<META DESCRIPTION> tag lost its shine after the emergence of off-page factors (like link popularity) for rankings in SERPS. In fact it lost its purpose to a great extent when Google started using contextual content from within the page as the description of the URL in its SERPS.

However in an interesting turn of events, <META DESCRIPTION> is back in business!

Most search engines, including Google are now using the <META DESCRIPTION> content as the description of the URL in their SERPS. The page <TITLE> is now being shown as the listing title with <META DESCRIPTION> as the description of the URL. If you compare it with Google AdWords, you can consider the <TITLE> as the Headline and <META DESCRIPTION> as the Description. Therefore, you must use it to outline your strength, your unique selling proposition and if possible your offer.

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal mentioned cited this interesting Meta Description used by NextStudent.com in his article,

Looking for federal or private student loans for School? Get up to 40k Fast: Call 877-680-9879. Student loan consolidation? Call 800-299-4639. NextStudent- College Funding Made Simple.

You can also include your phone number (as cited in the above advertisement – description) for the prospect who is in a hurry! May be you will end up prospecting without having the visitor hit your website! In fact, with the latest version of IE and the FireFox plugins, the phone numbers listed in this description become hot-links, which a visitor can simply click and get connected on a voice call through Skype. And you can close a sale!

And yes, many SEO specialists believe that higher CTR on your SERPS listing (due to improved <TITLE> and <META DESCRIPTION>) can help you further improve your rankings.

BTW, I forgot to mention that some expert copywriters may like to even put in their headlines and teasers to pre-sell the product / services!

Lisa Ditlefsen says:

Basically if you think about it the meta description tag is your FREE ad! If you have experience in running a pay per click campaign I’m sure you have put a lot of thought into what the PPC ad says. The ad is what distinguish you from all the other PPC ads right? So why should it be any different in the organic SERPs? The title tag is your free headline and the meta description tag is your FREE ad, this is where you have a chance to ad hook someone in. How many times have you searched for something, got to the results and been put off by the description, it can’t possibly be what you were looking for!!?

May be people do not give so much importance to this FREE ad, because it is FREE! It is never late. Give proper attention to your website <META DESCRIPTION> tags and turn your organic traffic to a highly targeted FREE traffic.

In a fast changing world of SEO, the best way to keep your knowledge up-to date are the authoritative blogs on the subject.

I stumbled upon a nice post by Daniel from DailyBlogtips.com, who has done a thorough research and listed Top 25 SEO Blogs. He has considered various factors including Google Pagerank of the blog, Alexa Rank, Number of Bloglines subscribers and the Technorati Authority Rank to get a holistic comparison and derive his list.

The list was prepared and posted on 23rd July 2007.

Click here to check out The Top 25 SEO Blogs list.

Just a random thought:

Programmers are supposed to use their programming skills to automate business process for their clients. Therefore, a good programmer should be one, who takes an initiative of automating his own work and never repeats the line of code he has written once Charity begins at home!

Unfortunately I have hardly seen many such souls.

What do you think?

When creating an exhaustive keyword list for your AdWords / PPC campaigns, you might face a tedious job of creating all possible combinations by joining two words / phrases to cover the keyword that your prospect might key in. This can be a very frustrating experience.

Recently, I sumbled upon this website: http://www.imscripts.com/keywords

It can generate these keyword combinations in less than a second.

So if the keywords are:

• web design
• web design company

And the cities are:

• kolkata
• chennai
• delhi

This tool will create these keywords:
 
web design kolkata
kolkata web design
web design company kolkata
kolkata web design company
web design chennai
chennai web design
web design company chennai
chennai web design company
web design chennai
chennai web design
web design company chennai
chennai web design company
 
So you could get valid and useful combinations!

Now think how much time this tool can save when you have to make a combination of 100s of keywords with 10-20 different "add on words" or "cities". So use this tool whenever you need to create the combinations!
 
This tool can also help by adding the {} and " " operators of Google Adwords if you want.

I regularly hear about terms like Manager, Managing, Management, Management Team, etc. The dictionary term for manage is "cope: come to terms or deal successfully with" and "pull off: be successful; achieve a goal"

In my opinion, the word 'manage' makes me think about:

• Control,
• Status Quo,
• Monitoring
• Come to terms

Somewhere it reflects a sense of compulsion, where someone else is setting the goal for you. It sounds like "ensure that it stays on track". I somehow find managing limits a person and his role to retain the lead.

Therefore, to get the lead, you need leaders!
Leaders are a different breed. They manage less. Instead, they lead.

The word 'lead' makes me visualize

• Energy,
• Execution,
• New,
• Inspiration.

When I think of a leader, I visualize someone who:

• Set the vision and inspire people.
• Set long term goals.
• Does not control the outcome.
• Trust people around him.
• Win trust of team members by setting examples
• Manages less.

So, to build / grow a company, you need leader(s). And to manage one, you need managers! Mostly, leaders are not good managers and they should not overstretch themselves for that role.  

Leaders are like creators.
Managers are like Accumulators.

You cannot run a company without either. So make sure that your company has both!

The bids on AdWords are soaring to new heights everyday. Some advertisers are even shelling out up to $10 per click. So, naturally the question arises – Is this complete madness or is there any logic behind such aggressive advertising?

To me, it does make some sense to bid aggressively if you have the right strategy in place. These are two scenarios you can consider:

1) Every client you acquire, on an average spends $12000 with you in a year. In this case, you do not mind spending 10% of the revenue as customer acquisition cost. Therefore you can comfortably bid $10 per click (provided you have a site which can convert 1 out of 120 visitors). Thus, looking at a lifetime value of a customer makes it a good investment.

2) If you have mastered the art of persuasion (or have hired a master of persuasion), and have come up with a website with converts well (visitor > customer conversion), every visitor you are driving to your website is equivalent to revenue . So go ahead, rock the boat and bid out all your competitors. You will get more customers and will also have lower customer acquisition cost. What more do you want?

So, expensive keywords bidding do work, if they are backed with high lifetime customer value and/or higher conversion on the website. And yes, those Internet marketing experts are not insane! In fact most of them are very smart.

So bid smartly!

Attractive designs do get attention. It can also get good visitor-customer conversion if some best-practices are followed. But the question is – how can attractive designs get traffic to your website?

They can! or,
They can at least help your site in getting good traffic.

Here is a simple technique posted by Daniel on his blog.

• Design an attractive web site. Or get it designed through one of the many web design agencies around. Make sure that the site is coded in XHMTL/CSS2.
• Now, submit these websites to several CSS galleries which has sprung all over the Internet. If your design is decent enough, you will surely get accepted. However, if your design is outstanding, you may get featured sending in hundreds of visitors!
• Now, design enthusiasts may not be your target audience (BTW, if they are, then you have struck a goldmine). Still, you get multiple listings and they link to your website, which ultimately helps you in getting better link-popularity and therefore higher rankings in search engines. In my opinion, you should not miss any opportunity to improve your link-popularity.
• Here are some links to the "List of CSS galleries"

• http://www.themoleskin.com/archives/the-definitive-css-galleries-list/
• http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2008/inspiration-overload-100-css-galleries-you-need-to-check-out/
• http://css-tricks.com/examples/WebsiteGalleryRoundup/
• http://www.nuff-respec.com/technology/css-gallery-roundup
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2006/12/21/creme-de-la-creme-of-css-list-of-css-galleries/

Now, if it looks like a daunting task (frankly speaking, it is!), do not give up.

Indus Net Technologies has a special service to help you focus on your core business and take care of different kind of manual submission (including CSS gallery submission) for a small fees. It is called Submit2Please.

Contact one of our sales representative / your account manager at Indus Net Technologies to get started. Or drop us a line at info@submit2please.com

I have recently revamped my five year old venture TemplateKingdom, which has till date sold 5000+ original template designs to companies and various template sites around the world.

And so TemplateKingdom 2.0 is right here.

Come, buy the ready-made web site template that best suit your next project.

All our templates are quality checked and are designed by top-quality creative professionals (including 100+ in-house designers). You can use every template for your projects as many times as you wish. We have given special attention to make the designs user-friendly so that they can be used for practical projects.

Salient features of Template Kingdom 2.0

• Lower prices
• You can discuss specific templates and design
• Members area to download free templates as we make them available
• 80% of our template collection can be downloaded instantly (remaining 20% within 24 hours)

Many more exciting features are coming up soon:

• Tagging for ease of search
• Reseller license (so that you can resell the templates and make money). Normal licenses can be upgraded later by paying the difference.
• Active Blog with tips / resources on using the templates
• Several new types & categories of templates

So keep tuned in and if you want to join hands with TemplateKingdom, feel free to write back to me! I will love to work out JVs with enterprising entrepreneurs. I are open to ideas – so write to me.

P.S.: The site is in its BETA version, but it can take orders. If you encounter a problem, please feel free to write to us. We will be obliged.

I just made a blog post – Buying and selling websites.

Within minutes, I got a trackback. I was a bit puzzled at the lightening speed. I thought – how can someone read my entire article and blogged about it in less than a minute! I followed the link and found a new kind of spam, which is spreading rapidly on Internet, making life difficult for Internet users, Google and Adwords advertisers.

Here is the site which automatically picked up the post (courtsey – aggregators), modified the author to some 'Wesley Warren' and snapped up few lines from the post to link it to my blog for further reading. A smart blackhat SEO tactic for sure. This is a new technique to create keyword dense pages to attract better rankings and make "free money" by inserting Adwords everywhere as the only exit route from the page. These spam sites are bound to get high click-through rates because we all are lazy to type in a seperate web address in the browser address bar.

Google has to get rid of this new spam to throw up quality results, as these spam sites does not provide any valuable (or unique) content, but still escape the duplicate content filter of Google. I think it should not be very complicated for the Google experts since this time the duplicate content is in "organized data" i.e. blogs instead of "unorganized data".

I hope this nuisance is sorted out ASAP!

In recent times, I have seen a growth in marketplaces which help website owners to buy/sell websites.

It looks like a good idea, as it allows website owners to reshuffle their portfolio of websites and offer services / products which are more aligned towards to their largest consumer segment (read traffic on their most popular website). Besides this, it also helps new companies to get into the business by making quick buy-outs!

I saw how I-Net Interactive bought WebhostingTalk, HotScripts, DBForums, ProgrammingTalk and several other sites to create a niche network. They further added websites on similar themes and made smaller buyouts to add value to the whole network with several relatively new sites. This does make a lot of business sense and I am sure new entrants into Internet media / technology business can learn from this.

However, I do not see any value in turnkey (me too) websites which is basically a smart design coupled with a free / low cost script being sold as a "ready to operate" business. Unless a website stands out (need not be ranked 1-2-3 in their category) with proper traffic, business model, earnings (not necessary) and a sustainable vision, one should not invest in it.

There are several parameters on which a site can be valued.

I feel the (1) profitability or potential of monetization and (2) sustainability of the revenue stream are primary ones.

I will not consider (3) existing traffic, (4) pagerank (as an extreme case), (5) branding, (6) exclusivity and/or quality of content  / service / product or (7) subscriber base to be a factor for judging the price of a website. These secondary factors can help in making a site success, but as usual the most important factor is the end result – i.e. the profitability. The secondary factors must be considered in the due diligence process to ensure that the result i.e. profitability (or potential) of the website is not fake and is based on firm grounds.

Now, the money part!

Every transaction has to be closed at a price which makes both buyer and seller win. There are several experts who recommend a 10x monthly profit factor. In my opinion it depends on a specific transaction and its strategic importance to the buyer.

Where to buy / sell?

These are some of the sites where you can buy/sell a website. I will look out for more and if I get one, I will add it to the list.

• http://www.sitepointforums.com
• http://www.websitebroker.com
• http://www.sedo.com
• http://www.dnforum.com
• http://www.daniweb.com

So happy trading websites

It is a true incident about, how a cookie shop messed up its sales!

CookieMan is a fast growing cookie brand in India. They have a small outlet at Chennai airport. Till recently, before boarding the flight, I used to buy some delicious cookies from that outlet to keep myself indulged for the evening.

Now, the real shocker! On my recent visit to Chennai, the store guy told me – "that the minimum you can purchase is 250 grams!"

I could not help, but smile at this "strategic" move of the company!

This is how they are messing up their own marketing:

• They are losing an opportunity to connect with their consumers and wow them! An airport lounge can be the best place to get into their minds.
• They are missing an opportunity to identify which product has high shelf-appeal. In fact, they can utilize this opportunity to implement interesting means to do market survey among the middle and upper-middle class of consumers who will be the most frequent buyers of such confectionaries.
• Above all, they are losing sales.

I fail to understand the reason. The only obvious reason that come to my mind:

• They were trying to reduce the work load of their sales guy (Who was sitting idle!)
• They were not interested in consumers who buy less than 250 grams. (Unfortunately, trust is won one step at a time. In fact some of the biggest customers of Indus Net Technologies initially signed up for a simple logo design service and then they kept increasing their exposure with us. Targeting for large sale does work, but nothing works like small experiences that builds relationship one step at a time.)

Besides fixing the obvious issue, this is what they could have done (some random ideas):

• Put a mail-order form and hand it over with every money receipt they give out. Most travelers who experience the cookies might like to mail-order the cookie (in fact on a subscription basis – every month). This can give them an opportunity to sell in decent quantities every month.
• Put a "self help" literature on "history of cookies" & "interesting combos". Indians like to eat in combination (mostly). When people have leisure time at an airport lounge, it is best to make them interested in the product (if not the brand).

And I hope you never repeat this mistake in your business. Give your prospects to try yourself out, one step at a time. Give them great experiences and build relationship one step at a time. They last longer.

BTW, if you have more ideas for them, do contribute. I will update my post with your input.

Yahoo announced that they are opening up their search results for third party data integration. This will allow third party to contribute to Yahoo search experience and make it more useful for their users. It will be interesting to see how other webmasters use this open search platform to gain popularity by sharing data with Yahoo, while still retaining their competitive edge, by virtue of their database, in their respective area. We can expect to experience a long-tail of innovation in days to come. This will help webmasters, visitors and Yahoo! A perfect win-win-win situation.

On the other hand, Google already have a open platform called Google Co-op, where anyone can create custom search engine. As per Google Co-op,

"Google Co-op is a platform that enables you to customize the web search experience for users of both Google and your own website."

Google also offer Google Subscribed Links which in their own language they define as:

"Subscribed Links let you create custom search results that users can add to their Google search pages. You can display links to your services for your customers, provide news and status information updated in near-real-time, answer questions, calculate useful quantities, and more"

The challenge

However, both the services that Google offers, has a great deal of focus on promoting Google, Google Search & Google Subscribed Links. Again, they are not directly making any change in the Google Search (at least it has not be publicly explained how it will effect user experience of a normal search).

Therefore, Google Search or Yahoo Search cannot be termed as true "user contributed" or "Web2.0" as described by Tom O'Reilly. People won't contribute unless they see that their contribution is making a positive impact in the search pattern and it is visible. In the current state both Subscribed Link and Yahoo Open Search will only help if a user wants to use the enhanced engine. Most Internet users will never switch these engines. Even if they are told the benefit of the plug-ins, how are they supposed to select the ones which will help them from a collection of thousands of user contributed plug-in channels? And what happens when new plug-ins come out?

Suggested solution

If search engines want to go the Web2.0 way with user contribution enhancing the overall experience and defining the way search engines display results, they need to bring user contributions to the mainstream. I feel that themed searches are the way to go. Google / Yahoo shall classify a particular user contributed plug-in into a theme. When a visitor wants to search for a business, he may choose a "Finding a business" theme. On a contrary when a visitor wants to learn about the subject he may chose the "Tutorial" theme.

Let us see an example.

We search for a very competitive keyword – "web design". This is the result we get.

If you see, there are three different intents that the search result satisfies. A person might be searching "web design" because he:

• Want to find a web design company (blue marker)
• Want to learn web design (red marker)
• Get web design resources (green marker)

All three intents are very different. Most people do not type-in their intent in the search box to make it a specific search, because they are not specialists in using search engines. Therefore, a search engine should suggest a possible intent and display results only related to the given theme. The theme model can best work when they are formed based on a collection of user generated plug-ins. Thus user generated content can find its way to the end user in an organized way.

It goes without saying that pulling in the user generated content directly into the main search result has its challenge of weeding out spam. But this seems to be the most logical way as of now. 

Today, Finance Minister P.Chidambaram presented the Union Budget for FY 2008-2009. A full copy can be downloaded by clicking here.

Some highlights of the budget are listed below with my comments:

Revenues

• New tax slabs for Income Tax: No tax for earning less than Rs. 150,000, 10% for Rs. 150,000 to Rs. 300,000, 20% for Rs. 300,000 to Rs. 500,000 and 30% above 500,000. Corporate tax remains unchanged at 30%. Income tax surcharge and education cess remains as it is. This is a clear step to win the fan following of the middle class employee segment where the majority earns below Rs. 500,000.
  
• Five year tax holiday for businesses a) setting up hospitals in tier II and tier III regions for providing healthcare in rural areas, and b) for businesses promoting cultural tourism. This clearly shows that private sector needs to play a major role in rural healthcare and promotion of tourism. Since no mention of SEZ was made in the budget, it seems that SEZ tax sops are here to stay. The much demanded extension on STPI scheme for export oriented IT & ITeS companies did not appear in the budget, which indicates that the scheme might be withdrawn from 1st April 2009.
  
• Short-term capital gains increases to 15%. The Securities Transaction Tax remains in its place and now it cannot be claimed back. In fact commodities Transaction Tax will be introduced on the lines of Securities Transaction Tax. So the quick money that people make by speculating stock market and commodities market will be taxed more! So stop speculating and start investing.
  
• Thank God! The Banking Cash Transaction Tax will be withdrawn from 1st April, 2009. I still cannot believe that this government taxed us for withdrawing money from our bank accounts!
• Cut in Customs Duty, Excise Duty & Central Sales Tax (CST) for some items to bring inflation in control. General CENVAT on all goods will be reduced from 16% to 14%. This has been done to control inflation and bring down the cost. We all look forward to some saving.

So where are they spending all this money!

• Farmers' debt to be waived at a cost of Rs. 600 billion. A target of Rs 2800 billion for agriculture credit set for the coming year.
  Besides this the rural India gets a bag full of goodies:
  • The corpus for rural infrastructure development has been raised to Rs. 140 billion.
  • Rs 200 billion for irrigation projects under AIPB, showing an increase of Rs 90 billion over last year.
  • Rs 750 million to be given to Agriculture Ministry for providing mobile soil testing laboratories in 250 districts.
  • Rs 6.440 billion for National Agriculture Insurance Scheme, which will be continued pending evolving an alternative crop insurance scheme.
  • NREGA scheme to be rolled out in all the 596 rural districts in the country in 2008-09.
  • Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission to get Rs 68.65 billion this year against Rs 54.82 billion past year.
• Education has got a very special treatment. However the application of last year's budget allocation for education leaves much to be desired.
  • Twenty per cent hike in education budget this year from Rs 286.74 billion to Rs 344 billion.
  • Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan will be provided at a cost of Rs 131 billion
  • Secondary Education Scheme at a cost of Rs 45.54 billion.
  • 410 additional Kasturba Gandhi Vidyalaya to be set up in backward blocks.
  • Rs. 1.30 billion allocated for opening Navodaya Vidyalayas in 20 districts with special focus on regions having SC/ST concentration.
  • Rs. 7.50 billion more to be given for merit scholarship to students up to 10th and 12th class.
  • Rs 850 million sanctioned for scholarships to students pursuing science education.
  • Mid day Meal scheme extended to upper primary level in 3479 schools. Mid Day Meal scheme to cost of Rs 80 billion
  • Allocation for NRHM increased to Rs 120.50 billion
  • 16 central universities to be opened in 2008-09.
  • Three IITs to be set up in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan.
  • Schools of architecture and planning in Bhopal and Vijaywada. More institutes of higher education to be opened.
  • Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research to be set up at Bhopal and Thiruvananthapuram.
  • Rs 1 billion to be given to Information Technology Ministry to set up national knowledge centres.
  • Rs. 2 billion for potable water in schools.
  • SC, ST and minority students to continue to get special attention.
• Defense expenditure has been increased by 10% to a staggering Rs. 1056 billion.
• Sixth central pay commission to submit report by March 31, 2008. It is expected to announce a hefty hike in salaries of government employees. There is no proper performance management system for government employees and they take the public and tax payers for a ride in most cases.

But, what is this?

• What irks me is an attitude towards playing the political card of religion and caste by allowing special incentives / packages to minorities and specific castes. I do not see any reason for having this in a civilized, democratic society.
  • Rs. 750 million sanctioned for Rajiv Gandhi National Fellowship Programme for SC/ST students pursuing M.Phil.
  • Rs. 2.30 billion will be extended as additional equity to developmental organisations looking after the welfare of Scheduled Cast / Scheduled Tribe, socially and economically backward classes and minorities.
  • Allocation for Minority Affairs Ministry to be doubled from Rs 5 billion to Rs 10 billion.
  • Rs 5.40 billion for multi-sectoral development plan for minority concentration districts.
  • 288 public sector bank branches to be opened in districts having minority community concentration.
• Fiscal deficit is 3.1%
• Revenue deficit is 1.4%
• GDP growth slows down to 8.4 per cent during quarter ended December 31, 2007 as compared to 9.1 per cent a year ago.
• Tax to GDP ratio increased from 9.2 per cent in 2004-05 to 12.5 per cent 2007-08.

Verdict

The budget is definitely a populist budget targeting the Lok Sabha Elections in 2009. It has given a lot of impetus for inclusive growth besides buying out a large vote bank for UPA Government. They have won the heart of farmers, employees and businesses! The badly hit has been the service sector and few manufacturing industries. But at the end you cannot make everyone happy! Unfortunately I have been on the other side, being an owner of an IT service company.