Friday, June 29, 2007
10 Things to Remember in Web Marketing
So you have your website set up and you’re ready to go. Before giving the greenlight to your webmaster to launch the site, make sure that you go over these Top 10 Things to Remember in Web Marketing:
Ability to Adapt - No matter how great you think your website is, it’s what your customers think about your site that matter the most. So if that great idea you had just doesn’t pan out the way you think it should be or if there’s some new technology that your site can take advantage of, don’t be too stubborn to adapt.
Make Sure your Overall Business Works - For most businesses, the website is another source of traffic to direct to your business. So make sure that your business is running like clockwork when delivering your service or products to your customers.
Establish Team Roles - Make sure your team knows their roles, so that if any part of the site is not working, you know exactly who to turn to in order to get things running smoothly as soon as possible.
Properly SEO the Site - As soon as your site goes live, it will beging to be indexed by all the search engines. You want to make sure that you provide the right title, description and keywords for each page of your site so that when people find your links in the search results, you have made sure to provide the most informative listing possible.
Be able to Update your Site Quickly - If you’re sold out of something, you better be sure to indicate that on your site or you’re going to be left with a lot of customers leaving with a bad taste in their mouth. The same point applies to any part of your site whether it be the correct email address or the right pricing points.
Think through your Customers Eyes - Everyone has been a customer at some point and we all know what we like and what we don’t when we arrive at someone’s business or website. Take time to look at your site as a customer and try your best to address what you don’t like!
Get Ready To Hustle - Traffics not going to come to your door with a box of chocolates and some flowers. You’re going to have to get out there and promote your site like no other. Get your checklist of forums, blogs, web sites and other hot spots ready to start getting traffic on a daily basis.
Important Metrics are being Measured - There’s no more emptier feeling in marketing than getting all the traffic in the world, but not knowing where it’s coming from and how it’s converting. Spending Wisely is the most overlooked aspect of online marketing!
Remember your Mission Statement - Use your Mission Statement as your Guiding Light just in case you lose your way.
Remember to Plan Ahead - Let’s say you’ve followed all my advice and you’re getting loads of traffic to your site, do you have a plan to handle the extra traffic? Are you ready to streamline your product line? Do you know who to contact to upgrade your hosting package bandwidth? Do you have enough products to provide your customers?
Ability to Adapt - No matter how great you think your website is, it’s what your customers think about your site that matter the most. So if that great idea you had just doesn’t pan out the way you think it should be or if there’s some new technology that your site can take advantage of, don’t be too stubborn to adapt.
Make Sure your Overall Business Works - For most businesses, the website is another source of traffic to direct to your business. So make sure that your business is running like clockwork when delivering your service or products to your customers.
Establish Team Roles - Make sure your team knows their roles, so that if any part of the site is not working, you know exactly who to turn to in order to get things running smoothly as soon as possible.
Properly SEO the Site - As soon as your site goes live, it will beging to be indexed by all the search engines. You want to make sure that you provide the right title, description and keywords for each page of your site so that when people find your links in the search results, you have made sure to provide the most informative listing possible.
Be able to Update your Site Quickly - If you’re sold out of something, you better be sure to indicate that on your site or you’re going to be left with a lot of customers leaving with a bad taste in their mouth. The same point applies to any part of your site whether it be the correct email address or the right pricing points.
Think through your Customers Eyes - Everyone has been a customer at some point and we all know what we like and what we don’t when we arrive at someone’s business or website. Take time to look at your site as a customer and try your best to address what you don’t like!
Get Ready To Hustle - Traffics not going to come to your door with a box of chocolates and some flowers. You’re going to have to get out there and promote your site like no other. Get your checklist of forums, blogs, web sites and other hot spots ready to start getting traffic on a daily basis.
Important Metrics are being Measured - There’s no more emptier feeling in marketing than getting all the traffic in the world, but not knowing where it’s coming from and how it’s converting. Spending Wisely is the most overlooked aspect of online marketing!
Remember your Mission Statement - Use your Mission Statement as your Guiding Light just in case you lose your way.
Remember to Plan Ahead - Let’s say you’ve followed all my advice and you’re getting loads of traffic to your site, do you have a plan to handle the extra traffic? Are you ready to streamline your product line? Do you know who to contact to upgrade your hosting package bandwidth? Do you have enough products to provide your customers?
Friday, February 24, 2006
Code Snippets
If want to display any currency lilke this ---------------$22.10 instead of ----------- 22.1
Use this Code it display Dollar Symbol and 2 decimals
***************************************************************************************************************
'Create a var. named price that will be formatted as a currencyDim price as Double = 3.1Dim s as String 'create a strings = String.Format("{0:c}", price)
************************************************************************
Use this Code it display Dollar Symbol and 2 decimals
***************************************************************************************************************
'Create a var. named price that will be formatted as a currencyDim price as Double = 3.1Dim s as String 'create a strings = String.Format("{0:c}", price)
************************************************************************
Thursday, January 19, 2006
SEO Promises of GMR Web Team
What are the GMR Promises for developing Search Engine Optimized website?
- We are not going to have any throwaway web pages; we shall link all the WebPages in a logical sequence.
- We shall not link your webpage with any harmful websites or websites which are considered as spam, but we shall have the links of your webpage in certain businesses which we feel shall be value adding to your business.
- We shall not have any hidden text\links written anywhere in the webpage, but we do say that we will embed the text and keywords so that your webpage is recognized by Search engines in a fast way.
- We use our own algorithms to find the best keyword match once you give the phrases with which you want to appear in the search engines. We are not using any ready made tools to employ this, the tools and techniques we use vary with the latest news items posted by Yahoo, Google and MSN on search engine optimization.
- We do not promise you the first rank in any search engine, but we do promise that by having some home made SEO algorithms; we increase the visibility in the search engines to a very great extent.
- We will give you a flow map of your website that will show all the WebPages and their navigation in the website.
- We promise that any confidential matter you would be sharing with us will not be revealed to any third party apart from the members of GMR web team.
- We do a lot of research in order to show you on top, we shall require your cooperation and seek continuous maintenance with GMR web team so that latest trends of SEO shall be implemented. We also want to say at this point that SEO frameworks would be changing time and again. Big giants like Yahoo, Google and MSN continuously work on their algorithms to find the best website. So there will be no constant top position in any search engine if you stop having maintenance.
- Search Engine Optimization is a science of logic and no body can own any rights saying their algorithm is right or say others algorithm is wrong. It depends only on the perceiving capabilities of the search engine.
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Using Stored Procedures in VB.net
writing an insert statement
CREATE PROCEDURE sp_InsName
@FirstName varchar(20),
@LastName varchar(30)
AS
BEGIN
INSERT INTO Names(FirstName, LastName)values(@FirstName, @LastName)
END
GO
This doesnot return any values, if we need to call it in vb.net then
add key="GMR" value="server=localhost;database=databasename;uid =userid pwd =password;"
Public ObjCon As New SqlConnection()
Public Sub OpenApplicationConnection()
ObjCon.Close()
ObjCon.ConnectionString = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings("WebTeam")
ObjCon.Open()
End Sub
Public Function ExecuteQry(ByVal strsql As String) As Boolean
OpenApplicationConnection()
Dim cmdExecute As New SqlCommand(strsql, ObjCon)
cmdExecute.CommandText = strsql
cmdExecute.ExecuteNonQuery()
cmdExecute.Dispose()
End Function
OpenApplicationConnection()
strsql = "sp_InsName 'Abc', 'DEF'"
ExecuteQry(strsql)
CREATE PROCEDURE sp_InsName
@FirstName varchar(20),
@LastName varchar(30)
AS
BEGIN
INSERT INTO Names(FirstName, LastName)values(@FirstName, @LastName)
END
GO
This doesnot return any values, if we need to call it in vb.net then
add key="GMR" value="server=localhost;database=databasename;uid =userid pwd =password;"
Public ObjCon As New SqlConnection()
Public Sub OpenApplicationConnection()
ObjCon.Close()
ObjCon.ConnectionString = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings("WebTeam")
ObjCon.Open()
End Sub
Public Function ExecuteQry(ByVal strsql As String) As Boolean
OpenApplicationConnection()
Dim cmdExecute As New SqlCommand(strsql, ObjCon)
cmdExecute.CommandText = strsql
cmdExecute.ExecuteNonQuery()
cmdExecute.Dispose()
End Function
OpenApplicationConnection()
strsql = "sp_InsName 'Abc', 'DEF'"
ExecuteQry(strsql)
Friday, December 23, 2005
Developer Guidelines For SEO
SEO guidelines For Developers
• Do not pass more than 2 values from one page to other to generate any dynamic content.
• Never hold a URL with session id. Most of the search engine spiders do not cache dynamic URLs with session Ids.
• As Search engines do not access the pages created dynamically, the only way to have the spiders observe the dynamic page is by giving static links in the table of contents page. Search spider stops if there is a ‘?’ in the link. Ex: www.mysite.com/anycategory?cat=1 then the value of cat keeps on changing dynamically. For this create a static html page and in the table of contents write all the html tags along with the product description.
• Write the individual dynamic page URL’s in robots.txt and then submit to search engine.
• XQASP offers a product that will automatically remove the query strings from your .asp pages and replace them with "/" marks. For more details click on the following URL: http://xde.net/xq/tool.xqasp-deep-web/qx/index.htm
• We can increase the chances of indexing individual products or product categories by including good descriptions and descriptive links of a product on a static table of contents page.
• Avoid paging as far as possible, as Spider searches for items that are available on the first page. If paging is unavoidable, show the list of all page numbers that are available in the form of links. Ex: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Displaying 6 out of 9
• Remove any unused variable declarations in the code
• While retrieving any image from the database, do retrieve its altText and display it dynamically.
• Have some static content on top of the dynamic page so that robot can understand what the products are all about.
• Use Hyperlink buttons as far as possible; only use link buttons if there is any server side scripting.
• Write comments in aspx page if any grid controls or server controls are used, indicating why the grid/Control is placed? What are the type of products that are displayed in the grid?
• Shopping carts are displayed in the search engine only if the special features of the products are highlighted. Common items require a large amount of advertising; thus, see to it that special features of the product are displayed in a more logical way. Make any special feature bold in nature with size varied from rest of the content.
• Avoid any error pages by giving a custom error page. Search engine black lists a website if there is a yellow screen indicating an error.
• Navigation from one page to other should be logical. Do not place any irrelevant pictures in any display pages.
• Writing the developer comments in aspx pages is advantageous but not mandatory.
• Avoid spam data and keep cleaning the junk data from the database.
• Modify at least two products in a day, like provide a sequence to display today’s Featured product or this week special so that website look gets refreshed when there is a search engine robot. This creates a better rank.
• Do not display more than 3 advertisements in a single products page.
• Notify to the customer that flash and images make the website load slowly, to avoid this make the images small in size and if needed more in number to have a better ranking.
• Place the image with its product name so that images are also ranked well in the search engine.
• Have the Meta tags and content load dynamically, so that owner will have full control on the website and the keywords that needs to be used.
• Do not pass more than 2 values from one page to other to generate any dynamic content.
• Never hold a URL with session id. Most of the search engine spiders do not cache dynamic URLs with session Ids.
• As Search engines do not access the pages created dynamically, the only way to have the spiders observe the dynamic page is by giving static links in the table of contents page. Search spider stops if there is a ‘?’ in the link. Ex: www.mysite.com/anycategory?cat=1 then the value of cat keeps on changing dynamically. For this create a static html page and in the table of contents write all the html tags along with the product description.
• Write the individual dynamic page URL’s in robots.txt and then submit to search engine.
• XQASP offers a product that will automatically remove the query strings from your .asp pages and replace them with "/" marks. For more details click on the following URL: http://xde.net/xq/tool.xqasp-deep-web/qx/index.htm
• We can increase the chances of indexing individual products or product categories by including good descriptions and descriptive links of a product on a static table of contents page.
• Avoid paging as far as possible, as Spider searches for items that are available on the first page. If paging is unavoidable, show the list of all page numbers that are available in the form of links. Ex: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Displaying 6 out of 9
• Remove any unused variable declarations in the code
• While retrieving any image from the database, do retrieve its altText and display it dynamically.
• Have some static content on top of the dynamic page so that robot can understand what the products are all about.
• Use Hyperlink buttons as far as possible; only use link buttons if there is any server side scripting.
• Write comments in aspx page if any grid controls or server controls are used, indicating why the grid/Control is placed? What are the type of products that are displayed in the grid?
• Shopping carts are displayed in the search engine only if the special features of the products are highlighted. Common items require a large amount of advertising; thus, see to it that special features of the product are displayed in a more logical way. Make any special feature bold in nature with size varied from rest of the content.
• Avoid any error pages by giving a custom error page. Search engine black lists a website if there is a yellow screen indicating an error.
• Navigation from one page to other should be logical. Do not place any irrelevant pictures in any display pages.
• Writing the developer comments in aspx pages is advantageous but not mandatory.
• Avoid spam data and keep cleaning the junk data from the database.
• Modify at least two products in a day, like provide a sequence to display today’s Featured product or this week special so that website look gets refreshed when there is a search engine robot. This creates a better rank.
• Do not display more than 3 advertisements in a single products page.
• Notify to the customer that flash and images make the website load slowly, to avoid this make the images small in size and if needed more in number to have a better ranking.
• Place the image with its product name so that images are also ranked well in the search engine.
• Have the Meta tags and content load dynamically, so that owner will have full control on the website and the keywords that needs to be used.
SEO guidelines for designers
Designer Guidelines for a Better Design
• Every image name should reveal the image description. Ex: Company Logo should be named as “your company name.gif/jpg” Avoid using logo.jpg or img.jpg. If company name has more than 1 word separate the company name using underscore. Ex: GMR web Team should be written as gmr_web_team_logo.gif
• While attaching an image into the design, there should be a div tag before the image and div id should have the main idea of what the image speaks. (if it is more than one word separate with underscore). Provide Alt text for each image attached to the design.
• If a new table is created then comment should be there at opening and closing tag indicating the table number.
Reason for having this: The comments would be attached to this tag line indicating the idea of the content placed in that particular table.
• Avoid unnecessary creation of tables
• Avoid using the same image names again and again. Ex: Do not use img1 and img2 or logo1,logo2.
• Title of the page should keep changing from page to page for a better search facility.
• Do not copy and paste the title. If done so take some time to change it.
• Google claims the most effective sizes for click-thrus/Advertisements as 326x280, 300x250 (inline rectangle), 160x600 (wide skyscraper).
• Google allows 3 ad units maximum on any one page of your site. Having Ads on every page result in more click-thrus.
• Delete any unnecessary commenting before uploading.
• Do not take the back up of any file in the same folder. This would result in page repetition. This is bad for SEO.
• Google/Yahoo prefers light colors for the website. MSN/Alta Vista do not consider the color seriously
• Avoid busy backgrounds that obscure the text, Black color text is the best color for spiders.
• Some spiders are programmed in such a way that 8 pixel fonts are seen as less important as 12 pixel fonts. Make the size of the content as 10 and heading contents as 12 to have a good crawl from the site.
• Bold text is more liked by the audience and crawler engines. If the size of the font increases 16 then there is a danger of search engine considering it as spam.
The emotions and concepts that you associate with specific colors may differ from other people's associations, but there are themes that run throughout each color. Hëre are some:
Red:
Positive: Sense of power, strength, action, passion, sexuality
Negative: Anger, forcefulness, impulsiveness, impatience, intimidation, conquest, violence and revenge
Yellow:
Positive: Caution, brightness, intelligence, joy, organization, Spring time
Negative: Criticism, laziness, or cynicism
Blue:
Positive: Tranquility, love, acceptance, patience, understanding, cooperation, comfort, loyalty and security
Negative: Fear, coldness, passivity and depression
Orange:
Positive: Steadfastness, courage, confidence, friendliness, and cheerfulness, warmth, excitement and energy
Negative: Ignorance, inferiority, sluggishness and superiority
• Every image name should reveal the image description. Ex: Company Logo should be named as “your company name.gif/jpg” Avoid using logo.jpg or img.jpg. If company name has more than 1 word separate the company name using underscore. Ex: GMR web Team should be written as gmr_web_team_logo.gif
• While attaching an image into the design, there should be a div tag before the image and div id should have the main idea of what the image speaks. (if it is more than one word separate with underscore). Provide Alt text for each image attached to the design.
• If a new table is created then comment should be there at opening and closing tag indicating the table number.
Reason for having this: The comments would be attached to this tag line indicating the idea of the content placed in that particular table.
• Avoid unnecessary creation of tables
• Avoid using the same image names again and again. Ex: Do not use img1 and img2 or logo1,logo2.
• Title of the page should keep changing from page to page for a better search facility.
• Do not copy and paste the title. If done so take some time to change it.
• Google claims the most effective sizes for click-thrus/Advertisements as 326x280, 300x250 (inline rectangle), 160x600 (wide skyscraper).
• Google allows 3 ad units maximum on any one page of your site. Having Ads on every page result in more click-thrus.
• Delete any unnecessary commenting before uploading.
• Do not take the back up of any file in the same folder. This would result in page repetition. This is bad for SEO.
• Google/Yahoo prefers light colors for the website. MSN/Alta Vista do not consider the color seriously
• Avoid busy backgrounds that obscure the text, Black color text is the best color for spiders.
• Some spiders are programmed in such a way that 8 pixel fonts are seen as less important as 12 pixel fonts. Make the size of the content as 10 and heading contents as 12 to have a good crawl from the site.
• Bold text is more liked by the audience and crawler engines. If the size of the font increases 16 then there is a danger of search engine considering it as spam.
The emotions and concepts that you associate with specific colors may differ from other people's associations, but there are themes that run throughout each color. Hëre are some:
Red:
Positive: Sense of power, strength, action, passion, sexuality
Negative: Anger, forcefulness, impulsiveness, impatience, intimidation, conquest, violence and revenge
Yellow:
Positive: Caution, brightness, intelligence, joy, organization, Spring time
Negative: Criticism, laziness, or cynicism
Blue:
Positive: Tranquility, love, acceptance, patience, understanding, cooperation, comfort, loyalty and security
Negative: Fear, coldness, passivity and depression
Orange:
Positive: Steadfastness, courage, confidence, friendliness, and cheerfulness, warmth, excitement and energy
Negative: Ignorance, inferiority, sluggishness and superiority
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Techniques to write RSS Feed
Definition of RSS feed
RSS is an abbreviation of Really Simple Syndication. According to Harvard it is a web content syndication format. This format is used for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites. It is written in Xtensified markup language (XML) to have an update of latest information on the website.
RSS feed can check for changes, if the changes are made then the changes are appropriately displayed in the area where this RSS feed is utilized.
Formats in RSS
There are three widely used RSS formats RSS 0.91,1.0 and 2.0 being the latest.
This is a case sensitive language, thus be careful with capital cased letters.
Step by Step procedure to create an RSS feed on the website
Before starting to write an RSS, we need to understand that there are several formats of RSS, we shall be formulating the steps taking RSS 2.0 format into consideration.
-
Channel is a component where mandatory and optional fields are declared.
-
Channel contains items in which each news item is drafted independently. Ex:
-
Step 1: There are certain mandatory fields and certain optional fields in writing RSS. Identify the mandatory RSS feed items
1. Title : This is how people refer the website from another website. This title should be same as the title of the page that the RSS is pointing.
2. Link: URL of the corresponding website
3. Description: Phrases or sentences that speaks about the website and summarizes the content. This should be opted to be same as the metatag content description for a better SEO. Ex:
Affordable Website for Small Business
Step 2: Identify the optional fields that are necessary in writing a good RSS
• Language: if the website is English or Spanish, this will tell to the person who is posting the rss feed about the language of the website. By knowing he can post all the similar language rss feeds at one place. Ex:
en-us
• Copyright: reveals the copyright notice of the owner Ex:
2005 gmr web team
• managingeditor: This will contain the email id of a person to whom the content belongs to. Ex:ajay@gmrwebteam.com
• webmaster: email address of a person responsible for any technical issues relating to the rss feed. ex:webmaster@example.com
• pubDate: The publication date of the content written on the website is declared. This automatically changes for every 24 hours. The date format is confined to RFC 822 specifications.To know more about that specifications click on the http://asg.web.cmu.edu/rfc/rfc822.html. Ex:
Tue, 10 Dec 2005 04:00:00 GMT
• lastbuilddate: This indicates the last date during which the content was changed or modified. Ex:
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 09:41:01 GMT
• category: It is a good practice to categorize the item that is written in rss feed. By doing this several items with different categories can be posted in a single rss feed. Ex:Newspapers
• docs: It is a link that points to the place where rss is written, so that a person who has posted this rss in his website has an idea of from where he has copied this content. Ex:http://www.gmrwebteam.com/xml/rss1.xml
• ttl: ttl is an abbreviation of time to live. This is written in terms of minutes that indicates how long a channel can be cached before refreshing from the source. Ex:120
• image: image has an url, title ,link, width and height. These are given to see an image displayed along with the rss feed. Ex:http://www.gmrwebteam.com/images/image1.jpg
• skipHours: this is used to have a positive effect on the bandwidth requirments of weblog. This will hint the aggregators the hours they can miss without refreshing. Ex: that says to skip hours from 6 to 11
6
7
8
9
10
11
• skipdays: similar to that of skip hours, except that it is specified in number of days
• guid: used to identify each item in a unique way.
RSS is an abbreviation of Really Simple Syndication. According to Harvard it is a web content syndication format. This format is used for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites. It is written in Xtensified markup language (XML) to have an update of latest information on the website.
RSS feed can check for changes, if the changes are made then the changes are appropriately displayed in the area where this RSS feed is utilized.
Formats in RSS
There are three widely used RSS formats RSS 0.91,1.0 and 2.0 being the latest.
This is a case sensitive language, thus be careful with capital cased letters.
Step by Step procedure to create an RSS feed on the website
Before starting to write an RSS, we need to understand that there are several formats of RSS, we shall be formulating the steps taking RSS 2.0 format into consideration.
-
Channel is a component where mandatory and optional fields are declared.
-
Channel contains items in which each news item is drafted independently. Ex:
-
Step 1: There are certain mandatory fields and certain optional fields in writing RSS. Identify the mandatory RSS feed items
1. Title : This is how people refer the website from another website. This title should be same as the title of the page that the RSS is pointing.
2. Link: URL of the corresponding website
3. Description: Phrases or sentences that speaks about the website and summarizes the content. This should be opted to be same as the metatag content description for a better SEO. Ex:
Step 2: Identify the optional fields that are necessary in writing a good RSS
• Language: if the website is English or Spanish, this will tell to the person who is posting the rss feed about the language of the website. By knowing he can post all the similar language rss feeds at one place. Ex:
• Copyright: reveals the copyright notice of the owner Ex:
• managingeditor: This will contain the email id of a person to whom the content belongs to. Ex:
• webmaster: email address of a person responsible for any technical issues relating to the rss feed. ex:
• pubDate: The publication date of the content written on the website is declared. This automatically changes for every 24 hours. The date format is confined to RFC 822 specifications.To know more about that specifications click on the http://asg.web.cmu.edu/rfc/rfc822.html. Ex:
• lastbuilddate: This indicates the last date during which the content was changed or modified. Ex:
• category: It is a good practice to categorize the item that is written in rss feed. By doing this several items with different categories can be posted in a single rss feed. Ex:
• docs: It is a link that points to the place where rss is written, so that a person who has posted this rss in his website has an idea of from where he has copied this content. Ex:
• ttl: ttl is an abbreviation of time to live. This is written in terms of minutes that indicates how long a channel can be cached before refreshing from the source. Ex:
• image: image has an url, title ,link, width and height. These are given to see an image displayed along with the rss feed. Ex:
• skipHours: this is used to have a positive effect on the bandwidth requirments of weblog. This will hint the aggregators the hours they can miss without refreshing. Ex: that says to skip hours from 6 to 11
• skipdays: similar to that of skip hours, except that it is specified in number of days
• guid: used to identify each item in a unique way.
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