Adobe to Acquire Omniture for $1.8 Billion

Omniture has announced yesterday through their press release that Adobe Systems Inc. is going to buy business software maker Omniture Inc. for $1.8 billion ($21.50 per share) on a fully diluted equity-value basis. It is going to be a smart move that Adobe has taken as it is going to add more values that Adobe is delivering to its customers.

Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture furthers its mission to revolutionize the way the world engages with ideas and information. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen called the move a "game changer" for the company.

"Adobe customers are looking to us for solutions to deliver engaging experiences and more effectively monetize their content and applications online," Narayen said in the press release announcing the deal.

The two companies said the deal is expected to close during Adobe's fourth quarter and is subject to government approvals. Omniture will become a new unit within Adobe, with Omniture CEO Josh James continuing to lead the business as an Adobe senior vice president. Adobe said the deal should add to earnings in fiscal 2010.

Omniture shares soared 25 percent to $21.74 in after-hours trading, while Adobe shares slid 4.5 percent to $34.06. The deal would be Adobe's second-largest acquisition after its $3.4 billion purchase of Macromedia in December 2005.

By combining Adobe’s content creation tools and ubiquitous clients with Omniture’s Web analytics, measurement and optimization technologies, Adobe will be well positioned to deliver solutions that can transform the future of engaging experiences and e-commerce across all digital content, platforms and devices.

First Hand-On Experience with Omniture SiteCatalyst Hitbox

To me for the last few years, it has been always Google Analytics which I dealt with for viewing web analytics report, both for my official clients as well as for my personal blogs. But things have changed and it changed really well to add its value to my career. For the last few weeks, it is only Omniture SiteCatalyst Hitbox that I am referring to and viewing all the extensive reports it does provide. Trust me, it's an amazing experience and I am really getting more enthusiastic to explore more of it.

Thanks God, I finally managed to come out of the shell (Google Analytics) as I did not get any chance to work with some other superior web analytical tools. Now everyday I am learning more of Omniture Hitbox and if thing goes on like this, I will be having an in-depth knowledge for the same.

I will be writing more of it so that you guys can have a better understanding of it in case you are not using this web analytic tool. May be it will motivate or give some sort of confidence to work with this tool. I know it is expensive but everything that is of superior quality, does not come cheap.

But I am still fond of Google Analytics and will continue using it for my personal blog as I have a long attachment with it and love every bit of it without any doubt. Thanks to Google for giving us a chance to have a hand-on experience with such a brilliant tool and that too free of cost.

Key Points from Matt Cutt's Presentation at WordCamp San Francisco 2009

Those of you who do not know about WordCamp, here is a brief intro about it. WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and Automattic takes the entire initiative to make event successful.

This year at WordCamp San Francisco 2009, Matt Cutts gave a very nice little presentation on how to blog, how to rank your website and what are other factors that one should consider while designing or managing your own website or blog. Given below are some of the key points based on his nice presentation:

1. He explained why people actually blog. He said that people have different intentions of blogging like some do it for fame, some do it for access, attention, money and rankings. It is upto you how you want to utilize your blog. The whole idea of blogging is to put up something online that you are interested in or rather say you are in love with it. At the same time, you want your reader to read, add it to their favorites (Google Reader), give you a natural link from their own blog as well as want them to come back in the near future to read more. If possible try to write often and do not do overdo anything that might hurt your rankings.
   
   
2. He also made us understand how to use WordPress as an effective tool to build a blog. He explained how to utilize various free WordPress plugins and utilize them to make your blog search engine friendly. He ensured that we should keep our WordPress and web server regularly updated so that we are always at par with other regular bloggers and do not miss out something that is useful for us. Using WordPress is a great choice to start your blog as it helps you to do better in Google since WordPress takes care of 80-90% of search engine optimization, which you don't have to do yourself.
   
   
3. He shared with us a list of WordPress plugins that he uses and recommended them to us. Plugins like "Cookies for Comments" to prevent spam, "Enforce WWW. Preference" to set your preferences for your blog url with "www" or without "www", "FeedBurner FeedSmith" that detects all ways to access your feed so that you can track every possible subscriber, and many more were discussed.
   
   
4. Google crawl depends in descending order of Page Rank. So if your website has a high PR (Page Rank), then there is every possibility that your website will be identified faster, crawl rate will increase, spider will go deep inside your website, and more often spider will visit your website to check whether your content has been refreshed or not. And in order to attain a high PR, you need good quality links pointing to your website. So it's the quality of links that does matter instead of quantity.
   
   
5. Google Rank pages based on relevancy and reputation. So to rank for a particular query, your webpage should be relevant to it as well as it should have some decent number of quality links pointing to it. For example, Matt Cutts is not ranking high for the keyword "matt". He is ranking at position 8 whereas Matt Mullenweg is ranking 3rd for the same keyword.
   
   
6. In order to gain your blog reputation, write something unique i.e. interesting, provide some great information, do some original research or reporting. All this will allow people reading those stuff, to give you a link from their blog or website naturally. In a nutshell, he asked us to start on a small niche that we are interested in and gradually cover bigger niches. He explained a very nice philosophy known as Katamari Philosophy.
   
   
7. While choosing keywords, you should ideally think of all the keywords/keyphrases that one might think of it and try to include it naturally to fit into your blog posts or in you webpage content.
   
   
8. It is always better to put in keywords in the your blog post url path instead of characters or numbers that have no significance in terms of ranking. If possible always opt of good keywords in categories also. Always use hyphen as a word separator instead of underscore as it works better in terms of ranking. Avoid totally using spaces in your url path.
   
   
9. In case you are running Adsense for your blog/website and want Google to display ads relevant to your website/blog content, then it is always better to put up this 2 line of code (given below) in your content relevancy to which you want the ad to be displayed. Doing so the ad will be more targeted, people will be clicking more on the ads and in return you will make some descent amount of money.
   
   < ! -- google_ad_section_start -- >
   
   < ! -- google_ad_section_end -- >
   
   
10. Use Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to understand the search engine spider as well as the user behaviour and based on that make some effective changes. Avoid shortcuts, scams and paid posts.
    
    
11. Add .htaccess in /wp-admin to protect your blog from hackers. You can specify the IP Addresses you want to give access in the .htaccess file.

Given below is the entire video of that presentation in case you are interested in watching it.

My Journey Begins at Lexmark International

Last 2 months, I had a tough time as I had made up my mind to change my current job. I have also decided to spend more time in blogging as you might have seen that I am not so fond of updating my blog on regular basis. So, I thought of giving it a shot once I get selected in a new company.

I started updating my CV on all the popular job sites like naukri.com, monsterindia.com and thetimesjobs.com. While doing so I ended up looking into 3 job posts that really gave me some hope that I might get selected if things go well. One was a job ad from HP (Hewlett Packard) and the other two was from Lexmark International and TCS (Tata Consultancy Services). All 3 of them are looking for Web Analytics Specialist. Without giving a second thought, I ended up applying to all 3 of them. (So, guys who are into SEO World and think that all the big daddy's are not into Web Marketing, then you are wrong. So gear up and look for the right opportunity.)

Finally after a week or so, I started getting calls both from HP and Lexmark. I did clear first round of interview at both the companies. But after second round of interview, I did not hear anything back from HP :( . But I did manage to clear Lexmark interview and I was asked to come to their office for the 3rd and 4th round. And after successfully clearing all the interviews, I have been selected as a Global Web Analytics Specialist (cheers :)).

I was a bit excited and I am still excited to think that I am now associated with a big brand. I always wanted to work for a big company which I eventually managed to do it. And the bonus point is that I don't have to relocate to some other state as the posting is in Kolkata itself. Also it takes only 20-25 minutes drive from my home to reach my new office which is located at DLF Building, Rajarhat.

While writing this post, I will be completing my 1st week at Lexmark. I had a wonderful 1st week out here. I met here with my old friends who are an employee of Lexmark now, as well as came across some fine colleagues who are very very helpful. I am happy as well as confident that I will be able to learn something new and will try to deliver some outstanding work.

As I started blogging again, I will ensure that I do that on regular basis and keep writing posts on various topics (of course SEO being the first choice). So see you soon with a new post.

Google Celebrating Rabindranath Tagore's Birthday

It is so great to see that Google is celebrating Rabindranath Tagore's birthday. They have changed their logo today in the name of his and it can only be seen at Google India and not at google.com. I don't remember whether Google had celebrated the same way earlier. May be they are doing it for the first time (correct me in case I am wrong).



Rabindranath Tagore was a famous poet, visual artist, novelist, composer and first Asian Noble Prize winner in the year 1913.

Yahoo to Shut Down GeoCities Free Web-Hosting Service

Yahoo Inc. on Thursday has declared that it would shut down its GeoCities free Web-hosting service. The company's second-biggest acquisition behind Broadcast.com Inc., which lets users design personal websites to show off photos, promote local clubs or publicize business services. The $3 billion acquisition in 1999 is finally getting closed after running it for the last 10 years. We have already noticed that Geocities is no longer accepting new accounts for the last few months.



Chief Executive Carol Bartz is trimming costs as Yahoo copes with a slowing online-advertising market. The company said this week it will cut about 700 jobs, or 5% of the total, after eliminating about 1,600 in the fourth quarter. 

Yahoo pointed GeoCities users to its paid Web-hosting service. The company will give users more details on saving GeoCities' data later this year.

U.S. visitors to GeoCities dropped 25% to 12 million in March from the year-ago period, according to research firm ComScore Inc. in Reston, Va.

Other services Yahoo has closed include travel-search site FareChase and online storage service Briefcase.

Two-Column Sitelinks VS One-Line Sitelinks

Google started showing sitelinks in their search result from the year 2006 (around Aug or Sep). They have now introduced a new and unique feature that is beneficial for the user. I always wonder how they come up with such nice ideas everytime. It’s the user that they always think of and which motivates them to provide such great stuffs. Yet another successful feature got added to their repertoire. Anyways, you might have already started thinking all about sitelinks? What it is? How do they work and many such questions must be already flocking around your mind.


Sitelinks are links that are shown below the first search result. All the links shown are internal links of the website which is ranking number one for a particular search term. The main objective of showing sitelinks is to allow users navigate and move to the other relevant sections of your webpage that might be of their interests.

Advantage of Sitelinks

• Saves time for the users.
  
• User can quickly find the information that they are looking for by quickly navigating to the important pages of your site.
• Useful for large and complex websites.
• Gives users an overview of a website's content by highlighting some of the popular parts of the site that users may not know about.
  

The entire sitelinks system is fully automated and an algorithm is running behind it. Google will show sitelinks only when they think that it will be beneficial for the user.

Sitelinks Depend on

• Website internal linking structure
• Content
• Fast navigation
• Relevancy
  

Google Pulling Sitelinks names from:

It is still unclear from where exactly the Sitelinks names are pulling from, since they are not an exact match for

• on-page anchor text,
• page titles or
• alt attributes.
  

Most likely it is using a combination of those factors, but then stripping out “stop words.”

Sitelinks are not shown if

• The structure of the website does not allow the sitelinks algorithm to find good sitelinks.
• The sitelinks are not relevant to the users’ search query
• Have a minimum of 3 sitelinks available
  

Manage and View your Sitelinks

• Login to the Webmaster Tools Dashboard and
• Click the site for which you want to see the sitelinks.
• In the left menu, click Links
• Then click Sitelinks. (will display a list of sitelinks if Google has sitelinks information for your website)
  

Sitelinks are generated periodically from your website content on account of which the lists may change from time to time. If you want, you can block a sitelink from the Webmaster Tools Dashboard. It may take 1-2 weeks’ time to remove a link as a sitelink. Sitelinks that are blocked will not appear as a sitelink for the next 90 days until you unblock it. The 90 days blocking period may extend everytime you visit the Sitelinks page on Webmaster tools.

Exclude a page from sitelinks if

• The page has become outdated or unavailable
• The page that contains information you don't want to emphasize for users.
  

One–Line Sitelinks:


We have witnessed till today that sitelinks are normally shown for few search terms and for websites that are ranking number 1. Now Google has started showing one-line sitelinks instead of usual two-column sitelinks. On April 15th, the day before Google announced it, the one-line sitelinks or alternatively "Mini-Sitelinks" are getting displayed even for results that are not in the first position. This means that for a single search query, multiple websites can have sitelinks in the search results. Up to four sitelinks can show up right above the page URL, instead of the usual two columns below the URL of the first result.

One–Line Sitelinks Advantage:

• Website will start showing sitelinks for a number of search queries where it previously didn't.
• Will increase the visibility of and traffic to your site.
• Improve user experience.
  

One–Line Sitelinks Vs Two-Column Sitelinks:

The main differences between these so called One-Line Sitelinks and Two-Columsn Sitelinks are:

• Display of this abbreviated version of Sitelinks is not limited to “branded” searches.
• One-Line Sitelinks are not just reserved for the #1 result and can appear in results at the bottom of the SERPs.
• One-Line Sitelinks are appearing on more than one result at a time.
• A single domain can have more than one set of Sitelinks per page.
• One-Line Sitelinks (aka "Mini Sitelinks") display four links in comparison to 8 links displayed by Two-Column Sitelinks.
  

For webmasters, this new feature might help them attract more visitors to their website. It is now just a matter of time to analyze and come to a conclusion, which is better, two-column sitelinks displaying 8 internal pages or one-line sitelinks displaying 4 internal pages. Only time can say.