Nearly 5000 employees quit TCS July 22, 2009

Bangalore: At a time when job losses are grabbing headlines, almost 5,000 employees of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) have in fact left the company on their own. Last Friday during its quarterly results, the company announced that its annual attrition rate was at 11.5 percent.

The headcount of India’s largest software exporter shrank despite a gross addition of staff. According to Hindustan Times, in the latest quarter TCS added a total of 2,828 employees with the total headcount of 1,43,761 at the start of the quarter. If the new hires are taken into consideration, the total employees strength should have reached 1,46,589 by the end of June. However, the firm’s headcount was at 1,41,642 as of June 30, 2009, showing a net reduction of 4,947 employees.

A company spokesperson confirmed the staff decline but added that TCS’s attrition levels were in line with the industry average. “Our attrition level has remained similar to what it was in the previous quarter. However, since we have controlled gross additions, the overall headcount has come down,” said a TCS spokesperson.

The spokesperson added that the company was hiring fresh graduates as per need, but will honor the 24,885 campus offers it had made last financial year and those students would come on board only from the second quarter (July-September). Like its competitor Infosys, TCS decided to honor old commitments on campus recruitments while slowing down the hiring of new graduates. But lateral hiring of experienced staff is continuing, though on a low key.

It needs to be seen if these 5,000 employees have in fact quit voluntarily or were they forced to leave by the company.

Building Directory Links: A Valuable SEO Trick? July 20, 2009

Although many SEO experts differ on the specific tactics required to gain organic search visibility, the majority of them would place a relatively equal emphasis on the refinement of site structure and taxonomy/hierarchy, the importance of having relevant and indexable content, and the value of inbound links. Each of these focus areas has a variety of different tasks and goals associated.

To ensure the validity of each individual SEO tactic, it’s important to constantly measure the performance of each tactic. This can be very difficult, because often many of the recommendations for SEO are implemented in conjunction.

However, in some situations, establishing case studies can measure the apparent results of a specific tactic. From a link building perspective, one of the longest-tenured tactics to employ is to build links within topical free and paid directories.

In late 2008, we launched three new pages within a specific business line of a financial services client. The content was optimized, and some internal links were established in order to get the content indexed. Our next step was for the link development team to request links from free and paid directories.

 

 

Search engine optimization for Yahoo! September 6, 2007

Yahoo! Inc. it’s an American Public Corporation as well as a provider of global services, founded jointly by Jerry Yang and David Filo. It includes a whole diverse package of products, consisting of a web portal, a search engine, mail (Yahoo! Mail) directory, news and posting. According to sources and web traffic analysis, it is one of the most visited and popular sites in the world. The Yahoo search engine is the second largest in the world, preceded only by Google. Its search engine includes vertical searches such as Image and Video searches.

Yahoo SEO Nuances
Majority of SEO work is done keeping the Google frame in mind, but it would be stupidity to ignore other search engines like Yahoo! that take in a major share too. SEO work done keeping Yahoo! in mind would also give ample traffic through to your web-site.

Techniques

Keyword Density
SEOs usually optimize with a mere 2%-3% of keyword density but Yahoo uses a much larger keyword density level. The attention to keyword density is because Yahoo does not lay much importance on inbound links but rather on content on your site. This however may lead to penalty imposed by Google as they might deem your site or SEO research done as keyword-stuffed and hence forced-optimized text.
This glitch may however be ironed out, by usage of different synonyms of the same keyword in order to maintain the keyword density and yet not get caught on the wrong foot by Google. For example, instead of using a 8% density for the keyword “jewelry” we can use its 3 synonyms at a 2% density each. A sure-shot way to manage SEO research for all search engines at tandem.

Meta Tags
Yahoo still prefers Meta tags which has almost been considered a outdated practice by webmasters today. Using this feature you might give a boost to your SEO stuff on Yahoo.

Freshness and Quality Rules
Regular updates and additions to your already existing content will help it become more search-engine friendly and SEO-streamlined. Blogs, posts etc are a good way to keep your web content fresh. Fresh content and massive use of it will assure you of a favorable place on the Yahoo search-engine lists flawlessly.

Yahoo web-spiders
The Yahoo web-crawler doesn’t issue very active action while indexing your web-pages and indexing them. And hence, a site-map is of utmost importance while doing SEO research keeping Yahoo in mind to maintain a high rank in the Yahoo search results.
Ignoring SEO for Yahoo would only be fool-hardy for though Google actually rules the search world, yet Yahoo has a well-accepted repute as an intricate search-engine. And since using content fit for both the big ones, Yahoo and Google is easy, therefore ignoring Yahoo will only mean a loss of a considerate amount of web traffic to your web site.

Article Source: ABC Article Directory

Top 10 websites for webmasters September 3, 2007

Being a webmaster is a complex thing, you need to know about design, style, graphics, writing, servers, hosting, databases, SEO, blogging, advertising, marketing and more!

Here is a list of top 10 sites which you will help be a better webmaster.

1. Digital Point Webmasters Forums – Digital Point’s webmasters forums are a must for anyone who runs a website. The membership base is huge with over 500,000 members. There are forums for everything from Google to PHP, from domains for sale to marketing. Excellent and essential!
2. SEO Book - Essential SEO reading. The blog posts latest information and news about the world of search and SEO. Aaron Wall (the webmaster) also offers marketing tips, search analysis, and whatever random rants come to his mind!
3. Matt Cutts is an engineer with Google. His personal blog is full of interesting information about Google, search engines, SEO and the web.
4. Adsense - While we are on the subject of Google, if you want to monterize your website then Google’s Adsense program is one of the best.
5. Web designer Wall – A create place for tricks, tips trends and tutorials about web design, CSS, photoshop and flash.
6. Every website needs a host and there are thousands of hosting companies, but no top 10 webmasters list would be complete without one, so I decided on Hostgator. Enough said.
7. Along with a website, you will need a domain name, again there are lots of Internet domain name registration companies, if I have to choose one it would be GoDaddy.
8. Online tools are a great help in optimizing your website for search engines and SEO Chat’s SEO tools are among the best.
9. HotScripts.com is an Internet directory that compiles and distributes Web programming-related resources, geared toward webmasters, developers and programmers looking for enhancing their Web sites with dynamic development tools.
10. And finally, The Web Directories List contains most of the top web directories in the web directory industry. If you are looking for the top web directories to add your site this is one of the better lists to start with.

Yahoo new mail delivers free SMS text messages August 31, 2007

New beta offers free text messaging to mobile phone numbers in US, Canada, Philippines and India.

Online search and services giant Yahoo! today unveiled a major update to its online web mail service to feature two new communication options as it battles with Google and MSN/Hotmail.

The first is the offer of free SMS text messages to any mobile phone number within the US, Canada, India or the Philippines. Instant messaging also gets a deal with Yahoo Mail now able to send instant messages to Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.

The company says that the new mail service will include added refinements to performance and speed and will become available today via a worldwide rollout.

However, while Yahoo! is focussing on its new service, it has said it intends to continue offering Yahoo! Mail Classic to users as an extra option.

The new text messaging feature is built into the new Instant Messaging client and offers SMS texting in real-time. All users need to do is type in a phone number, add a message and hit the Send button.

The ability to use instant messaging with the email client also extends to switching email messages to IM chats or text message with a simple click.

“We have always been focused on making it easy for people to connect to those who matter most to them, and during the beta testing period of the new Yahoo! Mail, we were able to incorporate a number of enhancements based on valuable feedback from our users,” said John Kremer, vice president, Yahoo! Mail. “Now, with the all-new Yahoo! Mail, we’re creating a more social e-mail experience. In addition, we wanted to make sure that people have the best possible Web mail experience regardless of their geographic location, preferences or system, so we’re continuing to offer our trusted Yahoo! Mail Classic interface.”

Other features include email search refinements, shortcuts (for US users only at this stage) as well as the choice of between six different coloured themes.

Both Yahoo! Mail and Mail Classic services are available now.

Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google are locked in a three-way battle for hearts and minds in the new “web 2.0” domain as web-based mail, storage, applications and messaging merge into a single communications portal that aims to deliver to users a complete package that relies less on PCs and more on portability.

New co-branded versions of Yahoo! Mail will also be available by September/October to customers using the following broadband Internet services: AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet, Verizon Yahoo! and Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet. The company expects the new mail service will be available to Yahoo! Small Business Mail users in the same time frame.

The inclusion of India in its free SMS text messaging service shows the importance the company sees that country with its huge potential audience.

Yahoo has not indicated when its free SMS text message feature will become available to phone numbers in other regions of the world.

Off-site optimization: Outbound Link strategies July 27, 2007

Getting quality back link is the most important thnig in high search engine rankings. Search engines count links to your site as a popularity vote. Search engines have better idea in recognizing link patterns, linking profiles, deep-linking, farm linking one-way and reciprocal linking, etc. Your links should be inbound one-way links with appropriate anchor text related to your site. They should also come from a site that’s related to the theme of your Website or the link is devalued. Search Engines gives values to theame base links.

The basic link building techniques (getting links, link exchanges and directory submissions) aren’t that effective anymore. You can say its a big waste of time (except for submissions to some high quality directories like Dmoz, Yahoo etc). Links always were suppose to be a sign of popularity. Link popularity is suppose to be the result of having a popular website, not the result of placing links all over the place. Search engines are now getting so good at determining real (natural) link popularity that webmasters have to get back to basics.

Back to basics means: doing marketing, increasing the popularity of the website/company which results in more links to the website. The marketing step has been ignored for a long time because search engines couldn’t tell the difference between links placed for SEO reasons and links that are the result of popularity. Now that they´re getting better at determining why a link was placed, the marketing step now needs to be included into the SEO strategy. Or if you prefer : marketing and SEO need to work together.

The WEB 2.0 makes it possible to do much more with a website. A company that combines marketing and SEO efforts to support each other, are the most successful in obtaining high rankings. This is becoming so obvious that it is almost impossible to ignore the WEB 2.0 for much longer. Websites that have enjoyed high rankings for years need to keep up with technology otherwise they may be passed by competition that does focus on the WEB 2.0. Marketing and SEO need to embrace each other, something that, in many cases, is not that easy as SEO is still often seen as something technical in which a marketing department can’t do much. But the reality is that the most difficult thing in SEO, link building, in fact should be handled by the marketing department and not by the SEO.

Negative SEO – Harming Your Competitors Easily July 13, 2007

There are 7 ways you can impact your competitors negatively:

(1) Google Bowling
(2) Tattling
(3) Google Insulation
(4) Copyright Takedown Notices
(5) Copied Content
(6) Denial of Servic

The Forbes article is a little sensationalistic.

Reporting paid links to Google – what Forbes pejoratively calls “tattling” – is not just ethical, it’s something we should be encouraging every search engine professional to do. (You should report paid links even in industries that don’t affect you – the better to discredit the link selling industry and make people think twice before using them.)

“Insulation” – creating many sites to take up real estate – is a legitimate tactic employed by a lot of big brands. It can be frustrating to the rest of us who would like to place in SERPS for those brands, but it is not unethical.

Click Fraud – a major problem on the internet and one I spend a lot of time fighting. But the perpetrators aren’t competitors. They are “affiliates” of YSM and Google AdWords who try to make money by clicking away.

Denial of Service, copying content, buying links to competitors – yes those are bad things. I wish law enforcement agencies would get involved. Right now it’s still the Wild West on the internet.

RSS Feed with Blog Widgets June 21, 2007

Widgets (website’s Gadgets) are now found everywhere on the web – people use them for cross promoting their blogs, running picture slide-shows in the sidebar, sharing favorite music or video clips, displaying Amazon Shopping wish-list and more.
Two of my favorite blog widget providers are YourMinis and Widgetbox – both offer detailed stats and an option to embed widgets in your Blogger, MySpace, FaceBook, Netvibes, Google IG, PageFlakes or other accounts automatically.

SEO latest – Search Engine Pro News June 15, 2007

There is only one thing that Every webmasters agree upon.They all want to be at the top of the search engine results for search terms that will drive traffic and consumers to their website. Every body worry about Leads and traffic.

The thnngs is that the search engines are like our childhood game of King Of The Hill. Only one person can be at the top of the hill and the top of the search results. Only ten websites can be on page one of the search results. When a new website moves into the top ten, another must be removed.People want their site should come on top pages of search engines.