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Creating Good Work Culture

November 12, 2008 – 5:53 pm

The work culture is the key to high performance.

More important, influencing the work culture is a manager’s best opportunity for creating high performance. “Culture” is a 24-hours-a-day training program that exists inside any organization. It’s teaching and influencing all the time. Sometimes it’s teaching what we like it to teach, and sometimes it’s not. It’s very difficult to “swim upstream” against the culture.

For example, you can teach value added and long-term relationships all you want, but if the work culture is really about short-term, adversarial relationships with clients, that’s what you’re going to get–that plus a lot of confusion.

The best of all possible worlds is a consistent, positive, reinforcing culture–and good sales managers are discovering that the best way to leverage their efforts is to manage the culture. After more than 10 years of research, we’ve come up with five factors that are critical to creating and maintaining a high-performance work culture. Listed in order of importance, they are:

1. A Shared Sense Of Mission Or Purpose. It’s the culture equivalent to purpose. It answers the questions “What’s expected around here, what do we do, and why do we do it?” If the only answer that you have is “making money,” be prepared for your people to ask for as much as they can get for doing as little as they can. On the other hand, if you’ve taken the time to establish a mission–and especially if you’ve taken the time to involve your people in the process–that larger sense of mission will help people focus on achieving their part of the mission.

2. Clear And Attainable Goals. People perform best when they have specific goals. Goals that are reachable yet that stretch them. Don’t tell people what to do, or how to do it, but give them the map, the destination, and sometimes the general direction in which to start.

3. Frequent Objective Feedback. People learn quickly and work well when they are told how they’re doing. Debrief and summarize every joint call you make. Don’t assume that people know how they’re doing or know what you think. Lead with positive information first, but always be honest, objective, and specific. Help your people learn from every selling experience.

4. Positive Rewards For Appropriate Or Approximate Performance. Selling is like playing tennis: Very few people get it right the first time. Sincere, positive reinforcement (”You did that really well.” “You really understand this.” “You’re doing a great job.”) helps people learn. Catch people doing something right, and tell them about it.

5. Timely Support And Help When Requested Or Needed. This is an issue of priorities for most sales managers. It’s deciding what your job is. Are you there to track numbers and quotas, or are you there to support your people? Clearly, both jobs have to be done, but the job of coach is the critical job in creating a high-performance team.

Tanya | Human Resources | Comments (0)

Sometimes Resumes Don’t Work…

November 11, 2008 – 6:31 pm

Job seekers spend more time fretting over their resumes than any other process during a job search. This is because most believe that the resume serves as a magic bullet. But no matter how great you sound on paper, the reality is that a resume can get you only so far in the job search, even if it is well written.

The job search is made up of several key components including your outlook, job search activities, and interview performance. Each component builds on the next and if you lack strength in one area, your search will be handicapped. Below are reasons, why your job search may be in jeopardy?, and the solutions you can incorporate to increase the chances so that your job search will be successful.

Don’t Have an Unenthusiastic Outlook

  • When you are quick to dismiss someone’s advice by making statements such as, “That doesn’t work. I tried it.”

Solution: Keep an open mind when someone is offering you guidance, even if you have heard the advice before. Sometimes it takes a few times for a message to penetrate.

  • After an interview you find yourself making comments such as, “The moment the interviewer saw me, I could tell he wanted someone younger.”

Solution: No jobseeker is the perfect candidate. Some are too old, others are too young; some don’t have much experience while others have too much.

  • You send out emails that read, “I sent a resume early last week and followed up, and you never returned my phone call. Are you ignoring me?”

Solution: When you feel overwhelmed, frustrated or just plain angry, take a walk and clear your head before you send an offensive email.

  • You aren’t taking personal responsibility for your own job search, instead blaming external factors for your lack of progress.

Solution: There are some aspects of your job you can’t control, but the ones that you can (e.g. the number of calls made per day, networking events attended), take seriously.

Take the Passive Approach

  • You haven’t developed a job search plan and are flying by the seat of your pants.

Solution: Don’t wing it. Take the time to map out a strategy and write it down. Don’t rely on your memory. There is something about writing down thoughts that makes you more accountable.

  • You’re going it alone without the guidance of an interview coach and/or career coach.

Solution: Partner with someone who will provide objective and constructive feedback. In doing so, you will be able to identify areas of strength and those that need improvement.

  • You adopt the if-they-are-interested-they-will-call-me approach and never follow up.

Solution: Take the initiative to call employers to inquire about the status of your application.

Your Interview Skills Could Use Some Work

  • You are always second best.

Solution: Call past interviewers and ask them why you didn’t receive an offer. When you make it that far in the process, interviewers are more likely to disclose the reason you weren’t selected.

  • You walk out of an interview saying, “Darn it! Why did I say that?” or “I wish I had mentioned my experience in ________.”

Solution: After each interview, jot down everything you said that didn’t work, and how you would rephrase it for the next interview. Then, when you get home or back to the office, write a thank-you note to the interviewer(s) that mentions the lacking information or carefully revisits what you wish you hadn’t said.

  • Every time you leave an interview you believe your performance was strong, but you never receive a job offer.

Solution: Work with a Certified Interview Coach or a professional who specializes in interview training who will be able to assist you in discovering and correcting the problem.

Tanya | Human Resources, Recruitment | Comments (0)

Third Commandment: Remember to Keep Holy the First Place

November 10, 2008 – 10:41 pm

Employers want know your most recent salary for one main reason: to screen you out. When faced with a lot of applicants they use the salary as a quick shorthand way of assessing the fit and narrowing down the list. They will want you to “go first” in the compensation discussions, and they’ll ask you to reveal your expectations or salary history. Going first is “sacred ground.” Don’t give it up or you can get screened.

Is it ever in your interest to get screened? If you’re qualified for the job, (or if you think the job can be altered to fit you),, no! Your first objectives are to discern whether this job is a fit for you and to establish what you can do for your employer.

Once they’re serious, let them make the first move. That way you lock in an offer and you’ve got the job — and you can negotiate from that place of security.  Let them offer you the job and raise the question of salary.

If you go first, you’ll be either too high, too low, or just within their range. But since you won’t know ahead of time which of those three numbers applies to you, you can lose the offer by coming in too high or too low.

You can also leave money on the table if you’re too low or within the range, so usually the best strategy is to let them go first. That way, you know you have an offer, and you have a solid base to negotiate from.  Two exceptions.

• Exception 1: Above I said that employers use salary as a screening tool. If you have already passed the screening and if you’ve gotten to the point where they definitely want you, not your competitors, you can “keep holy the first place” by naming a figure first. In other words, if you have the job locked up, then going first with a high number can act as a magnet and pull their offer up higher without risk of getting them upset and moving to the next candidate in line.

Looked at another way, the going-first place offers either safety or momentum. If it’s the safety/secure-ness of the offer if that’s most important, let them go first because if they go first you have an offer, it’s secure.

Letting them go first gives you security; you going first can give you momentum to a higher salary, if that’s your priority. Going first with your top number will act like a magnet, pulling up the employers offer.  It’s easier to negotiate down from a high number than to push up from a low number.

• Exception 2: Also, this rule does NOT apply to conversations with a headhunter. You score “Candidness Points” with third party recruiters for disclosing all accurately. Try to get their estimate of your market first, though, so you know where you stand; then fill them in on your salary history and expectations.

(c)2008, Jack Chapman, “The Salary Coach,” and author of Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute.  Used with permission.  For more information about salary negotiations, visit www.SalaryNegotiations.com.

Jack | Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Second Commandment: Thou Shalt not Regret Disclosure.

October 31, 2008 – 5:03 pm

Oops, I already told the interviewer what I am making. Now what?

All is not lost! Just because they know your current salary or salary expectations doesn’t mean you can’t negotiate for a fair market value.

Once you’ve broken the sound barrier, so to speak, on your salary, you at least have one advantage: no more tug-o-war between you and your potential employer about revealing salary.

If salary bumped you out of interviewing, it will be hard to gain reentry at all, and even if you do, it might be at the price of an informal pre-interview agreement that if chosen, you’ll consider a pay cut.

If you’re still in the running, however, your “disclosed” circumstances make it doubly important to do your research well. In this case, you don’t need to address salary again until there’s an offer. At that point use researched facts, not your past salary, to substantiate your salary request.

When they’ve decided on YOU, that is, when they’re making you the offer, not your competitor(s), then it’s time to make the move away from the number you disclosed to your ideal compensation. Don’t let your past salary be the starting point for negotiations. Let your own satisfaction and joy of receiving great pay be the motivating force behind you at this point.

Remember that what you negotiate now is what you’ll live with for a long time. A minute or two here can engender months and months of satisfaction – or the opposite if you miss this opportunity. Let’s assume they’ve made an offer. What do you say?

Respond with: “I know I’ve discussed my [current] salary / salary expectations. I want to make sure from this point forward that we’re looking for a compensation package that is not just a ‘raise’ from my previous job, but rather a motivating, fair, value-based salary we will both be satisfied with. Can we agree on that principle?”

You’ll find 15 phrases to help you prevent spilling the beans in the Negotiating Your Salary: How To Make a $1000 a Minute.

Once you have your agreement on that, then follow the rest of the Ten Salary Negotiation Commandments.

(c)2008, Jack Chapman, “The Salary Coach,” and author of Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute.  Used with permission.  For more information about salary negotiations, visit www.SalaryNegotiations.com.

Jack | Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Black-Hat SEO

October 31, 2008 – 4:20 am

Search engine optimization (SEO) is often divided into ethical and unethical practices. Black hat SEO refers to those practices generally thought of as cheating the system.

Black hat SEO can also refer to a consultant or specialist who uses unethical practices or sells deceptive techniques to others.

Black-Hat SEO Tactics:

Keyword Stuffing
This is probably one of the most commonly abused forms of search engine spam. Essentially this is when a webmaster or SEO places a large number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase in hopes that the search engine will read this as relevant. In order to offset the fact that this text generally reads horribly it will often be placed at the bottom of a page and in a very small font size. An additional tactic that is often associated with this practice is hidden text which is commented on below.

Hidden Text
Hidden text is text that is set at the same color as the background or very close to it. While the major search engines can easily detect text set to the same color as a background some webmasters will try to get around it by creating an image file the same color as the text and setting the image file as the background. While undetectable at this time to the search engines this is blatant spam and websites using this tactic are usually quickly reported by competitors and the site blacklisted.

Cloaking
In short, cloaking is a method of presenting different information to the search engines than a human visitor would see. There are too many methods of cloaking to possibly list here and some of them are still undetectable by the search engines. That said, which methods still work and how long they will is rarely set-in-stone and like hidden text, when one of your competitors figures out what is being done (and don’t think they aren’t watching you if you’re holding one of the top search engine positions) they can and will report your site and it will get banned.

Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are pages added to a website solely to target a specific keyword phrase or phrases and provide little in the way of value to a visitor. Generally the content on these pages provide no information and the page is only there to promote a phrase in hopes that once a visitor lands there, that they will go to the homepage and continue on from there. Often to save time these pages are generated by software and added to a site automatically. This is a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages.

Redirects
Redirecting, when used as a black-hat tactic, is most commonly brought in as a compliment to doorway pages. Because doorway pages generally have little or no substantial content, redirects are sometime applied to automatically move a visitor to a page with actual content such as the homepage of the site. As quickly as the search engines find ways of detecting such redirects, the spammers are uncovering ways around detection. That said, the search engines figure them out eventually and your site will be penalized. That or you’ll be reported by a competitor or a disgruntled searcher.

Duplicate Sites
A throwback tactic that rarely works these days. When affiliate programs became popular many webmasters would simply create a copy of the site they were promoting, tweak it a bit, and put it online in hopes that it would outrank the site it was promoting and capture their sales. As the search engines would ideally like to see unique content across all of their results this tactic was quickly banned and the search engines have methods for detecting and removing duplicate sites from their index. If the site is changed just enough to avoid automatic detection with hidden text or the such, you can once again be reported to the search engines and be banned that way.

Interlinking
As incoming links became more important for search engine positioning the practice of building multiple websites and linking them together to build the overall link popularity of them all became a common practice. This tactic is more difficult to detect than others when done “correctly” (we cannot give the method for “correct” interlinking here as it’s still undetectable at the time of this writing and we don’t want to provide a means to spam engines). This tactic is difficult to detect from a user standpoint unless you end up with multiple sites in the top positions on the search engines in which case it is likely that you will be reported.

Reporting Your Competitors
While this may seem a bit off, the practice of reporting competitors that you find using the tactics noted above or other search engine spam tactics is entirely legitimate and shouldn’t be considered at all unethical. When we take on search engine positioning clients this is always incorporated into our practices when applicable (which happily is not that often).

Tanya | SEO/SEM | Comments (0)

10 Different Ways to Increase Traffic on Your Blogs

October 24, 2008 – 7:28 pm

1. Write Unique Content: Unique content is the key to success in today’s blogging world. No one can stop your blog from getting on the top of the search engines and driving traffic like anything, if you spend an hour writing one thoughtful, and original post that is relevant to your target readers. Post regularly, if possible try to write 3-5 posts every week. But remember there are already other bloggers who write on same subjects that you do. So, use catchy titles and write original posts that will add to your blog content and your blog can never be ignored by the search engine spiders.

2. Thoughtful Comment: Don’t forget to spend some time and effort in finding other blogs that are related to your blog subjects. Leave some thoughtful comments to their posts and try to add some humor in your comment because people love humorous content. If appropriate, link back to your posts and with this you can gain some popularity on different blogs.

3. Use of Social Networking Sites: To get some exposure you can submit your post or content to Digg and Propeller and add their buttons on your blog post. If your post is beneficial for the readers such as guide articles, it will surely fit into the top 10 lists. Once you submit your content on these websites and if people like it they will digg or vote for your content. If you can manage to receive 100 votes within a day, your content will get to the homepage and on Netscape if you get 50-70 votes within a few hours, your content might hit the homepage. This is the easiest way to drive traffic on your blog for free. You could also use niche specific social media sites, which could bring in more visitors without much pain.

4. Do You Stumble: Another great way to get huge traffic to your website is “StumbleUpon”. There is plug-in that you can install in your Mozilla Firefox. There are unlimited numbers of people who use stumble plug-in to browse through their favorite websites. There are many blogs who get over 100,000 visits in a week to a single blog post with the help of StumbleUpon. All you need to do is pay a specific amount of fees to the StumbleUpon website and they will add your website in their software. Whenever people will select any topic related to your blog subject, your site will appear on their screen when they stumble.

5. Conduct Contests: Contests are something that many bloggers have been using to get free web traffic for years. You can come up with a prize or many prizes that would attract blog readers. Everything depends on the prize you offer, if it is useful for people you will definitely be able to get a lot of traffic. You can ask your readers to post a comment to win the prize or review your contest post in a creative manner on their blogs. To advertise your contest, try and post threads on different forums to spread the news.

6. Offer Free Stuffs: Visitors love to get free stuff. This is one of the best opportunities to make a good impression on your visitors. You can give away free stuff like software, a domain name, free review on your blog for 1 or 2 days, some gifts like T-shirts with a logo of your blog, play station or bags etc. Make sure that you mention all the guidelines of giving away the free stuff properly on your blog, so that there is no confusion.

7. Invite Guest Blogging: Inviting well known bloggers can contribute to your blog’s growth. You can ask a well known personality in your subject to contribute something on your blog like a comment or review. You will not only flatter the blogger by acknowledging their value but you will also guarantee yourself a link or joining hands with a brand can earn you readers.

8. Theme Updates: Keep changing the look of your blog every month. This will invite visitors to check your blog’s new look every month. They will look forward for new design of your blog and if it’s good and attractive, your blog can become famous.

9. Controversy: Writing something controversial can bring a lot of traffic. Although it can create negative impact among few readers because everyone has different opinions but still it works.

10. Don’t Quit: Never stop promoting your blog even when you are not in your blogosphere. You can add your blog’s link to your e-mail signature and business cards. Keep talking about your blog in offline conversations as well.

Tanya | SEO/SEM | Comments (0)

7 Ways To Find ‘Real’ Search Engine Optimizers

October 24, 2008 – 6:35 pm
  1. Poor Search Capabilities Are Difficult To Fix: Searching is rather a very vital and complicated process that requires both skills and time. A number of products might be fake and real content might be far away from what you are looking for.
  2. Heavy Content Management Requirements: For search pages to work efficiently and crawl thoroughly, the search engine optimizer must create web pages and maintain constant meta data. Meta data (especially the title tag) is of vital significance as it lets a search engine know what is on the web page so that content can be found, ranked and presented in response to a search engine. This process is time consuming and costly manuals are made.
  3. Problems With Search Result: The real problem with text based search engines is that they match users search request by some programmed criteria.Actually this is a search based algorithm which is programmed to deliver a specific search result, only the words having meta character indexing are indexed into the search engines.Popular search engines like google,yahoo,msn,astalavista., etc., are programmed to deliver the search results within the framed search contents & keywords. Usually there is a repetition of the popular search results and they keep on repeating .
  4. Create a product Taxonomy Based on Specification: All the products endorsed through net marketing are very critical and crucial, The reason being its global interaction and coverage, with such a good coverage and vast exposure, This seems to be a whole new game - A game with international players where everything is global and not only india when we speak about  business today we mean global . So it is very vital for a company thinking to expand and propagate or profess their business, they need a global launch pad where they can think of exposing themselves, so in order to propagate their business they need to create a product taxonomy based on the specifications this specification table will help the viewers to search by the product variety, this product variety will help to index the product differently.
  5. Provide Easy To Use Search Capabilities : The regular indexing should be done in such away that it not only is lucrative but also easier to understand and implicate. A lay man will only search what is desired definitely if he will find some variety the customer will have more options, obviously the company having more variations will be benefitted
  6. Provide Relevant Search Results : The search results should be more precise and specific not only should it precise but also relevant in its content, A customer will definitely not spend any time on worthless product . So the search results should be target oriented.
  7. Adjust The Right Database For Site Promotion : The database should not only be immoculate but also be more specific & provide more useful info.The database regarding should be well updated .
Tanya | SEO/SEM | Comments (0)

Business marketers ‘to focus on SEO in the near future’

October 22, 2008 – 5:15 pm

Almost four in ten business marketers intend to concentrate primarily on search engine optimisation (SEO) in the next six months, a new survey has shown.

Carried out by the Online Marketing Blog, the poll of more than 400 marketing professionals revealed that the slowing economy will prompt 36 per cent of firms to focus on SEO in the near future.

This was followed by blogging, which received 33 per cent of the vote, and pay-per-click search marketing with 26 per cent.

Email promotions, social networking and managing blogger relationships also appeared in the top six.

Commenting on the results, Lee Odden of the Online Marketing Blog said the research showed that SEO is now viewed as a “comfort” strategy by many.

“Search is about customers reaching/seeking companies, not the other way around. With SEO, it isn’t a matter of ’should we?’ - it’s a matter of ‘what’s stopping you?’,” he stated.

A recent study by e-commerce software firm SLI Systems revealed that SEO is currently being used by 87 per cent of online retailers in the US.

Tanya | SEO news | Comments (0)

SEO & W3C Compliance

October 22, 2008 – 5:13 pm

From reading the title many of you are probably wondering what W3C compliance has to do with SEO and many more are probably wondering what W3C compliance is at all. Let’s begin by shedding some light on the later.

What Is W3C Compliance?

The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and basically, since 1994 the W3C has provided the guidelines by which websites and web pages should be structured and created. The rules they outline are based on the “best practices” and while websites don’t have to comply to be viewed correctly in Internet Explorer and other popular browsers that cater to incorrect design practices, there are a number of compelling reasons to insure that you or your designer insure that the W3C guidelines are followed and that your site is brought into compliance.

Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE Web Design mentioned a number of less SEO-related though very compelling arguments for W3C-complaince. Some non-SEO reasons to take on this important step in the lifecycle of your site are:

  • Compliance help insure accessibility for the disabled.
  • Compliance helps insure that your website is accessible from a number of devices; from different browsers to the growing number of surfers using PDA’s and cellular phones.
  • Compliance will also help insure that regardless of the browser, resolution, device, etc. that your website will look and function in the same or at least a very similar fashion.

At this point you may be saying, “Well that’s all well-and-good but what does this have to do with SEO?” Good question.

“Proper use of standards and bleeding edge best practices makes sure that not only is the copy marked up in a semantic fashion which search engines can interpret and weigh without confusion, it also skews the content-to-code ratio in the direction where it needs to be while forcing all of the information in the page to be made accessible, thus favoring the content. We’ve seen several occasions where the rebuilding of a site with standards, semantics and our proprietary white hat techniques improves the performance of pages site-wide in the SERPs.”

A fairly logical conclusion, reduce the amount of code on your page and the content (you know, the place where your keywords are) takes a higher priority. Additionally compliance will, by necessity, make your site easily spidered and additionally allow you greater control over which portions of your content are given more weight by the search engines.

Examples

The W3 EDGE site serves as good examples of site that performed better after complying with W3C standards. The biggest jumps were on Yahoo! with lesser though still significant increases being noticed on both Google and MSN.

How To Bring Web Site In Compliance With W3C Standards?

To be sure, this is easier said than done. Obviously the ideal solution is to have your site designed in compliance to begin with. If you already have a website you have one of two options:

  1. Hire a designer familiar with W3C standards and have your site redone, or
  2. Prepare yourself for a big learning curve and a bit of frustration (though well worth both).

Resources

Assuming that you’ve decided to do the work yourself there are a number of great resources out there. By far the best is the Web Developer extension for FireFox. You’ll have to install the FireFox browser first and then install the extension. Among other great tools for SEO this extension provides a one-click check for compliance and provides a list of where your errors are, what’s causing them and links to solutions right from the W3C. The extension provides testing for HTML, XHTML, CSS and Accessibility compliance.

Tanya | SEO/SEM | Comments (0)

The Semantic Web: An Introduction

October 16, 2008 – 4:56 pm

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from World Wide Web Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

The Semantic Web is about two things.

Ø It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents.

Ø It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

The Semantic Web was thought up by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There is a dedicated team of people at the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) working to improve, extend and standardize the system, and many languages, publications, tools and so on have already been developed. However, Semantic Web technologies are still very much in their infancies, and although the future of the project in general appears to be bright, there seems to be little consensus about the likely direction and characteristics of the early Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web is generally built on syntaxes which use URIs to represent data, usually in triples based structures: i.e. many triples of URI data that can be held in databases, or interchanged on the World Wide Web using a set of particular syntaxes developed especially for the task. These syntaxes are called “Resource Description Framework” syntaxes (RDF).

URI - Uniform Resource Identifier

A URI is simply a Web identifier: like the strings starting with “http:” or “ftp:” that you often find on the World Wide Web. Anyone can create a URI, and the ownership of them is clearly delegated, so they form an ideal base technology with which to build a global Web on top of. In fact, the World Wide Web is such a thing: anything that has a URI is considered to be “on the Web”.

RDF - Resource Description Framework

A triple can simply be described as three URIs. A language which utilises three URIs in such a way is called RDF: the W3C have developed an XML serialization of RDF, the “Syntax” in the RDF Model and Syntax recommendation. RDF XML is considered to be the standard interchange format for RDF on the Semantic Web, although it is not the only format. For example, Notation3 (which we shall be going through later on in this article) is an excellent plain text alternative serialization.

Once information is in RDF form, it becomes easy to process it, since RDF is a generic format, which already has many parsers. XML RDF is quite a verbose specification, and it can take some getting used to (for example, to learn XML RDF properly, you need to understand a little about XML and namespaces beforehand…).

Tanya | SEO/SEM, Technology | Comments (0)