by Simon on February 20, 2012
90% of companies stop following up before most people are ready to buy.
Spending money on Lead Generation and then failing to follow-up those leads, is one of the ways that companies waste money and lose enormous opportunities for growth.
A few years ago I was invited to attend a European product manager’s meeting at Hewlett Packard in Geneva. We were there to discuss lead tracking. About half way through the meeting, the main budget holder turned to me and said quietly “I spend millions of Euros each quarter on leads and I don’t know what I get in return. I think of it as a black hole which I can’t afford to stop pouring money into.”
Whilst I appreciate we don’t all have lead generation budgets the size of Hewlett Packard, I certainly know what he means.
The problem I find is that the busier I get, the more difficult it is to stay in contact with people who have enquired into the business. Some people enquire at a very early stage of their buying process. They may not be ready to buy yet. I want to nurture these to the point where they become customers.
If you’d like to understand how we think this through please register below to join us for a webinar on Tuesday 28th February at 4:30 to find out more.
by Simon on February 2, 2012
The canonical link is used to tell the major search engines which URL you would prefer them to use when you have more than one URL pointing to the same page.
Here are some examples of the sorts of URL’s we are talking about.
- www.example.com/product.php?name=shoes&color=black&brand=clarks
- www.example.com/product.php?brand=clarks&color=black&name=shoes
If you simply add a <link> tag to specify your preferred version of the page’s URL inside the <head> section of your page then the search engines will treat all variations of the URLs to that page as pointing to the one you specify. So for our examples above you would add the following into the head of each page:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?name=shoes” />
If you are using a content management platform to manage your site (e.g. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.) then these platforms can be configured to insert a canonical link into every page automatically.
If you are worried about that your site structure is negatively effecting your search engine rankings, then please use the contact us form and we’d be delighted to see what we can do to help.
For more details on how Google uses the canonical link go here.
Technorati Tags: canonical link, duplicate content
