SEO Gemini

 Tracking a site is as important as developing it. Google Analytics is a powerful tool that will help you get the right insight about your website and each of its elements, by providing supporting facts and figures and enabling you to take an informed analysis. A better understanding of every aspect and feature of Google Analytics is therefore a must to assess every step and decision you or your team makes. While you can churn out many reports from this tool, the below are a few of the most crucial:

• Visitors Overview:  Wish to probe into the nitty-gritty of the website? Visitors overview is the ideal tracking tool to serve your purpose. A detailed analysis of the amount of traffic you have, the number of page views, the average length of visit and the bounce rate is shown here. You can also acquire a further comprehensive analysis about the quantity of traffic you are receiving, the size monitors of your visits and the connection they have been using.
• Traffic Sources Overview: This report gives you a detailed analysis about the source of your traffic; whether it was the search engine, any website, or other URL. An understanding about the competence of the resource will pave way for effective allocation of funds for resources.
• Referring Sites:  These sites, in a way, have served to be a gateway for people landing on your site. Visitors referred to these sites  (not including search engines) before entering your own site.
• Keywords:  This report will render you the list of words visitors used, search engines used and information about the efficiency of each keyword, the time visitors have spent on your site, the number of pages they view, conversion rate, the way they convert amongst many other metrics.
• Top Content:  Know the pages that have garnered the most traffic, with this website tracking. This will help you apprehend the way people use your site and would want to use your site.
• Map Overlay:  This report will help you recognize your target audience, in an enhanced way. The map will give an overview of your source of traffic with respect to their location. You can dig deeper and even find the city’s name from where your visitors come.
• Site Overlay: With this tool, you can identify the percentage of visitors who clicked a particular link on a specific page of your site. Fructify this information by designing your website accordingly.

Putting an end to your guessing, predictions and assumptions, Web Analytics will provide you with all the necessary information about your visitors, your sites, their preferences, sources of traffic and the preferred pages on your site. This tool ensures that your next decision is always an informed and conscious one, substantiated by supporting facts.

Summary:
Understanding the varied features and aspects of Google Analytics will help you to use it in an enhanced and efficient way. A few most crucial reports that website tracking via Google Analytics renders include visitor’s overview, traffic sources overview, referring sites, keywords, top content, map overlay and site overlay

This article is written by the research team at Convonix, an internet marketing firm based in Mumbai, which offers Website Analytics as one of its major service offering.

With new businesses placing websites on the Internet every second, it is essential to create a name for yourself online through a top notch web design. A good design is the first impression that a business gives to a customer; therefore if it is not a good impression, then it will certainly be the last impression!

Is Web Design Essential for My Website?
Because of the sheer number of websites that are on the Internet and the near infinite capacity of growth on the landscape, web design is critical to obtain any kind of loyalty.
Proper web design will also help to ensure that a website is set up for future iterations of the Internet. For instance, many websites that were not Web 2.0 compatible were made completely obsolete when major brands began switching over to a more responsive Web format.

What Are the Benefits of a Good Web Design?
The benefits of a good Web design include:
- increased customer loyalty
- higher visibility on the major search engines
- a better customer conversion rate
- word of mouth/free public relations from social media mentions
- increased brand recognition.

Some Essential Tips for Good Web Design

Keep your designs simple.
There is a great deal of backlash because of the increased complexity of apps and the functionality of websites. Although you want your website to have essential functions like a click to call feature and a map function powered by a major search engine, features that are not essential should be left off. Do not be swayed by the latest technology and assume that you must have it on your website in order to compete.

Optimize your website content to the major search engines.
The major search engines can now index pictures and videos as well as text. Make sure that you index your multimedia properly and use the tag feature that these outlets provide. Also make sure that your keywords match your multimedia tags and that you use good writing technique for the text on your web page.

Consolidate information.
The less that your audience has to click around in order to get to the conversion action that you wish, the better. There should be as little scrolling and clicking on random pages as possible. Your website should be a streamlined journey that gently nudges your customer in the direction that you want them to go without any detours.
Many times, information can be summed up better in a video than it can with a block of text and sometimes, a picture can contain all of the information that a video purports to have. Find the quickest way to present your information to your audience and use it generously. If your audience gets bored at any time, they can and will just click away.

Keep your brand constant.
Just because you have an online outlet does not mean that you have to change your brand. As a matter of fact, you should do everything in your power to make sure that your brand messaging stays the same offline and online. Make sure that your website adheres to the brand that you have already set up and you will be well on your way to a great site design.

Ben Sawyer is an Internet marketing consultant for a wholesale candles ecommerce website. Here Ben explained the importance of having a good web design for ecommerce sites or other small businesses.

Citations:

• photo taken from Flickr with cc license. Author: Jeffrey

Featured images:

•  License: Creative Commons image source

Are you one of the growing legions of online businesses that has seen your website take a drastic hit in search traffic over the past few months?

You may have kept up with the Penguin and Panda updates and survived those without any issues only to come to the realization that your traffic and rankings have still taken a hit. So if you didn’t get penalized by Panda or Penguin, why is it that your traffic has taken a dive? Turns out there are plenty of recent changes from Google that could be impacting you…

1. Big brand preference.
   Not long ago, Google largely favoured highly specialized retailers. If you were a website selling college sports merchandise for a certain school, you likely were competing against highly specialized retailers who only sold college sports gear or some localized retailers like university book stores. If you do a search for your favourite university now, however, you’ll see retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods and Target among the top search results. Oddly, many of these stores only carry a small number of products but Google in many instances has given a huge boost to some of these larger known brands and by doing so has forced some smaller businesses down the rankings. As I’ve had to explain to several businesses lately, it’s not that your business was penalized, it’s that other sites have been rewarded by Google.
2. Extra AdWords is killing you.
   A year or two ago you’d never see more than two AdWords ads at the top of any search result. If you haven’t noticed, that has changed dramatically. Now it’s pretty standard to have three ads at the top of most search results and Google now allows expanded information like site links, phone number extensions and more. On many laptop screens there’s only one organic listing showing above the fold (meaning its visible without scrolling down). The amount of clicks going to paid listings has increased with this new layout which makes Google more money and certainly decreases your organic traffic listed beneath these ads.
3. Google has changed your real estate.
   It’s not just AdWords that’s eating up screen real estate lately. Google has also made a clear move to better personalize results with local listings and an increase in blended search results with images, videos, news results and shopping listings. When Google adds visual candy to search listings in the way of product listings, maps, images and videos, those listings not only draw the attention of a user’s eyeballs, but it also draws clicks. Even if you maintain a number one organic listing, if your search result starts showing thumbnails of videos or images you’re going to lose clicks to this eye candy whether you like it or not. The screenshot below highlights the one above the fold organic listing for the search term “pontoon boats”.
4. Your users are on the move.
   Slightly related to the previous point, but more and more people are using mobile search. Again, as Google tries to provide personalized results, more map listings and different search layouts on mobile can also affect your click through rates even if your rankings don’t change.

The moral of the story here is that Google is becoming an increasingly difficult beast to understand and tame! Expanding your understanding of where your traffic comes from and what type of results your keywords are returning will give you a better idea of where you’re losing traffic and why.

Adam Henige is co-owner and director of online marketing for Swimtown Pool Supplies, an online pool and spa retailer carrying more than 3,000 products.

There are various reasons for getting a Google penalty; some people just do not follow the rules and some people are simply unaware that they are breaking these rules due to the lack of knowledge about good SEO practices. In the latter example, it is easy to see that not everyone can optimize their content based on simply doing research without any previous planning or in-depth knowledge.

Cheap and Fast Results

People who want to avoid hiring an SEO expert will often embrace the flattering title of SEO experts themselves, but the chances are they will not know enough about SEO to be able to back up the name. In most instances, they will follow any piece of advice they find on the Internet meaning the chances are even higher that they will come across black hat SEO techniques by basing their research on one thing only – fast and cheap success that will get them to the top of search engine results. Black and white hats are not fashion accessories; they are strict rules regarding what you can and what you cannot do. Therefore, read on in order to find out what you should do so as to recover from a Google penalty.

Bad Links as One of the Most Common Reasons for Getting a Penalty

According to a study which included a hundred websites that got penalized by Google, almost one third of these websites got a penalty due to bad incoming links. Although these are considered to be black hat SEO techniques, many people use link farming and buy links in order to increase the ranking of their website. In case you are not familiar with link farming, here is a brief explanation of what this term represents. Link farming is a process in which websites are created with the sole purpose of increasing the ranking of another site. These websites are often not related to the site they link to, and they are most commonly full of bad links. In order to recover from a Google penalty earned by using bad incoming links, you can use the Google Disavow tool.

Problems with the Content on Your Website

Another thing that can get you into trouble is low-quality web content. Yes, you can get a Google penalty for featuring poorly-written content on your website. On the other hand, the same can happen if you have unoriginal content on your website. The solution for this problem is relatively easy to find – you need to change your audience. Instead of writing the content that crawlers will like, you should redirect your attention to writing for people. However, just because you are writing for people, it doesn’t mean that you should have poorly-written web content. Remember, content is king. So, try to feature content that brings useful information, perfect grammar, and content that is easy to digest.

Be Cautious

In order to avoid getting a Google penalty, you should also stay informed about all Google’s search algorithm updates. What was considered desirable in regards to Google trends last year may not have the same status today. So, pay attention to all the changes that are happening relating to Google and SEO, and try to adjust your web content according to the latest trends and updates, as this will save you from getting the infamous Google slap!

Featured images:

•  License: Creative Commons image source

This article is written by Abhishek for a SEO professional based in Sydney.

Gone are the days when you could randomly pick a domain name to fit your business perfectly. Today, you will find that virtually every variation of the words you think of has been taken with all the popular domain extensions. So, where does that leave you? Here are the options you have and how to hunt down the best possible domain name:

Add a Brand Name

Let’s say you’ve been searching for 2 and 3 word combinations that describe your business. If you’ve really done an exhaustive search, you will have been through the singular and plural versions of those words, you’ll have used synonyms and you’ll have checked all the different domain extensions. If you haven’t done that, I’d suggest you go back and do so. If you came up empty because your price range was so narrow, then I suggest you broaden it a bit and see if raising your budget slightly won’t help you to find the perfect domain. Assuming all of the above have been done, you can use a partial keyword match domainwhich is a domain that contains your keywords plus an additional word, which could be your brand name. For instance, the brand word “Haden” plus the keywords “car sales” would give you hadenscarsales.com. If your brand name is unique enough, the .com version of the domain name could be available. When you choose a brand word to combine with the keywords, the one thing you want to do is make sure it won’t be difficult to spell or remember. If it’s short and catchy, the word will work great in combination with your keywords.

Local Word(s)

If your business serves a specific area, local keywords are ideal for adding to your domain name. Create a list of words that include your state, city, county, town and commonly used names for your area such as North Fork or East End, etc.  Now, if you were to combine the town “Northport” with “car sales,” you could have a keyword rich domain that will help your website to rank better in your specific area. Also consider that the .co extension should be rising in popularity now that Google has made it official that the .co domain extension will be considered an international extension.  If you haven’t checked for .co domain extensions, do so before you perform your exhaustive search. When all else fails, if you work with a domain broker, that person can keep an eye out for you when a good domain name becomes available whether it gets listed for sale or is about to expire.

Theresa Happe works with BuyDomains.com where you can search for available domain names for your business using a wide variety of sort options to identify the best one.

Featured images:

•  License: Creative Commons image source

Introduction
The importance of a CEO can be overlooked by many who may fail to really understand the roles that the position holder plays for the wellbeing of the organization. To many the CEO is just another figurehead perched atop the fabled ivory tower divorced from the problems of the lower echelons of the corporate hierarchy. However if considered carefully you will find that the companies with the best CEO’s tend to perform so much better to the benefit of the whole organization. So let’s look at some of the important roles of the CEO to a start up and indeed to any business of any longevity.

Fundamental function of a CEO
The most fundamental and important role that any CEO worth his salt will have to undertake is the building up of a firm and solid foundation for whichever business that he/she is in charge of. This means ensuring stability and growth of the company by delivering a cash flow for the company operations, managing the company resource, providing guidance to the staff below his guidance, nurturing innovation, budgeting and accurately judging and deciding on risks to take or ignore.

Team building
The building of a team that is strong is also another major function of the CEO. If the CEO builds a team that is strong enough to survive even the loss of a key member, then the CEO can be said to have done his job. The team should be able to continue running smoothly even after the loss of a member which includes evens the loss of the CEO himself/herself. This is achievable if the CEO makes the building of the right team his priority. When this is in place, then there will be proper leadership and even if the company was to abruptly lose the CEO, the company would still be able to operate optimally.

Leadership not micro management
Contrary to popular belief, it is not a mandatory requirement for a good CEO to always work on the mundane day to day drudgery of running the business. A good CEO will be able to build a team such that he can delegate the day to day running activities of the business to senior staff members who can ensure the proper functioning while the CEO concentrates on providing leadership to the overall company. By doing this, all the CEO has to do is to mange the senior staff to ensure the day to day running is done to perfection.

We can describe the responsibility of the CEO as being the provision of leadership and not micro management. Leadership means providing the motivation, encouragement, vision and direction to the whole organization. This may sound a bit abstract and overwhelming but that is what good CEO’s excel at.

Succession
Good CEO’s always set up a succession plan where they have a chosen successor to them in case they were to leave or not be able to carry out their responsibilities for any reason. They set up a clear direction for all staff to unwaveringly follow and are never involved in the micro-managing of minor crises.

Being the company leader the CEO’s roles change with the business as it matures and grows further. The CEO also needs to ensure that their personality does not subvert from the companies profile but rather build on it. This helps to remove risk associated with their personality from the company and instead leverages their considerable influence towards the companies benefit. In a startup, the CEO needs to be very good at organization.

“For example, an IT start-up, by nature, requires a CEO who is visionary, evangelistic and displays strong commercial sales and marketing skills to present the technology to market. However, in a more mature IT organization, the skills are more about maintaining organizational agility, governance and performance.

About the Author:
Matt is a blogger who usually writes about business and administration related topics. He also covers TV series called Today in America with Terry Bradshaw. Join Today in America on Facebook.

Meh – it’s all about building links right? Paying for them, getting them organically – hell even earning them! (novel I know ). As long as you’ve got lots and lotsa links you’ll be just fine…

Pah I WISH! A number of trends have gone full circle in the tempestuous (always wanted to use that word in a sentence) cyber-world we call SEO; chief among these onsite optimisation.

Let’s break it down; it used to be important, like REALLY important. Then we got a serious crush on its younger, cooler brother “link-building” in a very big way and left onsite behind a bit. As with any other SEO technique, we abused link-building methods in various stages – by starting with reciprocals, moving swiftly on to directories, to blog comments and finally to article marketing until none of that stuff reallyyyy worked ENOUGH to get the results we wanted anymore. So, we come back to the present day and conclusion (as Google did) that to really understand what a website is about, we should know what’s on it.

I was having a discussion about this a few months ago with a fellow SEO and it re-emerged in our monthly “geek chat” last week – onsite will return, and in a significant way. Below are ten things you need to consider in 2013 for your onsite optimisation:

1. NAP/Contact information prominent and consistent throughout the site (read more here) think carefully also about calls to action
2. Concise and appropriately structured page URL’s
3. Internal linking structure using a mixture of broad and some exact match anchor text
4. Content structure and placement
5. CMS system (easily editable to keep pace with new updates)
6. Redirects (301, 302, canonicals) to pass on any link equity to appropriate pages if any URL’s change with the optimisation process
7. Pictures – optimize images and add alt tags
8. Avoid complex sites and functionality like flash, keep navigation simple
9. Keep the number of clicks to conversion low
10. Create content according to which keyword/s (if multiple keep them VERY closely related) you are targeting on each page

Disagree? Add your comments below.

So here we are, the end of January and the end of our series – 2013 is shaping up to be an interesting year in the world of search already! Welcome to part three on the future of local; in our final blog we’ll be discussing discussing just that, the future! And also going into some detail about the r-word…reviews.

To review or not to review?
One of the main components and points of local in which we put our effort are those dreaded reviews; Where do we collate them? How do we go about getting them? How do we upload them to our websites in bulk without getting penalized? How do we get 5 pretty little stars to show up on our organic listings?

72% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

So what if you get a bad one? There is a good way to handle these and retain your reputation:

1. Always thank the disgruntled customer for their feedback
2. Invite the person to contact you OR refer them to someone else, I’ve seen it done and it looks very impressive!

Some other general review tips:

• Reviews need to be left with a real name, not a nickname or pseudonym
• Encourage those leaving reviews to make them continuous and natural
• A lot of top reviewers are from Google!!
• Look at the top reviewers! Hit them up on Google+!! Be brazen…the worst they can do is say no right?
• Use feedback forms to try and avoid any bad reviews, get in there first!
• If you use an online feedback form, have an excellent result divert to Google+ to leave an online review and have a click on a negative or sub-par button link to somewhere else so it doesn’t go online – it goes to an email form perhaps…genius!
• Track your reviews just like any another metric
• Don’t have LOADS more reviews than the competition
• Make reviews part of the process with existing customers

So to conclude our series…The Future of Local:
• Each page of services offered should have a dedicated page!
• Don’t jump on the band wagon, be original in your approach – it’s likely to get rewarded
• Some food for thought…consider having high quality local microsites to localize your campaign, this could be the way forward
• Onsite onsite onsite…get your onsite optimization right
• Use local guest blogging, and Google advanced operators to optimize your link building efforts for local, add a geographic tag
• Google+ is tied to employee bonuses…therefore have a presence on here and use it!
• Use social as part of local

Also worth noting…

Facebook launched new version of app that allows search for local businesses; whatever you can do to make your local info prominent on it!

Some sites it’s worth taking a look at:
- Review Skeptic (spots whether a review is likely to be fake)
- Get Listed (check existing listings for your business)

Despite all the warnings though and above all…NEVER GIVE UP!

Read part 1 and part 2 for our previous posts and get localizing!

Welcome to part 2 of 3 of our New Years blog series on local search. We hope you enjoyed part 1 focusing on citations, schema and 2012’s Venice update. Today we’ll move on to some of the other components of  Mike Ramsay’s mozinar and talk through duplication and link building for local search.

Avoid…Duplication when localizing your site
Easier said than done! Imagine for example, you have a website for an online estate agent; they have twenty offices located throughout England and Wales. Each office offers the same services and there is a company blog page but no means or resource to have an individual blog for each branch, everything about each branch is the same…apart from the address. It’s easy for duplication issues to arise.

So what’s Matt Cutts’ take on this?

Well, someone asked him – and he responded in kind: In addition to having the address and phone number different for each branch, something so small as 2-3 sentences of copy about what is unique to that specific location should suffice just fine.

This is still a pain in the backside for bigger companies with hundreds of offices…however it’s not too onerous and nearly as bad as it could be.

Matt Cutts has a horrible habit of er…backtracking though and well, omitting information shall we say so to be on the safe side other methods you can employ to really make your local landing pages different and avoid duplication are:

- Add in directions to that specific branch location
– Add a staff list (if applicable) to each location and individual staff bios
– Any local news items specific to that location on to the webpage
– Insert an image of the branch, labeled appropriately with the location (alt tag)
– Add testimonials from customers specific to that area
– Add in recent sales, “bragging rights” or prospect/expansion details specific to that branch

So it is possible to build individual landing pages, giving anatomy and trust symbols relative to each branch and relevancy for each type of customer.

Manage your…Link building when localizing your site
So we got to this part of the mozinar and Mike was like – “yeah, link building for your local site is hard… (story of any SEO’s life ) So the options are to get over with it or moan about it”. I therefore decided to do a bit of both….link building is SUCH an absolute b***h!!! There, done. Glad I got that out of my system.

A lot of the methods are similar to the usual; they just require some slight adaptation to really get the most out of them.

- Guest blogging (just don’t overdo it, look for a high page and domain authorityon your target site and the site itself should be a highly relevant one too)
– Content expansion (linking your sites internally – as well as being great for navigation this also helps Google to find each page and service of your site, helping the wider as well as the local SEO campaign)
– Citation directories (look out for directories specific to your location, be sure to keep your business name and NAP (link) information consistent across all sites too, local directories are likely to be more specific and so a higher quality also making this less of a spammy option than it would be normally)
– Press releases (local press releases with local news specific to your page can be easier to obtain than ones from wider organizations, in this way they can be very effective too)
- Blogging (link bait)

That’s it! Tune in for part 3 next week where the focus will be on reviews and the future of local – bring on 2013!

First off yes this was my very first mozinar, my very first webinar in fact and yes my head is presently hung in shame – to say it’s overdue is a rather more polite way of putting it…still, better late than never so a big thank you to Mike Ramsay for his valuable and insightful, well, insights to local search in 2013. Here’s what I took from the session:

Background:
Panda, Penguin…Per-lease, pretty much everyone in the SEM world is sick of hearing about them now! Lets focus on a different update from last year, Venice. This algorithm (whose label is derived from Venice beach situated near Google’s offices FYI) better detects when search queries plugged into the Big-G are local ones. Released in February 2012 amidst a load of other, admittedly more major updates this one was swept under the radar somewhat. However, its re-emergence is no coincidence as over 50% of search is anticipated to be local in 2013/2014 making it more than just places. It’s now organic. The long and short therefore of this rambling explanation is that if you haven’t localized your site, do it. Now.

Localize Your Site With…Citations
Localizing your site doesn’t have to be a developers job just as “citation” doesn’t have to be such a complicated sounding word for something so simple, but hey we’re in SEO and we love complicating things So make sure your citations are correct and updated. Speaking of complicating things, here’s an acronym to explain just what they are:
N
A
P
Those blissful twenty minutes mid-afternoon when you can enjoy a quick snooze…unfortunately not:
Name
Address
Phone Number
Not unlike the information you’d request from that guy you fancy down the gym…you know the one…big muscles, gorgeous, funny…urgh – focus! Citations are important, make sure you have them!

Localize Your Site With…Schema:
Schema code is no longer an unfamiliar term and it’s the way things are going in terms of telling Google just who, where and what you are locally. You can visit schema-creator.org to learn more and create your own schema for web pages. There’s also a great tool and explanation here; but basically it’s a piece of code that goes into the HTML of a web page to let the search engines know exactly what your page is about. There’s now (HURRAH) a WordPress plugin for Schema too for all the non-techies to implement schema code into their sites.

Whilst schema is the way forward, you can also add citations to localize your site using an hCard. In the mozinar we were told some sites use both or you can just use one or the other – it’s entirely up to you and just a different way in which identifying information is displayed.

Conclusion
The most important thing with your citations is to be consistent. Have the same information and details listed in the same way on your site, in directory entries, maps listings etc. The search engines like local, they want to help associate you with your local area, so help them and let them know just where you’re local to!

Next weeks blog will continue on with local search (there’s too much to cover for one post!) and will go through duplication, Matt Cutts’ take on this and link building (bleh). We’ll then move on to reviews, getting them, responding to them and monitoring them.

Happy New Year!