5 Essential Things to Know About SEO

From the very start of the Internet era, the first and foremost challenge which we all are facing is how to attract qualified visitors to a site. The days has gone past when only populating and stuffing keywords in META tags and Title tags were enough to rank high on the search engines. Massive funding and buying links is not going to work now as well, these all seems old stories now as search engines has grown much mature now. These all practices also sound unethical in true nature of business.

As an SEO lover, with ambitions of experimenting with all possible things and knowing the results has let me to share you with something very beneficial. If you can give more time than money, believe me, you can beat much of the competition in the market and you will stand distinguishable from the others in your area. The outcome of these trial and error techniques sets the foundation of our SEO efforts and the basis for the constant growth of traffic to website.

What is Google Analytics Bounce Rate for a Website?

One of the most important factors to consider while performing SEO activities is to check for the bounce rate of website. I personally consider that this is a very important criterion that can give you the true insight of your visitors. Google Analytics can provide in depth statistics regarding Bounce Rate.

In simple, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who closes your website without browsing any other webpage. So this can give you the clue of what exactly you need to do or incorporate into your website to decrease this rate. There are many entrance paths to your website. One of the most visited and important path is the home or index page of a website. Many visitors come through this path and if they are unable to find information they are looking for, they might simply close your website without browsing any other page and so your bounce rate will start to increase.

In fact, each and every webpage should be optimized in such a manner that when a visitor land on it should find the information that he was looking for. For example, if a visitor come to your site through Google organic search with the keyword of “tic tac toe flash game download” then your landing page should have this download available with other relevant games in the categories if possible. This would definitely increase visitor loyalty to browse more pages of your website and hence will result in the decrease of bounce rate and increase of achievement of your primary goals. Content rich websites should not have bounce rate of more than 60%. There can be varying level of thresholds for different websites out there but it is always good to have this ratio as low as possible.

How to check Bounce Rate in Google Analytics

Follow the steps below:

• Login to your Google Analytics account
• On the main Dashboard screen, you will see Bounce Rate in the right panel, showing you the overall bounce rate for your website.
• You can check the detail stats by clicking on this link. See the screen shot below:

Top 5 Website Success Metrics

What is your primary criteria in measuring website success? Does it number of visitors per day, Entrance Paths, Subscriptions ?? There are lots of metrics upon which you can test your website but the essential ones that are used to reflect true benchmarks fall into a common group. You should focus on these metrics on the day one of your optimization and keep a watch on them as they show fluctuation with the passage of time. I believe almost all popular website analytic programs have these set of metrics to measure. Below are the top 5 website success metrics that you should always monitor and control.

How SMART and SEO works together

Make your SEO efforts SMART [Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely]

Simple

SEO works great if you have simple goal(s) to start with. By simplicity, I mean that your SEO goal(s) should be very straight forward and specified in couple of plain sentences. Anyone reading it should be able to understand that what you are going to achieve in the future. For example, I am going to launch a brand new site for Cars (Sell and Purchase). My Goal statement can be as follows:

“To make a Car (sell and purchase) website for UK region specifically and achieving 3000 registered website users in next 6 months, and a regular traffic of 500+ visitors/day from search engines at that time.”

This statement is very simple and general in nature. I will definitely plan and devise methods to achieve those goals but technical details should not be the part of Goal statement. I will make my plan revolving around this particular goal that I have made. At this stage, I will list all possible activities that I would need to perform to obtain those figures specified in Goal statement. This is somehow called a Work breakdown structure of activities. I can make two level plans approach here. First level plan will describe only the major activities and the second specifying further details under each major activity.
My first level plan may include the following major activities just to give you an idea:

• Professional website Design
• Slicing and Publishing of Website
• Building quality Content
• Website and Search Engine Sitemaps
• Discussion Forum
• Social Media Marketing
• Directory Submissions

Measurable

This is rather a very important criterion for your Goals to be evaluated fairly. In real world, we compare things by features, aesthetics, comfort, design, reliability, durability etc. In SMART methodology, firstly you should have a set of characteristics against which to measure. Once you are clear about those parameters, measure them one by one and in-depth. You can also measure your success by building benchmarking criteria’s. You can measure your position with respect to your competitors. SEO is an activity which starts right with the creation of website. So you cannot delay your measuring process until the deadline, instead you should start measuring your results continuously and make adjustments in the plan if something is going wrong or anything unforeseen happens.
You should always take help from the tools. For example, Google Analytics is one of the tools that you can use to measure your results constantly. There are lot more in the market, but you should use one which best fulfill your needs.

Achievable

The Goal(s) you specify for your SEO campaign should be achievable. You can set the challenging goals but yet they should be achievable on ground realities. Making goals out of bound will make your plans always slip with respect to time, budget and scope. Carefully plan your resources and expenses well ahead of kick start of the SEO project. For instance, If you are an entrepreneur; evaluate your skills, abilities and knowledge from your past history and prior achievements and then estimate your efforts required for the SEO activities. After this, you will be in good position to check whether this project is achievable for you in the given timeframe. Always make adjustments to the plan as you go along with the various stages of your SEO project and put things on track.

Relevant

You should not throw the arrow in the air and then draw your target. Always keep laser focus on the Goal(s) you want to accomplish. Always make sure, all of your SEO activities are revolving around those goals. For instance, let’s consider our above example which we specified in “Simple” for Cars website, suppose we need to build inbound links to our Auto’s website. My first priority should be to get the links from existing Autos websites in the UK region. It would be difficult but it is highly relevant to my niche area and region. My priority afterwards then would be to acquire links from article submission websites with high PR and getting links with my desired relevant words in the anchor tag.

Now see this from another angle. I want to promote my website by running Ad campaign. Now there are many ways to do so. I can use Google Adwords, Linkedin, Facebook, and AdBrite etc. But choosing Adwords would be more relevant and appropriate for my Auto’s website promotion. Linkedin is a website for professionals, so it can give me best results if lets say I have a jobs website. So linkedin network for my Auto’s business will be an irrelevant selection for Ad campaign.

Timely

The “timely” factor is the most critical from SEO perspective. Once you have an online presence, you need to remain in-touch with your visitors or customers; you would never want that relationship to break. Because once your site is up, and you started receiving traffic, then you should be very efficient and effective in delivering fresh and relevant content to your visitor, which will convert them to returning visitors and then finally to customers. Even when you are performing SEO activities, you should keep in mind that search engines love fresh and updated content with uniqueness and relevancy. So if you respect time, it can give you long lasting results.

SEO and Google Analytics - The best match for Integration

Google has a lot to offer for website optimization and tracking, it has many sophisticated tools that you can use freely to promote your website and to monitor its performance over time. One such tool is Google Analytics. You can use this tool to take control of your SEO activities and monitor them in real time. Google analytics provides in-depth analysis of your site visitors, traffic sources, content and regional data for geo targeting. You can even set your Goals which you want to achieve over time.


Google Analytics also have a Dashboard, where you can see summary of all activities at one place and in rich graphical format. You can apply different filters to look for different patterns and insights into data. Below I am going to show you concrete steps to integrate this great free service into your own website or Blog.

Step: 1 Enter this address into your browser and launch Google Analytics. Click this link to launch Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics

Step 2
If you have Gmail account, you can Login directly by pressing “Access Analytics” button and then signing in. If you don’t have Gmail account, then click Sign Up Now button.

Step 3
After your account has been created, its now time to setup your Google Analytics account. Login with your ID and password and provide the website URL asked. Also give your account a name and select appropriate time zone. Then hit “Continue”. Here you will provide your contact information, you must agree to the Terms of Service.

Step 4
At this stage you will be provided with the Code snippet. Copy it and paste it into your web pages just before the end of HTML body tag.

Step 5
Here you are almost done. Now you can track your website performance and reports in real time. Google may take few hours to display the reports for the very first time and information about the stats like visitors, traffic sources etc.

Choose Best Keywords, make optimization and get the full power of SEO

Increasing the website traffic is core objective of all SEO (search engine optimization) activities. By quality traffic, we mean that people should get the content for which they were looking for, while landing to your webpage and that’s it. But for different key terms, the traffic graph greatly varies, so if you want high traffic, you should target those keywords in which the competition is somewhat medium, even it seems very difficult to achieve at the very first glance but if you are following all the techniques in your website then this should not be a big problem for you. If you are choosing best keywords and proper optimization in right manner, you will surely get high volumes of traffic and hence increasing sales or whatever your initial goal is.

For optimization of a web page, you need to choose best keywords relevant to the content present in the body. Here, we will discuss all keyword selection and optimization techniques which you can use to maximize the SERP (search engine result position) of your website with proven results.

There are mainly 2 simple steps for achieving boost in traffic with targeted audience.

Keyword Selection: Whatever business you are doing! You are offering something to your customers. Customers will get to your business by typing some keywords on search engine which should probably take them to your website. So you need to SELECT those keywords, the visitor is searching for.

Optimizing Keywords: After keyword selection, you would need to optimize your selected keywords so that you should get higher position in search engine result pages.
Now we will discuss these 2 steps in detail.

Search engines like Google crawls any webpage from top left to bottom right, the closer you have placed your main keywords to the top left side, the more weight will you receive. This can be said as top-bottom approach of keyword optimization. This is very natural too, as people will also see your page in this way while reading, so putting emphasize on this part of webpage is crucial to your success.

Selecting the best keywords

Before going into any detail, you need to understand what is meant by best. By best we primarily mean the traffic or number of visitors looking for that keyword, so you should go for the keywords which are relevant to your context and their monthly or daily traffic graph is higher. You can always find high traffic search terms for any business through different programs. We will show you, how to accomplish this. Actually there are some programs available that can do it for you.

Google keyword Suggestion Tool

This tool is the best solution for anyone serious in getting the best keyword for their website at no cost. It is totally FREE and provides very sophisticated statistical results. You can access it at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Use this Google Suggestion tool to obtain a list of keywords that contains your business idea. You would require entering keywords or phrases related to your business or you can also provide your website address and Google will suggest keywords for you. Screen shot of this is shown below:

For demonstration purpose, we input “Job” as input to this tool and it returned the results in following pattern. Only a portion of the result set is shown in the screen shot below:

Word Tracker

Word Tracker is also very effective solution for choosing best keywords with accurate data of monthly traffic estimates along with other features. It will cost you $59 per month for continuous access to their complete keyword database. UK customers will have to pay only $25. You can access it here http://www.wordtracker.com/index.html

Keyword Elite

This is yet another nice software that can not only suggest you best keywords but also help you in launching successful Adwords campaign through its easy to us GUI. keywordelite.com/index2.html

Optimizing Keywords

The most important thing that you should understand is your landing page, where the customer would be taken to when he/she will click your website in search engine result page. You landing page should provide customer with the content for which he/she clicked your website by looking at the title and short description in result page. This is called relevancy and is also crucial to your success with advertising campaigns that you might have planned in future to increase website traffic even further. When optimizing your pages, think like a searcher. Navigate your website by assuming yourself to be as a customer and find out holes and improvements needed in most prominent pages.

There are many factors you should consider to increase your website quality and relevancy. You title tags should represent the body theme and it should represent the content which visitor is looking for in your website, plus you should have reasonable propagation of main keywords in your webpage. Major headings should also support your title tag and abstract of your webpage i.e. initial text of page should be in close relation with the subject. Also try to focus on META tags. Internal and external linking should also have your main keywords present, never use click here text or anything like that, instead specify descriptive hyperlinks throughout your website.

This is all what you need to boost your traffic with best keywords and with proper optimization of those keywords.