SEO Kolkata - Experienced SEO Consultant India, Kolkata

*Note: This post has got nothing to do with SEO, SEM etc

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and PayPal has been up to arms for some time now- multiple times, multiple attempts, multiple regulations and the only casualties have been Indian freelancers and small Indian IT start ups that have been using PayPal for their payment processing.

I received the most recent PayPal email on this yesterday that says..

1. Payments from PayPal needs to be withdrawn to bank account within 7 days
   
   This is most likely because if they hold money for more than 7 days RBI would want them to be treated like a bank(also pay interest) and they would come under RBI regulations. RBI doesn’t seem to understand the “online wallet” concept yet and PayPal don’t want to have RBI as the big boss either. So, the burden is now on users to move their money out within 7 days.


2. Export related payments may not exceed $500/transaction
   
   We are still stuck with the FEMA rules that were framed pre-internet/ecommerce revolution and PayPal would need to report any transactions above $500 to RBI – which they want to avoid and so they have put the burden on their users.

Now let’s try to understand what this means for India as a country:

1. The whole process of accepting payments from International clients becomes a lot more hazardous and restricted resulting in client’s getting irritated about working with Indian freelancers. Think if a client needs to pay you $600 – he will have to make two separate payments – isn’t it an additional hazard? Why would they take this trouble when they have other people to do the work? ( India isn’t the only country that is good for outsourcing )


2. As a consequence of the above, some of the clients would move out – especially because they have tons of freelancers in countries like Philippines and Vietnam waiting to do similar work at an even lesser cost.


3. At least a few millions Indians earn their bread as freelancers and some more employed with really small IT setups that are currently using PayPal. As this problem takes a toll on the number of clients who outsource work to India, many of these people would be effected – lose their clients, resulting in lesser income or going jobless ( as if we don’t have enough of them already )


4. Lesser work coming to India with same number ( rather increasing) number of freelancers would mean a higher competition, resulting in even cheaper rates and lower quality of work offered by freelancers, earning Indian freelancers an even worse reputation.

And for those who are touting PayPal alternatives, I can say from firsthand experience, none of these alternatives have half the credibility that PayPal has and so most international clients would think ten times before using them.
While I am not even close to being called knowledgeable about banking regulations or economic reforms, after being in the industry for almost 9 years now and being working with International client for more than 5 years I have some understanding of how business works. Unfortunately I don’t see any positive impact of these regulations on the Indian freelancer community and the innumerous small businesses that are cumulatively earning at least a few million dollars every year for the country.

Isn’t it time we look back at our rule books that are way outdated and rather than putting more and more restrictions try doing things that help these people grow their business, earn more money for themselves ( I believe that adds to the country’s economy also).

Frustrated !!!!

Labels: PayPal, RBI, Reserve Bank of India

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As I mentioned in my 7 Notable points for Internet marketers in 2011, Mobile is going to get bigger this year and it seems Google is doing everything possible to help the search marketers to target this growing mobile audience.

Google Adwords campaign by default includes desktop as well as mobile devices to run
your ads, however, over the last year we have seen further fine tuning of this capabilities, which now allows paid search professionals to target their mobile ads through Google Adwords to users on specific mobile devices and on specific carriers.

Google mentions that in the third quarter of 2010, Google mobile searches jumped 130% year over year, which indicates that more and more advertisers would be interested in mobile ads.Now to further help Adwords consultants Google has enhanced its Keyword research tool to show mobile specific data. The Google keyword tool now offers options for users to see keyword ideas and statistics for various types of mobile devices under "Advanced Options".

The tool is pretty detailed and there are multiple options to choose from, you can choose to view keyword ideas for -

• Mobile device with full internet browsers ( iPhone, Android and similar smart phones)


• Mobile WAP devices ( most Internet enabled phones)


• All Mobile browsers


• Besides, desktop and laptop devices

This could be a fantastic addition for search marketers to understand which queries are specific to or are more common on which type of device. It’s a good idea to search for your target keywords using the keyword research tool, set once for “Desktop and Laptop Devices” and once for mobile. Export both the options in Excel and the compare the volume for common keywords across platforms to better understand the search trends by device.

Also, I would strongly recommend keeping a close eye on your analytics to see if you are getting a sizable traffic volume from mobile devices. Based on this consider setting up separate “mobile only” campaigns, so you can further experiment with these platforms.

It would not be surprising if Bing also beefs up its mobile user targeting options and starts offering new tools of similar nature. This enhancement to Google’s keyword research tool is definitely a great addition for all SEO and Adwords consultants in the New Year and I am sure there would be a lot more new stuff happening in the mobile marketing space this year.

Labels: Adwords, keyword research, keyword research tool, Mobile Marketing, mobile search, PPC

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Well, this is kind of a rant post and am not sure how much value you will derive from it but I presume if you are reading this, next time when you are looking for a SEO consultant whether from India or anywhere else in the world you will probably have a different perspective.

On an average, I get around 3-4 request for SEO consulting job from this blog every month, and though I said “consulting”, some of them do not really require a SEO consultant and are primarily looking for someone who can just follow instructions blindly and carry out stuff like link exchange, directory submission etc and I politely decline those.

Now there are some other clients who actually require a senior level consultant who can create a proper holistic internet marketing strategy for their business and implement / help in implementation of the same. These are the projects that I really look forward to.

Typically with this type of clients and projects , we would have a few discussion/ email exchange to understand their business model and marketing requirements and when they are all happy and ready to start the fun begins as it comes down to pricing.

Because I am based out of India, some people would have an impression that I will work for peanuts and the most common phrase that I get to hear from them is, “there are so many other SEO experts in India who work at a much lower price” – Agreed ! but I offer much more than just that! What you get typically from those so called “SEO Experts” is what I call 90’s SEO – Keyword stuffing +link building( read: link exchange) for a few months without any effective strategy and noticeable result.
Some clients definitely understand the difference in the level of service, knowledge and experience but then there are others who fail to understand that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

Being in India, shouldn’t be a reason why someone would devalue my services. Of course, it does give me the opportunity to offer my services at a lower rate compared to my US or European counterparts and I do leverage that advantage by offering a much lower price compared to SEO consultants from those countries. My location doesn’t really affect the quality of service I provide and when you are looking for a premium service isn’t it natural to pay a few dollars more than usual? Though most SEO projects are priced based on a monthly fee in India, a little calculation would reveal the hourly rate to be at around $10-$12/hour. My rates are typically a dollar or two higher than this and I offer a lot more for that minimal premium.

Just to put in perspective, here are the SEO consultant rates for some of them who have been nice enough to put up some ball park figures on their website:

• Scott Hendison ( UK) : $2500 Set Up fee+ First Month, Monthly Price: $1000 or higher


• Simon Shandler ( US) : price varies by project complexity, $4000 retainer fee


• Shane Hunter (US): $1000-$2000/month


• Dream Ware Enterprise(US) : $350/hour for Telephonic consultation


• SozoFirm (US) : $150/hour Email, chat, & phone consultation


• Sheffield Marketing (Chicago, US): $150/month for telephonic SEO consultation


• iOptimal.co.uk –Cost: £6300. Delivery time: 7 months ( for moderately competitive keywords)

(The rates are taken from their respective website as on 12th January, 2011)

Now when you look at these prices, I am sure you can understand that if an equally experienced guy in India is asking you $250-300/month, he isn’t really asking the world from you.

I really don’t mean to offend anyone or come across as a snobbish high priced SEO consultant, most of my clients are small businesses and I do understand that each penny counts when it comes to small businesses. I am more than open to talk about prices, discuss and find mutually beneficial options, however, it really pains, when some potential client tells me “why can’t you work for $5/hour, after all you are in India” .

I hope this blog gives a fair idea to my readers and potential clients about the level of expertise and experience I have in this domain and while we are all looking for bargain prices, as a professional, I expect the rates to be respectable.
I would rather end this rant on a positive note. I have found some of my best clients through this blog and I take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks for all the business they have offered. Hopefully the New Year will bring in a lot more business for all of us.

Labels: india, SEO Consultant, SEO Consultant Rates, SEO experts

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A very Happy New Year to all the readers! Now that we have all stepped into 2011, it’s the season for predictions on every possible aspect and I thought I would hop on to the same bandwagon and share a few points that I feel might be crucial for all of us Internet marketers.

With the way technology has been evolving and more and more new data sources and marketing channels opening up Internet marketing is going to become a much more interesting mix than it was even a year back. While some of these are very apparent some would still leave many of us speculating, whether or not this is going to happen. Let’s take a look at the following points:

1. Location Based Marketing: Yup!! We have seen Foursquare, Google Places, Tags, Boost, Facebook Places, Gowalla and innumerable more and this definitely going to grow. With increasing number of people using internet from mobile devices, people would get more comfortable checking into places, merchants would work actively in tapping into this audience by offering coupons, discounts and local offers. I would expect search engines would probably also tap into this data and use this for improving their local search results and location based web search results.



2. Search & Social – Search is likely to get more and more dependent on social, in other words, search engine algorithms would factor in social media metrics in much more details and these would become crucial functions for your search rankings. You can read my other detailed article on how Social Media is going to affect Search in 2011.



3. Videos : Videos are going to be one of the most important marketing tools on the web in 2011. We have seen how brands have been increasingly using videos effectively and this is going to get all the more intense. Besides typical video syndication, I would predict live streaming on the web become more frequent and more and more businesses would be using this for effectively reaching out to their target audience. Besides, YouTube, it would be wise to keep our eyes on sites like Daily Motion, Viddler, Vimeo and UStream. Adoption of Universal search has already made videos an easy way to hit the first page of search results for competitive terms and with more brand conscious marketing strategies and the inherent viral nature of videos would make them all the more important in this socially focused web.



4. Social Commerce: This has also taken off already and is going to get bigger by days! The same reason why word of mouth marketing is immensely powerful, social recommendations are going to be big time influencers in purchase decisions.
   Merchants have always set up shop where people are and in 2011 what better place to set up your shop than the social platforms like Facebook ? Facebook already has a full-fledged ecommerce integration option and it would not be surprising to find other social platforms offering similar facilities and even simpler point and click setup for ecommerce stores within social platforms. The ease of setting up such social ecommerce stores would be a big determinant of the growth of social commerce in 2011.



5. More Than Your Website: If we look back a few years, we would remember where businesses were just dying to have a website, anyone who had a website had a clear advantage over the ones who didn’t it. Now in 2011, that almost all businesses have a website, what would make the difference? The differentiator would be whether the businesses are present where their customers are, namely, social platforms. It would be equally important for businesses to establish their presence in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn FourSquare and similar social platforms – having a website is just not enough anymore.



6. Reputation Management : The wave of reputation management would continue to get bigger. Even smaller businesses would get extremely brand conscious and work actively towards reputation management. This is also likely to give rise to a lot of new businesses who would start offering/ claim specialization in reputation management. From a SEO’s perspective, educated customers are likely to get demanding in ensuring that SEOs are careful about what they do to achieve ranking, so as not to affect the reputation of the brand in any way during the process.



7. Mobile & Smartphones: Most companies would start considering a mobile strategy very soon. A huge number of users are already accessing internet on their mobile devices – the smart phones and tablets are getting increasingly powerful. Businesses would leave no stones unturned to tap into this audience and mobile apps and advertisement would be the two most effective and popular channels adopted by businesses. The war for establishing your apps in the crowded appstores have already started and it is going to get fierce in 2011. There would be a lot more independent agencies and mobile strategy companies that would start offering app marketing as a stand-alone service.

There are definitely more surprises waiting for us in 2011 and one year down the line if we try to do a review of this year has delivered this list would probably get much longer. Feel free to share your thoughts on these predictions and also what are the other possibilities you think 2011 holds for us.

Labels: 2011, internet marketing, Mobile Marketing, predictions, Reputation Management, Social Commerce, Social Media, Video

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Question-answer sites have been a real craze over the last year and besides the highly popular Yahoo! Answers we have also seen a bunch of other question answer sites coming up. There are various advantages of having a question-answer site, the main one being it is based on user generated content. This relieves the users from the headache of generating content for the site and as more and more questions are being answered, the site automatically develops authority in respect to high quality content. Further to this most of this question answer sites have an inherent social networking nature which furthers interaction between users and contributes positively towards the growth of the site.

However for an average webmaster it might not be very easy to set up a question answer website as it typically requires a lot of programming skills. While doing a little research on this I found the Famous Question CMS and was really surprised to see that someone might consider building a CMS for such a niche. Digging more into it revealed some really good features and honestly I was a little impressed (probably more because I never thought that such a CMS would be there).

It is basically a PHP based CMS that has integrated a question answer script with a social media script – undoubtedly a potent combination. The whole thing looks SEO friendly as well – the question answers can be categorized pretty easily, helping in creating thematic content groups, the users also get to create their own customized profile pages. Typical to any social network script, the users can communicate with each other and also have debates. To make the script further user friendly besides its registration and login section, sites built in this CMS would also allow users to login using Facebook Connect.

Keeping in mind the monetization aspect the CMS also has advertising modules built in which allows for webmasters to place ads of their choice in strategic locations. While inquiring about support options, I noticed that the script has a support board and also there is a forum from Famous Why( developers of the script).
With the ease of setting up a question answer website with this CMS I am now a little tempted to start one of my own, maybe I will need some more time to make up my mind.

Labels: FamousWhy, Question Answer website, Social network script

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First of all a very Happy New Year to all my readers! May this New Year bring in a lot of SEO and Internet marketing success for all of you!

It’s that time of the year again when we are reflecting and reviewing what the previous year has left us with and predictions are raining about on every other blog on what 2011 is about to reveal. As I have already been guilty of not posting in this blog so often, I thought I would jump on to the bandwagon and share a few interesting and slightly futuristic thoughts on how SEO is likely to change in 2011.

As most of us can already predict one of the key factors would be Social Media – it has already started playing a major role in most planned internet marketing strategies and now if we try to look a little deeper on how specifically it would affect SEO there are two definitive predictions that I would like to make :

1. Social Links - Yes, we know search engine algorithms and specifically Google’s have been highly dependent on backlinks and we SEO’s have tried every possible form of manipulation to drive links to our websites, genuine or not. ( While personally I do not really work towards “manipulating” links for my websites and neither recommend it, as a part of the SEO community, I feel I will have to equally accept the responsibilities for good, bad and ugly acts). Now that the search engines have started drinking from the live hose of some of the major social platforms like Twitter, they are surely going to leverage it to improve their results. The primary reasons being, using data from social media would actually mean they would be using data generated by actual human mass intelligence, which is highly difficult to manipulate due to the “mass” factor.
   
   Given the situation I would not be surprised if social media links starts to get more importance compared to links from other websites and blogs. Contextual in-content links will still hold their fort but blogrolls, footer links, link exchanges( I think this is already almost dead) etc are going to get diminishing importance in Google’s algorithm.
   
   Also, in terms of social links, it would not just be the link count that would matter, a lot of other factors would also come into play, the user contributing the link and his profile would be of paramount importance. For example, if this article gets tweeted by Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan - my New Year dream!! Lol ) it would get far more importance with the search engines compared to if it gets tweeted by someone who doesn’t have the authority of Danny or by someone who might be an equally big authority in some other industry but not in SEO. Parsing a user’s timeline, followers-following ratio, number of likes & shares their posts get in Facebook, the communities they are fan of etc give a very clear signal to the search engine about a user’s profile and level of authority he/she has on that particular domain and accordingly that can be factored in while evaluating links placed by them in the social platforms.
   
   From a SEO’s perspective it would mean that the days of hitting up the search rankings with those small links from mushrooming directories, link exchanges, buying links etc are coming to an end and this might be the actual beginning of links generated by virtue of quality content. Search engines have always been preaching this but for most small businesses ( who cannot afford to spend money on creative link builders or do it themselves) it has mostly been an utopian situation till now.
   This New Year, let’s generate a lot of good and useful content that people would love to read and share – links and rankings would automatically follow.


2. Social Mentions - Yes, I believe it would not just be links, even brand mentions would matter and count in your search rankings. All the contributing factors as discussed on the point above for Social Links would hold good for this too and even if there is no link it would add to the search engine’s perception of your website and brand. Of course, context would probably be the biggest factor in contributing keyword/ topical relevance to your website when it would come to social mentions.
   
   For both social mentions and social links there is also the indirect advantage of getting a lot of genuine links from various blogs and websites as your content gets syndicated.


3. Location: More and more users are surfing internet from mobile devices, we have already seen a big leap in the local search space and things would continue to improve. My prediction in this case would be that regional directory listings and location based tags are going to be factored in location based search queries (not just local search results but also the way web results are ranked). We already know that search results today are customized as per our location; this would probably see a lot more improvement based on these location tags. For example, if someone searches for “Pubs in Kolkata” besides the local results, if there are some pubs that has been tagged by users from Kolkata those websites are probably going to be ranked higher compared to other Kolkata pubs that has not been tagged. While I do think this is very likely, a piece of the puzzle that I am not able to work out till now is from where is Google going to collect this data? Facebook places? Foursquare or someone else?

I am sure there are lot more new things would happen in SEO this year, with new and evolving technology and additional data sources opening up for the search engines, algo’s would get more complex and it would be a tougher time for SEOS – however, all these are likely to lead to a better web with lot of useful and relevant content and accurate information at finger tips.

Labels: 2011, link building, local search, SEO Predictions, social links, Social Media

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