Category: Strategy

Top 10 Local Search Optimization Ranking Factors

March 22, 2012

Local Search Ranking Factors depend on a number of things that businesses do online, to promote their products and services. David Mihm, who is a well respected Local Search Ranking expert, released a comprehensive list of factors, which he updates each year. Here is what we think about the top 10 Local Search Ranking Factors that he speaks about. Physical Address in City of Search It is very important to make sure that a business’ physical address matches the city in which the company must be listed. Having an address in London and listing it under New York City may not be a very great SEO technique. However, when a company may have operations in different cities but has only one physical address, mentioning that could be a good idea. Manual Verification of Business Ownership It is now possible to verify that your business belongs to you, by asking Google to send a postcard to the physical address which can later be returned to Google to complete the verification process. This service is available in most countries except a few. In such cases, one might want to contact other search engines like Yandex, if you are in Russia or Baidu if the business is located in China. The driving point is to validate a business’ physical existence in a particular city with the help of a search engine. In most cases, it just happens to be Google. Correct Category Associations While listing your business in Google Places or in yellow pages online, it is important to make sure that it is listed under the right business category. Looking at similar advertisements and listings could help you to decide under which category your business belongs. Traditional Structured Citations It is important to make sure that your business is also listed in traditional and conventional listings which include yellow pages, classifieds and other such listings. Getting listed on local portals and local sites help a lot too, and that adds up to the credibility of your business being important to the place you want to optimize your name under. Listing Company Address Though many companies frown at this idea, it is a very important step to make sure that your business is crawlable. When a business address is listed in a company’s website, it not only adds credibility but becomes easier for search engines to recognize your business is local. Well-ranked Company Website It is of course important to have a website which is search engine ranked. it must be well ranked in order to make sure that it is crawlable and listed high in order of importance. Following SEO techniques of keeping metadata clean and using appropriate keywords, not indulging in unfair SEO practices, and publishing quality content in a consistent and timely manner help to increase a site’s ranking. Moreover, getting links from higher pagerank sites would increase a page’s pagerank as well, ultimately resulting in better search engine ranking. High-quality Inbound Links This is an area that most companies find difficult to understand. Companies need to makes sure that internal links to their own sites are provided appropriately. However the links should be relevant and appropriate to the published matter. Company Phone Number A phone number has psychological implications of immediacy, availability and reliability. Thus, when you list your company’s phone number, it automatically helps people to recognize that your business is reliable in local contexts. The key is to have a local number and listing it in a manner so that it is crawlable. Using 800 numbers may not be advisable as they don’t give the local flavor. Local Area Code on Google Places Of course, any local ranking factor depends on your presence on Google Places. It is important to add a zip code or area code, as that can be searched by web crawlers too. by doing so, your business tends to becomes searchable based on exact location within a city. Location in Page Title It can be very useful to have the city and state in which your business is located in, within the page title of Google Places landing page. While address can always be mentioned within content, it is equally important to mention the city and state within page title. Apart from these 10 factors, there are a few more ways to improve local ranking. It is always prudent to go through all the reviews that your business may have received. More the number of reviews, the better it would be for local ranking. It is not necessary that one must have only positive reviews. Negative reviews could be used to correct what is wrong within the organization. Of course, requesting for reviews isn’t such a bad idea either if done in an acceptable and honest manner. Having a presence on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is very important. One could invite target audience to like a page or get them to follow you on Twitter. This could be a novel method to let people in your business’ vicinity know if you have discounts and offers. Most people discover local business with the help of their GPS-enabled smartphones and maps. Thus, optimizing your website for mobile devices and making sure that you are available on Foursquare and other check-in services may help people to find you, when they use Google Maps, or any other map service for that matter. All this might sound like work, but there is nothing better than having a strong local presence for the success of your business. It might take a while, but eventually all the handwork will pay off.

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Using Link Baiting for SEO

March 19, 2012

Today the Internet Marketing landscape is quite competitive and everyone knows how difficult it is get quality traffic. So Internet marketers and SEO specialists are often employing innovative ways to drive quality traffic and back links to their websites. One such technique of garnering back links is called “Link Baiting”. We can define Link bait as a “technique to garner back links to a website naturally”. In link baiting, we create a compelling piece of content that arouses people’s interest, so they wish to link to that content from their website. In normal link building we approach others to link to our websites or we exchange links with others, but in Link baiting the content that we create attract people and they are compelled to link to the site as they want to share it with their readers too. The goal of perfect link bait is to let people keep sharing it till everyone in the Internet sees it. A Viral link bait is quite useful and give result beyond imagination. Types of Link Bait There are various approaches the professional link baiters follow to create link baiting strategies (hooks). However these strategies can be broadly categorized into the following: News Hook This kind of link baiting strategy is dependent on the freshness of the content. You need to be pretty proactive in publishing the news as and when it happens. The news like a much anticipated product launch or preview of a gadget before it launch gets quite lot of attention in Internet community and can help you in getting lot of backlinks. The unveiling of iPhone 4 by Gizmodo is the best example in using this link bait hook. It has got 244K Facebook shares and more than 4000 back links from diverse domains. Humor Hook Put something in a funny way, make a cartoon of a celebrity or write a funny story or a joke and you will get lot of people talking about it. You can even make fun of yourself or fun of a renowned celebrity or the industry. But make sure your content is unique and special then million of other sites. Resource Hook Infographics, widgets and online gadgets serve as good link bait items. Resource hooks are the best and easiest link baiting strategy. There are lots of opportunities to do some ground breaking research and put your research finding in a nicely done infographics, which is enough to get you a plethora of backlinks. You can even write How-to-guides or an ebook and you will get backlinks for sure. Though this strategy is time consuming, it gives desired result. Attack Hook This strategy relies on negative views and comments to create buzz. But this can lead you to making few enemies for sure. Talking bad about someone or something creates a debate sort of thing and divides people into 2 groups who indulge in fighting among themselves and indirectly help in promoting the content. Political bloggers and critiques are good at this strategy. Incentive Hooks This strategy is employed by almost everyone at some point in time. Running contests on blogs, asking people to write review about your site etc come under this. When you give people something in return, they will never hesitate to write about you. Elements of Link Bait For maximum return from link baiting, the quality of content should be good and unique. It should be well edited and properly formatted. This will let others to skim over the content and decide to link to it. With that in mind, we need to consider following things: Headline: A strong and alluring headline is a must. So the first step is to decide on a catchy headline that will automatically divert people’s attention and they will think of reading. When people will link they may use this headline to link to your site which in turn will serve as an added benefit and will increase traffic inflow. Main Content: Remember that great link bait content cannot be produced in a few hours. The main content should be written thoughtfully and in an easy to understand manner. The information provided in the content should be thoroughly researched. The content should be well formatted and should be free of spelling and grammatical errors. Graphics and Visuals: Pictures speak better than the words. So complement your content with graphics and visuals. If you have an infographics in place for any research based article, do include that and talk about the infographics in brief. Targeted list: Before you publish the article meant for link baiting, build up a list of bloggers and web masters who will be able to help you in promoting by sharing the link bait. This way it will get more visibility and can go viral faster. Launch with a Buzz: Even if you have a great article, complemented with pictures and graphics, you cannot expect people to find it and link to it on their won. You have to put little efforts to make it viral. Social media is the best choice in the regard. Use social media like Facebook and Twitter and social bookmarking service s like Digg, Reddit etc. to submit the content and promote it. Make sure that you are not over promoting it, else it will be regarded as Spam and will be of no use. Factors for Link bait success The ultimate aim of link bait is to gain backlinks which helps in SEO. Because one of the prime requisite in SEO is gaining backlinks. The social media like Facebook and Twitter act as catalyst which trigger the link bait posts to be mentioned in traditional blogs and websites. That is when the actual magic of link bait can be seen. Link baiting is the natural way of building backlinks. Main purpose of any SEO campaign is to bring traffic to a website by employing various methods and link bait serves this purpose effectively. One of the factors for the success of link

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Hiring Your Next SEO Company

March 17, 2012

Gone are the days when only the bigger companies were investing for the online marketing to strengthen their position in World Wide Web. But now the scenario has changed, as Internet is reaching to more and more people, the traditional offline business is rapidly migrating to online business. Hence, small business like restaurants to individuals like doctors and lawyers are embracing Internet to reach to more and more people and spread their business. The primary essence of being successful in online business is driving traffic to your website and converting visitors to customers. The best and the cheapest way to drive traffic to your website is through Search Engines. The Science and Technology involved in this process is called Search Engine Optimization. The power of Search Engine Optimization in online business cannot be underestimated. Hence choosing an efficient SEO agency is a daunting task when every other person in Internet claims as an SEO guru. Choosing the wrong SEO agency for your business can be disastrous and can ruin your business. So proper evaluation as well as thoughtful planning while hiring an SEO agency is required. In your search for the right SEO agency, you need to shortlist a few and then study the shortlisted candidates in and out before finalizing the one who will be working for you. In first phase try to collect as much information about the shortlisted SEO companies/agencies as possible. Go through their website and read about them. Find out for how long they are in business and for how long their domain name exist. You can use web tools like who.is to find domain details. Check their clientele. All these details you can collect on your own without actually talking to them. In this phase you can again reject a few. While you are in the finalizing step you need to check the following things with the SEO company/agency to get a clearer picture about them: Reference: Ask them for reference sites on which they have worked. If possible try to contact the webmaster of that site to collect their feedback on the SEO agency. Also request for case studies on earlier project they have worked on. Proposal: Ask them for a pre-evaluation of your site and a customized proposal. Ask them to find out the issues related to your site. Most of the SEO agencies provide a readymade proposal which they send to all prospective customers. This kind of proposal might not be suited to your business type. Hence insists on a tailor-made proposal. When you go through their proposal, check if they are focusing more on keyword oriented tasks or the proposal is more ROI driven & takes into account resolving various on page & off page issues Work Experience: Verify if they have working experience in SEO related to your business/niche. Every business and niche needs little tweaking in the general SEO practices. So an agency having prior experience in SEO related to your business or niche will be able to do better. Time Frame: Ask for a time frame by when you will be able to see noticeable result. SEO is neither a week or month old project nor it is do once and forget kind of project. It usually takes 3-6 months to see any noticeable result. Business Practice: Ask them the business practices they follow. Some of the SEO service providers use unethical means (black hat methods) to rank your site high and they can boast f the achievement. But the black hat methods are sure to cause greater harm to your site in long run. So stay away from such things. Reporting: What kind of report they provide and what is their reporting frequency. The regular report with comparison on week to week or month to month basis will give you a clear picture of how the SEO campaign is performing. Keyword Analysis: Do they provide keyword suggestion and how many keywords they target? Make sure the keyword election is proper and does not look vague. If the keyword selection is not done wisely then whole SEO campaign will fail. Staffing: Check whether they have adequate staff. Lot of SEO activities like link building, article writing etc require manual work for better result. So the SEO agency should have adequate staffs to full fill the service quality. Also check for the knowledge level of the staffs and ask to interact with them if possible. Tools: Though lot of manual work is involved in SEO, some things like keyword analysis, back link checking requires usage of sophisticated tools. So the SEO agency should be well verged with those tools. SEO is such an Art that if implemented correctly by a knowledgeable consultant it can yield result beyond imagination. But a wrong step in implementation can cost you to lose your rankings and potential leads. The newer players in this field though charges less but most of the time they do not yield result. So hiring them will be of no use. That also does not mean that an older SEO company charging higher may be good. A good and reputed SEO agency will never guarantee and they always under promise and over deliver. So proper evaluation before you zeroed in on the SEO Company is essential.

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SEO Trends in 2012

March 7, 2012

The web has played a major role in expanding business today. And becoming visible to people who matter, is the priority of all business. Search Engine is the key for online visibility as people use Search Engines to find the relevant thing they are looking out for. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the technique using which the visibility of a website can be improved in Search Engine and rank it higher in Search Engine Result there by placing it on the FrontPage for a keyword. SEO helps in putting one website above others so that it will be noticed and the searcher will click on it and visit the website. When we talk of Search Engine Optimization, we keep in mind that we are talking about Google. With 84% market share Google is the leader in Search.  The business of Search Engine Optimization is quite fickle because of the ever-changing methodology Google employs to rank websites. In SEO it is difficult to predict what will work and what will not because of this frequent changes in the backend algorithm. What is working today might not be as relevant tomorrow.  So a good SEO professional should be well acquainted with changing trend in SEO and keep himself/herself updated with what is coming in. With that in mind we present below few of the expected trends in SEO for 2012. Humanized ranking Whatever automated techniques are implemented to rank sites, nothing can beat it when actual readers start ranking the websites. This way only the really relevant sites will be ranked and appear in the front page of Search result. Search engines like Google have realized this and have resorted to this way for ranking sites. So what is the implication? Link buying, swapping and baiting will rest in peace for ever. Social Media Social media in 2012 will have major impact on Search Engine rankings. The Search result page will contain more and more of social media mentions. The Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ profiles and brand pages will have bigger roles in search engine rankings. For this the SEO strategy should be inclined towards social media. Your presence in social media should be strengthened and enhanced. Share only relevant information in your social network to catch the attention. Also number of Tweets, Facebook Likes and Plus ones can have impact on the SEO. Posting quality and relevant information will draw the attention and will garner more likes, tweets and plus one. While searching for Abhishek Rungta in Google, the 3 results in top 5 are from social network sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Quality and not Quantity Earlier it was thought that longer articles with lot of keywords help in ranking. So it was a trend to write long articles with keyword stuffing. These are considered spam by Google with the recent Google Panda update. Many content firms have been penalized and are still trying to recover from the effect of Google Panda. Those with quality content saw an increased in traffic and rankings. Google is refining the Panda algorithm more with every updates, so that searchers will be able to reach to sites with quality content. So the SEO strategy should consider having Quality, relevant and informative content. Mobile Search The growth in Mobile usage has been tremendous. Introduction of Smartphone at affordable prices is strengthening it further. People prefer to search for information on mobile devices because it is easier and faster and always at reach and give better result in some cases as it employs localized search. So the mobile search market has huge opportunity in 2012 and in coming year. It’s high time the SEO professionals should start consider optimizing the sites for mobile search and the businesses should relook at their mobile strategy. CRO will be the buzzword CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. This means converting your visitors into customers. If you are running an online business, then you can understand the importance of qualified traffic. These are the actual visitors who actually convert into customers. The site needs to be overhauled to engage customer and spend more time on the site. The call to action buttons need to be placed at proper location. SEO aimed at converting qualified traffic to customers will be the order of the day in 2012. Voice Search With Siri from Apple and Google Voice search it is easier to see where the web search is moving. Instead of browsing through a lot of result people tend to look for a direct answer when they are searching for something. Siri has been able to address that to some extent in its infancy. It usually relies on few sites to find the result. So SEO professionals concentrate on how to optimize the site to be in the purview of those sources. In future this new search technology is definitely going to replace all other kind of search. Personalized Search Most of the search engines are now displaying personalized search result. The search result now shows result recommended by people in social network. This can be tested by searching for something while you are logged in to Google and while you are signed out; you will see 2 different sets of result. With recent release of Google’s Search plus Your World, the personalized search has gone to a higher level. Decline CTR for Top Rank A study shows that In 2006, a no.1 rank in Search result used to enjoy a CTR of more than 42%, which declined to 34.5% in 2010 and in 2011 further down to 18.2%. This decline is due to many factors like organization of Search result page, introduction of search technology like Universal Search and Instant search. SEO should digest this hard fact that the value of top ranking is going to decline further. Rich Snippet Snippets are the 2 lines of text that appear below the site Title on a search result page. This is very important, as it provides a gist

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Intellectual Property and Outsourcing

Intellectual Property and Outsourcing

August 3, 2006

Being worried about your intellectual property while outsourcing your project makes a lot of sense. After all, this is what you are paying to get developed, right?  So let’s first understand what exactly IP covers: Patents i.e. Inventions registered with government which will prevent anyone else from manufacturing or marketing it Trademarks i.e. Name, Phrase, Sounds and Symbols which distinguishes your product and services Copyrights i.e. Expressions of ideas but not the idea itself Trade Secret i.e. Any formula, pattern, device or compilation of data that gives your company an advantage over competitors is a trade secret Let’s examine how your intellectual property can come under attack: Immoral Employees Employees who is working on your project might not stay with the company forever. Once they are gone, they can sell the property or use (read as “reuse”) it in the next organization. Immoral Companies The vendor may themselves feel welcomed to use the work for their own benefit i.e. launches a competing product at lower price. Act of Theft A hack or theft of vendor’s servers or storage devices may make everything available to the entire world. How do we protect your IP? 1. Signed Agreement with your organization We sign an agreement with your organization that grants you full, exclusive and irrevocable rights to the IP. This agreement is only subject to one clause i.e. there should not be any outstanding money against your account. 2. Signed Agreement with Employees Each employee at Indus signs an agreement which basically ensures that any work product at Indus cannot be used outside our organization. In case of a breach of such agreement, we can proceed immediately with legal action. 3. Secured Infrastructure Indus employs fulltime in-house system administrators who ensure that our staging servers both in USA and India are monitored 24/7 for its usage. The servers are also physically secured.  Thus, go ahead and outsource in peace!

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