Digital Media Marketing Expert

New SEO Strategy : Best for Current Scenerio

The responsibilities of SEO practitioners have changed to include far more of the digital ecosystem, yet for so many, much of the SEO process remains the same. Currently there are several segments of SEO strategy seen as optional that are actually absolutely imperative to the success of an SEO campaign, as well as to the synergy of other initiatives within the marketing mix. In other words, SEO must adopt and adapt in order to be taken seriously and command the type of influence required to drive change. As it stands, SEO looks to disrupt the symphony (or cacophony) that is a brand’s marketing mix. Let’s discuss a new process that allows SEO to improve the effectiveness of all digital marketing channels – not just inbound.

Disclaimer: Kanye West is awesome, but you understand how he is perfect to illustrate these points.

Problems with the Old Process

I’ve heard SEO called a lot of ugly things in the past few years. My favorite one lately was delivered to me by the wonderful Brittan Bright after someone passionately declared to her that SEO is the “Calculus of Marketing.” I love it simply because it fits. Just like Calculus, if you’re not looking at the aggregate value of what you’re working on you may do a lot of work for a result that doesn’t seem big in the grand scheme. Just like Calculus, SEO is quite specific and esoteric to those that haven’t studied it. Just like Calculus, you can be completely successful without it altogether. And finally SEO and Calculus both set a barrier of entry that excludes more than it includes.
With all that said, here is the typical SEO process as it has been defined over the years.

Although we often treat it like one, SEO has never been an initiative that existed within a vacuum. It has always required changes be made across a complete digital ecosystem in which there are numerous stakeholders. However, this existing process always asked for change without justification with regard to the purpose of goals of these touchpoints. For example, if my recommendation is to change a title tag there has been no justification as to how that affects the CTR of a page shared on Facebook. Perhaps the social media team has discovered that the target audience clicks through less when a page title doesn’t feature a brand name. That’s a hypothetical situation but let’s go into a little more detail as to why SEO will not continue to work this way.

No Regard for Market Research

Just as the diagram above suggests, most SEOs jump right into keywords, analytics and competitive analysis of those keywords. Wrong move; search is about fulfilling needs. Before looking at a single keyword there needs to be a deep understanding of business objectives and the market. Standard kickoff questions often look like this:

What analytics package do you use?
Are there any other domains or sites that you own?
What SEO efforts have been done in the past?
List your top 3 competitors.
Do you have social media accounts?
What keywords are you looking to rank for?

The biggest problem with this is we often take these inputs at face value. That is to say, very often the brands that the client believes they are competing with offline are not the sites they are competing with for keyword coverage in the SERPs. Also the keywords a client may think they should rank for are not the keywords that are going to help them meet their actual goals.
To simplify it, many SEO teams send clients kickoff questions to get a sense of the keywords they should target and then hop right into the keyword tool. Pages are optimized. Keywords are allocated to pages. Links are built. Content is pushed into social. Performance is measured to identify subsequent opportunities. Obviously it oftentimes goes far more in-depth for many, but this is basically the widely accepted process.
One of my biggest issues as a consumer of Search that understands SEO is if the results I click appear to be overly optimized I become quite leery of the content. This is simply because in my experience many copywriters (SEO or otherwise) often don’t know what they are talking about. Recalling dusty memories of early in my own SEO career when I wrote copy, in most cases I was just a human article spinner. I definitely read a few wiki articles and the top results for a given keyword and just reworded what other people said. I shared all that to say: Becoming an expert in the niche that you are optimizing for is an extremely underrated step in the SEO process. For this reason, if I were to hire an agency, I would prefer one with extensive prior experience or specialty in my vertical. All my in-house SEOs – make some noise!

Little Regard for the Audience

Truthfully, the real differentiation between clients happens in a latter set of questions. Unfortunately, the following doesn’t get asked enough in the standard SEO kick-off:

What is the purpose of your site?
What are you trying to get users to do once they arrive?
Who is your target audience?

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These are typically questions that Conversion Rate Optimization teams focus on rather than SEO teams. For shame SEOs, for shame!
We all want traffic and we all want to rank #1 for juicy head terms, but these things are not goals. By themselves these are not KPIs that make clients successful. Simply put, if you rank highly for keywords but aren’t fulfilling the needs of people searching for them, you just put a ton of effort into exactly the wrong thing. It’s not about the keywords; it’s about the people searching for them.
Consider this offline example of Target using data on customers to identify when they’ve become pregnant to learn when to ramp up efforts to turn mothers-to-be into long-term big spenders at the wholesale department store. You can do this far more effectively with Search if you’re mindful of your audience and their needs. This measurement of intent plus interests plus demographics plus network is the Holy Grail of Marketing. With that in mind it becomes quite clear what Google’s ulterior motives are with Plus and the consolidation of privacy policies.
Recently, I had a short conversation with AJ Kohn via Twitter about personas and how client research can prove useless. I agree somewhat because clients that have done audience research beforehand may have only looked at offline factors. To that point, it is important that we validate or disprove those insights with our own research rather than taking what the client says at face value. Our goal is to optimize, not paint by numbers.

SEO Disrupts Most Digital Strategies

As much as I hate to say it, the reality of SEO is that it disrupts much of digital planning even when it’s included from the onset.
Most other digital capabilities start from the target audience before they do anything. User Experience has user stories, personas and user flows. Strategy teams build personas and need states by examining demographics and psychographics in efforts to really try and understand what does and will influence and fulfill the target audience.
Kanye WILL Disrupt Your Campaign

Whichever of these teams develops these audience insights then feeds them to other teams so that efforts are glued together by the target consumer. Paid channels such as Facebook Ads, Display Advertising and Paid Search benefit from this significantly in their ability to target demographically. Media teams examine the available audience by vendor and allocate dollars based on where the delivery will be most effective.
Traditionally, Organic Search ignores this step entirely and declares “HEY! I’M HERE NOW WE’RE DOING THIS MY WAY!” This is partially why SEO gets shunned by brands when they are determining where to distribute their efforts within the marketing mix. SEO is certainly effective, but it has always been a maverick that didn’t want to play by the rules. There is little meritocracy because if channels were chosen only by ROI – Display Advertising would have died 10 years ago. Evidently, they are not chosen this way so for SEO to get buy-in it needs to be team player.

Many Link Building Initiatives Exist in a Vacuum

Regardless of the hundreds of strategies, tactics and tools that are being born for link building daily, every successful link building campaign boils down to making news and/or making friends. As SEOs, we try to strong arm how and where brands will do this. Making news and building relationships are functions of many different groups and initiatives within a business from top to bottom. How is it that we as SEOs believe our best initiatives can exist outside of the things the brand itself contributes to?

Brands launch PR campaigns, social media efforts, events, so on and a variety of other social strategies to facilitate the awareness of the news they create. How is link building any different? The fact of the matter is, it isn’t. Therefore it should be attacked from, and included with, the same standpoint as the rest of a brand’s social strategies for both scale and effectiveness. Simply put, link building is better when the entire muscle of a brand is leveraged.
The New SEO Process

To do effective SEO now, at the very least, you have to be a digital strategist, social media marketer, a content strategist, conversion rate optimizer, and a PR specialist. I’m skipping anything coding related because although I believe you should be able to build a website you don’t necessarily have to. SEOs are already inherently each of these things, however in most businesses these are all different capabilities that sit in different groups, or offices or cities. Who are we to upset an entire digital ecosystem and undermine so many people?
Well I work with some awesome digital strategists, content strategists, creatives, etc. and while they tend to have impressive grasps of web trends, audiences and their specific capabilities they typically don’t know how to leverage cross-channel campaigns as specifically as SEOs or Inbound Marketers. It is now the role of Inbound Marketers to drive strategies that looks far more like this (sorry guys, Kanye had to go – busy schedule):

I wish very much that I could be there for your “aha!” moment right now as no doubt you recognize many of these steps and can guess where other tasks will fall. Now let’s break it down completely – forgive me for anything that is obvious.
The New SEO Process Explained

Opportunity Discovery – Opportunity Discovery is a cyclical process of understanding brand opportunity with regard to business goals, target audience, industry specifications and past performance. It’s cyclical in that insights from one step often refine insights from another step in the process.
Business Objectives – Everything must be done within the context of the goals of the brand. This requires a deep understanding of where the brand has been and where it’s going. In many cases businesses large and small may not understand how to translate their goals and therefore it is the job of the Inbound Marketer to do so.
Market Research – The reason why SEO gets such a bad rap for polluting the web is that so many people simply do not build content that is worthwhile or has utility for the market. At this point, the entire team must take a deep dive into the industry and be able to have more than cursory conversations on the subject matter. For those that believe this to be a largely arduous task I suggest specializing in verticals of interest.
Audience Research –The Facebook Ads tool is the Adwords Keyword Tool of personas. The Doubleclick Ad Planner is also good for understanding the demographics of existing sites. If available, Facebook Insights gives demographic data on the existing users visiting the site as well. The output of this is a set of user segments and stories or – personas.
Analytics Mining – As always, you should mine existing analytics data to understand who is visiting. Take deep dives into keyword performance, especially in concert with any internal Search data, to identify opportunities. All in all, this is no different than normal unless the client has already been tracking their audience at which point you can see if who they are trying to attract is actually coming or not.
Social Listening – Using a core set of keywords, collect data on the conversation around those keywords. Keep track of patterns and identify user segments, demographics and need states of the people partaking in that social conversation. You’ll also want to keep track of how these users are using the keywords as this will allow you to eliminate ambiguity in keyword decisions and help to create messaging that resonates with the audience during the customer decision journey.
Quantitative Analysis – Services such as ComScore, Quantcast, Forrester Research, etc. track a multitude of data points on users in various verticals by demographic. Leveraging these reports gives you deeper insight into what types of users visit your competitors and exist within the market.
Keyword Research – Keyword Research must be completed with regard to the audience not just a determination of whether the keyword is viable from a search volume standpoint, but whether the keyword intent matches the business goals. Keywords should then be correlated with target personas and need states to help drive the build of content that is optimized for people first and search engines second.
Site Audit – Under the New SEO Process the Site Audit becomes decidedly more comprehensive, as it covers UX issues that would normally fall into a CRO Audit. Specifically, the audit talks about things impeding the conversions due to incongruence with the target audience in addition to the standard SEO technical issues that it covers.
Asset Inventory – A standard practice SEOs are already doing wherein there is an understanding of what a brand controls and is willing to leverage to the benefit of the campaign.
Content Audit – What content inside our outside of the site can be leveraged?
Brand Relationships – What other companies, businesses, groups and events are the brand involved with?
Offline Assets – What tools, venues, prizes, etc. are at the brands disposal?
Competitive Analysis – As always, competitive analysis is a collection of high-level audits of competitors across the vertical. The difference is that since site audits are completed with regard to the audience, the competitive analysis must also include a determination of how other brands are capturing that audience.
Measurement Planning –A standard practice amongst analytics teams the Measurement Plan is the Statement of Intent and determination of Key Performance Indicators with regard to the business goals and audience. Avinash Kaushik covers measurement planning in his Digital Marketing and Measurement Model post. (Hat tip: @scotttdodge)
Content Strategy & Development – Content Strategy and Development are big picture initiatives with a variety of stakeholders, so it often carries with it the most pushback. Creative teams just want to take big swings for big ideas and brand managers just want to advertise. To be effective we have to show how our content ideas will connect with the brand’s target audience and make sure content is designed to our specification.
Content Ideation –With all this social data we have collected and correlated to keywords we can now come with ideas for content with portions of the target audience built-in. Do so.
Wireframes – are an early deliverable in the design phase of a website wherein we can annotate considerations for SEO and CRO to ensure that Creative teams design with both in mind. Be very involved in this phase.
Content Build – Once all your points are baked in, it’s time to let the Creatives do what they do. If they come back with creative is not congruent with what is agreed upon in an earlier phase, then you now have data to back up your position with the client.
Technical Development –Technical SEO is the price of admission and cannot be ignored, so this where we make sure that the structure of the house is sound.
Technical Build –At this point, we’ve done all we can do now we just wait to see what the tech teams come back with. We’ve specified everything in wireframes and hopefully have had some say in the build of the CMS, but the tech team is going to do what they know. We’re just going to have to wait to see what they come back with unless they are open to our input during the actual build.
Implementation Audit – We’ll always have to double-check the work of a technical team and this is the spreadsheet in which we do it. An implementation audit briefly recounts the issues outlined in the site audit and wireframes and says whether or not they were successfully implemented. This is the easiest way to show that the bottlenecks are not so much with the SEO team but the tech team – as they oftentimes are.
Social Strategy – Typically link building is an initiative that exists by itself, in the new SEO process link building is an initiative that must be completed as part of a broader scope. While it is clear that low quality tactics like blog commenting continue to work, even those are far more effective coupled with a social push across PR and social media. Leveraged strategically, you are launching a piece of content with a cross-channel marketing push and therefore the link velocity will appear more natural to search engines and the return on the social strategy is likely to be higher. While link building has always been about casting the widest net, social strategy is about casting the rightest net the widest. I just made up a word. Kanye approves.
Link Strategy – Link building for most businesses, particularly small businesses, is not an “if you build it, they will come” situation. Therefore it is not enough to just launch content and hope for the best, we must continue to supplement content launches with smaller complementary content launches, outreach and manual submission link building. This is where this strategy is defined with its own measurement plan. Yes, I’m saying we should report both our prospects and the links we close. If you’re proud of your work that shouldn’t be a problem. Link Building is just like a PR campaign in that there is no guarantee of placements and should be explained as such.
PR – News is better than advertising, so a key part of social strategy is doing things that make news. Users spend a large part of their day reading, sharing and linking to news so make it a large part of the social strategy to make sure that content is newsworthy and get it to the news outlets that your audience frequents.
Contests – Contests are an excellent way to get a one-to-many return on incentives. Rather than performing outreach and directly offering them a free sample or (gasp) money request that they enter a contest wherein their entry is a blog post about the brand’s topic that contains a link. Also add a layer of gameplay to the contest by determining the winner through the number of times their post is shared in social media. Unbounce had a similar blogging contest in 2011 but link building wasn’t the goal of the campaign so they had all the posts on their own site.
Events – Throwing a party, conference or trade show is another one-to-many return for link building. Simply host an event and invite influencers in the brand’s audience where the stipulation for attendance is that people must blog about it and link back to you.
Social Media – is a two way street. Not only is it a place for discovery but also a place for conversation. Use that conversation to find the influencers in the space with regard to the target audience and business goals. Build social media profiles to be authoritative and engaging to easily get your content shared and also convert sharers into linkers. Regardless of where Google is headed, the social graph will never completely replace the link graph.
Social Implementation – is the phase when you let it all rip for the best synergy.
Measurement – is not just about whether or not we hit the goals. It’s the insights into why that makes measurement the most valuable step in Online Marketing. Measuring with regard to the audience helps with understanding the why even further than speaking in concrete abstracts such as bounce rate of a keyword. After all the ability to tangibly measure is why digital marketing is far more effective than traditional.
Reporting – is tailored specifically to the goals of the client. There’s no one-size-fit-all report. For example, a client business goal may be to get user segment A to watch a video and therefore, the primary metrics reported should be the Time On Site and persona type versus traffic and keyword. Rankings are only important with regard to how they’ve affected traffic. Everything should be focused on who (persona A) and why (because the message is unclear) rather than what (“blue widgets for sale ranked #5”).
Link Reporting – Under the umbrella of social strategy there is a lot to be said about what has been done to increase visibility. Aggregate rankings should be reported with regard to link building efforts to show the direct correlation between the two. Furthermore, link prospects and closes should also be reported with close rates to show clients what is being done on their behalf. This is obviously a subject of contention within the community, but if the links you build are so suspect that you are afraid to show them to the people you’re building them for – you need a different approach.
Optimization – I had an art teacher once that always used to say “No work of art is ever finished, we just give up.” The art and science of SEO is never complete and there is always an opportunity to do more.
Conversion Rate Optimization – While CRO is far more baked into this strategy it still likely to take its own seat at the table. That is to say that while SEOs may also be CROs they may be too close to the project to properly optimize. This is much the same way that the mixing engineer of a song is not supposed to also be the mastering engineer. At this point, a separate CRO Team should run A/B Tests, Usability Tests and so on and report back.
Continued SEO – Do it all over again!

A Better Web

Not to go all “land of milk and honey” on you guys, but the consumer is the biggest winner here. Naturally businesses benefit immensely as well, but the more we optimize with people in mind the more likely their needs will be fulfilled and consequently, the more likely we are to get those people to convert. Including people throughout the process and making the core goal to encourage them to do something ultimately makes the web a better place because everything we create will have a distinct purpose for the user and never solely for search engines. This is not to say we are circumventing the technical tenets of SEO as they are the price of admission.

Brand Buy-In

SEO has always been an industry that explains itself using empirical data. Starting from the audience, a place that businesses can understand, it is far easier to get buy-in for SEO initiatives. So when we make recommendations and explain the impact of our efforts on a target audience that has been determined as a focus of all initiatives, it’s easier to obtain brand buy-in than when we’re just talking about keywords and traffic.
Compare the following statement:

“We want to build links targeting websites with a PageRank of 3 or higher. We’ll reach out to a variety of prospects and target anchor text for keyword opportunities identified by our extensive keyword research in order to gain rankings for your brand.”

with:

“We’d like to launch a contest targeting Influential Moms with over 5000 followers on Twitter. To enter they’d write blog posts that link back to our properties in order to drive traffic for our target Listener Moms that are using Search to buy more healthy cereal.”

Both ideas would potentially accomplish the same goals however the former will require far more explanation for the client and ultimately more effort on the part of the SEO team. Whereas the latter explains a link building campaign in terms of the brand’s target audience and business goals then further lays out a campaign wherein the brand commits cross-channel resources that the SEO team can leverage. Understanding the business objectives and the audience make it easier to develop and deliver strategies that client can easily get behind.

Scalability

Getting on the same page with the other capabilities allows SEO efforts to be scaled considerably for brands large and small. This is how we regularly achieve those otherwise rare instances of synergy between capabilities when the PR team is facilitating Link Building, the Content Strategy teams and Creative teams are creating link bait and SEO is both driving and supplementing those efforts. That is the perfect storm where we spend far more time chiseling our perfect sculptures rather than polishing poop and our efforts have far more impact with less effort.

Cross-Channel Optimization

Learnings and wins in SEO can influence other channels. Imagine we discover through social listening, keyword research and/or measurement are a large number of the client’s target audience is looking for “red kanye west t-shirts” but the client only sells every color but red. We now have a tight business case as to why that client should start manufacturing the t-shirt in red. Conversely, what if we find out that people love the shirt but bounce from the landing page because they hate the user experience of the site? There is any number of scenarios that when explained purely from the context of search brands are far less likely to make a move. However when you explain these insights through the context of personas and market research you have a tighter case that can affect change across all channels and capabilities.

[not provided]…so what?

Google has positioned itself to take away all of our organic keyword referral data and let’s be honest they ultimately will take it all. Plus, and the consolidation of privacy policies to allow cross-product data access, is Google’s way of positioning itself to attain the Holy Grail of Marketing. However, measuring through our audience essentially allows us a new way to determine the effectiveness of a campaign. We know the keywords we are targeting for a given page and we can see rankings and analytics of a given landing page by channel to determine whether or not Search is driving traffic. The true measure of success was never the rankings, nor the traffic but how well the page a given page converted for our visitors. If we track conversions based on audience that is the only metric that is truly worth optimizing against. The holistic performance of a channel is what brands are concerned with, not necessarily the performance of a given keyword.
Opportunity Discovery Resources

The following are a list of posts, pages, tools and presentations to help get a deeper understanding of personas and need states and how to apply them to various Inbound Marketing efforts.

Personas

Need States

Useful Social Tools

Quantitative Analysis Providers (PAID)

During the #seochat I did on the SEO Process there were some questions of whether this applies to small businesses or not, citing that small businesses only care about the #1 spot and they “just want rank.” Yes, understanding what makes an audience tick applies to all businesses. Again, the ability to quantify the interests and intent of your audience and track a brand’s ability to persuade is the advantage of digital marketing of any kind. As I said on Twitter, #1 is not a goal, but a means to an end. #1 gets users to the door; it doesn’t keep them in the house.

Finally, the new SEO process is a call for us to speak the language of other capabilities and deliver strategies that can plug and play with what brands truly understand. The new SEO process is not about chasing the algorithm; it’s about fulfilling the needs of the people the algorithm serves. It’s about creating and discovering the content that resonates with the people that a business is trying to reach and then also covering the technical bases required to get results. It’s about understanding the connections between keywords in the mind of your target audience in order to optimize for them effectively. And most importantly, it’s about having SEO become the driver of the marketing mix rather than the outcast. No doubt SEO will remain the esoteric “Calculus of Marketing” but it’s time to prove that we can actually do the math so to speak.

Google Zeitgeist Report : Films, Cricket dominate 2011 Search list

10:56 PM | online marketing news , online seo , rb trivedi , rbtrivedi seo

As 2011 nears its end, internet giant Google has released its search list, Google Zeitgeist 2011, which is a compilation of top search keywords that users have been using throughout the year. And as usual, there are surprises.

Zeitgeist is a word of German origin and means a general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time. It is one of the many tools that let users map and compare all searches -- globally, regionally, past and present.

So, here's looking into the hot search terms of the year 2011.

Fastest rising searches globally

The list of top searches in 2011 had Rebecca Black at number one, Google+ at number two and Ryan Dunn, who was best known for his daredevil stunts, was at number three. Fourth and Fifth spots went to Casey Anthony and Battle field 3 respectively.

The speculation that kept the rumour mills churning about an impending launch of iPhone5 that never happened, even overtook the launch of iPad 2 and Steve Jobs' death and was at sixth spot. Singing sensation Adele bagged seventh spot with the release of her sophomore album "21" and on eighth spot was Japan's Fukushima nuclear Reactor which was damaged by an earthquake.

Google's fastest rising search list also revealed how much its rival company Apple ruled not just people's pockets, but also the search. Apple's late CEO Steve Jobs who died on October 5 after suffering from chronic sickness, was placed at the ninth spot while iPad 2 took the 10th spot.

Google Zeitgeist 2011 also features top search terms from India. From Facebook to Anna Hazare, Salman Khan to Poonam Pandey, all of them made search history in 2011 so here are the categories

Fastest Rising Search

While Facebook topped the Fastest Rising Search terms, IBPL on second, Google+ ruled the third spot. The list also highlights that sports was quite popular among users with India winning the Cricket World Cup 2011. It was the fourth Fastest Rising Search followed by Bodyguard, Ra.One, Anna Hazare, Ipl 2011, Poonam Pandey and Ready.

Fastest Rising People

Anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare took the top spot among personalities, followed by Poonam Pandey at second then Steve Jobs, Anushka Sharma, Salman Khan, Justin Bieber, Kajal Agarwal, Katrina Kaif, Vijay Mallya and Aishwarya Rai

People

Celebrities and cricketers are next to gods in India. Bollywood actress Katrina Kaif was the most searched in India on Google overtaking anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare at the second slot followed by Salman Khan, Poonam Pandey, Justin Bieber, Aishwarya Rai, Sachin Tendulkar, Kareena Kapoor, Steve Jobs and Priyanka Chopra.

Movies

Movies are almost a daily pilgrimage for many in India. Salman Khan-starrer Bodyguard was the top searched movie in 2011 in India and at the second spot was 'King' Khan's ( Shahrukh Khan) Ra.One which were followed Harry Potter, Delhi Belly, Singham, Ready, Mankatha, Transformers 3, Dookudu, and Farhan Akhtar's Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara at the 10th spot.

Top news of 2011

Even the Cricket World Cup 2011 which was won by Mahendra Singh Dhoni's team was placed second, behind IPL, which was the top news for 2011 in India. The others were CBSE Result 2011, Diwali, Lokpal Bill, Japan earthquake, Aadhar card, Osama Bin Laden. At the 10th spot was India's first ever F1 that was organised in November at the Buddha circuit, Noida.

Online Retailers are Looking for a new Height in India

10:48 PM | ecommerce news , internet news , online marketing news , rb trivedi

Online retailers have almost doubled their staff strength in India during the current financial year and will continue hiring to fuel the service sector's latest growth engine.

India has 11 million online consumers who buy everything from diapers to condoms to airline tickets on the internet. The number of e-buyers will grow to 38 million by 2015 and the booming sector has already hired 80% more this fiscal, according to estimates by financial services firm Avendus Capital.

"The pace of growth is crazy and we need more hands to enable e-commerce. By December 2012, I will hire an additional 1,000 people,"

says Rohit Bansal, COO, Snapdeal.com. From a local deal company one year ago, the portal now offers 10,000 storekeeping units (SKUs) that cut across lifestyle, home appliances, and travel. Of the 750 Snapdeal executives, 500 have been hired this fiscal. Apart from hiring 50 from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the company has hired 15 graduates from Stanford, Columbia and Harvard. For 2012, Bansal is targetting the Indian Institutes of Management.

Growth potential of e-tailing presents a very interesting challenge for talent acquisition, says an Indiatimes spokesperson, adding, in order to keep pace and succeed in this almost exponentially evolving and growing industry, one would need a good blend of domain knowledge of the brick and mortar industry, the ability to constantly challenge the status quo and learn and an intrapraneurship spirit.

The sector may be nascent, but manpower commands a premium. As per Elixir Consulting, a senior-level executive comes at Rs 75 lakh to Rs 80 lakh (per year), mid-level at Rs 60 lakh, while junior executives take home Rs 16 lakh to Rs 18 lakh. Career prospects are lucrative and there is a lot to look forward to. Internet penetration in the country changed the way Indians travelled in the past decade. Now, it's the turn of e-commerce to transform the shopping experience for Indians, who are often pressed for time and parking space at malls.

The number of internet users is rising by a third every year and people increasingly prefer the net to book hotel rooms, buy books, electronics, apparels and personal care products. Despite the 2002 dotcom fall, e-retailers seem to be confident of their journey.

"Lower working capital need and low investment in fixed assets and rental deposits are driving more players in the category. Portals offer a 10-20% discount and consumers find them irresistible,"

says Purnendu Kumar (vice-president - retail) of consultancy firm Technopak.

A 35% growth in e-shoppers will transform the sector from the current $800 million to $11.8 billion in 2015, predicts Avendus Capital. Private equity and venture capital firms have already invested $180 million in the sector since 2009.

Driven by the numbers, e-retailers are going for the best talent.

"Manpower requirement is linear to business volume. I am hiring round the year with business growing ten-fold over same time last year. Of the 1,100-member team, 800 were roped in this fiscal,"

says Manmohan Agarwal, CEO of Yebhi.com, who will double his team by December 2012. About 25 of the company's top executives are from IITs and IIMs.

Tradus.in brought in former Amazon-.com executive Krishna Motukuri as CEO in October 2011 to not just firm up the backend of the business, but also to improve the shopping experience on the site.

"The sector is witnessing a battle for brains. We are looking out for innovative software engineers, creative designers and product managers who understand consumer behaviour so that e-shopping is delightful,"

says Motukuri. Of the 50 people that will be taken on board, there are computer science engineers from IITs too. Motukari plans to go to the IIMs and Indian School of Business in 2012 to hire, he says.

"It is a space which is in a chaotic growth stage and companies realise they need to scale up quickly to ensure they match steps with the industry's growth,"

says Prateek Srivastava, manager - leadership hiring at Noida-based Elixir. He says, more than 30,000 people have been hired in the space in the current fiscal. By 2015-16, the number will be in excess of 70,000.

Be it Manoj Chandra of Allschoolstuff-.com or Vishal Mehta of Infibeam.com, the CEOs running the show are on their feet to look for the best possible talent. Chandra's venture is just three months old and he wants to double his team size by mid-2012. He spends 30% of his time on recruitments, he says.

The remuneration for graduates from coveted colleges is not making employers shy away. "If we have big dreams, we have to be aggressive," says Mehta, who too is keen on doubling his team strength to 800 by next year. He has already hired more than 10 IIM graduates and has even tapped non-resident Indians who are coming back due to the slowdown in the West. Manu Midha, who is from the 2010 IIM batch, for instance, is VP, planning and operations, while Maulik Jagirdar is a UK-returned professional who now heads customer care at Infibeam.com.

Career growth in e-commerce is at least three times faster than the in conventional industries, says Elixir's Srivastava. People in regional roles in top organisations are getting national roles with ecommerce startups, which eventually gives them a whole canvas to paint their career growth, he says.

Global Investors Looking Towards India's Internet Business :Invested $1 billion on New Start ups

5:25 AM | digital media , e-commerce news , internet marketing news , online marketing news

Global investors have placed a billion dollar bet on India's Internet and mobile start-ups during 2011, reposing confidence in the fast-growing base of digital consumers in the country. Marquee venture capital and private equity investors made aggressive investments in start-ups - most of which are less than five-year old - as they backed the story of rising disposable income and Internet penetration.

These investors have already ploughed more than $900 million between January and November, while deals worth another $250 million could be clinched by December-end, said an Avendus Capital report titled 'India Goes Digital'. The boutique investment bank, with work expertise in internet and technology, said the domestic e-commerce market would quadruple to $24 billion by 2015.

These global investors are bullish on India's Internet economy even as there's a waning appetite for the core sector investments stymied by highinterest rates and lack of policy reforms. The belief in the Indian digital consumer story has been so robust that start-up ecommerce firms managed to raise follow-on investments within six months, at significantly higher valuations.

Online retail, or e-tailing, will lead the internet consumer story catching up with online travel, classifieds and advertising which dominate the digital consumer industry in India right now. E-tailing will develop into a $12 billion-strong business, accounting for half of the total e-commerce market in the next four years.

"The e-commerce sector has reached an inflection point this year and will surely surpass the online travel industry over the next few years. India's online story currently is where China was five to six years back,"

said Niren Shah, MD, Norwest Venture Partners. The Silicon Valley-based-VC just announced an investment of $5 million in a soon-to-be launched shopping portal, Pepperfry.com.

The number of deals more than doubled to 66 in the first 11 months with investors rushing to board the digital consumer story. The top e-commerce firms emerged as big advertisers and employed hundreds of courier boys in the most techsavvy neighborhoods to grow their businesses.

"There seems to be a belief that you need to start working with the online players early because if they might become expensive. But next year, valuations and deal flow is likely to temper as 2011 was an exceptionally aggressive year,"

said Prashant Prakash, partner at Accel Partners, a US-based VC fund with investments in Flipkart.com, LetsBuy.com and Exclusively.in.

India's emerging e-tailers are burning cash - many of them incurring heavy operational losses - to emerge winners in an industry that is poised for a shake-out and consolidation.

"We see the potential for online retail in India become larger than that of online travel in next five years, perhaps by a factor of 2:1. Regular commerce will create more transactions as compared to travel since consumers need regular things on an everyday basis unlike travel which is mostly driven out of necessity,"

said Mahesh Murthy, founder, Pinstorm, and co-founder , Seedfund. Globally, e-tailing has cornered 6% of the US and 4% of the China retail markets.

Meta Tags Explained

3:41 AM | description meta tag , keyword meta tag , meta author , meta content , meta content type , meta google , meta rating , meta tags explained , meta tags uncovered

Over the years, Meta tags have become quite misunderstood and are often used incorrectly on the Internet. This document will provide a brief explanation and breakdown of the most widely used Meta tags, as well as recommendations regarding the ones you should or shouldn't use for your website. Done correctly, Meta tags can be a valuable onsite optimization tool and can have a positive effect of conversion rates.

What are Meta tags? We are asked this question all the time. Meta tags are snippets of informational code that have been located between your <HEAD> </HEAD> tags that are a part of the HTML document you've generated.

There are two known styles/attributes that you'll see for Meta tags. These are:

1. <META HTTP-EQUIV="name" CONTENT="content">
2. <META NAME="name" CONTENT="content">

In the mid 90s, Meta tags were developed to assist with the rapid growth of web pages. In the late 90’s there was a major occurrence. Many Webmasters, generally those who ran adult-orientated websites, began to abuse the use of Keyword Meta tags. Many unrelated keywords were placed on their sites in the Meta tag section, causing their pornographic sites to begin appearing in search results unrelated to topics such as "Smithsonian".

Eventually the major search engines began discontinuing the use of Meta tags as major criteria for listing sites. Google had always ignored the use of Meta tags, and currently will only index Google Meta Tags. There are several searches that do read Meta tags in their own way. I have another article on Google Tags if you are looking for information specific to Google.

The following list of links will take you to information about the most important individual Meta tags:

Recommended Tags
Meta Content Language (non-US English ONLY)
Meta Content Type
Meta Description
Meta Language (non-US English ONLY)

Optional Tags
Meta Abstract
Meta Author
Meta Copyright
Meta Designer
Meta Google
Meta Keywords
Meta MSN (No ODP)
Meta Title

Not Recommended Tags
Meta Content Script Type
Meta Content Style Type
Meta Distribution
Meta Expires
Meta Generator
Meta MS Smart Tags
Meta Pragma No-Cache
Meta Publisher
Meta Rating
Meta Refresh
Meta Reply-To
Meta Resource Type
Meta Revisit After
Meta Robots
Meta Set Cookie
Meta Subject
Meta VW96.ObjectType

Now that you've seen the list of recommended, optional, and not recommended tags, here is a little more information on each of these. If you'd like to quickly jump to a specific Meta tag, select the link from above.

Meta Abstract

Gives a short summary of the description. The Meta Abstract is used primarily with academic papers. The content for this tag is usually 10 words or less.

Example of a Meta Abstract:

<META NAME="Abstract" CONTENT="Short description of page">

Recommendation on Meta Abstract: This is an optional Meta tag. It will not assist you with the major search engines. If you have content that is highly specialized, the use of the Meta Abstract tag will allow search engines that are apart of your field of expertise to index your website correctly. Currently the Meta Abstract tag is not a part of Google, Yahoo!, or Bing algorithms.

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Meta Author

The Meta Author tag will display the author of the document. This Meta tag will reference the name of the person who developed the HTML/XML document being viewed. If you use the Meta Author tag, it is recommended to use it with the author's first and last name. It is not recommended to have the inclusion of the author's email address due to the proliferation of Spam. If the author would like to be contacted, it is advised to include a contact form on a HTML page instead.

Example of a Meta Author tag:

Recommendation of Meta Author tag:The use of the Meta Author tag is optional. If you have several individuals contributing to the content of your site, include this tag for assistance in tracking the author. The Meta Author tag is not indexed by Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. While it will not assist you in search engine rankings, it is recognized as part of the "Meta Tag Standard."

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Meta Content Language

The Meta Content Language tag declares the natural language of the document. This is also known as the Meta Name Language. Robots use this tag to categorize the language of the web page.

Example of a Meta Content Language tag:

Example of a Meta Content Language tag: It is advised only to use the Meta Content Language tag if your website is written in non-US English. To date we have not tested this tag, but we have had reports from our members that it does assist non-US English sites in getting categorized properly by the search engines.

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Meta Content Script Type

The Meta Content Script Type tag is used to specify the default scripting language of the document.

Example of a Meta Content Script Type:

Recommendations for Meta Content Script Type: It is advised not to use the Meta Content Script Type tag. Search engines do not need this tag to detect scripts as they do this on their own. Browsers do not use this tag either, as they have other detection methods in place.

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Meta Content Style Type

The Meta Content Style Type is used to specify the default Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) language for the documents.

Example of a Meta Content Style Type tag:

Recommendations for Meta Content Style Type tag: It is recommended not to use the Meta Content Style Type tag. Search engines do not need to know the style sheet of a document. Web browsers also do not look to the Meta tags for style sheet information.

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Meta Content Type

Used to declare the character set.

The Meta Content Type tag is used to declare the character set of a website. It has become recommended to always use the Meta Content Type tag even if you use a DTD declaration above the Header. If you fail to do so, it may cause display problems. For instance, the document may use UTF-8 punctuation characters but is displayed in ISO or ASCII character sets. There are other benefits to using the Meta Content Type tag. Simply subscribe to our SEO Revolution Newsletter (nominal fee membership) to get the entire scoop of what the Meta Content Type tag can do for your site

Example of a Meta Content Type tag:

Recommendations of a Meta Content Type tag: It is recommended to always use the Meta Content Type tag along with the DTD declaration format by the World Wide Web Consortium. If you fail to do so, you may cause display problems. For example, the Meta Content Type tag helps properly display the page if the document uses UTF-8 punctuation characters, but is displayed in ISO or ASCII character sets. There are many benefits to using the Meta Content Type tag.

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Meta Copyright

The Meta Copyright tag is used to include a copyright, trademark, patent, or other information that pertains to intellectual property.

Example of a Meta Copyright tag:

Recommendations for a Meta Copyright tag: It is not required to use a Meta Copyright tag. Please be aware that the Meta Copyright tag will not protect your site's content or your intellectual property. Consult your attorney to ensure you are protected properly.

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Meta Description

The Meta Description tag gives a brief overview of the document. The Meta Description tag is a short, plain language description of the document, usually consisting of 20-25 words or less. Search engines that support the Meta Description tag will use the information to publish on their search results page, normally displaying below the Title of your site listing.

Example of a Meta Description tag:

Recommendations of the Meta Description tag: It is recommended to always use the Meta Description tag. Make your Meta Description as compelling as you can, as that description is often the motivating factor involved with getting your listings clicked in the search results. The Meta Description tag is particularly important if your document has very little text, is a frameset, or has extensive scripts at the top.

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Meta Designer

The Meta Designer tag is used to declare the designer of the website.

Example of a Meta Designer tag:

Recommendations of the Meta Designer tag: The Meta Designer tag is optional to use. Usually web designers who want advertising or to catch people hijacking their designs use the Meta Designer tag. It should be understood that search engines do not support the Meta Designer tag.

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Meta Distribution

The Meta Distribution tag is used to declare the distribution of your web content. The three classifications of distribution are:

Global (the entire web)

Local (reserved for the local IP block of your site)

IU (Internal Use, not for public distribution).

Example of a Meta Distribution tag:

Recommendations for the Meta Distribution tag: It is recommended not to use the Meta Distribution tag. If you want to have restricted distribution, use the robots.txt tag or your HTAccess file.

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Meta Expires

The Meta Expires tag is used to declare the date and time after which the web document should be considered expired.

Example of the Meta Expires tag:

Recommendations for the Meta Expires tag: It is recommended not to use the Meta Expires tag. While the Meta Expires tag is good conceptually, it is impractical for search engines. Not only do search engines not read the Meta Expires tag, but according to my testing, browsers ignore it too. Are you looking to stop Google from caching your site? Even if you use the Meta Expires tag Google will cache your page. The Meta Expires tag is worthless; don't bother with it.

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Meta Generator

The Meta Generator tag is used to declare the name and version number of the publishing tool used to create the page. Tool vendors use the Meta Generator tag to assess market penetration.

Example of the Meta Generator tag:

Recommendations for Meta Generator tag: It is recommended not to use the Meta Generator tag. If you have Meta Generator tags, delete them if possible. Meta Generator tags serve no useful purpose for your pages.

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Meta Google

The Meta Google tag has several options that are exclusive for use with Google. These include:

Googlebot: noarchive - does not allow Google to display cached content

Googlebot: nosnippet - does not allow Google to display excerpted or cached content

Googlebot: noindex - similar to the robots meta element

Googlebot: nofollow - does not allow Google to pass any PageRank or link popularity to the link served.

Recommendations for the Meta Google tags: The Meta Google tags are optional to use. You generally do not need to use Meta Google tags unless you want Google to do something specific with your site. The Meta Google tag is one of the few Meta tags Google will read, index, and obey.

Looking For Quick SEO ? Check the Potential SEO Factors

3:27 AM | learn seo , online seo , quick seo , rbtrivedi seo , search engine optimization tips , seo serp factors , seo tips , seo tutorial

Here is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, Bing, Yahoo! and the other search engines. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them exist. Most of the factors in the checklist apply mainly to Google and partially to Bing, Yahoo! and all the other search engines of lesser importance. If you need more information on particular sections of the checklist, you may want to read our SEO tutorial, which gives more detailed explanations of Keywords, Links, Metatags, Visual Extras, etc.

	Keywords
1	Keywords in <title> tag	This is one of the most important places to have a keyword because what is written inside the <title> tag shows in search results as your page title. The title tag must be short (6 or 7 words at most) and the the keyword must be near the beginning.	+3
2	Keywords in URL	Keywords in URLs help a lot - e.g. - http://domainname.com/seo-services.html , where “SEO services” is the keyword phrase you attempt to rank well for. But if you don't have the keywords in other parts of the document, don't rely on having them in the URL.	+3
3	Keyword density in document text	Another very important factor you need to check. 3-7 % for major keywords is best, 1-2 for minor. Keyword density of over 10% is suspicious and looks more like keyword stuffing, than a naturally written text.	+3
4	Keywords in anchor text	Also very important, especially for the anchor text of inbound links, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular.	+3
5	Keywords in headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags)	One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword.	+3
6	Keywords in the beginning of a document	Also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings. However, have in mind that the beginning of a document does not necessarily mean the first paragraph – for instance if you use tables, the first paragraph of text might be in the second half of the table.	+2
7	Keywords in <alt> tags	Spiders don't read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag with some keywords about them.	+2
8	Keywords in metatags	Less and less important, especially for Google. Yahoo! and Bing still rely on them, so if you are optimizing for Yahoo! or Bing, fill these tags properly. In any case, filling these tags properly will not hurt, so do it.	+1
9	Keyword proximity	Keyword proximity measures how close in the text the keywords are. It is best if they are immediately one after the other (e.g. “dog food”), with no other words between them. For instance, if you have “dog” in the first paragraph and “food” in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the phrase “dog food” without any other words in between. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.	+1
10	Keyword phrases	In addition to keywords, you can optimize for keyword phrases that consist of several words – e.g. “SEO services”. It is best when the keyword phrases you optimize for are popular ones, so you can get a lot of exact matches of the search string but sometimes it makes sense to optimize for 2 or 3 separate keywords (“SEO” and “services”) than for one phrase that might occasionally get an exact match.	+1
11	Secondary keywords	Optimizing for secondary keywords can be a golden mine because when everybody else is optimizing for the most popular keywords, there will be less competition (and probably more hits) for pages that are optimized for the minor words. For instance, “real estate new jersey” might have thousand times less hits than “real estate” only but if you are operating in New Jersey, you will get less but considerably better targeted traffic.	+1
12	Keyword stemming	For English this is not so much of a factor because words that stem from the same root (e.g. dog, dogs, doggy, etc.) are considered related and if you have “dog” on your page, you will get hits for “dogs” and “doggy” as well, but for other languages keywords stemming could be an issue because different words that stem from the same root are considered as not related and you might need to optimize for all of them.	+1
13	Synonyms	Optimizing for synonyms of the target keywords, in addition to the main keywords. This is good for sites in English, for which search engines are smart enough to use synonyms as well, when ranking sites but for many other languages synonyms are not taken into account, when calculating rankings and relevancy.	+1
14	Keyword Mistypes	Spelling errors are very frequent and if you know that your target keywords have popular misspellings or alternative spellings (i.e. Christmas and Xmas), you might be tempted to optimize for them. Yes, this might get you some more traffic but having spelling mistakes on your site does not make a good impression, so you'd better don't do it, or do it only in the metatags.	0
15	Keyword dilution	When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the text.	-2
16	Keyword stuffing	Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines.	-3
	Links - internal, inbound, outbound
17	Anchor text of inbound links	As discussed in the Keywords section, this is one of the most important factors for good rankings. It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text but even if you don't, it is still OK.	+3
18	Origin of inbound links	Besides the anchor text, it is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable.	+3
19	Links from similar sites	Having links from similar sites is very, very useful. It indicates that the competition is voting for you and you are popular within your topical community.	+3
20	Links from .edu and .gov sites	These links are precious because .edu and .gov sites are more reputable than .com. .biz, .info, etc. domains. Additionally, such links are hard to obtain.	+3
21	Number of backlinks	Generally the more, the better. But the reputation of the sites that link to you is more important than their number. Also important is their anchor text, is there a keyword in it, how old are they, etc.	+3
22	Anchor text of internal links	This also matters, though not as much as the anchor text of inbound links.	+2
23	Around-the-anchor text	The text that is immediately before and after the anchor text also matters because it further indicates the relevance of the link – i.e. if the link is artificial or it naturally flows in the text.	+2
24	Age of inbound links	The older, the better. Getting many new links in a short time suggests buying them.	+2
25	Links from directories	Great, though it strongly depends on which directories. Being listed in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and similar directories is a great boost for your ranking but having tons of links from PR0 directories is useless and it can even be regarded as link spamming, if you have hundreds or thousands of such links.	+2
26	Number of outgoing links on the page that links to you	The fewer, the better for you because this way your link looks more important.	+1
27	Named anchors	Named anchors (the target place of internal links) are useful for internal navigation but are also useful for SEO because you stress additionally that a particular page, paragraph or text is important. In the code, named anchors look like this: <A href= “#dogs”>Read about dogs</A> and “#dogs” is the named anchor.	+1
28	IP address of inbound link	Google denies that they discriminate against links that come from the same IP address or C class of addresses, so for Google the IP address can be considered neutral to the weight of inbound links. However, Bing and Yahoo! may discard links from the same IPs or IP classes, so it is always better to get links from different IPs.	+1
29	Inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites	This does not affect you in any way, provided that the links are not reciprocal. The idea is that it is beyond your control to define what a link farm links to, so you don't get penalized when such sites link to you because this is not your fault but in any case you'd better stay away from link farms and similar suspicious sites.	0
30	Many outgoing links	Google does not like pages that consists mainly of links, so you'd better keep them under 100 per page. Having many outgoing links does not get you any benefits in terms of ranking and could even make your situation worse.	-1
31	Excessive linking, link spamming	It is bad for your rankings, when you have many links to/from the same sites (even if it is not a cross- linking scheme or links to bad neighbors) because it suggests link buying or at least spamming. In the best case only some of the links are taken into account for SEO rankings.	-1
32	Outbound links to link farms and other suspicious sites	Unlike inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites, outbound links to bad neighbors can drown you. You need periodically to check the status of the sites you link to because sometimes good sites become bad neighbors and vice versa.	-3
33	Cross-linking	Cross-linking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to site A. This is the simplest example but more complex schemes are possible. Cross-linking looks like disguised reciprocal link trading and is penalized.	-3
34	Single pixel links	when you have a link that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines.	-3
	Metatags
35	<Description> metatag	Metatags are becoming less and less important but if there are metatags that still matter, these are the <description> and <keywords> ones. Use the <Description> metatag to write the description of your site. Besides the fact that metatags still rock on Bing and Yahoo!, the <Description> metatag has one more advantage – it sometimes pops in the description of your site in search results.	+1
36	<Keywords> metatag	The <Keywords> metatag also matters, though as all metatags it gets almost no attention from Google and some attention from Bing and Yahoo! Keep the metatag reasonably long – 10 to 20 keywords at most. Don't stuff the <Keywords> tag with keywords that you don't have on the page, this is bad for your rankings.	+1
37	<Language> metatag	If your site is language-specific, don't leave this tag empty. Search engines have more sophisticated ways of determining the language of a page than relying on the <language>metatag but they still consider it.	+1
38	<Refresh> metatag	The <Refresh> metatag is one way to redirect visitors from your site to another. Only do it if you have recently migrated your site to a new domain and you need to temporarily redirect visitors. When used for a long time, the <refresh> metatag is regarded as unethical practice and this can hurt your ratings. In any case, redirecting through 301 is much better.	-1
	Content
39	Unique content	Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site's rankings.	+3
40	Frequency of content change	Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content.	+3
41	Keywords font size	When a keyword in the document text is in a larger font size in comparison to other on-page text, this makes it more noticeable, so therefore it is more important than the rest of the text. The same applies to headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.), which generally are in larger font size than the rest of the text.	+2
42	Keywords formatting	Bold and italic are another way to emphasize important words and phrases. However, use bold, italic and larger font sizes within reason because otherwise you might achieve just the opposite effect.	+2
43	Age of document	Recent documents (or at least regularly updated ones) are favored.	+2
44	File size	Generally long pages are not favored, or at least you can achieve better rankings if you have 3 short rather than 1 long page on a given topic, so split long pages into multiple smaller ones.	+1
45	Content separation	From a marketing point of view content separation (based on IP, browser type, etc.) might be great but for SEO it is bad because when you have one URL and differing content, search engines get confused what the actual content of the page is.	-2
46	Poor coding and design	Search engines say that they do not want poorly designed and coded sites, though there are hardly sites that are banned because of messy code or ugly images but when the design and/or coding of a site is poor, the site might not be indexable at all, so in this sense poor code and design can harm you a lot.	-2
47	Illegal Content	Using other people's copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines.	-3
48	Invisible text	This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but not for humans, don't be surprised by the penalty.	-3
49	Cloaking	Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page.	-3
50	Doorway pages	Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is another way to get the kick from search engines.	-3
51	Duplicate content	When you have the same content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look larger because the duplicate contentpenalty kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate content applies to pages that reside on other sites but obviously these cases are not always banned – i.e. article directories or mirror sites do exist and prosper.	-3
	Visual Extras and SEO
52	JavaScript	If used wisely, it will not hurt. But if your main content is displayed through JavaScript, this makes it more difficult for spiders to follow and if JavaScript code is a mess and spiders can't follow it, this will definitely hurt your ratings.	0
53	Images in text	Having a text-only site is so boring but having many images and no text is a SEO sin. Always provide in the <alt> tag a meaningful description of an image but don't stuff it with keywords or irrelevant information.	0
54	Podcasts and videos	Podcasts and videos are becoming more and more popular but as with all non-textual goodies, search engines can't read them, so if you don't have the tapescript of the podcast or the video, it is as if the podcast or movie is not there because it will not be indexed by search engines.	0
55	Images instead of text links	Using images instead of text links is bad, especially when you don't fill in the <alt> tag. But even if you fill in the <alt> tag, it is not the same as having a bold, underlined, 16-pt. link, so use images for navigation only if this is really vital for the graphic layout of your site.	-1
56	Frames	Frames are very, very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary.	-2
57	Flash	Spiders don't index the content of Flash movies, so if you use Flash on your site, don't forget to give it an alternative textual description.	-2
58	A Flash home page	Fortunately this epidemic disease seems to have come to an end. Having a Flash home page (and sometimes whole sections of your site) and no HTML version, is a SEO suicide.	-3
	Domains, URLs, Web Mastery
59	Keyword-rich URLs and filenames	A very important factor, especially for Yahoo! and Bing.	+3
60	Site Accessibility	Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is unaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can't be indexed.	+3
61	Sitemap	It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap, spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap format.	+2
62	Site size	Spiders love large sites, so generally it is the bigger, the better. However, big sites become user-unfriendly and difficult to navigate, so sometimes it makes sense to separate a big site into a couple of smaller ones. On the other hand, there are hardly sites that are penalized because they are 10,000+ pages, so don't split your size in pieces only because it is getting larger and larger.	+2
63	Site age	Similarly to wine, older sites are respected more. The idea is that an old, established site is more trustworthy (they have been around and are here to stay) than a new site that has just poped up and might soon disappear.	+2
64	Site theme	It is not only keywords in URLs and on page that matter. The site theme is even more important for good ranking because when the site fits into one theme, this boosts the rankings of all its pages that are related to this theme.	+2
65	File Location on Site	File location is important and files that are located in the root directory or near it tend to rank better than files that are buried 5 or more levels below.	+1
66	Domains versus subdomains, separate domains	Having a separate domain is better – i.e. instead of having blablabla.blogspot.com, register a separate blablabla.com domain.	+1
67	Top-level domains (TLDs)	Not all TLDs are equal. There are TLDs that are better than others. For instance, the most popular TLD – .com – is much better than .ws, .biz, or .info domains but (all equal) nothing beats an old .edu or .org domain.	+1
68	Hyphens in URLs	Hyphens between the words in an URL increase readability and help with SEO rankings. This applies both to hyphens in domain names and in the rest of the URL.	+1
69	URL length	Generally doesn't matter but if it is a very long URL-s, this starts to look spammy, so avoid having more than 10 words in the URL (3 or 4 for the domain name itself and 6 or 7 for the rest of address is acceptable).	0
70	IP address	Could matter only for shared hosting or when a site is hosted with a free hosting provider, when the IP or the whole C-class of IP addresses is blacklisted due to spamming or other illegal practices.	0
71	Adsense will boost your ranking	Adsense is not related in any way to SEO ranking. Google will definitely not give you a ranking bonus because of hosting Adsense ads. Adsense might boost your income but this has nothing to do with your search rankings.	0
72	Adwords will boost your ranking	Similarly to Adsense, Adwords has nothing to do with your search rankings. Adwords will bring more traffic to your site but this will not affect your rankings in whatsoever way.	0
73	Hosting downtime	Hosting downtime is directly related to accessibility because if a site is frequently down, it can't be indexed. But in practice this is a factor only if your hosting provider is really unreliable and has less than 97-98% uptime.	-1
74	Dynamic URLs	Spiders prefer static URLs, though you will see many dynamic pages on top positions. Long dynamic URLs (over 100 characters) are really bad and in any case you'd better use a tool to rewrite dynamic URLs in something more human- and SEO-friendly.	-1
75	Session IDs	This is even worse than dynamic URLs. Don't use session IDs for information that you'd like to be indexed by spiders.	-2
76	Bans in robots.txt	If indexing of a considerable portion of the site is banned, this is likely to affect the nonbanned part as well because spiders will come less frequently to a “noindex” site.	-2
77	Redirects (301 and 302)	When not applied properly, redirects can hurt a lot – the target page might not open, or worse – a redirect can be regarded as a black hat technique, when the visitor is immediately taken to a different page.	-3

Digital Media Marketing Expert

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New SEO Strategy : Best for Current Scenerio

Problems with the Old Process

No Regard for Market Research

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SEO Disrupts Most Digital Strategies

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Online Retailers are Looking for a new Height in India

Global Investors Looking Towards India's Internet Business :Invested $1 billion on New Start ups

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