The About Us Page can do wonders for your web sites' Sales

A new person joins a company and gets introduced to everyone by the chairman, President or head of that company. His/her qualification, work experience and other details are revealed to the other staff members, so that they come to know about this new person. This is not done to waste peoples' time, but to foster confidence and trust in them about the abilities and capabilities of the new joinee. This also helps the other staff members to interact with this person so that they get a clear idea as to how this person can help them, and for what purpose they should contact him in the office. The 'About Us' page of a website serves exactly the same purpose.

Some things to keep in mind while creating the 'About Us' page

1. Be real, show yourself and your staff by putting picture(s) so that the visitors feel they are dealing with flesh and blood human beings, and not just a dumb machine. Pictures also arouse the curiosity of people to know you better.
2. Why should a visitor come to your site? Personalize your features and services by connecting them with your expertise and knowledge about things related to your services or products. Show them your passion, and hunger for providing the latest andthe best to them.
3. No lies, please. There is no need to exaggerate, distort, or manipulate about what all you don't do. Tell people the truth and see them getting drawn to your site like flies draw towards sugar. Be honest and tell them exactly what you do. Because you may be able to attract people to your site by doing big (dishonest) talk. But ultimately, they will be able to see through the veil.
4. Bombard them with as much information as possible. Yes, you heard it right. Give them more than required information about yourself and your services, leaving no scope for them to ask you or remain confused regarding anything.

About Us page should truly serve the purpose of delivering people with most relevant and updated information about you and your services, so that the visitors get to know about you as if they met you personally. This page should act like a reflection and mirror image of your site. If you give the right information on this page, you have hit the Bull's Eye!

Practicing Safe and Honest SEO

Principles of Safe SEO

Practicing safe SEO will surely lead your website to positive and fruitful results. And doing it is not so difficult or confusing also. Then why not indulge in these safe, honest, and right SEO practices in order to further brighten and improve the chances of your website's presence and reach on the net:

1. You are not to write any invisible text in the webpages at all or you will get banned by search engines.
2. Use tools like Wordtracker to get high rankings because without right and proper choice of keywords you may have good rankings in search engines, but will not be able to sell anything.
3. Keep updating your content and adding new, fresh content regularly.
4. Do not ever link with banned websites or sites that do not enjoy a good reputation on the search engines.
5. Don't try to stuff your meta tags with unwanted, irrelevant words that have nothing to do with your actual text on that page.
6. Doorway pages are not at all suggested while doing SEO. Doorway pages offer different pages to search engines and human visitors and this is not acceptable in SEO industry.
7. Always build a very simple yet professional website that combines all the important features being offered by your company.
8. Your body text and sales copy should be very effective and powerful, attracing the visitors to your site.
9. The title tag forms a very important component of SEO as a well written title tag informs users about the page and also helps the search engines index your page more effectively.
10. Keep your self abreast with the latest SEO news, activities, developments, tools, etc that are taking place around the globe in SEO industry.

Building Online Customer Relationship: Multiplying Your Online Business

It is very rightly said that a personal touch in marketing can make all the difference between a sale or not. Building up a positive and trust fostering relationship with the customer can go a long way in ensuring sales for your online business. But the sad part is that not many webmasters pay attention to this aspect of online marketing. Most of them is just concerned about getting higher rankings and more targeted traffic to the site. But what they forget is the real reason behind getting targeted traffic-converting traffic into customers. Would you be interested in getting 500 hits a day and converting half of them into customers or getting 5000 hits a day but converting just 1 percent into customers? If you understand this simple fact, you will understand what I am trying to convey here.

The fact is that in order to convert visitors into customers, you need to build strong customer relationship with them. You need to wrack your brain and find out why people should buy from you instead of your competitor. Do some serious research and thinking on what information exactly your prospective customers are looking for. Present that information to them through some report, e-book, article, or newsletter answering all their questions. Spend some time writing a sales letter that convinces and attracts the clients to give away their email address to you in exchange of the valuable information you give them. Place this sales letter in your home page and go to any autoresponder companies to get an autoresponder account. Now put your sales letter on this account.

What you achieve with this is the building up of a database of people who can later on be your clients. Take up one solid product or service of yours and write a sales letter around it and send it to the customers. Keep sending these people new and fresh news of interest from time to time. In a way you are maintaining a regualr contact with the clients and personalizing the whole interaction. There is no harm adding some personal
information about you or your personal life in the letter.

Don't confuse this promotional method as spam because all auto responders these days have unsubscribe links at the end of the message in case you wish to discontinue receiving any mails from the company concerned. Doing this not only builds a strong customer base for you, but also makes you know about whether people like, dislike, respect, look up to you or not.

This is a kind of two step marketing where you get something in exchange of giving something to the visitors. In this case you get their email addresses in exchange of giving away free information to them. It is a simple fact of life that people buy from people whom they like and trust, especially on the internet, where trust is a major factor contributing to sales.

Remember all webmasters that internet is a medium of direct marketing and the sooner you understand it, easier it would be to convert visitors into clients.

http://www.segnant.com/

Obtaining An SEO Proposal: The Cost Involved (Part IV)

Till now, in the earlier blogs, we concentrated on the methods, strategies, techniques to be mentioned and put in the SEO proposal. In this blog ,we will discuss about the importance of mentioning the total cost involved in seo implementation as well as the individual break down of prices and costs for each phase of the seo project.

To present or not to present the pricing in the proposal

One rule of the thumb is to provide the price details of the project if the project is small, easy to handle, and can be easily explained. Here you can provide the individual break down of the different phases of the seo work that will be taken care of by you along with the man hours required for each phase. But if the project at hand is large and complex, then it is better not to confuse the client by mentioning it in the proposal.In that case, the most advisable course of action would be to present it during vendor pitch, or face to face presentation where you can comfortably explain each and every part in detail.

Also ensure that your proposal is customized and relevant to the client's website. It is highly essential that your proposal is built upon your initialinterview and discussion with the client where you make a note of the client's needs,requirements, and expectations. As a proposal giver,it becomes quite obvious that you study and go through the client's exiting site and finding out the current position of the client's site in the search engines. This will act as food for giving examples as well as reasons for implementing some particular SEO strategies for the site concerned. And this will also build yur reputation and impression in the eyes of the client as highly professional and thorough in your anaysis and study of the website concerned.

So in nutshell complete understanding of the implementation steps involved, the time required for implementation, and the total cost involved in implementation are some of the essential aspects to cover in your proposal if you expect or hope to satisfy the client and fetch the project.

Obtaining An SEO Proposal: Explaining The Methodology (Part III)

Last two blogs ( part I and part II ) were concerned about SEO proposals and the strategies involved in SEO that need to be spelled out in the proposal, in this blog, we will talk about the SEO methodology that needs to be mentioned in the proposal for better comprehension by the client and impressive presentation by you.
Generally clients want to know your firm's approach and methodology towards the execution of SEO services before they sign you up for a contract. It is always better to mention how the work will be executed in your proposal so that there are no questions or doubts left in the mind of the clients regarding your approach towards the project. Your proposal should mention clearly the methodology that you will be applying while doing SEO for the client.

Page Optimization- Do mention the techniques and strategies that you will employ for optimizing the pages, including both on-page and off-page optimization. Clients want to know whether you have actually done your homework in mentioning examples very specific to their website and are capable of providing service customized to the client needs.

Code Changes-Also it is important to spell out in the proposal the way of making changes in the code-whether it will be done by the SEO firm itself or it will be comunicated to the programmers of the company for which the proposal is being made.

Complicated SEO Hurdles-Your proposal must address all the complex issues involved in SEO implementation like handling Flash,dynamic urls, frames, e-commerce or other large sites with thousands of pages. It will be great if you also mention case studies of successful implementation of such complex sites in the past also. And clients find it quite impressive to know that you have a hold over your work and can easily handle coplex sites.

Submissison of optimized sites- Optimization is all about having a good ranking on the search engines, so it becomes all the more important to talk about the submission process of the optimized sites to the search engines in detail in your proposal. Also mention in the proposal the fees involved in submitting the sites to different search engines.

Tracking of Results-It is very essential that you mention in the proposal the methods for tracking the results and reporting them to the clients. There is no harm in requesting a sample report to find out whether report customization is an option or not.

Assumptions on the part of the SEO firm- You as an SEO service provider must also be having certain assumptions and expectations from the clients. Spell them out clearly so that the clients know what kind of cooperation, information, and resources you require from them.

More coming in the next blog regarding SEO proposals.

http://www.segnant.com/