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On-Page Search Engine Optimization

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For most newbies in the internet marketing world, search engine optimization, or the majority of commonly referred to as SEO, is a difficult matter to take care of. Since they are not all geared up with the information to seize the very first standing in Google and other search engines, it is very problematical for them to accomplish this aim. The whole matter may appear meticulous because of all the technicalities concerned, but the fact is, one does not have to understand all those highly confusing terminologies to attain significant SEO results.

There are actually a few easy tactics any internet marketer can do to be successful in search engine optimization. SEO does not have to be wearisome and frustrating after all. The next SEO techniques will provide you some sense of achievement if carried out the accurate way. They are very easy and practical that any beginner will definitely have no trouble in doing.

Simple and Effective On-Page Search Engine Optimization Methods

By doing on-page SEO, you are generating the chance for Google to be clued-up on what your site is all about. The pages must be properly developed to achieve a winning rank in the search engines. Listed here are some methods on how to do it.

Try including Meta title, description and keywords in your site. In on-page SEO, these are the things deemed crucial. Through this technique, you can let the Google know the focus of your web page. For WordPress users, there are actually some plug-ins available to help you easily apply this.
To put emphasis on the target of your web pages, you can highlight your keywords and put them in bold, italic and underlined codecs. You be obliged to also take into accounts the placement of the keywords in an article. Make sure that that they are located in the beginning, middle and ending of the article.

Be certain to put in ALT tags to your images in any page in your site. Again, this is an effective means to let the search engines recognize that your site is focused in a particular area.

Configure your permalinks in such a way that the names and titles of the post are reflected, not the date or time of the article. This particular format is very much deemed as search engine friendly.

Through these undemanding and simple search engine optimization tactics, getting to the first page of search engines becomes so trouble-free.

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• Important Factors of On-Page Optimization (understandingecommerce.com)
• Make Your New Web Site SEO Ready (understandingecommerce.com)
• Looking for a Good SEO Service Company (understandingecommerce.com)

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tags: Business Development, Business Services, Google, increase online sales, internet advertising, internet search engines, Meta element, On-Page Search Engine Optimization, Online Marketing, online marketing business, online marketing strategy, onsite optimization, Search Engine Marketing, search engine optimization, SEO articles, Web design, Web page, Web search engine, website promotion, WordPress

Why ALL Sales Decisions Are Based On Emotion – Here’s The Proof!

Image by Gerard Stolk vers l’Assomption via Flickr

Business development has a lot to do with sales experience .

Have you ever gone to a newsagent, picked up a magazine and looked through the pages for a while, read the index and then read some of the pages in the magazine?

From my research your reply will almost be sure to be yes . So why did you stand there reading the magazine instead of just saying to yourself, ‘I’ve read this magazine before, I think I’ll get it?’

The answer is, because you wanted to be sure you would get value for your hard earned . You wanted to know more about what the content might help you or interest you in your life. And you really wanted to know if the magazine was worth your hard earned cash !

After all $5 is $5 . You don’t want to worry about throwing it away, do you? So instead you stand there reading looking at it for a while, as long as you need to (without feeling guilty or locking eyes with the shop owner), to see if you can determine enough VALUE for your  money .

Could it be that you feel fearful about spending your cash ? Of course you do, you ‘feel’ a risk anytime you part with money .

Let me give you another example…

Have you ever told a lie to a salesman ? Have you ever been to a shop and been approached to see if you need help then replied with ‘ I’m fine, I just want to look around?’

That’s the knee jerk reaction to the most common question in sales, ‘ are you right’. Have you ever thought soon after replying with your knee jerk reaction with ‘ no thanks just looking ‘ that you regretted saying that?

If so then you’ve just told a lie. And why do you tell small, little, white lies? Could it be that you’re afraid of sales people… because they might pressure you into making a rash decision you regret later?

Its hilarious … but they say sales people tell lies to customers ! Maybe we learned how to lies as salesmen by telling lies to salesment when we’re customers !

The lesson here is understand emotion is there in people when they talk to salesmen .

Here’s one more example…

When we’re buyers and we contact a business in Yellow Pages, what’s one of the final questions we commonly say ?

‘How much does it cost?’

The reason I’ve noticed that consumers ask that question is that it’s one of the few questions they know how to ask!

Customer lack information on what they are buying . So instead of telling the sales person ‘ I’m ignorant about your product or service’, so we can wholly rely on their recommendations and ‘trust’ them, we instead pretend that cost is important by asking them that question.

If the salesperson is smart, they will realize the customer desires help not just a price, so they can make quality decision about suitability of the product or service to their own emotional needs .

We don’t like anyone to think we’re ignorant . We worry about asking a question about a product or service we haven’t bought before, in case we ask something that makes us feel stupid and we have buyer’s remorse.

As part of your business training include learning to sell better with emotions in mind to see your profits soar!

Related articles

• Sales Success: The John Wooden Way (customerthink.com)
• Distract yourself or think it over? Two ways to deal with negative emotions (scienceblog.com)

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tags: Business Development, business training, Emotion, sale, Sales Decisions Are Based On Emotion, small business management, Utilizing Wholesale Sources

How to Build Rapport in 7 Seconds

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I received my first sales training with a man who was very assertive , almost pushy.  This conflicted with my laid back nature, and for the next 6 months I didn’t even obtain one sale.

I knew I needed to enhance my style . I began started to acknowledge there were two sales I had to make, first myself, so that my client “believed” what I have to say or recommend , then the second sale was the designated service I provided.

With this understanding I began to focus on building rapport. The system I developed was so powerful I was dumb struck . Customers clients would purchase virtually anything I suggested . I didn’t miss a sale for 3 months straight. I had proven my process succeeded !

I then proceeded to instruct salespeople in other industries, who were selling anything from new bathrooms to carpet cleaning, from blinds to jewelery and the system worked, beyond my wildest expectations.

The “system” is founded on this concept from Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People…

People are 10,000 times more interested in themselves than they are in you (or your product ).

Too often in sales the salesperson starts with a few questions to gain insights about their prospect’s needs , then with that knowledge makes some recommendations. Then the salesperson does the usual thing of “trying to close the sale”.

This approach won’t work for numerous reasons. First of all the salesperson hasn’t usually earned the right to give an opinion as they haven’t created the first selling step, earning the right to speak and to recommend.

If you have high rapport with a prospect and I mean the same level of rapport as you would have with a friend of 1 year, then the customer will “believe” you and your advice . What commonly occurs is the salesperson generates their own objections by making recommendations too soon before deep level rapport was there .

Nobody likes an arrogant person and this is all too often the error that salespeople fall into, not creating enough rapport before making a recommendation.

So how you do build fantastic rapport, in as little as 7 seconds?

The method I’ve perfected is understanding a person’s DISC Profile.

DISC profiles have been here since 1930 when Dr Marston observed peoples’ behavior falling into 4 different categories. These being… outgoing and task orientated, outgoing and people orientated, task orientated and reserved and people orientated and reserved.

About 50% of the population are task orientated and about 50% are people orientated. Also 50% of people are outgoing and 50% are reserved.

By understanding these percentages I learned that by being friendly with a customer you could be annoying them because 50% of people are task orientated people that are irritated by ‘friendly’ salespeople. They don’t feel any need to like the person they buy from.

While the other 50% of the population are people that need to like the person they purchase from or they won’t buy from them on principle. You’d be surprised at how true this is, ask your wife/husband or friends about it and you’ll see that it’s very true.

Now the key to creating rapport is to be friendly if they are a people orientated person. Don’t try to be friendly if they are not reciprocating. It takes time to obtain this skill, it took me about 6 months to pick which DISC profile a person is accurately and regularly in 5-7 seconds, so you can too.

Once I learned this, the benefits were unbelievable. Even without the knowledge how to “close the sale” I had customers wanting to buy from me expression things like ‘how do we work together’, before they even knew the price of my business development program ! I realized I needed to say, ‘do you mind if I outline the investment before we kickoff’

With this new found skill I realized I had created a selling system of “how not to get objections”, where you simply don’t get them… at all! This is in contrast to trying to overcome objections written about in dozens of books on selling. Salespeople nearly always create their own rejections due to their own personality!

Rapport is the key to super sales success and you create rapport when you’re listening, but NOT when you’re talking.

There’s a lot more to this system than I can talk about here, in fact its a whole book full of insights about selling with DISC profiles, including selling to outgoing versus reserved people. That’s covered comprehensively in my company’s business development program.

I suggest you try to learn more about DISC profiles and study them for 6 months. You can get to the stage where you can pick a person’s profile in less than 7 seconds, even on the phone!

Related articles

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• Sales 2.0 – what about the buyer-seller conversation? (thesalescafe.wordpress.com)

Popularity: 5% [?]

Tags: Business Development, Dale Carnegie, DISC Profiles, How to Build Rapport in 7 Seconds, Rapport, Salesmanship, small business management

Build Your Firm’s Online Presence by Using Facebook

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Do you maintain a Facebook page? I sincerely hope you do, because Facebook is a fantastic instrument for attracting traffic to your page.

Here’s a few tips to get you started.

Because Facebook has become such a fierce market instrument businesses ought to start to think of their Facebook page as a “second home page”. Facebook has a lot of features that can help you connect to people through your friends. Using the messaging system, the events calendar, and the news feeds you can expose your brand to a significant swath of of Facebooks 500 million users.

Here are some practical steps you can take to improve your facebook presence and drive traffic to your business.

1. Take some time to choose a good name for your page. Once you decide commit to it. Changing your facebook name is not unlike changing your business phone number. It makes it harder on your friends to refer people to your page.

A good name for your Facebook page is the most important consideration. This is not a Search Engine Optimization strategy, it’s about marketing. You don’t want to use a name that’s just stuffed with keywords. That doesn’t work – it makes your page’s name too long and it looks like spam to your fans, which means they will likely hide it in their news feed.

Remember that a good name is not generic. Facebook hates being played. In fact, Facebook has been disabling updates for generically named pages, killing their ability to connect with fans.

Don’t get greedy.

Use your company name in the page title and don’t be misleading.

2. Use the Info tab to your advantage.

At this point I need to address a common misconception about Facebook. You won’t ever get a significant SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization”, benefit from your Facebook profile. External links are obfuscated making backlinks from facebook useless in passing “page rank”. Facebook works very hard to keep link spammers off their site, and this is a very effective way to do that. The real marketing strength of Facebook isn’t in it’s SEO potential. It’s real power is it’s popularity. Facebook has become so large that it’s become an outstanding networking tool. Rather than worrying about the search engines, make your focus using the site to attract new customers and keep existing customers engaged and excited about your product.

That said, however, there are a few things you can do to use Facebook to help the search engines pay attention to your website. Facebook has a lot of “domain authority”, and anyone who’s ever gotten listed in Wikipedia will tell you that links from a high domain authority site gets a search engine benefit, even if you don’t get any page rank.

It won’t hurt to include keywords and links on the info page. Make sure to include:

• Links to your own sites or other relevant resources
• City, state, and address, which are important fields for local searches
• Company overview, mission, and products, which become relevant when folks do product searches

Make sure to include your phone number and links to your “buy now” pages. Remember… over time this page will bring in prospects. Your top priority should be making it easy for your Facebook visitors to contact you, or if they are already ready to commit, buy your product.

3. Post direct links in your page’s stream to your website and other relevant sites. This is the real trick to getting the search engines to notice your facebook presence.

There are two ways to post links into your page’s stream:

Actual URL: If you enter an actual URL facebook will link directly to it with a “nofollow” tag. This is the best way to do it because the link goes straight to your site. Try to use an actual URL wherever possible.
Attach Link: Attach links seem really cool because they automatically pull down all kinds of cool information from the page you’re linking to, including a thumbnail image. This method gives you the option of changing the anchor text of the link. The only problem is that the link does not go straight to the destination URL, but rather through a Facebook URL. The search engines won’t be able to follow them properly.

4. Get fans to comment and like content in your stream to strengthen intra-Facebook linking.

Facebook links a fan’s name back to their Facebook profile page when they comment or like content in your Facebook page’s stream. When these comments and likes are indexed, Google will see more links between your page and your page’s fans and will view this as a stronger bond.

Facebook can be a valuable ally to both your website and your firm. With a Facebook page your firm becomes visible to a huge user base. OK, it will take a little time. You’ll have to do a little creative planning and you’ll have to actually build and maintain it, but in the end your online visibility will be stronger.

About The Author

Brian O’Connell is the CEO and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country’s leading edge web design businesses dedicated exclusively to accounting website design. His firm currently provides websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, bookkeeping, and tax preparation firms.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tags: Build Your Firm's Online Presence by Using Facebook, Business Development, facebook, Facebook features, Marketing, Online Networking, Sales, search engine optimization, Selling, Social network, social networking, Web search engine

Business Development Program for Small Businesses

SBA Proposes New Regulations to Strengthen the 8(a) Business Development Program for Small Businesses

The U.S. Small Business Administration this week announced proposals aimed at strengthening opportunities for disadvantaged small businesses to benefit from its 8(a) Business Development program.

The proposed 8(a) regulation changes are the result of the first comprehensive review of the 8(a) program in a number of years and were published today in the Federal Register. The rules cover a variety of areas of the program, ranging from providing further clarification on determining economic disadvantage to requirements on Joint Ventures and the Mentor-Protégé program. The public comment period on the proposed changes is open for 60 days.

“The 8(a) program has a proven record as an effective program for helping disadvantaged small businesses gain access to training and contracting opportunities to help them grow, create jobs and ultimately succeed in the marketplace once they graduate from the program,” SBA Administrator Karen Mills said. “These proposed changes build on that foundation of success, and will strengthen the program and maximize its benefits for eligible small businesses.”

The 8(a) program is a nine-year business development program for small businesses that fit the SBA’s criteria of being socially and economically disadvantaged.  The 8(a) program helps these firms develop their business and provides them with access to government contracting opportunities, allowing them to become solid competitors in the federal marketplace.  It also provides specialized business training, counseling, marketing assistance and high-level executive development to its participants.  In FY08, small businesses received $16.1 billion in 8(a) contracts.

Some of the components of the 8(a) program that the proposed changes will affect include:

• Joint Ventures – qualifying that 8(a) firms are required to perform a significant portion of the work to ensure that these companies are able to build capacity;
• Economic Disadvantage – providing more clarification on economic disadvantage as it relates to total assets, gross income, retirement accounts and a spouse of an 8(a) company owner in determining the owner’s access to capital and credit;
• Mentor-Protégé Program – requiring that assistance provided through the Mentor-Protégé relationship is directly tied to the protégé firm’s business plan;
• Ownership and Control Requirements – providing flexibility in admitting individuals of immediate family members of current and former 8(a)participants;
• Tribally-Owned Firms – seeking public comments on the best way to determine whether a tribe meets the criteria of being economically disadvantaged for the 8(a) program;
• Excessive Withdrawals – amending regulations on what is considered excessive as a basis for termination or early graduation from the 8(a) program; and
• Business Size for Primary Industry – requiring that a firm’s size status remainsmall for its primary industry code during its participation in the 8(a) program.

Small businesses may submit comments to this proposed rule on or before Dec. 28, 2009, to www.regulations.gov, where they will be posted or mailing them to 409 3rd St. SW, Mail Code: 6610, Washington, DC  20416 or via e-mail at:
8aBD2@sba.gov.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: Business Development, Business Development Program for Small Businesses, disadvantaged small businesses, SBA, Small Business Administration, small businesses