Traffic from Social media optimization can be tracked 

1. Google Analytics Referral Traffic

2. Number of Friends who have added you in their friends list in each of your profile in each Social Networks.

3. Frequency of updates and quality of content posted.

4. Number of votes on your content and number of people who regularly vote on your content.

5. The Amount of content in each of your profile pages and community knowledge sharing page.

6. The Total Number of Links to and from these profile pages.

7. Number of comments and frequency. How many of them are not in your friends list.

The amount of effort that is needed to market on social networks is tracked

A Facebook or an Orkut application is like an small widget which is used by the Users of social network. Since this application interacts with lot of people, it also has the ability to interact with the external server. Google Analytics for applications can be embedded into the application giving all data w.r.t the users using the application. Developers will also get an idea about the extent to which the application was spammed by users.

Developer Analytics (http://www.developeranalytics.com/analytics.php) and http://adonomics.com/ are service which is offered to developers of application to keep in touch with the traffic, demographic data, visitor data and conversion data.

These analytical tools in combination with customized tracking which you can set at application level which can send data to external server allows developers to track a lot of information about the user profiles and get useful information such as Traffic, Demographic Data, Profile Data etc.

This data has to be used to remodel and remake applications on Social Networks to make it more useful for users and make it more spam proof. A successful application can be built overtime by building more features to app based on the data, response derived from it.

Google gives details about creating a App;

http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/about/developer.html 

 There are 3 phases for Gadget promotion:

Create: Develop a gadget based on idea. Hire a developer for this or try out yourself. Thinking of an successful idea is Gold, however it happens by chance. Make sure it works on all kind of sites and all Browsers including remote ones like Safari.

Promote: This is the easiest and lest effort part, just add these in various webpages, sites.  Give options to Add to iGoogle, My Yahoo etc.

Track and Optimize: This requires analytics and time. You must use Log file analysis tracking for analyzing the performance of visitor data, traffic data, demographic data, user quality data. Etc. For example your gadget is running on Orkut and Facebook. The number of users in facebook may be more than Orkut, but traffic from Facebook may not be of much use to your business. Then you must customize you App to favour more Orkut community users based on quality of profiles on Orkut. A popular web app can have an impact on Reputation Management and Brand on social networks apart from monetizable traffic.

This Article was originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/

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The idea of this blog posts and future blog posts is to identify problems in web based business and how analytics can help solve it?

Blogging and Blogs

You have a small blog and spend considerable amount of time updating it, also have spent some money in creating and putting it up live. Measuring the success of a blog is not just pageviews, subscribers and unique visitors count.

ROI of a popular blog can be huge, if you have rich content and have active RSS subscribers. You don’t need a resume. Every popular blogger gets job offers regularly flowing into his email. Above this you have created a brand for yourself. This is a huge economical benefit considering the money and time you spend on make your blog active.  If you have a great blog then you have separate brand and identity for yourself.

Small Scale Business Online

Concentrating on search engine marketing, seo, affiliate marketing to generate profitable visitors to site is fruitful. This is the cheapest form of advertising online. You have control over spends and will be able to monitor your ROI. Set up Google Analytics or any other analytics tool which will help you look at the visitor information.

Conversion University from google is very helpful in optimizing the website for higher conversions and sales (http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py?answer=77123)

Small scale business must focus their marketing efforts cleverly around geo-locations to get maximum return from marketing & advertising. The site must clearly offer maximum benefit & response to their end users as promised in their USP. Most sites initially work on small set of customer base and keep them satisfied at all circumstances.

These companies are ecommerce sites, shopping sites, travel agent sites that are looking to sell products to their websites’ visitors. They should target at long term steady and consistent growth not looking to achieve instant traffic hoping to dramatically increase page-views and visitor count hoping make revenue quickly and grow faster.

Large Businesses Online

There are various large online website who advertise heavily online & offline for the purpose of promotion. The spend a big amount of money with an objective to increase visitors, page views hoping to increase brand value. It is unwise to spend money on marketing, advertising without looking at the actual value it adds to their users (customers).

Increase in page views and visitors may not proportionally be related to increase in revenue and profit. There are definitely smarter ways to reduce cost of marketing & advertising without impacting the bottomline.

I read about many large advertisers in US & worldwide who have decreased spends on search marketing as it has become unprofitable after a certain limit. They have found search engine optimization, social media marketing ways more effective to gain relevant traffic to their websites for increasing their sales.

Measuring ROI through every channel and making them profitable is very essential and must be the key factor

EXAMPLE:

The traffic to my blog has constant traffic from social media sites like stumbleupon and other social network sites. Few days it has huge spikes of about 2000 hits in a day from stumbleupon alone, totally free traffic.

Blog attracts about 16% of overall traffic from social media sites of which 48% contribution is from Stumbleupon alone.

The cost of promotion on stumbleupon is consuming few hours of time in writing rich useful content and building a network of bloggers, friends & general users. Comparing this with search marketing campaigns, same amount of traffic might have costed me few thousand dollars.

Never be afraid to use new format of media, content for promotions such as Videos, Apps, Images, podcast, audio files, flash files etc. It is just a new form of content by the underlining principle of promotion remains the same.

Reading:

Measuring ROI from SEO : http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3625973

Measuring ROI from Social Media Marketing: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/measuring-the-roi-from-social-media-marketing.html

This Article is originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/

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If you are good at link baiting then you should know want content to be distributed to attract audience.

• Use various content formats such as Videos, Images, Content for keep your community happy

• You can organize contests, puzzles, quizes for engaging the users.

• Understand & know your community group members, their preferences, geo location, profession, Interests.

• Mostly the mode of communication is Email, Scrap book(Message Boards) or Chat.

• Two main areas of management: Managing Content, Managing Users

• Advertise you community on Blogs, Social Media sites and even on PPC program works good. Nobody has tried advertising
  
  References:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/10/21/community.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/holy-mother-of-linkbait

http://www.fullcirc.com/community/communitytypes.htm

This Article is originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/

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Advantages:

1) Ability to target your Market segment

2) No Media costs

Method:

It is form of viral marketing technique, 3 Success Elements in SMO: Linkability, Visibility/Discoverability, Popularity

It is 50% what you do and 50% what your users do. What your users do will depend on how you build your relationship with your users. For example: By providing an easy access to submit your content on social media sites there is good chance your users will post it, if your content is worthy.Therefore the process of making your website social media complaint is known as social media optimization.

Key features of Social Media Sites:

A) Social Media sites have large number of users, therefore increasing the visibility of your website on these sites will surely have marketing benefits.

B) Social Media sites have lot of information such as user profile data which can be effectively used to rank users, or target a specific set of users for advertising.

C) Social Media sites have high user activity, due which fresh content upload happens at frequent intervals sometimes faster than News & PR sites.

D) Most social media sites has the ability to measure the quality of user generated content/users quantitatively and are transparent to general audience and search engines.

For example Digg gives details on how many diggs on content, who has dug, who has blogged about the content, what are their user profile data. All these details are transparent due to which the quality of the site, quality of users and quality of content can be measured both by users and search engines.Elaborating the points stated by Rohit Bhargava on social media optimization.

· Increase your linkability: Linkability is definitely the first step of optimization wherein users must be able to link to your rich content from other websites/blogs. Every successful website/ online business inherently is aware of this.

· Make tagging and bookmarking easy, submitting content easy: In short this means encourage to people to link to your website or post your content on other sites. As website owner you must encourage your users to link to your content and make the overall process of linking simpler, by few clicks.

· Reward inbound links: When you reward your users by giving a link to them in return of their link, you will encourage them to write more about you. This is very nicely practiced by Google blogs, you can find Google blogs(Adwords blog, Webmaster central blogs etc) linking to every blog who write about them. This encourages blog writers to write more about Google and their latest news.

· Help your content travel: This is another important optimization. If you allow your content travel, you are also generating backlinks wherever your content is published. RSS feeds are great example.

· Encourage the mashup: Mashup is simple algo in which inputs one or more content and outputs a new content using standard functions. Do you know the behavioral pattern of users who visit your website? Find out the behavioral profile of your users:

A) Are they tech savvy?

B) Are they first time internet users?

C) How many of them have a blog?

D) How many of them have Orkut profile, facebook profile?

E) What is their Internet Usage frequency?

F) How many of your website users, have a profile in social media sites?

A website like irctc.co.in may not currently need a social media optimization, but a website like rajshri.com definitely needs one currently. It also depends on how you want to grow as online business and which market segment you want to target in future.

1. Create Valuable and useful content, junk content can never be able to achieve the traffic, rankings you desire. The content must be useful for the users in your market segment, so that your attract quality traffic.

2. Help the social media users to post, rate and review your content.

3. Participate in relevant social media site, and network with people.

Types of Social Media Sites

Various types of social media sites are reviewed on SEO, Traffic, Ease of Optimization: For actively promotion and building your community high participation levels are required in each of the below sites.

1) Bookmarking Sites: Most bookmarking sites are open for crawling; hence getting as many pages in other users bookmark list is beneficial.

2) Social Media Content Rating Sites like Digg, reddit, propeller etc.: The work has to be done in building your network, friends’ circle that diggs your content, only way to attain top rankings is high level of participation in combination with posting high value content.

3) Image Sharing Sites: Upload images, tag effectively, form groups & networks for sharing and tagging.

4) Video Sharing Sites: Sites like Youtube.com, Dailymotion host videos as well allow users to post them on blogs, link to them etc. Additionally there are users viewing your video & posting comments on your video.

5) Social Networks such as Orkut, Facebook etc: Very little SEO value, as most sites are not open for search engine crawlers. Ideal for reputation management.

 

Social Media Optimization cannot be separated with Search Engine Optimization as SEO reaps significant benefits from SMO activities. Moving forward Social Media optimization will be the way to optimize sites, as sites will focus more on personalization, local and building relationship with niche audience.ROI of SMO activities is dependent on what you measure as success. If generating backlinks and ranking on search engines is success for you then you must invest in SMO activities for generating backlinks only.

The question is how do you measure success?

If you have a small website you can measure traffic and backlinks. For this you can set up Google analytics with e-commerce tracking and goal conversions. Look at traffic from referral sites and you can find traffic from social media sites. Also, you can find increase in rankings for top keywords on search engines.For more study on Social Media Optimization you could find these links useful:

• http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/introduction-to-social-media-optimization.html
• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060829-150053
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media-optimization-13-rules-of-smo/3734/
• http://www.toprankblog.com/2006/08/new-rules-for-social-media-optimization/
• http://blog.seoptimise.com/2007/02/ultimate-social-media-optimization-list.html
• http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2006/08/5_rules_of_soci.html

This Article was originally found on praveenkodur.comCopyright 2008, All rights reserved by praveenkodur.com.

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1. Emails Marketing campaigns with no referral tracking

2. SEO traffic has no referrals in some analytics tools

3. Traffic from Bookmarks.

4. A Viral Marketing Campaign

People who take advantage of direct traffic:

Domain name purchasers, typosquatters, cybersquatters whose intention is to purchase a domain name with typo mistake of popular brand, hence hoping to generate traffic. For more information please visit SEOmoz

Affiliate Marketers, Adsense money makers whose main intention is to make money through arbitrage.

Tracking Direct Traffic

Tracking Radio Ads and offline advertising internally: Some advertisers advertise their brand in Radio and give out the URL such as “http://radio.example.com” which is 301 redirected to URL “http://www.example.com/xyz.php?trackingcode=number”. This way the impact of advertising on the channel can be tracked. This will help in comparing the effectiveness between

1. Two different Ads..

2. Impact on other channel due to advertising on this channel and its co-relation

3. Same Ad performing differently in different cities, regions, geographies.

4. You could further extend to record Page Views, Time on Site and other details..

Google has launched tracking of Adwords audio campaigns in Google Analytics..

Below is an Interesting Example of my blog: The search engine traffic, referral traffic to my blog can be easily analyzed and explained as they are fairly straightforward. SEO, Referral traffic analysis requires no expert, even a layman can understand if they look at Google Analytics Report. However, the interesting part is the Direct Traffic Analysis, which initially I failed to understand until a few months back, hence I have decided to share this analysis in this Direct Traffic post.

Traffic Details

Traffic Share – Medium Wise

Direct Traffic User Details

What can we analyze from the given data?

What Google Analytics says?

1. 13.97% of users are direct, how are they finding my blog even though there is no offline Ads, no TV Ads, no Radio Ads whatsoever?

2. 49.37% of Direct Visitors are new visitors. How could this be explained?

3. Blog has 80.38% bounce rate (for direct visitors) which is high Can we figure out where the problem lies? What is wrong with the site?

4. Average Time by Direct Visitor is 41 seconds. This is a time taken for glancing a webpage, not even reading it.

This means half my direct visitors are new, they glance the page in 41 seconds and most of them leave without doing anything. Not sure how they are finding my site. They mostly visit 1 page of my site and bounce off the site like it was yuck.

Google Analytics does not give any details apart from the above.

Analysis from the above data

The direct users are landing on inner pages of the site. Its very unlikely they are typing the entire URL in the address bar…These Direct Users must be from RSS feeds, bookmarks.

Another data to look at is number of comments.. I get about 12-15 comments in a day most of which are junk and some genuine ones.

1. Users could be clicking on blog posts on their RSS feeds and land on specific page.. They then read and/or post a comment and leave the page.

    

   This is the reason for bounce rate being so high. The users read the blog post and leave; hence bounce rate is not relevant figure to look at.

 

2. Users visit one page and leave, therefore the Average time spent calculated is wrong. Google can only track time correctly if users visit more than one page.The reason being that when a new page is requested from the server then the log files records the time at which the new page was requested from server by the same user.The difference in time at which the page 1 was requested and page 2 was requested is calculated as time spent on the site. So, consider a example when a single page was requested then time spent by user on that page is cannot be determined. Hence average time here is the time spent on site by the users who browsed more than 1 page divided by the total number of users who visited the page.

 

3. Users are finding the blog through blog search engines, blog directories and other blog sites.
   1. They subscribe the RSS feed after which they click on blog posts in RSS Feed.
   2. Users may be finding the site through Book-marking sites, Social media sites add it to their own bookmarks, where users directly find the link to inner page of the site.

Direct Traffic is the most targeted traffic, as these visitors really read the content on your website.
Most returning visitors return through Direct Traffic, especially when you are not advertising offline. They are ideally the best source for returning visitors, hence business can sell their content easily.

This Article is Originally found at praveenkodur.com

Copyright @ 2007 Praveenkodur.com

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In measurement and benchmarking of conversion rate never make comparison of conversions rates or other metrics between different websites. You often find users quoting statistics like 5% conversion rate in retail industry, 10% conversion rate in services Industry etc..

There are publicly available tools like Fireclickhttp://index.fireclick.com/: or shop.org which contain benchmarks on conversion rate statistics w.r.t to industry.

How accurate is it to fix a conversion rate number for an industry? The comparison of conversion rates is irrelevant & inaccurate, Web site A might have 8% conversion rate and Website B may have 5% conversion Rate for variety of reasons

Difference in Conversion Rates between sites may be dependent on:

1) Branding & Overall Popularity of the site: Web site A may be industry leader; Web site B may be a startup.

2) Products Service Offered.

3) Landing Page Structure

4) Sources of Traffic

5) Seasonal Offers, discounts offered by few sites.

Measuring Conversion Rates (Issues): There are issues in measuring conversion rates.

Latency issue:

a. Users may convert at later point of time; Users may bounce but return after a certain time period to sign up or complete the form.

b. Users may call you on the number displayed on your landing page

c. Users may visit your site and buy offline.

Tracking Issue:

d. Google uses a 30 day cookie

e. Analytics Software may use track differently, (Log file analysis tracks conversions differently using IP based tracking)

f. Deleted Cookies

Incomplete conversions:

g. Users who buy a product but abandon the cart at checkout page.

h. Users who fill incomplete details in form

A user visits your website many times and may be through different channels before making a purchase or converting. Is your business capable of measuring such users?

Reasons for users not converting on the site:

1. The User did not want to visit your site in First place
2. Miscommunication between Ad text and Landing Page
3. The Landing Page did not load
4. The Advertising Traffic was not directed to the Right landing page
5. >Sponsored advertising & external links on landing page may be driving away users

There are various methods to increase conversion rates.

http://www.sherpastore.com/RevisedLandingPageHB.html?8913

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/02/learn-about-landing-page-optimization.html

http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/

Other Users

Majority of Users who have landed from advertising channel do not convert. Should we care about them? Yes, because they tell a different story. We can know a lot about our website if we just know the activity of these users online.

How do you measure the activity done by users who did not convert? However advertisers have paid the channel to bring them on their website. Since we are paying to get users on the site, can we identify these users and their actions?

What actions did these users perform?

• Did they click sponsored links, links to external site
• Did they view/navigate to other pages of the site?
• Perform a search on the site.
• Did they view the FAQ, Contact Us, About Us pages?
• Subscribe to Feeds
• Downloaded any content, files.
• Tagging, Bookmarked, Rated any content
• Submitted a Comment

Attributes of these Users that should be measured:

A) The Time Spent by these users on our Site

B) Depth of their Visits

C) Frequency of each Visit (Did they return again to our view the site)

D) How many Unique Visits (Detect unique IPs)

What were these users looking for? The Ad text, keywords and even the channel of advertising can give us a better Idea.

If you are an ecommerce site, find out how many times a user visits your site before making a purchase. And how many users are repeat customers, and through what sources do they visit your site.

Marketing is not about acquiring One Time conversion, it about building relationship. Therefore it is necessary to identify different users online and understand their activity, behavior to value them differently.

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In Search Engine optimization the cost incurred are mainly is on effort, time, agency cost/employee cost. While as in Search Engine Marketing, the costs are Advertising cost(which is CPC, CPA, CPM etc) and the cost of time/effort.

It is necessary to track the value derived from Visitor Engagement on the site and revenue generated,

Visitor Engagement Tracking

Visitor engagement depends on objective and size of the business,

1) Defining Visitor Engagement depends completely on the content present on your web site.

a. On a Shopping site: Engagement has to be product sale, product search etc..

b. On a Blog: It is the number of comments posted, subscribing RSS feeds, Average time spent on the site, No of page views per visit can be engagement metric.

c. On a Corporate Business Site: People might just visit to pick up telephone number, address of the business. Therefore none of the metrics work.

d. On a News Site: It is number of subscription RSS,Email. It is again time spent on article, number of comments posted, no of page views per visit.

e. On a Forum site: Registrations are a value.

f. Software Downloads Site: Number of downloads are a value.

2) Getting Users to Subscribe your RSS feed is a value. These users will read your content more than repeat visitors. It shows the measure of content popularity.

3) Users favourite the page, site in social bookmarking sites, social network & media sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com, Del.icio.us, stumbleupon.com is also a value provided by SEM traffic.

4) If Links to your blog post increases from SEM traffic, due to people positing your link elsewhere in answers etc, then it is a big value..

5) Users might land on specific detail page pick up the phone and dial the number given on page. Measuring telephone call rate is necessary.

6) For smaller business getting targeted traffic to their website is a value, since it adds to brand building etc.. if not sales..

7) For larger websites, brand is already in place, hence traffic which has a direct effect on revenue is more of a value than mere traffic from.

If the mode of revenue generation is advertising then attracting just traffic, might be worth

For small shopping sites setting up ecommerce tracking is very useful and necessary

This can be done by using the option present in Analytics Settings à Profile Settings àEdit. Give details of Currency, decimal places etc.

Tracking Ecommerce Transaction through Google Analytics

Once you opted Ecommerce tracking, you must edit the receipt page, which is the page after transaction, install a script into this page passing the order value into the Analytics system. Google has provided a comprehensive material on setting up ecommerce transaction.

For other business they need to monitor, track the objective of SEM campaigns. If not the engagement of the visitor on the site.

Optimizing SEO, SEM Campaigns

1) Generally Specific Keywords have higher conversion rate but are lower in volume

2) It is important to add as many new specific long tail keywords as possible…it need effort in research on new keywords on regular intervals.

3) The Head of the keyword list is pretty much fixed with little variations but more effort has to be made in making the tail longer…..that is where maximum effort and time as it can change the ROI of the campaigns.

4) Competitive keywords are always costly and extra effort can change CPC minimally…

a. However the efforts has to be done on Landing page creation..

b. Small changes in conversion rate by new landing page optimizations can dramatically increase ROI

5) Constant Generation of long tail keywords and new keywords are always the key…

6) Using different landing pages for each set of keywords is very good

a. Domain name keywords can be landed on home page

b. Category Specific Headings can be landed on respective section on the site

c. Product keywords or Specific keywords must be landed on inner most pages of the site or respective product pages.

7) Make sure your website ranks for all brand terms including the misspellings of your domain name etc..

a. This can be done by creating a page with list of all misspelled keywords

Using Misspellings can be a great way of generating low cost traffic…but remember there can be 2 types of users typing misspellings

a. Users who accidently typed a misspelling, will most likely click on “Did you mean - Correct Spelling”

b. Users who are uneducated or illiterate,

So you need to decide on keeping such keywords based on the quality of traffic you generate

9) For Large Websites tracking of every keyword to last metric of calculating business ROI is essential…For example:

a. Banking website could track the number of savings accounts, number of loans applied per every keyword along other details such as location, amount of loan, income of user and other other quality measurements which will help determine the quality of keyword.

b. This will help them to make a decision of increase bid rates, adding more same kind of keywords etc..

10) Track phone Calls, If you are running a Click to Call Campaign then provide the keyword which generated the call to call center executive. After the call process collect the feedback of the user and measure the business quality of the keyword, which is again fed back into the Adwords campaigns.

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Some of the below SEO Tips for optimizing for locally was found to be extremely useful.

1) Websites must be Optimized for Mobile Users, it is very very essential to have your website optimized for geographies. This is because the localized search results will have extra value add for mobile users. Search engines have developed technology which would identify location (if not, it will soon to be) of mobile phone users and serve results based on their location. Therefore highlighting location names in your WAP enabled website is very essential.

2) Use Google Trends: Google Trends shows you which cities generate the highest amount of searches for the term. Target those Cities for publishing your Press Release Online.
Create Separate Pages for those Cities and include more content on those pages, rank them higher in search engines

3) Create a Directory structure of listings of Locations: Countries, cities, areas, pincodes where your product and service is located and link to corresponding profile page from each link.

4) Title Tags, Headings: In product details page include area, city, country in the same order in Title Tags, Headings

A) In your Product Details page include links to your external sites of related industries in same geographies.

5) Sub Domains, Folders: Create location names as sub domains or folders. the content present in these sub domains or folders should only be related to that particular location.
Having a sub domain has an advantage of hosting each domain in respective geographies. for example:

1. india.example.com can be hosted in India
2. us.example.com can be hosted in US
3. uk.example.com can be hosted in UK
4. australia.example.com can be hosted in Australia
5. This way each subdomain will have higher probability to rank for searches in respective countries.

6) Common Words: Include keywords which are specific to that locality people in each product page along with Geo location. Such as common nicknames apart from main keywords

A) For Example: Include Green City Bangalore, Pink City Jaipur, and not just Bangalore, Jaipur

7) IP Redirect: Do not redirect users to websites based on IP location in the same country. This is can have negative effect as search engines reach your site from different IPs.

Backlinks from Geo Specifc Sites: Generate Backlinks from other sites which are oriented to same geography, use location names in the anchor text of back-links.

9) Local Business Listings: Observe the backlinks and content on sites which rank higher in Local search engines including http://local.google.com, Yahoo Local, MSN Local. Optimize your site accordingly..

A) Some Local Search Engines rank sites alphabetically

B) Some Local Engines rank site based on presence on web site link in other properties of same portals. For example: Yahoo might rank your site higher if your site is listed in Yahoo directory, Yahoo Small Business, Yahoo Yellowpages, Flickr, Del.icio.us.

C) Good idea is to get listed in every geolocation your business operates. For example: In US category, UK category.

D) Include City Name, Country Name in every keyword.

E) Signup for Google Local Business Listings, similarly for Yahoo & MSN

F) Give Full Address in every product on your page.

G) Get your Local Listings reviewed regularly .. this will ensure to keep it on top…

10) Yellow Pages Listings: Getting your website listed in Yellow Pages directory, Local Business Directories is very essential.

A) http://yp.yahoo.com/

B) http://yellowpages.msn.com

C) http://www.yellowpages.com

D) http://www.yellowpages.com.au

E) http://www.yell.com

F) http://www.yellowpages.ca

G) Similar Yellowpages directory for your location

11) Maps: Link to Wikipmapia (containing Lat Long Data) or Google Maps from your product details page. You can even embed a map.

12) Images & Videos: Photographs, Videos present in your website must be uploaded in respective vertical search engines such as Flickr.com, Youtube.com and importantly to Optimize & tag them will all geographical location names along with Lat, Long data if options as given. You must also provide a link to your website from these image, video content

13) Blogs & Reviews: Generate Backlinks from Blogs which are specific to these location, Blog links have higher weightage in local industry. Get Reviews from Experts who claimed to be professionals in that location. For example: Real Estate Expert in London recommending your site from his blog.

Related Articles on Local SEO

1) Natural Search Blog

2) Local SEO Guide

By the way I am located in New Delhi, India (National Capital Region) & my interest includes SEO, SEM, Web / Business Analytics. Please find the Google Map address locator below. View Wikimapia

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Optimization Tips from Adwords Team

Adwords 101 : Part 1

Adwords Optimization Part 1

Adwords Optimization - Assesing your Website

Adwords Optimization - Account Structure

Adwords Optimization - Keyword Basics

Adwords Optimization - Beyond Keyword Basics

Adwords Optimization - Ad Text Optimization

Generating New Keywords

Managing and Optimizing Bids

Landing Page quality Update

Website Optimizer Strategy

ROI Matters - Part 1 of 3

ROI Matters - Part 2 of 3

ROI Matters - Part 3 of 3

Google’s Help on Dynamic Keyword Insertion , is a must read for large advertisers

Other Adwords optimization resources shared by various advertisers around the world..

A) 32 Very Good Useful Tips on Adwords : This is list of Top tips put in one document. 13 calls to action verbiage ideas: Browse our store, Submit Your RFP (RFI), See our client list, Free Shipping, Order today, ship tonight. Download our brochure, Free Consultation, Free demo, Free quote, Free Report, Start now, Call 24/7.

B) Google’s Expanded Broad Match : Find out What is Google’s Expanded Broad Match, why google displays ads after remembering previous searches, how to test it?

C) Protecting from Expanded Broad Match : How to prevent from showing in expanded broad match.

D) Reaching Local Auidence : If you are a local business looking to reach local audience, then this can be helpful.

E) Using Video Ads in Adwords : Explaining the usage of Video Ads in Adwords Account.

F) Know about Placement Performance Report : The new feature Placement Performance Report greatly helps in getting insights into the account and performance in content network. Find out how to use it.

G) Search Query Performance Report : Search query reports generates keywords which have actually been searched on google to reach your website. This would help in generating negative keywords, additional potential traffic/profit keywords .

H) Adwords for Auto Sites/Forums : Find out how to manage adwords accounts in Auto Sites and Forums.

I) Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid in Adwords Account : What not to do & How not to manage your Adwords Accounts.

J) Tips to pay less and get more : Simple tips to optimize your account to spend less on adwords. You can also read the 5 Tips for Spending less on Adwords.

K) Adwords Expert Tips & Techniques: How new developments affect the adwords account management

L) Optimizing PPC Campaigns for B2B Businesses

M) Landing Page Optimization : 10 Tips you should never forget on optimizing landing pages.

N) Best way to generate PPC TRaffic and perform PPC Marketing

Small Changes to Ads which can boost your CTR

There are various small changes that can be made to adword Ad Text which can boost your CTR way above the competitors. You can find the exhaustive list on various blogs, Some of them are given below:

• Adding … in description Increases CTR: A test points out that adding 3 dots … at the end of the description line 2 will increase the CTR of the Ad.

• Plural & Singular : Small changes from singular to plural can boost your CTR

• Speaking to User as 1st Party : Using phrases like You Will Get can sometimes lead to higher CTR. Addressing the user directly as 1st person will help you boost CTR.

Few Adwords Tips for Beginners starting out on Advertising Online:

1. How to Get Started with Adwords
2. 8 Tips for Advertising Online :
3. Broad, Extact, Phrase Match :
4. Adwords Tip for Beginners :
5. Good Tips for PPC Starters:

You must watch the 2 hour Video on Perry Marshall Talking About Adwords.

Read a comprehensive description on how to test A/B testing of Text Ads, Landing Pages with Adwords.

These resources & knowledge on Adwords may not be present in the Google Adwords Learning Center

For Appearing for Google Advertising Professional Exam you could visit the Adwords learning center http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/

This is my personal list of bookmarks on Adwords. However do keep a looking for more postings on Adwords Tips.

Copyright of Advanced Adwords Learning Center is reserved by praveenkodur.com

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Google, Yahoo has come a long way from the days it used ignore webmasters when Google started out to helping webmasters/site owners with optimizing websites. Google has created a special channel of communication with webmasters/site owners for helping them design search engine friendly websites to make information available to users easily.

Link Building

Google clarifies Link exchange is fine as long as it does not look excessive and spam. This means the link exchange schemes & programs deliberately increasing links in attempt to achieve ranking is bad. Buying and selling links is bad. Any marketing done excessively is bad for websites. The discussion on this on webmasterworld can be found over here. Google in its Webmaster guidelines had stated that any link exchanges schemes, buying, selling links are not good for website rankings. As per Google the links are editorial votes to webpages and have to given naturally to add value to visitor.

A) Google introduces Paid Link Reporting service, find mattcutts story over here and here. Link selling sites loose the ability to transfer PageRank.

B) Google Introduces No-Follow attribute

C) Link Building with Google Bookmarks

D) Link Baiting Advice by Google & by MattCutts

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engines are interested in providing rich, useful & relevant content to end users. This can happen only when site owners publish rich content & design a search engine friendly site.

Search engines would want to index all the content provided by site owners. It is therefore in their Business Interest to help webmasters provide more content to search engines. Search Engines therefore encourage webmasters to publish more content online both quality & quantity.

Website owners are looking to drive traffic from Search Engines by optimizing websites. Search Engines are looking to provide relevant, quality results to end users. Therefore it is a Win-Win solution for both. The only glitch is Spam.. Spam is defined as any activity where this equation is disturbed.

Search Engine spam is defined as any activity by website owner which is in the business interest of webmaster but not in business interest of Search Engine. However there is no such thing as “Webmaster Spam” when the site owner’s business interest is not protected by search engines.

SEO Tips by Google

• SEO Basics
• Google Sitemaps
• Using Robots Meta Tag
• All about Robots.txt
• Quality Guidelines for Webmasters
• Duplicate Content Caused by Url
• Understand Duplicate Content
• SEO for Flash Files
• Server Location and SEO
• Using Google Webmaster Central Tools
• New Robots Meta Tag check: X-Robots Tag and Unavailable_after Meta tag
• Canonical Urls
• Google Webmaster Help Center

Some of the active channels the information & Tools online are:

A) Google Webmaster Central

B) Google Webmaster Discussion Group

C) Google Sitemaps

SEO Tips by Yahoo

Yahoo.com also offers extensive help and awareness program for webmasters for optimizing websites for higher ranking on search engines. In some areas like Dynamic Url rewriting they offer more advanced help than Google.com

• Basic SEO on Yahoo
• Ranking Factors on Yahoo
• Yahoo Webmaster Guildelines
• Yahoo Site Explorer & Sitemaps
• How Yahoo Handles Redirection
• Reporting Duplicate content through Urls & Faqs on Dynamic Urls. WMW Discussions on dynamic urls in yahoo is very useful
• Removing Urls from Search Index
• Yahoo Store Help

Web Master Tools offered by Yahoo

1) Yahoo Site EXplorer

2) Yahoo Search Blog

This is an article which is worth bookmarking for all SEO, SEM Managers, as the resources listed has to be referred by everyone in this field.

The golden fact is everyone (Search Marketing world) is aware of it but very very few people have the patience to constantly observe & learn for maintaining their website rankings on Top of Search Engines.

Copyright of this Article is reserved by praveenkodur.com

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