| >> Webcasts | >> Case Studies | >> Best Practices |
| >> Newsletters | >> Blogs |
Email Us
1-888-REGALIX
Facebook
|
|
 Subscribe to feeds
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
International SEO 101
By Belmond on June 16th, 2010 — 3:08am
Now that you have established yourself and become familiar with your home market, its time to expand to other geographies. You look at the market research reports and realize that there is a tremendous growth potential. Poring over the new country demographics you decide on the best location for your store and set up shop. The market research report also advises you to setup a local website in that geography. You take your SEO optimized website and put it through Google Translator or through a local translation agency and presto your Search Engine Optimized local website is ready. Well that was quick & easy - wasn’t it? That cost even lesser than the cost of registering the local domain.
But is my site really optimized?
International SEO is a complex process as it involved several variables like the local language and the local search engines. Most of the SEO companies optimize for Google - what do you do in China - there is no Google? What do you do in Japan - where mobile internet is the norm and Yahoo is the most preferred search engine.
Continue Reading >>
Paid search…Not for marketing alone!
By Shivraj Asthana on June 9th, 2010 — 3:54pm
Riding the Marketing Highway
If you searched on the keyword “oil spill” (937M+ results) on Google you will discover that BP is bidding on the keyword to hit the top spot. Their ad tells the curious that the link will provide information on the spill and BP’s effort in helping. BP did not stop at this one keyword but extended it right into the realm of the long tail with keyword like “deepwater horizon explosion causes” (down to 2M+ search results). The company extended its paid search to News (ok), Books (?), Shopping (??), Discussions (not bad) and if you are in map section searching for “deepwater horizon oil spill” you will find the BP ad pointing you in the right (?) direction!
BP bidding on the keyword oil spill
Why is EzLocalJobFind.com paying for the keyword - oil spill on Yahoo??
BTW the keyword “oil spill lawsuits” brought up 16M hits on Google with Beasley Allen as the sole advertiser (they claim on their website -www.oil-spill.com to have filed a class action lawsuit on the oil spill).
Continue Reading >>
|
|
Social Open, Social Closed or…Both?
By Shivraj Asthana on May 28th, 2010 — 5:20pm
Concerns about online privacy and limits to data sharing have dominated the social media waves over last few weeks. First Zuckerman blazed away with Open Graph, relegating any concerns about privacy to something very old fashioned. He then made a quick U turn and promised to simplify privacy settings on Facebook (whose security settings are not less daunting than setting the winking clock on a old VCR -if you are old enough to remember).
Then the shoe dropped loudly with a research report from PEW Internet revealing than 71% of youngsters (ages 18-29) have changed the privacy settings to limit sharing information about themselves. 47% of this age group removed unwanted comments from others from their sites and 41% turned to anonymity by removing their names from photos/tagged photos.
Quite the opposite to being social!
This undercurrent has been simmering for some time. Previous surveys conducted by CareerBuilder and Microsoft have established that young job seekers were being rejected because of content on their Facebook pages or online photo albums. In fact college grads have been creating profiles with incomplete names or fake alias just to escape the unwarranted attention from Recruitment Managers or overzealous Admission Officers. (See the blog post on Hiring in a social world…)
Continue Reading >>
|
|
Tags: Bliopy, driod, facebook, Goggles, google, hiring, PEW internet, privacy settings, social media, social networks, swipely |
Hiring in a social world: Rise of unequal Opportunity Employer
By Shivraj Asthana on April 4th, 2010 — 6:55pm
Last January Microsoft commissioned a survey involving 2500 Recruiting Professionals, HR and consumers. The results were startling for job seekers in the US. Three out of four said that reviewing online information has become a part of the formal hiring process. 79% said that they research on candidates online, Googling or trolling Facebook or YouTube and picture sharing sites. A whooping 70% admitted that they have rejected candidates based on what they saw in the online profiles!!!
Law Governing Equal Opportunity
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination against a job applicant or an employee because of the person’s race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. Title VII goes further to prohibits discrimination against an individual because of his or her association with another individual of a particular race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Is the act of rejecting an applicant based on his/her social media profile an act of denying opportunity without any sufficient cause? Is EEOC aware of this widespread practice?
|
|
Tags: hr, job applicants, job survey, microsoft, recruitment, rejection, social media |
The unfought war for the Long Tail
By Shivraj Asthana on March 29th, 2010 — 6:19pm
Last week at Search Engine Strategies show in New York City, Yusuf Mehdi, the Search Boss at Bing, admitted that Microsoft neglected the long tail of search “We missed the boat early on that the focus was about the long tail,“. He went on to say “… it turned out the long tail was much more important.” This, of course, caused a ripple in the media and everyone weighed in with their own angle on this revelation.
For those of us, neck deep in the thicket of search engine marketing this did not come as a surprise. For the word on the street has always been that Google’s had (and still has) the biggest lead on indexing of the long tail keywords. Their gargantuan index has helped Google’s ranking algorithm to match the queries exactly to the desired content, much faster. It also helped small advertisers by providing them an an affordable way of generating leads through paid search in the face of stiff competition.
|
|
Tags: bing, google, Long tail keywords, paid search, search engine marketing, search index, SEM, yahoo |
Social Media Boot camp: March 25
By Shivraj Asthana on March 28th, 2010 — 8:08pm
The two and half hour social media boot camp at Four Seasons, Palo Alto, drew participants from both large and small companies in the Bay Area. The group had strong representation from Business-to-Business and Direct to Consumer companies.
Not surprisingly majority of the participants were already experimenting with Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin YouTube and blogs. They talked about issues ranging from privacy yet effective communication to measuring ROI, to challenges in content generation & distribution and wondered if the channel was right for them.
Microsoft IIS - SEO TOOLKIT
By Dhiraj on February 15th, 2010 — 6:18am
Microsoft which has been known to make things simpler for the common user like in the case of the PC – this time it has done so for SEO. With the plethora of tools claiming to be better than the other Microsoft has gone ahead and introduced a free tool that open the doors to webmasters. There’s growing need for a free search engine optimization toolkit which is tailored to all the major search engines namely Bing, Yahoo and Google. Wasting no time, Microsoft’s SEO Toolkit is one such tool which has a lot to offer at one go allowing webmasters and web administrators to adapt their sites not just to Bing, but also to Google and Yahoo.
The IIS SEO Toolkit can be used to analyze web sites to serve to purpose of optimizing sites content, structure and URLs for search engine crawlers. The tool focuses on discovery and fixing of problems related to web-sites and their optimization with regards to SEO. The toolkit includes a web crawler which crawls publicly available site links and resources which are needed or viewed for site analysis.
“The free SEO Toolkit analyzer helps you increase traffic and visitors to your site, and as a result can increase the revenue you directly or indirectly make through your website,” notes Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, Microsoft.
News from around the blogosphere
By Namrata Kumar on February 3rd, 2010 — 7:04pm
It’s been a while since my last posting and a lot has happened in the marketing world. I figured that with the recent spate of interesting developments, the timing would be right to post my next blog update. Here are some of the newsworthy developments in the blogosphere and my personal views on them…
Google and China – Starting off with the news that’s been dominating all the RSS feeds and blog posts…Will they or won’t they? Will Google finally take a stand and walk out of a booming market or will they bow down to the higher powers. While Google in the past had agreed to censor search results in accordance with government policies in China, it is no longer willing to do so. Miffed at the reports about hacking of personal email accounts of human rights activist, Google threatened to take its business out of the China market. However, as I write, the analysts are still speculating on what will be the outcome of this tug-of-war. While on one end, Google is talking about the right to free information and privacy laws, on the other end China is questioning the double standards by Google. Several cyber-security experts claim that “e-mail hacker had obtained the e-mail information by accessing Google’s own internal intercept system - a program designed to enable Google to collect user information in response to US government demands.” While I firmly believe in freedom of speech and information, I also wish that all the facts come out in the open before we make any judgments on this issue.. More details on this here. Also read Google’s official statement here
|
|
Tags: community marketing, email, marketing, privacy, social media, superbowl |
Search is not really a monkey business
By Shivraj Asthana on November 25th, 2009 — 7:57pm
Internet in US virtually lit up when some doctored images appeared image appeared at the top of the image search results for Michelle Obama (a sample appears below)
Image search results?
Why the related search suggestion?
Forrester Groundswell Award 2009
By Shivraj Asthana on November 2nd, 2009 — 8:01pm
It was all Treats…No Tricks
13 is not necessarily an unlucky number. On October 27, Forrester announced the winners of Groundswell Awards for 2009. For the first time this year, the Awards included a Business-to-Business category. Regalix was one of the lucky thirteen in B2C, B2B and Employee & Non Profit categories.
It was a matter of great pride for us at Regalix to bag this prestigious Award in B2B Spreading category for MetricStream’s community- Compliance Online.