Love for Gardening

Aikya Mantra by Suguna Rajaram

Sometime back, I had written about why “babies with ladies begging in traffic signals never cry” . I had read that babies would be taken on rent and carried around, drugged to evoke sympathy.

Suguna Rajaram, an HR professional with a prestigious company in Bangalore initiated a group called Aikya Mantra, to generate awareness against this detestable practice. They distributed flyers in traffic signals asking people to not give money to these ladies. Suguna also told me that drugging these babies for a few days could kill them. It is a big racket and we need all the support we can get to help these little ones.

I also joined Aikya Mantra, but I am ashamed to say that I’ve been a silent spectator. Creating a Facebook page for Aikya Mantra is my only contribution to the cause.

If you are interested in joining this group, pledging your support, please visit the Facebook page of Aikya Mantra. See you there! And, please do stop giving moneys to ladies begging with small babies.

Online Marketing

Google panda algorithm affects many websites

Google panda algorithm update started in Feb, 2011 and was rolled out across all countries by April 11, 2011. Panda or farmer update is supposed to weed out websites with low-quality content or duplicate content. True, some of the worst affected sites are ezinearticles, suite101, buzzle, hubpages. The same names that were the favorites of SEO specialists have now become taboo.
But the Panda or Farmer algorithm has also affected good-quality, original content sites like ours. Our website, http://www.outsource2india.com suffered more than 50% dip in traffic and significant drop in rankings after April 11th. We have always been conscientious of the content that went online outsource2india; original content that would be of interest to our visitors. And yet Google considers us a content farm.
Ideas on what can be done to overcome the Panda algorithm update- traffic drop
1. Google webmaster tool – Go through and rectify any and all suggestions given by Google, like crawl errors, sitemap errors, HTML suggestions, loading time suggestions.
2. Run Xenu Linksleuth to fix any broken links, 404 errors that you website might be throwing up.
3. Modify robots.txt to include any unnecessary blog files or outdated pages.
4. Beware of your hosted wordpress blog files. Plugins can be hacked easily. Outsource2india suffered a pharma hack which took some time to rectify. And we fear that is one of the reasons why our rankings went down. Remove foreign codes, unnecessary plugins. If possible, move the blog to WPengine, which is the paid version of WordPress.
5. If you have not been active in the social media arena, start Facebook and Twitter accounts immediately. Google would be using your presence in these media as one of the factors to rank your websites.
6. Start off on top social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon. But everything in moderation. Don’t overdo it, and then cry when these sites go the ezinearticles way.
7. Try to remove your articles from the article submission websites that have become the dirty word after Panda update. Ezine has not increased the number of words in the articles to 400 and doubled the review period in an effort to increase the quality of content.
8. Take care of duplicate content. If you have taken content from other websites, remove it. If you think, other websites have taken content from you, take a premium account of Copyscape that will help you search for websites that have copied content from you. File a DMCA complaint with Google. Be patient; this is a time consuming affair.
9. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=76830633df82fd8e&hl=en&start=1480 – Write about your website on Google webmaster central. There is a disclaimer that individual websites cannot have manual exceptions, but the feedback would be used in tweaking the next update.
10. Submit your site for reconsideration. And be optimistic. Google manually brought back the rankings of Cult of Mac, a popular blog, after reports on dropping traffic to the blog. The big white elephant might start considering smaller sites too.

Good luck. And do let me know if these worked! I am trying them too….

Musings

So bugged with this government

I am so bugged with the Karnataka government. So much corruption, so much mud-slinging, so much clinging-for-power. Instead of accepting his mistakes and promising not to do it anymore, the CM keeps saying that “everybody does it”. In fact, he is paying Rs. 5 crore as cash incentive for anybody who is able to dig up some land scams. If they start digging, the only land scams they would find are the ones committed by him.

Oh please!! Have some moral. The CM cleared land papers for his kith and kin really fast. But when it came to allotting land for IT majors like Infosys, it took way too long. And Infy is now going to locate their new office in Pune. And I don’t even know whether I should be happy about it or sad about it. More offices in Bangalore would mean more immigrants, more pollution, more vehicles on the already crumbling roads and infrastructure.

And they keep telling us to do something about it. “Go vote”. I applied for a voters card and chased it twice, to no avail. But if they are all thieves, whom do we vote for? And why vote when one thief would be replaced by another thief?

Lord save Bangalore!!

Musings

CWG and corruption

Last week, I put a new status in my FB account. Here is what it read “Why did the media have to play spoilsport, and try to seal the fate of CWG even before it began? Let Kalmadi make some money too. After all, our politicians are doing it day in and day out. So long as India came out in shining colors, nothing matters. Jai ho, India!!!”. Part of it was enthusiasm after seeing the closing ceremony of CWG and part of it was righteous anger that the media tried to spoil India’s image among other countries and their athletes.

How is it going to help? Corruption is there and has always been there. Kalmadi should be punished and so should the other hundreds of MPs who sit in parliament and rule us, their name tainted with criminal records. But making a hue and cry about bad living quarters, bad infrastructure, terror threat immediately before the Common wealth games! So much so that it prompted athletes to withdraw from the games. I frankly think that was bad professionalism on the part of media. Instead of trying to promote the good things that were there, and attracting athletes to India, the media just tried to discourage them and at the same time, bring down the image of India as a country.

Well, my status update certainly sparked some discussion with 8 people giving detailed descriptions of why they liked or disliked my comment. I like that. People are concerned, people are interested, especially because the money we are paying as taxes is going to the pockets and waistlines of many corrupt politicians.

Online Marketing

I thought it was very easy

My mom was working on Pay per click for the past two years. I wanted to get her some more business than what she was managing. So we started a website called http://www.myppconline.com. Domain and hosting with godaddy.com; everything went well. Wrote about 8 pages and got the site up in couple of days.

The idea was to get inquiries by advertising on Business.com and 7search. We researched keywords, made ads and put them online these sites. But guess what happened!!

Not one good inquiry over a period of 2 months. And I thought it was all too easy.

Right now, hosting is over and website is down. So I have given up on the idea; and also the optimism that it is all too easy to start a website and get inquiries online. It takes perseverance, persistence and a lot of hard work to make a website succeed. Keep writing good articles, keep giving information to visitors…. just keep at it.

Musings

Are printers alive?

Has anybody noticed that printers are very emotional, moody beings that need to be talked to, cursed at, or even blackmailed before they print a page?
We had a small HP printer which was so emotional that we reached the point of patting the printer and talking to it before giving the print command. One bad word, and the printer would throw the printed papers all over the room. Let me list the reasons why I think printers are alive:

1. They usually play hard-to-get, and don’t print the first time you give the print command.
2. When you try to cancel a print command, they play high-handed and refuse to cancel it.
3. Sometimes, they become over-enthusiastic and print out all those copies you gave ages back, but cancelled ages back too.
4. After a lot of fuss with printing, sometimes you just need to restart the printer, and it would behave like nothing happened and print normally.
5. If you give it too many papers to print, it will try to find some fault with your command and stop obeying.
6. It loves throwing the papers it printed all over the floor instead of neatly stacking it in the allocated place.
7. If you have an urgent document to print, it will suddenly say that there is no ink or give all kinds of error messages.
8. Home printers are usually more fussy and non-professional compared to office printers.
9. If my printer happens to read this blog entry, it will never again print all its life.

So be good to your printer. Say good words, praise it liberally when a page was printed well, and don’t give it too much work. It helps to have a good relationship with your printer.

Musings

Travelogues are not my thing!!

As I mentioned in the previous post, I am reading the travelogue, “Travels with Charley” by John Steinbeck. And I hereby declare that I am not a travelogue person. I usually read a book from the preface and finish it at the very last page, without skipping anything in between.
But here, I am not compelled to return to the book. Reading that book has become more of a chore than a hobby. So it’s good-bye to travelogues, at least for the time-being.

But I am in no way underrating the author, John Steinbeck who won a Pulitzer prize for his novel “Grapes of Wrath”, and also a Nobel prize in the year 1962. John Ernst Steinbeck III is an American writer of German and Irish descent who wrote twenty seven books in all. One statement I loved in the book is ….that he is not one to compromise quantity over quality. He says that people, when they become old, they become laggard and over-cautious, thus compromising quality of life over quantity, or the number of days you would live.

Think about it… isn’t it so appropriate for every situation? When you buy lots of clothes for less money rather than one or two good clothes for more money? When you go to a restaurant and choose the low-price buffet over the a la carte? When you try and finish off a lot of work in a hurry without looking at the actual quality of work?… And so on…..

Musings

Reading….. is such fun….

It is nice to have a book, an interesting book, waiting for you when you have some spare time. I’ve always loved reading. When I was smaller, I used to dream that I could finish reading all the books in the school library or the municipal library and then brag to others that I have read it all….With age came wisdom and a realization that this is impossible.
Reading still remains the first love. In the last couple of months, I read 4 books and enjoyed it all.
Five boys – Mick Jackson.
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Final Diagnosis – Arthur Hailey
Travels with Charley – John Steinbeck

All four are very very different in their styles, story lines and speed. Five boys is about a small unsuspecting countryside to which a war comes quite unexpectedly. Pride and prejudice is the classic featuring love and prejudiced lovers. Final Diagnosis is the fast-paced life in a hospital with tragedies, victories, personal adventures, suspense, drama all packed into one. Travels with Charley is the first travelogue I am reading.
Have not finished reading this, and that is why I said it is nice to have an interesting book waiting for you when you have spare time.

And what joy! I have also got the next book lined up. “Twilight”, one of the four-book series from Stephenie Meyer. This one seems to be quite a rage among youngsters now. And I am yet to test and see whether I would still enjoy those books that youngsters love. Let’s wait and see….

Online Marketing

Liveperson.net – for online chat

Just like Mongoosemetrics for tracking online phone numbers and calls, we wanted to try a good tool for online chat as well.
Liveperson.net Business Solutions fit the bill perfectly. And their support is awesome. Being a chat support company, their chat is available 24*7, which is a huge relief. And the support team is quite knowledgeable. I never had to end a chat session because a problem was not solved.
We took the trial account for 8 days, and then moved on to the normal account. Have been using it for about 3 weeks now.

The good points are:
1. Beautiful technical support
2. Customisable chat buttons (though they only have pictures of females on the chat screens)
3. They gave me a discount on the monthly charges, which is $99/month.
4. They offered to design a chat button based on the website design. Haven’t made use of that yet, since our internal team designed a good-looking button already.
5. Admin panel is very easy to navigate, with options for modifying look and feel of the screens, providing canned responses etc.
6. Reporting is really good. Sessions, complete transcripts, time stamps, details of the person, navigation of the visitor etc.

Not time to discuss whether the chat option was effective in generating leads. But I would definitely recommend Liveperson. net to somebody looking of a reliable online chat platform.
Happy chatting!