Everything has been changing from time to time and the same is applicable to consumers markets and marketing activities. As is always mentioned change is inevitable hence success comes to business only when it modifies or redefines its strategies according to the current market trends.

It’s high time every organization starts considering the current situation of the market where the entire marketplace has taken a shift and migrated into the electronic market space. The significance of this change has never been discussed as this change has happened so rapidly that it’s taken the marketing world by storm. Fixed and mobile access to the Internet is continuing to grow rapidly and seamlessly across borders and into an online world which is already inhabited by over a billion customers. Given the scale of operation and the reach and the enormous benefits it offers to the customers and business, it is surely a big part of the future of all businesses globally. It’s interesting to analyze the way business has adapted to this growing Internet rage and according to a recent study 60 % of marketer’s time is spent on digital marketing activities.

Although the desktop access platform has been very dominant all these years and still remains significant, mobile platforms have emerged as a strong means of accessing data over the Internet and for almost all our communications. The most common way of accessing the Internet remains the desktop computers or laptop but there are many up- and coming ways of accessing the Internet today. Mobile phones, Interactive digital TV and access to the Internet anywhere from trains, planes, and even automobiles have all created a vast array of possibilities for marketing and reaching consumers. Today just about anything can be wired up and all credit goes to the fast development of technology which is coupled with powerful computer chips and cordless as well as wireless technology. It’s the growing higher speed of data transfer protocols which has taken us from the age of 2g’s through 3g’s and now into the 4g’s and 5g’s.

Given this scenario digital marketers need to evaluate and understand the main platforms which need to be managed today. Let’s take a quick dive into the various platforms available now.

Desktop, Laptop & Notebook platforms:

• Desktop browser based platforms: This is a very traditional way of accessing the Internet and still prevails. The consumers use multiple choices of browsers as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Safari for access.

• Desktop Apps: There are a growing market and opportunities for brands to engage via app stores as App users access paid as well as free apps and the same goes with Windows platforms too.

• Email Platforms: Though we cannot consider email as a traditional platform it can still be taken as an alternative to browser’s and app based applications in order to communicate to our prospects or clients.
•  Feed based API: There are a good number of users who still consume data through RSS feeds and today Twitter and Facebook updates can also be considered a form of feeds.

•  Video Marketing Platforms: There is a different way of delivering television channels through the Internet which is also known as IPTV. Other than this there is a load of video content streaming and sharing done which is browser based and App based.

Even all major Social Networks like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter can also be called as platforms though many would like to call them as Ecosystems which is normally accessed across multiple platforms.

   

    Mobile phone & Tablet Platforms: The options which we have on mobile hardware platforms are quite similar to that of desktops but a major difference being these can be used in different locations and at any time. Hence, it gives us many new opportunities to engage the consumer’s via mobile marketing and can be targeted based on location and proximities.

The current scenario in marketing has taken a huge transformation from the traditional way of selling and has shifted to virtual markets and consumers which have to be connected to via such platforms. Ever evolving and adaptive technology is driving and transforming business every single day and hence more time and money has to be focused on evolving the current business to that of E-commerce and E- Marketing.

Earlier websites were created to showcase just about the company and a minor web presence wherein visitors can know about the company and contact or call the company for further details. But it’s been years now that this has changed from just having a web presence to having a website that will have a killer ROI (Return on Investment). Hence, in today’s SEO age it’s time to dive deeper into Conversion rate Optimization also known as CRO. But what does CRO actually mean and how much does it matter to the company? A Conversion rate of a website is the percentage of website visitors who take action and in a sense if you improve this rate then you improve your revenue. But the question is, does it take a lot of time for actually seeing improvements in conversion rates of your website and the answer to this is a definite YES. There are an entire group of people, agencies, and occupations who are totally engaged in CRO.

CRO though is a very wide and to be researched and tested area of implementing strategies yet there are a few easy ways and tricks to improve your CR for your website even without spending too much money and time to achieve the same. There are simple conversion techniques which you can implement and let’s enlist it for easier understanding.

    Testing software is a very handy tool and it’s a worthwhile investment for good powerful software. The right software which you need is A/B testing software which will be very handy and easy to operate by yourself.  Some of them to name a few would be Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, Unbounce, Kissmetrics and Google Experiments. A personal best if you want to try free would be Google Experiments.

    A/B testing is the biggest conversion testing or in simple words split testing which is the process of using two versions of a website or landing page. You try to give one version to a set of visitors and the other to another set and then have a comparison of which version work the best with the most conversions. Split testing is the most reliable of all and works the best when it comes to conversions. Some of the simple valuables tests to start with on your website are as under

    The headline text
    The CALL to Action text
    Form fields which should not be long.
    The right place for the CALL to Action
    The size of the image which should be prominent and attract the visitors for action.
    The size and style of the font used and also the color scheme.
    The amount of content on the page and should be appealing to the visitor.

    CALL to ACTION should always be placed above the fold of your website as it makes it easier for the visitors to convert them and where people can see it right away. This means to have the CALL to ACTION on a section on the landing page and visitors don’t have to scroll down. This doesn’t mean that you have to eliminate any CALL to ACTION beneath the website and it’s imperative to say that you retain everything as it is as the visitors once when he finished reading you page may then reach the end of the page and think of having a CALL to ACTION.

    Always use short forms as invariably website users are turned off when they have to fill out long forms and it’s always better to make your forms easier and shorter. For example, if your goal is to get users email address then it’s best to skip collection of unwanted data like First name, last name, phone numbers and size of the company as those details are very irrelevant. Focus on the goal and do not distract from that.

    Always keep your call to action bigger as it works best for your conversion rates. The bigger and better your CALL to ACTION the more likely visitors will click it.
    Make your headlines more obvious and more than 80 percent of your visitors will ready your headlines. The best would be to use large font text that appears at the top of your web page. Make it bigger and attractive but keep it shorter which ideally, should not be more than 20 words. It should be easy to understand and to the point for your visitors.

    Testimonials are the best way to show your visitors how trusted your website is and that the easiest way to convince that your visitors are taking the right CALL to ACTION. Show pictures of the actual person who have put in their testimonials and feature the name, position and the company details his/her work. Use testimonials of people who are a part of your target audience and that appeal to your prospects.

Goodbye 2015 and the 2016 celebrations are knocking at our doorsteps. As always New Year means there should be something new and let’s have a prior thinking in terms of SEO strategies. As has been the same all through the years, the focus would never leave Keywords and Keyword research as that’s the primary place from where all online searches begin. All these years we have been quite sure that keywords play a very pivotal role in Search Engine Optimization. Nothing much has changed over the past year and to some extent, this is still true as of today.

The fundamentals of SEO remains the same and our prospects still would use words and phrases and we would continue to research on keywords and phrases which will lead our probable customers to our business and products. There are many different ways keyword research can be done and that too very effectively. Our start point would be to use keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMrush and Search metrics Keyword Analysis tools to find out the popular keywords and phrases that are not too hyper competitive but can still attract the right customers traffic to a business website.

Another strategic and useful area would be analyzing our website analytic to find out which all keywords are already generating traffic and sales to your business or your clients business. This data can be very well used to find new and related keywords and also work out additional content strategies around the new keywords.

Looking at your competitor’s website and their top ranking pages is a very valuable source to find out which keywords your competitors are targeting and there by change your own keywords strategies accordingly.

A greater focus has to be given to long-tail keywords as natural language search becomes more popular and pervasive. Our online prospects think more on a general search language and it is not narrowed down to just one keyword search. Hence priority has to be given on more than one phrased keywords and all our keyword research should be based on this strategy.

All these strategies can be very effective at finding out the right and relevant keywords but there has been a shift in the way these keywords are actually used in achieving high rankings. Google has become more sophisticated and it surely is focusing more on analyzing the intent of the online prospect. While doing keywords research it’s important to find out relevant topics and themes to create content around them instead of just focusing on one single keywords and incorporate it in our articles and posts. The focus should be to be to find out about your audience and their requirements and if our keywords which will drive the audience to our content in a way that it satisfies their needs and interests.

Link popularity is the total number of Websites that link to your site. Good link popularity can dramatically increase your Website traffic. Well-placed links are an excellent source of consistent and targeted traffic. And due to recent developments, they can even generate additional search engine traffic to your site.

Most of the major search engines now factor link popularity into their relevancy algorithms. As a result, increasing the number of quality, relevant sites which link to your site can actually improve your search engine rankings. You cannot get high link popularity by submitting your Website to thousands of FFA (free for all) link pages. Improve link popularity of your website by adding links from important Websites. This have a greater effect on your link popularity and your search engine rankings.

Successful link exchange tips

1. Search engines value links to and from sites that offer quality information on pages that are not overloaded with advertisements and pop-ups. If you link to a high-traffic volume site that is poor on relevant content, it is unlikely you will see an improvement in your search engine ranking.
2. Link to sites that compliment the topic or category of your site, thereby offering the web visitor more information on a relevant topic. This is sure to boost your search engine ranking and pull in more qualified visitors to your site from those that link to you.
3. The more quality links to relevant sites that you have, then the better your search engine ranking and traffic volume will be.
4. A consistent ongoing campaign of link exchanging is vital to your success. Not only should you look to build link volume, but you should also look to constantly review the links you have in place to keep them fresh and up to date.
5. Use keyword phrases in the link text. Links to your site with 'click here', 'please visit our sponsor', 'check this out' or similar phrases can lower your ranking.
6. Do not get links from link exchange sites and link farms. Link farms are networks of heavily cross-linked pages on one or more sites, with the sole intention of improving the link popularity of those pages and sites. All of the major search engines consider such links as Spam, so stay clear of these types of links.
7. Before approving a link exchange partner, consider where your link will be posted on their site. If it's posted on some obscure page that no human could possibly ever find, then you may want to reconsider accepting his or her link.
8. You should not go overboard in the quest of getting more and more links. Quality should not be sacrificed at the cost of quantity. 

Since they are "headings" the search engines figure that they are very closely related to the content of the page that they appear on. Be sure to have one Head tag on each page. Headings are defined with the <h1> to <h6> tags. <h1> defines the largest heading. <h6> defines the smallest heading.Head Tag <h1> ,Head Tag <h2>, Head Tag <h3>, Head Tag <h4>, Head Tag <h5>, Head Tag <h6>

These tags should contain your specific keywords along with any other descriptive text relevant to the content of the page. Search engines regard Head tags as valuable pointers to what a web page is all about. The Google ranking algorithm dictates that if you're using a <h1> tag, then the text in between this tag must be more important than the content on the rest of the page. So try to include your most important keyword phrases in heading tags on your page if you can.

By default, H1 tags aren't the prettiest in terms of formatting, so using a CSS style to override the default look is usually a good idea:

<style type="text/css">

<!--

H1 { color: blue; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px } 

-->

</style> 

These are the tags that tell what a .gif or .jpg is. Adding ALT (Alternative) descriptions to your IMG tags is quick and easy. You don't have to do any complex HTML coding. An example of a ALT tag looks like this: 

<img src="images/services-pic.jpg" width="100" height="78"ALT="XYZ company's website optimization services">

If you use images in your Web pages, its good practice to include Alt text for every image that a visitor to your site will see. ALT tags filled with keywords can also be used to boost your keyword frequency and help you achieve better rankings. 

Image ALT tags also make your site more accessible to visually impaired people using text readers. Even if your Website is content rich, the alt tags allow you to reinforce what is highly important, the key terms, within the content. 

The overall impact of using ALT tags, in terms of search engine optimization, is low. As they have become abused by webmasters who fill alt tags with streams of keywords, the major search engines have lowered the importance of ALT tags in their algorithms. However, ALT tags are a required element for standards-based HTML coding. Every image must have an ALT tag, and each ALT tag must be properly implemented.

A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. This process is called Web crawling or spidering.

Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses.

A Web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent which starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies.

Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, or Web spiders, Web robots, or Web scutters.

The description tag you are using in your web pages can be found by viewing the source of the page you are looking at. Internet Explorer > view > Page source; Internet Explorer > view > source.

Description tags serve a double purpose. First, they're one of the first places a search engine looks for keywords.

The Description tag is not just another place to include all kinds of SEO keywords, however. On many search engines, the description tag is what they'll show as your blurb when your website appears on their SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

In other words, this may very well be the first point for a visitor to contact you.

There are two purpose of Description tags:

·         First, in SEO, to get your page ranked higher on the SERP by including your most important keywords in this prominent place.

·         Second, to attract visitors to your site by presenting them with a brief, overview of your business and services.

Conciseness is the keyword towards a good description tag. Decide on your most important keyword, and use it at least twice. If you can't figure out how to include that keyword twice and still write an appealing description, then either find someone who can teach you, or hire someone to write the Description tags for you.

Choose two or three other keywords that you feel are important, and include them once. Its always better to double check on the spellings and grammer in the description tag.

When thinking of what to put in the meta tags, see it as a benefit of what ever you have put in your title tag. For instance say your selling shoes, and the title is about a nice pair of joggers, your description tag might be ‘Selling a range of comfy, durable and hard-working Joggers, with a 10 year guarantee’. Make sure you get your keywords in there.

While Google and AOL may not place high regard on the title tag, you still may pick up extra traffic from Yahoo!, MSN or AltaVista.

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Everybody use Google and it’s by far the best and most popular search engine on the Internet. Have you ever asked yourself how does Google decide which site ranks first and which site appears on the last page of the search results? Of course, it use your keywords to determine which site is the most relevant to your query, but how does Google decide between two sites with the exact same title? You can even push it further: How would Google decide which site to rank first between to sites with the same content and same title?

Google ranking algorithm is called PageRank and was developed by Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Standford University. This is the core of Google’s ranking even if a lot of other aspects will influence the rankings. Here’s how Google define their PageRank algorithm:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

So there you go, the more back links a website has, the more chances it has to be highly ranked. The quality of the websites pointing to another also has a lot of influence. I think it’s probably the best technique so far as your search will return you the site that seems to be the most popular for the query you entered. This is where it gets tricky as more popular doesn’t necessarily mean best quality. Let’s say you build a new website about technology with a lot of quality content and that is built with the highest standards of the industry. Now you write a new website about the new MacBook Air hoping to get some traffic when people search for MacBook Air on Google. Even if your website is the best available for that keyword, it will be returned on maybe page 15-20 of Google search results. Why? Because you don’t have any links pointing to your website, so poor PageRank. It might be also almost impossible for you to rank on the first Google search results page because you might be competing with websites having millions of back links.

That’s where Google ranking gets tricky. Most of the users don’t go any further than 30 results and sometimes you could be surprised by the quality of the links you would find on page 7-8. The websites might be a little less popular but that doesn’t mean they don’t offer quality content. It’s hard work today in the Internet industry to get a good rank on Google because you fight with people and companies that wants to be first on Google and have full time employees whose job his to optimize the rankings. There’s a lot of techniques to improve your rankings other than back links and it’s called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is out of the scope of this article though.

So there it is, that’s how Google works and how it decides which site should be ranked first for specific keywords. It has a lot of advantages but at the same time, smaller websites with quality content struggle to get decent traffic. That’s the downside.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3). Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee,^[2] the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web. As of 8 September 2009, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has 356 members.^[1]

W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web.

Standards

W3C/IETF Standards (over Internet protocol suite):

CSS CGI DOM GRDDL HTML OWL P3P RDF SVG SISR SKOS

SOAP SPARQL SMIL SRGS SSML VoiceXML WCAG WSDL XForms

XHTML XHTML+Voice XML XML Events XML Information Set XML Schema XPath XQuery XSLT

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The query processor has several parts, including the user interface (search box), the “engine” that evaluates queries and matches them to relevant documents, and the results formatter.

PageRank is Google’s system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PageRank is deemed more important and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank.

Google considers over a hundred factors in computing a PageRank and determining which documents are most relevant to a query, including the popularity of the page, the position and size of the search terms within the page, and the proximity of the search terms to one another on the page. A patent application discusses other factors that Google considers when ranking a page. Visit SEOmoz.org’s report for an interpretation of the concepts and the practical applications contained in Google’s patent application.

Google also applies machine-learning techniques to improve its performance automatically by learning relationships and associations within the stored data. For example, the spelling-correcting system uses such techniques to figure out likely alternative spellings. Google closely guards the formulas it uses to calculate relevance; they’re tweaked to improve quality and performance, and to outwit the latest devious techniques used by spammers.

Indexing the full text of the web allows Google to go beyond simply matching single search terms. Google gives more priority to pages that have search terms near each other and in the same order as the query. Google can also match multi-word phrases and sentences. Since Google indexes HTML code in addition to the text on the page, users can restrict searches on the basis of where query words appear, e.g., in the title, in the URL, in the body, and in links to the page, options offered by Google’s Advanced Search Form and Using Search Operators (Advanced Operators).

Let’s see how Google processes a query.

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Search engine optimization refers to the tasks that are carried in order to maintain quality ranking and indexation of the website being visited through various major search engines.Search Engine Optimization is a two part process, firstly it is important to make sure that the major search engines know what keywords you would like your pages to rank for, this is done using "OnPage"Search Engine Optimization. Secondly the search engines need to know how popular your page is. To measure this, they look around the world at all the other websites that they have records for, and add up how many of them link to you, they also give each of these links a notional value. In short,Google,Yahoo and Bing run what is simply a massive popularity contest and the business with the largest volume of targeted, high quality links will rank first. This is called "Off-Page" Search Engine Optimization.
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Did you Know you could post your blog Posts to Twitter automatically  without having to open a single page on Twitter.I just got registered in this amazing facility at twitter feeds and believe me I dont have to post a tweet on every single new topic which appears in my company blog.

1. Go to Twitterfeed.com,register or directly login if you have OpenID (your Blogger or WordPress blog URL). Put in your Twitter user credentials.
   
2. Create a new Twitterfeed. Choose the feed URL as (Blogger): "http://YourBlogName.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false". This helps faster posting, as it is the raw feed. WordPress and other blogging systems, use the raw feed, not the FB-burned feed.
   
3. Set other options and update the feed. As you post a new entry to your blog, it will be posted automatically to Twitter.
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RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

Why RSS? Benefits and Reasons for using RSS

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.

What do I need to do to read an RSS Feed? RSS Feed Readers and News Aggregators

Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.

A variety of RSS Readers are available for different platforms. Some popular feed readers include Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac),FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook). There are also a number of web-based feed readers available.My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers.

Once you have your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites that syndicate content and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.

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