Linkeratis: why & how to allure this new X-SEO generation?

Getting back to what I may now call my favorite topic – Link Baiting & Linkeratis, I would first like to refer to Abhishek’s blog where he explained the types of hooks to catch your favorite fish; I would like to take the discussion further to understand the evolution of this new X-SEO generation – the linkeratis and their increasing importance in SEO industry. If you walk to an average SEO, and ask him what it takes to optimize your site, the standard answer they will give you is (like they are revealing a NASA secret) – keyword in your title tag, botable link & content, anchor text in your links, and off course links from quality sites. If not esoteric, these are still the main stays of any SEO program. However, where they might miss out (and the chances are 99%) is – ‘luring the link savvy linkeratis’.

Even though ‘Linkerati’ is a well known terminology in the SEO industry now, but it’s really ironical how so many SEO’s still believe that they can get away without bribing them. You can also take it as paying toll tax (non-monetary off course) for using a flyover to your destination. It’s equally surprising to see even the most excellently built websites (way better then the one’s sitting at the top of the engines) struggling to acquire even a bit of search engine exposure. To understand why this happens to them, lets try to broadly segregate the internet traffic:

While majority sites do well to target the first two segments, but when it comes to targeting the 3^rd one, they are either not aware or they just don’t care. But the price to pay here is heavy as the linkeratis have the power to make or break any website. You might get away from them with flawless SEO work in short run but you are bound to struggle in the long run. You will be surprised to know: if you count the number of links created every month the number of links created by linkeratis are at least 10 times more than the ones created by browsers & customers.

“…the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion, those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward.” - Matt Cutts

For my fellow mates, who believe that baiting is almost impossible for their website as their industry is the most boring & non-interesting industry on the whole planet, let me give you some examples of how you can make some really exciting viral content even for a boring industry like yours:

• Packaging services – You may feature a blog in which you can demonstrate how you packed an egg to save it from an impact of 100 mph and submit it to Digg. And get ready for a mob of visitors who are so eager to know what happens to the egg after such an impact and how you saved it. Also the big guns of the packaging industry would love to link to it.
• Website supplying washing powder – Make a list of the toughest possible stains while telling every one, how worse they can get and your expert analysis to clean each one of them representing it with a cool diagram. Explain how ketchup stains are 10 times tougher than the ones by soya sauce portraying it like it is a rocket science with facts about washing clothes that none of us knows (but do follow KISS – Keep it simple stupid). You might want to include nicely taken pictures of kids and teenagers performing a litmus test of your product with different stains. I am quite sure that if you present all this material in an organized & interesting manner, Digg & boingboing would actually love it.

All that these linkeratis want is source(s) of unique, interesting & digestible content that tells the visitors something they don’t know.

All right ! For a while, lets assume that you have some how managed to post some content that is really interesting & viral-worthy, which every one in the industry just can’t wait to see, but is it enough to spread your link building campaign like wild fire? NO, It’s not. If your hot content is amidst ugly banner ads & poor navigations, you might still end up starving of link hunger as no one would like to digg a member of ‘usability hall of shame’. Back to the basics, It’s also about your website design, navigations, presentation and overall experience of the user.

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SEO at its best: when every one starts contributing

This week, when every one heads off on a vacation for thanksgiving, I am posting a new blog to unearth the real SEO guru within your company’s staff members while throwing some light on how your organization can effectively use universal search to fetch exposure and some much needed bonus traffic for your website. Before going ahead, tell me if you or your staff members are conducting any of the following activities for your company professionally & intentionally as a part of your SEO strategy?

• Do you post & rate your company’s video on YouTube/Yahoo/Google with some tags & description title?

• Does your HR/Public Relation department submit press release to online Journals like newswire.com?

• Do they tag the event photographs on Flickr.com (owned by Yahoo) ?

• Do they post the upcoming events on the upcoming.org (also owned by Yahoo) ?

• Do you add local listings to Google Base (base.google.com) ?

If the answer is NO, don’t worry it’s no corporate crime but you are probably depriving your site from some high quality bonus traffic & valuable corporate exposure via universal search; simply because of the fact that the search engines pull content from a range of their alternate sources like photos, videos, news, local listings etc into the main listing. One other good reason to perform these tasks is that the search engines like ask.com feature the aforesaid videos, news etc right beside the main natural listing.

It is all a part of SEO, which includes activities like a retail store manager updating local listings at base.google.com, HR Manager posting upcoming CSR activities at upcoming.org, marketing department posting product clips on social video sharing sites like youtube.com, Marketing head ghost writing about the rising sales boasting on the company’s strategies and policies on their corporate blog and HR asking other employees to rate these video posts, blogs (which in turn signals the engines that the content posted is genuine & worth while). These small contributions by the employees of your organization will not only help to the cause of the search engine optimization for your website but also will give much needed corporate exposure on internet while sending a very positive message to your targeted market segment and helping you to increase your sales and establish yourself as a super brand.

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Time & Effort distribution to reap maximum out of your Internet Marketing Strategy

RedAlkemi being one of the most comprehensive Online Marketing Solution provider, it is our cyber-duty to suggest website owners and development teams; how to ideally distribute their valuable time (in%) & efforts to reap maximum out of your Internet Marketing Strategy.

Each of the six activities above mentioned focus on how to grow the Popularity, Quality & Profitability for any kind of Internet Marketing venture like Blogs,Informative websites, e-commerce websites etc.

Creating reliable, rich & viral content (40%)
Creating viral worthy rich content deserves at least 40% of the total time spent on the whole internet marketing process. I know it might sound surprising to some but that’s the way it is. The idea here is to spend considerable amount of time creating articles, blogs, forms, applications & graphical content that provides value to your targeted customers. The term ‘viral’ means that the content should be so rich that it has the ability to spread over web automatically. It should entice the visitor to share it with his friends, bookmark it or at least try to memorize your site and to return again in the future to find more useful updates. Make sure that all the content on your website should seem so authoritative that no one on the world wide web can raise questions on its authenticity. The coverage, quality & the entertainment aspect of your content should be so comprehensive that it becomes almost impossible for your competitors to catch up. Needless to mention, in case of any doubt feel free to refer to Wikipedia to create some thing that is 100 times better than others. Rich content works nothing less than anchor for a top performing website. All your efforts including Development, SEO, Link building will go insane if your site is a warehouse of useless & uninteresting information that can be found anywhere on the web inducing nothing but boredom. Make it as interesting & lively as you can.

Developing New Features/Designs (25%)
You can take this component as the cousin to ‘Creating Viral Worthy rich content’. It comprises of the activities to upgrade your website constantly. Think of new ideas that can help you to maximize the impact of the content designed by you. The people involved here are website owners, think tanks, designers, developers etc. Even if you are the industry leader, it takes a lot of effort to stay there and maintain your cutting edge.

Studying the competition for new keywords & other industry trends (10%)
Each week, take out some time to evaluate the industry changes and the activities of your competitors. Keep a close eye on the new entrants, changes in keyword search trends and analyze the whole industry to discover the new trends & ideas that can add to your cutting edge.

Participate in online activities (10%)
Make sure that you spend some time socializing in the internet communities like forums, blogs, social media sites etc where the other industry gurus gather and share their thoughts. All these activities will not only build a positive profile for you as a website owner but will also reap attention, reputation and off course,it will reap some much needed industry relevant powerful links.

Testing/Refining according to the Visitor Data (10%)
Spend the rest 10% of the total time to keep a close eye on the analytics to track most conducive links & keywords so as to focus and redirect your advertising & marketing efforts. The analysis of your PPC campaign can yield surprising results that will surely help you to design or redesign your keyword targeting strategy. Analysis and resulting changes have equal share with in this 10% time share of the total marketing effort. Its all about testing, experimenting, analyzing, refining and repeating the good work. This component involves changing titles, headlines, object placements, PPC analysis, call to action etc. Without these experiments and testing you will never know what works for your targeted market segment and what not.

Manual Link Building (5%)
We are rating the much talked about Link Building at the bottom most, not because it is unimportant or outdated but if you have invested same time & effort on the aforesaid components, you need not beg for links in front of any one; you will get them automatically with much ease. Off course you still would require a link building campaign, but life would be much easier this way. Just a few dozens of rich carefully built links and you are on your way to outperform all your competitors. Obviously these handful of links will not be so easy to find but even if you hire someone else to do it for you, you can save some serious link building man hours.

I am not expecting every one to agree on this time & effort distribution though, it makes lot of sense if you apply simple Internet logics. And it is as simple as it sounds..!

Posted in General, Web Development, SEM | No Comments »

PR update finally?

It seems that the PR update is finally happening. It took a long time coming, the last one being April-May 2007.

I have checked a lot of websites and there seems to be a drop mostly in PR of the sites. Also, for some sites, the PR is different in different Google datacenters.

You can check your website PR on different datacenters using this tool

Check out other useful tools at  http://www.redalkemi.com/web-tools.php

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RedAlkemi gets Enlightened with Joy & Affection - Celebrates Diwali

The moment we all have been waiting for finally arrived and indeed we had a rocking time in the party as the spirit of Diwali driving all of us was truly enlightening. Company’s Entertainment Center never looked so beautiful like it was on the evening of 7th November as it was decorated beautifully with flowers and sparkling diyas. The celebration started traditionally at 6 pm when all the creative minds of RedAlkemi gathered to make beautiful Rangloi’s on the EC floor. Prize for the best Rangoli was taken away by Gurvinder Kaur, Chetna Singh & Jay Ram and Mrs. Kalyani Raghavendra being the runners up.

(Click on the thumbnails above to view the larger version of the pictures)

After the Rangoli competition, DJ came into play as the RedAlkemi party animals started coming in. All were dressed up in colorful ethnic wear, it was indeed a beautiful sight to see women in Salwar kameez & beautifully draped Sarees and the men in Kurta-Pajamas. But the ones to steal the show were Gaurav Yakhmi, Anuradha Arora, Mr. & Mrs.Shivani Narang & Nimisha Raina as they won the crown for Best Dressed Male - Female, Best Dressed Couple & Best Dressed Child respectively. This small beauty contest was followed by Dance as the DJ came into a full groove as it played some really foot tapping tracks. Mouth watering South Indian Cuisines were served as Dinner to all as no one was looking too eager to leave the dance floor.

It was really an unforgettable night for all of us. May the light of this Diwali fill our lives with Love, Affection, Team Spirit & Joy. Wising a very Happy & Prosperous Diwali to All. Cheers

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It’s Party Time: RedAlkemi all set to rock this Diwali

Diwali is just around the corner with all its grandeur n festivity and RedAlkemists are all geared up to celebrate this festival of light with joy & love and make this Diwali another unforgettable one. Thanks to the HR team who are organizing a party at company’s Entertainment Center, where we will enjoy activities like Rangoli competition, Tambola & Cards with our office mates & family members. We have a dress code for the party as the women are suppose to come in Sarees & all the men in Kurta-Pajama. The Best Dressed Couple, Best Dressed male and female will win exciting prizes. Best of Luck to the judges as with so many good looking people around, they will really have a hard time choosing one. All the activities will be followed by Dance & thumping Music and needless to mention, a very special Dinner.
May the light of this Diwali shower our lives with Joy, team spirit & hope with plenty of masti thrown in!!!

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