The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. But the time has come to face up to your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is becoming so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to visit your premises, make an enquiry or make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would probably be your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. and avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 500 - 750 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 250 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

Go to a site like www.linkpopularity.com which will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company like ours, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet Marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

BUTTERFLY

Butterflies go through four life stages, and they look very different at each stage. In fact, if you didn't know that they were the same creature........

The question is how do companies and butterflies compare?

Really in more ways than at first seems obvious.A company's inception takes energy, engagement and enterprise much like the creation of the egg of the butterfly.

The egg has lots of promise and at this stage of its life so do many companies - but not all survive, like the eggs they fail to prosper in the open environment in which they have been laid. They need parents who have given them the right protection to survive - well camouflaged on their leaf. An interesting observation is that, like companies the shape of butterfly eggs is remarkably variable.

If a company survives the formative stage then it grows and emerges from the egg to become a caterpillar. This is a process that that changes it out all recognition. A caterpillar is an eating machine. It needs to grow to move on to the next stage so it needs to eat - companies at this stage need cash and as a different form the dangers in the environment change too, just like the situation for the butterfly.

Now comes the really difficult bit - the time that it seems like you have to go back to go forward. Becoming a chrysalis or a pupa is an act of consolidation for the butterfly that will allow it to fulfil its destiny, but it is remarkably dangerous as massive changes take place to its structure and during this phase it has absolutely no protection from predators. Sound familiar?

Then there is the butterfly. But to become a butterfly the creature must leave behind its case. Companies have similar 'decisions' to make about people, products and many other actors.

The real point is that massive change is the normal order of things and for a company to be successful it has to understand this and know how to deal with its changing environment and its changing status. Companies need to know how to survive those changes and how to prosper from them. This requires proper concentration on marketing - the wide range of activities involved in making sure that you're continuing to meet the needs of your customers and are getting value in return. It also requires concentration on people and relationships within the business.

E-CRM is experienced in taking companies from egg to butterfly. Call Richard Hill on + 44 (0) 1 225 840 490 to find out more.

SugarCRM - Commercial Open Source CRM

SugarCRM is a suite of business automation tools for managing your marketing, sales and customer service operations. From leads to contacts, opportunities to cases, the Sugar Suite helps you track and gain insight into your customers.

SugarCRM is "Open Source", that is a program in which the source code is available for use and/or modification from its original design free of charge, ie, open. It is software for which the license contract allows access to the entire source code to the licensee.

There are, naturally, some licensing conditions, but basically the package is free and you can modify it to meet your own needs.

"If you don't have to pay for it then it can't be any good" is the first thought that then springs to most people's minds. In the case of many software packages that is just not true. Because Open Source is developed in a community of developers that are deeply interested in their project and tested by a wide ranging community of users that need the product the benefits of Open Source software is in lowering total cost of ownership, offering more choice and the increasing quality and functionality of the code as bugs are discovered and fixed fast.

Open Source based software companies are built on business models that are much more efficient and cost effective in building software, distributing software and acquiring customers. They spend far less on marketing and sales and far more on engineering and quality. Since the Open Source project is such an effective marketing mechanism, Open Source companies can keep their sales and marketing costs low.

However, one has to point out that there are some clear issues with Open Source too, issues such as:

Informal support - the free license for an Open Source package is just a part of the cost to deploy and maintain an application, but a using a company that understands the product will reduce these costs and can still lead to much lower costs of total ownership.

Velocity of change - the fact that the Open Source community is constantly tweaking its software is a reasonable concern. Open Source software introduces more complexities in software maintenance, but also promotes more secure and reliable code through rapid bug and vulnerability fixes.

No roadmap - many Open Source projects suffer from an informality that causes anxiety. Most managers want a clear roadmap for products so that they can better plan for their future. But good Open Source distributions have specifications and web sites that outline the various projects, so whilst the code-by-committee approach may not align with your goals the Open Source process has beneficial tradeoffs such as higher specifications and solutions.

Perhaps the best way to understand if Open Source is the right solution for you is to look at demonstrations - see here for a demonstration of Sugar CRM [Username: demo & Password: demo] - and then speak to the companies that support the code to find out whether it will do the job you need with the security you require.

DIRECT MAIL

1 = List
2 = Offer
3 = Product
4 = Creative

is the mantra for direct mail.

Direct mail can be personal, not just personalised making it an extremely effective means of acqusition, customer service and retention.

Direct mail can be a very powerful and profitable direct marketing tool, but it has to be targeted so to be. When targeted it becomes something that recipients can appreciate. Often it is the best way for a brand to demonstrate that it really does understand the aspirations of its customers, one by one, not as some inchoate mass.

That's why the list or target audience is the most important consideration in direct mail marketing, followed by the offer (free, trial, incentive, discount, what's in it for me offer), clarity about the product and its benefits (not just what it does by why that's an advantage) and only finally the creative that needs to sweep all of the above into a design that catches attention and, more importantly, achives the desired response.