Archive for June, 2010
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
It is widely believed that Search Engines give less importance to directories and pages buried deep in the site architecture. However, people often get confused between the directory depth (link structure) and URL structure of the website. A page may not be considered deep by SEs only if it has a number of slashes (“/”) in its URL. Rather, it is the internal linking pattern that determines a page’s depth. For e.g., http://www.example.com/category/sub-cat1/sub-cat2/topic/post-title.htm should not be considered deep if it is directly linked from home page of the website; even though there are four sub-directories in the URL. The depth of a directory or webpage depends upon the number of clicks it take to reach there from the homepage. However, you should try to keep the length of the URL short as the value of keywords in URL gets diluted and can lead to low click-through for long URLs.
Posted in SEO Tips | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
The “site:www.exmaple.com” operator in Google (and other search engines) is normally used to check the number of pages indexed in search engine of particular website. But this operator can also be useful to search for pages relevant to a particular keyword within a website. To search within the website, add the keyword at the end of the above mentioned query. For e.g. “site:www.exmaple.com keyword1“. Suppose if you want to find information on Article Syndication within the RedAlkemi.com, your query will look like “site:www.redalkemi.com article syndication“.
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »
Friday, June 25th, 2010
RedAlkemi organized a blood donation campaign in collaboration with Rotary Blood Bank today on 24th June 2010. The camp saw employees of RedAlkemi as well the people outside RedAlkemi line up at the venue to donate blood. The venue was fully equipped with all technical requirements and doctors to render the process a success.
The Blood donation started with Mr. Atul Gupta, CEO RedAlkemi coming forward as the first donor followed by our enthusiastic RedAlkemi staff. There were 80 units of blood collected at the camp. Refreshments were arranged for the donors.
Donating blood does not require any heroic deeds; it just require a firm mind to be able to believe that donating blood is actually very simple and anyone can do it. You do not loose out on anything and who knows this donation of yours can help save your family member or a friend when in need.
Posted in CSR | Comments Off
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Google is now showing personalized search results for all queries based on user’s search history even if you are not logged in. If you open a website quite often or have clicked it from search results in the past, Google will give that site a little ranking boost for relevant terms. Even when you are not signed in, your search history is stored for 180 days through browser cookies. Though, the changes are small and may not be noticeable for many queries, it will not provide the true picture while checking rankings for SEO purposes. To turn off the personalized results, search for a query, click on “Web History” link on the top right corner of the Google search page(when not signed in). Then click on “Disable customization based on search activity”.
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Cost Per Click (CPC) is not the only factor that determines rankings of sponsored ads in a PPC campaign. In order to provide quality results to the users, all major search engines advertising platforms including Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter also take into account the Quality Score of the PPC campaign to determine the ad rankings.
Ad Rank = CPC * Quality Score
It means that you can outrank your competitors while paying lower CPC if you have a good Quality Score. Some of the factors affecting the Quality Score are:
- Click Trough Rate (CTR) of the keyword and matching ad; where CTR = (Total Clicks/Total Impressions) *100
- Historical CTR of your account and display URLs in ad groups
- Quality of landing page
- Relevance of keywords to ads in an ad group
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
It is widely believed that domain registration and hosting also plays an important role in website rankings as it helps Search Engines to establish domain trust. Some of these factors are listed below in order of their relevance.
- Fast Server Response time & Page Load speed
- Extremely limited Downtime (when server is under maintenance or not working)
- Domain Registration for extended period
- Valid WHOIS info that matches other records
- Dedicated IP address
The first two officially announced by Google and have a significant impact on your rankings. Remaining three are not very prominent yet but they do influence website rankings.
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »
Monday, June 21st, 2010
The first three results on search engine result pages (SERPs) get more than 60% of the clicks. The Click percentage drops significantly after the third clicks. Below mentioned chart shows the percentage of total visitors clicking on the top 10 results. This percentage can be calculated upon to get approximate number of visitors coming to your website provided you know the average monthly search count for the keyword.
Position % age of Clicks
1st 34.35%
2nd 16.96%
3rd 11.42%
4th 7.73%
5th 6.19%
6th 5.05%
7th 4.02%
8th 3.47%
9th 2.85%
10th 2.71%
The percentage of clicks for some of the top results may seem to be low but this can happen due to query refinement (user modifying query without clicking on results), misspellings or due to news sites, local results or other multimedia results present in top spots. Please note that these are just approximate values and may change over a period of time.
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »
Saturday, June 19th, 2010
Though Web Analytics from Google and Yahoo are most popular in monitoring traffic and user behavior, there are many other tools available which can be helpful in improving conversion rate. These tools can help track visitor movement, user intentions and analyze usability of the website.
- CrazyEgg and ClickDensity are perfects tools to see click heat maps. I.e. see where your users click the most even if it is not hyperlinked
- ClickTale lets you see video of users’ screens and let you track their movement and how far they scroll down the screen
- SurveyMonkey and 4Q for online visitor surveys. Know what your visitors like or dislike about your site
- Google Website Optimizer to do A/B split testing on your webpages in paid as well as organic search results
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »
Thursday, June 17th, 2010
In 2009 we witnessed exponential growth of Social Media as per the study conducted by Nielsen Online. Twitter usage has shown an impressive growth rate of 1382% YOY in February and registered 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month.
If we look at FaceBook, it continued to outperform MySpace so far the unique visitors are concerned.
In the near future we can see the trend of Social Media being included in every aspect of business whether it is marketing, customer service, public relations etc. Looking at some social media channels like twitter through which you can pass your information to thousands of your targeted people by just typing 140 characters or less. Similarly, social bookmarking, video sharing has revolutionized the reach of marketers or just a common man who is just sharing his views on the social forums and site.
As social networks like Face book and YouTube become some of the biggest content repositories on the planet, it provides a strong edge to the marketers to make use of it in order to have a strong presence on the WWW.
What is more interesting to the marketers is that the people have really well adopted and devoted themselves to these new systems and are now looking forward to find and share more among their friends. The concept of sharing on the social media sites in real time have created so many avenues to the marketers to engage the people with the targeted content and entice them in order to make efforts count via social media.
Most of the companies are now cutting on the traditional advertising systems and are getting more interested in social media advertising due to various reasons like reach and low investment. If you could recall the Coca Cola’s Sprite Online Campaign, which was totally targeted for the emerging youth who are spending most of their time online.
The more interesting and relevant you will make your content the more it has chances of getting re-tweeted and re blogged, thus more chances of strong brand presence in digital world.
Posted in SMM | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
There are many geo-targeted (keyword with location name) for which search engines show Local Business Listings within the main search result pages. For e.g. if you search for “san diego restaurants” or “new york realtors” in Google.com, you will see a 7-pack local results listings along with a small snippet of Google Maps indicating the location for these businesses. These Local listings can be quite beneficial if you have local customer base. You won’t even need a website to appear in these results; although having a website is good for your rankings. Optimize you business for these listings, you will need following steps:
- Claim Your local listing in Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing
- Create a profile with thorough and accurate information about your business
- Write keyword-rich Title and Description of your business listing page
- Mention Physical same as the one mentioned in the website
- If you have local landline number, don’t forget to include it with local STD code
- Add a lot of Pictures and Videos
- Submit in Yellow pages, Local Directories and other sources
- Get positive reviews from both on the website as well as other industry review sources such as InsiderPages, TripAdvisor etc .
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
Google caffeine was under development since last few months. This update by Google doesn’t include any user interface changes. Caffeine has nearly millions gigabytes of storage space in one database and can add thousand gigabytes of more new information per day. The users won’t find a big difference in search results, but web developers and daily searchers might find some. The Google’s new technique had been tested by many webmasters /developer and received positive feedbacks from them.
How will Google technique help in search?
- Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches when compared to the old search.
- Crawling and indexing may change
- It is faster than ever before.
- Will improve indexing speed, accuracy, size, and comprehensiveness.
- Will show local results even if you are not logged in. Your location may be detected based on the IP address or ISP.
- More importance will be given to the exact matching domain names.
- Powerful, flexible and robust in the way pages are indexed.
- Relies more on keywords.
- Search is moving into real-time. News, information and social media results are set boosted by Caffeine, with this all being part of the large effort to make real-time search a reality.
Few tips for Webmaster:
- Rankings of the website in Google search engine can fluctuate.
- Updating your website regularly can help get best ranking on Google search engine.
Posted in Blogroll | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
An ecommerce website might allow various sort orders for a page (like by Lowest Price, Most Popular, Sort by Brand etc.) or webmaster might want tracking codes added to URLs for Analytics. You could end up with multiple pages with similar content. There may be 1000s of pages with almost same content. This can lead to content duplication issues and incoming links may get divided among these similar pages. To solve this problem, search engines now support Canonical tag which specifies a canonical or original version of page which you want to promote among all the pages with similar content. For e.g.
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=blue-widget”/>
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »
Monday, June 14th, 2010
Besides on-page and off-page optimizations factors, User Behavior data also plays a role in organic rankings of a website on Google. Although it is not much significant yet, Google looks at parameters such as Bounce Rate, Pages Viewed, time spent on website, pages bookmarked, website usage history of user and possibly the Click Through rate of a website on search result pages. It is believed that most of this data is collected through:
# Google Analytics
# Google Toolbar
# Clicks on Search Results
# Google Adsense
# Browser Extensions
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
Google Caffeine update is mostly an infrastructural change which has made Google’s results more fast and accurate. It does have some changes on search results although not very profound yet:
1. A little more importance on domain authority and trust rather than plain link popularity
2. Lesser exposure of video, image and universal search results on SERPs
3. More emphasis on Latent Semantic Indexing
Posted in SEO Tips | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
It is not a secret that Internet is the biggest marketing medium; it helps the organizations and individuals to sell their services and products all over the world. Also, it allows them to get in-touch with their clients and customers directly. Most of the organizations are trying to establish their E-presence and launch their business on the Internet.
However the drawback of any online business is that it restricts the customers with a choice of browsing things, and the customers start referring to the other sites. Therefore it is very important for the online business to have an effective website. Having an impressive website is not enough, it should be well optimized and easily recognized by the search engines.
So when the entrepreneur successfully launches its business on the Internet, the next step is to find the ways to promote the business online. The best techniques to promote the business online include:
- To get the website optimized by effective SEO services to make it popular on the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing (MSN)
- Submission of your website to all the major directories.
- Promoting your business in different social networks. (SMM)
- Organizing effective PPC campaigns on search engines.
- Use some good tools like Google Analytics to monitor the demographics of your audience
Services providers known as Search Engine Marketing Service providers provide all these services online. It is the best tool to promote your business online as they use different and effective promotion techniques. SEM service providers assist the companies by offering them with best and professional SEM services to enable them to achieve enhanced results from their Internet business.
I believe, in this 21st century customer depends largely upon Internet for collecting information on any products, services, companies etc. So, if any organization or entrepreneur wants to sell its products or services, then it becomes necessary for them to make the website, product and services more popular on the search engines. In other words, Search Engine marketing service providers offer to its client services that can make their website popular on the search engines and also get high listing in the result pages.
As the demand of search engine marketing is increasing, so the number of SEM providers in also increasing. So it is very important for the companies those who need SEM services, to look for the service providers who offer them professional and best search engine placement and marketing services. It is very important for the companies or entrepreneur to look for the provider whose services are aimed at assisting the organization in facing the online business challenges more proficiently. The best SEM techniques and professional services offered by the providers helps your company in getting the better results in your online business that too in lesser time.
Posted in SEM | No Comments »
