WHY EMPLOYEES LEAVE ORGANISATIONS ? - Azim Premji, CEO- Wipro

WHY EMPLOYEES LEAVE ORGANISATIONS ? - Azim Premji, CEO- Wipro

Last week, less than eight months after he joined, Mark walked out of the job. Twice Mark was sent abroad for training. "My learning curve is the sharpest it's ever been," he said soon after he joined. He had heard a lot about the CEO. The salary was great. The company had all the right systems in place employee-friendly human resources (HR) policies, a spanking new office, and the very best technology, even a canteen that served superb food. Early this year, Mark, a senior software designer, got an offer from a prestigious international firm to work in its India operations developing specialized software. He was thrilled by the offer. Every company faces the problem of people leaving the company for better pay or profile.


Why did this talented employee leave ? The answer lies in one of the largest studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization. The study surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers and was published in a book called "First Break All The Rules". It came up with this surprising finding: Arun quit for the same reason that drives many good people away. If you're losing good people, look to their manager .... the manager is the reason people stay and thrive in an organization. And he's the reason why people leave. When people leave they take knowledge, experience and contacts with them, straight to the competition. " People leave managers not companies HR experts say that of all the abuses, employees find Mostly manager drives people away? ," write the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.

When people cannot retort openly in anger, they do so by passive aggression. By digging their heels in and slowing down. By doing only what they are told to do and no more. By omitting to give the boss crucial information.

The first time, an employee may not leave, but a thought has been planted. The second time, that thought gets strengthened. The third time, he looks for another job. stress out employees in different ways - by being too controlling, too suspicious, too pushy, too critical, but they forget that workers are not fixed assets, they are free agents. When this goes on too long, an employee will quit - often over a trivial issue.


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Everyone have their points.... at the end of the day, only that matters is it was met or not...!!!!

Is content still the king???

You carefully choose an ideal topic for your target audience who are desperate to know more about it. You toil hard and pour every ounce of your creativity, insight and knowledge to give it an interesting angle. The content radiates authority and strikes a chord with your readers. In short you have written a killer post with all the ingredients necessary to make it an instant hit. You submit your post to various social media and bookmarking websites i.e Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, etc. Then you wait in the hope of making the headlines and nothing happens. Somewhere, something went terribly wrong. But what could have possibly gone awry, when everything was executed with perfection – a question many of us would have faced in the past.

‘Content is king’, an adage that has been around for many years and has imparted the desired outcome time and again. Content that is informative, engaging, useful and unique is proven to entice readers but the rules of the game are changing. Apart from ‘what you know’, ‘who you know’ seems to be playing a crucial part. Having great content is only half the battle, marketing and promoting it is the other half.

People might argue that this adage will only stand true in the blogging arena and not for websites. An attractive website with good content will lure visitors and play a vital role in getting more business. But what if your website is ‘invisible’ to online users. It would be similar to building a plush hotel with all the modern amenities, without telling people where it is and how to find it. The hotel will have low (people who would accidentally discover it) or no customers for the simple reason that it cannot be found by customers willing to stay in it. Had the hotelier marketed it well, people would have known about it and stayed in it for one of their holidays. And before I go any further, let clarify what I mean by ‘content’. According to me anything written in black and white, videos, graphical representations, or for that matter anything that conveys an idea should be deemed as content.

Talking about search engines, crawlers are not in position to judge quality of the content on its own. It uses factors such as links pointing to the content to make this decision and would remain this way, at least in the near future. More links equates to high quality score. On the other hand visitors are capable enough to judge the quality of content but this would only happen if they get to read it. Online visibility – Precisely. In a nutshell, no matter how good the content is, it would require a good push. This is where marketing steps in and ‘who you know’ can provide impetus to your marketing efforts. Once people know about your content and it suffice all the characteristics of good content, it would deliver the desired impact. However the ‘who you know’ concept is more suited for the social media arena.

“Is content still the king???”; my answer would be “not entirely”. Looking at the statement in isolation - “YES”, looking at the statement in a broader perspective - “NO”. This however does not diminishes the importance of content.

You may have a different viewpoint altogether and therefore I would encourage you to share it with us.

Google Suggest: A death nail for …..

Google finally launched ‘Google Suggest’ feature across all the data centers, after it spent years in Google labs (better late than never). A post on Google’s official blog states “ Today we’re excited because Google Suggest will be “graduating” from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. Over the next week, we’ll be rolling this out so that more and more of you will start seeing a list of query suggestions when you start typing into the search box. We find that by providing suggestions upfront, we can help people search more efficiently and conveniently.”

Google suggest is a feature that provides suggestions upfront i.e when you start typing in the search box, related keywords/key phrases appear directly below where you are typing. It would look something like this:

It is easy to move your cursor down and select your search term. But what would this mean for keyword search, especially long tail keyword search. Well the answer is simple – it would effectively kill the long tail keyword search. To me it looks like a well thought strategy of enticing users into searching for keywords with high volume (and probably high bid prices, for PPC and Adsense, which would equate to more revenue for Google) and defining the SERPs even before the search is actually carried out.

‘Google Suggest’ is going to be a death nail for long tail keywords. When presented with suggestions, searcher are more likely to choose one of the options mentioned below than typing the whole search term. This would especially hold true in case of people unsure of what they are looking for and end up typing long keywords, but would not effect well defined keywords in a big way. I am not trying to say that people would be completely satisfied with what they are presented with, but it is most likely to be their first stopover. And for those who bank on misspelled keywords, the jolly old days are over.

Looking on the brighter side, companies targeting keywords that features in ‘Google Suggest’ or associated keywords should get ready to see a surge in traffic. To see if you are the lucky one, start typing in a query on Google.com and see ‘Google Suggest’ in action.

Search Engine Rankings: Worthless or Worthwhile

A never ending romance…….

Not long ago, Google announced that it has banned a prominent rankings checker tool WebPosition. This move by Google, as always, created a ripple effect in our industry. Soon the topic of discussion shifted from what instigated Google’s action to the worthiness of search engine rankings - a subject that has been widely debated and discussed. Still out interest or rather curiosity in this topic refuses to die.

This move by Google may set precedence for other search engines to follow suit. The reason behind Google’s action may be the fact that queries arising from automated tools put extra burden on the computing resources. With a major like Google, the reason seems to flimsy. Automated queries skew the search data sounds like a credible justification and many of you would nod your heads in agreement.

I read several articles and blog entries, both for and against the importance of search engine rankings, which provided compelling argument to support their claim. Here’s my take on this topic. Rankings are important, no doubt about it. But should ranking be the only parameter to judge the success of a SEO campaign? Search engine rankings are crucial but (there is always a ‘but’) it is not the only defining factor. Measuring the success of a search engine optimization campaign solely on rankings prevents you from having a holistic view.

The end goal of any website is to achieve maximum conversion. Let’s take two situations to depict a clearer picture (every thing else being constant):

1. The website does not rank #1 for its targeted keyword but still achieves 50% conversion.
2. The website ranks #1 for its targeted keyword but only manages a meager 10% conversion.

Even with primitive computational skills, you would be able to figure out that the first situation is nearer to your end goal. Ranking also render itself useless in situations wherein the keywords being targeted are obscure or driving irrelevant traffic. Getting less but qualified traffic would be sufficient to suffice the end goal. It however does not imply that ranking is worthless especially in the case of niche market.

Ranking on the second page for a niche market would mean that you will find your listing surrounded by a heap of irrelevant results. Searchers would not go that far looking for your website and with traffic being next to nothing; even 100% conversion would miserably fail to put a smile on your face.

Rankings are not the be all and end all for any online business. There are many more factors that command due consideration and are instrumental in providing you a complete picture.

Google’s double standard

‘To err is human’ and is quite understandable, as it is not only hard but impossible to achieve perfection – Accepted. On the flip side machines do work (whatever it may entail) with perfection leaving no room for error. Numerous organizations across the world have achieved the distinction of being perfect (thanks to technology) in whatever they do and people look upon them for guidance and inspiration. It is this faith and integrity that keep these organizations alive and ticking. But it also gives them the added responsibility to carry the mantle of moral and social responsibility, to be fair and just in their deeds.

To give precedence to my finding, I would like to build some basic background which would help me draw a clearer picture. The number of characters that should be used for the ‘title’ of a website is a widely debated topic. Ask this question in a SEO forum and you would be amazed at the variety of answers that you would get. Blame it on the fact that our industry operates without any set guidelines or blame it on search engines that closely guard their secret. Ask the same question to any seasoned SEM professional and pat comes the reply, “65-70 characters”. Not an exact figure, so as to accommodate as many search engines as possible, but useful nonetheless. Anything over and above the higher limit (depending on the search engine) is truncated and is usually followed by a “….”

The story is usual until now and had been sung a thousands times. However I witnessed something (only by accident) that contradicted this widely believed notion. “A temporary glitch” I thought. A repeat search yielded the same result and it leads me to believe that it is no mistake.

If you closely monitor the above snapshot you would realize that the title in question (and contention) is more that 70 characters long (89 characters to be precise) but is not truncated like any other listing. My curiosity was further piqued by the fact that the listing is related to Google. Is Google working on two sets of standards, one for itself and the other for the rest of the world? I was so tempted to discount it as an error and just get on with my usual stuff, which I was doing prior to finding this. But then, do we expect Google to make such errors or for that matter is this error at all. I will leave that to your best judgment.

Doctor your website

Most of us have met a doctor at some point in time. You would have noticed that a doctor does not start writing prescription as soon as you enter his/her office. It is quite obvious that they first need to know the symptoms, run a few tests if required, and based on the finding prescribe you medicines and/or therapy.

Similar is the case with your website. You would have to diagnose your website and run tests to figure out the shortcomings. You would then need to base the corrective measures (prescription) on the problem areas, to make your website healthy.

“You cannot make your website perform better unless you know what exactly is going wrong with it.”

To get a more accurate understanding, a little background is probably in order. Businesses use websites as instruments to convert visitors into customers, and thus fulfill their goals. This conversion process can be visualized in the form of a funnel – the website conversion funnel.

As evident from the funnel diagram, not every visitor performs the desired action – in short the goal is not accomplished. Although 100% conversion may be an impossible feat to achieve; increasing it is a definite possibility. In order to maximize goal conversion performance of your website, you need to play the role of a website doctor.

Doctors use instruments (stethoscope, CT scan, etc.) to identify problems. Similarly, you need to use web analytics to study and analyze the website and its visitors. Armed with this knowledge, you can cure most (if not all) of the website’s deficiencies. Caution: You cannot turn a ‘blind eye’ and pretend that everything is just fine. If you do so, you will be missing out on a huge opportunity to garner more business.

Web analytic tools have abundance of raw data that needs to be interpreted correctly into actionable information. It is also imperative that you clearly understand the correlation between each data set.

Since most of us use Google Analytics (it is free, simple and a powerful tool), I would confine my discussion to it. However most of it will also be applicable to other analytic tools. To get you off the mark, you need to define your goal(s) in analytics – one of the most important key metric or KPI (Key Performance Indicator).

You will need to constantly track this key metric along with other key metrics, some of which are mentioned below.

1. Visits and conversions: Check the number visitors over a predefined period of time (preferably a month) and the associated conversions. You would then have for yourself the numbers that go at the start and the end of the conversion funnel.

Armed with this basic knowledge you would know the rate at which visitors convert into customers, and can then strive to better it.

2. Bounce and Exit rate: The second step would be to analyze each webpage and the corresponding bounce rate.

Since every webpage/landing page acts as an entrance to the conversion funnel, it is imperative to identify pages that help visitors move further into the conversion process. At the same time it is also important to identify pages that trigger a high bounce (visitors who leave a webpage without navigating further) rate, which creates proliferation of visitors.

A more important task would be to check exit rate (not same as bounce rate) of the most important landing pages.

Once you have zeroed upon the ‘troublemakers’, you would have to make appropriate changes (based on your findings) and test them. Google website optimizer is a great tool to help you accomplish this.

This would greatly assist you in arresting any further conversion funnel abandonment.

3. Page Views and time on site: You can break down visits into page views/visit to study visitors’ behavior. This metric defines the ‘stickiness quotient’ of your website. The more the visitors stick the more are the chances of them converting into customers.

This data also tells you how you could possibly space you call to action elements. If the average page views per visit are less to 2 then it is imperative that the CTA element is resident on the next page, irrespective of where the visitors land. In essence, the visitors should be able to perform the predefined action within two clicks. At the same time you should work to better this figure to get more page views per visit.

Average time per visit is another metric that is worth your attention. Can you visitors find all the relevant information required to make a decision, in the given time frame?

In addition to this, studying the navigation pattern of the visitors, reverse goal paths, and funnel visualization, will give you the required insight into the performance of your website and visitors’ behavior. This actionable data can be effectively and efficiently used to not only enhance the performance of your website, but also maximize your business goals.

It may be a seemingly mammoth task and may deter many, but believe you me – it’s not. And even if it was a bit difficult and time consuming, it is definitely worth your time and attention.

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Legitimacy of guaranteed SEO

31 Jan

Posted by admin In seo

Are you looking for ‘guaranteed SEO service’ – We offer…………………………

Guarantee – A word that grabs attention and instills a sense of security (monetary) in the minds of prospective customers. But can guarantee be given in the realm of SEO services?

We, as SEO service provider, have asked ourselves this question umpteen number of times. But that is not the intention of writing this post. The motive of writing this post is to challenge the legitimacy of such guarantees.

Many of our prospects have demanded ‘guaranteed SEO service’ in the past. They have gone to the extent of quoting guarantees offered by other vendors. ‘Organic ranking’ is what most vendors guarantee; it is a different story that closer scrutiny reveals a number of strings attached to any such guarantee.

Can anyone guarantee search engine rankings?

Let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth first

“
Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings ….
”
If this is not sufficient evidence to convince you; think of it yourself. Search engine ranking algorithms are one the best kept secrets in the world. The only way to guarantee ranking is to know exactly how the algorithm works, and nobody has that kind of knowledge except for a privileged few. Sure there are tried and tested methods but even they are susceptible to algorithmic change. Guaranteeing something, over which you don’t have total control, is not only unethical but misleading.

Our research took us from one service provider to another and we zeroed upon some of the most abused guarantee statements. Subsequent to which we decided to play the role of ‘Myth Buster’.

Myth #1 – Guaranteed top 10 rankings

Many SEO companies (we are not taking any names) give guarantee which reads something like this:

“
We guarantee to optimize your website for up to 100 different keyword phrases.
(Your primary targeted phrase will appear on the first page of one or more major search engines.)
”
Sounds impressive and many prospective clients fall for it. They however fail to understand that such ranking guarantee is for keywords chosen by the vendor and not you - needless to say that these keywords would be obscure in nature. Ranking for non competitive terms or terms with low search volume will give little or no benefit.

A pizza parlor which has an online ordering website will derive no benefit by ranking for keywords like ‘pizza recipes’ (non-targeted) or mozzarella cheese (obscure) – ‘online pizza delivery’ is the more apt Keyword option.

In essence, this flavor of guaranteed SEO offers no real value.

Myth #2 – Top rankings for competitive key phrases

Here’s an example of one such guarantee statement”

“
First page ranking or money back!
(We will guarantee top 10 rankings across the 15 search engines or don’t pay)
“
The top three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) command more that 93% of the total market share in US (comScore). The remainder is distributed amongst various other search engines. The picture is pretty much similar globally.

If you read the fine prints you would know that these 15 search engines do not include the top 3. Such guarantees are offered for search engines having insignificant market share and are mostly unheard off. Ranking on search engines like these will have no benefit whatsoever. Would you open a shop in a desolate locality?

Myth #3 Search engine placement guarantee

Many companies are lead to believe that the only factor that is holding back their website from being an online success is search engine placement. They have a new website but it has not been indexed by search engines.

Unscrupulous vendors claim to have ‘special relationship’ with search engines and promise priority submits. Well there is no such thing for sure. This is what big G has to say on this:

“
Beware of SEOs…… allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google.
“
There is only one way of submitting your website to search engines – the ‘add URL’ feature. If you have an optimized website which is linked from other web pages, you can even spare yourself the trouble of submitting it to search engines.

The Truth – Customized Assurance

Certain SEO companies will offer you guarantee/assurance derived from the analysis of your current traffic, the competitiveness of your business, and revenue of your site. You will ideally be offered this type of specialized guarantee from the beginning of your contract, and it will ensure that you will achieve meaningful results and maximum ROI. Fair enough.

However, most SEO companies cannot or should not give assurance that they would achieve something (especially the ones mentioned in this post) which is totally out of their control. We personally consider it as cheating a client. We commit on deliverables, something we can fully control, and execute it with professional integrity.

Don’t get us wrong, we by no means are trying to scare you. There are experienced legit people who can help your website perform to its potential. However, mention of the word ‘guarantee’ should set the alarm bells ringing.

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Work backwards to move forward

27 Jan

Posted by admin In search engine optimization

Sounds like an oxymoron but is true nonetheless.

Businesses often build websites, with the intention to make money, without having carefully thought and planned the entire process. If you are in the process of building or rebuilding your website, this post is for you. For those of you who already have a website running, you could very well draw some inferences for making appropriate changes to your website or mark it for future reference.

Before jump starting your online business (or for that matter any business), you will have to define clear and concise goal(s); objectives that you wish to achieve via your website. Without a goal you are headed nowhere because you don’t know where you are going. It’s like hitting the road without actually knowing the destination. You can drive as much as your want but you would reach ‘nowhere’.

Your website goal could range from selling products/services to building your brand – whatever it is, you need to know for sure what you need to achieve. Once you are fixated on the goal(s) you want to achieve through your website, the job is half done (well begun is half done). You now need to ascertain the key performance indicators aka KPIs to measure your goal(s); the measurement part kicks in after the launch of website. The stage is all set – from here on you need to start working your way back.

It is essential that the website is designed to fulfill your goal(s). The website’s navigational structure should be designed to guide visitors to perform the desired action. It is imperative that every page is treated as a landing page - an entrance to the conversion process. If the entry doors are conspicuously absent, visitors would leave without fulfilling any of the goal(s). Please don’t expect that visitors would find these entry doors; you have to keep it wide open for them. Website content that urges visitors to perform the intended action(s) also plays a pivotal role in this entire process. Besides this, the website design should fulfill usability and readability parameters. Also, it is imperative to ensure that the website is not complex and/or cluttered – simple works fine.

If you are looking to promote your website using search engine optimization it is important that the on-page factors are incorporated during the design and development stage. Your SEO strategy will need to be ingrained into the website design. Search engine optimization should never be considered as an afterthought. If you do so you would duplicate efforts and end up redoing work (some if not all) done during the design and development cycle. It is therefore important that all these activities are carried out in tandem and are synchronized to achieve synergy. If you plan to hire an SEO agency, it is always a good idea to have them actively involved in the design and development of the website.

There are too many activities going on simultaneously and it is easy to lose sight of your goal. You would therefore need to carefully examine all activities to ensure that they are on track. Implement ‘course correction analysis’ to continuously monitor these activities and identify any deviation from the set objectives. I am not trying to scare you but it is crucial that all the pieces fit together perfectly when they are put together. It will decide whether your business is a success or a failure. ‘Going back to the drawing board’ is an option you should avoid at all costs.

In essence, every building block of your website should individually and commutatively work together to fulfill the goal. The only way of ensuring this is to work you way back to the smallest denominator with the ultimate goal in mind. Since each element will be built to fulfill the ultimate goal, the entity as a whole (website) will do exactly the same - help you achieve your goal.

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