Apurvaab's Blog on Online Marketing

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apurvaab — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:08:11 +0000

Hi you might be looking for my blog, i have shifted it to http://onlinemarketbuzz.com/

Bing …is it a threat to Google Or pushing it further for innovation?

apurvaab — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:00:01 +0000

Bing.com, released on June 1, 2009, is the latest technological invention by Microsoft.

Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” said Steve Ballmer,Microsoft CEO. “When we set out to build Bing.com, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web.” he added

Bing is launched in many countries around the globe but some of its unique features may take longer to be used in countries outside North America owing to its beta version.

Here are some of the interesting features that Bing offers:

• Gives a brief summary and additional information on the right hand bar about that particular search result

• Access to Hulu videos–commercially supported streaming video of TV shows and movies offered only to users in United States. Now, it will provide an easy access to all such videos anytime anywhere.

• XRank is another feature to track search popularity. It counts Live Search web searches for movie stars, musicians and other famous people. Then rank them in order to tell you who the world is searching for.

Being a new platform, Bing.com will take some time to convince the Internet surfers to use it. But It’s interesting to observe that Bing soars to 6% Share within a few hours of its launch, and have started attracting masses on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

On the other hand, this new search engine is creating a lot of buzz in the market, there are mixed reviews coming from different experts as Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor, TechCrunch says, “Whether Microsoft ultimately succeeds or not in “winning” the search war, the competition is very good for the rest of the Internet. Google needs to be pushed to try innovating new things.”

Hence, it is too early to comment that whether Bing will be able to stand tall before such big Search Engines , but it will surely give internet users a new approach and lot of interesting features to explore and understand.

Please provide us with your feedback, suggestions and comments as always.

To Bing or Not to Bing ?

apurvaab — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:46:35 +0000

I think for the past two days, Bing is one of the most talked about topics in social media sphere. And why should it not be ?

Google is leading the search engine race by being miles ahead of the other popular two MSN and YAHOO from almost a decade now. Google has no doubt is so far the best in terms of search results and features and almost has the monopoly by capturing whopping 73% of market share. So when some other search engine comes in with some visibly value added feature (potential threats to google), people are bound to take interest and talk about the same.

I have been exploring bing for the past two days and actually trying to find out why Microsoft is positioning it as a decision engine that goes beyond search to help customers deal with information overload. Regardless of my personal opinion and experience with bing, it is definitely a big advancement for Microsoft’s search efforts.

Let’s see an interesting conversation on Twitter between Google’s Matt Cutts and Betsy

Matt Cutts: Congrats to @bing on the launch! Sad to see this not-so-relevant result at #4 for [matt cutts] though: http://bit.ly/4a8Q1Y

Bing: @mattcutts anytime you want to give feedback to @bing, we’re here. I’m sitting with the devs at present. ^betsy

Bing: @mattcutts I know you are disappointed in ego search stuff tonight w/ @bing, but try ‘mtv movie awards 2009′ and see what you get. ^ba

Matt Cutts: Ouch. The #5 Bing result for [matt cutts] is spammy too: http://bit.ly/B2r5F It’s a YouTube->WordPress autogenerated blog.

Matt Cutts: @bing okay. First web result was from 2008 instead of 2009, even with 2009 in query: http://bit.ly/SToK1 . Google nails it.

Matt Cutts: @bing but doesn’t it bother you that [mtv movie awards] on Google gives great news results and 2009 url, but w/Bing I only see 2008, 2007, ?

Bing: @mattcutts Uh – the first answer folks see is the news answer, not what you circled. Apparently twilight won. ^ba

Matt Cutts: @bing by the way, Twilight did rock. I’m not ashamed to say it–glittery vampires rule!!

That’s about it for the conversation between the two (so far), but Cutts referenced that number 4 result again later:

If you want to compare Search results from ‘Bing & Google’ side by side use this tool
http://www.blackdog.ie/google-bing/search.php

Social Bookmarking Strategy To Promote Your Site

apurvaab — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:30:59 +0000

A successful online marketing campaign has to be treated in a more comprehensive way and must include the participation of community. It’s the era of crowd sourcing and democratic marketing. While planning your online marketing campaign, do consider social bookmarking as an important strategy to promote your website.

Possible Bookmarking Strategies that you can adopt to make your website popular

1. Basic Bookmarking
2. Multiple Account Spamming
3. Blogfarm bookmarking
4. Sitemap bookmarking
5. Random bookmarking strategy

Basic Bookmarking:
This is as it sounds. You create one account each in some of the popular bookmarking sites and start bookmarking your favorites. Along with some other informative sites you bookmark your own site.
Some Recommended Bookmarking sites are:
• Digg.com
• Stumbleupon.com
• Deleicious.com
• Furl.net
• Simpy.com
• Blinklist.com
• Spurl.net
• Blogmarks

This is a slow but 100% effective and requires dedicated effort to make your content travel. If your content is good and offers some value definitely people will bookmark and you can see multiple incoming links and lots of tags pointing towards your site.

Multiple Account Spamming
This strategy has an immediate effect on your site but definitely is a spam. This strategy is practiced by spammers who wants immediate short term boost (one day) of traffic. You create multiple accounts using different email IDs and start bookmarking sites. You may see yourself on first page on some of the bookmarking sites but soon your accounts will be banned.

Blogfarm bookmarking
This is one of the oldest practices and has been considered a super spam by search engines but when used wisely it can turn out to be a good strategy to increase crawling rate and indexing.
It is a very effective tactic to get your site indexed. BlogFarm usually involves the linking of related blogs together. You can use it to bookmark the blogfarms! If you try to bookmark 50k pages, you will be easily accused of spamming. The best practice is to link to the 50k pages from your Blogfarms and then social bookmark your Blogfarm. Those 50k pages will be crawled faster.

Sitemap bookmarking
This is a good strategy to bookmark. All your domain names are set to a sitemap and then bookmark your sitemap. The search Engine spider crawl that sitemap and find all the links.

Random bookmarking strategy

This is very good strategy to make good random traffic from bookmarking site.
create small number of account(2 or 3 email account) and bookmark to bookmarking website. After one week then create new 2 or 3 account and submit to that sites. But please handle some care because it’s one of the blackhat techniques also.
This can be understood with following example:

Creating 3 Accounts Each at some of the bookmarking sites:

Digg A, Digg B, Digg c
Furl A, Furl B, Furl C
Spurl A, Spurl B, Spurl C

If we have 3 accounts at each of the above mentioned bookmarking sites, we will have 12 accounts. The 12 accounts can be grouped into 3 categories, Profile 1, Profile 2 and Profile 3 depending upon your target audience, geography or anything that suits your social bookmarking campaign.

Profile 1: Digg C, Furl A, Spurl B
Profile 2: Furl B, Spurl A Digg B
Profile 3: Digg A, Spurl C Furl C

Now randomly choose profile and start bookmarking your sites.

Some of the benefits of including social bookmarking as one of the strategies to promote your site

1) Your content start traveling as it is accessible to all
2) An effective and 100% legitimate way to build links
3) Can see sudden spikes in traffic sent through social bookmarking sites

Matt Cutts Discussing Meta Tags, Snippets, No Follow and More on SEO

apurvaab — Thu, 07 May 2009 11:27:12 +0000

Watch out some of the really really helpful videos on search engine optimization. These Videos are collected and placed at one place to help you find answers of some of the Frequently asked but rarely answered SEO questions.

How to Get Better Visibility on Google ?

Matt Cutts Discusses Snippets

Matt Cutts on “No follow”

Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?

How do I optimize an e-commerce site without rich content?

Fancy Twitter with Top 10 Celebrities

apurvaab — Sun, 03 May 2009 16:10:31 +0000

Last night I tried to find out some of the celebrities on Twitter and believe me the list is endless. Not so surprising, but exciting to watch the number of followers they have. Well no wonder, the corporate may soon think of tying up with many of them to endorse product through their tweets. So do not be surprised to see your favorite celebrity tweeting about their favorite (read as endorsed) toiletries or a shopping arcade or anything for that purpose. Here is the list of top 10 celebrities on Twitter (that I could find out). I am ranking them on the basis of followers they have currently.

1) http://twitter.com/TheEllenShow

With 1,301, 548 Followers, The Ellen Show stands at the top of the list. The famous talk show hosted by Ellen DeGeneres. On 1st May, The host got a double-whammy surprise while celebrating the 1,000th episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, as Oprah Winfrey unexpectedly popped in, not only offering her congratulations but setting a date for the duo’s much-hyped cover of O magazine.

2) http://twitter.com/britneyspears
“Fancy a Twitter with Britney”. Who would not like to read the tweets from the sensational Britney. No wonder, she has 1, 292, 871 followers. Her last tweet as I could see written on April 29th at 7:31PM “My friend gave me a pair of shoes called Tom’s-I love them! If you buy a pair, he donates a pair to a child in need-what a great cause!~Brit”

3) http://twitter.com/barackobama
Yes, the 44th and current President of United States is on Twitter. It is his way of communicating directly with the Citizens. Not a bad idea. His popularity also can be roughly gauged with the number of followers he has. Currently he has 1,058,189 followers, which definitely is increasing every day. Interesting enough to know about his another ID on Twitter with “RR” in Barack http://twitter.com/barrackobama. In this ID his profile states President of the United States of America.

4) http://twitter.com/jimmyfallon

It doesn’t have to be late night or Saturday to be with Jimmy Fallon. You need to sign in with your twitter account and start following the Famous actor and comedian to know what he is up to at present. If you join Jimmy today on Twitter, you would be among one of the 889, 965 followers of Jimmy.

5) http://twitter.com/the_real_shaq :

“Very quotatious, I perform random acts of shaqness” . That’s what the Bio of Shaq on Twitter says. Followed by 877, 176 people, he is one of the most quotable athletes of all time and the dominating player in the History of NBA . He believes “Life is too short to be in a hurry”.

6)http://twitter.com/RyanSeacrest
Get official tweets from Ryan and his producers about the radio shows, American Idol and breaking news from Hollywood! He is being chased by 850,321 people.

7)http://twitter.com/mrskutcher

Well Mrs Kutcher may not be so enticing but what about Demi Moore? KutcherYes, we know you know Demi Moore. But please say a big Showbiz Shed hello to Mrs Ashton Kutcher on Twitter. Who is, of course, the gorgeous Demi Moore followed by 824,900 people.

8)http://twitter.com/oprah
797, 442 people currently look for twitter updates by Oprah. According to some assessments, she is one of the most influential woman in the world, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history.

9)http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong
He won the Tour de France a record-breaking seven consecutive years, from 1999 to 2005. He has survived testicular cancer, a tumor that metastasized to his brain and lungs, in 1996. He also runs a cancer foundation that says “we unite people to fight cancer believing that unity is strength, knowledge is power and attitude is everything”. Lance ArmStrong is followed by 769,031.

10)http://twitter.com/perezhilton:

Perez Hilton is the creator and writer of one of the most famous websites PerezHilton.com – Hollywood’s Most-Hated Web Site! And he also loves music – a lot! He is being chased by 739, 619 twitters.

What Next on Twitter to Entice all of us?

apurvaab — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:26:09 +0000

A new survey report by Nileson (March,09) confirmed what we all knew that Twitter is at the top of five fastest social networking platforms growing by 1,382 percent from last year. Twitter users have increased From 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. Nielson also reported that unlike other social networking platform that the largest age group on Twitter was not college students or teens, but adults from the ages of 35-49.This group comprises nearly 42% of the site’s audience at 3 million unique visitors.

But this was all on the brighter side.

Nielson again came up with a report on Twitter last month. “Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent,” reports David Martin, vice president of Primary Research for Nielsen Online. This simply means 60% of the users or 3 out of 5 twitter users fail to return in the following month.

Martin did compared two other biggest social networking sites MySpace and FaceBoook growth period with that of Twitter and found their retention rates were twice as high. Martin writes “When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today’.

The low retention rate is actually a roadblock to twitters success in long run and Twitter must plan something enticing enough to make its new birds flock back to nest at regular intervals. Or else the most talked about micro-blogging platform’s sustainability is questionable.

Designers Should Know The Basics of SEO-Part 2

apurvaab — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:38:28 +0000

As promised yesterday, here are a few more SEO tips for designers.

Provide A Link To Your Home Page: Of course, we all know we should do this but you might have not thought over the right way to do it from SEO point of view.

Find problem with these two structures:

home

Can you find out the problem? The problem is linking with the file name. Always link to the root address. Your links on your site and any external links pointing to your site’s home page should be something like this:

Home
Home

This is done so that the search engines don’t split your page rank to multiple web address of home page. If all the links are pointing to the root address (http://example.com) then all the page rank will be accumulated in the root address, which otherwise will split between the root address and the file name (http://www.example.com/index.html)

Use just “/” or the full url http://www.example.com. Both work the same way.

If you want external sites linking to your home page use the same “/” or full url http://www.example.com to accumulate maximum benefit of page rank.

Understand the importance of

TAGS: The H1 tag is your second most important tag after your title tag, of course. Search engines like to see the heading tags because it helps them understand what the pages of your site are about. When title tags are reinforced with the same keyword as in H1 tag, you are more likely to improve your Search Engine Ranking.

WordPress for example puts the Title of the individual post into a H1 tag when listing snippets of multiple posts on one page. This would be the logical way to organize the content as it denotes content that is separate to each other, but related to the site topic.

Tag in a nutshell

•    Use keywords that relate to the page content in your heading tags
•    Have your keywords occur early in the tags
•    You can use more than one instance of an

tag per page (e.g. wordpress)
• Use multiple

and

tags where appropriate

Know more on h1 tags

Alt Tag is Important: Every image on your site should have an alt tag. Especially images that are relevant to the page. If your page is focused on “website designing” labeling a sample website image as “sample website design” will increase your chance of being found. While labeling it as an “image” or screenshot will be of no help.

Some Useful Resources on Alt Tags:

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/altAttribute

http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol6/html_no1.htm

Designers Should Know The Basics Of SEO: Part 1

apurvaab — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:15:03 +0000

SEO is not only for online marketers, as a front-end developer or a website designer on-page optimization is your responsibility. If you are not making a search engine friendly website then you are actually leaving your client with a job that has to be reworked later. Knowing a few basics but important SEO tips can add value to your skills.

Here are a few SEO guidelines that you as a web designer should follow:

Less Use of Flash: Now Google can index flash sites but this is true only for textual content in SWF files of all kinds. At present, Google only discovers and indexes textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, Google will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, it does not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text. Avoid a complete flash based site if you want search engines to recognize and index your site.

Source: Google Official Blogpost

Your site should upload fast: It’s mainly the size of the page that decides for download times, coupled with bandwidth. Though you can influence the bandwidth of your webservers, you cannot influence the bandwidth of your users. So make sure that your pages are no larger than they need to be.

You can reduce the size of web pages by:
Decreasing the size of your images:
• Use JPG instead of GIF or BMP. Sometimes PNG files are smaller than JPG files
• Use harder compression on your jpg images
• Make the images smaller in size
• Reduce the number of images
• Use HTTP compression on your web servers, which may compress code/text by up to 90%

Click Here or Learn More Buttons: I hate these two buttons but it is one of the most common mistakes I find, when I review a site from SEO perspectives. Can anyone make me understand why the hell we use these words? Are we trying to optimize our site on key phrases “ Click Here” or “Learn More” ? If that is the case then I see no wrong in doing it but if not then please start utilizing these links. Tell user as well as search engine exactly where the link is going to take rather then saying click here. Use keywords in the anchor texts, it will help.

Note: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam.

If you have find this post useful come back tomorrow for more tips on the same topic:

5 Great Tips on Viral Marketing

apurvaab — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:42:02 +0000

1) Make People Feel Something

When Gmail was launched users were not permitted to sign up directly. One could create an account only through invites. It started with a small user base (many of which surely would be Google employees), then repeatedly gave out small numbers of invites to the existing GMail users for friends and colleagues.
The users started growing exponentially and each user felt invites are scarce and precious. Not much time it took for Gmail to become one of the most popular mailing services available.

Was that a viral campaign planned to market Gmail? Indeed it was. The success of marketing lied in the fact of artificial shortage of supply creating demand and the attention people were paying to the invites.

2) Viral marketing is all about making good story

Have you watched the video titled Ronaldinho: Touch of Gold (Nike)?

Without doubt it’s a masterpiece from Nike. No wonder, it has more than 28, million views till date. Watch the video; it has used Ronaldinho as what he is best known for. Ronaldinho takes delivery of a new pair of Nike boots and spends over two minutes demonstrating the most amazing football skills.
Perhaps Nike video is one of the best videos ever created for a viral campaign.

3) Doing Something Unexpected

The John West Red Salmon video in which bear attacks a human and tries some kick boxing was one of the unusual video created to promote the brand. This video was shared out of fun and the brand gets tremendous recognition.

4) Creating Sequels would be a great Viral idea
People have seen your campaign and now recognize your brand. They have found your campaign unusual and interesting. This is the right time to come up with a sequel and create an even more popular buzz this time. Grab complete attention this time.

5) Give an opportunity to Share, Download and Embed
Viral marketing is sharing. Share everything you can to make your campaign get going. Allow people to:
• Download the content, in a usable format (videos in MPG, pictures in JPG etc.)
• Allowing them to easily embed the content on their own sites (Note: remember bandwidth issues)
• Sending it to friends, either using a link or by sending the content directly.
• Publishing it on varies social networks – Digg, YouTube etc.
• Allow people to add it the bookmarking sites