The MaGic of Lexical clouds: for higher rankings and enhanced user experience

Web BuzZ-BuZz, Web 2.0 BuzZ-BuZz
There has been so much of buzz about Web 2.0. Many webmasters have embraced weblogs, mash-ups, RSS feeds, bookmarking, social networking, tag clouds, wikis etc. But what excites me most about Web 2.0 are Tag clouds that so many website owners are using these days, for higher website rankings and an even richer user experience. For those who haven’t heard of these lexical clouds before, this is how a tag cloud for flickr looks like:

There are so many websites today, that are using tag clouds but the reason why I mentioned only flickr is because flickr was the first Web 2.0 website to use this concept successfully. Check out the tag cloud for Technorati:

Tag clouds, for better user experience
Tag cloud according to Wikie is - “ A visual depiction of user-generated tags used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information”. Flickr says - “Tags are like keyword or category labels, and they can help visitors find items which have something in common“. The simplest way to explain a tag cloud is that it is a Web 2.0 way of categorizing, organizing and navigating your website content with keyword links.When a user saves, bookmarks or votes (what ever they may call it) for some blog post, picture, video etc on a web 2.0 website like flickr, technorati, del.icio.us etc, he/she has to enter a keyword that the user thinks best describes it.

If you look at the picture above, you will notice that each tag (or keyword link) have different font sizes. The font size of these tags depend on the number of times keyword has been used to tag that an item. More the items are associated with the keyword, the more it is popular and bigger will be the size of the font. So it’s an intuitive means of navigation on a website.

When the user clicks on a tag, he/she is navigated to a tag page which on flickr looks likes this:

The tag page comprises of the most recent items tagged by visitors using that particular keyword they have clicked on. Please note that these tag clouds are not necessarily the only way to reach to the items on the website, but they serve as an alternative & intuitive way of finding them. Most often then not, you will also find the item’s tag adjacent to the item, clicking on which will take you to the other items tagged using that keyword tag. ‘Related tags’ are the other common tags which contain that same item.
Tag clouds: not just usability, it’s also an amazing SEO tool
So you still have doubts, if you should incorporate these lexical clouds on your website or not? I will give you one more good reason to do so - With Tag clouds, you consolidate your website’s internal linking which means you have better strategical control on your link equity (juice) and since the anchor text of these tags is extremely keyword rich, it boosts the ranking of your website or weblog far more than what conventional navigation bar does and hence increases the website’s ranking for significantly larger variation of keywords. You yourself will be surprised to see the keywords tags (including long tail keywords) that people will associate your content with (even wordtracker would have failed to find those). Bloggers will be glad to know that WordPress 2.3 comes with tagging in-built. Ultimate tag warrior is an awesome plugin to create a colorized tag cloud or heat map.

Other Tag cloud resources:
How to make Tag clouds using PHP, MySQL, CSS
Tag clouds using ASP.Net

Posted in Web Usability, General, Web Design, Web Development, SEM | 1 Comment »

HR organize team building activity: FuN TiMe !

On 15th January 2008, we, the HR Team organized TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITY within our organization to boost team spirit and better co-ordination in a team. We had five teams with us, NUMEROUNO, D-COMPANY, SPARTANS, INVINCIBLES & PDME for the final event. The event started with the game MINE FIELD. A mine field was set up with the help of plastic bottles half-filled with water and two members from each team were asked to participate. One member was blind-folded and the other person was asked to direct his/her member through that mine field by giving instructions (left, right, forward & back). The rules were that no part of the body (person blind-folded) should touch any bottle or it would be considered as foul. A team committing three fouls was liable to be disqualified. The first team to participate was D-Company which got disqualified as they did 3 fouls. Similarly SPARTANS and PDME also got disqualified. INVINCIBLES (Abhishek & Akash) started out well but could not go far and got disqualified too. It seemed as though no team would be able to complete the race but towards the end the last (but not the least!) participants, NUMEROUNO proved everyone wrong! The credit goes to the team members Vivechana and Anuradha. They were so well coordinated that they completed the full race with only two fouls and stood as winners (Number One as their team name justifies).

Second Game was Tug of War. Two teams comprising of three members each aligned themselves at the end of the rope and as the referee said GO they attempted to pull the other team such that their opponent crosses the center line. First came to battle were, Invincibles and Numerouno of which INVINCIBLES won. Then came SPARTANS & PDME, of which SPARTANS won.Last team left was D-COMPANY who played against the winners of first round, INVINCIBLES and once again INVINCIBLES stood undefeated. Finals round was played by INVINCIBLES (Kulwant Singh, Abhishek & Jagdip) and SPARTANS (Jay Ram, Nikesh & Amit), everybody was trying to guess the winner and once the game started and the teams started to pull, the INVINCIBLES won the game, thereby being the OVERALL WINNER with 3 wins. But the the pull between INVINCIBLES and SPARTANS was a treat to watch, SPARTANS gave a tough win to INVINCIBLES.

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

Last but not the least was the game ‘Make a Decagon’.
Here the participants were given plastic balls and they were instructed to make a decagon using the balls taking utmost care that the shapes are exactly appearing as the decagon that too within minimum time. Every team tried its best to make the exact shape but once again here also the INVINCIBLES stood as proud winners. And their team members celebrated with claps and cheers for the team. Other teams also joined in to celebrate their victory.

In the end we had the prize distribution ceremony where prizes were given to the winner teams and ended the event with the melodious song of Jagdip Singh.

Seeing the good response of all the employees we are planning to do such activities once in every month. Such events help in building strong teams, develop employee motivation & are fun-for organizations.

Posted in Inside RedAlkemi | 9 Comments »

RedAlkemi celebrates Lohri

Here in India, in January, the rich fields ooze up with the promise of a golden harvest, and farmers celebrate Lohri during this rest period before the cutting and gathering of crops. So RedAlkemists also gathered, on the chilly evening of 12th January, in the office parking lot to celebrate the festival of Lohri with peanuts, jaggery, and traditional sweets like gajak, rewri, etc. Amidst the cold weather, we all sang and danced around the bonfire on the beat of dhol in the praise of Dulha Bhatti, a Punjabi avatar of Robin Hood who robbed the rich to help the poor, and once helped a miserable village girl out of her misery by getting her married off like his own sister.
As always, we had a lot of fun while we celebrated the event with lot of exuberance. Cheers !

Posted in General | 3 Comments »

Having landing problems with your website? Try these 11 Power tips on Landing Page Optimization

Look at the picture on the right. Is this what happens to your visitors, when they land-up on your page from a Search Engine or your PPC ad? Landing page of your website is where you persuade visitors to perform a pre-defined action on your website. You may also take it as persuasive on-page copywriting, to make a visitor do what you want him to do. I find it ironical to see people wasting their landing page space by offering the visitors ample reasons to quit, rather than making them perform the ultimate action on your website. You should always look to concentrate to make every piece of your Real Estate count, while enabling your site to deliver optimum ROI on the website development process. Concentrate on writing, pushing and benefit rich headlines which clearly state the visitor - ‘What’s in it for me?’ Consider the following power tips for landing page optimization, they can increase the conversion rate of your website many folds.

1. Eliminate irrelevant navigations, sign-in boxes, and other reasons for the visitor to quit from your landing page.
2. Add your best testimonial or a testimonial from your most renowned client. Don’t forget to match the testimonial to the benefits. If your client allow, you can increase the impact of the testimonial by featuring a small, nicely taken picture of him/her along with the testimonial, this will make the testimonial look more natural and trustworthy
3. Consider multiple column format to increase the flexibility to add more features without distracting the visitors from the main call to action.
4. Use window pop-ups to provide important information like ‘privacy policy’, ’satisfaction guaranteed’ etc to the client on the same screen without making them leave the landing page.
5. When it comes to writing the copy of the page, the content should never sound like - “what I/we give you”, but it should be say more about “what you get?”.
6. Use graphics intelligently to add as many call to actions as you can in different formats without showing your ‘desperateness to sell’ to your visitor.
7. Don’t give your visitors too much options. Only feature your best two or three offers on the landing page so that you don’t end up confusing them. To accomplish this, you need to perfectly understand your target segment (about what they exactly want?).
8. If your target is to make a client fill up a form, you’d be surprised to see how much, adding a prominent link - ‘we value your privacy’ can increase the conversion rate of your website.
9. If you are offering a guarantee, make it as prominent as you can with the help of relevant text and graphics.
10. In the offer, tell people precisely, how much they save in dollars (and not in percentage).
11. Internet Marketing is mostly about impulse buying. So you should look to convert the visitor’s interest that brought him to the landing page into an impulse and then to convert that impulse instantly into the desired action.

Thumb rule to maximize your conversion rate is to test, test & test (A/B testing precisely). I highly recommend you to refer to this Google guide which will actually help you to test your landing page and also increase your ad’s CTR at the same time. Wishing your website visitors, a very safe landing next time!

Posted in Web Usability, General | 1 Comment »

Cannibalization and ideal link pattern for higher keyword rankings

If you ask Kotler about cannibalization, he would probably say that it is the drop in margins and sales due to entry of new players in the market. But this phenomenon happens differently in our SEO industry and it plays a very important role in strategizing one’s link building campaign. So many times we come across people who just sprinkle their most important keywords all over their website and just sit back hoping that it’s enough for Google to start ranking their website for those scattered keywords. But by unplanned scattering of keywords, all they do is, confuse the crawlers and fail to rank for any of those targeted keywords. This is due to cannibalization effect.

Due to cannibalization effect, your website can face following setbacks:

• Internal linking: You dilute the keyword equity by using it in all the links on all the pages and as a result search engines fail to determine your most important keywords and pages. For eg. If your website is about cars, you should not link a page on ‘engines’ to ‘tyre’. Instead it is a better idea to link ‘engines’ page to ‘types of engines’ and ‘tyre’ to ‘types of tyres’

• External Linking: Same holds true when you try to link to external websites without understanding which keyword category the linking page is specifically targeting.

I don’t think it is possible to rank all the pages of your websites. When your content and keywords are all over the place, even the few back links produced are spread all over the place, which hardly benefits any page. So ideally you should try to focus on the most important pages while using other pages as a bait for crawlers to rank those important pages highest on search engines. You may also want to refer to Brett Tabke keyword pyramid, where he has explained the most rank boosting internal and external link pattern with nice diagrams. Even though it is a very old post but it still holds good and will definitely clarify all your doubts about linking of your website. Happy linking!

Posted in General | No Comments »