Thunder Splash at RedAlkemi

For Link Building team, it was a day of full of enjoyment and fun! We organized a one-day picnic to Thunderzone exclusively for Link Building team. The team gathered in front of office at 10:00 am sharp from where we all headed to our picnic spot the famous waterpark, Thunderzone that is located in Mohali. We received a warm welcome from the staff of the amusement park. After taking a bit of refreshment we entered their water park. The park is one of the finest we have seen in or around Chandigarh. It has a large water pool, great water rides and a stage set for rain dance exclusively. Without wasting any time our team jumped into the water and had loads of fun. The whole team was there for almost 7 hours but everyone enjoyed and not even for a bit looked contented. I am sure if they had been given an option they would not have let the amusement park close on its closing time

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Create Sitemap Index File For Multiple Sitemaps

In case of a very large websites, creation of multiple sitemaps is common. Either the number of pages exceeds the set limit of 50k for single sitemap or individual sitemaps are created for each content type (i.e. for web, videos, news etc.).  In such a case, it is quite convenient to create a sitemap of sitemaps knows as the Sitemap index file. It will list all the sitemaps located in the website just as other sitemaps list the content URLs in the file. The format of an sitemap index file is:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<sitemapindex xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

There can be only one sitemap index file for a website and can contain up to 50,000 sitemap URLs and should not be more than 10MB in size.

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Cultural Blast 2010 at RedAlkemi

24th Sept once again saw RedAlkemi organize its Cultural Event “RACE 2010” with a BIG BANG. Just like previous years, the occasion called for teamwork from the employees’ front.  There were quiet a few performances by the employees which throbbed the hearts of the audience. The hosts for the evening were Preeti Raina & Gurinder Kaur.

To begin with there was a classical performance by a guest named Ms. Nimisha Raina. She is 10 years old and did a fabulous classical dance performance, which followed the skit performed by the Achievers “Baba Kamal Khan Bengali”. Everyone was laughing their hearts out to this one. Then came the skit by the Spiders Team “Sach Ka Saamna”. A fun filled activity done with internal members just to have fun. Then there was the dance performance by Numero Uno team. These performances keyed up the whole environment. Business Development Dept. came forward with the Skit on office environment, Dance and a performance portraying Comedy Circus. Vipin, team member of Dexter’s sang a Himachali song. The RAPID Team came up with a Skit “Say no to alcohol” and a poem that was self-composed by Shiv Madhwal. Technical faults added flavor to the evening as it gave some time for the Riddles & Tongue Twisters to engage the audience. A dance performance by the HR dept. was the Showstopper for the day. This dance parody was repeated once again on high public demand. A cultural event in Punjab cannot be complete without one performance, which is ‘Bhangra’. This was a performance by the group of Link Builders & Achievers.

To end the event on a memorable note was a guest performance by Brahminder and his younger brother Jay. They sang the notes that made them the heart favorites of those present. The performances followed refreshments for all. Yet again came an end to an unforgettable evening at RedAlkemi.

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Rich Snippets – For Convenient and Informative Results

When displaying results on search result pages, search engines often use Meta Description tag as the snippet below hyperlinked page title, or make its own snippet at runtime from the page content. These snippets are mostly text descriptions and may not look attractive at times. However, Google provides a way to add a little depth in your webpage snippets using structured data in the form of Rich Snippets. The Rich Snippets can be used to provide users with convenient and informative search results. For e.g. you can show reviews, price range of products, schedule of events and time required to cook a recipe. Currently there are three formats supported by Google for rich snippets:

• microdata
• microformats
• RDFa

Google currently offers Rich Snippets for five types of data i.e. Reviews, People, Businesses and organizations, Events, Recipes

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Guidelines For Submission To Google News

A news website has to follow certain guidelines in order to get their news stories indexed and shown in Google News. Once your website has been submitted in the Google news, it will crawl your website for news articles & press releases and show them in news search results. Some of these guidelines are mentioned below.

1. Submit your website here to be reviewed
2. Your website must have unique and latest content uploaded frequently. The articles should not be too long or too short for being considered as news articles.
3. The content should be only in plain HTML format. Although PDF is supported in web search, it is not crawled under News search
4. Each article must have its own unique URL. No URL should have multiple articles or changing content on it.
5. The URL must have a unique number consisting of at least three digits. For e.g. /news/article234.html
6. Place article title in <h1> tag and make sure that page <title> matches the article title.
7. Article title should include at least ten characters and should be between 2 and 22 words
8. Create News Sitemap and you can keep URLs up to only two days old in it
9. Images should be only in .jpg or .jpeg format with minimum size of 60px * 60px
10. Google doesn’t read audio, video or multimedia content from within the news websites. Though the videos can be included via YouTube

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Google Instant – Enhancement By Google To Save Time

Google Instant is the latest search enhancement by Google which predicts and shows results even as you are typing it the query. The queries are shown in the drop down which keeps on changing as you type in the search box and the search results also keeps on changing. The suggested queries are more diverse and versatile than the one shown by Google earlier.  This feature has been implemented by Google (and earlier by Yahoo) to save time of people searching online.

This change is currently visible on Google US and with logged in account for some selected countries.  Google Instant does not have any major implications on search engine marketing as Google in no way has changed the way it ranks and finds the relevant pages for a particular query.

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Search Transition Between Yahoo And Bing

As per the Yahoo-Microsoft deal, the search transition between Yahoo and Bing is currently taking place in many places including North America. Most of the Yahoo searches are increasingly powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine at the back end. So, if you see drastic changes in your Yahoo organic rankings, this is probably the result of search transitioning.  The results in Yahoo will be almost same as that of Bing for many queries. The paid search transitioning is also taking place whereby the PPC ads on Yahoo will be managed trough Microsoft’s AdCenter network.

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Latest update on Link building

1.    The website loading speed has been added as a parameter in Google’s website ranking algorithm. Since the internet users enjoy spending time on fast loading websites, so the speed of a website and that of the site from where its links are coming from need to have fast loading speed.
2.    Google has removed the extra weight awarded earlier to the links from .gov and .edu websites. This was done to reduce the spam from such sites. Google reduced the weight from such sites to that of a normal website, therefore linking from government and educational websites may not help much.
3.    Google seeks for the naturalness of links. Therefore to look more natural, links need to be from different sources like article submission websites, from blog comments, social bookmarking sites, forums, facebook, old and new websites, follow and no follow websites, covering different PR rankings.
4.    Websites with low content volume and higher inbound links may be penalized by Google; so before building links for a one page website with very less content, it is must to build its content first.

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Divide And Conquer – Driving Traffic Through Micro sites

RedAlkemi, the leading provider of search engine marketing and website promotion services to businesses and organizations has added another feather in its cap with the introduction of multiple micro sites for its clients’ websites. This all has greatly helped our clients to exercise more control over their online marketing campaigns or website optimization efforts. These Micro sites are being excessively used for commercial purposes to create in-depth information and relevancy to a specific product or service.
Technically speaking, these micro sites are small, self-contained web destinations that are separate from company’s primary or parent site, have their own unique URLs and consist entirely of content focused on promotion of a particular product or service. Having a tight focus, these micro sites can be effectively used as hubs for a specific marketing campaign. These micro sites can more easily achieve higher online visibility and if their content is fresh and engaging, they can drive word-of-mouth or viral marketing through linking and pass-along.

There are many benefits of using Micro sites as listed below:

·    Micro site has a unique domain name as compared to its parent site and contains different pages of topic-specific content, setting the stage for high organic search engine rankings.
·    Micro sites do not have to follow the brand guidelines of a parent website so creative and quirky designs can be incorporated to immediately capture a visitor’s attention.
·    A micro site offers the freedom to go into more details like specifications, history, press coverage etc. as it may not be possible to go into too much details on one parent site.
·    Micro sites help in driving targeted traffic to the parent website as they provide the visitors with exactly what they want without having to look for it. The whole site can be geared towards a single call to action.
·    A micro site is generally found to have higher search results having a domain name with relevant keywords in it, and highly focused site for a particular product.

RedAlkemi has effectively built multiple micro sites for Auto Insurance, Long Term Care Insurance, Online casinos websites and has achieved high levels of online success with these websites. These micro sites play an important role in providing the prospective buyers of the products with deep information on a product, information that cannot be handled by single parent website. Micro sites have been designed mainly with the aim to convert the online visitor into a lead, but that lead capture is handled through a more content-heavy approach.  With expertise in online marketing business, RedAlkemi has been able to actively track ROI and measure the success of these focused sites in a way that will be most beneficial to the business of its clients.

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Custom Reporting Made Tracking of SEO Campaign Easy

Custom Reporting is one of the most useful features in Google Analytics  for generating reports for any kind of information you want to see. You don’t have to dig deep into Analytics interface to find information or associate some attributes with others. For e.g., if you want to know the source or medium of the visits converting in goals, or average time a visitor from a particular city/country spends on your site, custom reporting is the way to go. The custom reporting has two main factors.

Dimensions – Visitors or campaign attributes which you want to measure

Metrics – The value or number you select from your report to measure the dimensions

Dimensions mostly have text values where as the Metrics have numeric values.  The list of valid metric-dimension combinations are mentioned here by Google. A report once saved can be viewed any number of time and for different time period by simply changing the date range. It can also be downloaded or scheduled to be sent to the client after regular intervals. Therefore, Custom Reporting feature can make the tracking and tweaking of your SEO campaign quite simple.

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Dynamic Keyword Insertion – Versatile Feature For PPC Management

Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is an advanced feature in Adwords and some other PPC platforms that lets you insert the actual query searched by the user in the ad at the runtime. All you have to do is insert a code in the Ad text and each time the ad is shown, the code will be replaced by keyword that triggered the ad. The syntax of DKI is

{keyword:default text}

The default text is shown when the keyword is too long and exceeds character limit. Given below are some examples given for ad title “{keyword:SEO} Services” with a maximum limit of 25 characters.

Although DKI is a versatile and useful feature for PPC management, it should be used carefully as some completely irrelevant keywords can cause jumbled up results. For e.g. query “SEO services” in above example can lead to ad title as “SEO services Services”.

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Quality Link Building: A key to your successful online business

The success of any business depends greatly upon its website placement in search engines. Higher your website is placed in search engines greater the amount of traffic you will generate to your website. Therefore, it is of immense importance for webmaster to optimize their site for higher rankings in search engines.

The most important aspect in getting higher placements in search engines is Link Building. Building high quality links that looks natural to search engines helps to rank your websites on the top pages of search engines. One of the simplest ways to build natural links is to submit your website to thousand of free directories. This is a gradual process but helps a lot in ranking your site on the top of Google.

Links help your website get indexed by search engines so they begin ranking your pages on the targeted keywords. Higher the ranking you have on search engines more the traffic you can drive to your website.

Secondly, links are used by search engines to determine how relevant your webpage is to search terms. By building links from relevant websites, you ensure that your web page gets indexed and ranked by search engines accordingly.

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Factors To Consider While Optimizing Images

When optimizing images, most of the webmasters concentrate on only three factors namely image Alt Text, Title Attribute and Image Name. But there are a few other factors also that play major role in ranking of images.

• The images should have surrounding text and page title optimized for keyword you want to rank for
• Smaller images (generally less than 400X300 pix) have lower chances of ranking than larger images. If you don’t have large enough space on your webpage, try creating a standalone landing page for each image where users can go after clicking on it
• Try to place your image further up in the page if you want them to rank
• The number of images on a given webpage and number of times an image has been used on the website also effects it’s rankings
• Group and save similar pictures in different directories. For e.g. thumbnails in one and full size images in other
• Build a few inbound links to the image URLs as well

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