Is SEO a kind of Link Building?

SEO isn't what it used to be.

The search marketing world has changed. Content is still king and link building is still queen (debatable), but collaboration is the key to both crowns.

For the best local SEO results, make sure about:-

Proper Keyword Research: It is important to identify the keywords that will result in a conversion rather than just focusing on the keywords with the highest search volume. High search volume doesn’t always result in high ROI. 

·         A keyword is an easy way of referring to the queries people type into the search bars of their favourite engines. As a website owner, you want to know which keywords your customers are searching for so that you can use SEO best practices to optimize your site for them and improve your chances of appearing in the natural search results for these queries.

·         Look in Google Analytics. If you have Google Analytics installed on your website, log in and head over to the "Traffic Sources" menu. There, you'll be able to separate your organic search visitors and see a list of the keywords they used to get to your website. Unfortunately, a large number of your results will come up as "Not provided" (thanks to anonymous browsers and Google's proprietary reasons), but add the phrases that you do see to your growing keyword list. You can also find similar information in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

·         Leverage Google's "Related Searches". You can also head over to Google and conduct searches for each of the individual keywords you've come up with to this point. Then scroll down to the bottom of the results. There, you should see a separate section where Google lists other keywords that are related to your original phrase. If any of these keywords are relevant to your business, they deserve a place on your keyword list.

Onsite Optimization: Once the keywords are identified, make sure that the website is properly optimized for the chosen search terms. The title tag, Meta description, images, and header tags all need to be adjusted for the targeted keywords.

The website content needs to be written for the visitor instead of stuffing the website with the main keywords. The days of keyword stuffing are long gone, so write for the visitor and optimize for the search engines. Make sure to also include a contact page on the website that contains the business address and contact details.

Optimized Places Pages: The two most important business profile pages are Google+ Business and Bing Places for Business. These are the listings that appear at the very top of the Google and Bing search results, notating the business location on the accompanying map.

Many businesses create these pages but they fail to fully complete the profiles. Make sure to upload pictures, videos, and fill in all of the business details, making sure to list the businesses address and contact details exactly as they appear on the websites contact page.

Directory Listings & Citations: Getting your business listed on the more popular directory sites such as YellowPages.com and Local.com etc. The search engines take these citations into consideration when determining the authority of a local listing, so make sure to put the extra effort in making sure that NAP is consistent across the board.

High-Quality Link-Building: Links also play a role in local SEO, and quality again trumps quantity. Focus on getting high-quality links rather than purchasing link packages that just blast links throughout the web. Incorporating user-engaging content and info-graphics into the local SEO plan are two great ways to build natural links because they result in social sharing. This is the type of natural link-building that the search engines like to see, and reward accordingly.

It is important to understand that local SEO results do not happen overnight. There is no top secret method that will take your website to the top right away. It requires hard work, a well thought out plan and consistent follow through and execution in order to see top local search results.

-Pinkesh Kumar

Analyst

BitSprint

LOON (Project Loon)

A balloon flying high above your head is now your new savior from lousy internet connection. Google, the father of internet searches is also now proudly, the father of Loon Project, Loon for all.

Loon is a research and development venture by Google to provide high-speed internet to rural and remote areas around the globe. Since Google is obsessed with fixing the world’s internet issues and today high-speed connection is like electricity but yet 2.7 million masses are still wired to the earth, here comes the floating solution.

“Loon for all” project gives our dear old balloons a new hi-tech face. Loon uses Raven Aerostar and polyethylene plastic of about 0.076mm thickness for envelopes. These balloons are filled with Helium gas and they stand 50ft tall when fully inflated with the help of their custom air-pump, “Croce”.

These new hi-tech toys have their own solar panel of the size of card table to enable them to provide facilities around the clock. In full sun, these can produce up to 100W of power, well enough to keep the balloon working during day and even charge up for the night.

A small box of magic weighing 10kg holds up all the electronic needed for this wonder to work. It contains radio antennae and Ubiquiti Networks Rocket M2 to comply communications with other loons and ground resources.

These loons normally function for 55 days and are well equipped with parachutes to retrieve the solar panel and control box once the balloon is ready to be taken down.

Each balloon flies above the range of airplanes and below satellites, it covers a 12km radius thus covering a large area of 1,256km² alone. They transmit their signals to a ground receiving station, spaced about 100km apart. The most interesting part is the “sig-hop” i.e. the hopping of signals from one loon to another to each the ground work and hence us.

Currently the loons communicate at 2.4 and 5.8GHz unlicensed ISM bands but Google has a vision and mission of delivering 3G like speed. How? It’s still to be uncovered.

This entire fantasy-come-true project started back in 2008 when Google considered acquiring “Space Data Crop”, a company who sends similar balloons in air to maintain connection between truckers and oil companies in southern USA, but it didn’t plan out. So the unofficial work started in 2011 under incubation in Google X at Californian central valley.

On June 16 2013, many amateur astronomer of Pike County, Kentucky, New Zealand grabbed their binocular and spied the glimmering UFO like object high above their homes.

CNN and governments followed the suit. Rich DeVaul was now satisfied by the buzz his craft has created. It was the launch of Google’s very first loon and the start of bringing the Internet to a huge swath of as-yet-unconnected humanity. Google plans on sending up to 300 balloons around the 40^th parallel south, bringing connectivity to New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Argentina.

Lying down underground fiber cables is a cumbersome and expensive job, which many of the developing countries can’t afford. Yet the recent growth of the world demands these newly emerging nations to have connections around the globe for better future prospects. The Loon project focuses on such places and is using a sci-fi technology to bring the gas-lit era to mainstream.

So in few years to come, all you need to get 3G speed network is a small red balloon on your house’s exterior to invite the Google loon and connect you to the universe. But wait that doesn’t mean balloons replacing stars in open sky, or does it?

---
Divyansha Singh Bais
Technical Associate, BitSprint

Sixth Sense Technology

What is Sixth Sense Technology?

Sixth Sense Technology integrates digital information into the physical world and its objects, making the entire world your computer. It can turn any surface into a touch-screen for computing, controlled by simple hand gestures. It is not a technology which is aimed at changing human habits but causing computers and other machines to adapt to human needs. It also supports multi user and multi touch provisions. Sixth Sense device is a mini-projector coupled with a camera and a cell phone-which acts as the computer and your connection to the Cloud, all the information stored on the web. The current prototype costs around $350. The Sixth Sense prototype is used to implement several applications that have shown the usefulness, viability and flexibility of the system

Introduction of Sixth Sense Technology

'Sixth Sense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information the hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. The Sixth Sense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror, coloured marker and a camera. The camera, mirror and projector is connected wirelessly to a blue tooth smart phone device that can easily fit into the user's pocket, Software then processes the data that is collected by the capturing device and produces analysis. The software that is used in sixth sense device is open source type.

The Sixth Sense prototype contains a number of demonstration applications.

• The map application lets the user navigate a map displayed on a nearby surface using hand gestures to zoom and pan
• The drawing application lets the user draw on any surface by tracking the fingertip movements of the user’s index finger.
• Sixth Sense also implements augmented reality projecting information onto objects the user interacts with. For example a paper newspaper can be augmented with projected dynamic live information.

The system recognizes a user's free hand gestures as well as icons/symbols drawn in the air with the index finger, for example:

• A 'framing' gesture takes a picture of the scene. The user can stop by any surface or wall and flick through the photos he/she has taken.
• Drawing a magnifying glass symbol takes the user to the map application while a ‘@’ symbol lets the user check his mail.
• The gesture of drawing a circle on the user’s wrist projects an analog watch

Gesture Recognition 

It is a technology which is aimed at interpreting human gestures with the help of mathematical algorithms. Gesture recognition technique basically focuses on the emotion recognition from the face and hand gesture recognition. Gender recognition technique enables humans to interact with computers in a more direct way without using any external interfacing devices. It can provide a much better alternative to text user interfaces and graphical user interface which requires the need of a keyboard or mouse to interact with the computer. An interface which solely depends on the gestures requires precise hand pose tracking. In the early versions of gesture recognition process special type of hand gloves which provide information about hand position orientation and flux of the fingers. In the Sixth Sense devices coloured bands are used for this purpose. Once hand pose has been captured the gestures can be recognized using different techniques. Neural network approaches or statistical templates are the commonly used techniques used for the recognition purposes. This technique has an high accuracy usually showing accuracy of more than 95%. Time dependent neural network will also be used for real time recognition of the gestures

APPLICATION 

The sixth sense technology finds a lot of application in the modern world. The sixth sense devices bridge the gap by bringing the digital world into the real world and in that process allowing the users to interact with the information without the help of any machine interfaces. Prototypes of the sixth sense device have demonstrated viability, usefulness and flexibility of this new technology. According to the words of its developers the extend of use of this new device is only limited by the imagination of human beings

 

The sixth sense recognizes the objects around us and displays the information relating to those objects in a real time environment. The sixth sense technology allows the user to interact the information through hand gestures. This is a quiet efficient way compared to the text and graphic based user interface. It has the potential to form the transparent user interface for accessing the information around us.

# BitSprint Team

Robotics (BitSprint View)

Robots can do a lot for us: they can explore space or they can cut our toenails. But do advances in robotics and artificial intelligence hold hidden threats?

What can robots do for us?
Robots have two very different roles. The first is to operate in locations that humans can't reach, such as the aftermaths of accidents in mines, oil-rigs and nuclear power stations. The second, also deeply unglamorous, is to help elderly or disabled people with everyday life: tying shoelaces, cutting toenails and suchlike. Moreover, if robots can be miniaturised, they can perhaps be used inside our bodies for monitoring our health, undertaking surgery, and so forth.

Should we be scared by advances in artificial intelligence?

Those who should be worried are the futurologists who believe in the so-called 'singularity', when robots take over and themselves create even more sophisticated progeny. And another worry is that we are increasingly dependent on computer networks, and that these could behave like a single 'brain' with a mind of its own, and with goals that may be contrary to human welfare.
                                 To understand what underscores these fears, we need to understand science and technology as having a particular and exclusionary kind of mimesis. Mimesis is the way we copy and imitate. In creating artificial intelligence machines and robots we are copying the human. Part of what we copy is related to the psychic world of the maker, and then the maker is copying ideas, techniques and practices into the machine that are given by the cultural spirit (the science, technology, and life) of the moment. All these factors are fused together in the making of artificial intelligence and robots. So we have to ask why it is also so frightening to make this copy. Not all fear a robotic uprising; many people welcome machine intelligence and see it as wonderful opportunity to create a new life. So to understand why some fear and some embrace you really have to know what models of mimesis go into the making of robots.

BitSprint Recommends:

We have already seen the damaging effects of simplest forms of artificial self-replicating intelligence in the form of computer viruses. But in this case, the real intelligence is the malicious designer. Critically, the benefits of computers outweigh the damage that computer viruses cause. Similarly, while there may be misuses of robotics in the near future, the benefits that they will bring are likely to outweigh these negative aspects. We think it is reasonable to be concerned that we may reach a time when robotic intelligence outstrips humans' and robots are able to design and produce robots more advanced than them.

# BitSprint Team