Praveen: Analytics SEO SEM Online Marketing

If you are looking for some authentic information on SEO, Link Building, this is the right article. The information & advice written here is 100% accurate and can be implemented without second thoughts. This is a SEO, Link Building Advice given by Google, Yahoo themselves.

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.

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Analytics is a system that gives data about your site. Information has to be interpreted from that data. This Information acts as an aid is decision making.

Analysis of Analytics data begins with a given underlining problem or a query.

Avinash Kaushik’s blog, which contains wealth of Web analytics information, is a must read for every one in this field.

1) Identify the objective of analysis. Define the problem.

A) To Improve Campaign Performance

i) How to increase conversion rates

ii) Which pages have higher pageviews, lower bounce rates and why?

iii) Which geolocation, keywords bring most loyal visitors?

iv) Can you retarget your new users?

v) Which referral sites gives low cost per acquisition? why?

B) Where to spend more money?

C) Where to reduce spends?

D) Which content/product is highly popular? Why?

E) Do you need to add more content, if yes, how often? which category of content?

F) Why is my market share going down?

2) Segmentation of Users: Divide your users into different segments based on your business objectives

A) Identifying visitors based on amount of time they spend on your site

B) Identify users based on length of time on site.

C) Identifying users based on frequency of visits to your site

D) Identifying users based on depth of visits/ number of pages viewed

E) Identifying users by repeat purchases on your site

F) Identifying users by gender

F) Identifying users by geo-location

G) Identifying users by value of purchase on your site.

H) Any additional segment valuable to your website.

Determine the segments most critical to your business, you may also give weights to each segment, for example returning visitors who visit once every 2 days may be the most critical segment for your website. You should be able to find data on above segments and cross-segments.

In a travel site may be returning visitors every month making a purchase may be very valuable. In a shopping site a new or returning visitors who visit more than one page on the site may be more valuable than returning visitors browsing just one page. In an Adsense site the important metric to be looked into is the depth of each visit irrespective of visitor being new or returning.

Based on your business, you need to segment the group of visitors to be monitored for better targeting of your marketing communication.

3) Segmentation of your Market. Based on your competition, quality of users on the site, determine various segments useful for business.

A) Segmentation based on Product Demand.

B) Segmentation on seasonal factors

C) Segmentation based on competition on certain product, geolocation, service.

Web Analytics is used for below main purposes.

1. To keep a watch on regular Metrics of the site on a day-to-day basis.
2. Provide required information to Marketing Team, and other teams.
   1. To increase performance of Online Marketing Campaigns
   2. To identify, segment users visiting your site.
   3. Traffic Sources and amount of marketing effort needed on each medium
   4. Identifying medium for each segment.
3. To find evidence for occurrence of particular event/action. To help in creating better content in the website.
   1. Identify geo location of each segment of users visiting your site.
   2. Identifying content viewed by each segment of users.
   3. By identifying Top exit pages, Top bounce rate on pages.
   4. Average Time spent by users in each page.

Segment Visitors based on the value they provide to your business, then create Goals and work to attaining those goals along with strong measurement techniques.
Identify visitors who are valuable and loyal, customize services for them…

Find out which content on your site these each segment of visitors actually view and how long.

1) Understand the needs of your users’ who visit your website.
A) Understand the needs of each segment of users..
B) Determine the content each of your segment browses
C) Even remote need of small percentage of users must not be ignored. It might help you in creating new products which could get more such visitors back to your site.

2) Provide required information to Marketing Team, and other teams before finalizing strategies.
This would help them assess the amount of effort required on external advertising and internal optimization. Read more about Marketing ROI on Avinash’s Blog.

If you would like to grow your visitors by 100%, then push marketing can do it by 20% & pull marketing can get you remaining 80%.

Reading some of the Best Web Analytics Blogs is must read for anyone in this field, some of them are:

1) Web Analytics Demystified
2) Conversion Rater
3) Occam’s Razor
3) Web Metrics Guru
4) Analytics Guide

End of Article …………….

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Every Online Business, large or small has some few consistent sources of Online traffic to their website. Mainly the Direct Traffic, Sponsored Advertising Traffic and Organic Search Engine traffic.

The Long tail for Traffic Sources can be explained as:

A) Numerous Sources each generating smaller amount of targeted traffic.

B) Cumulatively form a significant percentage of overall traffic.

Advantage of Long tail traffic sources

A) Never be completely dependent on few sources of traffic. Never put all eggs in one basket.

B) Mitigate the risk due to competition & market dynamics.

C) Find New segment of target audience.

a. Forums, Social Networks, New Media formats also attract good amount of targeted traffic.
93% of IT professionals in US find social network helpful for professional solutions.

b. 60% of facebook users login daily.

c. It Industry spends more time in Social Media

How to develop a long tail of traffic sources

A) Optimize sites to support all types of users, media formats (Video, Images, Audio).

B) Do not ignore the needs of even a small percentage of users on your site.

C) Include features in your site for every new type of users as well. For example: Video/Audio/Image content users,

Why the effort?

A) People are increasingly using social media sites like del.icio.us, digg, facebook, answers etc.

B) Support your users to use your product on every social site.

B) Competition on newer traffic sources is less, so it is better to make the first move.

C) It is important to increase the length of the long tail.

D) It is also important to increase the width of the long tail.

D) Develop applications to like Blog, gadget, Facebook application, podcast subscription.

Using the Face Book example, which has more than 230% growth even in countries like India:

A) The idea behind making the site Open to developers was to increase the long tail of traffic.

B) Facebook now supports all type of users & all needs of users.

C) Even the need of small percentage of users to share Books is met by a Book application, which notifies people of best books and rates them. Face book car pool application, Face book Linkedin Application

D) Each application on facebook could have been a new profitable online business altogether.

E) Facebook’s is a collection of multiple brilliant ideas put in one single site. This has exploded the website, traffic, activity and popularity & brand value.

F) Every small & medium business can cash in traffic on Facebook by creating an innovative application for users. By giving freedom to external developers it has allowed them to create products for Facebook. These products meet the needs of even the smallest percentage of users on the site.

G) This is the biggest USP of facebook: satisfying the remote need of the smallest percentage of users with products developed by external developers who in turn get their brand promoted.

Overall Facebook wins by ensuring the long tail grows longer and wider.

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A normal website such as an e-commerce site, News & Events site, Travel site or a generic portal like Yahoo, the core of the website is a product/platform that is sold to people. A e-commerce site can act as platform to Buy/Sell/Trade, a Travel portal offers access to bookings, News & events portal provides information material.

In an Online Community or Social Network the focal point of the website/business is the user and user generated content. A social website generates reputation by the quality of users/user’s content present on the site just as a portal gains reputation by the quality of product offered to website users.

The core values for such websites are:
A) The focal point of the website is the user generated content and the user himself.
B) Quality of users/user generated content is the quality of the website
C) Users/Moderators can make or break your website
B) Use Product cleverly as a tool to attract right people to use the site and increase activity.

Types of Social Networks & Online Communities.
A) Forums
B) Groups
C) Book Marking Sites
D) Content Popularity Sites (Digg, etc)
E) Answers
F) Social Networking
G) Professional Networking
H) Specialty Search Engines (video, Photos) Like Youtube, Flickr.com

Traffic to Social Media Sites

A) Organic Traffic

B) Word of Mouth Marketing
i) Blogs
ii) Marketing on Other Social Network Sites (Facebook)
iii)Viral
iv)Link Baiting

C) Targeted PPC advertising (very small scale)

D) Product Offerings: This is basically generating gadgets, applications which can be used in external sites and help drive traffic to your website.

Traffic From Social Media Sites

It is true that you can receive huge amount of targeted traffic for Free from Social Networks, this is possible only if you can spend lot of time and effort in each of the social network.

It is important to build reputation on your profile in these sites to drive targeted traffic.

If your business receives good amount of traffic from other social network sites then you must be aware that traffic flow is not consistent over a period of time. There will be spikes in traffic graph from social network sites.

Social Media Marketing

Social Network is a place where users posts content (textual, video, other) about various topics under predefined categories. There is generally a moderator or an algorithm, which monitors activities and gives prominence to few stories/user generated content. Moderator also starts discussion or edits the thread on any topic.

A) Content is clearly divided into Communities, Categories or Tags

B) Tagging is very essential. Location & Keyword tagging are 2 main important tags

C) All pages to have static urls as the content posted by users can rank in Organic results.

D) The Title, Category Heading, Breadcrum trail, Number of Views of the content, Content Url and links in the content post are essential for organic ranking.

E) If right content is not getting exposure the moderator has to work to ensure they get maximum views. Bring them on Home Page or link from relevant other pages.

F) The features and tools must be designed to get right content on Top of user attention.

G) To know the value of social media site,

i) Find the top number of views for any content or category.
ii) Find the number of users on each category at any point of time
iii) What is the average posts per user on each category
iv) Find the top 20% of the users posting maximum posts/threads. The same goes to rating content as well.

H) Moderator/Algorithm must choose the Content, Urls to be placed in the home page of the site.

I) Sharing the content is very essential, Users should be able to share any content with their friends.

J) Having a Personalized and customizable user profile is very essential.

K) Rating of Users by different level of activity on the site is good feature.

L) User Voting on the content is important aspect of the website.

M) The best content or Top Viewed/Rated Content must be clearly highlighted.

N) Users could be stalked by other users. Send a Add a friend request to other users.

O) All the content on the site to be made available to search engine crawlers.

P) Link back or track back Urls are essential. giving a link to posts which link to this content.

Q) In Q & A, giving rating to answers, users, and choosing a best answer is very essential.

R) Commenting is another most important aspect of the Social network. Giving a comment on every post increases the overall content on that page, helps it rank better in site search as well as organic web search.

S) Sending personal messages to other users is an important feature.

T) The user profile must exist in unique static Url which can be shared, linked from elsewhere on the web.

U) RSS feeds of user generated content is important. Users must be able to subscribe to other user generated content.

V) Including a plugin code which can help embed user generated content into an external blog, website is a useful tool.

W) The website must be able to assess the semantic relevance of the content posted by user and associate a relevant category or a tag to it.

X) The content posted by user should be sent as feed to various other vertical search engines and meta search engines.

Y) Every location or geography must have unique domain and contain local content.

Z) On every content page there must be links to other similar content.

AA) Marking a content as favorite is essential.

AB) Generating Quality Traffic & exposing Quality content. Both are reciprocal, you need to expose quality content to users and search engines and hence attract quality users to site.

AC) Moderator must be experienced and very good in promoting the right content.

AD) Users must be able to Bulk edit and manage the content submitted by them.

AE) License for every content submitted is essential

AF) Giving a number on every element based on its activity is very essential.

i) Number of Views of a content.
ii) Number of Votes to a content or answer.
iii) Number to every user based on his level of activity.
iv) Number of Comments on a content.
v) Number of Friends to each user.
vi) Number of webpages linking to each content.
vii) Number of categories, tags through which you can find this content.
viii) Number of Favorites for this content.

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In Pay Per Click Marketing through Google, Yahoo, MSN advertising is done on search and content websites. Users type in queries and find sponsored results for each keyword. Users then click on the Ads based on their liking.

In display marketing the websites you advertise on, provide extensive details like quality of traffic on their website, as a part of media kit. For example information on user’s geography breakup, economic class break up, age group breakup, gender breakup etc. However search engines never provide such details to advertisers. At the max they give search volumes, competition volumes, estimated clicks for each keyword, geography and ofcourse the hot keyword trends in the market.

In countries like India, where Google market share is about 80% and with Alexa rank in Top 3, you can safely assume all demography of people browse Google.com.

The keywords driving traffic to your website can give a lot of information about the nature of audience present in that particular market.

• Group campaigns, adgroups based on theme, product.

• Target each set of keywords in each location, content, language, Ad Scheduling.

Let’s discuss with an example of shopping site. Assuming shopping site extensively advertise on all products, in each location separately. Just by looking at your campaigns, you can identify:

1. The best performing location that generates traffic

2. The best performing product for each location

3. The least performing product for each location.

4. Location wise serious buyers can be identified, Looking at Avg time spent for each campaign in Analytics,

5. Time range with maximum activity on the site. Users are active from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm or throughout the day?

6. Which product page has highest bounce rate? Look at Campaign/Adgroup wise Bounce rate.

7. Which location has maximum repeat customers? Look at % New Visit for every campaign

8. Judge the competition in the market. Competition in Market is directly proportional to competition in PPC bidding.

9. Identify seasonal changes by change in traffic, location wise.

10. For B2B products or High Value products, if majority of conversions take place from content network. Quality of users buying your products is quality of users browsing those content sites.

11. Best location that generates maximum sales, you can do this if you set up E-Commerce Revenue Tracking in Google Analytics.

Your PPC Account can act as a pulse for your online business.

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