Online Marketing Blog

Why SEO is the best form on online marketing?

George — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 14:44:59 +0000

Online marketing and advertising is on the rise and more and more companies turn towards the internet to promote its products or services. Online marketing includes services such as SEO, SEM, Social Media Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing etc. All of these services have their own benefits such as speed, accuracy, reach, conversion rate etc.

In my opinion SEO is the one of the best online advertising or marketing techniques and the reasons are many. This differs from industry to industry and there might be industry which gets its online marketing benefits from techniques other than SEO. Other online advertising methods might be fast, have better conversion, drives good traffic etc, but the advantages of SEO in online advertising is really great.

Some of the major reasons why I rate SEO as the best online marketing technique are listed below. (This is just my personal view and not a public opinion).

1) Cheap and Affordable
SEO is considered to be one of the cheapest and affordable form of online advertising methods as it does not require to spend money on a regular basis Once you do SEO properly, you will get its benefits for some time without spending anything extra.

2) Long Term Results
Once SEO is done properly we can expect long term results without much maintenance. But when we use other online advertising and marketing techniques we need to spend money consistently for better results.

3) Higher ROI
Since SEO is cheap and affordable, naturally its ROI is also high provided the SEO is done in the right way and the website is getting targeted visitors.

4) Large Coverage Potential
As with other online marketing methods SEO is also having a large coverage potential or wider reach. This helps in getting more targeted visitors from different locations.

5) Relevant visitors
Usually traffic from SEO brings in relevant visitors as people get on to your site after searching for their targeted keywords on any search engine. They would only enter your website from the search engines if they feel satisfied with the snippets shown in search results.

6) Reasonably Good Sales conversion rate
Since the traffic from SEO is relevant and mostly qualified, you could enjoy a reasonable good sales conversion rate.

Beware of Fake or Forged Page Rank While Purchasing a Website

George — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:19:19 +0000

I am writing this post on behalf of a small blunder created by one of my friend. He was lately into SEO activities and the dude decided to buy a ready made website related to his niche (Travel). As per my advice he searched in DigitalPoint.com’s Market Place for a website suited for his interest and budget. I also cautioned him to be careful while purchasing websites and asked him to make a good research on a website before buying it.

After a few days he rang me up and told me that he had purchased a website with a Google Page Rank 4 for just 30 USD. He was really pumped up, as it was clear from his way of talking. I really felt shocked and some doubts started creeping into my mind regarding the price and the Page Rank of the website. I asked him to mail me the URL of the website and he did it immediately.

I opened the URL in my browser and was really glad to see the Google Tool Bar showing a page rank 4. I just checked the number of pages of the website and found that it was around more that 400. I just thought the the guy had made a good deal of buying a PR 4 website for a mere 30 USD. Then I checked the most important factor and that was the backlink of the website and to my astonishment there was not even a single backlink either in Google or Yahoo SiteExplorer. I also found out that the website was barely 2 months old. I smelt something fishy and after checking the cached version, I was really shocked to find out that my friend had been smartly fooled in the website deal as website was having a Fake Page rank. I informed this to him and he was really depressed to know about it.

Such page rank faking is a black hat SEO technique by writing some scripts in the web pages or in the .htaccess files, which fetches the page rank of some other site with good page rank mentioned in the script. When a request for page rank is send, Google gets the fake page rank of the website with good PR. As a result even if your site is new and doesn’t have any back links you would be able to show some good page rank in the Google tool bar. This is a kind of cloaking.

I wrote this just to inform everyone to be careful when buying websites with good Page rank and to take precaution against. Such types of blunders can be avoided if you are a little alert and know how to check whether a page rank is fake or not. You can check it out manually or through some free online tools.

If you want to check it manually just type “cache:domainname.com“ in Google search bar. This query will return you the cached version of the website in Google’s search database. If the cached version shows some other website instead of your website, then you can assume that some type of black hat method is implemented on your website. You can also search for “info:domainname.com” in the Google search bar, and if Google shows results for some other website, then it would be pretty clear that your page rank is faked. Finally you can also check the backlinks and you can see there would not be sufficient backlinks for you site to get that high page rank.

I also used an online tool http://www.checkpagerank.net/, which says whether our page rank is forged or real. How ever after knowing this I suggested him some tips to get rid of this fake page rank which I would like to share with you.

1) Remove suspicious redirect codes from web pages
2) Remove suspicious redirect code from .htaccess, if any.
3) Try to get good links from sites with good page rank.
4) Try to bookmark the site in various social bookmarking sites.
5) Request for a website reconsideration with Google Webmasters Tool.
6) Wait for some time till Google reconsiders your site and indexes the original version.

After step 6 you can see that your page will be having the original page rank and you can also search for “cache:domainname.com” and “info:domainname.com” which will give you the results for the original version of your site. So at any time you face such issues, just follow the above steps and wait for Google to crawl your original version. There is nothing more to panic, but as per an old proverb “Prevention is Better Than Cure”.

New SiteNotice Messages by Google To Inform About Crawl Errors

George — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:16:48 +0000

It is always important to get Googlebot crawl your site on a regular basis for better search engine visibility and ranking. When a Googlebot crawls our site it is quite natural for it to get responses such as 200, 404 etc. The crawl details for your site can be seen through your Google Webmasters account’s Crawl error section and subsequently you can fix any crawl errors that is show in the Google Webmasters tool.

In some cases there would be certain files or folders which we have intentionally blocked for Googlebot via the robots.txt file. In this case our Crawl errors section in the Google Webmasters tool will show us the crawl error messages. In some cases there might be certain files or folders which are prevented by the Googlebot from crawling unintentionally. In this case also we will get an error message in the Crawl Errors section.

By checking the Crawl error reports and fixing the issues we are making our website healthier. Checking the crawl error reports for both intentional and unintentionally blocked files every time is time consuming and as a result most webmasters never spend time on it and as a result may push their website into more danger.

In their latest blog post Google has announced about the inclusion of a new feature in Webmasters tool to keep an eye on the Crawl error reports. As per its new feature it would be sending Site Notice messages whenever they detect a significant increase in the number of crawl errors in the report. The message helps the webmasters to take action against the crawl errors and the message contains samples of the URLs which are causing crawl errors or are not being able to be reached by Googlebot.

This is a sample image from the official Google Webmasters Blog and shows how the New SiteNotice looks like:

Introduction to Google Insights for Search – Video

George — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:51:53 +0000

Google Insights for Search is a powerful online marketing tool by Google and is your for various online marketing activities. The tool is sued to analyze data collected over millions of users from different data centers. It is used to effective analyze keywords and its trends based on the total number of searches done on Google over a certain time period. The data provided by Google Insights is updated once in a day and except for some some rare cases there may be some slight delays. The tool detects the highest peaks in search volume for a particular keywords and randomly shows a set of related news headlines.

Google Insights for Search is used for various online activities such as selecting the right advertising messages, examining the seasonality of the keywords, creating brand associations, find breaking keyword trends, comparing keywords, comparing competitors, enter new market areas and more.

This tool is in fact an advanced version of Google Trends and is more flexible and versatile. Both these tools use the same data but Google Insight is mainly aimed at online advertisers and researchers. The search data for Google Insights is available from January 2004 and for certain search terms complete data may not be available.

I have got a nice video to share with you, which offers a visual demonstration on how to use Google insights effectively for your online marketing campaigns.

Google’s Dictionary Search Feature Enhancement

George — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:05:48 +0000

Finding the meaning of a word on the net is so easy as there are many online dictionaries and other sources which helps you in getting the exact meaning or definition for a dictionary related word. You can also get the meaning of a word by prefixing the world define or what is infront of the word for which you are seeking the meaning. For example if you need to get the meaning for the word “successor”, then you have to type “define successor” or “what is successor” in the Google search box. Then Google would show you the relevant sources leading you towards the meaning of the word.

Recently Google has made another Dictionary search feature enhancement in which you don’t need to prefix the words define or what is infront of the dictionary related word for which you are seeking the meaning. You just needs to type the word into the Google search box and Google would be offering you the showing you the meaning of the word as the first search result. It also shows you additional information such as how it is pronounced, its noun, link to usage examples, available web definitions of that word, synonyms etc. It also provides links to the online dictionaries where this word can be found. I am sure that this would speed up our searches and be beneficial to the large chunk on online searchers.

Site Overlay Feature in Google Analytics

Creating an Image Search Ad with Google Adwords – Tutorial

George — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:28:31 +0000

Most of us might be well familiar with Google Adwords and how it works, and some of us may not use it much frequently. Hence we might not be aware of all the available features of a Google Adwords Campaign. This post is intended to help you to create an Image Search Ad with Google Adwords for Google Image Search.

Displaying Image Ads in the image searches are one of the most effective mode of advertising and if the images are appealing enough, then the Click Through Rate is sure to soar high. Unlike the regular image ads for searches, the image ads for image searches is an ad format which combines text and images, making the ad more relevant. Creating a Image Search Ad with Google Adwords is really simple as it offers flexible image ad templates upon which we can create our image ads. For this you need to have a Google Adwords Account. The steps are mentioned below.

1) Login to your Google Adwords account.

2) Next you need to select the Campaign or Ad group on which you want to create the image ad.

3) You can see a tab named Ads inside the Campaign section and you need to click on that.

4) Inside the Ads section you can see a Tab named New ad above the statistics table which is basically a drop down menu. From the drop down list click on the option Display ad builder.

5) There would be a category section in the left navigation and select Templates for Search from the category list.

6) Now you can see 2 ad types namely YouTube Promoted Videos Template and Image Search Ad. Select the Image Search Ad.

7) Complete the form with Descriptions, URLs and upload your image and preview you Ad.

8) Finally click the button Save Ad.

Now you have successfully set up you Image ad for Google Image search and you can see tangible increase in your traffic from images.

Some Important Features of the Revamped Google Image Search

George — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:55:31 +0000

Google has recently revamped its Image search results and overall it looks good. As with the previous Google image search results, the images does not have any text or URL beneath it. Instead it shows a popped image when you hover your mouse over the image and it also shows the image name and URL.

As with the old version, the image results does not have pagination, instead it displays pages vertically and you just need to move the vertical scroll bar downwards to move along different pages. If you click on the image you would be taken to a different page which shows the image in its original size and the original web page of the image in the background. There is also a left side bar showing the website detail for the image with the file size and type.

Google has so far rolled out this new image search feature to 80% of its users and it would be rolled out completely in the coming days. The new feature seems to have made it easier to search for images along with an excellent user experience.

Google has mentioned about the advantage of the new image search in its latest blog post. I would like to share some of the advantages of the new Google image search.

1) Tiled Layout Design
The new tiled layout makes the image search results look more good and appealing and is designed in such a way that more images can be displayed at once.

2) Smooth Scrolling Between Pages
You can go from one page to another of an image search result by the use of the vertical scroll bar, unlike the old version where you had to click on the next page button to view the images on another page.

3) Larger Thumbnail Previews
The larger thumbnail previews are really good looking and is designed for modern browsers and high resolution screens.

4) Hoover Pane
Whenever you move your mouse over the images in the results page a hover pane appears with the image thumbnail and other image details, which makes it easier to know more about the image.

5) New Looking Landing Page
The new looking landing page of the image search results is another added feature with the image thumbnail on the foreground and the original page in the background. There is also a left side bar containing image details. If you click anywhere outside the thumbnail, you will be taken to the original page.

6) Page Navigation with Keyboards
The new image search page by Google makes the navigation through different pages much easier and faster with the help of Page Up and Page Down keyboard buttons.

7) Speed
The speed of the new Google image search page is another factor which makes it more attractive.

8) Increased User Experience
The new Google search result page is much more compelling and neat in design which gives a much better user experience when compared with the older version.

Using Google Analytics Does not Have Negative Effects on Rankings

George — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:37:22 +0000

Will Using Google Analytics Have A Negative Effect On My Ranking? This question have been asked a several times on many search forums and people were really feared if there is something that would affect their search ranking with the use of Google Analytics. In the latest Google Analytics Blog Post, Matt Cutts has answered this query and the answer is a big no. There is no way that Google Analytics usage would affect your search engine rankings.

People have always complained that the use of Google Analytics code on their web page increases the load time of their website. This makes their website appear to be slow and since Google takes the web site speed into account while ranking a website, many webmasters were left confused. But as per Matt Cutts Google Analytics’ new asynchronous Java script code avoids the issue of load time and it makes the website more faster. None of the data from Google Analytics is taken into account for determining the search engine ranking of a particular website and it is pretty safe to use Google Analytics to track your website.

Watch the Video by Matt Cutts regarding this.

Mouse Movements May Influence Your Website’s Ranking in Google Search

George — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:33:59 +0000

It might not be too long before your mouse movements may influence your ranking in Google search results. A new patent has been granted to Google to track the position of the mouse cursor of the user. The patent is named “System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring” and is invented by Taher H. Haveliwala. The patent was filed way back in 2005. This patent allows Google search engine to collect information when users hovers mouse pointer when viewing a search result page.

Till now the search result which has higher click through rates are ranked higher by Google. But there are many instances when a user gets the required results from the search results page without clicking on any links. Consider that some one is searching for the price of a particular product. On the search result page he gets the price from a snippet and he would be satisfied with the price. Once he is satisfied, he would no bother to click on the link, instead he would go for some other search activities. But the fact is that the user might hover his mouse pointer on the result from which he got the price.

In this case the website to which the user got the result snippet should be ranked, as it provided the answer to the user’s query. This is where the new patent comes into play and when Google notices that a lot of users hovered over that particular website’s snippet containing the price it would naturally rank that site more higher. Even if the search result with large number of mouse hover is much lower down the search results, Google would tend to put the result in a higher position.

The duration of the mouse hover would also help in better rankings as a user would point his cursor over a snippet for a long time reading the snippet, it he finds it relevant to his search query. The movement and speed of the mouse pointer is also taken into account, as the user always reads the snippet moving his mouse pointer over the text at a normal speed.

Anyway this patent is going to be another milestone in the search Industry and chances are that this would be implemented by other search engine giants in the future. This would also helps us to get more relevant search results as more relevant websites would be pushed up in the results page based on the user mouse movement and behaviors

Get more information here.

Multiple Content Types in a Single XML File

George — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:29:33 +0000

XML sitemaps are usually used to inform Google about your sites content so that they can index them easily. XMl sitemaps can be used for different file formats that are available on a website. Till now we used to create separate sitemaps for different file formats. The ever increasing specialized formats prompted us to create more multiple sitemaps to accommodate these multiple file formats.

Google has recently introduced the inclusion of multiple content types in a single sitemap and has announced about this on Google Webmaster Central official blog. With its new sitemap update Google has made it easier to accommodate different file formats in a single sitemap file. The new sitemap format allows formats such as video, images, mobile, code, geographic content etc to be submitted in a single sitemap.

The structure of the new sitemap is similar to the standard sitemap except for the ability to accommodate URLs referencing multiple file formats. I am providing an example for the new sitemap format which I got from the offical blog post. The example shows you the new sitemap format containing reference for Web search of standard web page, image content for Image search and a video reference for video search.

xmlns:image=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1″
xmlns:video=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1″>

http://www.example.com/foo.html

http://example.com/image.jpg

http://www.example.com/videoABC.flv
Grilling tofu for summer

The below image shows what you see in your webmaster tools, when you submit the new sitemap format.

As per Google the rest of the sitemap rules like 50,000 maximum URLs in one page and the 10 MB uncompressed file size limit remains intact.