WOMM (word of mouth marketing)

It’s quite a rare sight to see someone glance through news papers. Magazines have almost become a leisure time activity. People are dwelling more on ad skipping digital video recorders and music players. In fact with the aid of new gadgets, they pick and choose their media exposure. Precisely, consumers are getting harder and harder to target. So, where is the new market ascending? What is the new strategy that rules the market?

As more and more people spend their time online the marketers need to find them in their space rather than dwelling in the traditional media. The new watch word for marketing strategist is now ‘WOMM’ (word of mouth marketing). It’s true that word of mouth marketing is emerging as a new force, over powering all other marketing strategies.

‘WOMM’ has got nothing to do with propaganda, advocacy or advertisement. In the marketing world conversation plays an integral part. And these new media sites focus on conversation as their integral part. For better or for worse people talk about products, events etc no one can stop that. So, here is the key for the new WOMM. Monitoring and harnessing these interactive platforms leverage the extra mile which marketers are longing for. WOMM can be of different kinds it can be a viral, a buzz or even a simple comment in social networking site or a blog. WOMM targets the complete social networking and conversation sites on the web.

The key elements of WOMM are:

• Research on the space (where the target audiences meet and exchange queries and thoughts)
• Communicate your product in the right network
• Monitor and respond to all the necessary conversations

The best part about WOMM is that you spend less and reap more profits. Marketing in these social networking sites doesn’t cost a huge sum. Hence, consumer generated content is yet another powerful to widen the market presence

To know more about WOMM can help you improve your business contact Himshilp

SEO Techniques for Yahoo & MSN

Google, Yahoo and MSN are the most preferred search engines. And it’s a know fact that each engine adapt their own techniques and methods in crawling and indexing the web pages. Hence, if we want a site to be indexed by all these search engines. It is important to understand the commonality shared by them and optimize the pages generically.

Title Tag
The title tag has been and probably will always be one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings.
Yahoo displays up to the first 112 characters of the page's "title" tag in their search results.
MSN displays up to the first 70 characters found in the "title" tag in the search results.
Title Tags Containing Specific Keyword Phrases are preferred by search engines.

H1/ H2 Tags
H1 & H2 headings are heavily weighed element in search engine optimization.
Yahoo and MSN gives preferences to the header tags which carries key words.

Key words
Tight focus on keywords is the key to a successful phrase selection by engines.
Breaking the topic into its basic elements and make a page for each will give better results.
Zero in on a very specific niche or description by using different combinations of keywords will help in better optimization.
Yahoo likes keyword rich content. The keyword tag should start with the key phrase and then all following words or phrases should be ordered according to their relevance to the website.
Yahoo works on exact match i.e. they recognize only an exact keyword or key phrase: "magazine" on "magazine”;” American magazine" on "American magazine”; “magazines" for instance represents completely another.
MSN Search places heavy emphasis on content. They even allow higher keyword density than Google does. Unlike Yahoo, MSN and Google work on partial matching. The general rule is that, the closer you place your keyword to the beginning of the "title" tag; the better is the ranking advantage.

Meta Tags
Meta tags have never been a guaranteed way to gain a top ranking on crawler-based search engines. Today, the most valuable feature they offer the web site owner is the ability to control to some degree how their web pages are described by some search engines. They also offer the ability to prevent pages from being indexed at all.
Yahoo's spidering process analyzes these Meta tags and uses them to determine rankings. Make sure your Meta tags include popular keywords that are relevant to your site's content.
MSN gives due credit to Meta tags and their algorithm appears to place some solid weight on the use of Meta tags. To take full advantage of Meta tag use, be sure to have some unique meta tags for every page. Do not use the same Meta tags for all of your web pages.

Back links
Search Engine often uses the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the factors for determining that website's search engine ranking. Websites often employ various techniques (called search engine optimization) to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website.
There are various factors for determining the quality of a back link. Main factor is the page rank of the web page giving the back link. Back link from high ranked site is of good quality. Second factor is the subject of the pages which are linked by a back link. If both sites are discussing the same topic, the back link is relevant and of good quality. Third important thing is the anchor text of the back link. If the anchor text is related to the theme of the website (where the link is pointing), then it is called a good quality back link. A good quality back link will increase the page rank of your website.
When you observe the top ranked sites in Yahoo, it is obvious that the sites have a large number of back links leading to that site.
One of the ways to secure high ranking in MSN is to get your site registered in internet directory listings. In the earlier days of MSN it would have been the wisest choice to get yourself listed in Zeal/ looksmart, as MSN used these listings.

Alt text
Optimizing images is becoming more and more important in SEO for websites.
Adding ALT tags to the images on your site can make your content friendlier to Yahoo's indexing process.
MSN gives more weightage to short key words in Alt text.

However the underlining fact is that all these search engines strive to produce ‘Relevant Results’ which should be the key for optimizing.