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Honeymoon destinations in south india |places in south india




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Google Analytics - A Beginner’s Guide SoftLoom IT Solutions

Google Analytics - A Beginner’s Guide SoftLoom IT Solutions

Analyzing the traffic to one's website is essential in order to understand the success of that website. This post is almost covers the topic Google Analytics and is believed to be helpful to the readers.

Ani Mol Baby

Google Analytics - A Quick Glance

Due to an easy access to the internet, the virtual world is now taking over. With e-commerce and e-marketing at its peaks, the world business is now becoming an integral part of this virtual world. This situation clearly shows the importance of having a successful website. The success of a website can be determined by monitoring its traffic (web traffic). Google Analytics is a service provided by Google in order to monitor a web site’s traffic.

Types of web traffic

1) Direct traffic:

When a user visits a web site by specifying its explicit URL then, he is a direct visitor and such a traffic to that web site is a direct traffic.

A web site gets a good amount of direct traffic after a very large number of repeated page visite or it should have a very popular brand name.

2) Organic traffic:

This type of web traffic is generated when a website is being visited by a user after querying the search engine using keywords of his interest.

One way to increase organic traffic to  a web site is through SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is about optimizing a web site or web page thus making it more crawler friendly. Optimizing one's own website is known by the term on-page optimization.

3) Referral traffic:

In this type of web traffic people who find your site through external links. For example, you publish a blog post which has a link to your web site and if someone clicks on it and decides to follow that link, then that person is considered to be a referral visitor.

4) Social traffic:

Gaining visitors through various social medias such as facebook, twitter, blog posts, etc.

To add Google Analytics to your site

Go to The URL google.com/analytics.Login or sign up (if new user). Provide the necessary details as requested and then get the tracking code.

A unique tracking code will be provided along with an HTML code. There are two methods to add this tracking code in order to add your site or blog to Google Analytics. They are:

1) Copy the Id provided and paste it in the area where Google Analytics Id is requested in the settings portion of your blog.

2) Copy the HTML code and paste it before closing the head tag i.e. before </head>.

Save the settings. You can now monitor your website's traffic. This would enable you to know the number of visitors, their locations, how did they reach your website and what were they looking for. All these information is critical in determining the success of your website. 

Image Courtesy:

1) help.tune.com

2) www.bou.org.uk 

Ani Mol Baby

 

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization in simple words refers to some small and simple changes that you can make on your website, web page or post. Making these simple changes would in turn help them rank higher on various search engine’s results page enabling greater traffic.

On-Page Optimization Techniques

On-page optimization can be brought about by following these few optimization techniques. A better result can be achieved by keeping in mind their simple dos and don’ts while optimizing your web site, web page or post.

1) Page Title:

The title tells both the users and the crawlers what the content of the page is all about. Therefore, great care should be taken in selecting a meaningful and short title. Short, because in the Google’s search results page, the titles of matched results displayed is not based on the number of characters or keywords, but by the pixel size. This pixel size is 512 which means, your title could have almost 55 – 60 characters.

Key points to remember:

The title selected should have at least three words.

• It should have a minimum of 40 characters.
• It should not contain any grammatical errors or spelling mistakes.
• It should be meaningful i.e. the title chosen should have a relation with the content.
• It should not be just the keyword emphasized. But, try and bring the keyword first.
• Minimize the usage of special symbols. If necessary, then replace them with their equivalent HTML code.

2) Meta description:

Try to provide a description that would summarize the content. Including the relevant keywords work better. But, it should be a meaningful one which has a relation with the title. The maximum number of characters a meta description can have is:

• Between 155 and 160 for a website and
• Between 154 and 155 for a blog

If no meta description is provided or if the provided one is unacceptable, then Google would either select the first line of the content or any other part of the content (according to its convenience) as the meta description.

Limit the use of special symbols as they make crawling difficult. If necessary, replace them with their equivalent HTML code in the meta tag.

3) Use simple and easy to understand URL’s:

Providing a simple and easy to understand URL will help users in memorizing them and would prove easier for the Googlebots to crawl through. Also, including the relevant keyword within the URL seem to work better.

4) Use of heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc.):

The heading tags help to provide a presentable structure to the contents of the page. The different heading tags have various sizes, starting with <h1> the biggest one in size and the most important one. The last one is <h6> which is the least important.

Key points to remember:

• The <h1> heading tag represents the main title. It should have at least three words and can have a maximum of eight words. Including the keyword would prove to be effective.
• It is best to have a single <h1> heading tag as multiple <h1> tags would generate a confusion to the crawler  in deciding which one is the most accurate one.
• The <h2> heading tag of a page would be displayed as the <h1> heading tag by Google if no specific <h1> tag has been provided.

5) Keyword density:

The appearance of keyword in the content of the page is an important factor. But, their presence in the page in an uncontrolled manner would put your page in harm’s way. The term keyword density is related with the number of times the keyword appears in the content. The best practice is to limit it to roughly 2 – 5%.

Some useful tips:

• Try to place the focusing keyword near a ‘,’ or ‘.’. Crawlers similar to users, pause when it encounters a ‘,’ or ‘.’. Thus, giving a stressing effect which creates an impression that the word before was of importance.
• Placing the keywords specified in the title throughout the content in a shuffled manner also works.

6) Usage of anchor text:

Anchor text is the clickable text which can be seen to the user. This text acts as a reference to the user but is a recommendation to the crawlers. An anchor text is created by placing the desired text inside the anchor tag, <a href=”...”></a>.

7) Usage of images:

Adding images to the content makes it more presentable and would have a pleasing effect on the users. Every image can have a distinct file name and an ‘alt’ attribute. The ‘alt’ attribute is used to specify an alternate text for the image.

If the image was taken from another website for your posts, then specifying it under image courtesy towards the end of the post is a good practice.

The above mentioned techniques can make your web sites, web pages or posts more crawler friendly thus increasing traffic and so giving it a chance to be ranked higher in the search engine’s results page. So, spending time in optimizing them would prove worth the effort.

An introduction to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has been provided in my previous post, SEO - A Brief Introduction. Feel free to leave your valuable suggestions and opinions.

Image Courtesy:
1) www.skydreamconsulting.com
2) seologist.in
3) conversionchamp.com 

Ani Mol Baby 

SEO - A Brief Introduction

The need for optimizing websites was found to be essential since the Google's crawlers (or spiders or Googlebot) could not effectively crawl majority of websites or web pages. Thus Google could not prove their efficiency in satisfying the user’s information requirements or queries. The main aim of optimizing a web site is to make it simple so that search engines can easily crawl through them, cache them and finally index them. The major step taken by Google was to publish their certain optimization techniques or guidelines among the webmasters. This decision also proved to be the cornerstone in Google’s success afterwards.

SEO - Major Techniques and Types

There are mainly two techniques of optimization on web pages. They are on-page optimization and off-page optimization. In on-page optimization the web master optimizes his own website. Off-page optimization is done through other websites using promotions through social medias, etc. 

There are two major SEO types. They are white hat SEO (Using pure ethical practices) and black hat SEO (Using non-ethical practices). Some claim to be using an intermediate technique called grey hat SEO. The optimization done using white hat SEO provides long life effective results and the optimization done using black hat SEO provides quicker results. But, these results are short lived.

 A Peek into Major Google Updations

In earlier days Google was content based- in which the web site containing the most number of keywords from the query in their content was listed first. Later on, they changed into link specific- in which the website having maximum links was listed first. Google came up with many updates in their algorithm afterwards in order to maintain the constant trust from the user side. From link specific they updated to be quality link specific, which dealt with Google page ranks. 

Then came  Google AdWords which was also a source for their income. 

Google AdSense was a method through which the users could earn money.

Google Panda updation or Farmer updation was to check for and to remove websites or pages of poor quality (content spamming), i.e., those having spelling mistakes, copied contents, irrelevant contents, etc. 

In Pogo sticking, wherein a website ranks highly but fails to satisfy the requirements based on the user's query. Google shifts the site for which the user has shown a negative feedback to a lower level. Social media signals was another updation which promoted the use of social media to decide the position of listing a website. 



The Penguin updation of Google was aimed at keeping a check on link spamming.Other updations include Hummingbird, Pigeon, etc.

With all these powerful ongoing updations Google has made a drastic change that has helped it to emerge as the best search engine today. 

Image Courtesy: 
1) Wikipedia
2) www.ubergizmo.com
3) www.rivaliq.com
4) www.linqia.com

Ani Mol Baby