Reference Designer

There are two schools of thought about optimizing the Search Engine Optimization technique. The proponent of the first school of thought beleive in what is known as “Content is King”. Do not confuse this content with the scholarly articles and quality of the content. In SEO arena, by the word “Content in King” we mean that the SEO expert carefully performs the keyword research. He then includes the keyword in the page title. The keyword is then included in the url and the meta tag. The keyword in included several times in the content of the web page. Most important of these are the header h1 tag and few bold tags.

The other school of thought belongs to what is known as the “Link is the King”. The proponent of  this school of thought argue that there are several web pages which do not contain and keyword in the title page and url and they still come to the top of the search engine. The proponents of the Link builders deride any attempt to optimize that webpage based upon the keyword.

A naive SEO expert who starts SEO work is generallly a proponent of either of these two schools of thought. I myself was a proponent of the link building school of thought. I thought that no matter what, if we build enough links the site is going to be on the top. I was successful in many cases. But I was baffeled when I could not make some web pages to top when I expected them to be top.

It was then that I realized the importance of the keyword and its implication. I started implementing both the strategies – keyword based content and the link. And that took me to the next height for several pages. If  a website has to have a user generated content, it must be optimized for content. This requires working with the architects in the early stages of the design.

SEO is not a precise science and it requires some degree of art and experimentation. It is an art that takes some experience, experiment and and patience.

Vikas Shukla is the lead architect of Hardware Design at BL Healthcare. He also provides consultancy for SEO and social media marketing.

Uncategorized seo

Recently, I have been studying several personalities, especially those who have some relevancy to the areas of expertise that I posses. I may or may not have met these personalities in person, but I would like to meet them if I have not.

The subject of today’s blog is Jill Whalen, the search engine optimization (SEO) consultant of great caliber.While today we have plethora of SEO experts, Jill Whalen has been providing SEO services since early and mid 1990s. Jill Whalen is CEO and  co-founder of Search Engine Marketing New England (SEMNE). Her geographically close proximity brings the first reason I am writing about her. Jill Whalen grew up in Framingham, Massachusetts and attended UMass Amherst, graduating with a degree in sociology. She lives in Ashland, MA. If I need to believe on Google maps, this is 35 miles from my home in Attleboro, MA. The second reason of my association with Jill Whalen, of course, is the fact that she possess SEO expertise and she, of course, has been doing it for a much longer time than I am.

If we belive Boston Globe her clients include as J.J. Keller & Associates Inc., DogWatch Inc., of Natick. Jill Whalen  is the founder of the  Search Engine Optimization Forum. The forum is very popular among the SEO specialists. Incidently, I figured out that the urls of the forum are not optimized for the SEO. However, the Forum gets a fairly good amount of traffic and its alexa ranking stands at 16,118 at the time of writing.

Jill has been mentioned in Wikipedia Search Engine Optimization page. She is frequently invited to speak at conferences worldwide. Jill writes monthly SEO columns for Search Engine Land and TalentZoo.

I look forward to interaction with Jill in the coming days.

Vikas Shukla is the lead architect of Hardware Design at BL Healthcare. He also provides consultancy for SEO and social media marketing.

Uncategorized seo

Copying any content from somewhere should always be avoided. If you are a website owner you should always try to see that the contents in your website are not copied from somwhere else and pasted on your website. A copy pasted content has SEO implications besides copyright issues.

Google always check if the content on your webites is a copy of some other content. If it is, it penalises the website. The website that is penalised is the one that is indexed later. Once penalised it will be difficult to bring the website on the top of the search engine.

Use Copyscape

If you are using a content writer to write content for your website, always check copyscape to ensure that the contents are original and the sentences are not copied from somewhere else. As an added precaution, make some editing changes here and there after you receive the contents from a content writer.

Implication on changing the website url

Many times website owners are told that their urls are not user friendly. So an earlier url that was something like

http://yourdomain.com/profile/profileid?=1000000234

is changed to

http://yourdomain.com/profile/vikasshukla

Now, the content of the two links are same. The content of the url http://yourdomain.com/profile/vikasshukla is same as the content of the url http://yourdomain.com/profile/profileid?=1000000234. Since the url http://yourdomain.com/profile/vikasshukla was created later, google may think that this is a copy paste of an original content and may penalise this link. Google then penalises the web page that was created later on. In other words, we loose the advantage of making the url SEO friendly.

What should you do

You must involve an SEO expert at the begining of the architecture of a website design. Changing the url for making the SEO frienly may not be best option. This highlights just one of the several aspects of the making a website SEO friendly.

Vikas Shukla is the lead architect of Hardware Design at BL Healthcare. He also provides consultancy for SEO and social media marketing.

seo seo

With today’s release, of ezdia achieved one great milestone – it now have a public profile for each member of ezdia. This makes eZdia in the same rank as LinkedIN – at least as far as making profiles and making network connection is concerned.

If you have a your public profile in  eZdia ,  you may like to use it in all communications and use it for your blogs. If you have noticed there is a “Share/Save” button on your eZdia public profile page. Use this button to submit your  profile page to social bookmarking site. Very soon -  if someone searches with your name it is possible that your eZdia profile page will be on 1st page of the google.

This will make you reachable. Your eZdia public profile also contains the important information about your capabilities and your areas of expertise. You should make sure that you keep it updated and include all the information about your expertise. People will then be able to take your help in the areas of your expertise.

And then this is just a start. With more offerings, eZdia is a strong platform with many more offerings to come. Most important of them is the project posting section which will allow experts to secure freelancing works. Does eZdia attempts to combine LinkedIn and elance ? The question is yes – but but with many more things – have you heard of Knowledge bucket ?

Reid Hoffman and Fabio Rosati – are you guys listening ?

Vikas Shukla is the lead architect of Hardware Design at BL Healthcare. He also provides consultancy for SEO and social media marketing.

freelancing ezdia, freelancing, linkedIn

I sometimes write about personalities that I share some connections or relevance and someone I find interesting enough about. This time my choice is Rashmi Sinha, the person behind slideshare.

Slideshare allows you to upload and share your PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF Portfolios on SlideShare. You can share the document publicly or privately. You can also add audio to make a webinar.

I just checked the Alexa ranking of slideshare and I was amazed by its popularity. Its three month average ranking is 516 and it is improving. Obviously it deserves some attention. If you have not explored slideshare you may like to do it now.

According to the Slideshare website, Rashmi manages the design and community for SlideShare. She has earlier worked for companies like eBay, iFilm, AAA and Blue Shield. She lead the team that created MindCanvas, a rich online survey platform for designers. MindCanvas has been used by companies like Microsoft, CitiBank, Expedia and Yahoo.

Rasmi Sinha has a PhD in Psychology from Brown University. However, she has been more active in creating new things. You can find Rashmi Sinha’s blogs at www.rashmisinha.com. And I just happen to be reading her latest blog – “Why VCs don’t invest in women led startups – my perspective”. I think that her idea behind the venture is given more importance than the women or men issue. But I liked her next blog more informative, and, if you are into a new start up you must read it Why I Dont Worry about competition. Just found that competition is misspelled in her blog, but, I am not complaining. Do not assess this article by minor spelling and focus on the essence of the article. Instead of worrying about competition, focus on how to execute your goal efficiently and properly.

As far as my association with Rashmi Sinha is concerned, we belong to the same city of origin. I look forward to my association with her in professional spheres.

Write to her if you are interested in partnerships, advertising etc. She can be reached at rashmi@slideshare.com

online marketing person

During the last weekend I took a break from my busy life to take off for a two day camping at Otter River State Forest in Massacusetts. If you are in or around the area in  bordering Massachusetts, Rhode Island or New Hampshire, you will love this inexpensive and  great area to relax.

How to reach Otter River State Forest.

If you have a GPS, it is very easy to reach Otter River State Forest. Simple put the  following address in the GPS and you are all set.

86 Winthendan Road, Baldwinwill, MA 01436

If you do not have a GPS, use Google Maps to find the directions to reach Otter River State Forest. Since I was coming from Attleboro in Massachusetts I took I-495 North and then tool US-2  West. I followed the GPS directions to reach there.

Camping Prices

The best part is that the camping is really inexpensive. We paid about $12 for each night of stay. We used http://reserveamerica.com  to book the camps for two days in Otter River State Forest. They however charge a hefty fee of $9 for each booking. So we ended up paying $24 + $9.25 = $33.25 for two night of stays. We are three families. And they charged $9.25 of booking fee from each of them. But we were still not unhappy
because $33 is still not bad for a grand place like Otter River State Forest.

You may also book the campsite by calling  1-877-422-6762 or  518-884-4959

Camping

The camping season is from mid-May through mid-October. Mid October could be a little too cold, but you can try. Best seasons are June to August.

What to Visit

If you can take a 2 mile hike, I would certainly recommend it. The hiking  takes you to Lake Dennison. Lake Dennison is a great lake with clean water. Probably the best thing to do is to take swimminig costumes, towel and something light to seat when you go to hiking that reaches to Lake Dennison. You can spend couple of hours at Lake Dennison.

Even if you do not plan to do hiking, you must visit Lake Dennison once. You will certainly love its clean water. You can also do boating at Lake Dennison.

Besides Lake Dennison, you can also visit the small lake inside Otter State forest itself. The water is not very clean but bad as well.

Pictures

I took some of the pictures using my iPhone Camera. If you have visited Otter State River Forest, share your experiences here.

About Photographs

Both the photographs were taken my me September 7, 2009. You may use these photographs after taking my permission, which I will be happy to grant if you write me at shukla_vikas@hotmail.com.

Vikas Shukla is the lead architect of Hardware Design at BL Healthcare. He also provides consultancy for SEO and social media marketing.

Uncategorized travel