Aside from being Pristine’s CTO, I also happen to be my company’s webmaster. I really do not mind this task, in fact I think its one of the under-rated jobs out there in the market.

The cool part about this role is how closely you have to work with the Google ecosystem of Analytics, Adwords and Webmaster tools. The thing about Google products is that many people might know about them, but how many of them use it the way they are intended to be?

In my quest to find the right person I have interviewed so many professionals, that its not funny. Almost all of them put everything but the kitchen sink on their resumes. That might be a good idea, but they all of them come down crashing in the interview. A royal waste of time.

In case if you want to differentiate yourself from the horde of wannabes out there, this is one of the things that you have to know!!

URL Builder Tool

Here’s the link to the tool.

* Ta-da! and all the fanfare *

What this tool allows you to do is allow you to track a segment of the visits which are generated on the provided link to be tracked as an individual campaign! The reason why anyone should be excited, is that now you can slice and dice all incoming links to your website (provided you can alter the incoming links).

Some of the ways in which it can be used is -

• Tracking a segment of your traffic which is coming via an online-ad – For example, I could put a banner ad on Timesjob, or some site. I could also have posted a job posting there with my website’s URL in the job description. Now instead of relying on the simply the data from Referral traffic to measure the ROI of this ad campaign, I can give them a generated URL and track it without worrying about any other source of traffic
• Email Campaigns clicks can now be tracked as a segment. With a little help of Goals and Conversions, I can calculate the ROI on a per email basis
• You can even measure the effectiveness of traffic being generated from different properties on your website

Well, this is just the start, you can go pretty much wild with this tool. Just remember folks! Slice and Dice data for better control and tracking.

Back in 2000, the dot com market in India was booming. Every company who wanted to have it’s presence online was scrambling to find domain names, hosting, email solutions, etc. Companies such as Net4India sprung up and came up with offerings with ridiculous prices (some of these offerings still exist to date!). Executives bought these websites thinking that somehow building a website would translate into revenues. In fact even today, the average “Indian IT company” continues to dole out development costs of websites propelled by content management systems (CMS) to be around 5-6 lakhs. If you are lucky, then that figure can go as high as 14-15 lakhs !!

What was the mistake then?

The single minded assumption that building a website will translate into revenues.

I still see folks who nurture this piece of ticking bomb waiting to explode and set their businesses to ruins. As a result, all derived-demand business also went bustville. It took a fair amount of years to clear the damage, and come back on track.

So why bring this up Now?

These days, whomsoever that I am talking (and you can include me in this list as well!!), is thinking about having an online enterprise. A sweet setup, where the person can run a business irrespective of where this aforesaid individual is. There are more than a fair share of success stories around, and these people have become heralded role models.

Yes, the online dream can become true. Yes.

Feels good to hear these words, don’t they? These days I am seeing a lot more structured approach, newsletters, opt-in forms, CRM systems, mass emailing systems, affiliate management systems, advertising networks, etc … the systems are all there. People just need to start using them and start churning the proverbial money mill.

But …

Back then it was IT firms, now I am seeing a large growth of Digital Marketing firms. It’s the same plot, just the players are different now. Organizations are again back to setting up websites, now with complex marketing and sales systems. But how are you doing in terms of sales? Is the juice worth the squeeze?

If you do own a website, could you share with me what are the plans that you are thinking of to generate sales? Are you creating value to generate those sales?

With the WordPress 3.3 update coming out, I decided that it was about time that I upgrade the wordpress running on our company’s website from the lowly 2.7.1 to the current version. This has been a thorn in my side from quite some time (about a year now). I had earlier attempted to correct this, however direct update options available in WP always resulted in broken themes or worse, broken functionality. It’s a nightmare when you have to consider the SEO juice you would be loosing because of the change in URLs. Even if I put in 301 redirects, it was too much of an effort to consider the update.

Installation

• Christmas and New Year is always a slow time for any business, the perfect time to update WordPress. Also, using Google Analytics, I noted the time of the day when we receive the least no. of visitors (2am to 7am IST, when the no. is around 300-400 visitors per hour, else it goes as high as 1700-2000 visitors per hour)
• The first thing I did was ensure that my hosting environment was compatible with WP 3.3. Turns out that my PHP version was not updated. I found this excellent guide to upgrade PHP from 5.1 to 5.3.
• Once that was done, I double checked to see if my existing packages were compatible with the updated PHP. Turns out, that a lot of the functions in the previous version were deprecated. My error_log was looking like a battlefield scarred with PHP Fatal Errors, and PHP Warnings. Some quick fixes, I was ready for the WP update.
• Using the awesome 5-minute WP install, I installed a dummy version on a hidden subdomain. I was sure to disable search engines on this deployment.
• I then exported all the data from our current system and imported it into this deployment. This was the easiest part!
• I then copied our theme files, and installed it into this new WP package (you have to check the theme files for deprecated methods)
• I then copied all the plug-ins from the old to the new WP. These were then updated. The good thing about updated plug-ins is that you get awesome set of functionalities and security updates that you so wanted. Note to New Webmasters: There are a lot of plug-ins out there whose older versions contain backdoors (more on this later), trigger false alarms on search engines, etc which need to be taken care of. Earlier I used to this clean-up using shell scripts, but not anymore
• Now with a bit of tweaking here and there, the site had URLs which were function properly (no more worrying about loosing on our SEO efforts).
• With adding a fair bit of plug-ins into the system, came a new problem – conflicting jQuery!! Earlier this month, I had asked our intern to hand script a jQuery menu, and that was conflicting with the other jQuery scripts. Fortunately, we have jQuery.noConflict().

A whole new World!

One part of my role at Pristine is building up the site traffic, be it via Paid Advertising, Referral traffic or via Search Engines.

Anyone who has indulged in Paid Advertising would know how expensive it can turn out to be if you do not know what you are doing. It can be very effective in the short term, however for long term and more sustainable results, relying on non-paid search results is far better. Hence SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

The problem with SEO is that almost everyone who has a website think that they should do SEO, and SEO is playing around with meta tags. Seems simplistic no? In the past month or so, the amount of people whom I have talked to regarding to SEO has shown how less people know about the workings. Add to it the complexity of the ever-changing algorithm of search engines such as Google, Bing, etc.

The idea behind SEO is to target specific keywords for specific pages on your site, so that when your target audience searches for those keywords, your site shows up in the search results.

Here are some tips which I would have appreciated when I started off. Please do keep in mind, that I am no self-professed expert in SEO, just that like all of us around here, even I am learning, and this post is one such humble attempt to share whatever that I have learned, and what I know works to get results. Having said that, I know it would help all of us if you could point out any errors that i have made, or make suggestions and provide additional tips!

• Read up on your meta tags, some of them are useful. Make a note of the description and author tags, you would be working with description the most.
• Do not target more than 2-3 keywords per page, since you have to use that keyword in all the different important sections of the page viz., description tag, title tag, h1 tag, main content, etc. you cannot really target 1-2 keywords without damaging the copy of your page.
• If you are working with a tight budget, then use a free tool such as Traffic Travis, the demo version is free. If you have a decent sized budget, then I would highly recommend Pro SEO MOz, it not only has a very comprehensive SEO tool, but also it has an extensive knowledge base on SEO
• Search Engine’s maintain the authority of websites, this is generally a factor of how well you write, and how many sites are linking to your content. Google especially is one search engine which rewards regular content creation, in fact the current search algo (don’t know why its called the panda update) also favors freshness of content. So the same page would rank higher if it were regularly updated.
• Always look at the different search terms via which people are coming to your site. Those are essentially content creation triggers!
• Many people swear by backlinking, citing different open directories to publish your site links. However, I am skeptical about this approach. The one thing I use this approach for is to check where are my competitors linking, and get my presence their as well. I think if you can create good quality content, then it will automatically fetch the backlinks that you require.
• Search engines are also influenced by social behavior, so typically the search results shown in Google would be influenced with what your friends are sharing on your social networks. E.g- If I share this post on say Twitter and if you are following me on Twitter, then you would definitely see this as a search result!
• SEO is a long drawn game, and it requires patience, practice and discipline. Do not expect magic to happen, it’s a slow and gradual process and does not happen over night. To hope for such miracles, either you need to be Larry Page or Steve Ballmer.

The good folks at Google have a great sense of humor. Ever since the launch of GMail on the 1st of April, and the subsequent April Fool jokes, we are always guessing what hidden joke lurks in each of the Google products. Here are some of them that I have found, you can check them out too!

I am also including some of the outputs, which you can try by yourself as well!

Do a Barrel Roll

Search this term in Google search, and watch the fun as the search queries take a tumble, and literally does a barrel roll!

Askew

Search this term in Google search, and see the screen go askew!!

Ascii Art

Search for this, and the Google logo shows you what Ascii Art is all about!

Recursion

Have you noticed that when search on Google, if you do typographical mistakes, Google corrects you by asking you “Did you mean <corrected spelling>”. Try searching recursion on Google!

There are more such easter eggs in Google, but they are time bound (for example searching football during the Soccer World Cup would give you an interested Pagination navigation on Google).

As a bonus, try this out in your Google Reader – up up down down left right left right b a b a (and beware of the ninja!).

No, I don’t drink and raid

I recently have taken a lot to playing World of Warcraft during my free time (I think this also reflects pretty well on the blog ). I also have bought a good powerhouse of a desktop, and had dual booted it with WinXP and Win7. The problem with Win7 is that I have the 64-bit trial distribution and it hangs a lot, it has driver issues. The problem with WinXP is that its WinXP

I am not that much of an operating system nazi, but the machine slows, down, the wireless network card that I am using is not fully utilized (WinXP sucks when it comes to driving the wireless interface!!). All in all, when it comes to playing an Online RPG, the environment does not deliver it’s 100%. Thus, I tried to give Ubuntu a try.

• I already had the 11.04 distro with me, so the first thing I did was update all the repositories, include the third party repositories, and install Wine. Wine stands for WINdows Emulator. You can read more about Wine here.
• After Wine, I went for installing Winetricks, which is a third party software. It’s used to easily streamline commands via a wizard which otherwise I would have been forced to use the console.
• Somehow the Wine commands that get integrated into the shell (the right click menu of your explorer) are a bit different from the wine that got installed. So at first the program refused to run giving some obscure access management errors.
• So, refusing to be let down, I went and searched for third party alternatives. You can skip this step, and definitely do not install the Crossover Games application because its just a trial, however, the PlayOnLinux (POL) application is recommended here, since after installing that, at least the icons of the .exe files will be visible
• However, when I ran the Launcher.exe of World of Warcraft via the custom command console (by right clicking on it and selecting Open with Other Application, and then simply typing wine in the command box)
• That’s it. Now the World of Warcraft launcher will run, and the game runs seamlessly

Since the game does not use the latest DirectX drivers, instead it replaces them with its own set, the textures and the games will be slightly different. I noticed a different texture for the water in WoW for example. But otherwise, the game is perfect for running. The network card works better, so I get a faster ping rate.

People who are in Social Media would already know of influence monitoring tools such as Klout, Peerindex, and Rapportive.

I started using Klout the minute I discovered it using the Rapportive add-on for Firefox. Measuring and monitoring your klout score seemed cool. Soon after that I chanced on Peerindex as well.

The approaches employed by Klout and Peerindex are slightly different. Whereas Peerindex considered the reach of your tweets and conversations, Klout seemed to focus on the richness. Both the web-apps seemed cool, since both of them gave you an indication of what and how to increase your respective scores. So I managed to hike up my Klout score from the low 40s to the low 60s. I was happy with what I had achieved, until one conversation with Sushrut at a Tweet-up made me realize, that a high Klout score or a high Peerindex score is not really the outcome.

The business model that both these web-apps adopt to monetize their influence measuring algorithms is pretty much the same. Organizations that need to reach out to the influencers and decision-makers in their particular niches can now do so … at a price of course. Peerindex for example, charges 50 GBP for identifying a single influencer in the topic of your choosing. Of course there are people who are willing to pay, but the question I want to raise is till when?

I recently read this article on the openview blog, and found this great directory of twitterati – Twellow. One simple search confirmed this, the application is a directory of topic-wise experts, whereas this might seem commonplace, what this means for Klout and Peerindex is that their premium services now seem overpriced. Why would an organization pay a premium for the same information which is available for free?

Agreed, that Klout and Peerindex do provide “perks” for influencers, but at the end of the day, the deliverable for which the organization is paying up good money is to get twitter handles of influencers to start engaging with them. Perhaps, if the engagement can be somehow integrated into these perks … but till then I am firmly sticking to Twellow!

If you have worked in a start-up and have been a part of the core team in any start-up, you would be familiar with and know the importance of venture capital; and their steep terms and targets

If you want a higher funding in the next round, give me more revenues.

How many of us have heard this line? In fact, it’s interesting to note that VC’s are not looking at higher bottomline, they are looking at increasing the topline. I am not complaining, it is a good perspective to hold if you want to keep an eye on the big picture.

This stand is also helping the slew of applications which are being launched as Softwares-as-a-Service (SaaS). Why? Read on.

As a business owner, one of the major targets dictated by a VC would be revenue targets. Not profitability. So I, as a business owner, will be willing to try out different new services in order to increase my offering. If a service exists which otherwise will take me ages to build or acquire, I am now more than willing to try it out on a month-on-month basis.

The overall cost of a SaaS pricing would be more, but the brunt of it on a monthly basis would be less. This impacts my profitability, but these days I am not looking at profits as much as I am looking at revenues. If I able to increase the reach or richness of my service offering using SaaS, then so be it. I will go ahead for the same at the cost of profitability.

Your thoughts?

There is a forum that I visit every once in a while, a place where a lot of youngsters flock for sharing ideas and seeking help on technical topics. As would happen due to my strongly felt statements, I recently got into a flaming match. Fortunately this is being conducted via IMs and not on the public forum directly.

I am finding it noteworthy because a decade back or so, I would have taken the stand that I am currently speaking against. The topic at discussion here is what should one do if one wants to build great websites. As always, I have chosen function over form and gone for learning design patterns, frameworks, understanding how logic is written and how algorithms can make you code better.

The youth (I am assuming that he is one, since his language reflects the brazenness of a college brat), has a simple argument. Since the end point of all websites is HTML, one should learn HTML inside out (HTML, CSS, JS, validations, the works). In all probability, I would have chosen the same answer … but that’s what decades are for – telling us our past answers were wrong

As I was trading IMs, I realized that perhaps there is more to this question than a simple answer -

1. Form V/s Function: Firstly, there is the age old looks v/s functionality argument.
2. You have the what makes a website great topic (Purpose, Usability, Functionality, what?)
3. Then there is the Purpose of a website tangent
4. And if that’s not all, you have the you cannot teach creativity argument

All the aforementioned approaches can enable one to make websites. They are tools. But first, do you have an idea as to what problem are you solving with your website?

Get an idea.

Dear Channel providers,

I am sure that all of you are complaining about piracy of your shows and content over the internet. In fact I won’t be surprised if you think the bit torrent technology is the scourge of all paid content models. Here is a suggestions -

If you can’t beat them, join them

Why don’t you start providing your premium content for download over the internet? Go ahead put your advertisements in them as well. Not only are you increasing your advertisement exposure, but also you are making money off the very thing which was a threat to you earlier.

The cool part is that even if your content then gets pirated, you are still getting the advertisement exposure. Isn’t that what you wanted?