Archive for the ‘General’ Category

My Cue Blocks Experience – Kate

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

KateAIESEC appeared as the first line when googled “international internship”. It was the first time I heard about this organization. As I found out later, it’s huge. But I didn’t expect, that I can find anything for my specialization (graphic design). And I applied for each position, which had something to do with art and design (teaching disabled children, illustration, newspaper design, packaging…and, of course, web design). Surprisingly I had some options to choose from. Cue Blocks was one of them, and I made my choice, right choice (we never know, but I believe, that it was the right choice:)).

I was so unsure about everything, so unconfident and nervous about going India and, most of all, starting to work (it was my first experience of working as a designer). My duties seemed so vague to me, I knew nothing about web design.

Almost 3 months have gone since then. As Pancham said on my first day, 3 months felt like 3 weeks. And he was so right! I always think, that everything is just starting, but it’s not. It started with birth and  it will slip away, if I don’t seize the moment.. It’s one of the things, that I became more assured about this summer. Cue Team

What astonished me about Cue Blocks team was professionalism. I heard interns from other companies complaining about “Indian stretchable time”, but in Cue Blocks tomorrow means tomorrow:) Everyone was extremely friendly. I really appreciate, that people wanted us (me and Melih) to feel comfortable and spoke English, when we were around (especially for the first month:))

I’m very grateful to Pancham, Avneet and Sarthak for giving me this chance, for guiding me through, for creating such a nice atmosphere. I’ve never seen people, who distinguish “being friendly” and “being professional” so clearly (I mean it’s not a surprise, because I’ve never worked in an office before. But I’m glad, that my first bosses showed me this attitude).

CB_souvenirAs always, passing a milestone, I think, that I could have done more, learned more. But now, looking back, I feel enriched. The blocks of information and experience are filling up the gaps in my  head. One by one they are falling down. Cue Blocks made me more magnetic for particular sort of  these blocks. I’m hungry for new knowledge, charged for this school year. Now I see better than ever, that school can’t give me as much I as need. This internship clarified my further path.

Elisha, my TN manager promised “life changing experience”, and Cue Blocks kept the promise.

Kate

Cue Blocks is hiring!

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

CueBlocks is expanding and we are excited to have new team members join us soon. Currently we have 12 job openings in the following areas:

  • Web Developers: PHP/ MySQL, Magento, Ruby on Rails,  OsCommerce (Open Positions – 4)
  • Iphone/ Android Developers (Open Positions – 2)
  • Copywriters (Open Positions – 2)
  • Social Media Marketers (Open Positions – 2)
  • PPC & Analytics (Open Positions – 2)

For more information about the latest career job openings, visit http://www.cueblocks.com/careers.php

If you are interested to be part of CueBlocks and have a passion for any of the above areas, please send your latest CV and Motivation/Cover letter to careers@cueblocks.com

Please make sure that the email accompanying the CV and cover letter should clearly highlight which position you are interested in applying.

Bing-Hoo to Search!!!

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is expected to power Yahoo’s search site (both paid and organic search); it is already in the testing mode. Yahoo has confirmed that they have started with the in-house testing for Bing powered search results. An excerpt from a news feature reads:

“Though much of our testing is already happening offline, this month we’ll also test the delivery of organic and paid search results provided by Microsoft on live Yahoo! traffic.”

So users will soon be able to see Bing powered results on Yahoo Search! The transition is expected to happen anytime over the next couple of days or may be months. The powered results are expected to influence competition among search engines vying to provide users with precise, relevant and accurate results. Is Google listening or can continue to enjoy the biggest slice of the search pie (read users). Hmmm.. this only time will tell.

Yahoo holds a large chunk of advertisers – undoubtedly a win-win situation for the Bing-Yahoo transition! Wherein Microsoft will be taking charge of algorithmic search serving platform & search advertising marketplace for both the companies. The search alliance covers algo search (web, image and video), search advertising and contextual advertising. None of the aspects of display advertising, vertical searches or site searches, such as queries on Flickr or Yahoo! News will be included in this alliance reports Yahoo Transition FAQ’s

Visit http://www.clickz.com/3640998 for more about the yahoo-Bing transition buzz or check out http://advertising.yahoo.com/transition/en_US/managed_faqs if the buzz has sparked questions in your mind!

Social Media Marketing – The Undeniable Benefits

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Social Media Marketing is one of the most effective tools for boosting your online business and making a presence for it in the web world. Before we move forward, let’s look at what Social Media actually is, and then we get to how it can work wonders for you. Social Media Marketing is a platform of web content created by people through real communications on various social networking websites and by gathering information from people all over the world.

But is making a profile on LinkedIn enough? Or Will making a business page on Facebook or MySpace solve the purpose?

The answer is a big NO! Because making a profile alone will not help, you have to jump into all the action and make some serious communication efforts. You have to be as active on your business profile as you would be on your own profile.

The perks of Social Media Marketing:

Social Media Marketing offers numerous benefits which provide the much deserved limelight to your online business. Let’s look at some of these perks:

1. Social Media Marketing can get huge amounts of free traffic to your website, which in turn results in increased visibility.

2. Through various social networking profiles, you can build a considerable fan base for your online products and services.

3. Most of the social networking websites like FaceBook, LinkedIn and MySpace offer the option of creating free accounts. Thus, using these websites generally proves to be very beneficial in terms of COST and BUDGET.

4. As you are communicating directly with people who share interests similar to your services/products, you can directly target a specific group of people who might be interested in what you have to offer.

5. Social Media Marketing helps in increasing the popularity of your website through various backlinks which leads to better search engine visibility.
6. As a result of User Generated Sites and Book Marking Sites, people can find your business online more easily than ever.

The most important factor in Social Media Marketing is to keep in touch with your user base and try to be as transparent as you can. Aside from Blogs, Video-Promotions and Photo-Sharing, start delving into micro-blogging services like Twitter & Plurk so that you are able to reach mobile users as well.

And last, but definitely not the least, BE PATIENT! :)

Have any queries, comments, suggestion or want your site to grow with Social Media Marketing? Contact us today!

Canonicalization – “A basic SEO tenet”

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

(Canoni-cali-zation) – Matt Cutts refers to it as the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.

We come across websites with both www and non www versions of its URLS.

  • www.yourwebsite.com
  • yourwebsite.com/
  • www.yourwebsite.com/index.html
  • yourwebsite.com/home.asp

Most people would consider these the same URL but technically, all of these are different.  Matt, in his post on SEO advice: URL canonicalization, explains that a web server could return completely different content for all the URLs listed above.

If you have duplicate content on multiple webpages of your site, this can cause problems for search engines – specifically in determining which URL should be shown in the  search results. Canonical URL comes to rescue in such a scenario:

•    Canonicalization becomes helpful as it takes the duplicate pages and uses a 301 re-direct to point all versions to a single, “canonical” version of the content or web page.

•    Google recommends that you pick a “canonical URL”as the preferred version of the page. You can indicate your preference to Google in a number of ways. Google recommends them all (if you don’t indicate a canonical URL, Google will identify what it thinks is the best version).

What to do to make sure Google picks up the URL that you want it to pick:

•    You can choose a preferred URL and use it consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/. Instead, pick the URL you prefer and always use that format for your internal links. If your site has duplicate content on multiple pages, there is a high possibility this could affect your search engine ranking results. For example – the link information could get diluted in a case where few incoming links may point to one version of the URL and few links to another.

•    Matt further adds that if you want your default URL to be http://www.example.com/. You can make your webserver in a way so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/. Doing this will help Google know which URL you prefer to be canonical. If you have a site that changes often, for example you have dynamic content on site, a blog, etc. then adding a 301 redirect can be very useful.

Using the URL removal tool to remove domain.com –

If you remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, you can end up removing your whole domain for six months. You need to do a reinclusion request if URL removal tool removes your entire domain when you actually only wanted to remove the www or non-www version of your domain. A reinclusion request refers to mentioning that you removed your entire domain by accident using the URL removal tool and that you’d like it reincluded.

For more information on 301 re-directs see http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-URL-canonicalization/

Google’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Google comes up with this useful compact guide that lists some of of the best practices that could benefit a website by improving site’s crawlability and indexing. Working on following areas of your website can bring about a tremendous change and improve the crawling and indexing stats.

Following is the summary of Google’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

1. Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of the website and SEO affects only organic search results, not paid or “sponsored” results.

2. Create unique, accurate page titles.

Good practices for page title tags:

(a) Accurately describe the page’s content
(b) Create unique title tags for each page
(c) Use brief, explanatory titles

3. Make use of the “description” meta tag

Good practices for description meta tags:

(a) Accurately summarize the page’s content
(b) Use unique descriptions for each page

4. Improve the structure of your URLs.

Good practices for URL structure:

(a) Use words in URLs
(b) Create a simple directory structure
(c) Provide one version of a URL to reach a document

5. Make your site easier to navigate.

Good practices for site navigation:

(a) Create a naturally flowing hierarchy
(b) Use mostly text for navigation
(c) Use “breadcrumb” navigation
(d) Put an HTML sitemap page on your site, and use an XML Sitemap file
(e) Consider what happens when a user removes part of your URL
(f) Have a useful 404 page

6. Offer quality content and services.

Good practices for content:

(a) Write easy-to-read text
(b) Stay organized around the topic
(c) Use relevant language
(d) Create fresh, unique content
(e) Offer exclusive content or services
(d) Create content primarily for your users, not search engines

7. Write better anchor text.

Good practices for anchor text:

(a) Choose descriptive text
(b) Write concise text
(c) Format links so they’re easy to spot
(d) Think about anchor text for internal links too

8. Use heading tags appropriately

Good practices for heading tags:

(a) Imagine you’re writing an outline
(b) Use headings sparingly across the page

9. Optimize your use of images

Good practices for images:

(a) Use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text
(b) Supply alt text when using images as links
(c) Store images in a directory of their own
(d) Use commonly supported filetypes

10. Make effective use of robots.txt

Good practices for robots.txt:

(a) Use more secure methods for sensitive content

11. Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links

12. Promote your website in the right ways

Good practices for promoting your website:

(a) Blog about new content or services
(b) Don’t forget about offline promotion
(c) Know about social media sites
(d) Add your business to Google’s Local Business Center
(e) Reach out to those in your site’s related community

13. Make use of free webmaster tools

14. Take advantage of web analytics services

Google also offers helpful resources for the webmasters with its help forum, central blog, tools , guidelines etc. Check out the complete Google’s SEO Starter Guide.

New Website Design launched by Cue Blocks Technologies

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Cue Blocks Technologies a Web Design, Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing firm, recently unveiled its new and improved website. The newly designed website can be reached at – http://www.CueBlocks.com

Announcing the launch of the website, Pancham Prashar, President Sales & Marketing said, “Our new website design is more indicative of the current range of services we offer to our clients. Since we mostly do business with companies based abroad, primarily in Unites States, Ireland and United Kingdom, we wanted to make good use of pictures on our new site and allow people to virtually see our team here. I feel we have manged to accomplish that fairly well in the new design”.

The Web Design, Development and Internet Marketing (SEM and SMM) Company has its main office in Chandigarh, India and deals with clients from different corners of the world. The company has over 25 team members who have a collective experience of over 2000 Internet Marketing and Web Designing projects.

Sarthak Aggarwal, President Products and Services, who coordinated the website design effort with his team, further added, “Our focus in the new design has been simplicity as well as uniqueness of design. Usually people have very little attention span while they are browsing the web – and the initial few seconds are vital. We wanted to showcase the various aspects of CueBlocks in such a manner that they catch attention early on. We have text intensive pages as well inside in the form of articles, service pages and blog posts. In addition, new features and sections will keep getting added to the site as we move along”.

Currently touring United States for business development, Pancham and Sarthak indicated that CueBlocks has extensive plans of expanding its client base in the States.

The site is live at – http://www.CueBlocks.com

About CueBlocks Technologies:

CueBlocks Technologies is a Web Development and Online Marketing firm – specializing in Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing. Formed in 2005, the company offers its services to a global audience and has a team of over 25 designing, programming and Internet Marketing specialists. CueBlocks is a member of Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

Contact Information:

Pancham Prashar
Cue Blocks Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
SCO 822, 2nd Floor,
NAC ManiMajra
Chandigarh – 160101
India
US Toll Free – 1-866-
Email: sales@cueblocks.com
Site: http://www.cueblocks.com
Blog: http://www.cueblocks.com/blog
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