Show the Benefits

What is in there for your customers? Saving, freebies, reward or any other benefits. Show it upfront. Your customer doesn’t care about how amazing your business is? All they are interested in is the benefit they get in associating with your products/services. How does it help them in solving their need/want?

Talk to them

Avoid using I, me, and we and start using you and your. Your prospects are more interested in themselves. Using you and your works better.

Use Active voice

Merely putting CTAs (call to action) like Call now, Click Now, Buy Now, Get Started, Register or something like these will not yield any result unless, your copy is persuasive . Avoid phrases like “This deal will help you save $50” instead rephrase it to “This deal Saves $50 “.

Adblock Plus

Tired of pop ups, pop- unders, images, banners or other ads? ? Install Adblock Plus now to regain control of the internet and change the way that you view the web.
Adblock Plus allows you to regain control of the internet and view the web the way you want to.

Lazarus: Form Recovery

You are about to completely fill a long form but suddenly your browser crashes. You might feel frustrated as you need to retype the whole info again. Install Lazarus, it never lose anything you type into a web form again. It securely auto-saves all forms as you type, so after a crash, server timeout, or whatever, you can go back to the form, right click, “recover form”, and breathe a sigh of relief.

BetterPrivacy

Do you want sites you visit to track and monitor your browsing behavior through not deletable long-term cookies, a new generation of ‘Super-Cookie’, which silently conquered the internet ?
BetterPrivacy is a safeguard which protects from usually not deletable LSO’s on Google, YouTube, Ebay.

wgen – Password Generator

It often happens that we have to think twice before setting a new password. With the installation of pwgen or password generator, password cane be created at One click on the icon that is “p”and a password is instantly generated, shown and copied into your clipboard
Really helpful for Sysadmins / Network Engineers who need to create multiple passwords everyday.

RequestPolicy

Be in control of which cross-site requests are allowed. Cross-site requests are requests that your browser is told to make by a website you are visiting to a completely different website.
Improve the privacy of your browsing by not letting other sites know your browsing habits. Secure yourself from Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and other attacks.

buySAFE Shopping Advisor

The buySAFE Shopping Advisor is a free tool that makes online shopping safer and more secure. Shopping Advisor provides exclusive access to the Safe Shopping Portal where purchases are automatically protected with a bond guarantee of up to $25,000 as well as identity theft insurance – for free. Shopping Advisor also provides Safe Shopping Ratings on more than 320,000 eCommerce sites in the search results of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and eBay.

Unhide Passwords

Type your passwords in clear texts instead of asterisks. Just be careful that while you are typing your 30 charcter secret password someone is not looking over your shoulder.

Long URL Please

You might want to know the exact site which you are visiting, especially when you are on Twitter or any other social media sites.
Short urls (eg http://tinyurl.com/123) simply redirect to some other page on the internet – you can’t tell what website they link to by looking at the link. This plugin fixes this by transparently replacing any of these links when every web page loads.

Uses the api provided by http://www.longurlplease.com to determine where short urls actually link to.

No Script

For full control of Javascript, Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, and other plug-ins, look no further than NoScript, an extremely powerful and customizable Firefox extension that can block pretty much every kind of script.
When you navigate to a page such as the Apple iPhone 3G QuickTime demo, NoScript blocks the demo initially. Just click the NoScript icon at bottom right of the browser window to unblock scripts on that site temporarily or permanently.

Cleanzer

We often visits some sites/forums where we are actually reluctant providing personal email addresses.. Get a new Cleanzer email address every time you register for a new site – on the spot with one click.

Find trusted sites, see Spam Free ratings as you browse.
- Get a permanent and secure alternative email address on the spot with one click
- Register for as many sites as you like and check emails whenever you want
- Forward emails you need to your own email address – leave the spam behind
- Unsubscribe with one click and never see unwanted emails again
- See Spam Free Site ratings as you surf the internet – find websites you can trust and avoid spam

One of the major reasons that make WordPress a top blogging platfrom is the availability of mammoth list of useful plugins. These plugins really makes some of our tasks much easier which otherwise would have required a lot of time and efforts. Here is my list of 5 highly useful plugins.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Once installed and activated, this plugin will help in getting the list of similar posts from your blog. You can edit settings and suggest a number of similar posts to be reflected whenever you publish a new blog. This plugin can really help in decreasing the bounce rate and increase the average time spent by visitors on your site by displaying other similar posts right in front of your blog readers.

SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. This really helps in improving internal linking on your blog.

All in one SEO Packs

This plugin takes care of all your on page SEO requirements. Be it Advanced Canonical URLs issue or about fine tune Page Navigational Links or any other, this plugin takes care of all on page SEO requirements in totality. All you need to do is to write great post and you are all set to get visibility in major SERPs.

Redirection Plugin

You logged in to your Webmaster account and found some of “not found” errors on your site. You understand the problem but you don’t know how to create .htaccess file to solve this problem. Install and activate redirection plugin and you will realize managing redirects is much easier task now.

Pc Robots.txt

This is yet another plugin designed for people like me who don’t want to mess around with files and permissions. Just install and activate and you will see a list of spam-bots disallowed by default . You can edit and add your own if you wish to.

Online Survey can be as good as any other established online marketing channels provided you know:

1) why you want a survey done?  and

2) how you are going to use your survey results?

If you are clear with these two points then probably you are in right position to launch and invest in online survey.

Here are some of the benefits of online surveys:

Direct Feedback From Your End User

A well planned survey can have you ready access data of your target audience opinion and expectation from your products. All you need to do is to design your survey questionnaire carefully.  You do not have to speculate on customers’ expectation and try experimenting with the features and positioning of your product.

Surveys Can Go Viral
If your survey has good reward or unique value associated, it will create buzz and people would be interested in sharing and talking about it. You can expect a good number of participation only when it has some good or incentive(s) attached.

Media Coverage

Make your survey participation big enough and draw inferences from survey wisely to make it press worthy. Do online and offline press releases based on your survey and have a chance to make your brand visible everywhere.
Frame your questions intelligently. Keep them short and crisp! It is important to have good number of people actually completing survey, hence keep a budget aside to market it as well.

Brand Recognition & Recall

If you are a start up or launching a new product, survey can be an effective tool to reach out to your prospects. Since you engage your prospects/customers for 2-3 minutes in the process, your brand gets easily recognized and recall is strong. Your audience feels good for voicing their opinion and can be even loyal if the voices gradually start reflecting in products/services.

link:example.com- if you use link operator (in Google) for your website to check backlinks and believe that whatever results shown are accurate you are probably mistaken. This was probably never a good way to check backlinks, but most of us have relied on this method since the time we learned the basics of SEO.

Though I am little late in updating you on this, but I felt this post will still help a lot more webmasters who still believe using link operator they would measure the actual popularity of the website.

Matt Cutts in one his video has updated that Google actually not emphasize much on this functionality and rather discourage this practice so to prevent spammer to gauge the actual strength of backlinks your site has. He says spammers and competitors may spy on the backlinks you have using reverse engineering and exactly knowing what sites are linking in to your site.

He agrees that the number of links displayed using link operator are relatively a small percentage of the actual number of backlinks your site has.

He suggests to login to webmaster account and check the actual number of backlink Google knows about your site.

Check out the video to know more on link operator and should link operator will give you the correct result of sites linking back to you.

A successful online marketing campaign has to be treated in a more comprehensive way and must include the participation of community. It’s the era of crowd sourcing and democratic marketing. While planning your online marketing campaign, do consider social bookmarking as an important strategy to promote your website.

Possible Bookmarking Strategies that you can adopt to make your website popular

1. Basic Bookmarking
2. Multiple Account Spamming
3. Blogfarm bookmarking
4. Sitemap bookmarking
5. Random bookmarking strategy

Basic Bookmarking:
This is as it sounds. You create one account each in some of the popular bookmarking sites and start bookmarking your favorites. Along with some other informative sites you bookmark your own site.
Some Recommended Bookmarking sites are:
• Digg.com
• Stumbleupon.com
• Deleicious.com
• Furl.net
• Simpy.com
• Blinklist.com
• Spurl.net
• Blogmarks

This is a slow but 100% effective and requires dedicated effort to make your content travel. If your content is good and offers some value definitely people will bookmark and you can see multiple incoming links and lots of tags pointing towards your site.

Multiple Account Spamming
This strategy has an immediate effect on your site but definitely is a spam. This strategy is practiced by spammers who wants immediate short term boost (one day) of traffic. You create multiple accounts using different email IDs and start bookmarking sites. You may see yourself on first page on some of the bookmarking sites but soon your accounts will be banned.

Blogfarm bookmarking
This is one of the oldest practices and has been considered a super spam by search engines but when used wisely it can turn out to be a good strategy to increase crawling rate and indexing.
It is a very effective tactic to get your site indexed. BlogFarm usually involves the linking of related blogs together. You can use it to bookmark the blogfarms! If you try to bookmark 50k pages, you will be easily accused of spamming. The best practice is to link to the 50k pages from your Blogfarms and then social bookmark your Blogfarm. Those 50k pages will be crawled faster.

Sitemap bookmarking
This is a good strategy to bookmark. All your domain names are set to a sitemap and then bookmark your sitemap. The search Engine spider crawl that sitemap and find all the links.

Random bookmarking strategy

This is very good strategy to make good random traffic from bookmarking site.
create small number of account(2 or 3 email account) and bookmark to bookmarking website. After one week then create new 2 or 3 account and submit to that sites. But please handle some care because it’s one of the blackhat techniques also.
This can be understood with following example:

Creating 3 Accounts Each at some of the bookmarking sites:

Digg A, Digg B, Digg c
Furl A, Furl B, Furl C
Spurl A, Spurl B, Spurl C

If we have 3 accounts at each of the above mentioned bookmarking sites, we will have 12 accounts. The 12 accounts can be grouped into 3 categories, Profile 1, Profile 2 and Profile 3 depending upon your target audience, geography or anything that suits your social bookmarking campaign.

Profile 1: Digg C, Furl A, Spurl B
Profile 2: Furl B, Spurl A Digg B
Profile 3: Digg A, Spurl C Furl C

Now randomly choose profile and start bookmarking your sites.

Some of the benefits of including social bookmarking as one of the strategies to promote your site

1) Your content start traveling as it is accessible to all
2) An effective and 100% legitimate way to build links
3) Can see sudden spikes in traffic sent through social bookmarking sites

Last night I tried to find out some of the celebrities on Twitter and believe me the list is endless. Not so surprising, but exciting to watch the number of followers they have. Well no wonder, the corporate may soon think of tying up with many of them to endorse product through their tweets. So do not be surprised to see your favorite celebrity tweeting about their favorite (read as endorsed) toiletries or a shopping arcade or anything for that purpose. Here is the list of top 10 celebrities on Twitter (that I could find out). I am ranking them on the basis of followers they have currently.

1) http://twitter.com/TheEllenShow

the-allenshowWith 1,301, 548 Followers, The Ellen Show stands at the top of the list. The famous talk show hosted by Ellen DeGeneres. On 1st May, The host got a double-whammy surprise while celebrating the 1,000th episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, as Oprah Winfrey unexpectedly popped in, not only offering her congratulations but setting a date for the duo’s much-hyped cover of O magazine.

2) http://twitter.com/britneyspears
britney “Fancy a Twitter with Britney”. Who would not like to read the tweets from the sensational Britney. No wonder, she has 1, 292, 871 followers. Her last tweet as I could see written on April 29th at 7:31PM “My friend gave me a pair of shoes called Tom’s-I love them! If you buy a pair, he donates a pair to a child in need-what a great cause!~Brit”

3) http://twitter.com/barackobama
barrackobamaYes, the 44th and current President of United States is on Twitter. It is his way of communicating directly with the Citizens. Not a bad idea. His popularity also can be roughly gauged with the number of followers he has. Currently he has 1,058,189 followers, which definitely is increasing every day. Interesting enough to know about his another ID on Twitter with “RR” in Barack http://twitter.com/barrackobama. In this ID his profile states President of the United States of America.

4) http://twitter.com/jimmyfallon

It doesn’t have to be late night or Saturday to be with Jimmy Fallon. You need to sign in with your twitter account and start following the Famous actor and comedian to know what he is up to at present. If you join Jimmy today on Twitter, you would be among one of the 889, 965 followers of Jimmy.

5) http://twitter.com/the_real_shaq 

shaqontwitter“Very quotatious, I perform random acts of shaqness” . That’s what the Bio of Shaq on Twitter says. Followed by 877, 176 people, he is one of the most quotable athletes of all time and the dominating player in the History of NBA . He believes “Life is too short to be in a hurry”.

6)http://twitter.com/RyanSeacrest
ryanseacrestGet official tweets from Ryan and his producers about the radio shows, American Idol and breaking news from Hollywood! He is being chased by 850,321 people.

7)http://twitter.com/mrskutcher

demimooreWell Mrs Kutcher may not be so enticing but what about Demi Moore? KutcherYes, we know you know Demi Moore. But please say a big Showbiz Shed hello to Mrs Ashton Kutcher on Twitter. Who is, of course, the gorgeous Demi Moore followed by 824,900 people.

8)  http://twitter.com/oprah
oprah797, 442 people currently look for twitter updates by Oprah. According to some assessments, she is one of the most influential woman in the world, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history.

9) http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong
lancearmstrongHe won the Tour de France a record-breaking seven consecutive years, from 1999 to 2005. He has survived testicular cancer, a tumor that metastasized to his brain and lungs, in 1996. He also runs a cancer foundation that says “we unite people to fight cancer believing that unity is strength, knowledge is power and attitude is everything”. Lance ArmStrong is followed by 769,031.

10)http://twitter.com/perezhilton

Perez Hilton is the creator and writer of one of the most famous websites PerezHilton.com – Hollywood’s Most-Hated Web Site! And he also loves music – a lot! He is being chased by 739, 619 twitters.

A new survey report by Nileson (March,09) confirmed what we all knew that Twitter is at the top of five fastest social networking platforms growing by 1,382 percent from last year. Twitter users have increased From 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. Nielson also reported that unlike other social networking platform that the largest age group on Twitter was not college students or teens, but adults from the ages of 35-49.This group comprises nearly 42% of the site’s audience at 3 million unique visitors.

But this was all on the brighter side.

Nielson again came up with a report on Twitter last month. “Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent,” reports David Martin, vice president of Primary Research for Nielsen Online. This simply means 60% of the users or 3 out of 5 twitter users fail to return in the following month.

Martin did compared two other biggest social networking sites MySpace and FaceBoook growth period with that of Twitter and found their retention rates were twice as high. Martin writes “When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today’.

The low retention rate is actually a roadblock to twitters success in long run and Twitter must plan something enticing enough to make its new birds flock back to nest at regular intervals. Or else the most talked about micro-blogging platform’s sustainability is questionable.

As promised yesterday,  here are a few more SEO tips for designers.

Provide A Link To Your Home Page: Of course, we all know we should do this but you might have not thought over the right way to do it from SEO point of view.

Find problem with these two structures:

<a href=”index.html”>home</a>

<a href=”http://www.example.com/index.html”>home</a>

Can you find out the problem? The problem is linking with the file name. Always link to the root address. Your links on your site and any external links pointing to your site’s home page should be something like this:

<a href=”/”>Home</a>
<a href=”http://www.example.com/”>Home</a>

This is done so that the search engines don’t split your page rank to multiple web address of home page. If all the links are pointing to the root address (http://example.com) then all the page rank will be accumulated in the root address, which otherwise will split between the root address and the file name (http://www.example.com/index.html)

Use just “/” or the full url http://www.example.com. Both work the same way.

If you want external sites linking to your home page use the same “/” or full url http://www.example.com to accumulate maximum benefit of page rank.

Understand the importance of <H1> TAGS: The H1 tag is your second most important tag after your title tag, of course. Search engines like to see the heading tags because it helps them understand what the pages of your site are about. When title tags are reinforced with the same keyword as in H1 tag, you are more likely to improve your Search Engine Ranking.

WordPress for example puts the Title of the individual post into a H1 tag when listing snippets of multiple posts on one page. This would be the logical way to organize the content as it denotes content that is separate to each other, but related to the site topic.

<H1> Tag in a nutshell

•    Use keywords that relate to the page content in your heading tags
•    Have your keywords occur early in the tags
•    You can use more than one instance of an <H1> tag per page (e.g. wordpress)
•    Use multiple <H2> and <H3> tags where appropriate

Know more on h1 tags

Alt Tag is Important: Every image on your site should have an alt tag. Especially images that are relevant to the page. If your page is focused on “website designing” labeling a sample website image as “sample website design” will increase your chance of being found. While labeling it as an “image” or screenshot will be of no help.

Some Useful Resources on Alt Tags:

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/altAttribute

http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol6/html_no1.htm

SEO is not only for online marketers, as a front-end developer or a website designer on-page optimization is your responsibility. If you are not making a search engine friendly website then you are actually leaving your client with a job that has to be reworked later. Knowing a few basics but important SEO tips can add value to your skills.

Here are a few SEO guidelines that you as a web designer should follow:

Less Use of Flash: Now Google can index flash sites but this is true only for textual content in SWF files of all kinds. At present, Google only discovers and indexes textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, Google will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, it does not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text. Avoid a complete flash based site if you want search engines to recognize and index your site.

Source: Google Official Blogpost

Your site should upload fast: It’s mainly the size of the page that decides for download times, coupled with bandwidth. Though you can influence the bandwidth of your webservers, you cannot influence the bandwidth of your users. So make sure that your pages are no larger than they need to be.

You can reduce the size of web pages by:

Decreasing the size of your images:
• Use JPG instead of GIF or BMP. Sometimes PNG files are smaller than JPG files
• Use harder compression on your jpg images
• Make the images smaller in size
• Reduce the number of images
• Use HTTP compression on your web servers, which may compress code/text by up to 90%

Click Here or Learn More Buttons: I hate these two buttons but it is one of the most common mistakes I find, when I review a site from SEO perspectives. Can anyone make me understand why the hell we use these words? Are we trying to optimize our site on key phrases “ Click Here” or “Learn More” ? If that is the case then I see no wrong in doing it but if not then please start utilizing these links. Tell user as well as search engine exactly where the link is going to take rather then saying click here. Use keywords in the anchor texts, it will help.

Note: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam.
If you have find this post useful come back tomorrow for more tips on the same topic: