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!

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

A few years ago, Google had developed a product called Google local, which was a map based classifieds directory. Business owners could add or 'verify' their listing, and spruce it up with logos, business hours and other particulars. Recently Google had renamed this service as Google Places, and has started displaying this against search result pages. Which means if anybody is searching for 'real estate agent in fraser town', you would notice local business results turning up at the top along with organic search results. One thing to remember is that only the first 7 results are shown. So how do local businesses such 'restaurants', 'real estate agents', 'florists' take advantage of this service to beat competition.

Firstly they have to go over to http://places.google.com/ sign in with a Gmail account and add your listing under suitable business categories. It is not mandatory that you have a website. But it adds greater value if you did have a website designed professionally.

After this a confirmation process occurs where Google rings you on your mobile and provides a code number in order to complete the registration process.

Once done, add other particulars including a logo or pictures of your office or restaurant. Ask your customers to post reviews, which will help in building business confidence for new customers. Post your Google places listing to Facebook and other social media, to promote your business.

Alternatively if you find this very intimidating, then you can find a local search engine optimisation company who can help you do all this for a small fee.

If you a small business owner or just need more sales (who doesn’t), then go ahead and get a Google Places listing today before your competition does.

Google's recently launched a new instant real time search, that has supposedly cost the search engine giant a lot of money to build, including the speed at which it has had to now display results which means more computing resources to power those algorithms.

But how this new feature affect search engine results and also the ranking of your website. Well for starters if you notice, Google displays results for every alphabet your type in the search box, with priority for the big brands. So an 'A' would display Amazon.com, 'B' for Bank Of America and so on. So this is really going to be a bit hard for small businesses. One thing to note however is that the instant results are personalised. Google takes into account your location and surfing habits as some of the data to display these results.

Will Google Instant make SEO irrelevant?

There are even some so-called experts which say Google Instant will be the end of SEO, since no two people will see the same results anymore. Once-upon-a-time a single search would display the same set of results for everyone, and that made SEO such a big impact for web marketing. But with instant search, everyone can now tweak and see various kinds of results with every letter they type in the box. On the other side, we have some others who argue that SEO cannot be killed overnight. The way you see results has changed, but the basics of SEO which are - quality content, back links & on page ranking factors which actually drives results has not changed at all. Keyword positioning will still get you to the number one spot in Google for your chosen phrase if you have the time and resources to create quality content, build quality one-way backlinks and use good on-page optimization. Besides the smaller emphasis on organic traffic, the only other real concern is the degree to which Google will use their suggestions and how much those suggestions are based not on SEO ranking factors but on users' histories and compiled data. Even with this concern, Google Instant, even at warp speed, does not negate the importance of getting those top rankings.

From a marketing angle, webmasters must now note Google's keyword suggestions which quickly pop-up and target them in their SEO efforts. Analyzing and targeting which keyword phrases Google are displaying in your niche market will be vital to capturing the majority of the traffic. Surfers will click on Google's suggestions to find what they're looking for on the web. Getting top rankings for those 4 or 5 suggestions will become important if an online marketer or webmaster wants to cover/corner all the search territory in their niche.

Web Designing and SEO, both are different processes but yet depend a lot on each other. We can say both help each other for the betterment of a website. You have a website which has a nice charming design, but do you know how many people are visiting it? Or is it just you and your employees who know about your site.

This is where SEO becomes that much important. So if you are planning to make a website, it would be better for you to start with a design that is search engine friendly and optimized to bring in the traffic. The advantage would be two fold- first it would be less costly and second it would save you a lot more time. Let’s try and further understand how web designing and SEO are related to each other.

As I mentioned earlier web design and SEO both are different process, but still depend on each other. We can say if you want to improve your website usability, you have to use SEO for your website and vice versa.  We can say SEO makes a website more user and search engine friendly. Moreover websites that make it easier for user to browse and read content, they would have to work lesser on their SEO.

Meaning, if your content is well laid out with bold headings, important phrases that are underlined, links to inner pages and a decent and well planned layout, then you are making your website appealing to both search engines & your prospective customers who come visiting. So we can conclude that both web designing and SEO focus on one common goal, to make the website more user- friendly.

Going a bit deeper, what do I mean by a ‘user friendly website’?  A website which is easy to navigate, has well written content, good background color, loads fast in different browsers, well structured URL, and has a site map etc. -  is what I call a user friendly web site. To know more about user friendly web designing, you can read our previous post on web designing tips.

Since SEO is an ongoing process and depends on lots of factors and algorithm. We can say SEO is an art and science and website usability tips can make a difference in SEO process. So whenever you plan to choose a web company for web designing, web development, web maintenance etc.  Make sure they know about SEO or offer the SEO Services as part of their service portfolio.