eThos from Hemant Soreng

Why should one benchmark one’s site?
To know how the site is doing w.r.t the important metrics vis s vis competition, industry.

Here are three ways one could benchmark one’s website and for free.

Google Analytics Benchmarks

Nielsen//NetRatings

Coremetrics LIVEmark

Source : ClickZ

Yipee !!! And its growing and the good part is that quite a bit of the grow is from rural India.

India has over 49 million internet users out of which nine million reside in rural areas, according to a study by online research and advisory firm JuxtConsult. The number of regular internet users, defined as anyone accessing the net at least once a month, is around 35 million of which 30 million live in urban areas. Interestingly, 80 per cent of regular online Indians are now buying through the net.

Read more…

Won’t this be great for us blogging clan…

Roovno Web Networks has launched Roovno Ad Marketplace, an online ad space market where bloggers can choose the price they think is right for advertising on their Blog space. According to the company, bloggers can choose the category and keywords, key-in a description of their web page and set the price they would like to sell their ad space for.

Bloggers can also choose the duration, size and location of the ad on their web page. Roovno also allows the bloggers to decide who gets to advertise on their blogs. “With our system you get to approve an advertiser before their ads start displaying on your web space,” the company has said.

Waiting with bated breath.

Convergence was the reason I started up eight years back. It was too early, I guess then. So when one reads articles like these, is it really back? Or rather did it disappear anywhere. I think it has just evolved adding more devices on the way …mobile being the most prominent one.

Check out this article from ClickZ. A good read

Nice article with great examples with basic tenet : don’t do viral for sake of doing viral…plug in with your overall marketing objectives….

My earlier posts on Virals has many such examples of companies doing it for the sake of it and because its the “in” thing.

Read in detail…

So everytime a new search engine launches itself first thing I do is search for the usual words Lenovo, a competitor search engine (for fun) and my name (the narcissism in me). So I was pleasantly surprised to find some old articles about my startup eDeltaC which I could not find through any other search engine. Which I promptly made a note of in In news  heh!

The SERP is distinct, but thats Yahoo and others are there already. Its the search which will make the difference and of course such WOM.
With this I promise that every time I Google, I will also.

Some good tips for SEO

Keywords are Key
Naming the pages on your Web site in a consistent manner (using keywords that describe the content on the page) can help your site’s visitors, as well as your organic search engine rankings. For example, your Web site visitors probably expect that your company’s privacy policy is located on a page called “privacy.html” or “privacy-policy.html.” If someone searches for your company’s privacy policy, they’re more likely to click on a link that has a URL with the keywords in it.
Search engines have been known to give some credit when you have your keywords in your URL, especially if that page has the keywords in the URL and the page’s content includes those keywords. Naming your pages consistently has its benefits.

Keepin’ Your Internal Linking “Real”
Now let’s look at the home page of your site. I would consider your home page to be located at http://www.example.com/, not at http://www.example.com/index.html or http://www.example.com/default.aspx. Even though the index.html or the default.aspx file is your site’s home page, the real home page is http://www.example.com because that’s the page everyone tends to link to when they link to your Web site.
It’s important to fix the internal links to your home page, and consistently link to what is the “real” home page.

Home Pages and Redirects
Different Web servers use different files to serve up the home page of your site at http://www.example.com/. A Unix Web server may use index.html as its home page file, or it might use index.htm. A Windows server might use default.asp, default.aspx, default.htm, or default.html.
When it comes to your domain name, it pays to be consistent. You have control over the internal links on your site, and you have control over whether you’re using www.example.com or example.com.

Read more…

With most of the content in English, the typical  internet user is proficient in English. But these users typically no more than one language apart from English. So is it the affinity to the local language prompts them to click?

According to Pankaj Jain, president and COO of Webdunia, clicks on online ads increase if the ad is in Hindi or regional language. “But most of the ads on regional portals are still in English. Regional language ads comprise only 5-7 per cent of the online ad space on regional portals,” Pankaj Jain has said.

Indian online advertising, which stood at Rs 215 crore in 2007, is estimated to touch Rs 2,500 crore by 2011. In this growth, local and regional portals are expected to play a major role. Findings across 10 largest regional bases reveal that 80 per cent of Indians are comfortable with regional languages.

As the content becomes relevant, local portals are expected to draw more visitors as users get hooked on to relevant content for a longer time which, in turn, generates good returns for advertisers, reports Business Standard.

So this is good news for the industry despite of the talk of economic slowdown

For the full year 2007, online ad revenues totaled $21.2 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)/PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) “2007 Internet Advertising Revenue Report.” That was 26% higher than 2006, which was itself a record year.

Read more

Microsoft has teamed with Ford for a highly experiential, super soft-sell microsite around Microsoft SYNC.

SYNC is a voice-actived gizmo for your car that’s kind of like an iPod crossed with a Blackberry: it does music, text, and telephone. Cool, but it’s a sell with a high educational curve.

Awesome, I’d say. Read more at ClickZ