Content is king, we have always keep saying it. Keep your website updated with great content, Google and other search engines will send you a cheque (in terms of visitors & customers). Believe it or not, check this infographic on why well written content for your website, can do help you in SEO, generating website traffic and sales! Can't write your own content, does'nt matter, get a content writer, but do it.

There is a lot of Buzz and news all over the Internet about Google's initiative to help small businesses in India by offering  freebies like a domain name, website and hosting..all for freeeeee..

There are few catches - here are some of them - taken from their 'FAQ' pages

> Your free domain can only be a '.IN' domain. Wonder why. Is it because they only cost something like 80 bucks (rupees), as compared to a .COM that costs nearly Rs.400

> You cannot get this offer for an existing website, that you may already have -no free hosting for existing website!

> You cannot take your 'FREE' .IN domain and host it elsewhere for the first year atleast - stuck with the hosting company for the first year!

> Personalised Customer service - really wonder how people feel about talking to agents about their website on a '1-800'

Press '1' for design, '2' for 'how to check email'... '50' for 'how to view website statistics' !!

Self-service in India - may work in 'darshini' hotels and take-away restaurants, but websites - i am not too sure!

A website after all today is not about just having one, and raving about it. But in ensuring that it has great content, a creative design & SEO to help you get sales enquiries. A real world web designer or design company can offer the kind of personalised service required for this industry, to ensure that a business can get online and stay online for 12 months or 12 years - don't matter!

For many years now, people have been debating about how Social media like facebook & twitter literally killed email - this infographic however shows something different - courtesy Smartertools

An awesome infographic from the theroxor displaying some interesting stats about the kind of data being pumped into the internet every second...

Google apps is a service provided by Google targeted at businesses who are using free email services like Hotmail, Yahoo, and are keen to shift to using business email along with applications to communicate & collaborate. Google apps was launched with a free edition, called ‘Standard’, with businesses having up to 100 users eligible for the free service. It was an immediate success, with many small and large companies readily signing up for the service. Google later cut down the number of free accounts from 100 to 50. The paid version 'Google apps for business' costs about $50 or about Rs.2500 per user, which is quite a considerable sum for companies with 25 or more employees. As of April 27th, Google announced that it would further slash the number of free accounts to 10. This new limit comes into effect from May 10th 2011. Google has also announced that existing customers with more than 50 accounts won't be affected, but it remains to be seen, for how long.

Till then any company with less than 50 users, who is looking for free business email with word processing, spreadsheets & other features can register before the 10th of May from when the new limits come into effect. But it sure looks like a nice marketing ploy, by Google. By providing an extended deadline, it sure can attract new businesses with less than 50 users, who would be happy to use the free services. But what happens if Google all together scraps the standard edition of Apps in the future, and businesses with 1 or 50 users have to pay for continued use of services! Windfall for one, heartburn for others!

For the past 4 or 5 months, there much being written on the rise of the number of SPAM sites showing up in Google search results. SPAM sites for the uninitiated - are sites that have no useful content relevant to the search results and may just contain links to advertisements or malware (trojan) websites. In fact there was recent article in New York Times, which showed even how a major retail chain in the US could push up traffic by employing black hat search engine optimisation techniques. What the retail giant did was to buy links on thousands of other websites which had little or no connection to the fashion, retail industry. By having links on other websites pointing to different pages/products in their site, searches for dresses, suitcases, ladies handbags was getting them top listing in Google even beating out websites of product manufacturers which that retail chain was actually selling!

Google was getting a lot of bad publicity in the search industry blogs and forums. Google had declared war on spam sites that were employing banned methods to drive their traffic, and even introduced a chrome browser extension that allows users to block unwanted sites from appearing in their search results. The extension was to helps users spot and block low-quality spam content that they want to avoid. The sites will not show up in search results, though users can see blocked sites at any time and manage them. This data collected from users was one of the dozens of other sources that Google was using to fight spam.

The big change in the Google algorithms that power the website ranking systems came on the 25th of February 2011. This change was supposed to impact almost 11.8 % of the search queries, wherein spam sites, sites with low or no value, sites that have copied content, would be literally pushed out of the ranking system or 'demoted' as some people would like to call it.

Going forward in 2011, this should be an eye-opener for website owners and businesses that don't bother to write original content, but depend on copied content. This important update by Google should warn businesses that need Search optimisation and ranking services about the importance of using 'white-hat' or genuine SEO techniques and ensure that they hire SEO consultants who believe in ethics and good business practises.

This is the second part of our earlier post on Email Marketing and SEO. Read the first part here

So if he is not going to buy, then why bother to target such visitors is what you may ask! The catch lies in the fact that customers never really buy a product unless they believe in the product, brand or company.  One of these factors definitely makes an impact in the buying decision. So if a business does not have a brand name or a 'hot-selling product, then how does he get the prospect to buy from him somewhere down the line.

Business owners can think of generating newsletter content that dishes out relevant articles, whitepapers, technical videos and graphs that can interest a visitor to hit the newsletter signup button. A sample newsletter can be provided as bait, so that he can preview before signing up. Thereafter, the mailer sent out should be a pure information oriented mailer with no straight forward marketing messages. A subtle way to reach out to your prospects would be to maybe include some of your customer case studies with videos, which would put your product/service in front without really making him think that you are hard selling him something. As this strategy evolves over a period of time, and you make efforts to increase your subscriber list, you can also ensure that your content becomes more appealing, powerful and something of immense value to your audience.

The end result is your target audience is a ready and target market where you can roll out your product demos, collect feedback, create subtle marketing campaigns, to this audience which readily believes in the company and its products & services. This audience would like to hear more about your company and its products. And would not hesitate to promote your company with word-of-mouth marketing. All this will ultimately lead to that one thing which every business owner wants – more sales and satisfied customers. So next time if you are planning on a SEO campaign, try not to make it with the intention to generate sales, but to generate long time prospects by having them hooked on to a email campaign, giving away relevant and useful information ultimately having them become paying customers to just prospects.

Email marketing has been around for some time now, and has proved itself beyond doubt, when it comes to building customer relations and generating new leads. Search engine optimisation as we know can generate a targeted audience for your website, who may visit your site, but may just click around and ultimately leave without giving you as much as a chance to know more about  them. If we can combine email marketing with SEO, it can possibly lead to building long-term relations with your visitors who may have come to your website, maybe with no buying decisions, but to identify possible companies from whom they would like to deal with in the future.

Consider this - your prospective target audience surfing the internet, looking for the’ real’ stuff in terms of information, literature, and 'guru' knowledge, at the same time avoiding sites that only have  marketing messages and sales talk. They want to hear from companies who can give them information that is new and 'breaking' in their respective fields. They want companies which can satisfy their quest for knowledge and have the right answers to their questions.

Coming down to ways in which you can attract that audience, your website content can be optimised with keywords and phrases that do not include any 'business-like' keywords like 'buy my product' or 'product available here'. Instead your keywords and phrases can be 'how to use xyz techniques' or 'technical whitepapers for download' etc. The keywords are more aligned towards searches that are targeting people researching information in the specified field, with no current intention to buy.  (To be continued)

Attending SMS India 2011 currently being held at the MVT hall at ISKCON temple. Great speakers including Gillian Muessig of SEOMOZ, Eric Weaver of Ants Eye View media. There is a live video of Randy Fishkin from SEOMOZ Headquarters USA.

Plenty of updates to follow, as we live blog this event.

Keep reading...

Official site - http://www.searchmarketingsummit.in/

A very interactive session with Mani karthik, on Social media and its influence on search engines. It turned out to be more like a Q&A session, with a lot of questions by the audience. 

Another interesting session was by Ian McAnerin of McAnerin Consulting & John Barron, Director Marketing of Gravity Free, USA.

SMS India 2011 is being held currently in Bangalore in aid of 'Akshaya Patra' foundation.

Recent studies conducted during the holiday season in the US, found that a lot of shoppers nearly a third of them emailed or texted friends and family about an experience at a store or a great deal. A good percentage of shoppers even used their mobile phones to post reviews or pictures to Facebook, Twitter about their shopping experience. Of the users surveyed, nearly a half of them used their smart phones to find a store, research products they wanted to buy and one in three of such users even looked for discounts, deals & coupons on their mobile phones.

Smart phones and the internet have literally changed the way people shop. Customers today are better informed thanks to technology and can make quicker buying decisions. All these trends point to the future of retailing, and how retailers and businesses looking to attract customers need to rethink the way they sell to their customers, if they want to survive.

A few important points that stand out in this survey report are:

*About half (53%) said that they purchased a product in a retail store after researching the product on the internet.

*About half (44%) purchased a product online after shopping for the product previously in a physical store.

*Seven in ten (69%) say online customer ratings or reviews are very or somewhat valuable.

*About half find e-mail promotions (50%) or online videos of product features/reviews (53%) valuable