Keerthana SEO Analyst

Introduction To Google Analytics

2019-11-24T16:31:00.000-08:00

What is Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides access to a large amount of data related to how people find and interact with your website or web page. For example, you can see how many people visited a particular page, how many times they spend there, where your users are live, how to perform certain keywords, and so forth. This information is important in determining how effective your SEO strategies are and also to uncover areas you can make improvements.

Key Features of Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers real-time data about who is on your site and what they are doing.

You can see that where your current users are located, on what page they are, and how long they remain there.

Traffic Sources tells you how people found your site on the web.

Events allow you to track customizable interactions with users of your site.

Audience reports group multiple users together based on a set of parameters. You can use this information to target specific sections of your audience.

How to do Google Analytics

First, you need an account in Google analytics. If you have a Google account that you use for other services like Gmail, Google Drive, or YouTube, then you can set up your Google Analytics using that Google account.

This should be a Google account that you plan to keep forever and only you have access to it. You can always grant access to your Google Analytics to other people, but you don't want someone else to have full control over your account.

Once you have an account then, you can go to Google Analytics and click the Sign in button. You will then see three steps you must take to set up Google Analytics.

After you click the Sign-Up button, you will fill out the information about your website.

You can have used up to 100 Google Analytics accounts under one Google account. And you can have up to 50 websites under one Google Analytics account. You can have up to 25 views under one website property.

For the absolute beginner's, we're going to assume that you have only one website and only need one view.

Beneath this, you have the option to configure where your Google Analytics data can be shared.

Once you are finished, now click the 'Get Tracking ID' button. You get a window of the Google Analytics terms and conditions, which you have to agree to. Then you will get your Google Analytics code.

This should be installed on all pages on your website. The installation depends on what type of website you have with you. For example, Wordpress, blogger, etc.

If you have a website designed with HTML files, you have added the tracking code before the </head> tag on each of your pages.

This will be done on the Theme of the Design. And now you can visit on your website's analytics page and find out each and every corner of your page. There you can see the option for your website such as;

Real-Time
Audience
Aquisition
Behavior
Conversation

Different Type of Traffic Sources

Direct Traffic - People search for your website using your website address

Organic Traffic - Search comes through Search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc.

Social Media Traffic - Visit from the link from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Referral Traffic - Search comes through the link on other websites.

Add Traffic - Visit through advertisements.

Google Search Console

2019-11-24T08:28:00.002-08:00

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a collection of tools and resources that help website owners, SEO professionals, and Webmasters to monitor website performance in the Google search index.

Google Search console is formerly known as Google Webmaster Central.

Search console is a service that lets you learn a lot about your website and about the people who visit it. It is useful to find out things like how many people are visiting your webpage and in which way they reach your site, whether through social media or direct search. And through a mobile device or a computer. Which page on your site is visited more. Also, help to find website errors, etc.

Verifying a Website in a Google Search Console

If you are a new person to Google search engine, then you will need to add your website before you can do anything else with it. By adding and verifying your site in search console prove to Google that you are a site owner, a webmaster or an authorized owner. After that search console will give you everything about your website.

Adding Site to Search Console

Adding a website to a search console is a simple process. First login to search console. Then you can see a button as “Add Properties”, then enter the URL of your site in the provided area. Now your site is added to console. To process verification goes to settings and choose 'Ownership Verification'. For verification there exist five methods. They are;

Uploading an HTML File

Meta Tag Verification

Verification Through Google Analytics

Verify through Domain Name Provider

Google Tag Manager

Uploading an HTML File

From the Dashboard of Search Console choose the option for ownership verification. There you can see the five methods. Choose HTML file. Download the given file and paste it inside the head section of the source code and save the changes. Then come back to the dashboard and verify. Then Google checks your verification code. Then using that code you can understand whether your site is verified or not. Please note that you do not remove the verification code from your site. It will treat your site as unverified.

It will be the most recommended method by Google.

Verification Using HTML tag (Meta Tag)

Verification is done by adding a meta tag to your site's home page. Copy the meta tag and paste it into your site’s home page.lt should paste inside the head section. Then back to the dashboard and verify.

Verify Through Google Analytics

Use your Google Analytics account for verification. To process verification paste your tracking code in the head section of your page. Do not modify that code. If modified it will fail.

Google Tag Manager

Use your Google Tag Manager Account. If you are already using a tag manager, then it will be easier. Otherwise, you need permission to edit, modify, view and manage permission enabled in your account.

Domain Name provider

Domain name provider is a company from where you hosted your website. If you have a large website then this will be the better option, because if you verify using your domain name provider it proves you are not only the owner of that website but all of its sub-domain.

To perform verification select option to verify with Domain Name Provider and choose the name of the provider. To know more about SEO Techniques refer to previous posts.

On-Page SEO Techniques

2019-11-23T23:47:00.001-08:00

On-Page SEO Techniques

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website by means of its content, images and HTML file, etc. Mainly SEO optimization can be categorized into two as, On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. In the following session, we are going to discuss On-Page SEO.

On-page SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic for increasing the visibility of pages to the user on the search engines. For doing this you have to optimize the content and HTML source code of a page that you want to rank in search engine.

On-Page SEO

Optimizing a website may include the modification of content, adding new content, and modify HTML and its associated code for the betterment of the website. These changes are done to improving the relevance of focusing keyword and quality content and thus influence the ranking factors manually.

Let us discuss the On-page SEO techniques briefly. The various optimization includes;

Title Tag Optimization

Meta Tag Optimization

Body Tag optimization

Content Optimization

Anchor Text Optimization

Image Optimization

Title Tag Optimization

The title tag is an HTML element that indicates the title of web pages. The title tag can be visible on the search engine result page as the clickable element. It must contain an accurate and precise definition of the content. The character limit of the title is between 55 to 65 (in pixel 512 pixels), then only Google can display this on SERPs. The content should be meaningful without any misspelled words. It's better not to use a fully block letter and fully small letter, because of character limitation.

A title must be impressive and unique. Google consider duplicate title content as an error.

In some case such as no title is given Google take the H1 content inside the body as default definition. If no H1 then take H2 content.

Meta tag Optimization

Meta tags provide data about your web pages to search engine and website visitors. This data can be called a meta description. Which makes it easier for the search engine to understand what your content is about.

Meta tags are placed inside the head section of the HTML document. Its character size is limited for a page is between 155 to 160 that for a post is 154 to 155. In the case of a post, the character includes a default date. In pixel, it will not exceed 1024 pixels.

Meta tag description must be impressive and attractive because it will be the definition that can be seen on the Snippet of a website.

Now, what is a Snippet?

The snippet is a small piece of brief extract. The format of search results you can see on Google when you search for something. A basic snippet consists of;

SEO title
URL and
Description

This all together is called a snippet. Hence the meta description is a relevant part of a website to attract users through its snippet description.

Body Tag Optimization

The content inside the body tag is the fact that is visible for the user. Inside the body, the tags for text are used. The content inside H1 indicates some important text on your page.it consider as the heading of the page. Hence if no description is given in meta tag Google will take this H1 as the description. So the content inside the H1 tag great relevance. It must be a suitable heading for the page. And it must not be too long and too short. It also can be the keyword itself. There is no character limitation for body content. More than one H1 content is not suitable for the website. If exist Google will save such pages into the Sandbox.

SandBox – is a directory kept by Google to save pages that are not clearly defined. Because Google cannot understand such pages. This will be the same for the case of H2 too. After H2 Google considers H3, H4.

Content Optimization

Google says that content is the one important criterion for organic search, but what makes a content good in terms of SEO?.

A website without quality content is like a car engine without wheels. An effective study on the search strategy of users, to know what queries the audience using and what kind of answers they expecting. Then you can design a content strategy that gives specific answers to their questions.

Thus quality content will result in more interaction of users. They spend much time in your website, finally result in Google search result ranking. Factors that need to be considered are;

The sentence must be limited in 20 words and simple too.

Try to use focusing keyword in the starting of the content, either in a paragraph or sentence. But it should maintain the Keyword Density.

Keyword Density – It s the ratio between the total number of words in content and total keywords. Out of 100 words, 4 keywords indicate keyword density is 4%. Google says that the number of keywords out of 100 by 2. Instead of frequently using keywords directly, we can use synonyms and variations of the keyword.

To enhance the attraction of contents you can use bold elements.

One thing that should be noted that content optimizing is not only for ranking websites but also for helpful for users. Otherwise, the Bouncing Rate on your website will be high.

Bouncing Rate – Is the analysis rate of how fast a user quite one website without spending minimum time on a website. The bouncing rate of the website will be higher if most of the user visiting the page is quite the website in a few seconds.

Anchor text optimization

Anchor text is a word or sentence, which set as a hyperlink when linking with other web pages or documents. It generally appears like a blue-colored text with an underline. Anchor text provides relevant information about the content of linked web pages. The format of anchor text is as follows;

<a href = https://www-wikiepedia.com>Anchor Text </a>

Here the URL is the target link and the text “ Anchor Text ” is the anchor text.

There exist different types of the link;

Outbound Link – Link to a page outside your website

Internal Link – link to your website itself is an internal link.

Inbound Link – Link to your page from another site.

Image optimization

Google says that every day hundreds of millions of people use Google Images to discover the content they try to explore. Because users get more clarity on information while they seeing an image or a video than spending time to read an entire paragraph. That's, why google promotes search through images and thus image optimization is becoming a matter. To effectively optimizing the images of your website following are helpful;

Alt Title – Alt title is the alternate name of the image, which you can see on images when hovering the mouse. So it is important to given appropriate names to the images that you were used in your web pages so that users can identify what the image means.

File Name – Google cannot crawl the image, hence it cannot identify for what the image stands. Because of that, the images with file names let Google understand the image and thus improve the search results. Better use of the image will result in better ranking and quality information.

To know more about SEO please visit my previous post. Click Here

Google Algorithm Update

2019-11-21T22:55:00.000-08:00

Google Algorithm Update

Every year Google update their algorithms a hundred times. Most of the changes are minor. In 2018 nearly 3234 updates in an Average range 9 per day. The major Google updates are Panda and Penguin.

Google Panda (2011)

The initial release of Google Panda was on February 23, 2011. The purpose of Google Panda algorithm updates was to improve the presence of quality Web pages in organic search engine results. It diminishes the chance of low-quality websites.

What Does Panda Do?.

The Panda algorithm update includes many problems that can be seen on the website. They are the following;

Thin Content: A page with very weak content. The content contains very little information regarding the targeted keyword, such as multiple pages containing information about many diseases with only a few points are given on each page.

Duplicate Content: Copied content from anywhere on the internet is used in your web page in more than one place. For example the website of a furniture shop for each city. Here the address of the city is changed in each page but the content may remain with little or no variations.

Low-Quality Content: Pages with weak information, which lack deep data.

Lack of Authority: The source of content produced by a website must be trust-worthy. The site that aiming to avoid Panda’s impact must gain an impression from a reputed and recognized authority. And the user should feel comfortable to share their confidential information.

Content Farming: Large numbers of low quality and weak pages are collected from other sources only for the purpose of gaining Search Engine ranking. For example, a content farm maybe a website that publishes articles with no values and trusted authority.

High Ad-to Content Ratio: Pages with more adds than content.

Website Blocked by User: Sites that are either blocked directly by the user or using a chrome browser extension, which indicates low quality.

Content Mismatching Search Query: Pages that failed to provide promised service. For example, if we click on an image with some offer to purchase a product, the link on that image will direct you to a page with adds instead of the product details or early mentioned offer. This leads to disappointment.

How Can You Understand If Punished By Panda?.

The hint for punishment from Panda must be a sudden drop in your websites organic traffic or recent ranking positions.

Google Penguin Updates (2012)

The initial release was on April 24, 2012. Under the light of the Panda Penguin update was an Effort to provide high-quality websites and reduce the presence of websites that produce useless links.

What Does Penguin Do?.

Penguin mainly target two practices;

Link Schemes – Adoption of backlinks from low quality or unrelated websites and creating unnatural events in an attempt to manipulate Google into awarding high rankings. For example, a company that sells furniture linking to itself as “best furniture in Cochin”. This shows an unnatural link or the same company pays and buys a link from another site that has no relationship to the website.

Keyword Stuffing – Filling a web page with a large number of keywords or repetition of keywords in an aim to manipulate search engine rank through the presence of specific search phrases. For example, an unnatural keyword repetition is given below.

“AAA Locksmith in Denver, CO is the Locksmith in Denver that Denver resident trust when they need a Denver locksmith”

How Can You Understand if Punished by Penguin?

Before knowing this you have to understand the difference between a penguin and the manual penalty is given to the website being reported by Google users for spam. And the penguin is a Google index filter, which applies to all websites. If your website shows a drop in ranking or reduces the rush in traffic due to any Penguin reason, then you may have been affected by this filter. Make sure that you are eliminated from the Google search result. If, then try to make your site vulnerable to Penguin Update Algorithm.

Google Pigeon Update (2013)

Initial release on August 20, 2013

The release of pigeon resulted in great changes in Google’s Local SEO. Pigeon stand to provide more useful, relevant and accurate local SEO search results. The changes are seen within both the Google Maps search results and Google web page search results.

The pigeon was developed to enhance the Local Search algorithm and improve ranking criteria based on location and distance of business firm.

Attraction of Pigeon

The following are some changes that took place as a part of the pigeon update.

The reason behind pigeon update was to link either local algorithm more deeply with their traditional web algorithm to utilize its full advantages, nearly hundreds of ranking hints.

Also featuring the ability of Google to calculate a local business along with distance and location. From experience, the search radius has been reduced, favoring businesses that were closest to the physical location of the user. For example, a person who searches for “Laptops in Bangalore” could receive local results that very closest to that person instead of citywide results.

One of the most interesting outcomes of pigeon was the loss of 7 pack local results. During the course of time, Google steadily decreases 7 pack results to 3 local results pack. Initially starting from 10 listings now decreased to 3 listings.

Humming Bird Update (2013)

Hummingbird is the new update of Google after Panda and Penguin. The word means precise and fast. The focus of Humming Bird is to provide full attention to the whole search query, sentence, and meaning rather than particular words. The aim is to show pages matching the meaning rather than pages matching just a few words. Thus an interactive search brings better results.

Knowledge Graph and Semantic Search

Knowledge graph enables the user to search about cities, culture, festivals, geographic features, artwork, etc...And immediately get the result that suitable for your search query. It is just like applying next-generation intelligence or Artificial intelligence. Knowledge graph go deeper and broader to provide information about the search query

How does Google understand that these results will be the intent of the searcher?. This is where Semantic Search comes in the scene.

Semantic Search - aim to match the result with the real intent of searcher instead language of the internet user. The intent behind the search is different from the language used. Thus Google finds out different intent of users and saved similar images and description then fetch whenever needed.

Rank Brain (2015)

The rank brain is a Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence system developed by Google to help sort through its search results. It’s a computer program that used to sort through a million pages it knows about and identifies the one with most relevant for particular queries. Rank Brain act as a part of the Humming Bird search algorithm. It does not handle all searches, as the overall algorithm would.

Parked Domain Update (2012)

Domain parking is the registration or reservation of an internet domain name without that domain being associated with any website or web pages. This may have done with an intention to use in the future. This parked domain will index as a result of certain queries. This will not be allowed by Google. So parked domain update is to detect parked domains. This algorithm automatically detecting parked domains. They are a site that is seldom useful and often filled with ads. Generally, they don’t have valuable content for our users, so in most cases, we prefer not to show them.

Exact Match Domain (2012)

It’s a filter launched by Google in September 2012 to prevent low-quality web pages from ranking very simply because they had words that exactly match the domain name. When a fresh EMD Update happens, and the site that has improved its content and quality may regain good rankings. A new website with low-quality content or which previously missed by EMD may get caught.

Pirate Update

Pirate Update is a filter that is designed to prevent sites from copying content from other sites or to prevent sites with multiple reports of copyright violation filed through Google’s DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) system.

Mobilegeddon Algorithm Update

It’s a new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm designed to improve the appearance of search results suitable for Google mobile search results. Google gives attention to the site with mobile-friendly updating. Here Google aims to better user interaction. The user wants to read without tap or zooming the content.

To know more about the history of SEO please refer to my previous post. Click Here

History of Search Engine Optimization

2019-11-20T22:57:00.001-08:00

History of Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the process of ranking a website or web page on a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Developing an SEO strategy for your business will help you to improve the traffic to your website. The drive through your website gives you the chance for more business opportunities.

SEO can also increase the quality of your web pages. By targeting certain words called “keywords” experts improve the visibility of your web page on the search engines. The expert who performs this is called an SEO analyst.

Evolution of SEO Through Google

When the Internet raises all over the world the chances and need of SEO began. Before Google, there were many search engines in use. Bing, Yahoo were some of them. That was the infant stage of the internet. Only a few people know about the internet and very few people use it as a part of their job.

The arrival of the mobile phone paved the way for the rapid growth of the internet world. The SEO evolution history starts with the evolution of Google Search Engine.

Google Search Engine was a project of two students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin to better organize internet search results. They made an algorithm that ranks pages based on some criteria. They initially called their project as Backrub but later change the name to Google, as a play on a mathematical symbol.

In the early stages, Google was not able to provide service to their customers in real-time. Hence it not gained that much attention. Later Google conducts research on its drawbacks and finds the problem. Google is not able to crawl the website due to the type of data, images, and techniques used to develop those websites.

In order to make the website convenient for web crawling Google takes massive action to aware the webmasters, who are responsible for the website and its services. For this develop an SEO Starter Guide. Which makes the website access easily among Google Engineers. This event became a milestone in the history of Google.

SEO Starter Guide improves the quality and trust of Google among people. Google can provide a better ranking of websites than earlier.

Framing a website using the SEO Starter Guide improves the quality of websites. This helps Google to provide search results with better quality and thus improve the quantity of traffic to the website. Automatically this influences the business of website holders.

Google worked based on algorithms. Based on certain factors these algorithms are subjected to changes many times. Along with these changes, Google also updates its privacy policies also. Google adopt many methods for ranking websites. They are;

• Niche-Specific

• Link Specific

• Quality Link Specific

• Passing the Juice

Niche-Specific (Content-specific)

The content-specific method is based on keywords. Keywords are the words used by users to search. The ranking is based on the number of times a keyword occurs on the web page. Then that page will rank higher in the search engine.

Through this practice, the webmasters are not concentrated on the quality of web pages instead they focus on stuffing too many keywords on each page.

Link Specific

Here the websites are ranked by counting the number of links. This count is a rough estimate of how important the website is. Then webmasters are trying to sell and buy links with each other to reach higher on the search engines.

Quality Link Specific

The website is ranked based on the number of links from quality web pages. To assess the quality Google brings page rank out of ten.

Passing The Juice

Link juice is the term used in SEO. Whenever a website shares its link to another web page value or equity is passed from one page or site to another.

According to Google gaining, multiple quality hyperlinks are one of the most important factors for achieving a top rank in the Google search engine.

As part of expanding its base in different areas, Google starts its new systems such as Adwords and Adsense.

Google Adwords: Google Adwords is their advertising system. Advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their ads to appear in Google and its advertising network.

Now it will be the main source of income for Google search. Sign in Google Adwords and submit your website with your budget. Then you can advertise with Google.

Google Adsense: Google Adsense is a simple way to earn money by presenting ads on your website. By agreeing to place ads on your website you can also decide the dimension of the add window.

You can customize where ads appear and can choose which type fits your site best. These advertisements are administrated, sorted and maintained by Google.

During the period of 2010 people spend more time on social media. Hence Google uses social media to rank websites. Websites are shared among social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and this practice is called Social Media Signals.

Now also webmasters use social media for the promotion of their website.

Still, Google continuously works on improving the quality and gain the trust of people. And try to find out better methods for eliminating the Black hat techniques. Then the authority value or Influential power of linked authority became matter. The authority of the website linked with your website must need a background and strong audience support.

SEO Techniques

Black Hat Technique

White Hat Technique

Black Hat Technique - This is the unethical SEO practice. It adopts strategies to get higher websites, search engine rankings. The practices include content automation, keyword stuffing, hidden text or links, etc...

White Hat Technique - It is the ethical SEO practice. Which tries to rank websites as per Google's guidelines.