How to Get Google Sitelinks?
Jun 29 2009
Posted by George as Google, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, seo
Google Sitelinks are generated by Google from site contents in order to help users navigate the site in a better way. Google generally shows sitelinks for results which they think, will be useful to the users. Google generates these Site Links periodically and also takes various site factors into consideration such as the site architecture, site navigations, the number of links pointing to the site with the main keywords as the anchor text, the number of searches and click through rates for the main keywords, the number of pages indexed for a particular keyword, the age of the website etc.
Site links can be achieved by following certain SEO techniques and tactics in the most proper way. There is no particular process which can give you a guaranteed site links in Google. But there are certain things that we can follow in order to get sitelinks.
Some of the steps that I find useful are
1) Easy site navigation structure.
2) Increase in traffic to the site
3) Proper SEO of the site.
4) Maintaining stable top rankings for the major keywords
5) Getting quality backlinks.
6) Updated XML sitemap generation (once in a month)
7) Using Google Webmasters tool.
8) Strengthening the internal links.
Moreover the age of the Domain is also considered. Google doesn’t give site links to relatively new websites. Follow the above mentioned things and wait till you get site links. Eventhough you cannot make Google Sitelinks happen yourself, you can control the links to be displayed in Site links via Google Webmaster Tool. I have tried the above mentioned things and was able to get sitelinks to 95% of my clients.
Google Analytics is one of the best free web analytics tool available and is the most used web analytics tool. Google Analytics (GA) has a lot of advanced features which makes the web analytics more interesting. Moreover it is simple to use and you don’t need to use any software to run this, instead you just need to paste a simple script on to you web pages. In this post, I would like to explain how we can exclude a particular IP address while using Google Analytics.
1) Log on to your Google Analytics account. If you use more than one websites for tracking, the list of those sites would be displayed on the first page you enter after logging in. This page is known as the account overview page and lists all the websites that are using Google Analytics code with this account.
2) Click on the name of the website account, of which you need to exclude a particular IP address.
3)Now You would be taken to the profile overview page for that particular website, where you can see a table in which the website that you need to filter the IP is seen.
4) There is an Edit link on the right side of the table, corresponding to the website name. Click on this link.
5) Now you will enter the Profile Settings page of that website. Here you can see a table with the title Filters Applied to Profile. Click on the “Add Filter” link on the top right of that table.
6) Now you will enter the page named Create New Filter. Select the Add new Filter for Profile radio button for new filters. Enter a suitable filter name under the Filter Name field.
7) Select the Exclude all traffic from an IP address drop down option from the Filter Type menu.
8 ) Enter the IP address to be excluded in the box provided below. e.g if you IP address is 123.249.21.162, then it should be typed as 123\.249\.21\.162.
9) Then click on the Save Changes button.
10) Now you have completed the process of filtering this particular IP address from tracking by the Google Analytics code.
Hope this would work for you better.
Getting Your Keyword Research Right!!
Jun 18 2009
Posted by George as Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, search engine marketing, seo
Websites have fastly become the major source of business for all the major companies and organizations. To have a website which is very much successful in generating sales and business, one needs to generate traffic to the site. In the end it is not just about generating traffic, but qualified traffic or genuine traffic.
Search engines are the most stable and major source of traffic generation and are capable of generating potential traffic to your website. The traffic from search engines is mainly based on keywords, and hence your site should be well optimized with the best possible keywords.
The website gets more qualified from search engine traffic if proper search engine optimization (SEO) is done, which means optimizing the site with potential keywords. Here comes the role of selecting better keywords or a better keyword research. Keyword research is the basic pillar of a well optimized website, and should be done with utter care. A website with a bad keyword selection would certainly be a flop in getting targeted search engine traffic. Keywords serve as the foundation for your online marketing strategy and you are advised to take time on doing a decent research on the keywords and phrases.
In selecting keywords there are many steps to be followed and it depends upon the nature of your business. The main thing to take care while doing keyword research is that you should try to thing as a visitor or a customer. You should try to think and find out what a visitor searches over the net, in order to arrive at your website. The best keywords that you can get for your website is from your customers and for that you have to think from a different level.
Once you have got a set of keywords, the next job is to evaluate and extract the most suited keywords. Extraction of keywords is based on many factors such as the competition of the keyword, its popularity / search count and more. The most popular keyword have a better chance being searched in a search engine, and if your website comes on top with that keyword you have more chances of getting traffic. While choosing keywords, it would be better to stick with specific keywords, rather than general keywords. The reason behind this is that a traffic that comes with a specific keyword has more chances of purchasing anything from your website. The traffic from generic keywords need not necessarily bring any sales or purchase from you site.
Consider the case where you have attained top search engine ranking with your keyword “shoe manufacturer“, even though you specializes only in the manufacturing of shoe soles. Even though the keyword “shoe manufacturer” is a popular keyword, it would not help in bringing and potential customers to your site. But consider the keyword “shoe sole manufacturer“, which is more industry specific. This keyword may rank lower in the keyword popularity than the previous keyword, but this keyword has more potential in bringing sales. The visitors coming with these keywords are more potential buyers.
You can also take the help of various keyword research tools and software available, some of which are paid and some are free. After finalizing your keywords, you have to continuously analyze your keywords in various search engines as the stats of the keywords changes frequently.
Now You Will not Miss Your Friend’s Digg Submission…….
Jun 17 2009
Posted by George as Online Marketing, search engine marketing, social media
Digg is one of the most popular social media site and is mainly based on social bookmarking. This is generally a social media site for news and other interesting stuff, where the best articles and news gets more votes and enter the popular page of Digg. Once it enters the popular page it would stay there for a few days depending on the quality and popularity of the articles. An article or news on the front page of Digg is sure to get enourmous traffic till it stays there.
Earlier there was an option to share your news or article with your network in Digg, but a few weeks back Digg removed the sharing / shouting option. Now you have to promote it via Twitter or Facebook, for which you need to have a good network in both Twitter and Facebook. The problem now is that you are not able to recieve your friends submissions or share via your Digg account. Instead you have to search Twitter or Facebook for that and with this you wont be able to see most of your friends articles who are not active on Twitter or Facebook.
Few days back I found a tool named Sub Digger Plus, which helps in keeping track of your friend’s submissions and also saves a lot of time.
This tool has a lot of facilities and would surely prove to be a much useful Digg tool. The tool is easy to use and you just need to enter your Digg user name into the box provided and you would be getting your friend’s submissions for the last 24 hours. You would be able to view your friend’s submission one at a time, and to view the next submission you have to click the next button provided at the bottom. You can also get the complete Diggs in last 24 hours listed in a single page by clicking the List View button. You can also easily mark the stories as read or unread.
The tools shows the original page or article submitted to Digg along with the Digg toolbar, which shows you username of the submitter, his avatar, title, url etc. With the List view option, you can also filter and sort the complete submission list. The Sub Digger Plus tool bar is compatible with the major browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. Hope ths tool makes your Digg campaign a successful one and lets also hope that Digg would not penalize or ban us from using this much useful tool….
How to View Search Engine Results for Different Geographical Regions?
Jun 17 2009
Posted by George as Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, search engine marketing, seo
One of the major issue that I faced while rendering services to my foreign client, was the differences in the keyword ranking on Google in different countries. For example, if my client is in the US and when I checked for a particular keyword from India, the keyword was appearing on the 3rd position. The same keyword was appearing at the 5th position in the US, and it created a some issues when sending keyword reports and similar stuffs. I tried some free proxy servers to surf anonymously but at times that also did not give me the exact keyword ranking in US. Usually these free proxy servers turned out to be too slow in loading. So after browsing and searching the net, finally I found out a useful tool, which helps in checking the keyword ranking in various geographical locations.
This tool is known as the Google Global Firefox Extension V2, and is used to view the organic as well as paid results in different geographical locations. This tool works with Firefox and has to be downloaded and installed into your browser. This tool is relatively easy to use and you have the option to use it in 2 ways, either as a contextual menu or as a toolbar in the browser.
For example after installing the Google Global tool from the location http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/google-global-view-results-different-locations/, consider that you are searching for something in Google and seeing the results in the result pages. Right click on the results page and you would see the “Search Global Option” in the menu. Select this option and select the suitable geographical location that you need to see, and you would be able to see the Google results for that selected geographical region.
To use it as a toolbar in the browser first install it from http://www.redflymarketing.com/googleglobal/google_global-2.0.4.xpi. The steps are as follows.
a) After installing the tool restart the Firefox browser, and click on an empty area on the browser menu area.
b) Click on the Customize button and locate the Google Global icon.
c) Drag the Google Global icon to any suitable place on the browser tool bar.
d) Now you Google Global tool bar is ready for you to use.
How to Calculate Google CPC for Your Keywords?
Jun 16 2009
Posted by George as Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine, search engine marketing
CPC stands for Cost Per Click, and is defined as the amount of money any advertiser has to pay search engines for single clicks on its advertisement placed on that particular search engine or advertisement media. CPC differs for different keywords, and also differ in various search engines. In CPC you need to pay the search engines only if you Ad is clicked, and the amount needed to be payed is decided at the time of keyword bidding for any particular keyword. Keyword bidding is done using different keyword research tools and we can decide on the keywords and the amount that has to be payed for each click.
Here I would like to write something about CPC in Google and the way to find the CPC amount for a particular keyword. Google offers a free keyword research tool, and is commonly known as Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Just go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and you can enter the keywords and get different information regarding those keywords.
The steps are given below.
1) Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and enable the Descriptive words or phrase radio button.
2) Enter Your Keyword, e.g “affiliate marketing” in the text box provided and press the button named Get Keyword Ideas.
3) Now you will get a list of information related to that keyword with information such as Advertiser competition, local search volume, global monthly search etc.
4) On the top of the table there is a drop down box named Choose columns to display. From that box select Show Estimated Average CPC option. Now a new field named “Estimated Avg. CPC” will be seen, which contains the average Cost Per Click for that amount.
5) Usually in India the Indian Rupees is the default currency type. If you want to change it to other currencies you can change it from the drop down box which appears on the top of this table.
6) By executing a single click on the Estimated Avg. CPC link, you can get the list in the reverse order of CPC.
I hope this would provide useful for those beginners in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), but for those experts in PPC this would not provide enough.
Twitter Analyzer….An Amazing Tool to Analyze Your Twitter Profile
Jun 15 2009
Posted by George as Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Twitter, search engine marketing
There are many online tools for managing ones Twitter account, and I have mentioned about some 10 Twitter tools which are very much useful in managing your Twitter profile. This week I came across another interesting online tool for analyzing your Twitter account and is known as Twitter Analyzer. Twitter Analyzer provides an excellent graphical representation of your Twitter account performance which is very much helping in evaluating your Twitter account. This tool is one of the best I have seen so far when consider such similar tools.
To use this tool just enter your Twitter username into the text box provided in the main page of the website. You can see a graphical representation of the number of Tweets per each day. If you click on the number of Tweets on any particular day on the graph, you would be able to see more detailed information. These information include details such as Total Update Messages, Total Updates Retweeted, Percentage of Updates Retweeted, Unique Users Retweeting etc.
At the bottom of the Tweet Analyzer dashboard there are certain buttons which are very much useful, and these buttons are named User, Friends, Mentions, Groups, Trends and Fun. I would like to elaborate all these buttons individually to you and these are based on my limited knowledge only.
User
This button contains default user information such as the number of Tweets on each day, retweet ratio, unique user retweet, unique readers reach etc. There is another sub button of the User button named Chats which tells you the details about the message interactions between you and your followers. There is another button named Popularity which tells you about your popularity rate, i.e how many times your profile name has been mentioned in Twitter. Another button named Reach determines the number of readers that have been exposed to your messages. The button named Subjects gives you an idea about the tops subjects that you are Tweeting about. The Hash Tag buttons tells you about the top Has Tags that you are using in your Tweets. The Links button tells you about the tops links that you have used for Tweeting. And Finally the Apps buttons gives you the details of the top Twitter applications that you are using to Tweet your messages.
Friends
The Friends button in Twitter Analyzed is another interesting button which gives you an idea about your friend’s activities. There is a sub button named Online Followers which give you the number of the total followers that are online which you login to your account at any point of time. The button Followers Growth Rate tells you about how many new users you add or lose each day. The Followers Density Map gives you idea about the geographical locations of your Twitter followers. The Followers Activity button tells you information about how many of your followers are active on Twitter. The RTing Friends provides data about the follower who Retweet your Tweets the most. The Closest Friends button provides information on the friends that you contact the most. The Disregarded Friends button gives you the list of your most disregarded friends, ie the list of friends or followers who send you messages, but you didn’t reply them back.
Mentions
The Mentions button helps to see the list of friends that you most mention in your chats and messages. The My Mentioning – All sub button gives you the list of friends that you have mentioned most. My Mentioning – Updates tells you about the friends that you mention most in your updates. The My Mentioning - Social button tells you about the details of friends you most mention in your Chat Messages. The My Mentions – All button gives you the list of all the friends that mention you the most. The My Mentions – Updates button gives the list of friends who mention you the most in their Update Messages. The My Mentions-Social button helps you see the friends most mentioning you in their Chats.
Groups
The Twitter Analyzer Group button allows grouping your friends by occupation, joining date, popularity, gender and actions. The Groups By Occupation sub button in Twitter Analyzer tells you details about the job and occupation of your followers. The Groups By Join Date button tells you about the join date of your followers. The Groups By Popularity gives list of your friends based on their popularity, and the button Groups By Gender arranges or groups your followers by gender. The Groups by Actions button help you see what your followers are doing the most.
The button Trends and Fun are yet to be live and are under development. Hope they must provide more interesting facts and figures to this already amazing tool. I hope you all will enjoy this tool and would start using this in your day to day tweeting process. Thanks…
Organic Traffic Vs Paid Traffic. Which is better?
Jun 12 2009
Posted by George as Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, search engine marketing, seo
Organic Traffic and Paid Traffic are the two factors that helps in bringing traffic to your site. These things are one of the main factors that webmasters and website owners are more concerned of these days. Before going into the details let me first introduce you to the terms Organic and Paid traffic.
Organic Traffic : Organic Traffic is the traffic that our site gets through the natural searches through search engines. This is very cheap in terms of cost and also takes a bit of time for your site to be visible in the search engines get traffic from them. An example of organic traffic is given below.
For example, consider you are a shoe manufacturer in California and you own a website. When people search for “shoe manufacturer” in the search engine, consider that your site is coming in the top 10 list. When someone click on your link on the search engine and enters your site, you are indeed getting an Organic Traffic. In order to get you website on the top page of the search engine for a particular keyword, your website has to be well optimized for various search engines. Once you site get neatly optimized you are bound to get organic traffic for a long period of time, i.e 6 months to one year. You don’t have any additional extra costs rather than the initial optimization phase. Organic traffic is the best way to drive traffic to your site and is widely adopted by website owners all over the world.
Paid Traffic : Paid Traffic is the other type of traffic that come to your site, by paying for every traffic that comes. Paid traffic is recommended for those who needs instant traffic for their site and does not have the time for organic traffic to happen. Paid traffic is the major essence of Search Engine Marketing and it requires proper planning and strategy to execute the paid traffic technique. There are many forms of paid traffic like paying for search engines to get listed, banner advertisement and other forms of advertisement where you need to pay for getting traffic.
For Example, consider you have a new business site and you don’t have the time to wait for the organic traffic. Here you need instant traffic from the search engines, say Google. So you have to go for the Google Adwords PPC, which is the most popular form of paid traffic. Here you pay for Google to get listed on the sponsored links in the Google search engine results page (SERP). When somebody clicks on your link you have to pay Google a certain amount and as a result you would be gaining instant traffic, but you have to maintain your monthly budget so as to continue getting the paid traffic.
What is Google Squared?
Jun 10 2009
Posted by George as Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine, seo
The term Google Squared is one of the most talked about term for the last one week and I was also curious to know what it exactly was. Google Squared is another important release by the Google Labs a week ago and is more spoken of. It is a search engine itself, but the difference is that it displays results in a table similar to a spreadsheet. Google Squared doesn’t find web pages about our topic, but it automatically fetches and facts from across the internet. Google Squared is very helpful when you need to search for multiple data as it gives you the information in a table format.
The columns of the table depends upon the type of search you have performed. But the common fields that is displayed by Google Squared are name, image and description. There would be other default fields which depends upon the search term that we have entered. We can also add our own fields or delete existing columns, and save this table.
Here I am giving you an example by searching for the term “digital cameras” in Google Squared. Soon Google produces a structured spreadsheet which contains a list of cameras. The main fields or columns displayed for the search term “digital cameras” are Item Name, Image, Description, Manufacturer and Color Support. If we want Google Squared to display more columns or datas we can enter the field name in the text box provided at the top of the empty column. This helps in redefining the search much more and getting a more detailed information of the product.
When you click on any boxes in the Google Squared spreadsheet result, you can see the related URL and can navigate to that page if you click on that. If you search for a search term which Google is not familiar with, Google asks for 5 examples and after that Google would build the spreadsheet result for us. Different squares under different fields or columns points to different web pages. Google Squared is still in its initial stage and there are many shortcomings and bugs, which would soon be fixed by Google Labs. It is very helpful for those professional who needs to perform a comparison on different datas.
Last few weeks has seen som many changes in the search engine world. These includes the announcement of Google Wave, the replacement of Microsoft’s Live with Bing, the end of Yahoo’s Geocities and Yahoo 360. These all things sends a feeling that the search engine optimization field is changing somehow.
The search engines has been there for almost last 10 years and we have seen a lot of changes since then. In the early years we were new to the search engines and were amazed at the results that the search engine produced. But over the times, search engine have evolved to a higher level, with Google leading the way and remaining at the helm for over a decade. Whenever anyone things of searching something on the net, the first name that comes into the mind is ‘Google’.
In the earlier days people used search engines to search something on the net, or search for some informations. But now it has changed rapidly and apart from searching stuffs on the net, people are using search engine for even taking decisions and other calculations. The search engine efficiency and its algorithms has become more complex and major search engines are trying too harder to stay in the top search engine brackets. Till some time back no search engine were comfortably able to read and crawl the text on the flash files and certain Javasripts. But Google has somewhat broken that jinx and has thrown more challenges to its competitors.
These all facts have brought the Search Engine (SEO) Professionals to work harder and stay up to date with the changing algorithms and tools. But in my opnion even with these advancements of the Search Engine algorithms the basics of SEO has not changed. The basic of the search engine optimization still remains the same, but the style of doing it has changed. So every SEO professional should be well equipped to adapt to these technological advancements.
The basic of SEO is to build a search engine friendly website structure and a good keyword research, so that the website does not perform badly in the search engine results page (SERP). The process of link building is also the same and does not have changed too much. The main thing that differentiates the SEO of today form the SEO techniques that was implemented a few years back is the introduction of Social Media Optimization (SMO). Social Media Optimization includes the process of getting traffic from certain social media sites which works purely on Web 2.0 platform. SMO mainly focuses includes user participation and loyality, and is also a major source of link building.
So in a nutshell if you stick to your SEO basics and get updated with the latest techniques, you would not find too much changes in the process of SEO.
