This is a way to get 3 free embedded backlinks to drive GoogleJuice PageRank to any website you want (which helps you get free leads from Google.)

And every one of your employees can do the same if you want. This doesn’t work with Facebook because Google spyders don’t follow links on Facebook. But LinkedIn does not use the NoFollow tag in links (at least not yet.)

Here’s how:

1- Decide which keywords you want to promote
2- Decide which web URL’s you want the keywords to point to.
3- Go to your own LinkedIn Account and click on your Profile link.
4- Scroll down to the section below ‘Connections’ called ‘Websites’. Notice you can put up to  3 hyperlinks from here.

Your LinkedIn Profile Page Gives you 3 Backlinks for SEO

5- Click one of the [edit] links to the right in this section and this window comes up:

The Website Link Gives you 3 Backlinks

6- Set the first field to ‘Other’.
7- Put the keyword you want in the second field (see I have typed in Inside Sales.)
8- Type in the URL you want (see I am driving a backlink of the Inside Sales keyword to my friends at AA-ISP, the American Association of Inside Sales, they should definitely be on the first page of Google when someone types in ‘Inside Sales’.)

That’s it, easy.

The process of converting visitors to leads or sales is the process of website conversion. And designing your website to do this well is called conversion design. Most companies make a fancy website that looks like a nice electronic brochure but hardly generates any leads at all.

I just spent an hour on the phone with Tim Ash, the founder of http://www.sitetuners.com as he walked me through an express review of the home page of InsideSales.com.

The good news is that we have lot’s of room for improvement. We convert leads at 3-4 times better than the average. The sad news is that our previous website, though not nearly as good looking, converted somewhat better than this one does. Hmmm, look or conversion? Definitely conversion.

Of course the best is to have a great look with a high conversion rate. That is our next adventure.

Why is this important to us? More leads.

Our dialer technology is like a Gatling Gun, leads are the ammunition. One of the first three questions we get asked by our customers is, “How do I get more leads?”

This is one great way. Design your site to convert leads better. How do you do it? You continue to test and tweak your site by changing different things constantly. I was first introduced to this concept by a company called LowerMyBills.com while at my last company, UCN (now inContact.) Then I met Mat Greenfield, the founder of http://www.ConversionResults.com. He has helped many smaller and mid-size companies design or redesign their website to increase conversion.

A free and simple way is to use Google Website Optimizer and do what is called “A/B Split Testing” where you make two versions of your site; Version A and Version B. Then Google sends half the visitors to A and half to B. We then watch the conversion rate on both pages for a few days or so. Let’s say Version A converts at 5%, and Version B converts at 10%, we’ll obviously turn off Version A and focus on B and do another split test to keep getting it better. Google is free, it just takes some time and effort.

Our friends at SiteTuners go to the next level beyond Split Testing of two variables, they can test lots of variables at once; this is called multivariate testing.  In fact, SiteTuners is a considered a Multivariate Testing Website Optimizer. They help clients like Google, Facebook, Verizon, etc.

We will let you know more later about how well the help from SiteTuners has had on our overall lead management process.

You will probably see our site change in lots of little subtle ways.

How to get the most for your money with a SEO-optimized press release.

You may not know about how frugal InsideSales.com is; we have built our company without ever taking venture capital and we were recently ranked by Utah Business as #10 in Utah for growth (See September Issue of Utah Business).  I bring this up because we did it organically by scrimping and saving yet keeping one foot on the gas pedal when everyone else in our industry is just trying to find ways to spend their venture money (rather than their own earnings.) Not us, this is our money and we are very careful with it.  Or, to put it another way; we are very “fiscally efficient,” and proud of it.

Why is SEO important?  The best leads that close into the biggest deals.

Why is PR important? The 2nd or 3rd best way to improve SEO.

The players in the market for SEO optimized press releases seem to be:

• BusinessWire.com
• PRWeb.com
• PRNewswire.com
• Marketwire.com

We shopped all of them and tested some of them.  Who do we use for press release distribution? Marketwire.

Marketwire was by far the most cost effective while bringing lots of great tools for SEO.  If there is a more effective news wire, we haven’t found it yet (please bring it on!)  Marketwire also has a cool now SEO auditing tool that you run on the draft of your press release before you send it and it tells you everything you ought to do to increase the power of SEO within the release.  Of course, a few things look like they are trying to upsell additional addons that cost more money like images and video.  But hey, that is to be expected.

We send most of our ads through the state distribution model that they offer instead of the national distribution and it is one-fourth of the price, yet we get about two-thirds of the distribution.

Recently we have tried the Tech Hot Spots distribution that they offer which costs 2.5 times what the state distribution offers and we seem to get about twice the distribution.  So when we do product specific press releases we stick with this, otherwise we go through the state distribution.