Ace2Three offers free Online Rummy - Click to play

Killer Resource - Part 2

2010-12-23T09:32:00.000-08:00

Theory of Constraints (TOC)
Blue Ocean Strategy

Strathclyde MBA Students donate for Haiti Earthquake

2010-02-09T10:27:00.000-08:00

MBA Students of University of Strathclyde Business School gave donations to the victims of Haiti Earthquake. This even was initiated by Ibrahim Dikko. Thanks for all the contributions made.

Scottish Institute for Enterprise (SIE) Competition

2010-02-09T10:21:00.000-08:00

Scottish Institute for Enterprise (SIE) Scotland has conducted a competition on New Ideas and New Ventures. It is a good even where people students of all ages from various origins participated in the competition.

Scottish MBA Fair at Strathclyde Business School

2010-02-05T16:09:00.001-08:00

The Scottish MBA fair organized at University of Strathclyde Business School on 5th Feb 2010. Participating students were from various Business Schools, Strathclyde Business School, University of Newcastle MBA, University of Glasgow MBA, Edinburgh Business School

Pharma and Health Care Market a Glance

2010-02-01T15:30:00.000-08:00

Global Pharmaceutical industry is expected to grow by $929 bn by 2012 as per the URCH forecasts. The rate of growth of the industry is still in double figures at 10.7%. Most of the growth seen in developing economies like China, Brazil and India by creating strong sales as a result of new innovative ideas and research.

In the USA alone the research and development of Pharma companies has been on a upward trend. The pharma and health care bug has also bitten the internet giants like Google and Microsoft. In 2007 Microsoft launched Microsoft Health Vault which deals with the integration of Health Plans, Employees, Health and Fitness Device Manufactures, Laboratories, Hospitals, Physicians and other Health care associations.
Google has also come out with a similar website called Google Health which maintains the patients medical records, Personalized health services and listing the Doctors in USA based on name, location and speciality.

In Europe, France, UK and constitute about half of the European market in pharma. With the growth of average life expectancy in Europe, the annual health care expenditure as a percentage of GDP is also increasing. The health insurance in Europe is also a big Puzzle. The out of pocket expenditure is decreasing, the governments are investing heavy in health care sectors in their respective countries.

References:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/76xx/doc7615/10-02-DrugR-D.pdf
www.eaepc.org/admin/files/eaepc_paper_on_r&d_debate.doc
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/76xx/doc7615/10-02-DrugR-D.pdf
http://www.csef.it/WP/wp221.pdf

MBA Student's, Killer Resources

2010-01-27T13:20:00.000-08:00

MBA Admissions

Stanford MBA Admissions Blog
Harvard MBA Admissions Blog
Wharton Business School MBA Admissions Blog
London Business School MBA Admission Blog
Berkeley Hass MBA Blog
ISB Admissions

MBA Rankings

Financial Times Global MBA rankings
Which MBA by Economist
Wall Street MBA Rankings (Old)
Business Week MBA Rankings
Forbes Business School Rankings

Business School Blogs

Knowledge @ Wharton
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
W.P. Carey School of Business
Emory Goizueta Business School
INSEAD Business School
ISB Insight
Kellogg Insight - Focus on Research

Business School Online Magazines

Harvard Business Review
Economist Business Education
Financial Times Business Education
Business Week - Business Schools
Wall Street Business Schools
Times Online UK Business Education

Video Channels

ISB Channel
Yale Courses
IMD MBA Network
UNC Kenan Flagler Business School
UNSW Australia
London Business Forum
Cass Business School
INSEAD official Channel
Wharton Business School
Katz Business School
BBC World Wide
Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner
FT Leadership
Google Business Channel
United Nations Channel
World Economic Forum
Gartner Video's
Forrester Research Channel
TNS Global Research
Institute of Corporate Ethics
Social Capital Markets
Patrick Dixon Channel
Carnfield knowledge Interchange
Booz Allen Hamilton
Darden School of Business

Other Useful Sites

Times Business Case Studies
Business In Community
Industry Market Research
1000 Ventures
Business Strategy Success

Scenario Planning

Hexagons for systems thinking
Collins Center
kenya Scenarios

Ipad Another Money Machine for Apple?

2010-01-27T12:37:00.000-08:00

With the extraordinary success of Iphone, Ipod and MAC, Apple is now stepping into a new world of tablet pc market. With the Q4 earning of $1.67 bn majorly from Mac and Iphone sales, Ipad has hit the market. The official video of Ipad has been released.

Ipad is the combination of Iphone and Mac. Its slim. Its gives awesome user experience. This can be handy and is expected to create a new benchmark in the gadget industry.

Guess what could be the new business we can get into. You are right building the Ipad applications. Big future definitely. But, I can also see that there are lot many questions that arise for me. what could be the future of Smart phones. We are almost in a diploma that Desktops will be replaced by smart phones, and the smart phone wars between Google and Apple. And now comes the Ipad. Whats the future of Amazon Kindle?
Well Lets wait and see what happens.

References:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/01/apple_tablet_perspectives_from.html
http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2010/01/ft-techtalk-apples-latest-creation-live-blog/

The Nike Story - Innovation Management

2009-08-22T11:58:00.000-07:00

I have seen this Video of Nike. The Video is very impressive, especially the companies strategies on how they started and how Nike slowly went to capture region by region all around the world. Each step of Nike added to their success rate.

Endorsements with Micheal Jordan and the shoe series named Jordon Air was a record breaking his. The research constantly comming up with latest innovations which was accepted by different demographies of people all over the geography. Their advertising added to their product as well where many of the advertisements received Emmy Awards. Watch the Video of Innovation Management of Nike

Online Advertising - Reach Vs. Cost

2009-05-19T04:22:00.000-07:00

In my opinion the above figure is a vague picture of the Cost Vs. Reach for Advertising over Internet. There are emerging mediums like Social Media which may be better proving than SEO for in some specific Industry.

PPC Advertising has always proved low cost and high reach, specially talking about Google Search and Content Network. The usage of Social media has been High specially in the recent times. In my experience Social media has not being effective taking into considerations the number of Conversions/Sales.

Employee First Customer Second by HCL

2009-02-11T22:09:00.001-08:00

This is a good concept, HCL is talking about "Employee First Customer Second" is a philopspohy at HCL tech. This is a good concept, HCL is talking about. Having employee on top and the customer second, I feel is like giving the total responsibility of the customer in the hands of employees by tapping the employees. As someone said, employees are impetus to organization.

Employee First Customer Second

View more presentations from Hcl Tech. (tags: first modern)

Maximize ROI through Email Marketing

2009-01-03T02:26:00.000-08:00

Email marketing has been one of the best and cost effective methods of internet marketing. E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. Let’s go through the stats of what few are saying about the ROI of Email marketing.

Email presently generates 21.6% of total revenue from campaigns. - Direct Marketing Association "The Integrated Marketing Media Mix" (2008)
For every dollar spent on email marketing in 2007, marketers can expect an estimated $48.29 ROI. - DMA (2007)
The email marketing industry is a $3 billion industry in the U.S. in 2007 - $456 million for email-generated advertising revenue, $1.15 billion for all the technology, agency, consultant, service providers out there, and $1.35 billion for the lead-gen portion. Bill McCloskey, EmailInsider (2007)

Let’s now get into the details of how to maximize ROI through Email Marketing. There are few points to be considered to get the maximum out of the Email Marketing campaign that we do. Let’s go through them one by one.

1. Build and Manage lists:
a) Cleaning and analyzing the mailing list is very important as process to manage and build an effective mailing list as we receive a unsolicited, incorrect, out-of-date or duplicated addresses
b) Divide your signup lists in to two categories and retail the relevant segments. Segment your list based on email and Web behavior such as which links recipients clicked on or what actions they've taken on your Web site.
c) Maintain Quality email list over size. Analyze and filter your lists regularly to maintain customer value and activity levels.

2. Use Image tags:
Using image tag for the HTML mailer. Users who use dial up connections or other slow connections will not view your images quickly. Also, email services providers like Google, Yahoo, AOL and etc have images in the mails disabled as default, in such cases when mouse is rolled over Image tags will help the text description to be displayed.

3. Avoid spammy words:
Make your mailers professional and avoid using spammy words in both subject and in the content. Also, avoid using the special characters and Capital letters where it is unnecessary.

4. Comply with CAN SPAM:
a) Review your company's email marketing programs to ensure that they comply with the content and notification requirements and involve your legal counsel as appropriate.
b) Add a postal mailing address to all of your commercial emails.
c) Review and test your opt-out/unsubscribe language and process. Make sure it's clear, simple and actually works.
d) Ensure that all opt-out requests are honored within ten business days of receipt.

5. Manage Bounces:
a) Its recommended that you retry email bounces not more than 3 times.
b) Remove hard bounces from your email list
c) Minimize incorrect and false addresses.
d) Monitor bounce rates continually, and establish a benchmark. Analyze the cause, and take appropriate action when a message lies outside of the norm.

6. Optimize Landing Pages
A strong message always maximizes your ROI. Have a appropriate and good landing page, that makes it easy for customers to take the desired action. Use web Analytics tools to find out what visitors are doing and what pages they are visiting. Consider that, if the click rates for a campaign are strong, but your orders and conversion rate are low, then your visitors are hitting the landing page and then disappearing.

7. Shorter subject lines
Have your subject lines in such a way that the recipient keeps guessing about what’s there inside the mail. They can build or destroy your brand image. Misleading subject lines can effect trust with the recipients.
Some of the best subject lines are
RedEnvelope — Shop now for Mother's Day or pay until 2008
Abercrombie & Fitch — Be Naughty Or Nice In A&F Fleece
Gap— Can the Shirt off Your Back Change the World?
Crate & Barrel — What holiday tables are wearing...plus Free Shipping
RedEnvelope— Why man discovered fire
Urban Outfitters — Step away from the leftovers: Free Shipping Ends Monday!
RedEnvelope — Gifts for the guy with a one-track mind

8. Creativity
Creativity can boost third party conversions. The normal physiology of the recipient is, if they receive a creative email, they usually forward it to people in their friends list. This creates good word of mouth publicity for your brand.

9. Concentration Period
Concentration period is the period of first few hours after your delivery of your mail. It is assumed that 37% to 38.5% of conversion happens in first few hours of the delivery of the mail. Have a tracking system in place to keep a note of the same.

10. Customer Retention:
Customer Retention marketing is a tactically-driven approach based on customer behavior. Relationship and loyalty are very important aspects of customer retention. We can predict our customers behavior based on past behavior. Active customers are always happy customers and retention always require feedback from these active customers.

11. Maximizing Click-Thru Rates
Numerous research papers tell us that the majority of Internet users respond better to a plain, bold, blue text link -- such as this -- as opposed to a banner or button. So, if you're going to include links in your emails, make sure they are bold, blue and underlined. This will mean that more subscribers click through, meaning more conversions/sales for you

12. Avoiding the Spam Filters
The majority of large Internet service providers now use rigorous spam protection mechanisms to trap unsolicited email before it gets into their customers inboxes. Spam filters generally "rank" each email by a number of different criteria, and, if that email rates above a certain level (such as 10 spam points), then it is flagged as spam and deleted . To make sure your emails don't get flagged as spam -- and deleted before they even get to your subscribers -- avoid using words such as 'Free', '$$$', 'Save', 'Discount', etc in both the subject line and the content of your email. Both web pages and emails can contain a lot of text and graphics, and this sometimes makes it harder to get your subscribers to perform a certain task, such as clicking on a link to see your special offers.

Google Personalizing Organic Search Results

2008-12-15T22:14:00.000-08:00

Google has always been experimenting on its products, and this time Google is planning to personalize the organic results. The thought is good and when I login to my account and search results I get a new kind of results and now I have an option to rank my favorite sites as number one. I have collected the snapshots of this new interface.

Google has introduced new buttons beside every result. Now you have an option to move the result up or down depending on your choice.

Set your preferences as per your wish that you would like to visit everytime.
I have tried removing couple of results from the listing and these results are removed from the listing and they are placed at the end of the page as removed listings.
This is the feature that I liked a lot. I can write comments about a website and that gets registered below the result.
Apart from what I have mentioned above there is a "Add a Result" link at the end of the page. This is good in some way.

Google's New Feature - Highlighting the Keywords

2008-12-10T02:26:00.000-08:00

Back to blogging after almost a month, how are you all? Hope everything is going good.
Google has introduced a new feature, which is "Highlighting the Keywords". You can observe this while you are typing a keyword in Google. Please see the picture of the same below.

How to increase My CTR?

2008-11-10T01:38:00.000-08:00

Recently Market sherpa has released an article on how to increase your click through rates and effective ad design tactics.
The following were suggested:
1. Adding pictures of people
2. Adding Data entry feilds like email, signups or Product Search's
3. Adding Video.
4. Adding Dynamic Text using XML.
5. Using Greater Interactivity (games, quizes etc.)
6. Include links of various targets.
7. Making ads Expandable.

Google starts showing Time Zones in the search results

2008-11-05T22:59:00.000-08:00

In the latest feature of Google search. Google starts showing the time zones for different locations all over the world. All that is required is to type place and time. For Example If you are looking for the time zone of "New York", then just type "New york Time" as a keyword in the search box. The image is shown below.

Affiliate Revenue Calculate - How much can I earn through Affiliate Programes

2008-11-05T09:56:00.000-08:00

Are you looking to earn money on internet. There are many ways to look at how can you earn money internet. There is a tool that I am attaching to this post which can calculate the amount of revenue that you can earn.

One of the biggest advantage that Internet marketing has over traditional marketing business is that internet business is pretty unorganized business. Many of the continents like India, Europe, Australia where the internet business is a very profit oriented business and can be done part time as well. The best part is that the governments have not yet looked at slapping these businesses with Taxes. For a starter internet business teaches the best practice than that of the traditional business because of the low investment and low advertising costs for starting these kind of business.

The greatest advantage that I see in this kind of business is "Directly reaching the customer unlike regular marketing where we need to shell money to attract customers or businesses.

Please do contribute by writing in your views by a comment to this post. I will try my best to reply you to the questions that you ask.

Use our calculators to help improve your site revenue

Usage of Meta Tags for a Web Page

2008-10-22T03:25:00.000-07:00

Meta Tags are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes. Let’s go step by step looking at an example below.

Let’s look at each of the attribute differently and the importance of that attribute. Firstly <> represents the closing of the tag. When a tag is opened it should be closed, else may result in an error. Then http-equiv=" ", META tags with an HTTP-EQUIV attribute are equivalent to HTTP headers. Typically, they control the action of browsers, and may be used to refine the information provided by the actual headers. Tags using this form should have an equivalent effect when specified as an HTTP header, and in some servers may be translated to actual HTTP headers automatically or by a pre-processing tool. On the whole the above example indicates that type of content within the document which is text/html.

Meta Tags of any web page can be found in any browser by going to View -> Page Source. Meta tags describe the content and the purpose of the webpage. Meta tags are very useful from the search engine point of view as it forms one of the criteria for ranking high in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and etc. The below is the example of the meta tag for Facebook.com,
elcome to Facebook! | FacebookMeta tags come under the header section of the web page, which starts with and ends with . Title is another critical attribute for the Meta tags. Title starts with the tag and ends with the same tag. A good title tag will be of 63 characters which can fit in any search engine results page correctly. If the title exceeds 63 characters we will see “…” with the characters that exceed 63. The title of a web page tells in short the content in that page. Deciding the title needs a good keyword research about the theme of the article.

What is “UTF-8”?
UTF-8 is defined by the Unicode Standard [UNICODE]. In UTF-8, characters range from the U+0000..U+10FFFF (the UTF-16 accessible range) are encoded using sequences of 1 to 4 octets. The only octet of a "sequence" of one has the higher-order bit set to 0, the remaining 7 bits being used to encode the character number. In a sequence of n octets, n>1, the initial octet has the n higher-order bits set to 1, followed by a bit set to 0. The remaining bit(s) of that octet contain bits from the number of the character to be encoded. The following octet(s) all have the higher-order bit set to 1 and the following bit set to 0, leaving 6 bits in each to contain bits from the character to be encoded. The syntax for the usage of utf-8 is

Why is “noodp and noydir” used?
The search engines Google, Yahoo! and MSN use in some cases the title and abstract of the Open Directory Project (ODP) listing of a Web site for the title and/or description (also called snippet or abstract) in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To give webmasters the option to specify that the ODP content should not be used for listings of their website, Microsoft introduced in May 2006 the new "NOODP" value for the "robots" element of the meta tags. Yahoo also came out with the similar option later “Noydir” to opt out of the Yahoo directory. The syntax will be,
Meta Description and Keyword attribute:
The description attribute defines the description of a page. The idle description attribute can be 150 characters that can describe the web page in short. This is the description that also appears in the search engines results page which can be visible for the visitors who search for your website in the search engines. The similar is the keyword attribute. Writing the keyword attribute requires a good keyword research on the theme in which the web page is build. We can include a wide range of keywords in the meta keyword tag which can include synonyms. There is no maximum number of characters for the meta keyword attribute but excluding the irrelevant keyword would make the meta keyword attribute very specific to the content on the web page.

Facebook Lyrics gets the new Search Status look

2008-10-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

Facebook has newly launched its new application called Facebook Lyrics. There are three main features of this application maily being
1. You can search for Lyrics in Facebook.

2. Add your favorate songs.

3. Show Facebook Lyrics in your Profile.

There is a new feature called Lyrics Scroller which is very customizable. You can change its colour, Back ground picture and etc.

MTV Roadies 5.0 Final Show down

2008-10-14T11:11:00.000-07:00

MTV Roadies 5.0 Final Show down

15th March to Part 2

MTV Roadies 5.0 - 15 March 08 - Part 2

Baba Ramdev's Google Chrome new ad

2008-10-07T05:21:00.001-07:00

This is the new add of baba RamDev to attract young techies and Internet savvy's

What an Inspiring Video from Harvard Business School

2008-10-01T22:59:00.000-07:00

What an Inspiring Video from Harvard Business School. The faculty explains their level of preparation for leading their classes. Its truly inspiring video.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid992329247/bctid769654260

SEO Manual

2008-09-26T06:31:00.000-07:00

I was looking at what could be the best SEO Manual for new learners in SEO, I could come out with this set of different streams for learning full SEO. Please comment on if there is any thing else that needs to be added.

Technology

1. Redirection methods and theory - 301, 302, and 200 response codes
2. Basic understanding of DNS and website hosting issues and jargon.
3. Enough javascript and PHP to tweak existing code and to understand how the script is supposed to work.
4. Header and meta information standards - metatags, http-equiv, title, etc
5. How server side includes work and how to troubleshoot them
6. Robots control methods (meta, robots.txt)

Web Design

1. Basic knowledge of HTML 4, XHTML and CSS
2. Knowledge of W3C compliance testing, and when you can make intelligent exceptions.
3. Knowledge of 501 Usability standards, especially related to alt attributes
4. Common standards and expectations for interface design

Marketing

1. How to make a business plan
2. How to create interesting content that converts
3. How to fit keywords into content naturally and easily
4. How to measure ROI, conversions and other web metrics
5. How to implement, understand and react to website analytics reporting
6. Understand international and language issues in marketing and search

Information Retrieval Science

1. How a search engine spider operates, as well as it's limitations and abilities
2. How information is stored - compression, tokenization, indexing, etc
3. Advanced query building and special searches and commands
4. Read every Google patent, as well as search related patents by Yahoo, MS, IBM, etc
5. Understand concepts such as term vector theory, semantic co-location, etc
6. Understand and know the guidelines and issues search engines have. This is more art than science, since they are intentionally vague.
7. Understand the key elements that search engines look at while analyzing a page and why they look at them.

SEO

1. Know how to analyze a site for key factors - links, anchor text, content, etc.
2. Know how to tweak a site to effectively present itself as a good candidate for ranking on a specific term.
3. Know the basics of link building - neighbourhoods, anchor text, etc
4. Know the basics of organizing links and content to be helpful to both people and search engines.
5. Know how to make the content in non-spiderable media like images, sounds, flash, AJAX and so forth available, or to be able to compensate for it.
6. Know how to tweak content and structure (headers, etc) to best present a site to a search engine and a visitor.
7. Be aware of all the major search engines, their demographics and idiosyncrasies. Also be aware of what they have to offer outside of search, and what the connections between the two are.

SEM

1. Know how to set up basic Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN search accounts
2. Know how to create and test ad copy and landing pages
3. Know how to analyze the reports and to optimize the results.
4. Know the basics of advertising purchases, including links, banners and other advertising channels
5. Know how to optimize for local search for the major engines

Social Networking sites - Facebook The Leader- facebook Traffic

2008-09-24T23:25:00.000-07:00

In the space of Social networking Facebook has going in a very high pace and climbing for the top ten sites positions. Lets look at Demographics of this site.

There are more number of females than Males who are visiting facebook, with around 55% of them being females and around 45% of the total being males. If we take a look at the different age groups, the age group of 12- 17 years are the people who are using this interface more than any other age group.
Most of them are college graduate with wealth around more than 100k. The following are the list of countries that use facebook the most.

Lets have a look at the traffic for the last 12 months. For the last 12 months the traffic has gone like a skyrocket.

The site frequency distribution for Facebook is as follows.

Keyword Comparision Tool Google Vs. Yahoo

2008-09-15T04:43:00.000-07:00

I was browsing the new and I found a very good tool which can compare any keywords results in Google and yahoo together.

Web Analytics - Bounce rate - Avinash Kaushik

2008-09-14T22:04:00.000-07:00

I found the interview of Avinash about bounce rate.

A look at HTTP Status Codes - Server Headers

2008-09-12T01:25:00.000-07:00

HTTP Protocol is a different subject altogether. Lets get some glimpse of what HTTP status codes or Server headers are and how are they useful for search engine optimization. When a client or a customer is making a request to a web server through a web browser, the request goes to the web server and HTTP status codes are returned in the header of the web server response. The client decides on what action to be taken.

For Example if the client receives the status code 200, Which is ok, it means that the webpage is found and is returned in the browser.

Lets look at the different status codes that are available. From the Search engine marketing or optimization point of view there are 11 major status codes that you need to know 200, 301, 302, 304, 307, 400, 401, 403, 404, 500 and 501.

1. 200 - OK : as discussed earlier 200 is a "OK". That means that request has been successful.

2. 301 - Moved Permanently: This means that the request is assigned or directed to new URL and will have a permanent redirection.

3. 302 - Found: The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field.

4. 304 Not Modified: If the client has performed a conditional GET request and access is allowed, but the document has not been modified, the server SHOULD respond with this status code. The 304 response MUST NOT contain a message-body, and thus is always terminated by the first empty line after the header fields.

5. 307 Temporary redirection: It means the URL request that is made from the client is temporally in a different URL. From My personal experience I would recommend that don't use temporary redirection for the web pages that you are optimizing, unless it is really genuine. If you see that the web page is moved permanently use 301 instead.

6. 400 Bad Request: If the web server does not understand the request, it gives a 400 error. It is always recommended that you give the same request without any modifications.

7. 401 Unauthorized: This code will appear if the client requires any authentication to perform for proceeding further.

8. 403 Forbidden : this status normally happens when the internet connection is down or slow or the web server has understood the request and is not performing the function due to various reasons like as I mentioned about you internet connection or if the server is over loaded etc.

9. 404 - Not Found: We usually keep seeing this status with many web pages. This means that the page that the client has requested is not found.

10 Internal Server Error: If the server encountered any problem and temporarily is not fulfilling on the request made.

11. 501 Not Implemented: This status generally comes when the server is not capable of recognizing the request made or even is not capable of returning response to the request made.

For Further reference, see links below:

Website Technology Issues

W3C Status Codes

Yahoo has launched its new version of Site Explorer

2008-09-08T04:15:00.000-07:00

Yahoo has launched its new version of Yahoo site explorer https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/new

The main features of the new site explorer is that it is easy to look at backlinks for each page on your website.

Singh Was King - Now Youtube is the King

2008-09-04T22:38:00.000-07:00

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen were the founders of Youtube.com. Prior to starting Youtube, they were employees of paypal which was later sold to ebay. Youtube was later sold to Google in the year 2006.

You Tube has grown very big in recent years and it is catching up fast. An article in Alley Insider talks more it. In an interview with Forbes, Bobby Tulsiani, a JupiterResearch analyst says "A studio declining to do business with YouTube would be like a cereal maker not dealing with Wal-Mart".

In a recent study, Comscore reports that Youtube is growing faster than Google
In a article of Forbes, they say an ad on Youtube home page would cost $175,000, would you belive it?

Research Tools for Competitor Analysis

2008-09-03T22:49:00.000-07:00

We need some research tools for doing competitor analysis for many reasons. It could be to find out the competitor in the Industry or even to know where are you standing in the bunch. Their are many competitor analysis tools, some free tools to help you look at what you are looking for. Lets look at some of the best competitor tools on web:

1. Alexa : is a free tool and gives you a brief analysis of your competitor traffic. You can check your website traffic and compare with that of your competitors.

2. Seobook Firefox Plugin : One of the best tool I would say for doing Competitor Analysis. Its free and you can use it as a firefox plugin. This tool check various factors of a webpage like site back links, .edu links, .gov links, age of the site, number of links from blog through Technorati and etc.

3. Compete : Compete has both free for basic and paid for advance. This is a great tool that can provide a statistical comparison of up to 5 different websites. Excellent for competitor analysis but the final data should be taken with a grain of salt because Compete can only produce stats on the limited data available.

4. Check Server Headers Tool : This is a free tool of Stepforth.com. A slightly technical this tool valuable insight into the setup of yours or your competitor’s servers. For example, StepForth uses this tool to verify that our clients have properly set up their server redirects (301’s) so that duplicate content issues are avoided. It is also used extensively within our competitor analysis reports; it is useful to see how your competitors might have an edge over you.

5. Xenu Link : This is a free tool. Please see the video below which explains about how effectively this tool can be used for SEO.

6. Domain Tools : Domain Tools is one of my favorite sites for competitor analysis. Its a free too. The most useful component, the Reverse IP Tool, allows me to plunk in a single competitor’s domain and then see every other website that is hosted on its server. In rare instances where the co-hosted domains are owned by the competitor I can get a hint at any future marketing plans my clients should be made aware of.

7. Robots.txt Syntax Checker : There is nothing worse than making an error in a Robots.txt file and accidentally dropping a site out of the search engines. The free Robots.txt checker will review your Robots.txt file; ensuring it is properly created and it will provide you with the rules within the file in plain language to ensure everything meets your approval. This is a valuable tool for avoiding serious indexing issues.

Behavioral Targeting - for Effective Online Advertising

2008-09-01T23:43:00.000-07:00

“Behavior is anything that indicates interest. It’s profile targeting.” —Jeff Hirsch, president,
Revenue Science. Behavioral Targeting is now the crucial factor in online advertising. This is a technique which can increase conversions or effectiveness of any campaign.

"Behavioral targeting segments the audience based on observed and measured data—the pages or sites users visit, the content they view, the search queries they enter, the ads they click on, the
information they share on social Internet sites and the products they put in online shopping carts.This data is combined with the time, length and frequency of visits. Recency counts a lot, too— data from two weeks ago is far less accurate at predicting interest than that from two days ago." - According to eMarketer

Behavioral targeting can be broadly segregated in to 2 categories.

1) Identifying customers by category: Identifying the customers and sending them to the relevant category they belong to. For example, If a visitor visits a News portal, and he is looking for news on travel industry in India, sending him to the relevant category and placing your ads relating to travel industry in India. This would be more effective method of relevancy for ads, and their are higher chances of the ads to convert at a low rate.

2) Contextual Targeting : This method of advertising is the most successful among all other methods of behavioral targeting. In this method, you select a specific set of keywords that you look to advertise and your ad will appear for such keywords. Google has definitely dominated in this industry. Their are many other players in the market like Tacoda ( acquired by AOL), Revenue science and etc.

Below is the diagram that shows that types of adtargeting that are effective.

Also see below the best performing online advertising tactics according to the US online marketers

Search Engine Marketing - The Spending trends and the Boom

2008-08-31T22:45:00.000-07:00

I was going through this article in Economic times.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/Internet_/Search_engine_marketing_poised_for_boom/articleshow/3418823.cms . It is a good article and has raised hopes for future of Search Marketing in India.

Let us look at the what are the four Pillars of Search Engine Marketing:

Paid Search Advertising : are the ads that appear on the search engines results page, beside the natural Listing. You can find them as Sponsored links in Google, Sponsored results in Yahoo and Sponsored sites in MSn.

Search Engine Optimization : is also called as natural or organic listing is a kind or search marketing where, the websites are listed on the basics of certain factors like, Meta tag's Content, external links to the site, site navigation and etc.

Paid inclusion : This normally means the amount that you spend to get your site listed in any director or a search engine to crawl.

Contextual Advertising : mainly refers to the text ads that appear on third party websites. Google dominates even hear. Quigo is catching up faster after AOL acquired Quigo. The other publishers are Industry brains, advertising.com, MSN, Yahoo and etc.

The below is the research done by IAMAI on Search marketing trends in India.
http://www.iamai.in/Upload/Research/sem%20report_24.pdf

Yahoo survey for search results

2008-08-27T23:52:00.000-07:00

Yahoo recently started survey and looking to keep a track of the kind of people who are searching in the yahoo search engine. One of the question that amazed me was, In the last 30 days, how often have you used Yahoo Search!. And the options were
Not at all
Once
Twice
3-4 times
5-6 times
More than 6 times

I am sure that I have not used this engine for the past 6 months.

Any one can participate in this test.
http://surveys.globalepanel.com/wix/p217746760.aspx
Cheers ;)

Bounce rate Vs Exit rate - What is the Difference

2008-08-25T04:30:00.000-07:00

I have seen most of us get confused with the difference between bounce rate and Exit rate. Lets see what is the difference between the both.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. A high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors.
A bounce usually occurs when someone comes to your landing and immediately returns the previous page they were on. (back button on the browser). Bounce rate is based solely on the number of "Entrances" to that page.

Exit Rate : An Exit means that the user or customer has left your site or could even mean that they might have closed the browser. The Exit rate is calculated on the unique views of that page.

Asia Dominating in world's Internet Users

2008-08-22T03:56:00.000-07:00

Recently I was checking the stats of the internet users all around the world. Asia is definitely the Leader and China is the worlds best.

If we look at which are the countries that are dominating and making Asia the biggest, We see that they are China, Japan, India and South Korea.

Online Marketing Strategy 101 - SEO and SEM India

2008-08-19T23:46:00.001-07:00

If you are a startup business and are looking to start marketing online, this article could be helpful for you.

There are many of us who are looking to start business or looking to expand their existing business. Online Marketing is the best option for such as Internet marketing has its own advantages when compared to advertising offline. Here are few of the best techniques that you can look at to make your online marketing startup business successful.

1. Book a Domain Name: Look for a domain name that would suit your business. Normally we book the domain name based on the company name. When that is now necessary, you can do research and look at capturing the best and relavent keyword in the industry. For example, if you are into sale of computers, then the relavent domain name that would be dominating in your industry is Buycomputers.com, Computers.com, Computershop.com or Computershop etc. Make sure that the domain name that you choose is dominating and is relavent. It's not that you have to choose the domain name that is relavent to your business, you can also do well if you register a domain name as your company name. The chances of your listing good in the Search Engine Results Page are higher if your website speaks about your products that you would like to target. Well one of the important criteria for listing in Major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN is your Domain Name Insync with the keyword that you look to target.

2. Designing of your Website: Decide whether you really need a dynamic site. Its very easy to have a static site. A Dynamic site is difficult to build but can be very useful for your business. Again it depends on your judgement whether you really want a static page or a dynamic page for your website. If the visitor in your site directly have to interact with your server , you may have to have a dynamic Website. Well if you ask me what is best for SEO, then I would say, if you are building a static website, then CSS is the best else if you build a dynamic website, ASP or JSP can do wonders on what you would like to create.

3. Meta Tags: Meta tags are the important factor for both SEO and PPC mainly Adwords. The typical meta tag contains Title tag, Keyword tag and Discription tag. Make sure that your Title does not exceed more than 63 characters. And the keyword and Discription is usually 150 characters. Have your Title and Discription Syncronized and see that you cover more keywords in these areas.

Google's Feature - Google Gadget Ads

2008-08-18T22:08:00.000-07:00

Google has launched Google Gadget ads. Gadget ads are suppose to be a mini versions of websites. Google claims that these kinds of ads are more advantageous in the following ways:

1. Beyond Rich media advertising with Websites within websites:
As said earlier gadget ads are mini versions of websites. These ads are designed in such a way as to fit all adsense sizes.
2. Dynamic and Creative Advertising:
Gadget ads can be designed applications including data feeds, maps, Images, Audio, Video, Flash Flash, HTML or Java Script in just a single Creative.
3. Google Network:
This ads can run on the Google Content network as its the largest adnetwork on Internet, you have a possibility of reaching huge and verity number of customers.
4. Community of Engaged users around your Brand:
users can post and share about your gadget ads anywhere.
5. Reporting:
Tracking actions site by site is possible.
6. Policies: Their are some policies to for google gadget ads like
a) Animation is restricted to a maximum of 15 seconds
b) Audio effects must be user-initiated
c) Users must be given the ability to mute all sounds in the ad
d) Your ad must clearly and accurately describe your business, product, or service and identifying the sponsor for the ad
e) Ads may not contain links or interactions which directly initiate the download of a file or client application.

Significance of Ask Search Engine

2008-08-17T23:55:00.000-07:00

Ask.com is the property of InterActiveCorp. Ask.com, according to the statistics of Hitwise shares approximately around 3.53% of the total Search Market.

Most of the advertisers and Search marketing professionals look ask.com as a search engine with low priority. It has come of the unique features and very easy to optimize without loosing rankings on other search engines.

Ask now has features of Universal search. universal search includes features like images, video, local information, news, blogs, etc. Eventhough Google has already implemented Universal search, Ask is the only search engine which gave Google the head to head competition.

One of the best feature is the AskCity, it gives the best local business listings, along with the Maps. InterActiveCorp. is also the owner of bloglines, one of the foremost news aggregation tools on the web and happens to be the database behind Ask Blogs and Feeds.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

2008-08-14T02:27:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization ? It can be put across as the best way of building up a brand and reputation management for any website, especially when competitors are standing close by to grab customers. It is one of the most effective marketing strategies for increasing the website relevance for the targeted customers.

Let?s look at the background of ?How Search Engines Work??

Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and AOL are few of the prominently used search engines. Google shares the major portion of the internet search engines, followed by Yahoo and MSN. The figure below gives you an idea of how much portion is being occupied by Google.

All the search engines work largely with keywords as the key matrix for giving their search results. Search Engines identify the article in the webpage by the keywords that appear on the content of the webpage, title of the webpage, meta tags and the description of the page and serve results. They have their algorithms which send the bots to web approximately every 15 to 90 days. These bots crawl a website (www.yoursite.com) or a webpage, which are submitted to www.searchengine.com/AddURL.html, or by passing through a website (www.example.com) which is freshly crawled and your site link appears on the website www.example.com before the bot crawling. Then your site is stored in the database of the search engine and whenever a keyword is entered in the text box of a search engine, depending on the criteria of keyword relevance, link popularity, site architecture, quality of content and site updating the chances of your site getting listed in the top 10 results are greater.

The best practices in SEO can be classified into four different categories:

Subject matter Expertise
Information Architecture
Technical Implementation
Marketing

Let?s have a look at each of the above one by one:

Subject matter Expertise:

In the search engine optimization industry we often come across a saying ?Content is the King?. The content for a website has major role to play for producing good results in SEO. We cannot build a large site unless we have good content. It requires expertise to build content that is unique. Content should never be duplicated or copied. We often find copied content not being listed in the search results page -- or they appear as supplemental results.

Here are a few ideas to show expertise with your content:

Write articles on the area of your expertise. Don?t stuff the article with the goal of selling it. Make sure that the purpose of your writing an article is served.
Create a theme-based site which has expertise in one area.
Create a community around your website for the theme in which your website content exists.
News and Updates make up a major source of expertise for a theme-based site.

The content-rich site wins more trust with the customers. And trust is something that lasts with a website for a long time.

Information Architecture

Information Architecture is a process or a practice of structuring information. This is an essential part of building a website.

First, let?s understand what the user needs and what is he searching for.

Here, keyword mapping plays a significant role. Identify keywords using the word tracker, keyword discovery or Google keyword suggestion tool. Find out what the search count is for the keyword you?re looking to optimize. If you see there are more appropriate keywords highly relevant to your subject matter, use the keywords which are likely to draw good traffic.
Have well defined site navigation so that the bot as well as the user can easily access whatever content they wish. A tree structure is always recommended, unlike site architecture.
Ensure smooth accessibility for the user to go any page he wants from whichever page he?s in.

a. Technical Aspect

As discussed above, search engines have some basic requirements to fulfill for listing a website on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP?s). Here are few key points that can be considered in order to have a search engine friendly web site.

See that the web page navigation is done properly and that the search engine bots can easily crawl your website when ever they come to your site.
Internal linking architecture should be easily accessible from the home page of the website. The good articles or articles which are regularly updated should be accessible within 2 to 4 pages from the home page.
Have Meta tags and Title of every page according to the article of the respective keyword.

Marketing

Word of mouth marketing is what works in search engine optimization. That can be achieved through links to your site from other good sites. The best way to get more traffic from SEO is to have theme-based link exchange. When you have good content on your site, there are many other external sites that will link your website or webpage to theirs, which gives weight to your site. You can even build page rank for your site through link exchange from other sites. It flows from one site to another. The page rank in the Google tool bar shows how good your site is with regard to reputation. It?s ranked on a scale of 1 to 10.

Here are the points to be noted:

Have Alt text for all the links that are from or in your site (i.e., inbound or outbound links).
Don?t blindly swap the links. Consider the weight that your site gets from linking to another site.
Have links from traffic-oriented websites which are ranking high in search engines.

Summary

SEO is one of the most effective methods to build a good reputation for your company or website. There are many ways of marketing a website and many other practices that are followed in optimizing a website. These are only few of them. Hope to come up with some others in the next article!

Easy tips to top listings on local search

2008-08-14T02:08:00.000-07:00

Local search is the fastest growing form of online activity, according to Comscore, and as consumers will soon conduct two billion local searches each month, businesses should take action to manage their online local listings. Local search has revolutionised how quickly and easily customers can find local business information. In an instant you can have a list of every Indian restaurant in a 10-mile vicinity and directions on how to get there.

A variety of search engines are currently providing local search, including efforts backed by the largest search engines and new start-ups. Some of these efforts are further targeted to specific vertical segments, and several are tied into mapping products. A few of them are local.yahoo.com, local.aol.com, maps.live.com, yell.com and of course maps.google.com

The local search algorithm is based on relevance. This relevance depends upon the trust the search engines have in the information they have about your business. In most cases, the merchant is considered to be the most trusted source of data about their own business. Verifying ownership of your profile online is the most important factor for ranking well on local search engines. Let's look at what could be the most important factors for building trust as well as optimizing them on the best search engines:

Domain Research

This is a crucial part of building any successful website. Choose your domain name in such a way that the name of the city or state that you are looking to target is included in the domain name

Hosting your website

Many SEO experts debate if hosting a website locally help in SEO. It is generally recommended that you host your website with the local hosting provider where you look to target your business. Technically the website IP address would be assigned as per your region of hosting, so hosting the website in the location is likely help in optimizing with some engines.

Optimize each page

Optimization of every page of the website can make optimization easy in search engines. Try to have the physical address and contact information on the pages you are optimizing for local search (ideally it's the home page of your website)

URL rewriting using .htaccess

While creating the pages in your website - for dynamic websites make sure that you are using .htaccess to rewrite the URL of every file. Try your best to put the files in the relevant folder and rename to folder as the city name that you would like to target.

Directory Submission

This is one of the important factors in the optimization of a website in search engines. Submitting your site in the relevant category within the relevant region. There are various directories including Dmoz and the Yahoo directory.

Address

Include your local address in every page as far as possible. Either at the bottom of the page or on the left hand strip. Make sure that you also include your local phone number for that respective address.

Local Links

Ask your customers to provide the link to your site from a relevant page. A relevant page could be either a page of your customer that talks about the city that you would like to advertise for, or a product relevant to yours. Get good reviews from your clients along with a good link to your site.

Local PR

Plan a strategy to build your local PR. This will help you to build good word-of-mouth publicity as well as good branding for your site.

Submit your site

You can submit your site to all the search providers like maps.google.com, local.yahoo.com, local.aol.com, maps.live.com and yell.com for UK. You can submit all these sites for free. You can also do a bulk upload in Google if your company has multiple locations all around the world.

Google Maps Local Business listing allows you to add coupons to print out and bring to your shop. Yahoo has a paid search option where you can get additional features like Company logo and tag line detail business description, guaranteed placement, and broader exposure about your business, etc.