Your Tech Story

Team YTS

Why Facebook is so important like SEO for a website or brand?

There isn’t any doubt that today Facebook plays a very important role in overall social media and marketing strategy for promoting a brand, website or an Android/ iPhone app.  Facebook with its unique and developer friendly APIs and  easy access beats Twitter and other social media networks  in creating that viral effect for your website.

Facebook with more than 800 million active users is not less important than SEO. If you plan strategically, Facebook can be a huge source of user acquisition and engagement for your website, blog or mobile app.

Use Facebook comment box and Like button

As per Facebook an average Facebook user has 130 friends. This means that any activity, status update done by a Facebook user on his /her wall reaches at least 130 Facebook users and a single comment, like of such wall post will make it reach another 130 Facebook users.

Since around 400 million users  logs in to Facebook everyday, it make sense that you use  Facebook Like and Facebook comment box on your website or blog. Each like or comment posted using Facebook comment box is gonna increase your reach by 130 times.

Do remember that Facebook comment box is Java Script based hence your comments might not get indexed. However, you can do some smart work here by fetching comments using Facebook API and keeping them in page source  so that s search bots are able to see them. That way you would be able to leverage the viral  impact of Facebook comments and meanwhile will not loose on SEO.

Create an Facebook APP 

Think of an engaging Facebook app which can generate that viral effect (think of another “FarmVille” or Takethislollipop). Whatever is the concept or use case of your app, make sure to prompt app users  to share their app activities, comments and status on their wall. Be bit innovative to make app users seek help, opinion of their friends.

Do get offline access permission from app users. Offline access to user’s wall will let you post text, videos, images on their walls. You can use this permission to occasionally post  some interesting stuff on app user’s wall so that people in their friend circle get curios about your app.

Accelerate user acquisition  with Facebook login

Who loves to create accounts on dozen websites and remember all those user-names and passwords. It’s a well known fact that most of internet users avoid filling up registration forms to get access to a website. Sometimes websites loose potential customers just because of this cumbersome registration process.

Use Facebook login or “registration via Facebook’ to let people get access to your website and that too without filling up  any sign-up form.  You just need to create a Facebook app to provide login with Facebook or register with Facebook on your website.

There is no point of not using Facebook login on your website when Facebook lets you save user’s profile information (name, image) including user’s email address (probably that’s the main reason websites have their own sign-up forms).

Let your mobile phone app go viral with Facebook

More than  350 million users access Facebook from a mobile device every month. If you have a  iPhone or Android app, you must check out Mobile section of Facebook developers.  Facebook developer’s mobile section has lot of  things in its kitty which can help you spread the word about your app, increase user base, enhance user experience and engagement.

If you haven’t  done all these things yet, it’s high time that you get started with Facebook.

Download documents from Scribd without uploading or paying for downloads

Many of you must be aware of the fact that document sharing website Scribd now ask users to either upload  a document or buy monthly/yearly download pass which costs from $5 to $59  to download the documents  because of archive feature which was rolled out last year.

Scribd never pays the actual authors or content uploader for such downloads. There are thousands of good documents on Scribd and most of them will not download until  you pay for the download pass or upload a document as mentioned in the screen shot above.

However, there is a simple hack using which can download documents (Obviously only those for which download is allowed) without paying for the download pass or uploading a document. This is possible via Scribd’s mobile website. Here you go:

  1. Open Scribd using your mobile device
  2. Search for the document and click “Download now” button
  3.  Download now button on  mobile device doesn’t ask for any upload or download pass. Download starts as soon as you click download.
  4. If you don’t have mobile device, download is till possible by using http://www.scribd.com/mobile/ URL on your laptop or desktop
  5. Let’s say you have searched a document on scribd.com on your desktop or laptop  with URL http://www.scribd.com/doc/37644657/Function-Point
  6. Copy the document ID from the URL (In this case it is  37644657) and append at the end after ‘documents’ http://www.scribd.com/mobile/documents/ to make it http://www.scribd.com/mobile/documents/37644657. You will now see the option to download the PDF file which allows you to download without uploading or paying for the download.

Go, download your favorite e-books, PDFs before Scribd puts validations on mobile version of the website too.

Generate Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions, Disclosure For Your Website Online

privacy
Image by Sean MacEntee via Flickr

If you are an individual blogger or someone who sells items or products online, it’s  important from moral and legal standpoint to have a privacy policy and terms & conditions webpage on your website. Privacy policy and terms and conditions should clearly set forth the rules and conditions for user conduct, content, age criteria, refunds etc. Now even Google Ad-sense requires publishers to have a privacy policy which at least talks about cookie creation by Ad Sense.

If you are among those who have no idea on how to go about creating a privacy policy or do not have adequate funds to hire a legal council, there are websites which can help you generate privacy policy and terms and conditions content for free by just answering few questions about your website.

Here is a list of websites you can use to create Privacy Policy and Terms & conditions page:

  •  http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion/privacy-policy-generator.htm: Generates basic Privacy policy and terms & conditions. You also get HTML code for easy integration.
  • http://www.generateprivacypolicy.com: Easy to use wizard but requires registration.
  • http://www.serprank.com/privacy-policy-generator/: Easily generate privacy policy as required by Google AdSense.
  • http://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/free-privacy-policy-generator.php: Generate privacy policy by just answering few questions.

There are more such websites. You can Google and select the one which fits the bill.

Generating Disclosures

If you run a blog or a product review website / blog, it is advisable  to have a disclosure on your website or blog so that readers know whether your posts /reviews can be biased or are  influence by some factors. Disclosure brings trust to your website.

You can head to http://disclosurepolicy.org to  generate a disclosure policy.  It’s just a 6 step process to create a disclosure policy on this website.

 

P.S. YourTechStory (YTS) will soon have a privacy policy.

SEO checklist for beginners: post panda update

For any website/blog, search engine optimization(SEO)is one of the key factors. Today Google search has become de facto search engine with more than 3 billion searches(approximately) per day. Since 80-90% of search engine traffic of any website comes from Google alone, SEO targeted towards Google search engine is of utmost importance.

For any website or blog SEO can make or mar the traffic and thus the revenue and user acquisition. There are mainly two type of SEO practices namely black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Though black hat SEO was being practiced by many and few websites even reaped the benefit too yet with Google strengthening it’s algorithm and adding more and more human factors like Google +1, it’s better to stick to white hat SEO to reap long term benefits of SEO.

Numerous websites have suffered because of Google’s Panda or farmers update to its search algorithm. These websites were either not having good quality content or were having content duplication or some other issues.

Here we’re sharing a basic checklist of things you should follow to get better indexing and avoid such issues in future because of any future algorithmic change to search. No matter whatever algorithm Google applies following things will only help you survive.

Basic SEO checklist

  1. Add H1,H2, title, meta description tags to your web pages keeping following conditions in mind:
    • Write H1 and H2 having keywords relevant to the page content and of search engine importance
    • A meta description of around 160 characters having content related to web page and covering keywords you want to rank your website for
    • A Page title not more than of 70 characters and having keywords of SEO importance
  2.  All URLs should be in small case
  3.  Make sure that all images have alt or title tags
  4. Avoid content duplication and use canonical tags wherever necessary to specify preferred version of URL in case content duplication is there and can’t be avoided
  5. Use rel=nofollow for external links for which you don’t want to pass on page rank juice
  6. No single web page should be accessible from two different URLs. For Google example.com/index.html and example.com/Index.html can two different URLs having same content
  7. Always define your preferred domain name. If you prefer www.example.com, always redirect http://example.com to http://www.example.com
  8. Indexable content should be out of Java script tags so that search bot can access the content
  9. All dead URLs or pages which do not currently exist on your webiste should return 404 status
  10. Do take care of page speed. Google’s latest algorithm do take page load time into account
  11. Use Google plus one button to let people recommend your webpages

There are lot of free SEO resources available online which can help you accomplish this SEO checklist.

Google has also published quite informative and illustrative SEO starter guide which every beginner should follow:

In a nutshell key is to write original quality content, avoid duplication and pasting content from other websites or blogs, take care of page speed and user experience, help search bots easily find and index your content to get better indexing and more and more search traffic.

How to maximize revenue with Google DFP for small business?

This post is not on “What is Google DFP?” or “How to setup Google DFP account? We’re assuming that you already know how to set up Google DFP account and generate tags for ad slots. In case you are among those who aren’t aware of Google DFP (Formally known as Google Ad-manager), this link or video below should help you understand.






Google DFP  offers lot of flexibility and ease to manage and optimize the ad slots. Using Google DFP you can decide which ad banner will appear in which region of the world or which banner will appear if specific keyword is found on a page. Selling ad slots to third party advertisers or running your own ad banners is quite easy with DFP.


How to Geo- target ads with Google DFP?

With Google DFP you can decide upon in which country AdSense ads should appear and in which country or region your Ad banners or Ad banners from your advertisers should appear. Here are the basic steps:

  • Create new placement if you want to use a new slot
  • Create a new ad unit, assign the placement and disable Adsense for it
  • Create a new order+Line item or add line item to existing order
  • Under option ‘add targeting’, select a new placement from inventory or you can select old one if you want to use some existing placement
  • Now click geography
  • You can either rule out few countries by selecting “click does not match” or set it to be ” matches these conutries”  and select the countries
  • Fill rest of the fields
  • Add banners to this line item
  • Put the code on web page

Your banners will be served on the basis of the country criteria set by you.


How to serve ads targeted to specific keywords?

To serve ad banners depending upon keywords on the page, you first need to have keywords defined in the HTML of the pages so that DFP code can read it on the page load and serve ads based on keyword criteria set in DFP. Let us say you want to run some banner on all pages having keywords “Web 2.0”, “Technology”, HTML of page should have keywords defined as follows:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
           GA_googleAddAttr("keywords","Web 2.0?");
            GA_googleAddAttr('keywords','Technology');
    </script>

You can ad as many as attributes on the fly as the number of keywords you would like to have. You can get the code done to pick the keywords from the page and add above mentioned attributes when page loads.

Now set keyword criteria in DFP for line item which will compete for these slots.

  • Go to settings of line item, add banners
  • Click custom criteria
  • Add keywords in “keyword is” field (in this case web 2.0 and technology)

Save the line item and you are done.


How to serve your own ad banners where Google AdSense fail to serve any ad?

If you are an AdSense publisher, you would know that there are times when AdSense doesn’t serve any ads or serve only public service ads. Your ad slots in such cases go waste. This situation can be worse when you run a website which has user generated content. Since users can upload any kind of content having keywords where Google never serve ads or such content for which Google doesn’t have any relevant ad, your page impressions will go waste.

In such situations Google DFP comes in handy. You can set up either your own banners or sell this inventory to some advertiser and make use of the impressions which otherwise would have gone waste. Here is how to do this:

  • Create a line item with type ” house” and  set it to compete with AdSense slots by selecting relevant placements
  • Set end time to unlimited
  • Set Goal=100% for remaining impressions

Add your own or advertiser’s ad banners to this line item.

Now whenever AdSense doesn’t have any ad, this line item will compete for remaining impressions and your Ad banners will appear on such pages where AdSense fails to serve any ad.

Create wireframes with Balsamiq Mockups

One of the major aspects of the Product Management is to create wire-frames or mock-ups for introduction of new features or enhancement to existing feature set. A mock-up, in simple terms, is a outline of how a particular screen or feature on the product (desktop application, mobile application or website) might look. A mock-up contains all the buttons, menus, text boxes and other functionality that the final product will have.

Product Managers have to create mock-ups or come up with first cut design interact and then go through number of iterations of refining it based upon the feedback of various stakeholders. …