Channeling The Power Multi-Channel Marketing

The key to a successful multi-channel marketing plan is integration; a common challenge that most marketers face. If your organization has established a digital marketing plan, for example, it should not be used in isolation, but instead used throughout all channels in your marketing plan process. Your multi-channel marketing plan should set out campaigns that span multiple channels, catering to the customer and tailoring them to fit multiple channels.
 Multi-channel marketing is all about choice. Consumers now have the ability to engage with your brand, in the manner of their choosing, at all stages of the customer journey. The proliferation of channels used by consumers, both off-line
The buying processes are controlled by the customer, rather than the marketer so the ‘always-on’ nature of multi-channel marketing will reach customers via the inbound or outbound channel of their choice. Organizations using an effective integrated multi-channel marketing plan will continuously stand out, gain qualified leads and maximize conversion throughout the customer lifecycle. Your multi-channel marketing plan should therefore continually and repeatedly engage, nurture and target customers in order to convert to a sale.Is there a guaranteed approach to truly effective multi-channel marketing integration? While the short answer is no, there is no one given approach that will guarantee maximum results, there are ways, however,  to maximize the approaches that do work and online, gives empowered consumers are creating massive data streams. To remain competitive your organization needs to be able to harness and collate the many disparate data points being generated from separate software solutions, into a single platform. And, you need to remain agile enough to be able to deliver the most relevant message or offer, in a personalized manner, through exactly the right channel at the very moment that a consumer is ready to engage with your brand them more control over the buying process which allows them to evaluate your brand at every touchpoint..

It begins with establishing a presence, getting your name ‘out there’ and engaging the customer before he knows he needs your product. We have put together a 5 step plan to help you begin to focus on relevant issues and develop a game plan

Step#1 Direct Mail
Start with postcard or an envelope with an ad specialty item to make it lumpy. Yes, the post office hates lumpy mail but when it gets to the prospect's desk, they open it. A #10 (business-sized) envelope with a real first-class stamp, a brief 1-page letter focusing on something specific to get you an appointment or offer for a  free or discounted item or service, and a flyer, a business reply card, and a business card. Every part of your direct mail should be focused on the offer. You can be educational but really geared towards the offer. It’s the offer that will really draw them in.

Step # 2 Email Marketing
The second tool to use in our example is a non-aggressive email marketing letter. We only want to send relevant, personal and timely information.

Email is a little more intrusive so make sure you have an opt-out.  You don't have to take a phone call or open direct mail. Email is in front of you, on your computer and you have to open and/or delete it. If used right and in tandem with telemarketing it makes a very strong piece of the marketing equation.

I would start your campaign with an email the same day you send your mailing out checking to see who and how many times they opened the email up, calling those that opened 3 or more times. Then start your follow up on the mailer a week later, with a 2nd email sent out every 2 weeks after that.

Step #3 Landing Page
Instead of sending prospects to your web page, have a landing page constructed for the promotion. This meant prospects will not go to your competition if they do an online search.

Step #4 Outbound Telemarketing
Five business days after the first class mailing is sent, have a dedicated telemarketer begin to call each name on the prospect list that hasn’t already responded. If a list of over 300 names list truncate it into pieces and staggered the drops to make this easier and timelier to follow up on.

Like most business callers these days, they generally reached voicemail rather than an actual human. Have a voicemail script ready to give them. It will be a large part of your marketing efforts. Just say something simple like "I’m simply calling to follow up on the mailer we sent out offering you (your offer). Give us a call to 847-991-1294 and we will get you the information”
When we are calling we like to make three attempts over a two to three-week period. You can call in deeper but 3 is optimal.

Step #5 Reload, Research and Repeat
 You are always promoting to both prospects and current clients.  Keep everyone on the list for direct mail emails and outbound telemarketing campaigns and start the process all over again in eight weeks.
We are committed to making  you  successful. We tailor solutions that fit your needs and. are able to draw upon our Associates, weAt Larson and vast experiences and knowledge base to resolve even the most complex of challenges. We empower organizations to make the most of their marketing efforts while reducing costs and driving profits.

Easy isn’t it? Yes, but it takes time and knowing when and what to do. If you need help just call us at 847-991-1294. We live and breathe this stuff so don’t be shy.

70% More Effective Marketing?

What if your marketing could be 70% More Effective?

Call it whatever you want: Multi-channel, Cross-Platform  Omni-Marketing: your marketing strategy needs to rely on both digital and traditional platforms online and offline to reach customers across multiple channels in various ways for the way they want to be contacted. Traditional forms of marketing such as print, trade magazines, direct mail, PR, radio, television commercials, and billboards if used together with digital marketing like email, social media, websites, blogs, YouTube, Pinterest starts to create a major spike in name recognition. Not surprisingly, cross-channel integration where online and some traditional forms like direct mail are linked together with the use of tracking software or bar code technology a telephone campaign and follow-up becomes 70% more effective.

I have 6 Tips for a Better Strategy

First you need to know your target audience. Who are they? What niche is it? Where are they? What channels work best for your business model? What are the channels your target nitch uses more than others? For example, an ad campaign for bath bombs might do well with a television advertisement or direct mail coupon. Events and musical concerts will get more ROI with social, emails and YouTube.

Second focus on the customer experience. Your marketing strategy should present information clearly and directly. Multi-channel digital campaigns should cater to not just convenience but also for after-sale 2^nd sale service, dependability, and responsibility—all qualities customers place value on. Consistency across all platforms is the key to talking about this success.

Third measure your results. After or even during any multi-channel campaign, review data to see which channels are working and how they are performing and which could use more improvement. And ask yourself why and are there other channels we should have or could have used? This will help allocate resources, time, and money more efficiently for the next wave or next attack.

Forth timing is everything. Constantly update your touch points. A successful strategy is well-timed and relevant. You might want to update your web page and send out emails the day before a big event. A drip campaign strategy allows you to space out information to generate interest and thus customers. Cross-channel integration brings your marketing strategies both online and off line together in a seamless flow. Incorporate a Twitter feed, use hash tags, incorporate bar codes in your direct mail, link your Facebook business page with your emails, generate printable coupons from your website or social business pages for in-store use. The more ways you can connect your customers to your brand, the better.

Fifth learn to change your strategies and platforms as needed. Don’t get too comfortable. What works one week may not work next week, so keep up to date on the latest marketing trends. And remember to track everything you can to know what works, where it is working and how it is working.

Sixth follow-up follow-up follow-up. Everything needs to be followed up on. You need to reach out and call someone. Yes the telephone. If you don’t make the reach out and make “that call” just save your money. The prospect is not going to call you 99.9% of the time. You have got to have a follow-up. Make that call or have me make it for you and your odds of a sale go up at least 10 to 20%

So now you only have to ask yourself:

Do I have the time?

Do I have the knowledge?
Do I have the connections?

Do I have the recourses?

If not we are here for you.

Howard Larson

Larson & Associates

Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition

Making good businesses great and great businesses even better

847-991-1294

howard@larsonassociates.ws

http://www.larsonassociates.ws

http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com

http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans

http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

Creating A Multi-Channel Marketing Attack

In a time where content and information is expected to be available 24/7, prospects and customers want to interact with businesses in ways that works for them and their lifestyle, not yours. The fact is: using one, single channel is not enough.

Why is multi-channel marketing an effective strategy?

There are 5 reasons why I see companies using this approach:

• Build a brand experience – Prospects are on multiple channels – and to gain name familiarity you need to leverage each channel to connect with them or at least have them interact with your brand. By using a multi-channel attack you are allowing prospects to choose where, when, and how they want to engage with you.
• Drive consistent in your message that keeps prospects informed – With multiple channels, you can ensure that your prospects are making informed decisions each time they interact with your brand through a consistent message across a variety of touch points.
• Keep your prospects in control – “No one likes being sold but everyone likes to buy?” The choice to interact with your brand where it’s most convenient to the prospect puts them in the driver seat and begin the buying journey. It takes 7 to 9 contacts with a prospect before they buy and they see or hear only 1 out of 3 so that is 27 messages to get you to sales heaven. Multi-channel marketing makes it convenient for your prospects to learn about your company and gives them the right information on their favorite channels at their time.
• Personalize your efforts for each prospect – What works best for one person may not work with the next. If you go single channel, your message will only impact a small part of your potential market. By using multiple channels of attack you reach people at different digital touch points.
• Fine tune your marketing strategy by measuring each touch point –You need to have an understanding of how to leverage channels in the context of each prospect or customer. This ideal process requires you to be able to target the right people at the right time – delivering the right message and most value with an integrated, multi-channel approach. Then you to measure what works and what doesn’t work to refine this strategy.
  
  

So you may be wondering what you can do right now to implement this type of strategy? According to a 2015 study by Econsultancy and Adobe, only 14% of marketers said they were running coordinated marketing campaigns across multichannel.

To help address this challenge, I’ve highlighted three simple ways I’ve seen Radius customers engage their prospects across multiple channels.

3 examples of multi-channel marketing

It’s important to note here that these are just a few simple examples used by other leading businesses to leverage multi-channel marketing. While this is by no means a definitive list of campaign ideas, the goal here is to inspire you to rethink marketing strategy with multi-channel driving the change:

1) Combine digital with email into telemarketing

Our customers have seen an increase in appointments when they launch a social campaign in combination to an email before anyone starts making calls. Here’s an example – You’re a window cleaner and its winter the weather is bad, snow & sleet are blowing all over the place making windows dirtier than normal, no one really wants to go out and clean them, so try running a campaign to a Facebook custom audience promoting your company. Then, start an email campaign, have your reps follow up on that same list with phone calls. This not only gives your business multiple hits to your target, but the digital ads, the email and the phone help warm up the prospects for your sales team. Prospects tend to be more receptive to speak with companies that they are already familiar with. 7 times familiar.

2) Leverage Direct Mail with email campaign and a telemarketing call

There are multiple creative ways to integrate these 3 channels. One example is to monitor how prospects are hitting your digital ads by hits and then customize email campaigns based on level of engagement on different posts. Target the email to the areas that have the greatest interest to your target. Chances are, what is the greatest interest to the majority of your nitch is of interest to all your nitch. If someone is engaging with multiple ads on multiple platforms an email that offers a clear call to action that is opened and then followed up on will drive sales higher faster.

3) Bring all together

The strategy I have the most success with is when customers let me take and use all their channels that are available together in one seamless integrated single message effort. In fact multi-channel strategies generated up to 24% higher conversion rates. This should include leveraging social to build awareness, email and direct mail to drive sales, and then the all important follow up phone call to bring prospects deep into the sales process and the actual sale itself.

Wrapping up

It’s no longer enough for marketers to be using one, single marketing channel – you need to match the buyer’s journey, with the way they like to be approached and target prospects across multiple channels. The more broadly you get your message out, the easier it will be for prospects to know who you are, what you do, and why they can benefit from your product or service.

Experiment with your available channels, use historical data to guide your testing and try to find the optimal mix of channels that gets you in front of the right prospects at the right time in the right way, and don’t forget the telemarketing follow up call or you will waist 95% or your effort.

Larson Notes & Satire: 

It is hard work getting new clients. So I have to ask you why are you sitting back and only using 1 or 2 tools you could be working with when you have a complete tool box right at your fingertips (or keyboard)? People what to, need to, will make you talk to them like they want to weather you like it or not so you had better just start liking it.

Getting good sales results is a hard, process. If your sales are stalled out we have ways that can make it happen for you that are cost effective and will give you results!

Howard Larson

Larson & Associates

Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition

Making good businesses great and great businesses even better

847-991-1294

howard@larsonassociates.ws

http://www.larsonassociates.ws

http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com

http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans

http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

205 SEO Hints: 10 At A Time Part 8

In part 8 we are getting into why content matters to your sit site. What makes a site really work and not work.

61. Useful Content:  Google may distinguish between “quality” and “useful” content. You have no choices on what Google things is good and what Google thinks is bad. All you can do is post what you think is the best you got.

62. Content Provides Value and Unique Insights: Google has stated that they’re on the hunt for sites that don’t bring anything new or useful to the table and guess what? Google lowers the page ranking,

63. Contact Us Page: Google prefers sites with an “appropriate amount of contact”. And if your contact information matches your whois info you might get a bump in page bonus.

64. Domain Trust/TrustRank: Site trust — measured by how many links away your site is from highly-trusted seed sites is a hugely important ranking factor.

65. Site Architecture: A well put-together site architecture helps Google thematically organize your content.

66. Site Updates: How often a site is updated and especially when new content is added to the site is a site-wide freshness factor. And it makes the spiders come back and rank your page more often.

67. Number of Pages: The number of pages a site has is a weak sign of authority. At the very least a large site helps distinguish it from thin affiliate sites. Size can matter.

68. Presence of Sitemap: A sitemap helps search engines index your pages easier, faster and more thoroughly, improving visibility.

69. Site Uptime: Lots of downtime from site maintenance or server issues may hurt your ranking and can even result in deindexing if not corrected. Google needs sites that are up. If you are not find another host. It is important

Larson Notes & Satire:  Content, content, content. Good quality and unique. BUT if your site is not on the 1st page of an organic search and you did not let me play with it.

IN the last week Page 1 results got 27 percent of all traffic from the average search, but my blog got 97%. Content matters and blogs matter.

In a sample of over 8 million clicks over 94% of people only clicked on first page results and less than 6% actually made it over to the second page.  One of the biggest drop offs is between the 10 spot (bottom of the first page) and the 11 spot (top of the second page).

And for better lead gen in telemarketing, teleprospecting and lead generation call Larson & Associates at 847-991-1294 or email me at howard@larsonassociates.ws .  One call is all it takes to start getting sales leads into your funnel.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-1294
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans
http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make teleprospection for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 10 hours a week. Maybe you should add teleprospecting into your marketing mix call today and find out.

205 SEO Hints: 10 At A Time Part 7

In part 7 we are getting more into the inner workings of your site. What makes a site really work and not work.

60. Parked Domains: A Google update in December of 2011 decreased search visibility of parked domains. So what is a Parked Domain? It is a web address that does nt have a site attacted to it or hosting of a site and is only redirects people to your primary site. A parked domain is NOT a website. Instead, it is a forwarding trigger so to speak to take the person to your primary domain name and web site for your company. Parked domains are commonly used when:

You need a place to park a domain for which you do not have a website

You have more than one domain that should lead to your primary domain

You have common misspellings of your domain name that you have registered.

61. Useful Content:  The key here is what is useful? Google decides. As king of web searches Google may distinguish between “quality” and “useful” content. Again this is a game and you need to learn how to play the game.

62. Content Provides Value and Unique Insights: Google has stated that they’re on the hunt for sites that don’t bring anything new or useful to the table, especially thin affiliate sites.

63. Contact Us Page: Google wants what they call prefered sites with an “appropriate amount of contact information”. You get a bonus and brownie points if your contact information matches your whois info.

64. Domain Trust/TrustRank: Site trust — measured by how many links away your site is from highly-trusted seed sites — is a massively important ranking factor. There are services that you can subscribe to for your site to become a trusted site. I guess if you need a quick fix it might be a good thing but I like to do things organically because they are more lasting in the long run.

65. Site Architecture: A well put-together site architecture (especially a silo structure) helps Google thematically organize your content.

66. Site Updates: How often a site is updated — and especially when new content is added to the site — is a site-wide freshness factor. A blog, a new service page in the beginning do daily updates or changes to your site after a while a few times a week should be enough to keep those little web spiders coming back to your page looking for your changes.

67. Number of Pages: The number of pages a site has is a weak sign of authority. At the very least a large site helps distinguish it from thin affiliate sites.

68. Presence of Sitemap: A sitemap helps search engines index your pages easier and more thoroughly, improving visibility.

69. Site Uptime: Lots of downtime from site maintenance or server issues may hurt your ranking and can even result in deindexing if not corrected. If your down all the time maybe it is time for a new hosting company.

Larson Notes & Satire:  Your site has to look nice load fast and now be able to be mobile friendly. I’ll take my personal satire down to a minimum because I don’t make the rules I just try to figure them out as they happen. BUT if your site is not on the 1^st page of an organic search and you did not let me play with it.
Page 1 results got 92 percent of all traffic from the average search.
In a sample of over 8 million clicks over 94% of people only clicked on first page results and less than 6% actually made it over to the second page.  One of the biggest drop off’s is between the 10 spot (bottom of the first page) and the 11 spot (top of the second page).
And for better lead gen in telemarketing, teleprospecting and lead generation call Larson & Associates at 847-991-1294 or email me at howard@larsonassociates.ws .  One call is all it takes to start getting sales leads into your funnel.

Howard Larson

Larson & Associates

Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition

Making good businesses great and great businesses even better

847-991-1294

howard@larsonassociates.ws

http://www.larsonassociates.ws

http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com

http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans

http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make teleprospection for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 10 hours a week. Maybe you should add teleprospecting into your marketing mix call today and find out.

205 SEO Hints: 10 At A Time Part 6

Here we are at part 6.
As before today’s list of 10 are all things you could do yourself but might want to outsource. Most of it is just content, content, content.
50. WordPress Tags: Tags are WordPress-specific relevancy signal.  Tagging your pictures is always a good way to ad in keywords.
51. Keyword in URL: Another important relevancy signal. If it fits work the key word in the page URL.
52. URL String:  The categories in the URL string are read by Google and may provide a thematic signal to what a page is about. This is one place I love. You might get hammered out with one or two key words but if you can work your key word strings to be nitch specific like “telemarketing for printers” , see what company comes up on page 1 with that string, you will start to get my excitement over them
53. References and Sources: Citing references and sources, like research papers do, may be a sign of quality. The Google Quality Guidelines states that reviewers should keep an eye out for sources when looking at certain pages: “This is a topic where expertise and/or authoritative sources are important…”. However, Google has denied that they use external links as a ranking signal. But Google could change the rules tomorrow if they wanted to. I tend to think that if you put in any sources for your content research it is an addition to key works and you could pull in possible hits from those companies or people.
54. Bullets and Numbered Lists: Bullets and numbered lists help break up your content for readers, making them more user friendly. Google likely agrees and may prefer content with bullets and numbers. I love numbered or bulleted content copy. I think or at least I like to have things laid out for me in a nice order to follow along.
55. Priority of Page in Sitemap: The priority a page is given via the sitemap.xml file may influence ranking. Most of you are not even going to get into the site map of your site but its there.
56. Too Many Outbound Links: Straight from the aforementioned Quality rater document a few blogs ago. Keep your links down to those that are important to you and your business. Don’t link out just to do it.  Don’t distract from the Main Content of your page
57. Quantity of Other Keywords Page Ranks. If the page ranks for several other keywords it may give Google an internal sign of quality. Keep in mind you want to be content consistent but all (keywords) matter.
58. Page Age: Although Google prefers fresh content, an older page that’s regularly updated may outperform a newer page. Yes age does have its benefits. But like a hair cut keep it fresh, cut and trimmed monthly.
59. User Friendly Layout: Citing the Google Quality Guidelines Document yet again “The page layout on highest quality pages makes the Main Content immediately visible”

Larson Notes & Satire:  This is all stuff you can do and be checking MONTHLY. If you don’t want to get a hold of me and I can do it for you. I took my page up to #1 so I know I can do the same for you.

And for better lead gen in telemarketing, teleprospecting and lead generation call Larson & Associates at 847-991-1294 or email me at howard@larsonassociates.ws .  One call is all it takes to start getting sales leads into your funnel.

Howard Larson

Larson & Associates

Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition

Making good businesses great and great businesses even better

847-991-1294

howard@larsonassociates.ws

http://www.larsonassociates.ws

http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com

http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans

http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make teleprospection for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 10 hours a week. Maybe you should add teleprospecting into your marketing mix call today and find out.

205 SEO Hints: 10 At A Time Part 5

Links links and more links! But do they do you any good? Here we are at part 5.
Today’s list of 10 are yours to not just take care of but be on guard that they don’t disappear on you. Yes links do disappear and become a deterent to page ranking.
40. Broken Links: Having 1 broken like is bad enough but having too many broken links on a page may be a sign of a neglected or abandoned site. You need to check who your linking to every once in a while. The Google Rater Guidelines Document uses broken links as one was to assess a homepage’s quality. Be vigulent its your site, not your linking partners.
41. Reading Level: There’s no doubt that Google estimates the reading level of webpages. In fact, Google used to give you reading level stats: But what they do with that information is up for debate. Some say that a basic reading level (sadly 3^rd grade) will help you rank better because it will appeal to the masses. But others (like myself) strive for a higher level to get a more educated client.  A lower language level will also rank your site and associate you to a basic reading level with content mills like Ezine Articles.

42. Affiliate Links: Affiliate links themselves probably won’t hurt your rankings. But if you have too many, Google’s algorithm may pay closer attention to the quality of those links to make sure you’re not a “thin affiliate site”.

43. HTML errors/W3C validation: Lots of HTML errors or sloppy coding may be a sign of a poor quality site. While controversial, many in SEO think that WC3 validation is a weak quality signal. ( https://validator.w3.org )
44. Page Host’s Domain Authority: All things being equal, a page on an authoritative domain will rank higher than a page on a domain with less authority. That is sort of common sense but needs to be said.

45. Page’s PageRank: Not perfectly correlated. But in general higher PR pages tend to rank better than low PR pages.

46. URL Length: Search Engine Journal notes that excessively long URLs may hurt search visibility.
47. URL Path: A page closer to the homepage may get a slight authority boost. Set up your page order to make best possible use of the content.
48. Human Editors: Although never confirmed, Google has filed a patent for a system that allows human editors to influence the SERPs. OMG yes real people do sometimes get involved.
49. Page Category: The category the page appears on is a relevancy signal. A page that’s part of a closely related category should get a relevancy boost compared to a page that’s filed under an unrelated or less related category. Yes the company your site keeps matters.

Larson Notes & Satire:  This is all stuff you can do and be checking MONTHLY. If you don’t want to get a hold of me and I can do it for you.
And for better lead gen in telemarketing, teleprospecting and lead generation call Larson & Associates at 847-991-1294 or email me at howard@larsonassociates.ws .  One call is all it takes to start getting sales leads into your funnel.

Howard Larson

Larson & Associates

Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition

Making good businesses great and great businesses even better

847-991-1294

howard@larsonassociates.ws

http://www.larsonassociates.ws

http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com

http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans

http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make teleprospection for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 10 hours a week. Maybe you should add teleprospecting into your marketing mix call today and find out.

205 SEO Hints: 10 At A Time Part 4

The more you do or sometimes the less you to the more you get! Welcome to Part 4.
Today’s list of 10 are more things you will have control over or not. And if you are like me, you love, control. More tecky stuff than I like but someone has to do it.
30. Keyword Word Order: An exact match of a searcher’s keyword in a page’s content will generally rank better than the same keywords or phrase in a different order. For example: consider a search for: “dog grooming methods”. A page optimized for the phrase “dog grooming methods” will rank better than a page optimized for “Methods for grooming a dog”. This is a good illustration of why keyword research is really, really important.
31. Outbound Link Quality: Many SEOs think that linking out to authority sites helps send trust signals to Google. I agree.
32. Outbound Link Theme: According to Moz, search engines may use the content of the pages you link to as a relevancy of your page. For example, if you have a page about dogs that links to automotive company, this just might tell Google that your page is about the dog in a car, not dogs themselves.
33. Grammar and Spelling: Proper grammar and spelling is always good but  Cutts gave mixed thoughts back in 2011 on whether or not this was important. Personally it is not good to misuse and misspell things but it is more important to keep pushing your message and content out than to be worried about the grammar police.
34. Syndicated Content: Is the content original? If it’s scraped or copied from some other indexed page it won’t give you as high a ranking as original content or it could just end up in their Supplemental Index.
35. Helpful Supplementary Content: According to a now-public Google Rater Guidelines Document (good till they change it), helpful supplementary content is an indicator of a page’s quality (and therefore, Google ranking). Examples include things like currency converters, loan interest calculators and interactive recipes as long as the content fit your business and page content. Did a site for a company that stored boats in Chicago and we put on the bridge openings on the Chicago river. Do you think a pica/points conversion table would work for me?
36. Number of Outbound Links: Too many does demote your Page Rank. So don’t go stuffing in every link you can find even if it is pertinent to your business just because you can. Over saturation does not work.
37. Multimedia: Images, videos and other multimedia elements may act as a content quality signals if you tag.
38. Number of Internal Links Pointing to Page: The number of internal links to a page indicates its importance relative to other pages on the site. Some you can control some you cannot. Other times it’s nice to have friends who own a web site or two. But keep them relevant if you can.
39. Quality of Internal Links Pointing to Page: Internal links from pages on domain have a high page ranking  effect than pages with no or low ranking.

Larson Notes & Satire:  My page is #1 in google yahoo and bing is yours? So we got a little tacky today. You did not think it would be all easy and straight forward and just anyone could walk in a do it, did you? All I can say is lie with it, Fix and do what you can and it will work out, maybe.
And for better lead gen in telemarketing, teleprospecting and lead generation call Larson & Associates at 847-991-1294 or email me at howard@larsonassociates.ws .  One call is all it takes to start getting sales leads into your funnel.

Howard Larson

Larson & Associates

Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition

Making good businesses great and great businesses even better

847-991-1294

howard@larsonassociates.ws

http://www.larsonassociates.ws

http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com

http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans

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P.S. We make teleprospection for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 10 hours a week. Maybe you should add teleprospecting into your marketing mix call today and find out.

205 SEO Hints: 10 At A Time Part 3

Now we are cooking! Sort of nice to have things that are totally in your control to make your site better and stronger isn’t it. Welcome to Part 3.

Today’s list of 10 are more things you will have control over or not. And if you are like me, you love, control. More tecky stuff than I like but someone has to do it.

21. Duplicate Content: Identical content on the same site is one of those things that is not liked and can negatively affect your site’s search engine ranking.

22. Rel=Canonical: When used properly, use of this tag may prevent Google from considering pages duplicate content. Canonicalization can be a challenging concept to understand (and hard to pronounce: "ca-non-ick-cull-eye-zay-shun"). It is essential to creating an optimized website. The problem is that canonicalization can fix stem from multiple uses for a single piece of writing a paragraph or, more often, an entire page of content that appears in multiple locations on a website or on multiple websites. For search engines, this presents a problem. Which version is the "real" version that they should be showing to searchers? SEOs refer to this issue as duplicate content. Another option for dealing with duplicate content is to utilize the rel=canonical tag. The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link ranking power as a 301 redirect, and often takes much less development time to implement. The tag is part of the HTML head of a web page.

23. Page Loading Speed via Chrome: Google may also use Chrome user data to get a better handle on a page’s loading time as this takes into account server speed, CDN usage and other non HTML-related site speed signals.

24. Image Optimization: Images on-page send search engines important relevancy signals through their file name, alt text, title, description and caption.

25. Recent Content Updates: Google Caffeine http://webtrends.about.com/od/webportals/a/what-is-google-caffeine.htm

 update favors recently updated content, especially for time-sensitive searches. Highlighting this factor’s importance, Google shows the date of a page’s last update.

26. Content Updates: The significance of edits and changes is also a freshness factor. Adding or removing entire sections is a more significant update than switching around the order of a few words.

27. History Of Page Updates: How often has the page been updated over time? Daily, weekly, every 5-years? Frequency of page updates also play a role in freshness.

28. Keyword Prominence: Having a keyword appear in the first 100-words of a page’s content is a significant signal to the little web spiders.

29. Keyword in H2, H3 Tags: Having your keyword appear as a subheading in H2 or H3 format may be another weak relevancy signal.

30. Keyword Word Order: An exact match of a searcher’s keyword in a page’s content will generally rank better than the same keyword phrase in a different order. Remember we are dealing with web robots not real live thinking people. For example: consider a search for: “Snake charming”. A page optimized for the phrase “Snake charming” will rank better than a page optimized for “practice of hypnotizing a snake”. This is a good example of why keyword research is important.

Larson Notes & Satire:  So we got a little tacky today. You did not think it would be all easy and straight forward and just anyone could walk in a do it, did you? All I can say is lie with it, Fix and do what you can and it will work out, maybe.

And for better lead gen in telemarketing, teleprospecting and lead generation call Larson & Associates at 847-991-1294 or email me at howard@larsonassociates.ws .  One call is all it takes to start getting sales leads into your funnel.

Howard Larson

Larson & Associates

Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition

Making good businesses great and great businesses even better

847-991-1294

howard@larsonassociates.ws

http://www.larsonassociates.ws

http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com

http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans

http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make teleprospection for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 10 hours a week. Maybe you should add teleprospecting into your marketing mix call today and find out.

205 SEO Hints: 10 At A Time Part 2

Are we having fun yet? Come on this is a game you are now playing between you, your completion and Google.  You can play if you have or control a web site and you can win or beat your competition at the game of web ranking.

So you ready for more. Today’s list of 10 are things you will have a little better control over. Some of the items from yesterday were sort of out of your control and I know, for all you control freaks it was driving you up a wall. Have no fear it’s not all that bad. So roll up your sleeves and take care of what you can.

11. Keyword in Title Tag: The title tag is a webpage’s second most important piece of content after the content of the page. The title sends out a strong SEO signal to all the little web spiders filtering through you site to say what you are about, at the top.

12. Title Tag Starts with Keyword: According to Moz data a title tags that starts with a keyword seems to do better than title tags with the keyword towards the end of the tag. Might seem like a small thing but each hit up (or down) can compound and snowball your site to the highest heights to oblivion.

13. Keyword in Description Tag: Another relevancy signal. Not especially important now, but still makes a difference. Really don’t listen to all those web experts who say it does not make any difference anymore. Everything counts. So things count for the good and some for the bad. Put lady luck on your side.

14. Keyword Appears in H1 Tag: H1 tags are a “second title tag” that sends another relevancy signal to Google, according to results from this correlation study http://cbutterworth.com/do-h1-tags-still-help-seo/ .

15. Keyword is Most Frequently Used Phrase in Document: Having a keyword appear more than any other likely acts as a relevancy signal. But I will warn you not to black hat yourself and spam your key word though out your text like we did in the old days of SEO. Keep those words relevant throughout your copy

16. Content Length:  Content with more words can cover a wider breadth and are likely preferred to shorter superficial articles. SERPIQ found that content length correlated with SERP position. http://blog.serpiq.com/how-important-is-content-length-why-data-driven-seo-trumps-guru-opinions . Now I am a long content kind of guy so don’t listen to me but say what you got to say. Put most things in the first paragraph and let the just flow.

17. Keyword Density: Although not as important as it once was, keyword density is still something Google uses to determine the topic of a webpage. But going overboard can hurt you. Yes those days are long gone.

18. Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords in Content (LSI): Try saying that 3 times fast. LSI keywords help search engines extract meaning from words with more than one meaning (Apple the computer company vs. the fruit). The presence/absence of LSI words (probably) also acts as a content quality signal.

19. LSI Keywords in Title and Description Tags: As with webpage content, LSI keywords in page meta tags probably help Google discern between synonyms. May also act as a relevancy signal. Yes you got to work the ideas on both the front page and the back page of your site.

20. Page Loading Speed via HTML: Both Google and Bing use page loading speed as a ranking factor. Speed matters. Search engine spiders can estimate your site speed fairly accurately based on a page’s code and file size. Even if you could care less about all the little web spiders your customers and prospects sure don’t want to be waiting for your site to come up. So make if FAST.

Larson Notes & Satire:  Ok the rubber hits the road today. This is stuff you can all take control of. Some things big some small but it all counts for and against you and your competition. And if you don’t care, someone else does. Don’t let them take your site ranking and get your customers because you are on page 2 or 3 of a Google search and not page 1.

And for better lead gen in telemarketing, teleprospecting and lead generation call Larson & Associates at 847-991-1294 or email me at howard@larsonassociates.ws .  One call is all it takes to start getting sales leads into your funnel.

Howard Larson

Larson & Associates

Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition

Making good businesses great and great businesses even better

847-991-1294

howard@larsonassociates.ws

http://www.larsonassociates.ws

http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com

http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans

http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make teleprospection for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 10 hours a week. Maybe you should add teleprospecting into your marketing mix call today and find out.