The Rise of Content Discovery Platforms

SEO, as we knew it, does not exist anymore. Last week, Paul Boag wrote an interesting piece in Smashing Magazine explaining why companies should no longer spend money on third-party SEO companies. The article was followed by a heated discussion and Paul had to write another post explaining his take on the necessity of SEO companies. Paul Boag pointed out:

If you hire a SEO company to improve your placement and you measure their worth on the basis of how high they get you in the rankings, then you are out of line with what Google is trying to achieve. Your primary objective should be better content, not higher rankings.

(via SmashingMagazine)

Suddenly, after all those Zoofixations of Google (yes, I am referring to Panda, Penguin bla bla algorithm changes), informative and useful content took the crown. Everyone seems to be so obsessed with ‘content marketing’. Jason DeMers wrote an article on Huffington on the same topic; entitled ‘The New Era of SEO: Content Strategy’. I can see that marketers are embracing this as a paradigm shift. I am, in no way, resisting this change. However, this scenario somehow reminds me of the time when people were equally excited about link building. That phase has gone. Again, I am not implying that content marketing will have a short life span as well. Indeed, I think content marketing is here to stay for long and we will witness its rapid evolution in coming years. Continue reading

Google Trends 2012: An Infographic

Google has published the report on search trends for the year of 2012. According to their numbers, people searched on Google for 1.2 trillion times. From this huge volume of data, Google ranked the top searches, top searched images, people, performing artists, movies and many more. On the basis of Google Zeitgeist 2012,  I have created an infographic to visually present some of Google trends 2012. You are free to use the infographic anyway you may wish. However, if you post it somewhere, a link back to subtlebias.com would be appreciated. Thanks. Continue reading

How to Bring Traffic to Website After the Launch: 9 Surefire Ways

trafficYou cannot realistically expect organic traffic within the first two or three months of launching your website because it takes time to rank on Google for keywords and bring traffic to website. That means, you have to devise some other plan than SEO and make a strategy on how to bring traffic to website. PPC campaign is obviously a good way, if you have a handsome budget. But what if you don’t have that much money to spend on PPC or your area of business is highly competitive for PPC even. In that case, you need to get a bit creative. I am going to explain a few ways that will help you to bring traffic at the initial phase of your website.

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How to Create a Clutter-free Minimalist Makeover of LibreOffice Writer

I absolutely love LibreOffice and the flexibility it provides me. Being a minimalist, I recently started writing using Focus Writer. While I do adore the clutter free environment of Focus Writer, at the same time, I also miss many functions of LibreOffice. Hence I was wondering how to create a similar clutter free environment in LibreOffice as well.

It turned out that the process of making a soothing minimal environment in LibreOffice is not difficult at all. Wonder how many steps it might involve? Well, only three. Yes, you are only three steps away from creating a pacifying writing environment like mine (click on the image to see the larger version). Continue reading

Google Now: A New Battleground for Businesses?

google-now-google-search-jelly-beanRecently, Google has unveiled two new products- Google Glass and Google Now. Google Now has caught my attention and I firmly believe that it is going to be the new battleground for the businesses. After two decades of globalization, businesses are now starting to shift their attention to the local. With Google Now on your smartphone, local information is now more available, almost instantly accessible.

So what is Google Now? As seen on the landing page, Google Now is introduced as:

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And then time stood still..

leap-second26.06.2012-640x400Yes, it did. Yesterday (June 30, 2012) time stood still for one second! A leap second was added to match the time super-accurately with the rotation of Earth.

International Atomic Time (TAI) is an uber-accurate time standard. How they maintain the accuracy? There are almost 200 atomic clocks spread all over the world in 50 national laboratories. International Atomic Time is calculated from the weighted average of time kept by all these clocks. Continue reading

Leo Babauta Tumbled These 50 Quotes

Leo Babauta is a person whom I am following for a long time and his wonderful blog Zen Habits is a constant source of inspiration for me and million other people. He also maintains a Tumblr blog where he posts interesting links, pictures, quotes etc. Everyday I check his Tumblr blog at least once. It never ceases to amaze me. Specially, Leo mentions some quotes from time to time, and each of the quotes he collects is a gem. Here are some of those gems – a collection of 50 quotes that Leo Babauta tumbled. These quotes will surely infect you with positive energy and passion. Be inspired.

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Three Special Purpose Search Engines

searchengineWe used to search information on Altavista or Yahoo! And then something happened that changed the history of human progress forever. Google entered the web. With a new kind of algorithm and more relevant result, the search engine just clicked right the moment. In fact, Google clicked biiiig time. Now, Google has grown to be the synonym of internet. 87.6% of all global searches are carried by Google. The nearest competitor in search engine market is Bing with only 4.2% of global market share (Source: KarmaSnack). Google, indeed, provides unparalleled service. Hence, new search engines are being developed targeting a niche or a special purpose serve. Here, 5 special purpose search engines are briefly discussed which might just help you better than the old good Google way.

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SEO Your Life : Life Lessons that Can be Taken from SEO Practices

Everyone in the web business knows about the importance of optimizing the website for search engine. Among the plethora of websites out there, without being visible there’s no other way of getting traffic. Once I came across the saying somewhere, ‘Without SEO, your website is like a store in the middle of Amazon forest.’ There are thousands of different ways of optimizing website. However, the main functions can be summed up in four best practices : building links with relevant websites, creating original and quality content, optimizing your website with appropriate tags and metadata, and making sure that the website code is clean and lean.  Now, this article is not about optimizing your website, it is more about optimizing your life. I will rather be ‘offline’ here and take a look at how these SEO practices are related with our own lives and living better.Let’s take a look the the four best practices of SEO from a different perspective.

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