Posts from — October 2006

Have you come across websites where, as soon as you load the page, you have some animated character speaking to you about their services? If you want your own website to also have something of that sort, you can have it from SitePal.

I pretty much guess it should be effective, though it can be highly irritating as well. I have myself muted my volume when I encountered websites with such talking characters sometimes. But then, the visitor atleast gets the message: that there is such and such a product, which is essential for the next stage of purchasing.

And so will I buy it if I were a web marketer? I don’t know. $10 a month looks like a pretty high sum for such a service, though if it is going to be really effective in increasing sales, I might be happy. A McAfee case study on the website claims that way atleast!

One thing Google has so well managed to do is capture the top market share in any side of web technology they get into. Blogger was a top blogging platform and Google got themselves to the top by acquiring it. YouTube was the most favorite website for a majority of internet users, ahead of even Google Videos, and Google has acquired it.

In doing so, Google has, no doubt proven it’s leadership in the Cyber industry. But it has also resulted in double-management for similar technologies.

Take for instance YouTube and Google Videos. Both offer the same service of personal video uploads and sharing. In fact, Google Videos is still in beta version. Now, that YouTube has been acquired, this has now resulted in Google managing two products, of the same category. I do not know if Google will, if it were to merge both of them, make Google Video You Tube, or the other way round.

I speculate on Google Videos giving way to YouTube primarily because YouTube is simply much more popular given that Google Videos was popular mainly because of Google running it. Another factor is that Google has stopped showing Google Videos on its homepage. Google users would remember Videos( with a new tag) being displayed on the Google search page till sometime back. But now, it is not seen even when you click on more and view all Google services.

This is not the only double game that Google has to play. One another is that of blog search. Blog directories like Blogosphere, Blogorama are already getting hugely popular. Technorati is famous for all the latest entries made by bloggers. In this situation, Google has the challenge of managing two blog search engines, one of Blogger and the other of Google itself.

Now, Google should be looking at merging one onto the other. But then, is Google looking at claiming the number 1 and 2 position in every segment that they are running two products in every segment. Or is Google apprehensive about not exploiting the brand value of its acquisitions that it is not talking about merging its own products in a segment with its acquired product.

It is not going to affect Google’s revenues anyway, though such a merger would avoid duplication of resources and more cost-effectiveness.

Dreamweaver, I guess is now facing serious competition. Microsoft has come up with a beta version of its own website designing software under the name Expression. The most important thing about this is that it can do all that the Dreamweaver can do, and sometimes much more efficiently and effectively.

If you are new to CSS and want to try it out on your new page, this is the best place to try it out as the previews of the layout come as good as it would in Internet Explorer or any other browser, where you can still edit details. This gives you a lot of freedom to decide what to edit and how.

I have only used it in bits. Have not tried it out fully to write a full fledged review. But if you want to try the product, check out the MS Expression page for download.

If you are a webmaster or a SEO expert yourself, you will know the extent of influence a high ranking website’s link to your website does. I recently had this experience when Wonkette.com linked to one of my article and I was taken aback to see the sudden huge increase in the number of visitors to my other blog.

Websites are coming out with new innovative ways to buy links from other websites. But, really high ranking websites demand a fortune for a link to your website. The better way is to get links from many lesser ranking websites by providing them an incentive.

This is the methodology under which PayPerPost works. This website targets bloggers to write a review for the advertisers with one or more links to the specific URL. Bigger websites which offer bigger revenue per review also demand decent PageRanked blogs but these are few and far between.

I haven’t thought about joining it yet. Probably I shall make use of one other blog which I have given up writing on for that purpose. It is nice to review products, especially if you get paid, right!?

PS:
I have received quite a few emails after my blog post on Orkut last week for invites. If you too are one of them, do send me an email to s.anand1[-at-]gmail.com . I do not use the email in my profile for any communication.

Moo the printer website is offering 10000 Skype minicards for free. Just customize them to display your Skype details and anythings else that you want to display. They look real cool. I missed it out last time when they offered free flickr cards.

I myself got it done late. Do check out Moo as soon as possible so that the 10,000 freebies do not run out.

I have designed my card to show the Cyberita URL at the top and my Skype details at the back. This shall help me more in my blog promotion than anything else.

Do you like the changes that I have made to my blog? I have now set any links to be highlighted with an orange background whenever you take the pointer over it. I have also changed the font to Arial Narrow.

All this is thanks to ProBlogger. If you also like the settings that you observe in some blogs, you can view how it is done by viewing their CSS template file. To do this, go to the website that you want to view, click on View -> Page Source.

Here, if you scroll down, you will find a file (with extension .CSS) that has been ‘imported’. This file contains information on how the fonts, color, background etc should look like. For my case, I checked with a{……} and a hover{….} settings, and opened my Template from Settings tab and incorporated the changes.

But remember that sometimes the CSS file can be made hidden. So, you can view a CSS page only so long as it is not hidden.

Many of you have Google ads on your blogs. But, most often it looks pretty out of place, either on the sidebars or above or below the blogs. I do not know how effective the ads are at these places, since visitors, especially those for blogs are there only to read through the content. So, an ad at any other place other than inside and with the blog content sometimes looks out of place.

This post might get you started in trying out the most effective position of your ads. The simplest way to get your ads in between posts is to look into the template and place it at the right position.

On the template you will find tags(those that are enclosed inside angled brackets) such as BlogDateHeader, BlogItemTitle, BlogItemBody and BlogItemComments. These tags are self explanatory as to what they are supposed to display. Now, if you want to see your ads after the Item title but before the content, paste in between these two. Or otherwise, you can try out the other ways.

There are other different things that you can try out. You could probably use the DIV tags to align the ads to the left or right or center. Try the different attributes of the DIV tag for this.

Now, as far as what I think, the most effective ad might be somewhere along the sides, standing close to the actual post in contrasting color. To achieve this, use the TABLE tag. Create two columns and place the ads on one column, either left or right, and the content on the other. You could achieve something similar to what I made here.

Getting indexed in Google can be hard and tiring. Sometimes it takes months before you can see your blog appear in the Google listings, let alone moving up the rankings to get traffic. But a proper understanding of Search Engine Optimization techniques can help you get indexed in Google quickly, sometimes as soon as under 24 hours.

Have you observed that news on the frontpages of CNN and BBC appear on the Web Searches hours after they are first published? Why does that not happen to your website or blogs? The answer lies in the PageRank of the website. The Google indexing robot is programmed to continuously or atleast more frequently index pages of higher PageRank. So, that is the reason your website is not indexed so fast.

But then, it is not only with the PR of that particular page. It is as much dependent on the PR of the pages linking to your website that is to be indexed. So, the bottomline is that if you can get your website links from high PR webpages, you can get indexed as much faster. So, while a PR6 can get you indexed in two days, a PR9 can do that in under 24 hours. Remember that more links, the faster.

How do you get these links?

Here comes the most interesting part of getting such high ranking webpages link to you. Have you seen something like ‘Links to this post’ below blog entries? This list on blogs gives you a link to all blogs that carry a link to a particular blog entry.

Now, you need to find out those blogs (that have the ‘Links to this post’ feature) that write on subjects on the same topic as your website and then link to the most high ranking pages on those blogs.

If you are lazy to do that as well, then doesn’t matter. There is one more way out. Google publishes a whole lot of blogs on its numerous products. The main one being Googleblog.blogspot.com. You can visit the blog to look at the other blogs available. Now, visit some of the oldest pages in each of these blogs (so that they have high PRs) and after choosing quite a few among them, link to 3-4 highest ranked pages among them.

This is a sureshot way to get indexed in Google.

NOTE: There are other factors with regarding your blog content that will hamper your site’s ranking if you would continue to have the links to the Google’s blog even after getting indexed. For a long term measure, find out blogs in your category that provide this feature and link to them. But do remember to remove all the links to the Google blogs once you have been indexed.

There was a recent post on Digg about an American Skyper who was skyped by a Chinese girl. She knew a bit of English and this chap did not know anything in Chinese. So, how did he converse? Well, he made use of a translator in Babelfish and manually converted every message into the other language to both type in as well as understand the message.

This was indeed intelligent, but then not the first time somebody thought of a thing like this. In fact, there are so many tools to help you in multi-lingual chats. I chanced upon this tool called IM Translator. This tool is for the Europeans and is helpful for chats in ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo etc.

And the work to be done is not the mammoth copy-paste that the American had to do. It is simply choosing the right language in the combo list that appears and it becomes very easy to convert the received and sent message to the appropriate language.

Ever since I started blogging, I have noticed that many people have taken to the concept of ‘blogrolling‘. If you have not come across this previously, let me explain what it does.

Blogrolling is a website that offers to manage the ‘reciprocal links’ on your blogs. Simple Search engine optimization suggests that the more inbound links you have for your website, the better it is indexed by Search Engines and hence more traffic.

Since most of us have problems with editing the default templates that come with blogs, Blogrolls help in managing the links to other blogs from your blog (which you do after agreeing to the other blogger to get a link to your blog from his own).

But, before you proceed, here is something you need to look at. Understand if your reciprocal links are for search engine traffic or simply links from your friends. There are numerous blogs of personal lives and the bloggers prefer to link to all their friends so that it is easy to navigate between the blogs of friends. Blogrolling is very useful here.

But, if you blog on a subject and you want to have traffic from the search engines, let me tell you that Blogrolling does not help.

PHP vs. Javascript

The basic reason for this is because of the language used to write the code. Basic blogrolling code that you use on free blogs like Blogspot or Wordpress have to be in javasctipt. Javascript is a client side code which is not read by search engines. So, it does not actually consider a blogroll link from a free blog, that has the code in javascript, a link ,and hence no points; which means no improvement in search engine ranking. Whereas a PHP code is a server side language which is read by search engines and hence a link in this improves search engine rank.

What should I do?

If you have been on blogroll, you would have seen that they also offer a PHP code for providing the links. If you have your blog hosted on a paid server, you will most probably have PHP support. Use the PHP code provided by Blogroll for linking.

But,it still does not help as you are only providing links to others’ blogs. To help your blog, make sure you get blogrolled by bloggers who have hosted on paid servers, and who have the PHP code version of blogroll on them.

Finally, if you understood nothing of what I have written above, do not worry, get your friends to use conventional HTML anchor text to link to you. Don’t go for blogrolling at all!