Upcoming Weekend Workshops At AMA To Be Conducted By WebPro Technologies

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Workshop Details: 

Google Webmaster Tools

April 13 & 14, 2013
Saturday 5.00 p.m. to 8.00 p.m. & Sunday, 9.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.

Understand how to use the Google Webmaster Tools and improve your site in Google Search. Using them appropriately for analyzing the website from the SEO perspective is always an ongoing learning process. Google keeps on adding valuable features to the tools and keeps on making it more useful to webmasters and SEOs. You can get data, tools and diagnostics for a healthy, Google-friendly site.

Google Analytics – Metrics that Matter

April 27 and 28, 2013
Saturday 5.00 p.m. to 8.00 p.m. & Sunday, 9.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.

Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications. Dive into your data. Standard reports make it easy to measure and understand engagement on your site. Plus it only takes a few clicks to quickly build out customized  reports, visitor segments, and identify important data to share with your team.

Google’s Knowledge Graph:  Implications for Search & SEO

May 4 & 5, 2013
Saturday 5.00 p.m. to 8.00 p.m. & Sunday, 9.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.

In May 2012, Google announced the Knowledge Graph. The purpose of the Knowledge Graph according to Google is to help users:

• Find the right thing

• Get the best summary

• Go deeper and broader to discover more about the search

Google says , “We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for.”Recently, Matt Cutts (Head of Google’s SpamTeam) mentioned at one of the conferences in August 2012 that “One of the key focuses for Google is to move away from being a search engine and focus on becoming a knowledge engine. Google is so committed to this that Google’s Search Quality team has been renamed to Google’s Knowledge Team.”

Fee: INR 3500/- per person per workshop

Faculty: Bharati Ahuja

Bharati Ahuja is the founder of WebPro Technologies, SEO Trainer and speaker, Web Entrepreneur, Blog Writer, Internet Marketing Consultant and Search Strategist. She started her career in the field of Computer Training in 1987 and has worked with NIIT (Delhi) , TULEC (Tata Unisys Limited Education Centre - Ahmedabad ) and Datapro Information Technology (Mumbai). WebPro Technologies has been offering web solutions since 2000 and conducting SEO focused training and workshops at AMA since 2007.

Registration:  Please send your registration along with participation fee to:

Ahmedabad Management Association
AMA Complex, Dr. Vikram Sarabhai Marg, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad 380 015 
Phone: 079-26308601-6 Fax: 26305692 
E-mail: ama@amaindia.org 
Website: www.amaindia.org

Is Your Blog Content Friendly And Authorship Compliant

Adding valuable content to the blog is a challenge for every blog owner. Just adding content is not enough, it has to be valuable to the readers in some form or the other.

Which content is considered as valuable content?

It is simple logic that the visitor on your site who reached your site via search engines, social media or some other referral link is looking for some information related to the topic of the landing page or the topic of the blog. If the user finds the content informative, valuable and is in detail then he is surely going to share it to his followers on Twitter or the relevant circles or friends on Google+ and Facebook respectively.

Quality content should be oriented around the following points :

· In-depth information about the topic

· About the latest trends of the related industry

· Explains a certain topic in detail (The How To and the Dos and Donts Posts)

· Personal perceptions or reviews about the products and services related to your industry

· Current Events And Conference related to your industry

· At times live blog a certain event or follow the Twitter Stream of events where the thought leaders of the industry are speaking and then write a summary of all the tweets .(For Example: http://goo.gl/XH0D5 )

· Success stories and failures related to your industry or something that you personally experienced while working on any project

· Discuss some comments made on some other blogs in detail .

Such content not only educates the user about the topic but also makes him share it further and this chain, in the long run generates social signals which get integrated with search and thereby improve your search presence.

If you are serious about search presence then it is advisable to:

· Have a team or a person dedicated to create and share content.

· If you accept guest posts then implement the authorship mark up .

· Have a set of Author guidelines which the authors should follow.

· Focus the blog to publish content on niche topics related to the industry only.

· Encourage comments by asking questions to generate the more valuable User Generated Content (UGC) as comments.

· Reward guest authors in some way if their content gives you a good out reach

· Request reputed authors to send guest posts for your blog after all its a mutually beneficial association

· Integrate Twitter Cards and Facebook Open Graph to the blog

· Focus on good quality titles as per SEO guidelines

· Try to publish content in all forms – text, infographics, video and podcasts.

· Focus on building trust and having a good UX

By content friendly I mean content which has a good out reach and  the guest authors reach out to you for getting their writings published. As the ‘Author Rank’ adds to the reputation of the blog and the readership and the reputation of the blog in turn helps in adding value to their ‘Author rank’.

Just as a blog has no value without content , the author’s ideas also do not get a good outreach, appreciation and understanding without being published on a reputed blog. It is a mutually beneficial and a content (pun intended) association .

Related Posts:

• The Best Way To Assure Quality Content Is To Innovate, Excel And Work Hard In Real Time
• The Quality Content Site Guidelines and Parameters By Google
• If Content Is King Then Context Is Queen And The Trust Factor Is The Royal Crown
• The Etiquette Of Co.ordinating With Guest Post Submissions.

Image Credit:http://heartifb.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Where-do-you-want-your-blog-to-go.jpg

Google Announces The Launch Of Think Insights

Google on its official blog announced the launch of Think Insights. Think Insights, is about the latest research in digital marketing, creative brand campaigns, and useful products and tools. On this platform Google shares industry-leading case studies and Google’s latest research, strategic perspectives, interviews with innovators and experts and more—all to help you make the most of the web.

Google says “we built google.com/think to help you do it all—stay up-to-date on the latest in digital marketing, arm yourself with data to support your business cases and create inspiring campaigns.” Explore the site now, and if you like what you discover, you can to subscribe to the Think Letter for a monthly round-up of the most popular content. 

The range of industries and the Ad Types covered on this site are as follows:

• Advertising 
• 
  
• Automotive 
• 
  
• Business to Business 
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• Consumer Goods 
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• Education 
• 
  
• Fashion 
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• Financial Services 
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• Government and Non-profits 
• 
  
• Healthcare 
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• Media & Entertainment 
• 
  
• Restaurants 
• 
  
• Retail 
• 
  
• Tech 
• 
  
• Travel & Tourism 

Ad Types

• Cross-media 
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• Display 
• 
  
• Mobile 
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• Search 
• 
  
• Social 
• 
  
• Video 

Google: From Google Glasses To The Talking Shoe

The web world buzz was all about the Google Glasses last week and now Google has unveiled a new experiment at this year's SXSW and it got some shoes talking.

The Android-connected Google shoe is fitted with a tiny computer, a speaker, an accelerometer, a gyroscope and a pressure sensor to provide detailed information on your physical activity.

The voice responds when you get moving, saying: "I love the feeling of wind through my laces" while you are running, or saying: "Call 911, because you are on fire", or says, “ Lift off” while you are jumping around playing sport.

Aman Govil, head of the Art, Copy & Code initiative and Google’s Advertising Arts team.says: “ Our goal is to really figure out how you marry innovations in technology with marketing and advertising” He also added: “imagine if, rather than having an app in your phone that tells you how far you ran, your shoe told you. And if you woke up too late for a run, the shoe would tell you how far you could have run”

The latest news is that Google has partnered with Adidas for the ‘Talking Shoe’. With social media touching each aspect of our lives the talking shoe also shares information over a social network to track your data as it can be connected to your android phone or computer.

Of course the experiment is still at the initial stages but maybe in future the inbuilt voice may motivate many to actually get up and walk or run. Keeping in mind the current scenario where “Sitting is considered as the new smoking” This idea could be a blessing in disguise.

image credit: http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Google’s Initiative To Help Hacked Sites

It is a well known fact that many websites are vulnerable and can be  hacked easily . Once the hacker has done his job it may take a lot of time, money and effort for the website owner to totally recover from the malevolent effects of the hack.

Google lately had started informing the website owners about the malware on their websites . But at times only notification is of very little help for the problem to be solved. Some more help is required about how the malware is affecting the site and all other sites it is linked to or the client side computer of the visitors. As Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google mentions in the blog post: “while we attempt to outline the necessary steps in recovery, each task remains fairly difficult for site owners unless they have advanced knowledge of system administrator commands and experience with source code”.

This initiative by Google is a great step towards fighting the spam and malware spreading on the web. For more detailed information visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/hacked/

Video On Help for hacked sites: Overview By Maile Ohye

Our Experience

Its truly great that such an initiative is being taken up by Google. Recently one of our client WordPress blog hosted on the subfolder was hacked by a link spam injection and a number of malicious links were added to the site and as a result the site was manually removed from the Google index. We tried to do our very best to make the blog free from all the links and after communicating with Google via WMT our site was again added back to the index. As a result the blog in the subfolder started doing well but somehow the main domain did not recover from its original search engine presence. Eventually we moved the blog from WordPress to Blogger and are hoping the site and the blog to perform better. The link spam injection attack is the most dangerous thing that can happen to your site. Especially after the Penguin update. Hope Google does something about it too.

Google’s Advice On How To Keep your Site Secure

1. Be vigilant about keeping software updated
2. Understand the security practices of all applications, plugins, third-party software, etc., before you install them on your server. A security vulnerability in one software application can affect the safety of your entire site
3. Remove unnecessary or unused software
4. Enforce creation of strong passwords
5. Keep all devices used to log in to your servers secure (updated operating system and browser)
6. Make regular, automated backups of your site

A Short Summary Of What Amit Singhal Spoke At SXSW conference 2013 in Austin

Amit Singhal – The senior Vice President and Google Fellow at Google Search was interviewed yesterday by Guy Kawasaki at the SXSW conference held in Austin. The topic was “The Future of Google Search in a Mobile World”

I am sure the whole SEO industry is all ears when Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal speak at any conference as what they say is like the weather forecast for the SEO industry so that you can prepare yourself for the coming changes in the search scenario.

Thanks to the Twitter stream at #AskSinghal and the live blogging by Search Engine Land it was like being present at the conference.

What Amit Singhal discussed is as follows:

1. Google has over 30 trillion URLs from 250 million domains in their index.

2. The perfect search engine should know exactly what to be, and give you exactly what you want.

3. The World Wide Web is the biggest depository of human knowledge with 30 trillion web addresses and 250 million domains.

4. As search has gotten better, user queries have gotten more complicated and harder to answer effectively.

5. Mobile devices have revolutionized search

6. Mobile search increases during lunch and dinner hours, so clearly more than just teens are online at the dinner table

7. We're designing search so you can use it from any modality at any time.

8. Google+ enables us to make Google truly universal.

9. High quality content that adds value is deemed desirable, ranks higher in search

10. Think of good SEO as marketing to the search engine.

11. SEOs add value when improving content.

12. We live in a visual world. #Video is searchable. Google needs to reign in video property tag identifiers for audience's to search

13. Voice is a far more natural interface than typing. But may require other interfaces to work

14. Future of search is bringing valuable content to the world

15. The future of search is a Star Trek computer. Search across multiple modes, voice, type etc.

16. High quality content that provides utility is deemed desirable, ranks higher in search.

17. Future of search is understanding the knowledge on the web, not just indexing and retrieving.

18. If you want to get to the first page of Google results then provide high quality content that adds value. That's it!

19. In the future, Google should be able to tell you what you need to know without you having to ask.

20. Having the knowlege is not enough, Google works to understand the knowledge.

21. Career Advice from Amit Singhal - "Follow your heart...happiness is more important than any money you can make. "There are no right decisions, you make your decision right"

22. User experience and speed has always driven decision at Google and shall always be .

23. The only way to truly improve is to use scientific methodology

24. It's too early to evaluate Facebook graph search. Time will tell if people need it.

25. Latency is a big problem in developing countries. That's why Google invests in infrastructure...so everyone can access Google

26. Google glasses is just one of many input devices. It gives users another context and new opportunities for search

27. Any changes you make in Google search will improve some queries and hurt others

28. To understand the future of search, we need to understand future input devices.

29. Search will do for education what calculators did for math. Don't memorize facts, search will take care of the mundane!

30. I phrase my search term as naturally as possible; if it doesn't work someone on my team gets yelled at.

31. Google's big challenges: Knowledge graph, speech recognition, natural language understanding

32. We do not manually fix searches to improve search. Google only manually intervenes in SERPs in terms of spam, porn and legal issues.

33. Every broken query is an improvement waiting to happen.

34. Google search has a feedback link at the end if every search results page for failed searches.

Entrepreneurship, The World Wide Web And Women’s Day

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is most important that you do it. - Mahatma Gandhi

Most of the big and successful organizations of today have been humble small start-ups in the past. If we trace the history of any successful organization of today we will find that there has been a person or a group of people who had a vision, mission and a passion to create, innovate and build something and thereby earn the profits  and not the other way round.

It all starts with a need, a passion for something or just the desire to do something different and flow with one’s thoughts and reach a destination which even he/she might not be aware of. As along this journey of entrepreneurship the entrepreneur has to face challenges and many ups and downs which may not have a cushion when you fall. One may even have to face the ridicule of people who have  secure jobs and even might get the looks of  “see I told you so”… when you falter or fall .

Many businesses fail in the first few years as people create a job for themselves and not businesses which will run on autopilot in the long run. Initially, one may start off doing everything by himself but if you are not moving away from the day to day activities of the business then you have just created a job for yourself and you are not in the process of innovating and creating a business.

Every entrepreneur does not only own a business but promotes capital, creates wealth and generates more jobs which does not only make him wealthy but also contributes to the wealth of the nation.

Well, I do not run a very big business with a big list of employees but yes I think I do contribute in a small subtle way . I run a web solutions company as a solo entrepreneur and try to do all the technical   work, blog writing and communicate and coordinate with the clients also myself . Yes, in a way you can say I have created a job for myself which gives me the job satisfaction with the ease of flexible timings and the option to innovate and take my own decisions. As my main focus is on SEO services I thank Google for being so popular as a search engine that I even manage to make a decent profit along with a lot of time spent creatively.

I think every SEO operating from any part of the world is contributing to the larger picture by helping their clients get a local and a global reach. SEO is not only about inbound visitors to your site . Apart from reaching out to the globe , every true SEO helps the client’s business get a search presence that helps in establishing its brand and identity on the web which in the long run establishes its reputation.  

It gives me immense satisfaction and pleasure when a WebPro Technologies client tells me that we have got such a good response from the SEO Services that we have decided to have a complete team dedicated to keep upgrading the site qualitatively and focus on social media. (More jobs generated – Thanks to Google and the WWW). Or the other day when one of our clients from the education field told me - our online classrooms for Maths, Science and English are doing so well that we have decided to focus only on online teaching rather than real time classes that we were running. (The business gets a global reach along with a local reach and identity)

We also conduct SEO Training and when a person who did not know what to do after his graduation as he had barely managed to pass his degree in Arts comes after 3 years and tells me that after the SEO training he had attended at WebPro Technologies he had got a good job with a decent salary and now after 3 years has started his own company for web solutions.

The WWW has opened up new vistas for learning and earning and at the same time also offers a good platform for women who are well educated and want to work from home or work within their own framework of limited targets so that they can do full justice to their homes, family and also at the same time not give their careers entirely.

Today women can work from home as content writers, web designers, programmers, SEOs, social media executives, etc. Due to some reason or the other, women do have to give their careers a back seat at some point of time in their lives but I think they should not totally give up as you never know the humble beginnings and the baby steps taken, might in future result to some business giant in the making or at least will keep the creative side of your personality burning bright.

Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is most important that you do it. - Mahatma Gandhi

Photo credit: http://www.dlcounseling.com/images/dlc-photo-bookcover.jpg

Is WordPress or Blogger better for SEO? Matt Cutts Answers The Question

When anyone decides to start a blog, the first and foremost decision one has to take is to choose between WordPress and Blogger.

Here is what Matt Cutts has to say.

 From my experience I can say that Blogger is a very simple platform and has all the potential to make the blog SEO friendly. Many of our clients have their blogs on WordPress which is also very good infact with more advanced features but if the WordPress blog in the subfolder gets hacked (of which the chances are very high) then the chances of the main site getting adversely affected in the search engines is very high. 

In such a situation the main site on the root domain and the blog in the sub folder both get adversely affected and lose the search presence. But, if you have the blog on a sub domain which is not hosted on your server as in case of Blogger then both the entities remain separate and even if the blog gets hacked then atleast the main site continues to do well on the search engines.