Google Analytics and It's Usage

GOOGLE ANALYTICS AND IT‘S IMPORTANCE

Google Analytics is a powerful analytic and reporting tool that can be integrated with your publication to provide insight into your visitors’ behavior.  Google Analytics integration is an easy process that should only take you a few minutes to complete.  Featured included in Google Analytics are: Tracking the referral paths of your users, map your visitors’ behavioral through your publication, Turn insights into action by tracking conversion events inside Google Analytics,  Gain more insight into how any paid traffic you’re sending to your publication is performing,  Benchmark your publication’s performance against other websites in your industry or vertical, and much, much more!

How analytics work

1. Sign Up for a Google Account  (Skip if you already have one).

2. Get your unique tracking code.

• If it’s your first time logging into Google Analytics read below. If not, skip to Step 2b

• If it’s your NOT your first time logging into Google Analytics.

3. Installing Your Tracking Code Snippet.

4. Adding Goals to Track Conversion.

5. Understanding Google Analytics Report.

The developments in Google Analytics keep flying in. Ever wished that you can sit yourself behind your terminal screen,  log into your Google Analytics account and watch the traffic and activity on your website real time?

I know of people that are already spending hours,  constantly pressing their reload button,  in an attempt to get the most up to date screen of their data.

Real Time is officially launched on September 29th, and will continue to roll out throughout October until it reaches 100% of users. With Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens, your obsession with traffic on your website can be further fueled.  Only the Real-Time reports will update in real-time. The rest of Google Analytics reports will continue update as normal. The Google Analytics Real-Time reports reflect what’s happening on your site within a few seconds making them actually real-time.

SARATH MM

Google Webmaster Tools an Overview

GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) provides keyword data about the websites you have added to your Google Search Console account.  This data tells you exactly how Google users are finding and engaging with your website in organic Google searches.  Google Webmaster Tools is a powerful tool for seo.  But, if you make a mistake or put this power in the wrong hands,  it can mean trouble for your search engine optimization.

Google Webmaster Tools (WMT),  which is another free tool from Google,  but allows performance monitoring of a website from the technical side,  as opposed to the marketing side.  Webmaster Tools will tell you important information like:

·         How often does Google crawl the website?

·         How many of our pages are indexed?  How many are not?

·         Are there any technical issues with the site?  (On-page SEO issues,  broken links, etc.)

·         Are there any issues with Google crawling the site?

·         What search queries are generating traffic and what is the average position?

·         Who links to the site?  How are they linking?

·         Has the site been penalized,  or is there another reason the site just “disappeared” from Google?

Google Webmaster Tools to learn what information.  Google has about your website as well as, provide Google with a few instructions, about how to index your pages. The first step is to go to google.com / webmasters / tools and sign into your account.  This will require a Google account,  and if you don't already have one,  you can head over to google.com / accounts to create one. Once you're logged in,  you'll see a list of the websites that you're able to manage.

Setting up Webmaster Tools is easy and Google provides you with at least a few different ways to verify that you own the website and want to start to gather data on it. These verification methods include uploading a file to your website,  putting a small piece of code in the html template,  verifying through Google Analytics,  or through the domain registrar.

Once an account has been created and verified,  the next step is to upload a sitemap to WMT with all pertinent website pages.  This provides some initial information about the website’s pages to Google,  their importance and how often the webpages are updated. This should be done immediately  (as soon as it launches)  and updated regularly as the website changes.

The  “Fetch as Google”  feature is pretty cool and will help jump start a crawl in many cases too.  Whenever we launch a new website at TM, or an important section of a website,  we use this feature to start the crawling and indexing  process.  Of course,  Google is smart enough to figure all of this out on their own, but a little help never hurt.

Webmaster Tools also provides the ability to notify Google of many website changes, including a change of address (if a website has been moved to another domain),  the correction of issues and many more.

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The Importance of On-Page Optimization in SEO

SEO AND ON - PAGE OPTIMIZATION IN SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  SEO is all about optimizing a website for search engines.  Most usefull SEO technique are designing and developing a website to rank well in search engine results,  improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines, marketing by understanding how search algorithms work,  and what human visitors might search.

When you search any keyword using a search engine,  it displays thousands of results found in its database.  A page ranking is measured by the position of web pages displayed in the search engine results.  If a search engine is putting your web page on the first position,  then your web page rank will be number 1 and it will be assumed as the page with the highest rank. SEO is the process of designing and developing a website to attain a high rank in search engine results.

Seo optimization is classified into two category one is On-Page Optimization and Off-Page Optimization.

·        On-Page SEO -  It includes providing good content,  good keywords selection,  putting keywords on correct places,  giving appropriate title to every page,  etc.

·        Off-Page SEO - It includes link building,  increasing link popularity by submitting open directories,  search engines,  link exchange,  etc.

ON - PAGE SEO

On-Page SEO refers to how well your website’s content is presented to search engines.  On page optimization involves ensuring whether a particular webpage is structured in a manner so that it gets

found by the search engines for given keywords and key phrases.  It not only helps in getting good search engine ranking but also increases overall readability of the site.  The best part is that not much has changed about the on-page optimization approach.  It can still be improved immediately by tweaking incorrect elements on a webpage.

1. Page copy

A good content copy is really the key to your success.  It is an open secret that you need to produce original,  unique and high quality content of relevance on a continuous basis to perform well and rank high on search engines.  There are few things you need to keep in mind while creating the content copy.

Keyword

Each piece of content should be created keeping the focus primarily on a single keyword or a key phrase.  This word or phrase should at least be mentioned for a specific number of times in the whole content and this process is known as keyword density.  Each content copy is supposed to maintain a keyword density of 3-5% as par industry standard.  Keep a mix of primary and secondary keywords and key phrases in your content but optimize your content around only those keywords and phrases on which you desire to achieve top organic search rankings.

Quality over quantity

You don’t essentially need longer articles for better search engine rankings.  Web pages with more content intensity and depth have started performing better on search engine ranking since the 2011 Google algorithm update.

2. Title Tags

Arguably title tag is the most important element among the  “big three” ,  the other two being page copy and inbound links.  Title tag contains the words which appear in the clickable link of the search engine result.  Google has limited the page titles up to 70 characters,  so it is extremely important that your title tags are keyword-relevant yet concise.  For example,  when looking up in Google for a query,  you might have noticed the chopped off title tags in few results,  that’s because the title tags for that page are too long.  To optimize the title tags primary keywords and secondary keywords should be mentioned in the same order and the branded keywords at the end,  this is a rule to follow except for the home page.

3. Meta Data

Meta data is a well-written description summarizing the content of a particular webpage.  It used to be one of the most important factors affecting search engine optimization in pre-Panda era.  Meta data completely lost its importance in influencing Search Engine rankings from September 2009 after Google’s declaration. It was majorly devalued because of a wide practice of spam techniques. Google crawlers though look at the Meta keywords to get an idea about the topicality of the page content. Meta descriptions have to be created within a limit of 155- 160 characters which essentially should not include anything but alphanumeric characters. It can’t influence search engine rankings but do help in getting a high click through rate.

Meta description works more as an ad copy for the organic search results which influences the readers to click on a particular link. It can also intelligently accommodate the primary keywords within it, Google especially highlights them if searched key phrase contains the exact key words.

4. Heading Tags

These are the tags which define the content of your page section wise, just like traditional headings and subheadings. There should be one <h1> tag every page, which should include the most relevant key phrase or key word. This tag can be created up till <h6>, though general practice is to use this till <h3>.

Apart from the primary keyword mentioned in the <h1>, you can include the other important key phrases in <h2> and <h3> tags to define the other sections of the content. The <h1> tag should be optimized well as search engines still give this some value.

5. Interlinking

Strategically, linking one of your website pages to other similar pages on your website provides context to the search engine and to the readers as well. Some best practices are:

1. Include links in the main content of each page.
2. Paragraph links carry the most weight.
3. Use keyword-rich anchor text in links.
4. Avoid using non-descriptive anchor text (for example, read more, click here, etc).
5. Link to relevant, deep pages.
6. Use breadcrumb navigation on every page
7. Monitor your inbound links through Google Webmaster Tools.
8. Avoid multiple links to the same page from a single page.
9. Less links= More authority per link.

The most common practice of showing “related links” or “tags” at the end of a page or in a sidebar is done to thematically relate one page to another.

SARATH MM

Evolution and Changing Nature of SEO

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEARCH & THE CHANGING NATURE OF SEO

Search Engine Optimization - SEO is the most powerful advertising mode in this technical era. Tremendously,  over the years since its birth SEO has its own changes,  and it will continue to change in the future.  It started its  pathway  when people first started using search engines to scour the internet for valuable information.  In those early days,   pages where ranked based on some factors only.  It didn’t take long for digital marketing strategists to figure out what these factors were and how to trick search bots into ranking their websites.

HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF SEO

In 1998,  Graduate students at Stanford University,  Sergey Brin and Larry Site,  created “Back rub,” that depended to price on the numerical formula web pages’ popularity.  The amount determined Page Rank, from the formula,  is just a purpose of power and the amount of back links.  Page Rank quotes the chance that the given site is likely to be attained with a web person who uses links in one site to a different, and surfs the net.  Essentially,  this means like a greater Page Rank site is more prone to be attained from the random reader that some links are more powerful than others.

Brin and Site started Google in 1998. 

A faithful following was attracted by Google one of the expanding quantity of online users, 

who preferred its style that was easy.  Off Page elements (for example Page Rank and URL evaluation) were regarded as well as on-site facets (for example keyword consistency,  meta-tags,  titles, links and website framework)  make it possible for Google to prevent the type of adjustment observed in search engines that just regarded on-site facets due to their ratings. 

CHANGING NATURE OF SEO

Beginning with that simple plugin,  Google unveiled its commitment to a better search and online experience.  The Google updates are now mostly known for larger-scale impacts on searches, rankings,  and traffic for websites.  But how exactly have these updates evolved for SEO?

We break down the most notable here.

·         Panda: While a handful of updates occurred between Suggest in 2008 and this update in 2011, components of the Panda really began to affect SEO.  A bigger importance of fresh,  original content promoted sites’ rankings as well as determination of that content’s quality.  Sites updated frequently with relevant information are now more prominent.

·         Penguin: This 2012 update brought Google’s threat of an over-optimization penalty,  which also had some overlap with Panda. Penguin targeted more direct spam,  wrong redirects,  and link farms (networks cushioning other sites with bogus links to rise in rankings).  About 3.1% of English queries were affected by Penguin alone.

·         Hummingbird: Continuing with the animal monikers,  Hummingbird debuted in 2013 and highlighted the importance of semantic search.  Searches became more conversational,  and individual words’ meanings gave deeper connotation to the query overall.  While semantic search is assuredly a big development,  this update was also the first Google algorithm replacement since the early 2000s.

·         Pigeon: In 2014,  local results were pushed to the front of the class with the Pigeon update, which pinpointed local search in a more specified manner.  Using Google Maps,  location queries,  and other search cues, local results became more accurate and influenced rankings based on the user’s location.  This also greatly helped local directory and local business results, for both slang and proper terms for geographical areas.

SARATH  MM