Fresh Content is the King

We already know that good content is almost always the reason why a website ranks high. But we also know it’s not only about how good your content is, the freshness of your content accounts for a successful online business too because search engines prioritized fresh contents more. A lot of online marketers are now beginning to realize the significance of having constantly updated content in websites.

We know what a ‘spider’ or a web ‘crawler’ is, right? These two are components of search engines which are sent to find relevant or fresh information in different sites on the web. This process involves indexing websites so that search engines would know its contents and if it is updated regularly.

As far as I know, marketers don’t always have the time to write and update the contents of their website. So, it is best to choose a ghostwriter who has excellent researching skills, better writing abilities, and good working habits.

Workers Don’t Want US Jobs?

Is it true that Indians don’t want US jobs anymore? According to a recent survey of Indian high-tech graduates, the vast majority of them would rather remain in India than relocate to the United States or other foreign countries to pursue career opportunities.

The survey stated of 677 graduates of Indian Institute of Technology showed a major drop in the percentage of Indian citizens who chose to leave the country for higher education or seek employment.

The research and analytics firm that conducted the survey says, among those high-tech workers that graduated between 1964 and 2001, 35% moved to countries other than India. Among those graduated in 2002 and 2007, 84% remained in India and 16% decided to pursue interests somewhere else.

It also showed that, fewer Indian graduates believe that other countries such as the USA would provide more opportunities than their nation of origin. Sixty percent of those graduating between 1964 and 2001 said they thought the United States and other developed countries provided better education and career opportunities.

That number dropped among more recent graduates to 51% believing they would have a better chance landing a job if located outside of India.

In conclusion, other Indian professionals or workers realized that they should not always depend on companies who outsource in their country; especially US- based companies because they know that they can gain more knowledge and more benefits if they land a job outside the country.

But the majority of Indians who choose to stay believe they can succeed best in their own country.

I guess deciding to stay and work for your own country is the best choice, right? Why decide to work abroad if there are a lot of good opportunities for you?

Working abroad is not an easy way to fulfill what’s the best for you, and you have no assurance if you can get a better job. We should be wise in making our decisions, and that’s the best thing to do because its so hard to find a better job these days.

Outsourcing: Come and Gone

Large firms that have fueled the global Information Technology outsourcing boom and have put developing countries such as the Philippines on investors’ radar screens are getting picky. “We do believe that the boom years for IT outsourcing growth have come and gone”.

Nowadays, buyers are getting more selective and strategic in the way they approach outsourcing and, as such, the pace of growth is slowing. Buyers are still prematurely terminating contracts, and questioning the value of outsourcing. They are also struggling with the basics of determining what to outsource, measuring effectiveness and managing a global pool of resources.

Buyers are concerned about contract renegotiations, extensions, and terminations to seek additional outsourcing opportunities. In 2006, 8 percent of offshore buyers said they plan to decrease their levels of outsourcing over the next 12 months.

Firms are reining in outsourcing for three reasons:

-Either they mistakenly outsourced a process or function that is core to their business and are now bringing those back in.

-Their provider over-promised and under-delivered.

-The complexity of managing and measuring outsourcing projects and relationships overshadowed the benefits.

This however does not signal the death knell for IT outsourcing. The industry is alive and will continue to grow well into the future, although at a slower pace.

If this situation continues, maybe this will be the end of offshore outsourcing because it lessens the quality of IT outsourcing rate to all buyers.

Offshore Outsourcing Grows, Automation key to Cost Cutting

According to Gartner Research, U.S. companies will increase the amount of work they outsource and in the next 10 years it will send overseas, but the type of work and how the work gets done will change.

The research firm is set to release this week the findings at its “Outsourcing & Vendor Management Summit” in Washington, D.C. The findings showed that by 2011 core outsourcing and external services will become the largest IT market spend, at more than 30% inching out spending on Telco costs. Gartner also forecasts that the offshore delivery model for IT services will increase in the coming years as U.S. companies look to further reduced costs. Today 15% of IT services use the offshore model. In 2013, 25% of outsourced services will be offshored and by 2018 that number will jump to 40%, the firm predicts.

Gartner states that,” Using staff in lower-labor-cost locations can decrease costs and provide access to different labor pools in terms of access to talents”. “Buyers looking to maximize cost reduction will need to embrace greater levels of non domestic delivery.”

But according to Robert Brown, research vice president covering outsourcing and IT services at Gartner, the true mechanism that will drop the costs of, say, business process outsourcing (BPO), will be the increased use of automation technology to complete human-intensive tasks. Today about 90% of the processes outsourced are completed manually, showing that automation has increased 5% since 1998. Gartner predicts by 2013, 35% of the processes will be automated, and in 2018, there will be a “huge and fast shift to automation” with 55% of processes being automated.

Gartner adds that, about 10% of the total available market today embraces BPO, and while the market will grow, it is not going to grow exponentially by 2018. Gartner forecasts that by then there will be 25% market penetration for BPO, and companies still are not comfortable outsourcing or offshoring business processes, even though many lend themselves well to the model. For example, hiring and recruiting, payroll and other HR business processes are a good fit for outsourcing and the automation that will deliver bigger cost savings.

“When you offshore a business process, you are fundamentally offshoring a human-intensive task,” Brown says. “The cost savings can be enormous, if you can then automate the task. The automation part of the story will probably hide the cost savings we have seen so far in outsourcing.”

Top 30 Offshore Outsourcing Locations According to Gartner Research Institute

Gartner Research Institute thinned down the world’s top countries that offer the best locations for offshore services.

Tuesday- the mentioned research firm released its Top 30 Leading Locations for Offshore Services of 2008. According to the results, India might not be the only country when considering outsourcing work overseas. Countries such as Argentina, South Africa and New Zealand could take some of the spotlight off India as the offshore industry darling; although India remains to be in the list of the leading outsourcing locations.

The location selection is a key factor that companies need to consider when sending work overseas, Gartner says; and the city they choose will impact the success of the offshore engagement.

“Whether you have a country-led or vendor-led approach to offshore services, you must understand the offshore location landscape,” according to a presentation by Gartner research vice president Ian Marriott.

This is a great opportunity for the countries mentioned by Gartner, to improve their economies more.

Gartner evaluated 30 countries in three world regions that could address enterprise companies’ outsourcing needs. Considering 10 key criteria, Gartner scored the potential of numerous cities to provide the right mix of English language proficiency, local government support, infrastructure and technical considerations, such as data security and privacy. The research firm released the data at its Outsourcing & Vendor Management Summit in Washington, D.C., this week.

Who Really Benefit in Offshore Outsourcing?

Custom Search

Most of us know what offshore outsourcing is. Offshore outsourcing is also called as a type of business process outsourcing (BPO), is the exporting of IT-related work from the United States and other developed countries to areas of the world where there is both political stability and lower labor costs or tax savings.

I recently read the article from McKinsey Institute, says that the savings enjoyed by companies that move labor-intensive service industry work from the United States to countries with lower labor costs have triggered an mass departure of US business-processing jobs.

Some analysts project that by 2015 roughly 3.3 million of them will have moved abroad. This prospect has prompted calls for the government to restrict offshoring. But they overlook the benefits that build up to the US economy from it.

This is a really mass destruction for the US economy because of this issue that they have been experiencing right now. This is also a good news for countries that really dominating in offshore outsourcing as well, especially India and Philippines.

A study by the McKinsey Global Institute details the wide positive economic benefits to the US economy from offshoring.

Beyond Offshoring

Companies that send their back-office jobs offshore often cut their labor costs by as much as half. But new research by the McKinsey Global Institute finds that these companies risk leaving billions of dollars in savings behind if they just replicate what they do at home in countries where labor is cheap.

The savviest operators redesign business processes to use automation and take full advantage of the new environment’s potential.

Transforming business processes as part of a strategy to offshore back-office functions can release huge new revenue opportunities even more valuable than the obvious labor cost savings that come with offshoring.

Outsourcing: Affected US Economy Recession?

I recently read in the news that US economy’s downturn might affect outsourcing. We know that US economy is involved vastly in most of the world economies, and it says that any major slow down might lead to a global downturn. If this happens in the US economy, there will be a huge downturn to the offshore outsourcing countries, especially India, Ireland, South Africa and the Philippines, who have benefited from outsourcing because of the low-cost of labor; and wherein most of the companies are from the US.

Slowing down of US economy means that companies, industries, and organizations in the US that outsource, are evaluating the recessionary trends. This might automatically translate into more interest in offshore outsourcing.

Outsourcing could be a strong business proposition in good times, and it’s an even stronger proposition when bad times last. Offshoring will grow over the long term, since it drives cost savings. However, this might not be quite so in the short term.

With the advert of the outsourcing trend, many IT/ITES companies have been joining the wave of outsourcing, growing by leaps and bounds.

It was like the outsourcing industry around the world was run as a subsidiary of the US/European economy. However, since the last 6 months, the US economy has undergone major changes. There had been a severe sub prime crisis hitting the economy, with the US dollar value depreciating to record levels.

The credit crunch might have a positive or negative effect on the outsourcing industry. Downturn in the US economy plus possible recession means technology and outsourcing as solutions to the need to slash overheads and minimize any negative impact on the bottom line.

The truth is that the US economy is at an unpredictable tipping point. If a very serious recession hits, then companies might actually scale back on outsourcing – this would be the resolve of service companies having less customers, therefore needing less service provision and therefore believing that a scaled-down internal team would suffice as opposed to an outsourced department.

Backlinks to Your Website

Backlinks are incoming links to a website. A high number of backlinks mean an indication of the popularity of the site and/ or its importance. It is also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Backlinks are very important, especially in search engine optimization because search engines like Google and Yahoo, will give more credit to a website that has good quality backlinks, and are most likely to consider websites which are more relevant to search queries.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of quality inbound links to that site. But what is an inbound link? When site A links to site B, site A has an outbound link and site B has an inbound link. Inbound links are counted to determine link popularity, an important factor in SEO. We should not be satisfied with simply getting inbound links; it is the quality of the inbound link that matters most.

How to check your backlinks? Here are the ways of checking your backlinks:

Google webmaster Console (http://www.google.com/webmasters)- It is an absolute reader for checking backlinks. Webmaster console is probably the most accurate source for backlink checking. The big disadvantage is that you can only check backlinks for your own websites. Also, some people say that its another way for Google how to get more information about your site. If you are doing something dishonest, be careful.

Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)- If you don’t have access to the webmaster console, then Yahoo is your tool. It’s not as accurate as Google webmaster console but still good enough. Seeing up to 1000 backlinks for very domain, but results include nofollow links as well.

Google Allinanchor command – Using Allinanchor command with your website name you can get quite a lot of backlinks for your site. Advantage of this is that, using that method you can get links which were not reported by Google link command or Yahoo siteexplorer

SEO Elite, Backlink Analyzer (http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer), (http://www.seoelite.com) – These tools can help you with digging up backlinks from search engines in an easier way. You don’t have to manually check every page in Google/Yahoo as this tool compiles a report with backlinks along with other useful information like Google Pagerank, Alexa rating etc.

Alternative search engines – There are other search engines that can give you information about backlinks:

MSN – uses link operator like G or Y – link:http://www.yourwebsite.com

Exalead – uses link operator like G or Y – link:http://www.yourwebsite.com

These search engines can give you sometime a backlink which is not reported by Yahoo Siteexplorer, but mostly its waste of time.

Positive Outlook of Multimedia

Multimedia is defined as a combination of sound, animation, graphic, and video. It is also known as a subset of hypermedia in the world of computers that combines the elements of multimedia with hypertext, with which it links the information.

A multimedia application is one that uses a collection of media sources. Better known for this applications are PowerPoint, a Microsoft presentation package, and Acrobat, an Adobe document presentation product.

Multimedia nowadays is commonplace because of its speed and efficiency. It gives the user a “richer” and more interesting experience. A lot of people using multimedia for business reports, school reports, and business promotions would agree to this.

In order for a computer to cope with multimedia, it needs to fulfill certain requirements such as, needs to be powerful enough to display the presentation. Example of that is a palmtop which utilizes a powerful processor to display pictures on its screen and be able to play good quality sound. A pc needs a reasonable graphics (video) card, and a considerable amount of memory on both RAM and hard drive space.

A method of producing reasonable sound (sound card plus speakers on a pc) is needed. It is also needs an output interface if motion is to be used for example, force feedback motion on joysticks to make them shake in games. Appropriate software to run the presentation is needed. An example of that is software that will display the video and sound file properly.

In accessing multimedia files through the Internet, the computer to be used has to be fast, with enough memory space available.

If the internet connection is slow, the files may need to be downloaded onto the computer directly and then played at a later date. And if the connection is fast enough, a broadband connection for example, then the files can be run directly as they are received, and it is known as ‘streaming media’.

In order to have a multimedia presentation, a computer needs to be able to output its sound, video, motion etc. to external devices such as speaker, monitors, and joystick and of course keyboard.

Even though multimedia has a lot of use in our industry, there are still disadvantages of using it. Because it is quite expensive for the following reasons: Acquisition or rental of equipment to produce multimedia can be costly, multimedia in Web Base Training (WBT) may require a high learning curve for designers since the use of multimedia in WBT is fairly new to most trainers and instructional designers. Development may require contracting out for specialized skills.

In conclusion, we should always put in our minds that the purpose of multimedia is to provide communications or virtual communications using text, graphics, animation, and video.

Working with Multiple Service Providers

First and foremost, a service provider is an entity that provides services to other entities. It usually refers to a business that provides subscription or web services to other businesses or individuals. Internet access mobile phone operators and web application hosting are examples of service providers.

Is the US and UK looking for single or multiple offshore service providers?

It’s always good to work with a single offshore service provider in order to establish a strong relationship. However, to cater to special needs, it is a good idea to establish small project oriented relationships with other vendors.

There should only be one main offshore service provider, while the other must be selected for domain specific expertise that your vendor cannot immediately render, for reasons varying from competency, right resources, and time.

Working with vendors and developing a relationship with them takes time, energy and investment. All companies cannot make such an investment too often and prefer to stick to a couple of vendors who address their needs.

Other companies don’t just rely on a single offshore provider because it’s like placing all eggs in one basket. You are totally dependent on one vendor for all your outsourced work. Perhaps, to address this concern of security, more so to fulfill special project needs, selecting a few more vendors would be suitable.

But it depends on whether the task you want to outsource requires different skill sets. It helps to have a dedicated Project Management Office (PMO).

But nowadays a lot of business companies are opting to outsource to multiple locations. Why? Because it helps accelerate the business pace. Offshore outsourcing comes to its meaning when a company hires outside vendors or experts for services to widen up their services and professionalism.

Examples of these vendors are India, China and Philippines. These three countries are dominating in Business Process Outsourcing and IT outsourcing industry

Having multiple offshore vendors allows you to spend great time for new development of products and strategy. It prevents your company from extra expenses like opening new offices and work space for completion of several tasks while saving money for other business expenses.

Also avoiding expenses on workers cost such as taxes, vacation time, holidays, medical, unemployment costs, workers comp. etc. In addition, multiple vendors can help expand the market share at the same time create competition. This in return will add prosperity to your business taking it to the top level in every aspect by preventing extra expenditure and time on useless things and utilizing it in proper channel.