How to Search Optimise Your Site

Posted on May 15, 2013 by carloselopez — 2 Comments ↓

On Google alone, there are over 694,000 searches conducted every second, think about that. Search engines consider two main areas when determining what your website is about and how to rank it.

Content on your website: When indexing pages, the search engine scans each page of your website, looking for clues about what topics your website covers and scanning your website‟s back-end code for certain tags, descriptions, and instructions.
Who’s linking to you: As the search engine scan webpages for indexing, they also look for links from other websites. The more inbound links a website has, the more influence or authority it has.

The search engine considers few factors when deciding what information to show in the search engine results page (SERP):

Geographic location of the searcher
Historical performance of a listing (clicks, bounce rates, etc.)
Link quality (reciprocal vs. one-way)
Webpage content (keywords, tags, pictures)
Back end code or HTML of webpage
Link type (social media sharing, link from media outlet, blog, etc.)

But essentially, there are 3 elements that a search engine considers when determining where to list a website on the SERP:

Rank is the position that your website physically falls in on the SERP when a specific search query is entered.
Authority, search engines determine how authoritative and credible a website‟s content is by calculating how many inbound links (links from other websites) it has.
Relevance is one of the most critical factors of SEO. Besides actual text on your webpages, the search engines will review your website‟s structure, use of keywords in your URLs and what keywords are in the headline of the webpage versus those in the body text.

The more customer centric you are, the better able you are to get good rankings.

On-page SEO: It covers everything you can control on each specific webpage and across your website, but optimising your on-page SEO is time-consuming, and it is an ongoing process that you will need to take care of for as long as you run your website

Implement a good content marketing strategy
Update your site frequently
Use social media
Link to trusted sites
Give your pictures, photos, images, graphics a name
Interlink your inner pages, link all your important pages from your homepage
Optimise your meta description, writing a well thought out, creative meta description
Validate your code, insert your website URL into the W3C Validator and it will tell you exactly what code you need to change
Vary your keywords, over half of your traffic will probably come from keywords other than your target keyword
SEO is not just about which keywords you use on your website, but it is just as much about where you place them
Use header tags (e.g. H1, H2, H3, etc.)
Do not over do flash
Optimise URL’s
Optimse title tags: include all of your target keywords; place your keywords near the beginning of your title, not the end, keep your title under 70 characters, create a title with click-through rate in mind
Optimise 404 pages

Off-page SEO: It covers all aspects of SEO that happen off your website to garner quality inbound links.

Create community in Social Networks
Have a blog, this is one of the most powerful ways to promote your company/website online
What about guest blogging
Submit your news releases to Distribution Services
Co-Marketing partnerships are a great way to get inbound links

To complete this post you can also check this out Good content and SEO

Tagged with: Content Marketing, Digital, SEO, Usability
Posted in Digital, Marketing

How to Identify a Good Customer From a Bad One

Posted on May 8, 2013 by carloselopez — 2 Comments ↓

Peter Drucker is one of the most influential business writers of the last century, one of his main ideas was the notion that without a customer, there is no business. But are all the customers the same?

How do I evaluate the customer I want?

The quest for good customers starts early on. It starts with deciding who your ideal customer is and this is tailor to your business objectives.

You can start by considering some parameters to evaluate:

Company size: What sizes are the companies you have enjoyed working with? Do you prefer to work with small family businesses or large corporations?
Budget: What is your minimum project budget? Will you take on a project with a tight budget if the customer is strategic?
Payment schedule: Would you agree to receiving the full payment at the end of the project? If not, what’s the minimum up front that you require?
Technical knowledge: Are you willing to work with a customer who has minimal technical knowledge? How might this affect the outcome of the project?
Marketing knowledge: Are you willing to work with a customer who has a poor marketing strategy (this include social media, communication, PR)? How might this affect the outcome of the project?
Project dynamics: Are you looking for a customer who will just give you the requirements and then wait for the deliverables, or would you prefer a more engaged client?
Length of relationships: Are you interested in one-time project or a long-term working relationship? If you are thinking long-term, estimate whether a particular customer would have enough projects to sustain that relationship.

If you get this right, you will be less likely to wake up asking yourself why you are working on your current project.

Keep it simple, I recommend a total of four to five principles; but tailor this to your own business goals. Set your principles in a spreadsheet, rank them (0 to 10), where 0 is unattractive and 10 is attractive, if you have a doubt, please be conservative in the estimate.

When do I have to say good-bye?

No matter how many hours you have invested, if a project doesn’t work, it will continue not to work, and you will only experience more grief. Kill it as early as possible. That would be best for both you and the customer.

The customer is abusive: You should not tolerate any kind of abusive language or behavior.
You do not get paid on time: A customer who does not understand this will hurt your cash flow and, eventually, your business.
The scope of the project perpetually increases, but the customer refuses to increase the budget and the release date. The responsibility for setting expectations is yours, but if you do that, and the customer still pushes for more without being willing to increase the budget, then you will end up with an unprofitable business.
The customer ignores your recommendations.

If you have many projects waiting on deck, you could probably fire a customer without hurting your revenue. In fact, by working with someone who don’t fit your business values, you are probably giving up on great customers who could take your company to the next level. Take all of these factors into consideration when deciding.

If you do decide to fire a customer, you should seriously consider how to go about it without hurting your relationship with them and without risking your reputation.

How can I fire a customer:

Look hard again at your decision to make sure it is the right one.
Explain the reasons for your decision, and point out that it was a business decision, not a personal one.
Help the customer find someone else who would be willing to work with them.
Bill what you deserve.
Note what you learned from the relationship, and add it to your qualification process.
Most importantly, life goes on.

Check out the How to identify a good customer – Done by Carlose Lopez

View more presentations from carloselopez

Tagged with: Marketing, Strategy
Posted in Digital, Management, Marketing

Social Media Crisis Contingency Plan

Posted on April 25, 2013 by carloselopez — Leave a comment ↓

Social media crisis communications is an area of concern for any company, and needs to be a part of any enterprise social media strategy.

Altimeter Group analysed 50 social media crises that have occurred since 2001 and found that those reaching mainstream media have risen steadily through the past decade.

Altimeter found that social media crises originated nearly evenly across five social media platforms: communities, YouTube, blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Furthermore, the top five industries affected by social media crises were: consumer goods, apparel & fashion, restaurants, Internet and retail.

The best practices on Social Media crisis are as follows:

Admit fault and try to turn a negative into a positive as quickly as possible
Don’t be afraid to say, “I’m sorry”
Build your community (key influencers) before you need it. If you have a community who trusts you already they will come to your aid if people make negative comments
Learn as much as you can about the customer when you reach out to respond
Your messaging needs to be consistent across all channels
Have a plan. Be proactive rather than reactive. Make sure your plan includes specifics of how, when, where and who would communicate around potential issues
Keep your plan up-to-date. Every time you have a crisis situation, there will be new lessons learned
Have a social media guideline
Listen to what your customers are saying. Make sure you have a social media monitoring and listening platform in place before a crisis or major event (good or bad) to ensure you can monitor and filter any comments in a crisis

The plan to action to respond should be simple and straight forward:

Assemble a team of trusted people who are willing to help you evaluate the situation and possibly respond
Assess the situation online by harnessing the tools that are publicly available, such as Google Search, Blogs, Technorati, Twitter Search and Who’s Talkin. Also watch RSS feeds to the online publications of both mainstream and industry media sources
Track these sources constantly to see what and how the situation is developing. Watch the “attacker’s” website or blog as well

To asses the situation you might have to consider:

Trend the volume of response and the type of consumer reaction over time: is it growing or waning?, is it supportive or negative?, how is this changing over time?
Identify what your target audience’s reaction is, this will determine your response

When responding, be sure to really listen and determine what consumers want, do they just want an apology/acknowledgment or do they demand change?, be sure to address these things in your response.

Important: do not respond too quickly (asses all the situation first), in too much of a ‘corporate’ tone or via a press release posted on your website use the same channel where the crisis is.

Tagged with: Digital, Marketing, Social Media
Posted in Digital, Marketing

Social Media and Social CRM

Posted on April 17, 2013 by carloselopez — Leave a comment ↓

Presently, technology has amplified the voice of the customer and has empowered them to take control of the relationship and the conversations.

It’s clear that customers are sharing more about themselves online (this is an opportunity for companies to better understand their needs), so companies face a challenge in terms of collecting all that information from various social channels for ultimately analise that information, find insights and create responses to the market that will create more business opportunities.

Companies looking to implement a social media strategy and build long-term relationships, must integrate social into sales, marketing, communication and service; they have to be efficient by turning content into conversations.

The IBM Institute for Business Value, has published From Social Media to Social CRM: What customers want presenting good and valuable information about the social media customer.

Today, Social Media is considered as a hub of customer activity, but the main question IBM wants to answer is: are customers and businesses in sync with each other’s expectations?

We can start by defining the objective of social media and CRM:

Social media is ultimately about interacting with others with an expectation of getting something in return
CRM manages customer relationships as a means for extracting the greatest value from customers over the lifetime of the relationship

The IBM Institute for Business Value found the following:

Despite the astounding escalation of social media adoption, only a very small percentage of consumers engages regularly by responding to posts and authoring their own content.
More than half of consumers don’t even consider engaging with businesses via social sites. For them, social media and social networking are about personal connections with friends and family.
In exchange for their time, endorsement and personal data, consumers expect something tangible. But businesses rank getting discounts and purchasing as the least likely reasons consumers interact with them.

Following these findings, is also very interesting to have a look at these graphics:

What does all this mean for business?, they need to be aware that less than half their customer base is likely to interact with them in a social media environment.

Businesses are more likely to think consumers are interested in interacting with them to feel part of a community, businesses overestimate consumers’ desire to engage with them to feel connected to their brand.

Consumers are willing to interact with businesses if they believe it is to their benefit, if they are value for more than the financial transaction, they want to be listened to and for companies to act on what they hear, feel they can trust the company and decide if social media is the right channel to use to get the value they seek.

The top social media challenges for businesses are:

Recognise social media is a game changer
Make the customer experience seamless across social media and other channels
Start thinking like a customer, the more you know your target audience the better
If you aren’t sure what customers value, ask them, iterate and create the best value proposition for each buyer persona
To achieve business goals (increased revenue, cost reduction or efficiencies)
Inform, educate, engage and shape conversations

Tagged with: Content Marketing, Digital, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Posted in Digital, Management, Marketing

Agile Methodology Planning

Posted on April 11, 2013 by carloselopez — 7 Comments ↓

The static plan:

Your project kick off, you have the best team, the right technology, the perfect project plan (Gant Chart). For the first weeks, your project is running smoothly, but something change:

Your lead developer accepts a new challenge in other company
You realise the team is taking more time that what you have planned
Your customer discovers what they really want
The market conditions change

The Agile Planning:

Agile planning is nothing more than measuring the speed a team can turn stories into working application and then figure out when the team will complete the application.

We start with the master story list which contains a list of all the features our customers would like to see in their application.
The speed at which the team turn stories into working features is called team velocity.
Iteration is one to two-week sprints of work where the team turn user stories into working features.

To give us a rough idea about delivery dates, we do the following:

number of iterations = total effort / estimated team velocity
e.g. number of iterations = 100 points / 10 points per iteration = 10 iterations

Important: our first project plan is not a hard commitment. We do not know our team’s velocity and until we built something value and measure how long it takes, we won’t know how realistic our dates are.

Be flexible about scope:

Being flexible about project scope is how the agile team maintain the integrity of the plan.

Important: insist to customers to drop an old story every time a new one comes in. Also consider if the customer can’t drop and old story, we can push out the date. What customers can’t expect is to drop something in the list and not expect something of equal size to come off.

When it comes to pushing out the date or being flexible about the scope, the agile team prefer the latter. When you are pushing the date this is like saying you need more money.

Your first plan:

Step 1 Create your Master Story List: list of features prioritised by the customer and estimated by your team. A good master story will have about one to six months worth of work but no more
Step 2 Define your Release: this is a logical grouping of stories that make sense to your customer, you want to choose the fewest number of features that deliver the most valuable in the first release (Minimal marketable feature set)
Step 3 Size it up: the objective is to get a sense of how big the project is.
Step 4 Prioritise: we have to get the most important first. Your customer will have the ultimate say about prioritisation, however, it’s the duty of the Agile team to make suggestions about what stories would be good candidates to build in the beginning to reduce architectural risks.
Step 5 Team velocity estimation: in the beginning of the project, the velocity is going to fluctuate, but after 3 or 4 iterations, the velocity is going to settle down, and then you can get a better estimate of your team’s velocity. It’s also best to not be to aggressive in the initial estimate, be conservative, remind your stake holders that it’s a guess and start measuring from day one.
Step 6 Pick the delivery dates: you can deliver by date or by feature set depending on what is more important the time to market or core set of features.

Important: delivering a feature means analysis, design, developing and testing.

Read the full series of articles about Agile Methodology: The Basics, Who and Why, How to Deliver, User Stories, Estimation and Planning.

Tagged with: Agile, Digital, Project Management, Web projects
Posted in Digital, Product Management, Project Management

Agile Methodology Estimation

Posted on April 9, 2013 by carloselopez — 5 Comments ↓

High level estimates are guesses (usually very bad and over optimistic).

In Agile, we accept that our initial high level estimates are not to be trusted. Of course, budgets need to be created and expectations need to be set.

Relative sizing means to size our stories relatively to each other and then measure how fast the team can go.

The Planning Poker is a team based estimation and building consensus technique in Agile. This is a game where the development team estimates stories individually first (using a deck of cards with numbers like one, three, five points on them) and then compares the results collectively together after.

If everyone’s estimates is more or less the same, the estimate is kept. If there are differences, the team discusses them and estimates again until consensus is reach.

This technique works because:

The people doing the estimating are the ones doing the job
The estimates are done based on discussions and consensus

Read the full series of articles about Agile Methodology: The Basics, Who and Why, How to Deliver, User Stories, Estimation and Planning.

Tagged with: Agile, Digital, Project Management, Web projects
Posted in Digital, Product Management, Project Management

Agile Methodology User Stories

Posted on April 3, 2013 by carloselopez — 5 Comments ↓

I have already post about problems to be focus on project documentation (specifically functional specifications).

The problems I see with heavy documentation are:

It’s expensive, out of date, complex in planning, hard to create
Real-time feedback is disable, discourage open collaboration and innovation
It’s really easy to misinterpret what someone wrote
The solutions are build according to specifications instead of what customer’s needs
They make bad assumptions/guessing as specification are made on paper not working prototypes
They waste a lot of time

Agile principle: the most efficient and effective method of gathering information is face to face conversation.

User stories: Agile user stories are short descriptions of features our customer would like to one day see in their software. They are usually written on small index cards (to remind us not to try to write everything down).

These are the element of good user stories:

A good user story is something of value to our customers
User stories goes to end to end (gathering them by feature, enables us to treat them independent and flexible)
User stories make sense to business
User stories must be testable
They stay away from the technical jargon (use the language of the customer)
User stories are small (1 to 5 days to be delivered)

To give context to the user stories, it may help to use the following template:

Start with goal stories
Size the story for the time frame it would be implemented
Keep User Interface (UI) out as long as possible
Write for a single user (a job seeker instead of job seekers)
Don’t number the story cards
For each release the customer prioritise stories (remember 1 to 2 weeks max of development)

The story gathering work-shop: before we can create our agile project plan, we need a list of all the features our customers think they would like to see in their solution. This get together must be done with the customer and development team. Here are some useful tips:

Get a big open room (good table, light, white boards, walls to use post-its…)
Remember, be careful of not diving to deep on the details you want to keep it high level
Write lots of stories (at the end of the day, 10 to 40 high level stories are good enough for 3 to 6 months of planning)
Once you have your initial list done, it’s good to go through it again looking for duplicates, things you have missed, and grouping logical stories together.

I have written at the beginning of 2010 a good post The use of User Stories, I invite you to check it out to complement this technique.

Also I share here a video done by The Agile Academy:

Read the full series of articles about Agile Methodology: The Basics, Who and Why, How to Deliver, User Stories, Estimation and Planning.

Tagged with: Agile, Digital
Posted in Digital, Product Management, Project Management

How to Search Optimise Your Site

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How to Identify a Good Customer From a Bad One

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Social Media Crisis Contingency Plan

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Social Media and Social CRM

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Agile Methodology Planning

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Agile Methodology Estimation

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Agile Methodology User Stories

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