MindScape

Team Vinove in action.

Advent of Internet has literally revolutionized the way business is done in the contemporary world. With millions of users across the globe surfing the World Wide Web for their day-to-day needs, activity and recreation, the potential of Internet as a market can easily be imagined.

The statistics reveal that more than 12 million websites are already over Internet and about one million new websites join in everyday! The figures reflect a stark picture of the extent of cut-throat competition prevailing over the medium. Doing business under the circumstances indeed needs a well-planned marketing strategy or a smart mix of strategies.

Marketing over Internet is a serious business in the present arena. Internet marketing comprises of many sophisticated and promising concepts, including Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Banner Advertising, E-Mail Marketing, Affiliate Marketing and Interactive Advertising. The span of Internet Marketing continues to evolve and expand, as the Internet marketers apply their tact and creativity to fight the ever-growing intense competition.

Of all, Search Engine Marketing is the most happening form of Internet marketing. It focuses on topping the Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP) by search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. The term includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. While SEO focuses on organic or natural search, PPC based links are called sponsored ads. SEO basically involves optimizing a website in all respects, so as to render it most favorable for top ranks as per search engine algorithms. The rest of the Internet marketing concepts are direct marketing strategies that may be easily comprehended by their name itself.

Given the informative and dynamic nature of Internet, Internet marketing provides even a small business entity with a lot of scope to expand its markets beyond its local margins and present itself with much more sophistication for lesser cost. Internet marketing is undoubtedly a considerably cheaper option than employing a sales workforce in an offline business. The highlight benefit of Internet Marketing is that it does not require much of experience to venture into it.

Internet Marketing may seem to be an all profit no loss situation. But, it also has a dark side to it. In the absence of any stringent rules and regulations against objectionable content, as well as, open nature of the medium, each online business entity runs the much dreaded risk of negative publicity. Spreading a bad word about something or someone over Internet is a very easy task that may render all marketing efforts futile.

A term being frequently tossed around in the contemporary Internet marketing circles is SMO or Social Media Optimization. As evident from the full form, SMO has everything to do with social media such as blogs, wikis, vlogs, forums and the likes.

The term SMO involves consistent and enduring implementation of all necessary changes in a website that may optimize it to render it more easily linkable and more vastly noticeable in the online social media. The essence of SMO is to provide such good quality content, design and usability that people should wish to link to your website. Accordingly, SMO focuses on designing, developing and maintaining a website to suit the social media applications like Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, Digg, Flickr, Miniclip et al, such that the pertinent social sites would want to stay connected to the website on their own.

Being a rather nascent concept, Social Media Optimization (SMO) still needs to be groomed into a full-fledged subject with exhaustive strategies and rules all laid down. Presently, there are few rules, coined by few Internet marketing experts, which dictate the scene in defining precise strategies.

The basic strategy involves giving up static web content in favor of dynamism. The tactics favor inclusion of blogs or white paper etc. to widen the scope of linkability and putting in quick buttons like add to del.icio.us / Digg this and ask a friend to facilitate tagging/ bookmarking, as well as, help the content travel. Supporting mashups is considered another fine strategy, wherein webmaster allows prudent reuse of his web content by others, so as to work in teamwork towards enhanced and augmented content. Further, rewarding inbound links is also a recommended strategy to encourage the links in the long run.

SMO, in essence, calls for being a user resource that is genuine and unpretentious. It is a good idea to keep trying new things and put across a fresh face forever. Active participation in activities of interest to ones target audience is a definite must.

If done properly, SMO can be your ticket to convincing and long-term commercial success. Effective SMO can fetch you highly desirable web traffic and significant brand recognition. The tale of extraordinary growth and glory of YouTube in a matter of mere 18 months is a striking instance of successful and innovative SMO.

Though SMO can drive crazy traffic to your website, it may also prove to be nasty, as you constantly run the risk of negative publicity. Therefore, it is utmost important to choose your tactics carefully and target the right audience.

I was taken aback at seeing a completely new interface for Google Analytics upon logging in today. I was automatically logged out after a few minutes but what I saw surely looked impressive.

When kicked out, Analytics also mentioned “5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertiser” on the sign up page!

Not sure if it existed previously but all the efforts from Google now seem like concentrating on Adwords/Adsense!

As they say, there’s no “Free Lunch” in this world!

Go Google!

We have recently started upgrading the code for our company’s website from XHTML 1.0 Strict to SEO Semantic XHTML 1.0 Strict. The new code would help in the following ways:

• Reduce the file foot print making the pages lighter and further reducing the load times.
• Assist search engines in comprehending the right hierarchy in which the content is to be inferred.
• Reduce the ever-increasing server load and bandwidth consumption.
• Possibly, improve the search engine rankings.

Those who might be interested can view the new (under development) code at http://www.vinove.com/

Update: We have received several e-mails enquiring if we offer SEM Semantic XHTML Conversion - Yes, we indeed do! If you would like to know more, please get in touch with us now!

Outsourcing has taken the world economy by storm. Many a companies worldwide have gained enormously from it and gradually but surely, outsourcing from an option is becoming a mandate to remain competitive.

As we move down the food-chain, numerous small-medium companies still struggle to find the right outsourcing partner. Even if an outsourcing partner is identified, the relation is not successful due to various reasons.

The primary reason for the failure is the mindset - outsourcing is almost always taken synonymous to cost-cutting. This has proven to be a time-bomb for many companies as they end up outsourcing to firms that offer the lowest bid on a project.

Some of the important points to be kept in mind while outsourcing are:

• You get what you pay for: The old clich holds true in the case of outsourcing as well! The cheapest vendor might not always be a good choice as they might try to under-sell to gain your project. A solid outsourcing partner would have overheads in the form of infrastructure and would have people on payroll. If you are on a look out for a long term relation - it may be a good idea to pay a little extra but to ensure that both parties make a profit.
• Look for partners, avoid fly-by-night operators: Easier said than done! For maximizing ROI, outsourcing should be considered as a continuous process rather than a one-time activity. Find yourself an honest and reliable partner rather than looking for vendors each time you wish to outsource.
• Transparency: Maintain transparency be it processes, timelines and costs (if possible). This would help you manage your commitments and estimate the deliverables.
• Don’t expect the stars: While outsourcing, expect the initial “turbulence”. As any other process, it might require initial leg work for the processes to smooth up and work as you expect them to.
• Don’t step into multiple boats: One good reliable partner is better than having 10s of unreliable vendors. Concentrate on finding one good partner.
• Shop around but be careful: Relatively better outsourcing companies are quite wary of replying back to templatized e-mails sent to various vendors seeking a figure. Study, choose a few. and provide your complete contact details while sending an inquiry. If possible, use your own domain to send an e-mail to establish authenticity.
• Walk with your partner: Attrition is very high in outsourcing favorable developing nations - your partner might face loss of one or more employees taking care of your project. Cultivate the culture of open-ness so that your partner can communicate clearly the reasons, if any for delay so that you may expect accordingly.
• Communication: Don’t expect your outsourcing partner to be available 24×7 - schedule and maintain a communication plan that is feasible in the long run.
• 24×7 work cycle: Yes, it is possible! It might take some time before you can actually get it going!
• Commit but do not over-commit: Commit if you can - however, do not promise something that you cannot fulfill!

The aforementioned points come from the other side of the fence and is a result of numerous outsourcing successes over the past years. These cannot guarantee but should certainly help in a better outsourcing experience.

I welcome any questions or feedback that you might have.

Happy Outsourcing!

Google toolbar page rank update which was expected to happen by the end of April, finally seems to be eventuated. We were observing real time inconsistency in our toolbar page rank (Sometimes it went to 5 and sometimes to 0).

Finally the chase has been in our favour and google has assiged a page rank of 4 to Vinove’s website www.vinove.com ( an accession of 2 points).

The April, 2007 page rank update has happened to be negative for many website owners as they have observed a dip in their page rank.

Real time changes have taken place with the new link algorithms coming into existence

1) Google disrespected all our links from pages like (links resources, links etc..etc)
2) Links below PR 2 were disregarded
3) Higher number or links coming in from ethical medium (Blogs, Articles etc. etc.) were considered.

For more information regarding the April 2007, Page Rank Update Click Here

As of today, most of the link building efforts are geared towards enhancing the Google Page Rank to further improve the search engine rankings. This may not be a wise approach considering the rapid changes in the world of search engines.

While acquiring links, it might be a good idea to consider the following:

* Traffic on the website that you wish to get a link from (both quality and quantity).
* How many links are already placed on the page?
* What is the relative position of your link?
* What is the quality of the neighboring links?
* Is the page a content oriented or a link laden page?

If due attention is paid to all/most of the above, not only the links acquired would result in PR enhancement but would also further help generate quality traffic to the website.

As a rule of thumb, if a link is acquired with a mindset of generating traffic rather than increasing the in-bound link number, it is bound to help your website on all facets!

Search engines seem to be either testing or moving towards a social search paradigm. Some of the examples include:
http://www.younanimous.com
http://www.eurekster.com/

Also, Yahoo is testing its social search engine:
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/faq

With numerous businesses relying on search engine rankings primarily, if not exclusively, an important question to ask is: What would be the future of Internet Marketing/SEO?

Some of the rather instant thoughts that come to mind are:

* Internet Marketing would further move towards a paid model with in-organic results over taking the organic ones.
* The search engine rankings would not only be driven by the search engine algorithms.
* The importance of currently existing concepts namely Google PageRank would recede.
* Content would rule: Websites serving quality content would attract repeat quality visitors and higher popularity resulting in even higher traffic.
* Meta search engines that integrate a number of tools like digg, del.icio.us etc. would further gain popularity.

It is now time for companies around the world re-think their long term Internet Marketing strategies and plan accordingly to minimize the “damage” social search engines might cause!

More later!

We noticed a change in the PR for some of our websites’ internal pages followed by a back link update. Seems like the Google PR update is underway!

Anybody else noticed any changes to the PR?