SEO Articles – Search Engine Optimization Posts – SoftLoom IT Solutions

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – Articles and blog posts connected with search engine optimization or SEO published in website blog posts of SoftLoom IT Solutions, Kerala, India.

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Social Media Metrics and Important KPIs

If I say about social media engagements and the metrics what comes in your mind first? Mostly the answer should be likes,comments and shares. But these are not only the metrics that considered as social media engagement and  KPIs.

There is no lack of data to track. Marketers don’t struggle with can’t having enough data. They trouble to pull the insights from all the data already provided. So to have social media monitoring process, we must have metrics to analyze.

The KPIs for modern social media teams to track are :-

  • Likes
  • Engagement
  • Followers growth
  • Traffic conversions
  • Interactions
  • Social sentiment
  • visitor goals
  • Shares
  • Web visitors from the social channel
  • Social visitors conversion rates

Social media is a valuable tool for building personal relationships with your audience. Also social media metrics should help you to determine the performance of your social media campaigns and the ROI from them. So the only way to ensure this however,is by tracking the right social media metrics KPIs – beyond your fan,followers, or ‘like’ counts.

When we use social media for business purposes we should consider this following factors :-

  • Are you reaching the Targeted audience?
  • Are you engaging with Targeted people?
  • How many of your social media fans are inquiring about your product or service?
  • How many of them actually become customers?

Through this section we will assist  you with identifying the full spectrum of social media metrics available to you for evaluating  your content and social media marketing, the meaning and importance of each,and how to utilize and improve them.

Here few will need to keep track of all these social media metrics, so choose the mix that gives you the most important information.

1. Reach in Social media

Understanding the Reach

Social media reach is the total number of unique account that were exposed to social media post. Media analytics metric that alludes to the quantity of audiance who have come across a particular content on a social platform such as Facebook, Instagram,LinkedIn,pinterest or Twitter,etc.

How to Track the Reach in Social Media

How to reach the track changes by platform, and not all the platforms will display this social media metric. Here we are introduce how to find out all the reach for some of the most popular social networks.

Facebook

At the post level,facebook displays a reach metric at the bottom of each post on your page’s home page. This is visible only to those logged into an account associated with those page.

Clicking on the “people reached” number will also open up and we could get the metrics for that post.

You can view the number of people reached for each post on the page’s Insights tab by selecting ‘Posts’ from the left menu on the desktop.

 On the Facebook Pages smartphone app, Insights just show the total measurement for the entire page. The desktop Insights ‘Posts’ section lists each published post are in reverse order, with reach displayed for both organic and paid versions of the post (if that post has been given a paid boost).

At the Page level, you can see the total reach of all these posts from the page for the selected time period on the Insights tab.

Twitter

In twitter that does not give a reach metric for the organic tweets.

LinkedIn

Click your profile  avatar at the top right side, and select your company’s page from the dropdown menu. Then you will be listed as an administrator for the page.

From the analytics tab at the upper side, select the visitors. The default view show the total page views for your company page for the last 15 days. Use the dropdown menu to change the view as to unique visitors.

Instagram

On this smartphone app, go to the company’s  profile page, and tap the graph icon on the top bar to the right of your account name.

The Activity tab shows you  metrics for all the activities around your account. Then to see reach for an individual post, tap the Content tab, scroll to the post you want to measure, and click on the View Insights.

Pinterest

Pintrest analytics at the top left, you could select a portion ‘people you reach’ from the drop down button. Then the graph shows the number of viewers of pins from your profile in order to day by day for the selected time period. Pinterest can’t display a reach metric for the individual pinned posts.

2 Impressions

What are impressions in social media?

An impression occurs any time a post will appears in a user’s timeline. It is depending on the network,the viewer may or may not be required to actually view the post, but could be counted as an impression and it to be recorded.

How to Track Impressions on different social media

The tracking of impressions is to be depending up on the platform you are using. Here is show how to findout the impressions for some of the most popular social networks.

Facebook

In Facebook only the paid promoted posts are provided. There is no impressions metric for the organic posts.

Twitter

Click on your profile avatar at the top right and select analytics from the dropdown menu.

The default view show your account’s total impressions for the past 28 days. To know about impressions for the individual tweets, click on the ‘tweets’ tab at the top.

The tweets are displayed in reverse order. You can sort it by the top tweets,tweets and replies, and promoted.

LinkedIn

Click your profile avatar at upper right and select your company ‘s page from the dropdown list.There you must be listed as an administrator of the page.

From the Analytics tab at top, select ‘visitors’. The default view shows the total page views 

Instagram

Go to the profile page and click the graph icon on the top bar to the right of your account name. Then the activity tab shows the aggregate metrics for all activities around that account. But impressions  are not shown for the individual posts.

3. Shares and Retweets

Facebook

The number of shares is shows the bottom of all post.

Twitter

The number of retweets on your profile, select Analytics from the dropdown menu. And then click on the Tweets from the top navigation.

In twitter analytics retweets are shown  in with all other engagements in the overview. To show the number of shares for an individual tweet, click on ‘View Tweet Activity’ in that tweets listing.

Instagram

Instagram does’t provide any share metrics.

4.Likes,Reaction,Favourites

Facebook

A few years ago Facebook changed only ‘like’to a post to a range of verity  ‘reactions’ – ‘like,’ ‘love,’ ‘haha,’ ‘wow,’ ’sad,’ ‘and ‘’angry.’

If you click on the title of a post in that all list, the ‘Post Details’ will show you a breakdown of the number of reactions by each reaction type.

Twitter

To see the number of shares of an individual tweet, click on ‘View Tweet Activity’ in that tweets listing. Here all the engagement types, including favorites, are listed separately with their metrics for that tweet. Twitter analytics still use the older designation of ‘likes’ for the favorites.

Instagram

Instagram does not provide any share metric. But shows the likes for every individual posts.

5. Comments/Replies

Comments and replies, both are responses from the users, usually it appearing with and under the post.

Facebook

A user  can see the number of comments for any page post in their news feed on both desktop and the smartphone app. It appears at the bottom of any page post.

To view all comment metrics for a page you administer, click on the insights tab. So you could get the number of  engagements for the posts.

Twitter

In twitter, you can see the number of comments on any of your tweets in your profile at the bottom of each tweet.

Instagram

Instagram does not provide any sum of comments metrics for any accounts. If you like to click on the individual post, you can see the number of comments for that post.

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5 Reasons Why Your SEO Ranking Drop and How to Handle Them

“Help! My Google Rankings Dropped”
Here is some SEO rank drop reasons Picture this situation: You’re running a website that, at one point, held the top ranking on Google. Over the past few months, you begin to see your web traffic slowly dying down from millions of hits to a few hundred thousand hits, and then to nothing a few months after that. You search yourself on Google, but find your website is no longer on the first page, and you wonder why.

We have some of the possible answers that may be SEO rank drop reasons. Let’s take a look at five common reasons your web site may be losing traffic.

1. Your Website Violates Google’s Content Guidelines


Google has very strict guidelines about how they rank websites. If you find yourself with little or no traffic and look in your email to find a notice from Google, you have likely run afoul of Google’s policies regarding content.


The number one rule for Google is “Content, content, content.” If you have a lot of spammy or low-quality content, Google will penalize you. Keyword stuffing is a big no-no. These are just two examples of old, but still surprisingly common practices that will earn you a Google violation and cause your traffic to drop significantly. Refer to this article to find out about bad SEO practices you might still be using.
Google violations can be removed. You will need to check your Search Console account. Inside the Messages menu under Warnings, you will find any manual actions taken against you. The message will include instructions on how to have the manual action lifted. Follow these instructions. You will then need to petition Google to take another look at your website. If you pass, the manual action will be lifted.

2. Irrelevant key word

Another SEO rank drop reasons are Your Keywords Are Either Obsolete or Not Relevant to Your Region Using obsolete keywords is a recipe for disaster. When people search on Google, they are actually using keywords to simplify their searches to get the most relevant results. Google has become so advanced these days that it can even search websites based on location. There’s a hint for you, in case you missed it!
However, you also need to take into account that nearly all industries change over time, so if you’re one of those people that are asking yourself “Hey, I used this keyword x years ago, and it worked fine, why is it not getting me anything now?”, it’s because that particular keyword has likely become obsolete. Furthermore, keywords can vary by region. The best way to find out if you’re using the right keywords is to do keyword research. Use Google Trends to find highly-used keywords in your country, or join communities with similar interests. Sometimes you can find communities that offer amazing insight into your particular industry.

3. Spammy or Low-Quality Backlinks

This is also one of the SEO rank drop reasons, Just as low-quality content on your site can get you penalized by Google, you can also get penalized if you link to other sites that have low-quality content. Here’s why: In the days before the Panda and Penguin updates, websites used backlinking to rank on Google. These sites often had spammy or spun content stuffed with keywords users commonly put into Google. The result was that you would perform a search for something like “fish tanks” and get a whole host of… well, let’s just call them “Not Safe for Work” sites just for the sake of professionalism and good taste, shall we?

The point is that Google looks upon poor backlinking as a way to “game the system” so to speak. In essence, you’re trying to gain artificial hits using very questionable methods, and that doesn’t sit right with Google. The above example is a good reason why you should always check the quality of your backlinks.

4. Poor Website Speed

Poor web Site speed is most SEO rank drop reasons for our website, We know it’s tempting to use those free hosting providers you see floating around the Internet. After all, free hosting is a great way to cut costs and increase your profit margin, right?
Wrong! What you may not realize is that a lot of these free hosting plans offer what’s called shared hosting, which means the speed of the server on which your site is hosted is highly dependent on the amount of traffic going to that particular server. Since you’re sharing bandwidth with other websites, it’s quite possible that the amount of traffic will bog your site down tremendously, and nobody likes a slow website. Just think of what you would do if you encountered a business that had a slow website. While free hosting may work for the average Joe Schmoe that doesn’t expect to get a lot of visitors, a business has to show a lot more confidence than that!

5. High Website Downtime

It also another SEO rank drop reasons, This will leads us to another caveat with shared hosting: it doesn’t guarantee 100% uptime and may even have a bandwidth cap. Downtime on a website is bad for business. If a customer, or worse, a potential customer visits your website only to be greeted with a 404 error, it’s going to create the impression that the quality of your services or products is as bad as the quality of your website. Do yourself and your customers a favour, and look into dedicated hosting options. It will cost some money, but don’t you think the rise in traffic would be well worth the cost?

Hosting

If you don’t have the money, knowledge or staff to handle the large-scale management inherent to dedicated hosting, you might look into what’s called VPS hosting. This type of hosting is best described as a low-cost upgrade for shared hosting. You will still have some of the bandwidth limitations, but every website has a dedicated partition on the server, so each site runs at a higher speed. This type of hosting is great for small businesses because of its typically low cost.

Your chosen hosting company will likely offer different types of hosting plan. Most, if not all of them, will offer dedicated hosting, no bandwidth cap and a high amount of uptime. Some services are quite affordable, while others are on the expensive side. Be sure to choose a plan that best fits your business as it currently stands. You can always upgrade to a higher plan later if the influx of new customers becomes too much for your current hosting package, and upgrading will cause very little downtime, especially if your provider can guarantee a high uptime. Just as not enough hosting can cause a serious drop in traffic, too much hosting might take a larger bite out of your profits than you can effectively handle.

Conclusion
SEO is the life blood of any website. There is no “easy way” to get your website to the first page on Google. Using the wrong SEO practices can reduce your website to nothing more than a collection of bytes sitting on a server. It takes dedication and hard work to rank high on Google, but the resulting web traffic you will receive is well worth the amount of effort you put in. Hopefully, this article will help you with your quest to the top.

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SEO-On Page Optimization Techniques

On page optimization

SEO, Search Engine Optimization is a process of increasing number of visitors to our website, by obtaining a high page ranking in the  search engine results. We are using two techniques for this. One is On page optimization and another one is Off page optimization.

After website analysis,On page optimization is one of the first step of SEO which every webmaster should look into. On-page optimization is used to optimizing each web page, for getting higher rank in search engine results. The optimization is done inside the website code.

SEO Title Tag

Title tag is one of the most important website optimization element. A title tag should be short but descriptive enough because when a user search in google, Title tag should be the first thing that all users check. So it should be attractive and make them curious to open our page. The HTML code for the title tag is:

<title>Write The Title</title>

Title tag

Main things that should be include in our title tags are Keyword that we focused should be included in title tag. Title should have a meaningful description. Full capital letters are not allowed. Character limitation should be between 55-60. No spelling mistakes and grammatical errors should come. Unique title give for each page. Title should not be more than 3 words. Title should be have 512 pixel width. Impressive title give then CTR (click through rate) will increase. If no title given, then Google shows probably H1 as the title. In case of H1 is not good then Google will take H2 as title.

  • Snippet

The result  that Google shows to the user in the search results is a snippet. The title in blue, the URL in green and a description that Google shows together called a Snippet. We also using anther snippet called a Rich snippet . It shows extra information between the URL and the description.

snippetSEO Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions  describes and summarizes the contents of your page to search engines. It have a great role in On page optimization. The HTML code for the Meta descriptions  is:

<head>

 <meta name=”description” content=”Writ the description.”>

</head>
Main things that should be include in our meta descriptions tags are For a page, Character limitation should be between 155-160 and For a post, Character limitation should be 155 because it needs to insert post publishing date. Like title tag, No spelling mistakes and grammatical errors should come . Use Unique meta descriptions give for each page and Meta descriptions should be have 1024 pixel width. If no Meta descriptions given, then Google will take some highlighting contents from web page. If web page don’t contain much content, then Google will take links, text etc…

  • Meta robots tag

Meta robots tag is a tag that tells search engines what to follow and what not to follow. It’s a simple code that gives you the power to decide about what pages you want to hide from search engine crawlers and what pages you want them to index. An example of a meta robots tag code would look like this:

<meta name =”robots” content=”index”>

  • Nofollow – Tells the search engines robots to not follow any links on the page at all.
  • Noindex – Disallow search engines from showing this page in their results.

Head Tags – H1 to h7

Head tags is used  to highlight certain parts of your website.  There are several tags in html. They are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. H1 should be used to define the most important section of your page. User mainly attract to H1 tags.

Head tags Image optimization

All uploaded images filename should be saved with related to that image description. Images should be added with respect to the page contents. In HTML part alt text is added for each image related to image description.

Content Optimization

Content is the king in SEO. And it is mainly decides it’s position in search results.  Contents should be always linkable to users. Anchor text is the hyperlink added text.Focused keywords should not be used as anchor text. Use our keywords at the beginning of sentences and arrange them in simple sentences. Keyword density is defined as the density of  keywords in content should be always between 2-5%.

On page optimization Techniques from Nivea Joy

 

Nivea Joy

 

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Best Lead Generation Tips with Content Marketing

Lead Generation Tips

This blog post can help you to improve your knowledge on lead generation tips with content marketing.  Article is mainly useful for digital marketing professionals, content marketers & SEOsLead Generation Tips with Content Marketing

One of the most important components of inbound marketing is the Content. If the content is not relevant, compelling or timely, inbound marketing may not be able to succeed as a form of lead generation tool. Your website might be thought of as a marketing machine, but technically speaking it is the content that should be considered as the fuel; the fuel which generates the leads, drives the conversions and creates engagement.
Yes, that doesn’t sound too easy, doesn’t it? But contrary to how it sounds, creating compelling content is not an easy task. The entire process boils down to one simple thing – and that is getting the most apt content for the right audience. Here we have given you some tips which would help you generate leads.

Get in touch with your Principal Personality

Like we just mentioned above, great content is that which is apt and that which speaks to the audience; the audience which is considered right for you. All this needs to start with the personalities of the buyer – that is your target audience’s representations. This is where your creativity and research should come in. Your content would not be able to bring in any apt leads if you are not familiar with your buyers. You need to create buyer personalities so that you can create targeted content as well. Start the process by asking questions – question their goals, concerns or motivators. The following are some questions you should be asking while creating the buyer’s personality.

•    What problems is she/he trying to find a solution to?
•    What concerns does the industry bring up?
•    Is the buyer a decision maker? What would his/her role be in the company?
•    What are the factors that drive the buyer’s needs?

Use Analytics to your advantage

You need to use the analytics in such a way that they work for you. Take advantage of the site’s analytics and use them to create compelling content as per your buyer’s personalities. Give attention to the most popular pages or posts. When you go through popular content, you would get an idea of what the visitors consider as interesting. You would find out the rates of bounces as well. If you find that too many new visitors are ‘jumping off’ the site then that means that something is wrong and that you need better and good quality content. Use the metrics and get in touch with the factors which drive page views, landing page conversions or page views. Run A/B testing, analyze, monitor and see what is working and what isn’t. So a landing page development must be completed after grabbing enough lead generation tips.

The following are four ways in which analytics can be used to boost leads
Find out what kind of content brings in more site visitors and connects with them.

•    The CTA or call to action content’s alignment needs to be improved.
•    The rates of visitors which get converted to leads across channels needs to be compared.
•    The content that is reproduced needs to be successful.

The Content Needs to be Audited

You might be an expert or a long time creator of content. But you still need to take a breath and evaluate the content. This is extremely important as far as the lead generation campaign goes. Everything boils down to the most important motive which is to align the content with the personas of the buyers. When you audit your content you might come up with some loopholes or errors which would push you to cut them out and get right on track.

•    You need to make up a spreadsheet and make an inventory of the content’s catalog right from the previous year. Take into account everything right from eBooks and blog posts to presentations and Webinars.

•    Make up groups of the type of content, the topic, the persona of the buyers, the creation of data and the customers or leads that have been generated.

•    Bring up each of the buyer persona profiles and take a note of the content that was created for every persona. Check how many was based on text and how many say based on the visual content.

•    Check the response rates for each audience and content.
The audit findings for the content can help you in the content marketing strategy. It is pretty much like a roadmap for you. Whatever you learn from the audit, apply it and keep a track of the results on a periodic basis.

Line up the content and the buying cycle

Through the entire buying cycle, the prospect’s behavior might differ. While a customer is in the research phase, he might have a different interest as compared to a customer who is in the evaluation stage. Hence, to generate more and apt leads, you need to align your content with the entire buying cycle. Imagine yourself as the buyer and think of the various issues that might matter to you during every stage of the buying cycle. The content that is created for the sake of generating awareness would be naturally different from the content which is created for the purpose of lead conversion into customers.

For example, a prospect who is in the research phase might have just come to know about your brand. So then is this person the right candidate for content that is educational? Yes, Absolutely!

You need to make sure that the content is right for every stage of the sales process – Knowledge, Research, the comparison and the final purchase. It has been seen that the kind of content can actually affect the decision of the buyer at particular stages of the cycle.

Knowledge – Educational Webinars, social media updates and Blog posts.
Research – Tip sheets, eBooks, videos on how-to, industry reports and webinars.
Evaluation and Comparison – Data sheets, case studies, customer testimonials and demo videos

The final purchase – Live Demos, analyst reports, free trials and consultation
Set and commit yourself to a budget for the ongoing content.
It is but obvious that resources are needed for content marketing. In fact, online content is probably another mode of paid advertising. Some of the marketing funds need to be allocated to ongoing content creation. If required, move some funds to content marketing and development from other paid media. This is how important content is. This way you would better your offers, bring in more leads and convert those leads into customers.

The conclusion – Lead Generation Tips

Imagine you are a sales manager at a fashion retail store. A customer walks in and is just browsing around. Whether she becomes a customer or not, depends on how you approach her. If you start pushing a dress on to her; you might throw her away and get her annoyed. This is her awareness stage. So depending on what she is looking for, you need to educate her and give her the information that would be useful to her. Be open to questions. If she finds you impressive and the information that you gave her as useful, she would be open to the idea of coming back and picking up more dresses.

This very same concept is applied to online buyer personalities. Buyer personas differ during every stage of the buyer cycle. Some might be just weighing their options while some might be ready to purchase. However, the one thing that is similar in all stages is that the buyer wants themselves to be approached in the right way.

The right content needs to be aligned with the right audience with the help of marketing intelligence. Also the content calendar needs to be regularly evaluated to make sure that pathways are laid out for the generation of leads.

But mind you, once you have attained your goals of lead generation the content alignment should not end. It has been seen that usually out of the leads 50% are qualified enough but are not ready to buy immediately. Hence, the content creation needs to be able to solve their problems. You need to make sure of that. Your leads need to be nurtured; and there needs to be an ongoing tactic for it.

Make sure that you implement all the above important points and build the groundwork for a thriving lead generation platform. Combine your content with social media, SEO, nurturing of leads, analysis and measurement and thus charge up the lead generation campaign.

If at all you are ever doubtful, you just need to evaluate the process from the point of the view of the buyer. You need to ensure that you push solutions and not push purchases.

If you like this blog post on lead generation tips with content marketing, please feel free to share with your friends and you can give your suggestion in comment portion.

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How to Perform Website Analysis for SEO- SEO Audit Guide

If you start working as an SEO Analyst at a company or if you receive inquiries to create and implement an SEO campaign on a company’s website when you work as a freelancer, the first step you need to take is doing a website analysis also known as SEO Audit for the company’s website and make a report/proposal on your findings. A website analysis shows the position of the website initially before starting the SEO campaign and it can be used to compare later.

How to do a website analysis prior to an SEO campaign

As a matter of fact, an SEO website analysis report also saves the headache both for the SEO Analyst and the company requesting the campaign because an SEO Audit report shows the areas which can take time and also be used to monitor the progress of the SEO campaign.

When doing a website analysis, there are four most important universal tasks to be done:

  • =>Reporting on the current state of the website- as regards to its visibility on Google, the achievements, the type of inquiries it must be receiving at present.
  • =>Check the age of site as well as how it performed in the previous years.
  • =>An internal analysis of the site
  • =>Preparing the final report

Pointing out recommendations in your report will help the company take full advantage of the internet marketing potential.

Here I give you the ultimate, most comprehensive guide to performing SEO Audits/ conducting a website analysis prior to formulating an SEO campaign. Since I want to educate all the beginners as well as point out new insights to the experts both together, this post is going to be a detailed one but I assure you the long read will be worth it!

In this post, I will be discussing all the bits and fragments of a website that’s to be analyzed during an SEO Audit, the contents of a website analysis report and I will be giving you the bonus of telling you which SEO tools you can use to analyze the various aspects of the website- something I guess no SEO blogs have been informing you about.

Part 1 of Website Analysis for SEO- Checking a website’s overall performance in Google

As part of doing a website’s SEO Analysis, you need to check a website’s performance in Google. It shows your website’s position and ranking on Google, as well as the factors contributing to such rankings.

1.Google Visibility: Obviously the first and foremost chore is checking the site’s visibility on Google, the number of the site’s pages indexed on Google. There is a very easy command for this and it’s site:example.com. Note down the number of pages the site has in total and compare it with all the pages indexed on Google. Also check the site’s ranking for the related keywords on Google.

no. of pages indexed

2.URL Analysis: A website’s URL must contain a small description about the web page in four to five words. If the URL is not optimized, the search engine bots can have a hard time figuring out what your site is about and which category/area your site belongs to.

URL Analysis

The URL should summarize something about the web page

3. Meta Description Tags: Analyze the meta description tag for each page on the website. A meta description is shown as the rich snippet on Google upon the lists returned to a related search query done by the user. You need to check whether the meta description includes the right keywords as well as entices the visitors to click on to the site.

Meta Description tag analysis

Check if the meta description tag is different for each page

4. Title tags and Headings: Is the webpage title and headings containing all the marketable keywords? I say, marketable keywords, because there is no use targeting keywords that have a high search volume or a click through rate. They won’t or will generate very less enquiries. The use of marketable keywords is necessary considering that the ultimate goal of formulating an SEO campaign is to generate more business and expand one’s market. Record whether the <H1>, <H2>, <H3> and <H4> tags are optimized for the best marketable keywords.

alexa rankings in SEO5. Checking global rankings of the website: Alexa.com gives you the global ranking of your website in terms of users visiting your website. Though it’s not an accurate way of measuring traffic, it gives you an insight into the position of the website among all the other websites in the world. It also displays the country wise rankings for your website. It is a simple tool to know the bounce rate of your site and the average time visitor spends on your site.

The best feature is that the Alexa Site Overview shows the top 5 search keywords which are sending traffic to your site. This can be really useful to optimize your site’s content incorporating these keywords.

top keywords from search engines sending traffic to a website

Keywords that send traffic to softloom.com

6. Page Authority and Domain Authority: This is important to find out the trust value of the website as far as Google is concerned. Page Authority is an indicator of how a webpage ranks in Google while Domain authority points out how your site domain ranks in Google.

Page Authority and Domain Authority as shown on Moz Open Site Explorer

Page Authority and Domain Authority as shown on Moz Open Site Explorer

7. Check Spam Score: Many websites have gotten links from low authority or spammy directories, contributing to bringing down their Page Authority, or increasing their spam score. Finding out spam score is necessary to eliminate all the bad links pointing at the website. The Moz Open Site Explorer tool works best to show these. You can also attach a screenshot like the one below supporting your stats.

check spam score

Spam score as shown in Moz OSE

8. Bounce Rate:Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors clicking on the close or back button of their browser when they come across a website. The bounce rate is to be reported while doing a website analysis. It can be found out via Alexa.com or through the site’s Google Analytics profile, if you are granted the access. While reporting the bounce rate, you should also analyze and state what can be done to decrease- maybe increasing the page loading speed might help or maybe a rearrangement of content is required.

The bounce rate, average daily page views, average time spent on the website daily

The bounce rate, average daily page views, average time spent on the website daily as shown on Alexa Site Info

9. Incoming links from other sites: Analyzing the number of links coming to your website as well as the competitors’ websites is necessary to know the amount of work that’s to be done as part of the SEO campaign for the site.

  • Using Link checkers/tools online: There are lots of backlink checker tools like Ahrefs tool, the Moz Open Site Explorer which shows the links pointing to your site.
  • Using SEO commands: Alternately if you use the link:command example.com on Google, you will get a list of sites having links to the webpage concerned. But Google just shows a few links. So it’s really good to use Yahoo for this purpose as it lists out all possible links. The command has a minor difference and it goes like this linkdomain:example.com.
  • How to know if a website has got bad links? The spam score in Moz Open Site explorer can indirectly state the number of spam links you have got. For example, if it is getting displayed in orange, you have 3 bad links. If you’ve got a red spam score, then it means you have got more than 6 bad links. In this case, the only option is to manually analyze each and every linking site, find all the sites with a bad spam score and use the Disavow tool to remove them.

Backlink analysis of a website

Backlinks Analysis for Softloom as shown on SEMRush.com

10. Reputation Analysis: So you have got a certain number of links from different domains to your site. But what is the anchor text that’s having the hyperlink in them? In SEO, it’s very important you get links with the relevant anchor text and with this, the surrounding content quality also matters.

Reputation Analysis- Anchor text analysis

Reputation Analysis- Finding out the anchor texts with which a website is linked to.

How to find these anchor texts? To find out the anchor text of every link coming to your site, you can use the SEMRush Backlink Analysis tool. If you are signed in, you can see all the backlinks to your site, classified as links coming from domain and root domain and most significantly the anchor text which gave the link.

11. Social Media Profile: This states the company’s outreach on social media platforms. The number of +1’s on Google+ profile, the amount of likes on the company’s Facebook page as well as the twitter followers all indicate a company’s social media presence and as we all know, social signals matter a lot in improving a site’s rankings.

Part 2 of Website Analysis- The website age and its performance in the past

Even if knowing the age of website has no significance of its own, it can work wonders to make impressions on your employers. It can also help you know when the site was started and the keywords and headings used on the site’s content previously.

Suppose you get an enquiry wherein the owner of the website tells you that he was receiving a lot of enquiries/having higher conversion rate before, going through the previous version of the website can make you understand the keywords which led to conversion.After that you can formulate optimized content strategies for the website.

How to check the age of a website? If you have installed the SEOBook toolbar on your Mozilla Firefox browser, click on the “Archive.org site age”  button when you are on the site. Alternately, you can go to http://web.archive.org/web/*/example.com, from your browser and a data which looks like a calendar appears. If you click on the dates marked in blue, you can get a screenshot of the site as on the date. So, the catch is to go to the oldest date available by clicking on the year and then the first date marked in blue. There, you get the oldest, the first version of your website! Interesting, right?

Part 3 of Website Analysis- A complete internal analysis for the website

A complete internal analysis of the website is mandatory if the company is planning to go for an SEO campaign. A website’s internal analysis reveals the underlying errors in its design and structure. One of the best tool to analyze all the internal aspects of a website is the GTMetrix tool. Besides offering a detailed comprehensive overview of the website’s structure, it has a grading system that gives you scores on the various aspects of the website. It also gives you suggestions as to how you can optimize or fix certain issues like page speed. Here is a sample analysis report from GTmetrix.com for Softloom IT Solutions.

Internal analysis of website for SEO purposes

The comprehensive internal analysis report for Softloom from GTmetrix.com

1.Number of Requests made: A website is built up of a number of files. More the number of files, higher will be the number of requests made to the server by the browser program. When there are a large number of requests to be made, it affects the page loading speed and this can be a big turn off to the visitor trying to access your website. Note the number of requests to be made to the website’s server and make recommendations on how you can combine similar files and java scripts.

The Waterfall: You can view the waterfall diagram of your site on clicking the “waterfall” tab on the menu below the scores. This can also be viewed on another website analysis website which is the Pingdom Website Speed Test tool. The waterfall shows the number of requests made by a browser to the server and the time taken for each request in a cascading form. The length/height of the waterfall indicates the number of requests and the width denotes the time taken for the request to receive a response that’s to be downloaded on the browser.

This is the waterfall diagram for Softloom's website as shown in GTMetrix Tool

This is the waterfall diagram for Softloom’s website as shown in GTMetrix Tool

2. Page loading speed and time: GTMetrix gives a clean summary of your website’s loading speed in Google and Yahoo browsers in the form of PageSpeed and YSlow scores respectively. Below you can see all the reasons and options listed below neatly. You can click on each of the options and work on the suggestions given.

3. Leverage Browser Caching: To leverage your browser’s caching means that you can control and specify the time period in which the browsers should store and keep the images, CSS and Javascripts locally. It’s done to reduce loading time in the users’ browsers.

Leverage Browser caching gives the user many advantages like saving data because already a certain amount of the website data is stored in the browser’s cache the first time he visits the page. For the website owner, the advantage leverage browser caching gives is that it doesn’t send the user away from visiting his site as the page loads with great speed and less time.

How leverage browser caching is done?
Go to Google and search for “leverage browser cache htaccess code“. You will find many pages which have the code. It should look like something below. Copy the code and paste it to the file having the .htacess code of your website. You can ask the site’s developer to do the same for you.

Leverage browser caching code for speeding up page loading time

5. G Zip Compression: The G Zip compression code helps you transfer files easily. Just like you compress files into a ZIP for easy transfer on your computer, websites can also use the G Zip compression code for doing the task of transferring the files from the server to the user’s browser easily. The advantage of this code is that compresses the many files on the server into a ZIP file and then after the ZIP file has been transferred to the user’s browser, the Zip file is extracted and uncondensed and displayed on the browser in the original form. All these happens at a speedy rate and the user doesn’t get to know them.

How to enable G Zip Compression? Google “G Zip compression htaccess code“. Out of any of the webpages mentioning the code, copy the code and paste it to the file having the .htacess code of your website. You can ask the site’s developer to do the same for you.

6.Keep Alive: Just like the G Zip and leverage browser caching codes, the Keep Alive code, if added in the .htacess file for your website, it helps in achieving faster page loading speed. The Keep Alive code is used to allow a persistent connection between the server and web browser. Usually, every time a new request is made for each file on the server, a new TCP connection has to be established. With Keep Alive, just one TCP connection is required to send requests for all the files altogether.

How to enable Keep Alive? Google “Keep Alive htaccess code“. Copy the code from any of the webpages having the code and paste it to the file containing the .htaccess code of the website. Again, if you are not familiar doing this for your website, seek help from the developer who has developed the website. It is rather better not trying to break your website  for this.

7. Serve Scaled Images: If you have a low score against this point, you need to resize all the images on the website and place them in the appropriate sections of your website.

8. Optimize Image: Having a defined image size that’s optimized both in terms of resolution and is very important for a website, especially when it comes to page loading speed. The “Optimize Image” option in GTMetrix.com not only tells you which images you need to fix on the site, but also provides you with the optimized image samples which you can download and save for use in you site.

9. Defer Parsing of JavaScript: Parsing (analyzing and breaking the code into parts and reading their applicability) of JavaScript is done when the browser loads a webpage. If your site has too many JavaScript lines, then it can impact the page loading speed by slowing it done. So the best solution is to defer parsing of JavaScript for the website by adding the “defer” attribute in the JavaScript code. Another option is to load all the java scripts at the bottom of the HTML page.

10. Combine images using CSS Sprite: If your website has got a lot of images to handle, it can slow down the page loading speed. Combining all the images of the site in a CSS Sprite can reduce page loading time as well as enable data savings for the user. If you have a low score against this option, considering writing a good CSS Sprite for the website concerned. You can seek the aid of the website’s developer for this.

11. Minify JavaScript and CSS: This score indicates unnecessary characters in the JavaScript and CSS of the website, which can slow down page loading speed. If your score for this option is low, they also give recommendations on the unnecessary characters that are to be removed.

12. Check for Broken links: Broken links or links to a page that do not exist/ has been removed can reduce crawlability of the webpage. If your site has broken links or links to other sites having broken links, Google bots will hesitate to crawl across your webpage.

13. Creating a customized 404 Page: If a person comes against a 404 Page Not Found error when surfing your website, he usually just clicks on the close/back button of his browser. It’s unsure as to whether he will come back to your site or not and chances are he will not visit your website forever! So creating a custom 404 page is mandatory if you want to keep your user on the website itself.

Certain tips to be noted while creating the custom 404 Page are:

  • Maintain the same navigation and menus as the rest of the site.
  • Inform the visitor that the Page they are looking for is not found.
  • Include suggestions for browsing any other pages of the website.
  • A search tab can also be included.

13. Content Delivery Network(CDN): CDNs or Content Delivery Network is a worldwide distribution network of proxy servers. The way a CDN works is simple. For example, if you have a website hosted in New York, people in New York and nearby states can load the site faster than the people far away, say India.

CDNs eliminate this difference by storing the website’s data files in its servers which are located in different countries and these are called POP servers (point of presence). So when a person is loading the site from US or India or the UAE, he/she can load the site in more or less the same time because they don’t need to travel all the way to the website’s origin server. Rather they can go back and forth from their browsers to the POP server. CDNs can store content, videos and images.

CDN benefits for your website: Besides playing a huge role in optimizing page speed, CDNs ensure safety as your site as it stores all the website files in its temporary cache which users can access, even if there is an Internet malfunction. It also prevents the site from crashing as the CDNs divide the page load time among the different geographically located servers.

14. XML Sitemap: Having an XML site map for the website enables better crawling by the Google bots. Check if the website has a sitemap and if it doesn’t, make recommendations for the same in the report. One can generate a sitemap from many of the XML sitemap generators available online.

15. Mobile optimization: Being mobile optimized has never been more important before ever after Google made it compulsory through the officially announced Mobilegeddon update on May 12, 2016. Websites which are not mobile optimized won’t show up in mobile search results.

  • =>Check if the website is able to be viewed easily on mobile devices without zoom.
  • =>Also check the server’s responding time for the website- it tells you about the page loading speed on mobile devices.

Part 4 of Website Analysis- Presenting the Website Analysis/ SEO Audit Report

The last and most important step is making a report on the website’s SEO Analysis. A well presented SEO Report is key to getting hired or convincing your boss that you are one smart SEO Analyst!

Make sure you support all the facts and findings in your report with appropriate screenshots. Also make recommendations or suggestions as to what you will be doing to improve the site’s performance as well as its rankings. So here I give you brief list of contents that form part of a brilliantly prepared SEO Website Analysis Report:

1.Your company profile: Name of your company(or your name), title of the report as well as the date on which you created the report.

2.The profile of the company you are reporting for: Name of the company, URL of the company’s website, Webpage title.

3.Page Authority and Domain Authority

4. Google Visibility: Number of pages indexed on Google.

5. Alexa Rankings

6. Bounce Rates

7. Daily Page Views

8. Average time spent on site

9. Links Analysis: Number of backlinks to the website, the number of domains and root domains

10. Reputation Analysis: The anchor text of the backlinks coming into the website.

11. Internal Analysis: PageSpeed score, YSlow score, Page Load Time, Total Page Size, Requests, Broken Links if any

12. Page Speed Improvement recommendations: Leverage browser caching, G Zip compression, CDNs, scaling and optimizing images, custom 404 not found error page, defer parsing of JavaScript, whichever is applicable

13. SEO Recommendations: Optimizing the URL, title tags, headings and meta tags of the website; adding Alt tags for images on the company’s website, XML sitemap generation for easy crawl-ability by Google bots, mobile optimization of the website, creating a company page on the social media sites if not done yet.

An SEO audit report comprising all these ingredients is sure to impress the person reading it if it’s presented in a simple but catchy design. Don’t forget to add screenshots wherever required. A picture speaks 1000 times better.

SEO Tools for conducting a Website Analysis/ SEO Audit Tools

1. SEO commands: To show number of pages indexed on Google- site:example.com; To show all the sites linking to the company’s website- For Google- link:example.com, On Yahoo: linkdomain:example.com

2. For showing Page Authority and Domain Authority: Moz Open Site Explorer, Smallseotools Page Authority Checker, SmallSeoTools Domain Authority checker

3. Backlinks Analysis: SEMRush, Moz Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs backlink checker, Nibbler analysis, Woorank

4. Reputation Analysis: SEMRush, Google Webmaster Tools (Available only if you have access to company’s google profile: Dashboard>Search Traffic>Links to your site)

5. Site Age check: The SEOBook toolbar extension for Firefox browsers(downloadable after registering with the site), Internet Archive website

6. Alexa Ranking: Alexa Site overview for your website

7. Bounce Rates, Page Views and average time spent: Alexa Site Overview, Google Analytics (available only if you have access to company’s google profile)

8. Mobile optimization check: Google Page Speed Insights, Varvy Mobile SEO tool

9. Internal analysis of website (page speed, loading time): GTMetrix.com, Google PageSpeed Insights

I hope my post has helped you with conducting an effective website analysis as an SEO professional. Why not let me know in the comments section? If you have any doubts, leave me a reply and I promise to answer your queries swiftly!

For more awesome SEO tips and website analysis posts, stay tuned to our blogs!

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The Role of SEO in your Business Site

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF SEO IN IT FIELD

The role of seo in it field

Do you know about what is the role of seo? The SEO is Search Engine Optimization. The Search Engine Optimization is the process  of improving the visibility of a website on organic (“natural” or UN-paid) search engine result pages (SERPs), by incorporating search engine friendly elements into a website. The role of seo,  is a successful search engine optimization campaign will have, as part of the improvements, carefully select, relevant, keywords which the on-page optimization will be designed to make prominent for search engine algorithms. The SEO is broken down into two basic area. There are  given below:

  1. On page Optimization: The process of website optimization that includes adding key word to your web page and linking your web pages together with keyword optimized links.
  2. Off page Optimization:  SEO is the term used to describe a set of process that aim in optimizing a website for Search Engine. SEO is important not only for getting high quality visitors but it is also a way to increase the creditability of a website and expand brand awareness.

The Role of SEO in Your business

The role of seo in business

Now a days competitive market SEO is more important than ever. Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems.  If you have a web site, blog or online store, SEO can help your business grow and meet the business objectives. The role of seo, is also important for the smooth running of a big web site. Web sites with more than one author can benefit from SEO in a direct and indirect way. Their direct benefit is increase in search engine traffic and their indirect benefit is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site.

SEO & Social Media Promotion

The role of seoSEO is also good for the social promotion of your web site. People who find your web site by searching Google or Yahoo are more likely to promote it on Face book, Twitter, Google+ or other social media channels. Every organization has different roles, and the roles may have different responsibilities, but this gives some idea of the ways you might persuade different people that they can contribute to and benefit from SEO. Feel free to use the comments to share any particular advice you have for explaining & promoting SEO internally. If you have any particular objections that come up, do mention them and we’ll see if we can come up with suitable responses.

 

 

 

 

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Future of Analytics and Optimization

Combining optimization with analytics is a frequent topic now. Though data analytics and optimizations are specifically hot topics at the moment, they’ve been widely used in marketing analytics and research for over 30 years. But there are still people who doesn’t know what Analytics and Optimization mean. So here is a brief description to those who are new to this field.

Analytics :

Web Analytics is the measurement, collection and analysis and reporting of internet data for the prpose of understanding and optimizing web usage. Companies may apply analytics to business data to describe, predict, and improve business performance.

Optimization:

Particularly known as Search Engine Optimization, is the process of improving the visibility of a website or webpage in search engine results. SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.

analytics descriptiveDigital analytics was mainly focused on reporting. The analytics were mostly descriptive, emphasizing what happened and possibly, why it happened. Between analytics technologies not actually being very analytical and data stored in proprietary structures, it was difficult to get data into another technology to do more detailed or sophisticated analytics. What it made me think, though, was that the future of analytics is not in reporting or spreadsheets, visualization or cubes. The future is to find new ways to bring human expertise and data analysis techniques together to make learning mechanisms that start “smart” and get “smarter”. Using analytics can help you track marketing efforts and optimize future marketing campaigns, enabling you to ultimately make the best possible decisions. With real, quantitative results you can develop your future marketing campaigns with full assurance & confidence.

Optimization is a business analytics tool. Analytics is considered to predict the future  whereas optimization does not predict any future.

Future of Analytics Industry

analytics growing opportunityMajor components for the analysis of web data are current search engines like Google. They are able to search the whole web and to return documents containing the specified character string. There is a soaring demand for Analytics professionals. Jeanne Harris, senior executive at Accenture Institute for High Performance, once said “…data is useless without the skill to analyze it.” We all know how true is that! There are more job opportunities in Analytics and Optimization than there were last year and many IT professionals are prepared to invest time and money for the training. 
The demand for Analytics skill is going up steadily but there is a huge shortfall in supply side. This issue is global and not restricted to any part of geography. In spite of Big Data Analytics being a ‘Hot’ job, there is still a large number of unfilled jobs across the globe due to shortage of required skill. McKinsey Global Institute states that US will face a shortage of about 190,000 data scientists and 1.5 million managers and analysts who can understand and make decisions using Big Data by 2018.

salary jobt itlesThere is a strong demand for Data Analytics skills and is boosting the wages for qualified professionals. Big Data pay big bucks for the right skill. A look at the salary trend for Big Data Analytics indicates a positive and exponential growth. According to the ‘Peer Research – Big Data Analytics’ survey, it was found that Big Data Analytics is one of the top priorities of the organizations participating in the survey as they believe that it improves the performances of their organizations.

key benefitsAnalytics is a key resource for many companies which is competitive. According to the ‘Analytics Advantage’ survey, ninety six percent of respondents feel that analytics will become more important to their organizations in the next three years. This is because of a huge amount of data that is not being used and at this point, only rudimentary analytics is being done. About forty nine percent of the respondents strongly believe that analytics is a key factor in better decision-making capabilities. Another sixteen percent like it for its superior key strategic initiatives. Analytics play an important role in driving business strategy and making effective business decisions.

From a career point of view, there are so many option available, in terms of domain as well as nature of job. Since Analytics is utilized in varied fields, there are numerous job titles for one to choose from. Big Data Analytics Business Consultant, Big Data Analytics Architect, Big Data Engineer, Big Data Solution Architect, Big Data Analyst, Analytics Associate, Business Intelligence and Analytics Consultant, Metrics and Analytics Specialist. Big Data Analytics career is deep and one can choose from the 3 types of data analytics depending on the Big Data environment- Prescriptive Analytics, Predictive Analytics & Descriptive Analytics.

Future of Web Optimization Industry:

future of seoSearch Engine Optimization is all about to figure out how to make Google put you on the first page. The Internet of 2015 is still a pretty simple world. Most people still access information through a web browser. The Internet still needs you to tell it exactly what you want in a very particular way.
 The Internet’s mobile-app generation has started to change this. The Internet of Things will change it further and so will wearable technology.

SEO as it stands today, is mostly a one-trick pony. Keyword targeting, link building and on-page search optimization are all tactics that accomplish one thing. Get Google to think your web page is more important than someone else’s web page. The future of Internet is about context. It’s about knowing what content a person needs, when they need it. It’s proactive, not reactive to a search query in a box. And, it’s diverse in terms of format and function.

Rand Fishkin had mentioned how important it is to be contextually relevant; that if you create great content that readers want to consume, Google will rank you well. And this is the first step toward a truly audience-focused mentality about how we build web content. The best SEOs already get this. We’re already good at stomping down content that isn’t relevant or valuable. We’re going to keep getting better. And, some day most of the content created using traditional SEO tactics is going to get stomped down. Web content strategy simply cannot be the zero sum game called “Hack the Algorithm.” I’m talking about “white hat” SEO, too. Gaming an algorithm by Google’s rules is still gaming the algorithm.

It’s time to start thinking differently about being found. If your marketing strategy’s priority #1 is to rank high on Google, your clock is ticking.

Conclusion:

No matter how advanced Analytics is, it does not neglect the need for human insights. On contrary, there is a compelling need for skilled people with the ability to understand data, think from the business point of view and come up with insights. For this very reason professionals with Analytics skill are finding themselves in high demand as businesses look to harness the power of Big Data. A professional with the Analytical skills can master the ocean of Big Data and become a vital asset to an organization, boosting the business and their career.

With an increase in demand for SEO services, employment opportunities in the industry are also increasing. Therefore, you can expect more job opportunities in the Digital Marketing industry. SEO is a profession that can be practiced while working for a company or even as a solo practitioner. Salaries over $80K per annum are not an exception for SEO jobs. Almost all freelance sites have sections for SEO services and offers for $50 an hour or more are quite common.

Where do you think Analytics and Optimization is heading to in 2016? Please share your thoughts in comments below!

 

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Google Algorithm Updates – Impact on SEO

Google Algorithm Updates

Google Algorithm Updates are the steps that google uses to upgrade their search results to deliver quality and more targeted results for users.  Google uses numerous other criteria that change periodically to deliver more relevant results as well as to prevent people from gaming the system. The word “algorithm” refers to the logic-based, step-by-step procedure for solving a particular problem. In the case of a search engine, the problem is “how to find the most relevant webpages for this particular set of keywords”. The algorithm is how Google finds, ranks, and returns the relevant results”.

Google has had numerous algorithm changes, many of Google Algorithm Updates  have names and multiple versions, including Boston, Caffeine, Cassandra, Dominic, Esmerelda, Fritz, Florida, Austin, Brandy, Allegra, Bourbon, Gilligan, Jagger, Big Daddy, Buffy, Dewey, Panda and Penguin. In 2013, the Hummingbird algorithm was a major change in order to deliver more targeted results for users.

Google Algorithm Updates

 

Before going deep into important algorithm updations of google, lets go through history of google.

History of Google

Google was started in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they where  Ph.D. students at Stanford University,California. The conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page. Then new technology called pagerank was introduced. It determined a website’s relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site. It was first named as ‘backrub’ because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. They changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word “googol”. Googol is the number one followed by one hundred zeros. Google’s original homepage had a simple design.google homepageWhy  Google Algorithm Updates was started?

Initially very little was needed to fully optimize a site. All we have to do is optimize the  page content. The inverse relationship between query position and weight, simply boiled up by putting  one’s important keywords higher on the HTML tag hierarchy. This was relatively simple algorithm. So webmasters quickly discovered tricks to vastly boost their SERP. They started practicing link keyword stuffing on page content. As a result, google removed these sites from its index. They started to practice this to punish disingenuous webmasters looking to cheat the system. Each year Google changes its search algorithm about 500-600 times.

Some important Google Algorithm Updates

  • Google Panda Update
  • Google Penguin Update
  • Google Pirate Update
  • Google EMD (Exact Match Domain) Update
  • Google Hummingbird
  • Rank Brain Updation
  • Google Payday Update
  • Google Pigeon Update
  • Google Mobile Friendly Update

Google Panda Update

Google’s Panda Update is a search filter introduced in February 2011. It is also called farmer update. It meant to stop sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results. Poor quality contents are those with

  • Shallow content (not enough content to be useful).
  • Poorly written content.
  • Content copied from other sites.
  • Content that’s not useful.

Panda is updated time to time in a monthly basis. Site once hit can be escaped if they have done appropriate changes to the content. The sites once escaped could also be caught. Latest Panda updation was the 30th updation on july 2015. Panda 4.2 affected 2-3% queries.

google panda

Google Penguin Update

Google Penguin is a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. This Google Algorithm Updates is to catch sites deemed to be spamming its search results. This  includes

  • paid links,
  • asking for a link,
  • negotiating link exchanges,
  • automating link creation ,
  • buying links or obtaining them through link networks .

google penguin

Some reasons why your site get affected by penguin are

*  Anchor text over optimization

*  Low quality backlinks

*  Link relevance

*  Outbound link quality

*  Keyword stuffing

*  Websites with virus or spam warning

*  Hidden links and Hidden texts

The last official Penguin update, Penguin 3.0 happened on October 17.  The simplest recovery is to extract the link list associated with his website. Through the webmaster tools “latest links” and remove the links that fall into an unnatural pattern.

Google Pirate Update

Google’s Pirate Update is a filter introduced in August 2012. Designed to prevent sites with many copyright infringement reports, as filed through Google’s DMCA system, from ranking well in Google’s listings.   Many sites experienced more than a 96% drop in search visibility.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act was signed into law by then-president Bill Clinton on October 1998. The law makes it a criminal offense to produce and distribute anything that is protected by digital rights management (DRM).

Take a look at daily traffic loss from several major pirate sites.

pirate

Google EMD (Exact Match Domain) Update

The EMD Update is for “Exact Match Domain”.  Exact match domains mean domains that match exactly for the search query. It is a filter Google launched in September 2012 to prevent poor quality sites from ranking. Simply because they had words that match search terms in their domain names. When a fresh EMD Update happens, sites that have improved their content may regain good rankings. New sites with poor content  or those previously missed by EMD  may get caught. In addition, “false positives” may get released.

Google Hummingbird Update

Hummingbird is the name of the new search platform that Google is using as of September 2013. Its meaning is “precise and fast” and is designed to better focus on the meaning behind the words. Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. Google Hummingbird is designed to apply the meaning technology to billions of pages from across the web, in addition to Knowledge Graph facts, which may bring back better results.

hummingbird

Rank Brain

Rank Brain is an artificial intelligence (AI) program used to help process Google search queries. Rank Brain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities, called vectors,  that the computer can understand. If Rank Brain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result. According to Google it’s the third most important factor in determining the results that appear in your search queries.

rank brain

 

Google Payday loan

Google launched the Google Payday Loan algorithm to filter out lower quality websites. They were using a variety of spam techniques to boost their rankings for heavily trafficked search keyword queries. This update, which was designed to combat specific search queries that tend to have a high number of extremely spam results was launched in June 11, 2013. The algorithm impacted roughly 0.3% of the U.S. queries, but Matt said it went as high as 4% for Turkish queries where Web spam is typically higher.

payday

Google Pigeon Update

Launched on July 24, 2014 for U.S. English result. The Pigeon Update is a new algorithm to provide more useful, relevant and accurate local search results. Google stated that this new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters. This is quite useful for the user and the local business.

pigeon

Google Mobile-Friendly Update (Mobilegeddon)

On April 21 2015, Google released a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that’s designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results. In order for a site to be considered mobile-friendly,

*   Its text has to be readable without tapping and  zooming.

*   tap targets need to be spaced out appropriately.

*   The page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling.

mobile friendly

Google algorithm updates from Kavya V K

 

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Off Page SEO and some of it’s Techniques

Off Page SEO

off page seo

Off page SEO refers to the techniques that can be taken out side of a website,  to improve it’s position in  search engine results page (SERPs). Off-Page SEO includes not only link building but also social media promotion, bookmarking, etc. It also done with promotion works of a website. It is a best way to get more website traffic.

Before learning more about Off-Page SEO, we have to know little about SEO and it’s types.

SEO

types of seoSEO (search engine optimization) is a method of changing the rank of a web page or a website in search engine results using keywords or phrases. Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. It is an approach of techniques to increase the amount of visitors to a website. Two types of SEO:

  • On Page SEO
  • Off Page SEO

On Page SEO:

Here optimizing your website and making changes on title, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalization problem, managingrobots.txt etc. It provides good contents, keywords & putting them into correct places, giving appropriate title to all pages, etc.

Now back to our discussion, Off Page SEO.

We all are know Off Page SEO is important as much as On Page SEO. Then The Question is… Why Off Page SEO is important ?

off page seo importance

When we search about anything on search engines, they give us the best results for our search. For getting this best results, search engines find a lot of techniques including on and off page seo. Through Off Page SEO, mainly we got back links. Each link is a reference for search engines about that site. It is more likely to have mentions on social media ( Facebook likes, tweets, Pins, +1’s etc. ) and it is more likely to be bookmarked and shared among communities of like-minded users. References means, a very good indication on how the World (other websites and users) value the particular website.

Off Page SEO have lots of benefits. Some of them are:

 

  • Increase in Rankings : by getting more back links, website will rank higher position in SERPs. Through this website gets more traffic also.
  • Increase in Page Ranks : Page Rank indicates the importance of a website in the eyes of Google.  We know that, Page Rank values between 0 – 10. That’s why Google gives more relevant results to the searcher.
  • More Exposure : By getting higher ranks means great exposure. While getting in the top position (a website), it gets more links, more visits, more social media mentions, impressions, etc.

Now we can move to off page seo techniques.,

LINK BUILDING

It is a popular Off Page SEO method. We mainly build a link for getting a good position in search engines. Search engines like Google treats a link from another website to your site as a confidence. By making links from other sites, it means your site is trust worthy and Google considers it as a vote for your site. For example if someone likes this page and references it from his/her website or blog, then this is like telling search engines that this page has good information.

link building

Link building is good, by getting Good Quality link is better for your site. Which means getting so many link from with or without trustworthy is not a good method. All links are not equal, One link from a high authority site is much better than many links from a bunch of low authority sites.

Try to avoid artificial link building methods, like buying and selling of links, use of automatic programmes to create links to your site, etc. These techniques are all considered as ‘Black Hat‘ method by Google, which will be punishable to your site.

Most popular link building methods are:

DIRECTORY SUBMISSION :

directory submission

Now a days, submission of website to a directory is a common method in SEO. Purpose of directory submission is to get back links. It is purely based on how effectively we are selecting those directories and how efficiently we are choosing the category for submission. Submit your websites to the topmost quality directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, etc.

Nowadays many web directories may offer paid listings but don’t go for it. That sites may not be trustworthy.

LINK BAITING :

Link Baiting is used to get many in-bound links pointed to your site. It is the practice of crafting content that is designed to get other content producers to link to it. Suppose you have copied/published another website’s news or content in your blog/website. Don’t forget to place their website link as a reference. Do it for others and, if your content is trustworthy, let others do it for you. This is another way to increase your link popularity.

link baiting

Examples of link bait, include breaking news, striking images, controversy, humor, educational material and applications. If your content has value for readers, they are likely to share the link.

CROSS-LINKING :

Cross linking is the process of linking between two sites. (Sites may or may not be owned by the same person). It allows users to reference sites with content similar to that which they are already viewing, and may be of further interest to them. Link to internal pages within your site wherever necessary (Internal Linking).  Through this you can increase your link popularity. Which is another major factor of Google Page Rank algorithm.

cross linking example

Also try to get a content link from websites/blogs that are related to your site theme. Try getting a link from within their site content using a targeted keyword as anchor text. Very good example for Cross Linking is Wikipedia. These types of links have more weight from a search engine point of view.

LINK EXCHANGE :

link exchangeExchange links with service-related websites (this is commonly termed as Thematic Link Exchange) that can help increase your link popularity, which is a major factor of Google’s Page Rank algorithm. Beware of Black-Hats while doing exchanges. For example, I could link your website from mine and you could do the same.

ARTICLE DIRECTORIES :

An article directory is a website with collections of articles written about different subjects. By publishing your articles on an article directory you could get a link (or 2) back to your website. Some article directories accepted only unique content while other directories accepted anything from spin articles to already published articles. Sometimes article directories are referred to as content farms, which are websites created to produce mass content.

SEARCH ENGINE SUBMISSION :

Submit your website to the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Alexa, Alltheweb, Lycos, Excite, etc., to get listed for free.

FORUM SIGNATURES :

Many people where commenting on forums for the sole purpose of getting a link back to their website (they included the links in their signature). It is a great way to build back links for your site. Search for the forums that is suitable to your topic.

COMMENT LINK:

The same concept as forum signatures where you comment on some other website or blog in order to get a link back. Even worse, instead of using your real name you could use keywords so instead of writing ‘comment by safna’,  you wrote ‘comment by How to lose weight’ or anything similar. Try to comment on relevant website which is suitable to your website topic. Otherwise it will become black hat method.

BLACK HAT SEO

 Black hat SEO doesn’t obey search engine guidelines.  Its Techniques and SEO strategies focus only on search engines. That is, black hat seo doesn’t focus on human audience. Some examples of black hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, invisible text, doorway pages, adding unrelated keywords to the page content or page swapping (changing the webpage entirely after it has been ranked by search engines). Black hat SEO can possibly result in your Web site being banned from a search engine. Google has become very intelligent in recognizing black hat seo. With the introduction of Panda and Penguine they have managed to solve the problem and protect their search engine from spammers.

Some Techniques of Black Hat SEO :

blackhat seo techniques

  • Cloaking: 

Here content presented to the user is entirely different from the content presented to Search Engine Spider.

  • Duplicate Content :

It involves copying contents from one website and posting it on another website.

  • Comment Spamming :

Some website owners leave poor comments on every blog post or any other area which will get a link back to their website. We are already said about how to get a back link through comment.

  • Link Spam :

A way of getting link to the site from unrelated and low quality sites. Link building is an easy way to manipulate the search engine algorithm and many spammers take the advantage of this by building link network which leads to the creation of black hat seo.

  • Article Submission :

Submit contents to many article directories which is low quality.

  • Directory Submission :

Paying to submit your website to thousands of low quality directories.

  • Hidden Text :

Creating text or links which is the same color of the background of the site.

  • Keyword Stuffing :

It involves overloading a page with keywords beyond what might be expected for meaningful content.

Disadvantages of Black Hat SEO –

blackhat

  1. If Google detects website of link spamming, link farming, keyword stuffing, or any other illegal activities, it can ban your website from their search portal.
  2. Temporary high ranking switches to low ranking.
  3. Quality of the website goes bad.
  4. Permanently banned from search engines.

Difference Between Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO

 

black white hat seo

To “FOLLOW” or “NOFOLLOW”

Nofollow is an attribute that can be added to links to discourage Comment Spam. Webmasters gives a way to link to a website without passing any ‘link juice’ (for example in the case of ads), search engines introduced what is known as the “nofollow” link. This is a special tag you can add to a link. Example: <a href=http://www.anysite.com rel=”nofollow”>Any Site</a>) that tells search engines not to count the particular link as a ‘vote’ to the referenced website. Now you can link other websites from yours without taking the risk of being caught for selling or exchanging links.

Now we have to know ‘what is a good link’?

First you should understand that link building is not only focused for quantity but for quality too. In other words it doesn’t matter how many links are pointing to your website but it is more important from where these links are coming. For example a link from a normal blog does not have the same weight as a link from New York Times or a link from Matt Cutts blog (head of Google Quality team) is not the same as a link from my blog.

SOCIAL MEDIA

social mediaSocial media is part of ‘off-site SEO’ and it’s also a form of link building. It should be noted that almost all of the links you get from social media sites are “nofollow” but this does not mean that they do not have any value. Try to become a member of the most popular social networking sites like Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Linked In, Ecademy, etc., and create a profile of your own. By doing this you can extend your network online, get connect with your friends, share things with each other, and promote your company/website to build an online reputation. You have to show your active participation on a regular basis. When you get involved with social networking sites you are stepping away from your website and putting your self into internet’s vast community. It gives more opportunity to interact with customers, etc. Likes and Shares also boost the visibility of your site.

  • twitter buttonAdd a TWITTER button to your website, so that visitors are able to tweet your content and share it with their followers. Create your own Twitter account and notify your followers about interesting contents, product updates, etc. In Tweets use hash tag with keywords easily found in Twitter Search.
  • facebookFacebook may have good impact on your rankings. Add a Facebook Like Button to your website. Create a Facebook page and engage your readers in sharing and discussing your post, photos and videos.

 

  • google plusMake sure your website has a Google+ page and make sure you’re sharing your content via this. It’s very likely that Google uses its own social channel as a signified for ranking content higher when it’s shared via the channel and achieved a certain number of +1s. If you take time to grow your audience on Google+ it will simply increase the possibility of +1s and therefore strengthen that signal.
  • etc .

BLOGGING

bloggingThis is one of the most powerful ways to promote your company/website online. Write a blog of your own for your company/website and include lots of unique content. Be precise in what you’re trying to convey for the users in your blog entry and promote your blog in blog directories and blog search engines.

blogYou can also promote your blog/website by posting comments in other service-related blogs which allow links in the comments section that are crawl-able by the search engines (these blogs are commonly identified as Do-Follow Blogs). If you’re not very good at writing content for blog posts, hire a guest blogger for your blog and ask him/her to write precise and unique content so that your blog can gain more credit from a search engine point of view. Never become a part of black hat method.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Social Bookmarking is yet another powerful way of promoting your website, but nowadays most people are spamming social bookmarking sites without knowing how to use them. Social bookmarking is a way to bookmark our favorite web pages online to read them anytime and anywhere if we are connected with the internet.

social bookmarking

Do some social bookmarking in popular bookmarking sites like Delicious, StumbleUpon, Propeller, etc. You should be very careful while doing this and you must properly handle the tags which are very essential to broadcast your news on a wide area network. The web pages we bookmarked at social bookmarking sites is considered as a quality back link in the eyes of search engines. This may increase your website traffic based on how effectively you have participated.

PHOTO SHARING

Publish/share your website product pictures and make them public. Let your friends see them and comment on them too, which will help drive traffic towards your website. Do this in major photo sharing websites like Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket, etc.

VIDEO PROMOTIONS

Like with photo sharing, you can publish/share your product videos, expert opinions, and reviews of your product and make them public in YouTube, Metacafe, Dailymotion, etc.

LOCAL LISTINGS & YELLOW PAGES

Instead of going global and facing huge competition, make your website local so that search engines can easily view your website and fetch the content. This will help you to reach a targeted audience. Submit your website to Google Local, Maps, Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages, Super pages, Hotfrog, etc.

Now we can conclude like this,

Off page SEO is as important as on-page SEO. If you want your SEO campaigns to be successful you have to do both. When thinking about link building don’t take the easy way, try hard to get links from authorized sites. The more difficult is to get a link, the more value it has. In the past you could easily get thousands of links and rank higher but nowadays you have to do more than that. Because getting so many links from irrelevant sites may cause your site banned from search engines. Making a great website using all your efforts through white hat method and promote it in correct way. Quality Links follows you without any black hat method.

Here I discuss only some off page seo methods. You can give your suggestions and methods here. Am waiting..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Importance of Social Media in SEO

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA HELPS SEO

Importance of Social Media in SEO

Social medias are important factor in SEO. Social media are computer mediated tools that allow people to create, share, or exchange information, career interests, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks.Your social media efforts will increase not only your direct traffic through the shared content but an increase of organic traffic via search engines. The most important social media sites are  Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube. The more likes you have there and the more people who share your story the better your ranking.social media marketing is your ability to foster and engage with a community of other people.

 How to add social media share button to a blog post

  • Get the HTML code from the social media websites like twitter or linked In and copy it
  • Open  your blog
  • Then click on layout
  • Add a gadget
  • Paste the copied HTML code in the provided space
  • Click on save arrangement

Adding widget to word press

  • Get the HTML  code from the social media websites like twitter or linked In and copy it
  • Open word press
  • Click on  widget  from appearances
  • Click on twitter timeline for twitter widget
  • Click on text for linked In widget

Importance of Social Media in SEO

Social media sharing

Importance of Social Media in SEO brings both organic and inorganic visits. So lets describes how to share a post in social media.

  • Click on twitter share button on published post
  • Copy the text from appeared block
  • Paste on tweet compose button
  • Open tweet  on twitter
  • Click on copy link to tweet
  • Open  search console from Google submit content
  • Copy the URL then submit it

Twitter analysis

Twitter Trends

Importance of Social Media in SEO

Importance of Social Media in SEO

A trend on Twitter refers to a hashtag-driven topic that is immediately popular at a particular time.Trends are determined by an algorithm that monitors hot subjects based on who you follow and where you’re located.

Topsy.com is a real-time search engine for social posts and socially shared content, primarily on Twitter and Google Plus. The service ranks results using a proprietary social influence algorithm that measures social media authors on how much others support what they saying.The service also provides access to metrics for any term mentioned on Twitter via its free analytics service at analytics.topsy.com, where users can compare up to three terms for content in the past hour, day, week or month. It was announced in September 2013 that Topsy will include every public tweet ever published on Twitter for search and analysis.

Twitter follower wonk

Follower wonk lets you see how your competitors are doing on Twitter with their followers. Follower wonk shows you the most active hours of your followers, which takes the guesswork out of deciding when to schedule your key tweets to get the most traction. Importance of Social Media in SEO improves SEO ranking.

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