Believe it or not. Every smoker donates to Israel

1. Total World Population: 6.5 Billion

2. Total Muslims in the world: 2 Billion

3. Total Smokers in the world: 1.15 billion

4. Total Muslim smokers in the world: 400 million

5. Largest Cigarette maker is Phillip Morris

6. Phillip Morris donates 12% profits to Israel

7. Total Muslim money to Morris $800 million DAILY

8. Average profit margin is 10%

9. Average profit for Morris is $80 million DAILY

10. Thus $9.6 million of Muslim money goes to Israel every single DAY…….

Yes DAY!!!

June 27th, 2008 - Posted in The World | | 0 Comments

Pakistani Student Sammad Khurram Refused to collect his Shield from American ambassador

Pakistani Student Sammad Khurram refused to collect his shield from American Ambassador, when he was called on stage in his college award distribution ceremony to collect his award for his brilliant performance. But everyone got shocked to see that he didn’t receive his award from American ambassador as a protest against the killing of innocent Pakistani soldiers in tribal areas of Pakistan.

sammad khurram refused shield

Watch the video and see the American ambassador for Pakistan’s face expression.

June 19th, 2008 - Posted in The World | | 1 Comments

Ideas to generate B2B Sales and Business Leads

People are pretty busy in their professional lives and they don’t have enough time to read the long stories and books to get ideas about how to increase their business traffic and how they can generate business leads.

If you have a business website and you are looking for just business traffic then following points are important to understand for you as air is important for breath.

1. How to tap the power of email marketing for B2B acquisition, demand generation, selling, cross selling and retention.

2. Expert feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of your website and how to improve your customers’ online experience.

3. Unique approaches for B2B Search Engine Optimization and paid search that will land the most qualified prospects.

4. The new and emerging technologies that can empower your business to compete in a fast moving global economy.

5. What works in B2B creative: traps to avoid, techniques to embrace, and tips that turn good creative into best in class.

6. Proven examples of campaigns, offer strategies and direct marketing techniques (online and offline) to lift your performance 25% to 200%.

7. The latest and proven approaches to fill your pipeline with highly-qualified sales leads and nurture them to closing.

8. Three steps to a successful branding road trip that will improve revenue, margins, and sales productivity.

9. The art and science of creating B2B viral marketing initiatives that will empower others to tell your story for free.

10. A step-by-step process for defining what aspects of social media are appropriate for your company.

11. A framework of tools and metrics that will enable you to measure the marketing department’s value and contribution to the company.

May 30th, 2008 - Posted in SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING AND OPTIMIZATION | | 2 Comments

Basic Tactics for Social Media Marketing (SMM):

It is very important to understand before you jump into the ocean of social media marketing, these five concepts are the base of Social Media Marketing. Any and all forms of Social Media Marketing tactics fall under at least one of these five forms of action. Often the same channel will incorporate two or more of these:

Declaration of yourself and Avoiding False Identity
Bookmarking and Association based in Interaction
Group network’s user-initiated Association
Your own initiated Conversation:
In-Person Interaction

Declaration of yourself and Avoiding False Identity:

This is the declaration of your identity, your introduction, your contact information, who you are, and where you can be found. It’s a sort of branding for your own business and yourself. And after sometimes it becomes your asset in the internet marketing arena. Your customer happens upon your online identity that you, as a provider, define and declare.

To boost and get output from social media marketing, try following things

· Make an About Us pages

· Elaborate it fully

· Explain yourself, your experience area of expertise

· Add your blog or website,

· Add your MySpace profile or your Facebook profile etc.

In this area basically you have to describe in best suitable manner that how yourself and your expertise can be helpful to the market you are targeting, but sometimes this becomes very critical to define how you can benefit your marketplace in a very small piece of paragraph.

There has been a recent projection of websites created purely for this function. Most also include the opportunity to link to your other forms of presence online, bringing together your presence in one place. They include:

Association and Bookmarking based Interaction:

After declaring yourself precisely, now you have to provide an opportunity to your clients and people in your networks to associate themselves with you and yourself with your customers (network). Most perceptibly, this could be done through communities and activities like inviting “Friends” on MySpace, Face book, Bookmarking your friend’s pages and inviting to your friends for bookmarking your pages and your customers’ BlogRoll.
In this way you can make your customer wearing your company’s logo proudly.

The most rapidly growing form of allowing other to remember and associate with you is through social bookmarking sites. I say this, and not social networking sites, because this is the sole function of these sites. Make it easy for your customers to bookmark your site, blog posts, etc with their favorite tool.

This video will help you to get an idea that how exactly bookmarking:

Group network’s user-initiated Association:

In this phase you provide an opportunity to your users to create their own declarations or questions, and provide you an opportunity to respond. This is your opportunity to be there and cater to them.

Your posts, your articles and your customers

The most popular examples of this lies in message boards, Feedback forms, comments and chat discussion rooms forums and “groups” sites such as Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups, community sites, etc.

In order to get directly involved with your customers, the most well-known examples of those are the sites such as:

Your own initiated Conversation:

In your social network you initiate a conversation to get the idea and opinion of the people in your social network; it initiates an opportunity to find out that what your customers/clients think, feel, likes and dislikes about your product or services or whatever you have written for.

Ultimately provides a chance to ask them, challenge them and present yourself to them, but let me tell you while doing this all you should be polite and in an educating behavior.

As much as it’s an opportunity for them to tell you what they love and hate about your product, it’s also their choice whether to do so or not. Be kind. Be respectful. Appreciate their time.

Although it’s not a primarily online company, there is one company that has made this their culture. Seeking feedback and input from its customers 24/7/265.

Social media marketing and social networking strategies which are connecting with your customers can definitely be complex, tricky and cumbersome, The following are the examples of such places where you can find your customers and can interact with them:

In-Person Interaction:

This is the top form of interaction with your customers. You’re interacting with them online, why not in person? Does it get better than that? This is where relationships are built and authentic conversation is had with so much more input, feedback, collaboration and communication. I had a seven hour conversation with a good friend last night. It was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had about so many things, and I could have never had that quality of a conversation online. Nothing beats face-to-face.

Get out there. Meet your customers. Let them interact with other customers. Build your community. Go to conferences…better yet, organize your own gatherings.

To help this along, coordinating, managing attendee status, etc, there have been several sites that can help in either finding local events or coordinating your own:

Few Complications:

After studying and working on social media marketing I found few complications in social media marketing:

The work and the strategies are not well planned infact no one has created a structure to work from.

Second many such websites are coming into the market rapidly and this creating much overlap in functionality of different sites that is what making it more confusing as to a site’s single purpose, there usually isn’t a single purpose.

More people are using these activities artificially and increasing the volume of spam in this specific area. And People who are into real and authentic way of doing this, they have to face problems.

But I suggest you let others do whatever they doing, get out there. Spend time with these sites. Sign up, Use them, meet your customers, talk to your customers, and LOVE THEM.

May 22nd, 2008 - Posted in SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING AND OPTIMIZATION | | 2 Comments

know the Role of Business Analyst IT in software Industry

IF you would like to become a Business Analyst IT, you must know the role of business analyst in IT industry.

What I found peculiar in my experience was that I began in production support, spent time as a report developer and data analyst and then moved in to a technical Business Analyst role. As soon as my job description read “business analyst” the same people that I had worked with over the years began to exclude me -

Business Analyst IT

Since BAs are the bridge between business and IT - their ownership becomes an issue in any project - if IT owns them with all the prejudices which I mentioned then business feels them as technical resources hardly adding any extra value and similarly if business owns then IT shuns them off as foreign..

This captures the situation so precisely I can’t think of any comment to make. On the IT side, if a business got the chance to know me they were happy (I was eventually “stolen” from IT by my the client.) Otherwise, they felt that the BA role was there to add another layer of billing to their project and that there would be minimal value. Now that I’m on the business side IT can’t shut me out but I am viewed with suspicion.

..I think both of the issues can be solved by making a distinction in the market between IT oriented business analyst and domain oriented business analyst (call each something else)..

I’m not sure this will completely resolve the situation. If I didn’t have the IT experience I wouldn’t have been able to walk into my current role and be as comfortable as I am so quickly. It was my prior role in business that led me to IT because I thought technology had the answers to just about any business question and problem.

I think individuals working in the role of BA on both the IT side and business side have a unique opportunity to define and develop the role. We have the unique ability to “step outside and look in”. We are not married to any particular technology, theory or methodology. We bring with us both business and technological experience and are open to learning from one another.

We need to look within and to understand, as individuals, where we can provide the most value using our unique backgrounds. We need to approach each situation in a neutral fashion. We’re the diplomats and the translators and we are in one of the best positions to actively participate in the creation of new and exciting cutting edge solutions.

May 20th, 2008 - Posted in IT Industry | | 0 Comments

How can you Calculate page rank of your website?

Most of the SEO and webmasters are worried about their Page rank, and sometimes they use to put efforts but unable to get the results.

Let me tell you before you start your SEO campaigns, study Google’s Algorithm and formula to calculate the Page Rank (PR).

Here is the formula which is being used by Google to calculate Page Rake for your websites:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

That’s the equation that calculates a page’s PageRank. It’s the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren’t telling us what it is. It doesn’t matter though, as this equation is good enough.

In the equation ‘t1 - tn’ are pages linking to page A, ‘C’ is the number of outbound links that a page has and ‘d’ is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

We can think of it in a simpler way:-

a page’s PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a “share” of the PageRank of every page that links to it)

“share” = the linking page’s PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page.

A page “votes” an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.

From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links is worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The PageRank of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it.

If the PageRank value differences between PR1, PR2,…..PR10 were equal then that conclusion would hold up, but many people believe that the values between PR1 and PR10 (the maximum) are set on a logarithmic scale, and there is very good reason for believing it. Nobody outside Google knows for sure one way or the other, but the chances are high that the scale is logarithmic, or similar. If so, it means that it takes a lot more additional PageRank for a page to move up to the next PageRank level that it did to move up from the previous PageRank level. The result is that it reverses the previous conclusion, so that a link from a PR8 page that has lots of outbound links is worth more than a link from a PR4 page that has only a few outbound links.

Whichever scale Google uses, we can be sure of one thing. A link from another site increases our site’s PageRank. Just remember to avoid links from link farms.

Note that when a page votes its PageRank value to other pages, its own PageRank is not reduced by the value that it is voting. The page doing the voting doesn’t give away its PageRank and end up with nothing. It isn’t a transfer of PageRank. It is simply a vote according to the page’s Page Rank value. It’s like a shareholders meeting where each shareholder votes according to the number of shares held, but the shares themselves aren’t given away. Even so, pages do lose some Page Rank indirectly, as we’ll see later.

Ok so far? Good. Now we’ll look at how the calculations are actually done.

For a page’s calculation, its existing PageRank (if it has any) is abandoned completely and a fresh calculation is done where the page relies solely on the Page Rank “voted” for it by its current inbound links, which may have changed since the last time the page’s PageRank was calculated.

The equation shows clearly how a page’s Page Rank is arrived at. But what isn’t immediately obvious is that it can’t work if the calculation is done just once. Suppose we have 2 pages, A and B, which link to each other and neither have any other links of any kind. This is what happens:-

Step 1:

Role of inbound links in perspective of calculating Page A’s Page Rank:

Page A now has a new PageRank value. The calculation used the value of the inbound link from page B. But page B has an inbound link (from page A) and its new PageRank value hasn’t been worked out yet, so page A’s new PageRank value is based on inaccurate data and can’t be accurate.

Step 2:

Role of inbound links in perspective of calculating Page B’s Page Rank:

Page B now has a new PageRank value, but it can’t be accurate because the calculation used the new PageRank value of the inbound link from page A, which is inaccurate.

It’s a Catch 22 situation. We can’t work out A’s PageRank until we know B’s PageRank, and we can’t work out B’s PageRank until we know A’s PageRank.

Now that both pages have newly calculated PageRank values, can’t we just run the calculations again to arrive at accurate values? No. We can run the calculations again using the new values and the results will be more accurate, but we will always be using inaccurate values for the calculations, so the results will always be inaccurate.

The problem is overcome by repeating the calculations many times. Each time produces slightly more accurate values. In fact, total accuracy can never be achieved because the calculations are always based on inaccurate values. 40 to 50 iterations are sufficient to reach a point where any further iteration wouldn’t produce enough of a change to the values to matter. This is precisiely what Google does at each update, and it’s the reason why the updates take so long.

One thing to bear in mind is that the results we get from the calculations are proportions. The figures must then be set against a scale (known only to Google) to arrive at each page’s actual PageRank. Even so, we can use the calculations to channel the PageRank within a site around its pages so that certain pages receive a higher proportion of it than others.

Remember:
You may come across explanations of PageRank where the same equation is stated but the result of each iteration of the calculation is added to the page’s existing PageRank. The new value (result + existing PageRank) is then used when sharing PageRank with other pages. These explanations are wrong for the following reasons:-

1. They quote the same, published equation - but then change it

from PR(A) = (1-d) + d(……) to PR(A) = PR(A) + (1-d) + d(……)

It isn’t correct, and it isn’t necessary.

2. We will be looking at how to organize links so that certain pages end up with a larger proportion of the PageRank than others. Adding to the page’s existing PageRank through the iterations produces different proportions than when the equation is used as published. Since the addition is not a part of the published equation, the results are wrong and the proportioning isn’t accurate.

According to the published equation, the page being calculated starts from scratch at each iteration. It relies solely on its inbound links. The ‘add to the existing PageRank’ idea doesn’t do that, so its results are necessarily wrong.

May 15th, 2008 - Posted in SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING AND OPTIMIZATION | | 0 Comments

Are you a Certified SEO Professional?

If your answer is yes to the question given above, The Be ready to face the reality.

Let me tell you that there are no official organizations or the institutions which are offering search engine marketing. But there are few organizations which appears to be a certifying authority which may or may not be in the best interests of the SEO industry. And, based on what I see some of those touting these certifications doing, I don’t think those doing the certifying want to take responsibility for these individuals. Or do you?

Let me define Certification or Certify:

· To confirm formally as true, accurate, or genuine. To attest, testify, or vouch for

· To assume responsibility for the quality, worth, or durability of.

Now that we have the definition right here in front of us, let me ask those who are providing these “unofficial” certifications if they are ready to attest, testify, vouch for and, assume the responsibility for the quality, worth and durability of the work performed by each and every one of these so-called certified SEOs? Are you? Really? If so, jump to Prepare for SEO Litigation.

I believe we have some confusion taking place out there in the industry. I think many are confusing a “Certificate of Completion” as being “Certified” which in turn ends up becoming an “SEO Certification”. It is pretty amazing how these two words, Certificate and Certify, can cause so much confusion and how they are being misused by those acquiring these so-called Certifications.

Define Certificate

Let’s take a look at the definition of the word Certificate…

Certificate

A document issued to a person completing a course of study not leading to a diploma.

I do believe the above definition is more in tune with what these unofficial certifying organizations are providing. If we use the correct definition in this instance, those touting these certifications are really just beginners who haven’t grasped the core concepts yet and are starting their trek into the industry, remember those days?

Why must you advertise yourself as a Professional Certified SEO when in fact you are not. None of us are. Not one of us is a Certified SEO. There are more than a handful of us who may be certifiable, but that’s as far as it goes.

StellarMis.com is an SEO Certification an Oxymoron?

In the past year, we’ve reviewed at least five (05) submissions to the SEO Consultants Directory where SEO Certifications were being touted. Guess what? Not one of those submissions made it into the directory. Why? Well, it wasn’t because they were branding themselves as a Certified SEO Professional. No, we can overlook that, although they do start out with -5 points on our 100 point scale.

What we can’t overlook is someone claiming to be certified in search engine optimization who has not grasped the basic concepts of developing an effective <title> element. Or, is able to write a paragraph of text without using an obscene number of keywords and phrases in an attempt to keyword stuff. Or, loading a menu of href’s with title attributes that match the keyword stuffed anchor text in an attempt to influence what?

As a peer, if I see anyone touting an SEO Certification, they may get a negative 5 points right away. Remember, I work on a 100 point scale. Touting certification, when in fact there are no certifying authorities yet in this industry, is misleading. The consumer is unaware that our industry has no certifying body. So, anyone can post this official looking SEO Certifications all over their site and instantly become an authority in the consumer’s eyes. While those of us who know better sit here and watch as some of your certified SEOs give our industry and your certifications a black eye.

Are We Ready for an SEO Certifying Authoritative Body?

I’ve been dabbling in this industry now since 1995. Our industry is far from having a certifying authority in our midst. It would take a mammoth effort on a number of key players in the industry for this to even begin to come to fruition. And, I can tell you from following various discussions over the years that it isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

I have great respect for my peers and colleagues who have assumed the position of coach, mentor, trainer, teacher, etc. at some of the various resources available for education in the search engine marketing industry. I applaud you for assisting our industry in developing some form of solid baseline educational guidelines.

What I don’t have respect for are some of your graduates passing themselves off as a “Certified SEO Professional” when they haven’t grasped the basics yet. That presents major challenges for our industry moving forward and will only make it more difficult when the time comes and we attempt to form and come to accept a certifying body. My crystal ball tells me that am not going to happen soon.

Where do “We” Start?

The SEO Consultants Directory started a general discussion amongst our members about “Search Engine Marketing Standards of Excellence - SEMSOE” back in 2004 December. While the feedback received was very positive, we are but a small part of a very large and diverse community that spans the globe and it would take efforts far beyond what a small group of us could do.

Now, if more than 50 members with a voice got together and decided it was time to start the groundwork required to assemble a set of standards that would then become the foundation for a certifying authority that might be enough of a push and a loud enough shout to get something started.

Without a set of written and agreed to guidelines amongst those who have the “say so” in our industry, we would be challenged from the beginning. There would be many individuals that would need to review, modify and approve all actions. It pains me to even think about the process.

April 30th, 2008 - Posted in SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING AND OPTIMIZATION | | 3 Comments