OMEBang Presentation

last week i had been to #OMEBang event second as i am related to the online industry where i came to learn new things about the tackling the negative reviews with social media which can be effective in Search Engines and later the presentation was started by MR.Suresh from Vayama in which new people from sonata and other companies learned a lot…

Now the presentation turned to Social Media which was handled by Preetham Venkky which as a hot topic and new things turned out as presentation as started in Social Media topic after completing the presentation we headed to Cuppa restaurant where we had chat for a while on social media and other happenings by Preetham Venkky joined by @brandbull and @seobangalore after bidding adieu to others our small team headed to Lemon Grass where we had a topic on PODCASTING by suresh accompanied by Shyam S with other guy which was a most interesting one i learn from pod casting in suresh was providing the information

I am posting the pics of the #OMEBang event which was a successful of all the invitees came over especially thanks to Crederity who provided their office space to use for the event and others like @seobangalore, @shivseo, @brandbull, @IdeasMaverick @praveenravi and others who were present at the events….

SEO Value Pyramid & Time Line

Doodling to explain the SEO Value Process to a new batch of SEO students, and we came up with the following SEO Pyramid. I thought of sharing this as it will be a useful “Guide” for SEO enthusiasts to better understand the SEO process, SEO value and SEO timelines.

SEO Expert Services – Week 1

1. We start Week 1 with Keyword Discovery and Analysis. This is the foundation of any successful SEO campaign, so it’s important to get the “winning” keywords for your business, services and products in the beginning itself. This process generally takes 4 to 5 days, and there are many useful free and paid tools to help you do that. Keep in mind; finding the right keywords is all about researching statistical, analytical and forecast data for keyword usage, history and competition over time, in specific geographies.

2. In parallel, we can start work on On-page Optimization. The KISS (Keep it Simple ……) concept works great here. Keep in mind that each well optimized page can be a source of traffic and conversions for your website. I would suggest focusing each page on 1 to 2 related keywords only, with modifiers like location, industry, long tails and mis-spellings, included in Meta tags and the content of that page. If you have a CMS driven site, then ensure your CMS allows facility of giving unique title, description and keyword tag for each page, and that your dynamic URL’s are short and SEO friendly.

3. Set up accounts for Google local, Maps, and Yahoo local and create/claim your listing. This not only helps the search engine identify the location (for geo targeting) of your business, it also puts your business on the local map for anyone searching for products and services you could offer. Local listings are displayed on the top of the SERP (search engine result pages), and many people want to do business with someone who is close by (types of businesses where service and personal contact is crucial) can reach your website almost immediately.

4. It’s time to setup the Corporate Blog. This is going to become your most valuable asset to power up your keywords/ website and share valuable content with your visitors. You will be using the blog to post new articles, How To’s, testimonials, reviews, press releases, case studies, videos, photographs, PPT presentations and more. Both WordPress and Blogger offer free hosting platform – so get cracking.

5. The last part of Week 1, you can set Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. These free tools will help you monitor the visitors to your site, visitor trends and demographics, entry/ exit pages, traffic sources, track conversions, performance of keywords, submit site maps, check on links and broken/bad links and a lot more.

SEO Expert Services – Week 2
1. We start Week 2, with Web Directory Submissions. These are the easiest links you can acquire, and there are many relevant, regional and niche web directories where you could submit your listing. Avoid directories that are not relevant to your business, products and services, though global directories should be included in the category your business fits under. There are many paid directories as well (Yahoo Dir, Business.com etc) which are great links to have, but I would be selective not to use up the clients budget in this activity, as it can be well spent in other places.

2. Time to get social! Social Bookmarking sites are a great way to promote your content across user communities like Digg, Mixx, Stumble Upon etc . The trick is to get other users (or your network) to up vote, thumbs up, review or comment on your content. This makes the link you are building permanent, and leads to more traffic as users generally opt to check links (and vote up links) that already has many votes. They key to social enlightenment is participation!

3. Announce you self, syndicate your Press Release. You can kill two birds with one stone here. Other than getting back good links to your website from the press releases syndications, a journalist may chance upon you story and make a National release out of it. Though ensure you have a worthy story first!

4. Power up pages of your website. This is an easy way to power up the existing pages of your website. Take each page link and post across relevant social bookmarking sites, and get a few users to up vote, thumbs up, review, or comment on your content. Don’t try and bookmark all your pages in one day, but rather just 3 to 4 links a week. You don’t want the social sites to blacklist you for spamming. Tip: Don’t use social bookmarking sites for just link building purposes. Get involved in the community, make friends, help them, and ask them to help you.

SEO Expert Services – Week 3
1. The weekly content strategy. Each week you can create unique and useful content focused around the keywords you are targeting for that month. The types of content can vary – like articles, how to’s, FAQ’s, case studies, pictures, videos, testimonials, PPT presentations, press releases etc. This content can be posted on your corporate blog. Both your visitors and search engines will love you for this effort.

2. The weekly syndication and promotion strategy. Each week you take the content from the blog and syndicate to select article sites, and promote across select social bookmarking sites. Get other users to participate by voting your content. Each type of content can be syndicated and promoted across relevant syndication channels. Eg. A press released posted on your blog can be syndicated to press release sites. A video can be syndicated to video submission sites. A How to article, can be syndicated to “How to” sites.

3. You can also post your articles in social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc. Keep in mind social networking is about building a network of contacts (potential business) and enhancing brand communication and recall. There is little SEO value to be gotten here.

SEO Expert Services – Week 4

1. Get other bloggers to review your website. Getting links from relevant blog sites will go a long way in your SEO strategy. Of course you will have to figure out that no blogger will review and link to your site because they love you. An additional tip here is to power up the external blog review pages by promoting across select social bookmarking sites and getting vote ups. Powering important external pages that link to you will in turn power your keyword pages.

2. Getting links from relevant websites. Get links from sites that are relevant to your business, products and services back to your important keyword pages. These industry links are “relevant” links and are highly valued by search engines. Tips: Avoid reciprocal linking unless it’s with very few select partners and not just for the purposes of link building. Another option, three-way link building is often tedious and filled with rejection. I would focus on “value” based link building.

3. Get involved by Blog commenting and Forums Posting. Find a few blogs and forums related to your industry. Spend time each week posting useful comments on blogs, and post/ answer queries on forums. If you cannot create value to the discussion by blogger/ forums users, then its best to avoid this strategy. Also if you plan to place links in the comments and forum posts, then make sure those links add major value to what’s being discussed, otherwise your comments, posts will not be accepted. Tip: I avoid placing links in any of my comments and answers.

4. The highly debatable paid links. While I don’t advocate paid links for various reasons, I have seen a few select power links make a world of difference to rankings. The tip here is to use this strategy after a couple of months of serious value driven SEO.

5. Run monthly campaigns in social bookmarking sites to power your keywords. Each month choose one social bookmarking site from the ones you are participating in, and choose one story/article from the previous articles you have bookmarked. The objective in the campaign strategy is to get 15 or more users to vote up your content. This accomplishes two things. A chance that your story gets “hot” and as the author of the content you gain popularity. Hot stories get more votes and links. Also search engines like user voted stories for obvious reasons.

6. Monitoring, Tracking and Reporting. Prepare weekly and monthly reports to track the links you are building. Prepare a report from Google Analytics each month showing progression over various metrics of conversion. A simple excel sheet work great. Also you can buy a good rank tracking software like Advanced Web Rank Manager, to track all the keywords and their progress over time.

There we go folks. It’s the end of the first month, and as you can see there has a lot of effort that’s gone into your website so far.

What has been accomplished so far?

1. We have build a strategy that’s in alignment with the new link variables – Consistency, Relevancy, Diversity, Progression, Participation and Age of Links.

2. We have enhanced the web, link, social and author reputation of the website.

3. Increased traffic sources to the website by creating “valuable content” and syndicating the same across diverse and select web, user and social communities.

SEO Expert Services – MONTH 2 to 6

1. We continue to create different formats of content each week (articles, how to, faq’s, press releases, case studies, videos, pictures, PPT, white papers, interviews etc).

2. We continue posting great content (articles focused around keywords we are targeting) on the blog each week, and then in syndicating and promoting that content (with up voting).

3. We continue to run monthly campaigns in social bookmarking sites with maximum user participation (voting, thumbs up, reviews, and comments). The objective being to make the story “hot” and link worthy.

4. We continue to source relevant links, blog reviews and industry related links.

5. We continue to comment and post replies on favorite blogs and forums.

6. We continue to build our network in social media sites.

There we go, you have the next 6 months seo expert services plan in front of you. So let’s get started!!

Mobile Marketing In The Near Future

Not to my surprise I find that mobile marketing has both a digital definition as well as a traditional definition.  In the digital definition it is as one would expect about marketing your business message through mobile devices.  In the traditional definition there are moving billboards that are associated with mobile marketing.  For our reference we are going to be talking about mobile devices and I think it is safe to say that when one thinks of mobile marketing now-a-days mobile devices are what come to mind.

The mobile industry certainly has grown quickly in the past three years.  The iPhone coming to market was only the beginning.  It did not take long for mobile applications to make the mobile device more useful to the consumers and with the flood of mobile applications consumers were able to find many different uses for their mobile device.  Games and Entertainment were only the beginning.  More useful applications like tools, utilities and resources also found their way to the mobile device.

As of December 2009 there were 285,610,580 mobile devices in the United States against a population of 308,505,000.  Basically      91% of the population has a mobile device.  Feel free to look at the Wikipedia article for more statistics worldwide.

With 91% of the U.S. population having a mobile device, and these devices having considerable capabilities, it is undoubtedly the next most significant source of information for the consumers and businesses alike.  Using it as a phone is only the beginning.  Email, Games, Entertainment, Texting, Instant Messaging, Browsing, Photos, Camera, Calculator, Calendar, Maps, Voice Recognition, News, Banking, Weather, Finance, Social Communities, and Radio are only the small fraction of what mobile devices are used at this time.  Their capabilities will continue to grow and this mini-computer will have more use in our daily lives.

As an Internet and digital marketing agency we want to focus the rest of this article on how a business can use mobile marketing.  We will focus on four specific areas and describe a starting point and planned progression over the next few years.  Each of these areas has many details and this information is designed to be a summary.  We will follow this article up with other articles that specifically discuss each section separately

Messaging Services

This is most often known as “texting” and includes SMS Texting (Short Message Service) as well as MMS (Multimedia Message Service).  In order for a business to tap into this marketing tool you have to first begin to get permission from prospects and customers in order to send them SMS or MMS messages.  Begin by seeking out a service that provides SMS and/or MMS services.

You will be assigned a text number that customer can send a subscription notice.  You can add this feature into your website, email marketing or display in your business to promote how prospects and clients can get alerts from you by SMS or MMS.  Because it will take time to build up subscribers you will want to start this sooner rather than later.

Mobile Websites

We have had discussions with client in which they felt that as long as their website was showing on a mobile browser then they had a mobile website.  This is far from the truth.  A website that was developed specifically for a standard computer or laptop monitor does not mean you have a mobile version of your website.  On a mobile version of a business website a user will not need to zoom in or out or pan left or right when viewing your website.

The website will be “lite” version of your primary website with specific call to actions that are useful to the users visiting your mobile website.  A good example I have of his would be Delta Airlines.  Go to their website on a standard computer.  Then go to their website using a mobile device’s browser.  You will see two very different websites.  As a business you will want to budget and get a mobile version of your website as one of your very next steps.

Mobile Applications

At some point every business will have a mobile application and it is even possible that mobile applications will diminish the need for domain names; however, lets’ leave that conversation for another time.  Mobile applications can be used to be useful as a tool for your customers or you may decide to have a application for branding purposes that is a simple game.

There are certainly many possibilities for mobile applications and you will need to consult with a marketing firm to decide how to best utilize mobile applications.  Mobile application development budgets can range from low to high all dependent upon the creative, interface functionality, database use and Internet streaming.

Mobile Advertising

Text advertising like Google adwords and banner advertising is available direct to mobile devices.  The difference is how they are delivered.  For example banner ads will appear in free mobile applications and appear when the application is used at the bottom.  You can push your mobile banner ads through mobile advertising networks like AdMob (acquired by Google) and Quattro (acquired by Apple).  Development of your mobile ads requires a different approach since there is limited physical dimensions of your message.

By utilizing all four mobile marketing components for your marketing plan over the next couple of years you will be able to tap into a new marketing tool that happens to be well suited for local business marketing.  Waiting for two years to pass and then deciding to plan and adopt this technology is probably the wrong answer.  You need to incorporate this process now and build it into your business marketing process now otherwise you will be left behind.

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/mobile-marketing-in-the-near-future/20759/#ixzz0nsR0GgHA

SEO Canonical URLs And 301 Redirects In Windows IIS 6, IIS 7

Some readers have emailed me asking why I’m only writing about canonical URL and redirect issues for the apache/linux platform and haven’t given any advice on how to fix these issues on Microsoft Windows IIS/ASP.NET servers. So in the interest of equal time, I figure I had better present fixes for both old and new versions of IIS. In IIS 6 it can be corrected with global.asax, but with IIS 7 Microsoft added URL redirect support to the web.config file. First a URL redirect fix for the older versions of ASP.NET on IIS 6:

Canonical URL Issues In Microsoft Windows IIS 6

IIS 6 (Microsoft’s Internet Information Server webserver) doesn’t have URL redirection built-in, but you can still add it on your own. Here’s the quickest and easiest way to fix the most common canonical URL issue, where both of these URLs return the same (duplicate) content:

http://yoursite.com

http://www.yoursite.com

The quickest and easiest way I’ve found to correct this is to add the following code to your global.asax file. The global.asax file is the ASP.NET application file which gets executed before anything else every time a page is requested on your webserver. Just edit the following code and replace “yoursite.com” with, well, yoursite.com.

Sub Application_BeginRequest(ByVal sender as Object, ByVal e as EventArgs)

Try
	Dim requestedDomain As String = HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.ToString().toLower()

	If InStr(requestedDomain, "http://yoursite.com") Then

		requestedDomain = requestedDomain.Replace("http://yoursite.com", "http://www.yoursite.com")

		Response.Clear()
		Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
		Response.AddHeader("Location", requestedDomain)
		Response.End()

	End If

Catch ex As Exception
	Response.Write("Error in Global.asax :" & ex.Message)
End Try

End Sub

The first thing this code will do is assign the requested URL to a string called requestedDomain. I then use an If … Then conditional to check and see if the string contains http://yoursite.com. If it does, I simply replace it with the www version. Next I present a 301 Redirect header to the visitor (which may be a search engine, such as Google) and redirect the request to the new URL, which is the www version. I also use some simple Try … Catch error checking; you can use something more complex if you wish.

Canonical URLs And 301 Redirects With IIS 7

With the latest release of Microsoft Windows IIS 7 webserver, URL redirect rules have been enabled in the web.config file. The following code comes from Carlos Aguilar Mares’ blog on iis.net, and demonstrates how to redirect using the new ASP.NET web.config rules. (His website also includes other code samples to demonstrate using these rules to create search engine friendly URLs, and more – check it out).

UPDATE: Pageoneresults pointed out to me that iis.net isn’t even using this technique … they didn’t fix their own canonical URL issues!!

And thanks to Dave Lawlor for reminding me that the URL rewrite module is not included by default; download links are available on iis.net

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <rule name="Redirect to WWW" stopProcessing="true">
          <match url=".*" />
          <conditions>
            <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^yoursite.com$" />
          </conditions>
          <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.yoursite.com/{R:0}" redirectType="Permanent" />
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

It is important to note both of these code samples demonstrate how to redirect incoming requests from http://yoursite.com to http://www.yoursite.com. If you want to make http://yoursite.com the canonical URL, you’ll have to reverse the logic.

Source: SEO Canonical URLs And 301 Redirects In Windows IIS 6, IIS 7

Geo-Marketing As A New Business Marketing Tool

Geo-Marketing (or Geographic Marketing) is a new method of marketing a business and its website through web searches, mobile searches and social media.  As you can see, the geo-marketing tools being used are digital and through the Internet or Mobile devices.

While geo-marketing’s definition is the association of data and maps in the traditional sense, the added convergence of local business listings, mobile marketing, and social media makes this method of marketing more powerful than ever before.  This marketing tool is no longer just a large business marketing tool, but is available to small and medium size businesses too.

We should define what we mean by local business.  A local business is any sized business dependent on the local consumer for its revenue.  This means you could be a national company like Home Depot, U-Haul, or Best Buy or you could be a local florist or independent store only known to your local geography.

From a technical standpoint an Internet users IP address is tied to GPS data, like longitudes and latitudes, which are mapped with technology to geographies around the world down to the city and street level.  While all this data may seem overwhelming, the good news is that most businesses do not need to concern themselves with this part of geo-marketing. Many of the tools already have all of this information built into their software or hardware technology so we can stay focused on how we will use geo-marketing tools.

The difficulty with any new marketing tool is a business’s inability to adopt the methodology early.  When it comes to technologies and the Internet, in the past, by the time most businesses are ready to adopt a marketing tool, the industry has already moved on to something new.  Being an early or at least an earlier adopter of marketing methods on the Internet and through digital devices can only benefit the business.

We have seen many signs over the past two years regarding the evolution of geographic marketing.  When companies like Google, Apple, and the investment community of Wall Street start to put $100+ million and more behind a technology it will become part of our daily lives whether a business wants it or not.  Consumers have and will be using more of these geo-marketing tools to find a business, service or products near them.

Let’s take a look at the three main tools that consumers are using to find a business, products or services close their geography.

1. Web searches are the first and most obvious, however, these are web searches in which a map displays with targets of businesses that match the search criteria.  Unlike the traditional yellow pages, these geo-listings (a.k.a. Local Business Listings) can be claimed and updated with your business marketing information in order to meet these search criteria.
   While this may sound relatively easy, geo-listings also include consumer reviews that need to be managed, the clean-up of duplicate listings, coupons, offers, discounts, offers, video, photos, citations, QR bar codes and hyper local websites.  Understanding what to start with and how to strategically use these components can be done by a professional marketing firm that specializes in this area.  You can read more about these components in one of our previous articles on local business marketing.
2. Mobile Marketing is the next most significant geo-marketing tool in which SMS Texting, Mobile Applications, Mobile version of your website, and Mobile advertising are your key components.  The starting point in this process will be with SMS Texting to get your alerts out to customers that subscribe to your short bursts of information.  The reason why this is your starting point is that it will take time to build your list of subscribers.
3. Social Media Marketing continues to evolve and is, also, geographic in its targeting ability.  Consumers are using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wiki sites, Four Square, Instant Messaging and other social community tools on their mobile devices.  While they use it mostly to find business, products and services, in the social communities they are seeking recommendations from their friends (near and far).  They are, also, using these social communities to post their experiences with a business, product or service.  For this reason you have to monitor the social communities in order to embrace any potential problem situations and work with them.

These three geo-marketing components are important to any business size – large or small – and each have their own sub-components that need to be well understood in order to succeed. Understanding the strategy amongst them; the acceptance and embracing them early; and, finally planning on a 3-year return will put you on the right path of geo-marketing.1

Read more: Search Engine Journal