SEO Consultant India - SEO Kolkata

Are you Ready for Social Commerce ?

2009-10-30T17:29:00.003+05:30

Isn't it extremely common to ask your family and friend's for suggestions before buying any product ? It has been so for ages and now with the increasing use of social media the same process has come on to the Internet. The social media platforms and communities are becoming big time influencers in online purchase process.Recognizing this, while many retail websites are trying to incorporate community features and build up a community around themselves, social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are taking this a step further.

Social platforms and communities play a major role through out the buying process. At the start of the buying process consumer interest in a product or service can be fueled by a special offer promoted by a brand through Facebook or Twitter. Consumers might also develop interest towards a product when they discover it through recommendations in social shopping sites like Kaboodle, StyleHive etc Typically before making a purchase most people look for reviews and this is when they are influenced by user generated reviews on retail websites and product review sites. Again post-purchase, customers today often connect with the retailer's customer service agents through social networks like Twitter, also customers often resort to communities like forums to learn about product usage and help. So all through the process from, initiating the customers interest in the product to providing them with after sales support the social media platforms are playing a crucial role.

Recognizing this potential of social media and also understanding the fact that people are spending more and more time on social networks, retailers are doing their best to enhance their social presence. In fact at this point when retailers are just working to make their presence felt by serving compelling content to their fans / followers/ friends , it might not be long when they would offer a complete e-commerce experience within social platforms itself.

Unless we have a sudden change in the social media dynamics with the entry of some new networking platform, Facebook would probably take the cake in this evolution. There are a number of reasons to support this.

a) Facebook already offers a high level of interactivity for brands. Once an user becomes a fan of a brand the brand can post updates about special offers and other compelling content which gets posted to the fan's wall.

b) Applications like Facebook Connect allow users to bring their friends along on a shopping session for feedback

c) Advanced Facebook apps are being developed that allows retailers like 1-800-flowers to offer a virtual store front within Facebook itself, allowing customers to complete their transaction process without leaving Facebook.

The e-commerce experience has already changed a lot from what it was a few years back to what it is today and given the way things are going it can be safely predicted that in the next few years E-commerce would complete its evolution to be Social Commerce.

Is your business ready for it ?

Related Posts:
Dell Boosts revenue with Twitter
How to measure success and benefits of Social media campaigns
Social Media Optimization - Two More Rules for SMO
Britney Spears Hiring Social media manager

Thisman.org - The Mystery Exposed

2009-10-30T11:47:00.005+05:30

I came across a news on Yahoo yesterday and found out that the web has got a new buzz about a mysterious man who seems to appear in the dreams of thousands of people across the world. Sounds Weird ? - Check out the details at Thisman.org. With the type of interest that everyone of us have about weird and mysterious stuff it is not surprising that this story would go hot on the Internet.

Now while some people are actually taking it seriously and are expecting to uncover some really mysterious psychological phenomena, there are also enough voices that doubt it to be a marketing gimmick. Keeping this in mind, I thought of digging into the issue a little and here's what I found.

a)The website mentions that the incident initiated when a "well-known psychiatrist in NY drew the face in 2006. It also mentions during the course of the events she forwarded this picture to other psychologists whose patients also identified the face to be in their dreams. - However, the website does not specify the names of any of the psychologists .

b)A quick look at the Who Is Records for the domain show that this domain is registered by some Andrea Natella from a Guerilla marketing agency in Italy. Check the screen shot below

c) The website mentions that its purpose is to connect people across the world who have dreamt of this man but on the site there is no option provided by which users can connect to each other. There is no proof that thousands of people have actually dreamt of this man, other than the declaration made by the site authorities.

d) Also there is no well defined contact information on the site. All you have is a contact form. If its actually a psychological research case, isn't it natural for the site to provide details of doctors who are leading the research and should be contacted in case someones identifies the man ?

e) Also , the website sells Tshirts, mugs, magnets etc with the ma's face on them. Don't you think this is too silly an ecommerce activity to be associated with a serious psychology research case ? I don't think a professional doctor would ever think of this, rather it smells of some savvy internet marketer.

With all these points noted, I am pretty sure that this is not a psychological phenomena and it is basically a well laid out viral marketing strategy, may be for some book, films etc. Probably, if they would have been a little more elaborate and careful about domain registration, and the contact information, it could have actually passed on to be real.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this.

Google Partners with Twitter to Provide Real Time Search Results

2009-10-22T15:08:00.003+05:30

Well, real time search has been a nice topic for discussion for quite some time now amongst the search enthusiast, there has also been a lot of speculations if Google is going to acquire Twitter or not. With all that happening Google has officially announced in their blog yesterday that they have got into an agreement with Twitter to include Twitter updates in relevant search results.

Including Twits in real time updates on search results would definitely enhance the user experience to great extent particularly for certain time and place sensitive searches. While it is not something that they are launching immediately, they are definitely working on how they can smoothly integrate Twits with Google search to offer an overall better search experience to their users.

Google have sighted an example related to weather conditions in a ski resort, while that is definitely a good possible use, I think once the Twitter and Google search integration becomes complete we might get to see some more interesting info like the following :

a) Traffic conditions in street : people often tweet when they get stuck in traffic somewhere

b) Real time updates on any event / accident via Tweeples who might be present at the spot

c) Special offers that are exclusive to Twitter users now would start reaching more audience , example: @Dell

d) Updated Flight information right from Google search results page via Twits - a la @JetBlue

e) Movie Reviews ; Short and crisp feedback on movies, very common in Twitter.

These are just some of my random thoughts on how things might change once this integration is complete.

Also, the SEO in me is thinking about a different aspect. Will Google be respecting links that a website gets from Twits while deciding on the organic rankings ? For those of you who would like to pic your brains on this, here is a small piece of information..

Bit.ly, tinyurl.com, Su.pr - some of the popular URL shortening services used in Twitter actually offers a 301 redirects to the main URL :)

If not as tradition links, is there going to be any direct correlation between Twitter mentions for a website and its organic rankings ?

What do you think ?

How Excel Pivot Tables Can Help in Your SEM Campaign

2009-10-19T15:39:00.005+05:30

Excel is probably one of the most powerful applications that we use day in and day out, often without realizing its full potential. For all search marketing professionals and particularly the ones that specialize in Paid search campaigns on platforms like Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search and Adcenter – Excel is probably one of the most used tool.

While there are too many ways that MS Excel is used in SEM campaigns right from the keyword research phase to campaign optimization and reporting, on this article I will focus on just one extremely useful feature of MS Excel that is used / should be used by all search marketing consultants and professionals.

Pivot Tables as per MS Excel’s definition is “A Pivot Table report is an interactive way to quickly summarize large amounts of data. Use a Pivot Table report to analyze numerical data in depth and to answer unanticipated questions about your data”. If you have not used this tool before and have managed any search account with more than 50,000 keywords, you must be super excited by now on reading this definition. Now let’s look at how Pivot table can help with search marketers in managing paid search campaigns.

The first thing you should keep in mind is that you don’t need to Pivot all data. Use Pivot tables only for data that you need to analyze and get meaningful information. This particularly effective when you need to shift/ change columns, rows, add / remove filters in the same report to get your required information. An ideal example would be if we try to analyze a keyword / placement report from Adwords.

Now from this report we can see a lot of information in terms performance of each keyword or placements and using the sort and filter functions we can also get some more information like the top performing keywords in terms of CTR / clicks/ cpc etc and few other information. Now what if we try to get a few additional information like..

Yes, you can answer all of these by going back to the report console in Adwords and pulling separate Network level, ad group level and Campaign level reports for each, but a simple Pivot Table can help yo to get answers to all these questions right from the Keyword / Placement Report you downloaded initially. Let’s see how..

Create a Pivot Table

Once you have the Excel data table with you, on the “Insert” ribbon, to your extreme left notice the icon that says “pivot table” – click on that. This should select the entire data range in the table and also pop up a dialogue box that shows the cell reference for the selected area and asks you where to create the pivot table ( in the same sheet or in new sheet). Make sure that the last row containing the “Total” data is not included. Click “Ok” on the box and your Pivot table gets created in the next sheet by default. ( you can choose to create it on the same sheet also but that is not advisable).

Now that you have your pivot table created, you can see the basic skeleton of the table on the page and to your right hand side you can see the list of all the column headers from your data table. All you will need to do is to select the respective column headers and put them in columns or rows as per your requirement.

Now let’s try to answer the questions…

Which are the best performing Ad groups ?

Just Drag and drop the following..

AdGroup field to Row Label Box;
Impression, Clicks and Cost field to Values box;

You will see that the Pivot has nicely summarized the impressions, clicks and cost by Adgroups.

You might be wondering why I did not include CTR and average CPC in this because that could have given an even better picture. I left them out intentionally because those would have to be calculated fields, that we will come to at a later part of this article.

Click image to Enlarge

Which Campaigns Generate Most Clicks ?

Same process as above, just add the Campaign label to the “Row label” box. Excel is intelligent enough to club all the Ad group data under their respective Campaigns and give you a summarized picture by campaign as well as by ad group.

You can change the order of the fields ( campaign and ad group) by drag and drop in the “Row level” box or by doing a right click on any campaign or ad group name and then “Move” > select the option that you want to use.

Which Placements are registering most Impressions and clicks ?

To the same Pivot that you had just add the “Placement / Keyword” label to the “Rows” box and the “Match Type” label into “Report Filter” Box. Now on the Pivot table Filter for Match Type, click the down arrow and select “Placement Targeted” – it will show you only the placement targeted data. You can make it further easy to analyze by sorting the data based on Impression, clicks or cost. For this, just click on any data from the column based on which you want to sort and then click on the “Sort & Filter” option to your top right. You will get a dialogue box where you can specify how you want the data to be sorted.

Click image to Enlarge

Search network or content network – which was more effective?

In the same settings as above from the Match type drop down on top ( Filter), select “Content” and it would show you the data for your Content Network at Campaign and ad Group level.

These are few very simple examples of how Pivot Table can be used. If you play around with the data for some time and have a logical bend of mind you can easily find numerous ways in which you can manipulate simple data tables to effective Pivot Tables that give out tons of useful analytical information.

Now let’s discuss talk about the “Calculated Fields” like CTR and Average CPC. If you put them in similar way as other fields Pivot table would tend to sum it up which is definitely not the right thing to do. So to add these fields to your Pivot table you will need to use the calculated field option.

How to use Calculated Fields ?

“Option” Ribbon > Formulas > Calculated Fields

In the Dialogue box, put the name of the field you want to calculate ( CTR) in the “Name” box and in the “Formula” field, write the formula – ensure that you use the exact headings used in your data table to create the formula, you can also do this by selecting the field names from the box below and clicking “Insert Field”.

Also, while naming the fields make small changes to it ( like adding an extra space, or adding any prefix or suffix) because Excel would not let you create a calculated field for exactly the same heading that you already have in your data table. Because you have CTR field in your data table, you will need to name the field in your Pivot as CTR1 or something similar.

You can use the same process for adding CPC to your pivot table or any other calculated field for that matter.

Calculating Average Position in a Pivot Table

To calculate Average position in a Pivot Table you will need to do a little more work. First in the data table add an extra column and put the formula “Impressions X Average position “ and drag it to have the value for all keywords. Once you have these values, copy them and then do a Paste Special > Values. Let’s name this column as AvgPosTot.

Now in your pivot table add a calculated field for average position and add the formula Avg.PosTot / Impressions . This will show the actual average position at keyword, ad group as well as campaign level.

There are too many things that can be done with Pivot tables and pivot charts and the more you play around with the data the more you will learn and develop on how best this tool can be used to analyze data and get useful information for your search campaign management. Now that I have explained the basics on how a Pivot table can help you with your search marketing data try it yourself and feel free to post any query you might have.

Google Recommends Reputation Management

2009-10-16T12:43:00.003+05:30

A few days back I wrote about some reputation management tips keeping in mind the increasing demand of this service and now we have a formal recommendation from Google also on such search reputation management.

With the increasing number of name searches / ego searches being on, Google sure does receive a lot of requests every day to remove negative content about people and businesses from there index; so they have now tried to address the issue with this article at Managing Your Reputation Through Search Results .

The bottom line for the entire post summarizes to three basic point

a) Be careful about what personal information you put online

b) If a negative content is published somewhere , try to remove it from the source rather than requesting Google to remove it

c) Create positive content about your self on the net to push down negative content in the search results

While point (a) is more of a common sense thing that most savvy net users do have today, point (b) in most cases might be difficult / not applicable. So the only option that you will be left with is point (c) - that is to create positive content about yourself proactively that pushes down any negative information that Google might have for you.

Check out this specific Reputation management tips that tells you the different ways and places where you can create content about yourself to maintain a stellar reputation in the Google search results.

Google Adwords Promotion for Indian Advertisers

2009-10-07T15:46:00.004+05:30

In their attempt to penetrate the Indian SMB market Google Adwords have decided to offer a free advertising credit of Rs.2500 for Indian advertisers ( small businesses) who have an online presence but have not used the Adword platform before.

To avail this Google Adwords promotion you will need to call 1 860 266 6622 and register your website with Adwords at http://adwords.google.co.in .

3 Steps to avail this Adwords Promotion

Call the number 1860 266 6622
Share your business and contact details
Google India AdWords representative will provide the account setup support along with 1 month dedicated customer support to manage the ad campaign.

This promotional offer is available to advertisers across India and gives a hint at Google's aggressive plan in capturing the fast growing small business market in India. While major businesses have already adopted to paid search and digital media, small businesses are yet to jump onto the bandwagon. This free credit of Rs.2500 would actually go a long way for Google to secure new SMB advertisers from the Indian market.

In case you need professional consulting or help with your Adwords account feel free to contact me at saptarshi.rc @ gmail dot com

Update: Amit Agarwal posted an update on his blog on this. He actually spoke to a guy in Google India office in Mumbai who informed him that before he could avail this promotional offer he will need to give them a check for Rs.10,000 which is the minimum requirement for Google to set up the Adwords account. The credit coupon will be given only next month after they have received this initial 10k payment.

This is very much in contrary to the news that was provided earlier. It mentioned, "All small businesses with an online presence will be able to avail Rs 2500/- worth of advertising coupons by just calling the number 1860266 6622 and registering their websites with Google India Ad Words platform".

Why would someone open an Adwords account with Rs.10,000 to get a Rs.2500 credit when most good hosting companies do offer some Adwords credit ( $25- $50) with their hosting package?

Related Posts:
How to Improve your Google Adwords Quality Socre
Guide to effective Ad Copy Writing for Google Adwords

How to Make Money on Twitter

2009-10-07T13:14:00.007+05:30

Twitter is really big now and it is still growing at an exponential rate. Users are glued to it and as I see it in most people, the tendency to Twitter is infectious. But besides the joy of Twittering what if you could make some money out of it ? wouldn't it be better ?

Well, there are tons of promises around that talks about making you reach on the web or getting you thousands of followers on Twitter, however, most of them would ask you to pay them to avail their service and or otherwise would not really deliver what they promise. I come across a lot of such "money making opportunities" like every other Twitter and was about to negate this one too but though to take a quick look and this time it I am lucky.

I came across this application called Sponsored Tweets from Izea that connects potential advertisers with publishers on Twitter and the best part of this application is that it doesn't send Tweets from your account directly - you can actually review and approve the message that would be Twitted from your account ( at times you can even write it yourself) and if you don't like it just don't approve it.

Once you sign up with Sponsored Tweets ( pretty simple and fast - no long forms to fill), you can quote the price you want to get paid for every tweet that you send out on behalf of the advertiser. If an advertiser likes your profile ( based on your network, popularity, nature of tweets etc) he would contact you with his offer. If you agree and send out the advertisement message through your Twitter account your Sponsored Tweets account gets credited for the money. You can then withdraw it almost instantly to your Paypal account.

It is a fairly simple and logical process and with a company like Izea behind it this is scam proof. Like any other advertising network the price you get would depend largely on your quality as a publisher which would take into account multiple aspects. Some of the factors that I feel would be necessary for you to make good money at Sponsored Tweets would be ..

The number of followers and friends you have. While followers are of big importance I believe advvertisers would also like to check the ratio between followers and friends.
How active you are on Twitter - mostly judged by the number of Tweets you make, RTs you get etc
The quality of your followers and friends - are their social media influencers in your network ? are your followers mostly from a niche/ industry ?

Also, make sure you have a Paypal account because that is the only way Sponsored Tweets pay at this point.

For advertisers, I think this is a great opportunity particularly for the ones with a tech/ web based products or service. You can get publishers to talk about your product at throw away prices and if you have a big budget you can probably get some celebrity like KimKardashian or Kendra Wilkinson to tweet about your product / service or website. You can see a complete list of Publishers under the Tweeters tab on their website.

So Happy Tweeting and hope you make some money as well !

Click here to Join Sponsored Tweets

Magpie is another advertising network that offers similar service to Sponsored Tweets however, I have heard that there payout is probably not as good as ST. Also, they would send payments only after you reach $50 mark. One good thing about Magpie though is that they allow all ad tweets to be preceeded or followed by a short notifice like "Ad" which maintains the integrity of your Twitter profile to your followers.

Google Web Elements - An Easy Way to Integrate Google Products

2009-09-28T11:50:00.003+05:30

Google has always been known for its simplicity and the wonderful services that it provides (in most cases apparently for free). With the launch of Google Elements it has now become all the more easier to use the Google products and integrate them nicely within your website.

Click thumbnail to view large image

You can use this to easily integrate features like Google Custom search, Maps, News, Calendar, Presentation in to your website. While some of you might like to call this an widget, I would rather think of this as a nice container for the Google tools that would motivate more and more webmasters to use them.

These tools are pretty handy and of them all the one I like most is the conversation module. This allows your visitors to post comments directly on your website. This can be fantastic addition for those traditional website that are trying to get onto the more interactive version of the web ( Web 2.0 ) but are restrained by financial/ technical capabilities.

You can checkout the different Web Elements offered by Google here.

Google's 11th Birthday Logo - September 27th 2009

2009-09-28T00:19:00.005+05:30

On Google's 11th birthday, 27th September 2009 Google gets a new logo with two "l" . If you have missed it on Sunday, see the logo below.

Google's birthday has moved around across many dates in September and it has often been debated how old is this search giant. While some count it to be as old as 12 years old, some tend to believe it is just 9. Actually Google's birthday depends on your perspective of what you consider to be the birth of Google.

Given below are few different perspective for Google's birthday.

Google - 13 years old
January 1996 - This is when Sergey Brin and Lary Page were working on Backrub, which later became Google.

Google - 12 years old
September 15, 1997 - This is when he Google.com domain was registered ( as per AFP)

Google - 11 year old
September 7, 1998 - When Google was probably officially incorporated

September 27, 1998 - The current official date. Back in 2005 Google announced this date to be their official birthday.

What's so Google-ish in Google's Birthday ?

Google has always been a little different from everyone else around in whatever they do and their birthday is no exception. They did an announcement in 2006 where they mentioned that Google's birthday could be anytime they want it to be. To be more specific, the page said,

"Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake. For more on Google’s history: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html"

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GOOGLE

10 Ways for Online Search Reputation Management

2009-09-20T22:01:00.004+05:30

It is becoming increasingly important for brands (corporations or even individuals) to monitor their web presence. With the increasing growth of social media platforms, the power is in the hands of mass and while it is a great thing to democratize the web it also brings with it some inherent drawbacks that can sting really bad.

Today most of us, whenever we get into anything new or meet someone interesting we would often Google it to find more about the person or the business. What if you see..

You are not able to find much information about the person on web

Google throws up a list of results including some blogs / review website / other social media pages where someone has talked trash about the company or the person.

In first case it would make your job extremely difficult to find more information about the business or person. Also you will probably give a second thought about doing any business with him given the fact that today most reputable businesses have their online presence.

In the second case you will probably never again think of doing any business with that company or individual in your life.

Truth or otherwise, every business would have some negative thinkers about them but it becomes a real problem when this negative views starts to surface in a Google search for your name. Companies realizing this have been spending tons for reputation management but here we will discuss a few easy and effective ways in which you can saturate search results for your name and do a good job at online search reputation management.

Make sure your official website is optimized for your brand name. You would typically like this to be the first result when someone searches for your name

If you have a blog – that’s great! Again focus on your brand, and make sure it shows up above the scroll for a brand name search. If your blog is your main website like in my case, make sure it is the first result people see when they search for your name.

Twitter – The entire world is going ga-ga over Twitter how can you stay away ? Join the bandwagon, make sure your Twitter profile has your Company name, also from branding perspective it is advisable to have your company name as your Twitter ID. Participate regularly and you will see your Twitter profile shows up for your brand name search ( Twitter has optimized its structure and Title for that – you don’t need to do the hardwork , just participate)
If you have a really long name like me ( @rishi3211us ), Twitter might truncate it, however, if you can push a few links here and there you will still get it ranked for your name.

FaceBook – Another extremely powerful social media platform. The same principle applies as in Twitter, participate more - Google and Facebook would take care of the rest. One thing that you would need to do is go to Settings > Privacy > Search and check the box that says “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing”.Take advantage of Facebook’s vanity URL policy and get a nice URL like http://www.facebook.com/Saptarshi.Roy.Chaudhury

Linkedin – A great place to be and definitely a great help if you are planning to display a clean picture of yours in Google. Create a complete profile with all necessary details. Remember it’s a professional networking website, so make sure what you write on your profile and the way you network depicts a professional image about yourself and your company. You just need to create the profile and be active in the network Google would do the rest.

YouTube – How about displaying a video commercial about your company in Google first page? Yes you can do that easily these days. With most major search engines adopting Universal Search model and given Google’s preference for YouTube, upload a nice infomercial about your company and put your company name in Video Title and description. Most likely the video would show up for a search on the company name.

Press Releases – Send out a few press releases to online PR networks. Make sure you include your company name in Title and the same is sprinkled across the content generously. Once it gets picked up by some good news website, it is likely to get displayed on the first page.

If you are an industry expert make a few guest post in some of the authority blogs in your industry. Don’t forget to mention your company name and these are also likely to show up in Google results.
Also once you can establish your status as an industry expert and if you are doing at least some bit of networking, you might be getting some offers from other bloggers who might like to interview you. These are golden opportunities to increase your reputation and authoritative value and also when they show up in search results it adds a lot to your credibility.

While the above 8 options are pretty helpful you can also get good help from some other websites like Flickr, Plaxo, Naymz, Pipl ( people search). Create a profiles, put in some good info, participate in the community and most likely your profile would hit the first page in Google.

While all the above points can be effective in saturating your search results and helping you to keep away any negative publicity about yourself - one of the key things that you need to keep in mind is what goes on the Internet stays there forever. So be extremely careful about what you post on your profiles or anywhere else about yourself. While it might look fun to post a lucid comment about one of your ex-colleagues, mind it that your present colleagues might not appreciate your thoughts once they find it.It is extremely important to ensure that anything published on the Internet about yourself or that relates to you is something that you really want the world to know.

While I have received a few such requests before and ran a few campaigns successfully, this days there are also niche companies that specializes in this type of online reputation management services. Recently I had a quick chat with Kaurik Raj from http://www.weboostu.com/ whose key offering is Internet reputation management. As Kaurik pointed out, the easiest way to maintain your internet reputation is to create positive content and effectively use them to bury any negative content.

With increasing power of content creation with the people, I am sure negative reputation / reviews would be a part of life for every brand very soon and that would actually create an increasing demand for online reputation management professionals or companies like Weboostu.

CPA Networks from Publishers Perspective

2009-08-23T14:33:00.003+05:30

This is actually an extension to my last post on CPA networks. While CPA networks are great for advertisers they are also a great source of revenue for publishers. Many bloggers make substantial money from these.

Typical to affiliate marketing systems, CPA networks pay a percentage commission based on the qualifying action. If you search the Internet you can easily find 100s of CPA networks, however, here is a small but powerful list of CPA networks that I found and decided to post here for my blogger friends, in case they would like to make some money out of it.

List of CPA Networks ( also includes Poker & Dining CPA networks )

Here is also another big list of CPA networks that you can refer to.

In case you guys have already registered with any CPA network or would like to have a one-on-one chat with any of the CPA network representatives, most of them do share their IM details on the site.In addition this site provides AIM id for all the popular CPA network representatives.

CPA Networks in Internet Marketing Mix

2009-08-23T14:19:00.003+05:30

Internet marketing includes a lot of different types of activities, it is not just SEO, not just PPC or display banners; a proper Internet marketing strategy would in most cases involve a strategic mix of the various avenues through which a product or service can be promoted on the Internet.
These days we often see companies and individuals coming up as "SEO specialists" or "PPC consultants" while they are definitely good for businesses that have limited budgets and are looking to work on any one of these aspects, what about the businesses that needs a more comprehensive Internet marketing plan ?

I think the only answer for such clients is to go to a dedicated online media agency that can offer all the services right from web design to seo, PPC, SMO, display advertising, CPA networks together under one roof.

There are many such agencies offering the services, however, while working with agencies it is important from the client's aspect to ensure how the agencies work would contribute to its top line and PPC and CPA ad networks are probably the most effectively measured options for this.

In UK, I am aware of this company, Status Media who actually offers all digital marketing services but specializes in working with CPA advertising networks and that has been one of the key reasons for their success. CPA ( Cost Per Acquisition ) ads are extremely effective for clients because they pay only for the leads they obtain and they don't need to bear the additional cost of marketing that has not yielded any results.

Google did start offering a PPA ( Pay per Action) service through their Adwords program in 2007 but after their integration with DoubleClick in 2008, they retired the program and instead launched a CPA option based on their Conversion optimiser and Google Affiliate Network.

SEO is definitely one of the most sustainable and profitable ways of Internet marketing in long run however, it often requires some initial investment. However, for those businesses that are looking for more cost sensitive option and relatively faster results PPC ads and CPA networks are probably the best option.

Google Caffeine Update - From SEO Perspective

2009-08-14T22:39:00.005+05:30

Google announced about its Caffeine update on 10th of this month through Google Webmaster Blog. The Caffeine update is "under the hood" at the moment and general users would not see much difference to the search results due to this.

This Google update is going to be the next generation architecture for Google web search and would push multiple dimensions of the search functionality including size of index, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness.

While Matt Cutts have somewhat underplayed the chances of any major change in ranking and defined it as "rearchitecting or rewriting how we index pages" SEO s have already started speculating on the impact of Caffeine update. The blog posts by Matt Cutts and also at Google Webmaster blog seems to echo the same factors - Size, Indexing speed, accuracy". As a derived conclusion from this I think most SEO s would be able to understand that..

How Caffeine Update Would Affect SEO

a) Size - Apparently means bigger Google index - more competition

b) Indexing Speed - Chances of getting content indexed faster thereby helping with ranking particulalrly for time sensitive content like news, scores etc. Real time search has been the buzz word in the search world recently and I wont be surprised if with this Caffeine update Google takes real time search to the next level.

c) Accuracy -some tweaks to the algo that would focus more on relevancy. To quote Matt Cutts, "Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change,"

Matt also mentioned that the Caffeine update would be infrastructure wise roughly comparable to Big Daddy Update - so its gonna be a major change but it will be rolled out slowly so regular users wont see much difference, power users might notice a few.

Unlike its prior algo updates, Google this time launched a sandbox environment for testing the Caffeine update at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ however, it seems to be down for maintenance at the moment. Google engineers have been actively seeking top level feedback from users in respect to the differences that they observe in the nature of search results at Google.com and the Caffeine sandbox.

You can check the video below where Mike from WebProNews interviews Matt on Caffeine update.

Kolkata Bloggers Meet 2009 - Review

2009-08-11T16:27:00.009+05:30

As mentioned in my last blog post I was in Kolkata to attend the Kolkata Bloggers Meet 2009 and what an experience it was! It would be a big lie to say that it was only a bunch of geeks gathering to discuss some uber-tech stuff over a cup of coffee ( like many other blogger meet ups). Rather this blogger meet saw a super charged group of bloggers from various walks of life. There were amateurs, professional bloggers ( one of them had 17 blogs ) and even bloggers who blog just for themselves. It was a fantastic mix of newbies and blogging veterans who all came together to share their experience and thoughts.

On the speaker's list were Mr. Abhishek Rungta, Mr. Arun Agarwal, Vikas Kedia ( Video Conf.), Aji Isac and myself.

For me the evening offered much more that I expected. Besides getting a chance to interact in real with some of my long time virtual friends, I met with one of my childhood friends with whom I have lost contact for few years now. We didn’t have any clue that both of us have a common link – “blogging” - and that would bring us together after so many years.

The Bloggers Meet was formally opened with a cake cutting ceremony by the youngest blogger in Kolkata, Soham.

The introductory elevator pitch round was an opportunity for bloggers to promote their products / blogs and was ushered in with much enthusiasm. While none of them were “elevator pitch” in the true sense of the word no one seemed to complain and it set the mood of the evening pretty well.

The first presentation was by Mr. Abhishek Rungta about how blogs can contribute to the topline of your business and it as pretty well structured and presented with equal ease. It was nice to meet Mr. Rungta after our first interaction almost 2.5 years back and I was pleasantly surprised to see that he still remembers me.

Aji’s had some really good tips in his presentation and some wonderful statistics that were insightful and helped the audience understand what could be done further to enhance their blogs.

Vikas Kedia came on Video conference and had a discussion on whether we should allow search engines to index our content. While it is a much debatable topic, given the monopoly Google has established I couldn’t see any possibility of webmasters charging a premium from search engines to index their content.

Arun Agarwal was next in line with his presentation on Reputation management. This was probably the most exhaustive presentation of the evening and the audience received it well. While it was a little too long , the content was worth the time.

My presentation planned to cover three different yet related points – objectives of blogging, how to get traffic and how to make money from blogs. You can check the presentation below. Am also trying to get the video of the session and would post it here if I manage to get it.

Why Do You Blog

View more presentations from Saptarshi Roy Chaudhury.

Kolkata Bloggers Meet was a result of effort by a group of fellow bloggers from Kolkata ( Kamanashish, Saikat, Anirudh and Shimul ) and we cannot thank them enough for the initiative. Besides, it was really generous on Mr. Rungta’s part to offer a sponsorship on behalf of IndusNet Technologies – even the best of intentions doesn’t stand without proper financial support.

Photos from Kolkata Bloggers Meet 2009 - http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/album.php?aid=128692&id=129612851702&ref=nf

Kolkata Blogger Meet 2009

2009-07-24T17:54:00.005+05:30

Kolkata being my home town I have always had the soft corner for it and every time I attended a search conference / barcamp / wordcamp etc I thought why can't we have one in Kolkata.

Finally we are having a Blogger's Meet in Kolkata on 8th of August, 2009. It is definitely a great initiative by a bunch of guys out there. While being in Hyderabad doesn't allow me to be a part of the organizing team, I will make myself available in Kolkata on 8th and will be speaking there.

From the list of bloggers that have already enrolled it seems we are going to have an interesting crowd from diverse field and that is one reason I am not so keen on taking up a SEO related topic. May be I will try to address some common concerns for all bloggers like generating traffic and money making from blogs.

Abhishek Rungta and Aji Issac would also be speaking in the meet.

Link Exchange Still a Valid Way to Build Links?

2009-07-21T21:52:00.003+05:30

It's been long that SEOs have been discussing whether Link exchange stills works and if it is a safe way to build links. While a major group of SEO professionals would keep away from it and doesn't even think of link exchange as a valid link building method any more, there are enough SEOs and particularly newbies who still trust link exchange.

Recently an article published on CNN has again stirred the discussion with their clear approval of link exchange as a valid method for building links. You can read the article at http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/14/cnet.google.link.exchange/index.html. CNN article clearly says,

"exchanging links without offering payment, or crossing obvious lines such as breaking captchas and posting spam links in guestbooks or comment forums, they're following the spirit of Google's Webmaster guidelines."

and points to the fact the Google webmaster guidelines mentions that they do not approve of "Excessive link exchanging" but doesn't define what they mean by "excessive". Like all things Google, there is always a subjective parameter that you will have to keep guessing.

With the above logic in place selective link exchange might still work and now that an article like this have hit CNN, I am sure the number of link exchange enthusiasts are going to get a boost.

I personally do not prefer link exchange for link building ( but still I keep getting at least 5 emails a week, saying add my id to Gtalk for link exchange - bunch of F****** Spammers - and yes, I take this opportunity to mention, MEGRISOFT leads them all - I received 7 emails from different guys in this company in last 1 week for link exchange) and prefer other ways of building one way links. However, I do understand that absolutely new sites, particularly the e-commerce websites face immense difficulty in building links and link exchange is probably an easy way to get some initial boost.

In case you resort to link exchange, take care of the following points..
a) Ensure that the partner site is related to your website
b) Check that the website is not having a penalty or ban from Google and are not associated with any link farm or FFA
c) It is good to check the PR of the page that links to you, but PR is not the ultimate. A PR 2 page today can become PR 6 tomorrow, so try to understand the potential of the page and the website.
d) Try not to get links from those traditional links.html / links.php pages with thousands of links. Links from content pages are much better

Having mentioned all these points, I must also add, Link exchange should not be your only way for link building, bring diversity in your back link profile by getting various types of links.

Related Post:
a) How to Build Backlinks for Free
b) How To Build Backlinks with Google

Strange Ad Copy for Google Adwords

2009-07-05T19:29:00.004+05:30

Today I came across an absolutely strange Adwords ad in my Gmail interface. I am absolutely clueless why would any advertiser put up an ad like that and even if they do how can the Adwords editorial team approve such an ad copy. On top of my Gmail inbox the Adwords ad displayed as

Text ad - www.url.com - Desc1 Desc2

Click on Image to Enlarge

Just to satisfy my curiosity I clicked on the ad to find that it leads to a page that apparently doesn't exist, however, I was even more surprised by the fact that the landing page URL is completely tagged to keep a tab on the performance of the campaign, which indicates that the person who has set up the campaign definitely knows a bit or two about Adwords and PPC

Landing Page:
http://www.test.0000000184.com/path?keywords=keyword&creative=3849139695&adGroup=7711

While the ad copy mostly complies to the Google Editorial policy except for the fact that the landing page URL isn't working ( and that should get the ad disabled ) it is rather strange for any company to put up an ad like that.

There are just two possibilities that clicks my mind on this..

a) The ad is run by Google themselves to test any internal feature or gather any specific user behavior data ( by passing the editorial policy is not an issue for them)

b)Any major agency is running these ads for the purpose of finding out any user behavior data or calculating some other competitive matrix like minimum cpc, ctr or minimum impressions on specific keywords etc. However, in this case I am not sure how they have been able to bypass the Adwords editorial policy.

If you have any other ideas about the possible reasons for such an ad copy please do mention in the comments.

Related Posts:

YouTube Marketing Now Stronger with Call To Action Overlay

2009-07-01T21:49:00.003+05:30

Call-to-action overlay is one of the most recent features that have been added to YouTube keeping in mind the marketing potential of the platform and I am sure this is going to make YouTube a much more powerful tool for marketers. This Call to Action overlay is available only for Promoted videos though.

YouTube has been offering the Promoted Videos for all its users in US for quite some time now. Promoted Videos were earlier known as Sponsored videos and are nothing but YouTube advertisement. You can basically select one of your videos, add some text to it and select the keywords for which you would like your video to get triggered. When a user searches for any of those keywords besides the organic results your result also shows up.

Promoted videos are increasingly gaining prominence in YouTube and with this new call to action overlay feature I would not be surprised if it becomes a rage among marketers. This call to action overlays allow the advertiser to drive traffic to their sites where they can make purchases, sign up for email newsletters or whichever action an advertiser wishes.

Setting up this call to action overlay for your YouTube video is pretty easy.
a) Start your promoted video campaign
b) Under My Videos go to Video Details Page
c) Fill out the easy form with the necessary details for call to action

YouTube Insights has always been a very helpful tool for YouTube marketing and with this call to action overlay coming into picture, Insights would be an indispensable tool for all marketers.

The lethal combination of the huge traffic base of YouTube, availability of Promoted Video option followed by this Call to Action Overlay feature and YouTube Insight can actually prompt a lot of marketers to consider YouTube as a main stream marketing channel.

Related Posts: SEO for YouTube Video Optimization

Google Enhances Flash Indexing

2009-06-22T00:04:00.006+05:30

Google announced about its capability to index Flash in July 2008, however the indexing capabilities had some severe limitations. In a recent announcement in Google Webmaster Blog they have now clarified about their enhanced capabilities to crawl and index flash files.

While they have improved on a bunch of issues I think the most important point is that now Googlebot is able to index a flash file and also index the content in it even if it is loaded from an external source like an XML, .txt file or another .swf. Also it can map the flash file to the content and evaluate the flash page in its entirety. Prior to these Google would typically evaluate the flash file sans the content whenever content is being loaded from any external source.

The points below summarizes all the points that illustrates Googlebot's capability with flash indexing..

Googlebot can now index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. It can click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.

Discover links within Flash files.

Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.

Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.

Index sites scripted with AS1,AS2 and AS3 even if the ActionScript is obfuscated.

With this super charged Googlebot it seems that it is no more an impossible task to have a full flash website and yet hit the first page of Google SERP. However, this is a very recent announcement and it would definitely be better to play it safe with good old HTML if you have some serious SEO in mind.

Related Post:
Google Starts Indexing Flash

5 Effects of Google Ignoring Nofollow Based PageRank Sculpting

2009-06-21T17:52:00.006+05:30

Recently Matt Cutts from Google made a statement in which he clearly stated that PageRank scuplting using No-follow tags will not be possible anymore and this created a strong hullabaloo in the SEO world. Let's take a look at what Matt said and how exactly does it affect the World Wide Web, SEO or otherwise.

What Matt Said about PageRank Sculpting and No-Follow

Earlier No-follow could be used to sculpt PageRank by restricting the flow of PageRank to the no-followed links and the additional PR juice available would flow into the remaining links. However, now no-follow would still prevent PR from moving onto the no-followed pages but would not add additional PR juice to the remaining links, it would evaporate. To illustrate it further look at the highly simplified equations below:

Earlier
PR10 -> 5 Links -> 3 links No-followed -> Remaining 2 links get 5 each

Now
PR10 -> 5 links -> 3 links no-followed -> Remaining 2 links get 2 each
-> Balance 6 for the other 3 links Evaporates

A Concern in the Blogosphere – Losss of PageRank

Sites with too many links (particularly blogs with loads of comments and links in them) might lose PageRank or will have very little PageRank

No Real Concern for Losing PageRank

What Matt said didn’t talk about how a page might lose Page Rank it talked about how the PR is distributed among outgoing links. It has been long stated that PR doesn’t leak. It is just a vote for other sites – when you link to a site you give them some PR power but you don’t lose any of your PR. So if you have thousands of links on your page that would actually reduce your potential to pass PR to other pages but would not affect your own Page Rank.

You can see the original PR formula here . Though I am sure this must have gone through multiple iterations but it would help to understand the basics and confirm the fact that there is no risk of losing your Page Rank by linking to other pages.

So, No-follow doesn’t help PR Sculpting – How does it effects the Web ?

It becomes more difficult to increase your PageRank now as most pages would get a substantial reduction in their potential to pass PageRank to other pages

Overall reduction in the tendency to link to other websites as most sites would like to retain their potential to pass PR to fuel their own pages ( through internal navigation). This could actually mean detrimental to the basic principle of WWW.

Blogosphere gets affected as a substantial part of it involves user generated content and links play a major role in this. So less number of links = less citations, lesser resources

Old school methods ( pre no-follow era) for PR sculpting like putting links in iframes, Flash, JavaScript links etc would come into play. Google is now rendering basic JavaScript as well, so that might not be a full proof method. Putting not so important links or user generated content area in AJAX would probably add to the list.

In all likeliness, niche websites would have relatively higher competition - There are authority websites on every industry but in spite of there existence there are various niche websites that survive and do good. This happens not because the authority websites do not have content on those niche segments but because they would often focus more on broader terms that drive more traffic and profit and care less about the niche segments and at times even link to these smaller sites when covering those niche areas. This helps them to retain their focus on the broader terms and maximize profit rather than diluting there effort over a wide variety of keywords. These links to the smaller sites are always no-followed. Now when the sites realize that using a no-follow would not preserve the PR for its own pages and it actually evaporates, they would stop linking to external niche sites and build their own pages on those niches. Because of the website authority, in most cases these niche pages on authority websites would start beating the niche websites in SERP.

I am sure there will be other impacts of this as well; it’s for us to wait and find out. If you can think of any other possible effects of this new Google policy of disabling PageRank Sculpting with no-follow tag please feel free to add in comments.

Press Releases Can Get Lot More than Links

2009-06-18T23:14:00.005+05:30

Getting back links through Press Release distribution is probably nothing new to most of us who have dabbled in the space of online marketing, however, press releases can do lot more than getting a few back links.

While links are probably one of the best value addition that a website can get through online press release distribution here are few other ways in which a Press release can help.

Rankings in SERP : A properly optimized press release can actually rank in Google and other search engines for related keywords, reaching a good number of your target audience and resulting in tons of referral traffic that actually converts

Reputation Management: Businesses are becoming increasingly conscious about their online reputation management particularly in search results. If a search for your brand names show any unfavorable result a few well optimized press releases can do wonders in pushing them off the Google first page

Additional Credibility for Brand and Product: Many customers would do some online research about the company and product before making purchase. Information about your product holds more credibility when they are passed through press release than through traditional advertisement.

Additional Reach: Your press release, if well optimized and properly distributed can easily end up on popular news sources like Google News, Yahoo News, Topix etc and draw substantial traffic from such websites if you really have something newsworthy to communicate.

It is true that we can have all these advantages from press releases but for this to happen it is also important that we know how to optimize our press release. The way a PR is distributed also plays a key role in the process. For more on this check out How to Optimize Press Release for Search Engines .

Facebook Launches Vanity URL

2009-06-14T23:09:00.006+05:30

Facebook finally launched a feature that was long overdue from a popular social networking site of its stature. After a dramatic 3 day countdown yesterday midnight they have launched the vanity URLs for its users. Now instead of a random number at the end of your Facebook profile URL you can actually have your name( if you are lucky) or some meaningful word of your choice.

I think I am a bit late on this post ( am a real lazy a** these days) because the rush is full on and if you have not secured your personalized Facebook URL, log on to your Facebook account right away and you will see a notification of the vanity URL on top of your profile page. Just follow the instructions and you should be done in a jiffy.

My relatively long Indian name helped me get some competitive advantage as I guess there are not many Facebookers by my name and now I am at http://www.facebook.com/saptarshi.roy.chaudhury . if you have not yet grabbed your

However, as per Facebook blog for recent Facebook users who have signed up for an account after May 31st this feature would not be available for now. This has been set up to prevent name squatting on Facebook and I think its a very wise decision that the Facebook guys have taken.

If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a user name immediately because of steps we've taken to prevent abuse or "squatting" on names.

Now with this personalized Facebook URL, it would probably be a better tool to use for online search reputation management, and would probably be much more effective if Facebook allows for a little more information on profile pages for users without log ins ( Google bot don't have a Facebook ID ;) )

Related Posts:
Facebook Song with Lyrics
Facebook Sacrifices Burger King Application

HTML Color Codes Chart - How To Find Hexadecimal Color Code

2009-06-03T12:47:00.003+05:30

I have always advocated the use of Notepad for people willing to learn HTML properly and recently one of my cousins who have just started learning HTML and is diligently sticking to the notepads, avoiding the lure of easy WYSIWYG editors came back to me with a problem."How can I find the proper HTML color code when coding in notepad"

Instead of giving him a short answer I thought I would make a post here on HTML color codes so that it can be of help to so many other people who are also stuck with issues and doubts about these strange looking hexadecimal color codes.

Though I mentioned them as "strange looking hexadecimal codes" they are not really strange and are rather pretty logically formed. In HTML, at times we use names of colors like, red, blue, green etc but more often than not we use Hexadecimal color codes to add more precise colors on the web pages.Let's look at what is the logic behind Hexadecimal HTML color codes..

HTML color codes are formed basically of three primary colors - Red , Green and Blue, otherwise referred to as RGB. In all the hexa decimal color codes you will typically see six characters, for example #ff6633 - in this case the first two character defines value for red, the next two for Green and the last two for blue. If you would go through a HTML color code chart you will notice that lower numbers and letters display darker colors ( Black: #000000 ). So if we would like to have a bright red color we would have the code as #FF0000 - which would mean to the browser maximum Red ( FF) No Blue (00), No green (00). If you can keep a few basic color codes in mind you can probably do some permutation and combination based on the above mentioned facts to get other color variations. It is important that we append the # before the color code.

How to get the exact HTML color codes

a) When you are creating a webpage from a design, open it in Photoshop and use the color picker tool to click on the color of your choice, it will show you the HTML color code for that. A color picker tool is available on all graphic design applications and this is the easiest way to do this.

b) HTML color code charts - Yes, readymade HTML color code charts are available on the web. A small Google search and you can find a lot of them. Some of them list almost all possible colors and variations along with their hexadecimal code for HTML. So a simple search and then a copy paste job can resolve the issue. Check this HTML color code chart for reference: http://www.webmonkey.com/reference/Color_Charts

12 SEO Tips on Press Release Optimization

2009-06-01T15:32:00.005+05:30

Press releases can be a very handy tool in the process of promoting a web site. While a well distributed press release can bring a bunch of links for your website, if written well, press releases can also rank in search results by themselves resulting in loads of referral traffic.

Internet marketing professionals and SEOs have all realized the potential of press release in optimizing their website and are trying to leverage this to maximum benefit.In this article I will list a few tips that will tell you how to write a search engine optimized press release.

a)Similar to the basic principle of SEO content writing, do a short keyword research to identify which are the keywords you want to target. Find a keyword that people are actually searching for and is a proper match/ description for your product/ service/ company. Use any keyword tool like WordTracker or Keyword Discovery to find this.

b)Ensure you use your chosen keyword phrase in the headline of your press release. If your press release is relatively long, create a sub heading using the keyword phrase.

c)Use this keyword phrase in the content of the press release wherever applicable but make sure that you aren't forcibly stuffing your keyword in the content. A keyword stuffed press release would never meet its proper distribution potential thereby failing the basic purpose of the exercise. If you are not the best person when it comes to writing skills it is strongly advisable to take help of professional writers.For a good press release it is extremely important to maintain balance between the natural content appeal and the keyword insertion for optimization.

d)Use your website URL in the body of the press release. Make sure that the URL is inserted in proper URL form ( http://www.yourdomain.com ) and not just yourdomain.com

e)While Press releases are official communication and demands the mention of brand names, unless your brand is already a household name try to use short descriptive phrase for your product or service than just using the brand name. This would increase the chance of your press release showing up on search results when people search for those product descriptions. For example, instead of referring to your SEO software by its name "SEOUltima", if you would mention it as "SEO Software" or "SEO Software SEOUltima" that would help in optimizing the Press Release for SEO Software keyword.

f)Another easy way to increase the frequency of such descriptive phrases or brand names in your press release is to use them instead of pronouns like "it".

g)This should probably have been the first point in this list. Make sure that your Press release is actually newsworthy. That is one of the key factor that determines how well it gets syndicated.

h)Depending on available budget and importance of the release use a paid PR distribution service. Alternatively, there are various PR services that will distribute your news for free.

If you are choosing a free PR distribution service, first check if the service is indexed by popular news search engines. Check the coverage in places like Google News, Yahoo News.

i)Besides submitting to PR networks, put up the press release on your own site in its separate page and link to it from the home page.

j)Submit your press release to popular social media websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl etc

k)Search Google News for your target keywords and make a note of the sites that are already listed. Check if those sites would accept and publish your Press Release.

l)If you are publishing frequent press releases ( that helps ! ) make sure you have a RSS feed for your press release.

Can Bing.com be Microsoft's Answer to Google ?

2009-05-29T11:07:00.003+05:30

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent an email to the employees confirming the launch of Bing.com and it clearly portrayed their seriousness towards the business. Ballmer in his email mentioned that Bing.com, the new search engine from Microsoft is an extremely crucial step forward for MS in redefining search and expanding their share of the online advertising market.

In fact Microsoft is positioning Bing.com top be more than a search engine. They are calling it the decision engine. To quote Ballmer on this..

"With Bing, our goal is to do more than just make it easier for people to find information. Today, we’re delivering a powerful set of tools that will enable people to make faster, more informed decisions.

In short, Bing is a decision engine that goes beyond what people have come to think of as search—and what our competitors offer today."

At present this search engine is available only to the Microsoft employees and from next week on it would be made public at Bing.com, till then you might like watching this video that shows Bing in action.

As with most major search engine launch a buzz has again started on the question if Bing is going to be the Google killer ? I think it is too early to comment or speculate on this because we haven't yet seen the new engine in action.

With Google's personalized search catching up and their extensive coverage of local search I think one of the main challenges that Bing would face ( if they plan to be a Google replacement) is in regards to local and personalized searches.