Blog and Article of Marketraise Corp

How to do Video Optimization?

tom — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:30:49 +0000

Video optimization from the perspective of your business or even as an individual, is to enable more viewers to find your videos in search engines, when you put them in some of the video sharing sites or your own website. It’s an emerging trend to watch videos on any topic. Videos help capture audiences attention, they make the businesses get little more creative. Capturing attention of the people in turn helps building brand name.

The major goal of video optimization is generating brand awareness. Therefore to add some brand value while optimizing your video, whether you post them on your site or video sharing sites is very essential. You can follow the simple steps mentioned below:-
- Add a short screen at the beginning or end of video that has your logo and url or a watermark throughout the video with you brand name. This will let the people know where the video came from and they have a url to go to after they finish watching the video. It’s important especially in the video sharing sites so that your audiences are sent to your website.
- Using keywords when adding the video (in title, description, tags). That way when people search the keywords related to your video you get better results. This way when people search keywords related to videos or your industry, your video ranks first. Put your keywords in title and description, those are key places to put them.
- If you are using the video in your website remember to use the keywords on the page itself. Within the content, and also the title of the other tags of the text in the page. This makes the job of search engines easy, to locate your video. If it’s in your website, do write in brief about what the video is about, describing it.
- While, adding videos make use of key term rather than keywords. For e.g. while searching for videos on IT Consultant for New York, people may precisely mention IT Consultant New York. This will help your audiences reach your video first.
- Though this sounds repetitive but make sure to have html content around the video on your website. Lots of search engines have the ability to read these videos but not to a greater extent. So, to be on the safer side put some content around the video that describes the video and use keywords to what similar is in the video. This way the search engines know what the video is about and they can help to rank your website through those keywords.
- Emphasize mainly on words related to video and business. You have to understand what keywords your customers will think of while searching for your product, what type of words that person might use while searching on the internet. The exact key terms should be repeating it. While doing this remember not to fill in the key terms without purpose in an awkward manner as this will ruin your effort to sell your product. Use the talent of jelling things.

Consumer centric businesses tend to capture more attention, as it gives a sense of involvement to people to watch video of any business or organization. People watch videos not only related to business but also for pleasure, maybe while shopping online or searching for certain products. By showcasing your websites url, at the end of showing your video, you can generate people to come to your website directly. It’s about people to recognize your brand and also about generating traffic and the video sharing sites help get you exactly that- traffic.

New Definition Of Outsourcing- BPO.

tom — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:49:52 +0000

Outsourcing has been around as long as work specialization has existed. Customized offshore outsourcing solutions have created the need of established Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) methodologies. To be able to provide improved process integration and optimal performance to clients is given utmost importance.

BPO- Business Process Outsourcing is fee for service basis. It provides a wide range of tactical, powerful, flexible tools which in turn helps in achieving the business objectives in a cost effective and efficient manner. To put it in simple words a BPO (business process outsourcing) is a process in which a company delegates some of its business processes to a third party by passing over total control of process to them. This in turn cuts the operational costs by half resulting into huge profits.

BPO’s are inclined to provide better customer satisfaction leading to customer retention, increased productivity, deal with competition effectively and in turn increase profitability. There are many kinds of work that can be outsourced to BPO’s for e.g. Call/Help Centers, Medical Transcription, Billing, Payroll Processing, Data Entry, IT Services, Human Resources (HR) functions, etc. Due to the proximity of IT industry to BPO, this industry is also termed as ITES (Information Technology Enabled Service). But, BPO doesn’t necessarily only provide IT services.

BPO will be time and again, simply defined as, taking over non-critical business processes or a function of those processes, as well as the people and systems associated with them, in order to achieve service level improvements and cost savings. It is useful in leveraging the process towards driven efficiency and achieving responsiveness, branding, customer relationships and organizational excellence.

Major SEO Updates for 2009

tom — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:32:13 +0000

Due to the wide spread nature of internet and web 2.0 trend the online presence is becoming increasingly competitive. Search engines are continuously working towards improving their search results to give accurate and relevant information to the users. Search engine algorithm tends to change every now and then and one has to adapt the changes immediately to be in the top of the race.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a broad sense is the set of methods used to boost website traffic, increase ROI that the website receives from the search engines, and businesses are affected depending on their placement in search results. It is an iterative and ongoing process, which keeps on changing as per the search engine rules.

Some of the major updates for 2009 till now in the field of SEO are as follows.

January ‘09

Google improves flash indexing

Google has enhanced its search engine’s capacity to index Adobe’s Flash files, which are very popular on the Web but tricky for search engine spiders. Google and Adobe’s created a new algorithm which now indexes text content in Flash. As a result Google Bots now indexes textual content in .SWF files of all kinds and extracts URL’s embedded in Flash.

The Latest update on flash indexing made by Google on June 19^th was that Google announces that when Google encounters SWF files on the web, we can:

Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
Discover links within Flash files.
Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.

Courtesy Google webmaster official Blog

February’09

Canonical Link Element

In short, the canonical element is a line of code that you add to pages that may be duplicates. The canonical link element rel=”canonical” is added to a page within the header () of a page, typically by developers, as follows

In this code, you designate the “canonical,” or “proper,” URL. Engines, in turn, note this URL and apply link popularity and authority to the canonical version instead of applying them to duplicate URLs.

This provides a hint to a search engine about which is the most important or original page if pages are identical or similar in terms of content, but have a different URL.

Google and other search engines announced support for a canonical link element that can help site owners with duplicate content issues.

Apart from canonical link element Webmasters have noticed few updates in the toolbar PageRank from February 28, 2009. Which was been discussed widely in many discussion forums, medias, etc

March ‘09 and April ‘09

Two major updates were :

i) Regular PR and Backlink Updates

Usually a Google PageRank update occurs every three months. So everyone was expecting an Page rank update in the month of march. Lots of rumors and gossips were spread out among webmasters and finally the wait ended up in the first week of April. This time Google crawled for both Page rank and Backlink. But this year Google gave two more surprises as Google danced similarly in the month of June and July which made a great impact on all the working strategies of SEO.

ii) Search Refinements and Snippets

There were three changes on the Google search result pages which were visible to all the users.

1. The snippet length for the search results has increased. Earlier the snippet was of two lines. Google now displays an extended snippet of 3 lines for queries that consist of three or more keywords. The idea behind this change is that these multi keyword queries are much targeted and complex and hence the short snippet might not contain enough information.

2. Another change is that Google now shows more related searches at the bottom of the search results page. It is very important that you optimize the different pages of your website for different keywords.

3. The third change is that Google now shows local results based on IP addresses. The local results are delivered based on the IP address of the searcher. That means that you will get different results than people in another city.

May ‘09

During the month of May two major updates occured in SEO world

i) Google Show Options

Google announced a new set of features called as Search/Show Options, which are a collection of tools that rearranges the result so that it can be viewed from different user’s perspectives.

If someone is looking for a particular query show options helps you in providing information regarding videos, forums, reviews, etc. Just say For example you want recent updates of your query but in general organic search you don’t get up-to-date information with the result, so these show options help you in getting recent information whether is 2 weeks earlier, 24 hrs or just latest one. There are other features which you can explore in your own time (like the nifty “wonder wheel”).These tools help in elaborating your result as per your requirement.

ii) Microsoft New Search Engine BING Launched

On May 28^th Microsoft publicly unveiled its soon-to-launch search engine Bing, which was publicly available on June 3. Bing is Microsoft’s new decision engine. The home page features a rotation of stunning photography, for instance, which can be clicked on to produce related image search results. In search presentation, Bing wins. It uses technology from Powerset (a search technology company Microsoft acquired) to display refined versions of your query down the left side of the page. Bing gave a menu of “related searches,” that included Walkthrough, News, and so on.

Bing brings a new way of thinking to using SERPs, which has shown to demonstrably improve the satisfaction of searchers in finding the answers to their questions.

June ‘09

No More Page Rank Sculpting

PageRank sculpting is an SEO tactic that involves adding the nofollow attribute to links for which PageRank flow is not necessary. Early in 2005, the main search engines introduced a ‘nofollow’ attribute for the A HREF HTML command for coding hyperlinks.

Example:

Domain Name

Nofollow is also used extensively in social networks and in forums to limit any value comment spammers get from posting in the forums to their own sites for SEO benefits. PageRank Sculpting was one of the controversial issues among the webmaster. But the engines have evolved their thinking. They realize now that rel=nofollow is a much more versatile tool than when it was first conceived.

Pagerank sculpting used to be really effective around a year ago but Finally Matt Cutts announced in his blog that it’s not the most effective way to utilize your page rank and its not recommended.

Increase in Social Media Importance

With the continuing evolution of the Internet, and increased adoption of web 2.0 functionality, social media activities and discussions are going to take on a more important role in the eyes of a search engine. Social media has provided its users with unlimited opportunity to decide the relevancy of content. The financial downturn will encourage more marketing executives to turn to organic social media initiatives to drive awareness and interest. All in all, 2009 looks to be a year of significant growth for social media.

Discussion forums have built the trust in the eyes of Google. It’s really not a surprise now if forum threads are been displayed in Google’s 1^st page of SERP.

July ‘09

Webmaster “Summer Shine”

July 2009 Google webmaster team have named there new update as “summer shine”. Webmaster added new feel to the webmaster. Among which some of the major updates are:

i) Site Selector Update:

Site selector lists all verified sites that you own, and allows you to search as you type. Only websites that are verified are been listed and available there.

ii) Site Links Updates:

You can now block non-homepage sitelinks. Before today if you owned example.com, you couldn’t block sitelinks for example.com/email.

iii) URL Removal Request Update

You can now see URL removal requests submitted by other users for any sites you own, and revoke them if necessary. In the past, if another webmaster for your site mistakenly removed a URL on your site it was a difficult process to undo the request.

iv) Home Page Update

Google has modified its homepage to make it really easy to identify the site that have been verified and the ones that didn’t!

Courtesy Google webmaster official Blog

August ‘09

Next Generation Architecture for web Search - Google’s Caffeine

On 10^th August Google ask people to help and test there next generation infrastructure. This change was made to improve indexing capability, speed and accuracy of the search results.

Google has provided a preview of the new infrastructure at www2.sandbox.google.com and invited web developers to try searches there.

This is an experiment by Google and Matt Cutt said that the Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: Google is rewriting the foundation of some of their infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so they wanted to open up a preview so that searchers and web developers could give them feedback. They only want feedback on the differences between Google’s current Search results and there new system.

Here’s How to give them feedback.

Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box.

SEO is a constantly evolving industry. It needs to adapt to the changes as search engines change their criteria and the web changes with new applications. These are some of the major changes in the field of SEO. Let’s wait for the next update in the SEO world.

Why Silverlight in Web 2.0 ?

tom — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:03:57 +0000

Silverlight is the next step towards user experience in enriching today’s 2.0 technology. Microsoft Silverlight is a web application framework with added interactivity features and supports .NET language and development tools. It is basically a programming model to develop and distribute Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). It is a free cross browser plug-in for delivering multimedia experiences for the web. It is considered as an Adobe flash alternative.

Silverlight supports Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR), which allows both designers and developers to run the .NET environment within a browser and do so in a relatively lightweight package

Silverlight enables web site development companies to design, develop, and deliver powerful applications and experiences for the web. It’s a browser plug-in that works with Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and devices. Best of all, it’s free, only 4MBs, and installs in ten seconds.

In silverlight applications, user interfaces are declared in XAML (Extensible Application Mark up Language) which is Microsoft’s XML-based language for creating a rich graphical user interface (GUI) and program using a subset of .NET framework

Silverlight applications can be hosted on any Web server accessible to the target audience. The two most commonly used Web servers are Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and Apache.

Microsoft Silverlight powers rich application experiences and delivers high quality, interactive video across the Web and mobile devices through the most powerful runtime available on the Web. Microsoft Silverlight extends and amplifies your existing development skills, empowering you to build new types of applications for the Web regardless of target platform or browser.

Microsoft has also released a free service called “Silverlight Streaming” that developers can use to store up to 4 GB of content for a Silverlight application, addressing concerns about storage.

There are various versions of silverlight that includes Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight 1.1, silverlight 2 and the latest being released this month is silverlight 3.

Silverlight 1.0

Silverlight 1.0 is released for Mac and Windows. Silverlight 1.0 is focused on enabling rich media scenarios in a browser. You can only use java script to create silver light applications in 1.0 version.

Silverlight 1.1

Silverlight 1.1 will include a cross-platform version of the .NET Framework, and will enable a rich .NET development experience in the browser. It include a subset of the full .NET Framework base class library you use today, including support for collections, generics, IO, threading, globalization, networking (including sockets, web-services and REST support), HTML DOM, XML, local storage, and LINQ. You’ll be able to use any .NET language to develop a Silverlight application (VB, C#, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Pascal, and more).

Silverlight 2

Silverlight 2 includes a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). Silverlight 2.0 is substantially faster than its previous version.

Silverlight 3

Silverlight 3 latest version of silverlight which just launched in the month of July is going to make it on top of the RIA platform of choice. The new version of Silverlight has better 3-D graphics support and the ability to offload graphics work to a GPU for a smoother, hardware-accelerated user experience.

Silverlight offers the power needed for smart client business apps, with the best deployment and navigation characteristics of the web.

Silverlight represents the future of development for most of us. Silverlight applications is going to make a difference to websites in a very real way in the near future.

Joomla and its Advantages

tom — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:05:53 +0000

What is Joomla?

Joomla is an open source Content Management System (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. In August 2005, Joomla originated from the Mambo content management system, which included the source code, as well as the development team. As Joomla code is open source, so it’s easy adaptable for anyone to write modules and extensions of the system. Joomla allows web designers to develop websites by combining modules, and requires no programming knowledge. Joomla framework is written in PHP, as are the modules used to customize websites.

Why Joomla?

Why is joomla so popular among web developers? There are various reasons for its popularity depending upon the joomla users. Mainly, as an open source system Joomla is free, Secondly Joomla environment is very flexible which meets the needs of different user accordingly. Thirdly, it can be downloaded from the Internet absolutely free of cost and also, because of its ease-of-use, extensible and accessible environment it so popular.

Characteristics and Benefits of Joomla

Completely database driven site engines. Each and every element in joomla is stored in a centralized database.
The content that is displayed on the website can be scheduled as per the requirement of the web editors.
Fully customizable layouts - there are thousands of templates to choose from so you can change the look and feel of your site without affecting the main content.
Joomla supports multiple languages.
News feeds from various websites can be gathered using the News Feed Manager available in Joomla.
Runs on any platform including Windows, Linux, several Unix versions, and the Apple OS/X platform. It also depends on PHP and MySQL database to deliver dynamic content.

Apart from these characteristics, it provides many benefits such as

Easy Management: Joomla is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you’re not a programmer. Once Joomla is installed, configured, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization go.
Joomla Components & Modules: The popularity and flexibility of Joomla modular architecture has made it possible to develop a wide range of components and associated modules. One can find nearly any component or module which meets our requirements and then just download and plug it into your content management system.
Joomla Templates: There are number of web designers who develop and design Joomla Templates which can transform the look and feel of your web site. All you have to do it find a template you like, download it and apply it to your content management system (CMS). Many of the templates come with predefined module positions so you can display modules in various different positions.
Joomla for Search Engine Optimization: Having your website found by the search engines (Google etc…) is vital in most cases for a successful website. Joomla has built-in SEO functionality. (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization). The SEO tab in Global Configuration (in Administration backend) takes care of global SEO settings for your Joomla site. Joomla provides (SEF) search engine friendly URLs to ensure you get the highest search engine ranking position

Joomla is an internationally developed application, with many developers contributing to the growing movement by submitting their own web services components and plug-ins to the Joomla Extensions Directory. It is a platform where you can plug-in smaller applications as per the needs of the user. Hence, scalability is an important factor to be considered for organizations that requires CMS.

Joomla is used by organizations of all sizes for Public Web sites, Intranets, and Extranets and is supported by a community of thousands of users.

The real power of Joomla is found in the application architecture that enables thousands of web developers around the world to create powerful add-ons and extensions to this powerful content management system.

Google Toolbar PR versus Actual (Internal) PR

tom — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:10:15 +0000

Most of us are unaware of the fact that Google toolbar Page Rank (PR) varies from Google actual (internal) Page Rank. Within Google’s actual databases, each of your pages is stored and does have some form of numerical Page Rank calculated value. This is quite likely to differ from the toolbar page rank. It seems to be confusing as most of us refer to the toolbar for the relevancy of the page but in fact the actual Page Rank values are some decimal numbers such as 3.831 which might be shown as PR 4/10 or PR 3/10 on the toolbar scale. The Toolbar Page Rank value only indicates that a page is in a certain range of the overall scale. One PR=5 page could be just above the PR=5 division and another PR=5 page could be just below the PR=6 division, which is a huge Difference.

Page Rank is one of the factors that Google considers in determining the importance or relevancy of a page. Google calculates the page’s importance from the votes (links votes) cast for it. It says that when one page links to other page, it is casting a vote for the other page. The more link votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Page rank just not only relies on the quantity of link pointing to a page instead it relies on the quality and relevancy of those links. Link Popularity and Link reputation are the two important terms which are generally associated with the link votes.

According to Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page, Co-founders of Google, the PR of a web page is calculated using this formula:

PR = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Where:

PR is the Page Rank of page A,

PR (Ti) is the Page Rank of pages Ti which link to page A,

C (Ti) is the number of outbound links on page Ti and

d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1.

That’s the equation that calculates a page’s Page Rank. Most probably Google uses a variation of it but they aren’t telling us what it is.

Google Page Rank as shown on the Google Toolbar is not updated very frequently. This is a reading of the actual PR and it’s updated roughly every 3 months or so and so is based on the historical data - not current ranking data. In contrast Internal Page Rank (Actual Page Rank) is the Page Rank scores that Google uses as part of its ranking algorithm. Those scores are constantly being updated. This is due to the fact that page rank has been misused by many of the webmasters all over. As anyone can achieve high rankings by simply buying enough links from any website, or trading links with any unrelated website, Page rank has lost its value as a factor in ranking websites accurately.

The Google Toolbar is divided up into 10 equal linear ranges from 0 - 10. These linear divisions correspond to a logarithmic scale that Google uses. The actual scale is estimated to be between log base 5 and log base 10.This table’s gives you an idea of how different toolbar PR is from actual PR.

Toolbar PageRank	Real PageRank
0	0 - 10
1	10 - 100
2	100 - 1,000
3	1,000 - 10,000
4	10,000 - 100,000
5	And so on…

In the long run, it’s likely that after a few weeks, you’ll have gained some internal Page Rank. You might see more traffic, as a result. But on, the Google Toolbar Page Rank may be the results are still the same. But it will be reflected only when Google will crawl for increasing the PR.

Ranking well in search for important keywords/phrases is far more important that the number shown in the Google toolbar for Page Rank. What matters is the relevance and quality of the incoming links

Google Page Rank is not always an indication of good traffic for your website. As the saying goes, “Good Sites get High PR, but not all High PR sites are good.” Traffic is more affected by your content and other factors which leads to conversion.

To Improve your Search engine rankings, take advantage of our SEO services

Getting Introduced To AJAX

tom — Mon, 25 May 2009 09:47:52 +0000

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML commonly known as AJAX. This is not a new programming language, but a new way to use existing standards.

Why Ajax?

The only and the most important answer is that an alternative to flash. No flash so Ajax. In other words we can say AJAX has two huge benefits:
1. Speed and invisibility makes for a very slick user experience.
2. The smaller server resources footprint helps server scalability.
With AJAX, Internet applications can be made richer and more user-friendly. when your customer clicks on something on an Ajax driven application, there is very little lag time. The page simply displays what they’re asking for.
It is widely accepted that fast-loading pages improve the user experience. In recent years, many sites have started using AJAX techniques to reduce latency.

History of Ajax

The start of 2005 saw the rise of a relatively new technology, dubbed “Ajax” by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path. Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. In a nutshell, it is the use of the nonstandard XMLHttpRequest() object to communicate with server-side scripts. It can send as well as receive information in a variety of formats, including XML, HTML, and even text files.

How does AJAX WORK?

The Ajax engine works within the Web browser (through JavaScript and the DOM) to render the Web application and handle any requests that the customer might have of the Web server. The beauty of it is that because the Ajax engine is handling the requests, it can hold most information in the engine itself, while allowing the interaction with the application and the customer to happen asynchronously and independently of any interaction with the server.
Ajax’s most appealing characteristic, however, is its “asynchronous” nature, which means it can do all of this without having to refresh the page. This allows you to update portions of a page based upon user events and provides one of the cornerstones of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) referred to in discussions of “Web 2.0.”

How AJAX is different ?

An Ajax application eliminates the start-stop-start-stop nature of interaction on the Web by introducing an intermediary — an Ajax engine — between the user and the server. Instead of loading a webpage, at the start of the session, the browser loads an Ajax engine — written in JavaScript and usually tucked away in a hidden frame. This engine is responsible for both rendering the interface the user sees and communicating with the server on the user’s behalf. The Ajax engine allows the user’s interaction with the application to happen asynchronously — independent of communication with the server. So the user is never staring at a blank browser window and an hourglass icon, waiting around for the server to do something.

Getting Started with AJAX

Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies. Ajax uses a combination of:

HTML and CSS for marking up and styling information.
The DOM accessed with JavaScript to dynamically display and interact with the information presented.
A method for exchanging data asynchronously between browser and server, therewith avoiding page reloads. The XMLHttpRequest (XHR) object is usually used, but sometimes an IFrame object or a dynamically added