Outsourcing SEO Offshore
Search Engine Optimization or SEO involves a set of strategies aimed at placing your website on top the search result page for specific keywords. Its ultimate objective is to drive more targeted traffic to your website and increase its conversion. Nowadays, SEO has become a must for online businesses because traffic is the lifeblood of every website.SEO as a source of traffic is preferred over paid advertisements online because it is much cheaper and it delivers targeted traffic. Studies have shown that traffic from search engines are more likely to convert as paying customers or clients. Moreover, it costs less to implement an SEO campaign in the long run over paid advertisements. Companies who have implemented SEO on their websites claim to have doubled their ROI in a short period of time. According to them, of all online promotional strategies they have used, SEO yielded the most favorable results.In-House SEODue to the unquestionable benefits of SEO, companies have included it as an indispensable strategy. Human resource departments of small and large companies alike are in the prowl for professional SEOs. Yet SEO is still in its infant stage, which explains the scarcity for qualified SEO professionals. Companies then resort to the next best thing, which is to train an in-house SEO. Naturally, companies spend for their training. They pay for the seminars and training materials on top of the salaries they pay them. Spending does not end from when the SEOs are technically skilled to perform their basic functions. The company still needs to sustain continuous training because SEO is an evolving art. In order to make sure you get the most out of it, your SEOs should be updated on all the latest developments. This simply means additional cost for the company to bear.Outsource SEOAlternatively, businesses are given the option to outsource their SEO. It could be offshore or within their own country. The concept behind outsourcing is simple. It allows companies to perform their core business functions and let other companies perform their other functions that they are least efficient at. This will lead to an increase in productivity level and will improve the quality of output as functions are carried out by teams with specialized skills. For these reasons, more than 50% of western companies have outsourced some, if not all, of their business processes.In terms of SEO, India and the Philippines are the most preferred hub for outsourcing these tasks. All throughout Asia, India and the Philippines have relatively higher literacy rate. They are also the top choice for outsourcing because of their cheap labor. More importantly, the Philippines and India have some of the most technically skilled laborers. It is not surprising that Indians and Filipinos are responsible for the SEOs of 5% of the Fortune 500 Companies.SEO SkillsAs a company, of course, you want qualified professionals to work on your SEO. While you want to cut costs on your online marketing, you would still want to be served by skilled SEO professionals that will deliver the expected results. It is true that the internet is full of scammers pretending to know SEO and promising you the top position on search engines for your target keywords so be wary. Most of them are from India, Pakistan and the Philippines but at the same time, the most qualified SEO professionals are from these countries. Because of the scarcity of labor in these countries, specialization on their chosen field is an essential strategy to succeed. Hence, the Indian and Filipino labor market invest on broadening their skills and deepening their knowledge to gain an advantage in the labor market. SEO professionals are no exceptions.In the Philippines where hundreds of SEO Outsourcing Companies operate, SEOs are measured by their performance. SEO should deliver results or they will find themselves out of work. The labor laws of the Philippines allow employers to fire non-performing employees, which give them the benefit of retaining only the bests. This means quality work for western companies who decide to outsource their SEOs in the Philippines. Provided they choose a reliable SEO service provider, their website should be ranking well on the major search engines in no time.
Increase Your Link Popularity – Increase Your Sales!
Increasing your link popularity can have tons of benefits. A high link popularity (and link relevancy) can make your website rank higher in search engine results and will allow more people to find your website. Over time, increasing your link popularity can also make your website’s page rank increase, making it seem more important to Google. This in turn means that Google will spider your website more quickly, and it will keep constant track of it.Increasing your link popularity earlier on in the game proves to be a good strategy for two reasons:1. The more quickly you submit links, the faster you will see an increase in traffic.
2. The increase in link popularity, by its very nature, is very time-consuming which therefore requires that you start with the process as early as possible.Suppose you start a website and would like to increase your incoming links quickly. You can try the following strategies, which can guarantee you a good return on your investment in the coming months:1. Sign up for the 3 way links service, which automatically links your website to your peers for a small monthly fee. The service becomes even more economical when you have multiple websites, you can add a total of 50 of your websites into the link database by using the 3 way links service.
2. Use a link submission software such as Directory Submitter to submit your links to the many link directories available for free online. However, try to submit with the higher PR directories first, because they get crawled really quickly, which means that your incoming link will be registered with Google more quickly.
3. Make a habit of commenting on other people’s blogs and add your link add the bottom of your comment. This strategy could easily be worth thousand of dollars in sales in the coming months or years.
4. Sign up for one or two high PR forums relating to your niche and work towards making sure people get acquainted with you. Prove to forum members that you have specialized knowledge in your field and provide a link to your website in your post signature. Once you have made yourself known and have started providing a valuable service, traffic to your website will increase quickly with little or no effort on your part.
5. Try software like Auto Social Poster to publish your blog or website contents to the countless news websites out there. ASP posts your single post to over 37 news websites, giving you instant 37 back-links for every single update you make to your website.Remember, increasing your link popularity cannot be done overnight; it takes time to implement and it works best when you work at it consistently everyday. Make a goal of adding at least 10 links a day and you will soon see a huge rush of traffic to your website.
Disruptive Technologies – Part 1: How Music Editors Are Related To Steam Engines
I am not into technologies, those that change so ever fast, and always. But I do observe technological trends, along which the development of scientific applications revolves.And of all trends, perhaps disruptive technologies are the defining path of industrial implications, a linear passage that technological progress almost invariably follows. Though the concept of “disruptive technologies” is only popularized in 1997 by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen in his best-seller “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, the phenomenon was already evidenced back in 1663, when Edward Somerset published designs for, and might have installed, a steam engine.As put forth by Clayton Christensen, disruptive technologies are initially low performers of poor profit margins, targeting only a minute sector of the market. However, they often develop faster than industry incumbents and eventually outpace the giants to capture significant market shares as their technologies, cheaper and more efficient, could better meet prevailing consumers’ demands.In this case, the steam engines effectively displaced horse power. The demand for steam engines was not initially high, due to the then unfamiliarity to the invention, and the ease of usage and availability of horses. However, as soon as economic activities intensified, and societies prospered, a niche market for steam engines quickly developed as people wanted modernity and faster transportation.One epitome of modern disruptive technologies is Napster, a free and easy music sharing program that allows users to distribute any piece of recording online. The disruptee here is conventional music producers. Napster relevantly identified the “non-market”, the few who wanted to share their own music recordings for little commercial purpose, and thus provided them with what they most wanted. Napster soon blossomed and even transformed the way the internet was utilized.Nevertheless, there are more concerns in the attempt to define disruptive technologies than simply the definition itself.One most commonly mistaken feature for disruptive technologies is sustaining technologies. While the former brings new technological innovation, the latter refers to “successive incremental improvements to performance” incorporated into existing products of market incumbents. Sustaining technologies could be radical, too; the new improvements could herald the demise of current states of production, like how music editor softwares convenience Napster users in music customization and sharing, thereby trumping over traditional whole-file transfers. The music editors are part of a sustaining technological to Napster, not a new disruptor. Thus, disruptive and sustaining technologies could thrive together, until the next wave of disruption comes.See how music editors are linked to steam engines? Not too close, but each represents one aspect of the twin engines that drive progressive technologies; disruptors breed sustainers, and sustainers feed disruptors.This character of sustaining technologies brings us to another perspective of disruptive technologies: they not only change the way people do business, but also initiate a fresh wave of follow-up technologies that propel the disruptive technology to success. Sometimes, sustaining technologies manage to carve out a niche market for its own even when the disruptive initiator has already shut down. Music editor and maker softwares continue to healthily thrive, despite Napster’s breakdown (though many other file sharing services are functioning by that time), with products like the AV Music Morpher Gold and Sound Forge 8.A disruptive technology is also different from a paradigm shift, which Thomas Kuhn used to describe “the process and result of a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science”. In disruptive technologies, there are no assumptions, but only the rules of game of which the change is brought about by the behaviors of market incumbents and new entrants. They augment different markets that eventually merge. In Clayton Christensen’s words, newcomers to the industry almost invariably “crush the incumbents”.While researching on disruptive technologies, I came across this one simple line that could adequately capture what these technologies are about, “A technology that no one in business wants but that goes on to be a trillion-dollar industry.” Interesting how a brand new technology that seemingly bears little value could shake up an entire industry, isn’t it?You are probably asking, why then that no one wants it? Or how true is the money claim to these disruptive technologies? And if it is true, what are the implications to the business practice? How do market incumbents and new entrants behave?The scope of this article could only let me take the first question. Well, it is not that dominating companies are not visionary to see a disruption is coming. They can’t. A disruptive technology is inherently not attractive initially; no one could see how Napster could boom and lead to the thriving market of audio softwares like the music editors and mixers, except the disruptors themselves. Even if one manages to foresee it, the “Innovator’s Dilemma” is there to keep them from acting.And as the books show, technology has always evolved in waves of disruption.