1. Get out and personally engage with your peers, join groups such as Recruiting Blogs or HRM Today.
2. Sign up for Twitter (follow #HR related news)
3. Start an external blog on HR areas that interest you
4. Join groups on LinkedIn and contribute to the conversation
5. Get a feed reader and subscribe to blogs about HR & recruiting
6. Encourage your hiring managers to begin engaging with potential candidates before they are needed
7. Use social bookmarking tools to collect links of sites and articles that are relevant to your hiring practices, share these amongst your peers
8. Teach managers how to use RSS, watchlists and alerts to find out when people are discussing your company and products, as they could be potential candidates
9. Create an alumni social network to allow you to connect with ex-employees, retirees and long term leave employees, you might get some of them back
10. Implement a microblogging tool, such as Yammer or Co-op, internally
11. Implement a Live Chat feature on your careers page so if candidates have questions on jobs or your company they can contact recruiters, or the hiring manager directly
12. Create a employee group on Facebook/MySpace to allow your team members to join together online
13. Instead of sending emails, post on your secret FB Group, tag team members & refer them for suggestion
14. Create a separate Facebook Page like Techshu Careers where you can post all the fun activities at your office and let the prospect employees have a sneak-peek at it.
15. Get people blogging internally about their learning experiences.
16. Monitor sites like Glassdoor (it can be scary at times!) to see what people are saying about your HR practices
17. Conduct background research on candidates using search engines
18. Create video job ads for some of your key positions, post them on YouTube and link them in the job ads
19. Add your company to Jiibe so the right people come to work for your organization
20. Add a share on Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon link to your job ads
21. Look at advertising job on social network sites such as Facebook or MySpace.
22. Implement the My Company’s Hiring Facebook application
23. Have fun!

The conclusion from my end: The purpose of a page is
1) (Bring visitors) Rank well
2) (Convert visitors) Sell/Satisfy well …..

Now a page that may satisfy well but doesn’t bring visitor is like a huge shop in a remote village (it is not profitable) … We will have to bring people in .. if we are bringing people using ads only we can forget about search engines and content for search engine part altogether (We may just a form), we can also forget about links….

Now if we need traffic from search engines then we need to understand the formula which is something like (Value of the content x value of links) … now the value of the content will be limited to a certain value so for high competitive market only content will not suffice and content will hardly play any role in very competitive keywords … links will rule but for low competitive keywords content enough will suffice….

Why do people say that the content is the king (the reason is for the informative articles as an informative article will bring in natural links and will also satisfy people) …

Content vs Links continues

The process goes like this for SEO traffic & Conversion:
1) Write content to rank so that you score well with respect to content value (Don’t compromise too much on brand value but do compromise, in the initial stage bringing visitor is very important to survive)
2) Get links so that you can score well with respect to link value …
3) Once you rank, de-optimize your pages and make it more sell-able and support your page with more links.

It is never a competition between which is bigger content or link … both are playing its role .. these days content is playing a major role in search engine rankings … example http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=search+engine&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=1bde53b2ade8e603&gl=us here Google.com used to rank but now only Google CSE ranks as the page has the keyword in it. …. Enjoy the discussion.

What is Http or Https problem?

1. Duplicate content: Both http and https are considered 2 different site. One works on 443 port and another on 80th port, technical both are different. Typical canonicalization problems.
2. 2 different sites being live means links can happen to any site and thus your link power is diversified/divided. You may be wasting your energy going in 2 directions. May be is the key as we don’t know how smart search engines are.

Prior to this post, I suggested going for robots.txt at SEOMOZ.org & SEOforClients.com to solve duplicate content issues. Now that is no longer the best available option.

Go for Canonical tags for http and https

I am attaching the ppt by Matt cutts, look at slide number #9 which says:

Q: Can I use this to suggest http://example.com be the canonical url instead of https://example.com?
A: Yes, absolutely

Canonical tag does take care of the duplicate content and most importantly the issue with link division. Now canonical tag is even available for multi-site. Now you have full control over what is ranked.Official docs for canonical tags:

1. Google’s canonical tag document, Canonical tag help section by Google
2. Yahoo’s blog post on canonical tag
3. Bing’s webmaster section does have some canonical posts

Should I rank http or https

My take will be http and make sure that all your links are relative. Only the signups or checkouts needs to be on https, you can also block these sections using robots.txt so that these signup or checkout related pages are not even indexed. Why I am insisting on http is to avoid any scary browser popup while shifting from https to http or vice-versa. There were some popup for http to https shift as well for some of the browser settings.

Advice finally for http https duplicate content fix

• Divide website into 2 parts, browsing section + transaction section, transaction section only opens on https (add 301 redirect for these pages, some people put them on different subdomain), browsing section can open on both http and https. Transaction section to be blocked by robots.txt
• All pages to have http:// canonical tag so that only http ranks + all link value is consolidated under https.
• All links to be relative so that if someone is on https, they don’t get a http link. Else it will pop up scary messages for non technical users.

PPT by Matt Cutts on Canonical tag

(this ppt is old, canonical tag is supported across multi domain now, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html)

Can I ask also that is it true that you should link to sites which have equal or higher page rank than yourself to improve your own PR?

Let me explain few of the points in really hurry.

Don’t judge a website by PR alone

PR or Google Page Rank was a major factor during the early days of Search Engine Algorithm. More importantly that was and still is the most prominently visible value for the site. There are other parameters like Trust rank, Topical page rank etc which are playing very important role in ranking. So don’t judge a website by just its PR. A site lesser PR than yours may be having more Trust rank and topical rank.

Is it Child site? Will it grow in PR?

Often a good site grows good in PR in long run. Not only in PR but in all the points, so if the gut feels that the site has a good business model, the concept looks good, the website is professional then there is chance that the site may grow in the days to come. Go ahead and get links from it.

How can you judge the website for linking?

As mentioned above PR is just one factor, judge a website/link by following parameters:

1. Theme of the site: (Do site:domain.com keyword) and see how many pages are there that are indexed
2. Traffic: Check quantcast or compete or google trend for website, so see the traffic it gets. Even you can check SEMRush to see the total keywords for which it is ranking.
3. Age of the site: Check the age of the site
4. Backlinks of the site: See how many backlinks it has, check Yahoo UK, opensiteexplore.org, majesticSEO
5. PR: Google Page Rank of the homepage and the page that is linking
6. Content of the page that is linking

Too tough, let me share my Golden rules

I don’t care about PR at all (I don’t have PR toolbar). I check following points:

1. The about us page, contact us page to know their business model and the people behind the site.
2. The overall site look and feel, content, I do a site:domain.com in google to see the total pages and the quality of the first few pages.
3. Baclinks: In Yahoo UK, I try linkdomain:domain.com -site:domain.com to get all the external links. Now a days I am trying opensiteexplorer.org too.

If I am convinced with the above 3 points, I will link to the site or will get a link from the site.

Goodmorning Sir,
Sir, I am looking for something exciting career in seo, please give me a chance to do something extraordinary Jobs, related to onpage, social media.

Its my request to you, if its possible for you, i ll be grateful to you. I really want to learn this job in a best way.

My answer:
, Talk to me tomorrow I will be in office tomorrow, I will try and make this happen.

Actually we any company need people who can take initiatives and pass on responsibilities/problems/revenue/partnership to them. Nobody wants to take it all and do it all … not atleast me, that is I am 100% sure. Let’s take a fresh example, Our HR is doing a Social media campaign for one of our clients, why that happened? Think very carefully … she is a HR but why as a company we choose to give a complete project to her …. because she made HR work amazingly and showed amazing attitude towards work … no complains about her so far … she used to clean the office every Saturday to make the interviews happen … we never asked her to come on Saturdays (We all hate to work on Saturdays), she came in by herself as people preferred Saturdays for interview … she used to come from tollygunge on off days, never asked any other favors in return … that’s a great attitude, a great leadership quality, a great honesty … I as a person will always help her irrespective of whether she stays in company or not as she is 100% honest when she is on TechShu boat and thats all that matters …. .

Now try and answer following questions (mentoring questions, so please think and then write):

1. Why should company give you these social media and onpage work (or any other work)? What will company get in return?
2. Why you? Why not someone else? Will company lose something if you leave or company asks you to leave (because you are not satisfied with your current work) … Are you a GEM in your work?
3. Do you try things by your own? What did you try and where did you get stuck? Did you ask someone? What was the response? What did you do after that? (Your attitude towards learning new things, that is sometimes the starting)
4. Apply SHU …. If you were Aji and I was You … would you give social media, onpage and other work to You… if so why?

Note: All teams want to retain their best team members. If you are good, remember that company wants to retain you and probably they are thinking about you too, atleast I do for sure http://www.seoforclients.com/hr/11lessons-entrepreneurs/ (read point #10, it is a old post with many grammatical mistakes) and I will continue to do so.

, there is a long way …. there are plenty of examples, I know a person who is heading the overall global operations for the company (and he is not with a heavy CV punched with recommendations and qualification)… he is there with this company for last 7 to 8 years … he is hardly in India now …He is handling so many things and so wisely, did it happen in a day or a month???…. he believed in company and company believed in him … both worked on this relationship and its a mutually beneficial to both .. for you it may happen faster or slower depending on your attitude, your company, your CV (for sure)

We will make things happen “together we all can achieve more” …

Thanks,
Aji Issac

how to change the facebook page type

People were asking on how to change the facebook page type. As of now there is no other way that requesting the facebook team. This may take some time. Also you will have give enough information so that they can convert it to the right page type. The issue with community pages are that it may be taken back at some stage.

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=page_category_change, please visit the mention URL to change the facebook page type. Try requesting and share your experiences here.

Be a part of Facebook Marketing series

Please join our FB club http://www.facebook.com/jeetbo to keep yourself updated with the facebook marketing series. We will be sharing some of the secrets on how we earned $100,000 by spending $1000 .. consistently for last few months

I need to know a little more about the website. If the site is good with thematic (http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~taherh/papers/topic-sensitive-pagerank.pdf), trust(http://infolab.stanford.edu/~zoltan/presentations/trustrank-vldb-2004-09-02.pdf) and popular rank (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)… the new pages will rank better. Even when the new project arrives, the new keyword can also rank better if the website is kept good with the above mentioned ranks.

• I have a domain say idealwebtools.com and I am planing to shift it to a new domain SEOforClients.com
• Now I am ranking for some good keywords from where I get good traffic like Chirkut, Paypal hack, meta title length etc
• If I shift to new domain, will I lose all my traffic and ranking?

Answer to Shifting the domain, losing the ranking

Yes, you will if you don’t let the search engines know in a proper way as they are scammers who buy old domain to promote their new domains. Let me explain how to retain the best of both world, the new cool domain name and the old ranking & traffic (I did it for idealwebtools.com, so I can share some good examples):

Search Engines know that shifting of domain can happen

Google and other search engine knows about it and they have a provision for it. Google’s site says:

If you’re planning on moving your site to a new domain, here are some tips that will help you retain your site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Your aim is to avoid 404 (File Not Found) errors when users click on links to your site.

• If you’re changing your domain because of a rebrand or redesign of your site, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and secondly, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Limiting the number of changes at any one time can also make it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.
• Use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect all pages on your old site to your new site. This tells search engines and users that your site has permanently moved. We recommend that you move and redirect a section or directory first, and then test to make sure that your redirects are working correctly before moving all your content.Don’t do a single redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. It’s more work, but a page-to-page redirect will help preserve your site’s ranking in Google while providing a consistent and transparent experience for your users. If there won’t be a 1:1 match between pages on your old site and your new site (recommended), try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.
• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. However, if this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don’t have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like ../recipes/chocolatecake.html).
• To prevent confusion, it’s best to retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.
• Use the Change of Address tool in Webmaster Tools to notify Google of your site’s move. (Note: To use the Change of Address tool, you must be a verified owner of both the new and the old sites.)
• Add your new site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verify your ownership of it.
• We recommend that you create and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site. Submitting a Sitemap is a way to tell Google about pages on your new site that we might not otherwise discover.

Once you’ve completed all these steps, you can use your Webmaster Tools data to check that everything is working correctly. While it can be some time before Google crawls your old and new sites, and all these changes take effect, here are a few ways to check that the process is working correctly:

• Check the web crawl errors for both your old and new sites, to make sure that the 301 redirects from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn’t showing unwanted 404 errors.
• If you’ve submitted a Sitemap for your new site, the Sitemap Details page lets you see how many URLs in your Sitemap we’ve crawled and indexed.

Read the latest at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105

Steps for shifting a domain without loosing the ranking

1. Make the new site live and check if everything is ok with a robots.txt block or .htaccess folder protect (Folder protect is best). Make sure the old website content is kept as it is for atleast few weeks (if possible).
2. Now see if you are retaining all the old URLs, in case if you are retaining all the URLs as it is then you can do a page by page redirection like
   
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^blog$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www\.seoforclients\.com/hr/ [R=301,L]

   Here I am redirecting all the blog pages to the new URL at SEOforClients.com, see few live examples:
   • http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/folder-protect/ is redirecting to http://www.seoforclients.com/hr/folder-protect/ &
   • http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/orkut/ to http://www.seoforclients.com/hr/orkut/

   This is a pure one on one redirection when the URLs are kept the same.

3. Now what if the url is also changed randomly, say http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/folder-protect/ is changed to http://www.seoforclients.com/hr-folder-protect-132/ (no specific patterns) and http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/orkut/ to http://www.seoforclients.com/orkut-vs-chirkut/ (the patterns in not in your control). It this case you can use .htaccess to do a one on one redirection but for each you will need one entry like
   

   RewriteRule /blog/folder-protect/ http://www.seoforclients.com/orkut-vs-chirkut/ [R=301,L]

   Sometimes it can be too much work for a non technical team, you can shift the old domain to a wordpress and use a 301 redirection plugin like we are doing for http://www.seoforclients.com/links (which is redirecting to Google CSE). Do one on redirection as much as possible as it will then retain the link value.

4. Make sure that the new site doesn’t have links to old site, change the links from all the content.
5. Mention the change in Google, Yahoo and Bing webmaters as mentioned above.
6. Keep watching both the webmasters for old and new domain and see if there are any issues with it.
7. The ranking may take a little time to come back, so have a little patience.

In our case we have regained all the ranking that we had at idealwebtools.com.

• The emotions that are portrayed in-person are often lost through e-mail.
• Proofread Before Sending
• Proofreading does not only refer to grammatical or spellcheck.
• One must also pay close attention to the tone that is portrayed in the message to avoid any miscommunicaton.
• Avoid emphasizing certain words with boldface, italics, or underlining (unless required) because this can portray a harsh or condescending tone.
• If you have any concerns about messages sent by your clients, whether on project specifications or project edit requests, always respond by asking questions to ensure you know exactly what they want from you.
• It’s far better to ensure you understand the client’s needs before beginning a project to avoid future complications.
• Finally if you find that e-mail messages are noway helping you to then you should switch to other modes of communication.
• There are sometimes unique circumstances when a phone call or in-person meeting can quickly resolve unnecessary complications and get the project back on the right track.

The word “Spam” as applied to Email means “Unsolicited Bulk Email”.

Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.

A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

* Unsolicited Email is normal email
(examples: first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries)

* Bulk Email is normal email
(examples: subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists)

Spam is an issue about consent, not content. Whether the Unsolicited Bulk Email (“UBE”) message is an advert, a scam, porn, a begging letter or an offer of a free lunch, the content is irrelevant – if the message was sent unsolicited and in bulk then the message is spam.

Spam is not a sub-set of UBE, it is not “UBE that is also a scam or that doesn’t contain an unsubscribe link”. All email sent unsolicited and in bulk is Spam.

Again if you are looking for some email marketing links then you must not miss http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=Marketing%20FAQs

So how do we ensure that emails land in inbox than spam box. In this post I will not talk about SPF or crypto authentication as I have written some posts about it already. SPF is very easy to set and one must set it. But only have SPF or crypto is not sufficient, you need to check the reputation of your IP, here are some tools for it:

1. http://www.senderbase.org/senderbase_queries/detailip?search_string=59.164.133.51 – This is a very powerful initiative by Cisco.
2. http://spamblock.outblaze.com/59.164.133.51 – Interesting that our IP is on block list, thanks to the Indian IP , we are on US VPN which is safer.
3. http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=59.164.133.51 – This is a powerful tool, liked the whole website, whole lot of information about email marketing and email security.
4. http://cbl.abuseat.org/lookup.cgi?ip=59.164.133.51&.submit=Lookup
5. http://www.mail-abuse.com/cgi-bin/lookup?ip_address=59.164.133.51
6. http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=checkblock&ip=59.164.133.51 – Some reading stuff available

Now running a proper email marketing is a big challenge. We are hosting our welcome email IP different than the main email sending server.

Will love to hear your experience with different email marketing campaigns that you have run so far.