Unfortunately, the number of participants was less than what we expected and it showed unprofessional attitude of SEO professionals of Ludhiana. Many of professionals who booked space did not turned up. But we are not disappointed and decided to keep organizing more meetups in this series.

The First Session was Knowledge Sharing session in which all participants shared their observations about latest findings and SEO related topics. We also discusses about “Will guest blogging be considered as spam in the future?”. There were different opinions about it but I think it can be considered as spam and in the future, only highly moderated blogs will get recognition. And over time guest blogging may be devalued too. Other thinks it will not be spam if it is moderated.

Second session was Brainstorming session where we discussed about Ways to create content and Quality traffic sources other than Search Engines.
We discussed about content because according to Gravity, it will be desired skill from any SEO Professional in near future that a SEO professional should be able to generate content or should be able to guide and educate the peers and clients about ways to generate valuable content. What happens now that we SEO professionals can list the requirements to rank higher but we don’t know that who will fulfill content requirement. We can use content writers but they can write the content and can’t create content. Therefore if a SEO professional has to deliver good results they have to start becoming more creative and find ways to create content. Here is the conclusion we derived about content and required skills and techniques for SEO professionals:

A SEO Professional should

• Spend good amount of time to understand the nature of business and insights of the business or website for which they are doing SEO.
• Explore competitor sites and gather as much information and knowledge as possible, they should also explore available images, videos, whitepapers and any other content available on the Internet and if possible through local libraries too.
• Read the content of the website to know what they are promoting.
• Discuss with Website owner about the content they have available which has not been published on the website. Also do brain storm about generating content. Don’t hesitate to give vague and stupid ideas too.
• Think how each piece of content can go viral. As per recent Google updates, unnatural ways of building links will be more and more difficult and disregarded for higher rankings. Therefore it is important that every piece of content has some virality.
• Learn basic writing, photo and video editing skills, so prepare content ideas and submit to customer or content department to fine tune it and develop the finished content.

Conclusion: Each SEO professional should be able to advice on various ways of generating content, and they should also have a show case of content generated by them and it’s results achieved. This is the only way to convince customer to generate valuable content.

Quality Traffic sources other than Google
In this session we discussed about traffic sources other than Search Engines to reduce dependency of any online business or website on Google and search engines.
Participants suggested Facebook, twitter, forums, blogs, yahoo answers, YouTube, glogster, stumble-upon, Digg and many other sites. But the most important thing we all agreed that before we start using these sites, we should know our target audience. It is also important to understand what you expect from the traffic when they land on your website. Each of above mentioned websites have different demographic of the users, therefore it is not necessary that if one source generate good traffic for one site, it can also generate same amount of traffic for other website. It is important to know what the user of your targeted source is doing on that website, and what will that user expect if he/she land on your website from traffic source?
Hence it is important to test these traffic sources with a pilot project before you put all the resources and strength on these resources. Choose your targets source very carefully.

Third Session was about open discussion but we were running out of the time therefore we had to skip this session for this meetup.

Fourth session was about workshop and experiments.
Workshop was to generate ideas for the content. We conducted 2 workshops for 10 minute each. Two groups of participants were made and hosts gave them a scenario. The scenario for the first workshop was that they are doing SEO for an Insurance website. And they have to generate content.
Each group came with good suggestions and gave recommendations about on-page SEO so that content can be useful, informative and easy to navigate.
The scenario of the second workshop was to generate content for the website that sells shoes. For this workshop both the groups were shuffled so that they can get better exposure to work in different teams. In this exercise, they come up with some good content ideas that may have some virality such as creating trend reports, share customer stories rather than boring testimonials, find and create celebrity stories etc.

It was a good exercise but once again due to time constraints we were not able to discuss more on this topic. We are planning to allocate more time towards workshops in next meetup.

The second part of this Session was Experiments. In this session we wanted to conduct a few experiments. The Idea behind this session is that various participants can come together and carry on experiments on unanswered or doubtful SEO related topics. And provide hands on experimenting with those things which we have only heard and know from other websites. Therefore by doing these experiments we can challenge ourselves and share the findings with others.

We decided to do experiments on following two things:

• Bing Optimization
• Effect of suddenly generated high amount of links for a web page / website

We invited volunteers who are interested to conduct these experiments, and formed 2 groups to conduct the experiments. Any costs involved in these experiments will be covered by Gravity Informatics. And the findings will be shared in the next (3rd) SEO Meetup.

We apologize that the topics were already decided. But we will like to invite topics for next experiments. Therefore feel free to submit your ideas for experiments.

Meetup Conclusion
Over all conclusion of this meetup was that each SEO professional in Ludhiana should prepare themselves for the future challenges. As era of web 1.0 was finished and web 2.0 emerged, the same way the era of SEO 1.0 has gone and it’s SEO 2.0
SEO 1.0 involved unnatural ways of getting higher rankings in search engines. Although many of practices were quite good but in the bid of higher rankings people start exploiting the good practices and converted it into spam.

SEO 2.0 is more about ethical and natural ways. I will say it is more organic way of doing SEO and this only depends upon quality content. I can see the SEO 2.0 era which started from 1st update of Google Panda in March 2011 has declared first generation of SEO’s unqualified.

Old SEO techniques are not going to be of any use now. Hence if a SEO professional has x number of pre panda experience will be devalued to minimum. SEO professional version 1 has to upgrade them to SEO professional version 2 for SEO 2.0
Google was always saying Content is the King, but Google has made it king now. Therefore it is now war between kings. And SEO professionals will be the knights who will help their king stay in the war, win the war and make them emperor.
There are no SEO institutes and colleges where you can get training, and hence for your own bright future it is your own responsibility to practice and train yourself, and build your own army of experts whom you can depend upon and ask for the help when required.
We hope next meetup will be even more insightful and help us find our way towards SEO 2.0.

The post Summary of 2nd SEO Meetup Organized By Gravity Informatics Pvt. Ltd. Ludhiana. appeared first on Gravity Web, SEO and Media Services.

Mr. Sachin Sharma, from Google shared the current trends in Google searches and shared data about current E commerce market of India & expected market in 2015 that is expected to reach at 4000 Crore INR by 2015. The current user base of internet is 11% in India & is expected to reach at 40% by 2015.

Mr. Bikky Khosla from tradeIndia.com shared his experiences & discussed the procedure of registering the business on tradeIndia & various benefits to businessmen. He shared that replying to a query within 24 hours gives a good impression to prospect. He also told that the business should be registered with the type of business, not the exact name of business, for instance, register as onlineshopping123.com instead of yournameshoppingsite.com.
Then we had, Mr. B Surnam, President of Ras Al Khaimah‘s India operations elaborated the procedure how to set up business in free trade zone at Ras Al Khaimah in UAE.

At last, it was a question & answer session. Many people asked questions from all the presenters.
I really learnt a lot from this event. As the businessmen were asking questions, I came to know about the level they think up to during a business settlement in UAE & registering business online.
It was a great event to attend.

The post TradeIndia Business Owner’s Event in Ludhiana Organized by VeriSign appeared first on Gravity Web, SEO and Media Services.

Although, we little diverted from the basic idea of the event but we agreed at the end that next meetups will be more about discussions rather than presentations.

In this event we realized that the time was insufficient for the meetup, so we would definitely increase the time span for the next such meetup.

The topic was “We are at war with Google”.  Mr. Amardeep Singh, SEO professional from Gravity Informatics gave presentation on “Google EMD update”. Mr. Kamaldeep Singh who is the project lead at Gravity Informatics presented his views about 11 Hot SEO Tips That Every Blogger Must Know, whereas Mr. Ram Babu who is working at Cyber Frame as SEO team lead gave presentation about Google Panda and Penguin updates. All speakers were bit nervous in the beginning including myself, the CEO but as event progressed we all gained momentum and confidence flowed in our speech.

On watching the video next day, we found that plenty of improvement is required in our speech. There was repetition of words which made the speech less effective. We will work on it for sure.  Anyone who is interested to get the videos of this meetup can contact us.

These meetups will help us improving our presentation, speaking, networking skills along with help us to give our best as SEO professionals.

Major Questions asked at this meetup?

• Content
  • Who should create Content?
  • Who should be part of Content team?
  • Educate customer too about generating content
  • Does software help ranking?
  • Does Adsense help indexing or crawling or ranking?
  • Does character length in Domain effects on Rank.
  • Will Google not rank a website that has built a unique and excellent content but have no links and has not considered basic SEO techniques such as Meta tags etc.?

Other questions sprouted during meetup in my Mind

• Does Link Wheel still work?
• Does free directories still works?
• Creative ways of building links
• What is effective SMO? Is it just getting maximum likes, tweets, etc?
• How to get more G-plus?
• What is spamming? Does our normal SEO activities fall into spam
• EMD? Can it extend to URLs (Page name)
• How to optimise for Yahoo and Bing?
• Should we not use keywords in anchor tags for link building?
• How to look Genuine in Link Building?
• How to compare competitors?
• Will Guest Blogging be equally effective in future? Will it not be considered as spam technique?

Ideas during meet-up

• Natural Link Building? We don’t mind if thousands of links are build within a day when a new content has been published.
• Let’s do experiments on SEO

Vows we took at this meetup

• Let’s be amongst the best SEO’s of the world.
• Members of this meetup should conduct experiments for un-answered queries. Cost of experiments can be covered by Gravity Informatics and the meetup members.
• This meetup should be conducted more frequently in Ludhiana and lets carry on the tag of being first in the city.
• Setup a closed Discussion Forum that will be only accessible to the active members of this meetup. We will utilise this forum to build a personal knowledge pool where we can share SEO tools, tips, experiments and results, ideas and experiences so that we can be best SEO professionals of the world.

To see all the photographs of this meetup, kindly go to the following link:

http://www.meetup.com/I-T-Professionals-ludhiana/photos/11245542/

Next meetup

We have decided to organise next meetup on 25^th November 2012, which is almost a week after Diwali. We look forward for you all to attend this event. The success of this meetup will depend upon how many more SEO professionals attend this meet-up.  We expect at least 50 SEO professionals attend the next meetup and utilize all abilities and experiences to make next meetup successful.

Please invite as many SEO professionals as you know. Anyone can join the meetup group at the following link:

http://www.meetup.com/I-T-Professionals-ludhiana/

Kindly download the Power Point Slides of the Meetup held on 14th of October, 2012 at the following link:

http://www.meetup.com/I-T-Professionals-ludhiana/files/

The post Summary of First SEO Meetup in Ludhiana appeared first on Gravity Web, SEO and Media Services.

Mr. Hiren Patel, CEO of Gravity Informatics said, “Ludhiana is the industrial hub of India, but the city somewhere lacks in IT industry. We have seen IT & SEO (Search Engine Optimization) professionals sharing thoughts & ideas through meetup groups through India, but why not Ludhiana?

The primary reason for holding this meetup was to facilitate discussion in a face to face manner. In this way, ideas can be discussed, brainstormed and expressed in a free-form manner. It is equally important for all of us to organize and attend meetups that are held in our city & in nearby areas because being together, we can achieve those targets that are difficult for us to achieve individually.

We are going to organize more meetups in Ludhiana discussing on different topics related to IT & Search Engine Optimization. There is open invitation to all the IT professionals to join the meetup group created by Gravity Informatics Pvt. Ltd. Anyone can join this group by visiting the following URL:

http://bit.ly/meetupldh

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“To be able to come into work every day and build things that help a billion people stay connected with the people they care about every month, that’s just unbelievable,” Zuckerberg said in an exclusive interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer.

On the site, Zuckerberg posted, “Thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you. Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life. I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.”

At Bloomberg BusinessWeek in a Q&A with Ashlee Vance, Zuckerberg points out that only other companies in the world with one billion customers are probably Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.

There have been 219 billion photos uploaded, 140.3 billion friend connections and 1.13 trillion likes since the inception of Facebook, according to a statement posted on Facebook’s (FB) web site.

Facebook also announced that 600 million people access the site from their mobile phone and handheld devices as of now.

The website also highlighted that most of the users are coming from India, U.S., Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia and the median age of users currently joining the social network is 22 years old.

The post Proud Moment For Zuckerberg, Number Of Monthly Active Users Reaches 1 Billion Mark appeared first on Gravity Web, SEO and Media Services.

1. Cirrus Logic

The company was started in 1984 by Dr. Suhas Patil in Fremont, California. The company supplies high-precision digital & analog signal processing components and supplies to companies such as Sony, Samsung, Philips etc.

The company’s revenues climbed 67% to nearly $370 million in 2011. Company also increased its expenditure on research & development for the third year and to match the same, increased its engineering staff by 26%.

CEO: Jason Rhode

2012 Fastest-Growing rank: 2

Previous rank: 11

2. Baidu

Baidu is the largest search engine portal in China with a market share of nearly 80% even after 12 years of its foundation by Robin Li & Eric Xu. The company has also expanded its services to include revenue generating online & e-commerce marketing tools like ‘pay for placement’ (P4P) platform, that let companies create text based ads on their own that appear in search listings.

Company’s earnings rose by 77% to $326 million in 2011.

CEO: Jason Rhode

2012 Fastest-Growing rank: 3

Previous rank: 4

3. Apple

Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne on April 1, 1976 in Cupertino, California.

Apple continued to impress its customers with innovative products despite of the passing of Steve Jobs last October. The company launched more innovative products under CEO Tim Cook. Apple’s latest iPhone with voice recognition has sold 5 million units in just 7 days of its launch. Apple is the world’s third-largest mobile phone maker after Samsung and Nokia.

Earnings for 2011 hit $38.6 billion on revenues of $142 billion. Apple became the most valuable company of all time recently, when its market capitalization hit $623 billion in August, 2012.

CEO: Tim Cook

2012 Fastest-Growing rank: 8

Previous rank: 21

4. IPG Photonics

The company was started by Dr. Valentin Gapontsev in Russia in 1990. IPG has manufacturing facilities in the United States, Germany, Russia and Italy. It provides high power fiber lasers and fiber amplifiers that are revolutionizing performance and utility in a remarkable array of materials processing, telecommunications, medical and other advanced applications.

Sales grew 59% year-over-year to $474.5 million in 2011. Indeed, sales of the company’s lasers for materials processing applications accounted for nearly 88%
of last year’s sales, and the company expects that trend to continue in the years to come.

CEO: Valentin Gapontsev

2012 Fastest-Growing rank: 9

Previous rank: N.R.

5. 3D Systems

The company was founded in 1986 by Chuck Hull. Its headquartered are in Rock Hill, South Carolina. 3D Systems is a global company that develops and sells systems, materials, and software for solid imaging. 3D Systems manufactures technologies that enable 3D printing, a process where three-dimensional data is used to create real-world 3D parts, from smartphone covers to prosthetics Its products are meant to make manufacturing processes more efficient, without requiring tooling.

Sales of 3D Systems jumped 44% year-over-year to $230 million in 2012, with half those sales coming from the U.S., and profits grew to $35 million, even as the company increased spending in global research and development.

CEO: Abe Reichental

2012 Fastest-Growing rank: 12

Previous rank: N.R.

6. Priceline

Priceline was founded in 1997 and is the brainchild of digital entrepreneur Jay S. Walker. Priceline.com is an Internet-based transactional service that offers products in two categories: a personal finance service that markets home mortgages, refinancing and home equity loans through an independent licensee and other is travel service that offers leisure airline tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, packaged vacations and cruises.

Due to large international sales, net income nearly doubled to $1.05 billion last in 2011 compared with the year before.

CEO: Jeffery H. Boyd

2012 Fastest-Growing rank: 14

Previous rank: 12

7. Acme Packet

Founded by Patrick J. MeLampy and Andrew D. Ory in 2000, Acme Packet is a Bedford, Massachusetts based company. The company provides session delivery network solutions, which enable the trusted, first-class delivery of next-generation voice, data and unified communications services and applications across IP networks.

Revenues grew by more than double to $307 million from 2009 to 2011, while profits also leapfrogged to $44 million. And as more companies transition away from older legacy technologies with IP-based solutions, Acme Packet expects to capitalize even more in what it in envisions as a $4.5 billion dollar market by 2015.

CEO: Andrew Ory

2012 Fastest-Growing rank: 37

Previous rank: 25

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Apple Inc. filed the lawsuit in April 2011 and demanded $2.5 billion from its top smartphone competitor for patent infringement. In response, Samsung Electronics Co. fired back with its own lawsuit seeking $399 million from Apple Inc.

The jury rejected all the claims by Samsung, and also a few claims by Apple against Samsung. One of them was Apple claiming two dozen Samsung devices has used features developed by Apple. The number was less so jury declined to award $2.5 billion that Apple demanded. Samsung used several features like ‘bounce-back’ feature and zoom with a finger tap, to say a few.

Apple also demanded that Samsung stop selling its popular smartphones and computer tablets from the U.S. market. Apple and Samsung combined account for more than half of global smartphone sales.

Samsung has emerged as one of Apple’s biggest rivals in recent times and has overtaken Apple as the leading smartphone maker. Samsung’s Galaxy line of phones runs on Android, a mobile operating system that Google Inc. has developed and given out for free to Samsung and other phone makers.

Samsung conceded that Apple makes great products but said it doesn’t have a monopoly on the design of rectangle phones with rounded corners that it claimed it created.

Samsung sold 22.7 million smartphones and tablets that Apple claimed uses its technology. McElhinny said those devices accounted for $8.16 billion in sales since June 2010.

Benefit to other Operating Systems

There is an OS that will be benefitted from this win of Apple over Samsung. This is a major platform in the smartphone market whose look and feel isn’t like that of Apple’s iOS, and there are no chances that it’ll be sued by Apple. It is the Microsoft’s Windows Phone.

Microsoft has just launched Windows 8 for computers, tablets & smartphones. Microsoft will unite its desktop/tablet and phone operating systems with shared code. That means it’ll be very easy for developers to make apps that work across all Windows machines. For any manufacturer that doesn’t want to lose the market, Microsoft promises protection with its Windows 8 platform.

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Facebook gave a shock to marketers when they announced that nearly 8.7 percent (83 million out of 955 million) of its monthly active user are of no use for marketers as the accounts has been created by people to duplicate their identity or for some other purpose like spamming or are fake or miscategorized. Facebook gave this news during a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

As per the quarterly report of Facebook, people in developed nations have created less duplicate or false accounts as compared to developing nations. So, it is less in United States and Australia but considerably more in Turkey & Indonesia.

Facebook says that they have estimated this number after taking internal review of a limited number of accounts taken as sample. The reviewer who find out fake accounts try to identify names that seems to be fake and other behavior of the account creator that seems to be inappropriate or inauthentic.

Facebook provided updated estimate and details about illegitimate accounts. The number could represent approximately 83 million accounts. Company also told that nearly half of the illegitimate accounts are created by people to duplicate their identity, that is, a person who creates one account for connecting to his family and another account for his acquaintance. Facebook provided these details to US Securities and Exchange Commission in its quarterly filing.

A miscategorised account created by a user for his pet, should be represented by a 'Page'

Have you created a user account for your pet or your company? Well, that comes in miscategorised accounts as per Facebook norms. Facebook estimated that out of total users of the social networking site, nearly 2.4 percent accounts are miscategorised, that is accounts created by people for their businesses, companies and pets. Facebook said that these accounts should not be created in user account but should be represented as pages.

Millions of users have created accounts for spamming purpose also. Facebook’s estimate for this is 1.5 percent of monthly active users. These accounts violate terms & conditions of the social networking site.

No doubt, people are using fake accounts for spamming purposes but the estimate number told by Facebook has given a tension to the marketers who use Facebook to communicate their message to target audience. A music startup company has also claimed that nearly 80 percent of clicks on its Facebook ad campaign came from bots. Facebook says they are looking into the matter and will give a solution for sure.

Whatever the solution may be, Facebook should keep a track of all the Sign Ups that they get, and if found something inappropriate, they should warn the user through their account, or else the number will keep on increasing and the trust of marketers on Facebook will decrease.

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Cognizant Technology Solutions Office at Chennai, India

As per the report, Cognizant’s June quarter revenue rose by 20.9 per cent from $1.485 billion to $1.795 billion,  in the second quarter of 2011

Its profit during the second quarter rose to $251.9 million which was $208.0 million in the second quarter of 2011.

Its operating margin during the second quarter of this year was at 18.5 per cent.

Francisco D’Souza, Chief Executive Officer of the firm said, “Clients continue to turn to Cognizant to help reinvent their business models in the face of secular industry changes, evolving demographics, and a new stack of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud technologies,” .

“We are well positioned to capitalize on these opportunities due to our unique combination of management consulting and operational capabilities in areas such as large scale program management and change management.  With our robust global delivery model, we make the complexities of managing large scale transformation programs seamless and transparent to our clients,” he added.

Cognizant sees third quarter revenue at $1.875 billion, a sequential growth of over 4 per cent.

Cognizant maintains full-year revenue guidance of “at least 20 per cent growth”, which is far ahead of Nasscom estimates.

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According to ACSI’s current report on user satisfaction index of social networking sites, Google+ stands way ahead than Facebook. Facebook is quickly becoming the least liked social media site while on the same index; Google+ topped the list followed by Wikipedia and YouTube.

The satisfaction level of Facebook users has decreased by 7.6% as compared to previous year’s data. As per the report, the main reason why people dislike Facebook is the frequent nature of tweaks to its user interface, including the launch of a new Timeline profile. High stress on advertisement is another reason. Facebook scored 61 points out of 100 as compared to 66 points last year.

Scores By Industry

On the other hand, Google+ , that is included in the list for the 1st time, has scored 78 points in the index, as Google+ puts less stress for advertising; the report says.

Even LinkedIn, the professional social networking site, scores better than Facebook in the customer satisfaction index with a score of 63. YouTube, which is owned by Google, scored 73, Pinterest too, scored an attractive 73 and Twitter grabbed 64 points.

The penetration level of Facebook is far better than Google+, but if the user experience of Facebook stood at this level & Facebook doesn’t feel the pressure to improve customer satisfaction now, it won’t take much time for users to shift from Facebook to Google+, the same transition that happened a few years ago from Orkut to Facebook.

So, will we see another transition in next 2-3 years, or the Facebook will work hard to improve the user experience and satisfaction. Let’s wait and watch.

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