Archive for March, 2008
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
Under our Employee Engagement and Initiatives, one day trekking was being organized to Nepli Forest (or more popularly known as Sukhna Wildlife Sanctuary).Nepli Forests is a nature trail within Chandigarh, which passes through the woods, hill slope, around water bodies with a gentle gradient. Apart from being an idyllic location for a quick getaway from city life, Sukhna Wildlife Sanctuary offers a great opportunity to raise our awareness about the floral and faunal heritage of our city.As decided we gathered at around 7am and with approximately 35 people we set off to the decided trekking spot in a bus. The funny part being that no one in the bus knew the exact way to the Nepli Forest. But we had a rough idea and after asking from few people, finally reached there in about half an hour.
(Click on the thumbnails above to view the larger version of the pictures)
At the entrance of Nepli Forest, we showed our permit (permission taken from forest officer well in advance) for the trek to the Incharge and unloaded things from the bus (brunch, water, juices, games like cricket, badminton, Frisbees etc) as we were not allowed to take bus inside. But we have obtained the permission for one car (Atul & Anuja’s) so that we do not have to carry those things along when we walk to the Inspection Hut as it was 4 kms walk.At around 8.30am all started walking to the first spot (Starting point of Kansal Hut Trekking). After reaching there, we set to our trek. In the way, we had lots of fun, sang songs and cracked jokes as well. The trekking up the hill was tough, little bit scary (since it had narrow and slippery paths) as well as adventurous. Some people were walking carrying bags (thankfully!) which had water and little snacks in it. To which everybody made sure they do made it lighter. ;)After about 15kms of long and hard trekking, we finally made it to the Inspection Hut. The Inspection Hut was surrounded by a huge green park, had a lovely lake with a boat and small zoo with lots of deers. Everyone was so tired and thirsty. And had lots of water and juices which we carried along. Those who reached earlier cheered for those who came later on. There was one group (whom we feared had lost way) reached almost after an hour of first group!When we reached at the Nepli Inspection Hut we all hogged on to the brunch like anything. The brunch included hot and piping aloo puri and raita with achar.The food was so yummy that most of us ended up eating a little extra. 
(Click on the thumbnails above to view the larger version of the pictures)
After half an hour or 45 minutes rest, all guys went to play cricket and rest of the group engaged in playing cards under the cool shade of the trees. Children played Frisbee while some brainy people engaged themselves with the game of chess.Around 2pm we all decided to pack up and leave for our homes. Anuja also told us some of stretching exercises so that we do not get cramps in legs next morning due to trekking. Before leaving for our home we had a cup of tea at a local tea stall with snacks (matthis and shakkar pare). And then finally boarded the bus to go back to our lovely homes (I was dying to reach home and fall on my bed..needed a good and sound sleep).Trek was full of fun and frolic and we’ll try organizing more such trips in future. 
Posted in Inside RedAlkemi | 1 Comment »
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
As I sign off for an extended festive weekend(friday being an off for us ), I would like to write this post to tell every one what makes this weekend so special. Offcourse its Holi, but what makes this weekend most special is the fact that its not every year when you have four blockbuster days on the religious calendar - Chhoti Holi for Hindus, the Prophet’s birthday and death anniversary for Muslims, Good Friday for Christians (followed by Easter on Sunday) and Navroz for Iranis and Parsis - have converged on March 21.
In India, Holi is one of the most popular festival; It is a festival of colors and bliss celebrated on Phalgun Purnima. Holi festival has an ancient origin and celebrates the triumph of ‘good’ over ‘bad’. The colorful festival bridges the social gap and renews sweet relationships. On this day, people hug and wish each other ‘Happy Holi’ to their egos and enmity.
RedAlkemi wishes you all a very Happy Holi, Easter, Good Fridar & Navroz. Cheers !
Image: MSN
Posted in General | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
In the dynamic world of SEO, where there are so many small and big things that contribute to your website’s Search Engine friendliness, it is so easy for even professional SEOs to miss out on few of the factors. So as to make sure that there is less SEO skipping and your website is fulfilling Search Engine’s basic requirements, I have compiled a really simple and most basic SEO checklist that will help you to be a little more confident about your SEO campaign. This post is a little long, so to make it more interesting, we are also serving some mouth watering snacks like - beer, chocolate, Energy drinks and what not. Relax and enjoy the feast:
- If you haven’t booked a domain name yet, make sure you have your main keyword in it; people will link to you using your domain name as anchor text and hence giving a boost to your ranking for that particular keyword.
- To begin with, make sure that you run a Google Adword Campaign to know the most convertible keyword theme for your website.
- After the final keyword research, use this data to write unique and click-enticing title and meta description tag for each page. 65 characters in title tag is the maximum amount that will display in the search results but a little longer won’t hurt either. Keyword in the title tag is one most important factor you can’t afford to ignore.
- Make sure that you haven’t overused keywords on the body copy; keyword density is a thing of past, Search Engines now use Latent Semantic Indexing instead.
- Use keywords in alt and title tag of every image on your site (without making it look spammy).
- Use H1, H2, H3 tags in your keyword headings. Use only one H1 tag per page with the most important keyword in it but you can use as many h2, h3 tags.
- Use bold or strong tags to highlight the most important keyword.
- Make sure all the internal and external navigational links have keywords in the anchor text and not just ‘click here’ and ‘learn more’. It gives a boost to the internal linking. You may even consider using tag clouds on your website for better Internal linking.
- Be selective while submitting links to directories otherwise you may spoil your link profile in pursue of easy back links.
- Use a robot.txt file to stop Google bots to index the unwanted & duplicate content.
- Use Google and static sitemap and don’t forget to update it time to time.
- Use keywords in bread crumb navigation.
- Make sure you have a customized 404 error page. To make this task more interesting for you, check out these cool 404 error pages. (But please don’t forget to put a static sitemap or site search on your error page).
- Implement Google Analytics and feed burner to monitor website stats.
- Minimize exit links from your landing page.
- Do your host’s IP analysis especially if you own a family of websites.
- Write your company’s local address with your important keyword somewhere in the heading on the website and submit your website to Google local business Center for optimizing your website locally.
- Make sure that there are no broken links. Use Xenu.
- Every time you add a new blog or article (auto) ping atleast Google, Yahoo, MSN and technorati.
- Keep your website and page URLs as simple as possible. Search Engines hate non-sense dynamically generated URLs like http://www.crapurl/114/cat223 or http://www.crapurl/view_item.php?listing_id=477443&pic_id=2. Use URL masking.
- For usability follow these simple design principles.
- Don’t try to rank all the pages of your website. Concentrate on five of them and keep cannibalization factor in mind while doing the internal and external linking of your website.
- Be creative in your link building approach. One solid idea can fetch you a million dollar worth links.
- Keep your website link worthy.
- Domain age matters a lot. You can’t do any thing about it but you have to be patient. (I wish there was some aging formula for websites like anti-aging cream for women)
- Link popularity of the website. Use Yahoo for this as it presents more accurate link profile of a website than Google.
- Additionally, use misspelled keywords in the keyword meta tags. It certainly helps.
- You don’t want to waste your link equity/link juice to get wasted on ranking pages like ‘request for proposal’ , ‘privacy policy’, ’shipping policy’. It’s better to use no-follow tags on such pages.
- Make sure you update your website content as often as possible. This improves your website bot-crawl frequency.
- Have your website W3C compliant, it will give your website some definite future benefits.
- Test your website on text browsers like lynx.
PS: These are the most basic SEO factors that I can recall at the moment according to current Big3 Search Engine algos. If you think I have missed out on any of the important factors, please feel free to add them as comments on this post.
PSS: Images courtesy: gsinc.co.uk. I hope you enjoyed the feast and don’t be surprised if you find any of these products being sold at your nearest grocery store. Cheers !!
Posted in Web Usability, General, SEM | 6 Comments »
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
It’s friday again, and looking back at my previous posts, I realize that there is some thing seriously missing on our RedAlkemi blog – yeah…’No Fun stuff‘. So I just thought of sharing some cool things, I came across this week on Internet. Yes, its funny but still there is a lot you can learn from each. Sit back and enjoy !
- The No.1 spot is occupied by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and his estranged girlfriend Rachel Marsden who has been auctioning off clothing belonging to Jimmy on eBay. Jimmy is facing public humiliation after he apparently used his website Wikipedia to break-up with his girlfriend and Canadian TV personality Rachel Marsden.
I call it nothing but a terrible ‘Reputation Management Error’. Ain’t it funny?
- The No.2 spot goes to this cool comic representation of Yahoo rejecting MSN’s rescue offer. I know it has been quite a while now but I still found it worth sharing. Have a look at the lighter side of e-visibility (I just loved that Goooogle airplane).
- The No.3 spot is taken by this cool link strategy chart I stumbled on. Even though not so hilarious, but it’s a fun representation of a very effective and an updated link building strategy. Although I found it really cool, but the designer of this pdf chart deserves my thumb down (some text there is little hard to read). Download the pdf, it’s still worth paining your eyes.
So with this fun post I wish you all a rocking weekend ahead! I hope you enjoyed the stuff as much as I did. Cheers !
Posted in General | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
While most of us are very much aware what wordpress is (it makes it easy for us to write, publish, edit and organise our blogs), but very few know that wordpress is capable of performing much more than just publishing blogs. So with this post, I would like to highlight some not so popular (yet so useful) features of a wordpress, which will be really handy for guys who are new to Internet and can’t afford to experiment with paid designers and programmers.
Wordpress as a CMS
In the world of the modern Content Management Systems like Drupal (I find it really complex though), and other specialized CMS(news website) like Vivvo and WSN gallery (media related website), Wordpress is the most conventional, free and easy CMS to implement and maintain overtime.
Use Wordpress to build a portfolio site or gallery
In order to use wordpress to manage your portfolio website, instead of posting simple blog posts in reverse chronological order, you’d want to feature your projects along with a thumbnail. Eric-powell and nathanielstern are two wonderful examples of a wordpress portfolio websites. Simple yet so attractive.
Use wordpress to build a gallery or photoblog
Similarly you can use wordpress as an image gallery as well but you have to enable comments and rating on the products so that the highest rated graphics are sorted to the top. This is a list of some very useful wordpress pluggins to manage comments and ratings on your blog.
Use wordpress to build an ecommerce website
Thanks to the wordpress compatibility to paypal that you can even sell products on your wordpress blog. All you have to do is to put thumbnails of your products, put some description & price tag and integrate it with Paypal. You are all set to run an ecommerce website built totally on wordpress. filipinoartisans and crafty-designs are two rocking e-commerce blogs built on wordpress CMS. I’d be mean if I don’t tell you how to do it. It’s simple, just read these two blogs and you will be able to do it yourself.
Use wordpress to build news website
Now that sounds interesting. But let me tell you this is the most easiest thing that you can do with wordpress. That’s primarily because news related websites usually need to have feature articles kept on the front page, thanks to wordpress’s default reverse chronological display format. Now since such blogs usually attract huge traffics, you can expect a decent affiliate revenue coming your way ( but only if you can put up every thing right). Do you hear the sound of Ka-ching ! BTW living.cebunetwork & xxlmag are two awesome news/magazine blogs that seem to be minting decent revenue at the moment.
I know there is so much more that you can do with wordpress, but with this post I hope I’d be atleast able to make you start seeing wordpress as more than just a content publishing platform. The best thing about wordpress is that you don’t have to be a master coder to implement new functionalities. Just a basic HTML here n there does the trick (most of the time) and with new pluggins evolving every day, sky is the limit with future wordpress possibilities.
Posted in General | 3 Comments »
