View it here:

Regards,

See our client samples: http://MySeniorService.com
Register for our webinars and marketing videos: http://LTCSocialMark.com

(February 2012) LTC Expert Publications is proud to announce the launch of a proprietary customer service and communications portal for many of LTCEP's larger clients. This portal allows clients to instantly see how their websites rank for certain keyword phrases, all of their social media, blog post and video content, leads and much more.

Roland Lacey, an SEO expert and programmer with many years of experience was instrumental in building the proprietary portal for LTCEP. The information provided to clients is accessible 24/7 and gives them the ability to use one username and password to access almost all of their accounts.

LTCEP is now the only elder care and senior service marketing company providing this level of instant access and unsurpassed communication for clients.

"We've always known that being able to see results instantly and to calculate ROI is a high priority for our clients. The addition of this portal allows this to happen 24/7. We also use this portal to provide access to educational videos, webinar replays, and tutorials on blogging and more. It's totally comprehensive and we are proud to provide this level of support." says Valerie VanBooven RN BSN Co-Owner of LTCEP.

George Novoson, Co-Owner of LTCEP adds, "The way businesses handle customer service has changed dramatically over the last few years. In order to meet the needs and demands of business owners, this is one step that we knew would be essential for our customers and provide the best service possible, 24/7."

The new Client Communications Center will allow LTCEP clients to do all of the following:

·         Easily track search rankings over time for greater insight into how their ongoing SEO efforts impact keyword positions across major search engines. All without downloading, installing or updating any SEO software.

• Web Rankings Overview

• Are they on the first page of Google for any of their keyword phrases? They can find out! One look through the report overview lets them quickly identify major successes, key trouble spots and the latest trends and changes in their search engine rankings and keyword positions.

•  Watch individual keyword performance fluctuate over time, and check each URL to see where it ranks for specific search terms. Filter by position or search engine, and sort by gains, losses or rank.

• Our portal runs the queries for them without risk to their own local IP address.
  

• Scheduled reports to automatically get the updated data on the first and fifteenth of the month.

• They can see who their competitors are and how they compare. The Reporter identifies their top competitors so they can track their search rankings alongside their own.

•  Download reports to PDF for sharing with clients, colleagues and supervisors. Export data to XML or CSV files to use in spreadsheets or add to their records.

• See the exact traffic to their website over the last 60 days, and even as recently as today.
• Learn the exact keyword phrase that the visitor typed in to find their website, and exactly what page they visited.
• See their lead reports instantly.

•  Log into their own trackable number account to instantly see the number of calls generated by their online marketing efforts. Here the recordings. Note leads vs employment calls etc.

• All social media accounts are listed with usernames and passwords and are instantly accessible from the new portal. This includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and more.

• ·         Wondering when their last blog post went up or what it said? Instantly see all of their latest blog posts and content.

For More Information about LTC Expert Publications and their Customer Communications Center for clients, visit them online at www.LTCSocialMark.com or call 888-404-1513.

Regards,

See our client samples: http://MySeniorService.com
Register for our webinars and marketing videos: http://LTCSocialMark.com

Here is the YouTube video replay of the entire event!

Watch at your leisure, share with your office:

For questions, comments, pricing, or general inquiries please talk to George Novoson at george@ltcep.com or call him at 888-404-1513.
Regards,

• Click here for SUPPORT
• Ask me about COACHING
• Visit our WEBSITE

Join us for our final 2011 Webinar on December 13

Space is limited. All are welcome, never a charge to attend.

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/779986162
           
       
Hi everyone, this is our final business building webinar of the year!

December 13, 2011 3pm eastern, 2pm central, 1 pm mountain, 12noon pacific.
(WATCH YOUR TIME ZONES!)

• Learn exactly what it takes to win your market and generate real, quality leads online.
• We will reveal what's working in real time and show real results. No fluff.
• What if you knew that in 19 days you would receive 25 quality leads that were exclusive to you?
• What is that worth to your business?
• We will explain.
• What is important to focus on in 2012… With regard to Google, Google Places, and Google Plus Pages?
• What about Facebook? Twitter? Linkedin?
• And did you know that video has new components that are so important that overlooking video today is costing you clients…..we will show you why.
• Register now to learn more. space is limited! There is no cost to you. Send your staff!

See you at the webinar!
Valerie VanBooven RN BSN
Http://myseniorservice.com
Http://ltcsocialmark.com

Title:     2012 Elder Care Marketing – Learn What's Next!
Date:     Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Time:     3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EST

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/779986162

by Tom Schmitz

Search Engine Optimization is growing up. I am not ready to say the Wild West SEO days are completely eradicated, but in 2011 good search engine optimization is less about trickery and more about engaging content and audience development than ever before.

Over the years, quality optimizers have become more prone to avoid technical tricks like using CSS image replacement to inject keyword text or controlling the flow of PageRank by hiding links from search engines.

Search engines keep getting better at crawling and indexing. If you are unwilling to burn your website or risk your career, you follow the search engines’ terms of service.

During 2011 the conservative attitude toward code crossed chasm to apply to content. For years, websites churned-out poorly written, generic articles in the name of long-tail keyword optimization. It worked so well some people turned crappy content into startups.

Now, thanks to Panda, Google’s site-wide penalty for having too much low quality content, people are asking why anyone would put pages on a website that no one wants to read, share or link to? Without taking potshots at the past, most of those articles look juvenile and antiquated.

Made in Japan went from signifying cheap to marvelous. Made for the Web is growing-up too. It is this evolution which guides my SEO highlights for 2012. I separate things to keep in mind by code, design and content.

Code – Keep It Simple

While Google likes to tell us they are very good at crawling and understanding imperfect code, I prefer to assume search engines are dumb and help them every way I can. Simple code is honest code. It’s also easy to parse and analyze. Just because you can AJAX-up a page with accordions and fly-outs does not mean you should. The more code on a page, the more things that can go wrong from spider access to browser compatibility.

Follow standards and get as close to validated markup as reasonably possible. Make it easy for search engines to spider your site. Validating HTML and CSS does not automagically raise your rankings, but it will prevent crawl errors.

At the same time, don’t insist on validation since some perfectly good code will never validate. Follow search engine recommendations to Make AJAX, XML  and Other Code Crawl able.

Make your CSS class and ID names obvious, especially for section div tags. Again, Google tells us they have gotten good at identifying headers, sidebars and footers. Part of that is almost assuredly knowing the most common div names.

• Make it easy on Google and Bing by naming your header div header.
• Name the CSS ID of your right sidebar div right-sidebar.

Why would you name a CSS Class xbr_001 when you can name it navigation? At the very least, it will make life a lot easier on your SEO team. They have enough work without the need to translate ambiguous naming structures.

Reserve h# tags for outlining principal content. I am amazed at the number of big brand websites that still use h# tags for font design. Tell your designers that h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6 are off-limits and reserved for content writers and editors.

The only exception to this should be if your content management system uses h1 tags to create a proper headline. Embargo h# tags out of your headers, navigation, sidebars and footers too. They don’t belong there.

Web Design – Less Navigation Is More

Look at the Zen like efficiency of any Apple product. Steve Jobs was ruthless about eliminating the unnecessary and achieving clean Bauhaus efficiency.

By contrast, too many websites, especially enterprise sites, try to be all things to all people. Their administrators or managers fear they might miss out on a conversion for lack of a link.

Websites should have clean vertical internal linking. Every page should not link to every page. You do not need a site-wide menu three levels deep. As long as people feel that they are progressing toward their goal or the useful information they seek, they will click on two, three or four links to get there.

Look at your website analytics. Which pages receive the fewest visits? Are any in your navigation? If no one uses a link, why does it to be there?

A website’s most widely visited pages tend to be close to the homepage. Review your categories and sub-categories. Can you eliminate whole categories by merging or reassigning content? For example, does the management team need its own category or can you move it into the About section?

This is not just about eliminating distraction. It is a way to increase the internal flow of authority (PageRank, link juice, etc.) to SEO hub pages.

Content – Engagement & Agility

Emphasize Community and Conversation. If your business depends on the Internet and you have the budget to hire one more person, consider employing a community evangelist. High rankings require authority. Authority comes from off-site links and, to an extent, brand mentions.

Earning enough links to make a dent in your SEO requires a continuous stream of link worthy content combined with forging and fostering relationships with people who create links or influence lots of others through online conversation. This requires a large commitment of time to work with writers and designers and to network. Even when decentralized, this rarely works without a strong empowered leader.

Get out of the sales funnel. The people you want to buy your products or services are not going to blog about your company or mention it on Twitter. More likely, they are peers.

A good exercise to undertake is ask each employee, if they could pick one professional conference to attend, what would it be? Then look for the session speakers on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Find which ones are active online and gauge their influence. Are people in your company qualified to write authoritatively about these topics or speak at conferences?

This is how to find content topics for the post-Panda Web, things people want to converse about and link to. For example, if you have a cutting-edge API team, an API development blog could be the key to higher domain authority.

Understand Social Technographics. It will help you to find influencers and create content that people will want to link to and talk about.

Embrace Agility

Realign your content generation and approval process so you can create near-daily web content and, if necessary, respond publically to something within an hour.

With Query Deserves Freshness, trending topics, news search  and simply because of how social media conversations come and go, agility is important for getting noticed and getting links.

Update Your Content

If your website has older articles that read like Wikipedia or a hardcover World Book Encyclopedia, swap out old content for new. In the future, Panda will not get leaner, it will get meaner. If you have reason to worry, start fixing it now. Do not wait and hope Panda will not see your low quality content. I want to be very clear here:

• If you have decent quality content that provides real value, keep it whether it is SEO optimized or not. Yes, get to work optimizing older content doing things like selecting hub pages, optimizing text and cross-linking. But do not delete your old content.

• If you have content that seems overtly advertorial, is cheesy or reads robotic because it is so stuffed with keywords, begin the process of writing one-for-one replacements and update your old content over time. For the old-time SEOs out there, this brings new meaning to a page a day.

• If you have been hit by Panda already, I suggest removing your poor quality content, set-up 301 redirects to salvage the link authority, then begin rebuilding with high quality, link worthy content. Panda is a site-wide penalty. It is not going to go away until the offending content is removed or replaced.

Those are my 2012 SEO playbook highlights. In the past, content creation and link building were too separated. We had writers covering every long-tail key phrase possible while, in another room, link ninjas emailed and telephoned soliciting for individual links.

That model is becoming less and less sustainable. The Web is too big. Too many people contribute content. Social media offers an entirely new world of context. Today, SEO means finding an audience you can connect with, become a part of the community, give them insanely awesome content and reciprocate. This is the new SEO arms race.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Regards,

See our client samples: http://MySeniorService.com
Register for our webinars and marketing videos: http://LTCSocialMark.com

From Freshnetworks.com http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2011/12/putting-the-customer-first-the-6-rules-of-online-engagement/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+freshnetworks+%28FreshNetworks+Blog%29

By now we all know that social media can help put our customers at the heart of our business.

With this in mind, Lauren Carlson fromSoftware Advice recently pinned downBrian Solis to discuss his definition of engagement.

Solis responded with what he calls the six rules of engagement: value, efficiency, trust, consistency, relevance and control. Let’s take a look at this to see how they can be applied as part of your engagement strategy:

1. Value

Consumers want to feel valued by the companies they do business with. Feeling valued translates to knowing that the company or brand will go above and beyond to meet your needs.

How to achieve this: Use social media to help you stay in touch with your customers in a personal way. In the “old days” this would be making a phone call, and there’s nothing worng with doing that today too, but you should also try to respond directly to tweets and other comments on social channels. You could also set up a loyalty program to reward return business, or offer discounts through social media channels to your most loyal customers to help them feel valued.

2. Efficiency

With the rise of new technology, particularly mobile, processes that used to be long and laborious are now happening much more quickly. Because of this, customers expect the same level of expediency when dealing with businesses.

How to achieve this: Consider how efficient your site is for mobile access and mobile purchasing. Also, instead of using call centers to deal with customer queries and concerns, think about using Twitter, Facebook or a live chat module for real-time support.

3.Trust

Consumers need to be confident in the credibility of your business and the product, actions and services that you deliver. With the rise of social media customers are trusting brand messages less and are turning to the advice of friends, peers and “people like them” to make their decesions.

How to achieve this: It’s been said time and again but be honest and transparent in all communications, across whatever channel. If a company builds trust through honesty and transparency, their customers will feel more confident to recommend the company or brand to others through social media. Don’t bombard your audience with your own brand messages and agenda; listen to what people are saying about you and join in the conversation in a natural, organic way to gain their trust.

4. Consistency

It is common for companies to offer multiple channels for communication with their customers. Offering multiple channels is a good thing, however there is no value unless the service you provide is consistent across each one.

How to achieve this: Don’t offer something you can’t deliver on. It is more valuable to have three consistent channels as opposed to six fickle ones that do not really engage with your customers. There is no point having a Facebook page or a Twitter profile just to have what you believe is a presence on there, if your customers are posting and commenting and getting no response or interaction.

5. Relevance

Many companies use social media as another means of advertising. They essentially spam social media profiles, blogs and marketing emails with product-centric information. However, that’s not what the consumer wants – engagement needs to be relevant.

How to achieve this: When potential and existing customers visit your blog, Twitter, Facebook page etc, they want to find information that is interesting and focused on their needs. Use social media monitoring to listen to what your customers are saying andidentify your influencers or people who form part of your target audience. Engage with these people on their terms and only interact with them if you have a relevant message, or something of value, to offer them.

6. Control

We have heard over and over again that the customer is in control. But the idea of control is two-fold. It is clear that customers want a sense of control in that they want to choose the channel they communicate on, and they want the ability to opt in and out of specific engagements. In other words, they want an experience that gives them the sense of control.

How to achieve this: This is an interesting analysis of the word control. It puts the onus back on the businesses to still control the customer experience as a whole; it’s just that now, with the rise of social media, the customer can choose where and when they want to interact with a brand, if at all.  What Solis seems to be suggesting is that businesses should gain consumer insight and design an experience that provides the user the choice to interact with you or not (so ‘control’ in that sense of the word). Look at your key customer touchpoints to see where social media can add real value to your business.

Regards,

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• Ask me about COACHING
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