Google Analytics

Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is an important tool used for search engine optimization. It is a free service provided by google for tracking and analyzing website traffic. It was  launched in November 2005. Using this service, we can track the location of visitor, how long they stayed, at what time they visited and their geographical position. At recent Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet. It is offered in two additional versions, they are: Google Analytics 360 and Google Analytics for Mobile Apps 

Visit 

It is the count of times the website was visited.

Page view

It is the count of total number of pages viewed.

Visitors

It gives the user's count of our site.

Classification of Visits

Direct Visit

Visitors who visited the site by directly giving  URL into their browser. It also refers to the visitors who clicked on the links from their bookmarks / favorites, links within emails, or links from documents etc.

Organic Visit / Natural Visit

Visitors coming through unpaid search engines such as google, bing etc.

Referral Visit

Visitors visits the website by referring URL from other sites.  

Social Media Visit

Visits from social media sites such as facebook, twitter etc.

Visit from advertisements

Visitors visit the website  from google advertisements.

Lets get started with Google Analytics

To install google analytics, first we need a google analytics account. We can set up google analytics account with the google account.

Steps 

1. Login to  google analytics through  google.com/analytics.                                                                                  
2. Click Sign In on  the right side of the window.                                                                                 
3. Click Analytics button. Now  you will be redirected to the following page.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
   
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
4. Three steps with greetings will appear on the screen. Now, click Sign Up button.                                                                                                                                                                               
5. You will be redirected to the following page which shows the information that has to be filled for the webpage.                                                                                                                                                                  
   
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
6. Add an account name, website name and website url.                                                                     
7. Select appropriate industry from the category.                                                                                        
8. Choose the reporting time zone based on the working country.                                                                  
9. Click on the Get Tracking Id.                                                                                                                                                                                  
   
                                                                                                                                                         
10. Now google analytics shows its  terms and conditions. Agree it  by clicking I accept after selecting the working country.                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
    
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
11. Copy the Tracking Id.                                                                                                                                             
12. Go to your blogger. Click Settings →Other →Paste the Id in google analytics text box →Save settings.                                                                                                     
13. Go back to analytics page and copy the tracking code. Because it has to be pasted on every pages of website to know the status.                                                                                                    
14. Again go to the blogger →Theme →Edit HTML→Paste the script before closing of head tag.                                                                                           
15. Click Save Theme. Now tracking code installation is completed.                                                        
16. Then go to analytics page and select All Website Data on the top left hand side and choose All Website Data.                                                                                                                                                 
17. Next step is to view the google analytics data. For this, go to google analytics page → REAL-TIME → Overview.                                                                                                                                                               
    
                                                                                                                          
18. Now we can get the real time tracking overview of our website or blog.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

To know more about webmaster tools, refer Google Webmaster Tools                                                                               

                                                                                                                               Neena Johny

Google Webmaster Tools

GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) are set of tools used by webmasters for the optimization of webpages. It can be defined as the primary mechanism of google to communicate with webmasters. On 20 May 2015, it is renamed as Google Search Console. It is a charge-free web service provided by google. It allows webmasters to check the indexing status, errors and to optimize the visibility of their websites.

Verification steps in GWT

1. Create a blog in your blogger account.                                                                                            
2. Copy the URL of blog post with .com extension. If it is in country specific extension, then remove it by adding .com with "/ncr". Then press enter key and copy the new URL.                                                                              
3. Login to Webmaster Tools or  google search console.                                                                                                                                                                                               
4.  Paste the URL in the given box.                                                                                                          
5. Click on "Add a Property" button. Then it will be redirected to a page with different options. For blog, select the “HTML tag” verification method and copy the “Meta tag” data given in the text box. (Eg: <meta name="google-site-verification" content="….." /> .                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
    
   
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
6. Now go back to Blogger Dashboard and click on the Theme and then Edit Html. This will allow you to edit the html of your blog template.                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
7. Paste the copied meta tag data inside the head section of template's html code. Click on “Save Theme” button.                                                                                                                                          
8. Now go to Google Search Console and press “Verify” button.                                                                                                                                                                                                       
9. Now you will receive a verification message.

Steps for Crawling, Fetching and Indexing

1. After clicking the continue in the verification message, the page will be redirected to Blogger Dashboard.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
2. Now we can see the "Crawl" option on the left side of the screen. Click on it and select "Fetch as Google" option.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
   
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
3. If you need to fetch the entire blog, then leave the text box blank. Otherwise enter the URL of the page you want to be indexed.                                                                                                                                                             
4. Now click the "Fetch" button.                                                                                                                                  
5. After  indexing has finished, we can see a "Request Indexing" button on the screen.                                                                                                                                                                   
6. Click "Request Indexing" and verify that your not a robot. Now you can see two options. "Crawl Only This URL" ( To fetch/submit one specific page) and "Crawl This URL and its Direct Links" (To index the blog and its links).                                                                                  
7. Select as per the need and click Go.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
   
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
8. Wait for the indexing to complete and successfully done.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

    For more ideas on SEO, refer SEO On-Page Optimization

Neena Johny

SEO On-Page Optimization

SEO On-Page Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the methodology of techniques and strategies used to increase visitor's count in the website by achieving high ranking in search results. There are two ways of optimization. On page optimization and Off page optimization. On page optimization refers to all techniques that can be done within the website to get ranked top in search results. This include optimization of contents, adding links, meta description etc. It is done by webmasters. 

On-page optimization techniques

1. Head section optimization

2. Body section optimization

3. Content optimization

4. Image optimization

5. Authorship optimization      

HEAD SECTION OPTIMIZATION

Here we mainly focusing on snippet. Snippet contains:

 Website Title

 Meta Description

 URL

Title Optimization

It is the important website optimization element which is displayed in the title bar. Title should be simple, meaningful and attractive one and it must contain the focusing keyword. No spelling or grammatical mistakes are allowed. And it should not be of fully capital letters. This is  because of its character limitation. Maximum character limit is 55-60 with 512 pixel size, but should be more than three words. Another  important thing is that, a title should be unique. No duplication of titles in the same website. Because this will cause Keyword cannibalism. If the title is not given, search engine will take the content  in h1 tag of the document as title by default.

Meta tag Optimization

Meta tags contain meta description, which is a brief description of  the website focusing on the areas and services. This small piece of text in snippet cannot be ignored. Because, if a searcher finds it appealing, then he will likely to click and go inside the page to get more information. Meta description must be unique. It may include in the respective page content, but  should not be in other pages. We can include focusing keywords also. As same as title, it should not contain any spelling or grammatical mistakes, less quality content etc. Minimum character length is 130 here with 1024 pixel size. And the maximum limit for a webpage is 155-160 characters, where it should not exceed 154 characters in the case of an article or a post. Words in meta description  get  bolded when they matches the user's query in order to give a clue about the content on the page to the user. But if  meta description isn’t written  or irrelevant, there is a good chance that search engine will  take content  in body part of the document as meta description. This may cause a degradation to our website.

URL

Abbreviation for Uniform Resource Locator. It is used as a reference to website. Also known as web address.

BODY SECTION OPTIMIZATION

Here we use several tags  in html  to highlight certain parts of the website. Tags h1, h2, h3, Bold [strong], Italic [em] etc. are these tags.

• Header tags : Content inside the  h1 tag is the main part of body section. Usually site titles are given in h1 tags and post titles are given in h2 tags. Maximum words in  h1 tag should be 8-10. Using more than one h1 tag in a webpage may lead to confusions. If h1 is not specified, google takes content in h2 by default.

• Bold: Bolding can be given to certain words which are of high importance. Keywords  can be bolded within the limit of use.

• Italic: Used  to emphasize certain words, this  will appear in italic.

• Quote:Useful when quotes are given .

CONTENT OPTIMIZATION

Content  section is the most  important part of a webpage. Contents can be text, images, links etc. In content section, highly focused part is the anchor text, which is used to add hyperlink. One important thing to remember is, focused keyword should not be used as anchor text, but it can be used at the starting of content to  get more benefit.

KEYWORD OPTIMIZATION

Use of keywords  in content is very important. Focused keyword must be used in the content for at least one time. Splitting of lengthy keyword and giving them in content is a good practice. Bolding of keywords will give easiness to read long contents. Placing keyword before a comma or full stop  and presenting it in grey color is also good.

keyword density:

is defined as the number of times the keyword used in our content as compared to the total number of words on that page.

IMAGE OPTIMIZATION

Google uses three optimization elements :

1. Alt name

2. File name

3. Contents around the image.

Alt name : It is a brief description about  the image, to provide information when it is  not displayed for certain reasons. It should be meaning full. Relevant keywords  can also be used here.

File name : File names should be meaningful one. Use  hyphens in file name instead  of giving spaces in between the words. Eg : “google-panda-update.jpg”

Contents around the image: Contents which contain the image is very important. Because it  provides a clear information about the image.

AUTHORSHIP OPTIMIZATION

Authorship optimization or Editorial power is the method of connecting the article authors with google to create ownership of the content. To publish a blog or article, authorship verification should be done. It is one of the most important on-page optimization technique. Authorship provides authority and validity to content readers. Authorship Optimization is only for single article not for website.

The steps are follows:

• Create a google plus profile.

• Give the label name at the end of your page. Then click LINK button → Add URL of google plus   profile → OK

• At the left top of the page, click HTML → Add attribute rel="author" into the anchor tag.

• Save the page.

You can also visit my previous post about History and Evolution of Search Engine Optimization.

Neena Johny

History and Evolution of Search Engine Optimization

History and Evolution of SEO

In this article we are discussing about the History and Evolution of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search Engine Optimization is the methodology of techniques and strategies used to increase visitor’s count in the website, by achieving high ranking in search results. Before going deep into the topic, lets have a look at the history of google.



Google was founded in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as a research project while they were doing their PhD at Stanford University in California. It was not much popular at its early stages. At that time, search results in google were send to users mail id. In 2001, its popularity got increased after the tragedy of World Trade Center. Al-Qaeda demolished World Trade Center on Sep 11, 2001. After this tragedy people began to search more information about it, but  unfortunately google couldn't give more relevant information about the same. This made the google officials to think about the issue seriously. They found that most of the websites in google are not crawl-able. And  there arise a question that, how to make websites crawl-able?.


In SEO, there are mainly 3 processes in delivering search results: Crawling, Catching and Indexing.

    •  Crawling is the process of scanning webpages and identifying its contents.
    •  Catching is taking snapshots of  webpages and storing them in databases.    
    •  Indexing is displaying respective webpages  to users based on the input query.


Also we can categorize Search Engine Optimization strategy into two: On-page Optimization and Off-page Optimization. In On-page Optimization, we are optimizing within the webpage itself. These methods include giving internal links and relevant contents, keyword optimization etc. to make it more crawl-able. And Off-page Optimization refers to all the techniques that can be done outside the webpage in order to improve its search engine rankings. Google cannot modify websites directly, but its webmaster can. Web master is the person who maintain a particular website. So in order to optimize, google shared their optimization guidelines through a PDF called ‘SEO starter guide’.

keyword stuffing

In the beginning, websites were optimized based on the content. ie. they were content specific. If number of occurrence of keywords is more, then that website will be ranked high. This gradually leads to keyword stuffing. This practice of stuffing is a black hat seo technique. ie. non-ethical. It is done by giving keywords in blank spaces and they were hided from the user by giving background colors or by reducing its pixel size to 1.

keyword meta tags

There was another practice of using keyword meta tags for getting high ranks in search results. Meta tags are the words that are hidden. It can be used to get a summarized idea of the website  to the search engine. Meta tags were located inside the head tags. When people started abusing its use, google opted meta tags out of the ranking factors. An article about it was published in webmaster central blog of 21 Sep 2009.



Due to increased non-ethical practices google changed their optimization technique to link specific.  Webpages which get higher number of links will be ranked top in results. But this optimization gradually leads to concept of buying and selling of links. To solve this, google changed its tactics to quality link specific. For this optimization technique, they introduced  page ranking concept. Page ranks were visible till last year. Here webpages which have links from higher ranked pages will be more relevant since links from them will be of high quality. When pages are rated out of 10, google itself rated 9 and Twitter, US Government website etc. are rated 10 out of 10.

 

Passing the juice 

A new mechanism of passing power or equity to a site via links from internal or external sources is introduced by google. This was known as ‘Passing the juice’. This power is interpreted as a vote of recommendation towards the website and is one of the most important factors in determining rank of the website in results. In this mechanism the rank of higher ranked site will be deceased. To prevent this loss of power, rel="nofollow" mechanism is introduced. By using this, only diversion of audience to the pointed location can be done.

Up to 2008, google was afraid to carry out updates. Its because of  the huge loss caused from Pay Per Click or PPC. To understand this, we have to familiar two terms in SEO. They are Google Adwords and Google Adsense.

Google Adwords

Here we can advertise and promote through google by paying amounts. It is based on cookies and keywords determined by advertisers. When a  user clicks on the advertising copy, an amount will be cut off from the prepaid amount given by the advertisers and it is credited to the google. This amount is known as Cost Per Click or CPC.

Google Adsense

It is another program run by google to earn cash. Websites which have more visitors count are registered for google adsense. Advertisements will be given in these sites. Google can generate revenue on the basis of Pay Per Click, ie. PPC  and Pay Per Impression programs. Some part of this income will be given to respective website owners as their commission. Thus ranking of websites in results had an important role in maintaining visitors count and also in PPC. So when google carries out updates, some websites got re-ranked and it will badly affect google.



After 2008, google becomes more powerful and it acquires more companies. Google carried out strong algorithmic updates and a team for web spamming is formed. Web spam team was formed to eliminate spammers and to maintain quality in search results. Google gradually becomes interactive to users by giving google suggestions and more relevant informations. It acts as a personal assistant for users.

Pogo-sticking

 

During 2009, google  introduced website ranking based on user’s response. Cookies are added to collect user’s response. According to this, rankings take place. Websites with higher user responses were top ranked and becomes trustworthy. Pogo-sticking is a bad effect caused to the website. It occurs when a user bounce back from a website by the unsatisfied result. This will cause the website to get ranked low. Next in 2010, google introduced new method of ranking based on social media signals. Websites which have high social interactions and high influential powers were ranked high.

Important google updates

After 2010, strict updates were carried out by google. They are,

 

Google Panda Update

Google Panda update  released in 2011 was against content spamming. Content spamming includes:
  •    Content  duplication or content plagiarism.
  •    Content spinning.
  •    Thinny pages.
  •    Occurrence of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.
  •    Irrelevant and less quality content.

Panda was updated from time-to-time. Panda 4.0 was released in 2014. Panda update was added as a permanent filter to google man’s algorithm for easy crawling. It thus eliminates content spammed websites or they were put into sand box, a place where untrusted websites were placed. In social media sites,  untrusted profiles were placed in sand box.

 

Google Penguin Update 

In 2012, Google Penguin update was released. This was against link spamming. Penguin 4.0 was released in Sep 2016. Link spamming includes:
  •    Link exchange.
  •    Link selling and buying.
  •    Having less quality links from outside source.
  •    Comment spamming.
  •    Link farming.
  •    Link referral.
  •    Wiki spamming.
  •    Excessive guest blogging.

 

Google Pirate Update

This was used to prevent piration of images, documents and multimedia files. If any piration  happened, we can file  case against them in google according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Google will mark the website as pirated one, notification will be send and it will be removed from the results.

 

Parked Domain Update

In 2012, Parked domain update was released. Here rich people buy domains  to start websites and to have links from them, but only some of them made live and others remained as it is. And these domains are known as parked domains. It was listed in google until this update was carried out. Domains will be unblocked if it is not renewed after certain period.

 

Exact Match Domain (EMD) Update

This update was released in 2012. It was used for webpages which are exactly matched to keywords. Webpages which are not updated further were removed.

 

Google Pigeon Update

 

Pigeon update was  in 2014. It focussed mainly on local ranking. Results were provided based on user location and local directory. Local interactions were mainly used as the basis of ranking here.

 

Humming Bird Update

Humming bird update was introduced to get semantic search results. Google here acts as an intelligent person by using artificial intelligence. Publicly accepted results were ranked top here. The main defect in this update was google will give results based on the feedback of users, whether it is correct or not. Advanced version of humming bird update was Rankbrain update, released in 2015.

 

Mobilegeddon Update

 

In 2015, an update called Mobilegeddon was introduced. It was used for the boosting mobile friendly websites. Thus non mobile friendly sites were removed from the results. This forced websites to make adjustments according to mobile responsive design.

Neena Johny