As a matter of fact, folks used to even run extraneous blog commenting campaigns, doing up to 100+ comments on a daily basis to quickly gather valuable back-links, drive more traffic and rank higher in the Google search results.

But, pretty soon the content king – Google realized the irony of the situation, and started penalizing websites that sold or gave away non nofollow links. As a result, even the default comments in all the newer versions of blogging engines like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, and the likes of them, had nofollow links by default.

Ever since then it has become a trend, and currently everybody has started using “nofollow” link tag – and even from social networking sites like FaceBook or Orkut, all that you can get is only nofollow links. But, social media is now becoming a great way to drive massive traffic and expose your business identity to the public.

Blog commenting has become a dying art and it is only a good way to build good rapport with fellow bloggers and improve the daily traffic to your website/blog. Something similar goes with the social networking and social media platforms, as one can only improve the traffic not Page Rank and search rankings with these links!

When it comes to link-building with so many constraints, a word of caution would be to remember the sheer fact that links to too many directories can make your site look like a link-farm – so beware Google is watching you!

Article directories are definitely the best bets to generate good backlinks. You may try running an article marketing campaign at reputed sites like EzineArticles.com GoArticles.com, Constant-Content.com, ArticlesBase.com and generate some targeted traffic as well as quality links.

Then the social bookmarking services like Digg Buzz.Yahoo, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, can come in handy in exposing your website to a wider range of audience and getting more traffic!

But, the bottom-line is that quality content, on-page organic SEO, and seamless user experience are the most effective ways to improve the overall SEO and search rankings of your website.

Last, but definitely not the least, you may want to add a robots.txt file on your root directory to exercise control over the pages that you DON’T want to be indexed by Google Crawler, Adsense Crawler and other bots. For instance, in a Wordpress blog, you don’t want Google to crawl the /wp-admin folder, so you can add following line in robots.txt file –

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google

Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /wp-admin

Note: Adding a sitemap to your site is a must!

KPI’s rely on both Leading and Lagging Indicators. A lagging indicator is revenue results or inventories from past quarters that are compared to a Leading Indicator such as current gross sales. Over time, Leading Indicators can be used to look at the history of Lagging Indicators to get a sense of seasonality, production peaks and valleys and changes in the market position of the company. So how do Web Analytics play a part?

Few companies have a Web presence for the sake of a brochure, and if they do, they’re likely missing the point of what the Web has become, no matter the size of the organization. A good Web Analytics package such as Web Trends or ClickTrends and even the free and very usable Google Analytics can, over time become a vital part of your KPI’s. Analytics gives you a reliable, instant and trailing view of everything happening with your Web traffic. Not just in term of sales, but what people are doing when they visit your site, and how they even arrived there. Just a Pay-Per-Click campaign uses Analytics to measure conversion and ROI which translate into current sales as a KPI, so does how people use your site.

As an example, HR can look at the analytics to determine how many people looked at the Career section of the website, and where they went on the site after looking at current job postings. This can tell them the success of recruiting advertising as well as getting a sense of what content they need to keep relevant elsewhere on the site. Production might use visits to the product pages to obtain a sense of what products the market is most interested in, which can then help them work with marketing to push a certain product and thus prepare inventory levels accordingly. Senior management can use Web Analytics to get a “sense” of what is happening with interest in the market place.

Now combine your Web Analytics tool with a reputation management solution and you start to have a very powerful set of benchmarking tools to work with. Web analytics can play a vital role in managing your KPI program or as a part of it. It’s all in how you use them. Of course, intevix can help there.

The concept of the “user” we find, is very Web 1.0 and reflects the era when IT ran the Website from design through to emails and what technology was used. The concept of a “user” is very much a programming approach, and in that context, is viable. But is it viable in the context of the Web 2.0 world? The very nature of Web 2.0 is to enable participation by the people who visit and engage with a Website.

In this context then, at intevix, we think of visitors to a site not as “users” but as Participants. They are participating in a conversation with you. Hopefully. If you’ve engaged them successfully. By thinking of these people (they are people, not blank faced automatons) as Participants, it fundamentally changes how you develop strategies overall, and how successful a project may be. The concept of “User” is one way and does not reflect engagement, whereas Participant reflects a sense of conversation, openness and activity.