Search Engine Optimization (seo) Process

admin    SEO Marketing     Engine, Optimization, Process, Search

Search Engine Optimization (seo) Process

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? It is the method of analyzing and constructing individual web pages, as well as entire site, so that they can be discovered by various search engines. Search Engine Optimization can make the content of your web pages more relevant, more attractive, and more easily read by search engines.

Do you want potential clients to find your site without spending a fortune?  If the answer is yes, then Search Engine Optimization is the answer.

The ideal time to have an SEO professionals optimize your site for top search engines is when it is first developed. This is vital because search engine-friendly web design is the foundation for a successful SEO campaign. A website that has not been designed to be easily indexed by the search engines will require changes, sometimes significant changes in order to become search engine-friendly.

The following is a quick outline of the Search Engine Optimization process that we have been using. Each of these stages is critical to the overall success of gaining top search engine positions and maintaining them.

1. Keyword Marketing Research and Analysis.

ASmart Solutions provides recommendations to assist you in selecting the best keywords for your particular SEO campaign.

2. Competitors Analysis.

At this stage we need to find out who your competitors are, what keywords are they using, and how well are they ranking.

3. Web Page Optimization.

We look at the technology being used to see if it might hamper the visibility in search engines. If there are any problems this may require a total or partial rebuild of the site. As well we look at what is known the more traditional aspects of SEO – the Meta tags, title tags, header tags and alt tags. Your website should be like a smaller version of the internet. Where appropriate, pages should link to other pages. In addition to internal links we also examine usability issues related to the navigation i.e. to ensure that users can easily find things on your website. And at the end we examine the use of keywords in your tags as well as within the text on your website.

4. Registering the site with appropriate online directories and establishing link exchange relationships with other quality and on-topic websites.

5. Measuring & Reporting the Results.

Optimizing your web site for search engines should be an integral part of your web design project, from the very beginning to the very end. Search Engine Optimization should be considered, and if possible, implemented, throughout the planning, design, development, and maintenance stages of your web site.

It’s very important to create your web site with SEO in mind. Changing a web site, or potentially even redesigning your web site, to optimize it for search engines can end up being an expensive proposition. Plan to create a search engine-friendly web site from the start.

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Top Ten Tips for an Optimal Order-to-Cash Process

admin    Twitter Marketing     Optimal, OrdertoCash, Process, Tips

Top Ten Tips for an Optimal Order-to-Cash Process

We know that everyone’s on the lookout for O2C wins, especially in still-turbulent times, so SSON asked network members to share their thoughts on the best ways to ensure such unobstructed O2C perfection. The responses made for some very useful reading – so without further ado we present Top Ten Tips for an Optimal Order-to-Cash Process. Enjoy…

1. Know the customer

It’s easy to get carried away with process efficiencies and technology-enabled savings – but at the end of the day it’s crucial to keep sight of the most important element in the order-to-cash chain: the customer. Maintaining optimal relationships requires solid and reliable information on what exactly each customer is worth to the business – and how much it costs. Regularly updated and analyzed, this data will help keep your O2C function focused on what really counts as well as ensuring as holistic as possible an approach to customer relationship management through the business.

“Do not start just with orders, but customers,” says Atos Consulting’s Sachi Fujii-Bautista. “Your finance Shared Service Centre may not have a sight of customers while dealing with tons of papers (issuing invoices and credit/debit notes). But it is critical to have a sense of value of each customer (even a sheet of paper), not just in view of annual gross sales, but overall profiles of customers (profitability, number of complaints/disputes, returns, your firm’s overall account strategy, etc.). I have come across one SSC which was dealing with a well-known retailer. The perception of the SSC agents was that the retailer was one of the top customers based on sales volume, but after a customer profile analysis, it turned out that it was not necessarily the most profitable customer due to lots of returns and complaints – the total cost of dealing with the customer was much higher than expected. Feeling the weight of each paper while dealing with tasks and handling it appropriately in view of the customers’ true value to the company does make sense. This also leads to defining and implementing an appropriate corporate-wide customer relationship strategy.”

2. It’s a risky business (so know how risky)

Keeping up to speed with your customers also helps when it comes to looking at risk. In economically straitened times a true understanding of risk and exposure is indispensable and this has to be founded within the order-to-cash process. Learning to identify – and taking steps to mitigate against growing risk at the customer level is an area where O2C practitioners can really show their worth to the organization and will continue to be so throughout the downturn and beyond. This doesn’t necessarily have to involve a full health-check every week, but a closer look on a more regular basis than what was being conducted in the boom times would be a start…

“Managing credit risk has become more important than ever,” says Brian Shanahan, senior director at REL. “The credit insurers and ratings agencies have largely failed the business community and it is time to re-learn the basic skills of managing credit risk. Most companies have a lot of information to hand in the form of customer interactions where they fail to recognize the signs of increasing customer risk.”

3. Keep the sales team risk-aware…

The sales floor is the engine-room of the business – and as such, as any mechanic will testify, it’s where a lot of things can go very wrong indeed. OK, so everyone knows times are tough and getting those deals in might be harder than it’s been for a long, long time – but you’ve got to do what you can (even from what might at times seem like a very long way away) to make sure your sales team aren’t hamstringing the rest of the company when it comes to the agreements they’re making with customers. Try to get the sales managers to keep their teams in line on areas such as payment terms: obviously the more homogenous these terms the easier it becomes to ensure a smooth O2C process (and vice versa…).
 
“It is essential that in these hard times that the sales force are not giving away payment terms in an uncontrolled manner,” urges Brian Shanahan. “While there may be selective cases for extending terms, this is not the time for a wholesale giveaway.”

4. …And make sure risk policies are adhered-to from the start

In a perfect process there are no corners to cut – and that applies to customers just as much as to your own organization. If the sales team is on the case from the beginning as far as risk is concerned, then every other element of the process should be as well. Have a single coherent risk plan and then ensure it’s applied as end-to-end as possible – and that means increasing the priority of credit-checking.

“Suppose your SSC has established company-wide credit policies and is dealing with credit evaluation in a consistent way,” says Fujii-Bautista. “But sometimes having a policy does not mean it is compliant in reality. How the defined policy is implemented and monitored is an issue. Your sales unit might have sold a big deal with a customer who has got unpaid invoices and it might be the case that its defined credit limit is already over. It is advisable to implement the process that the credit limits can be checked against a number of things such as latest credit-worthiness ratings from organizations like Dunn and Bradstreet, or look internally at invoice payment performance etc and dynamically set new limits without the need for manual interference – and stop the order if appropriate.”

5. Smooth out the collection process from the front

The sales team won’t like it, but the more responsibility for collection that can be front-loaded into the sales process, the better for the rest of the system – up to a point, of course. The more successfully your team can make it their business to follow up the cash their contracts are securing – with suitable incentives, of course – the fewer the wrinkles that come down through the process.

“I meet good sales guys who told me ‘cash collection is part of my sale’,” says Fujii-Bautista, “while I also meet sales guys who do not care about cash collection as they can claim ‘sales’ for his or her performance. There are more companies which started setting up a KPI on cash collection/DSO against sales people as it is fundamentally true that sales only, does not give cash for the organization! It is important to set appropriate KPIs for all the stakeholders who get involved in order-to-cash processes and develop an appropriate rule on who to contact whom for what profile of customers. The way you want to handle this process must be quite different for customers which are giving you a seamless cashflow to the ones which have got blockages in the flow.”

6. Diplomacy is at a premium

With markets still jittery it’s easy to panic already-stressed debtors, and personal contact, while increasingly important, becomes consequentially more important to get right. Remember things might be an awful lot worse at the other end of the phone and look to take simple and non-provocative steps towards a mutually satisfactory conclusion.

“Ensure that the first collection call to the customer is proactive,” recommends Shanahan. “Proactive calling helps to highlight disputes at an earlier point and can be the best aid to the early signs of customer risk. In these difficult times, it is worth reviewing the quality of outbound calls to customers. Many collectors will need training particularly on dealing with difficult customers.”

7. Get strict on dispute management

With the above in mind, and even with the best team in the world in your corner, sometimes there’s no avoiding a falling-out: some people, and some situations, are just too inflammable. If this occurs, make sure you don’t take any of the fire: no matter what the other side says or does, stick to a formalized and rigorously stress-tested dispute management process. Needless provocation needn’t provoke – and shouldn’t as long as requisite levels of professionalism are maintained – and if the other side wants to throw toys out of the pram, well, as long as you’re playing it by the book it’s not your problem.

“This is quite a sensitive process within the order-to-cash process. Therefore, the rule for handling this process needs to be carefully defined and roles and responsibilities need to be established with an intention to regain and maintain good customer relationships for the future, not just for ‘now’. It is also critical to make this process as transparent as possible for customers as well as internal stakeholders. This process is normally time-consuming and to be honest it is not pleasant. Identifying causes of typical disputes and preventing the process from reaching this stage would make much more sense I think!”

8. Get the dunning down pat

Whatever the state of communications between yourself and an errant customer, the I’s need to be dotted and the T’s crossed. Ensure you have a clear, compliant dunning procedure in place from the start of operations and test the system regularly – and make sure your team, as well as your software, know precisely what should be done at each stage, and why. 

“Make sure that promises to pay are recorded and followed up when not fulfilled,” Shanahan says. “While most companies have an escalation process, it is important to do exactly what you promised. Otherwise the value of overdue debt will grow and grow. For those customers that are not called, there must be an effective and strict dunning cycle. If there is a sequence of letters it is worth considering reducing the number of letters or reducing the time lag between each step.”

9. Remind the organization: it’s about you too!

Running O2C from a shared services organization has its advantages but it isn’t a miracle cure-all – so make sure everyone knows that. While you understand that a great deal of work still needs to be done outside the SSO, the business at large might not be aware of its retained responsibilities, and it’s your responsibility to get that message out – because the process can’t be optimized without the necessary efforts outside your own domain. 

“Typically most of the real issues in the order-to-cash process are caused in the upper-stream, not within SSC,” says Fujii-Bautista. “Wrong terms being set with customers, wrong prices in sales agreements, customers credit limit exceeded without any notice, goods actually returned (and customers made a complaint due to inappropriate chase for payment for returned goods), etc… Tackling order-to-cash issues just within SSC would not dramatically improve the process performance.  Having said that, just tightening the belt within SSC could make quite a difference, but what I am trying to say is having a collaborative approach with sales could make a miracle in the order-to-cash process! In most cases I worked on, revenue leakages were not truly recognized in the organizations in a broader sense as the order-to-cash initiative was dealt with by just Finance communities.”

10. Get the buy-in (from everybody)

Collaborative working is the future – both within the organization and without. Obviously it’s crucial to have senior sponsorship (always high on the wish-list) and to leverage it effectively – but getting true support from all stakeholders, not just the board, is increasingly important. Proper communication and, where appropriate, change management – approached from an end-to-end perspective – are an absolute must-have to get full engagement from all actors, within your SSO as much as within the wider organization. And include your customers among your stakeholders; consultation about possible transformations, or even just general customer relationship management, can result in input which can itself help in the optimization process.

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A comment to this article after it was published  from Gerry Dempsey PIIA FRSA , Chairman and CEO of  Dempsey Group

Tell the client what your credit terms are, what the ramifications are for non-compliance and HAVE THE CONVICTION TO FOLLOW THROUGH!!

This is simple to do with new clients in a B2B market where you can establish the boundaries in advance of providing the service. But it is more difficult to do for existing clients with whom you have tolerated bad behaviour. For example, during initial meetings with new clients we set the expectation that we manage our cash quite closely and that by managing this risk we are able to keep costs low for all our clients. During subsequent meetings we discuss this in more detail with them so that they fully understand the consequences of not paying on time. Depending on the risk factor and the client profile we treat clients in one of two ways:

1.  We suspend the service immediately and do not resume until payment has been made

2.  We add x% interest per day on the invoice amount but if the invoice is not paid within 2 weeks we suspend the service.  

If clients repeat a pattern of not paying on time, and if our escalation of the issue is not successful, we terminate the business relationship.

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This article was first published on the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON) – Read it here: http://www.ssonetwork.com/topic_detail.aspx?id=5208&ekfrm=6&utm_source=ssonetwork.com&utm_medium=SMO&utm_campaign=DIRECTORIES&mac=SSON_External_Listing_2086

About The Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON)

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SSON provides the roof under which key industry experts and organizations share their experience, knowledge and tools, and practitioner peers connect with other all over the world, both face to face and online.

SSON focuses on developing its members through providing training, tools, and networking opportunities. SSON staff works from international offices in New York, London, Singapore, Sydney, Berlin and Dubai to research current trends and developments in shared services.

More information visit the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON) website. Stay up to date with SSON’s latest twitter posts at twitter.com/ssonetwork, connect with global practitioners, providers and advisors on the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON) LinkedIn group and Sign up to receive SSON’s weekly updates today

How Twitter Hummingbird Can Automate Your Follow Process

admin    Twitter Marketing     Automate, Follow, Hummingbird, Process, Twitter

Twitter is the newest “latest & greatest” fad in the internet marketing world. It allows for a very easy opportunity to send your message to thousands and thousands of people instantly. The trick is that you have to get a very large number of people following you (and hence, seeing your message) for Twitter to make an impact.
Lets face it, if you’ve only got 1,000 people following you & you send out an offer that gets a 2% click through rate… big whoop, you just got 20 clicks. Who cares?
The most common method of growing your twitter following is to follow mass amounts of people, and a certain percentage will follow you back.
The two most common ways of following people are:
a) Navigate to a leader in your market, look at their followers, and manually click the “follow” button next to each one of them
b) Have one of your outsourced minions do the above
Those two ways are ineffective. If you do it yourself, you’re spending a lot of your own time doing monkey work. It’s not fun. It’s not valuable. And if you rely on an overseas outsourcer to do this for you, they won’t always make the best decisions on whose followers to follow.
This is where Twitter Hummingbird will help. The software opens up & logs into one of your Twitter accounts. You navigate to someone’s followers and click “follow all.” That’s it. Done. The Hummingbird client will keep following until you tell it to stop, or until you hit one of the Twitter soft caps.
There are two other areas where Hummingbird is very useful:
1) Mass unfollows – you need to do this fairly often so that your ratio is within the 110% soft cap. Currently, there’s a free tool called Twitter Karma that can do this for you, but Twitter Karma will only unfollow 70-80 people at a time… which makes a large unfollow very time consuming and cumbersome. Since Hummingbird doesn’t use the Twitter API (it logs directly into your account instead), you can just press the “unfollow all” button, and it’ll take care of all your dirty work for you with no effort on your part.
2) Protected VIP’s – often, you’ll want to follow people on Twitter who will NOT follow you back. Most commonly, this will be celebrities or leaders in your market who you do not know personally. If you’re using a tool like Twitter Karma to do your mass unfollows, you’d have to manually look through your list & uncheck these VIP’s to prevent them from getting unfollowed. This is another huge chore. Hummingbird solves the problem by allowing you to create a “protected VIP list” – once you add someone to this list, they’ll get skipped over whenever you do a mass unfollow through the tool.
So if you’ve got an aggressive follow/unfollow strategy on Twitter, Hummingbird will make your life much easier for the above reasons.
However, that being said, there are 3 areas where Hummingbird could stand to improve.
a) No Mac Version – it’ll still work on a Mac, but you have to run it through Parallels or VM Firmware. That’s not ideal. Maybe they’ll come out with a Mac version eventually, but for now, it’s only PC based.
b) No hashtag support – it would be great if you could tell it to follow people based on hashtag use. This is not an option right now; the only follow method is to follow another Twitter user’s existing followers.
c) Can’t use it as your main Twitter client – its too slow and clunky. Although that doesn’t really matter, since you’d be doing all your tweeting either directly from twitter.com or Tweet Deck, or whatever your favorite tool is.

Pay Per Click: Process and Search Engines

admin    Pay Per Click     Click, Engines, Process, Search

Many online business owners are still unaware of the meaning of Pay per Click advertisement and don´t realize its tremendous potential for increasing their on line placement and bringing more traffic to their web sites. Even those who have basic knowledge fail to make a distinction between Pay per Click, ad campaigns and Organic Search Organization.

Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is the placement of and short ad on the search result pages for a specific keywords and key phrases. In return for every click in the ad done by a visitor, you pay a determined amount of money. Advertisers don´t pay money to appear on the site, they pay a set bid for every click their ad gets. The term “pay per click” means just what it says: the advertiser pays each time a visitor clicks on the ad.

The most popular search engine is Google, and their PPC advertising program is called Adwords. The next most popular search engine is Yahoo!

The basics for constructing a PPC campaign

First you have to determine your budget and the level of risk you are willing to take. Both things help you determine which PPC search engine (s) you´re going to choose to start with. As one would expect the larger the search engine is, the less the risk it´d involve. Major search engines already have excellent market coverage and usually have great assistance for their customers. However, they´re also the most expensive ones in terms of the amount you have to pay to get real visibility.

Second you have to choose your keywords. This is very important as it will be the link between your clients´ minds and your site.

Third is the composition of the headline that will appear on the search results page, and a description of your product or service, or other promotional text.

Next, you must open an account with a PPC search engine. No charges apply until you have bid on the search words you want and have funded your account.

You may have a number of alternatives for funding your ad campaign. For instance, you may fund your account with a credit card for a set amount, such as $100. When this amount is gone all advertising stops. Alternatively, you may be able to set a monthly spending limit where your ad will no longer appear once the limit is reached. Carefully consider the consequences of the funding option you choose to avoid unanticipated draws on your credit.

Now you can begin bidding for keywords. When you first register the keywords you have chosen with the search engine (and some large businesses will have thousands of keywords), you must specify the maximum amount you are willing to bid for those keywords.

The price of a keyword can range anywhere from 1 cent to a few dollars or more, depending on its popularity as a search term and the search engine itself. Naturally, advertisers who pay more appear higher on the search results pages.

Is a Pay per Click campaign right for your business?

Recent studies confirm that only consumers rarely ever go beyond the first three pages of organic search results (those results that pop up as a natural connection between the search and overall web site´s content and relevance). The highly relevant PPC ads results on the first search engine results pages can be a main source for conversions and sales.

However you need not be a fool, the apparent simplicity of PPC can be deceiving. You can set up a PPC on a search engine with only a few steps and get results that will satisfy you, but if you want to really take advantage of all that you can from the PPC method of advertising, you need to be prepared to use every option and every tool available to you.

Monitor your bids, track your investment and conversions, chose alternative keywords that can work effectively without the huge cost and remember it is always better to have your Pay per Click campaign on expert hands.

Seo Marketing Is The Process Of Search Engine Optimizing

admin    SEO Marketing     Engine, Marketing, Optimizing, Process, Search

Effective Internet marketers penetrating to add essentials to search engine optimizing, or SEO often supply SEO tools that give awe-inspiring results, which at first these marketers learn some “nerve-wrecking” SEO strategies to reach the major search engine’s top ranks.

Some SEO services online offer various solutions that often include writing SEO gigs. The yuppie experts in SEO copywriting assist marketers by supplying these awe-inspiring results to the highest possible SERP range. Marketers go above the scoring system that are specs in Big Name search engines, such as Big 3, Google, Yahoo, MSN and so on.

The mission of most web ramblers is to get their pages at the top rank of the leading search engines. for more detials:-www.offline-promotion.com.SEO marketing is the process of search engine optimizing that involves content written SEO and keyword density style to meet the standards in Google’s outlined algorithms. To find relevant, quality keywords, marketers often use spotter tools or other tools that help them to find quality, relevant keywords. The spotters they use to track keywords hunt keywords that help them to increase odds of reaching top ranks at the major search engines. The Internet dummies want to reach top ranks to hit Google, MSN and Yahoo’s spotlight.

Most SEO services online is a Data Highway that works with marketers by helping them driving SEO solutions home using keyword density strategies.

Keyword density is imperative. Quality, quantity, relevancy and keyword density factors into Google’s decision to rank the web pages. The content incorporates SEO market tools that combine to attach to H2 Tags, Description Tags, Spiders, Header Text, Meta Tags and the relevant keywords SEO experts supply.

Optimizing is the prime focus. Optimizing is the process that fills in relevancy, accuracy and easy access to users. Users can expect top-quality content when searching properly filled SEO style web pages. for visit detials:-www.seo-prediction.com.Internet SEO marketing makes it possible for geeks to intensify their traffic coming to a web page by applying correct SEO marketing strategies.

SEO marketing assists marketers by increasing traffic to a web site, which obviously will increase sales. SEO and keyword density give Internet marketers customized, publishable copies that attract the major search engines online, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Superhighway marketers aim to reach top ranks by approaching the major search engines armed with relevant, quantity, quality, and accuracy keywords and links.

Relevant links should be less than 100 to reach the best results. Copywriters or link builders often try to deliver SEO content and quality, relevant links accessorized to attract Internet users.

In conclusion, SEO marketing is the process of advertising web pages.