Author Archives: Khuram
Gmail is going to be banned in UAE?
Google has said it will provide Middle East versions of its new VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service, which has proved hugely popular since its launch in the US last month.However website Emirates 24/7 said the tech giant has no set timeline for the rollout of the service, which currently allows Gmail users based in the US only to make low-cost VOIP calls to any parts of the world.
US-based Gmail clients can make a phone call directly from their computer to a UAE landline for just 19 cents per minute. To call Saudi Arabia the rate is 11 cents, for Oman 15 cents, Qatar 26 cents, Bahrain 17 cents, and Kuwait 9 cents per minute, the website said.
Black Berry is going to be banned in UAE from October 2010
The UAE’s telecoms regulator has announced that BlackBerry services in the country will be suspended from 11 October this year.
The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) said that the suspension was due to the failure of ongoing attempts since 2007 to bring BlackBerry services in the country in line with local regulations.
“With no solution available and in the public interest, in order to affect resolution of this issue, as of October 11, 2010, Blackberry Messenger, Blackberry Email and Blackberry Web-browsing services will be suspended until an acceptable solution can be developed and applied,” said TRA director general Mohamed Al Ghanim.
“The TRA notes that Blackberry appears to be compliant in similar regulatory environments of other countries, which makes non-compliance in the UAE both disappointing and of great concern.”
BlackBerry devices, introduced in the UAE in 2006, allow users to send messages that can’t be monitored as allowed for under the country’s 2007 Safety, Emergency and National Security rules, the regulator said last week.
Although such communications should fall under the remit of that law, technical encryption allowed them to avoid monitoring, it said Sunday.
Telcos Etisalat and du were informed of the TRA’s decision on Sunday. They were also instructed to ensure minimal consumer disruption in the provision of alternative services.
“All Blackberry services fall within the UAE regulatory framework developed by the TRA since 2007, however because of Blackberry’s technical configuration, some Blackberry services operate beyond the enforcement of these regulations,” said a statement issued by the TRA.
“Blackberry data is immediately exported off-shore, where it is managed by a foreign, commercial organization. Blackberry data services are currently the only data services operating in the UAE where this is the case.
“Today’s decision is based on the fact that, in their current form, certain Blackberry services allow users to act without any legal accountability, causing judicial, social and national security concerns for the UAE.”
Etisalat and Du respond to BlackBerry ban
UAE telcos Etisalat and du have confirmed they will comply with the TRA’s decision to suspend certain BlackBerry services starting October 11, 2010.
The two operators each issued short statements, in which they confirmed they were looking to deliver alternative solutions to BlackBerry customers who face being unable to use services providing email, web browsing, instant messaging and social networking.
“This is an important decision made by the Regulatory Authority and we fully understand the legal and social considerations behind the decision,” said Etisalat in a statement.
Modren Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) Vs. Forums
Facebook, & Twitter has become such a buzz words that even Google has launched Google Buzz, But if these Social Medias are more powerful and usefull for business (Specially for Lead Generation and Support) from relatively old Social Media Type Forums?
While advertising executives desperately search for the best ways to target audiences through Facebook and Twitter, there’s another social media format that is proving to be a highly effective tool for reaching consumers. According to a new white paper released from PostRelease, “If the Holy Grail of marketing is a band of self-motivated enthusiasts proactively recommending your product, then the Grail’s secret location could very well be the world of online forums.”
Want to Target Influential Consumers and Word-of-Mouth Powerhouses? Find Them in Online Forums, New Survey from PostRelease Reveals
Influence Extends Online and Off – Forum Users Are More Likely to Post Reviews, Share Links, Organize Offline Meetups and Proactively Recommend a Purchase
People who contribute to online forums are overwhelmingly more engaged in “influential” activities – both online and offline – than people who don’t use forums, the study found.
By far, the biggest disparities involved blogs and meetups: those who contribute to online forums are 10 times more likely than non-contributors to also publish a blog, and are 9 times more likely to take an active role in organizing an offline event or meetup for a group that originally met online.
Forum-users are 3.5 times more likely to proactively recommend a particular purchase to someone else, 3.5 times more likely to share links about new products, 4 times more likely to post online ratings and reviews, and almost twice as likely to share advice – offline and in person – based on information they’ve read online.
Those are the principle findings of a new nationwide survey conducted November 19 – 23 by PostRelease. In conjunction with Chicago market researcher Synovate, PostRelease asked 1,000 Americans to choose from a list of activities that could be considered influential in helping others make a purchase decision, and select those in which they participate. In every case, those who contribute to forums are more likely than others to engage in the activity.
The survey found that one in five Americans contributes to online forums. Forrester Research reports that 28 percent U.S. consumers read online forums – making it the second most popular online activity, second only to watching video. But a forum contributor’s influence is not confined to the world of online forums.
Here’s an overview of the results:
- 79.2 percent of forum contributors help a friend or family member make a decision about a product purchase – compared with 47.6 percent of non-contributors and 53.8 percent overall
- 65 percent of forum contributors share advice (offline and in person) based on information that they’ve read online – compared with 35 percent of non-contributors and 40.8 percent overall.
- 66 percent of forum contributors post online ratings/reviews of products/services, compared with 16.8 percent of non-contributors and 26.4 percent overall.
- 57.7 percent of forum contributors proactively recommend that someone make a particular purchase – compared with 16.9 percent of non-contributors and 24.9 percent overall.
- 43.6 percent of forum contributors share links to articles about new products or with reviews of products – compared with 12 percent of non-contributors and 18.2 percent overall.
- 35.6 percent of forum contributors attend an offline event or meet up where people with similar interests or who share the same hobby connect – compared with 13.8 percent of non-contributors and 18 percent overall.
- 20.6 percent of forum contributors publish a blog – compared with 2.1 percent of non-contributors and 5.7 percent overall.
- 18.8 percent of forum contributors take an active role in organizing an offline event or meet up for a group that met originally online – compared with 2.4 percent of non-contributors and 5.6 percent overall.
Google Buzz – A New Buzz in Social Media (Impact on SEO and Twitter & Facebook)
February 9, 2010 : Google held a press event to announce the most “buzzed” topic of the week – Google Buzz. This is Google’s new product, which is being compared to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It is integrated with Gmail and other Google products, so it really fills the missing puzzle of Google Products.
Google says Buzz has following key elements:
- It is integrated with Gmail. So no need to go to an
y other Site. Gmail Already has billion 0f users world-wide. It is fully integrated with inbox. Buzz sends responses to your posts straight to your inbox. Unlike static email messages, buzz messages in your inbox are live conversations where comments appear in real time. - Share publicly or privately: Publish your ideas to the world or just to your closest friends. It has fast flip type of picture viewer.
- It can Import your stuff from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and Google Reader.
- Classy example of AJAX technology, missing in Twitter: New posts and comments pop in as they happen. No refresh required.
- Just Good Stuff : You can follow the specific people whose posts you want to see, but Buzz also recommends posts from people you’re not directly following, often ones where your friends are having a lively conversation in the comments. If you’re not interested in a particular recommendation, just click the “Not interested” link and your feedback will help improve the recommendations system
Impact On SEO:
Although, Google has not announced about its impact on SEO, and its too early too, but any one can guess that its going to impact like Face Book and Twitter has.
Google’s Personalized search has already changed scenario and now sites you visit often will more come in your searches. And Social Networks are widely used to increase the Brand-awareness and in result effect he Google Search results.
Besides, Google Live Search is also showing every second updates on Twitter on Facebook. So for sure, Google Buzz will play its role, and will replace or take larger part from Twitter/Facebook in search results.
Impact on Twitter & Facebook:
Google has billion of Gmail users, but I don’t see any immediate impact on Facebook and Twitter. Definitely, people who have established networks on Facebook and twitter can’t left. However, Gradually, it will snatch share from these social media giants as it did in case of Chat and Mail from Hotmail and Yahoo. And as it provides all facilities at one place, so it should be little faster than Chat & Mail case.
If Seo is Dead? 10 Questions
Google Personalization has raised various questions in SEO Professionals that how it is going to impact SEO work. It looks like main SEO activities are going to be dead. Following are some questions I collected from different articles and forums.
- If everybody is going to see different search results based on their searching patterns, how can you measure a consistent ranking? How can you reach an audience if their search queries are already personalized to show your competitor’s brand?
- On page optimization and link building will no longer have as much influence on rank for competitive search queries?
- Clients who opt-ín to personalization will get awkward results, for example, if they visit their own sites often, they will see it on Top in Results. Even it is not supposed to be to others. And they will feel like no improvements needed, as their site is already doing god in ranking.
- Companies / brands with greater traffic have a better chance to gain new business because searchers will see more impressions of snippets to their sites. This creates branding opportunities via snippets.
- It will become even more difficult to rank for generic keywords and search phrases (as larger brands will tend to dominate based on market search share), meaning long tail search queries will become much more important in an SEO campaign.
- Pay Per Click advertising will become more popular as people find organic SEO too complex and useless. Google is making way to raise its income.
- Usage of different SEO tools to check Rank and Backlinks, etc will become useless, as search results will no more based on these factors. I think i will have to cancel my SEOmoz Ranking
- If you have good brand awareness now, your site will be above and above in search results. Sites which don’t have good ranking right now will go down and down. It will become more and tougher for them to rank better. So new sites will have tough time to compete.
- Black Hat SEO and such viral software will become common that install on visitors computers and affect their searches.
- Social Media will be only internet marketing tool that will provide a way to increase brand awareness for new companies and affect Google results largely.
Internet Marketing Vs. Conventional Marketing (TV, Newspaper, etc)
E-marketing gives businesses of any size access to the mass market at an affordable price and, unlike TV or print advertising, it allows truly personalized marketing. Specific benefits of e-marketing include:
- On Demand Marketing: As compared to interruptive nature of advertisement on TV and other medias, where ad is shown to even those people .who don’t want to see, Internet provides On-Demand Information. People search on net what they want and when they want.
- Low cost and high return on investment. Hundred times cheaper than conventional marketing tools like TV or News Paper advertisement. Just compare the cost of printing a full News Paper Ad for one Day vs. the cost of e-mailing to 25,000 e-mail addresses. Internet is clearly the winner.
- Durable & Cost Effective An advertisement in a newspaper is worthless the day (perhaps two days) after the paper is released. Having a booth at a business fair or conference only lasts as long as the conference – it doesn’t reach anybody once it is over. And the costs of both print ads and conferences can rack up quickly. On the other hand, apart from details such as dates and prices, much of your website content will still be valid and viewable years after you’ve done the work to launch it and the costs are much more reasonable than print.You can choose when you want to pay for people to see your ads online. Pay for every time someone sees your ad, or only when they click on it. You can even have them fill out a form that identifies them or just pay when you actually get a sale from another website. With print you pay the same, no matter how much business it generates.
- Easy distribution of information and media to global audience, like Webinars has taken place of Seminars.
- Easy to target local market (Geo Marketing) as well Global Market (You don’t need to be a huge Multi-National to access International clients)
- Measurable Results: Biggest advantage of Internet Marketing is the measurability. You can obtain detailed information about customers’ responses to your advertising. Examples are:
- How many people saw your advertisement banners
- How many clicked on them
- How many asked information or a price quote
- How many sales resulted from that campaign
- How many people came to your website per day AND exactly what key words they used to find it
- Calculate the profits per 1,000 visitors on THAT specific keyword
- How many pages people looked at
- What section of your site is most popular
- What is the most frequent “exit page” (where users leave your site)
- How many visitors are NEW to the site and how many are repeat-visits?
By contrast, data for Conventional Marketing operates within “estimates” or averages. Getting exact numbers of sales that result from a specific ad in a newspaper or magazine is both difficult and expensive.
- Broad and Targeted Audience . As Internet users are increasing, internet marketing is getting more and more effective.
- One-to-One Marketing . As most of internet users, use internet alone, it’s more effective for selling products which has personal nature. Even for other Products decision making is faster.
- Interactive Marketing: Internet marketing is interactive by nature, both in terms of providing instant feedback and eliciting responses. Internet marketers are able to collect data about specific users, through the use of online registration forms, quizzes and surveys- or through computer “cookies,” (that track where kids surf, how long they stay there, and what they download.)
- Quick Results: As compared to TV ad or other conventional marketing means, user gets all information at one place. And in the mean time sell on the same time. (E-Commerce Sites)
- Always available: Either your business is 24 hours open or not; your Web shop sells round the clock all seasons. Even if no staff is in your office, visitors will come to your website. Your website NEVER closes. Bring more visitors to your company. Convert those visitors into more customers. Generate more revenue.
- Low Cost, Quick Updation: You have a change in your offerings? Its easy and virtually no cost to change your website and online advertisement. Compare it with TV Ad or Radio Ad. You will have to pay lot of price for that.
In the United Kingdom, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is reporting that online advertising has overtaken television. According to Reuters, advertising spend on the Internet grew 4.6% to a total of 23.5% of the total market.
Google Live Search – Every Second Update can be searched now (Impact On SEO?)
Google has launched a new search engine on Monday Dec 07, 2009 that will facilitate to search every update on internet live.
This new search engine can search Facebook and twitter updates also.
Google says, this new search engine will next another two days to be available to all over the world.
The experimental search-by-sight feature, called Google Goggles, has a database of billions of images that informs its analysis of what’s been uploaded, said Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering. It can recognize books, album covers, artwork, landmarks, places, logos, and more.
“It is our goal to be able to identify any image,” he said. “It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query.”
However, the feature is still in Google Labs to deal with the “nascent nature of computer vision” and with the service’s present shortcomings. “Google Goggles works well on certain types of objects in certain categories,” he said.
Impact on SEO:
As i discussed in my previous aricle about Google Personalized Search and its impact on SEO, i believe next era is of Social Communities. In future, 90% of SEO will depend on Twitter, Facebook and other such communities and 10% on On-Site Optimizations.
Google Personalized Search — A New Challenge for SEO
As on December 4th 2009, Google extended its Personalized Search system for Non-registered users. Earlier this option was available to registered users, only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. Google Search now displays all users with personalized results – including those who are not registered. Google saves a cookie contains information about Search Results for the last 180 days. On the basis of the file search versed in internet user preferences, adjusting the results to him. User will know, he is seeing Customized search results when a “View customizations” link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let user see how Google have customized results and will also allow user to turn off this type of customization.
What does it mean to SEO? No Doubt Google is making it more and more tough for SEO professionals to tweak its results.
Now how can we know the behavior of different users? You have a “cookie” Google to do that, but what SEO professionals should do?
Definitely its gonna be biggest challenge for SEO. In my opinion, now Social Networks will play most vital role, as this is the only method available to us to remain closer with community. There are over 100 Community networks, and for me, it is already biggest source of traffic. Become more and more visible to community, and definately your brand will be preffered in their personalized searches.
Anchor Text – Everybody makes this mistake
Do You know which are the most popular anchor texts? You will not believe that, as i did. These are “Click Here” and “Read More”.
If you Google the word phrase “click here” the first page is Adobe Reader. See the proof by clicking this link.
Now if you see the #1 site on that page you will get this page: Adobe Reader . But that page has no words “click here” on the page. It is ranked #1 because millions of websites have a link on it that reads: “Click here to download Adobe Acrobat Reader”. Because millions of websites name their link “click here” it is ranked number one. Now imagine those same websites had the link: “Web Designer UAE to download Adobe Acrobate Reader”. The site that the words “Web Designer UAE “links to would be #1 anytime someone Googled “Web Designer UAE“.
Now just look at your own website, how many time “Click Here” and “Read More” are used? These are just useless phrases taking away your most important SEO Juice. No Body will use these phrases to search you.
LinkedIn and Twitter join forces
LinkedIn has announced a new partnership with Twitter that allows users of both social networking services to interchangeably update their statuses from either service.
“The idea is simple,” said Co-Founder of LinkedIn Allen Blue. “When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool.”
