A lot of Indian blogs on blogger seem to have had their TLDs changed from .com to .in. We picked this up today morning and are investigating to see if this is a widespread issue. Strangely, not too many others are talking about this on the internet or blogosphere. It might be because blogger quiety redirects the browser from the original .com URL to the new .in URL. Is this a country specific thing or only in India? India has been known to be a source of a lot of web spam. Blogger is but naturally a victim of such spammy content. This writer’s personal blog was affected – so if they are really looking at spammy, promotional content before deciding to move TLDs, they need to look harder!

2011 was a super year for us. We enjoyed it very much working with our prestigious clients and with our colleagues. There were a lot of things to learn – in UI design, UX, new technologies and the team showed a good positive spirit.

Some of the websites designed by the team in 2011 were www.clubitc.in, microsite for ITC Grand Chola hotel, (first seven star hotel in India by ITC Hotels), microsite for Condenast Traveller and for the Glamour websites (both of these are leading brands in the UK in their respective fields), Maxbupa & many more. We got great feedback for some of this work.

We also designed our first mobile apps and mobile websites – m.itchotels.in, m.welcombreak.com, site for ITC Grand Chola,  Maxbupa mobile apps for Android market

Another area where we started off afresh was in the design of Facebook applications. Now, by the end of the year, we have a good portfolio of work as well as loads of experience designing facebook applications.

Training and development was an important factor contributing to our ability to plunge into new areas. HTML 5, Jquery and CSS3 were the topics we spent our time on. This helps us in designing the layouts on latest & internationally accepted trends.

One of the challenges we faced in 2011 was hiring – rapid growth led to a need for increasing the size of the team.

In 2012, I am quite confident that we will be in a good position to leverage our new competencies. We will continue to work closely with the development team at Envigo to deliver compelling concepts across multiple platforms – web, social and mobile.

2011 was an awesome year for the SEO Team here at Envigo. During this period, the SEO team grew in size and as well as in skills and in acquiring new processes.

Strategies

New linking strategies have been introduced in company which can provide number of quality back links for website. We focused on quality rather than quantity for effective results. The Panda went by without any big bites from our ranks. Page quality has been a centerpiece of our SEO efforts, which helped this a lot this year with Panda.

Content

Due to a rapid scaling up of work, we faced a significant challenge in content. In the past few months, we have made a lot of inroads into creating a team which is able to deliver high quality, uniquely written content for our clients.. We moved away from keywords and embraced themes in our content generation strategy. We have operationalised this strategy by working with content roadmaps for each client.

Tools

A lot of time and effort went into the requirements writing and scoping for LinkedList – our new link building and SEO analysis tool being developed in-house.

We are now in process of creating sustaining web assets – which will act as genuine platforms for content exchange by certain niche communities. By sticking to a few niches, we will be able to gain authority faster. This will help us in related SEO projects.

Training & Hiring 

Hiring was major challenge for us this year. We hire carefully and are willing to evaluate anyone who has put the effort in meeting us. Investments in training bore results. Our philosophy is to groom talent for the future. This means investing time and effort on junior team members, so that they can grow to take on more and more responsibility. No one really trained us on training. This year, I think we are satisfied with the process and results from our training program. The entire SEO knowledge pool has been divided into grades and mapped to job levels. The team here contributed a lot in designing and improving the training program.

Plans for 2012

Our aim is to continue to deliver consistent and reliable results to our clients. We will need to continue to test and innovate various SEO strategies, implement better processes and tools and put it all together to achieve our goals. The highlights for next year are going to be:

-          Launch and rollout of LinkedList

-          Managing a large and growing team

-          Finding talent

-          Improving content quality

-          Launching new services as part of SEO

2011 has been a great year for Envigo. It has gone past very quickly and has not had a dull moment.
I think that means that we were all very busy – growing, hiring, developing new services and products and becoming better at our jobs.
Envigo.co.uk has undergone a revamp – it needs to get one every year or so – only to keep up with the changes at Envigo.
We have invested in improving our processes and in creating IP in some of the fields we work in. We created many different tools – a tool for tracking Fans and engagement for any brand page on Facebook, a tool to manage link building activity and many different games and applications for the facebook pages we manage.
We have made significant inroads in mobile devices. Appavatar, which is Envigo’s mobile division, now has capabilities in Symbian, Iphone and Android platforms. We have made a provisional filing for our first patent on mobile authentication. We are working to launch our first product – a new service which will help brands connect with customers in new and unexpected ways.
Back in Envigo, we will launch LinkedListin early 2012. It is an SEO management tool, which will be used to track and control link building and also provide direct access to clients.
We went to WTM 2011 and met over 150 potential partners. Some of our work was appreciated and I hope that such visits will add to our list of clients and content customers.
Watch this space for all the new rollouts promised for 2012!

Social media has proved to be an evangelist, revolutionising marketing, communications, and the outflow of information. Brands and businesses have always had an access to rich promotional channels, but, the true promise of social media lies in the direct connection and communication. The most beneficial by products of social media are:
1. consumer engagement,
2. creating brand value and
3. building customer loyalty (stated in order of priority)

The dictionary defines engagement as, ‘to attract or hold attention of, engross’. Consumer engagement on the social platform therefore, refers to anything that glues a customer to the brand or business on the social media channel. It could be an update on twitter/tumblr, a page on Facebook, a profile on LinkedIn, an account on Orkut or an upload on you tube. The brand needs to be everywhere and anywhere the consumer is and mere presence is not enough. Of utmost priority is to keep the customer engaged to all the events and updates. The simplest way is to communicate all that takes place within the brand premises so as to build curiosity in order to gain affinity; else the brand needs to get curious about all that lies within the range of interest of the consumer and build affinity. The main idea is to have the consumer coming back to the page or continue searching for the brand.

This however, isn’t as easy as it sounds. Consumer engagement is not tangible, it’s hard to measure or track. The brand/business needs energising and motivating content to remove any kind of viewer fatigue. It is important to establish a personal connect making way for a 2 way process of communication, initiated by the brand. To maintain engagement on the page, it is highly recommended to follow up on each post. A simple thank you note for any feedback/suggestion may not do wonders but not acknowledging consumer action can sure do blunders.

In social media, just like in the real world, presence is felt between people who represent companies and the people who define markets of interest. Engagement helps weave the graph of social significance and success. All brands and businesses are out there, swimming in the ocean of social media, so engagement is the ingredient that serves as a mast, for the brands, against which they can pull their sails and voyage unhindered.

A question asked by hundreds of people in social media is how can they increase the engagement on their pages? The answer to this persistent question is complex but never truly illusive. However, we decided to view the question differently and thereafter, derive an answer to it. The question should really be what makes a particular page so engaging that fans can’t resist interacting with it. The answer really requires cognitive reversal of theories to determine what interaction attributes a successful post that result in a psychologically engaging user experience. Here are a few pointers you must keep in mind each time you wish to start a conversation on a page.
1. Simplicity breeds familiarity
Simple and basic interactive posts do not require too much thinking on part of the user. They are familiar with the language and the message being communicated. And their response to the post is prompt without having to spare a second thought or an extra second.

2. Add details where needed
If the posts are brutally simple and familiar all that it can breed is boredom. Therefore, now a need arises to add necessary details to the content. Once the fan’s mental model of how the page interacts is well formed and fully embedded (known technically as schema formation) to elude boredom and using familiarity add details to the page keeping in mind the profile of the targeted audience and user base. The posts should slowly move on to being user centric addressing their needs, solving their queries and forming a bond.

3. Cleverly Manage response time
The quicker and prompt the reaction time, the better will be the engagement. The aim really is to marry the user needs and the brand page resulting in many loyal customers. Time management can be leveraged to add to the quality and depth of engagement on any page.

4. Measure the engagement and proceed
The engagement on the page can be measured by the likes and comments and interaction per post. But the success really depends on when you can track profile of the most loyal amongst them and interact with them directly, in turn increasing their affinity to the page.

System Alert: MALWARE ALERT

Warning
Trojan Adware.W32.Exp.Dwnldr spy-ware detected. This Trojan allows Attackers to access your computer
from remote locations, stealing passwords, Internet banking and personal data. This also prompts
advertising pop-ups.

This sort of warning even in your system is good enough to give you a huge scare. Imagine what this would do to you if Google starts showing the warning to the users that this site has malware. Yes, Google does this. And this happens to more sites daily than you can imagine.

This has happened to me in past too when I had a “certain” shared hosting. All the script files in my website were corrupted with a malware. There was a small code at the bottom of the page which was basically a redirection code. As soon as user opened my site, it got redirected to a “certain” website. This was quite scary to me at first, so I contacted my shared hosting provider about this. Not surprisingly, I got a standard reply that website was hacked due to my insecure way using ftp and its not at all their fault. It took me sometime to get my website working again but then the real problem started, so to speak. Google has marked the website as spammy and showed warning to users to enter at their own risk. This was a one time incident for me but this is surely not uncommon. This has happened to a lot of sites. See screen shot:

Google has a malware database which it keeps on updating based on its own crawl of the websites. Pages which are deemed dangerous are identified and blacklisted. In addition to Google, many browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and anti virus too use this database to warn the users to keep away from such websites/pages. This is just not about the traffic for a few days but also affects the standing of your website. The onus is upon the site owner to deal with this and clean the site in order to remove these warnings.

So as a webmaster, what should you do? You need to know how to remove your site from google’s malware database and avoid common mistakes that can leave your website (even after being cleaned) blacklisted for a long time.

First you need to figure out what went wrong. To do this you can use google’s safe browsing diagnostic page  http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site={YOURSITE}. Go to the section which says “What is the current listing status for google.com?”. If your site is in google’s blacklist then you would see something like “Your site is currently listed suspicious”.

The second section which you must carefully look upon is “What happened when Google visited this site? “. To interpret this information, you should look at the two dates: “Last time google visited this site on” & “Last time suspicious content was found on this site was on”. If your site is currently blacklisted, these two dates would probably the same.  Look for the sentences like “Malicious software is hosted on x domain(s) including xyz.com, abc.com. x Domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware content”. Scan your website for these domains. After you clean the code, you can request the website for malware review through Google Webmaster tools. In a few hours, google should rescan your site and come back with an approval.

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!

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.

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.