Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimisation (SEO)  

It gives companies the ability to:
• Drive high quality customers to their website
• Increase sales leads from customers looking for their products and services
• Build their brand online by communicating marketing messages to their target audience
• Increase their profile against their competitors
• Target a global audience via international search engines
• Be accountable with ROI tracking (SEM)

What is SEO?
SEO is the act of modifying a website to increase its ranking in organic (vs paid), crawler-based listings of search engines.

How do organic search listings work?
• A spider or crawler which is a component of a SE gathers listings by automatically “crawling” the web
• The spider follows links to web pages, makes copies of the pages and stores them in the SE’s index
• Based on this data, the SE then indexes the pages and ranks the websites
• Major SEs that index pages using spiders: Google, Altavista, Msn, Aol, lycos

SEO strategies/techniques
Domain name strategies
- domain names are traffic magnets
- choose a domain name that will increase your search engine ranking. How?
- simple, short, no hyphens, no numbers
- use keywords, common words, advertising terms, product names
- choose  keywords that is important for your business

Linking strategies
- the more inbound links the higher the SE ranking
- if the site linking to you is already indexed, spiders will also receive your site 
- quality of inbound links is critical
- how to increase links: a) good content b) good outbound links c) target a list of sites from which you can request      inbound links
- links for the sake of links can damage your search rankings

“Link relevancy is critical in getting your site indexed by search engines”

“A small number of inbound links from high-quality, relevant sites is more valuable than many links from low-traffic, irrelevant sites.”

Keywords
- important in optimising rankings
- keywords are words that appear the most in a page
- the spider chooses the appropriate keywords for each page, then sends them back to its SE
- your web site will then be indexed based on your  keywords
- can be key phrases or a single keyword
- do not use common words eg ‘the’ ‘and’ ‘of’: spiders ignore them
- write keyword-rich text
- balance keyword-rich and readability
- always have text in your page: at least 100 words

Title tags
- important in optimising rankings
- the first thing that a search engine displays on a search return
- must keywords in title to be ranked no. 1
- should have the exact keyword you use for the page
- every single web page must have its own title tag
- you can use up to 65 characters

Meta description tags
- the next important
- displayed below the title in search results
- use dynamic, promotional language
- use keywords

Meta keywords tags
- no longer carry weight with major SEs
- a myth that meta keywords alone affect rankings

Alt tags
- include keywords in your alt tags

Submit your website to SEs for indexing
- submit your site to search engine directories, directory sites and portal sites
 - indexing takes 1 wk to 3 months

What is Oracle E-Business Suite?

Oracle E-Business Suite is the most comprehensive suite of integrated, global business applications that provides:

             The most complete, Integrated business intelligence portfolio

             The most adaptable global business platform

             The most customer-focused application strategy

The below example explains a few of the important terms and concepts used in the Oracle E-Business Suite. This would be a good article to understand the concepts behind Oracle Applications.

Say Harry is the owner of a wholesale fruit shop. He buys various fruits like apples, oranges, mangos and grapes etc from farmers directly and sells them to retail shop owners and also to the direct customers.

The farmers are referred to as VENDORS/SUPPLIERS in Oracle Applications. Harry keeps track of all his vendor ’ s information like  their addresses, bank account  details and the amount he owes to them for the fruits that he bought etc, in a book named ‘PAYABLES’

Harry gets an order from a retail shop owner of Fruit Mart, for a shipment of 11 bags of apples, 25 bags of oranges and 32 kgs of grapes. In Oracle Apps, bags and kgs are referred to as UOM (unit of measure), Fruit Mart is called CUSTOMER and the order is referred to as SALES ORDER. Harry maintains a book called ORDER MANAGEMENT where he writes down all the details of the SALES ORDERS that he gets from his customers.

Say the fruits have been shipped to the customer Fruit Mart. Harry now sends him the details like cost of each bag/fruit, the total amount that the customer has to pay etc on a piece of paper which is called INVOICE / TRANSACTION. Once the INVOICE has been sent over, the customer then validates that invoice against the actual quantity of fruits that he received and will process the payments accordingly. The invoice amount could be paid as a single amount or could be paid in installments. Harry’s customer, Fruit Mart pays him in installments (partial payments). So Harry has to make a note of the details like date received, amount received, amount remaining, amount received for what goods/shipments/invoice etc, when Harry receives the payments. This detail is called RECEIPT, which will be compared to the invoice by Harry to find how much Fruit Mart has paid to him and how much has to be paid yet. This information is maintained in a book named RECEIVABLES to keep track of all the customers, their addresses (to ship the items), what and how much he has shipped to his customers and the amount his customers owe him etc. Harry’s fruit business has begun to improve and has attracted more and more customers. As a result, Harry decided to buy a cold storage unit where he could stock more fruits. In Apps, this cold storage unit is known as WAREHOUSE and all the fruits are referred to as INVENTORY.  Due to increase in customers, Harry needs to hire more people to help him out in his business without any hiccups. These workers are called EMPLOYEES. At the end of every month, Harry pays the salary for all his employees through Checks. These checks are nothing but PAYROLL in Apps.

At the end of every month, Harry prepares a balance sheet in a book called GENERAL LEDGER to determine how much profit/loss he got and keeps track of the money going out and going in.

As the business grows, it becomes impossible to record everything on a paper. To make everybody’s life easier, we have very good tools in the market, which help the business men to keep track of everything. One such tool is Oracle E-Business Suite.

Oracle Applications is not a single application, but is a collection of integrated applications. Each application is referred to as a module and has it own functionality trying to serve a business purpose.

Few of the modules are Purchasing, Accounts Payables, Accounts Receivables, Inventory, Order Management, Human Resources, General Ledger, Fixed Assets etc.

Here is a high level business use of various modules:

    Oracle Purchasing handles all the requisitions and purchase orders to the vendors

    Oracle Accounts Payables handles all the payments to the vendors.

    Oracle Inventory deals with the items you maintain in stock, warehouse etc.

    Order Management helps you collect all the information that your customers order.

    Oracle Receivables help you collect the money for the orders that are delivered to the customers.

    Oracle Human Resources helps maintain the Employee information, helps run paychecks etc. 

Oracle General Ledger receives information from all the different transaction modules or sub ledgers and summarizes them in order to help you create profit and loss statements, reports for paying Taxes etc. For Example: when you pay your employees that payment is reported back to General Ledgers as cost i.e money going out, when you purchase inventory items and the information is transferred to GL as money going out, and so is the case when you pay your vendors. Similarly when you receive items into your inventory, it is transferred to GL as money coming in, when your customer sends payment, it is transferred to GL as money coming in. So all the different transaction modules report to GL (General Ledger) as either “money going in” or “money going out”, the net result will tell you if you are making a profit or loss.

All the equipment, shops, warehouses, computers can be termed as ASSETS and they are managed by Oracle Fixed Assets.

There is a lot more in Oracle applications. This is the very basic explanation just to give an idea of the flow in ERP for the beginners.

Invoice
Receipt
Customer
Vendor
Buyer
Supplier
Purchase Order
Requisition
ACH: Account Clearance House 
Sales Order
Pack Slip
Pick Slip
Drop Ship
Back Order
ASN: Advance Shipping Notice

Will Get back to you shorlty with more details and articles on Oracle technologies in the later sessions

 

Cheers,

Dinesh Nair

What is Global Warming?

Everybody is talking about “climate change” and “global warming”. But what is global warming, actually?

Global Warming is defined as the increase of the average temperature on Earth. As the Earth is getting hotter, disasters like hurricanes, droughts and floods are getting more frequent.

 Over the last 100 years, the average temperature of the air near the Earth´s surface has risen a little less than 1° Celsius (0.74 ± 0.18°C, or 1.3 ± 0.32° Fahrenheit). Does not seem all that much? It is responsible for the conspicuous increase in storms, floods and raging forest fires we have seen in the last ten years, though, say scientists.

 Their data show that an increase of one degree Celsius makes the Earth warmer now than it has been for at least a thousand years. Out of the 20 warmest years on record, 19 have occurred since 1980. The three hottest years ever observed have all occurred in the last eight years, even

 But it is not only about how much the Earth is warming, it is also about how fast it is warming. There have always been natural climate changes – Ice Ages and the warm intermediate times between them – but those evolved over periods of 50,000 to 100,000 years.

 A temperature rise as fast as the one we have seen over the last 30 years has never happened before, as far as scientists can ascertain. Moreover, normally the Earth should now be in a cool-down-period, according to natural effects like solar cycles and volcano activity, not in a heating-up phase.

 All these facts lead scientists to infer that the global warming we now experience is not a natural occurrence and that it is not brought on by natural causes. Man is responsible, they say. What did we do? Read more about the man-made causes and impacts of global warming in the following articles.