Currently, there has been some changes in the verification process in Webmaster Tools. One of the important change is that the blogs hosted on Blogger that haven’t been verified yet has to use meta tag verification method instead of the “one-click” integrated from the Blogger dashboard. The webmaster team is working ona automated verification approach for the Blogger hosted blogs in coming days, but till that time you need to follow the below given steps to verify Blogger blog:

In Webmaster Tools

# The first step is to click the “Add a site” button on the Webmaster Tools Home Page.

# Then enter the URL of the specific blog and click on the “continue” button to navigate to the Manage Verification page.

# You will then have to select the “Meta tag” verification method and then copy the meta tag.

In Blogger

Go to your blog and sign in.

Click the “Layout” link given on the blogger dashboard for the specific blog you want to verify.

Click “Edit HTML” link under “Layout” tab. This will enable you to edit the HTML for the blog’s template.

You will then have to paste the meta tag that was copied in the webmaster tools process immediately after the element within template HTML. And lastly, click on the “SAVE TEMPLATE” button.

In Webmaster Tools

Confirm the “Meta tag” is selected on the Manage Verification page and click on the “Verify” button.

Your blog is now verified sucessfully and you can start using the Webmaster Tools!

Reputation Management theory is getting quite popular nowadays. We all know more or less the basics of that. But as far as managing Search Engines are concerned these are some few concepts.

#Brand value

#Contested name space

#Engagement

#Hostile entity

#Hostile environment

#Name space

#Result flipping

#Shared name space

Michael (Director of Search Strategies at Visible Technologies, Inc.) has a great post on that, you can read it HERE.

These are some of the top Joomla SEO tips ..each one of the tips is very useful & you can read them in detail HERE

#Turn On Joomla Search Engine Friendly URLS (SEF)

#Install The sh404SEF Component

#Make Joomla URLS SEO Friendly

#Good Page Titles & Clean URLs in Joomla

#Insert H1 Tags In Joomla

#Create A Unique Home Page Title In Joomla

#Prevent Duplicate Content Problems in Joomla

While setting Goal settings for Google Analytics we should be very clear on all the objectives we want to achieve for tracking. As analytics does not let us track more than four goals, we need to set a duplicate profile for every goal we need to track.

The important goals we must track are Track Comments, Social Bookmarking Actions,Catalogue Request,Newsletter Subscriptions, New Account Openings, File Download, Feed Subscriptions, Call Back Requests, Leads & Sales.

Read this great article for more on this

Most of the blogs nowdays built on wordpress and for better great search engine optimization (SEO), it is always advisable to use plugins for wordpress which are quite easy to install. These are some of the plugins to use, but there are lotsn lots more which can be used too!!

All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular SEO plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title,meta tags, keywords, & to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in for any kind of SEO .  Though the name only mentions “Google,” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip off the “nofollow” command from the comments, and then you can also apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

SEO Friendly Images –This plugin is very useful for blogs with lots of pictures n graphics , it helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

Simple Tags – This plugin helps you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot of things.

SEO Title Tag – Tags ina blog are an important part of the site for making sure that search engines know where to place posts, and SEO Title Tag plugin focuses exactly on this.

Redirection – For any reason if you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, then you are at the risk of losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

HeadSpace2 – This plugin helps you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog.  You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you  have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

It’s quite some time I am using Google Adwords for my own sites & client sites. Goofing up with billing is a common issue with Google but I have got into a habit of ignoring it.

But from yesterday what I am experiencing is quite a horror story with Google Adwords. My client’s ads have not been running on Google Adwords for more than a day now. This is because the Adwords system says that we have not made our payment. But the actual story is: In India, the Reserve Bank of India had introduced a rule that all credit card transactions made online need a PIN. We got that done, and Google sent us a form which was supposed to take care of all this from their end. We signed the form and sent it to Google Hyderabad, India. I checked out with some friends & they are also experiencing same kind of issues with Google.

On August 7, we got a message from Google that our Adwords payment could not be processed, and that our ads will be stopped if we do not make the payment quickly. We contacted our account representative regarding this, and he told us that it is a technical error and to be ignored. Yesterday, we got a message that our ads are not running. Adwords being a pretty sizable mode of traffic for us, we immediately mailed our account representative. But we got no reply from him for almost 6 hours. We decided to call up Google’s India offices so that we could have our ads running as soon as possible.

Google has 4 offices in India – Gurgaon, Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad. We called up each of them, only to be told that everyone had gone home (at 11 in the night, which is not so late if you are working in a company which intends to change the world). I then realized I was talking to the security guards at the offices who obviously had no idea of what their bosses had done wrong. They gave me an email address and asked me to direct my problems there. And an auto-responder got back to me: This email address is no longer in use. And it gave me no other way to get in touch with an executive.

So I decided to call up Google’s US offices. After 2 minutes of pressing numbers to get through to a support executive and then waiting for another 2 minutes for someone to pick up, I was finally asked to leave my message in the voice mailbox. Obviously, I was in no mood to leave a message and then wait for someone to call me back. So I mailed my account representative again. Five hours into the working hours of the next day (which happens to be today) and I got no reply from them. I again called up their India offices, this time during working hours only to be told that the only support that they offer is through email. So 24 hours have gone since our ads stopped running and there is no information that I have got from Google.

Things I got to know from the entire episode:

1. How can a company like Google not offer phone support for something that generates over 95% of all its revenues?

2. Google manages search for the entire world, but they can’t manage their internal communications itself.

3. Google knows that the world cannot do without it, or will take a very long time to get ungoogled. So…

I think Google takes customers for granted becoz  it has a monopoly in online advertising & turning out to be a bigger evil than Microsoft.

I am writing this post since I read a gr8post at Smashing Magazine explaning most corprorate blogs fail. Being into web marketing I have always seen most companies nowdays crave for a corporate blog or official blog, whatever you want to name it. The most funny thing is there are so many articles over the web about  how to ” Have a Successful Corporate Blog ”  & if you ask most web marketing people like me, everyone will tell you almost the same do’s or don’t , but still only 5% succeed & the rest fails. Why?? It is becoz I truel believe in one thing that gettting ideas is not the toug thing, it’s the application which is the hardest part. Back to corporate blogs most CEO’s/Management Guys tend presume getting a blog up will drive traffic. NOWAY! you need to give lot of time & effort in making the blog itself  popular in the social community[unless your Microsoft or Google].

There are some of the best things rounded up in the post at “10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging” which every CEO or management guys should read[ not Web Marketing Guys], did I say we already know this .

It has been quite few months with FusionCharts & every day I am finding some or other new company using our charts for some projects. Well as it has a free unlimited version & you can use it for internal reporting, so always it is not possible to know exacly how many of projects it has been used for. But this week I was really exited to find out USASpending.gov is is using FusionCharts for it’s Federal IT dashboard. The news was blogged by Tim O’Reilly at his blog . We have also got a nice snap of Barack Obama at our official blog using FusionCharts!

After Myspace nowdays the trend to be build one of those niche long tailed sites for Twitter. There are so many Twitter applications from desktops to web applications popping everyday, tweetme, retweet all kinds of services based on Twitter. So natually there is a craze to market and advetise on it. Recently we had come across a third-party advertising site called “ Be-A-Magpie ” from Germany for Twitter.  The idea is pretty simple, advertisers need to sign up & provide a ad text,CPM rates, budger per day, keywords & it will serve the ads as a tweet in a Twitterer who is a publisher of Be-A-Magpie. Now how the Twitterer is selected to match the adtext? as far as they say it is done by a matching algorithm. Coming to the point we had run ads in & well I was not fully satisfied because of some issues. Firstly the ads come as a tweet but a word called “ads” is prefixed with the tweet so as I believe the people who tweet are quite net-savy & I wonder how many will click seeing the word” ads”, only those who will be like really interested in the product can click on the link. Another issue is tracking clicks & conversions as many tweet using other applications, if you see your analytics account ti does not match the number of clicks which be-a-magpie shows. But yes you can mail them and they can send you a detailed log. It’s very new to comment on, but they need to come up with some more smart features for improving click convertions.

Any advertsing platform make by Twitter would be much better, but as there are many twitter advertising model rumors we are yet to see how twitter comes up something by themselves for advertising & revenue generation. It has to be very innovative so that it can blend perfectly without annoying users, but yes they have to come up with a good revenue model or else in the long run  they will fade away like some sites no matter how many traffic may they get!

WordPress is by far the the most popular blog platform. But being the  the most popular one so nowways lot of hackers are targeting WP blogs & you need to upgradeand fix it quite often. so I was looking for easy & secure blog platform which can be hosted on own server for business & blogging needs.

These are some alternatives to wordpress which are easy to install,more stable & are also SEO friendly.

# MovableType : One of the most popular blog platforms since date. It has been bigger than WordPress a few years ago but as it is not Open Source & you need to pay so it lost market share. But now MovableType has open sourced and it is easy to install. It certainly is more secure and has less upgrades to be performed.

# Drupal : Drupal is more than a blog platform but you can set a blog with it with ease & it is quite SEO friendly.

# B2Evolution : This blog platform has been around for ages but never got really popular. It may be name or the lack of character, B2Evolution even attempts to mimic WordPress looks by using the Kubrick theme, but this might be as well an advantage. anyways, just the fact that it’s around as well as “alive and kicking” for a such long time makes it a viable alternative.

# Textpattern : Back when I started blogging it was an easy decision, WordPress o Textpattern. It was a choice like PC vs Mac, the more design oriented bloggers have chosen Textpattern. The community seems a little dormant by now but Textpattern is still a good choice it seems to me. Also there seem to be quite a lot of plugins for SEO.

# Mephisto : It is a comparably unknown blog platform but if you look at the code, screenshots and and WordPress-like URLs it looks very promising. But due to lack of funding and only two developers working on it Mephisto is still stuck at Version 0.8

# Typo : In version 5.1 Typo introduced many of the features we’re accustomed to from WordPress or MovableType. Like Mephisto the URL structure follows WordPress defaults and the markup looks great.

But still inspite ot having all this other options people tend to blog on wordpress for its great list of plugins or themes. But if you want a more secure blog with lesser hacking attacks these options can be tried .