Tips to Get the Best Air Fare Deals

Tips to Get the Best Air Fare Deals

The dotcom cult has made the world much easier, faster and flexible and finding discounted airlines tickets is no exception. Booking and buying airline tickets was never as straightforward as it is today with plenty of flight details available on the internet. Whether you wish to make an exploration trip or business trip, you can find all details to suit your needs on the web.

Plan Your Trip a Little in Advance

Planning is always beneficial in saving money and after all, a penny saved is a penny earned. The biggest benefit of advance planning is that you will be able to have flexible dates for your travel. This flexibility in dates can make you grab some of the best deals online as it will also give you enough time to do enough research on the air fares. One of the surprising facts about air fares is that they are really cheap during the weekends or also during the last minute buy of tickets. The air tickets to Asian countries is quite cheap, for instance going to cities like Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok are much inexpensive from Canada or U.S.

Forget Agents!

Gone are the days when you had to depend on the agents to fetch you the best deals for getting an airline ticket. You can get yourself airline tickets, hotel bookings and much more online. After all, the agent would also look at earning money in buying you a ticket! Avoiding them can actually make you save a lot of money. Getting a good deal is no longer a hassle as you can do online research on your preferred destination flights with just a few clicks of the mouse.

The Comparative Advantage

Though this term has much of relevance for economics scholars, let’s take it in the literal meaning of the word. A good comparison of the air fare can be made through a pool of websites that offer the services to view the details of the discounted tickets to the destination of your choice.

However, there are also sites that perform the comparison of the discounted air tickets on your behalf. Flightnetwork.com is the best website to make a comparative study and take the advantage of buying the most inexpensive air tickets; they have great offers for people wishing to travel from Toronto to Mumbai. Check out their special air fares that you will surely get no where else. The website also features several other valuable and handy details regarding hotel bookings and much more.

Note: I have written the above article with SEO point of view and therefore, I have not made it sound like some marketing article for flightnetwork.com.

Gmail is 10th most visited US site

Gmail has been seen as 10th most visited US site

Gmail lags behind direct competitors in the US like Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail. However, a new study shows that - in terms of the most visited US properties overall, Google's e-mail service (Gmail) knocked the popular sister site YouTube out of the top 10 list for the first time.

As per the Hitwise report, during the week ending January 10, 2009, Gmail jumped up the list of most visited US sites to number 10. Number 10 was previously YouTube.

Hence, it can be said that Gmail overtakes YouTube as 10th most visited US site!!!

How to optimize an image and gain benefits

How to optimize an image and gain benefits?
One of my friends asked me few days back followed by one more yesterday; that asked me to put this on my blog as it should be useful to all who are unaware of image optimization.

If your image is correctly optimized, it shall come up in the Google image search.

By optimizing, you need to help Google decide what your image is. Below are some tips for optimizing images:

1) Use proper file names for your images.
For example, if your image is of Rose, your file name should be Red_rose.jpg
If it is in a folder, it should be in a folder called flowers or roses, etc.

2) Use the proper alt tag on your images.
For example, for Red_rose.jpg, the alt tag can be alt tag="American Red Rose".
The alt attribute is what determines the text that shows up when you hover your mouse over an image. Also, if due to some technical flaws, the image is not downloaded, the text is seen as alternate that says to the visitor what the image is of.

3) Use captions or relative text near the image.
Google reads that!

4) Use the width and height attributes on images.
It is advisable to put the proper width and height attributes on images. This helps for fast downloading of images and in a way is part of Optimization.

5) Make sure that your File-name, Alt-tag, caption, etc. are keyword-rich.


--> The above are what I feel the best and useful 5 Tips for Image Optimization.
One more additional tip is to submit your image into Flickr or Picasaweb with similar keyword-rich tags.

"Search the Web" button is back in Gmail

The web search button is now back in G-mail after a brief disappearance. A small number of vocal users complained and Google restored the button.



For the Gmail search: This Gmail searches the same way one would use Google Search, by entering a keyword (or search phrase) that appears anywhere within the message (body/ subject/ email-address) you want to locate. For instance, if you're looking for a message that contains the word software, simply type software in the search field and press Search Mail. The results for your search will be displayed with your search terms highlighted in yellow.

Highest searched terms in Google in 2008

This is very interesting. When I tried to see what are the most searched terms in the last year or say the Top keywords that have been searched the most in 2008; below is the list that was popped up by Google in Dec 2008:

1. obama
2. facebook
3. att
4. iphone
5. youtube
6. fox news
7. palin
8. beijing 2008
9. david cook
10. surf the channel

These were said to be the fastest-rising search terms in the U.S. for 2008. This was brought up after combing through billions of anonymous, aggregated search queries that had been in top-of-mind for Americans in 2008.

And while searching this, you know what? I guessed Obama would be in the first position and see I was right!

Search Engine Optimization- The Significance

From a small local business in a town to a big industry playing on an international platform, marketing has been a prime tool for any company or business to succeed. People started with using tools like write-ups, references, pamphlets and much more to convey their means or advertise themselves among a group. But now is a time where everything happens just on the click of your finger. And in this time is required marketing at the speed of light, marketing with niche concepts that are applied even before a common man would think.

With the time we are moving from a physical world to a virtual world. Companies started building up their websites to have a presence in the virtual world. But likewise there are billions of websites. What would be your identity then? In this age of Internet and Technology, getting your business visible to your customer segment is more important and this is where the Search Engine Optimization comes into picture.

Building up a website is like making a saw and optimizing your website is like sharpening that saw to use. And it is quite logical that you cannot take optimum use of your saw without sharpening it.

Search Engines are a system through which one gets the information the later wants. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines through search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. In simple words, Search engine optimization (SEO) just means your site is as accessible as possible to the search engines to improve the chances that they will serve it up when your potential customers type in specific search terms (called keywords). The more easily search engines find your site, the higher up it appears on their results pages.

In this world, SEO is definitely a smart move for any business.

But getting your site ranked for your keywords, there are many aspects that play a key role: a proper site structure, clean coding and necessary keywords, to name a few. This requires the every page of your website to be optimized. Every page should have a proper title, genuine keywords and a perfect description that matches the page. These title, keywords and description have to be relevant for every individual page. Search engines "crawl" the Web looking for the keywords that their users enter, so putting those keywords throughout your site means your pages will be picked up during searches by the search engine. Hence you have to put your foot into your customer’s shoe to understand what keywords your customer would use to search for a particular product or service. You have to learn your customers’ mind and this will give you the best of Title and meta (Keywords and description) to optimize your website. Also, optimizing your content is equally important as that plays an important role. You may optimize your content with putting keywords in your content, giving the Heading tags to titles, giving bold effects wherever necessary, giving links (to phrases in the content) to internal pages wherever appropriate.

Also, other activities to rank up your website in search engines are submitting your website URL into more and more search engines, adding your website URL into online directories, building up links with other relevant business sites, submitting rich articles into article sites, submitting your blog pages into various blog sites, submitting Press Releases into various Press Release sites. This will both increase the traffic overall to your site and enhance your search engine rankings, since the search engines pick up on the number of times people link to and from your site and rank your website higher accordingly.

People try many techniques to boost up their website ranking in these search engines for the specific keywords. People make researches to add-on their skills to make this task easier, faster and more genuine.

It has become very important to move ahead with the fast pace if you wish to survive your business in this global competition.