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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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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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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Lots of work has been going on and we have opened up the India delivery centre as well. In true small company fashion, it is in a flat converted into an office but it is a fun place. We have a help who takes care of all our needs and prepares great lunches.

We have been meeting a few potential clients. Read the rest of this entry »

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Envigo started its journey as a company today. We are now registered in the UK as a company and will now be setting up operations. In the first few years, we plan to have a delivery centre only in one or two locations in India. This is going to help us deliver at competitive price points. Thanks to our previous employers, we have done exactly this – have an offshore delivery centre in India to manage and deliver multimillion online marketing spends out of India. We, in our previous roles as employees working with a large budget and delivering high volumes with low margins to play with, have delivered a substantial chunk of business and managed 100% of it from India. We will do the same for our clients. The UK office will help us reach out to local clients and will function as a business development and client acquisition centre for us. Read the rest of this entry »

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