Archive for September, 2009

Is It Worth Investing In Online Surveys?

September 27th, 2009

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.

 

Is It Worth Investing In Online Surveys?

September 27th, 2009

Online  Survey can be as good as any other established online marketing channels provided you know why you want a survey done and 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.Online Survey

Here are some of the benefits of online surveys:

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.

Tip: Do not make your survey questionnaire exclusively related to your product. This can be done only with your customers if you want to reach out to new audiences make it indirect and generic.

Direct Feedback

A well planned survey can have you ready access data of your target audience opinion and expectation from products similar to yours. 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 aonline surveyssociated, 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.

 

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.

Checking Backlinks Through Link Operator

September 23rd, 2009

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.

Link Operator

How to use “no follow” attribute for your advantage?

September 23rd, 2009

As I mentioned by using “no follow” you are actually raising a flag that the link is either not important or has not been approved by me, so there is no question of transferring my link juice to the link with rel=”no follow”
So that means you are actually preventing outflow of link juice from your site.

Nofollowadvantage

Checking Backlinks Through Link Operator

September 23rd, 2009

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.

Matt Cutts 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.

Can I increase Page Rank of my site using “no follow” attribute?

September 22nd, 2009

That’s something which you need to be very smart about. Simply by using rel=”no follow” for external site you will not be able to increase your page rank.

IncreasePageRank-NofollowPage rank is something which is based on sophisticated algorithm, which no one other than Google Engineers could explain with 100% accuracy. Yes, all serious SEOs know what it means and what are some possible factors that can help to improve page rank?
One suggestion regarding this is to combine your link building efforts with applying with rel=”nofollow” attribute to all the lesser important pages on your site.
For example the page rank for your home page is 4 and you have 1000 pages

on your site with some 30-40 links going out from your home page. Do you think all 30-40 pages are equally important for you or do you want them to be indexed by Google at all.

Why the hell will I want my privacy policy, my sign in form page, my disclaimer policy, my RSS feed link, etc. to be indexed by Google. Isn’t it better I support the effort of my webmaster who is working all day hard to bring in fresh stream of link juices from social bookmarking sites, article marketing or through press releases by applying rel=”no follow” attribute to all such pages.

Give it a try, you will not loose anything but definitely will gain. It is like applying strong adhesives to all the leakage area which was letting your link juice drip out of the container.

How to apply rel=”nofollow” ?

September 21st, 2009

Once you add “no follow” attribute, search engine robots will understand that site owner is actually not giving any prominence or weightage to the link in reference and hence will not transfer the page score How to- nofollow

<a href=”http://www.example.com/”>Visit My Page</a>

This is how the link would look after the nofollow attribute has been added, with the attribute portion shown in bold

<a rel=“nofollow” href=” http://www.example.com/”>Visit My Page</a>
This would also be acceptable, as order of elements within the anchor tag makes no difference:
<a rel=“nofollow” href=” http://www.example.com/”>Visit My Page</a>

 

You can apply rel=”no follow” attributes to

•    Blog comments
•    Reference sites
•    Trackbacks
•    Lesser important pages on your site such as privacy policy, disclaimer, etc.
•    Any other link, which you feel is of not much use even if indexed by search engine