There are so many SEO conferences happening lately. You see advertisements about conferences in various websites. They are hugely promoted. Is it any good going for one of these conferences?

Most webmasters or SEO analysts feel these conferences are no good as they keep speaking the issues already known. No additional knowledge gain. The speakers try to come up with an insight from a different angle. Well, how much would that be helpful? Being that most of these conferences are costly to even attend.

Few possible reasons you could go for a search engine conference would be:

1. Learn Something New: Not all the information spoken are known facts. Good SEO conferences do help understand or learn new search engine strategies.
2. Industry Networking: You end up meeting a large number of attendees who are from the same field. They do the same work you do. These people would definitely be useful. You end up making few of them friends and would turn out planning a large business collaboration or at least discussion for reciprocal links or one way links.
3. If you are the one who is conducting the conference, well, you have to go. You have put in a lot of money or probability would have earned a lot with good sponsors. You at least have to attend it and know how it goes so you can make more money next time. Though this sounds ridiculous, most of the conferences are organized mainly for this reason. It’s more of a business trick rather than an educational platform.

If you already have enough friends who are into blogging or into online small business, the best way is to sit along with them and discuss and share plans, projects and ideas among yourself.

One way paid links with nofollow tag would not be successful if your site does not drive enough traffic. Recent discussions, polls and surveys by websites reveal that website owners would not be interested in having a link on your site with a nofollow tag if they would not yield much benefit.

There are three main reasons one would like to link to your website:
1. The traffic/visibility they would obtain by having a link on your website
2. A link on a high PR page can help increase SERP to a certain extent
3. Increasing external links

If you would be placing a nofollow tag to the link that you sell, then two of the three main reasons become invalid.

The largest search engine Google has created the nofollow tag and we need to follow it. Most of the sites get 50% - 70% of the traffic from Google. With a nofollow tag, you would be stopping the PR from passing on to the linked page and also prevent Google from recognizing it as an external link.

With just one reason remaining, an interested visitor would now look at the amount of traffic your site receives. Many blog and forum owners make a mistake here. They quote huge prices for an ad which is no where related to the number of hits the website receives every month. A advertiser would be at least aware that he/she has to check how productive that link would be before they pay you.

The best strategy would be to give out paid links with nofollow only on top performing pages.. You need to have some convincing figures on Alexa or a popular traffic analyzing tool before you ever plan to provide the service.

It was probably the April of 1974. Bangalore was getting warm and  Gulmohars were blooming at the IISc campus. I was the only girl in my postgraduate department and was staying at the ladies’ hostel. Other girls were pursuing research in different departments of Science.
I was looking forward to going abroad to complete a doctorate in  Computer science. I had been offered scholarships from Universities in the US . I had not thought of taking up a job in India …

One day, while on the way to my hostel from our lecture-hall complex, I Saw an advertisement on the notice board. It was a standard job-requirement notice from the famous automobile company Telco (now Tata Motors). It stated that the company required young, bright engineers, hardworking and with an excellent academic background, etc.

At the bottom was a small line: “Lady candidates need not apply.”

I read it and was very upset. For the first time in my life I was up against gender discrimination.

Though I was not keen on taking up the job, I saw it as a challenge. I Had done extremely well in academics, better than most of my male peers. Little did I know then that in real life academic excellence is not enough to be successful.

After reading the notice I went fuming to my room. I decided to inform The topmost person in Telco’s management about the injustice the company was perpetrating. I got a postcard and started to write, but there was a problem: I did not know who headed Telco.

I thought it must be one of the Tatas. I knew JRD Tata was the head of The Tata Group; I had seen his pictures in newspapers (actually, Sumant Moolgaokar was the company’s chairman then). I took the card, addressed It to JRD and started writing. To this day I remember clearly what I wrote.
 
“The great Tatas have always been pioneers. They are the people who Started the basic infrastructure industries in India , such as iron and steel, chemicals, textiles and locomotives. They have cared for higher Education in India since 1900 and they were responsible for the establishment of the Indian Institute of Science. Fortunately, I study there. But I am surprised how a company such as Telco is discriminating on the basis of gender.”

I posted the letter and forgot about it. Less than 10 days later, I received a telegram stating that I had to appear for an interview at

Telco’s Pune facility at the company’s expense. I was taken aback by the telegram. My hostel mate told me I should use the opportunity to go to Pune free of cost and buy them the famous Pune saris for cheap! I collected Rs 30 each from everyone who wanted a sari. When I look back, I feel like laughing at the reasons for my going, but back then they seemed good enough to make the trip.

It was my first visit to Pune and I immediately fell in love with the city.

To this day it remains dear to me. I feel as much at home in Pune as I do in Hubli, my hometown. The place changed my life in so many ways. As directed, I went to Telco’s Pimpri office for the interview.

There were six people on the panel and I realised then that this was serious business.

“This is the girl who wrote to JRD,” I heard somebody whisper as soon as  I entered the room. By then I knew for sure that I would not get the job.  The realisation abolished all fear from my mind, so I was rather cool while the interview was being conducted.

Even before the interview started, I reckoned the panel was biased, so I told them, rather impolitely, “I hope this is only a technical  interview.”

They were taken aback by my rudeness, and even today I am ashamed about  My  attitude. The panel asked me technical questions and I answered all of them.

Then an elderly gentleman with an affectionate voice told me, “Do you Know why we said lady candidates need not apply? The reason is that we have never employed any ladies on the shop floor. This is not a co-ed college;  this is a factory. When it comes to academics, you are a first ranker throughout. We appreciate that, but people like you should work in research  laboratories.”

I was a young girl from small-town Hubli. My world had been a limited place.

I did not know the ways of large corporate houses and their difficulties, so I answered, “But you must start somewhere, otherwise no woman will ever be able to work in your factories.”

Finally, after a long interview, I was told I had been successful. So this was what the future had in store for me. Never had I thought I would take up a job in Pune. I met a shy young man from Karnataka there, we became good friends and we got married.

It was only after joining Telco that I realized who JRD was: the Uncrowned king of Indian industry. Now I was scared, but I did not get to meet him till I was transferred to Bombay … One day I had to show some reports to Mr Moolgaokar, our chairman, who we all knew as SM. I was in his office on the first floor of Bombay House (the Tata headquarters) when, suddenly JRD walked in. That was the first time I saw “appro JRD”. Appro means “our” in Gujarati. This was the affectionate term by which people at Bombay House called him.

I was feeling very nervous, remembering my postcard episode. SM tntroduced me nicely, “Jeh (that’s what his close associates called him), this Young woman is an engineer and that too a postgraduate.

She is the first woman to work on the Telco shop floor.” JRD looked at me … I was praying he would not ask me any questions about my interview (or the postcard that preceded it). Read More »

SEO has become a common buzz word for any business that thrives on the internet. But still there are a lot of confusions and misunderstanding on what search engine optimization process is and how it could be beneficial.

“Search Engine Optimization is not necessary for Us”

If you have a website, and you are paying for the domain and hosting, then you need to get at least the basic optimization done. Well, if your business thrives on the internet, then your statement is absolutely ridiculous. Business on web needs visibility. Visibility can be provided easier and on a larger scale thru search engines. Higher the visibility, more traffic. More traffic, more profit.

If you still claim that SEO is not needed, then you are not confident about the product you are selling or the data displayed on the internet. You might have hosted the site because you just wanted to show off saying “we too have a site” or because there was nothing else to do.

“Let’s do the website first. Then think about SEO”

You are wrong if you had uttered this. You need an SEO expert along with you right from project planning and designing to deployment and even after that. SEO plays a part in all aspects. You would end up spending additional time and money in reworking on major sections on the site if you had not considered SEO in the beginning.

“Changing Titles and Meta Tags or Content is Outdated”

You could see a lot of websites claiming that without titles and meta tags you could still have a high PR. Well, targeted keywords in Titles and Meta Tags are definitely necessary. Even if your site ranks first, how will a visitor click on your link if he/she finds that the word they are looking for is no where mentioned?

Why not first do the basics that are needed. Then go for the so called advanced level SEO. The problem is most of the search marketing sites make the word SEO so sophisticated and give a complexity look. That’s not true.

“Images and Flash content are bad SEO”

Well, if all the text that you have on your site are just as an image and if you have only flash content, then it is bad. However, good content with images and flash description are add-ons to lure your visitors. They would love to come back to your website as they know its not boring with just textual content.

Make sure you have good content to back your images and flash. Also, provide proper Alt descriptions and Titles to your images. Make sure that your flash content can be read by search engines.

“Search Engine Optimization is a technique to fool search engines”

Its not fooling search engines, but making search engines better understand your website and also more useful content to the search engines. Search engines are not that dumb to believe so easily. They have become very brainy over the years. The site should be to the point and without any confusion so that search engines can easily understand and rank them better.

This would involve improvement of:

1. Content
2. Improving Navigation
3. Increasing popularity on the internet

The points above should be carried out in a genuine way. This would involve a great deal of research, planning and implementation if your site is small and working on bringing in a huge traffic.

Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers. What exactly is a protocol buffer? What are its advantages? Let’s discuss.

What is a Protocol Buffer

Protocol buffers are an automated mechanism to serialize structured data in an easy, effective and flexible way. This is great to do an update on an old data structure without affecting its functionality.

Protocol buffers also helps pull data from numerous resources using all popular languages. Well you might think, aren’t XML files doing the same? They help read write data, store then sequentially and they are flexible. When you consider storing, retrieving, updating millions of data at a flash of a second, then protocol buffers certainly have a lot of advantages over XML.

Protocol Buffers Vs XML

Protocol buffers are at least 20 to 100 times faster than XML. If you are handling enormous amount of data, protocol buffer is the best option
Protocol buffers are much simpler and hence better understood and easy to program.
Protocol buffers are at least 3 to 100 times smaller in size. While dealing with huge data, it definitely makes a difference.

Protocol buffers were developed by Google using an index server request/response protocol. There are 48,162 different message types defined in 12,183 .proto files in the Google code tree. These are used by Google RPC and in persistent storage of data.

The suggestions below can help you collect information and write quality content at great speeds.

1. First collect all the information you can get for all the topics and paste them onto a word document. The raw data should be at least twice the size of what is required
2. Gather content from different sites and verify the content authenticity. Do not stick to one site alone even if the site contains a large number of information.
3. The first Para or introduction should always be creative, imaginary and influence the person to read further. It should not be like a definition or similar to reading a history book.
4. Try to have equal content for all sub topics
5. See to that there are not more than 3 sentences in a paragraph
6. Make sure a sentence is no longer than two lines
7. Try to give 20 words more than what they require but not anything more than that
8. First try to finish the required content in time and if there is still more time, add further content or rework on the content
9. Try to have subtopics, lists, images if permitted
10. Format the content properly with bold, italics, bullets and proper fonts wherever applicable

Whether you are a newbie or an experienced search engine optimizer, any free SEO lessons on the internet would surely be of interest. If you are an experienced SEO expert, you would still like to take a glimpse of a free SEO article to see if there is anything new that you can add to your knowledge.

Well, in this article, I would like to collate all the tips and articles I wrote about SEO under one topic in a chain so that you can have an easier understanding.

Define:SEO

In simple terms, SEO is the art of bringing up a website on a search result by making some changes on the site and outside the site. SEO is as simple as that. But the strategy or procedure used is more of an art which would be more complex.

You would have found various websites asking you to subscribe for a free article or lesson on SEO. All articles on the net would say the same story but from a different angle. Click on the topics to read about them.

1. Introduction to SEO
   This section talks about what SEO is in general and how it can be implemented effeciently.
   
2. The SEO Process
   The various processes involved in SEO
   
3. SEO Objectives
   Why you want to optimize your site? What are your long time goals? Read more.
   
4. Analysis of Company Goals and Values
   Optimizing a site should go along with the company goals.
   
5. Keyword Research
   Your site would be seen by new visitors largely through search engines. How would you find out which keywords they use and the keywords for which you wish your site to have a good SERP.
   
6. Site Analysis
   Analyze your existing site and find out its pros and cons.
   
7. Competitor Analysis
   How well are your competitors performing? Do you draw more visitors or do they have the largest piece of cake? Sounds interesting? Find out more as you read the article.
   
8. SEF Content Rewriting
   Content writing needs a lot of creativity and speed. You need to write a huge amount of content and also make sure it’s interesting. Also read the free content writing tips on the website.
   
9. Optimizing Meta Information
   What are meta tags? How can these small tags make huge changes to your search engine rankings?
   
10. Site Map Generation
    How can you make search engines know how many pages you have on your website? Where they are and how much priority you wish to provide them.
    
11. Link Popularity Enhancement
    Make your website presence in third-party websites.
    
12. Site Speed and HTML Validation
    Shouldn’t your site be faster and without any coding errors? You should also know at least the basics of HTML if you have big plans for your website. Learn more from the article on basics of HTML for SEO.
    
13. Search Engine and Directory Submission
    An article on how to submit your site to search engines and directories.
    
14. Paid Advertising
    Paid advertising can be a great option if you have a sound budget.
    
15. Compatibility Check Offsite Testing and Deployment
    Testing is a crucial step in making your site perfect for search engines.
    
16. Post Optimization
    Is SEO dead after optimizing the site and making it live? Well, there is a lot of continuous optimization you have to carry out after the site is live. This will ensure you are competitive and well ahead of your competitors.

Hope this free lesson on SEO sounded useful. Read more through the Articles and SEO Basics sections on the site for a larger understanding.

Just Google the word “Web 2.0” and you would end up with 94,100,000 results. Well what does this mean? Why has this word become so popular? Is this an application? A concept? A marketing term? No, it’s just a pattern or business model to help a website  survive and grow in today’s web world.

In the end of the last century, there was a severe boom and hype on the Internet industry. People believed that no one would go to a shop, office or school again as they would use internet for all these activities. However, soon the world came to know that the web was overhyped and the dot-com burst fell drastically. Internet boom was busted.

This marked the birth of new age websites. The websites which prevailed the burst also had something in common. This was first noted and presented at the O’Reilly Media Web2.0 conference in 2004.

Web 2.0 defines using the web as a platform and building services and applications around it.

O’Reilly formulated Web 2.0 as below:

Web 1.0                        Web 2.0
DoubleClick                –> Google AdSense
Ofoto                      –> Flickr
Akamai                     –> BitTorrent
mp3.com                    –> Napster
Britannica Online          –> Wikipedia
personal websites          –> blogging
evite                      –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation    –> search engine optimization
page views                 –> cost per click
screen scraping            –> web services
publishing                 –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy)     –> tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness                 –> syndication

Lightweight business models can be enabled by syndication of content and services. Web 2.0 relates to such websites which communicate, share and publish content with other websites.

O’Reilly described that the Web 2.0 tagged websites fall under four hierarchy levels.

Level-0 : Applications work online as well as offline. Examples of such websites include Google Maps and Yahoo! Local.
Level-1: Applications which can work offline and have to connect to internet to download features, plug-ins or updates fall under this category. iTunes, Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets are some examples.
Level-2: Sites like Flickr can operate offline however, if connected online can acquire additional features like photo sharing and community features. Such sites are termed Level -2.
Level-3: Level 3 applications live on the internet. They are dead when offline. A large number of applications fall under this category. Skype, Adsense, online community and sales websites like del.icio.us, eBay, Craigslist all fall under this category.

O’Reilly also specified that email, telephone and instant-messaging clients do not fall under this hierarchy.

Many technology experts have however argued upon these hierarchy, stating that these are not properly defined and do not have a reason based guideline.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who implemented the first successful communication betweek HTTP client and server via Internet, considered as the father of Internet questions whether one can use this term in a meaningful way. He mentions many of these Web 2.0 technology components existed since early days of the web.

Is there any other name more familiar than Bill Gates? The founder of the world’s largest software company had in him the power and will to change the personal computing industry for ever.

Born in October 28, 1955 William Henry Gates III was born to a rich family with a business, law and political history. Bill Gates father was a prominent lawyer and his mother served as the board of director for First Interstate BancSystem. Bill Gates was a bright and intelligent person from childhood which prompted his parents to enroll him with the Lakeside School.

The Lakeside school had then decided to educate the students with the knowledge of computers. Computers then were too heavy and costly for schools to afford. However, the school raised funds and bought a DEC PDP-10 made by General Electric.

Bill Gates, his friend Paul Allen and other Lakeside Students fell in love with the computers. They were inseparable making the lab their home day and night. Gates and Allen spent their entire day reading articles, books and magazines related to computing and the rest on programming. This lead to problems with the Lakeside faculty and for the school. The school ran out of budget on maintaining these computers and Bill and Allen lost their interest in studies.

However, Computer Center Corporation a Seattle business offered their computer assistance to the school. This would mean more computing time and knowledge for Bill and the young comrades. They now skipped classes, rarely submitted home works and had used all of their school computer time.

Well, the story of these computer freaks or what ever you wish to call, did not end up here. Their minds now led them to hack the school security system and even alter the files which record the number of school computing time used. The nuisance was finally caught and Computer Center Corporation finally banned them from their system for several weeks.

What would these computer addicts do without computers? They formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. Might be they had the adrenaline by birth to change the world forever. They wanted to apply their ideas in the real world and in real time situations to make life better.

What more can be good for these young comrades? The same company who threw them out had now some serious issues. Computer Center Corporation was facing issues as the system had week security and was crashing frequently. This was when they remembered the hackers and their impressive assaults on their computer. They asked Bill, Allan and the other comrades to help fix bugs and find issues with security and reliability. In return, Computer Center Corporation would provide them unlimited computer time. Well, as you would have assumed by now, this was too big a temptation to resist for the addicts. Gates remembering those early years mentions, “It was when we got free time at C-cubed (Computer Center Corporation) that we really got into computers. I mean, then I became hardcore. It was day and night”

After a few years, Computer Center Corporation had to close due to insufficient funds. After this the Bill, Allen and the group worked for University of Washington and then for Information Sciences Inc. However, work with TRW defense meant not just finding bugs but fixing them. TRW made Bill a serious programmer and made Bill and Allen think of forming their own company.

In 1974, Allen stepped on a magazine while he was on the way to meet his fellow comrade Bill Gates.  Little did they realize what he saw would change their life for ever. On the Popular Electronics magazine cover was a photo of Altair 8080 with the headline “World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models.”

Allen just rushed back to Bill’s dorm with the magazine. They soon found out the maker of Altair, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems). Gates called them up in the next couple of days stating they have developed a BASIC which can be used in Altair. Both Allen and Gates had never seen an Altair and did not even have one line of code written. That was an unadulterated lie.

Who on earth would know that they lied. MITS was eager to have a look at the code and this was the start of some serious homework for Bill, Allen and his well formed lie. But they stuck to what they promised. They had already informed that they would show what they have in a couple of months.

After days and nights of coding forgetting and forfeitting sleep and food, they could now say that the code is now real and not a lie. Bill did most of the coding and Allen worked on stimulating a PDP-10 to work like Altair. As you know, they have never seen one.

Allen now flew to MITS to show their BASIC. They had never tested in an Altair. It should work perfectly or it would be a failure shattering their dreams. Well, Allen entered the program in Altair. Hurray! It worked perfectly the very first time. Well it should, as it was coded by none other than the master, Bill Gates. MITS was impressed and got the rights to their BASIC.

Within few months, Allen convinced Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard and thus Microsoft was born. Isn’t the rest History? Surely, they dreamt what a common man would call “the impossible”.

Ever wanted to represent your ideas, tasks, plans or dreams on a chart in few minutes? Well, the latest mind mapping softwares do that and much more. What more, some of the best mind mapping software’s are absolutely free.

Mind map is defined as a diagram created to visualize an idea or plan to aid in studying or understanding a topic, organization, theory, goals, plans or decision better. Mind map is basically an image-centered diagram representing semantic connections between information in a radial or non-linear graphical format.

Since these elements or information set is represented in groups, branches or areas it helps in faster and easier understanding which paves the way for brainstorming.

Semantic Networks Vs Mind Maps

Early forms of mind maps were semantic networks which were fundamentally directional or unidirectional graphs. The network consisted of concepts represented as vertices and relationships as edges.

In 1956, Richard.H. Richens from the Cambridge Language Research Unit first invented “Semantic Nets”. The Nets were invented for computers as an “interlingua” [International Auxillary Language, IAL, auxlang) for machines to translate natural languages. These Semantic Nets were further developend by M.Ross Quillian and Dr.Allan Collins as Mind Maps to study the process of human learning. Dr.Allan Collins greatly influenced the birth of the modern Mind Maps.

These early developments and involvement of mind maps for application development has helped Mind Maps evolve into software’s helping educational and business organizations adapt mind mapping.

A whole lot of Mind Mapping softwares are available on the Internet. Read our Mind Mapping Software review to select and download some of the best free mind mapping softwares available online.