Salt, Pepper and Seasonings!

Posted by | Anuradha M | October 29, 2009 | No Comments

In an effort to get higher search engine rankings various methods are employed. Finding just what algorithms are at play and strategizing your SMO and SEO tactics to win against the odds are important. SEO and SMO play vital roles in winning traffic to your site. Once you’ve got traffic flowing, conversions to cash are not far behind. In this sandwich between SMO and SEO is content writing. We could liken SMO and SEO to pepper and seasonings. How does content blend in? Good content is like the salt – adding flavor to the whole package!

What is Content all about?

Traditional web content focused on text and images but today’s web content offers a variety of content options. These include:

• text
• images
• video
• flash movies
• podcasting

Content writing can involve extensive research. There is so much information on the web. An important feature of content writing is making sure your content is accurate, unique and well-written specifically targeting your audience.

Search engine friendly content requires the use of keywords and coding. Fine tuning content to SEO specifics helps it to be picked up by search engines. To accomplish this, web content writing must involve two aspects:

• Content that is reader friendly
• Content that is SEO friendly

Purpose of Content

In competitive internet space today, web content writing is being extensively used as a marketing tool that empowers your products and services in order to outrun your competitors.

Web surfers, we are told (and we know that from experience) don’t read. They hurriedly scan through a page and make a quick decision regarding their next action. It’s exactly at this point that good and bad content can make a difference.

Giving the reader a reason to stay on your page is a vital goal of content writing. Good content can become the best kind of promotional for any company. It is becomes the point of sales where your company meets a potential customer. It can lead to cash conversions; it can facilitate link-baiting; it can keep a viewer coming back for more information.

Whatever the content topic may be—technical, marketing or purely informational, remember to keep your content:

• engaging
• compelling
• effective
• understandable
• clean and simple
• very readable for both your visitors and for search engines.

The Role of Content

Many view content as the king of SMO. If used well, this tool can draw potential customers to your products and services. It can help create respectful visibility and make you a formidable contender on the World Wide Web. The Internet gives you opportunity to reach millions of potential customers all at one time! With an average Internet user, you’ve got just a few seconds before he or she decides whether to like your site and stick on, or jump to the next site! Good content can make a difference!

Salt, pepper and seasonings – the whole package is well-blended in a good SMO strategy.

Offline Website Analytics

Posted by | Sajit N | October 16, 2009 | No Comments

“The Internet is arguably the most measurable medium in history.” -Bill Perry(Audit Bureau of Circulation)
Website traffic is the de facto performance indicator for all websites. The analytics tools that track website traffic stats assume pivotal significance from the perspective of performance reporting. Being in the know of major traffic sources, time-sliced traffic fluctuations, internal traffic flow, top performing pages, top traffic-drawing keywords, geographic distribution of traffic and conversions helps one rein greater control on website’s performance metrics. Moreover, a website’s traffic stats help rate online properties for ad-space purchases, domain reselling or embedded marketing.

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics” -Benjamin Disraeli
Website traffic analytics tools can be divided into two types: on-line analytics tools and off-line analytics tools.
On-line analytics are meant to track visitor activities at a granular level, giving details about keywords used for visits, the navigation path, exact location of visitor, time spent et al. The techniques used by online analytics tools involves server-resident native database analytics like log file analysis or 3rd-party solutions that make use of client-side script activations through page tagging.

Off-line analytics tools intend to offer, at best, a bird’s eye view of website’s traffic data. Broad-brushed data on overall traffic volume along with visitor demography, psychography and bizography is what is offered by off-line analytic tools, which are mostly 3rd- party in nature. This blog-post aims to specifically discuss about this category of website analytics solutions.

There is considerable demand for competitor/peer website data, besides data about our own websites. This demand is met by 3rd party off-line website analytics services, making use of distinct methodologies to extract data and distil takeaways from it. Most services only offer “satisficed” data-set, not often meeting optimal accuracy standards. At the same time, there is an exigent need for website rating indices, a la Nielsen ratings for Television.

“Three’s a crowd” -Saying
The exercise of choosing a fairly accurate website analytics solution is like picking the bad out of the worst. None of them are accurate enough for one to bet their money on. Of all services, there has emerged a troika of analytics solutions who have gained widespread, though a tad begrudging, acceptability: Alexa, Quantcast and Comscore.

Alexa: A backronym for “Address Lookup EXperts Authority”, ALEXA is a website traffic tracker that makes use of Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and integrated sidebar for Mozilla. The ratings are generated based on the browsing habits of users who installed the toolbar, and thereby get access to Alexa data in return. The ratings themselves, as explained by Alexa.com, are “calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.”
Plusses:
• Worldwide distribution
• Sample size of over 10 million users
Minuses:
• Sample size with a major webmaster-community bias
• Ratings are open for manipulation through automated tools

Techcrunch reported a systemic blooper in Alexa when they pointed out how Alexa put Youtube ahead of Google in traffic volume

Quantcast: Quantcast is a website analytics service restricted to measurement of US internet behavior. Unlike Alexa, Quantcast requires website users to insert special HTML code within website for it to be tracked. Users accessing Quantcast-tracked websites have cookies installed in their browsers which estimate extensive data about gender, income-level, education-level etc. of the users. To this, they also add data they collect from anonymous usage at major internet destinations i.e. reverse tracking internet sites to cookie-identified visitors. So, as Quantcast officially states it, their system “couples machine learning with massive quantities of directly measured data”. This technique is referred to as direct-measurement model- a paradigm that’s obviously crippled by disjunction of cookie counts to unique visitor count. Quantcast claims to have statistically normalized figures for all its data garnered from its direct measurement model, as explained here, though the projected traffic figures still fall short of acceptable accuracy standards.
Plusses:
• Fairly distributed sample size compared to Alexa
• No effect of Hawthorne effect i.e. measurement hampering accuracy of data being measured
Minuses:
• Major disconnect between cookie counts and actual unique visitors count lends inaccuracy to data
• Restricted to USA

A study by RedEye shows how Cookie-based tracking of traffic data has incremental error percentages with increasing period of measurement

All services listed unto now are server-based measurement solutions. They collect data from different sources (website log file uploads, javascript tags activations, html codes etc.) and analyze these to offer website usage patterns. The obverse of this type is panel-based measurement which considers a cross-section of people as sample for tracking internet usage habits. The data obtained is extrapolated to arrive at roughly estimated figures for total traffic. The services below make use of this model of traffic measurement

Comscore: Comscore is the most prominent website traffic analyzer that makes use of panel-based traffic measurement methodology. To counter effects of cohort-specific data errors that emerge in opt-in server-based measurement means, Comscore chooses participants from the widest possible spectrum of internet demography and tracks their behavior. In its own words, Comscore’s panel “includes approximately 2 million people under continuous measurement on a global basis, with 1 million residents in the U.S., and the remaining 1 million distributed across more than 170 countries.” Comscore also tries to reduce “self-selection bias” of its panel by including people that it itself chooses and ensuring that all groups in the panel are adequately represented. Starting August ’09, Comscore has introduced server-based measurement aspects in its analytics data mix, to counter criticism of its panel-based approach.
Plusses:
• Most representative sample space
• Accurate tracking of each participant without redundant counts or automated gaming of system, as those that occur in server-based measurement solutions
Minuses:
• Like pre-election surveys, panel-based measurement means depend heavily on sample space distribution for its accuracy
• USA-centric data

Local Search Optimization – I – On-Site Tactics:

Posted by | Jignesh T | August 25, 2009 | No Comments

Wikipedia defines Local Search as:
“Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about “what” the site visitor is searching for (such as keywords, a business category, or the name of a consumer product) but also “where” information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates like latitude and longitude.”

Long before the Internet and Search Engines came in our lives, it were the road-side hoardings, newspapers, magazines, radio (all local mediums) and TV where businesses spent most of their advertising money. However, today, search engines are gradually replacing these traditional advertising mediums. And all major search engines are following the same local approach by integrating ‘local listings’ in their search results. And hence, for us internet marketing firms, local search optimization has become an imperative activity for businesses that have limited geographical focus.

This post talks about few on-site local search optimization tactics that should be executed to make a website ‘local search ready’. 

1. Dedicated Page for Each Location: Assuming that the business you are marketing, has multiple offices or locations from where it provides it’s products/services, it is important to have a dedicated page for each such location. For example, you do not want to have a single page for New York, if the business is present in 5 cities under 5 different counties of New York. Each city should have its own page. It is important to show up in search results when the exact (city level) target audience is looking for your product/service in their area.

 2. Driving Directions: Adding Maps to the page that has driving directions to your office(s) is now a common practice. But you need to go one step ahead and write details of the location/directions. For example, wherever required provide ‘directions for car’ and ‘directions for truck’ separately.

 3. Use Geo-modifiers: In your titles, Meta datas, H Tags, ALT  tags, internal link texts, content, etc. For example, instead of “click here for directions”, write “Directions to our Local Area Name, Product/Service, Office”.

 4. Embed Google Maps on Landing Page, wherever feasible: This will provide an interactive way for a customer to map their way to your location. It will also count towards a better ranking in the Google local listings

 5. Address on Each Page: To the extent possible, mention the business address on each page. If it is not feasible, at least the name of areas served by the business should be mentioned somewhere on each page of the website.

 6. Add Geo-Sitemap with KML reference: This should be added to you authenticated and verified Google Webmaster Tools account. A Geo Sitemap can help a website listing stand out with following an extra line (Show map of…) to your listings, which gives users a quick link to a map of your location. For ex:  

 

 

 

 

 

7.  Coding Address On Website In hCard Microformat*: Search Engines support hCard format and Rich Snippets which help them separate address information such as business name, street address, locality, and postal/zip codes. This may help increase visibility and CTR.

 I’ll soon come up with another post “Local Search Optimization – I – Off-Site Tactics:” to cover the remaining aspects of local search optimization.

Is your website ready for the Holiday Traffic?

Posted by | Bhaskar Thakur | August 14, 2009 | No Comments

The last quarter is the most critical for all retailers, online or real world. According to comScore Online holiday spending in 2008 fell 3% compared to 2007. EBay.com recorded 85.4 million visitors in the last quarter of 2008, down 3.9% from 2007.

Let’s accept, 2009 is going to be a tough Holiday Season for Retailers; Online Retailers included. Various estimates indicate a maximum increase of 4% to Shrinking Retail E-Commerce space in 2009. 

At RankUno we believe , at best,  Online Spending will remain flat this Holiday season. Is your website ready to make the maximum in a shrinking economy? 

Here’s a checklist for your website:

Shopping Cart Experience

Is the Shopping cart intuitive?

Is the Shopping cart drop out above the industry average?

Does the Shopping cart have graphical overlays?

Does the Shopping cart estimate and display shipping cost at ever stage?

Is Shopping cart the pivot of user experience?

Internal Search

Is Internal Search box Prominent on all important pages?

Have you tested the results of the internal search?

Product Suggestions Cross Sell and Upsell

Does your website have product suggestion engine?

Is your product suggestion engine intelligent (learn from historical purchase data)?

Customer Support and Live Chat

Do you have a Toll Free number?

Are there Agents to answer the call 24X7?

Do you have Live Chat to support online customers?

Are your agents trained in Sales and know Product Features?

Product Display and Images

Does your website provide multiple views of the product?

Do you have 3D (360°) view engine?

Product/ Price Comparison Engine

Does your website have a product comparison engine that works on various decision parameters and product features.

If you sell at the lowest price do you have the competition price comparison on your website?

Real-time Search – A Definitive Rundown

Posted by | Sajit N | August 14, 2009 | No Comments

Real-time search is a topic beaten to death by numerous SEOs and internet thought leaders. And yet, all the hair-splitting and blasé discussions on this issue have left so many loose ends that a proverbial cloud seems to have descended on the concept as a whole. What exactly should be termed as “real-time search”? How is it different from a “non-real-time search”? Why should website owners/bloggers take notice? This post makes an attempt to address these issues.

The Real McCoy

Real-time search is that which seeks to elicit a slice of the global ‘thoughtstream’ (more on that, later) over a particular topic. In other words, the searcher wishes to follow a developing story as well as read related content/opinions that are bandied around in the webosphere. Therefore, a real-time search engine should deliver a set of results tailored to meet the demands of “content freshness” and “crowdsourced popularity” in the form of latest updates, topmost links and most popular comments for the searched queries.

In a way, the results thrown up by a real-time search engine are similar to what a news engine delivers. However, unlike a news engine, the real-time search engine will act largely like a Mechanical Turk – it will employ a human-controlled system to keep the visitor in loop with the on-goings, rather than an algorithmic solution. For this, a real-time search engine gleans social media data (primarily from Twitter APIs), which will be processed & sorted into result types and then displayed accordingly.

Riding the wave

Sensing an opportunity, all mainstream search engines have already started incorporating real-time results for queries keyed in. A query for any contemporary topic will produce news results which partly realize real-time search’s requirement. However, what mainstream search lacks is social media driven “thoughtstream” data. Thoughtstream can be defined as the sum total of opinions, information, ideas, rants, comments, tidbits, debates or any form of thought that gets projected on to the social media landscape.

Take a look at the top results for keyword “recession” in Google. The first three results are purely informational in nature, without any element of real-time contextuality. The news results do some justice to temporal relevance. However, what’s lacking is masses driven grassroot-level feedback for “recession”, as opposed to a reporter’s account derived from research, not often emanating from first-hand experience.

On the other hand, Twitter search returns a panoply of result sets in the form of comments, news items, links and the occasional spam. While it’s hard to make real sense out the results returned, this bunch of incoherent and raw results is exactly what defines the “thoughtstream” for “recession” today. If one needs to get a primer on “recession”, then search engines are the best place to look for such information. However, if one wishes to get a peek into the street buzz about “recession”, then real-time search engines are better equipped to deliver the goods.

And this “thoughtstream” data is what is coveted by all mainstream search engines. While, the crawlable World Wide Web can be the indexed and processed to provide searchers with a semblance of real-time search results, nothing can beat the “tweetfall” of data that Twitter generates, in capturing the present state of meme metamorphosis or news story development. News items about Google’s attempts to acquire Twitter, Yahoo’s interest in Twitter-powered real-time search & Bing embracing Twitter results show the kind of influence Twitter wields presently, not just on search realm but on the whole of Internet, all on account of its “thoughtstream” database.

Show me the money

Real-time search engine optimization has to follow where rankings determine visitor footfall for a website. For enterprises, merely having and updating a Twitter channel would be more fruitful than ranking high on real-time searches. However, blogs and news websites have a serious opportunity in boosting their site traffic via real-time search optimization. For one, consider the search volumes for “Michael Jackson” related terms in the hours following his death: 30% of tweets on Twitter related to “Michael Jackson”, Yahoo News recording its highest single-day visits(at 16.4 million unique visitors) and a search spike big enough for Google News to mistake it for a ghoulish cyber-attack. If your website or blog wishes to capitalize on its freshness quotient, then real-time search is the place to score big in.

First of all, one needs to know what goes into ranking of real-time search results.  There are myriad real-time search services, most of which use Twitter’s data to rank results. These search engines display results based on either freshness or popularity. Twitter Search itself, along with Almost.at ranks results solely on the basis of freshness of results. Others like Collecta, Tweetmeme, OneRiot etc. show results that are popular. Popular results are those which are retweeted more frequently, shared more frequently or those coming from twitterers with authority(as measured by ‘follower’ to ‘followed” ratio, follower authority, PR of twitter profile etc.)

Here are the basic rules of optimizing a page for real-time search engine ranking:
•    Find suitable keywords for your tweets & insert these keywords in the beginning of your tweets to let these be the initial part of tweet page’s title tag
•    Insert keywords in hash tags for individual tweets
•    Put retweet references in the end as these should not form part of your title tag,
•    Make your tweets worthy of being retweeted(make them funny or informative, insert hyperlinks etc.).
•    Ensure that your profile moves up the authority ladder, by keeping a healthy follower-to-followed ratio and following those who are authoritative

Comparison Shopping Glossary

Posted by | Bhaskar Thakur | July 22, 2009 | No Comments

Find below definition of important terms used in comparison shopping engines:

1. Category CPC:
   The specific category CPC set for a particular category.
2. CPC (Cost Per Click):
   There is a floor bid price; the vendors bidding above the floor price are ranked from highest to lowest in shopping search engines.
3. CTR (Click thru rate):
   CTR is the number of times a listing has been clicked compared with the number of times a listing appears in search results.
4. Feed Data:
   Product details added in a specified format to shopping search engines. Tip: Complete feed with all data helps boost position.
5. Product Pricing:
   The price of the product charged from the customer. Tip: Lower price boosts position.
6. Search Relevance:
   Shopping search engines matches Title/Description of a product to search query and displays the results.
7. Top BID:
   Top spot (highest visibility) goes to the highest bidders. Below these listings others are minimum category bid.
8. User Feedback:
   Many shopping search engines allow users to rate and provide feedback for a product. Tip: Better user rating boosts position.

How to net the search engine spiders

Posted by | Bhaskar Thakur | July 22, 2009 | No Comments

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of studying the search engines and their indexing algorithm in and changing or designing a web site to rank high on user searches. Rank is the relative position in the search engine results page for a keyword / key phrase search.

No fancy links, no doorway pages, no spamming techniques can achieve what clean, logical and spam free coding (HTML) can. Here is a quick checklist to drive the search engine spiders to your website.

Search engine optimization coding Checklist:

1. CSS: Using CSS as it simplifies site maintenance.
2. <H1> and <H2> tags: A must. Place your keywords in the HTML header codes <H1> and <H2> tags.
3. Anchor text: Use keyword rich anchor text that best justifies your landing page.
4. Title Tag: Maximum 90 Characters.
5. Keyword tags: Maximum 25 words.
6. Browsing Menu: If you use java script menu include redundant set of text links.
7. Internal Linking: Ensure that you have good internal linkage and no dead pages.
8. Dynamic URLs: In case of dynamic URL’s use tools to convert dynamic links into static. The correct way to use newly created static pages is to place links to the dynamic pages on the static pages, effectively submitting the static pages to the major search engines manually.
9. Use HTML validator (http://validator.w3.org)
10. Other tags: <Strong> & <em> tags perform well than <b> in the eyes of Spiders, without compromising website aesthetics.
11. Avoid placing links in images
12. Avoid Javascript, flash and frames
13. Avoid Dynamic URLs.

Search Engine Optimization Basics

Posted by | Bhaskar Thakur | July 22, 2009 | No Comments

Search engines are the doorway to the Internet. They are perceived as ‘independent rating authority’ by most web suffers. Good ranking on search engine drives ‘free, qualified’ traffic to websites.

Search engine optimization ensures accessibility of website to search engines for the desired search terms.

But what are search engines?

Consider Search engines as the ‘smart’ Yellow pages of the Internet. They collate information about the resources on the Internet and serve them based when searched for. There are three basic types of Search engines:
1. Spider based search engines
2. Human – managed/edited directories
3. Fusion Search engines
Spider based search engines like Google are “algorithms” or “software programs” written to Spider, Index and process results.

Spidering involves traversing the websites with the help of links and recording the content. Indexing result means storing the “data” captured by the spider in a huge database. This data is then ‘organized’ by the Search engine’s logic software. This helps in grading, categorizing and ranking the result based on search engines proprietary algorithm.

Human managed/ edited directories like the Open Directory Project (Dmoz) are managed and edited by human editors. Editors decide the category and the snippet in such directories.

Fusion Search engines use the best of both worlds. They rely partly on the spiders and partly on human editors to build their database.

How do search engines rank websites?

Search engine spiders create giant database with information about the websites on the World Wide Web. Every spider based search engine has a unique algorithm to analyze its database and categorize results. These search engine algorithms consider various on page and off page factors to rank the websites. Rank in simple terms is relative ‘importance’ of a web page in context of the search term. Some of these factors are:

On Page factors:
1. Meta Content
2. Web page theme
3. Keyword density and spread
Off page factors:
1. Back links and link balance
2. Click thru measure

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• Local Search Optimization – I – On-Site Tactics:
• Is your website ready for the Holiday Traffic?
• Real-time Search – A Definitive Rundown

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