Google’s Matt Cutts gives tips to small business owners

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Gandhi in Google

Google featured Mahatma Gandhi’s image in its logo celebrating 140 th Birthday of Gandhiji.

Happy Bday Google

Google 11th Birthday

Search Engine major, Google celebrates 11th Birthday on Sep 27 2009. Google has changed its logo (L to 11) to show its 11th year celebrations to Google users (Lovers).

Bounce Rate the Killer factor of your site …

Bounce Rate

Not many care about the Bounce Rate of their site; the most predominant factor that influences your site’s performance is the bounce rate. Bounce rate in simple terms means the percentage of people who come to your site, then immediately leave without viewing any of the inside content pages. Bounce Rate is usually used to measure visit quality – if the bounce rate is high it means that the landing page is not relevant for the users coming to the site. Low bounce rate indicates that the visitors are engaging and exploring the site. So what constitutes a good rate? This is a very hard question to answer, but if you do some research, most say it needs to be under 50%. It also will depend on the type of site that you have. For example, if you have a news website, many times a visitor will come to your site to read the latest updates then leave. Thus more often a News Website will have a higher bounce rate than a “normal” site as there is no need for them to go any deeper.

How can you improve your bounce rate?

1. Track the bounce rate of your site over a period of time

2. Also check the time spent by visitors on your site

3. Check the Traffic Sources – Identify which source contributes bulk of your traffic. Is the traffic coming from Direct Links, Search Engines or Social Networking Sites

4. After getting your Statistics rate, Start making changes in the landing page

5. Make sure that you showcase prominent links that will pull the visitors interest

6. Make the site Navigation more user friendly

7. Check for the load time of the site – check in different browsers. Make sure your site loads quickly 8. Change one thing at a time and keep an eye on the bounce rate and check if there is improvement.

Follow the basic principles said above and ensure your visitors pass the home page and read the content inside the site thereby increasing the stickiness of the visitor. I have also read that it plays a big role in search engine algorithms. Sites with less Bounce Rate get better rankings.

Search Camp’09 in Chennai, India

SearchCamp is a two day event aimed to bring together the best minds from the Search Engine Marketing space to talk about search engine advertising, including optimization and marketing issues. The event is scheduled for the 28th February & 1st March 2009.

This is the second edition of the event and the first edition happened during 6th & 7th of October 2007, at Tidel Park, Chennai. SearchCamp will feature workshops, debates and keynotes on the present state and evolution of Search Engine Marketing.

Check the wiki for more details : www.searchcamp.in

Search Camp'09 Chennai, India

Mobile SEO – SEO tips for Mobile Sites

Mobile SEO

Lot of buzz is happening in the industry for Mobile SEO, probably you would have heard many “experts” advising you to optimize your site for mobile phones, or to create a “mobile” version of your site and optimize that for “mobile search.” This process is defined as “Mobile SEO”. I heard lot of misconcepts and misleading discussions on Mobile SEO, so i thought let me discuss:

There are few things we should consider while creating a Mobile Site:
1. There is no need to purchase a .mobi domain name for creating a Mobile Site, you can use a .com domain name which is more than sufficient for creating a Mobile Site (You can also use the other domain extensions also).

2. Use the same URL for both Mobile and Traditional Site, so that users need not remember two URLs for your site.

3. Using one URL can also avoid content duplication.

4. SEO best practices for traditional sites are best valid for Mobile Sites also. But in addition we need to take care of few  more stuffs while doing Mobile Sites:

 a. It is good to have basic accessibility standards like W3c Complaint, XHTML code check etc.,
 b. Create Mobile Dynamic Pages by combining Websites Content DB.
 c. Submit your site to Mobile Search Engines
 d. Apply the Traditional SEO techniques – Relevant Page Titles, Effective Page Descriptions and Quality Links.

If you check the Search Results in Google through mobile its almost the same as we see in the PC, so there is a clear indication that there is no preference given for mobile sites. In conclusion its better to create your site accessible in all browser versions, make sure its readable in any screen resolution and ensure it loads fast instead of creating an “Mobile” site. Mobile Technology is developing day by day so there will not be more requirement to create additional sites for Mobile instead we can create our site more mobile friendly.

Grow Your Business by tracking … Track Everything.

Traditional advertising mediums like print, TV, radio, etc are notoriously difficult to track. You cannot track how many people saw/heard your ad and whether they were interested, oblivious or, worse, annoyed.

But the web, and analytics, changed the game. So how should you be using your web analytics to grow your audience, and your business, online?

Track Everything

With web analytics on your site you can track:

Where your traffic is coming from by
   – The referring website and page
   – The search engine and keyword used

Your website visitors by
   – Their location
   – Their operating system, browser and monitor resolution
   – Their network

Visitor behavior and actions by
   – Duration of visit (time on site)
   – Pages per visit (number of pages viewed)
   – Bounce rate (percentage of users who viewed only one page before leaving)
   – Conversion rate (percentage of users who completed a preset task)

If you’re planning on doing any kind of web marketing, be it through search engines, email or advertising on other websites, information on your past and current traffic is crucial. Not to mention you’ll want analytics in place so you can properly track the new traffic your promotions will, hopefully, bring in.

Tie Your Traffic Sources to Your Users’ Actions

When looking at your analytics data the behavior and action metrics mean little by themselves. If the bounce rate of your site overall is 75%, what does that tell you? Well, this is a pretty high bounce rate – you should at least be shooting to have a bounce rate lower than 50%. But does this tell you exactly what is wrong?

Likewise, if you have secured advertising or a listing on another website, the number of visits coming in from that site only gives you part of the picture.

Tying your bounce rate to a specific traffic source, on the other hand, can tell you a lot.

If a given traffic source is generating a bounce rate of 85% or more, for example, this indicates that users are not being satisfied. There are a few possibilities as to why:

The users may not be well-qualified – or the site where you are listed or advertising might not have the best audience for your content/offer.

The listing/ad may promise something that the entry page does not live up to (or, at least, the promise is difficult to locate once the user arrives at your site).

Your site is simply not usable, is unattractive or unprofessional, causing users to leave immediately (and most don’t come back)

Your users are not connecting with your content/offer.
There are other possibilities, but you’ll want to find the most likely answer here – and try to fix it. Then, using the same metrics (traffic source + bounce rate), you can see whether things improve moving forward.

Using metrics like these you can also get a sense of which advertisements are bringing you a return on your investment and which aren’t. With goal tracking in Google Analytics, for example, a conversion rate is added to just about every traffic metric, including referring websites. If you’re finding that a website is sending you plenty of traffic but none of it is converting, re-examine the referring website’s audience, how your site is being presented and the user’s experience when they click through.

The Point

Your website is more than a brochure. It’s an interactive tool for your users. The only true way to find out how they’re using it (or not using it) is to get web analytics set up properly on your website (including setting goal points to track conversions).

And the best way to improve your website in the aim of building your business is to use the information your web analytics give you.

If you aren’t tracking everything, taking time on a regular basis to understand what the data reveals about your users and adjusting your efforts based on this information, you’re missing an opportunity to optimize your advertising and get a better return on your budget.

Google Analytics updates

Google Analytics updates

Google announced some major updates to Google Analytics today:

Advanced segmentation (public beta, being rolled out gradually)
A Google Analytics API (private beta)
Custom reports (public beta, being rolled out gradually)
Motion charts (public beta, being rolled out gradually)
AdSense integration (private beta)
Improvements to the administrative interface

I believe that the most advanced free tool available as of today is Yahoo! Web Analytics. I knew Google was planning to release some improvements like advanced segmentation, but they hadn’t at the time so I couldn’t say anything. Users of Google Analytics can now wait to make the switch to Yahoo!

Yahoo announces Yahoo Web Analytics !!!

Yahoo Web Analytics

Yahoo Inc has announces the new Web analytics tool called Yahoo Web Analytics. Yahoo has acquired IndexTools recently and the outcome of the acquisition is the Web Analytics product. IndexTools is a German based Web analytics company started in 2000. Yahoo has planned to roll out this services till 2009 and Yahoo Small business customers will be the first one to test this tool.

 

 

 

About Yahoo Web Analytics:

 

Yahoo Web Analytics looks more likely like Google Analytics tool. It has Executive dashboards, custom reports, advanced campaign management, comparative reporting, advanced path analysis, and marketing workflow management, real-time segmentation, live cost analysis, merchandise reporting, scenario analysis. Yahoo! Web Analytics has a drag & drop interface, custom reports, alerts, benchmarks, and metrics. 

 

Advantage of Yahoo Analytics over Google Analytics:

Yahoo Analytics reflects the data within minutes of collection and not as other web analytics products take 24-48 hrs for reflecting. In other words, with Yahoo! Web Analytics, you can practically see in real-time what your website users are experiencing.

Is Reciprocal Linking really useful

How useful is Reciprocal Linking

We had a big debate in my office last week regarding the effects of Reciprocal Linking. I just thought it might be the question in most of the minds of the optimizers today.

“Is Reciprocal Linking really useful???”

If you ask to the SEO community the instant reaction will be “Yes”, but not as before.

So what type of Strategy changes we need to adopt for making Reciprocal Linking bit effective:

There were days when reciprocal linking was useful, some webmasters use to link everything that would link back, even if there was no relevancy from site to site. In the recent years due to advancements in Search Major Google’s Algo, many of those reciprocal links were not as reciprocal as they used to be, as other webmasters became savvier and realized there was likely no value in these links.

With this being the case, if you have a website with more number of reciprocal links pointing back to your reciprocal websites, there might be few questions in your mind. Should I dump all the links or should I check for the links which don’t reciprocate and remove those.

The best possible solution would be removing the links which are irrelevant to your website and inform all webmasters that their links are to be dropped.

Linking Strategies are changed don’t always look for 100 % reciprocal ratio instead look for 30 – 80 % which shows the search engines you are linking for your end user and not necessarily for reciprocation.