In Search Engine optimization the cost incurred are mainly is on effort, time, agency cost/employee cost. While as in Search Engine Marketing, the costs are Advertising cost(which is CPC, CPA, CPM etc) and the cost of time/effort.

It is necessary to track the value derived from Visitor Engagement on the site and revenue generated,

Visitor Engagement Tracking

Visitor engagement depends on objective and size of the business,

1) Defining Visitor Engagement depends completely on the content present on your web site.

a. On a Shopping site: Engagement has to be product sale, product search etc..

b. On a Blog: It is the number of comments posted, subscribing RSS feeds, Average time spent on the site, No of page views per visit can be engagement metric.

c. On a Corporate Business Site: People might just visit to pick up telephone number, address of the business. Therefore none of the metrics work.

d. On a News Site: It is number of subscription RSS,Email. It is again time spent on article, number of comments posted, no of page views per visit.

e. On a Forum site: Registrations are a value.

f. Software Downloads Site: Number of downloads are a value.

2) Getting Users to Subscribe your RSS feed is a value. These users will read your content more than repeat visitors. It shows the measure of content popularity.

3) Users favourite the page, site in social bookmarking sites, social network & media sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com, Del.icio.us, stumbleupon.com is also a value provided by SEM traffic.

4) If Links to your blog post increases from SEM traffic, due to people positing your link elsewhere in answers etc, then it is a big value..

5) Users might land on specific detail page pick up the phone and dial the number given on page. Measuring telephone call rate is necessary.

6) For smaller business getting targeted traffic to their website is a value, since it adds to brand building etc.. if not sales..

7) For larger websites, brand is already in place, hence traffic which has a direct effect on revenue is more of a value than mere traffic from.

If the mode of revenue generation is advertising then attracting just traffic, might be worth

For small shopping sites setting up ecommerce tracking is very useful and necessary

This can be done by using the option present in Analytics Settings à Profile Settings àEdit. Give details of Currency, decimal places etc.

Tracking Ecommerce Transaction through Google Analytics

Once you opted Ecommerce tracking, you must edit the receipt page, which is the page after transaction, install a script into this page passing the order value into the Analytics system. Google has provided a comprehensive material on setting up ecommerce transaction.

For other business they need to monitor, track the objective of SEM campaigns. If not the engagement of the visitor on the site.

Optimizing SEO, SEM Campaigns

1) Generally Specific Keywords have higher conversion rate but are lower in volume

2) It is important to add as many new specific long tail keywords as possible…it need effort in research on new keywords on regular intervals.

3) The Head of the keyword list is pretty much fixed with little variations but more effort has to be made in making the tail longer…..that is where maximum effort and time as it can change the ROI of the campaigns.

4) Competitive keywords are always costly and extra effort can change CPC minimally…

a. However the efforts has to be done on Landing page creation..

b. Small changes in conversion rate by new landing page optimizations can dramatically increase ROI

5) Constant Generation of long tail keywords and new keywords are always the key…

6) Using different landing pages for each set of keywords is very good

a. Domain name keywords can be landed on home page

b. Category Specific Headings can be landed on respective section on the site

c. Product keywords or Specific keywords must be landed on inner most pages of the site or respective product pages.

7) Make sure your website ranks for all brand terms including the misspellings of your domain name etc..

a. This can be done by creating a page with list of all misspelled keywords

Using Misspellings can be a great way of generating low cost traffic…but remember there can be 2 types of users typing misspellings

a. Users who accidently typed a misspelling, will most likely click on “Did you mean – Correct Spelling”

b. Users who are uneducated or illiterate,

So you need to decide on keeping such keywords based on the quality of traffic you generate

9) For Large Websites tracking of every keyword to last metric of calculating business ROI is essential…For example:

a. Banking website could track the number of savings accounts, number of loans applied per every keyword along other details such as location, amount of loan, income of user and other other quality measurements which will help determine the quality of keyword.

b. This will help them to make a decision of increase bid rates, adding more same kind of keywords etc..

10) Track phone Calls, If you are running a Click to Call Campaign then provide the keyword which generated the call to call center executive. After the call process collect the feedback of the user and measure the business quality of the keyword, which is again fed back into the Adwords campaigns.

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Some of the below SEO Tips for optimizing for locally was found to be extremely useful.

1) Websites must be Optimized for Mobile Users, it is very very essential to have your website optimized for geographies. This is because the localized search results will have extra value add for mobile users. Search engines have developed technology which would identify location (if not, it will soon to be) of mobile phone users and serve results based on their location. Therefore highlighting location names in your WAP enabled website is very essential.

2) Use Google Trends: Google Trends shows you which cities generate the highest amount of searches for the term. Target those Cities for publishing your Press Release Online.
Create Separate Pages for those Cities and include more content on those pages, rank them higher in search engines

3) Create a Directory structure of listings of Locations: Countries, cities, areas, pincodes where your product and service is located and link to corresponding profile page from each link.

4) Title Tags, Headings: In product details page include area, city, country in the same order in Title Tags, Headings

A) In your Product Details page include links to your external sites of related industries in same geographies.

5) Sub Domains, Folders: Create location names as sub domains or folders. the content present in these sub domains or folders should only be related to that particular location.
Having a sub domain has an advantage of hosting each domain in respective geographies. for example:

1. india.example.com can be hosted in India
2. us.example.com can be hosted in US
3. uk.example.com can be hosted in UK
4. australia.example.com can be hosted in Australia
5. This way each subdomain will have higher probability to rank for searches in respective countries.

6) Common Words: Include keywords which are specific to that locality people in each product page along with Geo location. Such as common nicknames apart from main keywords

A) For Example: Include Green City Bangalore, Pink City Jaipur, and not just Bangalore, Jaipur

7) IP Redirect: Do not redirect users to websites based on IP location in the same country. This is can have negative effect as search engines reach your site from different IPs.

Backlinks from Geo Specifc Sites: Generate Backlinks from other sites which are oriented to same geography, use location names in the anchor text of back-links.

9) Local Business Listings: Observe the backlinks and content on sites which rank higher in Local search engines including http://local.google.com, Yahoo Local, MSN Local. Optimize your site accordingly..

A) Some Local Search Engines rank sites alphabetically

B) Some Local Engines rank site based on presence on web site link in other properties of same portals. For example: Yahoo might rank your site higher if your site is listed in Yahoo directory, Yahoo Small Business, Yahoo Yellowpages, Flickr, Del.icio.us.

C) Good idea is to get listed in every geolocation your business operates. For example: In US category, UK category.

D) Include City Name, Country Name in every keyword.

E) Signup for Google Local Business Listings, similarly for Yahoo & MSN

F) Give Full Address in every product on your page.

G) Get your Local Listings reviewed regularly .. this will ensure to keep it on top…

10) Yellow Pages Listings: Getting your website listed in Yellow Pages directory, Local Business Directories is very essential.

A) http://yp.yahoo.com/

B) http://yellowpages.msn.com

C) http://www.yellowpages.com

D) http://www.yellowpages.com.au

E) http://www.yell.com

F) http://www.yellowpages.ca

G) Similar Yellowpages directory for your location

11) Maps: Link to Wikipmapia (containing Lat Long Data) or Google Maps from your product details page. You can even embed a map.

12) Images & Videos: Photographs, Videos present in your website must be uploaded in respective vertical search engines such as Flickr.com, Youtube.com and importantly to Optimize & tag them will all geographical location names along with Lat, Long data if options as given. You must also provide a link to your website from these image, video content

13) Blogs & Reviews: Generate Backlinks from Blogs which are specific to these location, Blog links have higher weightage in local industry. Get Reviews from Experts who claimed to be professionals in that location. For example: Real Estate Expert in London recommending your site from his blog.

Related Articles on Local SEO

1) Natural Search Blog

2) Local SEO Guide

By the way I am located in New Delhi, India (National Capital Region) & my interest includes SEO, SEM, Web / Business Analytics. Please find the Google Map address locator below. View Wikimapia

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Google, Yahoo has come a long way from the days it used ignore webmasters when Google started out to helping webmasters/site owners with optimizing websites. Google has created a special channel of communication with webmasters/site owners for helping them design search engine friendly websites to make information available to users easily.

Link Building

Google clarifies Link exchange is fine as long as it does not look excessive and spam. This means the link exchange schemes & programs deliberately increasing links in attempt to achieve ranking is bad. Buying and selling links is bad. Any marketing done excessively is bad for websites. The discussion on this on webmasterworld can be found over here. Google in its Webmaster guidelines had stated that any link exchanges schemes, buying, selling links are not good for website rankings. As per Google the links are editorial votes to webpages and have to given naturally to add value to visitor.

A) Google introduces Paid Link Reporting service, find mattcutts story over here and here. Link selling sites loose the ability to transfer PageRank.

B) Google Introduces No-Follow attribute

C) Link Building with Google Bookmarks

D) Link Baiting Advice by Google & by MattCutts

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engines are interested in providing rich, useful & relevant content to end users. This can happen only when site owners publish rich content & design a search engine friendly site.

Search engines would want to index all the content provided by site owners. It is therefore in their Business Interest to help webmasters provide more content to search engines. Search Engines therefore encourage webmasters to publish more content online both quality & quantity.

Website owners are looking to drive traffic from Search Engines by optimizing websites. Search Engines are looking to provide relevant, quality results to end users. Therefore it is a Win-Win solution for both. The only glitch is Spam.. Spam is defined as any activity where this equation is disturbed.

Search Engine spam is defined as any activity by website owner which is in the business interest of webmaster but not in business interest of Search Engine. However there is no such thing as “Webmaster Spam” when the site owner’s business interest is not protected by search engines.

SEO Tips by Google

• SEO Basics
• Google Sitemaps
• Using Robots Meta Tag
• All about Robots.txt
• Quality Guidelines for Webmasters
• Duplicate Content Caused by Url
• Understand Duplicate Content
• SEO for Flash Files
• Server Location and SEO
• Using Google Webmaster Central Tools
• New Robots Meta Tag check: X-Robots Tag and Unavailable_after Meta tag
• Canonical Urls
• Google Webmaster Help Center

Some of the active channels the information & Tools online are:

A) Google Webmaster Central

B) Google Webmaster Discussion Group

C) Google Sitemaps

SEO Tips by Yahoo

Yahoo.com also offers extensive help and awareness program for webmasters for optimizing websites for higher ranking on search engines. In some areas like Dynamic Url rewriting they offer more advanced help than Google.com

• Basic SEO on Yahoo
• Ranking Factors on Yahoo
• Yahoo Webmaster Guildelines
• Yahoo Site Explorer & Sitemaps
• How Yahoo Handles Redirection
• Reporting Duplicate content through Urls & Faqs on Dynamic Urls. WMW Discussions on dynamic urls in yahoo is very useful
• Removing Urls from Search Index
• Yahoo Store Help

Web Master Tools offered by Yahoo

1) Yahoo Site EXplorer

2) Yahoo Search Blog

This is an article which is worth bookmarking for all SEO, SEM Managers, as the resources listed has to be referred by everyone in this field.

The golden fact is everyone (Search Marketing world) is aware of it but very very few people have the patience to constantly observe & learn for maintaining their website rankings on Top of Search Engines.

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1) High traffic/Popularity on Video Sites such as Youtube.com, Google Videos, Daily Motion, AOL-cut, Yahoo Videos and other video search engines,

2) Availability & increase in usage of broadband internet in India.

3) Search Engines moving towards Universal Search.

4) Social Sites enable sharing and voting best videos.

5) Increase in traffic to Torrent sites and forums where people share videos

Ways to Market Video Content

Marketing & Optimization are 2 different terms, Marketing is creating new and optimization is refining the existing content. Marketing is mainly push, Optimization is pull.

Social Media including videos is a place where there is a very thin line between the two, both exist simultaneously. For example: Viral Marketing is both Push and Pull. Videos is also both Push and Pull. Advertisers need to push only to an extent beyond which pull has to take it forward.

1) Include Your Website Name inside your Video

2) Keep posting Videos Frequently

a) Post Videos about your Company, Investor Information.

a) Post videos on Product Usage

b) Post videos on Customer Testimonials

c) Post Videos on Training and Development Program

d) Informational B2B programs in your Videos

e) Awareness about your Industry

3) Upload Videos in all possible video search engines such as youtube etc.

4) Submit your Videos to Digg, Stumbleupon and other such content sites.

5) Embed Videos in your Blogs, Websites etc.

6) Give Links to all your videos in your sitemap

7) Give links to Videos from inside the content or article.

Include Digg this Button on webpages which embed videos

9) Include Keyword rich content, brand names in Titles, Descriptions of Videos around the Videos.

10) Include ror.xml Sitemap or podcast RSS feed and submit to google, yahoo and other search engines.

11) Ask Users to Post comments, this will add the content on the page.

12) Create a Textual version (SubTitles) of the video in all languages of your TA and embed in your blog

13) Give links of your sites which link to Youtube video, inside Youtube Video page.

14) The Page which embeds the Video in blog, website must have keyword in H1 tag as Heading.

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SEO is a field where parameters affecting the business model are more dynamic. Search Engine Optimization services offered by an agency to its clients has absolutely no control over Search Engine Algorithms, which ranks web pages in organic listings. Neither has it any full/part knowledge about its working.

Despite all this agencies across the world offer Search Engine Optimization services promising its clients higher ranking in Google search results, fully aware of the fact that Google itself cautions users on choosing SO services.

My idea about writing this post is about SEO Agencies how they can best sell services & operate ethically and businesses on whether or not choosing such a company if yes then how to do it?

SEO Agency India

SEO Agencies must act like any other Ad agency or a PR agency, they promise to work for your promote your brand online but do not take fully responsible for the result of the action/promotion.

Similarly SEO agency must follow the below important issues:

1) Make a review of the website initially and send it to the client.

2) Educate your clients about Search Engine Guidelines & process of SEO. They should be repetitive, if need to be emphasize on maintaining search engine friendly site.

3) Suggest/Work more on making the client content copies more appealing to the user.

4) Overlook every change made on the site to ensure high search engine crawl ability.

5) Evaluate the site on all commonly believed ranking factors

6) Any change you suggest on the site, educate the client first on why you are suggesting it.

7) Be transparent about your past clients, projects and method of working, such as explaining this activity would have high probability of generating this result.

Do not perform Link exchanges, use more Link baiting methods.

9) Communication is the key, keep informed about latest developments in your work.

10) Avoid spamming of all forms, Black Hat SEO and other unacceptable methods to boost rankings.

11) Avoid using software that queries Google, other search engines.

12) R&D and innovation is must need for every SEO company. They should have resources/manpower who constantly works on new methods & ways of promotion.

13) There are some SEO companies who have converted their SEO division into an assembly line production unit, every new SEO project is taken through same set of standard processes without any customization or knowledge input. All this in the name of ISO standardization. This is due to sheer lack of knowledge of Industry dynamics (environment). You must understand one size does not fit all.

SEO Client India

Every Company having a website & can convert its online visitors into sales/revenue must think about SEO services at some point or the other. Organic traffic is highly targeted and gives higher ROI than any other online source of traffic. More over Organic traffic adds branding value to the company, for ranking top for branded terms, in addition to generating traffic.

Companies when choosing a SEO service provider must remember following things:

A) SEO results cannot be achieved overnight. It requires patience and hard work.

B) SEO can be done both in-house and outsourced to an agency.

C) In-house SEO will give you flexibility, Accountability and a person who understands your business and your company.

D) SEO agency may have the expertise but lack insight into your business, or may be unaware of your company processes. Also if you do not want your outsourced partner to make direct changes to your website, then co-ordination between your Tech departments is a key issue.

E) Get details of past work, previous clients.

F) Know about their mode of work or standard processes. Get to know if they use any SEO software

G) This is a single test for choosing SEO agency; find out how much of R&D, knowledge work, innovation or Human involvement is present in forming SEO strategies for your project.

H) Make sure they do not perform any spammy activities to artificially boost your rankings.

I) They should be ready to educate you, whenever & whatever necessary about SEO and processes.

J) Be Open to new suggestions/ideas which your SEO consultant may suggest. For example Flashy design, extensive facelift for the site may not convert into equivalent sales/revenue for the business. It may not make business sense to have a highly decorative website. Ordinary simple websites with great content can do a much better job of generating traffic, revenue, meeting ROI & brand value.

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This simply means suppose you search for any brand name or generic word on Google.com more than 6/10 times you will find one or more results from:

A) Wikipedia

B) Technorati

C) Del.icio.us

D) Blog Site

E) New Site

F) PR Site

G) Tags with that Keywords

H) Last but not the least from Vertical Engines (Images, Videos etc…)

Optimization must be done by closely monitoring the type of results displayed by search engines. For generic names or brand names it is very essential to have content online in all forms and media formats. This content must not only be optimized with keywords but also popularized by driving traffic by linking from main site, including popular tags, intelligently interlinking each other content.

Each media hosting your content has a potential to attract traffic and hence drive traffic to you website. Aggregate of traffic from all referral sources forms a signification chunk in your overall traffic to any website. Building the long tail of referral sites is very essential for every website.

Try to port your content in as many media formats, languages possible, which makes sense to business. Distribute this content to all possible publishing sites. Link to these content intelligently giving users access to all relevant content distributed and published online.

For example your business sells bicycles, you can do the following:

A) Create all possible useful textual content on bicycles and publish them online.

B) Publish Image of Bicycles online, upload on blogs, Flickr etc..

C) Videos of Bicycles on your site, Youtube, Video search engines.

D) Create Tags on technorati, del.icio.us etc.

E) Create blogs linking all of them. Link to wikipedia, swicki, rollyo, del.icio.us,

Some Optimization Tips for other Media Formats

A) Host Images in the same server; do not source it from other domain/server.

B) Do not have images of the size of wallpaper. Have smaller images with content covering around the image.

C) Use Stemmed Keywords/related words appropriately in Titles, Alts, Tags, Headings, Image Names, Video Names, Description content, Category Names, Urls without repeating the same word.

D) Keywords can be repeated in for proper names.

E) Give Location names wherever possible, Video Tags, Blog Titles, Image Description, Image Headings, Image Names, Anchor Texts etc.

F) Host Videos on Youtube, Google Videos. Give a link to your site in the Title or description of your Video. Include Location Names in description.

G) Use all possible keywords & location names as Tags in the Video.

H) Embed your Videos, Maps on Blogs, Website.

I) Create Custom Search Engines on Google, Swicki, Rollyo specific to a location. Include all you content from PR, Youtube, Websites, Blogs in Custom Search Engines etc.

J) Drive traffic to CSE, Swicki, by embedding in Blogs.

K) Regularly update Blogs & increase RSS subscriber count.

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1) Search Engine Optimization is technique which is optimize your website for gaining better visibility or ranking in search engines.

2) SEO is free of cost

3) SEO is more of promoting web content. Involves a lot of working on your content.

4) SEO can be done in-house or through an Agency

5) SEO involves making your online content richer with keywords

6) Search engine optimization also involves techniques to promote every event, news about your company so as to be gain online visibility.

7) SEO requires lot of linking which again requires you to get in touch with other websites and build relationships

In SEO there is a simple rule you do not know what you do not know.

9) Getting high visibility always require hard work, knowledge and perseverance.

10) Last but not the least SEO has no direct measurable results.

11) Right SEO can get you brand promotion.

12) If you can do SEO right your site can get promoted by itself.

13) SEO involves constant analysis of how search engines & users view your website

14) SEO involves constant analysis of how your competitors are placed against you on search engines.

Similar comparison of above point’s vis-à-vis Public Relations (PR). I am not very good about knowing what PR is about, however do comment me on if I am wrong somewhere.

1) PR involves always working on your content that offline media picks up about you.

2) Right PR can get your free publicity.

3) PR also involves constant check of what your competitors are saying

4) PR adds to your brand value.

5) PR also cannot give you direct measurable results on increase in awareness, traffic etc.

6) PR also involves constant monitoring of how the media looks at your company.

7) PR equally requires hard work, knowledge & perseverance. No shortcuts to gaining success.

PR involves publicizing and taking leverage of every possible event, news about your company and industry.

9) PR also requires maintaining relationships with other network companies to provide positive support to your standing.

10) PR is done mostly through an Agency

11) PR is more of promoting web content. Involves a lot of working on your content.

These are just few points however SEO involves a lot of technical knowledge and know-how and analyzing how search engines rank websites. Also SEO involves optimizing different forms of content such as video content, news content, Image content, to respective media like video search engines, news search engines, Image search engines etc..

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If webmasters or site owners are proactive, they could save huge money on Web site rebuilding/redesigning if they are aware of certain search engine friendly guidelines initially.

Below are certain Tips for new site owners before making live their brand new site:

A) Minimize the use of Flash Content. Do not use Frames.

B) When creating file names use keywords. Suppose a page on Buy-Widgets will have Purchase-widget.html.

i. Use hyphens in file names not underscore if you wish to.

C) Create a page on Privacy policy and Disclaimer.

D) Create static URLs for individual user profile pages, these pages to be light and crawl able. For example http://www.domainname.com/username.html

E) Include Address or Contact number on every page of the site in the footer.

F) Validate pages with W3C CSS validation. Include the sign W3C validated on the page.

G) Use Compressed Image Format to reduce the web page weights.
i. The Total web page size must be maximum 100KB.

H) Include Content of about 300 words on every page

I) USE H1, H2, H3, H4 Tags wherever required. But just one 1 H1 tag per page

J) Use appropriate Titles & Heading describing the content

K) The Site must have text links linking to other pages. Do not make navigation in JavaScript. Make static text links to inner pages. If you are using images then give Image Alt, Title with keywords.

L) There must be a link to home page from every inner page of the site both from Logo and Home anchor.

M) Do not use extensive JavaScript in the HTML. Keep pages simple HTML, keep a tab on average load time. Remember even if the site is not very attractive it is fine but if takes longer time to load then it would not be good.

N) Use CSS instead of tables in HTML, avoid the nested table structure.

O) When linking to different pages, use the same urls. Avoid canonical urls. For example, use either http://myworld.com/ or http://www.myworld.com/ or http://www.myworld.com/index.html. Do not use all combinations of them in the HTML.

P) Use both Header Menu as well as Footer Menu.

Q) Create a Site Map. Use the word Site Map instead of Site map

R) Do not use hidden text links, comments in HTML.

S) Keep all JavaScript in the external include files

T) Keep all CSS in the external Include files.

U) Try to free the HTML page from code as much as possible.

V) Use meta name=”Robots” content=”Index, Follow” on every page of the website

W) Use XHTML format for developing web page only… (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/)

X) Do not increase the directory structure by more than 2 levels. Try to keep all pages in the root directory on the site.

Y) Please do not keep pages with no content.

Z) Do not use Meta Refresh Redirect or JavaScript Redirect to any page.

AA)Do not copy the content that is already present across any other site.

BB) Remove redundant files present in the server. It reduces the downtime in searching the file name…

CC)If a redirect needs to be placed, place a 301 permanent redirect. Using Domain Level mod_rewrite function to redirect.

DD)Kindly ensure the text of the page in the top portion of the page.

EE) The Brand Name should be visible in Big Bold Text.

More detail on the above broader points in my future posts…..

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SEOs would spend the same amount of effort building backlinks through article submissions/Pr submissions and persuading webmasters to post a link on their site than spend the effort in creating wikipedia posts.

You find their reasons here, this would hopefully be easier for people to post genuine articles on en.wikipedia.org

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However the site has managed to gain No.1 Spot for keyword Job on Google.co.in. Despite the fact the nearest competitor having PR 8 backlinks with similar keywords as anchor text.

Getting backlinks are not the sole criteria for gaining rankings on Google. My strong belief is that you need to promote your site with strong content across the Internet in all forms of websites, such as directory, blogs, article repositories, forums, etc…. This can be called Content Marketing.

The promotion need to be natural, in the sense the your content has to be complementing the theme of that web page, value adding the web page and users reading that web page.

If your content can act like a link bait then it is an additional incentive in gaining popularity.

More on this Topic in following posts…

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