SIX TIPS FOR MOBILE MARKETING TO ENGANGE CUSTOMERS

People love their smartphones. Whether you're walking down the street or inside a shopping mall, sitting in a coffee shop or at the airport, half the people around you are looking down at their cellphones.

Eighty-three percent of American adults own a cell phone, and 42 percent of them own a Blackberry, iPhone, or a similar smartphone, according to a recent Pew Internet Project report. The study also found that 87 percent of smartphone users access the Internet or email on their device. Two-thirds of smartphone users do so daily. Increasingly, just as how the home broadband connection remains always on, the mobile connection seems to be ever present.

Today's apps-savvy consumers want business information delivered concisely and available for reading on the fly. Thanks to the explosion of Internet-enabled mobile devices, you and your customers can communicate on the go. Here are six easy ways to deliver on mobile devices marketing that encourages customer interaction.

1. Make Your Emails Mobile-Friendly
Whereas delivering email marketing that can be read on mobile devices used to be optional for a business, now it's essential. Keep a message's subject line short and place high up in the message your brand name, the offer, and the call to action.

Keep your email design simple and light on text, and offer a link to your company's website or Facebook page so a reader can find out more.

2. Give Mobile Customers What They Need
Forty percent of U.S. smartphone owners compare prices on their mobile device while shopping inside a store, according to HubSpot, an Internet marketing firm in Cambridge, Mass. If you do not optimize your site for mobile users, you may miss sales opportunities. The most sought-after information (a company's hours, locations, and directions) and popular features should be front and center where customers can easily find them. If mobile consumers cannot find the information they need to guide their purchasing decisions, they may click -- but then take their business elsewhere.

3. Invite List Sign-ups via Text Message and Quick-Response Codes
Customers entering into your retail establishment probably are carrying their cellphones on them. Build your contact list by inviting patrons to send a text message (if your email service provider offers this feature) or scan a QR code. Put a sign at your cash register to encourage such activity while the shopping experience is still fresh.

A savings coupon or special offer can sweeten the deal for any customers who sign up via text message or QR code. And you end up building your list without having to manually enter email addresses after deciphering handwriting on a sign-up sheet.

4. Build Your Fan Base
Your socially active customers have a Facebook or Twitter app loaded on their smartphones. A sign or poster that encourages them to connect with you in the social media sphere can propel significant growth of your network -- and expand your company's visibility to the contacts of your new followers. Be sure to give customers a good (and fun) reason to like or follow you.

5. Tap Location-Based Services
If you run a brick-and-mortar business or host an event, encourage people to check in on location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla, or Where. You will gain information about your regular customers and how often they visit you. It also lets your customers share information and tips about your business with others. A unique special offer can encourage these regulars to check in more often.

6. Encourage Reviews on the Run
Encourage customers to share their thoughts about their experience while they are still at our place of business. Post a sign that says, "How'd we do? Let us know!" You can even direct customers to sites like Yelp, Where, Google Places, or TripAdvisor, where you would like them to offer reviews of your business. Make sure you post your company's Twitter handle, so customers can include it in reviews and follow your business on Twitter for updates. Be sure you stay on top of any customer reviews posted about your company.

HOW TO RANK HIGH IN SEARCH ENGINES RESULTS PAGES (SERPS)

Studies have revealed that 90% of Internet users find websites through search engines and out of those users, 90% do not go past the first 30 results displayed. With this in mind it is easy to see why it’s important for your website to rank high in these results.

Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's) are the pages you see after you type in a search on Google or other search engines and click on the Search button. Because 90% of people use search engines to find what they are looking for these SERP’s are the most important pages on the internet.

The Search Engines Result Pages (SERP’s) can be broadly divided into two categories: “Organic” or ”Natural” listings and Paid Advertisements usually bought on a "Pay Per Click" (PPC) basis.

Roughly 80% of clicks at Google occur within the organic listings not the PPC listings. This is why is it important to get your site to rank naturally in the search engine result pages. Getting your site to rank high is not tricky; it’s just a matter of optimising your website to be search engine friendly. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of engineering your website so it can be properly read by the search engine spiders. SEO is pretty much common sense, search engines are text analysis systems so if your webpage is full of images with little text your site will not rank high. You need to target each keyword/phrase on different pages. So if you want to target the search terms “business plans” you need to have one page with the title “business plans” and lots of text about “business plans”.

To me this is just common sense but then I have been working in the SEO field for a number of years. However it never ceases to amaze me why people still call their home pages “home” or have their business name on the title of every single page of website. The owners probably search for their business and are pleased when it comes up first in Google. This is only good for the customers that know your company which is fine for large brands like Argos or Amazon but if you’re trying to get customers from for internet users you need to optimise your text for the search engines.

The other aspect of getting high SERPs is trust and authority. It is kind of no different than any other business trying to gain trust and a good reputation. Forgetting the cyber world for a moment, in the real world established businesses have much more clout that new start up businesses. Like your favourite restaurant. If a new restaurant opened up just down the street you might not want to chance eating there and stick with your favourite restaurant. Now if you hear that its gaining a good reputation for good food you might then decide to try it out yourself. The same can be said about websites except the trust you get is via an algorithm. The more links you get from already established trusted (authoritive) sites the more Google will trust you. It makes sense really, because a good website will not link to a rubbish or not relevant website.

Another aspect of trust is by doing things with the search engines terms and conditions. This means building links naturally and using keywords excessively. Adding 500 pages in one day is not a naturally progression, search engines like websites to expand naturally, anything else and their warning lights flash which means they might look into your site and possibly penalise it.

So the only way to obtain high SERPs is to do everything the search engines like. This means building websites that are easy to navigate (so users and the crawlers can find every page easily) ,have lots of good relevant interesting content and plenty of trusted links. Make your website the best site on the internet in your chosen niche and you shouldn’t go far wrong.

STRUCTURAL DECISION AROUND SEARCH ENGHINE OPTIMIZATION

Making the right technical choices when you build your website will affect the extent to which you can easily improve your on-site SEO. At the very least, your CMS should provide you with enough flexibility to build a site that is both usable by you, the site owner, and by your site visitors.

Once you have settled on a technical architecture, you will need to decide on a site structure that best exposes your content to site visitors, and to the search engines.

The easiest way to think about your site structure, is how you will expect visitors to navigate and find content once on the site. Some questions you will need to answer to help you come up with the best structure, will include...

- What pages will the homepage link to?
- How many, and what are the top level content categories?
- How deep will these content categories be?
- How will relevant pages link to each other?

The answers to these questions will should result in a fairly obvious navigational structure. Be sure to test it with real users too. Getting your on-site usability right is just one aspect you should be considering as part of your overall SEO plan.







This navigation structure will also help web crawlers to determine what pages are considered the most important on the site. It will also help to establish the relevance of any content you might have to specific topics too.

There are a few others factors that you will need to keep in mind as you develop and refine your sitemap though. Some of these are summarized below.

Targeted keywords

One of the cornerstones of effective search engine optimization, is the targeting of appropriate keywords. You will need to know the types of terms and phrases that people use to search for services and products similar to yours.

Ideally, your site's navigational structure and page hierarchy will be a reflection of this.

Cross linking content

One of the most powerful feature of the web, is the ease with which anyone can navigate from one page to the next, by simply clicking a link leading to a relevant piece of content.

It is important to ensure that your site is internally complete, and that you make it easy for visitors to find additional relevant content easily. Even on ecommerce sites, linking to related complementary products or indeed alternatives, can be incredibly powerful and profitable.

Amazon does this well with the "What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?" and "Customers who bought this item also bought..." links.

Also important to keep in mind, is linking content that might seem intrinsically different. Your CMS for example, could provide anyone viewing an article on topic X with a link to an image gallery of the same item, or a discussion about it on your site's forums.

Using appropriate anchor text

"Click this link" is not the most informative anchor text. Today, web users are savvy enough to be able to follow links without being explicitly told to "Click Here". Anchor text is also incredibly powerful for indicating to the search engines the subject matter of the target document.

Everyone involved in producing and linking content on the site should understand the importance of using descriptive anchor text, particularly when linking to other internal pages and documents on the site.

Breadcrumbs

Navigational aids such as breadcrumbs can make a significant difference to the overall usability of your site. This is true for both search engines and human visitors to your site.

Keep your site shallow

The breadcrumbs noted above will also help you realize if you are going overboard with your site's hierarchical depth. If you have Home>Category>Sub-category>Sub-sub-category>sub-sub-sub-category>Content, it is probably time to pause and re-evaluate your site's hierarchy.

Keeping your site shallow will reduce the number of clicks users have to perform to find your content, and will also do wonders for your SERPs rankings.

Generally, the rule when coming up with a structure for your site, is to keep it as simple as possible. Simple for your site's visitors to understand, simple for the search engines to crawl, and simple for your internal content developers to maintain.

HOW TO GET HIGH RANKING IN SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Those who create a website do so with the ultimate aim of popularizing it amongst the users. A successful marketing strategy which will have long term benefits is the way to popularize a website. The website should also be free from errors and comfortable to use. For the website to reach out to the millions of users, one needs a huge marketing procedure. And to achieve that result, outsourcing is essential. The most common, cost effective and useful way to market one’s website is, through the number of users coming in everyday with the help of the search engines. Hence, a high ranking by the search engine helps in popularizing a website. To efficiently handle all the methods involved in this process a designing team will need the help of a SEO specialist.


To get a high rank allotted by the search engine the assistance of a SEO specialist will prove to be beneficial. They are aware of the various marketing strategies and they also know the pros and cons of the business. They will provide solutions which will help promoting the website on a larger scale. It helps, if one gets a high rank given by the search engine. When a layman keys in a query the search engine provides him with a list of websites which he can refer to. The list goes on and on for pages with a plethora of websites at our disposal. Nobody has the time to go through all the websites to find the perfect answer to their question. The general tendency is to go through the first few websites at the top of the list. So those websites which are at the top of the list have a greater amount of traffic and therefore gain popularity.

It is the job of the on page search engine specialist to draw the users to the website. A search engine specialist analyses and evaluates the website in the first stage and sees whether it needs any modification or not. This is done solely with the marketing strategy in mind. A SEO specialist also indulges in a research to find keywords which are similar to the most commonly ‘entered’ queries of the users. An important thing which must be remembered is that, the search engine functions based on the reading of texts. It does not have the capacity to go through all the websites and analyze the content and then rank it accordingly. It simply uses the web crawler to go through the sites which registers the text and identifies the keywords which are in sync with the queries. Thus, by using the proper keywords one can elevate the website’s rank. This process of inserting the keywords is done during optimization by the Search engine optimization specialists. The web rankings keep on being changed by the search engine to give it a fluidity and authenticity. Thus, to maintain the rank the website needs to be constantly updated. This is also done by the search engine specialists during optimization. They have to be aware of the changing market scenario as well.
Thus, search engine optimization specialists are necessary during and after the process of web designing to secure a high rank given by the search engines.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION COMMON MISTAKES

The truth is, they are easily avoided when you pay close attention to the basics. My goal is to share with you four basic errors made when trying to optimize for a front page ranking. They are, of course, easy to correct.

Keyword Research Errors

When a person goes to Google, Yahoo or Bing and enters a word or phrase to search for what they are doing is searching on a keyword.

In good SEO you want to match the search words with the keywords on your page so that when someone searches for a particular word or phrase your page is likely to show up on top.

There is a method to choosing keywords that is proven time and time again to work. The best keywords or phrases are those that are relevant to your website, to your product or service, that have a high search volume, anything over 7,000 monthly searches is okay, and shows little competition for that keyword or phrase.

Relevancy is obvious. If you sell purple widgets then a keyword like silver earrings is not relevant while violet widgets may be one that works well for you

To understand the relationship between popularity (p) or global monthly search volume and competition (c), I use the Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI. It is computed as follows:

KEI=p2/c

The KEI will return a number, a ratio (n:1) that gives you an indication of how easy it will be to rank for any given keyword or phrase. The higher the number the easier it should be to rank for that keyword or phrase.

Many people, however, make the mistake of choosing keywords that look cute or appeal to them without doing the hard work of ranking those keywords against a particular standard. That is an error.

Keyword Stuffing

Another significant keyword error is keyword stuffing. This error manifests itself in two forms.

Too Many Keywords in The Keyword Meta-Tag

Many people put every possible keyword in their meta-tag for keywords. That is a mistake. By stuffing the meta-tag with too many choices, the search engine spider has no clue which keyword you want to rank for so it discounts them all.

The solution is simple. Include two, and only two, keywords or phrases in your keyword meta-tag. First list the keyword you want to rank for on that page and then list the site core keyword. Say, for example, I sell purple widgets and I have a page on widget uses. Widget use has a KEI of 345.32, pretty good. My page keywords for my page on widget uses will be "widget use, purple widgets" and that's it. No more.

Now when the search engine robot sees the page it will know that I want to emphasize widget use and the site is all about purple widgets. No need to try to fool the robot, it doesn't work anyway.

Too Many Keywords in the Content

The second instance of keyword stuffing is to place the keyword you wish to rank for in the body of your content more than 3% of the total content.

My basic rule of thumb is to include the keyword I want to rank for three-times in the content of any page. I place it in the first 50 words in as natural a position as possible, in the last 50 words again worked in naturally and one time in the body of the page. Any more than that and Google especially will penalize you big time.

Quality Content

In real estate the three most important things are location, location and location. In SEO the three most important things are content, content, and content. Yes, content is king. Presenting poorly written, irrelevant content is useless to your reader and the current level of sophistication of the search engine spiders is such that they can sniff out poor and irrelevant content better than any human can.

So the key here is to write quality content and present it in a straightforward manner. Anything else is a grave mistake.

Graphics

Search engine robots detect text and skip over graphics. The only exception to this general statement is that when they see a code for an image, the spider looks for the "alt" tag, a textual description of the graphic. If it is missing then your site is penalized.

So graphics have a negative effect on your site if they are overused, there are more graphics than text on a page or if they are missing an "alt" tag or the tag is empty.

Follow these few search engine optimization tips and you'll increase your chances to rank high, perhaps even on the

front page of Google

GOLD HITS NEW RECORD 1800 $

The price of gold surpassed $1,800 an ounce Wednesday for the first time as investors pulled their money out of stocks and snapped up precious metals contracts.

Gold is fast becoming a favorite port in a storm of uncertainty. Investors are clinging to what they see as a hedge against volatile stock and currency markets.

December gold contracts backed off their highs, and traded around $1,785 an ounce during midday trading after reaching a record $1,801 an ounce earlier in the day on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Gold prices have shot past a series of milestones over the past two years on an uninterrupted climb. Gold was trading at about $900 in the summer of 2008, before the financial crisis unfolded that year.

Resulting turmoil in currency and stock markets has burnished gold's luster.

SEO

Search engine optimization, abbreviated as SEO, has been a buzzword in the Internet marketing world for several years now. Basically it means making a website better searchable by the search engines. Marketers who are looking at optimizing their websites work with regards to one of three major search engines – Google, Yahoo! Or MSN – because all these three have different parameters for organizing their links.

Out of this Google is the most popular and most marketers wish that their rank – called as PageRank in Google parlance – improves. Since Google is a context based search engine (which means it ranks content-rich websites higher than others), marketers use the following methods for improving their PageRank on Google:-
 They research on keywords and use them in their content. Google ranks websites based on the number of currently popular keywords that it contains

 Apart from keyword optimization, the overall content matters too. There must at least a 250 word content on a webpage for it to be considered by Google.
 The content needs to be regularly updated too. Google is looking for content that provides value to the reader. Content that keeps changing is looked upon as dynamic content that the visitor would like.
Speaking in a broader sense, all methods of traffic generation are SEO methods. There‟s a reason behind this. Search engines like Google keep a watch on the popularity of websites. According to them, if a website is visited more, it contains good value. Hence, websites that generate traffic automatically end up with better stakes on the search engines.
We shall be learning many more SEO methods in the course of this eBook.

U.S. Stocks Post Biggest Gain Since March 2009 on Fed Statement

U.S. stocks rose, capping the biggest rally in more than two years for benchmark indexes, as the Federal Reserve said it was prepared to use a range of tools to bolster the economy following yesterday’s rout in equities.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index swung between gains and losses following the Fed’s statement and closed near the highest level of the trading day. Financial stocks in the S&P 500, which paced a slide that erased $1 trillion in market value yesterday, rallied 8.2 percent. Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. jumped at least 13 percent. Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. gained 7.5 percent as gold advanced to a record.

The S&P 500 jumped 4.7 percent to 1,172.53 at 4 p.m. in New York, after falling as much as 1.6 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 429.92 points, or 4 percent, to 11,239.77 today. Both gauges had the biggest gain since March 23, 2009. About 16.8 billion shares changed hands at 4:56 p.m., more than twice the three-month average, Bloomberg data show.

“The Fed is on top of the game,” Michael Holland, chairman and founder of New York-based Holland & Co., said in a telephone interview. His firm oversees more than $4 billion. “For people who are serious about the business and about the economy, I believe that the Fed fulfilled what they wanted to hear. It’s premature to say that they are prepared for an imminent stimulus, but it’s not early to say that they are becoming more likely to do something of significance.”

Biggest Slump

Benchmark indexes had their biggest slump since December 2008 yesterday amid concern that a reduction of the U.S. credit rating by S&P could worsen an economic slowdown. The S&P 500 was down 14 percent from this year’s high on April 29 through today.

Treasuries rose, pushing 10 and two-year note yields to all-time lows, after Federal Reserve officials promised to keep benchmark interest rates at record lows at least through mid-2013 in a bid to revive economic growth. The Federal Open Market Committee also discussed a range of policy tools to bolster the economy and said it is “prepared to employ these tools as appropriate,” it said in a statement. Three members of the FOMC dissented, preferring to maintain the pledge to keep rates low for an “extended period” without a specific timeframe.

“What the market is trying to digest here is that low interest rates are typically good, but the reason interest rates are low is that the economy is bad,” Brad Sorensen, director of market and sector analysis at San Francisco-based Charles Schwab Corp., which has $1.66 trillion in client assets, said in a telephone interview. “Stock valuations are better than they were a week ago and we find them relatively attractive in a low interest-rate environment. The economy is still growing, albeit slowly.”

Valuation Level

The S&P 500 has wiped out almost $3 trillion in market value since July 22, as a political battle over the U.S. debt ceiling prompted S&P to cut the country’s debt rating. The benchmark gauge for American equities dropped 6.7 percent yesterday and traded at 12.3 times reported earnings, the lowest valuation since March 2009.

Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross said he’s buying assets as the losses in global markets are being driven by fear rather than economic reality.

“Has the world really gotten 10, 12, 15 percent worse in the last 48 hours? I don’t think so,” Ross, who leads WL Ross & Co., said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “Buying stocks at today’s prices over a couple of years’ time period will prove to be a uniquely rewarding experience.”

Volatility Tumbles

The benchmark index for U.S. stock options tumbled, following yesterday’s biggest surge since February 2007. The VIX, as the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index is known, slumped 27 percent to 35.06. The index measures the cost of using options as insurance against declines in the S&P 500.

Financial and raw-material companies, which paced the declines in the S&P 500 yesterday, were the best performers today, rising at least 5.9 percent. Companies which are least- tied to the economy, including consumer staples providers and utilities, rose less than the S&P 500 today.

The KBW Bank Index rallied 7 percent as all of its 24 stocks rose. Bank of America, the largest U.S. lender by assets, gained 17 percent to $7.60, after erasing 20 percent yesterday. Citigroup added 14 percent to $31.82.

The two banks led yesterday’s 11 percent decline in the KBW index after S&P’s downgrade cast doubt on federal backing for U.S. lenders. Bank of America’s $33 billion plunge in market value over the past week has stoked concern that Chief Executive Officer Brian T. Moynihan needs to raise capital even as his options for finding it narrow by the day.

Freeport, Alcoa

Raw-material producers in the S&P 500 jumped as gold advanced to a record and copper rebounded from an eight-month low. Freeport-McMoRan, the world’s largest publicly traded copper producer, climbed 7.5 percent to $45.05. Alcoa Inc., the largest U.S. aluminum producer, added 8 percent to $12.24.

Ford Motor Co. gained 9.9 percent to $10.91 after Bank of America added the automaker to its “U.S. 1” list, which represents a collection of the firm’s “best investment ideas.”

Pfizer Inc. advanced 5.6 percent to $17.60. The world’s biggest drugmaker was also added to Bank of America’s “U.S. 1” list. Separately, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. added Pfizer to its “Conviction Buy” list.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. was raised to “overweight” from “equal weight,” by Barclays Plc after the company’s stock fell yesterday to its lowest since January 2010. Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares added 9.4 percent to $72.93.

AOL Drops

AOL Inc., the Internet company that purchased the Huffington Post in March, tumbled 26 percent to $11.19, its lowest level since its spinoff from Time Warner Inc. in 2009. AOL reported a second-quarter loss as rising global advertising sales failed to overcome the continuing decline in subscriptions to Web access.

Laszlo Birinyi, one of the first investors to recommend buying when the bull market began in 2009, said the S&P 500 will continue its ascent, though possibly not to the level he had predicted. Birinyi said there’s no fundamental reason for the slide, and equities will continue the rally that took the S&P 500 Index 73 percent higher since March 2009.

“The bull market is intact, and while our ‘target’ of 1,450 in mid-2012 is admittedly a bit shaky, our more important conclusion that a rational, disciplined portfolio can attain a 10 percent plus return in 2011 is not,” Birinyi, of Westport, Connecticut-based research firm Birinyi Associates Inc., wrote in a note today.
Source:Bloomberg

BUSINESS STARTUP TRENDS

People start businesses for different reasons. Many simply want to be their own bosses and a lot of these people start businesses in sectors that they've previously worked in. Others have an idea or spot a gap in the market and try to exploit it. A small number look to join growing sectors in a bid to get rich quick. Whatever your reason for starting a business and whatever sector it's in, you'll need to do some market research before taking the plunge.

Even if you've 100 per cent confidence in your business idea and capabilities, a downturn in the market could mean there's simply not enough demand for you to succeed. Alternatively, a struggling market might help you realise you'd be better off targeting a niche rather than mainstream audience.

Anyone investing in your business will also expect you to have considered the market you're about to enter and your business plan will look stronger for having considered these aspects.

The last official startup statistics, published by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, offer the best insight into the types of businesses that are on the increase or decline (see Table 1 below).

Source: Small Business Service Statistics Team, BIS.

When looking at the sector you intend to enter, consider not only how many businesses were started in 2007 but how it compares with 2006. Is it a growing market? If so, has that now been fully exploited and will it drop in 2008/09? If it's less than in 2006 why is that?

Also consider the changes to the total number of businesses that occurred during 2007.

For instance, business services is an area which shows the largest net gain and percentage change, with the stock of VAT-registered businesses rising by 38,800 -- a 6% increase since the start of 2007. In fact, this industry sector has grown by nearly 240,000 businesses in the last ten years to 644,600. That’s 32% of all VAT-registered businesses in the UK at the start of 2008. However, in 2007, the largest increase in de-registrations was also in the Business Services sector, where de-registrations rose by 3,400.

If you're looking to enter a market that's losing a lot of businesses, you'll need to consider why this is and research which particular firms are suffering and why.

Additionally, you should try and consider the outside influences that are likely to have affected startup and stock business figures. For instance, how much have the hotel and restaurant trades been affected by the smoking ban?

Local businesses for local people

National startup statistics are important to consider, but are by no means relevant to every situation. For instance, trends may vary in different parts of the country and at different times. The local economy will also affect your chances of success.

Unless you're about to launch on a national scale, probably the most valuable research you can do is to research what need exists for your business locally. Look how many other similar businesses are in the area and target places with little competition or where there's room for competition, either in terms of better quality service or on price.

Making trends not following them

There's also the argument that trends should be made and not followed, and there's some truth to this. The telecommunications industry is full of very young bold, and now wealthy, individuals who proved a lot of sceptics wrong, and it can pay to be at the forefront of the latest movement.

However, over-confidence can also be perceived as arrogance or naivety, and it's always worth checking the state of the markets even if you then choose to ignore them. Anyone walking into a bank confident about launching in business services but oblivious to the current difficult market in the sector won't be taken seriously - bear this in mind.

Buffett's Berkshire bids $3.25B for Transatlantic

A unit of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has bid $3.25 billion for insurer Transatlantic Holdings.

Berkshire's National Indemnity Co. is offering $52 per share in cash for Transatlantic. That tops the price the company would get in its agreement to be bought by Allied World Assurance Co.

In a letter released by Transatlantic on Sunday, National Indemnity said its offer isn't subject to due diligence or financing conditions. The company said it wants a formal response from Transatlantic no later than the close of business Monday.

If the offer is accepted, National Indemnity would want a $75 million break-up fee if the transaction did not close by the end of the year.

Transatlantic's board said it would carefully weigh the offer by National Indemnity and asked its shareholders to wait until it has a chance to judge it before taking action. But the company also reaffirmed its recommendation of the deal with Allied World Assurance, which is based in Switzerland.

Allied also backed its commitment to the deal in a statement issued Sunday and said it hopes to close the deal in the fourth quarter.

Under that agreement, Transatlantic and Allied World would combine in what the companies are calling a merger of equals. Shareholders of Transatlantic would receive 0.88 of an Allied World share for each share they hold of Transatlantic.

The companies say the deal, which calls for Transatlantic shareholders to receive a 58 percent stake in the combined company and for Transatlantic to name 6 of the 11 board members, will put them on better competitive footing because of the combined company's larger size.

Allied World CEO Scott Carmliani would head the combined company and Transatlantic CEO Robert Orlich would retire.

Last month, Transatlantic rejected a hostile takeover bid from fellow insurer Validus Holdings Ltd. The board also adopted a one-year stockholder rights plan, commonly called a "poison pill," a move used to avoid hostile takeovers.

In light of the latest offer from National Indemnity, Validus also issued a statement Sunday calling on Transatlantic to "remove the obstacles" it said were preventing shareholders from receiving the greatest value for their stock.

Source:Associates Press

Building Search Into Your Organization

Most corporations understand that a great search strategy relies mostly on incorporating the absolute best practices throughout their organizations. It can become a nightmare as a corporation’s activities start to become separated from each other. Departments often have territorial or political reasons for not talking and communicating interdepartmentally, and sometimes the organization of these departments prohibit excellent communication across multiple branches.

The key to great support comes from the top down. If your upper management creates an environment which is central to having search strategies a priority, then it can then be a goal shared by the entire corporation. Upper management absolutely needs to provide the necessary resources for search integration and to make sure that all departments are motivated to create great upward momentum to the search marketing strategy.

Here are some tips to great content architecture across your organization.

1. Make sure that your website has the most useful and functional information architecture possible
Make sure that multiple pages don’t have similar or thin content. Will your website’s visitors be confused at all? Is the page they access relevant to the information they’re looking for? Don’t ever confuse your visitors, and don’t ever show them something they aren’t looking for. Keep it simple!

2. Make sure that the copy on your website speaks to your customer
Keyword research is a huge part of this. You must make absolutely certain that anyone writing web copy has access to (and understands) your keyword research. Make sure they use this research in the writing and development of web copy – if your core demographic is high school children, don’t write using the vocabulary of someone with a PHD.
3. Although your meta keywords tag is not helpful in search engine optimization, it can be helpful in collaboration.
Often, a company will spend countless dollars and time on research about how to speak to their customer, how to create the best marketing calls, marketing segments, and then a copywriter will change the message without realizing all of the energy that was put into the message. To help avoid this, make sure the copywriter has coordinated site wide, and make sure they incorporate the correct keywords into the content. Don’t focus too much on keyword density, but rather on providing valuable content.

4. Remember that every page of your site is a possible entry point.
Every page of your website is a possible entry point for your customer and should be developed using this mentality. Make sure that each page clearly states the primary subject, provides contextual navigation and momentum about the rest of the website, helps the visitor complete a task/find what they were looking for, and to motivate the visitor into your sales funnel. Pages often don’t have a strong call to action and conversions may suffer greatly.

Your corporation should create a checklist for each page to ensure all of these actions get met.

5. Make sure that your website has a great internal linking structure.
This is absolutely crucial to make sure that you have an easily crawlable website. At least one internal link should be in place to each page of your website. A page that does not have an internal link to it is called an “orphan page” and will never be seen by the search engines.

6. Think about what you’re going to link to from the home page.
Your website’s home page is the page that most visitors will see – so it’s important that you link to your most important pages. Search engines also recognize this, and they use your home page link architecture as a sign of what your most important pages are.