Archive for category Search Engine Optimization
Is Your SEO Campaign Built Around Algorithm Chasing?
Posted by admin in Google Search Engine, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO on September 26th, 2011
Chasing Google?
Almost every online business nowadays has a SEO campaign with various rates of success. The success of any SEO campaign is largely determined by the targeted traffic it is able to deliver to the website. Traffic is increased by researching for the most relevant and popular keywords. Once the keywords have been selected, a website is optimized and a link building campaign is initiated. Hopefully, if dome correctly and consistently, all these activities result in a website rankings for all or many of its selected keywords.
But over the last few years, SEO has evolved. It is no longer about delivering traffic to a website but also encompasses analytics.
Usually, a SEO company will do the needful and deliver the traffic. If and when a search engine updates its algorithm, the campaign is tweaked accordingly. This becomes a never ending cycle where the bulk of efforts are spent on chasing algorithms. Rather than building a website according to your initial goals, the focus of an algorithm chasing SEO consultant is now what a site should be as dictated by the latest algorithm update.
With every algorithm, SEO consultant will be frantically making changes to the site’s SEO campaign but by the time SEO consultant is done with them next update m ay be around the corner.
Also, algorithm chasing means overwhelming attention on just one search engine at the cost of other search engines. This means putting all your eggs in one basket which is not a wise decision when you business depends overwhelmingly on your online presence.
Chasing algorithm means creating a one size fits all solution which takes in to account various signals which can affect the SEO of a site. But as we know such solutions don’t work across industries and niche. Such an approach can be a perfect recipe for disaster if followed to a T.
Chasing analytics is a better technique than chasing algorithms because it forces you to concentrate on much better and tangible statistics which make more sense.
Analytics involves focusing on your audience and serving them with best way possible. This is how search engines actually want the sites to perform in the first place. This also saves SEO consultant from always figuring how to game search engines or how to get off the penalty imposed during last update.
But analytics is only successful if you have considerable traffic. Without any traffic even the best designed and most UX friendly site may fail.
To get the best of any SEO campaign, a SEO consult should marry analytics with their SEO campaigns if possible. A traffic may not necessarily be converted in to sales and it’s here the power of analytics can be unleashed. Analytics can unearth user behavior and trend which can help a site convert visitors in to customers.
This will mean a much more successful website which doesn’t need to be tweaked with every algorithm update.
Top 5 Reasons Why Your SEO Campaign Failed
Posted by admin in Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Technology on September 19th, 2011
Top 5 Reasons Why Your SEO Campaign Failed
SEO is thought of as a panacea which can cure low business and make site suddenly popular and successful. What is often ignored is the fact that a good SEO campaign will get your traffic. What a site is able to do with that traffic is outside the scope of SEO. If the SEO is getting you inbound traffic but you still fail to see any increase in your sales then your problems may lie somewhere else.
1) Website design: The first thing a site visitor encounters is the website design. There are numerous ways, one can scare away the potential customer. A site with old design signals that the company is out of sync with modern innovations. Old fashion sites score very poorly on credibility.
Slow loading sites also turn off visitors. No one has the time to wait for your site to load when there are hundreds of sites which are prompt to load on screen and eager to serve their clients.
A website with poor navigation and structure may also witness low sales activity. A client will not be able to find the information, services or products easily which may force the potential client to seek it on some other site.
2) Page content: A website’s page is the sales letter which convinces the buyer to buy your services or products. If the content is ridden with grammatical mistakes, inconsistencies and fails to attract the site visitors then traffic will not get converted to sales.
3) Errors: A website with broken links, blank pages, non-working contact forms and broken images send out very poor signals. A website has few seconds to establish trust and rapport. A website with such errors will stop visitor on his track and leave your site immediately.
4) Social Media: Social media is the most effective way to build trust. A company with no social media presence may look like fly by night operator. Social networking enables customers to send you feedback and establish your reputation.
5) Call for action: Many times websites do not have a strong call of action buttons or options to call. This leads to lost sales opportunities.
A SEO company should be able to analyze and determine which factors are hampering the effectiveness of their SEO campaign and suggest appropriate measures.
Bitten by Google Panda? One important lesson to learn
Posted by admin in Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO on August 29th, 2011
Bitten by Google Panda? One important lesson to learn
A cursory browsing of SEO & webmasters related forums will reveal that many of them have suffered a lot from the spate of Google Panda updates. Many sites which has good rankings earlier and used to get huge traffic from Google suddenly got penalized severely. As a result, a huge chunk of their revenue just disappeared. This applied to small as well as large websites. These sites may or may recover fully but what this has put in to sharp focus is that one should not rely totally on one source of traffic.
To ensure that your website doesn’t suffer from drastic and potentially fatal drop in traffic, a comprehensive link building efforts straddled across all internet has to be evolved.
Using social media as well as traditional link building methods will mean that you do not put all your eggs in one basket.
Using a diverse source of traffic also means that your website has a better link profile which is highly recommended by search engines. Additionally, not all your users come from one source. One section of users may come from Google, while others may be from Bing, Facebook or blogs. As internet evolves, you will also have to tweak your link building efforts to include the latest link sources.
In next few years, social networking sites may pip search engines as major source of traffic. Including them in your SEO efforts will benefit dramatically for those times.
Enovabiz Solutions is a SEO company India which provides website design, development and promotion services. “Websites that bring business”
Online Ad Spending set to double to $50 Billion by 2015
Posted by admin in Google Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, SEO on July 28th, 2011
Industry analysts have estimated that online ad spending will reach an astounding figure of $50 billion by 2015. This will be almost the double of online ad spending in 2010 which $26 billion.
This is largely due to increase in banner ad marketing. These figures highlight the fact that internet marketing is growing at a frantic rate as well as increased usage of internet all over the world.
For any business making its presence felt on internet has now become a very crucial step. It has reached such proportions in some advanced economies that companies without any web presence are in danger of becoming irrelevant soon.
Online shopping is surging, more people are on internet thanks to Smartphones & tablets, Facebook and social media sites have made people addicted to internet. With such huge usage of internet, companies have figured out that reaching their customers where they spend most of their time make more sense. And hence, huge increase in online ad spending is being predicted.
Apart from online ad spending another type of marketing is also being adopted by most companies. Search engine marketing or SEO aims at promoting a site on search engine such as Google & Bing. Almost everyone must have used search engines to find some services or products. Most likely, you must have clicked at top listings of the search results. SEO company use various tactics to rank websites higher up in search listings.
In the last few years, Social Media Marketing (SMO) has also emerged very strongly due to increased popularity of sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. While exact figures for SEO and Social Media marketing are hard to get, it can be safely assumed that they match Online Ad spending and will only go north in next few years.
It is very vital that any organization keeps a part of their marketing budget for online whether it’s banner, PPC, SEO or SMO. Because if you don’t now then you may soon perish!
Enovabiz Solutions provides website design, development and promotion services. “Websites that bring business”
Fox on Cool Google Engineers, Panda, and UGC
Posted by admin in Search Engine Optimization, SEO on July 20th, 2011
Vanessa Fox, a former Google employee and now a well respected SEO, was recently interviewed by Eric Enge. Check out the interview on Eric’s blog
The interview covered a host of issues and believe me, it is a must read for any SEO who wants to know a little bit more on how Google works. After all, Fox worked for Google. I will suggest reading this interview at least a couple of time to absorb and assimilate. The article is not just for SEO consultants but for any website owner.
Here are few interesting bits of this interview
“there is a wall between the organic search people and everything else at Google”
Fox states that there is wall between the organic team and the Adwords team. This segregation ensures that the organic search team is concerned solely on providing the best search results to users. They are not bothered about the revenue side of Google.
According to Fox, Google’s engineers are very loyal and love their jobs. She even claims that they have very high professional integrity. NERDS!!!
I will say that Fox, is just being too liberal with her compliments.
“Panda is platform for new ways to understand the web and understand user experience”
Panda has been in news for months now and has been hated with full fervor by most SEO experts and site owners. Fox, delved in detail with Panda and provided many deep insights in to it.
Fox stressed that Panda is important and is here to stay. Panda is a platform for new ways to understand the web and UX.
According to her, there are no short term or quick fix results for those affected by Panda updates.
A better solution will be to have an unbiased and dispassionate observer check out the site and provide feedback. Try to find which aspects of a site needs improvement. There are so many signals now apart from just links: Site speed, content quality, User experience, Content uniqueness.
Vanessa said that adding value to a site will play an important role. After all, there are so many sites saying virtually the same things with just different words. Content Sameness needs to be tackled with user generated content like forums and reviews.
Bottom line: Sites will need to be lot more interactive and useful then they ever were if they hope to succeed.
“I think it becomes harder to reverse engineer Search engines for a number of reasons.”
Search engines like Google and Bing continue to be more obscure. It is becoming difficult to try game them. No, it has got nothing to do with specific intentions but the nature of web right now. With so many signal around it will be almost impossible to measure impact of any one search signal.
Unlike the old simple days, when there were no twitter, Facebook and Google + buttons, now there are so many signals that try to game will soon become an exercise in futility.
Bing Surges at Google’s expense
Posted by admin in Bing, Google Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, SEO on April 14th, 2011
Hitwise’s March 2011 search market share report has showed us the signs of the things to come in very near future.
Bing has finally achieved 30% market share while Google has dropped to under 65%. Google is the market leader for now but on the face of multi-pronged attacks from rivals, government agencies, and search users, it is still to be seen how Google transforms it’s image from an internet tyrant to a benevolent giant.
Google’s share declined by 3% while Bing gained 5%.
Over the last couple of years, Google has managed to antagonise every group which was once aligned with it. Users are angry with the level of SPAM lurking in Google searches. SEO consultants are getting increasing vary about incessant & drastic yet ineffective updates. Search experts even have questioned Google’s intentions.
With such mounting troubles Google is faltering at every step while Bing is single-mindedly trying to provide the best research results.
Will SEO companies start recommending Bing more? With millions of sites at their disposal, it is not too difficult for all SEO companies and webmasters to mount a campaign against Google and influence public opinion.
Can it really happen?
Getting to know your competition
Posted by admin in Search Engine Optimization on March 23rd, 2011
A SEO consultant has to be aware about his competition at any point of time. Which of them are ranking well. Not only just that but also how much traffic they are cornering, the movement on Google search rankings and ongoing SEO activities by your competitors.
Sounds overwhelming?
For an idea on how to evaluate how to get rough figures of CTR of your competition check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/defining-your-true-competitors.
It has summed up easy to use techniques. Results will not be very accurate or revealing but can be an important tool to measure your competition. Though, many SEOs like me rely more on checking competitors across a range of keywords and then ranking competitors accordingly. Why? because accurate CTR stats are hard to get by and may fail to give a clear picture.
Do chime in with your opinions.
Bing surpasses Yahoo
Posted by admin in Bing, Google Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization on March 4th, 2011
Seems like TV product placements have helped Bing afterall. Mircosoft’s Bing has displaced Yahoo as the world’s second most popular search engine. According to Statcounter, Bing grabbed 4.37% of the global pie whereas, Yahoo! is at 3.93%.
The figures may seem paltry when compared to Google’s share of 89.94% but nevertheless, is a good news for Bing which trying harder to place itself as the next viable alternative to Google.
In US market though, the picture is slightly different. Yahoo! is still at second position with 9.74%, with Bing trailing with 9.03%. Google’s share is less but still substantial 79.63%.
Hope the industry become much more multipolar for the sake of users.
Google Update: Why webmasters should not panic (not at least yet)
Posted by admin in Google Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, SEO on March 3rd, 2011
The Google update has claimed many innocent casualties and even reputable sites have suffered. While, some may dismiss off the distress of these sites as inevitable collateral damage when a serious purge is going underway, the matter is quite serious for those affected.
Google is the main source of traffic for most of the sites on internet and any dip in traffic means huge amount of revenue loss. When it’s a matter of your next pay cheque, the matter is serious enough.
My take on this issue is that those sites who have been penalized for no fault of theirs will see rankings improve very soon as the Google will be working overtime to fix the glitches. After all, I don’t think Google would like to seen as this bully who goes on picking geeks arbitrarily.
While there is not much a webmaster can do except take the case on various forums like http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en and wait while Google cleans up the mess it created.
What this episode has done is that many companies will be now asking tough questions from their SEO consultants. Advice for SEO consultants – Be prepared for any eventuality. Your site could be the next victim of Google update. Till then, you can just keep doing legal SEO stuff and try not get involve in shady SEO practices.
Has J.C. Penny debacle opened a can of worms?
Posted by admin in Search Engine Optimization on February 28th, 2011
Few days back, J.C. Penny was penalized for allegedly using black hat tactics to acquire top ranks in Google for many keywords. It was found out that links were bought on thousands of websites. All links had keywords as anchor text and pointed back to thousands of J.C. Penny pages. Even cursory look will reveal that these were paid links. This is quite a common technique and is done by every SEO company (even if they do not admit it).
But this practice runs contrary to Google’s guidelines.
J.C. Penny paid price for this. Soon their rankings dropped significantly for many keywords.
Does your company also buy and sell links? Let us know so that we can let Google know … 
Just kidding
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