Mobile goes social: It is a known fact that most Indians browse the Internet via mobile, and 2012 will see even more fondness to pocket devices. A large percentage of Indians are spending time on social networks using their mobiles, with the biggest chunk comes from non-metros. Expect mobile to add some extra zing to the Indian social media market in 2012. $100 mobiles powered with Android have already made it possible for Indians to browse the Internet quite cheaply. Are we going to witness brands now focusing more on mobile apps rather than web apps? This was a thought also expressed by Preetham Venkky in a recent chat.

B2B and corporate gear up: The B2B arena will gear up, and we will see not only professional networks opening up but also see large enterprises will walk the extra mile to embrace Enterprise 2.0. I have always felt that LinkedIn has been inside a shell, as its more of a corporate network. But this year, I think it will be more social and allow its API to be used by more developers. This would be great news for the Indian market considering how many people use Linkedin here. We are already seeing companies such as Standard Chartered opting for Enterprise 2.0 with the help of Kreeo. I think in 2012, we will see more companies being social, dropping their logos, and providing a platform for employees, stakeholders, and customers to engage.

Social commerce: New e-commerce sites are popping up all over the place in India, and they’re being funded pretty quickly too. Some pundits assert that it is a bubble but for the time being, there is money in that bubble. We have also seen the growing fondness towards Facebook, so a gradual evolution of e-commerce to social commerce seems like a logical next step. We have already seen lot of e-commerce brands such as Fashion and You, Flipkart, Fetise, and MyGrahak, doing an amazing job on social media. However brands will also have to understand that social commerce means far more than creating a Facebook fan page. They will have to provide fans with a positive experience, keeping the social aspect in focus, evolving from just liking and commenting on products.

Blogs and brands: Brands have kept their distance from blogs in the past, but 2011 saw some brands testing the waters more. Red Bull started a blogger hunt contest for F1, and we also saw the Snexy.in campaign that used blogs very effectively. IndiBlogger, India’s biggest blog network, made sure that it kept running contests all year round. Brands such as Tata, Dove, KFC, Samsung, and HP also tried creating a relationship with bloggers via contests. I have always believed that bloggers can be your best brand evangelists. Blogging is far from dead, and it will evolve further in 2012.

Forums will be back: I think social media is cluttered right now, and the content overload often detracts from the experience. Could it be that 2012 will see a resurgence of forums. We recently saw Pluggd.in launching its forum for the startup and entrepreneur community. I have engaged a couple of times and found some very interesting discussions. Forums have like-minded people and are moderated; they have more focused discussions and less spam. I hope PO is planning one too!

Video consumption increases: In 2011 we saw the launch of both BoxOffice and then Movieplex, from Internet giant’s Google and Yahoo respectively. After the Kolaveri di [2] snowball I am sure every artist and Bollywood personality would want to make his or her video viral. India is a market that is not going to be behind in 2012 even though we have infrastructure problems in the country, so expect video to be the next big thing.

The idiot box goes social: Television channels connecting to fans via social media is a common trend, but 2011 saw television serials being telecasted on social media. In December, we saw the rebirth of the movie review show Chicks on Flicks, aired on Facebook. Sony PIX had stopped airing it on TV, and from now on it will show movie reviews on the day of the release. I believe this will be followed by others in 2012.

Social media outsourcing: Last time when I spoke to Adhvith Dhuddu, he predicted that 2012 would see lot of social media outsourcing work coming to India. I think many bigger brands will opt for social media outsourcing as this will also allow them to scale. But how exactly can social media work be outsourced? Certainly there is some risk in some areas, but at the same time there are many mundane tasks that can be outsourced.

ORM becomes important: With more and more brands opting for social, brands will need to be more careful about their online reputation. 2011 saw Vodafone Dhaval Valia fail in this area. Having witnessed such catastrophes, other companies will be trying to avoid these kinds of mistakes in 2012.

SMEs become more social: I have always believed that social media can be a game changer for SMEs. In 2011 we saw some amazing social media work from Faasos, Shopo and more which may become case studies for their competitors. SME’s will be more open and innovative on social media over the coming year.

Source: www.penn-olson.com

Whether they think of it as magnetic content or advertising, marketers are increasingly focused on creating video assets. This type of media reproduces the richness consumers associate with TV, often at a lower cost. And if online venues tend to fall short of TV when it comes to reach, they make up the difference by engaging viewers in an active, lean-forward mode.

The virtuous circle of content and technology adoption that consumers are experiencing is also fueling this trend. eMarketer estimates that US online video ad spending will grow by a compound annual rate of 38% in a five-year span ending in 2015, making this by far the fastest-rising category of online spending.

By 2015, video ad spending will reach $7.11 billion, up from $2.16 billion in 2011. In the past year alone, growth was 52.1%.

Similarly, in the UK video advertising will lead the pack, growing by a compound annual rate of 65% over five years. By 2015, UK video online ad spending will reach $850 million, compared with $150 million in 2011. As a percentage of total online advertising, video will grow to 8.2% in 2015 from 2.1% in 2011.

Still, challenges remain, including the high price of online video adsand the need for better reach and measurement. Several factors will mitigate these problems, making the upward course for video ad spending strong in 2012 and beyond. These factors include better filtering technologies for user-generated content, so publishers can better monetize it with ads; the emergence of cost per view and cost per engagement pricing structures; the increased use of interactive ad units and magnetic content; and personalization and targeting of video ads.

Source: www.emarketer.com

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that ecommerce sites are increasingly adding social features. She shared with us a new statistic: 88% of Internet Retailer Top 200 retail sites are integrated with Facebook.

Sociable Labs’ founder and CEO Nisan Gabbay explained that the target age market for an ecommerce site has surprisingly little influence on the percentage of visitors that were logged in to Facebook. Those aimed at college students were closer to 60%, but even those with middle aged saw at least 40% of visitors logged in.

The data was collected using the FB.getLoginStatus() API call from sites of Sociable Labs’ analytics and eCommerce integration customers. Gabbay tells me that while some of the studied sites attract early adopters, he has discussed the data with Facebook and the company validated it. Also, despite the fact that his company could benefit from more sites adopting social, the sample size is large enough to decrease the likelihood of bias.

“People look at Facebook’s active user count but don’t quite get how pervasive the service is in people’s lives. It’s there all the time in any activity they do online”, Gabbay says. The stats indicate that there may be less risk of sites offending non-Facebook users by adding social functionality than one might expect, because there just aren’t that many hold-outs any more. There’s also technical ways to detect if a user is logged in, and hide those big blue social plugins if they’re not.

As we enter the holiday season, there will be a critical mass of shoppers taking actions on ecommerce sites. Those willing to develop or license Facebook integrations can use social data to point visitors to the products most relevant to them. This can produce a lot more sales than leaving visitors them to browse aimlessly.

Source: Techgig

For advertisers that didn’t purchase any video ads so far this year, 84% say they will include digital video in their campaigns in Q4 2011 or 2012.

Advertisers say they are most likely to shift spending away from display and print ads to fund the increased online video spending. While some have feared online video might start replacing TV ad spending, the report claims television ad budgets, especially for cable, are safe for now. A majority of advertisers say online video ads are a direct compliment to TV, not a replacement for TV ads.

The report, which surveyed nearly 600 advertisers, publishers, and video technology providers, says rates for interactive video ads are up an average of 19 percent over last year.

Some other key findings:

1. Brand engagement is the top online video campaign objective.
2. Sharing video via social networks is an important return-on-investment metric for buyers.
3. Rich media overlays, pre-rolls, and content integration are the favorite ad formats.
4. Page-roll, expanding video banners, and post-rolls are the least favorite.
5. Video ad spending on the iPad is up 18%, the highest among all devices.
6. Average CPM for Premium content, broadcast content online: $21-$30
7. Average CPM for Mid-Tier, professionally produced content: $11-$20
8. Average CPM for User Generated Content: $0 – $5

A webcast about the findings will be streaming at Noon ET at www.digidayvideo.com. There will also be a Twitter-based Q&A at 1pm ET via @Adap.tv with the hashtag #StateofVideo. When the webcast ends, the report will be available online at www.adap.tv.

The business and technology of online video will also be the big topic today when the Streaming Media West conference kicks off in Los Angeles.

Source: Techcrunch.com

Google has announced a new option to bid differently for phone calls versus clicks to your web site with Bid To Call charged on a cost-per-phone call (CPP) basis.

So if you are willing to pay $5 for a phone call but only $1 for a click to your web site, you can now specify so.

The ad position for these are are based on the quality score and CPP price. The algorithm is Ad rank = (max CPC bid x click quality score) + (max CPP x phone call quality score).

How do you set this up?

You need to select the option to use a Google forwarding number when you set up Call Extensions. Then you must enter a Max CPP bid in order to activate bid-per-call.

Then when someone sees your ad and calls you, Google will charge you the CPP price:

An H1 heading is a prominent piece of text on a web page. It's like the headline of a newspaper or magazine article – it helps readers quickly understand what the web page is about. For example, if this email were a web page, "Search Engines Notice H1 Headings" would be its H1 heading.

An H1 heading is plain text that lives between these HTML tags: <h1> and </h1>

How can H1 headings help my search engine rankings?

Because headings are defined with HTML code, search engines understand that these pieces of text are of particular importance. You should include important keywords for a page in its H1 heading to tell search engines what the page is about, and help it rank higher in results for searches on those words.

Do my website's pages have H1 headings?

You can find out by looking at the HTML source code for every page on your site. When you're viewing the page, look for this option in your web browser. For example, in Firefox, you would click "View" at the top of the page, and then "Page Source." You'll see a page of code, and you can search for <h1> tags.

Because H1 headings are important and it's tedious to check them manually, we analyze these – and many other SEO elements – in our Site Report.  We'll alert you to any pages that don't have an H1 heading, and also any pages that have two or more (you should have one per page). We show you what your H1 headings say, and alert you if they're too long, or include anything other than plain text (they shouldn't). 

How can I add or change my H1 headings?

Your content management system should have a simple way to add an H1 heading to each page. Look for an option like "heading".  If you don't see it, consult the Help pages of the tool you use, or contact their support people.

If you can edit the HTML code for your website, you can add an H1 heading where you want it to show up, like this: <h1>What you want the heading to say</h1> You can also look for an existing H1 heading, and change the text between the tags.

Some website editors don't allow you to add an H1 heading or edit the HTML code for web pages. If this is the case, you won't be able to add an H1 heading. But you can emphasize a piece of text to make it look like a heading by making the font bigger or by making it bold. This will help your visitors, and it will be a signal to search engines that this piece of text is important, much like an H1 heading.

The Google Network is a large group of websites and other products, such as email programs and blogs, who have partnered with Google to display AdWords ads. Advertisers have the option of running their ads on Google as well as the Google Network for no extra cost.

AdWords ads are placed based either on searches or website content, so the Google Network has two components: the Search Network and the Display Network.

Who's part of the Google Network?

We are always expanding the number of sites and products in our network through our premium services, our online Google AdSense program, and Double Click Ad Exchange. Participating websites must adhere to Google AdSense standards.

Keyword-targeted ads

Besides appearing on search results on Google, AdWords advertisers are automatically eligible to have their campaigns with keywords appear on the Google Network.

The Google Search Network

Ads are targeted based on a user's search terms. For example, if you search for "Italian coffee" on a search engine powered by Google, such as AOL.com, you'll see related coffee ads next to the search results.

The Google Display Network

Text, image, video, or rich media ads are targeted based on themes in your keyword list, rather than specific keywords. You can target websites that have partnered with Google (display partners), YouTube, and specific Google properties.

• Placement-targeted ads on the Display Network: Placements are another way of targeting ad groups. By adding placements to ad groups, advertisers can choose the sites where they would like their ad to appear, or bid more for those sites when they're a match for the ad group's keywords. 
• Adding audiences to your Display Network campaign: Use remarketing to reach people who previously visited your website, and match the right people with the right message. You can show users these messages as they browse sites across the Google Display Network. Remarketing is a feature of interest-based advertising available on the Audiences tab.
• Display Network bids: You may also choose to enable the Display Network bids feature. This lets AdWords advertisers set one price when their ads run on Google and Search Network sites, and a different price when their ads run on the Google Display Network.

Setting where you want your ads to show

New campaigns that start with keywords are automatically opted in to distribution on the Google Network, so if you want your ads to appear on Search and Display Network sites and products, you don't need to do a thing. We recommend targeting both the Search and Display Networks. You can adjust your campaign settings to show only on the Search Network or only on the Display Network. 

Source: Google

Facebooks growth is slowing down and this is true specially in its US core market. This is to be expected as Facebook stabilizes and becomes a mainstream site in US market. In May Facebook lost almost 1 percentage point of visits dropping from 64.35% to 63.46%. But do not fear for Facebook as it still commands more than half of all US population. 

YouTube gained 0.56 percentage points moving to 20.50 percent of visits from 19.94 in April.

In May we got a new number three and four. After agonizing decline MySpace finally dropped from third place to fifth with only 1.06 percent remaining from its once dominant market share. This “once” was mere two years ago In May 2009.

Drum roll please, the new number three is Twitter with 1.15 percent by market share of visits. To get to this position Twitter had to pass Yahoo! Answers which lost ground in May.

Now the top 3 social networking sites by market share of visits match our perception:

1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. Twitter

Last month LinkedIn’s marketshare moved slightly upto 0.39 percent as its stock price dropped about 25% from the first day of public trading.

The chart below is in logarithmic scale so that the smaller sites wouldn’t just a single line around 1% of social network market share. Every month in the chart lists the top 10 sites of that time by the market share of visits. Please note that it is just a percentage and 30% in January 2009 is a lot less than 30% in September 2010. The gaps in the the lines mean that the site wasn’t in the top 10 at that time.

Source: dreamgrow.com/top-10-social-networking-sites-by-market-share-of-visits-may-2011/

The Social networking sites trend does not show any type of slowdown in the foreseeable future as many entrepreneurs are now using social media as a tool to market their business. Whether someone considers this paradigm shift a good thing or a bad thing, it does not reflect just how fast social networking is growing. Businesses and companies today are fully aware of the power of social networking and are putting resources behind it. This only enhances the future of this new genre and will continue to be a major force in any type of internet business strategy.

A web host is the server where your web site is stored. Generally Search Engine Optimization efforts overlook hosting features. But hosting affects SEO both directly and indirectly. The primary aim of Search Engine Optimization is to generate more revenues for your online business. Hosting servers affect user experience to a great extent thereby affecting the profitability of the web site. 

Effects of Hosting on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to minimize them:

• Spiders crawl web sites to index them. If your hosting server is down at the time the crawler visits your web page, it leaves your page without crawling. Consequently, no indexing happens and you lose an opportunity to get your site optimized. Check the reliability of your Hosting server.
• Generally small to medium sized web sites are hosted on shared servers. The server hosts other sites which you are unaware of. If any of these sites is blocked as a spammer and is de- indexed by search engines, your web site also stands a chance to go down in ranking on SERPs. Ensure that you do not share a server with a potential spammer. For e-commerce and other larger web sites opt for a dedicated server.
• Link Building is an important aspect of SEO. One common feature of Link Building is to have a network of web sites that link to your main web site. When spiders crawl a web site, they index all aspects of a web page including IP addresses. It is recommended to have different IP addresses for all your network web sites.
• Robot.txt file plays a crucial role in directing the robots/ spiders on your web page. If robot.txt file is set to disallow robots, no indexing happens. Most hosting companies leave this blank or does not include robot.txt.  Verify the status of your robot.txt file from your hosting service provider.
• Now coming to the actual user of your web site-the visitor.  If your server speed is slow, web page loading time increases and it is a big put off for visitors. Visitors bounce off your site in no time. Recently major search engines like Google have also started considering page loading time as a determinant of PageRank.
• Once you have zeroed in on your Hosting service provider, ensure that your subscription is for a minimum period of 1 year or more. This assures search spiders that your web site is genuine and not built for spamming purposes.

Source: SEO Pandit

Google generates these links automatically, but you can remove sitelinks you don't want.

Google claimed the number-one spot in U.S. display advertising in the first quarter, with 14.7% of the market ($396 million), up from 13.3% in Q4 2010. Yahoo’s hold on the market declined from 13.6% to 12.3%, or $330 million, in that same period.

Facebook, meanwhile, had 8.8% of the display market, or $238 million. Karsten Weide, IDC vice president and the author of the report, says he expects Facebook‘s share to overtake Yahoo’s in the third or fourth quarter.

Weide says the latest numbers reflect Google’s strength rather than Yahoo’s weakness. “They have a huge search network,” Weide says, “And anything you offer based on that is likely to work well.”

Google got into the display ad arena in earnest in September 2009, after its acquisition of DoubleClick. Since then, the business has grown rapidly and is now estimated to be worth $2.5 billion a year, including YouTube.

Other findings of the IDC report:

• Global online ad spending grew 14.3% to $18.2 billion in the first quarter.
• U.S. spending was up 14.2% to $8.1 billion.
• For the ninth quarter in a row, display is growing faster than search advertising. Display’s share is now at 33.3% vs. 29% two years ago.
• Google’s share of search advertising rose to 59.6% (vs. 59.1% in Q4 2010). Microsoft’s share was 7.9%. Yahoo’s was 7%.

Source: linkedin.com

We can define twitter as social medium, money earning medium, social communication medium, entertaining medium and so on.  These all definition suites only for who knows the tactics and secrets of twitter for business promotion. I would like to share some of the twitter promotion tips for your business.

Twitter Promotion Ideas:

• Create a twitter account with URL related to your business. Make sure that your business or website name included in it. For example http://www.twitter.com/embitel
• Upload image for your twitter profile and optimize the image using free twitter tools.
• Add your corporate business website URL in profile, so that visitors come to know your website presence.
• Promote your twitter presence by adding twitter link on websites, email signatures, customers newsletter and so on.
• Do not forget to include your brand name as the title of your profile.
• Use Free Google keyword tool to select keywords related to your business and add it with your tweets using the “#” symbol before it.
• Use your keyword in first 30 characters of your tweet which will be easily track by google real time search engine.
• Select some important keywords of your business and include in your “bio” section.
• Find your targeted audience based on their interest and this is the most important part of twitter business promotion.
• Use Twitter directories like twellow, Justtweetit to find your targeted audience in category wise and start follow them.
• Start follow the influencers related to your business or industry which makes you up to date with industry updates.
• Use twitter profile management tool like Hoot suite to manage your multiple twitter account, in case of various business.
• Use collaborative tweeting tool cotweet.com – Make conversation using this tool. It will bring more exposure to your business.
• Post tweets about useful links, resources, images, info graphs related to your business.
• Search the topic related to your business and talk to influencer.
• Send direct message to the people about your product or service. (People who is need of your business related service)
• Post new product screen shots on twitpic.com portal.
• Increase sales using twitter by giving special offers and coupons to your followers. (Use twtqpon app to distribute your coupon via twitter)
• Send your offers to your followers using twitter bulk message sending application.  Before sending direct messages analyze the interest of your followers
• Security is necessary for your business twitter profile and user strong password to protect your twitter account from hackers.  If you find any security issues, change your password immediately without fail. Do not link links send via direct messaged from anonymous.

Complete Your LinkedIn Profile: Before doing anything else, make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete and up to date. There is absolutely no point in improving your search engine rank if the end destination does not represent you accurately. I wouldn’t go too overboard trying to game the system, but search engines do scan the information in your profile, so make sure you are including the keywords you want associated with your name.

Customize Your URL: You can customise the URL associated with your profile to include your name, rather than the random sequence of numbers LinkedIn generates for you. URLs are incredibly important component of SEO, so this is a no brainer. 

Pay Special Attention to Your Job Title and Location: Your location and job title are the only personalised pieces of information provided on a generic search for your name on LinkedIn. There is not often a lot of flexibility in job roles, but perhaps think about how you can present your title in the most effective way to include desired keywords.

Include Your Entire Job History: People may be looking for you by searching for previous companies you have worked for. If these are not included in your profile then you may not be found. This is particularly important for people with more common names.

Specialities: Make sure you fill out all the sections. A particularly good section for including keywords is the Specialities section. Google does index this section, so make good use of it.

Join Related Groups: There is an enormous value in joining LinkedIn groups beyond SEO. From an SEO perspective they help by associating the name of the group with your search profile. Search for Groups that are aligned with your professional interests. The Group names will typically include relevant keywords for you.

Customize Your Links: Rather than the generic, blog, company website or Twitter links that LinkedIn generates you can customise your personal URLs to generate more potential Google Juice. This is a little bit involved, so check out this handy video created by Mike Volpe of HubSpot.

Answer Questions: I have heard it suggested that you can improve your search rankings by responding to questions on LinkedIn, thus creating link backs to your profile. I would imagine Google is clever enough to ignore this, but perhaps I am wrong? Irrespective, answering questions does raise your profile generally and is a good idea, so I have included.

Google has opened up Google MapMaker to all Google Account users to edit any spot in the United States. With the philosophy of "you know your neighborhood best," Google wants everyone to jump online to tag their favorite bike paths, coffee shops, college buildings and more.

Google Mapmaker is a product where Google allows the general public to draw shapes to tag buildings, parks, paths, rivers and more inside a Google map product. Mapmaker has been around since 2008.

To prevent spam and verify accuracy of the information, each of the edits made need to be verified by other Google users before they are made live. To get people to assist in editing, Google states that if you review some edits, your edits will get reviewed faster. If you don't want to edit, using Google Earth you can watch others as they edit live.

How To Edit

To make edits in Google Mapmaker, navigate to the location you want to edit and click one of the icons in the "add" toolbox. You can add a point, a line or a polygon shape. When you do, Google presents you with a series of fields with which to label your new location. These labels include name, street address, categories, web address, email, and many more context-specific tags.

Reference: searchenginewatch.com

301 Redirect: 301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently".

Below are a Couple of methods to implement URL Redirection

IIS Redirect

• In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect

• Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL"

• Enter the redirection page

• Check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource"

• Click on 'Apply'

ColdFusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<.cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.new-url.com"> 

PHP Redirect

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); 
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" ); 
?> 

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/"
%> 

ASP.NET Redirect

<script runat="server">
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-url.com");
}
</script> 

JSP (Java) Redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%> 

CGI PERL Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.new-url.com/"); 

Ruby on Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.new-url.com/"
end 

Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Redirect to www (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com 
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

How to Redirect HTML

Please refer to section titled 'How to Redirect with htaccess', if your site is hosted on a Linux Server and 'IIS Redirect', if your site is hosted on a Windows Server.

Source: webconfs.com

Here I have listed some strategies for developing a profitable AdWords Campaign

Make use of a Number of Market and Keyword Research Tools: Rather than while using AdWords Keyword Tool that everybody else uses includes other tools for example Word Tracker, Keyword Discovery, Word Pot and Thesaurus. Search for related keywords and misspellings.  You will find keywords that nobody else is applying for his or her AdWords campaigns.

Make use of the Best Keywords Inside your Ad: When bidding on the particular keyword is sure you include it within the title and the body of the ad. It’ll get bolded which makes it stick out amongst competing ads.

Create Different Ad Groups: Don’t place all of your keywords in a single ad group unless they all are closely related. Your ad group ought to be tightly targeted together with your ad. For instance “Italian red shoes” ought to be put into one ad group and “fashionable red shoes” put into another.

Test your Ads: Write 2 ads for the ad group and also have them rotate evenly to determine what one receives probably the most clicks. If a person ad isn’t performing well, delete or pause it and write a rather different one. Training to improve your CTR (click through rate). A higher CTR increases your conversions which mean you make more sales.

Switch off Content Targeting: Only show your ads on the internet search, Search Partners, Desktop and laptops unless you’re an AdWords expert. Switch off another options for example content targeting. This can prevent you spending lots of money and generate specific data associated with your ads.

Set a Regular Plan for Keywords: Calculate just how much you intend to spend daily and monthly. This can prevent you over spending. For instance should you set your everyday budget at $5.00 you’ll spend $150/month.

Set the Most Cost Per Click (CPC) for the Keywords: Make use of the Google Keyword Tool to see the typical CPC for the keywords. Bid above it if you wish to be indexed by the most important position about the page. Bid lower if you prefer a lower position. Remember you could adjust your bids after establishing your campaign. Also don’t think what Google suggests as frequently their suggestions are incorrect. Take control of the campaign.

Track Keywords: You should know what keywords triggered your conversions. I personally use Ad Trackz to trace my keywords. It takes only a couple of minutes to set-up and you will observe the recent results for each campaign. For tracking your squeeze pages or site use Google Analytics. It is a free tool provided by Google that tracks traffic, conversions and ROI.

Track Conversions: The conventional conversion minute rates are 1%. What this means is one sale per100 clicks. For instance in case your CPC is 30 cents, 100 clicks can cost you$30.00. Always work to enhance your conversion rate.

Analyze and Tweak Campaigns for Optimum Conversions: After letting your campaign run for any day or 2, analyze the information, then adjust your bids, write a brand new ad or try alternative keywords to enhance your click through rate (CTR) and conversions.

Over 75% of consumers use social media in some form, so if you're not using it you may be missing out on a big opportunity. Getting involved doesn't have to be complicated. Here are three things you can do to get in the game.  

Create a Blog and Post it With Relevant Content:

Blogs are easy to create and easy to maintain – with tools like wordpress or blogspot, you don't even need to consult a webmaster. The key is to create high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience. Keep it consistent and keep it real. Other than that, just have fun with it! Some suggestions for blog posts include:  

1. Industry-specific tips and insights 
   
2. Special offers or give-aways 
   
3. Analysis of recent news items 
   
4. Product tutorials 
   
5. Humorous anecdotes 
   
6. Interviews with employees, customers or partners 
   

Start a Facebook Fan Page & Update it With Relevant Content:

Facebook is one of the most popular sites in the world (along with Google). To get started, simply create a Facebook page where you can post updates, link to your blog articles, and receive feedback from your customers. As you post relevant content and interact with customers on your Facebook page, your fan base and your revenue will grow. 

Post Videos on YouTube and Post the Relevant Videos:

If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, a video must be worth 1,000 pictures (and 1,000,000 words)! Plus videos get priority in search engine results and allow you to show a little personality. Start with a company overview or a product demonstration and build your video library from there. 

As Facebook has entered the mainstream marketing mix, marketers are having to decide how much of their budget to divert from other channels into social campaigns.

Because search gets the lion's share of a digital marketing budget, it might seem like the most likely candidate for a cutback — after all, there's usually so much of it. But marketers might want to think twice before jumping to that conclusion, because it may very well be a blind leap of faith.

In the last year alone, the only thing more impressive than Facebook's growth has been the buzz around it. Users, page views, estimated value, and a Hollywood blockbuster all seem to point to "the next big thing" – something that all marketers should want to be part of.

In reality, Facebook marketing offers a very different value proposition from search marketing, and results-driven marketers can still get a much better return our of search than they can out of social.

Facebook: The Prodigal Channel

The last year has been nothing short of a series of achievements for Facebook — both as a social network, but also as marketing platform. Indeed, some of its marketing milestones have included:

• Pushing out Like Buttons

• Launching LBS product Facebook Places

• Launching Facebook Deals

• Generating nearly 25 percent of all page views in the U.S. — more than double that of Google and YouTube combined

• Launching Sponsored Stories

• Not to mention all the publicity from "The Social Network" ($96.4 million box office and numerous awards) and Mark Zuckerberg being named TIME's Person of the Year.

With Facebook also boasting close to 600 million users (or more, depending on who you believe), no one can deny that Facebook has become an attractive marketing platform. But there are different kinds of marketing platforms. As much reach as Facebook can provide, it doesn't offer the same kind of impact as search.

To that extent, Facebook and search offer very different value propositions. Indeed, comparing search and social is like comparing apples and oranges.

Search vs. Social

Despite Facebook's phenomenal growth and all the speculation about Facebook displacing Google and taking over search, Google (and search, in general) can still offer marketers a better ROI on their ad spend.

Granted, Americans might spend more than six times as much time on social networks as they do searching. But while Facebook's 2010 ad revenues are estimated at $1.86 billion, Google posted $6.77 billion in revenue in Q1 2010 alone.

Why is Google still raking so much more than Facebook? Well, part of it has to do with Google having already hit critical mass, but part of it has to do with the value that Google offers marketers over Facebook.

Search and Intentional Targeting

Google listings (paid or organic) are keyword driven (i.e., results are served up by keywords that are either typed into a search bar or exist on a page alongside AdSense ads).

As a result, Google listings leverage intent. Basically, when a user is searching for something, they are actively interested in it. They are already in a mindset where they want to know or have more.

And because these users are already interested in the keyword at the moment the listing/ad is served, this makes them a much more qualified and targeted prospect from a marketer's point of view.

Admittedly, keywords are one of the variables that Facebook relies on to serve up ads. More specifically, the Facebook algorithm looks at keyword themes that occur throughout users' social graph and therefore reflect their interests.

And as a targeting metric, interests do tell advertisers a lot about a user's personality. But they tell marketers nothing of a user's intent — their mood and what they're doing at that time.

Just because someone is interested in certain kinds of products in general, that doesn't mean that they are interested in buying any at any given time. For example, I might be a hot-rod enthusiast. But that doesn't mean that I'm looking to buy another hot rod, or can even afford one for that matter.

Social Intent vs. Search Intent

More importantly, Facebook ads not only fail to gauge what a user's current intent might be, but they fail to acknowledge what Facebook know a user's intent is.

Essentially, most Facebook users log on to socialize, not buy. In this respect, Facebook ads can make you look a lot like the guy who goes around a cocktail party trying to sell insurance.

Social intent is probably one of the main reasons that Facebook's average CPM ranges somewhere between 13 and 53 percent below the industry standard. Indeed, as ClickZ reported, Facebook ads get half the clicks of network banners and the average click-through rate (CTR) for Facebook ads in 2009 was 0.063 percent and 0.051 percent in 2010.

Conversely, the average CTR on AdWords is around 2 percent. That's 20 times the industry standard and almost 40 times that for Facebook ads.

This is probably because many search sessions revolve specifically around making a purchasing decision — maybe not buying right then and there, but deciding how the user will buy when they're ready. And when they are ready, there's a decent chance they'll return to Google to recall that product or purchasing decision they arrived at during previous sessions.

Context is Everything

Given Facebook's position in the marketplace, this isn't to say that Facebook ads should be ignored by marketers. Indeed, Facebook has become such mainstream channel, that it can't be ignored by certain advertisers. As this Webtrends study points out:

… industries that are fun to discuss with our network are seeing higher CTR. … Brands that are social get a higher CTR, which translates into better engagement metrics: Post Quality Score, EdgeRank, Feedback Rate, and others. In turn, Facebook rewards such behavior with a lower cost-per-click and greater visibility in the News Feed.

It's the marketers and/or campaigns that are driven by results, however, that should think twice before investing too much into Facebook — especially if investing in social means diverting resources from search. Search offers marketers a degree of intentional targeting that social cannot.

Social users are (possibly 40 times) less likely to be in a purchasing mindset. While Facebook might represent a great opportunity for brand-advertisers, search (whether it's paid or SEO) still offers a much better return for marketers who are focused on their bottom line.

Source: searchenginewatch.com

#2 Incoming Links : A link is a link is a link, but without the simplest form you aren’t going to do well in search engines. The more links you have the more often you are going to be crawled. It is also important to make sure that you have the proper anchor text for your incoming links. The easiest way to gain quality links from other sites is to link to sites to let them know your site is there and hope for a reciprocal link. It is also important to make sure that you have content that is worth linking to on your site.

#3 Website Title : Making sure that you have the right web site titles for your pages is extremely important. The keywords you place in your title are important in order to ensure that your topic is understood by Google. One of the primary factors for ranking is if the title is on-topic with the search results. Not only is it important for robots to index and understand the topic of the page either. It is important for click-through rates in the search results. Pay attention to what you click on when you are searching in Google, I know that I don’t always click the first results. Using great titles and topics on your site will bring you more traffic than a number one listing. Most of the time it is within the first page, but I skim through the titles to see which looks to be more on-topic for my search query.

#4 Heading Tags : When you are laying out your site’s content you have to be sure that you are creating the content flow in such a way that the heading tags are based on prominence. The most prominent of course being the h1 tag, which says “this is what this block of copy is about.” Making sure you understand heading tag structure is very important. You only want to have one (or two) h1 tags per a page. It is important to not just throw anything into an h1 tag and hope you rank for it.

#5 Internal Linking : Making sure that your internal linking helps robots (and visitors!) to find the content on your site is huge. Using relevant copy throughout your site will tell the robots (and visitors!) more effectively what to expect on the corresponding page. You do want to make sure that on pages you don’t want to rank in Google that you add a nofollow tag to ensure that the ranking flow of your site corresponds with your site’s topic and interests. No one is going to be searching Google to find out what your terms of service or privacy policy are.

#6 Keyword Density : Ensuring that you have the right keyword density for your page and sites topic is paramount. You don’t want to go overboard and use the keyword every 5th word but making sure it comes up often is going to help you rank better in search engines. The unspoken rule is no more then 5% of the total copy per a page. Anymore then this and it can start to look a little spammy. Granted, you aren’t shooting for 5% every time. It is really all about context and relevance” just make sure it is good, quality copy.

#7 Sitemaps : It is always a good idea to give search engines a helping hand to find the content that is on your site. Making sure that you create and maintain a sitemap for all of the pages on your site will help the search robots to find all of the pages in your site and index them. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all support sitemaps and most of them offer a great way to ensure that it is finding your sitemap. Most of the time you can simply name it sitemap.xml and the search robot will find the file effectively.

#8 Meta Tags : Everyone will tell you that meta tags don’t matter, they do. The biggest thing they matter for is click-through though. There will be a lot of times when Google will use your meta description as the copy that gets pulled with your search listing. This can help to attract the visitor to visit your web site if it is related to their search query. Definitely a much overlooked (as of late) ranking factor. Getting indexed by search engines and ranking well is just the first step. The next, and biggest, step is getting that visitor that searched for your keywords to want to click on your search listing.

#9 URL Structure : Ensuring that your URL structure compliments the content that is on the corresponding page is pretty important. There are various methods to make this work, such as modrewrite on apache.

#10 Domain : It can help to have keywords you are interested in ranking for within your domain, but only as much as the title, heading and content matters. One very important factor that is coming to light is that domain age is important. The older the site or domain, the better it is not spam and can do well in search results. The domain age definitely isn’t a make or break factor but it does help quite a bit.

Article Taken from dustinbrewer.com

Embitel has successfully completed the Webinar on Online Retailing using Facebook on January 20^th at 4:00 PM IST .

For Recorded Presentation File, Please Mail us at e.seminar@embitel.com or Visit @ http://www.embitel.com/Download_Webinars_on_eCommerce.79.0.html

The description tag should be a useful, compelling summary of your page content. This tag is often used to display a summary of your page in the search results, so it's worth making it keyword-rich and including a call to action.

Most search engines ignore the keywords tag these days; however it doesn't hurt to create one (if nothing else it's another chance to insert your keywords in the page). Some directories also use the keywords tag to classify sites.

Ensure that each page has unique description and keywords tags. If a search engine finds many pages with the same description and keywords, it can see those pages as less important.

Even keywords change as new phrases enter the lexicon and may begin to outpace the ones you were initially targeting. And if your corporate strategy changes, don't you think the optimization efforts on your site may need to change?

Someone needs to be in charge of monitoring your site. That includes an analytics solution and other monitoring tools, such as Google Webmaster Tools.

It's amazing how many sites haven't implemented an analytics solution or at least don't have one implemented correctly. Does your analytics solution track your entire sales funnel? Do you know where in the sales process you lose the majority of your prospects?

With those tools at hand, problems and potential opportunities on your site can be identified.

Anatomy of Google: How the Search Engine Works

Design and layout made from a description provided by the founders of Google, Lawrence (Larry) Page and Sergey Brin.

Dating from 2008, this paper presents a simplified view and in particular, the unit of PageRank should be developed into several units to take into account multiple criteria, including for example the user behavior.

The components

Crawlers : There are several distributed crawlers, they parse the pages and extract links and keywords.

URL Server : Provides to crawlers a list of URLs to scan.

Server Store : The crawlers send collected data to a store serve. It compresses the pages and places them in the repository. Each page is stored with an identifier, a docID.

Repository : Contains a copy of the pages and images, allowing comparisons and caching.

Indexer : It indexes pages to ber provided to SERPs (results). It decompresses documents and converts them into sets of words called "hits". It distributes hits among a set of "barrels". This provides an index partially sorted. It also creates a list of URLs on each page. A hit contains the following information: the word, its position in the document, font size, capitalization.

Barrels  : These "barrels" are databases that classify documents by docID. They are created by the indexer and used by the sorter.

Anchors : The bank of anchors created by the indexer contains internal links and text associated with each link.

URL Resolver : It takes the contents of anchors, converts relative URLs into absolute addresses and finds or creates a docID. It builds an index of documents and a database of links.

Doc Index : Contains the text relative to each URL.

Links : The database of links associates each one with a docID (and so to a real document on the Web).

PageRank : The software uses the database of links to define the PageRank of each page.

Sorter : It interacts with barrels. It includes documents classified by docID and creates an inverted list sorted by wordID.

Lexicon : A software called DumpLexicon takes the list provided by the sorter (classified by wordID), and also includes the lexicon created by the indexer (the sets of keywords in each page), and produces a new lexicon to the searcher.

Searcher : It runs on a web server in a datacenter, uses the lexicon built by DumpLexicon in combination with the index classified by wordID, taking into account the PageRank, and produces a results page

Source:  scriptol.com

1. Keyword as the link text
2. Link popularity
3. Domain Popularity
4. Keywords in Title
5. Trust a domain

Ranking factors for local results 

• Right (claim) for a Record
• Local reference of the address
• Relevance of the categories
• Keywords in Title
• Keywords in Description

Ranking factors for images 

• Uniqueness of the image
• Description (Alt-Text)
• External link an image
• Internal linking an image
• Image size / quality

Ranking factors for videos 

• Keywords in Title
• Relevance of the tags
• Link to YouTube
• Keywords in Description
• Ratings / Comments

Ranking factors for products 

• Keywords in Title / description
• Amount of price
• Size of the product
• Timeliness of the product
• Product Reviews

Ranking Factors for Blogs 

• Keyword in Title / Description
• Links to blog post
• Links to the blog
• Trust blog of a (subscribers etc.)
• Number of keywords in the text

Ranking factors in News 

• Number / quality of a news source
• News Article
• Uniqueness / links to the article
• Quality / length of the article
• Visitor/Clicking behavior

Ranking factors for Tweets 

• Keyword in the text / Hashtag
• Number of Tweets to keyword
• News of Tweets
• Number Retweet
• Trust (follower, etc.) of the account

Reference: vineetwaldia.com

Of link: In adding together to words and text passages should be regularly link other elements (images, etc.).

Link text: The link text should be from only relevant keywords, but also always fire terms, fillers and so on.

Link Decoration: The decoration of a text link (bold, etc.) the text flow of the linked page should be accustomed.

Destination URL: The link building should not only be a few pages (Home, etc.) but always sub-pages or other elements (images, etc.) are linked.

Link Position: Typical positions for buying and exchanging links (footer, etc.) should be avoided if possible.

LINK Environment: The environment of a link (text, images, etc.) should if possible meet the theme of the left / the linked page.

Link Title / Alt: The title / alt text of a link / linked image should nielmals only relevant keywords, but also always fire terms, fillers and so on.

Link Source: The nature of the sources (websites, blogs, etc.) should be in natural proportion to one another.

Link Triggers: As part of the social web is a reasonable number of links from user generated content (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) must be ensured.

Link Timeliness: Links from the defunct content with a temporal reference (news article, etc.) should be avoided if possible.

Link Distribution: The distribution of links (Domains, IPs, etc.) should be the natural environment of each page to be adjusted.

Link Equity: Too many reciprocal links (exchange links) may indicate a manipulative link building.

Page Rank: almost exclusively with a high Page Rank links can point to a manipulative link building.

No Follow: Please link building should be respected links into a natural relationship of follow and no follow.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that we’re making an important development tool – Google Code, the documentation on which developers depend to create these applications – available in five additional languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. We’ve identified these languages as ones especially useful to users wanting in-language, technically involved documentation about Analytics.

Whether you are a long-time Analytics partner/developer in Brazil, a systems integrator in China, or an applications developer in Japan, you can now use Google Code in your native language.

To view the language of your choice, just go to http://code.google.com/apis/analytics and click on the language selector to the left of the Sign out link.

Source: Google Analytics Blog

Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, Orkut, and others to interact on your site.

Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the Open Social developer community.

No programming whatsoever, Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect do the rest.

Know more about Google Friend Connect

The name "Google Dance" is often used to describe the index update of the Google search engine. Google's index update occurs on average once per month. It can be identified by significant movement in search results and especially by Google's cache of all indexed pages reflecting the status of Google's last spidering. But the update does not proceed as a switch from one index to another at one point in time. In fact, it takes several days to complete the index update. During this period, the old and the new index alternate on www.google.com. At an early stage, the results from the new index occur sporadically. But later on, they appear more frequently. Google dances.

Technical Background on Google

The Google search engine pulls its results from more than 10,000 servers which are simple Linux PCs that are used by Google for reasons of cost. Naturally, an index update cannot be proceeded on all those servers at the same time. One server after the other has to be updated with the new index.

Many webmasters think that, during the Google Dance, Google is in some way able to control if a server with the new index or a server with an old index responds to a search query. But, since Google's index is inverse, this would be very complicated. As we will show below, there is no such control within the system. In fact, the reason for the Google Dance is Google's way of using the Domain Name System (DNS).

Google Dance and DNS

Not only Google's index is spread over more than 10,000 servers, but also these servers are, as of now, placed in eight different data centers. These data centers are mainly located in the US (i.e. Santa Clara, California and Herndon, Virginia), indeed, in June 2002 Google's first European data center in Zurich, Switzerland went online. Very likely, there are more data centers to come, which will perhaps be spread over the whole world. However, in January and April 2003 Google has put two data centers on stream which are again located in the US.

In order to direct traffic to all these data centers, Google could thoeretically record all queries centrally and then send them to the data centers. But this would obviously be inefficient. In fact, each data center has its own IP address (numerical address on the internet) and the way these IP addresses are accessed is managed by the Domain Name System.

Basically, the DNS works like this: On the Internet, data transfers always take place in-between IP addresses. The information about which domain resolves to which IP address is provided by the name servers of the DNS. When a user enters a domain into his browser, a locally configured name server gets him the IP address for that domain by contacting the name server which is responsible for that domain. (The DNS is structured hierarchically. Illustrating the whole process would go beyond the scope of this paper.) The IP address is then cached by the name server, so that it is not necessary to contact the responsible name server each time a connection is built up to a domain.

The records for a domain at the responsible name server constitute for how long the record may be cached by a caching name server. This is the Time To Live (TTL) of a domain. As soon as the TTL expires, the caching name server has to fetch the record for a domain again from the responsible name server. Quite often, the TTL is set to one or more days. In contrast, the Time To Live of the domain www.google.com is only five minutes. So, a name server may only cache Google's IP address for five minutes and has then to look up the IP address again.

Each time, Google's name server is contacted, it sends back the IP address of only one data center. In this way, Google queries are always directed to different data centers by changing DNS records. On the one hand, the DNS records may be based on the load of the single data centers. In this way, Google would conduct a simple form of load balancing by its use of the DNS. On the other hand, the geographical location of a caching name server may influence how often it receives the single data centers' IP addresses. So, the distance for data transmissions can be reduced. In order to show the DNS records of the domain www.google.com, we present them here by the example of one caching name server.

How data centers, DNS and Google Dance are related, is easily answered. During the Google Dance, the data centers do not receive the new index at the same time. In fact, the new index is transferred to one data center after the other. When a user queries Google during the Google Dance, he may get the results from a data center which still has the old index at one point im time and from a data center which has the new index a few minutes later. From the users perspective, the index update took place within some minutes. But of course, this procedure may reverse, so that Google switches seemingly between the old and the new index.

The Google Dance Test Domains www2 & www3

The beginning of a Google Dance can always be watched at the test domains www2.google.com and www3.google.com. Those domains normally have stable DNS records which make the domains resolve to only one (often the same) IP address. Before the Google Dance begins, at least one of the test domains is assigned the IP address of the data center that receives the new index first.

Building up a completely new index once per month can cause quite some trouble. After all, Google has to spider some billion documents an then to process many TeraBytes of data. Therefore, testing the new index is inevitable. Of course, the folks at Google don't need the test domains themselves. Most certainly, they have many options to check a new index internally, but they do not have a lot of time to conduct the tests.

So, the reason for having www2 and www3 is rather to show the new index to webmasters which are interested in their upcoming rankings. Many of these webmasters discuss the new index at the Google forums out on the web. These discussions can be observed by Google employees. At that time, the general public cannot see the new index yet, because the DNS records for www.google.com normally do not point to the IP address of the data center that is updated first when the update begins.

As soon as Google's test community of forums members does not find any severe malfunctions caused by the new index, Google's DNS records are ready to make www.google.com resolve the the data center that is updated first. This is the time when the Google Dance begins. But if severe malfunctions become obvious during this test phase, there is still the possibility to cancel the update at the other data centers. The domain www.google.com would not resolve to the data center which has the flawed index and the general public could not take any notice about it. In this case, the index could be rebuilt or the web could be spidered again.

So, the search results which are to be seen on www2.google.com and www3.google.com will always appear on www.google.com later on, as long as there is a regular index update. However, there may be minor fluctuations. On the one hand, the index at one data center never absolutely equals the index at another data center. We can easily check this by watching the number of results for the same query at the data center domains listed above, which often differ from each other. On the other hand, it is often assumed that the iterative PageRank calculation is not finished yet, when the Google Dance begins so that preliminary values exert influence on rankings at that point in time.

Source: Google

The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.

Benefits

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.

Source: google.com/instant/

To make this easier to understand they have given some examples In their post on the Google Analytics Blog.

When you have a lot of data within an normal account, you tend to get given a lot of information like the image below. We have all seen it, the single visits that have 100% bounce rate. A lot of the times, this does not help you gather the information that you need.

With the new weighted sort option, Analytics took into consideration the number of visits for each row bringing to the forefront the items you care about.

Weighted sort is also available on other metrics including Goal Conversion Rate and % New Visits.

AdWords have included a handy video to explain further.

Source: atelier-seo.com

Creating a press release for a campaign or assignment requires thought and preparation, without the core fundamentals your release may end up right in the trash folder of your recipients email.  A well-written press release can be an invaluable asset to your company and the success of the content within the release you're trying to help generate attention for.  Here are 7 mistakes most commonly made when writing a press release that you can easily avoid to become more successful at pushing your product, website or idea.

1.  Lack of proper research.  Spend the time to read and subscribe to press releases not only in the niche you work within, but from some of the larger and more successful companies in the world.  Look to see how they are laid out, worded and put together and pick the best parts from each to incorporate into your own releases.

2.  Don't assume anything.  Your reader may not know what it is they are getting, and since your goal is to have your reader generate buzz to their readers or media outlet, lay out the specifics for them.

3.  Don't belittle or talk down to anyone.  While number 2 says to be specific with what you are writing, don't write in a condescending manner, which almost always ends in a delete from the reader.  Assume they are not a total idiot.

4.  Don't oversell your product or service.  The purpose of a press release is to put it into the hands of those who have influence and a crowd to share it with.  They are not the ones who will be buying or using whatever is in the contents of your press release.  Don't try to make them the buyer, rather look at them as yourreseller and present the information in the same way you would teach a sales associate how to sell to a customer in a store.

5.  Don't over-write or bloat the release.  A press release is not an article, it's meant to be informative and easily digestible; keep the fluff to a minimum and focus on the details that pertain to the service or product

6.  Do write a clever subject line.  Log into your email and check the messages you have deleted but never opened.  Chances are the subject line didn't entice you to open it.  Be creative and to the point with the subject line, the difference here can be a success or total failure and most new press release writers skip the importance to this small but invaluable part of content delivery.

7.  Don't jump the gun with sending your release.  Wait until you have all the facts, specifics and proper information for the contents within, then send it.  Don't send the release announcing a forthcoming release, which will break the trust and relationship with the readers you have.  You're better off sitting on a release for a few days then sending it out missing crucial information.

These simple mistakes can all be easily avoided, in turn you will have a higher success rate across the board, from emails being opened to media outlets picking up your content.  As with all writing, reread, proof and then read it again to ensure it flows smoothly and covers the exact message across that is needed for each assignment.

Google penalizes Adwords ads with poor click through rates.  If your ad is not generating clicks, it's making it more expensive for you to advertise.  Discover how to improve the click through rate of your ads.

Your Adwords ad is sales copy. You are attempting to persuade a potential consumer to make a decision based on your ad text. This is the art a science of sales copy. Sales copy can be defined as salesmanship in print.

The trick in Adwords is that you only have 95 characters to do it in (25 character headline + 2 lines of 35 character description). That is daunting task for any professional salesman.

The following tips can improve the sales copy in both your Adwords ads and in your landing page or sales letter.

Speak to the customer: A general rule of sales copy is that you want to appeal directly to the consumer. By using the word you, you address the consumer in a direct personal way, as if you were speaking to them. Use you in your sales copy instead of your product name or I.

Solutions: People buy solutions, not products or services Another general rule of sales copy is that a customer is looking to find a solution, not buy a product. A customer doesn't want to buy a drill, instead they need a way to make a hole. You need to sell a solution. A perfect example of this are Billy Mays TV commercials for Hercules hooks, Oxyclean, OrangeClean or any of his products. Did you ever notice the commercial starts by describing or creating a problem? The commercial then proceeds to persuade you that they have the solution to the problem. The commercials are like that because the method works.

Feature versus Benefit: You may be tempted to list a prominent feature of your product. Don't. Instead, make a list of every feature you can think of. Then write down the corresponding reason the customer would want that feature. You can often move from feature to benefit by using "what that means to you, Mr. Customer is". That becomes a benefit. Then don't describe a feature in your ad, but describe a benefit.

Use a Call to Action: A Call to Action is a sentence instructing the consumer to perform a task. The consumer will often be subconsciously persuaded to do it. A call to Action generally begins with a verb (the action). Here are some examples.

    * Click here.
    * Download your copy now.
    * Call now.
    * Get help.

Keyword or Phrase: Your ad will be more attractive to the customer if your ad text contains the keyword or phrase they searched on. Right away your customer will view your ad has highly relevant, because the keyword is right there. The headline is a particularly good place to have the keyword since your customer sees it first. This tactic is done automatically if you use the Adwords strategy from adwords-marketing-tool,com

Use Free if applicable: Using the word free is likely to increase your CTR. Make sure your landing page does freely give away what you promised.

Hype words: Hype words like amazing or incredible may help you attract attention. But be careful, overuse them and you sound like a snake oil salesman.  

Sense of urgency: You can create a sense of urgency with a phrase like limited offer. This encourages a customer to make a purchase on the spot. If you have the space available, you can describe the consequences of failing to act.

No risk: Consumers are cautious of being taken advantage of.  A money back guarantee or a no risk free trial helps persuade you consumers.

Test your ads: The only way you'll know if your sales copy is working is to test it. Split testing is the accepted method of testing your ads. You run two ads simultaneously. After the proper amount of time, you compare CTR or ROI and declare a winner and remove the lesser ad.

The personal details of 100 million users of social networking website Facebook are now available for download after they were leaked online.

Ron Bowles, an online security consultant, used a code to scan Facebook profiles, collected data not hidden by users' privacy settings, and compiled a list, which is now available as a downloadable file, containing the URL of every 'searchable' Facebook user's profile, their name and unique ID, the BBC reported Thursday.

Bowles said he published the data to highlight privacy issues, but Facebook retorted by saying the information was already public.

'People who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want,' the website said. 'In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook.'

'No private data is available or has been compromised,' Facebook said. The list has already been downloaded by over 1,000 people on Pirate Bay, the world's biggest file-sharing website.

One user, going by the name of 'lusifer69', said the list was 'awesome and a little terrifying'. But internet watchdog Privacy International said Facebook had been given ample warning that something like this would happen.

'Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it,' Simon Davies, an official of Privacy International, said. 'It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn't have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there's an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence, he said.

Facebook hit 500 million users in June this year.

Sorce: Yahoo News

Deliverability is getting the email into the inbox. Unfortunately not, there is a lot more to it than that. However there's no reason why you can’t have a deliverability rate above 95%. Your email service provider (ESP) should be able to provide this statistic for you as well as do the following:

• Warm up dedicated IP addresses
• Set up feedback loops for Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail                                                         
• Have your IP address white-listed
• Give you (as the client of the ESP) the option to move shared IPs if a bad sender is affecting deliverability for all

Email Open Rate:

An email open is tracked by a 1×1 hidden GIF image your ESP automatically adds when an email is sent. When this image is downloaded an open is tracked. Therefore, if images are automatically disabled then no open is tracked.

However, the open rate is an ambiguous reporting measure and is not always indicative of a good email marketing campaign. For instance, if your HTML email is designed with a good text-to-image ratio people can still read your email without downloading the images. In this situation opens are NOT tracked.

Email Click-Through Rate (CTR):

An email click-through is tracked using a redirect to the ESP server. This redirect passes information about the member id, mailing id and URL id which allows the ESP to record who clicked on the email, which email it was and what link was clicked on. Thus, the CTR is a stronger indicator of email success because it is a more reliable tracking method.

Email Subject Lines:

This is normally the first thing someone receiving your email will see – so make it good. One of the questions I get asked a lot is, “You have done a lot of testing … what subject line works best?” The answer: it depends on whom, maturity, how they got there, day, date, sector, and it also changes every time you send. The solutions… live testing:

• Select two subject lines
• Open a book on which one is going to generate the best open rate (not for money of course, sweats maybe)
• Send those two subject lines to 20% of your database (10% per subject line)
• Wait an hour
• See which subject line generates the best open rate
• Send that subject line to the remaining 80% of your database
• LIVE split testing, done

Email Frequency & Timing:

What day of the week, time of day, and how many times a week to send email is very important? The old school view was to send Tuesday morning … however that really is old school.

It will depend on many factors (as mentioned above – who, maturity, how they got there, day, date, and sector) and also requires testing.

The method that works well for me is to consider people’s behavior rather than focusing on the day of the week. Think about events that may change behavior. A great example of this is sending an email on pay day – this always generates excellent response rates for obvious reasons.

Basic Meta Rules for SEO
 
Title Tag: Title Tag is the most important part of a Web page to optimize. It appears at the top (title bar) area of the Web browser and as the first line in the search engine results page. On most search results pages the title tag is used as the main link to the site in the listing. Most importantly search engines use them to determine the theme of the website.

1. Place the TITLE tag within the <HEAD> tag
2. Should contain the most important keyword that appears on the Web page
3. Limit to 60-70 characters including spaces between <TITLE> and </TITLE>
4. Place the most relevant keyword phrase at the beginning of the text
5. Don’t blatantly repeat the keyword.
6. Don’t use stop words such as “the”, “a”, “as”, “of”
7. Should read well and contain a marketing message
8. Remember to keep your TITLE tag short and to the point.

Description Tag: Meta Description Tag is a significant part of a Web page to optimize and appears as the second line in the search engine results pages. Essentially it provides a brief description to the visitor about your webpage and sets their potential. Place your Meta Description Tag directly below the TITLE tag. The difficult part is optimizing this tag for both the spiders and your site visitors.
 
1. Limit the number of characters to 150 – 180
2. Blend keywords that appear on the Web page with a strong marketing message and call to action
3. Limit the use of stop words and don’t repeat words
4. Keep keywords unique to the Web page
5. Write in complete sentences and keep important keywords at the beginning of the description
6. Place tag within the <head> section of the HTML code 

Header (H) Tags: H tags are built-in purpose of HTML that shows the text within this tag as a header. They are assigned a importance (1 being the most important) and repeated on the same page. The most common use of the H tag is the title or top line of text that appears on the web page, the header.

1. Use H1 tags for the header or most important text of the page
2. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to control the color and size of the tag
3. H tags give some extra importance to the words within it
4. The format looks like this: <h1> Search Engine Optimization Techniques</h1> 

Alt (Image) Tags: Most of the People will like to include some images of the website. Alt text can usually be seen by hovering over a picture with the cursor in a browser. A helpful way to boost your search engine ranking is to include the ALT attribute, which means alternative text. This tag is read by search engines and they also contribute to the on-page optimization.

1. Use the alt tag on product pictures
2. Good place to strategically place keywords and boost results
3. Use the alt tag on the site logo – it should contain the company name
4. The alt tag is part of 508 compliance (accessible to people with disabilities)
5. Search engines cannot read pictures, they read the alternative text
6. Do not over use the alt tag
7. Do not stuff it with keywords 

The new system officially rolls out today for anyone using Google.com and searching in English. Not everyone will see it at first, but over the course of the next several days, Universal Search should be more, well, universal.

The move potentially should be a huge boon for searchers, while search marketers who have paid attention to the importance of specialized or vertical search will see new opportunities. To fully explain the importance to both groups, I’m going to work step-by-step through the concept of vertical search engines, how they’re often ignored by searchers and search marketers alike, and then how Google is going to make this content more visible through Universal Search.

In fact, if you are competing against other vendors in your market who are trying to do SEO effectively and they do not use Flash on the specific page in question for a specific keyword, I will beat you one hundred zillion dollars (That's a lot of Austin Power money…) that your Flash-based page will be significantly beaten by straight HTML pages on Google. Google can but Google doesn't. So that first annoying distinction is out of the way.

One other thing… You might be advised to alter your HTML so that non-Flash users (a.k.a., Google) can see your non-Flash content, and Flash users (a.k.a., most humans) see your Flash. This is technically possible, but – again – technically possible does not make it desirable. Google hates to see any website (potentially) show one set of content to a user, and one set to Google and in this scenario Google isn't sure that you aren't playing that game. After all, it struggles to index flash. So this scenario – while technically feasible – has some risk to it. It can work, and it may work, but in a competitive area, Google will probably choose sites that are more reliable / straightforward.

All those techies just keep getting confused between something that is technically feasible but not desirable from Google's perspective in this game called Search Engine Optimization. So what is to be done? 
 

Solution No.1: Below the Fold

Ultimately, flash is largely about images and in that sense, Flash isn't really conceptually different to Google than images: it can't really read them. So the humans need images / Flash for a website to be fun, exciting, and engaging, but Google can't really interpret them.

The Solution: use images or Flash for the humans, ABOVE the fold, and place keyword heavy text below the fold. This is an especially good solution for your home page, which has the most SEO power on your website. You simply cannot have a 100% image or 100% Flash home page – that is a disaster. So here is an example of a good design –

• Geico – notice how the Gecko image is at the top, and then below the fold is a ton of keyword heavy text about their business.
• Fillmore Florist – notice how their flowers and cool images are at the top, and below the fold is a ton of keyword text about San Francisco, Flowers, Floral delivery etc.

This sort of Images / Adobe Flash above-the-fold and text below-the-fold caters to both humans AND Google and avoids the Google no-no of showing one content to humans and another to the search engines. 
 

Solution No. 2: Gateway Pages

Another solution to the idea of having your Adobe Flash and having Google / SEO too is to have different pages serve different masters. The important exception here is your home page which must serve both, as discussed above. But beyond your home page, you can conceptualize some pages on your website as being flash with cool graphics and interactivity, but not very SEO-friendly… and other pages being keyword-rich text with little or no flash. Or perhaps the above the fold / Flash – below the fold / text distinction.

Either way, you conceptualize different pages on your website to serve different purposes, and bring in traffic from Google via the textual pages. That works too.

What doesn't work is to wait for Google to prioritize Adobe Flash as an SEO technique. That just isn't going to happen, as the busy search engine has just so many more keyword-rich textual pages to choose from. In a competitive market, Flash – at best – doesn't hurt you, nor help you with SEO. 

Author: Jason McDonald

The benefits can be recapitulated as:

• Chance to reduce costs of production by reducing overheads
• Chance to increase sales
• Chance to access new markets across the globe
• Chance to target market segments more effectively
• Provide more perfect information and improve customer service familiarity
• Improves the efficiency of the supply chain
• Improve employee motivation through more flexible working methods
• Allowing 24/7 access to the firm's products and services
• Provides convenience and comfort for customers

Email marketing is the most reliable and profitable method for generating leads and achieves the targeted visitors.  There is no wonder that this platform has become a very popular as well as valuable for Internet marketers especially for small business owners as we all know that our economy is going through the recession. This is directly affecting our marketing budgets. In this crucial time email marketing is the best option for all Internet marketers.

Consider the Following things when you are going to startsEmail Marketing:

• First start making list of customer for email marketing. You can start by first including your existing customers on your email marketing list later on you can add new customer to the list.
• It is always suggested to use a template. Create a template for your emails and use it consistently. Your template should guide you in developing each email's layout and design.
• Always try to keep your emails short and snappy.
• You should follow data protection act. It is very important to respect customer’s privacy. As customer privacy is the prime concern. 
• Do send quality marketing emails. Nothing is worse for your brand if you send poorly design emails to your customer.
• Give your email a personalize touch. Not to forget that people don’t like mails who is nothing to do with them.
• Always put attention grabbing subject line. Attractive subject line gets the attention of reader.
• Always monitor the performance of your email marketing campaign. And based on the performance of previous campaign improvise and plan the future campaign.
• Always make sure that your subscription procedure must be simple, the form is always visible on website. In short make the registration procedure user friendly.
• Always send relevant information to your customer. Remember then only you can target your audience and get the proper response from them.

Email marketing is one of the most powerful techniques. It is a proven tool for success. It will not only help you achieve your sales objectives but also enhance your reputation online, build a rapport with your subscribers, and establish yourself as an expert within your community.

Search Engine Statistics 2009

Figures are Taken from www.hitwise.com

If you consistently add new content you will not only attract regular readers but also the search engines. Try to add new content to your blog at least 3 times a week.

Optimize Your Content

Make sure you optimize the titles, paragraphs and links within your content. This means you must first do keyword research to incorporate keywords related to your content.

Include keywords in your tags

WordPress allows you to include tags below each post. Place your most popular keywords in these tags separated by commas.

Add Meta tags

Use the headspace or seopack plugin to add title and description meta tags to each post. Search engines place great emphasis on title tags that contain your keyword at the beginning.

The description meta tag is what visitors read about your site when they find it in the search engines. Make sure the description of your page will get the reader to click to your content.

Create internal links

A single doesn’t get much traction in the search engines unless you get links pointing to it. If you have related content from other areas of your blog create a text link (anchor text) within that post that links to your current content. Your post ranking will increase in proportion to the number of links pointing to it.

Encourage commenting

Include questions within your content and encourage readers to leave a comment. This increases blog interactivity. Readers will see that it’s an active blog and will want to read the comments and provide their own feedback.

Leave comments on other blogs

Find blogs that have content related to your own and write a comment that compliments their post or is in response to another other comments. With each comment include a link back to your own blog.

Use trackbacks

A trackback is procedure for notifying the original blog poster that you have referred to their blog post in another blog. Leave lots of trackbacks to popular blog posts on your own blog. This will encourage those you trackback to, to do the same and will increase traffic to your site.

Submit to blog directories

Submit RSS Feed to RSS Directories

Reference: drostdesigns.com

1. Attract a Large Audience

Video enables you to capture people who like to watch rather than read. This extends the reach of your content because you can appeal to visual learners.

2. Engages the Senses

If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then video does even more because you can create live movies with sound. This engages more senses than written text which only uses one medium.

3. Access at Any Time

You can view videos with all kinds of devices these days eg ipods, cell phones, laptops, etc. allowing you to access video content anywhere at any time.

4. Achieve top Rankings in the Search Engines

Google recently introduced Universal Search. This means videos now appear in the search results pages. For example if you Google “Mustang” you’ll see video listings of mustang cars on the first page of Google.

5. Become Known as an Expert in Your Field

If you consistently create high quality video content that your visitors want and need you will soon become recognized as the expert in your niche.

6. Repurpose Content

Convert your written content to video by talking about it in a video clip or creating a slide show then upload it to video sharing sites like YouTube. The beauty of this method is that you don’t have to create fresh content and there’s no need to worry about duplicate written content.

7. Easy to Create and Publish

All you need is a video camera (or just use a digital camera), windows movie maker software (already on all windows’ computers) and a YouTube account.

Article Taken from drostdesigns.com

First in Updations:  Be the first to update new things, news or any attractive information.

Re Tweet: if you think other people posts is interesting, useful or fascinating then Re Tweet it

Tweet a Joke Comment: Tweet a funny story or re tweet, but make sure it is humorous!

Recommend Product: Recommend a product or may be service, this will be a good way of build up the relationship between you and your followers.

Special Offers or Discounts: Tweet about special offer either it's your product or others Products which are having discounts.

Wishes: Don't forget to congratulate whenever you saw someone’s success on the tweet post.

Thankful Mind Setup: Thanking someone is another good way of build good quality connection.

Video Sharing: Share the videos which you think is humorous, imaginative, obliging or remarkable to the followers.

Event Publication: Share the event information like seminar, webinar, TV program etc.

Since your bookmarks are categorized into different TAGS, you will get much targeted traffic from people searching within a particular TAG. They will click on your bookmark link and visit your site. Your tags will rank well in the search engines due to the authority these sites have. 

Source: bookmarkingdemon.com

"Search engine rankings are arguably the most important small business marketing tool available today because it drives Web traffic — and potential prospects — to a small business’ Web site," a PRWeb spokesperson once told WebProNews. "However, because improving search rankings is desirable, achieving results can be both challenging and highly competitive."

Back in the summer, PRWeb shared a case study with us, involving a firm that typically sees a boost in search engine rankings and a 50% spike in web traffic after they issue a release. In fact, for one release in particular, the firm saw a spike of 400% on two different Web sites, and the firm doesn’t believe they were from the same users. They also incorporate social media tools like Twitter to extend the "shelf life" of press releases, and say that drives additional traffic.

"When we included a link to our press releases on Twitter and other social media networks, we saw these both expanded the scope of distribution and the extended the longevity of the announcement," the CEO of the company behind the case study had said.  "With other news releases we saw an initial spike in Web site traffic on the first two days and then it dropped off.  With these features we’ve seen increases in traffic up to five days after the news release was issued."

In a study from Arketi Group, also back in the summer, journalists were found to use the web in the following ways:

• 95% search
• 92% reading news
• 92% emailing
• 89% finding story ideas
• 87% finding news sources
• 75% reading blogs
• 64% watching webinars
• 61% watching YouTube
• 59% social networks
  

You’ve got to wonder if that social networks number has gone up by now. My guess is that it has, and social media has since become all the more important to search, particularly with the inclusion of real-time search results in Google and Google’s social search experiment (which may eventually move beyond experiment status).

Marty Weintraub, the President of aimClear shared some great tips and insight into the use of press releases for search in a recent interview with WebProNews. Among other things, he noted that when you do a press release, you’re "hitching a ride" in the search engine results and news results. You can use outbound links in press releases, and perhaps more importantly, you’re out there where the journalists are looking.

Here are some press release distribution sites (some are paid and some are free): 

• Business Wire
• PR Newswire
• PRWeb
• 24-7 Press Release
• PR Zoom
• PR Leap
• I-Newswire
• Webwire
• ClickPress
• PR.com
• PR Log
  

Beyond the distribution sites, don’t forget to include your releases on your own site. Journalists like being able to find the most up to date information from the source itself.  Earlier this year I discussed how some companies’ own press centers are holding back some marketing opportunities for them. Your site should have a section for press releases, and that should be up to date with the latest release when it goes out. You’d be surprised at how often these go without being updated even when a press release has been spotted elsewhere. It is also a good idea to link to any company blogs, Twitter accounts, or any other place where company announcements are made. 

Source: www.101techreview.co.cc

Marketers targeting business channels, for example, are often tasked with generating leads to support a long and complex sales process. This is why about a third of B2B marketers define a conversion as a visitor completing a registration form.

The B2C sales cycle is often short and sweet, and driven by an ecommerce website transaction. This is the reason approximately half of all B2C marketers define a conversion as a visitor who purchased a product or service online.

Digging deeper we find that the larger the organization, the more likely it is to define a conversion as a visitor taking an action, such as downloading content or completing a registration form. Smaller organizations are more likely to use a direct marketing approach, defining a conversion as a visitor purchasing a product or service online.

• Gives immediate online presence
• Have a new site? Have ads in an hour
• Start getting ROI sooner
• No ramp up time
• Great for seasonal items or time sensitive promotions
• Great for testing
• Easily test effectiveness of new marketing message or site design change
• Quickly gather feedback
• Regulate traffic volume
• Sales pipeline empty? Use PPC to push traffic
• Overloaded? Pause campaigns or cut back spend
• Have limited sales season? Saturate market while demand is high

The Robots Exclusion Protocol, more commonly referred to as a /robots.txt file, provides webmasters with the ability to provide instructions on indexing the site to bots. The file, which must reside in the domain’s root directory, serves to limit the bots’ access to files within that domain’s root directory. There are often a large number of pages that make up an entire site, but many of those pages – like registration, login, 404 error, privacy policy and order confirmation pages – should not be indexed by search engines. The /robots.txt file also comes in particularly handy for webmasters with a wide network of sites with identical privacy policies, terms and conditions or e-commerce sites that have checkout pages, shopping carts, etc.

Addressing Duplicate Content with /robots.txt

The /robots.txt file can also help to eliminate duplicate content issues that arise with blogging software, such as WordPress. With WordPress – and all blogging software, for that matter – content from blog posts is published on the post URL itself, but copies of that content are also published on category pages, as well as tag and author archives. This inadvertently creates several pages of duplicate content. Since duplicate content can have a negative impact on a site’s ranking in the organic search results, the /robots.txt file can help to reduce the potential for duplicate content that can adversely affect the site’s search marketing strategy.

Understanding How to Use /robots.txt

In order to function properly, the /robots.txt file should be accessible at http://www.domain.com/robots.txt and reside in the domain’s root directory. The file itself should be created as a plain text document. Do NOT use Microsoft Word or another word processing program – the standard Notepad program that is installed with Windows or SimpleText/TextEdit with the Mac OS work best. The file name must be robots.txt and uploaded directly to the domain’s root directory. The commands within the file itself can be as simple or complex as your needs demand.

The standard, generic /robots.txt file – one that does not limit access to any of the information in your domain’s root directory – would be formatted like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

In order to block bot access to the domain’s root directory completely requires adding only one character to the standard or generic /robots.txt file and would look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

What if you want to limit bot access only to certain subdirectories or specific pages of the site? Not a problem. You would simply add each individual subdirectory or URL to the /robots.txt files as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /checkout.asp
Disallow: /add_cart.asp
Disallow: /view_cart.asp
Disallow: /error.asp
Disallow: /shipquote.asp

The Robots.txt File Is Not Fool Proof

While the /robots.txt file does a good job of blocking a bot’s access to the domain’s root directory, it isn’t fool proof. Each individual page you do not want bots to index should also incorporate a properly formatted robots META tag. The standard robots META tag is configured like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />

To help to prevent the bots from accessing individual URLs, the robots META tag in the header of the page should look like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />

or

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow” />

The Bottom Line

A /robots.txt is a very useful tool and, unfortunately, an often overlooked and neglected aspect of web development. Now that you have a better understanding of what it is, what it does and how to use it, take some time to consider how your site may benefit from having a properly configured /robots.txt file. In the meantime, start checking out the /robots.txt files of the sites you visit to familiarize yourself with different configurations and uses for it.

For that you just need to open your FeedBurner dashboard, then click the title of RSS feed and select “Configure Stats” under the Analyze Tab. Now tick the options that say “Items views”, “Item click” and “Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics” and save it.

Besides the click counts, you will also know the exact source from where the click may have originated. This is an important data because it will help you to know if people who subscribe your feed in Google Reader are more engaged than you “My Yahoo” subscribers or vice-versa.

Traffic from the clicks inside your RSS feed will come under “All Traffic Sources” and “Campaigns” in the reports of Google Analytics reports. Select “Ad Content” from the category drop down in the traffic source data table and it will allow you to see the incoming traffic from your RSS feed segmented by the specific feed readers or the email clients.

1. Use keyword-rich titles, about 20 words long and unique for each page of your site. These titles are the first things that Yahoo! sees and are the single most important aspect of your site regardless of which search engine you are optimizing for.  

• Website tracking
• Adobe Flash rich media tracking
• Gadget Tracking
• Exporting Analytics data 

The Analytics developer documentation is divided into the following sections:

• Overview

  This section covers important technical concepts in Google Analytics that will help you correctly modify or use the APIs for Google Analytics. Here, you'll learn:

  • how the tracking code works
  • how Analytics accounts differ from Google Accounts
  • which cookies are set and for what purpose
  • how and when data is sampled
• Tracking Code

  The Google Analytics Tracking Code, ga.js, works with any web page or web application that can execute JavaScript. You can install the tracking code for your site with a simple copy-and-paste operation to enable hundreds of reports for your website traffic.

• Data Export API

  Use the Google Analytics Data Export API to download Analytics data in the form of Google Data API feeds. With the Data Export API, you can embed a customized dashboard in your website to display the most commonly viewed or requested page statistics for all your reports users. Or, you can integrate your Google Analytics Data with other website data that you might be tracking in a separate system.

Content Taken from Google Analytics Info

Popular micro blogging service website Twitter earlier this week announced that it had reached agreements with Microsoft and Google to integrate users' tweets into search results, creating a considerably changed situationfor search engine optimization (SEO). 

The battling search giants will both Google and Microsoft Bing have access to Twitter's vast store of public data in real time, enabling the users to track trends with a high degree of accuracy. AFP reports that, under the terms of a recently signed deal with Microsoft, Yahoo will also gain access to the real-time data.

Microsoft has signed an additional deal that will give Bing and, presumably, Yahoo access to user status updates on Facebook. This will provide SEO professionals with an additional analysis tool to help them more carefully craft site content for improved search rankings.

Rumors about the Twitter deal had circulated for weeks, fed by sources inside that company who said that a deal was close. Experts say that effective SEO will have to become more responsive and more content-based in order to fully take advantage of the new opportunity.

Now that you have a website or a blog wouldn’t it be nice to know where visitors come from, what pages on your site are viewed most often and which ones aren’t?  Would you like to be able to measure results before making changes? 

Having that information and much more is as simple as installing a small snippet of script on your website or blog and best of all there is no charge for this service. Hard to believe but it is true. Our good friends at Google have, for sometime now, made this available to all website owners. They provide the code, you install it on your website or blog and within 24 to 48 hours data collected about the traffic on your site is available in various reports in your Google Analytic account. This information will provide you with a good starting point to understanding how your content is performing and where changes are needed.  

Installing Google Analytics to Your Blog 

1. Type Google Analytics in your search bar.  Once there, if you have a Gmail account you may simply use it to sign up.  Otherwise in the center of the page use the ‘Sign up now’ link. Create your account.
2. After creating your account Google sends you an email to verify your address. Go to your email, click on the link provided in the email you just received from Google and you will be taken to their webpage. On the right hand side of the page select Analytics.
3. You will be asked for your website URL. They have ‘http:’ already selected so just type in www.yourdomainname.com (or .net or .info – whatever is correct for your address). Your Account Name should automatically become www.yourdomainname.com. Select the Country/Territory and the Time Zone and click Continue.
4. On the next page you will be asked for your Name, Phone and Country then click Continue.
5. Read through the Terms of Service and if you agree select Yes and then click on Create New Account.
6. You now arrive at the page with the tracking code and are given a choice of installing the Legacy Tracking Code (urchin.js) or the New Tracking Code (ga.js). The choice is yours but I would opt for the New Tracking Code.
7. Without closing the Google Tracking Code page, open a new browser window or tab and log in to your blog. Navigate to Presentation à Theme Editor. Once at your Theme Editor select ‘Footer’ from the list of Theme files on the right hand side. When selected the code for the ‘Footer’ now becomes visible in the editor. Scroll down through the code and look for the closing </body> tag.

    

   
   

    

8. Copy the tracking code from the Google Analytic page and paste it right above the </body> tag, just as I have in the above illustration. Notice that the Analytic code starts with the tag <script type=”text/javascript”> and ends with the closing </script> tag.
9. Look at the code closely to make sure you copied and pasted all of it. When done, select Update File, log out of your blog and close the window or tab. (Reminder: If you don’t click on Update File your code will not be saved.) The installation is finished but we need to complete the process and let Google know.
10. Go back to the Google Analytics window and select Continue. You will be taken to the dashboard of your Google Analytics Account. Notice the Check Status link, click on the button and you will return to the Tracking code page where you will see the status. It should give your Profile Name, Website URL and indicate that it is ‘Waiting for Data and that Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now’. At the bottom of this page ‘clicks’ on Finish to complete your installation. Congratulations! You have successfully installed Google Analytics. You are now taken to the dashboard where you can learn more about the reports that will soon be generated for you. 

Installing Google Analytics a Static Website  

If you have a static website rather than a blog the process is very similar but the Analytic code needs to be placed on each page you want tracked.  

1. Follow the instructions above for signing up for your Google Analytics Account. Then open your website files in your favorite text editor. Copy and paste the Tracking code on each page you want tracked. Insert the code just above the </body> tag.
2. After you have finished inserting the code, upload the files to your server via your favorite FTP program and you are set.
3. Complete the process of checking the status. Follow through the directions above and finish your installation.  

Resources: 

1. Google Analytics by Mary E. Tyler and Jerri L. Ledford
2. Web Analytics an Hour A Day by Avinash Kaushik 

By using the Yahoo Search Marketing account, we can advertise online, where more and more customers are going every day to learn about, shop for and buy products and services. Signing up for an account allows us to advertise our business in search results on Yahoo! and other popular sites in the Yahoo! distribution network.

Even if our business is a traditional brick-and-mortar store and we don’t sell anything online, we can still use our advertising distribution tactics, Sponsored Search and Content Match to attract potential customers to our business. Yahoo Search Marketing can be beneficial to most businesses, whether we are selling online products, promoting business services or providing media and information on our website.

Our Ads Can Display in Search Results with Sponsored Search

When we sign up for a Yahoo Search Marketing account, we can use Sponsored Search to create ads containing keywords or phrases related to our business that we think users might enter when searching on the Internet. When there is a match between user’s entry and our business-related keywords, our ads can display in search results. The user can then click on our ad and be transferred to your website to learn more about our products/services and complete a transaction. We pay only when our ad is clicked.

Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say we own a company selling the electronic products and our company’s website is www.electronics-planet.com:

1. We create an ad using the keyword “digital cameras.” The ad contains a link to a page within our website related to digital cameras.
2. Our ad can display in search results when someone types the term, “digital cameras,” or we can choose to match the term “digital cameras” to similar terms that a user may enter, such as “discount digital camera” or “digital photo.”
3. Potential customers who click on our ads will be transferred to our website www.electronics-planet.com.

Benefits of Sponsored Search

With Sponsored Search, We can:

• Put our business on the Yahoo distribution network and the most popular destinations on the Web.
• Get targeted leads for our business.
• Target our ads so that they appeal to potential customers who are searching for what we offer.
• Utilize numerous account tools that can help us to manage our advertising campaigns.
• Utilize account features to tailor our ad copy to user search terms with our Insert Keyword and Match Type features.
• Set spending limits for our advertising and marketing campaigns, as well as set spending limits and pay only when our ad is clicked.  

Social bookmarking is used in the same way that we would bookmark our favorite website; instead users store a catalog of bookmarks via a Social Bookmarking service. Social bookmarking allows other individuals with compatible interests to hook up browse and comment on bookmarks creating a basic but influential display place. 

Important Tips for Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking generates traffic from users actively looking for a particular product, service or a solution. The addition of several key techniques ensures that our website gains the optimize amount of visits, reinforcing our business brand and eventually spawn new sales.

Top 5 tips in optimizing social bookmarking to generate more traffic to our web site 

1. A well structured marketing strategy to promote our site and the goods or services what we are looking to sell. Bookmarking links to our website will drive more traffic to our site from our objective market.
2. Creating and maintaining interest is extremely important in attracting users to our site. We need to make the right connection with our target demographic in order to continue the interest. This means generating an imaginary profile of our target customer base and including information and features that would request to them.
3. SEO techniques, such as using highly searched key words, are crucial in allowing search engines to acknowledge our links when it hunts for specific phrases.
4. Combine SEO techniques with well written web copy. It can make a spectacular difference in generating traffic to our web site.
5. The bookmarking service which we can choose ultimately increases the odds of our web site being sighted. Links to and from popular bookmarking sites and the use of highly resourceful bookmarking tools can make a spectacular different in our online traffic.

Web 2.0 Services and Applications:

1. Blog Marketing
2. Wiki Creation
3. Social Bookmarking and Tagging
4. Social Networking Creation
5. Video / Multimedia Sharing
6. Audio Blogging and Podcasting
7. RSS Feeds and Syndication
8. Mashup Creation
9. Folksonomy / Collaborative Tagging

There are more users logging into Bing every single day. Some of the cool things about Bing is that it is QUICK and has a better USER INTERFACE.

However, there is a significant different in the way Google and Bing rank websites. If you are planning to optimize your website for Bing then you need to consider these following tips.

1. Domain Age – Bing gives preference to your domain’s age. Google on the other also gives preference to domains which are old.

2.On-Page Optimization/Off-Page Optimization – Google gives more preference to Off-Page optimization rather than on-page optimization. Bing on the other hand gives more preference to On-Page SEO optimization rather than Off-page optimization

3.Text Density – Bing gives preference to keyword density of your content. If you are targeting a particular keyword and your keyword density for that keyword is abysmally low then you wont be able to rank too high on Bing.

4.TITLE is more important – Although Google does gives preference to keywords in TITLE, Bing entirely focuses on TITLE of any given webpage to decide whether it should be ranking at page 1 or Page 8. Therefore make sure to add your important keywords in the TITLE. Also you should abstain from artificial keyword stuffing. Several keywords are semantically considered as same. Take for example, Search engine optimization company, and SEO marketing company are semantically connected with each other. If you are ranking high for one combination, you will also rank for other combination.

Source: webhostingtalk.com

Facebook Fan Page Advantages: 

• Looks polished; closely resembles an individual profile page
• Can include videos, photos, links, events, etc.
• Can be fed into “fans’” update stream similar to an individual profile update
• Can be given a customized url similar to an individual profile
• Hides the name and address of the page creator
• Offers options to add applications such as a Twitter feed
• Includes a “wall” similar to individual profiles that people can post comments on
• Can be paired with a Facebook Fan Page Widget on your site

Facebook Fan Page Disadvantages: 

• More difficult to manage conversations between fans
• Conversations are on display for the public to see
• Unable to convert Facebook Groups to Fan Pages if you’ve already got a Group page set up
• Until you have an adequate number of fans, you’ll be posting a lot
• A dismal Fan Page linked to your site can hurt your inbound links in SEO

Source: Zen Cart

Black hat SEO is about getting higher search rankings in an unethical manner. Black Hat SEO involves in questionable and sometimes illegal search engine techniques. Black hat SEO is about spamming. Black hat SEO focuses on earning money without even trying to provide any value to the visitors. Black hat SEO is primarily about cheating/manipulating the search engines with non ethical search engine techniques. It is also about misrepresenting content to search engines.

White Hat SEO refers to the usage of SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience opposed to search engines and completely follows search engine rules and strategies. White Hat SEO techniques include using keywords and keyword analysis, backlinking, link building to improve link popularity, and writing content for human readers. White hat SEO is also called as Ethical SEO in SEO terminology.

Advantages with WHITE HAT SEO:

1. White hat SEO work refers to legitimate and proper way of increasing traffic
   
2. White hat SEO work has been proved very effective in long run
3. White hat SEO work always focuses upon quality of web content
4. White hat SEO work includes regular tracking of visitors and always keeps them prepared for any sorts of challenging task
5. Most popular white hat SEO techniques are original & relevant content creation, article submission, director submission, request site feedback, create back links, prepare business blogs, create site mappings, RSS feed, forum contribution and so on.  

Latest trends in SEO

• Professional SEO Copywriting
• Image Optimization
• Content Optimization
• Flash Optimization
• Geographic optimization
• Blogging & Posting lot of Content
• Social bookmarking
• Article Marketing
• Getting Inbound links with targeted Keywords
• Video Optimization & Marketing
• Micro blogging like Twitter

 Link Building Tips 

• Try to link to your most relevant page when getting links
• Create the Anchor text with relevant keywords
• Don't be afraid to link out to relevant high quality resources
• Use deep linking strategies i.e. try to get the links with your inner page URL’s

Link Building Strategies

• Submit website to general directories like DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory and Business.com
• Submit your site to relevant niche directories
• If you have a local site submit to relevant local sites
• Join trade organizations
• Get links from industry hub sites
• Submit your website Content in Press Releases
• Submit Article Directories
• Exchange the links with relevant theme based websites

Link Building Advantages

• Increasing Link Popularity
• Driving Relevant Traffic
• Brand Building
• Improves website visibility in the search engines
• Website will get a higher ranking on search engines
• Get highly targeted visitors to your web site
• Google Page rank will increase
• Receive return visitors

• Link structure is important to the search engine spiders. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Each and every page should be accessible from at least one static text link.
• Create a site map to accessible by users with links that point to the important pages of the site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages. Then it is easy to crawl by the search engines.
• Content is the king for the search engines. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
• Meta Tags were very important to the website rankings in search engines. Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
• Broken links are frustrating for users. Check for broken links and correct HTML. Broken links are a sign of a poorly maintained website. If the user will find more broken links on the website, then he will not show interest to browse other pages.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number i.e. less than 100 links on each and every page of the website.
• Allow search engine bots to crawl the sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. If you use a robots.txt file, make sure it is correctly written because an incorrect robots.txt file can block the bots that index your website.
• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Avoid hidden text or hidden links like the links which are coming from the FFA website and blog comments.
• Submit your website to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, Dmoz as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Google use a huge set of computers to crawl billions of pages on the web. The program that does the Crawling is called Googlebot and also known as a robot or spider. Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.  

Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, content updates on the web page, image updates and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating Adwords service.

Google Indexing: Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. 

• Google will process the information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes.
• Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, Google cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

Sitemaps will helps to improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found in a single place. This is especially important if a site uses a dynamic access to content such as Adobe Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links. Most of the search engines will follow a finite number of links from a page, so if the number of links is very large, the site map may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site.

Sitemaps will give the hierarchical structure of the website by defining all the pages in a sole place.

XML Sitemaps & its Use in SEO

XML sitemaps have replaced the older method of "submitting to search engines" by filling out a form on the search engine's submission page. Now a days no one is submitting the website to all of the search engines. Search engines only crawling the website XML sitemaps and indexing all the pages which are there in sitemap.

Google introduced Google Sitemaps, and it will take the XML sitemaps which is developed on the webpage. Directly we can login into Google Webmaster and submit the XML sitemap in it.

Yahoo & MSN will index the XML & txt sitemaps, so we can easily submit our website sitemap in Yahoo search engine.

I am suggesting some of the free sitemap generators, which will help to create the XML, txt and html sitemaps for your website

1. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

2. http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com 

3. http://www.sitemapdoc.com/

4. http://www.pctimelimit.com/site_map_generator.html

5. http://www.automapit.com/

6. http://sitemapfree.com/

7. http://www.rapidsitemap.com/

8. http://www.sitemapbuilder.net/

PPC definition: Pay Per Click (PPC) is a method of advertising our website on search engine sponsored result listings where advertisers bid against each other to be the top search result on particular keywords. Pay Per Click is a pricing model that guarantees that our website will appear in list of results for a search queries that have been specified by us to the customers who are searching for that keywords. Our website ranking is depending upon the bid amount that what we are paying. If we pay high amount to the PPC search engine then we will get high rankings.

Process Involved in PPC Campaigning

I am including the top 4 steps that which are involved in PPC ad campaigns creation & execution

Keyword Research: Keyword Research involves searching for the best and most relative keywords those are to be focused for the website which we are targeting for PPC Ad Campaigns. We need to target for the keywords which related to our business & website services.

Campaign Ad Copy Writing: Good ad copy of advertised ad on search result will be the key to the business, whether customers clicks on our website or not. It is important to give more brief information to a customer that we are offering genuine products and services with the promise of best results/outcome. For this we need to write a good title and description which is giving good & brief information about our website business.

PPC Bid Management: Bid management is an ongoing process that is dependent on competition and on the pay per click process itself, which is based on a bidding system. Bids can fluctuate on a minute, hourly or daily interval and therefore the position or visibility of your advertising. It is important to manage and optimize against these fluctuations to maintain a solid campaign plan to get good results more than competitors.

Analysis & Reporting: Statistics tools and traffic tracking codes are used in the website to track the movements and time duration of a customer’s visit. This helps in daily monitoring of the traffic on our website. The PPC search engines will give the traffic analysis, budget what we spent in the previous days & conversions etc. So we can easily analyze those statistics and give some more push up to how to increase our business sales.

Main Steps Involved in Blog Optimization:

Blog Subject: Subject line and blog URL keyword is the most important to the blog marketing. If we select one of the best traffic getting keyword for the blog URL, then easily we will get rankings in search engines. Blog subject line will help to scrawl the blog URL by the search engines.

Blog Hosting: Host is the one of the important thing to get the rankings in search engines. WordPress, Blogger.com, Livejournal and Thoughts.com are the leading blog hosting websites in online. Hosting in our own website for the blog rather than the free hosting is the better way of hosting. This will cost money but well worth it if you want the search engines to find your blog. If you are doing the blogging for just fun, then it’s good to go for free hosting blogs.

Blog Posting: After creating the blog setup & hosting, then next step is writing the post to the blogs and for these very good keywords required. We are looking for is many people searching for the words but not many people using those keywords. When we find a keyword that around 4 to 10 thousand people are searching for but only 50% or less are using these keywords, then write the post around those words.

Blog Marketing through e-Mails: After posting the new content to the blog, then we need to send the updations to our regular customers. For this social networking will help to our blog information. Twitter, Facebook, My Space, Orkut, Linkedin, Tagged and so many more social networking websites there in online.

Search Engine Scrawling: If we update our blog in regularly then the search engines will scrawl our blog website. If that is not possible, then post at least 2 – 3 times per week. Search engines love fresh content, so the more you post, the higher you will rank in the search engines.

Comment Posting: Commenting on different related blogs is very important thing to our blog traffic. By using our comments, we can get some backlinks to our blog and also traffic. Make sure you read the post and leave a sincere comment. Blogging can be fun and also hard work. The more often you post, the quality of content and keywords you have in your post and the links to your post will determine how quickly the search engines find you.