<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.

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.

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

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. 

W3C HTML Working Group has recently released HTML 5 working draft. This is a very important step forward; the same is available for review and comment at http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/

The new standard addresses the need of web application developers in more pro-active way:

• Basic template facility has been implemented with facility to repeat elements
• There are also new elements for navigation, headers, footers, figures, and dialog
• Client-side persistent storage functionality (JavaScript APIs for key/value pairs & embedded SQL databases)
• Support for server-sent events, which will facilitate persistent connections to remote data sources

Some old features like frames have been removed.

Let us see how soon new browsers start supporting these new features of HTML 5. Currently the Opera browser has the best support (though it does not support all features) for HTML 5.

Footnote:

There is an overall trend to make HTML more developer friendly so that complex web applications are developed as per W3C standards and are compatible on different browsers on different mediums. With Bill Gate’s prediction coming in about different shapes and sizes of computers in this decade which will make computers more intuitive (like the table PC), this seems to be moving in the right direction.

So let’s think, how your website will look and take shape (as per device specific browser compatibility) when displayed on a coffee table as the people sitting around it mumble the name of your company!

Abhishek

IMHO, online candidate search is a great service. I currently use two such websites and shell out almost $5000 per annum for the same. I always do a solid cost / benefit analysis and I have found that I am saving almost $15-$20K on my recruitment cost alone.

We manage to find decent candidates. However there are few limitations that you must keep in mind:

1) Candidates you get through online database search are more prone to attrition compared to those who are through a consultant. This happens because they have an active profile online and they continue to get offers from various companies.

2) You will get quality resumes for people with experience range of 0-8 years. People who are more qualified or experienced and hold important position in companies generally do not post their resumes to such sites.

3) Verification / validation of employees who come through these sites need to be done rigorously at your end. Like every online transaction, there is a probability of fraud in terms of forged resumes.

BTW, I found a very nice concept. Please check out www.yellojobs.com/ to see the new model of personal reference network for hiring. Its a mix between sites like linkedin.com and pure resume database sites like monster.com and naukri.com.

Abhishek

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!

I recently read Ed Kohler’s comment where he has ranked the importance of various "Google Apps" programs in the following order:

1. Docs
2. Presentation
3. Spreadsheet

However, I beg to differ.

In my personal experience I have found spreadsheet to be most used online collaborative tool of the entire office suite.

An online spreadsheet can be used in hundreds of ways for different purpose and help you collaborate much better for several reasons:

1. Spreadsheets keep data in a more organized way which can be further imported / exported as a comma delimited file and also imported / exported from a third party database

2. Some common usage can be sales tracking, basic level project tracking, bug management, issue tracking, any collaborative data gathering, managing petty accounts, etc. The list is endless. You cannot do all this using word processor or presentation tools online.

3. Every spreadsheet has several sheets, which enables various versions of inputs to be gathered from different sources, all put together in one place with a very easy-to-shuffle mechanism.

May be my opinion is based on the way I use Google Apps!
What is your opinion?

Abhishek