Almost every SEO professional has a different opinion on how to perform effective SEO, but unless you know what the basic functions of SEO are your site may be missing important elements that could affect its overall ranking. The perfect SEO plan uses all of the visible and behind the page (HTML code) elements to build a Meta content driven map for the search engine robots to use in crawling and indexing your site. Making your site easy to crawl and understand for the search engines will be the difference between getting your site ranked well and getting ranked poorly, or in some cases not ranked at all! So what are the basic elements your site should have to ensure it is crawled and indexed? The use of DHTML or flash roll over buttons and drop down menus should be a priority on your “do not do list”.

A few years ago if your site didn”t have drop down navigation menus or flashy looking roll over menu buttons then your site just wasn”t cool. Lets forget that from an SEO stand point alone that both DHTML and flash roll over buttons and drop down menus are ranking killers as most people just find them complicated to use or in some cases even confusing. Another big “do not do” are frames pages. If your site has a frames page as its home page, then you can forget about getting any top search engine placement. Besides the SEO affects, the use of frames pages cause problems with printing, bookmarks and even when emailing a link from a frames page. The best course of action for SEO and ease of use is to use “includes”.

Your Meta structure should contain: title, description, keywords, and robots. Your Title tag should be no longer than 70-90 characters and be a descriptive title of what the page is about. Avoid using stop words like; “and” “the” “of” and “a”.

Your Description tag should be unique for each page and be a summary of each of your page’s content as it relates to your site and should be no longer than 120 characters, and should include a keyword or phrase.

Your keywords tag should reflect the content on your page with the first keyword being the main focus of the page content. Use as few keywords as possible (7-10 per page); many search engines consider the use of large amount of keywords to be spamming. Your content should make use of keywords throughout your site moderately. Create and make use of a robots.txt file. The robots.txt file is an efficient method of telling the search engine robots which pages and directories they shouldn’t crawl and index.

Anil Vij is an Expert Author and an Online Marketing Specialist. Visit http://www.onewaylinkexchange.net for more information.

During good economic times it is important to know what your customer is thinking, however in uncertain economic times it is “crucial”.

As market conditions change, it is important to understand the following questions you can simply ask your customers. Being sure you are on top of your customer’s concerns, by doing research, is a powerful information-gathering tool. These questions will help you understand how you need to change with the current market conditions.

* What are they worried about?
* Where are they focusing; where are they focusing their buying?
* How are they responding to the recession?
* How are they defining value?

The take-away is that you have understood your customers and can change your approach. Based on your research you may have to give more reassurances that the purchase is not risky. Perhaps use more testimonials, show them that you are the expert/authority to lead them through these times and provide them with tangible ROI.

It’s key to remember: People DO spend but their behaviors change and so should you.

I thought it would be helpful to list some examples of things you might find while doing your research. You should strive to get even more specific information from your customer — here are the general trends you might encounter:

* Your customers plan on spending less vigorously than they did before but they *are* spending (find out where they are spending)
* Your customers are applying more scrutiny than they did before
* They are reluctant to make big purchases
* Your customers need lots of reassurance to make their purchase (ROI, guarantees, etc.)
* People think maintenance rather than expansion

Now, it is up to you.

You may want to change the products you sell or emphasize the products that match the research you found. For instance, if your customer is focusing on maintenance, what products can you present to them? (Ex: virtualization, managed services, etc.)

You may also want to repackage what you have or focus on smaller sales; make the chunks bite-sized rather than focusing on large purchases. Be creative about what you are offering. Provide on-demand or SaaS-type products or simply add a creative offer to an existing solution.

It seems to me that instead of trying to lower price, thus lowering your margins, you need to be adding lots of value to your clients. That is a long-term strategy you should always employ, not only in uncertain economic times.

Ramon provides more marketing information, especially created for the IT VAR industry but also applies to everyone who wants to improve their sales. Stay up-to-date at StreetSmartVAR.com and while you’re there, don’t forget to sign up for Ramon’s popular, no-cost online marketing course!

In relationship marketing, having a good lead-scoring model can help give you a competitive edge for attracting, retaining and successfully developing prospective customers. While the data points in a lead scoring model may differ from business to business, there are a few general qualities and principles that will set you on your way to developing an effective lead scoring model for your company.

A successful lead-scoring platform starts by measuring a person’s attributes and behaviors over time. This can help accurately define a person’s level of interest in your products and services, and whether he or she represents a strong potential sales opportunity.

If a person’s interest appears to be low, they can continue to be fostered and nurtured as a prospect until their interest in your business increases. If your lead-scoring model shows that a prospects interest in your company and its products is high, they can be contacted and developed to turn into potential sales.

Input from your sales department (or just sales data if your company is not large enough to support an entire sales team) is critical to an effective lead-sales program. One of the first things to do when developing your lead-scoring model is to analyze sales data to determine which attributes a prospective customer needs to have to be considered a “hot” lead. This data will be particular to your company and type of business.

Understanding a Lead-Scoring Model

One of the first important things to know when developing a lead scoring model for your company is that the model can, will, and probably should change over time. This is vital for every person in your company to understand. The lead-scoring model for a new start-up company will not be the same when that company is ten years old.

One of the many benefits of a sophisticated lead-scoring model is the insight it can provide regarding the attributes of your best customers. This data may then influence the structure of your lead-scoring model. The more data you add to the model, the better you’ll be able to understand where your best leads come from, what their needs are, and the behavior they exhibit that makes them a good client to your sales force.

When you first develop and implement a lead-scoring model for your business, it may need to be simple and straightforward, such as evaluating prospective customers on the personal information they provided to you (location, gender, job title). As your company expands, you may need to develop a more sophisticated lead-scoring model, which may contain automated programs to monitor activity on websites, email responses and more personalized sales choices and history.

Another thing to keep in mind is that as the lead scoring of a prospective customer changes, the lead scoring model may need to change slightly to adapt to and accommodate the change in your prospect. The lead scoring model for a hot lead will look different as that lead becomes a customer, and moves into a different category in your relationship marketing plan.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A strategic Collaboration Marketing consulting firm empowering business owners to discover and implement Integration, Alliance, and Joint Venture marketing tactics to solve specific business challenges. christian@synertegic.com
http://christianfea.com