blog

baidu earnings release shows 48% growth in net income

Posted by simon ashwin On Wednesday 10 Feb 10

Leading Chinese search engine, Baidu, Inc. ((ADR) NASDAQ: BIDU), announced yesterday its unaudited financial results for Q4 2009 and FY 2009. With news of the possible exit of Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) from the Chinese market, one would expect that Baidu is poised to further cement its dominant market leader position BUT the company’s transition to a new advertising platform and a couple of senior management departures in January has left analysts wondering about the future trajectory of the company.

Key financial highlights for Q4 2009 and FY2009 include:

• (Q4): Year-on-Year (YoY) online marketing revenues grew 39.8% to RMB1.261 billion (US$184.7 million).
• (Q4): YoY operating profit grew 51.7% to RMB462.2 million (US$67.7 million).
• (Q4): YoY net income grew 48.2% to RMB427.9 million (US$62.7 million).

• (FY): Total online marketing revenues grew 39.1% to RMB4.448 billion (US$651.6 million).
• (FY): Operating profit grew 46.3% to RMB1.605 billion (US$235.1 million).
• (FY): Net income grew 41.7% to RMB1.485 billion (US$217.6 million).

“The year ended on a positive note as Phoenix Nest’s better than anticipated performance helped us to exceed expectations for the fourth quarter. This encouraging performance is a reflection of Baidu’s relentless focus on execution and innovation. With a solid base of users and customers, our foundation is stronger than ever and we will continue...

Read More »

what is seo and why optimize?

Posted by simon ashwin On Friday 23 May 08

You spent a good deal, worked hard for many days and nights and built a great website, but alas! it doesn’t get enough visitors. There are millions upon millions of pages of web content out there and your website is totally lost in the shuffle, like the proverbial needle in a haystack. When search engines ignore your site, your site becomes non-existent in the cyber world. The real problem with your website is that it failed to harness the most cost-effective and powerful Internet marketing strategy: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)!

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your site appear at the top of search engine results for your domain-specific keywords and phrases. The higher your website ranks in the results of Google, Yahoo, MSN etc., the greater the chance that your site will be visited by many, which in turn would skyrocket your sales.

Simply put, Search Engine Optimization is about making your website visible on search engines. Its commercial purpose is to be the first to hit a customer base effectively.

Why Optimize for Search Engines

Everyday, millions of people search the web to find out what they look for. If your website doesn’t come up top in the results, you lose your business to your competitors. SEO is important not only because it brings lots of visitors to your website, but also because it helps to increase the return on investment, if harnessed properly. Say for example, you have a website that...

Read More »

combining video content with seo

Posted by simon ashwin On Thursday 03 Jan 08

Today amongst a Web2.0 field, search engines are beginning to concentrate on not only gathering text and images but video content. Naturally the demand by users has risen dramatically. As a business, you want to include content that is not only going to entice users to explore your other web site content, but showcase your product or service in a unique way to anticipate use.

As a great selling point, organizations can use a creative, cleverly marketed video package to demonstrate and display your product or service.

According to recent statistics, of the 80 per cent of Australian’s online, 62 percent are regular video viewers. Today, video’s online rival advertisements on television because of the potential to reach millions of viewers worldwide at no cost. For progressive companies, a popular video can become a positive and permanent addition to your brand awareness.

Keys to optimizing your video content and expanding your business brand

To make your web site a worthwhile investment, your content needs to be visible to search engines and clients. Video content that is not optimized can often be ignored, as consumers use search engines to locate videos and generally do not go directly to the source. Therefore the optimization of your video content is crucial. Whiteduck can implement a well designed, marketing strategy and employ tools such as Social Bookmarking and RSS Feeds to entice users to your web site and increase the average time spent browsing your web site.

Optimization of...

Read More »

seven common seo mistakes

Posted by simon ashwin On Friday 16 Nov 07

Starters in Search Engine Optimization, in their zest to increase their site’s SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) ranking, commit some mistakes, which drastically affect their Website’s position on search engines. The following is a list of 7 common mistakes, which you can use as a checklist while optimizing your Web pages.a

1. Ignoring the Title Tag
This is one of the gravest, but most common, mistakes that may spell doom for your site’s SERP ranking. Most of the search engines consider the Title tag very important. Search engines generally display the content that you give in the Title tag. Therefore, have most important keywords in the Title tag. DO NOT leave the Title tag empty or have irrelevant words such as “Home page”, “Welcome to our site”, etc. in the Title tag.

2. Irrelevant Keywords
Some Webmasters use irrelevant, but much sought after, keywords to drive traffic to their site. Getting traffic in such a way will not help your business in anyway. After all, you optimize your Website to boost your business. Say for example, you have a Website where you sell Desktop Computers. To increase the traffic, you use the keyword “Britney Spears” throughout your content, META tags, and Title tag. People who search for “Britney Spears” reach your page. But, when they find that your Website has nothing to do with “Britney Spears”, they will move away from your site quickly. You don’t gain anything from that traffic. In fact, had you optimized your site...

Read More »

top ten seo practices

Posted by simon ashwin On Sunday 15 Jul 07

Search Engine Optimization is the sum of many parts.

In order to generate the maximum results from your SEO campaign, it is very important to streamline certain aspects of your online presence.

Here are the top 10 SEO factors according to Whiteduck’s team:

1. Crawlability / Indexability
The notion of “If we build it, they will come...” still holds true for many web design and development agencies around the world. However, considering the fact that search engines have now become the “user interface” of the world wide web, you would be losing out on a lot of visitors and potential clients if you don’t pay attention to these basic requirements.

Clearing out all the technical “speed bumps” that could have a negative impact on the user’s experience or the search engine crawler’s access to your web site content, is crucial.

Using a “progressive enhancement” approach ensures that your website still provides the main content, even if all the “bells and whistles”, like flash or AJAX are turned off.

Starting with a solid foundation is key!

2. Keyword Choice
This is a big one!  All too often, keyword research is done with a limited SEO tool-set, or worse, based on half-baked research guidelines. Choosing the right keywords and key phrases to connect with your target audience is the corner stone of any successful SEO project.  The failure to do so can be very costly...  Proper research requires having  a solid understanding of the target...

Read More »