Identifying and Interpreting the Key Performance Indicators in Web Analytics

Web analytics softwares have changed the way we measure the success of our online marketing campaign. Earlier, measurement of SEO efforts revolved around the search engine rankings of a website for a set of targeted keywords.  The use of server log details gave online marketing professionals and website owners some more insight into the website usage and helped them define some new metrics to track the progress of an online marketing campaign. With the advent of more advanced page tagging and hybrid web analytics sofwares, both free and paid, we have a whole lot of data and performance metrics at our disposal. However, it is quite likely for someone to get lost within the heap of data provided by these applications making it difficult to find the meaningful data out of it. I am going to mention some of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) pay attention, what useful information you can derive from them, and how other performance metrics affect these KPIs. Please note that this post focus mainly on Google Analytics which is most widely used web analytics software.

Visitors: This is the most obvious metric to look for. All the hard work done in an Internet Marketing campaign is derive good amount of visitor traffic to your website. More the visitor traffic, better the website is performing. However, it is not only the quality of the visitor traffic that matters but the quality as well. For e.g., if am only running an SEO campaign, then majority of my traffic should be organic search engine traffic. We should also check the top 20 keywords deriving traffic to our website. Are majority of these the ones we are targeting? Are most of my visitors coming from the geographical area/country where I offer my services?

Bounce Rate: When a visitor visits your websites and exits the website from landing page itself, it is known as a Bounced Visit. I.e., visits with a single page view. Bounce Rate is calculated percentage of bounced visits as against total number of visits in a period of time. A high bounce rate means that users are not associating your website with the product or service they were expecting to look for.  Or your webpage design and architecture needs overhauling. Check the top list of 15-20 top landing pages and sort them to find pages with highest bounce rates. Then check the keywords through which visitors are landing on these pages. Are these keywords relevant to the page content? Are all the navigational and functional elements working fine? These top landing pages receive majority of your visitor traffic and hence changes made to these should impact your overall bounce rate. If you have enough time, dig deeper into the landing page list to work out the pages with high Bounce Rates.

Goals/Conversion: A Goal or Conversion can be defined as a transaction, sale, download, subscription, page views or any other metric which shows if your website is fulfilling its business objective. This is by far one of the most important KPI to measure. The number of conversions will provide you the real picture on whether your online business is really succeeding or not. The main purpose of every online marketing campaign should be to increase conversions. And it is the conversion rate of your website which tells you the quality of visitor traffic and that of your website itself. Typically, the conversion rate of 2% is considered to be an average but it can vary considerably depending upon the industry segment and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Site Overlay: This is the least known feature in Google Analytics but can be of great use for usability experts who want dig deeper to the level of user behavior in order to improve the website structure. This feature shows the number of clicks on each hyperlink of the webpage as the percentage of total number of visits on that page. You can check which links attract most user attention and which the least. Based on this info, you can restructure your webpage like changing the navigation menu and making the Call For Actions (CFAs) more prominent.

PageViews Per Visit: This is one of the important but a bit overrated factors. This is also one of the most misinterpreted factors. Universally, a lot of average page views per visit are viewed as a sign that the website is engaging and users are finding it interesting to dig further. But on the other hand, a lot of page views per visit can also mean that visitors are not able to locate the product or info easily on the website. A higher number of average page views can also mean that visitors are distracted from main goal i.e. conversions. The number of page views per visit should be correlated with the conversion rate of the website to see if is beneficial for website or not. Higher number of page views is particularly beneficial for websites providing information, news or websites with impressions based advertising.

Benchmarking:  This feature in Google Analytics helps you compare your website’s metrics or performance with industry averages.  Although the data sources are ambiguous, still it can provide introspect as to what others have achieved.  To view this data, you must first agree to share your websites’ data anonymously with Google’s benchmarking service.   You can see where your website stands as compared with other websites within your industry segment. This can provide a thorough understanding of the areas in which we are beating our competition and in which we need to improve.

Posted in SEM | No Comments »

SEM Services: The perfect tool to promote your website

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 »

An Insight into RSS and Web Feeds

All of you must have heard about web feeds and RSS but many of you might not aware that exactly what these terms mean. Simply put, a web feed is a data format used to syndicate (or distribute) your website’s content, allowing users to subscribe to these content updates. Web feeds allows subscribers to be aware of any addition/update of content or articles on your website without actually visiting the website check the updates. This is the same concept as subscribing to a newsletter. News websites and blogs are common sources of webfeeds.

Web feeds are often XML based documents and RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is one of the most commonly used formats of web feeds. Another format called Atom format is a bit outdated nowadays. There are three main components involved in web feed subscription mechanism -

Feed: The article or content which has been added on the website

Feed Generator: Software which generates feeds. A typical website needs RSS feed generator software integrated in it where as a Wordpress Blog has a built in RSS feed generator. An Orange web feed icon in the address bar indicates that web feeds are available for subscription.

Feed Reader: Also known Feed Aggregator, this is a program which allows users to view feed. It is the feed reader which checks and ‘pulls’ the feed rather than feed generator ‘pushing’ the feed into the reader.

One of the most common forms of subscribing to RSS feeds is by Live Bookmarks. To use these, just click on the orange feed icon address bar of your browser and choose Live Bookmarks from the drop down menu. This will palce dynamic bookmark in Bookmarks Menu of your web browser, containing links to latest feeds. These links will keep on updating as new posts are added and old links disappear from live bookmarks. If you are using Mozilla Firefox, check ‘Bookmarks Toolbar’ in your bookmarks menu to view the recently subscribed feeds.

Apart from live bookmarks, you can also subscribe to webfeeds by websites such as iGoogle, MyYahoo, Google Reader or Bloglines. All you have to do is select Google (or Yahoo) from the drop down menu after you have clicked on feed button. Then, select Add To Google HomePage or Add To Google Reader. A gadget containing feeds from the website will appear on you iGoogle page if you select the former.

Though web feeds have similarity with email newsletters, they have certain advantages which make them preferred method of subscription. First, you don’t have to share your email id, thus reducing the risk of spam and virus attack. Secondly, rather than sending an “unsubscribe” request, you can simply remove the feed. All these features make RSS and webs feeds most popular technique of syndicating website content. So don’t forget to subscribe to feeds for our RedAlkemi Blogosphere to keep you updated with latest informative articles.

Posted in Software Concepts, SEM | No Comments »

Relevancy, the Most Important and Confusing SEO Factor

The term relevancy plays important roles in each process of search engine promotion of a website. Whether you are finalizing the keywords, optimizing the website with keywords or doing link building for your website, if there is any confusion in relevancy, the promotional campaign can be mislead. Generally from relevancy we understand ‘related to’, however the specifications of relevancy varies in SEO depends upon the situation. Here I am discussing some relevancy factors that can have a great impact in a website’s success on web. From SEO perspective, there are lots of definitions for relevancy on web. Keywords, content or link partners that represent or can impact your website/services most would be best relevant to your website.

Keyword Research: As keyword research is a complete topic in itself to discuss and we’ll also discuss it in our future posts. However from relevancy point of view, a keyword that is focused to your website services/products will be best relevant. During keyword research, each keyword should be relevant and focused to website services and products rather than website industry. We can understand it better from following example -If you are searching for keywords for the website of a dentist, here targeted audience would be the people who are looking for dentists services. Then you should not take keywords like “dental equipment” however it is relevant to the industry still it is not be able point targeted audience.

Keyword Grouping for Website Optimization: You need be more detail oriented in this practice. After have finalized the keywords to be targeted on your website, you now need to group them to distribute on different pages of the website. If you are grouping the keywords in such a way so that all related keywords will be targeted on same page then the relevancy gain would be maximum.

Link Building: A link should be able to pass relevance and importance to the website on search engines as well as relevant referral traffic. There is no specific scale to measure the relevancy. However, we can have a fair amount of idea if it will be useful to place your link on particular website if

• The industry segment of that website is exactly same as yours

• People interested in product or services offered by that website might be interested in your products or services as well. For e.g., people interested in a trip to Hawaii might also be interested in scuba diving or parasailing.

• If your website provides supporting services or accessories for the product. For e.g. people buying an iPhone might also be interested in buying a case/cover for their iPhone.

The above mentioned points are not only valid from search engine perspective but from user perspective as well. If we ignore the user intent and consider only how search engines work, then opposite of last point mentioned above is equally true. In some cases where your website’s industry is not general then you might have problem to find relevant link partners for your website. Then you can search for broad industry relevant link partners to do link exchange.

So be careful next time, all it needs is a little thought process and business sense.

Posted in SEM | 3 Comments »

Sitemap.xml - The most Overrated Search Engine Indexing factor

Ask an SEO next door to tell you reason for the poor ranking and indexing of your website of your website, the first statement he will come up is - “Cmmon, how will your website rank, when it doesn’t even have a sitmep.xml file”. Yes, we all know that sitemap.xml helps to improve indexing of a website, but is it actually as important as the most community hypes about it? Certainly not. Infact, I think that XML sitemaps is the most overrated SEO tactic ever. Sitemaps don’t really solve the problems (I mean all the problems) where indexing and crawlability are concerned. What I mean here is that if you have a website that has 150 pages and the Search Engines can only access 30 of them, don’t think that uploading a sitemap.xml is a sure shot way to index 100% of your pages. It’s very much like applying a 2 inch band aid after open heart surgery.

By now, you must be wondering - “If not sitemap.xml, then what’s the cure?” - I believe instead of just spoon feeding the Search Engines with pages with the help of a sitemap.xml file in a hope that it will pick all the listed pages one day, you must rather focus on making the un-indexed pages better and worthy in the eyes of Search Engines by improving the content, acquiring better/more links to them, and so forth. When Google, doesn’t indexes some pages on your website, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Search Engines had trouble finding the page, but actually the Search Engines never found those pages worthy of keeping them in its main index. Just because a website doesn’t has a sitemap.xml doesn’t mean search engines wont crawl it unless the website has weak internal linking and information architecture.

Please don’t get me wrong here. I am not against the use of sitemap.xml file but what I want to say is that if your website has indexing problem, don’t just rely on the sitemap.xml as the sole indexing factor. Consolidate the internal linking of your website, use nofollow to control the link juice flow and most important – add quality content on the pages and get quality back links for those pages.

Posted in SEM | 1 Comment »

The Code looks Good, but is it Search Engine Friendly too?

No matter how good a developer is, each one makes few mistake while writing HTML code. And I am talking precisely about mistakes which the Search Engines don’t like - some small ones and some fatal search engine disasters. These mistakes happen not because we don’t know how to write an HTML code but because after we are done writing the code, we say to our selves, it’s done and it’s looking fine; why bother change it now for Search Engines. Not every developer is a Search Engine guru and very few know (or bother to know) that couple of such coding mistakes here and there might cause the site to choke to death. But don’t panic yet, it’s easy to avoid these mistakes - just consider the following while you code a website next time:

• Make it a thumb rule to avoid repeating yourself. If it’s a commonly used object property, place it in CSS. If it’s a repeated Javascript, store it in an external file and call where ever required.

• Don’t mess up the code with unused or unclosed DIV’s. If a DIV opens, it should close as well and if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t open. It’s as simple as that.

• The most common web developer mistake - every page has it’s own unique title and description, please do not put the title and description tag in the include files.

• Please make all links and references to images, CSS and JavaScript root relative by starting them with a slash, “/”. Dreamweaver users, please set the “Links relative” option to “Site root” in the Site Definition wizard. This is handy because root relative links don’t break when files are moved from one directory to another.

• Don’t put too many files in a single directory. Keep the heirachy going and manage the files in different directories.

• Use Validator to keep the code and CSS clean. Clean code is easier to manage then something that’s messed up.

• Don’t use <br> for <p> tag as it’s unprofessional and results in inconsistent layout in different browsers.

• Avoid spacer graphics and nested tables. Use heading tags, unordered lists and numbered lists to organize content instead.

• Make it a habit to put a forward back slash ‘/’ at the end of every URL.

Image credit:Flickr

Posted in Web Design, Web Development, SEM | 1 Comment »

Widget Bait for Link Love

The recent launch of an amazing MP3 widget by Amazon, made me do a little research on some very interesting widget ideas in the market and the role such widgets can play in a successful link building campaign. For those of you, who are unaware of the term widget, widget is nothing but a small stand alone web applications that can be installed and executed in web page without installing extra plugins. Check out these cool widgets Apple & Amazon. Even Yahoo! has a dedicated widget gallery featuring some really cool widgets for free download.

The Power of Widgets
The god of widgets as I call him, Mathew Inman (why god? Check out his widget gallery) generated thousands of links for his website Justsayhi with widgets like this and this, just untill when Google decided to ban Justsayhi. But wait, why would Google ban a website for distributing widgets? Actually Justsayhi wasn’t baned for distributing Widgets for link building but for cross-promoting a spammy website network with its widget & quizzes. If you still doubt the power of a widget, go and ask Zillow, how much money and links did they raised from Zestimate (property evaluation widget ) and out of the famous Zillow-Yahoo teamup.

Widget Bait for Link Love:
Generating server crashing traffic and links requires four things – good idea, designer, programmer and a crystal marketing channel to promote the widget (Email Marketing rocks). After you develop your widget, insert URL link in the interface and showcase it on your website for a free download. People use it and if they find it cool, they embed it in their own website for free with the help of the simple instructions on your website. But make sure you use different keywords in links otherwise same anchor text may go against you on Google. Here are two smart ways how you can generate links for your website and make your green bar go dancing.

• Create some rocking Wordpress themes and showcase them on your website as free ware with back link to your website.
• This one is too good. Create a contact form widget that uses Google Docs as database.

If you are creative and have good understanding about your industry, you can also come up with hundreds of such widget bait ideas. But remember, for the success of your widget, it’s important that an average non-techie user should be able to understand and use the widget application and it must be really easy to implement/install.

There are many powerful widgets that can help you to control the web around you. Here are few of them:

1. Bookmark This
2. Email Subscription Widget
3. Picture Badge
4. Recent Visitor
5. Search Blog
6. Snapshot widget
7. Twitter Update
8. Playlist Video Widget
9. Web Poll Widget
10. What I am Listening

Posted in SEM | No Comments »

Google Empowers Your Competitors To Destroy Your Search Engine Rankings

No matter how smart you are, with the current Google algorithms, you can never run away from the possibility of your competitors destroying your presence on the Search Engines by using Google’s savvy algorithms against you. There are variety of ways, how your evil competitors can do this:

1. Google proxy hacking
2. Automated Comment spamming your website’s URL on explicit websites.
3. Automated directory submission of your website in crap directories (your ranking on Yahoo may jump but Google will surely bury you for links from such directories).
4. Your competitor might generate hundreds of links with same anchor text from single IP address.
5. Your competitors might use content scrapping scripts to replicate your entire website. So many times, I have seen Google penalizing the original website and ranking the content scrappers.
6. 301/302/Javascript redirect hijacking.

The consequence of such attacks are not always fatal but even a drop of 5 places can hurt your website’s traffic badly. I know that if you have strong immunity (Google trust rank) you can survive such competitor attacks but it takes time and efforts to build such a strong immunity and not every websites is blessed with it. I don’t think Google should allow website’s competitor destroy its ranking just because it has a weak immunity.

Solutions

• Block the IP address of the websites scrapping your content.
• There are many ways to fight Google proxy hacking like mod rewrite from .htacceess file, reverse cloaking & other PHP scrips.
• Use honeypots.

Additionally, what I feel Google can do here is to let the webmasters drop the the links manually from their webmaster central account which they think might harm their website’s ranking and immunity. Search Engines need to evolve…big time!!!
Image credit: flickr

Posted in SEM | 4 Comments »

The dilemma of Page Rank Sculpting, follow or nofollow

While every one around the SEO corner is busy hoarding the page rank of their site using nofollow attribute in quest to rank the important pages of a website, I am quite sure this practice (page rank sculpting) is just an accident waiting to happen as webmasters will abuse it up to an extent that Google will do what they have done to ‘keyword meta tag’ – start ignoring it. After the public announcements and claims done by Rand Fishkin, Stephen Spencer, Danny Sullivan and even Matt Cutts, that directing the link juice to the important pages of a website improves the Search Engine Ranking of a website, the SEO community is using nofollow on anything they don’t want to rank for, claiming it a ‘wastage of link juice’ otherwise. But I personally believe that this nofollow practice is taking the SEO community no where, as webmasters have a license to get away to rank their websites even with a poor internal navigation and hence poor user experience. So obviously the nofollow era is facilitating more spammy websites making it to the top of the Search Engine lists. It’s just matter of time, when Google will take an evasive action.

If we have a look at the origin of a nofollow attribute, we find that nofollow attribute was made with the primary motto to combat comment spam (which it has failed miserably as comment spammers are still employed). Further Google found that nofollow can also help Google bots to firstly determine the most important pages out of huge websites with complex blog categories in little time and secondly the webmasters could use nofollow while linking to some website content which they don’t want to get associated with and vote to. Here is a recent precise statement made by Matt Cutts on use of nofollow attribute:

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.”

Now getting back to my anti-nofollow visionary, the nofollow tags also facilitate a fake information architecture. As we know Google ranks the sites with solid internal navigational architecture higher on SERP as these are the sites which provide rich user experience to the Google users as the important content is just 3 clicks away, nofollow isn’t helping to their cause. Coz what most webmasters are doing at the moment is hoarding the page rank and shooting it on the targeted pages even when the target page is nothing but pure crap and weakly linked from other pages of the site.

Having said that, please don’t take me wrong, as I am not questioning the effectiveness of page rank sculpting, because it’s working great at the moment, but I am not too sure how long will this nofollow rampage last: I am afraid not too long. So I have a simple advise to give – use nofollow but only after you have crystallized your internal navigation and don’t rely 100% on this nofollow ploy as you might soon see Google derank the websites with weak internal structure indulging in page rank sculpting. I am looking forward to SMX Advanced and hopeful that it might clear up the mounted clouds over rank sculpting dilemma.

Posted in Web Development, SEM | No Comments »

We are now offering ‘Deep Indexing Service’

Are you still wondering if all the pages of your website, indexed in Search Engines or not? Leave your worries to us as now we are offering a unique SEO service - Deep Indexing Solution. Our robots will crawl your website, will find the un-indexed pages and will force the pages from the supplemental index to the main index. Yes, our robots can determine which of your pages are lying in the Supplemental Index. Our deep-indexing campaign not only improves your site’s deep-indexing but also improves search engine ranking for your keyword phrases. Please click here for more information about our premiere service.

Posted in Inside RedAlkemi, SEM | No Comments »

The SEO war of redirects: 301 vs 302 vs meta-refresh tag

With this post, let’s discuss the much talked about 301 vs 302 vs Meta-refresh tags to understand which one in the most ideal one to use from the Search Engine Optimization point of view and in which situation? First, let’s have a look oni this small cartoon I’ve made for a general idea about redirects, then we will go into details so that the whole information is easy for you to digest

301 Redirects
301 redirect is undoubtedly the safest way to redirect a website as all Search Engines treat a ‘301 redirect’ in same way ie. They simply pass all the link value, juice, ranking etc to the redirected page. A 301 redirect tells a search engine that the requested page has permanently been shifted to a different location so search engines simply ignore the original URL and index the destination URL foreg. If we 301 redirect a website that is about watches (let’s say - awesome-watches.com) which is ranking for keyword ‘wrist watches’ to another website – cool-watches.com, the search engines will simply ignore awesome-watches.com and will index and rank cool-watches.com for the keyword ‘wrist watches’. 301 redirect is also the most handy tool to handle canonical URLs. The most common cases when we use 301 redirects are:

• If the page is deleted or permanently moved.

• You want a new top level domain for your website without damaging your link value and rankings. To serve either of the version of www vs non-www. This is done with a combination of 301 redirect and mod-rewrite.

• Content duplication. For example you may 301 redirect www.yoursite.com/index.htm to www.yourwebsite.com

  If you have many topically relevant but outdated websites which your are not willing to maintain anymore, you may slowly redirecting the outdated websites to the most current website. But beware, if there are many websites, redirect them one by one slowly as otherwise you might end up getting flagged for being a spammer. Please take a note that At SMX, all the engineers from all the search engines made a statement that 301 redirect will not carry the full effect if the content of the redirecting website is topically not the same. We should avoid redirecting our website to a site which is topically irrelevant to our website. For e.g. if you are planning to redirect (301) your website about cars, then you should not redirect it to a website selling watches. An inappropriate redirect will not lead to any benefit to your website.

302 Redirects
302 redirect, also known as temporary redirect tell search engines that the content of the requested URL is temporarily available at a different URL location but will be soon restore to the original URL. So in case of a 301 redirect, the search engines will index the original URL, but they will extract the content content from the 301 redirected URL. This is the the most dicey redirect that you can use on your website as all the search engines tend to treat a 302 redirect differently with lots of exceptions to what they claim. Here is a link for any budding 302 hijacker
Mattcutts has explained here with simple examples, how Google, MSN and yahoo handle a 302 redirect. You may consider using a 302 redirect within your website pages (ie. Onsite redirect), when you want to serve search engines a simple version of a URL and the content from a different page with a complex URL, since simple and short URL’s look more click-enticing in the Search Engine result pages foreg www.yourwebsite.com can be 302 redirected to www.yourwebsite.com/userdata?user=12xc2?id=crap
However you must never try a cross domain 302-redirect.
MSN treats a 302 redirect exactly how it treats a 301 permanent redirect, that is, it will always ignore the original URL and instead index the destination URL. Same is the case with Yahoo, but yahoo reserves the right to make exceptions to this declaration (which they do at many occasions). You must be very careful as 302 redirects are often the default redirect in host control panels and JavaScript. Many meta redirects produce the same 302 redirect effect.

Meta-refresh Redirects
Actually a meta-refresh is not a redirect but it is s simple instruction to the browser to refresh the page after a certain period of time (content in seconds, with or with out a new supplied URL instead of the current one). It is situated in the head of the HTML page and looks something like this: <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.anotherdomain.com/category/shoes.htm”>
All search engines understand a meta-redirect but again, tend to react differently depending on the content figure. If the content time is 0 or 1 second, most search engines take it as a permanent 301 redierct; anything more than 1 is normally considered a 302 redirect. Use meta-refresh only if you your current hosting provider doesn’t allow a 301, primarily because the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (7.4) discourage the creation of auto-refreshing pages, since most web browsers do not allow the user to disable or control the refresh rate and secondly Spammers use a meta-refresh to refresh the page after every 5 seconds to save themselves from any type of ranking punishment. I am sure you don’t want to look like a spammer. If you want get into details here are some really useful threads on meta-refresh tags

Javascript Redirects
Don’t use Javascript redirect as search engines simply don’t understand it or tend to confuse it as a 302 redirect.

Posted in SEM | 15 Comments »

Geographical Targeting: Factors You Can’t Afford to Overlook

Have you ever wondered why an Australian website (yourdomain.com.au) physically hosted in Australia ranks higher when searched on Google.com.au than an evilcompetitor.com hosted in Europe? Or Does a country-specific domain name (TLD) (e.g., .co.uk) actually helps if someone is targeting a specific country market? These are some of the most common issues which many webmasters across the globe face when they are looking to rank a website at different country specific search engines (ie. Google.com/.co.uk/.com.au etc).

I recently wrote this guest post at seomoz.org, featuring the major issues that you must consider while Geographically Targeting a website for country specific search engines (without getting penalized for content duplication). You must read it, I know that it’s not all that comprehensive but I am quite sure that it will give you a good insight of ranking discrepancies in different geographies. Cheers !

Posted in SEM | No Comments »

Meet the family: Meta name= “robots”

In my last post on SEO feast, I offered you so many things to eat – PR Bar, optimizer beer, Energy drinks and what not. But did you ever wonder, what do Search Engine bots eat? Yes they love eating fresh content & HTML on your website; but there are few things on your website, that you never want to feed bots with like - flash, silly javascripts, duplicate content, affiliate links (that pass link juice) etc. So how do you stop these dumb bots – Simple, by defining robots meta tag values:

<meta name=”robots” value=” <value> “

I just happened to stumble upon this cute flicker pic of five robots, I could relate to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask & Altavista. So I just simply used my paint brush and wrote their names accordingly. Looks so cool to me !

And now that you have met the bot family, let’s discuss different values you can serve to these witty Search Engine bots:

1. Index: Allows bots to index the page. This a default value, you need not define it on all the pages.
2. Noindex: Search Engines will not index the page and hence the page will not appear in its results.
3. None: It’s like shortcut for noindex, nofollow. “None” gives strict instruction to search engines – Don’t do any thing with the page at all.
4. Follow: Tell search engine bots, to follow the links on the page and take them as a vote to the linking website ie. pass the link juice.
5. Nofollow: Gives strict instruction to bots not to follow any links at all.
6. Noarchive: Stops paparazzi bots from showing the cached version of the page in its reults.
7. Nocache: Prevents MSN/Live to show the cached version of the page in its results.
8. Nosnippet: Stops the bots from not only reflecting a snippet of the page in search results but also doesn’t let them cache the page.
9. Noodp: Makes sure that search engines don’t use the description of the containing page in DMOZ as the snippet for your page in the search results.
10. Noydir: Works just like noodp, but used exclusively for Yahoo!

BTW, you may also want to go through our comprehensive article on Working with robots.txt file. I hope you enjoyed the post. Cheers!
Image credit: flickr.

Posted in Web Development, SEM | No Comments »

Power feast: 31 most basic SEO factors you can’t afford to overlook

In the dynamic world of SEO, where there are so many small and big things that contribute to your website’s Search Engine friendliness, it is so easy for even professional SEOs to miss out on few of the factors. So as to make sure that there is less SEO skipping and your website is fulfilling Search Engine’s basic requirements, I have compiled a really simple and most basic SEO checklist that will help you to be a little more confident about your SEO campaign. This post is a little long, so to make it more interesting, we are also serving some mouth watering snacks like - beer, chocolate, Energy drinks and what not. Relax and enjoy the feast:

1. If you haven’t booked a domain name yet, make sure you have your main keyword in it; people will link to you using your domain name as anchor text and hence giving a boost to your ranking for that particular keyword.
2. To begin with, make sure that you run a Google Adword Campaign to know the most convertible keyword theme for your website.
3. After the final keyword research, use this data to write unique and click-enticing title and meta description tag for each page. 65 characters in title tag is the maximum amount that will display in the search results but a little longer won’t hurt either. Keyword in the title tag is one most important factor you can’t afford to ignore.
4. Make sure that you haven’t overused keywords on the body copy; keyword density is a thing of past, Search Engines now use Latent Semantic Indexing instead.
5. Use keywords in alt and title tag of every image on your site (without making it look spammy).
6. Use H1, H2, H3 tags in your keyword headings. Use only one H1 tag per page with the most important keyword in it but you can use as many h2, h3 tags.

   

7. Use bold or strong tags to highlight the most important keyword.
8. Make sure all the internal and external navigational links have keywords in the anchor text and not just ‘click here’ and ‘learn more’. It gives a boost to the internal linking. You may even consider using tag clouds on your website for better Internal linking.
9. Be selective while submitting links to directories otherwise you may spoil your link profile in pursue of easy back links.
10. Use a robot.txt file to stop Google bots to index the unwanted & duplicate content.
11. Use Google and static sitemap and don’t forget to update it time to time.
12. Use keywords in bread crumb navigation.
    

    

13. Make sure you have a customized 404 error page. To make this task more interesting for you, check out these cool 404 error pages. (But please don’t forget to put a static sitemap or site search on your error page).
14. Implement Google Analytics and feed burner to monitor website stats.
15. Minimize exit links from your landing page.
16. Do your host’s IP analysis especially if you own a family of websites.
17. Write your company’s local address with your important keyword somewhere in the heading on the website and submit your website to Google local business Center for optimizing your website locally.
18. Make sure that there are no broken links. Use Xenu.

    

19. Every time you add a new blog or article (auto) ping atleast Google, Yahoo, MSN and technorati.
20. Keep your website and page URLs as simple as possible. Search Engines hate non-sense dynamically generated URLs like http://www.crapurl/114/cat223 or http://www.crapurl/view_item.php?listing_id=477443&pic_id=2. Use URL masking.
21. For usability follow these simple design principles.
22. Don’t try to rank all the pages of your website. Concentrate on five of them and keep cannibalization factor in mind while doing the internal and external linking of your website.
23. Be creative in your link building approach. One solid idea can fetch you a million dollar worth links.
24. Keep your website link worthy.

    

25. Domain age matters a lot. You can’t do any thing about it but you have to be patient. (I wish there was some aging formula for websites like anti-aging cream for women)
26. Link popularity of the website. Use Yahoo for this as it presents more accurate link profile of a website than Google.
27. Additionally, use misspelled keywords in the keyword meta tags. It certainly helps.
28. You don’t want to waste your link equity/link juice to get wasted on ranking pages like ‘request for proposal’ , ‘privacy policy’, ’shipping policy’. It’s better to use no-follow tags on such pages.
29. Make sure you update your website content as often as possible. This improves your website bot-crawl frequency.
30. Have your website W3C compliant, it will give your website some definite future benefits.
31. Test your website on text browsers like lynx.

    

PS: These are the most basic SEO factors that I can recall at the moment according to current Big3 Search Engine algos. If you think I have missed out on any of the important factors, please feel free to add them as comments on this post.
PSS: Images courtesy: gsinc.co.uk. I hope you enjoyed the feast and don’t be surprised if you find any of these products being sold at your nearest grocery store. Cheers !!

Posted in Web Usability, General, SEM | 8 Comments »

Try these 4 useful tips and optimize your website locally

Are you aware that ‘nearly 40% of all search queries have some sort of local intent’? And most of the people (as much as 70%) Google or Yahoo before consulting their local classifieds or yellow pages. With this blog post I would like to throw light on some really useful tips on how to optimize your website copy for local search (Google and Yahoo maps to be precise) -

• Know your place
  When I say ‘know your place’, I actually mean geography. You should know all the variations of names with which your work place is associated and use these names creatively in one form or the other in header or strong tags and at least once in title tags too. If you are selling pizzas in Denver, instead of writing just ‘yummy pizzas’ in h1 tag, you may want to use ‘the most yummy pizzas in Denver’, this might prove to be a longer tail, with higher conversion traffic. So make sure that you include all the landmarks and places of interest when you write your website copy. For geographical research Wikie can be surprisingly useful for you.
• Play with categories
  If you are running a restaurant, targeting broader keyword categories like restaurant and bar, it won’t be such a smart thing to do, instead – ‘Best ‘Mexican food’ restaurant in Denver’ is a longer tail with a broader category that is more likely to convert. You can have more pages on your website targeting keywords like ‘best ‘Chinese’ food at ‘15th street’ instead of ‘best restaurant’.
• Local Business Directories
  This is extremely important for your local search, make sure that your website is present in the local directories like Google Local Business Center, BBC, Talking Phone book, SuperPages etc. If not all, at least Google Local Business Center.
• Web Analytics
  Use Web analytics to monitor your website and watch out closely for the keywords people are associating your website with and insert those bubbling keywords into your website copy.

You may also want to refer to this wonderful post on Google’s local search algorithm.

Posted in SEM | No Comments »