A conference call lets you remain at your desk rather than trek off down the hall–or across the country–to a meeting. It also provides a great opportunity to get the opinions and concerns of the entire team heard as long as it doesn’t disintegrate into a wasteland of wandering discourse. Investing some time and effort up front will ensure that the call works for everyone.

1. Volunteer to set up the call so you can assume the role of moderator. Confirm that everyone has both the dial-in and conference code numbers, as well as the correct time for their zone.

2. Poll the other participants in advance as to the items they want covered in the call. Develop a written agenda with a specific time allotment for each agenda item. Better yet, e-mail the agenda to all parties before the call.

3. Take charge of gathering and disseminating the printed background material, numbering pages clearly and prominently. Nothing creates conference-call chaos faster than a chorus of “Where are we?” or “I don’t seem to have that chart.”

4. Refuse to discuss major agenda items until everyone is on the line. Bringing latecomers up to speed on important issues wastes time and irritates those who were prompt.

5. Monitor the clock closely. Be prepared to intervene with “Excuse me, we have to move on–we’ve run out of time for this topic” or “Let’s discuss this topic at another time and report back to the group.” Stay polite but firm throughout.

6. End the call with a synopsis of conclusions reached and future actions required. Send out a written summary of these conclusions and action items to all participants promptly.

Overall Tips:Use a handheld phone on a land line rather than a cellular phone or speakerphone. Your voice will be clearer, with minimal background noise. Use an office where you can close the door to further reduce noise. If more than two other people are participating in the call, keep a written list of names beside your phone so you can be sure you are getting everyone’s input.

Tips from eHow Users: Focus by eHow Friend
Do not do anything else but participate on the conference call. Answering e-mails, reading papers, etc., are counter-productive to the purpose of the call. And since many people forget to mute their phones, the noises you make will distract from the meeting.

Goal setting is equal parts art and science. Many people create goals that simply don’t work. If you’re in business, you don’t have the luxury of creating goals that don’t work. You need to work effectively and you need goals you help you do it. To plan a meeting, you must set goals. For example, one question to ask is “what are the goals and objectives of my meeting”? For tips on goalsetting click on A Smart Way To Set Goals.

New content! In order for any search engine to provide relevant results to their visitors (so their visitors will repeatedly use them) they must provide the best results possible for every search performed on their site.

The best website gets more traffic and more traffic means more business - so websites have to be up to date to stay competitive in their market.

The big sites on the net, like www.hereschicago.com, who have pagerankings of 5 upwards, obviously serve a ton of visitors per day, provide search engines with a mass of links to follow and index.

That’s why search engines go back to the big sites like www.hereschicago.com more often than the little ones.

High traffic, very popular sites are visited by the search engine robots more often than sites with little traffic. Some large sites are visited by search engines as much as 2-4 times per month to scan theircontent which makes these sites more visible and higher in the ranks of search engines.

How can article marketing increase your search engine traffic?

By submitting articles you can get links from these high traffic sites. Furthermore you can optimize your articles with your searchterms to get high rankings for that particular page. This wouldotherwise take weeks on a new site as oppose to a well established onesuch as this.

Each of these sites will have its own resource area, at the end of the article, writers include a bit of Author information on where to findout more about them. Place your website link in here and bob’syour uncle the search engines will find your site through that link.

The more articles you submit with your website link in them, the more pages on the net you have pointing to you from high traffic sites and the better your ranking and link popularity.

Start submitting your meetings and events related articles today toour blog. You will be amazed at the results they yield.

If you are interested in submitting an article, please email your article to info@hereschicago.com for consideration.

By:Bernard Peh

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the buzz word you will see everywhere in the internet nowsadays. Designing a website today is no longer about aesthetics. It must not only look good, it must be visible to the search engines as well. What should a web designer take note when designing a search engine friendly website? This article attempts to discuss some important pointers for web designers in creating SEO friendly web pages.

(Note: We are not talking about boosting search engine rankings as that would require a separate article.)

From a search engine point of view, the perfect webpage has no graphics, no scripting, no tables…etc but just alot of normal, plain readable text. You can just take it that plain text is the food for search engine spiders. Therefore, the more text you have, the more you will keep the spiders happy. However, from the design point of view, such pages are very boring but the fact is that everyone is more interested in keeping the spiders rather than us happy. The argument is that if search engine spiders cannot find your site, no one will. Based on this philosophy, we witnessed the fall of flash and sites with strong graphics over the years. Many sites that utilized heavy graphics where no longer found. Web developers become happy because they have an excuse to create less impressive websites…

The question is can we make both the saerch engine spiders and us happy? The answer is definitely a “Yes” provided that web designers can follow certain rules when designing web pages. They need to step out of their comfort zone and learn abit more about new web technologies.

Domain Name and URL Naming Convention Having a proper domain and url name is quite often neglected. Many search engines actually put some weightage in the way you name your domain or url files. You will definitely want to include some juicy words in your naming convention. For example, if you site is about website critics and your url is http://www.sitecritic.com, this will definitely be better than a domain like http://www.bluecatfish.com. The same principle goes for hyperlinks. If you have 2 words as key words, you can use an underscore “_” or dash “-” to separate them.

Title

Do not fool around when writing the title. From my experience, this is the most important part of your webpage. Many designers like to put special characters such as ” * “,” | “, ” : ” or ” [ ] ” in the title to make it look unique. If you really want to make your webpage special, I advise you to do it else where such as in the body of the HTML document. You should include your keywords in your title. Like the previous example, if your web site focuses on website reviews, make sure you have the words “Website Reviews” somewhere in the title. Noticed that “WebsiteReviews” is not the same as “Website Reviews”. Spacing is important. When writing the title, try not to write more than 8 words. There are no hard and fast rules on that but the fact is that more does not mean good. In fact, the more you write, the more your keyword density will be diminished. If you keep repeating the same keyword in the title, search engines will see your site as spam and you will be dead in no time. For example, a title like “Sitecritic Web Reviews” is much better than “Sitecritic Web Reviews, Internet Marketing, Web Design Ideas, Internet Directories, Budget Web Hosting, Melbourne”. I will have to stress again, do not fool around with your title.

Meta-Description

After the title tag is the meta description tag. Many people argued that meta description is no longer important. Based on my experience, they are still relevant in SEO rankings especially if your website is new. The principle in writing the meta description tag is the same as the title. The only difference is that you want explain abit more about the services that you provide in a friendlier format. You will also want to include your keywords in the meta description. Menu, Content and Links You should not use any javascript menus that hid the urls. Many javascript menus are fancy but actually not SEO friendly. What ever technique you are using to create the menus, make sure that the tag is visible. You might also want to include a variation of the keywords in the menus, links or text. Like the previous example, if your keyword is “Web Site Reviews”, you might not want to use the same word over and over again. You can vary it by using “Professional Web Reviews, Reviews of Websites, Site Reviews…etc”. Varying the keywords makes your content more interesting and is good for SEO as well. When writing the contents, try to put the keywords in different areas of the document. Use tags like or to make the keywords stand out. Avoid urls that say “click here” or “view”. Though often used, they are not advisable for SEO purposes. Text links are stonger than image links. It is therefore not advisable to use images as the main navigation menu throughout the website. If you would like to incorporate images in the user navigation experience, you might want to consider separating the text from the images. This can be achieved easily using CSS or the background image option in the or tag.

Images

Unlike many Search Engine Experts, I strongly encourage the use of graphics because I am passion about Web Design and is sad to see so many websites that are well optimized for search engines but look crap on screen. You need to balance between the amount of graphics used and downloading speed. Like I mentioned before, if your header banner or important images contains text , you could split up the text and use the images as a separate background or floating layer. That way, you can make the image size smaller and also make the text visible to the search engines. Transparent gifs are very useful for laying over other content or images. Appropriate use of jpegs and gifs can also cut down loading time by alot. CSS Technology CSS helps you to cut down your tag and gives more room for the spiders to read your content. The problem with CSS is that it is not as straight forward as tables. At the moment, CSS is also inconsistent in different browsers, so before you publish your web page, you need to check the layout in different browsers. I am actually not against designers using tables especially if they find the time spend in creating a full CSS site not justifiable. The fact is that there are still cases when using CSS is not advisable. An example is when displaying tabular data; Tables still excel in displaying tabular data at the moment. Unless you are using complex nested tables, the , or tags should not pose too much of a problem for the search engine spiders.

Conclusion

Web pages should not be boring and web designers should not bow down to the Google revolution. A well designed site combines both form and function and yet, still able to be search engine friendly. I strongly believe that this can be easily achieved if website designers are able to follow very basic rules in designing their web sites

Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are two important ways to promote your business to online customers.

I read this great article on search engine optimization and wanted to share with you. One thing to note is that you can be found on search engines by doing a little work on your website. You don’t need a ton of money to be next to your competitor online. I have been trying to tell the world about how important it is to do a little work on your website and then seek out some low cost solutions to be found. One low cost solution is to find “portals” that aggregate and build community like Hereschicago.com.

Hereschicago.com provides a “doorway” into your business from visitors from Google, Yahoo and MSN in addition to a host of other “niche” search engines. Oh yes, there are over 300 “other” search engines out there delivering targeted traffic to Hereschicago.com and ultimately your business. Ok, I am off my high horse for now. Take a good look at the following article. This is exactly what I recommmend doing to make your website be found on the internet.

SEO requires making your site search-engine-friendly, and SEM involves targeting potential customers by purchasing relevant keyword ads on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Alta Vista.

SEO: There are many ways to optimize your site so that search engines will list your site higher in their rankings. Start with the following:

• Links from other sites: Search engine spiders move from site to site across the Internet by following hyperlinks. The more high-quality and high-trafficked sites you have pointing to your site, the more important the search engine will think you are. Make sure to register your site with directories such as Yahoo, (Hereschicago.com) and the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org).
• Internal links: Make sure your site is well-organized and easy to navigate. A site map will help visitors – and spiders – nawigate your site.
• Metatags: Metatags are hidden HTML directions for Web browsers or search engines. They include important information such as the title of each page, relevant keywords describing site content and the description of the site that shows up when a search engine returns a search. Make sure your metatags accurately describe your content.
• Keywords:Spider likely words or phrases that users might type into search engines to find your site. Make sure your content contains those!words or phrases, and include them in the title portions of your site and in relevant content.
• Search engine optimizers: Businesses often enlist the help of optimizers who specialize in improving the visibility of their clients’ sites. Among other things, they’ll register your site with major search engines, list it in the appropriate directory, write optimized content for your site and recommend changes to your site architecture.

SEM: The more targeted your advertising, the higher your ’’conversion rate.’’ Conversion rate refers to the percentage of ads that actually convert to sales or some other desired action (such as registration). One way to ensure that your prospective customers are qualified is to buy ads according to specific search engine keywords that a user might submit. For example, if you’re selling a Minolta 60X digital camera, buying the keyword ad ’’Minolta 60X digital camera’’ will most likely give you better results than buying the keyword ’’camera.’‘

Some terms get bid up quickly – for instance, you’ll pay a lot more for a technology keyword than a knitting keyword. SEM, however, has a higher conversion rate than other online marketing methods, so it can still be a cost-effective route to take.

Make sure you have compelling ad copy luring people to your site. Provide a call to action to prospective customers to encourage them to click on your link. Also, make sure that you send prospective customers to a targeted page on your site. Your home page will convert fewer customers than a page describing the exact service that you promote in your keyword ad.

You generally pay for keyword ads on a cost per click (CPC) basis. Review the keywords you’ve purchased to ensure you’re getting a good return on your investment. If not, try a different word or phrase. You can also try different ad copy or landing pages on your site to see what’s more attractive to prospective customers.

Companies offering CPC programs include Google, Yahoo, AskJeeves, FindWhat, Kanoodle, Entireweb, Industry Brains and LookSmart.

Once you’ve exhausted your SEO and SEM options, there are a couple of other routes that will produce results. You can put together an online ad campaign by either buying advertising on sites that appeal to your demographic. In addition, you can send out e-mail newsletters. Encourage customers to provide their e-mail addresses so you can contact them with useful information and promotions.