I won’t blame anybody, if I’m receiving negative replies to a well-written, precise and persuasive SEO proposal letter. Some even complain that I’m charging more for the SEO services which others offer. But in most cases, Price is not an influencing factor. I would it say it is the lack of dedication and adaptation to a change that is brought to you by SEO efforts.

It’s really difficult to find out what exactly the reason behind such failures. May be people have no time to give a thought to SEO of their website during this recession. Whereas, they prefer to ask their existing employees work harder on these issues. Outsourcing SEO is not a bad option either, if it is planned, well-negotiated and properly implemented. Planned, well negotiated and properly implemented SEO means bringing all of our assets together and working towards a common cause. In a simple term, we can say that all SEO strategies: Webpage Copy writing, PR writing, Blogging, Article distribution, eHows, social media optimisation, web design, development and so on should satisfy the common cause, i.e. Better Search Engine Ranking.

Competition and Popularity are two external factors that influence the overall result of your SEO campaign. You can get various combinations of both the above two factors to determine where your business stands. The combination would be like such:

• High Competition and Low Popularity
• Low Competition and High Popularity
• High Competition and High Popularity
• Low Competition and Low Popularity

You can easily recognise in which combination your business falls. Once this is determined, formation, implementation of SEO strategies and getting visible results within stipulated period will be a problem neither for webmaster nor the outsourced SEO Company. Any confusion, argument won’t benefit either business owner or SEO Company. Here an SEO company expects one client to be more co-operative so that deal can be properly made and both can work out all the SEO strategies without any further hassle without any more turbulence.

Twitpic – Twitpic is a Twitter tool that lets twitters sharing pictures on Twitter. Just login to Twitpic with your existing Twitter User ID and password and now you are all set to twit your favourite pictures.

TweetDeck – TweetDeck is your personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more. TweetDeck is a simple and fast way to use Twitter on your desktop. TweetDeck allows users to customise Twitter experience with columns, groups, saved searches and sharing your tweets on Facebook instantly.

Digsby – Digsby is an application that centralizes e-mail, IM and social networking accounts into one desktop program. Digsby is an IM type application where users can maintain one combined buddy list for all your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat Accounts. Users can manage email accounts like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP accounts right from Digsby. Users too can get real time updates from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn like social networking site. What more you can expect from such an application, if you are a social networking buff!

Tweetburner  - Twitter just offers 140 characters to tweet. So it’s not possible for its users to give every detail in a single tweet. That’s why, very often Twitters write a brief with a reference link to it. Tweetburner is an online tool that helps you tracking the reference links you tweet.

GroupTweet – If you maintain groups on Twitter and want certain messages to send to a specific group of followers, the GroupTweet is the right tool for you. Register on GroupTweet with a newly created Twitter account for your group. You need to change your Twitter settings in order to make your group a private one. Now you can easily broadcast messages among the members of that group using GroupTweet tool.

Give these Twitter applications (developed by third-parties) a try to help simplify your social networking campaign. These tools certainly help your campaign an easier and traceable one. Reach more people, and stay organized just for free or a marginal payment. In the subsequent posts we will be including more useful Twitter tools to the existing list. Check the post regularly!

John (requested to be mentioned anonymously) is an active member of aerospace engineering research team at the University of Manchester since 2005. Last summer, I had the opportunity to speak to him while I was on a business tour to Manchester. During this brief conversation, John mentioned that he and his team were using twitter to share their daily research briefs on Twitter. Twitter! Really, I need to have a look at it at least to what it is all about. Since then I’m an ardent fan of Twitter. Since then Twitter, a micro blogging application has achieved a lot and successfully established itself in the mainstream blogging community. The best example would be Barak Osama’s Election Campaign as Obama micro-blogged from his campaign trail using Twitter. This has successfully followed by media giants like The New York Times and BBC to publish headlines and links in micro blog posts.

The initial concept behind Twitter is to promote mobile blogging, especially through SMS. Here we can assume that Mobile Blogging is the base concept from which Micro Blogging has evolved out. In simple words we can sum up Twitter is a micro-blogging application that facilitates its users to connect with people directly on their cell phones or computers in a non-obtrusive way. Twitter is all about speed and participating in the discussion. This concept is so important to your success in Twitter that it bears repeating. Twitter is about individuals, involvements, and influences. Twitter like micro blogging application has really revolutionised the way people share their thoughts, discoveries, questions and happenings. The impact of micro blogging throughout internet is so immense that Twitter like, micro blogging applications have qualified to the discussion as significant as about global recession. A close look all major news headlines would confirm the popularity of Twitter across the globe.

Along with Twitter, there are other big players too that have substantial shares in the micro blogging industry. Here follows some of them: Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku, MySay, Hictu, Moodmill, Frazr and Emotionr.

In the end, we can conclude as Micro Blogging isn’t not her online for a day or two – it is here to stay and stay alive forever. The evolution of blogging to micro blogging has spawned this new tiny version of blogging and many sectors like mobile technology, media and other similar sectors are eyeing on its growth minutely. The simplicity and ability to post frequently are basic facets that attract micro blogging the most. I expect a much faster adoption of micro blogging and mainstream penetration than blogging in general is evident in near future.

Technical complexities

In comparison to static websites (i.e. .html websites), dynamic websites powered by E-Commerce Applications are large sites and have the capacity to generate up to tens of thousands of web pages. So it is really a tough most task for a single person to understand, implement and manage an e-commerce website. On the other hand, a poor understanding of such an application yields bad ever worse results for both e-commerce store owners as well as store users.

Business Complexities

Lack of technical understanding of an e-commerce application affects the website’s profitability. Person or team that manages the e-commerce website faces really gruesome tasks ahead to meet the business objectives. As we consider communication and sales as two basic strengths of a business are hampered severely.

An e-commerce website should satisfy the above two complexities in order establish itself as a user-friendly one. So far we have discussed the general complexities of an e-commerce application. But Web has its own complications and has been doubled by the growing popularity of search engines. It does not make any sense, whether you have a great looking e-commerce site with thousands of popular products in your inventory. The matter is buyers must find you online easily. So, do potential buyers find your web store easily online? If your reply is affirmative then your business gets a huge boost. But a negative reply can be devastating for your business. Search engines have their own web page standards and strictly follow them. Here follows the Quality Guidelines from Google:

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don’t create pages with malicious behaviour, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans or other badware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programmes with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate programme, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

(Courtesy: Google.com)

So far as E-Commerce website is concerned, a lot of things one web store owner can take care of for search engine ranking improvement. Search Engine Ranking (acronym is SER) is very important for those who operate online business through web stores, because more than half of the internet users use search engines for finding information. If your web shop is not available in search engine result pages, then you lose the chunk of traffic from search engines. There are around 101 points can be implemented to make an e-commerce website search engine friendly. Here go some of the most significant points that you must prioritise. I’ve distributed all the points under three broad categories that will give you a better understanding of SEO points: On-Page Optimisation, Site-Wide Optimisation and Off-Site Optimisation.

What you think about your business may not be similar to the users’ views. So consider terminologies that your web store users would type in the search boxes to find web pages similar to your website. Always ensure that your website really consists of those terms within it. So the bottom-line is a good Keyword Analysis required to find out some relevant key phrases to target for the site.

1. Distinguish between “user end” and “admin end” web pages.
2. Target one unique key phrase per web page.
3. You can use the key phrase in your web page’s file name, meta-elements (i.e. Meta Title, Meta Description, Headers)
4. Substitute dashes (-) with underscores (_). You can rewrite the URL Structure Rules in the available .htaccess file in your website root folder.
5. Try to use the targeted key phrase number of times in the content, reasonably.
6. Make sure your content is for users, not for search engines.
7. Key phrase stuffing is a sin in the process of search engine optimisation. Don’t stuff the key phrases everywhere on a web page.
8. The major problem of an E-Commerce web store is that it generates number of duplicate pages with exact content. You can do this away with Canonicalization.
9. Do not hyperlink action words like Click Here, Enter and so on as these hyperlinks may confuse search engines.
10. Add a blog tool to your website and regularly update with useful articles, product reviews and HowTos. Some of the popular blogging applications are Wordpress, LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger and so on. Wordpress is a great blogging tool which can be hosted independently.

Follow the above SEO points for your E-Commerce Web Store and adopt best industry SEO practices for quick search engine ranking improvement and targeted traffic with better ROI.

Though some months back the concept of “Canonical URL” was no where around WWW. But this has really been a great problem for those who largely depend on the search engines to make business. Search engine is all about a tool that provides relevant web documents when a search is made. Everyday millions of web documents on various niches are generated and search engines too regularly indexes them. But things become worst when a web server provides different version of URLs for a single web document. This results into indexing duplicate copies of single information. To avoid such technical shortcoming, Google introduces Canonical Tag. Google spokesman Matt Cutts informs “Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.” Here goes the Google defined tag:

So there is a question that how somebody ensures that Google indexes the URL you prefer? First ensure which URL (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/ or http://www.yourdomain.com/) you want to use widely and consistently throughout your website. Once that has been fixed, use that particular URL in Canonical Tag consistently. Don’t make your half of the site URLs without www and half of the URLs with www.
Matt Cutts too suggests some other solutions in his famous article on Canonicalization. Checkout more information on Canonicalization in SEO advice: url canonicalization.

DMOZ, also otherwise known as The Open Directory Project (ODP), is one of the largest categorized directories of websites and pages, which is maintained by volunteers. Every website and page that is added to the directory is manually reviewed before it is included to the directory. The listing of a website in DMOZ is absolutely FREE. Let’s learn some of the interesting facts about DMOZ.

The ODP (Open Directory Project) is the largest human-edited web directory on internet. Some of the popular web portals and search engines like AOL Search, Netscape Search, Google, Lycos, Alexa and HotBot use DMOZ’s data.

People behind DMOZ

The Open Directory Project is hosted and administered by Netscape Communication Corporation. ODP is primarily a self-governing community of netizens. “Through a system of self-governance, the ODP volunteer editors manage the directory’s growth and development, and through a system of checks-and-balances, ensure the directory is of superior quality.” (Courtesy: DMOZ.org)

DMOZ is an acronym for Directory Mozilla. The association of the term “Mozilla” with Directory is a clear indication of its Open Source aspect like the Open Source browser attempt as Mozilla Firefox. The term Mozilla represents the popularity and growth of Open Source projects.

Yahoo Vs DMOZ

Yahoo! Web Directory is developed and managed by small group of paid professionals. But DMOZ exceptionally does well with small staffs and still manages to retain its quality as well as its huge database.

DMOZ is developed and maintained by a continuously growing community of netizens who are highly skilled and well exposed in their respective fields of interest. Such a vast community of volunteers and the global scope of the Directory has been the success secret behind maintaining quality of the directory. “Given this vast community of subject expertise and the global nature of the directory, there is always someone working on the directory: processing submissions, resolving dead links, culling out the bad and keeping only quality information, and discovering new topics to add.” (Courtesy: DMOZ.org)

Unlike Yahoo!, DMOZ editors are core web surfers helping to create a web directory for other Web surfers. Getting your site listed in DMOZ is very difficult and frustrating, too. Everybody (who is more or less associated with SEO/SEM) knows that being listed will probably help website’s Google ranking, but getting listed can take a very long time. But one should not lose faith and keep trying to submit the original website details in reasonably regular intervals to ensure that your site is not out of the queue.

People use credit cards or debit cards for purchases in an online store. While making such online transactions, your account information is transferred for transactional approval online. In a usual environment, access to such information is/should be limited to individuals and businesses directly involved. So the involved persons and organizations must ensure the security of such private information. Those who still presume that going offline, is possible alternative to such information theft; later or sooner they have to use internet for such information sharing. This compulsion is inevitable as there is substantial upsurge in use of Internet as a Digital Information Sharing Tool.

Online Payment Transactions can be thoroughly monitored, recorded, and key logged by different hackers and third parties without your knowledge or prior consent. Immediately such private information can be available for other hackers and this would certainly put your business and company reputation in trouble. This information is transmitted across hackers’ networks and opens up the gateway to several types of risks that can be fall into the wrong hands. If you store your user ids and passwords on your computer, they are especially vulnerable to security breaches and easy to steal. A meager computer security loophole can open up the entrance to the password files, and hackers can extract and copy this information without your knowledge.

While dealing with online sellers, the best security option is your common sense. Anyone can launch a professional looking e-commerce website, as it costs some hundred pounds and there are millions of e-commerce solution providers operating online. So make it sure that whenever you are dealing with any online seller, the company must be a reputed one. Here follows some of the fundamental questions, the answers to which can solve your problem:

• Is this the e-commerce website of an established retailer?
• Does the website have an exact street address, not just a post box number?
• Is there any facility to call customer service?
• Is a return and refund policy published on the website?

If you’ve got the positive replies to above questions, they I assure you that your transaction would be safe. Now-a-days, most of the online sellers do offer Secured Check Out page. These check-out pages are secured by SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). SSL is a protocol (developed by Netscape) for transmitting private documents and information through the Internet. SSL uses a cryptographic system that uses two types of keys for data encryption − a Public Key known to everyone and a Private or Secret Key known only to the recipient. So before making any such financial transaction over internet with any e-commerce website, make it sure that its check out pages must use SSL or any such similar data encryption software.

During these days, most of the online sellers prefer to manage their business through various other channels including their own web store. Online market places like eBay, Amazon and Kelkoo; Shopping Search Engines like Google Base, eDirectory, Shop.com; and Comparison Shopping sites like Shopzilla.com and Google Products are some of the most preferred destinations for shoppers to shop at. That’s why online sellers prefer to make their presence felt at these channels as well as their own web stores. This is one of the reasons that has made E-Commerce applications with multi channel selling features are high in demand. There are numerous e-commerce solution providers available online; you can choose any of them as per requirements.

Though it appears pretty easy from customer point of view, yet E-Commerce can be truly a complex technology to develop. To offer a world class customer experience, sellers must incorporate and integrate technologies and functionality that exceeds growing customer expectations.

Your complacency may cost dearer if your website does not meet customer expectations as well as search engine guidelines. If your web store satisfies both the requirements, the conversion average of your website traffic will go up. Here follows some of the insights:

Think Fast

Broadband has made data transfer a quicker business, but quite a number of potential customers still use dial-up connection. So while developing a web store for your business, ensure that page loading time should be within 9 seconds. Your failure may be an advantage for your competitors. Recommended page size should be within 60kb to 70kb. Try to avoid flash. Images are very important and mostly neglected by seller. Product images should be of high resolution and larger with multiple size variants.

Shopping in general is a part of entertainment activity and online shopping carries the similar taste and trend. A customer should not be forced to make transaction as this may affect your business. Your web store should have multiple order facility like; Order through Phone and Checkout as Guest or Registered User.

Personal type of blogs is one of the most common blogging forms and the number of personal blogs is pretty healthier than any other form of blogs. Such types of blogs are traditional, maintained on daily basis as a digital diary. Growing popularity of blogs as a medium of communication has opened several other options. Such an example is Corporate Blogs. Corporate blogs are either used internally to improve Communication and Culture within a corporate or externally used to create Brand Awareness and Promotion.

Blogging is one of the popular cultures of growing Social Networking. The collective community of all similar blogs is known as the blogosphere. Such networking has been possible among bloggers through blogrolls, comments, linkbacks and backlinks. Whether it is 9/11 or 26/11, bloggers and blogs are always ahead to share information, ideas, feelings and condolences with each other. Blogs are the forbearers of Personalised Web World. Blogging applications are offered by quite a number of websites; some of them are absolutely free, free with further upgrades and paid. Some of the free hosted blog sites are blogger.com (from Google), WordPress.com (from WordPress.org), LiveJournal.com, Xanga.com and so on.
The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or journalers. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earliest bloggers, as is Jerry Pournelle. Dave Winer’s Scripting News is also credited with being one of the oldest and longest running weblogs. Another early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person’s personal life combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site in 1994. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to as sousveillance, and such journals were also used as evidence in legal matters. (Courtesy: Wikipedia.org)

Despite a shaky start, blogs finally gained popularity 1999 and there onwards it has further popularized with various first hosted free blogging tools. Blogger.com belongs to such an era. Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan (Pyra Labs) launched blogger.com in August 1999 and it was acquired by Google in February 2003. Blogger.com is one among some popular blogging tool. Blogger is further supported and strengthened by Google Blog Search, FeedBurner.com (Google venture) and some other popular applications. Bloggers do honoured with various blog awards like any other form of art. Among the major blog awards are The Weblog Award, the Bloggies, and the BOBs (Best of Blogs).

Web design is not as easy as most people assume. Several groups of people meet together, zoom in to the requirements and deliver a well-designed and user-friendly website. But it has been found that very often the web developers approach and accomplish web design project from a technological point of view and web designers are nothing but mere. This never justifies a web design project. One should consider some other groups of people to consult with. You may need the following groups while planning a web design project:

• Content Experts,
• Writers,
• Information Architects, and
• Graphic Designers.

All web design projects have a single bottom-line, “have to be genuinely useful to your target audience, meeting their requirements and expectations without being too hard to use.” Here we can infer some of the basic objectives of web design and that are:

• A website should be designed and developed for its users.
• A website should be user-friendly.

Most of the users of your website are not expected to be technologically savvy. The users always follow the directions that you have shown to them in your website. If your website navigation structure does not provide easy drive experience for the users, then it is obvious for users to hit back button more often. Your website should provide a pleasant experience to each and every visitor it receives. Here follows some guidelines for developers and designers while developing a website:
Online visitors are very volatile, but in general they show a similar pattern in tendencies which govern their behaviour while surfing online. First, most of your website users are expected to scan your web pages in top-to-bottom and left-to-right pattern (this assumption is based on English speaking readers and specific to English websites). Put your navigation menu at the top or on the left of the web page. Users have come to expect this anyway as this pattern is one of the Web Conventional Page Structure.

The navigation menu should explain what the destination page would be and its relationship with the source page. The users should be aware of the outcomes of each and every click on web page. If you are not following this content display policy, then it is nothing rather your design stupidity.

Text Underlining is one of the neglected parts of a website. Underlined text within content very often assumed as hyperlinks. So unnecessary underlying of non-hyperlinked texts for the sake of highlighting texts is not a good idea. You can bold or italicize texts in order to highlight texts.

Creating Mouseovers and Alt-Titles on your graphic links is a very good aspect of a user-friendly website. This makes it pretty easy for a visitor to recognize that the link exists, what it does and where the link is heading.