Ekta Shah's Blog

Since, I grew up in India, I always learnt in history that how long we have been brutally ruled by other people. For centuries, we have been ruled by Mughals and European Countries. East India never wanted to leave, and we fought very hard for our freedom. Lord  Mountbatten said “ If we just leave, there will be chaos” Gandhi replied “ Yes, but it will be our chaos”. It shows, we wanted to be governed by own decisions, not by any body’s interferences.

No country, no company and nobody can  be a single power for a long time. Dominance is not survival and change is inevitable. First east then west, and I guess again East is rising. West has ruled the world for a long time. England was powerful for eras, and  then America and now China? According to Thomas Friedman world is flat, and according me all are rising at a same time. US taught everybody that how to do business with less taxes, what are human rights,  how to be ahead in game, how to invest in research, technology and education. It also taught, when to fight for our own selfish benefits and I guess, other countries are also catching up. May be other countries took time, but they are in game now.

The tallest building in the world is now in Taipei and will soon be overtaken by one being built in Dubai. Largest Publicly traded corporation is Chinese and biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine. Leading refinery is under construction in India and largest factories are all in China. And leading financial center is London and  world’s largest ferries wheel is in Singapore. Number one casino is not in Las Vegas but in Macao. The biggest movie industry, in terms of both movies made and tickets sold , is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Of the top ten malls in the world, only one is in the United States, the world’s biggest is in Beijing. China’s growth alone has lifted more than 400 million people out of poverty. The economist Jeffery Sachs puts it simply “”China is the most successful development story in world history”. We have experienced a revolution in information technology that now brings us news from around the world instantly, vividly, and continuously. Many emerging markets are piling up large surpluses, so much so that they now hold 75 percent of the world’s foreign exchange reserves. China alone has over 1.5 million dollars in its accounts. Goldman Sachs has predicted that by 2040 five emerging market countries China, India, Brazil, Russia and Mexico will together have a larger economic output than the G-7 countries, the seven western nations that have dominated global affairs for centuries. Canada is becoming a major power,and yet acting extremely responsible. The Persian gulf, where so much of the oil revenue flows, is investing more of its profits in infrastructure and industry, rather than in Swiss Bank accounts and Monte Carlo casinos. Dubai has become an efficiently run, business-friendly enter pot, a middle eastern Singapore.

China and India are becoming bigger players in their  neighborhoods and beyond. Russia has ended its post-soviet accommodation and is becoming more forceful, even aggressive. Europe acts on matter of trade and economics with immense strength and purpose. Brazil and Mexico are becoming more vocal on Latin American issues. South Africa has  positioned itself a leader of the African continent. All these countries are taking up more space in the international arena than  they did before. On  the first stage of globalization, everyone watched CNN. In the second stage, it was joined by the BBC and sky news. Now every country is producing its own version of CNN. Wall mart imports about 18 billion worth of goods from China each year. Starbucks predicts by 2010 it will have more cafes in China than US. The Goldman Sachs study projects that by 2015, India’s economy will be equal to the rise of ITALY and by 2020 will have caught up to Britain. By 2040, India will boast the worlds’ third largest economy. By 2040 India will boast the world’s third-large economy.Over next year GM alone will import one billion worth of Indian made auto parts. And India now has more billionaires than any other Asian country and most of them are self made.

Again, my intention to show all the facts is that other countries are doing phenomenal job on world’s sphere. Its not US is failing big time, but if it wont act quickly on international arena, very soon other countries will have much more higher GDP and employment rate. Craziness of international students coming to US is definitely going down but it still can try to maintain its own charisma by its creative and thoughtful education approach. Young Americans have started thinking that the latest trends- in finance,architecture,  technology- might originate in London, Shanghai, Seoul, Tallinn, or Mumbai. Its time to become more economic/technical  savvy then acting like controlling neurotic , who spends billions on wars. Its time for wake up and do reality check and save our areas of expertise like technology, education, creativity, business before they are outsourced to other country in Africa.

Note: Lot of facts have taken from the  book -Post American World by Fareed Zakaria.

We all want to be on the top of Google Search. Who does not?  SEO-search engine optimization-is a quite known word around. It was there, but Google made it famous. No, I ain’t trying to sound very techy here.

When we “google” anything, we always want that particular search result on the top. We don’t like, if we have to click next pages for our search coz we are too busy nowadays. Since we all google, all companies want their stuff up on first page. SEO teaches you, how to bring your company name to be on the top. It may sound complicated but goal of SEO is, gaining  targeted visitors.There is a tough competition out there, but with the help of SEO you can bring your product/services on top of the heap.

A major component of search engine is a  a robot or spider, a software that gathers information about your site and brings it back to be analyzed by a powerful central “engine”.  This activity is referred to as crawling or spidering. Search engine robot as an explorer ant, leaving the colony with one thought on its mind: Find food. In this case, the “food” is HTML text, preferably lots of it, and to find it, the ant needs to find obstacle-free paths: HTML links/URLs. Following these paths, the ant (search engine robot), with single-mindedness, carries the food (text) back to its colony and stores it in its anthill (search engine database). Thousands and thousands of the little guys are exploring and gathering simultaneously all over the Internet. If there’s no food, the ant brings nothing back. Keeping those robots well fed and happy is one of your biggest priorities. But again, in SEO you cann’t be 100% sure  that what you’re doing will be rewarded with the rank and the listing you want. Search engine ranking algorithm is the formula that a search engine uses to determine its ranks. Each search engine uses its own algorithm to determine which results to show and in which order. Search engines change their algorithms constantly so its very hard to understand and its not worth to become algoholic.

For spider emulator these two sites would be good to check out.

http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/

http://www.seo-browser.com

Bur there are tech-tics that can help for good SEO results like choose your keywords carefully. Try to see how your competitors choose its keyword. Try to see their source code and read their HTML Code- nope its not stealing, its referring. You are not copying their code but trying to find appropriate words. You can put lot of words in your meta tags but again jamming to many words its not helpful. Try to put unique and rich key words in meta description for each landing page. Never try doing cloaking. Cloaking is a method of identifying robots when they visit your site and showing them special, custom-made pages that are different from what human visitors see. This thwarts the search engines in their attempt to deliver the most accurate search results to their users. In the vast universe of website technology, there are sometimes valid reasons for showing different content to different entities. Tricking the search engines to give you higher ranks than you deserve is not one of them. Never try to put duplicate contents. If the search engines catch on to duplicate content schemes, they’re likely to knock you down in the ranks and you don’t want your site black listed. Also , you can put inbound links which relates to your site contents on your page. So when people are looking for similar sites your sites can also get hits. Communication with  IT guys, graphic designers and sales team people is a very good idea for good SEO results. IT people will help you with algorithms and other technical knowledge. Graphic designers will help you with html codes and images. Just explain graphic designers that when search engine looks for results they always avoid images. Its not a bad idea to put images on your sites but you don’t want it too much. Sales team/PR team/ Editors are people who will  help you with site contents and keywords. Just remember, when you put a  request to them, you gotta nice to them.

Google AdWords, Google Analytics , Google web optimizer are going to help you a lot in your  SEO campaign. Alexa -www.alexa.com, is a good source to see how your competitors doing also  to keep a check on your traffic. Keeping a track with Social web is also going to help you a lot. Success in the social web depends on spontaneity, transparency, frequent communication, and being an authority on your subject matter. Digg, Reddit, and del.icio.us, Mashable are popular examples. Also MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you want to go the extra mile in social search and participation marketing, follow Web 2.0 gurus like Seth Godin, Chris Burgner, Keith Ferrazi, Neil Patel, Monika O’brien to keep you on the right path.

These are some helpful sites, blogs and forums on SEO. I hope you find this blog helpful for your SEO Campaign.

Some useful sites for SEO

Search Engine Land, http://searchengineland.com

HighRankings.com, www.highrankings.com

ClickZ News, www.clickz.com
Search Engine Watch, www.searchenginewatch.com

SEO Forums

forums.searchenginewatch.com
www.highrankings.com/forum/
www.webmasterworld.com
www.searchengineforums.com
www.cre8asiteforums.com
www.seroundtable.com/forums.html

SEO BLOGS

http://searchengineland.com

• www.mattcutts.com/blog (for Google-centric information)
• www.seomoz.org/blog
• www.problogger.net
• www.smallbusinesssem.com (for small businesses)
• Jill Whalen’s High Rankings® Advisor Newsletter at www.highrankings.com
• Avinash Kaushik’s web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor, at www.kaushik.net/avinash/

Charmian of Wipro and one of the richest persons in India -Azim premji said he has been a  rebel without cause lot of times. Premji has been recognized by Business Week as one of the Greatest Entrepreneurs of All Time for his vision and leadership. Why entrepreneurs are rebellious because they seek change ?  The entrepreneur, the innovator, is a source of change. He creates new products, develops new managerial techniques, introduces new ways of producing products and finds new resources.. The entrepreneur is searching for unoccupied economic niches, opportunities to make a profit. The search is risky and usually ends in failure. But when it is successful, it can change the lives of all of us (just as when a new species evolves in nature, it can change the lives of all previously existing organisms). Most large corporations are the results of entrepreneurial effort

Rebellious  people are always hard to accept. They are thinking what other people are not thinking. They are seeking what others are not seeking. Again out loud they are bringing changes. If you look around and see what changes are happening you would realize outcomes are thoughts of change. Entrepreneurs always bring change in our lives. Their products and services are changes. Sometimes we luv those changes and sometimes we do not. This rebel starts from home when your parents do not understand why this young age other kids are trying to finish study and you are trying to open company. Then you win the home , gain their confidence and come in market. Their again you build product/service and try to gain confidence of your customers. Again everybody is reluctant to accept change. Everybody gets comfortable with routine lifestyle. Once my friend asked me that it has been 3 years , I m not learning anything new and really worried with my growth. I told her that coz you are very comfortable what you doing and you do not want to break this slacker zone . You are contemplating taking risk. Getting new job is also a  risk and a change. We have fear that new company and new environment is always  hard to set. I read in  a book  “Monk and the Riddle”-Silicon valley start up book that there is one thing common between an immigrant and entrepreneurs that both take risk.

All entrepreneurs are not successful but they very ambitious. Once I argued with my mentor that why being so ambitious is good? She told me if you look around and see all buildings, corporations, products are results of ambitious people. There is nothing wrong to try out new things. More you try more you take risk. More risk you take more chances of being successful.

Each day of our life is risk. Who knows we can reach work safe? Car can break down or accident can happen. We can get laid off or fired. Fire can happen at work or food Poisson in our stomach. Each day comes with nemours risks but we do not think about those ones. We can convert an adversity in an  opportunity. While our life is already full of risks why not take the ones we have been  always longing for and see if we can be successful. Any effort with passion will bring sheer success in one’s life. At the end of the day we all want to see silver line in the sky.

World has given us lot of heroes but few heroes are legendary. When we die , we all think there should be some legacy behind us but few of us are fortunate enough to do so. When we call somebody hero, which shows  person’s life,actions,character are exemplary. I admire lot of heroes like Martin Luther king, Abraham Lincoln , Nelson Mandela, Gandhiji, Dhirubhai Ambani,Mother Teresa etc. Hero who had recently hit my long list is Barack Obama. I used to follow Obama’s news since last year when he won primary as a democratic candidate. I was not familiar with his early days work at churches and communities that time. I got very curious about him while watching him on TV. I did youtubed and watched his appearance on different shows. In those election days,qualities which amazed was his comfort level,poised outlook,commendable control in his speech, affection/warmth towards people.

Most of the politicians know how to give speech but there was something about Obama -his candid approach towards mass. He can easily relate to ivy lig school graduate and resident of south side Chicago who has barely gone to college.  He was equally famous in liberals and conservatives. He became hottest Hawaiian political superstar in old and young crowd. So his easy going persona with his complex upbringing background got me curious. I found a book on him and started reading it. Since I was already impressed by his charismatic personality , I also found some interesting facts about his life. We all agree that kid’s childhood plays big role in his growth but Obama had very complex childhood. White mid western mother and Kenyan father. Father was never there since his birth and mother was never there in his teen days. He was raised by his white grand parents in Hawaii while mother was at Vietnam with his white half sister. How does it feel when you are only black person in white family? How it feels when you know people call u Barry with affection but deep down they think you are almost orphan? I read in a book Freakonomics that yr childhood has nothing to do with yr personal growth. May be Barack Obama is one of them. Guy without parents support has touched success of the sky and reasons can be numerous. His dedication, determination, visionary ambitious prsonality,strategic approach. In 1988 he told his brother in law( Michell’s brother) that he could be president one day. His brother in law said, yeh lets meet aunt first and do not tell to anybody.What do you call this? Vision or ambition?  His compelling nature to understand people pain got him working for south side Chicago community at age of 22. Columbia graduate could have done very well in NYC corporate culture but that was not his dream or call. He went to Harvard not to have ivy league name on his resume but he used to feel without power. He felt without law degree he wont be able to bring justice in black communities. His regular Sunday mass at churches also shows his deep respect towards religion.He gives speeches not with only diplomacy but he speaks his heart too. This Person is not  only ideal president but caring father and loving husband.His commitment for his wife and kids is as strong as his thoughts.

What I feel person with strong determination, commitment and integrity can receive triumphs in life. Sometimes It does not matter what you have studied or where you have studied it matters how u studied.

I randomly picked a book from Crossword-Ahmedabad while I was visiting India. Book name is ”Who will cry when u die” and author is Robin Sharma. Book title really striked me, author’s previous book ” Monk who sold his Ferrari” also I found thought provoking. Without any hunch , I just bought this book.

Earlier when I used to write blogs most of the times I would end up writing quotes or some nice sentences from books. I used to collect sentences,the ones which have strong impact and convey message in a strong manner.But this time,I would just suggest to read this book since its a very small book with two hours time frame.This Book does not speak much about death. When we see books with this kind of title, we feel reluctant to pick those books. Why to read related to death right now. My mom’s first expression was similar to that when she saw this book in my hand. I tried to tell her book is not about death, in fact it treasures thoughts on peace,purpose,passion and profound wisdom. It motivates you and gives a lesson in a gentle way to appreciate people around us and gift of their knowledge/learning to what they have to say. Book does not teach anything new but it teaches you to approach life with beautiful-humble way. Book is certainly insightful and strikingly inspiring.

Robin Sharma has described 101 topics to improve your life. Although this book touched me very deeply and made me introspect myself. I really luved one story from this book. Story is on priority and importance of priority.

Its a story of an old lighthouse keeper. The man had only a limited amount of oil to keep his beacon lit so that passing ships could avoid the rocky shore. One night, a man who lived close by needed to borrow some of this precious commodity to light his home. so the lighthouse keeper gave him some of his own. Another night, a traveler begged for some oil to light his lamp so he could keep on traveling. The lighthouse keeper also complied with this request and gave him the amount he needed. The next night, the lighthouse keeper was awakened by a mother banging on his door. She prayed for some oil so that she could illuminate her home and feed her family. Again he agreed. Soon all oil was gone and his beacon went out. Many ships ran aground and many lives were lost because the lighthouse keeper forgot to focus on his priority. He neglected his primary duty and paid a high price.

We all are very good humans and we always complied by other people pain. But at same time, we have to focus our own priority before we misdirect the boat of our own life.

Blogging should be social activity not a solitude one. By blogging we initiate conversation by creating content that people want to talk about.

Blogs are simply the best way to publish new media content. And social media news and networking sites are the ways that content gets exposure. It’s not money and geography that determines if your content spreads,it just has to be deemed good enough to be shared by regular people.As a blogger, you are establishing a bond with each and every reader. And how will you be doing that?Exactly, you will be establishing a relationship or building upon an already existing one through each and every post.

Blog is simply a means of displaying content in the form of posts on your website.A blog is easy to set up and is a great way to express yourself.There are many different blogging applications available, and the one I use is Wordpress. Blogs generally organise everything for you. All you have to do is supply the content.Oh, and Search Engines love blogs.

Encourage Visitors to Share and Comment on your Content

Make it easy for your visitors to promote your content if they find it interesting by placing icons to popular social sites underneath every post. This allows them to easily bookmark any content they find interesting. Provide the ability for your readers to comment on your posts. If you do get comments, try to reply quickly and be as helpful as you can.

Participate in Social Networking Sites

Apart from creating content, participating in social networking is another time-consuming part of blogging.When you write a new post on your blog, actively go out and spread your content to the rest of the Internet.Submit it to your favorite social networking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, etc and email a link of your great,new content to all your friends and colleagues. Create a profile for yourself in the social sites and participate in their community. Support other bloggers by sharing and promoting their posts also if you like them. Networking in this way can generate an amazing amount of traffic to your website.

Communicate with your Subscribers via Email & Newsletters

Once you have a few people on your Subscriber list, make sure you keep in touch with them regularly.Send them links to useful articles. Ask them to comment on your latest post. Offer them something for nothing, or just thank them for subscribing. The key here is not to overdo the contact and to remember why they subscribed in the first place.

It’s also essential to remember that unlike the transient nature of Twitter and the great walled garden of Facebook, blog posts are effectively conversations that are eternally visible through Google,meaning they have more inherent value to brands.Getting people to talk about your content and to link to it without being asked is the golden egg of social networking.