<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.

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 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!

It all started with pixels. Alex Tew started selling pixels with milliondollarhomepage.com to earn some quick money. Public relation clicked and he became a success story with a wild frenzy among people to own a "piece of history". The "me too" crowd followed and we saw thousands of similar sites selling priceless pixels and few smart companies selling scripts to build such sites.

After one year came Joel Comm, who improvised the concept to link words instead of pixels, and launched 500words.com. This innovation was expected from an Internet marketing wizard like Joel, who is well known among Internet marketers and has a capacity to create a loud buzz. He sold the entire inventory and laughed his way to his bank with few hundred thousand dollars! Just like milliondollarhomepage.com, this improvisation triggered hundreds of similar website and scripts that can be installed to launch similar sites. In fact, I also launched software called wordsitebuilder with my friend Arun Agrawal, because I believe in selling spades when the gold rush is on.

Now, exactly after one year of the 500words.com gold rush, I came across another concept - Wordhugger.com & MillionDollarWiki. Now they have logically extended the legacy and moved on from words to a page dedicated to a given word / phrase. They have presented the concept in a much more lucrative way for prospective buyers. I was just wondering how is this different from squidoo.com? This seems to be picking up and I am watching the show .

So, overall, there has been a gradual transition from a pixel >> word >> page What’s next? - A website / or a blog?

Let’s watch the show!

There has been a lot of talk over the BIG IT talent pool in India. Every bureaucrat and market research agency in the country shows towering numbers of colleges and students that they produce.

But the burning question is - Is this talent employable?

The biggest challenge Indian IT industry faces today is the ever-growing gap between graduating engineers and employable graduates. If not checked in time, it might result in a lost opportunity for India Inc. as opportunities will not wait and move towards economies who provide more employable talent at the best ROI.

The main reasons for this gap are:

• Low motivation for top experts to take up teaching as a profession.
• Outdated syllabus, course curriculum, infrastructure, teaching methodologies and content!
• Little or no emphasis in making people "life long learners", primarily because education is spoon fed in most institutions.
• Priviledge to "best education" has been made available to selected class.
• Poor use of technology to spread education to rural areas

There is a lot to rant about the negatives, which we all do. I never liked the way education is imparted in our country and always wanted to grab the first opportunity to change the same.

I am taking a humble step towards my dream project by launching Indus Net Academy in the third week of June 2007. I have coined the slogan as "New Age Education", which is timeless and conveys the feeling behind the project. The initial academic setup will be in a small area of 1000 sq feet, which will be extended as we mature and generate more demand.

Indus Net Academy has been housed in SDF Building, Sector V, Salt Lake, Kolkata for the following reasons:

• Close to the industry!
• Easy availability of successful professionals who might like to share their experience and knowledge.
• Ease of management, since Indus Net Technologies is also located on 4th and 5th floor of the same building.

The purpose of Indus Net Acaemy can be summerised as follows:

• Create employable talent
• Continued education for working professionals
• Accumulation & distribution of knowledge
• Rural education

(From now onwards the team behind Indus Net Acaemy is being termed as "We" instead of "I" since many key members of Indus Net Technologies thinks about the academy the same way that I do and are working tirelessly to make it a success.

Initially, Indus Net Academy will start with career oriented professionally taught courses on:- Web Design, Web Development & Internet Marketing. The course will be taught by experts who are practising these subjects at Indus Net Technologies and serving clients from all over the world. Teaching methodology will be a mix of classroom based core concept delivery, self paced study, research and discussion on important ideas, lab sessions and practical tips from practitioners of "how things are done in real life".

We are further backing up the courses taught in Indus Net Academy with guaranteed jobs by joining hands with companies who need the "industry-ready talent".

Since we have in-house professional talent available in Indus Net Technologies, we chose to start with subjects related to Internet industry. As we move ahead, we expect professionals from different walks of life to be a part of this movement and make a difference - to make the "new age education" dream a reality!

Will keep you posted. Looking forward to a bright future…

Keep an eye on http://www.indusnetacademy.com/