Tag: SEO

10 Advanced Settings of Google AdWords to Boost Your Campaign

June 15, 2012

When companies decide to launch a Google AdWords campaign, they would need to bear a number of factors in mind. While much of AdWords settings can easily be understood and customized to suit the needs of a particular campaign, many companies tend to ignore the specific details that are very important. One may call these specificities as ‘Advanced Settings’. SEM professionals understand that these advanced settings not only consist of all the steps available in AdWords’ very own Advanced Settings tab, but also consist of a few other customizations and tweaks that one may need to engage in manually. Let us take a look at the top 10 advanced settings of Google AdWords to boost your ad campaign. The Advanced Settings tab in Google AdWords has some of the most important techniques to launch a successful campaign. Let us take a look at all the options that Google provides under this tab. 1. Schedule: Start date, End date, Ad Scheduling This option allows users to set a particular date to launch a campaign and to turn it off, when the campaign is no longer needed or when the season comes to an end. This option helps campaigners to automate ad scheduling and avoid lengthy and unnecessary campaigns which may become relevant and hurt a company’s marketing efforts. Ad Scheduling on the other hand allows users to set certain days of the week or particular times during a day for campaigns. This may be particularly useful once you profile your target audience and how they behave temporally. Ad scheduling also provides the option of setting the percentage increase/decrease in bids by hour, day or week. 2. Ad Delivery: Ad Rotation, Frequency Capping Ad rotation helps you to evenly rotate and optimize ads based on which ad is doing well at the particular time. Again, ad rotation depends on how much time you can invest in managing AdWords campaigns and how best you understand which campaign may be particularly useful. SEM professionals usually can help you understand ad rotation and its importance. Ad Delivery Options to choose from: Optimize for clicks: The ads expected to provide more clicks will start showing more frequently Optimize for conversions: Frequent showing of ads expected to provide more conversions Rotate evenly: All the ad copies currently active will be given equal preference and will be rotated and shown same number of times. Now, this will be continued for 30 days and then the ads will be run with ‘Optimize for Clicks’ features. These settings work upon the available ad performance data of the particular campaign and its ad group(s). Campaign launchers sometimes witness a number of impressions but very few translate to clicks. This may hurt a campaign’s quality scores and frequency capping helps to reduce the number of impressions during a particular time. It could be a given day, a week or per month. You also choose whether the limit applies to each ad, ad group, or campaign. 3. Demographic Bidding As the name suggests, it helps you to segregate your audience according to their gender, age or other criteria that you may notice in your Google AdWords demographic reports. Over-performing or underperforming demographic segmentations can be identified and bids may be modified accordingly. 4. Social Settings This setting allows you to incorporate the +1 button and annotations. Google+ is Google’s social networking endeavor that may also add to your revenue and ad campaign to an extent. You may request your friends, acquaintances or just about anyone else to click on +1 when required. 5. Automatic Campaign Optimization This setting helps you to analyze historical conversion data in your campaign. It is particularly useful if you do not have time to do it yourself or hire a professional. However, you may bear in mind that by choosing this setting, you are giving Google a lot of control over your campaign. In most instances, it is advisable to optimize a campaign with the help of professionals who know how Google AdWords and SEM work. 6. Campaign Experiment AdWords Campaign Experiments help you to sequestrate certain factors of your AdWords campaign and test certain areas by segmenting your traffic the way you please. You could test keywords, bids and placements, according to Google. However, there are limitations to the number of experiments you can carry out and at present there is no API support, which means you will have to use their web interface. However, it can be a great tool to test different keyword match types. If this is a little confusing, hiring an SEM professional may be necessary. Apart from the 6 settings available under the Advanced Settings at Google AdWords, here are other ‘advanced settings’ that you can utilize yourself by tweaking your campaign a little bit. 7. AdWords Sitelink Google first unveiled Sitelink way back in 2009 and it consisted of 2 to 6 links under an advert. Now, AdWords Sitelinks come with social, call, location and product extensions. Exploiting available Sitelink real estate should be your primary goal, and you might want to play with your campaign in order to do so. 8. Negative Keywords Google allows you to filter out negative keywords which may bring unwanted traffic that is not relevant to your ad campaign. By avoiding certain keywords, you may direct desired traffic who actually might click. This helps in improving the click through rate and directing our ads only to relevant searches. Usually words like free, cheap are used as negative keywords. For e.g. – for a Website selling designer watches, negative keywords would have been cheap, inexpensive, discount, affordable, free, etc. Hence, ads won’t appear for any keyword having any of these phrases in them. Also, for the brand names which they are not selling (e.g. – Christian Dior, Rolex) can be used as negative keywords since they would cut down unqualified traffic. 9. Separate campaign for Display Network By creating a separate campaign for display networks, you will easily be able to make changes or experiment

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Google’s Penguin Update

May 8, 2012

When Webmasters and Bloggers are still struggling with Google Panda Update, the new algorithm in the name of “Google Penguin Update” has come up as yet another threat to a considerable number of websites. Google has rolled out this update in order to decrease the ranking of all such sites that are violating the existing quality guidelines. The Penguin Update is focused to penalize those who are using tricky webspam tactics for over optimization. In post Penguin Update period the Penguin update can not only decrease the traffic of the websites but it also has a big tendency to damage the SERP ranking. Penguin Update has been launched as an effort to promote quality content and reduce webspam. Google’s Penguin Update is an improved version of Panda Update which was released on the 24th of April 2012. It aims at demolishing all those websites that are over-optimized with webspam techniques. Many sites have been seen to use wrong tactics and a shortcut to bring traffic and rank higher than expectations; these tactics are of no use to the users and Google’s new algorithm is targeted to penalize such sites. Therefore, while Google Panda will fight against low quality pages the Penguin will focus on spam content. You can be safe and stay away from being hit by Penguin update if your website is not using any spammed, old-fashioned strategies. It is mainly going to affect those websites which are loaded with low quality contents and abuses the guidelines of inbound linking. If you are wondering whether your website can be hit by Penguin or not, it’s easy to find it out. Simply search with common keywords in Google to check whether it is getting the same rank that it used to get previously. Check the website statistics to find out whether there is a major traffic drop compared to the previous stats. If it is yes, you are likely to be hit by Penguin Update and if there is no change, then you are safe. To Avoid being Hit by Panda do the Following: It is time to stop comment spamming; commenting on high page rank websites for the sake of getting BackLinks or using automation commenting over-stuffed with keywords and links, will make Google identify them easily and the sites using such spam techniques will be penalized in Post Penguin age. Avoid the contents which are overflowed with same keywords. Since keywords are an essential part of SEO and it is the keywords that help the users to get relevant contents by means of search engines; repeating the same keywords again and again make Google suspect and penalize. Avoid duplicate content; you cannot attain high rank in SERP by copying contents. Therefore, instead of copying contents from others, concentrate on making your unique, fresh contents. Otherwise, you many face penalty and your blog may get banned from SERP. Link Building Tips for Surviving the Penguin Update: Whenever you post fresh contents to your site make it a point to share it on your social pages like Google+, Facebook or Twitter. During Link building do not make the mistake of linking to your homepage, rather link to the inner content pages. Keep in mind that apart from external links, internal links are also very important and will help both Google and your visitors to crawl your site easily. Avoid over-optimization by diversifying your anchor texts. There should not be a feeling that you are you are forcibly trying to rank a site for a particular keyword, therefore, try to diverge your anchor links in a natural way. Keep focus on quality, not quantity; having a large number of backlinks from untrustworthy sites, you can be penalized, therefore, prefer high quality, small number of posts rather than large number of low quality ones. Focus on producing high quality contents that people like to link from websites and from their social profiles. Do not worry! Google Penguin update is not going to affect those websites which are using pure SEO and high quality contents. This new algorithm is surely meant to give the users a better way of searching and better search results. It will also give a boost to high quality blogs or websites by ranking them high in Search Engine Results. If your site is already a victim of this update and has lost ranking an traffic we can bring it back by our purely white –hat technique of Link Building. Before the situation gets more worse contact us today and allow us to help you to regain your lost position. Mail us at info@indusnet.co.uk

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What? How? Why? About Pinterest and Some Useful Tips

April 7, 2012

The latest social networking site, Pinterest has attracted a lot of press lately. While many have begun to swear by it, there are many of us who still do not understand this novel tool and how it might help us to drive traffic to websites, organize design projects and add a little colour to an otherwise text-filled world. What is Pinterest? In simple terms, Pinterest is an online space where one could organize pictures that are interesting. These images can either be uploaded originally or shared after running into an image while browsing. Once an image is uploaded or shared on Pinterest, it becomes a ‘pin’. A collection of pins that are related to each other can then be organized under themed Boards. It is up to the user what the boards are going to be named, or what sort of ‘Pins’ the board would consist of. How is Pinterest Used? Pinterest comes with an official ‘Pin It Button’, which is a browser extension. Each time you come across an image you like, you could click on the image and pin it under a board of your choice. Of course, you could accompany the ‘Pin’ with a caption or lengthier text as well. At the moment, it is possible to use your iPhone to Pin original pictures. Images can be categorized for further use, or for inspiration. All the hats that you like may be pinned under a specific board, so that others may see which hat you like. Or, you might want to pin pictures of apartments that you may find interesting, and pin them under a board titled ‘Possible Apartments to Buy’. The possibilities are endless! It is also a great tool to make lists of products that you may find attractive online, which you may choose to buy at a later stage. While you can always pin all day long anything that catches your eye, Pinterest is better used with a specific purpose in mind. Moreover, Pinterest can serve as a collaborative tool, with which you can collect images, brainstorm and work on issues that may be important to you. Pinterest is an open and public network. Anybody can follow anyone, and one is not obliged to follow back. One could categorize pins under hashtags, similar to Twitter hashtags. Who Uses Pinterest? Pinterest’s power users are aged between 25 and 44, and 80% of the users are female. They also earn a lot more than most people and have some level of college education. They tend to be located in the Midwestern states of the United States. However, this demographic is quickly changing to include people from other countries, and a growing number of men who have begun to use Pinterest for design projects. Can Pinterest Drive Traffic? All said and done, Pinterest is an important traffic driver to websites. It is particularly important to retail brands, as their products depend on visual appeal. Pinterest was launched way back in 2010, but it already has more than 10.4 million users. Of course, it can’t be compared with Facebook’s 845 million users or Twitter’s 200 million users. What needs to be understood is that Pinterest targets a certain visually oriented target audience, which could be a great platform to look for niche traffic. If one were to consider referral traffic, Pinterest is almost equal to Twitter, with both driving 3.6% of web traffic. Facebook on the other hand, has a share of 26.4%. LinkedIn and Google+ lag behind at 0.2%. Why Pinterest is Important to Web Designers? Most images that are pinned lead to a source link and as Pins can be ‘liked’ or ‘repinned’, they come with a promising traffic driving potential. This is perhaps what would interest SEO specialists and web admins. When it comes to web designers, it is rather easy to surmise that they would pin templates, images and graphics that they may want to use in certain projects. Pinterest is collaborative and social, which also means that web designers can use it to present design ideas to clients. Again, like we always say with social sites, the possibilities are endless. Pinterest is being increasingly seen as a promising tool for web designers, mostly because of its visual nature. Pinterest allows you to organize links based on images that you see on various websites. These images, which might be websites that inspire you to design similarly, could be clubbed under various categories of boards. Top 10 Tips to Use Pinterest 1) Use Pinterest on Websites It is very important to make your presence on Pinterest known to visitors to your website. Pinterest has a number of goodies, which can help you to add Pinterest buttons, either on the page or on individual products that you display. This would encourage visitors to pin products on your site, and eventually drive traffic back to your website, probably resulting in sales. 2) The Right Etiquette Like any other social media website, it is important to not sound like you are over promoting yourself or your products. It is alright to promote your products, but your boards must include images and links to themes, ideas and interests that can be associated with your business. It is important to be nice, polite and non intrusive. 3) Engagement and Participation Increase the number of pins and boards, and keep them relevant to your business. Follow people who follow you, and engage in conversations about what they like and dislike. The more images you pin, the more traffic you will drive back to your website. 4) Keywords and Hashtags Just like in Twitter, Pinterest allows you to use keywords and hashtags relevant to particular pins. For instance, #Flash, #design, #CSS can be relevant hashtags to your web design projects. It is important to identify which hashtags are most relevant to your business. If you are a developer, you could perhaps link images to your blog posts that describe coding, screenshots of HTML and PHP codes, etc. 5) Interest Groups There

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Top 10 Local Search Optimization Ranking Factors

March 22, 2012

Local Search Ranking Factors depend on a number of things that businesses do online, to promote their products and services. David Mihm, who is a well respected Local Search Ranking expert, released a comprehensive list of factors, which he updates each year. Here is what we think about the top 10 Local Search Ranking Factors that he speaks about. Physical Address in City of Search It is very important to make sure that a business’ physical address matches the city in which the company must be listed. Having an address in London and listing it under New York City may not be a very great SEO technique. However, when a company may have operations in different cities but has only one physical address, mentioning that could be a good idea. Manual Verification of Business Ownership It is now possible to verify that your business belongs to you, by asking Google to send a postcard to the physical address which can later be returned to Google to complete the verification process. This service is available in most countries except a few. In such cases, one might want to contact other search engines like Yandex, if you are in Russia or Baidu if the business is located in China. The driving point is to validate a business’ physical existence in a particular city with the help of a search engine. In most cases, it just happens to be Google. Correct Category Associations While listing your business in Google Places or in yellow pages online, it is important to make sure that it is listed under the right business category. Looking at similar advertisements and listings could help you to decide under which category your business belongs. Traditional Structured Citations It is important to make sure that your business is also listed in traditional and conventional listings which include yellow pages, classifieds and other such listings. Getting listed on local portals and local sites help a lot too, and that adds up to the credibility of your business being important to the place you want to optimize your name under. Listing Company Address Though many companies frown at this idea, it is a very important step to make sure that your business is crawlable. When a business address is listed in a company’s website, it not only adds credibility but becomes easier for search engines to recognize your business is local. Well-ranked Company Website It is of course important to have a website which is search engine ranked. it must be well ranked in order to make sure that it is crawlable and listed high in order of importance. Following SEO techniques of keeping metadata clean and using appropriate keywords, not indulging in unfair SEO practices, and publishing quality content in a consistent and timely manner help to increase a site’s ranking. Moreover, getting links from higher pagerank sites would increase a page’s pagerank as well, ultimately resulting in better search engine ranking. High-quality Inbound Links This is an area that most companies find difficult to understand. Companies need to makes sure that internal links to their own sites are provided appropriately. However the links should be relevant and appropriate to the published matter. Company Phone Number A phone number has psychological implications of immediacy, availability and reliability. Thus, when you list your company’s phone number, it automatically helps people to recognize that your business is reliable in local contexts. The key is to have a local number and listing it in a manner so that it is crawlable. Using 800 numbers may not be advisable as they don’t give the local flavor. Local Area Code on Google Places Of course, any local ranking factor depends on your presence on Google Places. It is important to add a zip code or area code, as that can be searched by web crawlers too. by doing so, your business tends to becomes searchable based on exact location within a city. Location in Page Title It can be very useful to have the city and state in which your business is located in, within the page title of Google Places landing page. While address can always be mentioned within content, it is equally important to mention the city and state within page title. Apart from these 10 factors, there are a few more ways to improve local ranking. It is always prudent to go through all the reviews that your business may have received. More the number of reviews, the better it would be for local ranking. It is not necessary that one must have only positive reviews. Negative reviews could be used to correct what is wrong within the organization. Of course, requesting for reviews isn’t such a bad idea either if done in an acceptable and honest manner. Having a presence on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is very important. One could invite target audience to like a page or get them to follow you on Twitter. This could be a novel method to let people in your business’ vicinity know if you have discounts and offers. Most people discover local business with the help of their GPS-enabled smartphones and maps. Thus, optimizing your website for mobile devices and making sure that you are available on Foursquare and other check-in services may help people to find you, when they use Google Maps, or any other map service for that matter. All this might sound like work, but there is nothing better than having a strong local presence for the success of your business. It might take a while, but eventually all the handwork will pay off.

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Using Link Baiting for SEO

March 19, 2012

Today the Internet Marketing landscape is quite competitive and everyone knows how difficult it is get quality traffic. So Internet marketers and SEO specialists are often employing innovative ways to drive quality traffic and back links to their websites. One such technique of garnering back links is called “Link Baiting”. We can define Link bait as a “technique to garner back links to a website naturally”. In link baiting, we create a compelling piece of content that arouses people’s interest, so they wish to link to that content from their website. In normal link building we approach others to link to our websites or we exchange links with others, but in Link baiting the content that we create attract people and they are compelled to link to the site as they want to share it with their readers too. The goal of perfect link bait is to let people keep sharing it till everyone in the Internet sees it. A Viral link bait is quite useful and give result beyond imagination. Types of Link Bait There are various approaches the professional link baiters follow to create link baiting strategies (hooks). However these strategies can be broadly categorized into the following: News Hook This kind of link baiting strategy is dependent on the freshness of the content. You need to be pretty proactive in publishing the news as and when it happens. The news like a much anticipated product launch or preview of a gadget before it launch gets quite lot of attention in Internet community and can help you in getting lot of backlinks. The unveiling of iPhone 4 by Gizmodo is the best example in using this link bait hook. It has got 244K Facebook shares and more than 4000 back links from diverse domains. Humor Hook Put something in a funny way, make a cartoon of a celebrity or write a funny story or a joke and you will get lot of people talking about it. You can even make fun of yourself or fun of a renowned celebrity or the industry. But make sure your content is unique and special then million of other sites. Resource Hook Infographics, widgets and online gadgets serve as good link bait items. Resource hooks are the best and easiest link baiting strategy. There are lots of opportunities to do some ground breaking research and put your research finding in a nicely done infographics, which is enough to get you a plethora of backlinks. You can even write How-to-guides or an ebook and you will get backlinks for sure. Though this strategy is time consuming, it gives desired result. Attack Hook This strategy relies on negative views and comments to create buzz. But this can lead you to making few enemies for sure. Talking bad about someone or something creates a debate sort of thing and divides people into 2 groups who indulge in fighting among themselves and indirectly help in promoting the content. Political bloggers and critiques are good at this strategy. Incentive Hooks This strategy is employed by almost everyone at some point in time. Running contests on blogs, asking people to write review about your site etc come under this. When you give people something in return, they will never hesitate to write about you. Elements of Link Bait For maximum return from link baiting, the quality of content should be good and unique. It should be well edited and properly formatted. This will let others to skim over the content and decide to link to it. With that in mind, we need to consider following things: Headline: A strong and alluring headline is a must. So the first step is to decide on a catchy headline that will automatically divert people’s attention and they will think of reading. When people will link they may use this headline to link to your site which in turn will serve as an added benefit and will increase traffic inflow. Main Content: Remember that great link bait content cannot be produced in a few hours. The main content should be written thoughtfully and in an easy to understand manner. The information provided in the content should be thoroughly researched. The content should be well formatted and should be free of spelling and grammatical errors. Graphics and Visuals: Pictures speak better than the words. So complement your content with graphics and visuals. If you have an infographics in place for any research based article, do include that and talk about the infographics in brief. Targeted list: Before you publish the article meant for link baiting, build up a list of bloggers and web masters who will be able to help you in promoting by sharing the link bait. This way it will get more visibility and can go viral faster. Launch with a Buzz: Even if you have a great article, complemented with pictures and graphics, you cannot expect people to find it and link to it on their won. You have to put little efforts to make it viral. Social media is the best choice in the regard. Use social media like Facebook and Twitter and social bookmarking service s like Digg, Reddit etc. to submit the content and promote it. Make sure that you are not over promoting it, else it will be regarded as Spam and will be of no use. Factors for Link bait success The ultimate aim of link bait is to gain backlinks which helps in SEO. Because one of the prime requisite in SEO is gaining backlinks. The social media like Facebook and Twitter act as catalyst which trigger the link bait posts to be mentioned in traditional blogs and websites. That is when the actual magic of link bait can be seen. Link baiting is the natural way of building backlinks. Main purpose of any SEO campaign is to bring traffic to a website by employing various methods and link bait serves this purpose effectively. One of the factors for the success of link

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Hiring Your Next SEO Company

March 17, 2012

Gone are the days when only the bigger companies were investing for the online marketing to strengthen their position in World Wide Web. But now the scenario has changed, as Internet is reaching to more and more people, the traditional offline business is rapidly migrating to online business. Hence, small business like restaurants to individuals like doctors and lawyers are embracing Internet to reach to more and more people and spread their business. The primary essence of being successful in online business is driving traffic to your website and converting visitors to customers. The best and the cheapest way to drive traffic to your website is through Search Engines. The Science and Technology involved in this process is called Search Engine Optimization. The power of Search Engine Optimization in online business cannot be underestimated. Hence choosing an efficient SEO agency is a daunting task when every other person in Internet claims as an SEO guru. Choosing the wrong SEO agency for your business can be disastrous and can ruin your business. So proper evaluation as well as thoughtful planning while hiring an SEO agency is required. In your search for the right SEO agency, you need to shortlist a few and then study the shortlisted candidates in and out before finalizing the one who will be working for you. In first phase try to collect as much information about the shortlisted SEO companies/agencies as possible. Go through their website and read about them. Find out for how long they are in business and for how long their domain name exist. You can use web tools like who.is to find domain details. Check their clientele. All these details you can collect on your own without actually talking to them. In this phase you can again reject a few. While you are in the finalizing step you need to check the following things with the SEO company/agency to get a clearer picture about them: Reference: Ask them for reference sites on which they have worked. If possible try to contact the webmaster of that site to collect their feedback on the SEO agency. Also request for case studies on earlier project they have worked on. Proposal: Ask them for a pre-evaluation of your site and a customized proposal. Ask them to find out the issues related to your site. Most of the SEO agencies provide a readymade proposal which they send to all prospective customers. This kind of proposal might not be suited to your business type. Hence insists on a tailor-made proposal. When you go through their proposal, check if they are focusing more on keyword oriented tasks or the proposal is more ROI driven & takes into account resolving various on page & off page issues Work Experience: Verify if they have working experience in SEO related to your business/niche. Every business and niche needs little tweaking in the general SEO practices. So an agency having prior experience in SEO related to your business or niche will be able to do better. Time Frame: Ask for a time frame by when you will be able to see noticeable result. SEO is neither a week or month old project nor it is do once and forget kind of project. It usually takes 3-6 months to see any noticeable result. Business Practice: Ask them the business practices they follow. Some of the SEO service providers use unethical means (black hat methods) to rank your site high and they can boast f the achievement. But the black hat methods are sure to cause greater harm to your site in long run. So stay away from such things. Reporting: What kind of report they provide and what is their reporting frequency. The regular report with comparison on week to week or month to month basis will give you a clear picture of how the SEO campaign is performing. Keyword Analysis: Do they provide keyword suggestion and how many keywords they target? Make sure the keyword election is proper and does not look vague. If the keyword selection is not done wisely then whole SEO campaign will fail. Staffing: Check whether they have adequate staff. Lot of SEO activities like link building, article writing etc require manual work for better result. So the SEO agency should have adequate staffs to full fill the service quality. Also check for the knowledge level of the staffs and ask to interact with them if possible. Tools: Though lot of manual work is involved in SEO, some things like keyword analysis, back link checking requires usage of sophisticated tools. So the SEO agency should be well verged with those tools. SEO is such an Art that if implemented correctly by a knowledgeable consultant it can yield result beyond imagination. But a wrong step in implementation can cost you to lose your rankings and potential leads. The newer players in this field though charges less but most of the time they do not yield result. So hiring them will be of no use. That also does not mean that an older SEO company charging higher may be good. A good and reputed SEO agency will never guarantee and they always under promise and over deliver. So proper evaluation before you zeroed in on the SEO Company is essential.

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SEO Trends in 2012

March 7, 2012

The web has played a major role in expanding business today. And becoming visible to people who matter, is the priority of all business. Search Engine is the key for online visibility as people use Search Engines to find the relevant thing they are looking out for. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the technique using which the visibility of a website can be improved in Search Engine and rank it higher in Search Engine Result there by placing it on the FrontPage for a keyword. SEO helps in putting one website above others so that it will be noticed and the searcher will click on it and visit the website. When we talk of Search Engine Optimization, we keep in mind that we are talking about Google. With 84% market share Google is the leader in Search.  The business of Search Engine Optimization is quite fickle because of the ever-changing methodology Google employs to rank websites. In SEO it is difficult to predict what will work and what will not because of this frequent changes in the backend algorithm. What is working today might not be as relevant tomorrow.  So a good SEO professional should be well acquainted with changing trend in SEO and keep himself/herself updated with what is coming in. With that in mind we present below few of the expected trends in SEO for 2012. Humanized ranking Whatever automated techniques are implemented to rank sites, nothing can beat it when actual readers start ranking the websites. This way only the really relevant sites will be ranked and appear in the front page of Search result. Search engines like Google have realized this and have resorted to this way for ranking sites. So what is the implication? Link buying, swapping and baiting will rest in peace for ever. Social Media Social media in 2012 will have major impact on Search Engine rankings. The Search result page will contain more and more of social media mentions. The Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ profiles and brand pages will have bigger roles in search engine rankings. For this the SEO strategy should be inclined towards social media. Your presence in social media should be strengthened and enhanced. Share only relevant information in your social network to catch the attention. Also number of Tweets, Facebook Likes and Plus ones can have impact on the SEO. Posting quality and relevant information will draw the attention and will garner more likes, tweets and plus one. While searching for Abhishek Rungta in Google, the 3 results in top 5 are from social network sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Quality and not Quantity Earlier it was thought that longer articles with lot of keywords help in ranking. So it was a trend to write long articles with keyword stuffing. These are considered spam by Google with the recent Google Panda update. Many content firms have been penalized and are still trying to recover from the effect of Google Panda. Those with quality content saw an increased in traffic and rankings. Google is refining the Panda algorithm more with every updates, so that searchers will be able to reach to sites with quality content. So the SEO strategy should consider having Quality, relevant and informative content. Mobile Search The growth in Mobile usage has been tremendous. Introduction of Smartphone at affordable prices is strengthening it further. People prefer to search for information on mobile devices because it is easier and faster and always at reach and give better result in some cases as it employs localized search. So the mobile search market has huge opportunity in 2012 and in coming year. It’s high time the SEO professionals should start consider optimizing the sites for mobile search and the businesses should relook at their mobile strategy. CRO will be the buzzword CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. This means converting your visitors into customers. If you are running an online business, then you can understand the importance of qualified traffic. These are the actual visitors who actually convert into customers. The site needs to be overhauled to engage customer and spend more time on the site. The call to action buttons need to be placed at proper location. SEO aimed at converting qualified traffic to customers will be the order of the day in 2012. Voice Search With Siri from Apple and Google Voice search it is easier to see where the web search is moving. Instead of browsing through a lot of result people tend to look for a direct answer when they are searching for something. Siri has been able to address that to some extent in its infancy. It usually relies on few sites to find the result. So SEO professionals concentrate on how to optimize the site to be in the purview of those sources. In future this new search technology is definitely going to replace all other kind of search. Personalized Search Most of the search engines are now displaying personalized search result. The search result now shows result recommended by people in social network. This can be tested by searching for something while you are logged in to Google and while you are signed out; you will see 2 different sets of result. With recent release of Google’s Search plus Your World, the personalized search has gone to a higher level. Decline CTR for Top Rank A study shows that In 2006, a no.1 rank in Search result used to enjoy a CTR of more than 42%, which declined to 34.5% in 2010 and in 2011 further down to 18.2%. This decline is due to many factors like organization of Search result page, introduction of search technology like Universal Search and Instant search. SEO should digest this hard fact that the value of top ranking is going to decline further. Rich Snippet Snippets are the 2 lines of text that appear below the site Title on a search result page. This is very important, as it provides a gist

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SEO Software Tools – An important element of your SEO strategy

September 22, 2010

Do you want your site to rank in the first page of top search engines and lure the best traffic in the online domain? Well, a competent Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) process can increase the chance of your site to achieve the top ranking. In simple terms, SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a process which improves the visibility of a site in various search engines through organic and paid search results. It is a major part of Internet Marketing and targets various searches related to image, video, audio or local searches. There are number of steps involved like site analysis, strategy framing, its implementation, result tracking and measurement. Optimization can be onsite as well as offsite. Onsite optimization includes the content editing with respect to the targeted keywords whereas the offsite involves link building and submission of the site to various directories of different search engines. The entire process can be overwhelming at times! To make life simpler, SEO activities can also be outsourced to a competent agency. Keeping and maintaining track of the results is a bit time consuming and lengthy, but is necessary for framing the right strategies and sustaining your site rankings on a continuous phase. This measurement of the result is done through various tools such as Google analytics, Woorank tool or SiteReportCard tools. Lots of onsite, offsite and domain related parameters can be judged through them. Hence it takes lot of time for organizing such results. There are a number of SEO software tools that are available online and you have to make use of them accordingly. Some of the widely used tools are Ranking Checker Fiddler Web Debugging Tool SEO Analyzer SEO for Firefox XENU’s Link Sleuth, Keyword Density Tool Prominence Tool Google Ad-words tool Starting from site monitoring, competitor analysis, keyword research, finding link partners to offering handy SEO advice, you can get an array of features from these SEO tools. In addition, these tools also help in deciphering the most popular pages that are being searched and visited, the Text to HTML ratio, the image detail, site w3c validation, site compliance to different browsers and many more. Certain off-site analysis of the back links can also be analysed, along with the site load time. Based on your requirement, you have to make use of the features and benefits of the SEO software tools. The above mentioned tools can only serve a specific purpose at one time. Whereas if you are looking for a multi-dimensional tool that brings most of the things together and help you correlate things better, you need an integrated SEO software. We highly recommend AnalyticsSEO for this purpose. Once you are able to get through, there will be no looking back. Your chances of getting the best traffic and excellent ranking will be enhanced. Let us know how did you get along!

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Keyword Analysis – Factors that influence choice of Keywords

September 3, 2010

By Santanu Mukherjee Keyword Research is an important aspect of Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing. Keywords for your website should be chosen cleverly so that those terms define your site and at the same time are widely searched. Say you have a website on “online games”. Then “online games” seems the obvious keyword. It not only defines your site but has a huge search volume. However – though it seems apparent that this is the best keyword there can be few practical problems. For example:  it’s possible that many websites are trying to achieve a good rank using this particular keyword (this often happens with keyword that have large search volumes) and so the competition is increased. The higher the competition, the less chance your site has of achieving a good ranking. You need to be very careful when choosing keywords. This article will guide you on how to choose the right keywords for your website. Brand Keywords (Brand epitomizes a company and helps build a strong sales base): Brand Keywords are usually a URL, a Company name, Company abbreviation etc. All these should be included in your keyword list as a matter of course. Brand keywords are vital in maintaining the reputation of your company. For example:  if you type “Samsung” into Google and get, instead of the company website, a dealer’s URL you’re not going to appreciate it very much, You won’t feel that the brand Samsung is particularly strong. In order for any company to keep the flag of its reputation flying as high as it should, its brand name or names should be taken into consideration while optimizing the search engine. Already Ranking Keywords (use Google analytics to identify these): Say your website is already achieving a ranking through existing keywords. This means you are getting value from them already. Targeting new keywords and forgetting the terms that already rank is not a wise decision: that’s like throwing money away for no reason. While new key phrases must be researched and incorporated into your SEO drive, you should also devote some effort to these “already ranking keywords”. Maintain or improve their rank and your site will be that much more visible to potential customers. Unique Product Name or Trademark Name: Let us consider a client who has launched a new venture. It will take some time for the venture to become popular. Initially, then, there may be no search volume for that particular term because the new service is not yet known to anybody. However – whilst optimizing the client’s website the new venture or the service must be considered in the list of keywords. Gradually, as the venture becomes popular, the improving rank will start paying the value. Geo- Location perceptions (Search volumes for “produce” for US & India are different): Geographic Location is the next important thing to be considered. If you don’t understand where a client’s market is targeted then you can’t judge their culture. Hence, your choice of keyword may be wrong.  Geo-Location plays an important role in local searches.  If you’re dealing with a website for a restaurant, café or a departmental store, for example, then you should obviously consider their geographic location before you finalize the keywords you intend to use in their site. Be aware, too, of search terms that have a high meaning or search volume in one geographic location but not in others, An example: the term “produce”, which means vegetable market in the USA, has a good search volume in America. There is almost no search volume for the term “produce” in India. You need to know that the keywords you choose have the right search volumes for the geographic location your website is targeting. Services or Products (Get under the surface of the industry): Study the website in detail and try to find out what service or services the company offers. If necessary, speak to the client so you can get to know exactly what it is they do and sell. So, for example: if the product is “insurance”, then you have to understand whether the site owner is an insurance company or an insurance agent. If a company’s product or service is very niche then choosing a keyword or keywords is easy. There might not be many competitors but if the service is popular it should have a good search volume. Competitors (Don’t re-invent the wheel): As I mentioned earlier, competition plays an important role in choosing the right keyword. If there is one apple and many people to eat, then obviously the probability of getting the apple for 1 person decreases. You can apply the same logic here. If many websites are targeting the same keyword then the probability of good rankings for any given website becomes smaller. This is why keywords that have a high search volume but a low competition are ideal targets. Broad, Exact, or Phrase: A keyword may be categorized as “Broad”, “Exact” and “Phrase”. Let’s define these one by one.  Say you own a luxury hotel in Kolkata, which has an authentic continental restaurant.  Now: people coming to Kolkata and looking for Hotels may search with keywords like “Hotels in Kolkata” or Luxury Hotels in Kolkata”. These can be considered as “Exact” keywords. Any variation from these exact terms may become either “Broad” or “Phrase” keywords. If someone searches with the term “luxury hotel in Kolkata with authentic continental restaurant”, the search becomes narrower and the probability of ranking for your hotel with this keyword becomes much higher.: because the searcher is looking not just for a luxury hotel in Kolkata, of which there are many; but for a luxury hotel in Kolkata that also has a continental restaurant. There are fewer luxury hotels in Kolkata with continental restaurants – but yours is one of them. This falls into the “Broad” category. A “Phrase” is basically a broad keyword where the “Exact” keyword is in the right order. “Luxury hotels in Kolkata with authentic continental restaurant”

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