You may have a spectacular website, but there are a few essential requirements that your website needs to be successful.

Meta Tags: Title Tag, Meta Keyword and Meta Description tags should be included in your HTML code at the top of every page. Search engines will crawl them and store them to display in their search results. Again, each page should be optimized separately and have a unique title, keywords, and description tags.

Navigation: Normally I will suggest Top, Left and Bottom Navigation, also if possible breadcrumb navigation too. Make sure it stays the same across the board on all pages of your site. Your job is to guide your visitors through your website, making sure they always know where they are and how to get to where they need to go.

Search Engine Optimized: Trust me it is very important, everybody wants their pages to rank well in the search engines. All the pages of your website should be optimized with 2, or 3 keywords/phrases. Use your keywords into your title tag, Meta keyword and description and in the body of each page, also use them in your images alt tag, even in the names you give your pages.

Google Analytics/Tracking System: Once your site is up and running you’ll want to keep your eye on traffic. Who’s visiting your website, what pages are the most popular, where is the traffic coming from. All of these questions and more can be answered by using a good analytics program. You can use Google Analytics for this, once registered you will be given some Java Script code to copy and paste in all your web pages.

Contact Us Information: Many websites fail because the visitors cannot find a way to contact the owner of the website. If you can’t include a phone number, at least have an email address or a “Contact Us” form. By this you can make your visitors feel comfortable and they can reach you.

Privacy Policy/Disclaimer: Privacy Policy document should be standard issue for every website you have. Visitors need to know how you are going to use their personal information.

You also need to include a disclaimer/terms of use page. This protects you and spells out to your visitors what they’re agreeing to by using your website.

Copyright Notice: All web pages should include a copyright notice. If you don’t want to have to update it manually every year, find a simple Javascript that will automatically do it for you.

Search Box/Site Map: If your website is rather large, you will also want to include a way to search, or have a “Site Map”. There are many ways to add a search function to your site, the easiest being to use Google‘s free service at- http://www.google.com/sitesearch/

A site map is just one web page that contains links to every page of your site, usually broken down by category.

Newsletter Sign Up/RSS Feed: By offering a newsletter you will be building a list of possible prospects, which is invaluable to any site owner. Remember no body will buy from you if they don’t know you.

You can also offer an RSS feed for your newsletter, or updates to your blogs or website. This makes it easy for others to keep up with your most recent posts.

Social Media Share Button: With the popularity of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, you would be foolish not to include an easy way for your content to be shared with others. Visitors can instantly share them with their friends. The best example I can give is ‘AddThis’ http://www.addthis.com/

Trust Seals/Testimonials: They both instil trust and confidence in your visitors. Remember, when someone comes to your website, they don’t know who you are and if you are selling something, they may not feel comfortable giving out their credit card information. To help them include trust seals.

Example: If you are dealing with online buying and selling, use ‘VeriSign’ Seal – http://www.verisign.com/

Also, if you have testimonials from happy customers, or ezine subscribers, weave them into your site copy. People always love to hear that others have had a happy experience with your products/services. Make sure you take permission first from the testimonial writers before placing them on your website.

These are the basic things your website should have, to build trust in your visitors. It is not very difficult to create a website, but to stands out in crowed, you need to include these important elements.

- Joydeep Deb

IIT Bombay unveils ‘AGNI‘ Formula Student car Bangalore: ‘AGNI’, a Formula Student car developed by the IIT Bombay students was unveiled for the Formula Student competition to be held in July at Silverstone Racing Circuit, England. The competition is organized annually by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) at eight different venues, reports Zigwheels. The car -equipped with a Honda CBR 600 F4i motorcycle engine, and weighing just 275 kg including the driver – was unveiled by Indian Formula 1 racer Narayan Kathikeyan. 95 teams from universities from around the world take part in this competition. The students face the challenges of designing, building and race a one man, open-wheeled race car. This has to be done assuming that they have been engaged by a manufacturing firm to produce a prototype car for evaluation as a potential production item. IIT Bombay’s first race car was the ‘VAYU’, developed by 35 students & faculty. The car competed with 120 other entries from different universities around the globe. Massive efforts were put in to make the car lighter and quicker, as the team has managed to shed a lot of weight of the car. The chassis is shorter than ‘VAYU’, boosting dynamics even further.

XML Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about pages on their site that may be crawled by their robots.

A typical XML Sitemap file lists each URL, together with information about when it was last updated, how often it normally changes, and how important it is, relative to other pages in the site). This helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site.

Generate your website sitemap by finding link here http://fashiong.com/linkexchange/185/Site-map-maker.html

The official site for the joint venture is at sitemaps.org and contains a lot of info about the new standard and it’s syntax. What the site singularly fails to do is explain correctly how to submit your sitemap to the big three! The format suggested on the site of:

does not currently work at any of the three sites! Until it does, this short article provides instructions for how to (a) create your sitemap and (b) how to submit to each of the three main search engines…

Creating your Sitemap

Some hosting providers (for example 1and1) provide utilities via their web control panel, to create your sitemap, so you should always check with your provider first. If this service is not available, then make a visit to xml-sitemaps.com and enter your site URL into the generator box. Copy-and-paste the resulting sitemap into notepad, then save-and-upload to your site with the file name: sitemap.xml

If you want to validate the XML prior to uploading to the search engines (useful if you have made any manual amendments), look at the XML validator (at the same site) where you can put in the URL of your sitemap and check it against the standard.

Submit sitemap to MSN

MSN have yet to implement a formal interface for Sitemap submission (as at July 2007). To monitor the situation, please visit (from time to time) the MSN Official Livesearch Blog (where where future announcements are likely to be found).

Whilst MSN have yet to implement a front door, there is a recognised back door for submitting your sitemap to the MSN Search index; namely moreover.com! You should use the following syntax directly in your browser URL box:

Since February 2005, moreover.com have been the official provider of RSS feeds to the myMSN portal (see press release) and reliable evidence suggests that submission to Moreover will result in MSN spidering your pages within 2-3 weeks.

Note that, whilst MSN still do not support direct submission, they do suggest on their blog that you add a reference to your Sitemap into your robots.txt file (something now supported by sitemaps.org). For example:

This would tell MSN (and all other engines) to crawl your sitemap file but not to crawl your cgi-bin directory. For more info on how to implement a robots.txt file (in the root of your site webserver) please visit: http://www.robotstxt.org

Submit sitemap to Google

Google originally developed the XML schema for sitemaps and have developed a dedicated portal for webmasters, from where you can submit your sitemap:

First, you need to tell Google all the sites you own, then verfiy that you indeed own them. The verifiaction is achieved by adding a metatag between the head tags on your site homepage. The syntax for the tag is as follows:

There are full instructions on how to do this on the Google site.

Submit sitemap to Yahoo

Yahoo follows a similar approach to Google. Again, there is a dedicated sevice for webmasters (Yahoo! Site Explorer) and a procedure for verifying your ownsership of the site. First go to:

Add a site, then click on the verification button. You can then download a verfication key html file – which you will need to upload to the root directory of your webserver. Then you can return to Site Explorer and tell Yahoo to start authentication. This will take up to 24 hours. At the same time you can also add your sitemap by clicking on the manage button and then adding the sitemap as a feed.

Submit sitemap to Ask

Ask follows a simpler approach to the other three. To submit you sitemap, you simply enter a ping URL, followed by the full URL of where your sitemap is located:

After clicking return, you will get a reassuring message from Ask that they have received your submission. Very neat!

About the author:

David Viney, the author of Get to the Top on Google, is a leading website promotion expert – and provides search engine optimisation services to companies large and small. Further articles tackling the tricky SEO challenges faced by David’s customers may be found on the SEO Expert Services site.

Kanpur: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur has come in to agreement with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to launch a nano satellite. It will be the country’s lightest and the institute’s first satellite to be launched in the orbit from Sriharikota.

IIT Kanpur had presented the second design review to ISRO which nodded to launch the satellite.

“Though the memorandum of understanding between ISRO and IIT-K for the project was signed in February, regular review sessions are being carried out by ISRO to check the progress of the project,” said Sanjay Govind Dhande, Director, IIT Kanpur.

“On Tuesday, our technical team working on the project apprised ISRO authorities of the release and antenna mechanism,” he said.In April, the first review of Jugnu was carried out by ISRO.

Since last December, a team of 40 students and around 12 professors, led by Professor and Mechanical Engineering Department Head, Nalinaksh S Vyas have been working on the project.

“A similar project in any European country would have cost over Rs 10 crore but we expect the entire project to complete within a budget of Rs 2-3 crore, without compromising on quality. This is a welcome signal for indigenous remote sensing technologies,” said Vyas.

A technical team led by D Madhav Murthy in the ISRO for Small Satellite, has said that the procedures for informing the ISRO officials for launch by a mother satellite has been provided, along with the details of the positioning of the satellite antenna set up in the institute premises.

Jugnu weighs around 3.5 kgs and would be 34 cm long and 10 cm wide. Equipped with the micro imaging and micro electronic system, it will transfer the images to the IIT Kanpur campus. The high resolution pictures obtained will be used for different applications like drought monitoring, wasteland management, urban planning and flood risk management.

“Although the stipulated life time of the satellite is six months, we are optimistic that it will complete at least 12 months in the orbit,” said Dhandhe.

Rajeev Motwani, the Indian-American computer science professor at Stanford University who mentored Google‘s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were graduate students, has died in a swimming pool accident at his Atherton, California home. He drowned Friday morning in a backyard swimming pool at the home, said the San Jose Mercury News. Though paramedics were called when his body was found, and he was pronounced dead at the scene at 12.28 p.m.

Born March 26, 1962, in Jammu, Motwani grew up in New Delhi, earned a computer science degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur in 1983, and his doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley in 1988. As a Stanford professor, he also served as the director of graduate studies for the computer science department and founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS).

Motwani was well known for his research in theoretical computer science and was a winner of the Godel Prize in 2001 for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to hardness of approximation. His work had a major impact on the field of algorithms, and he used his knowledge of that field to develop methods for searching almost infinite archives of data by randomly selecting subsets of the data. It was in the field of data mining that he made some of his seminal contributions. The field is the basis of much of modern Internet commerce and the operation of search engines such as Google.

Motwani co-authored two widely-used theoretical computer science textbooks, Randomized Algorithms with Prabhakar Raghavan (Cambridge University Press 1995, ISBN 978-0521474658) and Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation with John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman (2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, 2000).

Motwani helped many Valley startups gain a foothold, but none so famous as Google, whose cofounder Sergey Brin mourned him Saturday. “I want him to really be remembered well. It’s a rare combination to have somebody who is so smart and also such a nice guy,” Brin told Mercury News on the phone.

Motwani, he added, “had a lot of interest in computer science theory. He’s primarily a theoretician, and it’s incredible the amount of impact he has had directly on products and companies.”

The news of Motwani’s death struck like a thunderclap in Silicon Valley. Blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter communications were filled with testimonials to a brilliant, kind man who was never too busy to help a budding entrepreneur or struggling graduate student.

Motwani is survived by his wife Asha Jadeja and daughters Naitri and Anya. The family will hold a private funeral, according to the university’s news agency, but a memorial service will be held at a later date.

Sitting on a pool of close to 900 patents, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are, for the first time, planning to monetise these intellectual properties (IPs) by exploring tie-ups with firms that invest in “inventions”.>

IIT Bombay, for instance, recently joined hands with Intellectual Ventures (which has drawn criticism for being a “patent troll” — those who acquire patents not to develop products but to pressure companies to pay licensing fees) to seek support in marketing and licensing patents the institute holds. IIT Delhi too has signed up with the venture fund and others like IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur and IIT Guwahati are considering such offers.

Other than the US-based Intellectual Ventures, Imperial Innovation — an arm of UK’s Imperial College — has approached a few IITs for the same purpose.

“Most of our faculty does research and there’s no inclination towards inventions. With this tie-up there’s a clear incentive to invent,” said Devang Khakkar, director, IIT Bombay. IIT Delhi Director Surendra Prasad agrees: “Securing the intellectual property (IP) has never been a major ambition for a faculty member. Since this tie-up, we have a regular series of patent filing which is picking up now. Besides, arrangements like these would help us protect the IP to an extent.” On an average, IIT Delhi files 20-25 patents annually.

Most of the IITs agree that while faculty members are interested in research, few actually take this as an opportunity for innovation. They are discovering that tying with companies like Intellectual Ventures helps because it provides them the wherewithal to market and monetise their patents.

Moreover, IITs say these companies not only facilitate the institute in filing for patents, but also to invent in the knowledge gap areas, called open invention.

Filing a patent in India, for instance, costs between Rs 4,000 and Rs 5,000, compared to around $25,000 to $30,000 (Rs 12 lakh to Rs 14 lakh) in the US. Indian universities still lack the capability to raise funds for innovation. A majority of large universities globally have a Technology Licensing Officer who works towards raising commercial investment in the development of innovation.

Industry observers agree that patent disclosures have increased dramatically since the IITs started tying up with these companies. “In a year’s time, patent disclosures have more than doubled. And in the next few years, it would go three-four times higher,” said a senior executive from one of the invested companies. Agrees IIT-B, which has seen the number of patent disclosures double.

The number of patents filed for 2007-08 is still not available. The Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks said the number of patents filed in 2006-07 was 28,940 — a 19 per cent increase over 24,505 filed in 2005-06. The number of applications for patents originating from India was 5,314 — approximately 18 per cent of the total number of applications.

India, though, is a laggard when compared to China which is the third-most prolific patent-filing country in the world after the United States and Japan. The State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) received more than 694,000 patent applications in 2007, says an Evalueserve report.

The Indian Patent Office, on the other hand, received just 35,000, 20-year patent applications in 2007-08. “Patent filing has been growing in both China and India at about 20 per cent a year, compared with a 7 per cent growth rate for the US. However, SIPO received approximately the same number of 20-year applications in 1997 as the IPO did in 2007-08. This implies that India is approximately 10 years behind China,” the report added.

If patent filings in China continue to grow at the present rate, SIPO will overtake the US Patents Office by 2012 in innovation patents.

There are several reasons for the rapid proliferation of patenting in China, especially after that country joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001. In China, patents are issued faster than in India: the average time taken from filing to grant in 2007 was 26 months for invention patents, 6.8 months for utility model patents and 6.6 months for design patents. In India it takes three to five years for a patent to be granted.

The Chinese government also gives grants to research institutes and universities filing a large number of patent applications. The patent office also has many initiatives to create intellectual property awareness among Chinese companies.

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