Web-enabling the world of business

Imagining Out Loud
Relevancy. Our blogging pledge to you.

Let's talk quickly on timely topics to elevate your web strategy. Fellow developers will be addressed as well, but in small doses, and wherever possible, in common-speak.

Archive for September, 2006

Blogging For Results - Rank Higher Now

September 13th, 2006
Author: Kyle

Below is a brief explination on how a blog can improve your ranking within search engines. Take it as you may….

Active / original blogs always receive backlinks from various sites, generally people link to the articles or blogs at the time of giving reference - You get a backlink because of posting good content.

Trade links with like-minded blogs. This plays important part as well, in simple terms you can say getting links from those with blogs that loosely cover the same topis you do. You get a backlink from users and your regular readers, just because the content is original and good.

Simple structure - Most of the blogs are CSS based and very easy for search engines to get through the content because there is not messy table structure, or javascript which crawler has to go through

The most important aspect of any blog is original content. Post it in a natural way and you can get lot of backlinks. The site can definitely rank well in search engines for various keywords. Just be natural and start posting! You will get backlinks from various sites from same theme and google just loves getting links from same like-minded sites.

If you are starting blog with the idea of getting top rank within search engines, then do not forget to read this or clear the basics.

Why Your Site Should Be Running A Wordpress Blog

September 13th, 2006
Author: Kyle

Wordpress is an exciting blog utility which provides an extremely easy to use interface making the process of getting your message out on the net quick and simple. With WordPress you can set up static pages so you don’t have to just blog. In fact, whole sites revolve around its code base and it can be maintain all yourself without being a professional webmaster.

Wordpress has been coded to be search engine friendly and conforms to W3 standards. You can easily set it up so the urls make use of your keyword rich title instead of all the dynamic parameters. Just having a blog is good for ranking well within the search engines. Writing content-rich articles and posts often creates pages that can be spidered and indexed. The pages the blog produces bring traffic and as you write more pages the search visitors will just keep coming. The more you write on the same topic over and over and assuming you’re writing quality posts, the more other sites will naturally begin to link to you and further increasing your search engine presence. Writing about the same subject matter will give the impression of you and your site as an authority within the search engines as well as with potential customers and clients.

There is no need to know how to code html, css, or any other scripting language. Creating and updating your Wordpress “site” is as easy as sending email in Hotmail. All the coding is done for you. Simply type and click submit, and your information is out on the internet for people to find. The Wordpress blog offers an easy way to create a fun, first rate website and maintain it with little to no fuss. We highly recommend one for anyone who has a hobby, a business, or simply wants to share their feelings. With Wordpress, you get your message out to the world.

Ten Secrets for Successful Web-Based Customer Service

September 7th, 2006
Author: Prashanth

As it is getting proved, effective web-based customer service is a very achievable goal with significant potential rewards. It simply requires the right principles, practices and tools. By surveying today’s most effective practitioners, it can be distilled to ten basic attributes that make web-based customer support work:

  1. Make sure your web site can “listen” to customers
    Every successful salesperson knows the most important part of their job is listening to the customer—for both explicit and implicit messages. Web sites should do the same. Explicit messages are clear requests for specific information. Implicit messages are patterns of queries or usage that provide clues about customer needs and interests. Effective online service requires mechanisms and/or practices that give an attentive ear to both types of messages.
  2. Give customers what they want—quickly
    once you’ve “heard” what kind of information customers want, you have to give it to them—quickly. The web is all about immediacy. So whether it’s getting new information posted onto your site or making the information that’s already on there easier to understand, you must optimize your ability to respond to your customers’ needs with online content. Don’t confuse this with the rapid posting of the information that marketers want to put on your site. Quality customer service requires the rapid posting of content that is completely customer-driven.
  3. Make customer service resources easy to find and easy to use
    Great content isn’t much use if customers can’t find it easily. That’s why it’s essential to provide customers with highly intuitive search tool that let them pinpoint the answers they need with a minimum number of steps. It’s also smart to maintain a “Top 20″ list of current hot topics that customers can view as soon as they come to your main self-service page.
  4. Integrate all your communications channels
    Different customers will use different communications channels at different times. You don’t want them to get different answers depending on which channel they happen to use. So it’s important to leverage your knowledge base across all channels. Ideally, the information you provide on the web should be exactly the same as what you provide via your live operators, voice self-service, email and chat.
  5. The “80/20″ rule
    To be successful at web-based customer service, you don’t have to be able to answer every conceivable customer question online. More than 80% of all customer questions are usually answered by just 20% of a support knowledge base. And many companies achieve 97-plus percent self-service rates with relatively limited—but highly customer-driven—content that they’ve developed over time by learning what customers need. That’s why it’s more important to get started with web-based customer service than it is to first develop the “perfect” knowledge base. Smart companies get the most important information up right away, and then refine their content over time.
  6. Let your customers rate you
    You can’t improve what you don’t measure. So the companies that are most successful with web self-service provide customers with a way to rate the quality of the answers they find online. Using this feedback, content that isn’t useful can be quickly weeded out—thereby improving the overall effectiveness of the site.
  7. Use rich content wherever appropriate
    A picture is often worth a thousand words. Photographs, diagrams, and animations can therefore be very useful in helping customers solve their most common problems. Creating these types of graphics can help further improve the effectiveness of your online customer service system.
  8. Connect the online world to the real world
    For retailers, banks, and many others types of companies, it’s important to link online operations with real-world facilities. After all, many customers come to a web site specifically to find a local store, branch office or service center. One of the best ways to do this is to provide a searchable database of real-world locations on your web site. It’s also a good idea to supplement street addresses with maps and driving directions to ensure that your customers can get where they want to go without getting lost.
  9. Consider a hosted, on demand solution
    Many successful web-based service implementers are taking advantage of hosted on demand solutions in order to eliminate capital costs and ongoing infrastructure management hassles. Hosted systems accelerate time-to-benefit and offload ownership burdens from corporate IT organizations that already have their hands full. Hosted systems also offer advantages when it comes to performance, reliability, scalability and security.
  10. Buy experience along with your technology
    Online customer service technologies can be very powerful. But you have to know what you’re doing to get the most out of them. That’s why the smart buyers look for a source of substantial customer service experience to complement the technologies they acquire. Best practices like those listed here are extraordinarily valuable. So it makes sense to partner with a vendor who can help you apply those best practices to your company’s online customer service initiatives. It’s even better when that vendor can help you optimize the rest of your CRM processes as well.