’t design ‘Pretty, But Useless’. Let’s step back and realise that a web page exists to provide something that’s useful or interesting to visitors. If your page doesn’t have that, then you must fix that problem before you worry about how to present it.

What are you offering to your visitors? Why is it worth their time to visit your site? Focus on that before you move on to how it should look.

5.Keep Advertising Ratio 25% or Less

Amazingly, I see some sites that are almost nothing but ads. We know that no one would turn on the telly if it were just adverts, or buy a magazine if it were just ads and no articles. By the same token, a website also has to have more than ads if it’s to be successful. If you are running ads on your website, then you should ensure that the ratio to editorial is no more than 25% to 75%. Your visitors came to your site to see what YOU had to offer.

If you have affiliations and partnerships that are relevant to your site, then by all means include them. Don’t do what I saw recently on a website for a large fabric retailer where the web designer had put her friend’s Aromatherapy Massage practice in as a link. It’s not professional.

6. Don’t Distract With Blinking/Scrolling Text Or Auto Play Video/Audio.

Animation and sounds are distracting. How can anyone concentrate on reading what’s on your site when there are things flying around the page? It’s like trying to read a newspaper when someone’s poking you in the shoulder repeatedly.

Scrolling text does nothing to serve the visitor. If it’s on a site it’s because the site owner thought, “Let me show how cool I am.” Don’t design the site for yourself, design it for the people who will actually use it.

If you have relevant audio or video on your site, make it so the visitor can play it when THEY want, not at start up.

7. Don’t Use Image Backgrounds.

Full Image backgrounds mean “amateur”. A site like this can also have extremely slow page-loading times. This is NOT a professional image, and will turn visitors away.

8. Put Thought Into Organization.

Think about what content you have and how it should be organized. This is just as important as what your site looks like, so spend time on it. You are not doing your visitors a favour if everything is thrown up higgledy-piggedly, and they have to leap about the site looking for what they want instead of being informed.

9. Minimize Clicking!

This is so important. Put as few clicks between the visitor and the information as possible. Clicking around will make the visitor abandon the site and go elsewhere

10. Limit Page Length To 2 Screens.

This is where it gets a bit difficult. While you should put a lot into the design to limit clicking, you should also avoid going too far in the opposite direction by putting too much on one page.

You should normally limit a page to 2 screens. Articles by their nature, like this, are exceptions to that rule.

11. Include a Navigation Menu on Every Page.

Always include a menu on the page. This allows the visitor to start all over again at ‘Home’, or to click on another page that interests them.

Don’t put navigation links only at the bottom of pages, because then users will have to scroll down to the bottom to get to them (unless your pages are very short).

12. Website Readability.

A line of text should be no more than about 600 pixels wide. What does THAT mean ? Well it means that your website page should be no wider than say the middle two thirds of your monitor screen. The reason that newspapers and magazines are printed in columns is to make the lines short, so after you read one line, it’s easy to find the start of next one when your eyes flick left.

The problem with wide layout is that the content will be too wide to read easily for those visitors with really large screens as the content expands to fit the screen (or window).

13. Use Contrasting Colours with Text. It is hard to read light text if it is on a light background, or dark text on a dark background.

There are also some combinations that just don’t work. For example I came across a website just yesterday that insisted I try to read a bright green font on a bright red background. I persisted only because the company owner was seeking my advice and help.

14. Seek Advice.

If all this seems too much to take in, remember you can always call in the professionals. A good designer will take all of the above into account, and much more if he or she is considering the area of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for your website. He wants it to work for you. There are many companies around who will do all the above and much more; for just a few hundred pounds.

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Neil Holley-Williams is a Specialist Designer of Small Business Websites and Business Identity Products. Neil is also studying advanced SEO techniques for use with his clients. For more information visit http://www.hwmarketing.co.uk

The Google Shuffle?

By Jonathan Anthony in Featured

Has your website recently sunk to “Davy Google Jones Jr’s Locker”?

Webmasters and SEO gurus have been scratching our heads for a few weeks now trying to figure out what has been happening to Google’s SERP rankings. After scouring blogs and forums for the last few days, it would seem that there is no real consensus. In fact, it seems that no one is willing to even speculate much as to what is happening. To date there has not been any official word from Google. We all know that Google does not announce their algorithm updates, much to the chagrin of webmasters everywhere.

Google Gets All Twitter-y

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

A year ago we were wondering why Google didn’t have an official Twitter account. This year they’ve made up for it by creating 44 of them. Yes, that’s right, Google now has forty four unique Twitter accounts, according to a post on the official Google blog today:

“Like lots of you, we’ve been drawn into Twitter this year. After all, we’re all about frequent updates ourselves, and there’s lots happening around here that we want to share with you.”

Here’s a couple of the main ones you should be following:

@Google – their central account

@GoogleNews – latest headlines via Google News

@GoogleAtWork - solutions for IT and workplace productivity

@YouTube – for YouTube fans

@GoogleMaps – uses, tips, mashups for Google Maps

@AdSense – for online publishers using AdSense

@AdWordsHelper – for AdWords questions and tech issues

@GoogleAnalytics – resources for users of Google Analytics

Any new Google Twitter accounts will be added to their official blog post, so get bookmarking!

It Takes A Village To Measure Social Applications

By Jodi McDermott in Featured

Have you been lured in by “Texas Hold’em” or “Mafia Wars”? This week I was analyzing a branded application on Facebook using three different data sources: Facebook’s native analytics, Google Analytics and Atlas. One could merely use Facebook’s native analytics platform for tracking app usage, notifications, installs and uninstalls, but you can also glean a lot more from the canvas page than you might think if you creatively use your Web analytics tools to mine some of the data.

The “Canvas page” is the application page that is hosted by the application developer. You can insert a Web analytics tag on the page and mine social graph data about users (if they have granted you permission when installing the app). Data points that are accessible include age, location, gender, interests and number of friends. For the exhaustive list (which might scare you — honestly) visit the Facebook developer wiki as it may provoke you to go change your own personal privacy settings.

Tags that you place on the Canvas page allow for grabbing these data points and inserting them into the URL as either directories or query string variables that you can later mine through your Web analytics tool. Keep in mind that you want to be concise about “bucketing” information so that the data is manageable for analysis. For example, capturing “male” or “female” only adds two elements to a list for analysis, but “city” could add hundreds if not thousands of elements for analysis. Depending on the tool that you use, cardinality may or may not be an issue (something to keep in mind before you go data-collection crazy).

Facebook provides some good tools for looking at the application data in that they will provide the “median” for how other apps are performing across their network. While this doesn’t tell you how you might be doing within a specific segment, it at least provides a benchmark for comparison.

A few pitfalls to note in Facebook’s application analytics:

• “Usage” statistics are reporting in PST while “Features” are reported in GMT (these two reports are just tabs away from each other). One of the cardinal rules in any Web analytics implementation is ensuring that your Web servers are time-synchronized. Ending up with logs (and reports) that are off by seconds, minutes and in this case hours can really throw off your data analysis. My guess is that many application developers or analysts may not see the footnote and have no idea that they are aligning two different time zones of data to each other.
• Definitions aren’t well-defined anywhere within Facebook (that I could find). Understanding how this data is tabulated and filtered would be very helpful to the analyst when trying to interpret the results.

Regardless, Facebook applications provide the application developer with a litany of data points for analysis about those users who are installing and using the application. For brands, this is huge! Just one look at the granularity of information provided within the Facebook API and you’ll see that it is a marketer’s dream (or data overload, depending on your perspective).

I’ve only scratched the surface on what is possible in analyzing here. The point is that utilizing your existing in-house Web analytics tools in conjunction with Facebook’s offerings will provide a more in-depth analysis than using either analytics package in “stand-alone” mode.

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Jodi McDermott is the Director of Data Strategy for Clearspring Technologies and blogs at http://widgetanalytics.wordpress.com. Contact her at Jodi@clearspring.com or follow her on Twitter.

Chasing Bing: The Truth behind the Hype

By admin in Featured

In recent weeks, we’ve noticed a surge in clients calling us to ask questions like “what’s up with Bing?” Or, “are you optimizing for Bing?” Even “are you taking advantage of Bing?”

In other words, people want to know that their search engine optimization company is taking special steps to ensure adequate representation on the newly created, much hyped search engine. And to answer the first question, what’s up is MSN’s umpteenth attempt to create a search engine that garners a significant amount of market share from its more formidable rivals – namely Google and Yahoo!. Microsoft has not been shy to promote the new engine; the current advertising campaign is estimated to cost around $100 million.

How To Tweak And Change Your Web Copy For More Sales On Your Commercial Website

By Malcolm Leyshon in Featured

Are you a commercial website owner who has been struggling to make sales? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one, but the good news is that by making a few tweaks and changes to your web copy you can expect to get better and better results in terms of sales and sign ups. It doesn’t matter whether you are selling your own product or service, or running an affiliate marketing website.

One mistake that a lot of inexperienced writers do when producing web copy is focus on their need to sell their products, and not on the needs and sensibilities of their target market. What you need to do is to try to see things from the perspective of one of your commercial website visitors, and also to understand the apparently contradictory feelings that people have about buying and selling.

In the rest of this article I will look at those feelings people have about the buying and selling process, and how you can respond to them and harness them to sell more goods on your commercial website.

The first thing to understand about buying and selling is that people are emotionally driven. People love shopping and they buy for emotional reasons and use logic to justify their decision to purchase. So people love to shop, but – and this is where life gets interesting for commercial website owners – people hate the feeling that they are being sold to where they have not first given their consent to the seller. Consent is only given in an atmosphere of trust.

So how can this knowledge be applied to writing web copy for a commercial website?

Probably the first thing you want to do is to stop thinking that you are writing “sales copy”. Too often website owners slip into hyped up sales talk when trying to push their products on visitors to their websites.

Selling Affiliate Products

If you are selling affiliate products for commission one option would be to offer a range of similar products and adopt an editorial style in which you write comparative product reviews and talk freely about the pros and cons of each of the product products. By writing truthfully about the weak points, as well as describing the benefits of each product, you’ll be giving the reader everything that is necessary for him or her to make an informed decision. They will feel in control of the buying process and the issue of being sold to is largely removed.

Make sure your writing is friendly, warm and open, as you want your readers to both like you and feel that you like them to. It will give your readers the impression that you are batting on their side, which creates an atmosphere in which trust can be allowed to develop. The combination of being trusted and being liked is a powerful device for demolishing sales resistance on the Internet.

Selling Your Own Product

If you are selling a product that you have developed yourself, think in terms of the kind of problem it will solve, and who it will solve the problem for. Now, instead of trying to sell the product, focus on the problem. Don’t take the problem for granted but hammer home to your readers the fact that they also have this problem.

Your next step should be to talk about why the problem persists and then paint a picture of what life would be like if the problem were removed and how that would be of benefit to the reader.

It is only at this stage, once you have set the scene, that you introduce yourself and your product and talk up the unique benefits that it offers as a solution to the problem have been discussing. Now that your readers have the solution to the problem, the time has come to tell them what action they need to take in order to purchase the product.

By taking things in this order, you avoid the mistake of hard selling the product from the beginning of your encounter with your prospective customers. This gives you space to educate them about the problem, the benefits of solving the problem, and then the unique benefits of your particular solution. You will have set the right emotional tone and then supplied the benefits that reinforce the positive emotions and justify the purchase with logic.

Writing editorials style product reviews, or problem-solution style articles is a much better way to reach out to your website visitors and provide them with both valuable content and positive emotional reinforcement to create an atmosphere conducive to generating sales on your commercial website.

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Malcolm Leyshon – For more information about how to start a home business and get a Recession Proof Business with Internet Work from Home Ideas and Opportunities available at http://www.malcolmleyshon.com where you will find a wide range of tried and tested ideas including a daily newsletter and a free 325 page e-book.

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