Following up on web leads properly can make you more sales, plus you will be building business relationships. Business relationships are more important than a sale.

So you’re getting high search engine rankings, well that’s great! You’re getting lots of qualified traffic, wonderful! You’re getting a high conversion rate, what else is there?. Overall you’re having a good measure of success, that’s great right? When you make your reply back, make a sale or what ever the goal is for your website, what do you do next? Do you toss the contact or sale to the side and wait for the next one? Are you trying to grow your business or not? If you’re not following up on every contact multiple times, for every sale, every form filled out from the customer or potential customer, your competitor will be!

Let’s talk a little bit about leaving sales 101 and graduating to real-world bite you in butt relationship building. It’s not an option whether you should or not, it’s when are you going to make it a very serious part of your web marketing strategy (if you’re not ready)? You can be building a referral based business today and grow your business faster, stronger and easier. How many emails do you send out and don’t get a response back? How many times have you tried to close a deal and couldn’t get the person to return your phone calls and or emails, probably a lot, right? It sounds like you’re trying to get a sale and NOT build a relationship. If you focus on building relationships instead of making sales you will be building a “referral based” business. How much easier would it be to have people contacting you to “buy” as apposed to you “selling” to them?

Having said all that, of course we know how important it is to keep in contact with customers, but sometimes it’s just another thing we have to manage. Using email and phone calls can be unsuccessful methods to build those relationships. Have you ever received a hand written greeting card from someone, of course you have. But how about from some you bought something from? Maybe? How’d it make you feel? How about just getting a card in the mail and NOT opening it up? We always open them up, right? But what if it had been an email or phone call? The email could have went in to their spam folder and never had been opened at all, our phone call may have went to their voice mail and disregarded.

Try the card follow-up system it works great! You’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.


Written by Tim Frisch, owner of SEO Help Desk , he has been assisting companies build business online since 1998, and offline for over 25 years. SEO Help Desk is good resource for most aspects of SEO. Including building business business relationships online and securing more sales through your website. Find out where your website is ranked in the search engines, get a free ranking report at http://www.seohelpdesk.com/free-search-engine-ranking-report/ . Find out more about building a referral based business at Get The Sale .

Get High Rankings and Better Traffic When You Have the Right Keywords

A question I get a lot is, “If my keywords are ranking great in the top search engines, why is my traffic so low?” A major problem could be that you’re either using keywords that have a low traffic value or that are not being evaluated often enough. If the keywords have low traffic they may never be the right ones to use and or they have may lost their value and need to be modified and or replaced.

Keywords are the foundation of an SEO campaign, if your website is not optimized with the right keywords, don’t start your SEO campaign. This is one of the most challenging parts of search engine optimization – SEO. Knowing which keywords to initially optimize your site with, and consistent website analysis is Critical! Keeping your website fresh is not only keeping fresh page content, it’s also equally important to modify your meta tags.

The meta tags in each page along with page content should reflect the new corresponding keywords. But always remember when a website is modified you could be “fixing” things that should not be “fixed”. In other words, you change the very fabric that equates to the current search engine rankings. So use kid gloves when making content and meta tag changes.

As mentioned before Overture and Google provide a few keyword assess tools that can give you a good idea as to which ones could be good performers. And of course your stats will tell you where the rubber meets the road. Here you’ll find out which individual keywords are driving the traffic.
The best way I’ve found to pick keywords is to make a “wish list” of the words that people might use to find the website. Next check your competitor sites out to see what they are using, then use the Overture and or Google tools to get a “bigger and better” second opinion list, then finalize your list. After you have made your final list, break down list into small groups that would apply or would be relevant to each page in website. Each page should have relevant keywords from list, populated in meta tags and page content.

Once the website has been re-optimized with new keywords, it’s a waiting game until the website is crawled on by the search engines and re-indexed. The stats will have to be rechecked along with a new ranking report.

To recap, locate the best keywords, optimize each individual page including meta tags and page content, track your results on a regular basis.

Written by Tim Frisch, owner of SEO Help Desk http://www.seohelpdesk.com/ , he has been assisting companies build business online since 1998, and offline for over 25 years. SEO Help Desk is good resource for most aspects of SEO. Including linking campaigns, SEO training, SEO coaching, SEO campaigns, SEO consulting and SEO analysis. To see how your website is ranked in the search engines, get a free ranking report at http://www.seohelpdesk.com/free-search-engine-ranking-report/

Link Strategies - Website linking strategies are one of the most important parts, if not the most important part of an Internet marketing campaign. Website linking is organic just like the rest of the SEO process. So it should be treated as part of the ongoing web promotion campaign. This is not a quick and easy process, but can have a stronghold in getting and keeping qualified traffic to your website. Having a lot of visitors coming to your website is nice, but if they aren’t the right type of visitors you’re wasting your time, energy and investment dollars. Do it right and step by step, the results will come.

If you didn’t know already, having the right link campaign in place for your website could make the difference between having a “door stop” or a “door opener.” Links can come in many forms, they can come from websites, search engines, search directories, articles, press releases and many other places. Some of these other places could in “bad neighborhoods”, also sometimes referred to as link farms, and could get your website rankings penalized. You could view this kind of linking as “bad association”. Some directories are solely there to cheat not only the system but you too. I have found that working within the system, although it changes frequently, is best working within their guide lines.

Some people have asked me, if they need reciprocal linking in place to get optimum search engine rankings. The short answer is yes you need a link strategy in place. In reality you need high quality links linking to you site. But most people of course will want a link going back to their website, hence the name reciprocal linking. But how might it effect your website if a link is coming in and not going out. If you are planning a reciprocal link strategy, you need to plan on giving a link back to the giver. You will gain better link popularity if you have links coming to your website. The links going out do not effect your link popularity. So what is link popularity and why do I care? It is one of the main determining factors or algorithms search engines use to determine your rankings.

How can I most effectively provide a reciprocal link campaign? The rule of thumb is locate non-competitor, relative type websites. For example if your business provides installation of vinyl siding you might want to share links with a website that installs hardwood flooring. Then contact those websites telling them you want to share links.
Since it’s established that incoming links are more important than links going out to other websites, let’s discuss additional ways to achieve this. There are industry portals or directories, search engine directories like DMOZ and other very important “one way linking” strategies, that should be considered in the overall linking strategy.

Another very effective way in getting those all so important links to your site is by distributing your own expert articles and press releases to specific directories that specialize and accommodate them. You could also distribute them to other non-competitor, relative type websites. This adds value to their webpage content and brings highly effective links back to your website.

What if I have a website with no links coming back? Your website rankings can be penalized. You definitely want to have this part figured out in the SEO planning process. In fact your SEO planning should be completed before you design and build your website (if at all possible), don’t worry most do it after the fact.


So is it OK to get as many links as possible, as fast as possible? Through my experience, I would say NO. You want to grow this area slow and strong, search engines tend view that as a trick or a way to try and beat the system. Quality is key here just as the rest of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts should be.

What about the “bad neighborhood” linking directories? How can I identify them? Usually they are some type of directory with just lists of any category with no real purpose in mind

So overall the best approach in getting a good solid link campaign started is to first, ask your vendors or industry contacts to share links, people you are already familiar with. Second, write “expert articles” about your business and or industry distribute them to directories, ask to trade a link with industry websites. Third, write and distribute your press releases to PR type directories. Fourth, go ahead and contact those “good fitting” websites to share links with. Fifth and last, stay away from “bad neighborhoods” or link farm type directories.


Written by Tim Frisch, owner of SEO Help Desk http://www.seohelpdesk.com/ , he has been assisting companies build business online since 1998, and offline for over 25 years. SEO Help Desk is good resource for most aspects of SEO. Including linking campaigns, SEO training, SEO coaching, SEO campaigns, SEO consulting and SEO analysis. To see how your website is ranked in the search engines, get a free ranking report at http://www.seohelpdesk.com/free-search-engine-ranking-report/

Learn SEO Basics - Most websites are not built with search engines in mind. Preparing your website prior to submitting to search engines or directories, is vital. By having a solid foundation you will save a lot of time and aggravation. Planning a web promotion strategy is as important as planning your overall business strategy. You don't know have to know everything to get started, but please get the basics down, such as researching the right key terms and optimizing your page content.

Are you wondering where or how to start optimizing your website to get more visitors or even how to get it ready for the search engines before submitting? The foundation to proper SEO or search engine optimization is first developing the most relevant keywords. One way to do this is by using the keyword tools at Google or Overture. Another way is to check what your competition is doing. After that is done, build relevant Meta tags for each page in the web site. Scan through each page and make sure you are using those same keywords throughout each page of the website, where they would apply, by relevency.

Next, build a site map giving the visitors direction to each important area within the site. Then a solid reciprocal link campaign should be put in place with the idea that it’s going to be an ongoing process (as in the rest of the search engine optimization process). It’s more realistic thinking to get links crossing in both directions (reciprocal), if you’re working within a traditional linking campaign. Most people you contact will want a link coming back. The purpose is to have good resources to link both ways, from your web site to relevant non-competitor websites and those websites linking back. I need to warn you here, getting companies to link back is very time consuming and some will never contact you back. Another way to get the right links from other websites is getting listed in industry directories, this can be free to very expensive.

A couple of additional methods is by writing and submitting press leases and expert articles. These are great because they both have relative content and can be placed on your website, providing good additional content. When submitted to a directory they link back giving you a solid link structure which helps ranking. And by adding them to your website you add value to your website, giving your readers something new to consider and it keeps your website fresh. Keeping it fresh is a very important component in the ranking process.

And last but not least, you'll need to have a good method to track your results, including search engine ranking, visitor traffic and other metrics, such as what key terms are driving the most business and which ones are not.


Written by Tim Frisch, owner of SEO Help Desk http://www.seohelpdesk.com/ , he has been assisting companies build business online since 1998, and offline for over 25 years. SEO Help Desk is good resource for most aspects of SEO. Including linking campaigns, SEO training, SEO coaching, SEO campaigns, SEO consulting and SEO analysis. To see how your website is ranked in the search engines, get a free ranking report at http://www.seohelpdesk.com/free-search-engine-ranking-report/