A blog on a website is a powerful asset for fresh content and search engine listings.

Your blog should be focused and relevant to your product or service and give valuable information to your audience.

By carefully selecting the blog topic, you can choose keywords that will be picked up by the search engines and used to drive traffic to your site.

Our previous blog posting (here) was posted on the 24th June 2008 and was listed in the search results of Google today (26th June). It shows that Google loves fresh content and will list it quickly.

This is great news as it means targetted traffic is being driven to your site super quick.

There are several blog packages available although our preferred blog is Wordpress (www.wordpress.org). This can be easily installed on your site and will be up and running within minutes.

Have fun!
D.

“I figure the faster I pedal, the faster I can retire.”

This is a super quote from Lance Armstrong, the seven times winner of the Tour De France.

His wins in the Tour were made even more amazing as previously he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He had a mammouth struggle to overcome the disease as his chances of survival dropped as low as 40%.

He clearly is not a quitter and puts 110% into everything he does - cycling or surviving.

This is a great lesson to bring back to your business.

Quitting is never an option and you should use all your resources to move your business forward and move into a winning position.

And it works on many levels. Remember that tricky prospect who never went ahead with your proposal?

Call them - chase it up - never quit. In sales, you find that the one of the main reasons sales fall through is because they are not properly followed up.

Remember that client who is delaying payment on an invoice?

Call them - chase it up - never quit.

You get the idea…

D.

The food retailer Sainsbury’s has experienced first hand the backlash of a failed website.

On Tuesday afternoon, a technical fault was spotted on the online ordering website. They immediately suspended the site pending getting the fault fixed.

You can read more here.

This site has been offline since then and is expected to be off until Friday. Nearly four days of lost orders … not a great week for Sainsbury’s.

It appears the crux of the problem is that they are unable to access customers’ orders. It will impact around 20,000 customers before it is fixed.

What’s the lesson?

If you rely on your website for a sizeable income then make sure you have back up methods in place to allow you to continue trading even when things go wrong.

It’s obvious, but often missed. Even on a very complex system (which this system clearly is), there should be simple methods of extracting the informaton.

D.

Search engine optimisation is one of the services that we enjoy delivering for clients. Mainly for two reasons:

1) We enjoy the challenge!

2) We enjoy it when the client sees success through the work we have done.

We have spent alot of time working on how we create the keyword optimised pages and how we get them listed in Google (and other search engines).

Sometimes Google does it’s own thing and lists a page in a different keyword search to the one we were aiming for. Because of the complexity of the way Google analyses and indexs pages, it is impossible to get it right everytime.

However, here’s an example of when it does go right:

washing machines parts evesham
How To Correctly Indentify Your Washing Machines Parts For Replacement.
www.lenchservice.co.uk/washing_machines_parts_evesham.php - 9k -

This is an extract directly from the Google search results page. This entry is in position number 1 for the keyword phrase ‘washing machines parts evesham’.

There are three parts to the results displayed above:

1) The keyword phrase - ‘washing machines parts evesham’

This simply displays the keyword phrase. This is taken from the keyword meta tag inside the html page code:

meta name="keywords" content="washing machines parts evesham"

2) The page description - ‘How To Correctly Indentify Your Washing Machines Parts For Replacement.’

This is the description of the page. It is vital that it contains the keyword phrase and reads as an enticement to encourage a click through to the web page. It is taken directly from the description meta tag inside the html page code:

meta name="description" content="How To Correctly Indentify Your Washing Machines Parts For Replacement"

3) The web page name - ‘www.lenchservice.co.uk/washing_machines_parts_evesham.php’

This is the actual name of the web page. It contains the keyword phrase spaced using an underscore (_). The underscore is important because it allows the search engine to ‘read’ the individual words within the web page name.

The way Google has picked up the various elements of the meta tags and web page name shows how important it is to make sure these elements are always within your web pages.

Without them, Google will make a best guess of what the page is about - and it could be way off!

D.

How important is customer service?

Do you really need to be ‘nice’ to your customers?

Can you just give them an average level of service (just like your competitors) and still continue to get business from them?

It amazes me how many companies still give lousy customer service. Even big, well known brands are being hammered in the press for their lack of customer service.

It shouldn’t be like this. Every company should understand and focus on customer service.

Why? Because it cements the relationship with your customer and provides a ’sub-concious’ barrier to moving their business away.

So what is great customer service?

To answer this, it is probably easier to give you an example of bad customer service.

Following on from this blog entry, I contacted the company concerned and received an email reply.

First tick in the box - they replied to my email.

The person replying apologised for the problem and stated that someone, specifically the Product Manager for this service, would call me back. Three days later and they have not called.

Additionally, in my email I specifically asked for a refund of the money I had paid. This has not been done either.

This is bad customer service. I won’t name the company, but they are a multi-national multi-million pound organisation in the parcel delivery and post business (no, it’s not Royal Mail - guess again!).

They should know better. They may be sitting back thinking that their size and brand presence will carry their business forward.

To a point this is probably true - but sooner or later, bad customer service will play a part and they will feel the financial impact.

What can we learn from this?

Well the most valuable lesson is drive customer service through your business and make sure every employee knows that you are a customer focused business.

You should be ‘wowing’ your customers and using this euphoria to gather positive testimonials (like these).

And here’s one you should try…

Don’t just aim for great customer service - go for legendary customer service.

D.

Here’s one of our latest client sites to be finished:

You can see the site in full here:

http://www.connecting4profit.com

The key features of this site are:

- Sales orientated web page text
- Fully installed blog
- Contact and enquiry forms protected by the Maxweb Safe Forms System
- Mini-course sign up managed by the Maxweb Marketing By Email System
- Downloadable ebook

D.