Resources on Web, Mobile, SEO, Outsourcing and more.

Have you heard of the term “Bounce Rate” and thinking of what is it and how to reduce it? If you are using Google Analytics it is well and good, in Google Analytics you should have noticed “Bounce Rate” in Dashboard section and Top Content section. Bounce Rate is calculated using percentage of visitors who view the site page and exit your site without navigating other pages or closing the browser. Few sites generate high bounce rates and it should not be more than 40% for normal sites with pages related to only services and 60% to 70% for sites with pages related to services, resources, tutorials, promotional articles and downloads

If the site has more number of resources pages or products, once user gets information from specific page they will obliviously close the page thereby leading to increase in bounce ate.

So, to grab the attention of the visitor or to help or divert the visitor to similar useful content pages, we also need to focus on user-friendly site navigation and we need to highlight similar or related resources, products or services on the page where user lands from search engine or from a referral link. Below are some measures that may help to reduce bounce rate of a specific page

1. Work on site load speed
2. Improve Look and feel of the design
3. Avoid too many ads
4. Add breadcrumbs
5. Add Similar or related pages / articles / products
6. Add Popular pages / articles / products
7. Avoid auto play video
8. Using H tag in titles properly
9. Highlight important sections in content
10. Avoid popup
11. Surveys and polls to vote and users to be around the pages
12. Tag clouds

Try out these measures and let us know how your site performs

Search engine optimization is very important with respect to any online business sites, to get it search engine visible. At the same time it is an ever-updating industry. When done in a proper and standard procedure, by experienced professionals, it is sure to give top long-term results.

So we thought an ebook on SEO techniques, to boost your website’s ranking amongst the search engines, is something you will really be looking for. While you can find a lot of techniques online, this Book gives a list of  reliable approachs. Hear it from our SEO experts, who have been in the industry since the incepton of Search Engines and grab these good practical knowledge about the various SEO techniques!

 

Follow this link “Practical SEO Techniques Ebook”, where we offer this free SEO e-book.

We all face competition everywhere. Especially in this fast paced life where everyone is expecting speed and efficiency, we ought to give them the best. Offshore outsourcing not only help in managing your organization’s work better, but also help in effective and timely completion of tasks. We have heard it from many of our clients that our offshore team of professionals has been of great help in finishing the tasks faster, along with the help from the Onsite team, as the task is worked upon, almost round the clock, by both the onsite and offshore teams. Thanks to the time zone difference and the experient professionals that makes this easier and quicker completion of tasks a reality! In my experience, I have realized that time zone difference not only helps in the quicker completion of the task, but also brings in a good rapport amongst the two teams.

Read our article titled “Effective time difference management with offshore teams” wherein we have analyzed the importance of time difference management and how useful it proves to be for an organization that has an offshore team employed

You have a well designed website with perfect usage of flash banners and graphic designs, with proper site navigation and easy accessibility. Still do you feel that you are not getting the desired visitors and sales to your site? I suggest you probably need to work on the content in the site. I believe it is essential to have effective web content in a website, to attract the search engines.  

So how can one write effective content for their websites? Read it as “effective writing” and not “lengthy writing”. Out of my experience as an SEO consultant and professional content writer, the more crisp and easy to understand the content is, the greater are the chances for it to become a hit among the readers. Also I am of the opinion that regularly updating your website with data that is useful for the visitors would divert more traffic to your site. When do you think one needs to consider re-writing their website content? I have come across the following observations that I have mentioned below: 

• Traffic inflow is good, but the conversion is not as expected, because the visitors are probably not getting what they expected out of the contents.
• When the content is very less and the site is filled with only graphics and Flash designs
• The content in the website is not explaining more about your business and gives irrelevant information to your visitors.  

I have found the following tips highly helpful in maintaining effective SEO web copy for websites: 

• Know your audience: Understand who are your audience and write keeping them in mind. Also write stuff that they can relate themselves to and what is realistic.
• Give a clear picture of your business: The content in your website should give exact details of your business. This helps in your audience getting a better idea of your business, thereby encouraging an inflow of website-relevant traffic.
• Make the content heading more appealing: Now that you know your audience well, next try writing stuff that will appeal to them. For example, if your visitors are going to be more of careful and budget-conscious family ladies, then you could write articles like “Top 8 ways to organize your household budget effectively”(Gosh! Am sure I myself would be interested to read it as well, and am not even married!) The heading has a striking impact to attract readers and wins a main part of the battle of bringing in traffic.
• Give them some useful information: Well you have clearly understood who your visitors are going to be and you have catchy headings as well. But what if the content inside is of no use to the audience. Write stuff that contains utilitarian information to your clients.
• Choose apt keywords: You have got to think from a normal layman’s point of view, who is searching for products. Choose probable keywords that your audience would search in the search engines.
• Use Keyword phrases: Bank on phrases and not single words as keywords, because the probability of searchers using phrases of words is more.
• Keyword phrases in Meta tags, links and headings: Now that you have frozen on the keyword phrases, use them in Meta tags, link them with text links, so that the pages get related to one another. This increases the probability of search engines spotting them out. Also use these phrases in headings as well
• Check and re-check! And more importantly, check and recheck whatever you have written, to overrule any spelling or grammatical errors.  

According to me, these are certain ideal steps that you can follow from the SEO point of view, to optimize your site. I am sure, if written smartly and relevantly, web contents would help give a boost to your website, thereby increasing relevant traffic and sales conversion.

Also feel free to download our Practical SEO Techniques EBook

A whole new browser. (?) Can’t agree to that fully, since it is based on Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox components.
I personally like the products from Google, and I believe Chrome would also make some difference in the Browser market, though it is available only in XP and Vista. A Linux version should make this difference easily. Few good things are  a Quicker installation, quick loading of pages (do they show them from their cache?), and recently visited pages shown as thumbnails.

You get a bigger screen for websites, unlike the other browsers there is no bottom information bar, the page loading information just comes as an Ajax(?) window, and vanishes after the page gets loads.

Our website menu is not positioned properly; Our CSS team is working on it to fix that soon. I used Chrome for writing this blog, and found it is working very fine. I hope WordPress team do not have to work hard for these browsers. I noticed on issued in WordPress editor issue – The format had gone completely, when I saved and opened this blog entry. This has to be fixed in the WYSIWYG plugin in WordPress.

I am keen to check some of the DHTML sites, probably the scripts from Dynamicdrive.com, as their scripts are widely used for menus and browser side dynamics.

There is no favicon appearing in the address and title tab, no Google chrome Logo and title anywhere. The location of the Tab looks nice, most of the browsers do use this project for Product title. This is a smart move.
No Google toolbar for Chrome yet, hope it is in development, they should launch it any time now. Chrome does import your favourites etc from IE quickly.

Developers and designers have to spend more time for this browser too, as I do not think Chrome is going to be just another Browser, since it has better focus on web applications. Google office documents should perform well with Chrome, But I didn’t notice big difference when I opened Spreadsheets in Chrome. I expected the suggest for work well inside the columns, seems like such features are yet to come.
Overall the Browser is impressive, and I hope it will affect the market Share of IE and Firefox to an extent, especially the later one.

Do you own a successful internet business? Built a great website and promoting it online? Is website your business gateway? So you value your website very much and  it’s time for knowing the attacks your website – your brain child, may face. There are both and good bad eyes looking at your website.
Apart from Physical and application level attacks websites may also face certain threats in few of the following ways.

1. Distributed denial of service (DDoS)
2. Website Defacement’ attacks
3. Spreading false information
4. Google bombing
5. Pagerank attack
6. Malware-based attacks

These kind of attacks are called reputation attacks, and primarily they aim to collapse your online business reputation. I recommend reading a detailed article at Reputation Attacks: A Little Known Internet Threat, as the article calls, these threats are little known, But which you must know your enemies to do better actions.

Did you ever wonder how to work efficiently with your offshore team. I am sure you wish to have some better mechanisms than simple emails back and forth. When you like your customers to interact with your team, without you spending much of your time, But at the same if you can monitor the projects without much of your efforts, I am sure you to need invest on some Web collaboration applications.

Web collaboration tools normally consist of a list web based applications which are capable making people work together via internet. Such suits of set of tools will simplify the communication and information exchange. For example A project team in different locations can work together with Web collaborative tools. Such tools normally consist of shared access to project files, share calendars, schedules and plans. They can have online discussions, share whiteboards and documents.

See my favorite tools below, But I recommend you to evaluate them before you start using them.

1. BaseCamp: Basecamp is a web based project management and collaboration tool, designed for small businesses, lawyers, publishers, manufacturers, and offshore web developers and outsourcing agencies. It has a very clean and interactive web based interface. It presents the clients and projects on one screen, you can make lists, add items, assign responsibility, upload files, categorize, sort and track versions. Message boards keep your communication centralized with no shooting emails back and forth. You can start practicing it with their 30-day free trial.

2. dotproject: This is a opensource application, written by several users, and it has the following features.

• User Management
• Email based trouble Ticket System, (Integrated voxel.net’s ticketsmith)
• Client/Company Management
• Project listings
• Hierarchical Task List
• File Repository
• Contact List
• Calendar
• Discussion Forum
• Resource Based Permissions

3. Twiki: TWiki, a flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise wiki, enterprise collaboration platform and knowledge management system. It is a Structured Wiki, typically used to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base, or any other groupware tool, on an intranet or on the internet. Web content can be created collaboratively by using just a browser. Twiki also has several plugins such as, Actiontracker, Calender, Chart etc.

4. Goplan: GoPlan! has number of collaborative features like Track project progress through task management, calendaring, note sharing and issue tracking. Additionally, real-time in-browser chat lets you converse with team members. Goplan also has developer API which allows you to integrate our system to the rest of your infrastructure.

There are number of free, paid script, and paid hosted solutions are available, finding the one for your team and making your client to use it would be bit challenging initially. But once when you start using it, you will make everyone in your team proud of you.

When you plan to outsource to India, or planning to work with a remote development team like us, these tools make make our colloboration easier on information, project details and file sharing.