Author: Philip O’Hara

CEO, Directory One

I always wonder how many of my customers are successfully responding to sales leads.

Good SEO and internet marketing campaigns may successfully send potential clients their way, but because of the way their offices handle the calls, the lead is dropped. Do they even answer the call at all? Is their receptionist starting with the information gathering process, and is this information then relayed to someone who can close that lead as soon as possible? It may be hard to believe, but a few simple steps at the beginning of the sales process can be the fastest way to increase your sales.

If you answer the phone every time it rings, you can identify and handle the problem accounts more quickly; you also stand a better chance of earning new customers more quickly, as well. When a potential customer calls an SEO company, they want easy access to technical support. They really don’t want to leave a number and wait for a callback. Turning on the answering service should be the absolute last resort for a successful company that uses SEO.

How can you improve your telephone customer service?

1. Hire a competent, courteous receptionist. No matter how large or small your company, it is imperative to make the investment in a quality receptionist. Make sure this staff member is knowledgeable about how to take down lead information, and is also clear about how to refer leads to the appropriate sales professional.
2. Establish a clear process for following up on leads. Whether you use professional salesforce software or prefer to see a clear paper trail, make sure everyone who has contact with customers knows the process for dealing with leads. This means that companies need to understand the importance of quality employee training and continuing professional education.
3. Provide exemplary customer service from day one. You want leads to turn into sales, and sales into longstanding customer relationships, which means your customers need to know your company values them–from the initial phone call and throughout the life of the SEO customer account. Providing a clear path for customer and and technical support, and encourage your clients to contact you with any questions or suggestions they have.

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Author: Jeremy Schooley
PPC Coordinator

Many website owners out there think Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a waste of time and money. The amount of time and money should vary for different goals and niches. The functionality of PPC is useful for every website owner. Here are 10 reasons why.

10. Click fraud has been minimized considerably.
When it comes to PPC, click fraud was the phrase that scared many website owners away. These days, Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. keep a very close eye on the clicks and automatically refund and amounts that accrued from fraudulent clicks.

9. You can expand your PPC as your business expands.
It is very easy to add a new product or service as your website expands into new areas.

8. PPC is perfect for seasonal products and services.
You have the ability to turn on and off campaigns as needed. If you sell Halloween costumes, you can run the campaign in October and turn it off when Halloween is over. The beauty is, once it has been set up, it will still be there next year, just waiting to be turned on.

7. You can set monthly/daily budgets.
PPC allows you to spend your marketing dollars strategically. If you want to test something out, but are only willing to spend $100 on the testing, you can do it easily by setting your budget accordingly.

6. PPC is a great test bed. If you have a new promotion, but are unsure how potential customers will take to it, you can set up separate campaigns with limited budgets just for testing purposes. This can save tremendous amounts of money on marketing a poorly received promotion.

5. PPC campaigns gather tons of useful data.
This is crucial information. It gives you insights to your customer base and changes in the market. You can also use this information to determine what is giving you the best return on investment.

4. PPC is very customizable.
You can spend your money exactly the ways you want to if you take the time to set up the PPC campaigns properly.

3. PPC is another doorway to your site.
If your site is ranking on search engines for certain search queries, then having an ad that shows on the results pages of those queries ads another doorway to you site. This increases the chances of searchers turning into traffic.

2. You only pay when people click.
PPC is like a virtual billboard on the super information highway. The key difference is, with traditional billboards, you pay for how many eyeballs drive past your billboard. With PPC, you pay when they click the ad.

1. PPC brings immediate traffic to a website.
Your website can literally start receiving traffic within its first hours of existence if it is promoted using PPC.

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Author: Henry Adaso
SEO Copywriter

If you think you’ve heard the last of the social media gold rush, think again. LinkedIn, the largest business social networking site, has raised $53 million for its European expansion effort which brings the company’s total estimated value to slightly over $1 billion. That’s good and all, but what does that mean to the rest of us who may never see a billion bucks in this life or the next? Whether you’re looking, find, or get found by others in your niche, there are many ways LinkedIn can be beneficial to your online business.

For starters…

Investor Confidence is Good for Business

This huge investment indicates a great level of confidence investors share in LinkedIn’s business model. They obviously have plenty of faith in the networking site’s long-term growth strategy. Thanks to investory confidence, business marketers who may have been skeptical about LinkedIn’s prospects may soon start saying to themselves, “Hey, if investors can trust them, why shouldn’t I?”

• Global Reach - There are over 23 million professionals on LinkedIn from all walks of life. That’s the  equivalent of the entire population of Texas in your palms! There’s no doubt that, after today’s significant news, millions more will probably tag along. And with LinkedIn’s proposed European expansion,

• Niche Networking - LinkedIn functions as a business directory in that it allows you to find the people with the knowledge and expertise you need to achieve your business goals. You can search for people in your niche based on recommendations, profession, network, etc.

• Improved Visibility - Want to maximize your brand visibility? Then make it a point of duty to develop an extensive web of connections on LinkedIn. For the uninitiated, “connections” are the Myspace equivalent of friends. The more the merrier. After all, people will much rather connect with people their friends find trustworthy. LinkedIn give rank preferences to the most active participant, and not necessarily the member with the most college degrees.

• Easy Connectivity - If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me to forward them a list of my PR contacts, I’d be typing this post from a million-dollar yatch right now. LinkedIn eliminates this problem by incorporating contact sharing into the social networking experience. Your contacts are my contacts.  Your friends are my friends.

• Enhanced SEO Results - LinkedIn allows its members to promote websites on profile pages. This is a smart and inexpensive way to improve search engine optimization results for your online business. So, go ahead, link away to your personal blog, business site, etc. Just be sure to enable “Full View” in your public profile settings.

LinkedIn is quite the unique social networking tool, one that presents online businesses with numerous long-term growth opportunities. So, go forth, search, connect, and be merry.

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Author : Thomson Chemmanoor
SEO Coordinator

As an SEO specialist, I interact with several people in our field from time to time. Some of them seem to have mastered effective SEO practice, but most show no interest in understanding safe optimization techniques that will stand the test of time. I’m completely baffled that such mediocrity can exist and it makes me angry that the average person may not be able to uncover it. Well, not anymore.

If you’re paying an SEO firm for quality service, you deserve nothing less. Here are 10 signs that you may be dealing with a bad SEO company.

1) Doing SEO after the site is designed - Most website owners think the site needs the web design finished first and then you do the SEO later on. But, actually it should be the opposite. Before building the website, SEO should be done first.

2) Does your site have a custom “404 error” page? A “404″ is an error message you get when you follow a link to a web page that doesn’t exist. This is especially important from the search engines point of view.

3) Does your site have a robots.txt file? A robots.txt file provides restrictions to crawlers or search engine bots that crawl the website. Since these bots are automated, and before they check the pages of a website, they check to see if a robots.txt file exists that prevents them from accessing certain pages which you restrict from indexing.

4) Duplicate content - If your site has duplicate content within the site like duplicate Meta tags in the title and description, then whoever did your SEO - wasn’t optimizing properly.

5) XML Sitemap installation - Sitemap protocol is a way to allow and inform search engines that your website URLs is ready for crawling. This XML site map file includes a list of URLs of your site. It is also a way to include information about your website pages when it was updated and any changes that have been made.

6) Using Paid Links - Links should be natural and should stand the test of time. Paid links are temporary and once you stop paying for it, the links are gone. A good link is one which is gained naturally when a website editor puts the link on the site. So if the company that is doing SEO buys links to gain immediate search ranking, they are not doing a good job.

7) Doing Reciprocal Link Exchange programs - If you find your website has a link exchange program with a page full of links pointing to other websites, then the person doing your SEO did not do proper link-building.

8 ) Sneaky Redirects or Doorway Pages - This is a black hat technique where the idea is to create a single page for the user and a different version of the page to the user. If your SEO partner is using this technique on your site it is going to get your site banned on search engines since they dislike these techniques.

9) Text Link - Each page of your site should be reachable through a text link. If it is not done, the person who did SEO on your site doesn’t have any idea of what he is doing. This helps search engine bots to crawl through those text links easily and index those pages. Change the link buttons or JS into text links.

10) Over Optimization - If your site is over optimized like repeating the keywords more than two to three times inside the Meta tags H1 Tags, and having a high keyword density instead of a moderate density and not using the long tail keywords inside the content. Also Spamming the ALT tags for images with keyword stuffing is considered a bad SEO technique.

The bottom-line is that if your site has the above signs, it is not going to help your ranking very well and chances are that it won’t even come up on search engine results.

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Author: April Hall

Internet Copywriter

The goal of every SEO company is to make our customers happy, right? But, how successful are we really at doing that? Is customer happiness measured just by the number of longstanding accounts we have? If so, what does that say about our ability to land new accounts? When was the last time you got a random card or email of appreciation from one of your customers? Before we can know if our customers are really happy, or if they are only content, a few definitions are in order:

Happy: Enjoying or showing or marked by joy or pleasure or good fortune

Content: Satisfied in a limited way

Which one of these adjectives would you prefer your customers use to describe themselves? We all want happy customers, but too many of us provide SEO service that offers limited satisfaction and customers who resign themselves to remain simply “content”. Sometimes our clients stick with us out of a sense of comfortableness with our work, and not necessarily out of happiness with our service.

How do SEO and internet marketing companies know if our customers are happy?

• The only emails we get are ones that thank us for our great projects
• We don’t get repeated requests for our clients to gain administrators’ access in order to make site changes and additions
• We begin getting client referrals without specifically requesting them
• Our clients become loyal enough that when they are ready for a complete content overhaul, they don’t hesitate to turn over the entire project to us

Besides offering quality SEO service, using only well-proven and ethical SEO strategies, what can those of us in the industry do to gauge how well we are pleasing our clients? It begins with making ourselves familiar with all of the resources and training available, of course, but it also includes:

1. Adding a quality control staff member. The sole mission of this staff member should be to ensure that every piece of work that your company produces is of fine quality. This mission includes checking to make sure links work, double-checking all outbound links, ensuring pictures are appropriate for the content included, and all other aspects of quality control. It’s a big job, and its also vague in some respects; so choose someone who is familiar with many different areas of internet marketing.
2. Concentrate on improving your good ol’ fashioned customer service. Are you available during the off-hours and on weekends? Can your clients get in contact with a live person, or are they limited to cold, impersonal email forms? In our rush to the forefront of internet marketing and our drive to make it to that all-important first SERP, let’s now forget that your customers want you to value their patronage about all else. Treat them with the respect and appreciation they deserve, and you may be surprised at how loyal they become.
3. Ask for customer input. Don’t forget that sometimes the best ideas come from the customers themselves. Ask them point-blank if they are happy with their service; and don’t send out a mass survey, for goodness sakes! Make a point to contact a few clients–by phone–every week. Ask if they would like to see more updated content, better pictures, perhaps some video. Would they prefer to stay constantly updated with new site content, or do they like to just get a regular analytics report? Would they like to make a contribution to the content? And, a big one, how interested are they in learning some SEO strategies of their own? Remember, the project runs two ways, and your clients don’t like to be treated as just an account number

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Author : Henry Adaso
Internet Copywriter

Oh boy, what a week it’s been in SEO land. In the past few days or so, we’ve seen the launch of a revamped version of Google Trends, the rise of Plurk, the all-around drop in traffic, and some SEO battle between the websites of our two presidential candidates.

Google Trends - The search engine behemoth we all know as Google has added yet another fun little tool to make our Internet experience a lot more exciting. You can now rely on Google Trends to predict the future of your business.

Plurk - It seems there’s at least 1 new social media site (or 10!) out every day. Plurk, the Twitter-like networking portal, is the latest to hit the web. I can’t complain, though; that just means one more social media tool for all of us.

Candidates’ Sites - The SEO watchdogs at Search Engine Land couldn’t wait for the inevitable presidential debates to point out the differences between John McCain and Barack Obama. Their post on the layout differences between JohnMcCain.com and BarackObama.com stirred up an interesting debate on Sphinn.

Link Building - And what’s an SEO week without some pointers on link building? We paused to examine 10 ways to get natural links for search engine optimization.

Traffic Plunge - If you suddenly noticed a traffic plunge, you’re not alone. Many high PageRank sites have seen a huge loss in traffic this past week. Most of these pages are still being indexed, even if their PR values have taken a hit. There are several reasons why you may be losing traffic, but that’s a topic for another day.

For now, continue in your path towards SEO nirvana by creating high-quality content, relying on natural link building techniques, and staying ahead of your competitors in the SEO rankings race.

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