Entries by Henrik Müller-Hansen

Universal Search is the ultimate search across all the content sources on the web; blog results, images, video results, local/map results, news results, books, patents, finance, code and catalogues. Including all "content elements" in the organic search result will effect the placement of your products & services in the Google search engine. For deeper understanding read Danny Sullivan's explanation - Google 2.0: Google Universal Search.

Some tips on how your business can leverage on Universal Search

1. Create a video tutorial when you release new mobile phones

2. Start a blog-session on Blogger that covers the differences between this new model and previous

3. Give a 3-d presentation of that new super nice mobile phone model - sell it visually

Quick VIDEO-note on the risk of duplicating content (6 min 47 sec)

In short and veeeery simplified - if you copy content and post it on your web site or media channel you are duplicating content. Google, YAHOO! etc does not appreciate duplication of content and are likely to punish you....

Here is a great interview from Matt Cutts. He joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000 and is currently the head of Google's Webspam team.

Matt is great fun to listen to

Enrich the content of your webpage through Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). LSI is a method used in order to position a word's distribution across the whole of the web. Web pages with many words in common are close to each other (semantically close) and pages with a few words in common to be semantically distant. The LSI-relationship between web pages is analyzed as the different SEs' spiders crawl the web. Spiders use LSI as one of the quality checks. Thanks to semantic indexing the spiders can evaluate your web site's relevance for certain keywords & compare your site's content with the content of thousands of other sites' content.

Keywords that the Spiders crunch on

So the spiders that crawl the web therefore spend part of their time evaluating this LSI-factor, i.e. the relationship between the words on a site. Simplified - the co-occurrence between two words, e.g. "Norway" and "Oslo" is the measurement of the two words LSI-factor. When you add LSI as a measurement of the web sites quality it gives the SEs considerable more power to cut through the BS, spam, and promotional links, copy, etc. As the average query word length expands from 3 to 4 to perhaps 5 words or beyond, SEs can continue to provide relevant results, even if the particular "keyword phrase" is not found on a site. Semantic indexing "constructs" a relationships between words based on number of times these two words are found together, so if you write "Oslo" on Google, the SE know that "Oslo" is related to "Norway" and perhaps consider a site that combines "Oslo" and "Norway" as more relevant than a site that purely focus on "Oslo".

When I write content for a web page I initiate the process by searching on the keyword that is important to me on Google, YAHOO! etc. I go through the pages that the SE provide me with and perhaps use some analysis tools, e.g. DomainTools. By doing this I understand the basic structure on these sites, inbound links, domain age, keywords etc. I then extract the important keywords and run a query on Quintura. This LSI-tool gives you a good indication of what co-occurring words a SE spider expect to find on your site as you optimize for a certain keyword phrase.

I punch in Norway and the words that occur most often on web sites that have Norway written in the content appears to be; country, travel guide, vacations, map and many more words.

Main Point: If you want to work your way up the organic search results for a particular keyword, pay attention to what co-occurring words the SEs' spiders expect to find.

Don't analyze sales figures with to much theory. Instead you should try hard to understand what is actually happening during the sales process. Start out with the following:

1. Separate sales towards existing versus new customers. Sales people tend to scream of happiness whenever they sign a contract with a new customer. Sure... it's crucial to grow your business through new customers but only in combination with an even stronger focus on existing customers. Think about it - how much time do you spend thinking about how to develop your existing customers, how to make them even more satisfied with your solutions so that you can sell more to them? Ask yourself how much of your revenue that comes from existing customers vs potentially new customers. Bottom line is that you most likely spend too little time & energy on your existing customers. You should hear the same type of screaming when your sales people extend an existing customer contract.
2. Poor sales are often blamed on poor products, too high prices, hard competition and so on... these conditions will never change so you need to know how to respond. The best sales tool for your sales force is their salary/bonus. A good example from real life was when the sales force at my previous job were blaming bad retention of existing customer contracts on high product prices and slow product development. To state an example we increased the bonus for retentions with 100% while decreasing the bonus for new sales with 30%. The result was quite astonishing - it took not more than 1 week before our products and prices had become surprisingly competitive Hard work is often the solution to poor sales performance.
3. Don’t restate your case – once you sold shut up! Too many sales meetings are not stopped when they should be stopped. Teach your sales force that when the sale is done, either change topic or end the meeting. Continue talking about your services, prices and products only risk changing the customer's decision - to your disadvantage...
   

Here comes a 60 second recapitulation of what shareholder equity or shareholder interest really is.

Remember - understanding of the financial terms and the numbers behind your financial status strenghten you when negotiating with lenders and investors.

Let's start with the balance sheet, the "best" and most proper description of how a company stands at a given moment. A balance sheet is thus, not a description over a time period, but only the financial status related to one single date. Even though a balance sheet could give an indication of the past, the financial history is best understood by analyzing the income accounts - profit & loss.

The Balance Sheet attempts to show the assets and liabilities of a company
Assets consist of physical property, money it holds or has invested, money that is owed to the company and intangible assets (e.g. goodwill).
Liabilities consist of the debt, reserves of various kinds and the equity (what a company owes it shareholders). Debts due to ordinary course of business is presented as "Account Payable", formal borrowing such as Bonds / Notes Outstanding and finally Reserves.

Where do we find the shareholders' interest?
The shareholders' interest is shown on the liability side often as "Capital & Surplus". This equity appears on the liability side since they are actually money that the company owe to it's shareholders. Consider the shareholders' interest as the difference between the company's assets and it's liabilities.

SUMMARY: The shareholders' interest (or "Capital & Surplus") is the amount required in order to balance the two sides - Assets vs Liabilities.