Search engine musings

SEO! Yes, thats right!
While working on a potential project for a government body, we had to review the www.nic.in portal and get some information from it about its services. While we were doing that, we came across a page – How to Promote your website?

This page has a list of tips for a webmaster – right from choosing his keywords, writing title and meta tags, advice about image and video alt tags. It even advises users to replace words like “about us” with the name of the organisation to make it more keyword rich.

The Indian government sure is set to go places!

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Envigo is offering the following positions in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi

1. Junior SEO

2. Applications Developer (PHP)

3. SEM (PPC) analyst

4. Content writer

You can get more details here and can also apply online. Go for it, we are waiting to hear from you.

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This business segment is new. Ten years ago,  an online marketing agency was hard to conceive. True, the internet existed, but not many marketing budgets had a line for ‘SEO’ or ‘PPC’. There might have been a line for ‘Website banner advertisement’ but definitely not so in India.

Today, our breed is thriving. Everyone has an online marketing agency or is planning to get one. Companies now have an ‘online marketing manager’ and even are trying out ‘ SEO Manager’ and ‘Affiliate Marketing Manager’.

Ten years from now, there might not be a search engine result page to compete for ranks. The web will be much more semantic – deriving meaning not only from the content of a page, but also by the structure of information arrangement. The web might also be omnipresent, with very blurred and/or thin lines between the desktop, the mobile and home appliances. Marketing to consumers will evolve and so will we.

About 15 years ago, there was a hallowed professional called the stock broker.  Either way the market went, the stock broker was earning his cut. Then came the electronic stock exchanges who charged razor thin margins. The stock broker had to reinvent himself. He is now usually managing portfolios. He has to advise and he has to predict and he has to earn his commission on performance and not on transacting.

This industry will also get paid only on performance and will have to adapt and learn new technologies. We will have to run very hard to keep us from falling behind.  Devices will start talking to other devices and to banks. Privacy laws will become tougher, but there will be much more data to play with. Customers might block away unsolicited ads completely but will also begin to solicit in an informed manner. The website will

The mobile revolution is just a trailer of the entire reinvention movie. It is exciting – much in the same way a roller coaster is.

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Every one who wants to make it big developing Iphone apps needs to know how much money the existing 200,000 applications are making. I came across a survey of 96 iphone developers and wanted to summarise the post here:

• Average number of apps sold – 101,024
• Price point – $0.99 (The average is higher at $5.49 because of a $49.99 outlier)
• Average number of updates – 3.89
• Average total development cost – $6,453 (but developers rarely included their own time spent in development, which would increase the costs a few times)

Even with a higher development cost, the app world is highly profitable. No wonder there are over 200,000 applications, but this field is set to grow further.

• The market is top heavy, the top 10% apps would be getting the bulk of the revenue
• Greatest contributor to sales – Being featured by Apple in some way, in place of sending out an app update

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We believe that we live in a world which does a lot of things on the internet, and very soon, will be doing most of it, on mobile. Can you imagine the look you will get if you tell a business partner that you do not have email? Just a few years ago, it would not have raised eyebrows.

Customers are getting onto the mobile bus in droves. In the US, data usage of mobile phones has surpassed voice.  In India, mobile operators are busy bidding for the 3G licenses. Apparently, they want to use the 3G bandwidth for 2G phones, because they are starved of spectrum.

In the not too distant future, a customer might expect video reviews of products streaming onto their location-aware mobile as they pass by a store. They would discuss it with their friends and family on their always on, 3G-enabled social network and then order it by dragging the video into their shopping cart. They would then pay for it using their phone provider’s monthly billing cycle.

The applications used in the paragraph above exist and are in use today.

Are you ready?

Large organisations have product roadmaps which look ahead 1-3 years. Smaller organisations have a mix of look-ahead and what-next plans which take them from quarter to quarter or year to year. There are firms who are working on their “20092010 online marketing strategy” because that is what it essentially is – the same story in a new page template.

Envigo is here to help. We have set our house in order and are now able to offer development services on mobiles – Iphones, Android, Samsung and Nokia!

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In our line of work, we spend a lot of time with Article websites. An article website is a website which accepts articles. It allows users to publish articles by subject. Once an article is submitted, it is reviewed by the website owners before publishing. A published article can then attract comments, and more importantly, attracts visitors. Visitors come through search engine results, in which the article might start to appear. The article website makes money by selling these visitor driven impressions on ad networks, such as Google ads.

A well designed article site therefore acts as a machine in perpetual motion. Articles are submitted by authors, who want to establish themselves or want to gain links. Every article can have a few links, which are inserted by the article owner. It is quite common for search engine optimisers to submit articles to gain these links.

An article website is a barter marketplace – Authors submit articles to gain recognition and links. Article websites offer both and want the uniquely written article content in return.

This is where our problem begins. Article website accept articles with links. We are happy with the link we get. However, what happens with some of the article websites is this -

1. Article websites remove the links a few months after the article is published
2. Article websites might insert their own links into articles
3. Article websites might remove the entire article after a few months

The marketplace of links-for-content also places a reduced value on the quality of the content. This is often capitalised by the authors, who regularly rehash their articles and lead to content and SERP spam.

What would be interesting would be to have an article website, which accepts only good quality content, and gives out perpetual links in return.

Here’s hoping for that to happen!

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Social Media and social media marketing are the order of the day. Are you thinking about it as well? We wanted to put some perspective behind it, by comparing it with all the other main channels of online marketing.

Social media is different – it is new and it is still evolving. While traditional online channels could be compared along the dimensions of risk, targeting and monetising models, social media does not really fit in very well. The differences between an affiliate sending traffic to you compared to you buying traffic from Google on these dimensions are below:

1. Risk – Who bears the risk of conversion – the risk of conversion sits with the affiliate alone as in the latter case, Google gets paid on a click

2. Targeting – How well is a user identified as a potential buyer – Similar in both cases- A user clicks a button for more information and writes out a keyword for more information

3. Commercials – What is the payment for the advertising based upon – Payment is based on competitive bidding, but in both cases, there is an element of earning per click which comes into play by the volume provider.

Social media fails to fit into such a model except as an over-simplification. The reasons for this are the same as the reasons for its popularity. Social media is -

1. Free in form – blogs, tweets, posts, discussions, status messages… (and pokes)

2. Free in channel and media – the web and the phone converge here – text, images, videos, maps and mashups are all equally acceptable

3. Free to edit, create, contribute, destroy – Yes, of course you can. Of all things, even an encyclpaedia is freely editable (but in a social manner)

4. Free of control – In the traditional sense, yes. There is no one owner. There can not be. It won’t be social any more.

5. Very important for a marketer – Free to engage and influence – The customer is present, directly and without any intervening chatter. You can chat him up – one on one – like never before. He can single you out (for good or for bad)

Search engine advertising was the magical new boy in college – strange at first but a well behaved person who lived by the rules, albeit new ones. You had to learn his language and customs and he became your best friend and did magical new things for you. Social media advertising is the brash new rock star – everyone wants to be with her but no one really knows how to tame her.

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A common question from our SEO clients is about telling them about our most successful SEO initiatives. Without praising ourselves, there are a few sites we like to talk about – travel.ebookers.com and childfriendly.co.uk. There are a lot of things which come together in a great way for these websites. At the same time, we like to remind our clients focusing on SEO tips alone for ranking a website is not most wise.

Search engines such as Google look at over one hundred factors while ranking a webpage. Also, the algorithms attach different weights to these factors. At every major update, search engines introduce changes in their ranking algorithms. What one needs to realise is that the search engine’s goals are not only to make life difficult for an SEO. The search engine is constantly trying to deliver a better user experience for its users – this means the most relevant results, with informative page snippets, appearing in the shortest possible time.

When we design a website for better user experience, while keeping it accessible, we are actually future-proofing it from repeated search engine algorithm changes.

Google asks webmasters here to design sites for users, not search engine crawlers. The search engine crawler is somewhat like a visually challenged person. It can only read text. It can not see images and stylesheets nor can it understand audio.  It ignores Javascript or Ajax. Its view of  a web page can be very different from that of a user. The goal of a search engine crawler is to close this gap between human web browsing and machine crawling. At the same time, the search engine also tries to rank a website based on its user experience. This is why there are high marks conforming to accessibility standards.

This is why sometimes good SEOs should practise their art with blindfolds.

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Quite a few banks in India use online lead generation to drive customer acquisition. The appeal of a fixed cost lead generation contract to the marketing manager is evident. In a way, she acquires a mini holy grail, where she has fixed the cost of acquiring a lead on a fully variable basis. She might need 50,000 leads of type 1 in month 1 and reduce this number to 20,000 in month 2 and none in month 3 as her back office is bent under the load of too many leads.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Our clients in the UK include a family friendly website called www.childfriendly.co.uk. We have managed their SEO and link building for a few months now and are getting excellent results. Check out Google for the keyword “family holidays” here.

Our manual link building team has been effective in generating a good page rank and rankings on relevant words. We also realised that our delivery capabilities from India while having a good understanding of the UK online landscape gives us a rather unique position as compared to other UK agencies. Read the rest of this entry »

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