History on Squidoo:
Seth Godin founded Squidoo in the year 2006 (alright I admit it’s not relatively new) as a platform for users to set up pages on any topic. They have a special term for the page known as “Lens”. On how Squidoo gets its name, Godin explains, “Squids have large eyes, and each lens on Squidoo provides a view on the world.”

Features of Squidoo:
The users here are known as “Lensmasters” and creating a lens is pretty easy with the facility of modules. You can include almost everything necessary on your page: text, images, RSS feeds, video, audio, recommendations, links and opt-in boxes.

What’s so special about Squidoo?
As a Squidoo user, I love their presentation. They are very friendly to the users, yes they are user-friendly as well. What’s the difference? Here’s a piece from the recent mail I got from them: “Happy Birthday! Okay, chances are it’s not really your birthday. But we wanted to give you a present anyway. So here it is. It’s another Squidoo secret. And it’s a big one. You’ve probably heard that you can make money from Squidoo. Yes, for free. We’re here to confirm the rumors.” You can see their approach is quite friendly. Ah wait I think I forgot to mention earning money from creating lens there. Let’s have a whole paragraph on that.

• Making Money on Squidoo:
  Seth Godin states that he started Squidoo for the purpose of earning money, not only for the company but for charities and lensmasters who provide content as well. Squidoo earns money through ads and affiliate links. 5% of this goes to charity, 45% goes to the company and the remaining 50% is either donated to charity or given to the Lensmasters. The charity or the page creator earns depending on how popular the Lens is.
• What else?
  Last but not the least advantage of creating Squidoo Lens is to get traffic to your site and your blog. Leave link of your website and your blog on your Lens and people are bound to click on that depending on how informative it is. The best way to enhance them is to keep updating them, add modules, experiment with the keywords, images and links, sky is the limit here!

Conclusion:
Opening an account on Squidoo is real easy and it is equally easy to create lens there. The reason I am talking about this site is because it has so many features and it is like a micro search engine for the lenses. More and more people are into Squidoo these days. If you are a regular Twitter, Squidoo has the facility to announce your lens there as well. It has the facility to connect to all your social networking profiles in an easy way. Squidoo is a great platform, if you expertise on something. Share you knowledge and you shall be rewarded!!

August 25, 2009 ISSUE #38

Considering this factor Google has introduced a new feature known as, “First Click Free”. Here, only those users who arrive at the website through Google will be granted permission to view the page. However, to view further information, they will be asked for login details. To implement this feature we need to follow these Google guidelines:

• The users who arrive at your website through Google search result should be allowed to see the full text of the content they’re trying to access.
• You need to make the content identical to both Googlebot and the users who visit from Google.
• In the case of multi-page article, Google states that you need to give permission to both Googlebot and the users to view the entire article and for this you need to display the entire content on a single page. If you are not able to display the entire article on one page you can use cookies to make sure that the user can visit each page of the article before being asked for registration or payment. You are however allowed to restrict the other parts of your website by asking for registration or payment. On the other hand if you want to display only certain portion of the content and want to prevent the rest, then you can make that portion of the article visible and restrict the rest of the content. However, Googlebot will only index the visible part and the rest of the article will not be accessible by Google or the users.

Technical ImplementationTo include the restricted content in Google’s search index, the crawler needs to be able to access that content on the site. Since Googlebot cannot access pages behind registration or login forms we need to configure the website to serve the full text of each document when the request is identified as coming from Googlebot via the user-agent and IP-address. It’s equally important that the robots.txt file allows access of these URLs by Googlebot.

When users click a Google search result to access the content, the web server will need to check the “Referer” HTTP request-header field. The website needs to display the entire content of the page that is protected from other visitors. When the referring URL has a Google domain www.google.com, the website needs to display the entire content. Hence, based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header, the content is delivered.

This helps the Googlebots to crawl the protected content, providing you quality traffic you seek.

Controversy
Some people refer to this as Cloaking, but Google denies this fact. According to Google, “Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.” But this practice shows the same content to Googlebots and Google users which could be termed as a fair practice.

August 10, 2009 ISSUE #37

1. Submission to Search Engines:
   Free easy steps and Google, Yahoo or MSN Live will add you to their list of millions of web pages. However they get so many website requests that they might take way too much time in indexing your site. It is hence advisable not to completely rely on this method and utilize this time by trying other marketing methods to get more traffic and visibility online.
2. Directories:
   There are so many directories online where you can submit your website for free. You can search for your niche directory or submit under your related category. One of the most famous directories is dmoz, an open directory. Google gives much preference to the sites that get listed here. There are other search engines which allow reciprocal link (link exchanges). Directories not only help you get targeted traffic but also quality backlinks which play a vital role in SERP.
3. Press Releases/News Releases:
   If you have any announcement, news, or events happening, then press release or news release would be the best way to spread it around. You can publish press releases and submit it to various free press release sites. Similarly, you can post news releases on free news release sites.
4. Classifieds:
   Craigslist is one of the most popular free classifieds available online. Posting ads on classifieds help you get targeted traffic. There are many free classifieds online.
5. Forums:
   You can participate in forums and discuss on various interesting topics. This is one of the great way to get one way traffic. You can leave your newsletter link, web page link or blog link in there.
6. Testimonials/Comments:
   If you have read a writer’s ebook, then make sure to leave your point of view there. You can leave your testimonial on that particular ebook which is of course a free and easy method to get one way traffic and quality backlink. Posting comments on various blogs is also a good way to bring traffic to your site.
7. Article Submission:
   Do you write articles related to your website? Well then you can utilize this by posting your articles on various article submission sites. People are always eager to learn new things and if you can write unique and new stuff, then surely people would love to read it. Article submission sites like ezinearticle is one of the easiest, free and quick way of getting traffic.

A proper SEO (search engine optimization) of your website and the above mentioned advertising methods will give you a good traffic. You need to keep posting and trying new things to get traffic on your site. Try as many advertising methods as possible. The more backlinks you get, search engines will give more preference to your site and will also get good exposure.

November 20, 2008 ISSUE #36

Recently I was going through Yahoo answers when my eyes stopped at this question: Does having a Blog help boost my website’s page rank? What is the importance of Blog from the SEO point of view?

I think a lot of people are wondering about the same question. The answer to this is Yes, Blog does help your website get good recognition and it does have a significant importance according to Search Engines, however few conditions apply. The first condition is whether or not you have enough time to devote to the blog. Just having few posts on the blog and forgetting about it will have no impact either on your website or on the blog. There’s no point in having a blog if you can’t come up with fresh materials and no time to look after it. Your blog needs more attention than your webpage. The reason behind this is, your readers expect regular posts and if you can’t come up with new stuff, you not only lose your readers (could be your potential customers) but also page rank. I’d like to give you an example. When I first started working at this company, my boss asked me to handle two blogs: I devoted my time and energy to both and in no time both of them got page rank 3 and with proper advertisements I was getting quite good traffic and search results. But during the course of time one of the blogs had to be stopped for various reasons. So after just a month the one I regularly worked on still had good results while the one we stopped lost its page rank and traffic. 1 month can be a short period but without proper updates all the effort could go to waste. So before you follow other sheep, be sure that the herd is not leading you to a dessert.

Coming back to the question how blog helps you get good page rank is that search engines have utmost respect for webpages who frequently update their content. The updates on the webpage signify that the owner constantly pays attention to it. However it is quite unpractical to keep updating your website, hence they came up with something called blog. Blog is the place where you share your ideas, and people are thrilled to read and learn from it. It started as a personal diary but later people started to view it from the marketing perspective. Hence people started to share ideas and they got more traffic as it was a form of free information. The other benefit of having a blog is that once you get good traffic you can advertise about your web page. Posts about offers and discounts could lead the readers to your web page. Having a good content in blog specially keyword rich content help get good rank in search engines. If you can provide valuable content then other people would like to link to you hence helping in link popularity. Once you have good keywords in your blog, good backlinks and good traffic the search engines will surely rank it well.

The best part about blog is they are really easy to set up as they need no coding skills such as HTML or web coding. Few of the popular blog hosts are TypePad, Blogger and Wordpress. There are two options to publish your blog to your existing web hosting:

1. Publish to your domain. For Example: www.webaddress.com/blog or blog.webaddress.com.
2. Publish to the blog hosts domain. For Example: www.blogspot.com/yourblog.

The first option is the better one as it helps boost your webpage’s rank along with the blog. Blogging takes a lot of time and creativity. If you can afford to give it extra time then blog is one of the best ways to boost your page rankings and if you cannot then it’ll be having an extra door that you never use. So make use of it, be creative and gain popularity through BLOG.

Outsourcing is defined as sending out (work, for example) to an outside provider or manufacturer in order to cut costs. One of the main reasons for the popularity of outsourcing is to lower cost or to cut cost. Money as we know is a huge factor in business. When one can get the same product or service with the same quality or better with less price, who’d want to miss that. The second reason will be increase in the flexibility. This is more important in the changing business world. Outsourcing increases the ability to concentrate on other functions hence giving you better results.

Cost is the main reason for outsourcing but there are other factors that one should consider before thinking of outsourcing. It is not an easy job to choose an outsourcing partner. There is a difficulty to tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones. If ignorant, there is a greater chance of being mislead. The best way to solve the problem is asking around, getting recommendations or finding out the history of that outsourcer. I read somewhere that outsourcing is pretty much the same as we going for a medical check up. If we are totally ignorant about the whole process there’s a greater chance of being mislead by the hospitals or the doctors itself. In this case either we have to blindly trust them or simply check their record or ask someone who’s had experience with them.

I just mentioned how an outsourcer should be chosen. Once you’ve done that, half your work load should be considered to be off your shoulder. This will let you concentrate on other sectors of your business, giving more benefits and let me remind you again, at much lower cost. The outsourcing is such an in thing now. There are free lancers who work from home, and have employees working for them from all over the world. Isn’t this incredible? The outsourcing is like getting a helping hand. Your work gets done quicker, better and easier. It is so famous these days that from the jobs like health care to website design are outsourced. This not only helps the businessmen but also helps in boosting the economy of the countries involved. The employment rates of the developing countries have increased tremendously because of this new business technique.

Avenues Nepal as an Outsourcing Company:
Avenues Nepal is an outsourcing website design company which have been delivering the best to its clients. Avenues Nepal has been able to maintain the international standards and fulfill the requirements of its outsourcers. Established in 2004, Avenues Nepal has complete more than 1000 websites, with the creativity and effort from their experienced designers and programmers. Understanding the competition in today’s market, Avenues Nepal as an outsourcing company promises to deliver the best at comparatively lower price.