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This is a guest post by SEO Eagles. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most popular ways of marketing your business. The marketing as well as extensiveness a business receives through online marketing is truly amazing. When you start any business your sole purpose is to make the products and services popular among the people all over the world. Thus you need to be quite alert while planning the marketing strategy. With help of dedicated SEO professionals or monthly SEO packages provided by different reputed SEO firms, plan the best strategy for your business.  Now the question arises that which one is better – to hire a SEO company for a monthly package or go for a dedicated professional.

Hiring Dedicated SEO Professional

First let us check out the benefits of hiring a dedicated SEO professional and how it can be advantageous for your business:

• Cost factor: One of the main things that has driven more number of people towards hiring a dedicated SEO online. If you hire a SEO company you will find them offering same services at more cost compared to hiring any expert SEO. The SEO pricing of any firm includes the additional overhead cost as well as the tax benefits.
• Handpicked Resources: Once you start searching online you will get an option of choosing the best SEO professional among them. Inspite of adding one more talent to your already talented team you do not worry about high charges that usually comes with monthly SEO packages.
• Multi-pronged Approach: Unlike the monthly SEO packages, dedicated SEO professionals are pretty flexible. If you end up choosing the right man, he can even arrange as well as execute the correct online strategies ranging from viral marketing, social media networking and link building. Hiring a SEO professional is more profitable as you can utilize him for the assigned hours you are paying him.

Monthly SEO Packages

The monthly SEO packages contain On-page optimization as well as Off-Page optimization. Major SEO practices such as social media marketing, link exchange, article writing is included in these packages. Once you hire a SEO company do not expect to get immediate results. Keep an eye on the regular reports that the company submits you and evaluates them thoroughly. A reputed SEO company has a lot of professionals working for them so you can always be assured of getting the best out of them. But be aware of those practices they perform especially unethical work like Black hat SEO. It will lead to spoiling the recognition as well as the credibility of your website.

But among the innumerable SEO companies that offers monthly SEO packages you have to select the best among them. It becomes quite difficult to choose the best among them.  Always go for the one that suits your requirements and budget. You may want to settle with a cheap SEO service but in that case you have to compromise with the work quality. An affordable budget option along with appropriate service is what you should look for in any SEO package. The SEO pricing are different for various companies depending on the kind of work for optimizing a site.

SEO Eagles is a prominent Search Engine Marketing USA company providing online marketing solutions to suffice the needs of their clients. They have a large customer base mainly for the high quality services they provide.

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Link building is an important part of off-page search engine optimization (SEO).  Many websites either forget to build links or don’t take the time to build quality links.  Taking the time to constantly build quality links to your website it important and should never be overlooked or forgotten.  The good news is that there are some tested and effective link building strategies that can work for any website.

One of the link building strategies that we choose to use is content submission techniques.  This technique involves the website owner or webmaster to create quality content that is to be submitted to quality article directories or as press releases.  Another great way of building links via content submission is to submit to related blogs that accept guest posts.  This allows you to gain links that are targeted to your website demographic and target audience.  The search engines like to see links pointing to other websites that deal with the same topic.

Websites and webmasters that use content submission techniques need to make sure that they place quality links either inside the content or within an author biography at the end of the content.  There are many article directories like don’t accept links inside the content, but will allow links in the author bio.  If you are guest posting on website or blog, then you need to make sure to ask if you can include your links within the content or author biography.  If time is taken to create content that is based on your website, then you can usually push your links within the content.

While there are many ways to create quality back links to your website, they all fall under just 5 effective strategies.  These strategies are as follows:

- Cherry Picking Links
- Content Submissions
- Link Bait
- Paid/Traded Links
- Social Communities

The online marketing company ProspectMX created a great breakdown of the 5 strategies along with samples of sites that can be used to further your link building resume.  Their PDF is a great way to visualize how link building strategies work and what works.  These strategies have been tested and are truly effective.  While some may be better than others, each of them have their function in the SEO world.

No matter what link building strategies that you use, it is important to always work hard to increase links to your site.  It is especially important to try and locate quality links from authority sites.  These sites include .edu extension sites and others that have high PR along with authority content.  These links are much harder to come by, but when you get them, it looks good.  It is also important remember that link building should never stop.  Along with refreshing content and creating more quality content, search engines like to see new links pointing to your website.  Link building is not one and done, it is an evolving processes that will continue to grow as your site grows.

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This is a guest post by Jaime Brugueras. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

With the large number of options that customers have today, it is becoming increasingly tough to bring customers back to your store. The situation is so competitive that the minute they leave your website, they are at a risk of being pried away by your competitors.

How important is customer retention?
On average, online retailers lose 25% of their customers every year. It has been published that a small increase in customer retention can increase profits by more than 25%. The calculation to prove this is actually very simple. Suppose that 100,000 customers buy from you every year and you expect 20% to never buy from you again.  If it costs you say $100 to acquire a new customer, then replacing the lost customers is costing you $2 million dollars. In this scenario, for every percentage point that you decrease, you save $100,000.

The benefits of improving customer retention go beyond the costs of replacing new customers. The acquisition of new customers costs 5 to 7 times more than maintaining an existing customer. Other benefits in direct relationship with economical success include repurchasing, cross-selling, and word of mouth. The stronger the relationship between customer and company, the more often she buys products (repurchase). Retained customers tend to buy other products from the same online store (cross-sell). Finally, satisfied customers share their experience with others via word-of-mouth, social media, and positive reviews.

Current Retention Efforts
Successful retailers understand the importance of customer retention and use tools and strategies to drive customers back to their store. The most common ones are: email marketing, loyalty programs, blogs, and a focus on customer service. These customer retention strategies are obvious, cost little to nothing, and can have an impact on your business. In what follows, I will introduce a few other retention strategies that can have a huge impact on your bottom line and are also easy to implement.
5 Retention Strategies for Online Retailers

1. Segment your email communications
   Avoid email techniques that club all the customers into one large group that receives 3 to 4 emails a week. This encourages disengagement by opting out rather than building a relationship. By segmenting your customers with demographics and purchase information, you can become more efficient at sending the right offer at the right time.

2. Analyze and sell
   Many marketers focus on converting a site visit into a sale, but once the sale goes through then they ignore the customer while in search for more business. You should know which products sell well together and which ones are an obvious after sale. You should also know how long it takes the customers to purchase again so you can strike when the customer is thinking of another purchase. All you need is to put a system in place that can automate this for you and sell, sell, analyze.

3. Measure lifetime value and share of wallet
   It is important to know how much business and profit you can expect from a customer during their lifetime. Lifetime value can be used to gauge how much you can spend and earn a profit when acquiring a new customer. Once you realize the total amount of profits a single customer can provide your business, you’ll gain a better understanding of how important is customer retention. Share of wallet combined with lifetime value can provide meaningful insight on which customers there is more potential for growth allowing you to focus on the customers that matter most for you business.

4. Encourage feedback
   Many unnoticeable issues can cost you a customer. Issues like “my order took longer than expected”, “customer service did not solve my problem”, or the “product was not what I expected” may not be reported by the customer, but contribute to attrition. After an order or a service request, send a short survey (1 or 2 questions) and gauge their satisfaction. If there is a slight issue and you react quickly (with a discount or solution), the customer will feel heard and might forgive you for his lack of satisfaction. That feedback is invaluable since now you can not only make that customer happier, but fix your internal processes to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

5. Surprise your customers
   Many loyalty programs, like the ones airlines use, automatically provide a benefit to the customers when certain spend threshold is met. The problem is that the customer tracks these points and eagerly waits for their free share or discount. Very few companies reward their most important customers without letting the customer know. You purchase from a retailer often and suddenly you receive a free t-shirt or new cosmetic bottle. Internally the retailer is tracking how much each shopper spends and automatically sends a free gift card or offer when the threshold is met. This surprise factor works wonders, I have seen my clients implement this with much success.

A data-driven approach to customer retention can increase sales and automate targeted campaigns. Identify customers with growth potential, segment your customer base, and surprise your customers to gain loyal customers who will buy more and spread the word. Encourage feedback and continue to improve any issues occurring in your sales cycle. That’s pretty easy right?

Jaime Brugueras is the CEO of Mineful, a customer retention solution for SMB online retailers. Learn more about Mineful at www.mineful.com.

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This guest post from Lenny Mcknight

When you live in the deep south there are a few things that are just expected of you. You will drink sweet tea, your husband will hunt deer, you will smile and say hi to people who pass you on the street even if you do not particularly like them, and you will defend your property if needed. I fully agree with making sure that your property is secure and safe for your family but I don’t know if that necessarily means that you need to keep a loaded shot gun in your closet “just in case.” When I first moved here everyone told me to get a gun because everyone else in the county is a gun owner. So by default I guess I should be too? I’m not too good with guns and my aim is terrible so I just decided to check out home security Alabama to protect my home instead. As it turns out once I had my alarm system installed several of the people on my street decided to get one too. I guess maybe the shotgun in the closet type is a dying breed.

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As you walk through retail stores looking at merchandise and checking out sales, have you ever taken a minute to step back to see how the store is laid out and what type of displays they are using for their merchandise?  In store merchandising can be a very intensive task to handle.  There are many different configurations that store owners can use in order to display their merchandise in a pleasing manner for their customers.  Figuring out what type of displays and what configurations to use can be daunting, but not if you have the right partner to assist.

RetailResource.com is the number one source for retail store fixtures and supplies for any new retail store or one that is trying to refresh their look.  They carry a wide selection of supplies and fixtures that will bring any outdated retail store up to date or give any new retail store the right look.  Many store owners that choose to update the look and feel of their store choose to find used retail fixtures in order to save money.  While this can be good on the balance sheet, finding and converting used store fixtures can be a time intensive task.  In many cases, the used fixtures are missing parts, or have damage that cannot be hidden by the merchandise being displayed on it.  When this is the case, it can have the reverse effect and turn the customer off.  Customers do not like to see new merchandise hanging on old fixtures as it shows that the store owner does not care about their entire appearance.

With their wide array of store supplies, displays, signs, mannequins, and fixtures, Retail Resource can provide your store with the look and feel that you are trying to achieve.  They guarantee your satisfaction and want to make you a customer for life.  Don’t let old and outdated fixtures tatter your retail store image.  Start thinking about updating or adding new store displays and fixtures to let your new merchandise speak for itself.

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