Search Engine Optimization and Internet marketing Blog

Rs.25,000 Blog contest for Indian blogs

Posted by Jude Festus on November 1st, 2008

On the occasion of Kanyakumari’ s 53rd birthday, hikanyakumari.com announces
Rs.25,000 worth Blog Contest.

Send us your blog details and participate in the Rs.25,000 worth Blog Contest.

Send your blog details here: http://www.hikanyakumari.com

1. First Prize (Ist English): Two days accommodation with food in the resort Indian Hermitage (12 km from Kanyakumari) for a couple – Worth Rs. 10,000
2. First prize (Ist Regional Language): Two days accommodation with food in the resort Indian Hermitage (12 km from Kanyakumari) for a couple – Worth Rs. 10,000
3. Second Prize (English): Two days accommodation in New Cape Hotel, Kanyakumari + Kanyakumari site seeing for a couple – Worth Rs. 4500

The Best Joomla Components for your Joomla website

Posted by Jude Festus on April 10th, 2008

I have been using Joomla for a while, so thought of compiling a list of joomla components which can be very useful for many newbie’s. Here are some top joomla components which i have used:

1. No Website is complete without Fireboard Forum.
Forget about hacking your smf or other free forum software to suit your Joomla website.
It is a powerful and stylish forum component for a well deserved content management system, Joomla!. It’s so simple and easy to install and configure this component.
Download it here.

2. Forget about coding for creating Forms, Install Chrono Forms
This is one of the sweet and useful Forms component i have ever used. Just design your form using your dreamweaver or frontpage and copy paste that code in the chrono forms “Forms Builder”, that’s all, all your backend programmings will be taken care by chrono. Sounds simple, right!
Scared of creating or programming a feedback or sales inquiry form! Then you must try this. Download it here

3. sh404SEF: For Search Engine Friendly URL’s
Concerned about SEO for your website, then you must install this component. sh404SEF rewrites Joomla URL to a more user-friendly format example.com/index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=69&id=34… becomes example.com/en/The-Best-Joomla-Components-for-your-Joomla-website.html. One more good thing this component supports most of the top joomla components like VirtueMart, Fireboard, Community Builder, myBlog, iJoomla Magazine and more.
Download it here

4. AdsManager: Classified Ads Component
If you have a portal then this is another component that you shouldn’t miss. This is a good component to keep your users and your website very active. Below i have listed few good features of this component:
- PMS Integration
- Choose ad Fields by Categories
- Complete Integration with Community Builder
- Unlimited number of categories and level of categories
- Dynamic page titles
- Multiple languages: English, French
- Full configuration : ads auto-publish, contact information for register only, etc…
- Email Notification
- Assign as many images you want to a ad
- Users can edit/delete their own ads
- Menu Modules to display the list of ads
- Ads Modules: display random ads or latest ads
- SEF possible
and many more
Download it here

5. Community Builder
I would say it’s a cute little social networking component for joomla. Users can add others users in their network, create their page by integrating stuffs like Gallery, share their albums and more. Some of the Key features: connection paths between users, admin defined tabs and user profiles, image upload, front-end workflow management, integration with other components, like PMS, Newsletter, Forum, Galleries.
No wonder it one of the Editor’s pick and Hot component in joomla’s component website.
Download it here

6. uddeIM: To send private messages
uddeIM allows users of your portal to send private messages to each other. The private messages can be received in your preferred email-id as well. It integrates and work well with Community Builder and Fireboard. Some features of it are:
You have four templates to choose from.
You can view online users
Allow email notification
Can block a message from a user
Download it here

That’s all in my list. Let me know your favorite joomla component. I have compiled this list using my personal experience, i’m not in any way affiliated with those component developers. There may be other best components also that i never know or never used. Comment me about those components.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for beginners – Part1

Posted by Jude Festus on March 31st, 2008

For the SEO experts around there, this article is not for you. This article is for who are new to the field of SEO and for SEO aspirants. Below are some good SEO practices:

1. Use good title for your pages.
The title of the page should represent the content in the page. Identify the keywords in the page and shrewdly insert those keywords in the title. Use the important keywords in the beginning of the title.

Don’t
1. Never stuff too many keywords in the title
2. Never use too many comma separated words in the title
3. Never insert irrelevant keywords. (Irrelevant means, The keywords which don’t represent the content in your page)
4. Don’t exceed 70 characters

Instead of “Show me your friend and I will tell you who you are” i would say “Show me your title and I will tell you how good you are in SEO”

2. Using Header tags (H1, H2…) at the right places

When you write the content for each webpage make sure it has a content title and never forgot to mention that title inside a H1 tag and wrap the following sub headings inside the h2, h3… tags.

Though I know the use of the header tag, I haven’t included any header tags in one of my website (very very quality community based website), the reason is obvious, I don’t want to disturb the appealing design of the webpage by including a large text. Not surprisingly, for the keyword I targeted my website is in the 4^th page of Google (But it’s in the first page of Yahoo and MSN). Frustrated with the result, I included the keyword inside the H1 tag and placed it in the top of my homepage, just below the menu.

Result: Believe me, Just after three weeks my website is in the first page of Google. So what are you going to do, still worrying about your design or ready to get more visitors to your website?

Tips: Find the keywords inside that Webpage content and shrewdly include it inside the header tags.

3. Meta Tags: Still Alive?

The predominantly used meta tags by many SEO’s are Meta description and meta keywords. Well, That’s history now. The big “3’s” (Google, Yahoo, MSN) are now not considering the meta keywords. When your webpage has no text content, say a Flash page, Google consider the Meta description and list it in their web result. For example see the picture below:

So I would say, meta will not affect your search engine ranking.

4. Don’t keep a page size more than 100KB

Google loves the webpages with more text. Try to keep your webpage size under 100KB. Though Google lists all the webpages, which has the size under 150 KB, my advice is to keep the webpage size under 100KB.

Now the question is, Why Google is doing this? Is it because your webpage is cached in Google’s Server? Nope.

The straightforward answer to this is, “Google wants their visitors to be happy, They don’t want to lead their visitors to a webpage which takes more time to load”.

To be Continued >>

Which is the most popular search engine ?

Posted by Jude Festus on March 9th, 2008

I guess most of them know the answer for this question, Undoubtedly it’s Google. Below is the statistics showing the market reach of all the major search engines. I took this information from a website (Forget which it is!) long back when i gave a presentation on SEO in my Office.

Search Engine	Hit Wise (%)
Google	60.0
Yahoo	22.3
Microsoft (Live)	10.6
Ask	4.3
AOL	0.5
Others	1.2

Now you know why all the SEO’s are scratching their head to optimize their website for Google.

Make money with your Orkut profile in Just 10 minutes

Posted by Jude Festus on March 9th, 2008

With these reach of social networking websites the options of making money online is boundless. Here is how you can do it with your orkut profile:

1. If you don’t have a profile in Orkut, create one now.
2. Create an account in Amazon Associates
3. After logging into your amazon affiliate account, create a aStore like mine.
4. Now give this aStore url in wishlist column in your Orkut profile.

Orkut and Amzon Make money online

That’s it, now you’re done. More the friends, more profile visits and hence more the click to your amazon wishlist url. If someone buys any items through your landing page then you will be paid a certain percentage of money.

Again, the options are more, instead of Amazon you can use any Affiliate landing page but Amazon’s aStore offer many user friendly options like “create and forget”. The “Similar Items” Section will dynamically display the relevant products. Creating a aStore is very simple when compared to Affiliate landing page.. With these options, are you ready to make money online?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – An Overview

Posted by Jude Festus on March 7th, 2008

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Optimizing the website to bring in more traffic is the main motto for all the Search Engine Optimizers. How they do it? Are there any predetermined steps for that? SEO is not a rocket science, anyone who has very little knowledge in maintaining their website or blogs can follow it. In the coming blog posts I will blog more about SEO.

The search result for the term SEO yields 224,000,000 and the search result for the term “web design” yields only 141,000,000 results and that show how important SEO is!

Why is it important?

When you optimize your pages more shrewdly you can funnel your target customers to the correct page instead of them landing in the wrong page of your website.
Hope you got it how important SEO is! Meet you in the next post with more details on SEO.

No more hopping :-)

Posted by Jude Festus on February 26th, 2008

If you see my blog stats the time line between my last two posts is like “trillion years”, as if my blog is in sleep mode. One in October ’07 and the next one in Feb ’08… Going forward i’m planning to blog regularly. So bookmark this page and visit again. As i’m a new born spider in this blogging world, i would love to hear the feedback about this blog. The comment box in this blog is open to accepts all rotten tomatoes and sweet bags . What’s in your mind, throw it now!

Change in Adwords Policy: A fatal blow for Affiliates?

Posted by Jude Festus on February 26th, 2008

Spider (It’s Me) was amused by the fact that Google Adwords approves the ads even if the displayed url and the landing page url’s are different. Many affiliate marketers including some top affiliates in the industry give the affiliate redirects links in the landing url which is a easy way of money making (If you bid for the keywords in a right way ).

Unsurprisingly, Google announced it’s change in policy on feb 19th. As per the new policy your ad’s display URL should match its destination URL (the URL of your landing
page). The new rule will be effective from April 1st. Hope it’s won’t be just another PigeonRank hoax for April 1st

If you’re using tracking URLs within the destination field of your ads, the URL of your landing page should match your display URL, to get your ads approved.

Here’s what Google has to say about the change in policy:

We’d like to give you advance notice
of an update to our display URL policy, which will take effect on April 1st.

In response to advertiser and user feedback, and in an effort to
provide more relevant advertising results and a higher quality experience
for our users, we have made the decision to no longer allow certain
exceptions with regards to our display URL policy. This includes, but is not
limited to redirects and vanity URLs. This policy will be strictly enforced
regardless of past approvals and will apply to all advertisers, beginning on
April 1st.

In line with our existing policy, we will continue to require that
your ad’s display URL match its destination URL (the URL of your landing
page).

For example, if your destination URL is www.google.com, your display
URL must also be www.google.com. The following would not be acceptable
display URLs for an ad for www.google.com:

* www.google.co.uk – because this URL leads to a different site

* www.gogle.com – even though this URL simply redirects to www.google.com it
is still not acceptable

* www.gooogle.com – because this URL leads to a page showing content
identical to www.google.com

What about tracking URLs?

We do understand that many advertisers utilize tracking URLs within the
destination field of their ads. Therefore, if the URL of your landing page
matches that of your display URL, your ads will be approved.

For example:

Display URL: www.google.com/adwords

Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123

–> Landing page URL: www.google.com would be acceptable

Display URL: www.google.com/adwords

Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123

–> Landing page URL: www.trackingurl.com would not be acceptable

Are sub-domains still acceptable?

Yes, the use of sub-domains and additional text within the display will
continue to be acceptable provided the top-level domain matches the URL of
your landing page.

For example, display URLs such as the following:

sub.google.com

google.com/extratext

www.google.com/extratext

would all be acceptable for the landing page URL below, as the
top-level domain of google.com is matched:

http://sub.google.com/miscellaneous

In light of this update to display URL policy, we’d encourage you to
make any necessary changes to your ads in advance of the April 1st date to
ensure that they’ll run without disruption by future disapprovals related to
this policy.

Saying that, now affiliate marketers has to strain a bit in making content rich website instead of just url redirects to their affiliates. So for seasonal sales blasts, affiliate marketers have to plan at least a month ahead. What do you say about this? Spider Loves to hear from you!

Breaking News: Jaiku is acquired by Google!

Posted by Jude Festus on October 9th, 2007

Just 3 hours back Google announced that it has acquired Jaiku. Well, For the folks who don’t know what Jaiku is, Jaiku is a website which provides micro blogging service, a clone of Twitter.

Current Jaiku users can still use the service normally, and new folks can sign up for an invitation to the service when they’re ready to expand.

I’m just wondering why Google didn’t buy the much popular micro blogging service Twitter.

Source Googleblog

Just another spider spinning it’s web?

Posted by Jude Festus on October 5th, 2007

Hello World, Bonjour, Hallo, Hola, Vanakkam, Namaskaaram, Namaskaar Everybody….. I’m Jude Festus spinning this web / blog from the southern tip of India, Kanyakumari. Though i have registered this domain long back i was in dilemma whether to write or not because of time constraints. Finally on Oct 5th, 2007 11.56 PM IST (this is the time here in India when i’m typing this ) i decided to go ahead with this blog and i strongly believe that i can manage my time between my full time work and BLOGGING. Well, anyway, only after one month i can tell you whether i can manage this blog

I’m more passionate about blogging after reading many blogs for the past three years. Just in a craze i booked this domain and then starts wondering “what to write?”. Well in a fine day, More than one year after purchasing this domain, I have installed wordpress for this blog and started to blog. Now it’s my time to spin my own blog. Hoo hoooooo…….

I’m planning to blog about Web design, Search Engine optimization (SEO) for all major search engines like Google, Yahoo and live, Joomla, WordPress, spider gossips….. geeeezzzzzz and what not, well, whatever on the way of this spider’s web journey.