SEO Your Website

Posted by Joel on Apr 14th, 2009 | one comment

The key required to reach and maintain top rankings in internet searches and also to ensure to have an enhanced and effective positioning of your website is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In the present days, the online environment is one that is not constant or in other words, it is in a constant change with new techniques and policies emerging out almost every day. And this is why it has become very difficult for a web-business owner to build a successful business of their own. There could be countless number of ways, black and white, to increase your websites potential and traffic but the only best solution an entrepreneur may find is to outsource essential Internet marketing and SEO.

You could probably get in touch with us if you liked our SEO services

Web 2.0 And Your Business

Posted by Nikhil on Apr 6th, 2009 | no comments

The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. When the search for truth becomes confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to a quest for power. This should probably be the advocacy that every entrepreneur and potential employer swears by. With the rise in internet technology and web development skills, and with information becoming more and more easily accessible, starting our own enterprise was never too easy!

Web 2.0 – one of the strongest drivers today—is creating new forms of communication, causing drastic market shifts, seeing massive innovation and opening up endless opportunities for entrepreneurs to both develop and take advantage of the technology. There are various arguments about what exactly Web 2.0 encompasses. In general, it refers to a maturing of the internet, the next version of the web. Some of the Web 2.0 trends, such as user participation, are occurring across many media channels. The increase in the number of reality TV shows is one major example of this. Hit shows like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars extend user participation to the audience by allowing them to vote for contestants at the end of the shows.

The entry points of the web have also contributed to these trends. The door to information is mostly managed through major search engines and portals, such as Yahoo!, Google and MSN. These three entry points now rank search results mostly on the popularity of a website, which is affected by the number of links to the website from other websites. When people post content, they also promote it; the links back to their content begin to increase search engine rankings for sites with such user-generated content.

The popularity of YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia further validates the importance of user-generated content. These sites either didn’t exist five years ago or were much smaller. All of these sites are predominantly tools for users to post content at no cost. These three sites in particular have come online and taken the internet by storm. YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia currently rank fourth, fifth and 10th, respectively, in terms of traffic.

For entrepreneurs, Web 2.0 means more opportunities and better tools for running your business. No matter what type of business you own, you need to be using technology to your advantage. If you don’t, your competition will most likely crush you. As the web audience continues to increase and the use of other traditional media and advertising vehicles such as TV, newspapers and yellow-page directories continue to decline, the web becomes increasingly important for even non-technology businesses. For those of you with businesses that target younger audiences, this becomes even more important. Advertising via Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter is becoming essential for most businesses.

If you’re in any type of business where processes and procedures are important, you can use Web 2.0 technologies like wikis and service portals for collaboration. Web 2.0-based project and task management services can help make your employees much more efficient. Web 2.0 tools for collaboration also make it easier for smaller businesses to collaborate with customers and partners.

Customer relationship management tools are probably the best known Web 2.0 software that’s used as a service. Salesforce.com was one of the earliest innovators in using CRM software as a service. Meanwhile, Google Docs and Spreadsheets provide word processor and spreadsheet applications at no cost as part of Google Apps. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs continue to build out software services for functionality that only existed as packaged software before.

Web apps are hot. But what does this really mean for entrepreneurs? Three things:

1. Lots of room for start-ups: The barriers to entry are low, but the way to stand out is by solving a real customer problem. If a web app solves the user’s problem, he or she won’t hesitate to use it over traditional software.
2. Existing software companies beware: Because web apps replace the functions of traditional software programs sans occupied disk space, many PC users may decide to switch.
3. New tools for growing businesses: The myriad business tools in web app form, such as video, accounting, CRM and so on, can help businesses be more efficient, saving them money and making information accessible anytime, anywhere.
   As more and more people rely on their mobile phones and the web moves to wireless, the mobile apps industry is growing by epic proportions.

And the exciting part for entrepreneurs wanting to dial into this hot industry would be the millions in investment money flying around. Apple and Google have launched third-party mobile app markets already, and Microsoft is scheduled to release its version next year. The technology is only going to get better.

Parts of this article have been sourced from Michael Crichton’s State of Fear and Gary Reid’s articles on Mashable.

Choosing Between A Blog And A Website

Posted by Nikhil on Apr 5th, 2009 | 2 comments

“Of course I want a website,” is the response that you’d expect from more than half of the people you’d ask the question. The fact remains that there is no right answer to this question. I think its more need-based than what’s ‘in’, because one of the primary reasons why a business may choose a website is to sell its products. Stats show that 55.8% of all websites have something or the other to sell. But why do people think that blogs are becoming synonymous with websites, perhaps overtaking them? I see five major reasons:

Ease of use You don’t have to be a techie to put up a blog. You don’t need to know any programming languages to start a professional blog, and with blogging platforms becoming increasingly user-friendly, anyone with access to an internet can get a presence on the internet. Most blogging platforms are offered in the SaaS model (Software as a service), which means that they do everything from give you a domain name to hosting your blog to give you a lot of gigs of free upload space. Which brings me to my next point.

Economical Blogs are way cheaper to put up than a professional website. Most blogging platforms are free to use and the only investment a business has to do is perhaps buy a domain name. And domain names are as cheap as $7 a year. On the other hand, putting up a website involves starting from scratch – the templates, the content, the design, the encoding, search engine optimization, maintenance, hosting, and just about anything else. There are SaaS models available that promise to put up, design and host your website for you, but they’re expensive. The cheapest one I could find costs $5 a month. Compare that to the investment in a blog, and you’ll see the difference.

Interactive Almost everyone who blogs will tell you that one of the coolest things about blogging is the discussion threads and comment forms. Its an instant feedback to whatever content goes up online, and its a great networking tool. With the right message and the right optimization procedures, you can reach out to a global audience who will be your end consumer for whatever services you’re offering. They have a chance to interact with you directly and more importantly, you have a chance to speak to your consumers in real time, with appropriate plug-ins.

Classroom Example, outlining the advantages of a blog

Widgets and Plug-ins Compared to a blog’s flexibility in terms of customization, a website is disappointingly static. There are plug-ins for almost anything – right from basics like a ‘Calendar’ and an ‘Archives’ widget to an ‘All-in-one SEO Pack’ to frills that make the blog look that much more beautiful. And none of these require an extensive knowledge of any programming languages. Anyone can do it. Perhaps the most useful widget for a business is the live-chat widget. Enabling this would help anyone who visits the blog to chat with someone from the company in real time, right there on the blog, with no logins and passwords required.

Content Management Blogs have the advantage of giving you complete freedom when it comes to your content. You can manage it anyway you want, make changes to the way they appear, the order in which they are listed, the ease of access and anything else. Its like being able to play with a bunch of building blocks without the fear of going wrong anywhere. Websites, on the other hand, are cumbersome and not very receptive to such flexibilities. They just exist.