How does Real Time Analytics help
In the dynamics of the web environment, a lot of money is spent in PPC campaigns. Real time data analysis can help you discover the pattern of user behavior towards a particular advertisement. With this data you can alter your content in 5 clicks rather than making change after 500 clicks. Now imagine the amount of money you can save with this dynamic data. The live environment in real time analytics re-focuses your attention and can facilitate to optimize your SEO efforts.

Real time analysis can tell you about adding an image or changing content or adding a call to action button, etc. and observe changes as they occur. You can make changes in a sloppy layout or even change of certain key words in your content depending upon the real time data. It is definitely a more satisfying experience to observe the shift in results in response to your change of strategy. Thus real time analytics undeniably adds value and gives you an edge above your competitors.

Marketers talking to CEO’s about brand awareness, search ranking and keywords hardly help, and end up as unable to break ice. Bang clear on target, and let him know and understand, if money isn’t spent here, there will be lesser products to sell and sales will eventually drop. Explain how search marketing brings in revenue at low costs, and how what you are doing will coincide with the growth of his business prospects. CEO’s are least interested in any kind of jingo, apart from the money if this can make. They need to see that searches are able to increase share holder value and help them make money.

Marketers having a direct marketing background effectively understand the relationship with sales. Search marketers will do better and help people understand and admit that the Web is the biggest direct-marketing opportunity of all time, where every move is traceable and constantly measured so that they can be improvised and optimized. This is e-commerce, you know the value of every new visitor, the conversion rates and revisit.

Most companies look at marketing as printing a brochure or going for a trade show. Make sure to help them understand that the virtual world has a concrete and a solid base, and you can look on how every person interacts on your web-site. Furthermore, make them see where they went next and how they bought from you. Let them have a direct view of this virtual exercise, and you have a perfect tool to justify every cent of the proposed marketing expenditure plan.

What every executive really wants to see is sales, leads and leads expecting to close. He is hoping to catch on the projected revenue targets at any costs, and any talk on brand awareness, positive sentiment, site traffic or ranking on search results will only put him off. If marketers can focus on relating touches that they have made to customers and sales will be the only way to persuade people to allocate funds. Set the map right so they are able to see clearly which route is more economical and valuable as well. After all, your budget level also requires sensible justification.

Web metrics systems, like the free Google Analytics to the expensive ones that help you understand the need to be passionately made use of. Search Marketing would come to be more useful if it were, eighty percent marketing and twenty percent search. If you don’t understand the marketing basis in SEM, it would be very difficult for you to show how effective your campaign would be.

Not many people would disagree that journalists and news publishers should be paid for their work. However, the advertisement supported model is not generating enough revenue to sustain the conventional news gathering infrastructure.

If you know the basics of Economics, then you would know that if ad-space (supply, in economic terms) is blasting on every social networking site, then without a similar increase in advertisers (demand, in economic terms) the price will drop down drastically. Considering this, we can only hope that a new model will soon come up. Some newspapers have taken initiatives to issue e-books instead of print versions as prospective models for the future.

Wall Street Journal editor, Robert Thompson, has mentioned in an article that some websites can be best described as lice in the intestines of the internet. He also says that readers have been socialized in a wrong way and that search engines like Google have profited from that wrong perception. He strongly feels that much of the content on the internet should be free.

Today, significant parts of the stories we see on social networks, blogs and tweets, have originated from the traditional media. While this does not mean that the bloggers don’t provide original news content and commentary, the question is: If we need to pay more for news content that we used to get for free, then will it negatively impact the quantity or quality of social media discussions around those news items?

Time will definitely provide an answer sooner than we think.

The mind reading technology is one such technology that will make our lives (social media lives) very easy. Controlling an interface without using your fine motor skills will have huge implications for human computer communication. Imagine being able to tweet what you are thinking without having to pick up your phone, key in your message and hit send. Also, by just thinking ‘Facebook’ your screen will show a summary of your friend’s action stream.

How the system works?

The new mind-reading system works by displaying letters on the computer screen that flickers one at a time. When a person thinks of a letter, and then that letter flickers on the screen, brain waves propel a signal to the computer that it identifies. While this form of communication is at a very experimental phase and is also quite slow, it does work for sending short messages such as tweets for Twitter. Twitter messages are restricted to only 140 character limits, and you really have to think hard about what you want to say. However, with mind reading technology thinking is all that you would require.

This new form of communication is currently meant to help people who have restricted motor skills, and not lazy social media fanatics! There is also a scope of applying this technology to senses other than vision. In the future, this technology can also help read feelings and complex emotional states. And one day people who cannot otherwise communicate will eventually interact with the outside world.

Whoever said mind reading was impossible are in for a pleasant surprise!

As a customer you might just go through the remaining results, that catches your attention or try on with a new search phrase for a better set of results.

As a more technology savvy user, you might laugh at Google’s search algorithm and wonder what the “Pocket PC Services” has to do with “PPC Service” and carry on.

However, what if you are in the on-line business providing zone? Would you not rub your eyes and get blatantly surprised? You’ll wonder how it could be possible. You would go back and refresh the page, might be several times, and if still you see the Pocket PC Services as a result for PPC services, you certainly would lose faith in the business abilities of the unerring search magnum.

How can Google, the leader in PPC business not understand the impact of losing the search by one competitor, and in this case not even a competitor?
How can the ruler of SEM allow one’s quality score to get affected by such an outrageous activity?

How can the LSA fail like this? Anyone endowed with the technological reasoning would understand that the algorithm can never err. It would under no circumstances deviate like this.

So, is the crawler crawling wrong limbs or is it one more of Google’s evil designs???

The first successful communication on the internet was implemented on 25 December 1990. In 1992 internet access was made available to the common public and its use exploded. Until recently, websites were a great advertising platform. However, with the introducing of the first social networking site in 1995, and its widespread use today, websites have started to become invisible on the internet.

If you come up with a new website on the internet, then you would probably have to spend a lot of your time and resources to bring your website on the first page of the goggle search engine. However, a simpler way to let people know about your website or your company is through social media.

Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace.com, Twitter, LinkedIn.com, etc. are very popular and so are great sources of promoting your website and products.

Gone are the days of “have a website and advertise”

Today, it is too costly to be noticed on an internet that is already full. Social media is the only way for new websites to get traction. If Darren Rowse, the guy behind ProBlogger, or Brian Clark, the guy who founded Copyblogger, talks about your website, then it’s visible. If your website comes up on the front page of Digg, then it’s visible. Once your website starts getting incoming links and lots of regular traffic, then you can use traditional SEO practices for staying visible.

Some of the companies that benefited from social media are:

Rubbermaid: A survey conducted by BazaarVoice reported that when the company Rubbermaid added customer reviews to their website, their sales increased and returns of their products decreased.

Fog Creek software: This company has achieved great success with no advertising because its founder has built an amazingly popular blog about writing software.

Nike: This company allowed customers to build and order custom shoes on their website. This move was a great hit with people and generated a lot of profit for Nike.

Will social media survive in the long run? Not sure. But today and for the near future, you can’t do without it. You have to jump in even if you do not fully understand it, or you will go the way of print media.

Three European web sites alleged Google of anti-competitive behavior and said that, the Internet search giant was unfairly steering traffic away from them.  The three sites: Foundem, a British retail price comparison site; ejustice.fr, a French legal search engine; and Ciao from Bing, a Microsoft-owned shopping site that operates in Europe, alleges the search engine magnate, Google, of deceitful conduct.

The lines sound interesting and surely demand a pondering. Let us try to uncover the story, where lies the problem, why is the giant being probed?

Google AdWords, PPC, Bidding rates and Click Through activity…

All of us are aware of Google AdWords, it is the PPC Advertising service offered by Google, through which it displays click-able links from advertisers, in exchange for a charge per click.

PPC requires the advertiser to bid on key words in order to buy a top position in the search engine results for a particular keyword. Google determines the placement of the ad based on the bidding price and the ad’s click-through activity. The advertiser pays for each click made by a search engine user, through which advertisers’ web page gets a reckoning and is ranked accordingly.

Google AdWords is a powerful advertisement arena, by Google through which it is managing PPC sites. The problem is that, Google is being unfair by promoting its own products on every page it springs out. Google is indexing itself first amongst the PPC sites, whenever any keyword is searched for, here is the catch. Even if the keyword is not related to Google AdWords or Google Maps or some other Google product, Google is systematically favoring its own products, and indexing it foremost on most of the pages delivered by the search engine, irrespective of the keyword.

The service protocol of PPC, assures the advertisers, that their web sites will be delivered to the audience targeting the keywords, and the advertisers have to compete with their adversaries for the ranking through bidding and click through activity.

Let’s view this in affect:

If someone in US wishes to search for ‘SEO Service’, then the resulting page which Google shoots forward is like this:

We all know that “Google.com/AdWords”, is not a SEO Service provider…

What’s fraudulent here…?

No doubt, Google is unfairly steering away the traffic, by ranking the other sites lower to its own site, thus decreasing the click through activity and increasing the bidding rates. Moreover, it is violating its own protocol of delivering the clients’ link to a visitor, appropriate to the keyword being searched, by posing itself as a competitor to most client sites, irrespective of the keyword.

Let’s wait and watch the ramifications…

So now, when the titan is undergoing antitrust scrutiny by U.S. regulators, and is facing the music, let us see how it handles the ramifications of the allegations it has been alleged with.

Why read, when you can witness? Last year surely has been the year for video marketing. What with more You Tube views than Google’s searches, video marketing is a more lucrative assignment. Finding ways and means to ensure that your video will not be lost in the crowd is what SEO would now be looking for. You do not expect to put together a video and hope it would generate business for you. You sure can add on a welcome video, a virtual tour, or a helpful tutorial video to your website, and use this as a riveting factor to compliment your content and your attractive web design. Expecting your videos to open up vistas all by themselves will require some innovative, creative and fresh approaches, which will now have to be accepted as a new challenge.

How You Make the Most from Your Video Presentation

There are some things to be kept in mind, and, which will come helpful for optimizing your video content to its’ full potential online. You can always be the first, and that definitely amounts to a very good start. Your competitors may just like to follow.

• Embed your videos and share – You will definitely benefit by sharing your videos with an embeddable feature. Whether you are having viral videos, trailers, or informative video clips, embedded videos is an advanced feature, and will come useful in time.
• Make sure to use the best format – There are a number of video formats available for you to choose from.  You can have FLV, MP4, AVI, and others if you want; but, make sure to use the most popular, as this will help you make it easier while editing and viewing.
• Make use of all available accurate tracking tools – What use are these videos if you cannot find out how they help you? Moreover, how would you be able to effectively optimize without understanding an angle that needs to improve upon? You would only be able to better your access and progress by measuring your performance and the impact each video can  create on your online presence.
• Video SEO will come useful – Your video is 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of a search result in comparison to your text pages. Make sure to utilize tags and keywords because these help you make your videos all the more visible.
• Consistency eventually pays – If you are planning on integrating plenty of videos onto your website, see that when put together, they are able to give a very reliable image. Never confuse the visitors or promise them a moon that is not there.

Multi-media content will enhance your capacity to make some deep impact. As it is, we have been using images since a long time to assist our textual content make more sense, so also videos can integrate into design and generate a better sense if and when properly applied.

• Seek Professional Help

If you really want to make any difference in your landing page conversions, we would need the help of professional experts. Go for specialists contributing to their dedicated area of expertise in order to maximize your landing page exposure, experience and off course conversions.

• Hire an SEM for SEO and PPC.
• A social expert for SMM.
• An expert web copy writer for web writing.
• A proven web page designer for landing page design.
• An experienced designer for additional conversion tips & tricks.
• A qualified web tester to monitor testing

• Choose the Best Possible Content & Design

Check your contents including design from all angles. The copy, size, colors, the placement of buttons, the functionality of your page, headlines must all be effectively managed. Check the copy for length, grammar and formality; images for type, size, color, variations and placement. Visual click heat-maps are great to gain an understanding of paths of interest, and to effectively make changes in layouts and design. Just make sure to give yourself the best possible content and design in order to optimize your own conversion rate.

• Compare Pricing Structures

Make it easy for comparison shoppers. Keep abreast with periodical reviews and check pricing on products and services. You need not be the cheapest to sell. You only need to be the most informative, authoritative and should have maintained a good reputation of delivery and performance. Goodwill is an asset no business can do without. Pass on these positive reviews to R&D. Conversion optimization is a combined process, where all units perform equally well.

• Keep Mandatory Completion Elements at Minimum

If the conversion page includes a form keep the mandatory completion elements at the minimum. Include as much of auto fill wherever possible and make this as easy as you can. Encourage click to subscribe with enticing content, offers and future discounts. Focus on the core objective should no way be lost.

• Target Your Landing Pages

Each target market demographic is distinctly different in many ways. Younger, or older; employed, or unemployed, or retired; attentive or inattentive, busy or bored, and all relevant parameters must be properly evaluated and effectively targeted.

• Pre-test Your Landing Page for Being Effective

Usability is all about how fast the essence and functionality of a page are communicated and how quick and effective this is in engaging. Test this on folks and find out. Just give them 6-8 seconds at the most to tell you what they think this page –

• is about
• if they liked it
• if they felt like leaving
• what stands out
• if they would like to bookmark it.

This will give you a fairly good idea of where exactly you stand.

• Learn & Run With Competition

Although online and offline competitors are different, keeping track of what both engage in will come very useful. You would be also wiser to learn from their experiences as well, so that you can save on both, your money and your time. Take their learning’s and make sure to run with them at the same time.

• Finish With an Attractive “Add to Cart” button

Color has a deeper impact most often than even the size and shape. Your ‘add to cart’ button has a lot to say than just that. Make sure that the shade of the color, shape and size are not only compatible with your business it should also be elegant and most effectively designed.

You are now perfectly placed. So get going – what are you waiting for. There is no one, no one can stop you now.

On-site mobile SEO
• Using 100% valid XHTML 1.0 code is the best practice as mobile search engines may however have more trouble digesting invalid code.
• It is likely that WML will be phased out in the near future, so play wise and safe. If you validate, the mobile search engines will not have any trouble with you.
• Follow accessibility best practices as they will ensure that your content is accessible to anyone regardless of their platform. This would include mobile users as well as the mobile search engines.
• Follow the traditional on-site SEO best practices, and which by now you know by heart. Major keywords for the title tag, H1’s and body text, keyword rich anchor text for internal links, and allow the link wheels to spin around.
Getting Spidery and Indexed by Mobile Search Engines
If you are wanting, your site to be indexed by the mobile search engines, they must come to know about it first. Make sure to submit your sites to major mobile search engines for some swift recognition. It would be a wise idea to see that each of your pages is having at least one incoming link.
List of mobile search engines
The following search engines are the major players in mobile search at this point of time.
• Google XHTML Mobile Search from Google Mobile
• Yahoo! Mobile
• MSN Mobile Search
• AOL Mobile Search
• Nokia Mobile Search
• Technocratic Mobile
• 4INFO Mobile Search

My sincere suggestion is, do not wait for the “year of the mobile” to arrive. Google has left us with a hint as early as the beginning of this New Year, 2010, when they decided to launch Nexus One. Get onto it and start creating some meaningful and genuine mobile related content. Apart from the adult stuff, we are having today, there is more that we can now do to make mobile SEO more relevant and effective in the days to come.

Proxy servers are a computer system or an application that intermediates between the client and the server. It accepts the requests from the client and directs it to the required server that can cater the information or webpage requested.

Utility of proxy servers

A proxy server offers various operational advantages. An ideal proxy server can:

• Maintain anonymity of the client
• ‘Cache’ frequently needed information
• ‘Police’ the traffic
• Speed up access to servers
• Scan for malware
• Maintain the log of activities

It also offers some features that can be disadvantageous, like, it can:

• Bypass security controls
• Circumvent regional restrictions
• Hide identity of culprits

Types of proxy servers

Proxy servers are classified as under into various types depending on the way they function:

Gateway proxy – Its function is to direct the requests to particular server and send the reply to the client without ant interference or modifications.

Reverse proxy – This works mainly for web servers. It protects the main server by features like load balancing, authentication and decryption.

Transparent and non-transparent proxy – Transparent proxy acts like a gateway but does check for identification and authentication. Whereas, non-transparent proxy modifies the request or response in order to provide some added service to the user.

Forced proxy – It can be intercepting or non-intercepting forced proxy, mainly to monitor adherence to various transfer protocols.

Suffix proxy – It allows modifying the name of the proxy server to the URL of the requested content. They are easier to use than regular proxies.

Because of the diversity of functions and utility of proxy servers, they are turning out to be a useful tool in networking. By ‘caching’ the required information and providing it whenever needed, they have helped in reducing traffic to and load on the main servers.

Cross Linking or Internal Link Architecture

This refers to how we are managing to interlink various pages within our own web-site. Wikipedia is a good live example of how Cross Linking or Internal Link Architecture can be effectively and efficiently utilized.

• This is the key to enable the visitor to quickly and easily navigate to the desired content & topics on the web-site. This is easy to create when we are starting a new web-site, provided we have a map charted at the start.
• If it is an existing web-site, it would only require some old-fashioned patch-work, editing a couple of words on different pages for including these links.
• The idea is to inter-connect various contents of our site making relative sense. The search engines also appreciate this kind of an architecture where you show a commitment to the user’s experience. Another way for increasing page views from users.
• Contain this cross linking to relative pages, and do not use these for promotion. Also use them moderately, and do not over link pages, from one to almost every other; since you’d only be destroying the very purpose you desired. Your purpose is to help the user, and not build an internal link – spam.
• There will be links between a page, to another within any given web-site. The Internal Link Architecture of any site enables cross linking take up a required size. Navigational links take up the other half – however, both are equally important for the success of any web-site. Navigation helps organize content into logical groups, enabling our users find out all the content on our web-site.
• Although many forms of navigational links are available, and can be utilized. But the best bet for SEO purposes remains the conservative & old plain text links.
• Linked Images are selectively used by many web-sites. You click on an image or a button, to go to another page or section. These images better be nice, perfectly blending with the design, and when optimized for size – be fast to load. Image links wont pass the same value to a page as the text link, but out-weighs by the look and feel images are able to give to any web-site. However when using these, make sure to enter the fight info for the attribute tags.
• These would not be of any help with the SEO point of view, as crawlers still don’t have the ability to follow linked images, it is best left for the larger sites that have plenty of content groups, They make it simpler for the user to find out what he wants, although some tweaking may be necessary to make sure that they work as expected on browsing platforms. Considering the Crawler’s limitations, it is very important to have well laid out, and easy to access site-map.

• You visit a SEO company and it guarantees you a ranking even before analyzing your website. These SEO analysts are either are just interested in extracting money from you and stuffing it in their pocket or they take SEO too lightly. A SEO strategy is different for every website and the optimization strategy depends and changes according to the nature and theme of website.
• Some just fill in the Meta tags with absurd keywords and create spamming. Your website might end up getting banned by Google. Increasing Meta tags list with irrelevant keywords is no SEO technique.
• Some SEO people create doorway pages that are held on another server and then they purchase this traffic to shell out more money from you. Make sure the SEO changes you pay for occur on your website only.

Quality of SEO analysts

• A good SEO analyst is always aware of the fact that the tactics of the search engine algorithms is ever changing and the same old techniques do not work for every website.
• A good SEO will never guarantee results on SERP because anyone who guarantees is sure to be a Charlatan. A good SEO will guarantee that they ill be driving the traffic on your website which will guarantee sales.
• They should be able to tell you exactly what they’re doing, and how much the cost is for various parts of the service.

A Few Important Tips

• A good SEO firm will try to get itself involved in rebuilding of website if it is done. They believe in avoiding the pitfalls like excessive use of Flash, HTML frames or graphics at the early stage because modifying them later on becomes a nuisance and waste of money.
• Make sure you check the references of the SEO Company on your own and check from the owners whether they are driving more traffic and having more sales.
• A really good SEO is no joke. By limiting the budget to less than a thousand dollars, you will be indirectly limiting the creative abilities of the SEO analyst. Pay more to get his focus on your site more. Also by finding some one working on much less pay scale is like finding some one who is willing to take your money for doing nothing.
• It is east to blabber about SEO techniques by reading from book. But when it comes to actual action, no reading helps as SEO environment is ever changing and dynamic. Do not fall for such blabber and research the work done by the SEO Company for other websites.

Search Places for Good SEO Analysts

• Visit the SEO forums. There you will find many companies posing as SEO experts. But the genuine ones will shine out on own.
• Search for SEO related articles found on sites such as Clinks, ISEDB, Search Guild, and Search Day
• You can trust the ones recommended by your friends. But for this you will have to trust your friend first.

Image Credit: Theseonerd.com

Image Credit: http://stompernetimages.com

The number of WebPages on the internet is increasing rapidly on the web which is posing a challenge to the search engine crawler. The prime motto of the search engine crawlers is to index the true original content and help the search engine give its users ideal search results. The search engine optimization process started in the nineties and initially the search engine crawlers failed to distinguish between original and copied content. The scenario has changed over the years with the advent of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). LSI is a form of artificial intelligence which enhances the search engine’s content analyzing capabilities.

The older search engines failed to distinguish between similar words with different meaning. For example the word Die can be referred in context of a Dice or related to death or clay work.The crawlers also failed to distinguish between words with similar roots like water, watering etc. Singular and plural forms of words like dog and doggies meant the same for old search engines.

Latent Semantic Indexing

The search platforms related with LSI does not just focus on the bunch of keywords. The search engines now days operate on relevance feedback. That is why now days when you search for the keyword tiger woods, you are displayed sites related to golf rather than websites related to tiger conservations and wildlife.

LSI is a concept rather than an algorithm of search engines. The phrase “artificial intelligence “attached to LSI technology echoes its true meaning. LSI is an answer to people who considered themselves smart by writing a meaningless template with rotating synonyms into which any keyword could be inserted innumerable times. LSI analysis is used by Google to detect this kind of spam content where excessive use of irrelevant keywords is used to fool the search engines.

CMS programs available today can have a negative effect on the visibility of the website in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). This makes CMS without Search Engine Optimization (SEO) abilities a big disaster. The major reason cited is that these programs were not designed keeping the search engines in mind.

Systems now days blabber that they are “search engine ready” or “search engine friendly”. What these blabbers mean is that a programmer can modify the system with add-ons (e.g. the Apache “mod-rewrite” extension) to not damage search engine results too badly. So do not fall blindly for such claims and make sure you inspect every aspect of the system to be sure that your website can be optimized. CMS that has the capability to induct common SEO tasks (human/search engine readable URLs, 301 redirects, Meta tags) directly is required.

I would like to specify some common problems that CMS generated contents face in not being indexed by the search engines:

• Dynamic URLs with query strings

The number of dynamic pages a search engine can index are limited. If at all you use dynamic pages make sure that not every search engine crawl the dynamic and static page. A Dynamic URL like “http://www.yourseite.com/prod.php?id=23485&blt=234” might be skipped by a search engine crawler as too many parameters included might clash with webmaster parameters. Inbound links tend to be less on dynamic URLs as any user prefers static URLs as they are easily understandable.

• Restricted Meta Tags

Due to ever-changing nature of SEO industry, customized Meta tags like Verification Meta tag for Google are in high use. Many CMS do not have access to add such customized Meta tags. This hampers the SEO process as the customized Meta tags have become quite important for search engine crawlers.

• URLs with poor keyword density

Keyword rich URLs play a major role in optimizing your website on search engine pages. Some systems that use static URLs sometimes do not let you create URLs with desired keywords. A query string without sensible keywords hardly lures traffic to your website.

• Using third party SEO tools with most CMS systems is time consuming and repetitive

The user desires to be in one tool to create content and another to analyze it. But in some CMS, it is mandatory to view the pages live from a URL on the web to use SEO tools to optimize the content. In such systems until and unless the content is published SEO cannot come into picture. This makes it highly time consuming.

• Lack of SEO knowledge

Buying a CMS and then hiring SEO professionals to optimize your CMS for SEO needs is wasting lot of time and lot of money. It is better to have a proactive approach to search friendly CMS.