Business Solution

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an indispensable piece of infrastructure in the effective management of prospect and customer information in any organization. With the advent of Internet marketing, there is a vast amount of information collected about prospective clients, or existing clients to whom services are sold and delivered using the Internet.

The Internet has grown from an alternative marketing channel to the sole auditable and highly cost-effective marketing tool. Much like not-having a website is no-longer an option, having a sound and effective Web Marketing strategy is imperative for any organisation that needs to grow and interact with its customer-base and consequently increase sales and customer satisfaction.

Traditional methods of marketing communication are not effective enough since a significant amount of trade and human interaction happens on the internet. The online community is less and less exposed to traditional media because members of this group do not look to television, radio, newspapers or billboards for information and product research. Even in cases where they do, they often use the internet to access publications, television and radio programming.

One must recon that a large majority of economically capable and influential individuals belong to the above-described section of society. This makes it only reasonable to conduct marketing communication through the media that is most pervasive - Web.

Web Marketing is a combination of Opt-in Email Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, and prospect communication infrastructure such as: feedback forms, and marketing campaign management tools.

Contrary to the common assumption that CRM refers to software or any other technological tool that is used to automate relationships with customers, CRM is primarily determined by the culture and established business processes that enable a company to interact with prospects through the operational stages of marketing, sales and after sales service.

Without intra-organizational cultural adoption of the stages upon which any CRM software is based, any implementation of such a tool cannot achieve success. The CRM strategy should enable the lead conversion and customer service teams to deliver high quality services to prospective customers thereby building and fulfilling the reputation, and promise of the organisation's brand.

How long does it take to get a new website indexed?
In order to establish the truth and set this matter to rest for some time, I set out to make observations of how long it would take in a real-world experience.

It is clear to all self-respecting web publishers and producers that trying to take shortcuts and sneak to the front does not work and has the potential of jeopardizing the whole mission. I decided to follow the text-book example of SEM/SEO and take the hard narrow road that (as the good book says) is the right way despite being less attractive.

I have set out to woo the search engines and hopefully the most desired ones will be willing to rank me highly after they visit my optimized site. As many have told me, Google and it's buddies are guests you do not want to see your house in disorder. I started off with great dedication and courage as well as the hope that I would have what it takes to follow the advice in Google Hacks

• Create clean code
  
• Write and post good quality content for your readers
• Properly tag and describe your content so that it can be found and indexed
• When linking to others, do it sparingly lest you leak your pagerank to them
• Do not hang-out in bad neighborhoods, only link to people with good content covering topics related to your content
  
• Avoid too many links to sites with relatively lower pagerank unless the content is good
• Write, write, and write again
• Visit respectable forums that deal with what your site is about and contribute... it's by giving that we receive

I am doing all this and infact, I am writing an average of 3 pages a day. Granted that I have consolidated the portfolio, technical blog of my daily tasks in the subject of the web venture (Web Production, design, development as well as communications research theory). A section of the website is dedicated to the various papers and publications that have been written over the years that are yet to be availed on the web for reference and commentary.

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The Web CMS submits updates to google and google is busy scouring the site for content (5 crawls per hour) because of the large amounts of content being posted (hypothesis); as expected, Google has only indexed the homepage, but not pageRanked it. MSN indexed too many pages at once and they were mostly RSS feeds. In the second fortnight, the traffic doubled. Besides being indexed, I made an effort to vist the Drupal support forums and comment on issues that I had encountered and solved always referring to an exhaustive commentary to the problem at hand on the website.

_______Timeline________

Alexa Ranking is
700458: 15-3-2006
375400: 20-3-2006
281929: 22-3-2006
222804: 29-3-2006
197353: 30-3-2006
173803: 04-4-2006
96773: 04-27-2006
78554: 05-05-2006
58685: 05-24-2006

26th March 2006 - Google search returns one page at #10 for the homepage searching for cms producer
29th March 2006 - One week after submitting iDonny.com to Yahoo and CMSproducer RSS to Yahoo, 12 pages have been indexed.
31st March 2006 - After constant authoring and submissions (gsitemap module) as well as about 12 indexing visits from Googlebot per day from google, we now have 10 pages indexed by google appearing in search.
1st April 2006 - I checked google index and BINGO! 95 pages indexed both from my site - 53 pages (cmsproducer.com) and inbound links from mySQL and Drupal forum entries in which I have so far participated. I also see that someone from google canada searched for Enterprise Document Management and read my document on that subject.
2nd April 2006 - The google index now has 140+ pages and other nodes from my website indexed and available for search! I even ranked #1 for one search composed of two words 'Bad Lonex' for a document in which I blogged on my experience at Lonex Hosting.
4th April 2006 - 294 pages are listed in the google index and the site is getting about 1/3 traffic from searches while the other 2 thirds is from documents and contributions that I have made to Drupal and Open-Source-CMS.
20th April 2006 - Google search returns the homepage at #1 'cms producer'
27th April 2006 - link:www.cmsproducer.com does not return an empty anymore and it has 12 unique listings.The amount of activity around the website (incoming links, search engine clicks, RSS subscriptions, feedback from visitors etc) has reached a point where we must stop updating this experiment report and concentrate on keeping the content updated, responding to feedback and providing high quality services.

3rd May 2006 - Upgraded the website to Drupal 4.7 for new functionality as well as to patch some problems that we causing SESSION IDs to be indexed with URLs thereby creating duplicate addresses for the same content - Now that the issue is fixed, Instead of creating 301 redirects for each of the URLs with SESSID to clear the search engine index of the bad URLs, since the whole domain will be regularly crawled and indexed on a regular basis, all that I had to do to replace the URLs with the cleaner URLs was to create a robots.tct entry that excludes URLs with session IDs such as:

Disallow: /*?PHPSESSID=
Disallow: /*?*PHPSESSID=
and the same goes for other paths that may present unwanted content to search engines

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Next Activity

Now that the pages are indexed, I will continue to add more content and as I revise existing content, I will optimise the pages further for ranking by:

• Edit the copy for easier readability
  
• Focus the documents that do not have a clear theme and write new supporting documents
• Create path aliases in Drupal for key pages so that the URLs can also contain the keywords (increases ranking)
• Retag documents based on an updated Drupal Taxonomy
• Write a targeted description for every document I re-edit and use a keyword density tool to determine the appropriate keywords for each page
• Continue doing more of what has resulted in a good indexing exercise.

If you would like me to assist you to get your site similarly indexed, please request Complimentary or Paid Web CMS Development and Production Advice and services here.