‘META DESCRIPTION’ tag lost its shine after the emergence of off-page factors (like link popularity) for rankings in SERPS. In fact it lost its purpose to a great extent when Google started using contextual content from within the page as the description of the URL in its SERPS.

However in an interesting turn of events, ‘META DESCRIPTION’ is back in business!

Most search engines, including Google are now using the ‘META DESCRIPTION’ content as the description of the URL in their SERPS. The page ’TITLE’ is now being shown as the listing title with ‘META DESCRIPTION’ as the description of the URL. If you compare it with Google AdWords, you can consider the ‘TITLE’ as the Headline and ‘META DESCRIPTION’ as the Description. Therefore, you must use it to outline your strength, your unique selling proposition and if possible your offer.

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal mentioned cited this interesting Meta Description used by NextStudent.com in his article,

Looking for federal or private student loans for School? Get up to 40k Fast: Call 877-680-9879. Student loan consolidation? Call 800-299-4639. NextStudent- College Funding Made Simple.

You can also include your phone number (as cited in the above advertisement - description) for the prospect who is in a hurry! May be you will end up prospecting without having the visitor hit your website! In fact, with the latest version of IE and the FireFox plugins, the phone numbers listed in this description become hot-links, which a visitor can simply click and get connected on a voice call through Skype. And you can close a sale!

And yes, many SEO specialists believe that higher CTR on your SERPS listing (due to improved ‘TITLE’ and ‘META DESCRIPTION’) can help you further improve your rankings.

BTW, I forgot to mention that some expert copywriters may like to even put in their headlines and teasers to pre-sell the product / services!

Lisa Ditlefsen says:

Basically if you think about it the meta description tag is your FREE ad! If you have experience in running a pay per click campaign I’m sure you have put a lot of thought into what the PPC ad says. The ad is what distinguish you from all the other PPC ads right? So why should it be any different in the organic SERPs? The title tag is your free headline and the meta description tag is your FREE ad, this is where you have a chance to ad hook someone in. How many times have you searched for something, got to the results and been put off by the description, it can’t possibly be what you were looking for!!?

May be people do not give so much importance to this FREE ad, because it is FREE! It is never late. Give proper attention to your website ‘META DESCRIPTION’ tags and turn your organic traffic to a highly targeted FREE traffic.

TemplateKingdom 2.0, an Indus Net Technologies venture has recently put up a free web template section on its website.

This section will list templates which are available for free download. Each template will include full source files, W3C validated HTML code and CSS files for instant use. To download these templates, you simply need to register at TemplateKingdom.com.

Registration is absolutely free and takes less than 10 seconds! Once you are registered, you can download these templates from your member’s area.

Please note that all FREE templates are under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. You are free to download and use these templates in any way as you wish as long as you give a link back as credit to TemplateKingdom.com

On 26th March 2008, Times of India ran a story about growing IT SME segment in Kolkata based on a survey done by Duns & Bradstreet.

The complete release can also be read online at their website here: http://www.dnb.co.in/news/City%20IT%20to%20top%20in%20SME%20growth.html

(Click on the image to see an enlarged version)

The bids on AdWords are soaring to new heights everyday. Some advertisers are even shelling out up to $10 per click. So, naturally the question arises - Is this complete madness or is there any logic behind such aggressive advertising?

To me, it does make some sense to bid aggressively if you have the right strategy in place. And if you are bidding for the right keyword. It does not make sense to bid for “web design” if you offer web design service in Texas! In that case your keyword should be “web design texas”.

Considering, you have done enough research, let us consider two scenarios:

1) Every client you acquire, on an average spends $15000 with you in a year. In this case, you do not mind spending 10% of the revenue as customer acquisition cost. Therefore you can comfortably bid $10 per click (provided you have a site which can convert 1 out of 150 visitors). Thus, looking at a lifetime value of a customer makes it a good investment.

2) If you have mastered the art of persuasion (or have hired a master of persuasion), and have come up with a website with converts well (visitor > customer conversion), every visitor you are driving to your website is equivalent to revenue . So go ahead, rock the boat and bid out all your competitors. You will get more customers and will also have lower customer acquisition cost. What more do you want?

So, expensive keywords bidding do work, if they are backed with high lifetime customer value and/or higher conversion on the website. And yes, those Internet marketing experts are not insane! In fact most of them are very smart.

So bid smartly!

And, if you need help, contact our SEO team. Reach them at info@submit2please.com!

Attractive designs do get attention. It can also get good visitor-customer conversion if some best-practices are followed. But the question is - how can attractive designs get traffic to your website?

They can! or,
They can at least help your site in getting good traffic.

Here is a simple technique posted by Daniel on his blog.

• Design an attractive web site. Or get it designed through one of the many web design agencies around. Make sure that the site is coded in XHMTL/CSS2.
• Now, submit these websites to several CSS galleries which has sprung all over the Internet. If your design is decent enough, you will surely get accepted. However, if your design is outstanding, you may get featured sending in hundreds of visitors!
• Now, design enthusiasts may not be your target audience (BTW, if they are, then you have struck a goldmine). Still, you get multiple listings and they link to your website, which ultimately helps you in getting better link-popularity and therefore higher rankings in search engines. In my opinion, you should not miss any opportunity to improve your link-popularity.
• Here are some links to the “List of CSS galleries”

• http://www.themoleskin.com/archives/the-definitive-css-galleries-list/
• http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2008/inspiration-overload-100-css-galleries-you-need-to-check-out/
• http://css-tricks.com/examples/WebsiteGalleryRoundup/
• http://www.nuff-respec.com/technology/css-gallery-roundup
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2006/12/21/creme-de-la-creme-of-css-list-of-css-galleries/

Now, if it looks like a daunting task (frankly speaking, it is!), do not give up.

Indus Net Technologies has a special service to help you focus on your core business and take care of different kind of manual submission (including CSS gallery submission) for a small fees. It is called Submit2Please.

Contact one of our sales representative / your account manager at Indus Net Technologies to get started. Or drop us a line at info@submit2please.com

When it comes to design, size does not matter - creativity does. In fact many times, small is beautiful.

The Indus Net Technologies’ web design team has proven themselves yet again with a relevant, memorable and creative favicon for their website - Hire-A-Designer. It has been recently shortlisted as “50 Outstanding Favicons” by Smashing Magazine.

Check it out here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/21/favicon-episode-6-black-abstract-and-hand-drawing/

Favicons may be a small part of a website, but it goes a long way in creating its brand identity among website visitors who have very short attention span. And yes, these favicons do stand out when a person reviews his “Favourites” or “Bookmarks”, making it a good marketing tool.

Congratulations to the design team!

Dear Friends,

TemplateKingdom 2.0 is right here.

Come, buy the ready-made web site template that best suit your next project.

All our templates are quality checked and are designed by top-quality creative professionals (including 100+ in-house designers). You can use every template for your projects as many times as you wish. We have given special attention to make the designs user-friendly so that they can be used for practical projects.

Salient features of Template Kingdom 2.0

• Lower prices
• You can discuss specific templates and design
• Members area to download free templates as we make them available
• 80% of our template collection can be downloaded instantly (remaining 20% within 24 hours)

Many more exciting features are coming up soon:

• Tagging for ease of search
• Reseller license (so that you can resell the templates and make money). Normal licenses can be upgraded later by paying the difference.
• Active Blog with tips / resources on using the templates
• Several new types & categories of templates

So keep tuned in and if you want to join hands with us, feel free to write back to me! I will love to work out JVs with enterprising entrepreneurs. We are open to ideas - so write to us.

Regards
Abhishek Rungta
Founder / CEO
Indus Net Technologies

P.S.: The site is in its BETA version, but it can take orders. If you encounter a problem, please feel free to write to us. We will be obliged.

Indus Net Academy has recently appointed a franchise of its training business in Siliguri. This will help us impart professional training on web design, web development (php programming) and Internet marketing to career aspirants from Northern Bengal.

Students passing out of the institute will be offered jobs in various full service web design service companies in Kolkata, including Indus Net Technologies.

The franchise is scheduled to be operational by May 2008.

Indus Net Technologies has been recently nominated for D&B’s SME Awards 2008 in the IT & ITeS sector category. We are waiting for the Award ceremony with our fingers crossed!

D&B India Website

Indus Net Technologies was also listed among the emerging IT SMEs of India from Eastern India by D&B in 2007.

There are hundreds of companies who are copying us - our business model, our web site design, our style of doing business, etc. Though we do not like it, we consider it as a form of appreciation and ignore most of the times.

However this one stumps everyone else! This hilarious copyright infringement was done by a “reputed” Kolkata based company. They went to the limit of copying our D&B number which is a unique number assigned to a company by Duns & Bradstreet.

The DUNS number 91-848-3439 belongs to Indus Net Technologies and it can be independently verified with D&B (which of course is a reputed agency).

While copying (or let us say ripping off) our website, they even copied our DUNS number and are openly publishing it on their website. The funniest part is that they continue to do this even after getting a legal notice! I salute their arrogance. I hope they do not pass on the blame to their designer. They have given full support to this illegal activity by ignoring the legal notices sent to them. So I  wish that the ignorant designer is not fired who did what he was asked to do - i.e. to copy our website content and use.

Best of luck to them! This won’t help in growing the company for long.