Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for PHP and Joomla

Syed Rahman in PHPExperts Group wrote:

Hi php Experts.....

I want to add my site to google search engine...and want to display my site in google within first page ..i mean i want to use search engine optimization...how can i do this...can anyone help me??? :)

Asif Anwar - SEO+SEM Expert, SMM: Toplinked 3.3K+ > 10M+ LION writes:

Please follow these steps:

Make Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs from PHP

You can do it with mod_rewrite rules. There are a lot of free tutorials on how you can do that. If you are using Joomla, then OpenSEF is the best solution. Just Google around a bit to find this Joomla Extension.

You have to switch on the Rewrite Engine (RewriteEngine On) in htaccess file. In Joomla, you have to find the line and hash it out. If you are using PHP, then please follow the instructions in this page.

Convert all .php extensions into .html files

Theses codes below in the htaccess file in your root server should do the trick:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule (.*) index.php

You may have to rename the htaccess.txt file into .htaccess

Generate XML Sitemap

If you are using Joomla, the OPenSEF can automatically generate the XML Sitemap for you. However, the problem is, you have to click each link in the XML Sitemap to cache the HTML pages in your server.

For PHP, there are some automated sitemap generating software and scripts. You have to google around. You can tryout PHP Sitemap Generator from XML-Sitemaps.

Submit your XML Sitemap to Google Webmaster Central

I am not going to give any instructions here, coz I have already talked about it in my blog. Please read it here.

After submitting, you can get almost all the pages listed in the XML Sitemap into Google's Repository within 24-48 hours. I usually got my sites listed in 24 hours this way.

Bringing it in first SERP (Search Engine Result Page)

There is no secret about this. You can read the total tutorial on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by Dan Thies. I have mentioned the link in my previous post. Please read it here.

I hope these instructions will help you to go about with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, developing Marketing Strategy for online marketing is different than just routine work for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you get your hands dirty on this, you can realize that.

Analytical Prediction of Direct Traffic or Visitors in Web Analytics Systems - Reasons for Direct Traffic or Visitors

Ishu Shah: I had abnormal visitors/clicks to my site www.collageindia.com during 28 December 2007 to 30 December 2007. My site usually has about 400 unique visitors in average. But, during that time, I had about 800 visitors mostly comprising Indian Direct Traffic. Can you suggest me what happened?

Stats:

Direct Traffic - 980 (70.96%) Referring Sites - 342 (24.76%) Search Engines - 59 (4.27%)

Hits:

India - 1,314 United States - 24 United Kingdom - 11 Qatar - 4 Canada - 4 United Arab Emirates - 4 Philippines - 3 Germany - 3 Italy - 2 Australia - 2

Asif Anwar says:

Let’s have a classification session. Website Visitors can be either Referred Visitors or Direct Visitors. Referred Visitors can be either Search Engine Visitors or Referring Link Visitors. Again Search Engine Visitors may be Keyword Search Visitors or Image Search Visitors and Referring Link Visitors may be either Visitors from Partner Sites or Directory Visitors. Direct Visitors can be …….. well, that is what this blog post is about.

Referred visitors come through search engines and referring sites. And Web Analytics Solutions like: Statcounter, Google Analytics, Awstat, etc. can provide you good insights in understanding the behavior of your visitors as well as the performance of your online marketing campaigns. However, direct visitors may not be a strange phenomenon. It can also be the Karma of your direct marketing effort, online branding, email marketing, and it may also result from returning visitors to your site.

From the Analytics Report, I see that abnormal direct clicks to your site are from India. I presume that clicks from other countries and search engine referrals are natural. In your case, direct clicks from India can mean that the clicks are coming from:

• Email Links,
• From Bookmarks,
• Offline pages loading the Google Analytics Java Script in the page,
• People are actually typing your site's address in the browser, etc.

Email Links

Clicks from email links from Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird, and other POP Mail Client Softwares generate Direct Traffic. Please find below some of my assumptions or direct traffic from emails:

• From 28 December 2007 to 30 December 2007 is the season to send New Year Greetings and almost all corporations send greetings to their stakeholders including customers, suppliers, well wishers, etc. Perhaps someone sent email to Indian Stakeholders on your behalf with link to your site form a huge email database. Please make sure if any mail was sent at 28 Dec 2007. Not all people read the mail at the same date. Some of them may have read the mail at 29 and 30 Dec. The visitors’ click on the links located in the email can result in direct traffic to your site.
• This also can happen when you implement an email marketing campaign. If you are emailing campaign targets clients from India, then this direct traffic is usual. However, if you are not responsible for the emailing campaign, then it usually is not a good thing. Because, people may be saying bad things about your site or business and you may not know it. So, it would be wise to investigate if someone is doing that. Google Alerts on your business name can help a lot to understand what is happening.
• If any affiliate marketer is campaigning for you, then that is a good thing. However, you should allocate different and distinguishing mechanism that can tell you that an affiliate marketer is responsible for that. Otherwise, you may be depriving the affiliate marketer as well.
• Often newsletter-based circulations may have ads as well as reference to your site. When they are circulated, they may not be read at that specific date. So, throughout the week, you might have visitors coming in at their convenient time.
• This behavior can also result from sudden increase in sales and customer support activities. When you have a large pool of sales and customer support executives for your business, they send out many emails throughout the day. And from these sales & support emails, people may also end up in your site.
• One of the wild guesses is virus emails. Some virus may be ruining your reputation by sending large amount of automated mails, which contains the link to your site. But, I have never seen that and emailing viruses are not built that way. However, I have heard of “Bandwidth Eating Viruses”. You can also look into this fact. These can be easily blocked with robots.txt file or redirected to 0 (zero) KB size pages through HTAccess file on your server. This can save you bandwidth.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are the simplest type of reference to your site. Just to define it: Bookmarks are stored links in your computer, either in internet browser or files that automatically generate URL for your browser. So, if anyhow or anything that automatically generate URL for your browser will be a bookmark. Because, most of the Web Analytics Systems can’t differentiate the source of the clicks from stored links.

However, they should be more valuable to you, since they are mostly returning visitor. The links from bookmarks mean your marketing & pre-sales efforts are maturing into sales. Well, if local traffic means business to you. The reason I am saying that, is because I used to do marketing for a graphic design offshore outsourcing company based in California. US traffic was our target, but local (Bangladeshi), Indian, and Philippino traffic would mean competitors’ spying activities. Bookmark visitors (as far as I can comprehend) can come through 3 different types of bookmarks:

• Lot of people bookmark sites when they find a site interesting or they think that it might be useful in future. They store it in their browser, which end up as link files in Windows’s “Favorites” folder. It also comes from custom links pasted in any toolbar, like the bookmark panel in Mozilla Firefox. These bookmarks are stored as very light weight link files.
• The link to your site from a stored webpage can also be treated as Bookmark. People may also come from pages saved in their computer that contains a link to your site. In that case, it might be a referred visitor. However, some computer blocks the reference. In that case, it will be direct traffic.
• Bookmark links may also reside in other types of files than HTML webpages. e.g. PDF, DOC, XSL, etc. These files provide links for your visitor to open the internet browser and go to your site. So, the visitors can end up in your site by clicking links in those files as well. And most of the Web Analytics systems can’t differentiate this type of link and treat them as bookmark.
• Bookmarks can also come from links in softwares. e.g. When you visit the About Window from the “Help” menu of any software, you can find link to their website. Again, many types of software also generate automated URL for the browser to visit. e.g. Customer Feedback form when you uninstall a software. But, I bet that’s not the case for you.

Offline Pages

Most Web Analytics Systems try to load a remote visible or invisible image into your visitors’ computer through the browser. These remote visible or invisible images are customized image that work as your identity. Web Analytics Systems provide some sort of codes (usually as Java Scripts) that generate the command to load these images.

It may not always be the case that the codes will come from webpages located in remote servers like your website. The visitors can also come from other sources such as stored webpages of your site in hard disk. Often if the Web Analytics code is in a blank page, it will also show the visitor. However, now most Web Analytics Systems show them as referred visitors by showing the exact location from the computer (e.g. C:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Asif%20Anwar\My%20Documents\My%20Site\collageindia\index.html - %20 means blank spaces). Often many computer blocks this reference system for external servers. It is then; the visitors are treated as direct visitors. In case, if the Web Analytics Systems can’t recognize or block the reference, the offline stored pages direct visitors can come through various ways, like:

• Someone extensively worked on your site for redesigning. Usually, when a webmaster loads the page in FrontPage, Dreamweaver, or other Web Design Software, the Java Script of Google Analytics is also loaded (if Java scripts are not turned off). It’s not unusual if you see that the hits are coming from various IPs. Webmasters using Proxy Servers can make their IP change from time to time. Again, the same webmaster may be working in different computers (perhaps in his laptop). Or people can be working as a team for various functions for your site. This action can generate abnormally huge traffic, since the site work is done.
• Imagine the same case, but this time the webmaster is designing the new site for your competitor by stealing your content or theme. We caught 2 competitors so far, who tried to use the contents of our site. But, the thing they forgot is to through away our web analytics code. So, each time they were modifying our site, we used to get the news. And we also found that the webmaster worked from Rajshahi (300 km from Capital Dhaka) during the holiday season of Eid (our equivalent of Christmas). By, IP hunt we found the company he is working with and also the webmaster from Rajshahi. If you have not done any site work for www.collageindia.com, then there is very much possibility that someone is piggybacking on your content or theme.
• However, looking at things in the eye of a pessimist is not always necessary. Someone may have found your contents very interesting and might have saved your page in their computer. This is good news if the visitor saves you for future reference to generate sales for you.
• Often you may also find good business opportunity, since most people save pages for offline use for marketing purposes. However, this may also mean spams.
• Again some student or researcher may also like your content so much that they would want to use them in offline or online versions. You should not bother if they are used online, since Google gives you competitive advantage for your contents by their Duplicate Content Filter Algorithm. However, if they want to use your content offline, then please state in your copyright policy to refer your site. That will work as offline marketing for your site. And if anyone wants to put these offline contents online, then you may get a backlink to your site. If they plan to use your content online, it would be wise if you offer the copier that you will provide them with custom content for free in return for a backlink from .edu or .org sites. In my opinion, it’s always good to have contents for researchers and student to get links from .edu or .org sites.

Typing Address in the Browser

Direct visitors also come from deliberate typing in the address bar of the Internet Browser. If they are doing that, then you have established your site as a brand in the mind of the visitors or your offline marketing campaign is a hit. A lot of people don’t come to Yahoo, Google or Live through bookmarks or any reference. They really type the site name in the browser and press Enter or Ctrl+Enter. The reference traffic for these giant sites are rare (I didn’t use very before rare :-). Every site actually strives to achieve this. Again, if your are running an offline marketing campaign, then the best way to go to your site after seeing an ad, is by typing the URL in the browser. There are thousands of reasons for this type of visitor typing URL in browser. However, in your context, here are some of my predictions:

• Previously, we had many direct hits from Bangladesh. Later, we learned that someone wrote an article on us in local newspaper. So the visitors were typing the web address and making direct hits. This can also be in your case. Try to know if any article on your site was published in any daily newspaper. But, that generate traffic for one day and consequent days have a bit low traffic. Since your traffic came throughout the week, can it be any weekly magazine?
• You may have also paid for advertisement in local/national dailies or magazines. However, you might have forgotten the date they will be publishing your ad. Another way to say it is: you may have paid some parties earlier and forgot when they will publish it.
• Last few days in December 2007 was the time when we had celebrated Pooja (by Hindus), Eid (by Muslims), and Christmas (by Christians) and most businesses were in peak. Because most people has bonus money in their pockets. This celebration mood can also influenced traffic in overall viewpoint. But this peak situation may have influenced visitors to come back to your site after long time (I presume that they remembered your site name).
• Viral Marketing can also influence typing of URL. Viral Marketing is a type of contagious marketing technique that spreads the news, contents, video, audio, etc. You might have seen mails like: “If you forward this, then you will get success in next 2 days. If you don’t forward this, then you will have sufferings from generation to generation”. Well, this is a bad example. But, when you find good video that you liked, you would want to forward it to your friends and they forward it to their network. This goes on and creates a virally infected network that knows the news. If the spread information is in video, audio or any other format from where you can’t extract text or automatically generate URL, then there is no other way than just typing the URL. If it is a New Year’s greeting video, then it would not have value after New Year eve. Please investigate if you have been infected by viral marketing scheme. Then, it would be a good sign and “Gesundheit! God bless you!” :-)
• Like Viral Marketing, “Word of Mouth” also can influence the spread. This time the only media that “Word of Mouth” uses is the mouth or words of people, their comments, findings, excitement, etc. Can it be that: 1. Someone really made a good joke about your site? 2. Someone is really making fun of your site? 3. Someone made a collage joke that became popular and forgot to refer it and people are assuming?

The possibilities of Direct Visitors are endless. But, Web Analytics System provides you insights or hints into the fact that brings Direct Visitors. So, it is up to you to investigate what has happened. The abnormal increase in traffic may not always be good news. So, it is always wise to watch out.

Philanthropists are the greatest marketers

7 Ls of LinkedIn as Social Marketing Media - Life, Livelihood, Links, Liaison, Lobbying, Learning, & Leveraging Reputation

Social Media Marketing (SMM) has created a buzz in the Internet Marketing industry. Most of the Internet Marketing specialists are referring marketing optimization for Web 2.0 as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 2.0. Therefore, I was also enthusiastic about learning the process. When I started SMM, I found that networking can bring good and free results. And have been involved with LinkedIn for some time to bring benefit for businesses, not for my career.

LinkedIn for most of the time, is misinterpreted as media for job & head hunting. But, with recent interactive facilities and professional online profile, you can do a lot more than just searching for jobs. Therefore, I have listed some of the utilities you can get from LinkedIn:

1. LIFE & LIVE Profile

LinkedIn profile gives you an existence in the web for your name. LinkedIn public profile which starts with “http://www.linkedin.com/pub/#/###/X##” (# = Digits, X = Letters) or custom link like http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname are extremely search engine friendly. Anyone who wishes to use the search engine to search for you can get information about your through your LinkedIn profile. Moreover, your LinkedIn profile has greater marketability in search engines which is often more frequently visited than your new site. So, your profile can be used as your information media for the world. Those who are willing to create a online professional profile and don't want to go into the hassle of promoting the profile for your name, then LinkedIn is the best solution.

2. LIVELIHOOD for Your Career or Business

Career would've been the right word for this. But, if you are an entrepreneur, then your career would be your business. In both cases, they are your “Livelihood”. LinkedIn provides great support for your career and business by increasing reputation though recommendations and experience badge. Moreover, your connection also works as your verification media for clients and employers that reduce risk for them. Often your reputation is more valuable than your marketability, as it can help you in marketing by itself.

3. LINKS with Peers, Like-minded or Target Professionals

LinkedIn is about building professional relationship with communities that you call as peers (friends and colleagues), who can help you in your personal and professional life as well. You can also get connected with people of similar profession to yours to share expertise and knowledge. That way you can also stay well informed about the industry trends and news. As a businessman, you can also use LinkedIn to connect with clients as well as suppliers and make your experience better by personally keeping them in touch.

4. LIAISONS at Personal Level with Other Companies

Sending unsolicited emails for the purpose of marketing has become tough these days. In my previous company we needed to contact a large company for the services we provided. Several mails to their corporate account proved to be useless. Then we started connecting individually with the employees of the corporation. And then one by one, we approached at personal level to find out the right person that can get our job done by mutually helping each other in the network. Finally, we were awarded with a small trial order. Maintaining liaison with your first time clients should be done this way, especially for highly expected clients.

5. LOBBYING & LURING People

If you are trying to create a group to support what you are trying to achieve or if you are trying to create a community by luring them to provide value for your goal, then Social Networking in LinkedIn can provide you greater result than any other platform. However, you should also be a good social person in online media as well. As a good social person in the real world, you can also mimic the behavior to provide support of others in the online media.

6. LEARNING through Professionals

“LinkedIn Answers” is one of my favorite utility in LinkedIn. Once you air a question, you can spread the question to your network and your network also forward the question to the people they think may have some answer. You end up getting answers from professionals related to the asked question. People enthusiastically answer your question, as the best answer earns a person experience badge, which dramatically increases reputation. Moreover, the quality of answer is very very good. If you haven't tried it, then you are really missing a great thing. For some questions, I have found very high quality answers that were not available in any forum or website. I was able to use LinkedIn as a media to gather information to take critical managerial decisions and resolve problems through the experience of others, who have faced similar problems and successfully came out of it. So, you are not doing the same error as others.

7. LEVERAGE TRUST and Reliability

If you are connected with your clients and gave your network the impression that you are extremely social, you have network that owes some portion of the reliability to you. You can establish yourself as one of the thought or solution leader by providing answers to the questions or solutions to the problems your network faces through your professionalism. This creates a personal bondage with your network and they rely on you when they think about purchasing the product or service you deal with. If you are dealing with services, then the best way to market yourself is by gaining reputation, trust, and reliability for the network. And LinkedIn can be used for that. This reputation gain can turn your network into clients or referrers/marketers for your business. Again, why not have your personal network that is full of your clients?

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Philanthropists are the greatest marketers

Issues on Sitemaps - Generating XML Sitemaps, Robots.txt Guidelines for Adding Sitemaps, Submitting Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Central

Shruti Chopra Said:

Can anyone tell me how to make a sitemap for our site.

Asif Anwar says:

I have prepared guidelines about making a simple XML sitemap which can be used by almost all the Search Engines, like: Google, Yahoo, and Live. Let’s have a look at the procedures:

Sitemap Generation

- Go here: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

- Put the domain name as http://www.shruti.com

- Choose the settings as: Change Frequency: Daily, Last Modification: Use server's response, Priority: 0.9 (or any priority you wish)

- And then press start and several versions of the sitemap will be generated.

- Download only the un-compressed XML Sitemap and save it.

Uploading the Sitemap

Upload the XML sitemap in this location http://www.shruti.com/sitemap.xml using any FTP Manager of file uploading software. I am a fan of FileZilla. You can also use that.

Please note that you are not bound to name sitemap this way: http://www.shruti.com/sitemap.xml. You can have different names and locations for your sitemap. i.e. http://www.shruti.com/4MonitoringGuys/sitemap/1.xml or http://www.shruti.com/4MonitoringGuys-sitemap.xml. In the example, I am suggesting that you can allow other people monitoring your site activities through Google Sitemap's Web Master Central. That way you don't have to give the access to your webmaster central account for them to monitor. They can be your webmaster, client, or outsourcing partner. As per now I haven't heard if Google Webmaster Tools can be shared. So, this tip can be helpful for you. But, for adding the sitemap wherever required, please mention the location. That should do the trick.

Robots.txt Modification for Including Sitemap

Now all the Giant Search Engines, i.e. Google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask follow guidelines from http:/www.sitemaps.org. As per the rules, you can also mention the location of the sitemap in your Robots.txt file in your server. It usually is located in the root directory and looks like this: http://www.shruti.com/robotos.txt. It's rather good if there is no text in the file or no Robots.txt file at all. But, now it is a good practice to have a Robots.txt file in your root directory to tell search engines where your Sitemap is located. A typical Robots.txt file's texts are:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

However, for mentioning where your sitemap is located, you have to mention another line in the Robots.txt file. e.g.

User-agent: *

Disallow:

Sitemap: http://www.shruti.com/sitemap.xml

As I mentioned earlier the location can vary. Please note that the Giant Search Engines allow you to have multiple Sitemap lines in Robotos.txt file, although the Sitemaps.org Protocol doesn't allow it. Anyway, it will not hurt you. Since, you may not be interested in smaller search engines that rarely bring you traffic.

Submitting Sitemap to Google Webmaster Central

- Go to: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview and log in with Gmail ID or the ID you have with Google Webmaster Central. If you don’t have one Just sign in with your Gmail account. You will end up in the Dashboard

- Add Site http://www.shruti.com by typing the URL beside the Add URL button

- After adding, you’ll see a Add and Verify link beside the site you added

- In the sitemap section click Add and provide the sitemap location, i.e. http://www.shruti.com/sitemap.xml or the one you have

- After adding the sitemap, in the "Verify?" section, click the Verify link

- From the Verify a Site Section, choose "Upload an HTML File", not "Add a Meta Tag" in Choosing Verification Method. Because the HTML file upload is hassle-free. But, for blogs the Meta Tags are useful, since you can’t upload any file in the root directory of most of the Blogs.

- Instruction on how to do it will pop up

- Copy the text of the file name like this: google9774db7d4de9921f.html

- Create a new text file in Desktop and rename it to the copied filename (e.g. google9774db7d4de9921f.html, but your's will be different)

- Upload the renamed HTML file with the sitemap key (i.e. google9774db7d4de9921f.html)

- After uploading, if you haven’t closed the window of Google Webmaster Central, then click Verify from that page. Otherwise, go back to the Dashboard and click “Verify” to go there.

- Go back to the Dashboard to see if there is a green tick mark under the "Verify?" section.

- Log in once a week to see the reports by Google from the webmaster Central to see the Scrawling Errors by Google,

- Change the contents of the sitemap.xml file whenever any page in the site is added or removed, if your site is a static one.

Philanthropists are the greatest marketers

Objective of Keyword Research and Analysis and Keyword Research Pricing Strategy Demo

Asif Anwar (Pathik) SEO/SEM/SMM - Toplinked.com - 1.9K+ LION wrote:

Background: This was a question aired in LinkedIn to my network.

Title: Pricing Strategy for Keyword Research & Analysis for Webcopy I have a customer who is willing to have the Keyword Research done for her site. Since, I have done most of the work in-house. I am not sure where to start for pricing. CAN ANYONE SUGGEST ME WHERE I CAN START FROM? Here are some of my chalked out plans:

Cost Involved:

· Wordtracker Subscription for 1 Week : $ 30.00

· Min. 4 Hours for finding competitors or related sites : $ 40.00 (@ $ 10 per hour by Search Engine Data Miner)

· Min. 4 Hours for Finding Relevant Keywords from : $ 80.00 - Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool - Overture’s Keywords Inventory - MSN’s AdCenter MS Excel Add-in - Wordtracker Subcription - MIVA Keyword Tool - 7 Search Keyword Suggestion Tools (@ $ 20 per hour by Keyword Researcher)

Min. 2 Hours for Sorting Keywords and : $ 60.00 Designing Content Architecture (@ $30 per hour by Keyword Interpreter) TOTAL COST OF KEYWORD RESEARCH : $ 210.00

Disclaimer: The prices are sample price, not the actual.

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SEO Expert (seo.exp at gmail dot com) wrote:

Hi Asif,

There is no need to give a break-up of hours and prices. I am not sure what research or how many keywords your client is looking for. Does she want keywords for every page of her website? If so, how many keywords and pages?

One need to just spend more time on initial pages and the subsequent pages need lesser time. You can provide a slab structure - for first 10 keywords/pages - xx $ 11-21 pages xx $ and so on...The more the pages the lesser the cost.

- SEO Expert.

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Asif Anwar (Pathik) SEO/SEM/SMM - Toplinked.com - 1.9K+ LION writes:

Dear SEO Expert,

My client has a site that is quite large in size with many information in the form of Blogs, Forum, Polls, Articles, News, etc. on current hot issues. Therefore, she would need the most comprehensive (quality) keyword research. She is interested in the most comprehensive Keyword Research, so that it can add value to future services, like:

· PPC Consultancy,

· Service/Product Content Architecture or Site Channel Plans (I mean the In-site Linking Strategy),

· Generating List of Blog Ideas,

· Meta Tag Rewriting Plan,

· SEO Content Targeting Plan,

· Link Building Contents Plan,

· Aid in identifying Link Partners,

· Aid in Planning for Future Contents

You can say that, these are the Objectives of Keyword Research and Analysis.

Thanks for glowing the bulb for the slab structure for Keyword Research. However, I had the pricing plan according to the number of pages. Since some of the work are routine and doesn’t incur cost per pages, I gave up the thought. But, you are right, because:

· The size of the site influence the intensity of work for the Keyword Research.

· The price according to the number of pages are more alluring ($ 8 - $ 11 per page against $ 210 for the total project).

· Again this allows a flexibility to the client to reduce their cost.

Philanthropists are the greatest marketers

Google Trends on Rich & Poor – News Say a lot about the Poor, but less is actually searched

I was going through some of the important keyword for one of our Non-profit foundations in the Grameen Family. And stumbled upon a Google Trend’s Analysis Report Graph. Usually, for a specific set of similar as well as opposite set of keywords, the Google Search Trend and Google News Reference trend are the same. But for the keywords Rich and Poor, I found differing results. Please have a look at the image below:

The stats tell us that the News Reference volume say a lot about the poor than the rich. However, the Search Volume suggest that very little amount of people actually search for the poor. Is it because:

* The news media feeds on the issue of the poor people to enrich their news?

* The search volume is contributed by rich people?

* Or the poor people still have limited access to search?

* Is it about the wealth seeking optimistic mentality of human not to look up for the keyword poor or poverty?

* Or the pessimistic approach of the news media to always publish bad news?

I am not sure. Even though the words are similar, the trend line resembles same behavior throughout years. But, my post is not for the grief about this fact. Because, I dream to eliminate the keyword Poor and Poverty out of this trend and let the Rich sustain there for long long time. --------

Philanthropists are the greatest marketers

People Search in LinkedIn – Hunting for Professionals with Specific Similarities

I have been in a hunt for SEO & SEM experts throughout the world. My objective was to connect with them through LinkedIn, to share expertise, and to discuss critical SEO & SEM issues. By the time I accelerated my hunting spree, I was banned by LinkedIn to add people by various relationships. That’s why I only could add them in my network with the “Other” relationship through mentioning their email addresses. That was a challenge, but it allowed me to explore many techniques for email hunting through the Search Engines. I have used many people or professionals hunting technique, which I would like to categorize into 2 categories, such as: Professionals/People Mining in LinkedIn and Email Mining for People or Professionals through Search Engines.

Professionals/People Mining in LinkedIn

If you want to find specific types of professionals, then the best way is the people search in LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a platform of over 15 Million users. All who are professionals and join LinkedIn to explore the professional relationship with others. Since career is also 1/3^rd of your life (8 hours per day), this also carries a greater importance in people. So, people like me use Facebook to get connected with friends and family that are 1/3^rd of my Personal Life and use LinkedIn for the next 1/3^rd. Well, for the rest 1/3^rd, we all live in the Dream Life :-) However, to search people or professionals in LinkedIn, you can also use Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Live, etc.

People Search in LinkedIn

LinkedIn People Search provides you the facility to search for similar professionals. Please note that in LinkedIn you can also search with double enclosed double quotes (“”) as well as Search Operators like: AND/OR, which can help you in narrow and strategic searching. I would encourage you to use it liberally.

However, for that you have to understand the keywords the Search Engine Marketers will be using to mention in their profile. There are various ranges of keywords like: Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, SEM, Internet Marketing, Online Marketing, Web Promotion, Pay Per Click, PPC, Search Engine Advertising, Online Advertising, Online Promotion, Social Media Optimization, SMO, Social Media Marketing, SMM, etc. To search for Search Engine Marketers, I personally prefer these keywords within braces: [SEO SEM] [“Search Engine” Optimization OR Marketing] [Internet Marketing] [Online Promotion] and [Online Marketing].

You can also search for specific industry with technical terms. e.g. If you search in the Information Technology & Services Industry, then using generic keyword like “Marketing” can logically lead you to Search or Internet Marketing professionals. Again, for the Marketing Industry, if you use the “Internet” or “Search Engine” that will also lead you to the same. However, you should manually evaluate each and every professional.

LinkedIn People Search in Google

LinkedIn only allows you to search and view people that are:

1^st Level: Connected with you,

2^nd Level: Connected with your connections,

3^rd Level: Connections that are connected with your 2^nd Level Connections.

However, there may exist more people than your network’s people search suggests. To overcome this barrier, you can use Google to search for the other people in LinkedIn. LinkedIn actually allows public profiles to be searched through the internet. You can set your LinkedIn Public Profile URL in this format “http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname”. These public profiles are searchable through the internet. Moreover, you can have access to the full profile by accessing the Public Profile. Again those who don’t change their Public Profile URL, LinkedIn use predefined Public Profile URL like “http://www.linkedin.com/pub/#/###/X##” (# = Digits, X = Letters).

So, to search for Search Marketing professionals, I have used the keyword:

[“Search Engine” OR Internet Marketing OR Optimization OR SEO OR SEM site: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ OR site:http://www.linkedin.com/in/]. This term will search within http://www.linkedin.com/in/ OR http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ sites (all the LinkedIn Public Profiles) looking for pages that contain “Search Engine”/Internet AND Marketing /Optimization/SEO/SEM. You have to individually visit each link that is generated through Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) and find ways how to add them.

Email Mining for People/Professionals

After you get the required or target people/professionals and if you are one of the unfortunate like me, the only way to get connected is through the email addresses of your desired connection. I have been using some of the below techniques to find out email addresses of various untraceable people:

Searching Name with Company Domain

Since the successful Search Engine Marketers promote their corporate identity, it helps to find them through their Corporate Domain Name. e.g. Mr. Jim Carrey obviously will have a company email address like jim.carrey@holliwud.com or jcarrey@holliwud.com. These two are the common forms of Corporate Email Addresses. i.e.

- FirstName.LastName@CompanyDomain.com

- FirstNameInitialLastName@CompanyDomain.com

So, the best way to Google Search for it is though this type of keyword: [“Jim Carrey” CompanyDomain] or [jcarrey CompanyDomain] or [“Jim Carrey” OR jcarrey CompanyDomain.com]

If Mr. Carrey is the CEO or any influential person in the company, then you will obviously find the reference to his/her email address mentioned in any webpage. Or at least get some reference on where to find it. Don’t give up your hope if you can’t find the email address in one try. Please also go on looking into the First 20, 30, or 40 results. I often found the email address directly mentioned in the Google Results in the first 40 results. Therefore, I really didn’t have to open any link in the Google Result Pages.

Searching Name with Popular Email Service Providers (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc.)

According to a recent statistics, the average age of LinkedIn users is more than Facebook. LinkedIn also has the major earning population. So, my guess is, they are the one of the first to get the email addresses like: FirstName.LastName@gmail.com, FirstName.LastName@yahoo.com, FirstNameInitialLastName@aol.com, FirstNameInitialLastName@hotmail.com. So, it always helps to use your guess power to make up the email address of the your target professional and then search for it in Google to verify the existence. Again, you may find them in other Social Media sites with a specific user id. e.g. Jim Carrey can use i_am_jim ID for his MySpace ID, chances are, he may also be using i_am_jim@yahoo.com or i_am_jim@hotmail.com.

Another fact is, people usually customize their LinkedIn URL by their Email ID when they can't find their name available for custom Public Profile URL. I am talking about the Public Profile URL in LinkedIn that looks like this: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mattcutts13. It is obvious that, if any other Matt Cutts (Not the Google Guy) may find the URL available. So, he wil try to think of alternative and choose the best URL name that represent him/her. The probability of using the Email ID as the name for the custom URL is more than 50% (True/False Situation). Therefore, when you see such custom URL, you can guess that the person may be using mattcutts13@yahoo.com, mattcutts13@hotmail.com, mattcutts13@gmail.com or mattcutts13@aol.com.

After doing your guesswork, Google the email address to see if the address exists anywhere. You can try by searching [mattcutts13@yahoo.com OR mattcutts13@hotmail.com OR mattcutts13@gmail.com OR mattcutts13@aol.com]. So, if any one of the email exists, then you've got your man.

Searching Name and Mailto Tags

Using mailto: as keyword for searching email addresses in Google, is one of the oldest techniques to find email addresses of related sites. I remember, before 2002, when you wanted to find email addresses of Diamond Earrings sites, then the best way was to search them trough this keyword: [Diamond Earrings mailto:]. This keyword search would allow you to have a lot of results from the related sites and also would show their email addresses. This was once the golden era of the Email Marketers. But, steadily when these marketers lost their reputation and became spammers, many people created some restrictions to disallow the spammers to collect their email addresses. So, now-a-days it is quite hard to find email addresses this way. But, there are always some pages that are not careful about mentioning email addresses. So the best ways to find these pages is through this keyword search in Google: [“FirstName LasteName” mailto:]. When any of the above doesn’t work, I try this search as the last weapon.

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Philanthropists are the greatest marketers

Tips on Customizing Settings for AdSense Earnings (Choosing Payment Option and Providing Tax Information) for Bangladesh or Non-US Countries

Hello,

I am Raz Ahmed. I have a blog site with Google Ads. When my account was $50, i got a letter with PIN. I has been send my PIN to Google.

Now my account reached $100. I don't enter TAX information yet and I don't know which payment option will be better for me. I have found you by searching on Google as a AdSense user in Bangladesh. I am really so happy to found you coz you are not an AdSense user but also E-Marketing & SEO Specialist.

Please help me to fill up appropriate information in Google AdSense,

1) I have a free Blog site as like sample.blogspot.com

2) Which TAX field will have to select?

3) Which payment option should I select to get paid? (I don't want to lose my $).

I am not confused but I need to confirm. So please help me.

Thanks.

Asif Anwar's reply:

Hi Raz Vai, Thanks for the mail. Google Adsense earnings are subject to income tax in the USA. Therefore, it is obvious that the US Government will deduct the tax amount from your AdSense earnings. Moreover, getting the money at your hand may also cost you some money as the payment will be done through proper banking channels. Anyway, this will not be a heavy burden of cost. However, please be aware that you will not get the round figure $100 at your hand. If you have an account with the remittance-friendly banks like BRAC Bank, AB Bank, Dutch-Bangla Bank, then the best choice would be Bank Cheques (that's how we spell it here :-). But, be sure that the Name in the Google's Check is same as your name with the Bank Account. Since Google will send you only account-payee Cheque, it's always wise to be careful with your name. Check the name you provided in Google AdSense. If you have provided your company name and don't have an account with the name, then I would advise you to rename it into your name. So, if your bank account name and name in the cheque by Google is different, then there is chance that you may never get it. But, this option will cost you some money. Anyway, there is no other hassle-free option.

Chose "Check - Standard Delivery" not the "Check - Secured Express Delivery ( $28.00 Processing Fee )" for the moment in the AdSense Payment Details Sec