Innovative Approach

SEO – manic term for the people who are adopting their career into this as there is no controlled academic or professional training for this subject. SEO is so demanding but still none of the university has endorsed it as a proper course. (Recently I saw an ad for sail university something regarding the internet marketing course but its somehow local).

When we came up with the SEO we only think of keywords and getting them ranked, if you ask a definition of SEO you will receive lots of replies :

From a businessmen who is getting  an SEO done by a company – SEO is just getting business from search engine.

From a fresher SEO perspective – It is a just bringing high rankings for keywords.

From a layman – What the hell is the SEO

From a professional SEO – The art of  moulding websites to be ranked in search engines easily with keywords thereby driving targeted traffic.

You know one of my client who has his site designed by me asked “What does SEO mean”, I tried to explain him via my technical terms – keywords, rankings, traffic but he was not able to get the entire thing in his mind, ultimately I cried

“You know web”
He said “Yes I know”

I asked “You know Google”
“Yes off course”

Then I said “Google control the web and we (i.e. the SEO professionals) controls Google in one way or the other though not completely”. He really got the subject and he is still my client with his site on top score.

Oh I consumed some times in SEO fundas but here I would like to discuss the subject of this post which says “Multilingual SEO”.

We have web here comprising of content  whether in the form of text, audio or video we are consuming content or doing some transactions. English is indeed the primary language of web but just have look at the stats below but there are other native languages which comprises the major part of world wide web. (Sources InternetworldStats)

Hence its true that websites in regional languages are too important and they can bring in a lot of regional sales on the websites if it has multilingual capacity.

For eg. If you are intending to sell your product in Germany as an exporter you must get it atleast translated either manually or some automated tools as English based webpages cannot drive too much visitors. This is so because all European countries primarily used their native languages for communication for eg. Germany, France, Italy etc. all use their native languages and the businessmen too mitigate over regional languages.

And with the advent of automated language translators a website can be published in several languages, even my blog can be translated into several languages via Babelfish tool of Yahoo.

So we came to a conclusion that multingual web has arrived and so the multilingual SEO. This is one of the growing field in internet marketing as all local businesses want their regional presence.

For eg. We have google.de, google.it, google. Fr, google.jp etc.  So this once again proves that SEO principles can be utilized for all languages and not only English.

So here we have a keyword : “buy cheap cell phones” -

Targeting Germany : kaufen billige Handys
Targeting France : acheter à bas prix des téléphones cellulaires
Targeting Italy : acquistare a basso prezzo cellulari
Targeting Spain : comprar celulares baratos

Almost all Scandinavians utilizes their regional languages more than English. So now it’s a world of multilingual SEO where can target visitor across the world irrespective of any language.

This is today one of the most demand and rewarding business as there are very few companies who are capable of delivering the results in several languages. There are people who are good at SEO but not on foreign languages and similarly there are people who are good at writing, speaking at several languages but they cannot do SEO.

So what is the right solution and for whom should we seek for a multilingual SEO.

The right answer is that if the SEO guy is both professional and intelligent he/she can win in the battle of multilingual SEO. There are loads of automated tools which can help in getting content, keywords etc. in various languages and the campaigns can be effective if these tools are utilized by person who is a veteran in internet marketing world and its operations.

I am writing this post so as to thrown some lights on Indian enterprise web and what we have created so far since the inception of world wide web. The web came into presence in about 1991 but in India the approach was in late 98’s when some few websites came into presence and few corporates start booking their domain name.  I will not discuss about the size of the web industry or the outsourcing concept here but the driving forces behind the internet.

We all know that there are many millions of websites over the net but if you analyse it deeply we will see that some of the websites have marked themselves and establish their potential identities in the internet. No doubt we are amidst of Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, Paypal etc. but if we look at the country(s) they have originated we will find that all of them are from USA, whether their owners or the technical executives are all based in USA. Its true that silicon valley is full of  young, innovative and rich people but this doesnot mean that the same cannot happen beyond this.

Let me give you a very fine example of Baidu- which is most trafficked search engine in China, Google and others have tried lot but cannot to defeat Baidu, still the major search market cap is with Baidu, so they didn’t give any chance for Google China to rise, infact google algorithm is very strong, effective and precise. But Baidu has done a good job by offering very good service thereby outgoing google. (Guys I am not an enemy of Google or an advocate of Baidu but this is true).

I have presenting this case study before heading deep into my post as we always say that US based sites predominant web.

Now get back to big portals of Indian industry we find several news, jobs, matrimonial, social media portals in India but none of them have established their identity over the globe. Nodoubt there are several success stories of Indian based portals but the penetration is limited to Indian subcontinent or the NRI’s (Non-residents Indians). Just for examples we have a lot of social media portals coming in but still Orkut and Facebook hold the major market stake in India.  If you look at the search Google dominates the same though a lot of local Indian search engine are trying to capture but there traffic is just a fraction of the big daddy – Google.

So what is lacking here my friends – is it talent, money, innovation, thinking or efforts. If you look at Google its backrub idea was being given by Indian Mr. Rajesh Motwani (he is no more now but indeed a great fellow), Sun by Mr. Vinod Khosla and Sabir Bhatia’s hotmail story is really interesting.

Please wait……………….these entrepreneurs did these tasks from abroad and not in India.

So this question really pitches me a lot as we have one of the worlds best talents, currently we have almost all IT and web companies operations in India and our IT professional are rated high but we really lack something or there is a hindrance in our thoughts that we cannot win the global market.

Few things I found myself through study, research and interviewing people in India which leads to some sort of  weakness in Indian web industry is :

•    There are no innovative entrepreneurs who can think like a consumer
•    There is no business intelligence or the competitive intelligence involved before launching any internet product.
•    There are several venture capitalist but all went ROI instantly which makes them hesitant to invest. (Please note that Google was launched in late 1997 and start making money by selling advertising after a year or two).
•    The manpower is not motivated if the project target audience is India as it is treated as boring or sleeping market.
•    Proper managerial and strategically skills are not present amongst the entrepreneurs nor in their staff. (Really they can do the best management and plan the best strategy for their clients situated abroad)
•    Money, money and money is their only concern and they want success overnight.
•    The product is launched but there are no new items or interesting things coming in which ultimately pulls the visitors. (Gmail is the best example here which has completed captured the entire email market in India leaving behind the major players, this is only due to new features coming up regularly)
•    Spam or widespread advertising is another factor which prohibits the user from coming to Indian portals as they are stuffed with heavy / massive flashy ads and hiding the main content which is the root cause of huge bounces.
•    People work only for money and not for achievement or awards which again slows down those activities which needs investment as ROI is in the mind.

Really loads of them but I have a hope one day the Indian youth will rise as Sabir Bhatia did with Hotmail something giant will happen here and our product will spread across the globle.

My friends lets try something new for our markets and prove ourselves in the world that we can really create something innovative…………………….(I am also planning something my friends, cannot tell you right now for some global penetrations)

So everyone one in the online world is fighting and have a strong lust for traffic. This is the only thing which creates the importance of any website. For instance Google predominates search so it receive millions of hits throughout the globe, Amazon sells products globally and has huge traffic, Microsoft has indeed to much traffic as people log onto website to download the softwares and drives for their computer. If we look at the horizon its traffic which has created the importance of web as there are many millions of websites but only just a fraction of them have the presence in the cyberspace.

Just look at the alexa now : http://www.alexa.com/topsites

So this post is regarding the traffic build measures for any website. By website I mean all sites ranging from small to medium and Giant. Usually the sites owned by SME’s are always fighting for traffic as they donot have any regular traffic on their site and even that traffic is not too much. The giants in the industry spends lots of money in creating new tools, content or any other interactive method to drive new visitors besides retaining the old ones.

But here is something which has indeed change the facet of web world and that is blogging. Blogs in itself have become so dominant that online entrepreneurs now consider it as an essential tool of marketing and even interacting with the direct consumers. First we need to find out the original definition of blog which has been derived from the word “Weblog” and was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997 and its short form “Blog” was given by P. Merholz. None of the people over the net or the entrepreneurs realized at that time that it could be such a potential channel.

Now its go anywhere on web and you will find blogs everywhere and technically we call it a Blogosphere – region where the bloggers and its readers are intermingling amongst themselves.

The blog content is somewhat more engaging then the website content because it is aimed in providing information, directions and other necessary resources to the consumers. For Eg. If you are a cosmetic surgeon and have a website indicating your services, its well and good but your website will be visited and searched by the people who are looking only for surgeries instantly but if you are running some blog on the subject on the site itself then various people who are desired to have some surgery or looking for the information related to plastic surgery might be the regular subscribers to the blogs and start questioning / commenting the blogger, this is where the blog dominates its identity as a social media / Web 2.0 platform.

Blogs are so empowered today that even the google indexed the blogs more fastly than the regular webpages. And with technorati, google blog search, blogger we have several free platforms to create and submit blog. As per technorati there is a blog born every half a second. Kids in school, Professors in Colleges, Businessmen in their office are writing blogs and want to reach the people interested in their subject.

There are ample examples of professional blogging whether its of SEM (searchengineland.com, seomoz.org) Health (ivillage.com), Business (Wall Street Blog) etc. Almost all big corporates are running their official blogs where they publish the information about their latest launches, events and press releases. Even the Small and medium scale business are scaling height for the website via blogs. There are lots of microblogs in the form of wordpress or blogspots which are being used by several SME’s to generate quality traffic for their business. Twitter has really done fair innovation in microblogging community where users can post short paragraphs indicating their service etc. and point them to the URL of their main site or the blog.

No doubt blog is indeed a viable channel of internet marketing and it could be a good CRM tool where customers can directly interact with the businessmen via commenting. But blogging is not so simple, everybody who writes for web cannot be blogger as the blog is writing up of stuff in a very natural manner it is not meant to publicize or market any product instead it is focused in providing free information to the end users.

Important points for the bloggers.

•    Instead of blogging on 3rd party like blogger etc. try to install the blog on your own domain. WordPress is the best. (I have the same running)
•    Keep the design of the blog very simple and plain, but it should be aesthetic and user friendly.
•    Install all necessary plugins and widgets as possible – Technorati, Translations, SEO, Feedburner etc. for maximum user and seo friendliness.
•    Keep the blogs posts long (not less than 400 words), short blogs are fair but professional blog postings are quite long.
•    User proper tags in you posts.
•    Link your Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter profile with the blog so that they can be syndicated.
•    Write post by your name and if you have several others create separate account for all of them.
•    Install unique google analytics on the blog irrespective of the main domain, this will keep you tracking the blog more effectively.
•    Donot populate your blog with loads of banner / flash ads or junk advertising. Use proper advertising methods as widespread advertising could lead to huge bounces on you blog.
•    Ping your blog whenever you do postings.
•    Always syndicate posts in your social media profiles – Facebook, twitter, stumbleupon etc.
•    Offer RSS subscription via a button and a link as well.
•    The most important segment of the blog is content make it unique and advanced. But remember always write blogs in a simplified manner as your readers are across the globe who are not too much fluent in English.
•    User Interactive images and statistical information on the blogs whenever you are giving the instances.
•    Syndicating your official videos on the blog is another plus.

So blogging if done in a professional manner even for small sites can do huge jobs and drive tremendous traffic and lead to more conversions.

Remember write always in a natural way and think like a consumer.

What are you doing then………………..go start blogging now

There are about two products of 20th century which are treated as innovative and has changed our lifestyles and they are Computer and Mobile Phones. Both these electronic instruments has put a huge impact on masses and now they on verge of big change.

Computers were introduced by Charles Babbage in 1837 but it find its place in common houses in late 1980s and with the advent of Windows which proved to be the most user-friendly platform it reached the houses with accessibility to kids and teens. Since then computer has been helping us all around to solve our deadly problems and it a one of the most powerful machine, no doubt in that.

But as stated the word change keeps hovering in the mind of intellectuals and they try to make something much better we get new forms of computers like laptops, palmtop etc. And today the instrument which we say cell or mobile phone meant for just telecommunication has itself turned into a computer and is impacting the computer world. I would like to change my topic post as it is to describe the potential of web over mobile so lets get to know the internet.

Hence we have internet on our system  use for checking mails, sharing thoughts, photos, videos amongst our friends, doing banking transactions and everything. I can almost say that a computer is almost useless if its without internet hence it is like a lifeline for any computer. Everyone of us now are addicted to web which is sometimes called as webmania. Persons from every age group is now surfing web for information, entertainment, business etc. so it now a part of life. So lets find out the basis requirement to surf the net, its nothing but a computer / laptop etc. with an internet connection. So we can only do surfing if we have some system in place with internet connection, this sometimes puts a hindrance on our will to do surfing if we are not with our computer may be away from office or home.

But if you have your cell phone and there is net connectivity may be GPRS or something you can access the web there and then. iPhone and Blackberry are real world examples which proves that the internet can be made mobile.

As per Jupiter search the mobile web users will cross 1.7 billion by 2013 and in Japan the scenario is such that mobile web users equals the PC web users. The figures are also amazing in developing states like India and Thailand where the same thing is happening and with the advent of 3G which is broadband access on cell phone, the market will improve gigantically.

Lets brief out what people are doing on mobile web :

•    Emails
•    Chatting
•    MMS
•    Twetting (Really a damn feature of twitter)
•    Watching Videos
•    Listening Songs and Podcasts
•    Mobile banking
•    Mobile shopping (shopping things on mobile phones)
•    Search (A very growing marketing as geo-targeting is possible)

Not only this most of the mobile advertisement platforms have been launched like admob.com, Google Mobile, Yahoo Mobile, Facebook Mobile etc.

With a revenue of USD 4 billion in 2008 it  shows the better signage of this growing industry and its expected to double fold by 2010. Check the latest stats at Clickz : http://www.clickz.com/3633115

Though the market is shine and will prosper but there are huge setbacks to it only due to lack of concern by the telecom industry.

Few factors which is hampering the industry is :

•    High cost of net connectivity
•    Low speed of net
•    Non availability of proper software to run the web easily, for eg. Mobile browsers.
•    Security threats are always there and there is a rumour that mobile transactions / dealings are never safe.
•    Lack of knowledge to the mobile users that they can access the web is once again a hindrance.
•    Mobile companies are not working heavily on making fully web compliant mobile phones
•    Carrier services are not following the right protocols.
•    Web developers / designers are not following web mobile standards.

So these are few of the challenges which this growing industry is facing but it will all be overcome by more young entrepreneurs coming in field and doing a big change in the whole machinery.

I must say that entrepreneurs must start investing some pie of their advertising on mobile as it brings up you to the direct consumer even if he/she is on the way. And my other message goes once again to the online entrepreneurs to launch their mobile compliant sites for visibility across mobile world.

Oh I really forget to say thanks to the inventor of Mobile Phones “Mr. Martin Cooper”.

With the advent of severe global meltdown almost all sectors are facing trouble in maintaining their profits and growth. With immense financial breakdown there are several hundred and thousands of layoffs since a year. We all know that it was started with the USA and grabbed the entire world into it. You could review more on that here.

Primarily sectors affected in recession were banking & finance but as there are other sectors which are indirectly related to them where too the victims of this downtime. So as a result companies start losing clients and employees the jobs.

I would like to throw some light on the internet marketing business which is still in boom and gaining momentum day by day even in such a financial calamity.

If you look at the overall profits made by the search giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft its increased though not to a great extend but they have performed hopefully well. Even the social media giants like Facebook, Twitter are on Venture Capitalist’s hitlist and may be launching their IPO soon.  I should not say that all of them are intact of economic downtime as layoffs been done in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft but not to that extend that the companies vanished as it happened in Lehman Brothers.

So just back to topic, as why the internet marketing still alive, the reason is very simple. Internet Marketing is just like marketing which if stopped will lead to business failure, profit stoppage etc. None of the companies can shut down their marketing and sales department though they can cull their other staffs because marketing is the core element in any company. So there is no survival with marketing, so that’s why still companies in finance, real estates are investing some money in getting business via internet despite of their bad financial status.

You see what happened to Citigroup, it was almost put to shutdown though it survived by Mr. President. The company is still in difficult situation with its stock hover around 1-2 something But I have a question will Citigroup stop all its marketing campaigns………….Absolutely not, instead it will enhance its sales and marketing team to build new markets and prospects.

So the internet marketing industry is helping out each and every business from small to big to enhance their sales figures and improve profits and we heard of any major layoff with internet marketing companies, though IT companies have sorted their staff to some extend but again its from technical departments.

I would like to discuss the outsourcing market which was and is full of rumors that it will ultimately halt but again it proved wrong. For Eg. In India major IT corporates like TCS, Infosys has shown profit and their business still at large with minor threats. It is true that business from USA is affected to some extend but the conditions are getting better.

Search engine optimizing industry is doing its best with companies indulged are increasing their budgets in their, the reason behind is that its cheap and faster way of getting business. In India primarily the companies are in outsourcing business and they have huge clientele’s in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. This channel is really vibrant and bring in targeted sales which cannot be possible by any other channel in the world, even we involve lot of Business Development Executives they can never cope with the SEM industry.

Check : http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/2/US_Search_Engine_Rankings

I myself has added about 4 clients (2 from USA, 1 from UK and other one from Singapore) during last month. Hopefully I can say that we all must work with all our hearts and efforts for this industry and revise our pricing during recession which will ultimately help in getting more accounts closed.

My call to entrepreneurs – Invest in Internet marketing and retain your business in this tough economy

When the word PPC come up in our mind we get sometimes scared due to heavy costings and low ROI but this is not the fact as if it was so then how can the search engine industry crossed billions of dollars.

We all know that SEO is not an overnight process and whenever we launch anysite we need to do some inorganic promotions to  get instant traffic on the new enterprise. PPC is mostly considered as a costly and less effective tool for generating traffic or sales which is totally untrue and in this post I will explain as how to make a successful ppc campaign especially adwords.

•    Initially analyzing the business thoroughly for which you are going to launch the adwords campaign. This is very much mandatory as you cannot do marketing without knowing the business.

•    Identity the landing pages for which you want to launch the adwords campaign, especially incorporate the services pages for targeting. Directing all the users on home page doesnot not work and leads to high bounce rates.

•    As per the content and theme of the landing page make a list of keywords just by your knowledge and share the same with your client and ask him for his ideas.

•    After getting some initial lists, do exhaustive keywords research via several online tools. I prefer : https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

•    Make a more comprehensive list of keywords as per your landing pages and make an account structure in some spreadsheet usually excel.

•    Please note that the no. of keywords varies with the budget we are heading. So if we are targeting 100 pages covering 20 keywords per page so we have 2000 keywords and if  have a budget of just $10 / day most of our keywords will have even the impressions for the same. So before putting the final keywords list we must keep our budget in mind.

•    So you are ready with the keywords, its time to create the ad copy. Use the best punch lines and call to actions in your ad copy and try to match the ad copy subject with the landing pages. Suppose a searcher looking for “seo services in Indian geography” saw the ad copy tittled
1)Best SEO Services  or 2) SEO Services India or 3)SEO Company India… both 2 and 3 will lead more probability of hit and if the same is used in the webpage title, it will surely lead to conversion.

•    Use broad, exact and phrase match keywords in your campaigns as per the requirement. Usually phrase match is preferred for fair traffic as broad match bring tons of visitors and consume money faster whereas the exact match sends just a few visitors. It is neither declared nor cleared that  by anyone that this sort of match can lead to more traffic or sales, the only thing is to try something for sometime and do necessary amends as per results. Negative keywords should be used if we want to prevent the user from landing on our site with keyphrases which are not indirectly not related to our business, suppose we are selling some paid CRM software then people searcing for free crm software should not land on our site as it’s a wastage of PPC fee, hence –ve keywords should be used.

•    As the destination and display url must be uniform so use the display url in a proper and readable format. i.e. for http://www.google.com use : Google.com and if you are targeting some specific theme suppose marketing use Google.com/marketing.

•    Make several variation of adcopy as per adgroup and the subject. Use dynamic keywords code in title which is helpful in getting more attention of the visitor. Dynamic keyword brings in the typed keywords of the user in the Ads title which is indeed a good practice and tends to more clicks and ultimately the quality score will be improved.

•    Primarily target your campaigns as per your audiences, if you want to promote your business throughout the globe or over a certain geography (country, city etc.) This is indeed of huge help as spending money on getting visitors from an untargeted market is a problem. Suppose you have an ecommerce site and you provide shipping only to USA and Canada then running the ads in UK is clueless. So this needs to get cleared with the client prior.

•    So the campaign is ready to go with the payment updations. Please wait a while have you done proper tagging and embedding script for conversion tracking. This is a must step as tracking plays a key role in determining the success rate of any campaign. Mapping the traffic-leads as well as the ROI is the ultimate way of tracking your campaigns.

So these are some basic tips which when applied in the right manner and monitored properly can yield good results thereby proving the ultimate potential of Pay per click.

Moreover I would suggest to do some A/B spilt testing using google website optimizer for better testing the landing pages and increase conversions.

So PPC is a Juggernaut, winning and winning if deployed by some professional and also it helps in SEO too by providing the best performance keyword in its reports.

Do donot wait initiate the ad campaign today with minimum budget  and see the different

I recently read the news of that the newspaper industry mainly in USA is in jeopardy and is seeking a bailout.

This is so astonishing because if you see any of the US newspaper whether its New York Times, LA Times, USA Today etc. were started in late 17 or 18 centuries and were / are considered as the major assets of information to the masses. If we look at the history of these newspapers they have really covered the political, social, scientific, technological, economic events in such a manner that they are the most admired memento of press. By Press we mean Liberty which cannot be destroyed or closed. Anyway lets find out why is this happening and what can be the alternate solution as by today most the leading newspaper are on to layoff their staff.

After reading several articles I found that it’s the masses which have somehow endangered the newspaper industry and it can be the masses who can roll it back but in a different manner.

Confused……………….Lets dig deeper.

I would like to state Darwin’s quotations “It is not the most stronger or the intelligent who will survive but the one who is most responsive to change”. CHANGE is the law of nature, so if you cannot change then you must quite or decline.

The primary objective of a newspaper is to convey relevant and updated information about the happenings to the people. This been followed since centuries and really the newspaper has been a landmark in the political revolutions across the world. But now this its impact is diminishing. There is no doubt that television and its news channel has give a setback to the newspaper industry but it has faced an extreme challenge by an enemy which is called “INTERNET” via which its possible to circulate the latest news instantly throughout the globe.

Internet has bring up the news world so close that its easy for us to get the latest happenings even if we are working in our office. Just log on to your favourite news site and its all yours. Giant news portals of BBC, CNN, Google as well as Reuters have simplified and put the entire world news in just one basket. Hence people are reluctant even in buying a newspaper as they get the same over the internet which is free and accessible to them in their offices where they spend their maximum time.

Hence its concluded that newspaper have been given huge setback by TV channels and internet. So the industry will die, no it will not if it moulds itself with the latest standards thereby recalling the protocol of Darwin.

So its time for all newspaper to launch their news portals with something different. Almost all newspaper have their official sites but they are unable to grasp the pie from Google news or CNN as they late comers but if you look at the history the newspaper journalists are the real news provides rather than the TV or website correspondent.

You will surely think that how can be it possible, let me give a very good example of nytimes.com which is the official website of New York Times, a newspaper which was founded in 1851. This news portal has really drived tremendous traffic by providing the unique, fresh and interactive stories to the users. Being a veteran in news industry it has established a very potential identity in online world. The site NYTimes.com is not even famous in USA but its visitors are across the globe it has millions of hits. So what they did can be replicated by all newspapers and they can penetrate online which is cheap, faster way of conveying information the users. This way they can really cope with current problem of financial crisis. We all know that everything in media whether its in newspaper, radio, TV or Internet bags its money by selling advertising so this can be done proportionally by the respective newspaper giant whether they want to penetrate in TV, Internet or both. But they have to change otherwise they cannot generate fair revenue with their current physical newspapers which will though never die but will diminish to a great extend.

So the bailout needs to go on so that the “Press” which is called “The Fourth Estate” is survived and necessary measures should be taken by their entrepreneurs to move on to innovative methods so that the business can be enhanced.

At the end I would like to say that this is happening in several countries even in India with people discarding the newspaper as they find the TV or the internet as quick and easier way to access news and the newspaper have either created or under process of enhancing their news portal for the future threats. For Eg. Times of India has a big news portal besides a TV channel which shows the signs of newspaper entrepreneurs penetrating in other media.

This is the topic which I would have discussed in my first post because it is the only issue which I had and still facing in my business. As I am in SEO for the past 10+ years so I have been dealing with people across the globe to solve their internet marketing problem and provide them the way to generate sales via their websites.

Everybody in the SEO industry knows that this field has changed so much than anything else. If we compare C programming language we will find only few updations in its coding structure whether its data structures or pointers.

Though there are a lot of new programming languages like PHP, Python etc. which have established themselves as new brand but there is no direct comparison of SEO with programming etc. It is such a vague but indeed a beautiful subject that nobody can predict something about it.

I remember the days of late 90s which was something about 1998-99 where we use to have Alta Vista as the engine and ultimately Yahoo which occupied Alta Vista and became even more powerful after acquiring overture. So at that time the SEO was hardly known in my nation India. I use to do this for very few clients mainly the exporters whose business was of B2B origin.

So here goes your Search………………………………………………………………?

From that day till today if you ask me that which is the most difficult problem you have faced in SEO?……………..Guess
•    Tough Keywords
•    Poor / Duplicate Content
•    Poor Website structure

My friends, these might be a problem for a traditional SEO or a novice or might be an expert may face this but they can be solved easily by applying some mind, doing necessary implementations etc.
The most tough part of any SEO project is the end “CLIENT” who is extremely ignorant and demand for something which is not possible.

Most of the projects in SEO get failed due to lack of understanding or miscommunication between the vendor and the client.

PROBLEMATIC AREAS

A) Keywords Drama

Customer : He/she provides the keywords list which consists of extremely generic terms like for any sports company the keywords list goes as “football, hockey, basketball”

Vendor : Accepts the lists from clients end and is unable to achieve ranking for the promised keywords. So project get failed

Solution: The keywords list should be mutually agreed between the company and client as per website content, competition etc. Vendor must emphasize short as well as long tail keywords. None of the client can wait for getting the rank on a keywords in 6 months.

B) Website structure

Customer : He/she says that the design of the website is best and go ahead with SEO.

Vendor : Accepts the same and start up the optimization even if sites uses 80% flash or all content rich URLs are embed in database which cannot be crawled by Googlebot. Ultimately a failure.

Solution : Vendor must explain very simply to the client as why we need to restructure his website and make it search engine friendly so that we can get all urls crawled. Usually it happens in dynamic website where we require meta tag module or static URLs or just pulling the hidden content and publishing them in a browsable / paginated directory. Ample proof can be handled to client and it can be agreed. You win the business.

C) Website Content

Customer : He / she says that promote my website which has 3 pages of content.

Vendor : Accepts the offer and start up the SEO. Its obvious that SEO and rankings highly depend on the nature of content, the keywords incorporation within that etc. Suppose you are targeting about 100+ keywords how can you make the same in 3-4 pages of content. So a big failure once again.

Solution : Before initiating the project intimate client that his website needs copywriting i.e. the content incorporating the keywords and give him some idea about the no. of pages to be rewritten or the fresh copies. Emphasize the client lot on content because it’s the prime thing which search engine indexes and rank webpages. Pagerank is the matter of the past.

D) Rankings

Customer : As per customer just within 2 weeks of the project initiation he can be able to see ranking with the desired keywords.

Vendor : They promise the ranking in such a manner that client do check up madly over search engine and becomes melancholy if there are no results. So he just call up the vendor and ask why the results are not there and poor vendor make lame excuses because he has promised blindly to deliver the results in very short span of time. Hence the project get deteriorate or else cancelled.

Solution : Vendor before signing any SEO contract must convey to the end client that SEO is a gradual process and the ranking will depend on the nature of competition for a particular website. Also it depends on the nature of keywords we are using, in initial phases we will be having ranking for long tail keywords then short tail and finally the generic. SEO is not an overnight process, so this must be explained to clients and links such as : http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40349 which will support your dogma.

E) Traffic

Customer : Client go to Alexa or compete and check up the traffic details and get astonished that his site is no where else. So calls you up ask why is that happening.

Vendor : They promise the client with several thousands of visitors in a day so as to grab the project then. Now the situation is that the website is of about 15 pages and targeting about 25+ keywords which can in month drive a maximum of 1000 visitors. Really the big fight can be declared at clients end and I am afraid that if the client is real crazy there could be a suit instead (it cannot be a strong one but if something is on paper with duly stamped that it can be challenged)

Solution : Never, never make false claims about traffic as its not under your hands, you cannot make people to clicks your client website like anything and you must address the same to the client that your website can at max. drive this much amount of visitors during this span. Donot promise blindly and emphases on other factors on increasing traffic like blogging, social media etc.

F) Sales

Customer : As per customer his website is both search engine as well as user friendly and anyone landing on his / her website will like to send the lead or purchase a product. Really damn tough situation if the client has invested a lot of money.

Vendor : Accepts the offer as it’s a business prospect and in the last both ranking and traffic came on the site and almost nil conversions due to poor site design and layout, site almost lacking all user friendliness features.

Solution : Vendor must explain politely to the client that his/her website is just like a brick and mortar shop and represent his business in the cyberspace as well impacts the same in physical world. Hence it should be equip with all facility like in a physical shop i.e. good layout, user friendly, call to actions, simple navigations etc. This is the most important part in any online campaign because it will lead to more conversions. If you speak to your client like a sales guy surely they will admit your thoughts and get agree

Here goes your online store………………………………………………………………?

Lastly I want to say that SEO is not an easy task with customer as well as vendor point of view as we have to do a lot of conjuring in making the site fully SEO compliant. The most successful SEO company is one which is able to win the trust of his clients and provide him the desired result by following his won principles rather than that of client. If the SEO company can work sink with customer the project will never get failed but there must be proper training for the customer so that he/she can have the idea about the industry.

There are other factors like sitemap.xml, urllist.txt, RSS, keywords stemming, link building, pagerank, articles submission which client is sometimes totally unware but the points mentioned above in A,B,C & D are real headaches for any SEO company.

This post is dedicated to all SEO companies and the companies looking for SEO to be done. Please go through the post and make yourself comfortable so that both customer and the companies are happy and let the business prosper in a positive manner.

Social media, an real buzzword for the virtual world. This thing is gaining prominence so hastily that the traditional online marketing mechanisms – Search engine marketing, Banner ads are somehow little bit scared and most of them have themselves evolved their social networking platform.

There is no doubt in saying that social media is extremely different with all the online materials as the entire web is stuffed with content written by content writers which are then owned by single entity i.e. the owner of the website but the social media networking popularly called as Web 2.0 has transformed the definition of web from a single webmaster oriented platform to the common masses.

The most popular and indeed the core element of social media marketing is the sharing of information and doing further interaction with our friends, colleagues, business associates and even the competitors (sometimes enemies). So social media is nothing but the sharing of content in the form of text, audio, video, photos etc.

It was predominantly founded by Rohit Bhargav in the year 1998 but neither Rohit or the web entrepreneurs were aware that how this will grow and mushroom on the web. Today the overall social media networking websites are valuated in multi billions.

Here are some growing and giant social media networks

Myspace : When Myspace was launched it was considered as the first and last destination for social media networking. This platform was and is enriched with special social media gadgets which marks its an exclusive social media portal. Till date Myspace has maximum registrants but as matter of  time and due to non user friendliness there is not enough growth in its visitors and even there is a decline in activity of the existing users. So Myspace is still king but its image is fading due to tough competition it is facing from its rivals.

Facebook : This is now considered as the prime venue for social media networking and comprises so many features with user friendly interface including spam control methods that visitors are stick to this and there is exponential growth rate. The company was founded by the youngest of the web entrepreneurs Mr. Mark Zuckerburg and he has transformed a local networking website for school to a global social media entity. One of the major and the strongest part lies in Facebook API’s which involve the application integration on facebook, thereby encouraging both marketers and developers to come and collaborate with facebook.

Youtube : The company founded by former Paypal executives and later acquired by Google in a deal of 1.65 billion dollar is real video networking hub. With its consumer based throughout the globe and advanced features its indeed a place for consumers, business where both uploading and viewing of videos is a common games. Companies are now investing in generating corporate videos and promoting the same on youtube etc. Although Google is unable to monetize Youtube with its proper advertising model, but it will surely solve this problem as this product is associated with Big Daddy “Google”. Hulu another video site has give a big shake to Youtube but still Youtube rules the video networking till date.

Twitter : I would like to discuss this in the last as this new (sometimes stated as “tiny”) social networking platform has changed the face of social media networking to a great extend. Its fast microblogging feature enabled from PCs to mobile has created a jumbling mania to netizines. The vast number of growing users proves that it might defeat all social media giants and will be the next King. Twitter success somewhat lies in its simplicity with user friendliness of its interface, its fast application and advanced features that now tons of people are either following or are being followed.

There are several other social media platforms like Orkut (a Google product), Linkedin, etc. which are also successful to a great extend but currently there are two hot topics “Facebook and Twitter” and the burning question which one will be the most successful.

If we look at the market analysis recently Facebook valuation was put at 15 billion something and now the twitter is also gaining momentum.

The answer lies amongst the consumers who will themselves decided which platform is much better as per their needs.

There are predictions from internet oracle society that Facebook and Twitter will lead the social media game in near future and might defeat (really damn difficult) linear search (Google).

Let us see………… -:)

There are millions of tutorials, blogs, articles on SEO as how to do it in a more effective manner but only few of them explains the result oriented search engine optimization. In general only 10-15% of SEO campaigns are the most successful rest are only fine enough to get the monthly bill from the client and some of them even get failed.

In this post I will try to explain the best SEO strategy which I can share with you with my past experiences.

SEO is a blend of three things :

1.    Web Content

2.    Site Backlinks

3.    Website Structure

Traditionally we always speak a lot about onpage and offpage optimization but the above 3 points are the major KPI (Key performance Indicators) for any of the SEO campaign.

In SEO the main focus of any professional should be on “O” which says “Optimization” as it’s the driving force behind the SEO campaigns. Hence get back to our KPI’s

Firstly by web content I mean the content incorporated with targeted keywords as per your industry vertical. As per search engine algorithm its spider indexes the content and chooses the keywords (several combinations and permutations) according to content present on the site. So the meta tags are the things of the past search engines primarily google gives some emphasis to title tag atleast, meta keywords or meta description doesnot not pay a key role in SEO as site without any keywords or description tag can be ranked much higher. So plan the site content in such a manner that you are able to incorporate the quality keywords in your site.

Do exhaustive keywords research via several online tools and if possible run an adwords campaign with minimal budget to get the exact idea about the keywords performance. It will be much better if you apply some competitive intelligence and extract some best performing keywords with the your successful competitor. For eg. compete.com, google trends etc. could provide some useful data.

Hence you are ready with your website content which is unique, keyword rich and user friendly, this is most important as content stuffed with keywords might lead to some rankings but user will rarely go through that. Also do update your website more often with content and starting the blog can help to a great extend for creating user engagement models in terms of subscribers.
Secondly it’s the strong backlinks which helps in crawling our website frequently and hence the quality and quantity of backlinks plays a key role in search engine optimization. If we go by traditional algorithm of google it says that ranking highly depends on pagerank which is a mathematical formula by addition, subtracting and dividing the outbound and inbound links by a damping factor. So more is the pagerank, more will be rankings, this is indeed partially correct as this is only a factor besides other but doing quality link building is good for SEO.

Link building can be done via several ways which includes :

General Directory submissions, there are about 4000+ web directories which offer free link placement in their webpages arranged categorically. Though the pages which offer link placement are rarely indexed / cached but getting the links in themed category sometimes help. But it must be ensure atleast the website is indexed or not as there are several penalized directories which have been de-indexed by google, so beware before heading for submissions.

Then there is reciprocal link exchange which is now discarded due to spam factors so I will not discuss this in detail here.

Now a days we have 3 way link building techniques where we have two websites one is our main website and other one is resource and we offer link exchanges with external site and put our link on our main site and place their link on our resource website, this is just to trick google which is unable to locate what has been done. (Some webmasters say that google can pinpoint the 3 way also, I am not sure but still it can be used if we are doing the link building with websites hosted on different IPs etc.)

The most powerful technique to do link building is to write quality articles and post on leading articles website (Eg. Ezinearticles.com) and remember to post one article to one site instead of submitting the same to 500+ articles directory, it will not be helpful.

Hence link building is important but it is one of the sensible item in SEO as it might lead to spamming and do unexpected harming so be cautious in doing this.

Thirdly it’s the ultimate structure of the website which makes it prone to search engine indexation and thereby helping it to appear in search engine results pages. This is indeed the most important part of SEO as there are several websites with thousands of pages and the indexation stats goes with few hundred, the reason behind this is nothing but poor internal linking structure. This rarely happen in static site in which every pages is flat and we can link all of them manually but it’s a mess with site having database driven pages, too long URLs or having sessions IDs.

This is what usually happens to most of the sites with loads of content being hidden (which we sometimes even call this Invisible Web, a different topic though). As I have told that this happen with dynamic website with several pages so SEO executives must seek the help of the programmer and make the entire site in browse-able format where each and every URLs can be accessed just by following links.

Suppose there is a bookshop with 40 categories and each category has roughly 500 books each and each book constitutes about 1 URL (with book title, image, description etc.) so we will be having 40X500 = 20000 URLs. Its not possible to embed all URLs in just one webpages as we cannot exceed the inbound links to more than 100 so doing necessary pagination with short and clean URLs is a definite plus. Also creating the Google sitemap will help in getting all URLs indexed properly.

Ultimately all these three factors have been explained and surely you will ask that its such simple BUT guys its indeed easy for you to implement but how can you get all this approved by your client.

NOW SOMETHING DIFFERENT:

Maximum SEO campaigns fail due to bad communication between SEO companies and clients. Client questions on selected keywords and sometimes fights if you want to change the landing page as per search engine, suppose changing the javascript based menus to some CSS based menus which is more SEO friendly. So atlast the SEO companies work as per client instructions and after 2-3 months client withdraw due to rough results.

So whose mistake is this – Clients or the company. I must say both are culprits but the SEO company can escalate the issue if they have good experts working in there just by explaining or giving a very brief training on SEO.

For instance :
Flash based site is not good for SEO but client is stick to it, so an a professional SEO can ask to have the flash website along with HTML version which will solve the problem of both (Client and SEO company).

Friend its so easy and I have found that when I trained my clients to some extend (they will never want to learn SEO, so donot get scared) I was able to achieve peak results alongwith high retention. So this is all about explanation of former with the latter which is indeed crucial and critical.