The responses to the beginning of a week, i.e Monday are universal and identical irrespective of culture, creed or race. These include sullen, discouraged and grumpy behavior and in extreme cases may also lead to diurnal depression commonly known as ‘Monday Blues’. To ward off this gloomy strain and influence that Monday drags along with it, we have come up with a cure to combat the Monday Blue Syndrome. This effective cure is the after work ‘Monday Movie’. Note that the cure works best when accompanied by pizzas, burgers, popcorns and delicacies of other kinds. Yes, it is a great way to terminate the germs of stress and vapidity which gradually kill the motivation, zest and energy in an individual during the course of the week. Therefore, at our company, CueBlocks, we decided to give this innovative cure a chance and to our delight, it has not only worked exceedingly well but also made all of us look forward to Mondays, which have now ceased to be mundane and monstrous.

The movie is screened at 5:30 pm, half an hour before the office gets over, and goes on till 7:30 or 8:00 and is selected unanimously. One can imagine the success of this small indulgence, when it can make all of us stay longer happily at the office, without being irate!

Till now three comedy movies have been screened Khosla ka Ghosla, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and Bheja Fry, and the result, well, the dispirited symptoms have now given way to increased laughter, interactions, discussions (about subjects apart from the movies also) and a general sense of commonality. We also watched, ‘The Secret’ a highly inspiring film that motivates to lead life in a bigger, better and a more beautiful way. The movie really touched the chords of everyone’s heart and encouraged us to realize our dreams and achieve our goals. The movie turned out to be a life lesson rather than just an inspiration. It helped us to actually incorporate ‘The Secret’ of living life to the fullest into our attitude.

It is very significant that a workplace gives you more than just work. It is important that it teaches, influences and shapes your way of life. You know that a company is evolving when its employees also share moments apart from work!

Hence, the cure does work and eventually we aim at completely eradicating the disease of melancholy Monday and maintain an active consistency through out the week. As our credo is ‘All can only end well if it begins well’.

New information in the article:

1. The 3 philosophies behind Google ranking:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally. (according to Amit, it’s their “no query left behind” principle)
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

2. …

Reminder in the post:

From Google’s Official Blog:

The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages. I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc).

Looking forward to the “followup post!”

Described as the “Coach behind Ireland’s Celtic Tiger” - Kevin Kelly is one of Europe’s and Asia’s leading authorities on motivation, entrepreneurship, leadership, communication, and personal excellence. Kevin Kelly is Europe and Asia’s leading authority on entrepreneurial thinking, leadership and motivation.You can read more about Kevin Kelly at - www.KevinKellyUnlimited.com

Paypal Fee: For withdrawal amounts of more than 7,000 Rupees are free. For withdrawal amounts of less then 7,000 Rupees, Paypal charges a fee of 50 Rupees.

Paypal has partnered with almost all the major bank in India, so this immensely increases the reach and utility of this new option. These banks include: State Bank of India , Bank of India, Canara Bank, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, ING VYSYA Bank, UTI Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, HSBC and Citibank.

Some days back, Paypal had announced another exciting facility - allowing users to withdraw funds from their Paypal accounts to their Visa credit cards as well.

You can read more about these features by visiting the following links:

• Paypal - Indian Bank Account Withdrawal
• Paypal - Transfer to Visa Credit Card

A perfect Diwali Gift from Paypal to Indian companies, freelancers and entrepreneurs!

Content Management systems were not designed for Search Engines. The objective was to allows the site owner to edit his website easily (usually just the content and images). The content is stored in a database and the webpage is generated on the fly when a user requests for one.

Why CMS became search engine un-friendly?

The restrictive approach caused a lot of problems. From dynamic urls that contained special characters and no keywords to common meta tags for all pages, the content management systems became more of a roadblock than a help.

Search Engine Friendly CMS

Today, most Content Management Systems have improved drastically. They are user AND Search Engine friendly. The open source CMSs had much more support and came through faster. However, many implementors still have trouble setting up the CMS is a search engine friendly way. Its very important to ensure that your CMS has all the required plugins/contributions installed to make it search engine friendly. There are lots of content management systems available today. But you need to look for one that:

1. has valid and clean HTML
2. maximum flexibility
3. allows you to customize it
4. can be integrated with other applications
5. is modular
6. gives you freedom over the pagenames
7. is tested for all browsers

This will be a good start.

Search Engine Optimized is More Than Just Search Engine Friendly

Don’t confuse search engine optimized with search engine friendly. While a Search Engine friendly CMS may help you get indexed, it may not help you get ranked well. In order to rank well, you need to ensure that you are catering to the needs of your end user first.

And it all starts with a keyword search.

With the world catching up, is your website mobile friendly? Its time to make your moves fast!

Google, who gave “search” a new synonym, launched Google 411, a free directory enquiry service today.

All you need to do is, dial 1-800-GOOG-411, speak out the location and the name of the business and Google gives you a list of businesses ready to be dialed!

Here’s the YouTube video:

(Source: vnunet.com)

The blogosphere has been growing at a very fast pace over the past couple of years. As of September 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 106 million blogs.

There are a several important reasons why you should consider having an active Corporate blog as a part of your Online Marketing Strategy. Some of the prominent reasons are listed below.

a. Blogging helps tremendously in SEO: When you put up a post on your blog, you end up creating a separate webpage on your website, which becomes a good candidate for ranking for some keywords. So over a period of time, as you become more and more active on the blog, you end up creating a lot of webpages on your site with good content, which can possibly rank high for some keywords.

Each well written blog post is a candidate for ranking in search engines, over time. So blog posts, with good content, can get you good rankings in search engines and thereby drive traffic to your site.

b. Content Delivery Mechanism: Blogs use a special delivery mechanism to push the content to the viewers. This is called RSS or XML. As a user, there are a few ways of reading or keeping yourself updated on your favorite blogs. One way is to go to the blog and read the content there - this is the typical method that most of the people follow. The second is that you subscribe to the “feed” of that blog and get the blog delivered to your computer / online account.

How do you do this?

For this you first require a Feed Reader a.k.a. Feed Aggregator. There are plenty of them available for free. Latest versions of browsers like Opera, Firefox etc. also come inbuilt with feed readers now). Once you install these on your computer or subscribe to the web based feed readers, you can subscribe to your favorite blogs and get their latest posts, without having to visit these blog sites every day. Something similar to downloading emails on your email client.

A lot of times you might not be able to visit your favorite sites, just because you just don’t get the time. But if you are subscribed to their RSS feeds or blog feeds (if they provide them), then you can come to know about any additions on these blogs automatically, without having to visit these sites. This saves me tons of time.

More and more people are now using these feed readers to get updated. You can subscribe to the Feeds offered by Cue Blog by clicking on the different feed options given on the right navigation side of our blog.

So anytime you have a new blog post on your corporate blog, announcing a new product, or a new offering, or a new discount etc. you don’t have to worry about missing out on letting the people know. The moment you put up a post on your blog, all the people who are subscribed to your blog’s RSS feed, would come to know instantly about it.

If your blog does not offer different feed options, you are missing out on very important delivery mechanism which can make a big difference in your blog’s visibility.

c. Listing in Specialized Search Engines: Apart from Google, Yahoo and Live (now called Live.com), a lot of other search engines are gaining in popularity. These are not general search engines like the above 3, but these deal only with blogs or RSS enabled sites/content only. Examples include:

• Technorati
• Bloglines
• Sphere
• IceRocket
• Blogscope
• Google Blogsearch

So if you DO NOT have a blog or a RSS enabled section on your website, your site CANNOT become part of these search engines and you will be devoid of the traffic potential of these search engines.

The moment you have a blog and it is set up right, these search engine index your blog and announce to the rest of the world about the posts on your blog, whenever people are searching for related keywords.

d. Content Flux: Blogs allow you to add content to your site in a much faster method. Usually websites have new content added only at different intervals - when a new product or article is getting added, or some new service is being introduced etc. So unless you have a strong content writing plan, your site does not see a lot of content based pages getting added to the site. So the main site’s content addition, in a way, becomes a formal and slow affair.

In a blog however, you can put up content related to any of the topics which you like. This increases the content flux on your website - which is a good sign for Search Engines.

So when you become active on your blog, you are adding more and more content rich text to your site. Sometimes there could be blog posts which are not very content rich and could only be of 2 to 3 lines (which is fine as long as they are meaningful) - but these too would help you in some way.

e. Branding: When you have an active blog, your prospective customers are also influenced in a positive manner. They can see your thought process, make a connection with the company and thereby build more trust with that company. It helps tremendously in branding.

f. Linking: An active blog gets linked from other blogs very openly. The blogsphere is very open in linking to each other (this is not very common in typical websites). So you increase your chances of getting inbound links, once you make your blog active.

To get the maximum benefit of a blog, it is imperative to have it installed in one of the directories of your website – eg. Yourdomain.com/blog.

Since the blog is residing on the main site and “not” on any other third party site like typepad or blogger etc. these links that will point to our blog, would eventually benefit the complete website. So the benefits trickle down to other sections of the site as well.

# Getting started with blogging: This is perhaps the first and most critical step. One shouldn’t get caught up in what to blog and what not - and aim at making the perfect blog posting at all times. Of course you will follow some general guidelines for blogging, but beyond that it is commonly said in blogging that - Anyone who can write an email can blog!

# Promote your Blog: You should also have your blog URL mentioned on your business cards, print material, company letter pad, email signatures etc. so that it gets good visibility as well.

CueBlocks offers extensive custom blog design and blog makeover services. Contact us now to get a custom blog design for your website. We provide active blogging consulting and advice as well.

Part 1 talks about “nofollow” tag and its origin while the Part 2 talks about Google’s new policies of using it.
In my post earlier about Google banning paid links in July, I’d shared similar thoughts on paid links.

I agree that humans should be informed if the product review is paid or not, if the promotion of the third party is being done because you’ve been paid to do it or because you really are recommending it.

But I do feel Google’s going a little overboard with this. Below is what I copied into Jennifer’s comment box as well:

Webmasters have been buying and selling links before Google was even born. It was the very exchange of links ( I’m surprised it was assumed all links were “unpaid for” links when PageRank was invented), including the buying and selling of links that resulted in an algo that is treating links as a voting mechanism. After Google, reciprocal linking became even more aggressive because webmasters realized how important these links were to Google. Soon, reciprocal linking changed to paid links and three-way linking, all methods of link bargaining for webmasters targeting Google rankings. And it worked. I’m sure it still works and thats why now Google wants paid links to be punished - but how exactly will this stop webmasters from running after the rankings. And really, its about rankings, not PR. There are many websites out there with excellent PageRank and no rankings.

There are rarely such cases who only buy links for PR - everyone wants traffic - the whole objective of wanting to rank on Google is to get traffic. Then when a website is getting traffic from another source, why will it not want to? If a PR 6 website is giving a text link for $50 on its homepage, and has some xxxxxx v/m, why should that website not charge. A usability study shows that a text link gets more the click-throughs than an image ad. Then why should ads be just converted to images?

Those who really do it only for PR and not traffic, will figure out a way to beat this too. Many of the genuine cases will suffer (ok, I posted “only genuine cases will suffer” in the comment - but sense has prevailed :)).

An article on Smashing Magazine, lists the 10 usability mistakes that you should avoid. Its an excellent article with examples of some of the popular websites that make these mistakes.

Here’s the summary of the usability mistakes listed in the SmashingMagazine article:

1. Hidden login link - Many websites forget how important it is to have the login link as prominently placed and the “Sign up” link.
2. Content in Pop-ups - Why would you want to do that, really?
3. Dragging instead of vertical scroll - This is debatable
4. Invisible links - Ok, a lot of SEO companies do that. But really, its not required. If you have links, just let the links show!
5. Visual Noise - There is a thing called too much information.
6. Dead End - Have your QA team check everything. And if some specific instructions are required in order to use the website, make sure they are displayed clearly for the user!
7. Overlapping of content blocks - Again, make sure you check your site in all browsers and all for scripts. Its no fun to have your navigation (that opens on mouseover) stuck under the main image
8. Dynamic Navigation - Its good to have an intuitive navigation. If you’re going to introduce something new, make sure you give your users some information on how its going to work
9. Drop down menus - No fun if they disappear by the time you bring your mouse over the sub-navigation!
10. Blinking Images - Spare your users the animated ads and blinking images. They may be fun for sometime, but they are very irritating when you are trying to read the contents of the page!

Mobile blogging is really just blogging using a mobile device. If you can send an email through your mobile device/ phone, you can do moblogging!

David Davies has a nice post on moblogging, the how-to-guide.

While search engine rankings may seem important, and I am not saying they are not, what matters more is how much traffic you are getting. Of course, you’re not going to see traffic if you’re not ranking well.

But, its not necessary that you see good traffic on your website if you are ranking well for a few keywords.

Keyword popularity is the key factor here. The end objective of an online marketing plan should not be to rank well on Google or Yahoo or MSN. The objective should be to bring as many qualified visitors to the website as possible. Good search engine rankings should be one of the means of bringing the traffic, not the end objective.

Long long time ago (Year 2005 is a long time ago when counting web years), we wrote an article on Web Accessibility and Why it Matters. It covers simple steps of making the site accessible and the reasons why we should do so.

In an attempt to impress Search Engines, many webmasters end up focusing only on making the site search engine friendly and not user-friendly.

A well designed and accessible website takes care of search engines and humans alike!

Then why not add proper alt text to images, allows users to operate the website with a keyboard alone, give proper headings, use informative anchor texts and look for image map alternatives?

The problem is that usually website owners don’t know about these requirements and the companies they hire don’t inform them. We need web development and design companies to be more responsible and the website owners to be more informed.

Have a website that needs to be made Web Accessible? Contact us now!