The Florida Self Storage Association (FSSA) will host a casino night legislative fundraiser as part of its upcoming Conference & Expo, April 25-27, at the Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center in Orlando, Fla. The goal of the event, scheduled for April 25, 9-11 p.m., is to financially bolster FSSAs effort to modernize the states self-storage lien law. Games will include poker, Black Jack, roulette and craps. A casino host and professional dealers will be present to enhance the event, and top-chip winners can win prizes such as an iPad 2, gift cards, gift baskets and others.

The casino night is sponsored by Company Roof Maintenance LLC, a commercial roofing contractor based in South Florida. The company specializes in roof maintenance and repair. The events prize sponsors are Automatit, MiniCo Publishing, On The Move Inc., Randall Merchant Solutions, Trust Self Storage and Waikato Enterprises Inc.

The Florida Self Storage Association, with support from the national Self Storage Association, has been working to create legislative improvements for the states self-storage operators. Its proposed revision to Florida's self-storage lien statute, Senate Bill 646 (SB 646), passed unanimously in the Senate in early March and awaits the signature of Gov. Rick Scott. The bill's companion legislation, House Bill 715 (HB 715), was read on Feb. 23 and also passed unanimously. If passed, the new law will go into effect July 1.

The FSSA is a non-profit organization of businesspeople involved in the self-storage industry in Florida. Its members include facility owners, operators, vendors, developers, investors, property managers and suppliers.

The planning board in Fulton County, N.Y., is staying neutral about a variance for a proposed self-storage facility just west of the city of Gloversville in the adjacent city of Johnstown.

The board conducted a law review of a variance request by developer Dean Fisher, who wants to build a storage operation on the south side of Route 29A.

County Senior Planner Sean Geraghty told the source Fisher already owns the property where he wants to develop the self-storage business on his property, which is zoned as an R-2 residential district.

"[Self-storage facilities] don't generate a whole lot of traffic," board Vice Chairman John Blackmon said, adding that no extra utilities are needed.

Even though the board saw no regional benefit from the project, the board decided to stay out of the issue and sent a neutral ruling to the town's Zoning Board of Appeals, which will make the final decision on the variance.

The Gloversville-Johnstown area is about 50 miles northwest of Albany.

California self-storage operator A-1 Self Storage donated $2,000 to the FAIR Foundation, an organization that raises awareness and participates in funding for research of chronic diseases. Its mission is to establish fair and equitable distribution of research funds by the U.S. government for all diseases and change organ donor policies.

"A-1 Self Storage is proud to support the FAIR Foundation," said Brian Caster, president and CEO. "We empathize with the difficulties patients and families face dealing with a chronic disease.

The company has 17 locations in the San Diego County area and more than 40 locations statewide. It is the self-storage division of the Caster Cos., a third-generation, family-owned company headquartered in Southern California since 1959. Caster Cos. develops and manages A-1 Self Storage, A-1 Car Storage and other commercial properties in California. Its portfolio includes more than 4 million square feet of real estate.

By Stephen Sandecki

This is part one of a series designed to help educate self-storage operators on the basics of on-page search-engine optimization (SEO). To read other installments in the series, search for "Sandecki" using the search box in the upper right corner of this Web page.

To clarify, on-page optimization relates to things done directly to your Web page(s). Everything explained in this series can be done by whomever manages your website. If you run your website on a third-party platform or use third-party CMS (content-management system) software, you may be limited to how effectively you can optimize your on-page SEO. To get the most out of on-page SEO, you need to take it into consideration during the development of your website.

This series is divided into seven parts, each focusing on a different optimization technique. It might be a little rough on someone who doesnt have much knowledge in HTML markup or the concept of Web development. If you fall into that category, you can still educate yourself with this guide, and forward it to whoever handles your Internet marketing and SEO. I'm starting this series off with title tags because its one of the easiest things you can manipulate when it comes to SEO.

The Technical of the Title Tag

The title tag is part of the head HTML element and is located inside the HTML syntax. In terms of HTML, the title tag is used to define the title of your document (Web page). Below is an example of the title tag HTML syntax.

There are three core things the title tag will do, and one of them is crucial to SEO. They are:

• Define the title visitors see in their browser
• Be the default title used when visitors add a page to their favorites
• Be displayed in search-engine results

Its important to remember you can only have one title tag per Web page. If you have more than one, search-engine crawlers and Web browsers will always use the one that appears first in your HTML code. Now that you understand exactly what a title tag is, its time to learn how you can use it for on-page SEO.

How Search Engines Use a Title Tag

Search engines will use the title tag of a Web page when showing it in their search-engine results. This gives the title tag two important factors. First, it can help attract the attention of the actual person searching. The other is search engines use the data in title tags to help rank sites in results. Below is a simple example of how a title tag would be used in search results. The section inside the red circle is the title tag for that Wikipedia Web page.

As you can see, the title tag is one of the most prominent parts of search-engine results. Its also what initially catches the eye of a searcher and draws him to your listing. Obviously, search engines all have their own algorithm, so how they use a title tag when it comes to ranking Web pages in search results will vary.

Optimizing Title Tags for Search Engines

This is the million-dollar question when it comes to title tags. Everyone wants to know how they can properly optimize them to help their Web pages rank better in search results. But title tags are only one of hundreds of factors used to determine search-engine rankings. You could have perfect title tags and still not rank well for the keywords in which youre aiming. Remember, you want to not only optimize for search engines, but attract the attention and interest of humans!

First, make sure you know what your primary keywords are for your Web page. These are crucial when trying to optimize your title tag because they need to be in it. For example, were going to optimize a title tag for a Web page based on organic dog food. Heres a good title tag:
"Organic Dog Food - We Offer the Best Deal on Organic Dog Food."

Since the Web page is about organic dog food, the keyword that appears first in the title tag should reflect that. Then, insert a small sales pitch that manages to include the keyword one more time. This is a great example of a title tag optimized for a specific keyword. Be careful to not just stuff keywords into your title tag, because they could appear as spam to search engines and discourage searchers from visiting your site.

Import Tips

Title tags arent that difficult to optimize. You have a few simple rules to follow to get the best results. The tips listed below are a great primer to use when creating or optimizing your title tags.

• Make title tags 70 characters or less. This is the maximum shown by Google in search results.
• Do not stuff title tags with keywords, as they can appear as spam.
• Try to have your primary keyword or keyword phrase appear first in title tag.
• Your primary keyword or keyword phrase should repeat twice, if appropriate.
• Use | as an alternative delimiter to a dash ( ).

A title tag is a simple element to optimizeas long as you dont overthink it. The title tag is purely the title of your document in 70 characters or less and should describe the content located on that Web page. In part two of this series, well talk about the title tags brother, the meta description.

Stephen D. Sandecki is the Internet marketing specialist for LifeStorage Centers LLC. He has more than eight years of experience in search-engine optimization, paid search and Internet marketing, and six years of experience in the self-storage industry. LifeStorage has 18 facilities throughout the Chicagoland area. For more information on Chicago Storage, visit www.lifestorage.net. You can reach Sandecki at [email protected].

IStore Self Storage in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, will be powering down all electricity in its office between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. local time on March 31 to observe Earth Hour.

Started in 2008, Earth Hour is a global event organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature to ask businesses and residents to turn off all lights and non-essential electricity between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. in their local time zones on the last Saturday of March.

Facility Manager Kelly Byrde said the facility will turn off all computer equipment and lighting in the office, but exterior security lighting, cameras and gate access will still be operational. She encouraged others to join the facility in the event.

"Earth Hour is one of those things that make people realize that we are all sharing the world," she said. If nothing else, by taking part in Earth Hour, at least you will save some money on your electricity bill.

IStore is a two-store operation, consisting of the Mississauga facility and Abacus Self Storage in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Both locations are in the Toronto metropolitan area.

A woman claims the contents of her self-storage units at California facility, including four Andy Warhol prints, were wrongfully sold. Now shes suing the self-storage operator in court.

Annemerie Donoghue, an art collector who lives in New York, said in court this week that she had prepaid two months of rent and allowed Extra Space Management of North Hollywood, Calif., to deduct rent automatically from her credit card. She said she prepaid on Nov. 20, 2010, and signed an autopay document. Donoghue also said the document was signed by the self-storage manager.

Donoghue rented three units in North Hollywood from Extra Space Management for $312 per month. Among the items stored in the units were four Warhol prints titled, Details of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli).

Donoghue said the storage company claims she fell behind on her payments, then auctioned her unit. Shes seeking more than $250,000 in damages for breach of contract and conversion.

U.K. self-storage operator Big Yellow Group PLC released a pre-close statement for the quarter ending March 31 with news of steadily increasing occupancy. The statement comes a week after government officials met about a nationwide budget deficit and released a proposal to levy a value-added tax (VAT) on self-storage consumers, beginning Oct. 1.

Occupancy among Big Yellows wholly owned stores is 64 percent, compared to 63.4 percent on Sept. 30, 2011, and 59.3 percent on March 31, 2011. For the first time since 2007, the first-quarter occupancy in the companys portfolio is higher than the previous September, which is traditionally the peak month. Occupancy growth in the first quarter is 86,000 square feet, compared to 41,000 square for the same quarter last year.

The company expects to meet market expectations in terms of its full-year earnings.

"We now look forward to our traditionally busiest trading period from a new all-time high of occupied space," the firm's executives said in a statement.

Referring to last week's VAT proposal, the executives added, "The proposed changes to the VAT status is an industry-wide issue and this, together with the current levels of demand we are experiencing, gives us increased confidence that our previously articulated strategy of wholly or substantially mitigating the impact of those changes has a reasonable chance of success.

"The proposed VAT change would see a significant reduction in the cost of construction of new stores given that VAT on the construction costs would be recoverable. Furthermore, the group would be entitled to a repayment of previously unrecovered VAT on past construction expenditure, which we believe would be sufficient to fund the £14.3 million ($22.7 million) construction cost of new stores on three sites that the group currently owns. This would have the desirable effect of turning fallow assets into income-producing contributors to the group."

Big Yellow Self Storage has 53 wholly owned and 65 total facilities in the United Kingdom, with most concentrated in Greater London.

The North Carolina Self Storage Association will host a webinar titled, "Learn How to Market Your Self Storage Business Online" at 2 p.m. ET on April 12. Presented by Yovonne Kenny, an independent marketing consultant at ReachLocal Inc., the online seminar will address search-engine marketing, pay-per-click advertising, search-engine optimization, local directories, display marketing, remarketing, reputation management, social media and more.

The event will be moderated by Jim Ferguson, marketing manager for SMD Software Inc., a provider of self-storage management software. Time will be allowed for questions from the audience.

Webinar registration is $10 for NCSSA members and $25 for non-members. Interested self-storage professionals can register online at www.ncssaonline.org/webinars.

Based in Woodland Hills, Calif., Reach Local provides online marketing services. The companys mission is to help businesses reach more local customers online. It has more than 68 locations throughout Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.

NCSSA's mission is to provide members with quality standards, proper guidance, networking opportunities, leadership, open communication and credibility for the local self-storage industry. The association is comprised of facility owner/operators as well as vendors. It is managed by IMI Association Executives Inc., a Morrisville, N.C.-based association-management company.

Call centers are widely used in numerous industries, from airlines to computer tech support. In the self-storage business, call centers are used to ensure incoming calls are never missed, giving facility operators the opportunity to close more sales. Advancements in technology are rapidly changing how operators interact with call centers, and the vital information they can obtain from calls to garner more business.

If you havent visited a call center lately or if youve never been inside one, you might be surprised by what you see. Although we dont get many visitors at our call center in Columbia, Mo., when people do stop by, theyre often taken aback by how much technology it takes to answer a phone call. Our facility is a small boutique center with some really neat gear, but the technology infrastructure pales in comparison to some of the major centers Ive toured.

I typically tour a few big operations every year to see firsthand the many new innovations working within the call-center industry. One of the most impressive operations Ive seen was the New York City 311 call center in lower Manhattan. This facility answers about 90 percent of non-emergency calls to city agencies for the entire city of New York. At my call center, we jokingly complain about taking a large number of storage-auction inquiry calls on the third week of every month. Can you imagine the number of calls the NYC 311 center gets during inclement weather when everyone in the city wants to know if there are transit delays, school closings or street-parking rule changes? This center sometimes gets more calls in an hour than we receive in a month.

Ive also toured the American Airlines call center near Dallas, and you cant imagine what it takes in space, people and technology to book seats and provide service to passengers for the thousands of flights American dispatches each day. The size and depth of the airlines commitment to customer contact is really impressive.

Even in a boutique center, you need a wide and deep technology foundation to provide the services that make your clients and stakeholders money. It all starts with Internet and telephony connections. These communications connections must have tremendous bandwidth. Then you need server capacity to handle the layers of software that power the phones, the lead-management systems and the integration systems. Whether the center uses internal software, cloud software or a combination, the power and capacity drain on servers is tremendous.

How They Work

Phone systems can take many shapes and formats, but they all require bandwidth and power. Work stations require powerful and reliable phone-set and PC equipment. When centers run on a cloud and use less-powerful PCs, they still need top-quality equipment to handle the workload.

Redundant systems are in place to provide a plan B for loss of power, Internet and servers. The backup systems need to be powerful and dynamic. If American Airlines call center was out of action for even one hour, it would incur a tremendous loss of income and reputation. Customers in most businesses generally have tolerance for about five minutes of downtime once theyre in a relationship with a company. The CEOs and CFOs of these companies have tolerance for about five seconds of downtime once a year.

One big expense often overlooked is sound management. Most centers invest tens of thousands of dollars in sound-proofing and sound-dampening systems to prevent sound waves from bouncing all over the room and ensure the conversations with callers sound personal.

Todays call centers are no longer just call centers. In fact, most now call themselves contact centers. This is because many also handle e-mail responses, live chat, social-media responses or posting and text responses. Depending on the types of contacts and customers being served, a contact center may have as much automated communication as it has personal communication.

The New York City 311 center uses dynamic recorded messages for the most popular message of the day to avoid caller wait times and avert having too many employees on the phone. For example, on a snowy day that promises only a dusting, callers might hear an automated message telling them alternate parking rules are still in effect, transit is running on a regular schedule and all city schools are open. It takes a huge machine to handle 50,000 calls an hour.

American Airlines has a sophisticated voice- and call-recognition system that allows frequent fliers to do much of their planning and re-planning without ever talking to a real person. You might think talking to a machine is a terrible experience, but it shouldnt be when done for the right reason at the right time.

As an American Airlines frequent flier, I can tell you its a great experience to call the customer-service number after a flight has been cancelled at the last minute to hear the automated machine say, Hello Tron Jordheim, I see you were on flight 123, which was just cancelled. You are already automatically rebooked on flight 789, which departs out of gate B6 at 2 p.m. I didnt need to talk to a human to appreciate the good service I received.

Collecting Data

Besides communicating with customers, data collection is also a big focus of call centers. Some of the latest technologies address ad tracking and lead-management effectiveness reporting. You can now tell exactly which ad campaigns are driving phone calls, leads, reservations and rentals. With all the various marketing platforms available to businesses in 2012, this function takes on huge importance.

Sales-performance tracking has also risen to new levels. Where previously one could evaluate a call-center agents performance only in general terms, we can now track performance by campaign, type of call and many other variations. This helps a great deal in evaluating sales strengths and weaknesses. Helping call-center reps improve performance metrics drives revenue increases like few other activities can.

All this data collection means better business intelligence is available far more quickly than ever. Collecting business intelligence from call and transaction history enables better short- and long-term planning. Where many businesses formerly could look back at only a small set of metrics that was often 45 or 60 days old, businesses can now project with some reliability well into their next sales cycle. What would it do for your self-storage business if you could predict your occupancy levels 60 days into the future instead of trying to make judgments based on the occupancy you had 60 days in the past?

Call-recording systems have become extremely usable, providing sales and customer-service trainers much better insight into what customers are saying, what they want and what they find helpful. New call-recording and evaluating systems go a long way in helping call quality improvement efforts.

Lead-distribution systems also have become more advanced. When our company first started, we faxed leads to clients. How archaic is that? We might as well have had carrier pigeons deliver the leads. Software integration advancements now allow systems to communicate regardless of platform. This makes for a much more seamless transfer of lead, reservation and rental information. This helps save transaction time and reduces errors. The ability of customer relation management (CRM) systems to talk to each other creates a much better customer experience.

Call-Center Staffing

What hasnt changed in the call-center world is the importance of well-qualified people giving live callers a great experience, although the level of qualifications has changed a lot over the last four or five years. Just having good phone reps doesnt cut it anymore. Most centers have extensive training, coaching and education programs in place to make sure the people with the most product knowledge, the best people skills and the most leverage for solving problems are the call-center reps. This holds true whether its an in-house call center handling corporate affairs or an outsourced one managing calls for clients.

Technology is a big help in conducting the training and empowerment work call-center agents need. Webinars, video training, gaming exercises and automated self-study systems have dramatically changed the efficiency and success of training programs.

The next time you talk to a call-center agent, think about all the technology going on behind the scenes. The organization you called has a plethora of people investing a lot of time, money and resources in talking to you. You must be important to them.

Tron Jordheim is the director of PhoneSmart, an off-site sales force serving self-storage owners for more than 10 years. For more information, visit www.phone-smart.info .