Google’s use of breadcrumbs in the SERPs is another useful element for the webmasters as well as for those who are searching something on Google. Breadcrumbs are usually the hierarchical display that is used to show site navigation. eg. Main Page > Services > Service 1. The use of breadcrumbs in Google’s SERP which was started a few weeks back is still in its initial stage and is not used with all the URLS.
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What is Google’s Real Time Search Results?
Google’s real time search result is another amazing search feature that was started last month in the search engine results page. The real time search results are actually displayed in boxes along the with the regular search items. The real time search results are taken from items that are currently active and discussed on social media sites. To provide these real time search results Google has started with some of the major social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc.
Adsense Category Filters for Better Ad Revenue
The Category Filter feature of Google Adsense is not that much new. It has been around for almost a year, but many of us are not aware of it or do not know how to use it for better Adsense revenue. The category filter feature by Adsense helps the publishers to block ads that falls into particular categories that the publisher doesn’t want to publish.
Something About Google Webmasters Tool
Google Webmasters Tool is an important tool which helps to diagnose and analyze your website. This tool is not a traffic analytics tool like Google Analytics, but provides other important figures and facts which can be interpreted for the better performance of the website. Google Webmasters tool helps in diagnosing the technical and SEO related issues of a website in an efficient manner. It has a lot of excellent features and new features are constantly being added. [Read more…]
Losing Google Site Links Due to Changed URLs
This is one of the interesting situations that I faced few months back. I had an SEO client whose website had a good presence on the web with decent and quality traffic. The site had a Google Page rank of 6 and was pretty popular in its industry. The site was also blessed with Google Site Links, which is the mark of the search engine popularity for the site. The client had just started their SEO contract and they had the site links for the last one year.
Just before entering into the SEO contract with us they made changes in all the URL names via their previous vendor and also deleted the old URLs. When they started with us we were happy to see the Google site links. But suddenly after a week the site links disappeared and the client started complaining over that. I was really shocked and really was not able to find the reason. After a thorough research I came to know about the URL changes that the previous vendor has made. Actually the URLs which appeared in the Google Site Links also changed and as a result the site links got disappeared. I knew that we can never create Google site links, but only manage them via Google Webmasters Tool.
I told the client about this and consoled them that we would try our best to bring them back. Fortunately the site maintained its ranking and traffic and after a few months the site again got its Site Links. The client was happy again and continued smoothly with us. There were certain things that I learned from this, and I always followed them going forward. They are listed below.
1) While changing the URLs of a website having Site Link, implement 301 redirect for the old URLs.
2) Don’t delete the old URLs at least for a few months, so that everything becomes stable.
3) It is better not to make any changes on the links appearing as Site Links.
4) Before changing the URL name, first consult with the SEO or webmaster.
Hope this would be applicable to all of you and take care in taking precaution before changing your URL names.
5 Google Market Research Tools That I Use.
Google is one of the major platform for online marketing as it is the most used search engine worldwide with high efficiency and accuracy. Google is the main stage for all the online marketing and market research activities for online professionals, webmasters, SEOs etc. The main part of Google is that they offer various tools for market research which makes the job much easier and flexible. These market research tools by Google helps you to stay afloat and updated with the ever changing internet trends. So in order to become a successful online marketing professional one must make the habit of using these online research tools in the proper way. So I would like to tell you something about the main 5 market research tools offered by Google, that I use for my online marketing campaigns.
1) Google Suggest
Google Suggest is another tool by Google which is mainly used for keyword research. Earlier it was run as a separate tool by Google, but there days all the functions of Google Suggest is integrated with Google Search. So for this, you just need to go to Google.com and start typing your keywords in the text box. Google will then start to show related and most possible list of Keywords as a drop down. The more specific keywords you type the more specific list it would be showing. This tool has proved very much helpful for me in conducting successful keyword researches.
2) Google Trends
Google Trends is another useful tool which helps us to compare the popularity of keywords or phrases over a particular time and also over a certain geographical area. You can see the results based on a particular Country, City and Language. Google Trends shows the results for the last 5 years, thus enabling you to check the consistency of a particular keyword or phrase. This tool also helps to compare the search volume of multiple keywords by simply separating the keywords with a comma in the search box. Google Trends can also be used to know the seasonal popularity of certain keywords and can also be used to know the seasonal trends of a particular keywords or phrases. The tool also shows the main news stories for a particular keyword in the last 5 years. This tool has helped me a lot in making the marketing research and keyword trending analysis for my clients.
3) Google Alerts
Google Alert tool is a free service offered by the search engine giant Google and is used for getting notified about the latest news, web pages and other market updates related to their keywords, via email. This tool helps you in keeping up to date with the market changes and is very much easy to use. Google provides 6 types of alerts such as News, Blogs, Comprehensive, Web, Video and Groups. To activate the Google alert, just go to Google Alerts and enter the keyword or a group of keywords separated by OR. Then select the alert Type, How often you need to get the alerts and the email address to which these alerts need to be mailed. Then submit the Create button and you have created a Google Alerts for those keywords. This tool also helps to keep an eye on your competitors.
4) Google Insights for Search
The Google Insights for Search is another important tool for doing online market research and helps in getting various facts and figures for our online marketing campaign. It can be used to select the proper advertising message, when we have a few keywords in our hand. Just enter the keywords and select the keyword which shows more interest over the time period. Google Insights for Search can also be used to examine and find the best seasonal keywords. The tool also helps you to make research over various geographical locations, suitable to introducing your product. You would be able to get informative data such as hottest rising keywords, search volume trends, keyword comparison, the Country, State or City where a keyword is popular etc.
5) Google Adwords Keyword Tool
The Adwords Keyword Tool is another important keyword tool offered by Google and is very useful for your SEO and SEM campaigns. Just enter your keyword or phrases into the box provided and you would get information related to that keyword such as its advertiser competition, local search volume, global monthly search volume, estimated average CPC etc. You can enter more than one keyword or phrases at a time. This tool also helps to get you keywords related to your website content by entering your website URL into the box provided. This is the major tool that is used by SEO professionals for doing keyword research for their website.
And there is one major tool that is not included in the list and that is the Google Search Search Tool. This is nothing but the same tool that we use to search on the net, i.e www.google.com. This is a great tool and can provide insight into many aspect of online marketing. Hope you have enjoyed this post and I would be back with some more in the coming days.
Setting Geographic Target for Your Site with Google Webmasters Tool
Geographic Targeting or Geo targeting of the websites need to be done if you want to promote your website for a particular geographical region. For example, if you have a Canada based site and uses .com as the TLD (Top Level Domain), you would not get any priority or importance in Google Canada Search results. In this case your site would be getting search visibility based on the global searches, and would be missing many potential visitors from Canada. To get priority for Google Canada search results, wither your site should be hosted in Canada, or you should use .ca as your TLD.
Google has provided an excellent option to do this through Google Webmasters Tool. The Geographic Targeting feature in Google Webmasters helps you to tell Google, the geographic area your site is supposed to be promoted and given importance. This tool is free and easy to use, as anyone with a Google account can use this amazing and interesting webmaster tool.
The steps for setting the Geographic Targeting for a website that is using Google Webmasters tool are given below. (I am not telling how here how to submit the site to Google Webmasters tool)
1) Log into your Google Webmasters tool.
2) From the home page click on your website name which is listed there.
3) Now you have entered the Dashboard of Google Webmasters tool for your website. Expand the Site Configuration link seen on the top left of the Dashboard.
4) From the expanded links click on the link named Settings and go to the Settings page.
5) There is a Check Box option with the text Geographic target. Enable that link and you will see a drop down list which contains the list of Countries.
6) Select the Country and press the Save button.
Thats it. You have set the Geographic targeting for your website for that particular country. I hope the mentioned steps are clear to you. I have done this for my clients and have worked for me.
How to Get Google Sitelinks?
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.
Exclude IP Address in Google Analytics
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.
What is Google Squared?
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.
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