Spec Ops: The Line - A Post Preview and Review

SpecOps: The Line (2011)

There was some excitement in my office and at IGN when I heard about Spec Ops: The Line at E3 2010 this year, not only because this game can turn the tables for the Spec Ops line, but also it happens to be based in my current city of residence - Dubai. 

Gears of War 3 was being shown alongside Halo: Reach, Medal of Honor is being revealed – I just like to root for the underdog.  Now Spec Ops: The Line isn’t 50 Cent: Blood in the Sand underdog, but it’s actually a quality underdog that could just take down the big guys.

I got a chance to see a preview of Spec Ops: The Line. SOCOM seemed to be a squad-based tactical shooter, and Spec Ops seemed to be more of a hybrid between Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, which are 2 of my favourite titles, by the way.  It’s more of a linear single-player campaign where you don’t have to worry about where your other squad mates are in relation to you at all times and how they affect the enemies your fighting. You take control of one military dude, and push your other mates forward.

It’s hard for a game to differentiate itself from the big players in the first-person military shooter genre.  The smaller guys are always compared to the mass marketed, big budget explosion-fests everyone knows about. One of the cool features that Spec Ops hopes to do is bring in an environmental element that some of the big dogs lack.  Things react to what you do.  I’ll quote an example from the E3 Demo.

In the demo we saw, our squad entered one of the abandoned temples of Dubai I believe.  The game is set in a desert region that has overrun a city.  You’ll see cars, trucks and buses have all been semi-buried by sand.  As you enter the temple, beams of light shine in through the high windows above the sand layer, and the windows and walls below have gone dark from the lack of sun coming through.  It was really a cool experience.  After a little exploration, we wondered how in the hell we were going to get out?  There wasn’t another door or anything, so we had to think.  About 20 feet up on our right side was a huge facade of windows with sand on the other side.  That was our ticket out.

We shot up the windows until they shattered into a million pieces, sending tons and tons of sand into the temple we were in.  We had literally created our very own ramp back out into the sweltering desert heat.  It was this type of moment that stuck out from Spec Ops:  The Line.  And not only in this way, but in combat too.

As we progressed further into the demo, we made our way through a series of sand channels that made their way through the sand.  The walls of the channel had barricaded the sand back as best as it could, but little clouds of dust continued to fall through.  I almost thought that if I could use this to my advantage against the enemy, why couldn’t they use it against me?  We ran across a few guys and the demo player proceeded to throw a grenade and blow one of the plates holding the sand away.  It buried the few enemies that were unlucky enough to be under it. 

SpecOps: The Line (Game-play)

Spec Ops: The Line also incorporates a moral system for key moments in the game.  But the most awesome feature of the game is supposed to be how one decision of yours can actually have an effect on the subsequent portions of the game. And what makes it even more interesting is that how you make your choices determines how your squad mates refer to you and talk to you.  Make a couple of bad decisions and your teammates won’t look at you the same way, so it actually includes the fun of having a multi-player AI while playing single-player campaigns.  You’ll also get to see some pretty f*%$'ed up shit too.  It is a military game after all.

The music they featured with the game was this sort of post-rock ambient grunge that's really just cheesy.  If they get a few licensed tracks from actual bands that do this type of stuff then they would absolutely have a winner in my book.  The slow flowing, silent guitar picking starting out but giving way to the loud crashing and crescendos later on in the song would be perfect for this type of game.

SpecOps: The Line (2011)

It’s hard these days to come up with a fresh take on the tried and true first-person military shooter.  It’s hard to do.  People try to do it all of the time, and it just doesn’t work out.  You also have to factor in that no matter what you do, you are going up against other shooters with the initials MOH or COD.  To make a name for yourself, you have to really push the envelope to do that.  Spec Ops: The Line doesn’t look to be of the caliber to take down the big guys, but it definitely has some surprise traits to look out for.  I’d say its a good middle ground between Call of Duty and SOCOM 4: US Navy Seals.

Spec Ops: The Line doesn’t have a definitive release date at this time, but we do know it should be some time in 2011.

Free Speech Rules!! Hackers Relive The Revolution

A hackers free-for-all exploded yesterday on the Web, and Facebook and Twitter are caught smack in the middle.

On Wednesday, anonymous hackers took aim at companies perceived to have 'harmed' WikiLeaks after its release of a flood of confidential diplomatic documents. MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, which had cut off people’s ability to donate money to WikiLeaks, were hit by attacks that tried to block access to the companies’ Web sites and services. Even Amazon.com, who provided free web hosting services to Wikileaks wasnt spared when they withdrew their free services from Wikileaks.Advocates of WikiLeaks complained that Amazon.com was bowing to political pressure to cut the organization from its Web services. An Amazon.com spokesman said the company was simply banning an organization that had violated its terms of service by trying to distribute documents it did not own.

To organize their efforts, the hackers have turned to sites like Facebook and Twitter. This, has drawn these Web giants into the fray and created a precarious situation for them.

Both Facebook and Twitter — but particularly Twitter — have received praise in recent years as outlets for free speech. Governments trying to control the flow of information have found it difficult to block people from voicing their concerns or setting up meetings through the sites.

Now the problem, both Facebook and Twitter have corporate aspirations that hinge on their ability to serve as ad platforms for other companies. This leaves them with tough PR and business decisions around how they should take care of situations as political as the WikiLeaks developments.

Any Internet user who cares about free speech or has a controversial or unpopular message should be concerned about the fact that intermediaries might not let them express it.

The problem came into relief on Wednesday, through an effort called Operation Payback, organized by a group calling itself Anonymous. The group spent much of the day posting notes on Facebook and Twitter that told followers which companies to single out and that documented hacking successes.

But Facebook banned one of the group’s pages, saying that using the site to organize hacking attacks like that violated its terms of use. The group went on Twitter to complain.

A Facebook spokesman issued a statement saying that the company was “sensitive to content that includes pornography, bullying, hate speech, and threats of violence” and would “take action on content that we find or that’s reported to us that promotes unlawful activity.”

In an interview Wednesday morning, Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer, addressed WikiLeaks’s own presence on the site. He said the company had not received any official requests to disable pages or accounts associated with the WikiLeaks organization.

Facebook generally resists requests by governments or advocacy groups to take down material if that content is not illegal or does not violate Facebook’s terms of service, which prohibit attacks on individuals or incitements to violence.

Twitter allowed the Operation Payback account to stay active most of Wednesday. But the group’s account was disabled late in the day, after it posted a link to a file that provided thousands of consumer credit card numbers, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation.

The company is not overly concerned about hackers’ attacking Twitter’s site, he said, explaining that it faces security issues all the time and has technology to deal with the situation.

Twitter is in a particularly delicate situation because its founders have celebrated their service’s role in political protest and free speech. They have not been shy about trying to capitalize on the good will engendered by playing that role.

WikiLeaks’s own Twitter account remains active, and it is the group’s main channel for reaching supporters and the media.

The last week has given rise to a hacking war in which counter-groups have blocked access to WikiLeaks’s Web sites by bombarding them with requests. Similar to the DDOS attacks launched on Mastercard, Visa, PayPal & Amazon.com

And now the WikiLeaks supporters have responded in kind, flying the freedom of speech banner as the motivation for their actions.

Protests have finally taken to the digital streets of revolution & freedom. Corporates really dont seem to get away with anything nowadays.

(with a little help from NYTimes)

The Link Wheel - The Link Between SEO and ORM

Over time, we seem to have underestimated SEO, and the thought that it should only affect our own domain would be the only way to go. Funny, right? The term Search Engine Optimization was only synonomous with ranking your own domain for a set of targeted keywords.

With the advent of sooooo many online properties, that (whether you like it or not) can rank higher than you at the drop of a hat and a few keyword injections, that its really not funny anymore.

As a part of an agency project, maybe more than a year ago, we launched a Search Domination campaign. Going head first and optimizing all the possible Web 2.0 real-estate that we could find. Surely enough, although for the targeted keyword, our website ranked #2 (as it did before), the newer optimizations cropped up and occupied all the other rankings on Google - mind you, pushing out around 4 negative sentiment posts in doing so in a matter of 10-14 days.

It is basically having a bunch of "web 2.0" properties (i.e., blogs, social media/networks, etc) all "linking" to a particular domain, in order to artificially "boost" rankings.
It appears google has written a simple algorithm to detect this, so to still get the same kind of link juice, you need to have multiple social networks link to multiple subdomains which then finally link to one main parent domain.
But theres no evidence yet to refute the fact that you cannot optimize a Brand name using this technique, so it not only boosts the Search Engine Optimization of your Brand/Product name, but also takes care of your Online Reputation woes.

Now thats interesting, isn't it? Killing 2 birds with one stone is not something that comes along in the Online Marketing world everyday

My office life-saver - Grooveshark

I've been using Grooveshark off and on for quite a while now, recently though I realised that downloading music is so pointless cause I'll probably listen to the tracks maybe once or twice.... But now I have the internet everywhere I go (and its all fast, mind you..)

If you create a login on GS, you can save your playlists and play that whenever you want by just logging in. They have a massive dbase of tracks and there are only a few tracks that I havent found on it yet....

They got another cool function that I noticed today - you can create your own widget for your website

Definitely worth a go, chances are people who see this, will follow eventually

Facebook Applications that made it big in 2010

Amongst all the other applications, its really no surprise that Farmville still comes out the winner on Facebook with 73.6 million users. With Café world coming in a far second at 30.2 million users. Texas Holdém coming in at 8th with 23.7 million  users & Mafia Wars at 10th with 22.6 million users.

The Top 10 list adjusts a little to allow for the addition of an older application, recently added to the metrics group used to track usage each week. iHeart, which has been an extremely popular application on Facebook for some time now, jumps onto the list in the #3 spot.
The addition of iHeart bumps some regulars such as Pet Society off the list, as it continues to face stiff competition from the ever rising newer PetVille game, developed by Zynga. Interestingly though, FarmVille, Cafe World and Mafia Wars have all been experiencing user decline over the past few weeks. Mafia Wars alone has lost almost 5 million players in the last 6 weeks.

Topping the Top 10 Gainers list is Pillow Fight. It’s a time-sensitive game allowing you to pillow fight with your friends, crushes, affair, love or enemies. The winner is declared within two days if the opponent fails to hit you back.
Next is a newer game called Tiki Farm, that seems to be a cross between Happy Island and FarmVille. You get to farm on an island, grow pineapple or sugacaner to please the Tiki Spirits, and yes, even wear grass skirts!
Rounding out the top 3 gainers is an application sure to appeal to the younger crowd – Graffiti. This app allows you to draw on the photos of your friends. Could be fun!
As predicted, Dantes Inferno appears on the list as well.

Static FBML and CSS in Static FBML tabs

I find myself spending more time working on Facebook than playing Poker, Farmville (yuck) or checking out status's cause I’m always trying to develop some basic functionalities on Facebook Fanpages. I’ve always wanted to go through the details one-by-one because I never had any formal education on HTML or CSS. Also, I thought it'd be great if this would be educational to anyone else as well...



FBML – The Basics
A bit of history – The first FB language that came was FQL (Facebook Query Language) which evolved into the Facebook API. Then in 2007, Facebook launched their Platform in order to complement their API, which uses FBML (Facebook Markup Language), which is similar to HTML in the way that it allows you to write browser interrupted code to render elements on a Facebook page or application. For example, we can now embed images, FLV’s or SWF’s, retrieve or send data, etc., essentially creating stand-alone/dependable widgets.

The only downside is that these widgets can only be used on Facebook!

Before we get into some basic code snippets, I should mention Jesse Farmer’s post An Introduction to FBML, he’s done a really good job of breaking down the theory, plus he has included some really good code examples to help you get started. You should also check out the Facebook Developers Wiki.



Static FBML Box (Script enabled widget)
For starters you will need to install the Static FBML application mentioned above. The nice thing about this widget is you can write HTML in it. So, for example if you want to load some graphics like banners, logos, etc., you can use . You can also link these images with and so on. The only drawback with this is that you cannot run any Javascript, only a majority of HTML & CSS. Not too bad considering a lot is possible with CSS. Facebook did this to prevent developers from running automatic scripts using Javascript to 'trouble' FB users.



Adding Your FBML Box or Tab to Your Page


    * In "edit page" find the “Static FBML” link, click on the pencil icon and select “edit”
    * Enter the name you want to appear in the box heading in the “Box Title” field
    * Enter the HTML content in the “FBML” field
    * When you’ve added in your HTML — click “Save Changes” and view your page to see the results.


Unfortunately there is no preview option.

*A few tips on dimensions – If you want your FBML box to appear in the left column of your Wall, set the width to 180px and/or if you want it to appear in the tabs in the main Wall column, set the width to 600px  width or less (Facebook is planning to crop down the size of a Page tab sometime in August 2010 to 520px. Nothing confirmed but always good to match the size up)


The FBML Test Console
Now that we have covered some of the basics let’s take a look at the Facebook Developer Tools. You may not be aware that Facebook offers a bunch of free online developer tools to help you learn, test, and eventually deploy your apps. For this example I will go through some basic FBML embedded in HTML.

Using the  FBML Test Console we can input our code and get a Facebook Box preview. The FBML Test Console will also output the HTML source if you need to embed it elsewhere.

The way it works is:

    * Log into to Facebook
    * Got to Facebook Developer Tools
    * Click on the FBML Test Console Tab
    * You will notice that the tool will automatically retrieve your user ID and API Key
    * Input code in the left box
    * Click on “Preview”

*Notice the Position dropdown menu, here you can choose from standard Facebook layouts like feed body, request form, etc.



Creating Custom Tabs
It’s important to create custom tabs that represent your page/brand beyond the basic Wall, Info, Photos, Events, etc.  Most successful pages use custom tabs to sell their products or services, watch demos and presentations, enter contests and so on. A good example is the Apple Students Page, they have a tab called On Campus which launches a really slick Flash app with videos, a google map mashup, and some ads.

The other bonus of custom tabs is the ability to set it as the default landing page. In your page settings you can choose which tab is set as the default, most people just use the Wall. A good example is the Nokia Page, which defaults to Nokia Twist-USA.



How do I create a custom tab? Easy! First you need to make sure you have added the FBML Application to your page. Without it you can’t create any custom widgets to display as tabs(you can also use these steps to add any of the default applications as a tab).

Click on “edit page” (link is under your profile pic when logged in) and under Applications click on the pencil icon on the top right corner of the application you want to add as a tab.
You will be giving 2 options, add/remove from Boxes and add/remove from Tab. Click “add”. Now go back to your page and refresh and you new tab should be there.



Removing Tabs
Removing tabs take only a few seconds.

Click on any of your tabs. When that page loads you will notice the tab is white and a pencil icon appears next to the tab name. Click on the pencil icon.

Click on “Delete Tab”. Told you it was easy!

The only tabs you cannot delete are Wall and Info.

*A quick tip about the Boxes tab – You can remove the boxes but not in the same way as others. To remove the boxes tab first you need to click on Boxes. When the page loads remove each box that is under this tab (the same steps as above). Once there are no boxes left under the Boxes tab go back to your wall. The Boxes tab should be gone, if not refresh a few times. Essentially this tab only exists if there is something in it!

Facebook Tabs killed the Websites Star

With Facebook Pages, Who Needs a Website? Seriously, think about it. One of the major fears of any website owner or designer/admin is that "Once my site is made, How soon can I expect to generate traffic to the website?" OR "Once my website is made, HOW do I generate traffic to my website(s)"

 That is one thing that really rocks about Facebook. Generating traffic has never been easier (as long as the visitors are kept on Facebook itself). As long as a publisher can produce rich content, there really are no limits as to the kind of traffic that he/she can potentially generate - owing to the fact that Facebook is infectiously viral. 

 

The virality of FB stems from the following :

1. 
   

   Facebook official stats state that an average registered user on Facebook has an avg of 130 friends on his list.

2. 
   

   Any action taken by a user, automatically updates all his friends "Home" pages. So one update to 100 fans, has the potential of reaching a minimum of 13,000 users. And this is with only ONE update!! Imagine something like a Zoozoo page, no wonder they have 500k+ Fans

3. 
   

   Facebook pages allow a lot of rich media to be uploaded/updated with complete ease. Without any knowledge of HTML/JS or any other CMS interface.

4. 
   

   Creating custom tabs on your Facebook pages can never be easier. A little HTML & photoshop, you can build a custom tab in no time. Lets face it, looking at even a simple colorful image on a custom tab is so much better than continuosly focusing on the drab Page wall...

About the generation of traffic, try and visualise & segregate your target audience out of a total of 500 Million people. This number can even give the biggest website admins wet dreams. Because you are not only trying to hit these 500 mil users once, you can repeatedly target them, harass them and engage them (or at least try to), but at least there's a shot..... With a website, you only get one shot. A user can visit, checks it out, doesn't like it and he'll scoot.
On a website, visitors come for only 2 reasons. They have some actions that have to be taken on the website OR they come looking for information. Visits attributed to actions to be taken are a safe bet, but around 90% of the time, these visits will be from repeated visitors. When unique visits drop (a very dangerous sign), this can mean that either the Website is not Search Engine Optimized or the content just simply sucks...

But people visit facebook for a multitude of reasons & actions to be performed. Where a site admin fits into this orgy of information depends on how he/she can attract the target and retain users. (with content, updates, contests, prizes, etc.)
Once a fan, you will have your repeated visitor, and using this fan, you can effortlessly generate virgin traffic and drive 'virgins' to your page/tab/group, etc, etc, etc
Doing this with a website,  can more often be very difficult even with all the social bookmarking tools.

You can also send bulk emails to your Fans for FREE and if you want to buy targeted ads you can do that too.

With all this in your favor with Facebook – Why would any business need a website anymore?

How to effectively use Web Analytics

A Web analytics program is like an airplane pilot's navigation system. As pilots look to their dials and scopes to steer the plane, site owners monitor the data from their Web analytics software to help them run their site.

An analytics program — like those by WebTrends, ClickTracks, Omniture, Google and others — outputs ever-changing data about a site's traffic patterns, unique visitor numbers, bounce rates, referring URLs, and other user trends.

But, like a pilot's dashboard, no one ever said using a Web analytics program is easy. These programs display torrents of data, row upon row of numbers. Even analytics experts admit that they're complex and can be confusing.

Big, well-financed Web sites have no problem with this complexity. Top e-tailers employ full time analytics experts (sometimes full teams of them), specially trained to interpret analytics data. The big boys know that constantly tracking user trends is critical to the bottom line.

But smaller and mid-size sites have struggled to catch up. Smaller merchants are busy handling everything from order fulfillment to accounting. After a busy day, digging into the inscrutable data from an analytics program is a daunting task.

To shed light on how to best use an analytics program, E-commerce Guide spoke with Avinash Kaushik, a top expert who's respected throughout the analytics community. Kaushik talked about getting started with analytics, key reports to run and essential concepts for understanding your site's data.

Getting Started

• You don't have to buy a top package (there are good ones available for free)

For merchants new to analytics, Kaushik says, "if you haven't yet bought a top program, please don't — you have other options.
"There's such a steep learning curve [to the top packages] that you're better off playing with a free tool and figuring out things about your site before spending your money."
He recommends that owners get the free package from ClickTracks or Google
These free packages are extraordinarily easy to set up. For ClickTracks, you download the software and point it toward your log files; for Google's program, site owners insert Javascript tags into their pages' footer files. Ten minutes later, the data is flowing.

Kaushik is fond of both free programs, though he leans toward ClickTracks because it's "an extremely simple tool. It only does six reports, and it's a fabulous way for a small business owner to feel things out."

Lets Start with the Rules of Engagement

Start with Your Desired Outcome — Not with Reports

Let your goals for your site be your guide to understanding the data. So rather than opening your program and getting distracted by the 'geo' report or the 'trends of unique visitors,' instead focus on factors that are actually producing the outcome you want. Look for reports and analysis that will help you understand the whys and whats around your desired outcome.
"Why am I selling X number of figurines, and not Y [a higher number] number of figurines? What pages are the people who buy things reading? If I'm running promotions, which Web sites are sending me traffic with people who make purchases? "If you start with the outcome, you will automatically ignore the distractions and focus on the data that will provide you with meaningful insights."

Six Key Reports — And What to Do with the Data
The analytics industry is full of horror stories of eager site owners who churn out dozens (in some cases, hundreds) of reports per week. Before you fall prey to report-mania, realize that some reports are more important than others. In particular:
•Key Report #1: Referring Search Terms From Search Engines
The report that tells you which search phrases people are using to find your site tells you a lot about your users. For most of the people who come to your site, it's very hard to understand their intent. Yet there's no more effective way to discern this intent than knowing these top search terms — it's like mind reading. They reveal specifically what people want from your site.
Check your unpaid search engine ranking for these terms. If you're not ranked highly, do more search engine optimization — make yourself number one. Also important: develop more content and/or products that relate to these terms. Catering to your users creates more traffic.
•Key Report #2: Referring URLs
Look at the report that tells you which Web sites are sending you traffic. Does this correspond to your expectations?
Use this list of your referring URLs to boost your user base. If you see that there are sites that should be sending you traffic but aren't, contact them — can you form an alliance with them?
And if you find Web sites that are sending you traffic, but not as much as you want, do something for them. For example, if you think your mother-in-law's site should be sending you traffic and it's not showing up, why? 
Included in the data about referring URLs is a still more important data set: referring URLs for all people who reach a certain goal, for example, people who make a purchase. (Breaking data down between various user types and actions is called "segmentation" in the language of analytics programs.)
Wouldn't anyone love to know which Web sites are sending traffic to your site who meet this goal? Once you know this, you'll understand a lot more about the traffic and what's going on in your site, rather than looking at generic trends of visitors.
•Key Report #3: Content Popularity
It's essential to view the list of Top 10 (or 15) most popular pages on your site. Knowing what content is being consumed can lead you to so many insights. "What are people coming to my Web site for? Are the things that I want to promote actually the things that people are looking at?"
This list offers plenty of surprises. Sometimes it validates that visitors are doing the 'right' things, but more often, it shows that visitors are doing all these other things on your site that you didn't anticipate — and that's great food for thought
Turn these 'surprises' to your advantage. "You get ideas for what you should promote on your Web site." And, if appropriate, make sure you run your most compelling promotions on your top 10 most popular pages.
•Key Report #4: Percent of Visitors Who Visit the Home Page
This metric often shocks site owners. They think that everyone sees the homepage, so they put their maximum energies and promotion there. But since search engines display a site's internal pages, most users enter a site far from the home page.
People have benchmarked across so many e-commerce sites, and on the extreme end, only 10 percent of people see the home page, on the other end, 50-60 percent see the homepage.
Knowing home page usage levels enables you to better calibrate the resources dedicated to your homepage. In many cases, sites spend far too much effort on their home page and far too little on popular internal pages.
•Key Report #5: Site Overlay
Wouldn't you love it if you could open your site and see exactly where people are clicking? With the Site Overlay report you can. It displays your actual pages — just as they look to users — with a click level indicator next to each link. It shows the number of people who click on each link.
Kaushik calls the Site Overlay report "one of my favorites. I recommend doing Site Overlay reports for at least your top 10 pages." Site Overlay might reveal, for example, that the gorgeous hyperlinked graphic you spent four hours building gets no clicks at all. Indeed, this report might hurt your ego.
Site owners, by segmenting their analytics data between "visitors" and "purchasers," can learn which links are most popular with people who ultimately make purchases. These links can then be positioned for still greater visibility.
To improve your click rates on key links, "do simple experiments" with site structure and navigation. Also, look at well-financed sites to see how they lay out their links. "Get inspiration from the big boys, they've invested millions in studying user trends."
•Key Report #6: Site Bounce Rate
The Bounce Rate report reveals the number of visitors who stayed just a few seconds. These are the people who came to your site but didn't engage. In short, your bounce rate is your failure rate.
When you calculate your site bounce rate, you'll be surprised by how many people leave your site in five seconds. The exact number of seconds that represents a failure varies site by site (and even page by page within a site).
Put another way, sites should be aware of a critical number: what is the shortest visit time (in seconds) for a site user to be considered "interested"? To find this out for your site, ask an average person to run through a typical scenario on your site, and time it with a stopwatch.
"Get your grandmother to do it, then get your 16-year-old to do it". "And then you'll have your benchmark — somewhere in between those two is the optimal time."
Site owners can dig deeper into their Site Bounce Rate report to find out which referring URL or pay-per-click keywords draws traffic with high bounce rates. "That traffic is the wrong traffic," he notes. This data obviously suggests changes in your PPC buy.
In the case of referring URLs with high bounce rates, take a look at that referring site. Are you being linked to in a way that doesn't accurately reflect your site? Why are visitors from this referring URL so disappointed when they land on your page?
Your Program's Blind Spot
Your analytics program tells you which search terms are sending traffic your way, but it can't tell you which popular terms you should be using but aren't.
For example, if you sell Tom Cruise ceramic figurines — but no Tom Cruise glass figurines — you're not aware of all the people searching for 'Tom Cruise glass figurines.' If you get no traffic for a term, your analytics program will give you no clue to this horde of users.
However, there are two ways to discover these "hidden" relevant keywords to draw this additional traffic:
1) Subscribe to a service like Hitwise
Hitwise lets you scan lists of popular keywords. For instance, it'll show you the top 1,000 terms in a given industry, or the list of terms from any search engine in a certain category. Hitwise also reveals which sites people go to for those terms.
But Hitwise is a pricey tool. A free tool is Overture's Keyword Selector Tool, though it won't show which sites people flock to from given terms.
2) Simply type in a large number of relevant terms to Google
As a business owner, you probably know (or can guess) the most frequently used search terms that might draw you traffic. It costs nothing to type them into Google's search box and find all the sites that come up.
"Look at the sponsored links that show up". These businesses (who are likely your closest competitors) have probably figured out all the best contextual key words. He recommends visiting these sites and doing a View Source look at their home page's code. Within the HTML code, look for the list of keywords embedded in their meta tags.


SEO vs. PPC: Using Analytics to Save Money
The science of Web analytics is married to the practice of buying pay-per-click advertising. The reason merchants huddle for hours with their analytics package is to find out if their PPC expenditure is actually driving them traffic.

Indeed, the frightful cost of PPC makes analytics all the more important. For those merchants considering PPC, analysts caution that they first must have full knowledge of their analytics program. "If you want to do PPC, first learn which key phrases work for your goal," otherwise you're wasting your money.
"PPC is a very fast way to lose a lot of money if you're not careful with your analysis. Very few people do it right."

In fact, sponsored links, though they drive traffic, are only one part of an effective strategy. "Increasingly, people who search are beginning to realize that these are sponsored links — businesses are paying to get in here. And organic placement [showing up in the free results] is providing more credibility." For this reason, resources spent on search engine optimization — which produces unpaid search rankings — tends to be a better long term investment than pay-per-click.

Reliance Money - The Reliance Money experience, More Information & Trading...

Reliance Money, A Reliance Capital Limited Company, is the financial services division of Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani (ADA) Group. Reliance ADA group is among top 3 business houses in India with wide range of presence across various sectors. Group’s major interests ranges from communications (Reliance Communications) and financial services (Reliance Capital Ltd), to generation, transmission and distribution of power (Reliance Energy), infrastructure and entertainment.

Reliance Money has over 22 lakhs customers and more then 10,000 branches in around 5,000 cities in India. Reliance Money is among the largest broking and distribution house of financial products and having share of more then 3% of total stock market volume at BSE & NSE.

RelianceMoney.com is the web based investment portal (with Online Stock Trading) from Reliance Money. This website enables its customer to invest & manage most of the services provided by Reliance Money including Equity (Stock) Trading, Commodity Trading, Derivatives, Mutual Fund Investment, IPO Investment, Life Insurances, General insurances, Money Transfer, Forex exchange, Gold Coins and Credit Cards Services. Company recently entered in to Wealth Management with tools like investment in equity-linked portfolio management services, structured products, insurance and mutual funds.

The Reliance Money stock trading websites uses special security features 'Security Token', which makes your online trading experience more secure without complexity.

Stock Trading through RelianceMoney.com is available for BSE and NSE stock exchanges. Offline trading is also available through Reliance Money partners in more then 5000 city across India and through phone by dialing 022-39886000.

Relance Money offers a simplified, automated, sophisticated technical analysis to Indian retail broking consumers with the help of Recognia's Technical Analysis tools. Recognia, a Canada based company, has proprietary pattern recognition technology capable of recognizing patterns in the price charts of any publicly traded financial instrument including stocks, bonds, funds, commodities, currencies and indexes.

The technical services are available for introductory free 7-day trail period to Reliance Money users. Post the trail period, this service is available to users at a nominal subscription of Rs. 99 for 3 months/ Rs. 179 for 6 months/ Rs. 299 for a year, i.e., less than Re 1 a day.

Finally, Bajaj Sees Competition in the Indian Market

While Bajaj and Hero Honda continue to fight for market share, Honda Motorcyle and Scooters, is making inroads into the Indian market and may ultimately eat into Bajaj Auto's market, as it readies to capture the fast growing urban market.

Bajaj Auto has a new rival in making, as Honda Motorcycle and Scooters. is all set to take on the Pulsar brand on the premium segment front, a segment where nearest rival Hero Honda is absent, which now plans to focus on the rural and new urban markets.


 Though Honda has not witnessed stellar sales last fiscal, it managed to sell only 520,000 bikes. Its newly launched 150 cc Unicorn Dazzler is sure shot completion to Bajaj and add to this another 250 cc premium bike, which is in the pipeline.

Although Honda Motorcycle and Scooters will be focusing on the biking segment with a new zeal, scooters will still continue to play a crucial role in the company's portfolio.

With a sales target 800,000 units this year, together Hero Honda and Honda Motorcycle plan to reign on the Indian two wheelers industry.

*Source - NDTV Profit

DeadMau5...... Just amazing

The track titled I Remember with Kaskade, simply amazing. Check out Ghosts'n'Stuff, Arguru and a lot more tracks of his. He's really very good

Getting a higher Google Page Rank for a website

The eternal question!! How does one get a High Google PageRank for a website??

The answers are quite a few. The common answers are as follows (ordered in descending priority)

• Backlinks
• MORE backlinks
• Some More Backlinks
• Quality Content (keyword targeted)
• Meta Tags
• Maybe more backlinks
• Continuous page updation
• Resolving tech issues (js, flash, canonical, etc etc )
• A few more Backlinks

As a reminder from an earlier post relating to the "click here" Adobe dilemma, where the Adobe website ranks #1 for the keyphrase "click here" is totally attributed to backlinks (incidentally the Page has a PR of 10!!) that it has received from millions of webpages from all around the world with varying PR's - FOR FREE!!

After a little look into the backlink promise, I found the following for the keyphrase "bajaj bikes for sale" on Google India:

Website	Rank on Google	Page Rank	Indexed pages	Backlinks*	Alexa rank
www.clickindia.com	# 1	2	719,000	1	n/a
www.bikes4sale.in	# 2	3	7,320	1	59,744
www.autonagar.com	# 4	4	3,350	68	n/a

* Source - SEOQuake for Firefox

I found the data above as really inconclusive. Seems indexed pages seems to overcast all other parameters including backlinks and even the Google PR itself. If this was the case then only large B2B, shopping or classified websites would rank for all related terms right, wrong.... Why isn't a site like Indiamart #2 or #3 with 700k indexed pages??

Google seems to be going loco. I recently read a writeup somewhere saying Google has stopped showing Backlinks altogether, to prevent 'link wars' amongst websites competing for ranking.

However, more often than not, this is the kind of jargonish nonsense you'll find on the web -

Ranking Well In Google: How critical Are Back links to Your Site?

When building your site for Search Engine Optimization on Google there are a lot of aspects you have to view in order to obtain a good value on search engine robots. Of course the articles and meta tags need to be inline with positive density percentage and reciprocal links. Google then takes the web site and fulfills a mathematic equation and places a rank on your webpage counting on one of the most crucial things, reciprocal or back links.
A back link and reciprocal link are identical. They both are saying the same fact to the Google search engine; that your webpages should be ranked higher, due to the fact that consumers find quality in what the web site has to offer, they provide a link to your website, accordingly setting up a great network connection. Google loves to see interconnectivity and will reward your web pages well for planning it like this.
There is one more important thing to consider. As soon as the Google engine goes through your site and discovers a dead link it shows that you aren’t taking good care of your webpages and subsequently decreases your webrank by reducing its point value.

If you would love to find out what your site’s current numberic value is download The Google Toolbar and type your website address www.yourwebsitename.com in the box and perform a web search. Upon reading the full site address, Google will go exactly to your website first thus pulling up your homepage. There on the toolbar will be a page ranking for your site between 1 and 10. 1 is a significantly less visited and a site with pagerank 10 is a web site that generates traffic 24/7.

This is just some dude posting an article with backlinks to his own website on some article directory. I lmao, this is backlinking from a page talking about the benefits of backlinking... Google really should stop considering backlinks and focus more on frequency of page updation, indexed pages, clean code,and relevant page content. Meta tags & on-page content should play the biggest role in ranking with backlinks taking a more tertiary priority......

Till then.... off to the directories, social bookmarks & article blasting

Facebook tabs - Developing a Tab Internal Website

You can actually develop a mini 'tabbed' website within a Facebook fanpage tab using div ids to make content dynamic. Spent a lot of time researching this and was happy to see the final result. Although my design skills are crappy - I managed to put a few things together.

The only difference in this case I noticed between FBML and HTML (and/or JS) is that the onclick function is replaced by "clicktoshow" & the "clicktohide" attributes. Separating the static portion from the dynamic portion can be quite a tedious job when you try to incorporate image previews (which onclick expand to full view). The code gets a little too huge and the number of ids that have to be set 'to hide' increase exponentially.

All in all, I felt it was a great week for Facebook. All that left is for me to sort out my underdeveloped artistic streak - then maybe it'll be a whole new ball game

Website iframe on Facebook Fan Page Tab

I had been pondering over this issue for quite a while now, as to how can I embed my website into a facebook fan page tab. (Kinda specific isn't it).
I looked around and found a few static iframe apps on Facebook itself - but guess what?? - They are limited trials (paid versions for an iframe app???) - something so functionally simple in HTML been made so complicated on today's most visited social network was truly mind boggling to me.

So i did a little research further and found that although Facebook does not accept the iframe tag in FBML for a page tab, but instead has to be used in an app, then the app has to be added to the Facebook page (and then the tab) - a bit of php, app creation (from a techie friend, of course) and voila - it was finally possible to embed a webpage on a Facebook fan page tab.

I owe this spark to the guy who designed this page called - "Pages Design" on Facebook - he's managed to give a simply amazing look and feel to his fan page

Facebook and banning of publishing rights of Page Admins

Facebook should really make things a little easier for all page admins by making the authentication procedure a little easier.

They give you 3 weeks to authenticate by some nonsense means, and even after providing the required details, they refuse to unblock your publishing rights.

Try to call them, and they do not service customers on their hotline (even paying customers)

They have to try and figure out as to how and deal with these issues before page admins who advertise stop paying for their PPC campaigns on facebook

Optimization SEO Tips

In today's tough online competition, competitiveness is the first thing in mind. There is no room for procrastination. Any effective method when it can be done right away must be done right away.

Link building techniques involve complex tasks. But there are lots of SEO firms that can perform such tedious tasks for your convenience.

As visitors, we need links to go from one page to another. Links are used for traffic and organic results. All of the search engines have the same function - you type in a term and you get a relevant query. The algorithm that returns the results uses a variety of components.

Link popularity is one of the largest factors in determining rank. Link popularity = measure of quantity and quality of links. All the major search engines use link popularity in some format. It's considered an off-page factor because the value is determined by another page. If the link sits on your page, it's content.

Getting a link from popular blogs is one of the best ways of link building. Whenever you post a comment on a blog, there will be a Name field, and a website field. You can give the link of your website in the website field, and include link building keywords that you are targeting, along with your name. This will ensure a link towards your site from the blog, and the 'anchor' text will have your keyword as well.

Link popularity measures quality and quantity. You need links from authority sites. Anchor text should highlighy on page keyword phrases. PR has little effect on rank. Look for links from contextually relevant sites.

Every business, small or big, needs to establish its presence online. The best way to gain visibility in the eyes of the user is through search engine rankings. It is vital that your website ranks among the top pages in search engines, for a particular search term. This is where link building comes in.

The relevance factor behind link popularity - search engines read words around anchor text and throughout the page looking for on-topic and subject relevance. They want sites relevant to the query and thematically related.

Gain insights on how to increase pagerank. P2W2 will show you the techniques on how to get backlinks.

Search Engine Ranking Factors

If you spend any amount of time doing research on running an online business, you'll run into the term "search engine optimization" or its common abbreviation "SEO".

It's intellectually interesting to know that there are 917,846,342 different websites that are relevant to the search query, but really, if your website doesn't appear in the first 10 pages (or first 100 results), it's invisible to the world.

Search Engine Optimization did something similar in fact it is now a multibillion dollar sector and with every passing day is growing by leaps and bounds. In the initial days it did dwindled a bit but later on when it found its footing it never looked back again and since onwards after seeing the magical results it became the prime focus of any business or entity who want themselves to be recognized over the world wide web but it is the micro details to it which makes it a huge business.

One of the things that search engine optimization specialists do is keep track of all the changes in search engine operations so they can optimize pages accordingly. They also keep up with changes in the different search engine submission policies.

Getting a link from popular blogs is one of the best ways of link building. Whenever you post a comment on a blog, there will be a Name field, and a website field. You can give the link of your website in the website field, and include link building keywords that you are targeting, along with your name. This will ensure a link towards your site from the blog, and the 'anchor' text will have your keyword as well.

An important aspect of blog commenting is do follow blogs. When creating a link on a webpage using HTML, the standard code for that link includes the HTML tag, the URL the link points to, the text that will be shown on the webpage for that link, and the closing HTML tag.

You can another HTML attribute to the tag, saying rel="nofollow". This will tell the search engine spiders whether or not you want them to follow the link when crawling your website. So, basically, there is no concept of a "dofollow" blog, it just means not using the "nofollow" tag.

Although SEO is not rocket science, competency is not to be disheveled as obvious or merely implied that by writing great content alone that such a metric is capable of making up for all of the other intricacies that are a prerequisite to develop a genuinely authoritative site.

Get information on how to improve page rank. We can help you achieve better search engine ranking.

Pulsar 220 vs the ZMR - Not what I expected!!

I think the video explains it all. I love the part when he just jumps the ZMR and runs towards the 220

The Pulsar 220 is supposed to kick ass in all aspects