Google search–Back with a “Bang”...

After some speculations over the last few about whether new search engine launches like Bing will have any affect on the search engine market share of Google, the answer is out—Google is gaining search engine market share again. China’s Baidu is a new entrant in the list and ranks at number 3 with a 7% share. Those who (pleasantly) fear that Google will become a monopoly in search market can breath easy, because that is what it looks like.

Online search market has sprung up 41% since last year with more than 113 billion searches conducted in July. The results show that each person who has access to the Internet, on an average conducted 103.3 searches in a month.

Bing is unable to increase its market share in spite of billions of dollars spent on its marketing. Microsoft has also launched Bing Visual search, which is a more interactive search in which you can search for something and get images for the same. But it remains to be same if it can compete with Google search + Google image search combination.

In the latest release, a Forbes study says that the best way to generate conversions is through SEO. No wonder, when people are using Google, it makes sense to optimize the websites for the same. Don’t you dare CTRL T!!

Hyperlinks in SERP descriptions-Yet another google...

Another Google plane just whiffed over my hair—The ever-changing Google search algorithm is giving sleepless nights to webmasters. But eureka, we searched for “limitations of Google analytics”…and I defied Archimedes principle…I did not jump out of the bath tub, because I wasn’t sleeping in one, but my eyes surely popped out and hit the computer screen.

Have a peek yourself

A hyperlink on limitations has surely crossed another border to provide users with more meaningful glance at the SERPs without entering the page. For a moment, the link appeared to be part of the site links, but there you go! As of now, we do not see if Google intends to have hyperlinks in the description for other sites (since we only see them happening for Wikipedia). Since we all believe –No, we know that Google plays it fair, it means that depending  on how Google decides to induct the hyperlinks in the text description—we might have something to look forward to.

So are they:

• Trying bringing more important links in purview of users?
• Trying to highlight some common important dictionary terms?

More comments are needed….

Directory submission philosophy...

You might wonder why lot of SEO services companies offer directory submission services. Majority of the search engines find you, is there still something useful about directory submissions? I had this doubt very early in my SEO ventures; not my fault, I did not come across something that could tell me the right things.

Philosophy: If you think directories aren’t useful, then you probably don’t know how to use them

Still useful? How?

• Directories can help to increase page rank and referrals.
• More links, so more chances of getting traffic
• Good directories are always valued by Google and other search engines

Philosophy: Best directories are selective—you can’t even bribe them!

Avoid very generic directories with lots of categories. Also, it is advisable to avoid directories that ask for reciprocal links. If you search around and find the directories useful for submission, you might come across few hundreds, and again, which one to submit to and not to, will be a question mark. There are few standard  “trusted” directories to which we can submit our case. Few of them are:

• DMOZ
• Best of the Web
• WOW directory
• Yahoo
• Blog search
• Bloggapedia for blogs

But again, our philosophy of being selective has to be kept in mind.

So apart from that how do you select a directory for submission. How do you find them?

An interesting tool called Web directory search can come in handy for such analysis.

The tool saves lot of time spent on searching for directories and also the time wasted on filling lengthy profiles in the blog directories, only to know that they are paid ones, or require some kind of reciprocal linking. Also, the tool gives you control over the regions for which you want the directories, so if your target audience is India, then you are better of submitting to the best directories that fall under that region.

Philosophy: localizing and narrowing your directories increases karma.

Like changing times, mantras change for time. Directories are no different and they too change over time. A Juicy link today may become dry after a year because of changes within the directory. But instead of canceling the link, nurture your link and renew it if it is possible.

Exit philosophy: Beauty lies in the eye of beholder…take your beautiful links out and show them around some gorgeous directories.

SEO in 5 minutes...

So you want to get into SEO and you have got no clue, what will you do? Raise your hands and give an excuse, or manage something quickly before you can spend some more time and learn the details of the trade? Business competency lies in venturing out into new areas, so if a client wants to give you business, would you want to stay away from it? (Unless the client is offering you a SEO project and you are into selling Dog-food). So, next time when you are in a business meeting and the client is talking about outsourcing the SEO project to someone; it would be better if you can quickly chip in, instead of dismissing the talks and thoughts because your IT off shoring department doesn’t have the required capability.

So you hear the word SEO—it is not the name of an intergalactic carrier—coming back to earth, it is much much simpler than that. Search engine optimization.

“What the hells is that?” you ask. Simple—If you have a website, and you want that website to be found out when people search for something on the web using search engines, then these [optimization] procedures can help (yes, it doesn’t mean that you can just have a website without relevant information and make it popular among people).

So you have got a web page? And what do you intend to market on that page? Think about it, find more about it using some search engine, and please write it down. With some hit and trial, you should end up with a pretty good title for the thing that you are trying to sell or market. Since you already know what you are selling, you might also want to write down a good description of your services using the help of a good writer.

Now it is time to get some dirty work done—if you see lot of things on the page that do not make sense, make little sense, or there are some supposedly flashy things which can be either improved or can be done without, then please do so. We are told that such things are not good for “optimization”—yeah, whatever the hell that might be. But, lets not be bothered by words here, looking at it (the site) closely, chances are that you might be convinced that such [irrelevant] things were after all hampering the usability of the website and also distracting the users. Believe me, you have already done few things that people on the SEO planet call “ optmizae proceduarae thy on-paiger”.

So do you know any other company that is also selling Dog food? Do they own a website? Try to share link with them. Is company too fussy about the dog-links? Simply go to a discussion center on the web where people currently are fighting about which dog-food is best for their dogs. Join the group discussion, throw a piece of advice, and provide your company address. Congratulations—you don’t know what you have done!!

This article is not a replacement for the huge information base related to SEO, but if you are just looking to know what is this so called helluva-SEO, then I hope it answered few of the questions. The other side of 5 minutes… to be continued

SEO and married life—Take two...

…And the honeymoon ends. The tremendous amount of activity for the client site (any site for that matter) at the beginning of the new SEO project is close to thinking “Is life really this easy? As they say–“honeymoon is only as good as the marriage gets”. But if you are ready to work it out, chances are that you will make it through and your SEO project and client might see a long-term relationship.

What exactly are things that make us believe that SEO and married life are similar? Here are few that we may find quite logical (Please don’t think of your wife or your husband as Google here):

• SEO is a process not an end result. It is true for marriage. Both need commitment.
• Lot of times there is a tendency to overlook lot of things. We know that lot of marriage fights occur over pity reasons. Similarly, it is common to overlook few things in SEO project, for e.g., “even Google’s home page has validation errors”, “It doesn’t matter?” But fact remains that everything counts.
• Doing the basics right—possibly applies to everything in life, and is true for SEO and marriage also.
• Marriage can have its ups and downs, so realizing that there won’t be huge traffics all the time is important. Adding quality content to the websites, and not stopping the marketing websites are ways to show commitment during the downtimes.
• Knowing things during the both the processes can be both funny and frustrating at times. But remember, perseverance will pay, and nothing can beat you when you are past that stage.
• No cheating allowed please! Google doesn’t like it, and the partners in the marriage won’t like it. So if you are looking for quick ways to find satisfaction, look at the screenshots (photo albums) of your website ranking in the first page.
• Nothing works like hard work, so keep at it.

Everybody knows that maintaining the positions in the search engines is far, far more difficult than getting the rank. Not ranking well in no way should lead to lack of enthusiasm to scale up the marketing activities. In fact, that is the time when search engine marketing activities should be beefed up. In contrast, what we get to see is clients backing out, wanting to spend less time and less money on marketing.

As a SEO company or provider of SEO services, it is important that we make client aware of all the possible scenarios that lead up to a successful search engine marketing campaign. Clients should be taken into confidence, should be made to believe that as service providers, we are not here only to take their money. After all, clients getting profits automatically means our profits.

So it is your call—do you want to be divorced?

SEO and married life—First take...

It happens sometimes that we can over-think our SEO strategies because we want to satisfy the clients—“don’t blame me! I am just trying to do my job”. That is ok, when your client and the manager are sitting on top of you like an Ostrich sits on top of its eggs, chances are that you will be even dreaming about trading links. Well spare a thought for the clients—they are spending their money, and the managers—they are taking money. Following is a result of my small intellectual ability being put under under-use.

So how similar is SEO to married life, or a “marriage-process”:

• Both start with a proposal: Marriage proposals can be formal and informal, but there cannot be a marriage without a proposal, isn’t it? Similarly, initiating a SEO project involves first getting the project, which essentially begins by a presenting a proposal.

An offering company gives a proposal to a client. Similarly, in real life scenario, usually, a guy proposes a female. Most of the projects don’t get past this stage due to various reasons. Lets not get into the particulars, but writing a good SEO proposal (promise it’s going to come later) is the first thing you have to do if you are seriously thinking about getting married.

• Both might involve a pre-analysis: Dating, in lot of cases might precede Marriages. Similarly, before the project commencement, a SEO consultant analizes the client site by perusing the site for any bloodstains, conspiracies, previous history etc. (meaning, checking errors in the site, page rank, and the popularity of the site respectively).

This is probably the only case where guy might suggest few things to the girl; rest is really history waiting to repeat itself.

If you have reached here, then, as a SEO consultant, you will be living the best days of your life, the days that you dreamt of for years before becoming a SEO consultant. As a guy, you are probably going to see life for the first time. And what about the client you ask? She is going to buy new offices, because she knows, ok, the client knows that the business is going to expand four folds hence after. Oh yeah, I am talking about the time when there is a tremendous activity for the client website on the web—In other words it’s called the honeymoon-time.

Mind you, honeymoon is no easy job; it does involve great deal of work on behalf of SEO consultant. So is the honeymoon period over-rated? No, don’t be bothered as of now; I don’t want to leave you on an unhappy note, but I am going to spoil the fun by just saying, “Success might not breed success”…to be continued

Get number 1 rank in Google… continued...

I think I dramatized the “don’t-do-s” –what should not be done when you’re looking to outsource your next SEO project. It is tempting to hire a company who promises a million hits in short span. Some of them promise really high rank with in a few months. But it is important to understand that ranking is just a number in the end; search engine page rank (for your competitors website!) is important, but an obsession with “numbers” can cost you business.

Remember, you are the best judge when it comes to selecting the right company; your prudency is at stake. Likewise, discerning what I mean and what I “really mean” is a test of how wise you are, it is really you, who has to know what I mean by “hurry up, get number one ranking…”

So it continues…

“We will use latest LSI techniques to get your pages ranked”. Really? So now you are going to tinker with a beautiful poem written by someone and turn it into a prose?

“Our key strategy is to out-think our competitors”—Are you going to invent a new language? That’s an erroneous claim.

“Free submission to 1000’s of search engines” – Not required really. That is like promoting a hotel by saying “we provide free air”.

On the other hand, there are SEO analysts and their managers, who will present a more down to earth and closer-to-reality proposition. In my experience, the clients in fact like such propositions, which have strong footholds in reality. A good company (an unbiased view, really) will deliver, it will promise you results, and you will see improvements in terms of your business visibility. But like any other business, the product is the most important part of the business, one has to realize this, if the product’s unappealing, then no amount of visibility is going to sustain the business for long.

It is important that businesses identify the scams and “potential scam” SEO services that are floating around the web. Not only do they end up harming their reputation, but they also fill up people’s heads with wrong ideas. Somewhere down the line, it is important to rethink the strategies that we use to attract customers. Instead of fancy hoardings, a good detailed proposal (more later) might do the trick.

Want a simple scam free quote for your project? Why don’t you find it out by calling our group of gurus? Don’t worry,  our gurus will not advice you a bad haircut!!

Hurry up!! Get number 1 ranking in Google in a wee...

Are you already ranked number one in Google?

Summer is gone, “so what are you doing to maintain the rank?” But nobody seems to ask that question

Tired of spending money on SEO and SEM?

Your search is over!! Now it is the people who will search and they will find you on the top.

We know exactly how Google’s search engine works. Get your website optimized from the very best—because very few know the secrets!!

Do u know the new techniques Google is using to index pages? Yes we have experts who can read sub-conscious of people working at Google.

You are only a phone call away from getting as popular as Angelina Jolie. So what if you are not a celebrity, you can start earning money like them with the help of our SEO services.

See for yourself, we guarantee search results.

If it is for these people—I would be able to marry top ten supermodels on the planet, you kidding me that you don’t want to be me!! If you happen to see any ad, proposal, website, which talks about getting you the…Oops! I mean, promises that their SEO services will change your lives, then you are going to bump into a no-go sign that looks like the picture as shown below.

Further, go no further, but I like to believe what they are saying, it’s question of number 1 rank.

“Well I got the hair cut alright, what next?”

“According to my recent LSI techniques for increasing search ranks, the hair cut was the only possible reason why we could not get your website to rank among the top ten search results. It should be fine now”

“I am running, I think I will get a great job, I submitted my resume to all the possible job sites which exist in this world”.

“But why don’t I instead start a company that competes with Google search engine”

“Please don’t ask me why my website is not ranked well, I don’t have time to work on my website”

Bottom line: Believe them with your life.

LSI check, Keyword Research, Competition analysis, optimized content Creation!! Submission to 1000’s of search engine, yeah, Well I have to hurry up, will attend to those words in the next post.

To be continued…

Outsourcing trends–A Google eye’s view...

In past one month we have done lot of posts about outsourcing, BPO, KPO, outsourcing policies. It would make sense to see the search trends related to our buzzword “outsourcing”. Google insights is a tool that has become an important decision-making tool on the web these days. While doing the insight search on outsourcing, it is important to note that world business and IT business has gone through transition, so the search results obviously would be responsive to the “changes”.

Just to put it into perspective; say for example you decide to buy a laptop, it is expected that you would search for various brands of the laptop. After sometime, it is expected that you will search for laptop accessories, so it is quite possible that in a region for e.g. India, if insight search displays lot of density for search term “external drive”, then it is not necessary that laptop sales have gone down, it can simply mean that people are more aware about laptops now, and directly visit the brand site to buy the laptop.

It isn’t surprising that India tops the list, with it being the number one outsourcing hub during the last few years. Lots of SME’s have entered into the ITO and BPO, people have known about it and lots of new players have ventured into outsourcing. The outsourcing has flattened the world so much that even students who have heard about the term have searched for it on the Internet. Before we know—the same students have got together and put up a company.

Most of the searches in this area in recent years are related to IT outsourcing. It is interesting to note that the most rising searches are KPO and RPO.

More and more companies have started venturing out into KPO and RPO. KPO requires lot of research, so searches related to KPO will be high.

Like I mentioned previously that the trends would depend a lot on the current scenarios. There has been a lot happening since Obama has come to power. It is reflected in the search volumes of outsourcing in the last one year.

There is almost a break out on the searches for “Obama outsourcing policy”. No wonder, while writing this, I had gone through many SERP’s for the same term.

Overall, there are no surprises. Outsourcing search trends are very similar to the way outsourcing industry is progressing. It will be interesting to see the search trends next year after recession waters will recede and policies will take more concrete shape.

…From BPO to KPO…. Revisited...

Follow up to BPO to KPO.

We see how BPO is giving place to a new name i.e. KPO. World economy is opening up. Outsourcing is leveling the playfield in an unprecedented manner. The changing nature of technical work, equal opportunities as a result of globalization, huge talent pools in Asian countries etc, are few reasons of the dynamism.

UK and US still the key players

Many see KPO as the next big thing in the outsourcing industry. Earlier post talks about how KPO is different from BPO. It seems most of the outsourcing is concentrated towards Asian sectors, which is largely due to huge English speaking population in these sectors. KPO can work on the shortcomings of BPO i.e. concentrate on other European and Latin markets and tap these highly potential areas of doing business. Since KPO is more bent on research and engineering solutions, the “cultural” and “linguistic” gaps associated with doing business in respective countries shouldn’t be as huge as compared BPO sector. UK and US markets will continue to be the main contributors in KPO till then.

What can be done?

So what can SME’s and large businesses of India (and Asian for that matter) do to take the next step for realizing the KPO potential? Few actions might include:

• Continuous focus on infrastructure creation
• Continuous focus on the improvement of skill-sets in the talent pool
• “Engineering value” brand creation
• Gaining domain experience by the way of relationships with the experts
• Leveraging the local industry potential or aligning them with future targets.

If the reports [1] are held in true light, the growth in KPO industry will be relentless in the coming years. Few highlights from the reports:

• Engineering services market to increase to $1.1 trillion by 2020.
• India’s share in the market to increase from 12% to 30%

Are you already considering a change in your outsourcing strategy?

These results will have huge bearing on outsourcing trends. India and the Asian countries will have to look into their plans for incorporating this new avenue. Few trends, which are likely to be seen, are:

• Professionals with diverse work experience will be high on demand
• SME’s will play huge role as the “critical size” required by the KPO would be very low compared to the BPO’s.
• We might see a deluge of acquisitions and mergers as companies will collaborate and try to workout a strategy that will help the companies to gain domain expertise, and also allow them to become “multi-service” companies.

Any bottlenecks?

Yes, low employability will be a concern. There’s a feeling that the graduates might not fulfill KPO industry’s demand. Very few graduates want to work in a knowledge space. Well we cannot coerce people to work in an industry. May be such things need to tackled at “ground zero”, where graduates can be made aware of the industry and its prospects.

So is your company ready to take the “B” to “K”?