Google’s Real Time Search & Google Alerts - Monitor The Latest Social Media Buzz Stream Without Any Unwanted Noise

Google started with the Real Time Search results sometime in last December and has been updating and improving this feature regularly. The preference of searchers shows a shift from the library search to the real time search. All these real time search results are from blogs, twitter conversations, news and other social media sites. Google presents the search under the UPDATES options available on the LHS of the Google search results page.

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Is Social Media The New Marketing Mantra Or Just A Fad?

By now everyone a casual net surfer or a serious professional in the web world must have seen this video on YouTube.
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How To Price An SEO Campaign

Every company has got its own pricing policies and especially when it comes to SEO many times the SEO companies and the clients who want to avail of these services are not sure of deciding upon the way the whole SEO campaign should be priced.

Any pricing for any service should be fair to the service provider as well to the client.

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Just SEO Is Not Enough .You Need A Web Culture In The Organization For Overall Online Success. How Healthy Is The Web Culture Of Your Company?

If You Think That You Have Signed A SEO Contract And Now You Are Going To Win The Web Market Then You Are Wrong.

SEO is the art and science of understanding the technology, the EQ , the IQ and of course thereby the algorithms of the search engines to make the websites rank high on the search engines to tap the targeted market.
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Who Should Manage The Social Media In Your Organization?

Every marketing campaign involves social interaction. As social interaction online is possible through the various social media platforms like blogging and micro blogging. In an online or internet marketing campaign social media is surely something which is catching up with the netizens.
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You Can Verify The Ownership Of Your Site In Google Webmaster Tools Using the Analytics Snippet

No one likes duplication of efforts and especially when they are mundane repetitive tasks like verification of accounts in the webmaster tools. Google seems to understand that and has added another option for verification in webmaster tools.
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What Is All This Link Building About, Why are all the Webmasters And SEOs Falling In Link Love?

Before we discuss and understand about why everyone having a website today wants to get as many inbound links to their site, let us understand why , when and how all this importance to inbound links started.

We know that when any technology or algorithm becomes open and more and more people gain knowledge about it there is a tendency in general to use it or misuse it. If it is used in the right perspective then, it achieves the purpose for which it was built. But, when it is misused by the miscreants then it is a major matter of concern and needs to be restricted ASAP.

Way back Google announced a PageRank technology to display quality search results as the webmasters were misusing the keyword tag extensively and there was a lot of black hat which was affecting the quality of results on the search engines.

According to Google the Page Rank is defined as follows:

• PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.

Find detailed information here: http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html

As mentioned above in the PageRank definition every link to your page is like a vote, a recommendation you make to the visitor coming to your site and thereby generating an online WOM for the linked site confirming your faith in the services and information offered by that company.

This is a very important and valuable opinion you give to your website visitors and in a way you vouch for it. Hence these links you give to other sites and the links your website gets were given importance by Google to determine the online standing of a company and business and hence the websites having a good inbound linking are considered to have higher popularity and given a higher PageRank .

The PageRank refelects how popular the webpage is online and thereby no doubt many times it is ranked high in the SERPs but let me tell you I have seen pages with ZERO PageRank also on Page 1 rankings of Google.

Inadequate SEO knowledge makes the SEO run after links. As a result there is a whole industry of Link Building which has come up and there are companies whose main service is to provide you links. Though there can be quality and innovative methods of getting links to your site as a continuous marketing effort but usually it gets limited to the easy way out by many to buy links from link farms or exchange links.

I am of the opinion that the term 'link building' itself is an incorrect term. Links do not have to be built but they should get built naturally in the process as your website starts getting a wider web presence and preference. The inbound links are something that your website earns by virtue of the quality foot prints it creates on the web as you reach out to more and more people by being focused on the valuable services and information offered by your website.

Buying a link is like telling someone that I shall pay you for speaking well about me. Now, how far is that ethical? How long will such a WOM last for your company’s credibility or in this matter keep your rankings high in SERPs? I am sure you have the answer . These short term solutions may give immediate results but will not ensure a long term web presence which should be the goal of any online marketing campaign. SEO has the possibility of achieving this if the SEO approach is ethical and as per the norms of the search engines.

I would like to emphasize here that yes having good quality links from authority and reputed sites and topical sites is essential and important but the way you achieve them is the main focus of this discussion.

To start with try to earn every link to your site as a result of unique, quality content and information on your site.

Yes, CONTENT is still the uncrowned king of the web since the first website went online and shall always remain inspite of millions websites coming on the web regularly.

Apart from a good qualitative site in all respects other genuine methods of gaining natural inbound links as your website goes from one milestone to another are as follows:

• Focus all your efforts on making the site informative, qualitative and content rich to get links automatically.

• Do not neglect the On-Page Optimization Basics and just go after links. (Very important from the SEO perspective)•

• Participate in social media networks for discussions and sharing of information and mention links to the relevant pages to your website. (It need not be the Home Page always)• People are sharing links on the social media like never before and whenever you tweet a link you are sharing it with so many people who are connected to your followers which again has the possibility and probability of gaining exponential reach. This in turn again offers a lot of scope for gaining unbiased genuine links.

• Have a social book marking button on your website.

• Make RSS feeds available on your website.

• Issue Press Releases periodically.

Create a whole ambience and atmosphere around your website which shall make websites link to the site you want. In a way ensuring that you don’t have to run after links but they instead walk up to your site and acheive the true purpose of the PageRank Technology by Google.

I think that it is the responsibility of every web developer, SEO and any one even remotely related to uploading and affecting the content on the web to add value to it in its own little way. 

Related Information on PageRank And Linking available here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

http://blog.webpro.in/2010/06/pagerank-obsession-patience.html

Online Marketing Ensures More Openness And Honesty In The Whole Marketing And Sales Process.

Online marketing methods are replacing the traditional marketing methods . Day in and day out, the Corporate world is allocating huge budgets for SEO (Search Engine Otimization), CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), for re-developing and tweaking their websites for better conversions and also trying to establish an attain a voice on the social media platforms for their business.

Since such an evolution is taking place in the field of business, no business owner can neglect the power of the web. Having an online presence is becoming mandatory for each and every business house.
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Social Media Marketing And The Online Presence Of Your Business

All marketing plans, efforts and strategies revolve around people and understanding the potential customer or catering to the existing customer is the main focus of any marketing campaign.

The social element can never be ruled out from any business activity as a whole because every business caters to some or the other want or requirement of people.

As all people involved in any kind of marketing are aware of the four Ps - Product , Place, Promotion and Price. We can see that we cannot decide about the product without keeping the people in mind, we cannot decide about the place without keeping the people in mind, we cannot decide about any promotion campaign without keeping the people in mind and again the price also is a people centric decision.
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SEO – One Of The Online/Internet/Web Marketing Methods

Marketing is defined by various marketing experts as follows:

Marketing is the social process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others.

Kotler.

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Conversion Ratio Analysis And Approach Towards ROI For PPC Or SEO

In a SEO campaign after the rankings are achieved, the first and foremost question on the mind is how are the conversions? The website owner starts calculating the ROI (Return On Investment) , his main concern is - has the amount spent on SEO proving to be an investment or was it a huge expense made by the company.

This situation is the most critical juncture of the whole SEO campaign. A s the conversion ratio depends on many factors. SEO is about making the website rank high and get the targeted organic traffic to the website. Once this is done the SEO mission is accomplished. But the client is not only happy with the traffic, what he needs is business, the conversions from these visits.

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Does Your Company Has The Vision, Mission And Value Statements Spelt Loud And Clear ?

All companies usually have a Vision Statement and a Mission Statement . Many companies also make it a point to display the Value Statement.

But, how many companies focus on these statements when the teams are being trained for setting targets and achieving them? short term targets affect the long term goals of the company.

Your organization's vision is all about what is possible, all about that potential. The mission is what it takes to make that vision come true.

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Do You Need A Blog And How Often You Need To Update The Blog?

This question has got a dual perspective –

1. A Personal Perspective:

Do you need to blog because you like to write and a blog is the best canvas where the thoughts and ideas can be poured on and made to reach out globally?

2. From the Business perspective of your website :

Do you want to reach out to your visitors and clients with more and more information about the company services, products and other developments? Does your website need additional content?
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Do SEO Certifications Matter?

SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of making a website rank high on the search engines for the keywords targeted for that website.

A decade back when people started optimizing sites for search engines there was no formal training available and the main source for understanding the search engine algorithms and knowing what the search engine bots are looking for on your site was the search engine blogs and forums itself.
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The Type Of Images You Use On Your Website

A picture speaks louder than words. Images on a website have got their own importance from the search engine’s bot perspective as well as from a visitor’s perspective. Hence the images that we add on each every page should be well thought of and of related to the content.

The images add the color coefficient to the web page and also offer text content to the search engine robots in the form of ALT TEXT which is one of the on-page optimization factors for SEO.

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The Approach For Online Marketing – Focus On Content And Information

 Marketing is all about bringing the people to the product whereas Sales is taking the product to the people.

Basically, the sales force of your company and the marketing team of your company both have to focus on these two important Ps i.e product and people. Of course there are the other Ps like price, promotions, professionalism , place and profit which are also inter-linked to this whole process.
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Online Reputation Management And Monitoring

Reputation is the opinion or a social evaluation of the group of entities toward a person, a group of people, or an organization . It is an important factor in many fields, such as education, business, online communities or social status.

• Reputation can be considered as a component of the identity as defined by others
• Reputation is 'the result of what you do, what you say, and what other people say about you'.
• Online Reputation is a factor in any online community where trust is important.
• An online identity, internet identity, or internet persona is a social identity that an Internet user establishes in online communities and websites.

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Digital Certificates - Best way of building users' trust is by enabling SSL on your website

In a virtual world, there is always an element of doubt when sending or receiving sensitive information. A large percentage of internet users leave websites when asked to provide any information about themselves, simply because the website was not a secure website. There is no better way of building users' trust than by enabling SSL on your website and getting an SSL Certificate for your website.

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What is Local Search?

Local search as the term suggests caters to geographic location specific searches. Business details can be submitted on the basis of geographic constraints to search engines which display local business listings for geographic specific keywords.
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SEO – Search Engine Optimization And PPC – Pay Per Click Campaigns

We all want our site’s presence on the search engines. Companies who fail to optimize their sites for organic rankings have an option of the PPC campaigns of the search engines to have their website exhibited on page 1 of the search engines.

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The Concept Of Content Farms On The Web

We all know that “CONTENT IS KING” on the WWW. Content farms refer to companies that create web content and fill in areas where there are not user content. Typically, these companies, create articles that are designed to be very search-engine friendly and to generate lots of hits.

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