What is SEO? September 28, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Internet, SEO, Search Engines, websites.Tags: Keyword Stuffing, Landing Pages, Organic Search Results, SEO, SEO Basics, SEO Best Practices, SEO Essentials, SEO Keywords, SEO Tips
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SEO – Search Engine Optimization Basics
- What is SEO? – To make your website cut through the clutter and deliver business is SEO.
- What is this clutter all about? - Everyday hundreds of thousands of web-pages are born, each with an expectation to deliver results and be on the top. This is the clutter. Fifty five million pages on Google respond to the words – What is SEO and over 136,000 pages are working precisely to be on the phrase “What is SEO?”. This page, once posted would add yet one more page to this clutter.
- How does a website deliver business? - If you know your business, half the job is done. Congratulations! Now for the other half, you need to cut through some jargon’s and face several challenges. SEO is one of the many challenges and definitely not the only challenge. SEO only helps you to get the eyeballs to move to your website, for your website to deliver business, you would have to attend to those eyeballs to convince the rest of the body to do business at your website. You would also need to get the RIGHT EYEBALLS and not yet any eyeballs. Landing Page is the page where your SEOed eyeballs land. SEO job ends and the landing page’s job begins. Many SEOs (the individuals who do the SEO) consider Landing Page as a different subject, however, no SEO strategy can succeed without a functional landing page. Landing Page is a marriage between the two half’s of online business – your business knowledge and your website’s effectiveness, it is the place where the SEO meets business and each order is an offspring of this marriage.
- So who should do the landing page? - The landing page should always be done by the business, it should have inputs from sales, marketing, production, dispatch, finance and every-other department which keeps your business running. The business should ask the SEO company or the inhouse SEO professionals - zillions of questions and incorporate SEO essentials to the landing page. An SEO firm doesn’t know your business, so take their inputs, look at the landing pages of your competitors and write down your essentials for the landing page. You may also study specific challenges on Landing Page Optimization.
- What do we mean when we say Organic Search Results? - Let us step back and understand the origin of this phrase. As per Wikipedia – “Organic farmingis a form of agriculture that relies on crop rotation, green manure, compost, biological pest control, and mechanical cultivation to maintain soil productivity and control pests, excluding or strictly limiting the use of synthetic fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, plant growth regulators, livestock feed additives, and genetically modified organisms”. Now let us check what Wikipedia has to say about Organic Search – “Organic search results refers to those listings in search engine results pages that appear by dint of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being adverts”. I would phrase it very differently: Organic Search Resultsare the snippet listings from those webpages which are most likely to focus on the searched term, the order of organic search results is reflected by the user friendly projection of the relevance of the webpage to the various automated programs (robots/spiders etc) which visit the page periodically, organic search results explicitly exclude cloaking (projecting what you are not to the robots/ spiders), paid link building and Black Hat (Illegitimate means of projecting your page) SEO techniques. So what do we call those results which show up in Organic Search results using Cloaking, Black Hat and Paid Linking – They are fakes.
- How important are Keywords to SEO? – To understand SEO Basics well, it is important to understand and underline the difference between Keywords and Key-phrases. Keywords are essentially the words on which you would like your site to come-up on SERPs (Search engine Result Pages), for instance if your business is all about selling birthday favors, your keywords would be, amongst others, birthday and favors. However your key-phrase would be “birthday favors.” Coming on Birthday favors as a phrase should be everything to you, as it is 100% business relevance. All the leads which this key-phrase would get you would be a potential sale. So Keywords are important but in many cases the key rests with the key-phrases. Literally.
- What is Keyword Stuffing, and does it hurt? -The act of populating disproportionately your content or meta tags with one particular or few keywords or key-phrases is referred to as Keyword Stuffing. Keyword stuffing is gross, it is bad for your site, bad for your business, bad for your client/ surfer, bad for the search engines and bad for the internet on the whole. It is a malpractice. As it hurts all concerned, it hurts you too, directly and indirectly. Directly it hurts as search engines are becoming smarter to identify keyword spammers, surfers report keyword stuffing more often, Indirectly as the surfer who lands on your website, discovers that you indulge in malpractices may decide not to do business on your website.
- Do you SEO a site, or you SEO individual pages? – You SEO individual pages, and if you SEO all pages on your website, your whole site is done. Having said that, you do SEO your website. You define the focus of your website and ensure that every page contributes and reflects that focus. Let us say, you have a hotel website which covers all the 50 states of the United States of America and over 600 cities, it would help you to use your anchor words and phrases on every page when you are optimizing them. If you come on say “Hotels in San Jose”, “Hotels in San Francisco”, “Hotels in Sacramento”, “Hotels in Los Angeles” there is a good opportunity to come on “Hotels in California”. Similarly if your site comes on “Hotels in Texas”, “Hotels in California”, “Hotels in New York”, “Hotels in Washington” and “Hotels in Florida”, it would be easier to make it perform on “Hotels in the US”, “Hotels in the USA”, “Hotels in the United States of America”, and on “Hotels” itself. So, work multi-stage – Stage I: Focus “Hotels in San Jose”- Stage II “Hotels in California” – Stage III “Hotels in the US” – Stage IV “Hotels” – Where Stage I is your web page focus and stage IV is your website focus.
- Is SEO genetically modular, or is SEO genetically absolute? – SEO is anything but an absolute exercise, it is totally modular in nature. You can work on Optimizing your site part by part.
Much More coming…
SEO Outsourcing to India September 24, 2008
Posted by simarprit in SEO.Tags: India, Indian Blog Writer, Outsourcing, SEO, SEO Outsourcing
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SEO Outsourcing to India – Challenges
Writing on any one of the three subject words would be a big challenge - SEO, Outsourcing, India, so would it be to write on a combination of any two of these three words. I’ve been living all the three topics for several years, I decided to take up this challenge head-on and added “Challenges and Myths” as the qualifier and boundary definer for this post.
The inspiration for writing this post came from my participation in several conferences, trade shows and expos on the subject of SEO. Spending quality and quantity time in attending and networking at these events exposed me to the title of this post “SEO Outsourcing to India – Challenges and Myths”. Quite a few speakers referred to “SEO outsourcing” as akin to “outsourcing your sales strategy” and quite a few attendees made side comments on horrifying experiences of outsourcing SEO work to India.
Challenges of Outsourcing SEO of your website to India:
- Context: Does the company and it’s employees understand your business climate, business conditions, business challenges and business realities. This interesting observation came up when over one of the “Meet and Greet” sessions one gentleman from a reputed Car Rental Company narrated his story of outsourcing SEO work to a company in Mumbai, India. He said, that he had to spend more time in explaining the SEO team and the “so called project manager” how the car rental business works in the US then they had asked for (in number of hours) to the do the SEO work for him. As his company, like many of the other leading car hire companies, own multiple brands, he was shocked to receive a proposal from the same company to one of his other brands with all training converted promptly to business knowledge (violating the founder of the SEO company’s signed NDA). No wonder he sacked that company and saved his job and as per his own admission he bad mouths SEO outsourcing to India as much as he can and wherever he can. It goes without saying, that I enjoyed his story and made absolutely no effort to challenge him or stand for this SEO company or SEO outsourcing. Here are some of the views which I shared with him, without offending him, I tried to convey to him that maybe these steps could have saved him the bother: A. Weigh total costs vis-a-vis direct costs while doing the outsourcing of SEO work. Unlike call center and BPO tasks SEO tasks may not be of the scale to be outsourced. B. Createan elaborate RFQ document, and go beyond technical analysis of the SEOcompanies capabilities. Challenge them to demonstrate their understanding of your business and on user expectations. Challenge them to explain their specialization and business streams. C. Ask for complete templates, style-sheets, and all documents which would be used on your behalf. Take time and approve each one of them individually.
- Training & Changing Algorithms: Who knows the job: the salesman, the founder, the project manager, the project leader or the team members. If everyone in the SEO company knows their job, check if they are organically coming on search terms or they have bought adwords to work for them. Knowing the job and down the line training is a key challenge in any SEO outsourcing company. One of the keynote speakers made an observation: She asked the audience to check on their “Version of SEO”, she said, she strives to keep hers the same as Google’s last version. She said most of the SEO farms find it very difficult to keep pace with the changing algorithms and the shifting sands. My two cents on this challenge: A. Check what you need, an SEO Farm, a Link Kingdom or a good individual SEO. B. Ask for video conferencing with actual doers and make sure once approved they work only on your project. Schedule weekly review meetings at transactional level to ensure you are not being shortchanged, and also explore another project if they have more competent team members (they can schedule video conferencing with). C. Volunteer to attend an internal training session, tell them to put it on WebEx, or some such real time conferencing software.
- Measuring the Success: How do you go about measuring what is happening due to the SEO outsourcing companies actions and what is organically happening to your website anyway. Over, yet another lunch an SEO Expert who represented an SEO company based in India narrated this story: An office furniture company had outsourced this contract to a Pune based SEO firm, this firm promised them Moon and delivered it in the first month, yes the first month. The sites Page Rank went up from 4 to 5 and the traffic to the website increased by 30%, but the conversions didn’t move úp at-all, the site improved its Alexa rank and all but it is the business which this company wanted. Presumably what happened was that this SEO company had over hundred websites which they were using for one of their new clients competitors (they had just lost that account). These hundred sites had some traffic and traction in the markets where this furniture company or the previous one had no business. So the page rank went up, the traffic went up but the business didn’t. After three months they realized that they had paid sizable amount, which even directly didn’t get covered by the increase in the business. They had to take a tough call as they knew that the link farm links would go away, maybe page rank would again be impacted, traffic would fall and so would Alexa ranking. They decided to let the contract go and save the money over the “not so tangibles” they were getting. Measurement holds the key, if only the contract would have built in various measurement criteria of SEO performance this loss of money wouldn’t have happened. Some of the tangibles which can be demanded: A. Country/ State/ DMA based traffic growth. B. Define your competitors, and ask for a competitive growth commitment. How would you make me better than my competitor? – I am here, I want to go here approach. C. Define your key phrases and link it to the organic traffic percentage of your website. For instance this office furniture company could have defined that their 4% traffic comes from the phrase “Office Chairs”, they would like this percentage to go up with increasing traffic to 5% over three months. So when traffic grows in your choice of DMA, in this case, New York, Chicago, San Francisco + Oakland + San Jose etc plus you move up on your competitors matrix and you get more leads for “Office Chairs” you are set. No matter. So measure what you want against what you give.
You may share your challenges and put up a set of questions. I would reply back.
I would also add more challenges to this write-up.
Agile Web Design September 19, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Design, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo, websites.Tags: Agile Design, Agile Software Development, Software Development Processes, User Experience, Web Design, Web Development
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Agile Web Design and User Experience in Web 2.0 Environment – Jackson Wilkinson’s session
- Agile web design developments core has to be building a window for failure, and a window for bypassing conventional software development process.
- Agile process has a lot to do with iteration a work cycle approach where you keep on entering and exiting the cycle as you tweak and tune. You handle challenges as you move on. Agile processes are largely collaborative.
- Embedding quality in agile processes brings a better product after each iteration cycle
- Time to do really good design work has no alternative, path of least resistance makes for decidedly inferior products which are likely to be similar to many around
- Cycle Zero must have defined receivables, mood boards or dummies should be handled during cycle zero or phase zero whatever you call it.
- User stories stage and cycle planning is critical to cost and time management
- Collaborative UX meeting and Collaborative UI meetings help in thinking out of the box and get everyone on the same page. Designers get a time to figure how the site is going to look like and what the challenges would be.
- Stand-up stage of just an update and plan for the day helps in monitoring agile development and measuring it over various stages.
- Testing, Validation and Public Demos are parts of the cycle and are looked at at-least once in eavery cycle/ phase
- Be rapid through your cycles and don’t justg et stuck at a point, move on, there are going to be other stages of iteration
Designing for Communities September 19, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Uncategorized.Tags: Designing, homepage designing, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo, Web Design, websites
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Designing for Communities -Web 2.0 Expo -New York
David Karp & Avi Muchnick
- You are different and you look different, don’t confuse us with something which has been seen before and make a notion about what we are. The challenge of establishing your look and feel and building a design case around you.
- You have to sell yourself to the user for the user to be convinced that he wins by engaging on your site, your design has to communicate ease of success to the user and the fact that you care for them.
- Ultimately content quality is your responsibility and you are answerable for the quality of your content. You need to understand your communities profile and preferences while designing your framework and layout. Participative approach towards quality monitoring is necessary. Defining boundaries of content creation and management is important for communities, community members should know what is good and what is not.
- User feedback needs to be prioritized and measured against your broader vision, community feedback is important, but don’t dilute what you believe would work over what the users talk about. Segregating user feedback and looking behind the motive may not be an evil thing to do.
- Design should encourage participation, and curb negativity. Hearing whispers would ensure that “ït sucks” messages just don’t get written.
- How do you get people to accept UI changes. Make your existing users choose what they want give them choice till they change over to the new one anyway. Let them understand the new interface is better, maybe underplay the existing page and down-sell it, tweak it to maybe, sub-perform. Beta testing your new UI and selective exposure may help.
Content Matters A Web 2.0 Perspective September 19, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo.Tags: Content, Information, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Content Issues, Web 2.0 Expo
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This session in Web Expo 2.0 on Content Matters is being coordinated by Liz Danzico.
Some of the facts as preamble to this discussion:
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Content Drives Traffic
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Users don’t read online
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The content now comes in various unexpected ways
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We aren’t writing, we are speaking in text, the internet looks like writing, but it is actually a conversation
Types/ Classification of content
- Navigation & Orientation content
- Labels and action
- Help
- Non textual
- Technical
Executive Summary:
You need a content strategy, and you need a content strategist to look after it. If you have lots of information flowing in from the UGC route, you would be better off dedicating an “Ïnformation Architect” to integrate it. Style Sheets and Content Guidelines are two of the few essential documents which you must have operational in any content development project. To cover against plagiarism, it is important to keep the background documentation and source for your creation handy.
For a successful content strategy you need the team to bring in Passion, Editorial Responsibility and Monitoring Responsibility. Sites which have a major flow of user generated content need to continuously evaluate content on multiple parameters.
A well attended but poorly presented session, too few takeaways from a very illustrious panel.
Search Engine Optimization Success Secrets September 19, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Advertising, SEO, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo.Tags: SEO, SEO Secrest, SEO Tips, SEO Tools, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo
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Best-kept Secrets to Search Engine Optimization Success: the Art and the Science Web 2.0 Expo Conference Session.
Stephan Spencer had his job cut – “I know my job, this is what I can give free comeback to me for business”. Which is fine.
- What’s your competition and why do they come on top, and why do they have a second link, and what can you do to bring there second link out and get your another link in or anyone’s another link in for that matter. He suggested title tweaking and cross link building to reduce competitors link value and get the sub-link out. Both are fine, but we must understand that “ït is a red hat approach with white hat techniques” nothing wrong about it though.
- rel=nofollow needs to be used very effectively to avoid your pagerank dilution, especially on your homepage, preserve it by avoiding it to be distributed towards disclaimers, privacy policy and other such stuff. Wherever you feel the page can do without just use rel=nofollow and make your PR go that extra mile. Smart usage of a tag which is live since 2005.
- Be wise in re-direction, be careful to use 301 and 302 properly, 301 would always pass the page rank and 302 won’t. Know what you are doing and just don’t let it be an accident.
- Google’s Directory allows your robots to visit and crawl it. Develop your spider to go to Google Directory crawl it and measure the page ranks of various sites, make a dump of high pagerank sites and work to get links from them. There are some merit based link selling sites which are not run of the mill, look at buying links from PR 8 sites. Also it is important to remember .edu, .gov and .org links always come on high pecking order.
- Sitewide links from left panel and bottom may not help. One good link from the homepge may be the only thing you may require.
- Do you have a matrix of your competitors links, you need it and you need it now. Chase and be there in that neighbourhood. Good neighbourhood matters and ensure that your links are in good neighbourhood.
- There are lot of absolutely free SEO tools available from Google/ Yahoo/ Microsoft and host of other players, choose your tools and integrate them with your daily tasks. Google Website Analyzer, Google Insights, Wordtracker, Server header checker, css zen garden, SEO title tag plug-in, keyword discovery etc…
- You must use these tools twice once to grow your sites and second time to reverse engineer your competitors.
Stephan knows his job, but for me there was not much new, still revising what you know and hearing what you believe is a good feeling.
Advertising in Web 2.0 September 18, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Advertising, Live Blogging, Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Online Advertsing, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo, websites.Tags: Advertising, Blogging, Digital Advertsing, Indian Blog Writer, Online Advertising, Simarprit, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo
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David Kidder is talking about Challenges on Advertising 2.0
- Automating of advertsing has to be multistage
- Analytic Vs. Creative Challenge
- Cost Optimization challenge has moved over to simplicity challenge and time optimization holds the key
- Decision making speed is rewarding
- Semantics hold the key to success
- Execution enabled but strategy focused approach is working
- Unified accounting measurements is mission critical
Panel Discussion Max Kalehoff, Jim Barnett, Mike Kelly and Tim Hanlon
- Forecasting accurately in digital world is a challenge
- Last 10 years have made things complex in advertising space, talking about simplicity is it real….
- Fundamentally machines just cant solve problems’, it is the quality of human resource which would continue making the difference, complex marketing needs would require complex marketing solutions and complex advertising solutions… so there is no easy way out Brands is a billion dollar issue and is bound to be complex, machines or no machines
- Objective of automation is and should be measurement of every single impression, strategic success rests with computing down to each and every impression released in the digital space.
- User experience needs to be measured to add value to any campaign
- Automation of cource leads to transparency, what is working and what is not, you can’t bull any longer. Transparency is what is creating to complexity and data overload
- Inventory is increasing every minute and new options are emerging simultaneously, which is adding to the complexity, at no point you have clue to the whole offering market has to offer
- Performance of fresh inventory available is very unpredictable, transparency is fine but what to do about the performance.
- Business models need simplicity too, complex advertising options for media buyers can create its own challenge
- Driving leads versus driving revenue, driving global traffic versus driving local traffic and linking them together is also a challenge
- Marketers dream is to make automation give a great flexibility, to ease moving around geographies and medias, and mediums
- Creativity can’t be automated, but at the same time the audience complexity and commonality pushes creative team to try it harder
- Advertisers have a choice and they know it, advertising agencies have a challenge in delivering to their expectations
- Interactivity and measurement would also strongly influence success
- Personal relationships have always driven advertising industry and automation doesn’t change that.
- Relationships are not replaceable but restructuring of relationships is bound to happen, better persons and better processes can be the differentiators
- Non premium inventory is growing and piling up, that is something which doesn’t require personal relationships that can be handled by automation very well
- Most of the automation are aimed at publishers making more money out of what they think is required, which maynot mean much to advertiser and marketer and the advertising company.
- There is a big talent gap which has emerged due to the digital challenge, new products in the market need new marketing approach
- Feature obsession may not be helpful, being choosy in mastering features for your own use is important
- Lot of inventory which has no buyers goes in for house ads, ad networks are not yet working to expectations, it may take some more time for action to happen.
The session concluded with couple of unexciting questions…
Reinvention of Marketing the Web 2.0 Way September 17, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Blogging, Business, Education, Internet, Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo, websites.Tags: Marketing Strategies, Online, Online Advertising, Online PR, PR, PR 2.0, PR Tips, Public Relations, web marketing
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Brian Solis on Web 2.0 and its role in PR and Marketing, my 2 cents are all over (Brian may or may not agree)
- Customers are moving online, PR and Marketing needs to move beyond 1.0 which it looks like it is stuck in’
- Are you an influencer, or do you know influencers, bloggers are influencers and they are at it
- Perception is important and social web has a role in how you are looked at
- Defining and measuring influence can help in decision making
- Are you everywhere… Traditional media, Events online and offline, New Influencers, Social Networks, Blogs and Comments, Forums, Content Creation & Curation
- Composite strategy can work for you, all encompassing approach to PR and Marketing would help
- Engagement is important in PR now, not just a look or a hit.
- You need to be hybrid PR professional in today’s world
- A PR professional needs to be all it takes he has to be octopus
- PR today all about Public
- A PR professional needs to be participative a good Press Release may not lead to anything
- Common Sense rules the day
- Rules of PR are influenced by rules of Blogging, which has no rules
- Relationship of trust with a lot of guys
- Be incremental in approach, keep sharing and communicating as you go on, let the story build up fast enough
- WOMM (Word of Mouth Marketing) is what every thing leads to.
- PR today has to be organization wide
- Are you everywhere, exclude none
- Do you know where-ever you are, you just have to be everywhere. Look at all of the key networks and measure your performance on all active networks
- Become a resource for people
- Participation is the key and not initiation
- Web Analytics holds the key to how you are doing
- Creating special landing pages for your various activities can help
- Quantification and tying the activity to sales helps
- WEB 2.0 is not frozen, there is a lot more to come so keep learning
- You are the brand you project
- Some resources – Future-works, SocialMediaClub, sncr.org, nowisgone