Larson's sales & marketing blog

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.

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.

Tags: SEO · Search · Engine · Optimization · Key · words · keywor

 

 

This number differs with each kind of business and each business within a specific industry. So Do you know your ratios?  Do you know your industries base line ratio numbers?

If you had 100 raw leads and started contacting them how many prospects would you get? Figure it out.

If you got 1 out of 20 you would have 5%, 1 out of 15 6.66%. But you need to understand that each of us have different and unique ratio numbers. They are ours and ours alone.

You can only manage what you can measure. If you have just 12 deals in the first stage of the and you KNOW you need 20, then it’s a clear sign that you are in trouble and need to find and add at least 8 more new prospects in order to achieve your numbers

If not there are 4 different things you can do:
1) Get deals from stage one to stage two quicker. Moving projects though the funnel faster.
2) Increase the size of the projects
3) Increase the size of your projects by upselling
4) Practice and lean the art of salesmanship


The challenge for most companies is to generate enough good quality sales into the funnel and to keep adding enough leads on a steady basis into the sales pipeline. Telemarketing and teleprospecting, when used in conjunction with other forms of marketing such as Blog, Social Media Marketing (seo)Content, SEO, E-blasts, Website and Analytics can be an effective means of communicating with your target market.

It is essential that you are set-up for success with your telemarketing and teleprospecting activity, by having good quality content on your website (people often visit your website after they have been called), a dedicated landing page to measure the success of your campaign and follow-up materials that can send to people that are interested in receiving more information.

A good quality database is vital to the success of any telemarketing and teleprospecting campaign.  Once you know your ideal client you need to find the correct database based for your target market and decide on what qualifies as a qualification lead. Then carry out the telemarketing and teleprospecting campaign. If required, you need to be make adjustments on the fly in order to ensure the best possible results. These types of campaigns typically generate some sales ready leads but many are marketing qualified leads that are not yet ready to convert and nurturing. So starts the sales process

Larson Notes & Satire:  Easy and hard all in one. So do you know your numbers and ratios?

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 teleprospecting 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.

Tags: Sales · funnel · Teleprospecting · Telemarketing · Tele

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.

Tags: SEO · Search · Engine · Optimization · Key · words · keywor

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

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

Tags: SEO · Search · Engine · Optimization · Key · words · keywor

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.

Tags: SEO · Search · Engine · Optimization · Key · words · keywor