It was a retro night and right when The Other People started belting awesome songs the club dropped into darkness due to power failure, but the spirit of true music lovers like us kept the night alive while patiently waiting for the power to come back. I was hoping the band would start playing acoustic version. Patience pays and few minutes later, the band was back with a bang.

The band played a mix of retro classics, reggae and some good old pop. The crowed was vibrant and I did not miss my usual trance nights. All in all it was a night to remember for a long long time. What more I discovered a great band and another reason to go to live gigs.

A well executed link building exercise leads to recognition and reputation of your website by gradually increasing its credibility and trust factor. Nevertheless, the task of backlinks’ generation demands planning and patience! The fact is that sudden surge in traffic might be achieved in a matter of days by artificial boosting of search ranks, but such tactics are bound to backfire over a period of time.

Achieving consistent and focused traffic is preferable from conversion point of view. Your goal can be attained with a time tested and fine tuned strategy instead of haphazard and hurriedly chalked out link building plan. Keeping this in mind, here are some handy ideas for small businesses to conduct the exercise in a professional manner.

• One way of getting a backlink to your business site is to populate it with original and meaningful content pages, which are updated on a regular basis – consisting of an anchor text or some other link to your website – and to offer that content to a popular portal, review forum or a content syndication service. Volunteer to pen a guest post on your industry specific blog. Add in it, a backlink to your website or product catalog page.
• Research about your site visitor’s preferences and check the pages on it that they visit the most, in order to gather more about their usage pattern. This will allow you to write the kind of content they are looking for and link up some of the most popular pages to draw their attention.
• It is a good idea to make use of reliable keyword tools like Google Insights for Search and AdWords Keyword Tool to gauge search volume for relevant terms and identify widely searched phrases so that you can insert them in your titles, headers, introduction and copy text in a discreet manner.
• Here’s a word of caution: Reciprocal links wherein two sites continue to link back as part of a mutual arrangement is something that should be used with discretion. Such informal exchanges won’t necessarily be viewed as quality links by the search engines.
• In our next post of the series, we shall discuss dos and don’ts of enhancing your site’s online visibility and credibility through link building.

The higher your page rankings, the better will your Web based business do. Unfortunately, your present so-called expert resource that you have hired apparently lacks the experience and expertise to offer you a clue to your site’s poor rank position. Let me give you some useful tips to rectify the situation.

Prefer quality over quantity, value over volume

Quality invariably trumps quantity. Volume is not always a preferable option. Why not opt for value and focus instead? This is made possible through proper planning broader vision and a holistic approach. Backlink quality is of prime importance. It is better to have a few number of good quality links than countless crappy ones.

A quality backlink is a definite endorsement of your website, in some way, from an authoritative and trustworthy resource. Such a link is often one pointing to an informative article or a webpage on your website relevant to the domain. When the content, the anchor text, as well as the page that is being linked to are woven around the same topic, the search engine will perceive that as a quality link. Such links help in boosting your search engine positions.

Emphasize on domain relevance, authority and consistency

Relevance to domain, legitimacy and consistency does matter a great deal, while pursuing search engine friendliness. These are three key factors that will do the trick for you as far as obtaining good links from the leading domain specific sites is concerned. In other words, pursue only a handful of links instead of launching the exercise on a massive scale. You should try to get them from credible and non-spam sites pertinent to your content.

When you create an interesting, useful and topical, or informative and user friendly blog post, you have created a ‘linkbait’, implying content that others would want to link to and also share it on their own blog platforms, on their Facebook pages, in their Twitter streams, on their LinkedIn accounts, or on some popular online forum. Search engines now take into account Twitter and Facebook data for the ranking purpose, and treat such links as public endorsement of your content.

We shall learn more secrets of successful link building in next post of the series.

You have tried your best! And yet, you realize that it is not still showing up in the top five Google search results for relevant keywords. Where is it lacking? There is no need to scratch your head, too much. If you inspect the sit closely, you will see it for yourself. If my guess is not wrong, what it lacks is quality links.

Let me explain to you why your SEO exercise remains incomplete sans link building. Here are a few basic things to keep in mind for you to grasp the vital role a well-planned link building program can play in your site’s visibility, popularity and credibility:

• For your site to be noticed by your prospects, they must come across it not only through search engine optimization but also through link building. When they visit some other industry specific site, they should invariably notice a link pointing to yours (termed backlink).
• Backlinks are important components of a comprehensive search engine optimization plan drawn keeping in mind the interests of any small business. A link back to a trustworthy online resource from your webpage or vice versa is perceived by the search engines as a vote of trust by other top sites for yours.
• It goes without saying that the more authoritative and trusted the sites linking up to yours, and the more relevant is the context and content of that link is to that of your webpage, obviously the more that particular backlink will help your site climb up the search results’ ladder.
• Quality links to and fro means a lot not only for search engines but also for readers, in effect, your target audience, thus increasing the chances of conversion, and boosting your business margins. There is a directly proportionate co-relation between the number of quality inbound links and webpage rank. In essence, hyperlinks greatly enhance your site’s SEO friendliness and conversion rate.

On one hand, the change has badly hurt many E-Commerce sites and online businesses. On the other hand, it harbors the potential to improve overall search quality over time apart from evolving a better information retrieval mechanism. But that’s something for the future!

The Panda enigma

For now, it has impacted the search spectrum. Here’s how!

• It simultaneously hurts SEO-reliant websites that have so far successfully leveraged certain vulnerabilities of Google, even as it raises the entry to organic search elements as a marketing channel.
• Panda algorithm change has literally left many sites starved for traffic that has dramatically depleted in its wake.
• On the plus side, the development has brought out the best of determined SEOs experts making efforts to find solutions and answers to the Panda riddle.

In my own assessment, it has improved search quality for some queries, while for a few others, led to an odd retrograde. So it has been a mixed bag, if you ask me? Does anyone out there remember the Vince update? Well, brand bias now appears to be back, and in a big way…

While brands tend to gain from authority signals, Vince, to put it in simpler terms, was technically not a ‘brand bias’, per se; rather a ‘weighting to authority metrics’ for the head terms, within which brands naturally gained the most. This particular aspect is also crucial in the context of Panda.

There is a valid reason to lean on brands when it comes to relevance in search on the web; actually much of what we are witnessing is the ‘real world’ lining up, so to say, with the internet. Big business names and brands rule, both on and off the web, though many would argue that it wasn’t always true! Well, there was a phase when the Web alluded to a level playing field. May be, that’s changing, or that probably is vision of Google for local search?

So, how to solve the Panda riddle and protect a site from complete SEO disaster? That’s what we are going to consider…

One young academically brilliant person went to apply for a managerial position in a big company. He passed the first interview; the director did the last interview, made the last decision. He looked like a poor man.

The director asked,

“Was it your father who paid for your school fees?”

The youth answered,

“My father passed away when I was one year old, it was my mother who paid for my school fees.”"

The director asked,

“Where did your mother work?”

The youth answered,

“My mother worked as clothes cleaner. The director requested the youth to show his hands. The youth showed a pair of hands that were smooth and perfect.”

The director asked,

“Have you ever helped your mother wash the clothes before?”

The youth answered,

“Never, my mother always wanted me to study and read more books. Furthermore, my mother can wash clothes faster than me.”

The director said,

“I have a request. When you go back today, go and clean your mother’s hands, and then see me tomorrow morning.”

The youth felt that his chance of landing the job was high. When he went back, he happily requested his mother to let him clean her hands. His mother felt strange, happy but with mixed feelings, she showed her hands to the kid.

The youth cleaned his mother’s hands slowly. His tear fell as he did that. It was the first time he noticed that his mother’s hands were so wrinkled, and there were so many bruises in her hands. Some bruises were so painful that his mother shivered when they were cleaned with water. The bruises in the mother’s hands were the price that the mother had to pay for his graduation, academic excellence and his future.

That night, mother and son talked for a very long time. Next morning, the youth went to the director’s office.

The Director noticed the tears in the youth’s eyes, asked:

“Can you tell me what have you done and learned yesterday in your house?”

The youth answered,

“I cleaned my mother’s hand, and also finished cleaning all the remaining clothes”

The Director asked,

“Please tell me your feelings.”

The youth said,

Number 1,

I know now what appreciation is. Without my mother, there would not the successful me today.

Number 2,

I have come to appreciate the importance and value of family relationship.

The director said,

“This is what I am looking for to be my manager. I want to recruit a person who can appreciate the help of others, you are hired.”

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PLEASE SPEND A FEW MINUTES (IF NOT MORE) WITH YOUR PARENTS EVERYDAY. LISTEN TO THEM PATIENTLY AND SAY TO THEM I LOVE YOU.  THEIR LIFE IS MADE!

Can Google still be at the top of internet universe?

In this context, the company is making a concerted effort to take search in the speedy wireless world so as to attract a wider user base, slowly being eaten up social media sites, now easily accessible on the mobile devices.

Retaining its role as the prime gateway to data on the Web obviously holds the key for Google, which it well understands. Take a look at this piece of fact: It generated revenue of $29 billion primarily from search ads, last year, and you will know the gravity of the situation.

Some believe Google’s undisputed position at the heart of the vast internet universe is no more as safe as it previously was, especially as a new generation of mobile gadgets dramatically alters consumers’ browsing patterns and as rapidly growing online social networks like Twitter and Facebook emerge as more popular online hangouts than it.

A new version of Google mobile site

On its part, Microsoft has tried to set part Bing by incorporating data from over 500 million Facebook users, pushing its social search capabilities. When queried about the new set of social search features, rather lack of it, Google executives pointed to aspects like the ‘+1’ buttons that let users endorse webpages and see friends’ recommendations within their search results.

Advanced Instant Pages feature

The company stated its new and advanced Instant Pages feature could well shave off 2 seconds to 5 seconds from the time needed by a user for carrying a Web search and arriving at the desired result page. The technology is based on the technique of predicting the result that a user is most likely to click and then downloading that particular page automatically in the background. Google claims that every time the company can cut down even 40-50 milliseconds from the whole search process, users are inclined to search more and more.

According to Google, initially the Instant Pages feature will be made available as an add-on to its Chrome Web browser and that the company intended to make it accessible on mobile devices in the next few weeks.

A section of them wrongly believe that each marketing campaign, by its very definition, has a specific start, and, a logical end point. That’s not the case…

Well, we shall try to see how E-commerce businesses can transform Search Engine Optimization and Internet marketing into an ongoing cycle. Unfortunately, in my experience, many people fall for wrong advices and leave out the gamut of ‘analysis’ and ‘refinement’ which is extremely vital.

Measure and analyze the results of a campaign

It is critical that you meticulously measure and analyze the results of a marketing initiative undertaken by you, and check exactly how your business site or blog is performing over a period of time.

You might, for instance, be able to attract good traffic volume, but not succeed when it comes to converting or monetizing on the same. What does this imply? It probably indicates your website is not properly ‘optimized to convert”.

So how really to make this happen! In my opinion, you just need to take a few simple steps and that help you understand where visitors across the Web arrive from and what they did while they were at your site. There are ways of knowing this with tools and techniques readily available.

Why do you need a customized plan of action for SEO?

• A generic SEO process may not fit one and all. By understanding the profile of your site visitors and target audience, we can provide you with a plan of action. It will aim at refining your marketing campaign cycle before it you run it again.
• Again, this is an ongoing process. Each time it’s refined and repeated, you add that much more value to your content by squeezing a bit more focused traffic out of it. Obviously, this is going to increase your conversion rate gradually and steadily.
• There is no point in chasing dramatic results that will only confuse search engines. Instead, the cumulative effect of small marketing iterations will have a greater impact. They will ultimately fetch you higher revenue and increased profit margins.

In the next post, shall be discussing a few of the techniques just to give you an idea of the whole process.