Silpa SEO Analyst

Google Analytics and the Traffic Sources.

2022-01-06T07:00:00.002-08:00

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Google Analytics is a free tool provided by google. When the tracking code is installed we can know the visitors coming to our website. This helps us to know the technology used, device used, visitor details, geographical details, behavior of user, network used etc. Google Analytics also provide more advanced features including custom visitor segmentation. There have been several online discussions about the impact of Google Analytics on site performance. Google introduced asynchronous Java script code in December 2009 to reduce the risk of slowing the loading of pages tagged. Google Analytics helps us to know the user interaction and to know the Traffic Sources.

What are the Traffic Sources?

There are different ways through which a visitor comes to our website. These are called the Traffic Sources.

Direct Traffic
Organic Traffic
Referral Traffic
Social Media Traffic
Ad Traffic

Direct Traffic: If a website's URL address is entered in a browser and user comes to website this is called direct traffic. This does not have a referral passed to our site. Direct traffic is simply the amount of web traffic you gain from visitors who type our URL directly into their browsers or who arrives at our website by way of bookmark they save.

Organic Traffic: Organic traffic is the most important form of traffic we can get to our website. If the visit is coming through any search engines by searching a keyword, It is Organic Traffic that is, this is a result of unpaid search results. It is the opposite of paid traffic. If searching in google it is also organic traffic. Organic Traffic is obtained from the appearance of the site in the results of a search that user perform in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. Organic traffic is free traffic, this aspect being what makes it the type of traffic that websites owner want the most.

Referral Traffic: When a referral link is taken from another website or the links coming as referred from other. When a visitor clicks on a link on a website or social network and is redirected to another site, tracking software such as Google Analytics records that visitors as referral traffic. Referral Traffic comes from backlinks. It sends potentially valuable visitors to the website from trusted domains while getting our content front of new people.

Social Media Traffic: Social Traffic. Social Traffic refers to traffic coming to our website, mobile site or mobile app from social network and social media platform. For example, a person who clicks on a tweet or a Facebook post and then arrives on our brand's website will be counted in our digital analytics reports as Social Traffic. This may be either paid or organic traffic, depending on if it comes from our marketing campaigns on social media platform.

Ad Traffic: Setting up ad campaigns such as links that are coming through ads shown on any platforms is referred as Ad Traffic. Google ads are one of the most popular method to drive paid traffic to a web page. Google uses display networks to create appealing formats to read a wide variety of customers. It is considered on of the best paid web traffic generators and helps build brand awareness and increase visitor engagement.

Google Search Console and its Verification

2022-01-05T07:09:00.001-08:00

SEARCH CONSOLE

Google Web Master Tool is another name of Google Search Console. This is a free tool and is useful when SEO is used in a controlled form. If a website is not working properly or any issues such as broken links, crawl errors or any others, this will be reported in search console. Thus Search Console can be done to improve the appearance on search to bring more relevant traffic to our website.

As part of SEO we use Sitemap, an xml document which contains the details of all the related URLs of that webpage, the date modified or priorities of the post etc. This makes the google easy to crawl through the page. Maximum number of URL in xml sitemap is 50000 and maximum file size limitation of xml site is 10 MB. The submitted sitemap is in zip format so that it is easy for google to crawl.

How to setup Google Search Console?

First sign in to google search console from any browser we can see two options. Domain and URL prefix. Copy the URL from our blog and paste it in the URL prefix as it is a subdomain and click continue button. Click on go to property after the URL is auto verified. Select URL inspection option and paste the URL and click enter. It will show that the URL is not on google. Then click on Test Live URL button on top right corner. Now we can see that URL is available to google, click on Request Indexing option and click on Got it. Now the page will be crawled.

How to verify ownership in Search Console?

There are 5 methods to verify the ownership in google search console.

1) HTML file verification method: As we know that google is an html file.

Download the verification file
Upload to the root directory of our website.
Click on verify button

Our ownership will be verified.

2) HTML Meta tag method: With the html tag method, we need to add a simple meta tag to our site's <head> section. Click on the verify button. It gets auto verified.

3) Google Analytics Method: Google Analytics is a free tool. This is used to know the traffic details such as the interaction time of users, device used, browser used etc.

4) Google Tag Manager: This is a resource given by google. If we want to add meta tags, tracking code or other details each time in the website, for to make it more easy using google tag manager we can add the details without login to the website.

5) Domain Name Provider: A Domain name is web address consisting a websites name and a domain name extension. This is a unique name that identifies a website and our domain name is the center of our domain identity.

On Page Optimization in SEO

2022-01-03T05:04:00.002-08:00

ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION

On-page or on-site optimization is the practice of optimizing web pages to earn organic traffic and improves a website's ranking in search engine results. It is important to optimize a websites on page SEO. SEO represents one of the most common digital marketing strategies. Whereas off-page or off-site optimization is done to improve ranking outside the website.

When a keyword is searched in google and if the website is displayed we get impressions, if the link is clicked it is called CTC or Click Through Rate.

So lets know about Snippet. When we search any keyword on google it displays many search results. The list of portion displaying on google website is called Snippet. Now, What does Snippet displays?

HTML mainly contains Head part and Body part. Head part consist of URL, Title, Meta description and Body part contains the contents. Google analyses both the head and body part to get a clear idea of the page. If the result is shown on our PC or laptops it will have the URL, Title and Meta description. if it is mobile, Favicon is also shown along with these.

At first head section is optimized step by step which involves:

Title Optimization

Title tag will help to get hint about the page. While optimizing the title there are certain facts that we must know.

Pixel width limitation of SEO title should be 512 pixels.
Number of words should be minimum 3 or else it shows that 'title is too short'.
SEO title should be unique
There should not be any spelling or grammatical mistakes.
Title should not be fully caps lock or fully small letters. Giving first letter caps lock will add an impression to the title.
It should contain focusing keywords. The title should be relevant. If the SEO title is not relevant or google does not accept due to any issues or mistakes or if we does not give a SEO title, it shows 'untitled', then the body portion of h1 or h2 tag will be shown in the snippet as title.

Meta Description

Meta tags are snippets of code that tell search engines important information about our web page, such as how they should display it in search results. They also tell web browsers how to display it to visitors.

The following steps are to be noted while giving meta description.

The pixel width limitation of meta description is 1024 pixels.
For a page the meta description should be 155-160 characters.
For an article or blog post it should be within 155characters. Because normally for a blog post the shows the date of published.
There should not be any spelling or grammatical mistakes
It should be unique.
The contents in a page can also be given as meta description.
Meta tags only works inside head section.
if meta description tag is not given or not acceptable by google, it will take any contents from the page. If relevant there is chance of taking the first or second line from the content.
Robot Meta Tags are used to give permission to bots that comes to crawl on our web page.

If "no index" is given then bots have no permission to crawl through webpage.

Canonical tag is a way of telling search engine that a specific URL representing the master copy of a page (avoid similar contents in a page).

Body Section Optimization

In Body Section Optimization most visible h1 tags are taken as most identity. I f more than one h1 is present and is contradictory to each other, crawls through the page will become confusing for the viewers and bot. This type of page will be stored in a temporary data base called Sandbox. The following steps are to be noted while in a body section content.

The contents below h1, h2, h3 should be matching.
The contents description area should be relevant to topic.
It should be simple, which give priority while ranking.
In first paragraph in first sentence itself the focusing keyword should be highlighted thus the user get a clarity of the topic.

Keyword Density

Total words of focusing keywords occurrence coming in a content. According to Old School SEO Practice, there was a myth, focusing keyword should be bold and then it will be ranked. They prepared an article regarding the same and 90% of them are not practiced nowadays. Keyword density should be minimum of 5% or else it will not rank. But these are not approved by google for ranking.

Anchor Optimization

Anchor Tags added text is called Anchor Text. In content area most visible area is known as Anchor Tags that adds hyperlink. By looking at the Anchor Tags one get to know the topic. It will also help to boost up the crawling process of google like a fuel. Anchor Tags should not link to another website in focusing keyword this result in recommending the other website and the rating of our website decreases.

Image Optimization

The web image can be Optimized in right format, dimensions, size etc. The alternative test in an image is alt and src referred as source path. Alt name is given to know what the image is. The code for image tag is:

History and Evolution of SEO

2021-12-30T22:23:00.001-08:00

HISTORY

Google is one of the main platform which influence the life of each and every person in the society, Google's search engine has made information and learning much more accessible.

Google was invented by 2 students Lary Page and Sergy Brin as part of their university project in the year 1998. At the times the search result were sent to the given mail id which took more than 24 hours. By 2000 the use of internet was increased rapidly all around the world later by 2001 after the attack on the World Trade Center in America, people began searching for the related news but did not get any result. By then google got disappointed that even the biggest search engine platform on internet does not provide the result of the attack of the largest building in the world. Thus they understood that the problem was that not all available web pages were crawled to google. As a result the google brought up many processes.

The search engine went through many updates in attempts to eradicate search engine optimization abuse, providing dynamic update of result and make the indexing system rapid and flexible.

Google search engine works through 3 core elements. Crawling, Caching and Indexing. SEO begins with web crawler which is a programs that crawls or scan through our website called as Crawling, it will take a snapshot of each page. This is referred to as Caching of our site. After taking the snapshots the google finally Indexing the result. This helps to improve the load time and optimize the site for better search result.

There are many changes that is made inside a website. On-page optimization also referred as On-site optimization, as part of SEO, the changes made inside the pages of website. Off-page optimization or off-site optimization is done to improve the ranking outside the website. A person who has access and control over the website or the custodian is referred as a web master, who can make edition and changes of website. For to improve the ranking using the keywords thus google introduced a document called SEO Starter Guide, which is an essential ingredients for any web page.

EVOLUTION OF SEO

The research of every internet markets begin from a broad topic that we are interested in and this was categorized based on Niche specific. This was to make a website ranking it high to attract traffic. Thus keyword stuffing was brought up for ranking a particular keyword, we stuff the particular keyword inside the website more times. This is a Black Hat SEO technique which is unethical practices. While the ethical practices are referred to as White Hat SEO techniques. Thus Niche specific was changed to Link Specific, where a particular link is given to another website to improve the ranking. Later due to the over attaching of links this system was changed to Quality Link Specific and introduced Page Rank System. This was a rating system where we can see the rating in the website. In quality link specific the links are earned through manipulating tactics and highly ranked websites shares their links to other website by payment modes. Then a new system was introduced called Passing Juice. Here the value or equity is passed from one page or site to another. This value is passed through hyperlinks. Search engines see links as votes by other websites that our page is valuable and worth promoting.

Why google feared about changes made in algorithms?

From 2003 to 2008 , google got more popular they introduced a program Google Ad Words (Google Ads) or Pay Per Clicks. Google gained more popularity and growth when they entered the field of ads. Here a website spend money and shows ads in other website. This was called CPC or Cost Per Clicks. Then they brought another program called Ad Sense. Here a website can earn money by displaying ads in our website, which is an affiliate program. That is, in each algorithm changes when the ad words does not get clicks the revenue decreased.

Bounce Rate

When a 100 people visit a website and 80% of them leave the page without spending much time, the website will be affected negatively, thus the bounce rate increased. Demoted the site due to less interactions. Regular visit or revisit increase the trust value.

Pogo Sticking

When searching for a particular keyword a user select the first website and click backspace without having much interactions and open the second displayed website. When more similar action happens the first website is demoted to second and second website which is most interacted is given top rank. Visit coming through google pogo sticking only comes in organic visit.

Social Signals

In 2010, Google gave more importance to social media. Google made social media signals as ranking factor based on the influential power.