SEO Kolkata - Experienced SEO Consultant India, Kolkata

With the increasing popularity of SEO, there are more and more so called "seo experts" popping up in every corner of the web world and while the sources of proper SEO knowledge has substantially increased over the last few years, confusion still exists and the misinformation spread by these half baked just adds more to it.

Here are some SEO Myths that are most commonly found among clients as well as newbies..

a) SEO is a Sham - This is mostly prevalent among clients who have burnt their fingers once or twice with so called SEO companies. One of the key reasons for this is that these companies would often not tell you what exactly they are doing to SEO your website and would often explain the stuff they do with terms like "proprietory technique" etc and finally end up with no results. This myth has been substantially busted this days because more and more good seo companies are coming into the picture who would properly educate the client and provide absolute transparency. Also articles on SEO and search engine marketing published on leading magazines like Business Week, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes have contributed to establishing the credibility of SEO.

b)It is better to go with a SEO company that guarantees ranking - It has been said time and again by authority SEO websites and even by search engines like Google to avoid SEO companies and consultants that guarantees ranking. Here you can check what Google says.
These guarantees generally work based on one or more of the following ..

• These SEO companies would not care about a long term success but show you some short term boost in rankings and get the money out.
• In most cases they would give you a large collection of keywords and the payment terms would be based on getting ranking for atleast few of them ( 5 keywords out of 20 should have first page ranking etc ) and in most cases they would have really long tail un competitive keywords included to cover these "5 keywords". You wont get any traffic but they get their money by fulfilling the condition.
• Some contracts require on going payment for continued ranking thereby reducing your marketing ROI. Whereas a good SEO campaign done for a proper period of time can go with minimum maintenance.
• Also, most of those SEO companies would have some fine prints in the guarantee which if you read in details you are sure to sense the bad ethics of these companies.

If you want to find a good SEO company or SEO consultant try to evaluate them by their experience, portfolio and get references for their previous clients rather than going by a guarantee. Here's an article on how to choose a SEO consultant.

c) You should Submit URLs to Search Engines - Yes, there are SEO companies that charge their client mentioning that they would submit the client's website URL to a few thousand websites every week.This is absolutely NOT required. The modern search engines can easily find and index your website by following the inoming links and there is no need to submit them to the search engines. Also, other than the few major search engines, the other engines that are there would hardly ever drive any traffic to your site so it doesn't make any sense submitting to those engines either.

d) Flash is bad - No, Flash is not bad however lack of text and complete reliance on flash is bad. Also, Google has announced about its flash indexing capabilities recently which is definitely a good news.

e) Meta Keywords tag is Important - Again a complete myth. Google has depreciated the Meta keywords tags and Yahoo might be using it for non-compeitive misspellings and similar variation of keywords but definitely not for regular keywords. It would not harm to have a Meta keywords tag on your web page but it would not help you tobbost your search rankings on proper keywords.

Labels: Google, SEO, SEO Myths

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Most of us who blog or maintain a website must have experienced it sometime or the other. Your hard worked content gets copied by some other website just as it is without a mention of your website. While this is an extremely irritatting and often frightening experience ( if you are have heard too much about duplicate content penalty) for some people , I can assure you that scraping of your website would not typically not get you penalised or get any negative effect on your website from the search engines perspective. Let's look at the reasons..

a) Generally such scraping of website would be done by new websites or sites that are struggling to establish their own presense. In such case even if Google indexes their page they would not be getting any benefit out of it. Your site, assumably with better authority than th scraper website, would still be recognised by the search engines. In rare cases, if a bigger site with more authority than yours scrapes your content ( I mean complete scraping of the entire website content) you can always file a DMCA or speak to them in legal terms - however, I would suggest you speak to the site adminstrators first in general terms and request them to remove the content rather than getting into legalities.

Other Options

b) Add a link to your posts - Always try to add a link to your previous posts or other pages of the website in your content. This way even if some website scrapes your content the link als gets copied and hus it is easier to identify who has copied the content.

c) Partial Feeds - Most website scrapers try to take advantage of XML feeds and leverage it to publish content. Creating partial feeds will discourage such scraper websites from using your content. However, this would be injustice to your genuine readers and feed subscribers - so think twice before implementing this.

d) Plug ins - If you are using Wordpress , use the WP Copyrighter plugin that attaches a Copyright notice to your XML feeds. So in case someone copies your content, the copyright notice goes in as well.

e) Signature -You can also use a signature text on your feed with a link back to your blog and your signature. Any site that scrapes the content would also carry the signature text there by crediting your website for the content.

When it is good to get your content copied..

Yes, at times it might be beneficial to get your content copied. Think if just one of your article gets copied by an authority website and they provide a linkback to your site as the source ! Well you get a good link as well as tos of traffic .

Labels: Copyright, duplicate content

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Besides web Google has been offering TV ads for considerable time now, however, one reason that the service has probably not become that popular is due to the difficulty of creating TV commercials. Now they have a solution for that as well.

Google has partnered with SpotMixer and introduced a new, free ad creation solution that is accessible through the Adwords account. The SpotMixer tool allows TV commercials to be created in minutes. There is a library of visuals, transitions and effects that the advertisers can use and mix with their own information to create the commercials. It also allows the advertisers to upload their own images or video content. There are options to use adjustable soundtracks or alternatively the advertisers can record their own voice.
Watch this video posted by Google to see how it works..

Labels: Adwords, Google, TV commercial, Video ads

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Last week Facebook decided to remove one of the insanely popular Facebook applications sighting privacy issues. The Burger King application offered a free whopper to every Facebook users who sacrificed 10 friends by removing them from their friend’s list. The application stimulated the removal of 233,906 friends by 82,771 Facebook users in less than a week.

While apparently Facebook should be extremely happy about the success of this campaign and could have sighted this as an ideal example of how successful Facebook could be as an advertising platform, they have decided to get the application removed. When a user removes a friend this application would send a notification with the same information to the person who has been removed. This was the key viral component that caused the application to be so popular so fast; however, the FB guys saw a privacy issue in notifying the users about their removal from someone’s friends list.

Burger King Officials mentioned that though Facebook gave them the option to continue with the application with certain modifications in the way it worked, they think that these modifications would substantially remove the appeal of the application rendering it almost ineffective and so they decided to pull it off.

While I really don’t see what can be such a major privacy issue in this application, I think the Facebook guys might be a bit concerned because this application tends to violate the basic nature of any social networking site. Instead of bringing people together and increasing interaction the Burger king Facebook application motivated people to sacrifice their friends ( though you could add them back later) and the Facebook guys might have a subtle concern that this might disrupt the increasing network of users and effect the level of interaction among users in the platform.

p.s: I am not an avid Facebook user, the paragraph above is just what I personally think is a possibility. There has been no such comment from the Facebook team.

Related Posts:
Facebook Launches Vanity URL
Facebook Song with Lyrics

Labels: application, Burger King, Facebook

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We have all observed that celebrities are becoming increasingly conscious about their online media presence and social media is definitely one of the key areas that they want to keep a tab on. One of the key differentiators in the US President election campaign that set Obama ahead of McCain was his social media presence and highly planned and successful implementation of Web 2.0 communication strategy.

Now Britney Spears joins the list..

Pop princess Britney Spears is planning to improve her Social media presence and enhance her brand online by hiring a Social Media Manager. Not just her blog and website but she is also planning to enhance and manage her presence in popular social media properties like Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and MySpace with the help of "Britney Spears 2.0 Media Manager". Here's a copy of the ad placed on a Harvard jobs board, Britney is looking for an ivy leaguer to manage her high-profile brand online.

Labels: Britney Spears, Celebrity, Job, social media campaign, Vacancy, Web 2.0

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Web 2.0 has been really big and almost every website has done something or the other to involve their users but Google has probably played the trump card. If empowering users and enhanced interaction is one of the key things that users love in a website, what can be better than being able to alter your Google search results? Google Search Wiki has done just that!

Google Search Wiki is a feature that allows the users to alter the search rankings of websites, add new websites, delete websites and even add notes against each websites. Google remembers the changes made by the user and in case the user repeats the search he gets to see the already altered form of the search results with all the notes. In addition, true to the “Wiki” nature the user gets a taste of collective wisdom as they can see how other users have promoted or demoted search results in aggregate once they click on “See all notes for this Search Wiki”.

This feature is available to users only when they are logged into their Google account.

Now this sounds really good and rather cool but things start getting interesting when we consider the possibility of Google using this human input to improve its algorithm. Google already uses human judgment in its algorithm to some extent by virtue of its PageRank technique, where a website is judged by the number of other websites that links to it. Though Google has still remain non committal and has not said anything that allows us to conclude that they are going to use this feedback in their regular algorithm, Google being Google it is highly unlikely that they would let go such valuable information and not make good use of it to improve their search results. On the contrary there has been statements from Google execs that fuels the idea of Google using this data to improve their search results.

While human influence can definitely help Google improve their search results this also makes the algorithm more vulnerable to manipulation. We have seen the PageRank technology being manipulated by people through link networks, link buying, link swaps and various other ways through which websites gain back links inorganically. Once Google declares ( which I don’t think they will ever do) that they are going to use this data in their algorithm or people find out that the changes made to results through SearchWiki does have an impact on the natural organic results it is sure to be manipulated. For a few dollars there would be people ready to create a few thousand gmail accounts and then vote up your site or delete your competitor or something similar.

Besides the possibility of Google algorithm being affected, I think most of us love Google for the simplicity of its interface and now when most savvy netizens are in the verge of getting frustrated with those bunch of social bookmark buttons on every possible web page, I don’t think many of us would like to see our beloved Google interface cluttered with a bunch of voting buttons.

Google is not the first one to try customizing search results, we have seen similar efforts in U Rank – where Microsoft is testing search results tuned by user inputs, Mahalo is using it for the top search terms and WikiaSearch who has already been doing this. However, Google being much bigger than all of them in terms of market share the impact of user influenced search results in Google on the overall WWW can be quite interesting.

Labels: Google SearchWiki, Web 2.0

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Wake up Google, it's 2009 ! HAPPY NEW YEAR - do you hear that ?? lol..

Google Home page still shows a copyright notice of 2008 :)




However, MSN seems to be prompt in this aspect and their home page shows a 2009 copyright notice.

For those of you who also forgot to update your copyright notice, its time you do it; we are already 5 days into the new year.

Labels: 2009, Google, Google Home page, Search Server 2008

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