Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

SEO Specialist

Senior SEO Project Manager at Ebrandz, India
in reference to:
"Senior SEO Project Manager at Ebrandz"
- Monika Moorjani - LinkedIn (view on Google Sidewiki

Friday, April 9, 2010

Google URL Shortener

Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:

* Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
* Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
* Speed – fast resolution of short URLs

Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.

The Google privacy policy applies to the Google URL Shortener. Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Twitter

Branding is extremely important, in SEO and in social media. If you’re using Twitter as a business tool to reach out to more potential customers and increase your traffic, then you absolutely need to have a strong brand presence. Rather than using the same Twitter account to target various audiences, set up multiple identities and use them to cater to specific audiences. For example, don’t use the same account to tweet about both SEO and gardening. It just doesn’t work. Brand yourself and stand for something. Twitter search will eventually give more weight in the search results to Twitter users who talk mainly about the specific niche being searched for.

Being focused will also help you to stay consistent with your marketing message and get the attention of your target audience. This in turn will increase the chances of people following you and paying more attention to what you have to offer (more on this in the next section) – which means you get better rankings in Twitter search.

It also helps to customize your Twitter profile to be consistent with your brand image. Use a catchy background with all of your contact information and write a descriptive bio that includes your name, location, and website.

301 redirects

Besides simply moving a page from one location on your site to another, 301 redirects have a number of important uses, including:

* Moving your site to a new domain name.

* Cleaning up ugly dynamic URLs so that search engines can crawl them more easily (combined with a URL rewriting tool).

* Closing pages or entire sections of your site and making sure both your users and search engines don't run into link "dead-ends."

* Pointing your extra domain names or outdated sites at a single location to consolidate traffic and links.

* Prevent duplicate content problems when both the www and non-www version of your site are accessible.

* Prevent duplicate content problems when both the directory root (/) and index.html versions of a page are accessible.

B2B vs. B2C

Business-to-Business or B2B refers to the online buying and selling of products, services or information between companies. It often covers the entire supply chain management. Business-to-Consumer or B2C refers to the online selling of products, services or information by companies to consumers for their own use.








B2B vs. B2C
The basic difference between B2B and B2C is that in B2B the customers are companies where as in B2C the customers are individuals.
* B2B transactions are more complex as compared to B2C transactions.
* B2B transactions involve lot of negotiations over price, delivery and product specifications. B2C transactions, on the other hand, involve a specific product, price and mode of delivery.
* B2B transactions require integration with the other companies' systems. This is important for communication. B2C on the other hand does not require any integration with their customers.
* B2C transactions are mostly done through credit cards. B2B transaction on the other hand may require setting up an account with the company.
* B2B and B2C require different marketing strategies. B2C customers do online price comparisons between competing B2B sites for the best possible price.
* The sales process takes a longer time for B2B Company than for a B2C company.
* B2B websites sell big value items or services. Their products are specialised and specific. B2C websites sell small items and mostly one time sale. B2B websites involve a long-term business relationship, support services, upgrades and modifications.
* B2B purchases require evaluating multiple factors. They require much more research, thought and analysis before a purchase is made. The B2C purchase process, on the other hand is fairly simple. It mostly involves price comparisons between competitors before the purchase. This is a quick and easy job on the Internet.
* B2B websites provide lot more information as compared to B2C websites. They require presentation of information in a concise and detailed format. The client may need concise information to know about the products and then detailed information to decide on purchasing it.
* Good content is the prerequisite for the success of both B2B and B2C sites. Content on a B2B site is more technical in nature while content on a B2C site is more general and in a layman's language.
* B2C website users mostly use the product themselves. They alone complete the entire buying process on the site. The buying process on a B2B site may involve different people or departments at different stages of the buying process. So, a B2B site has to provide information that caters to people with varying needs and requirements. That is why B2B websites should be designed with usability in mind.
* One major difference between B2B and B2C websites is that most B2C websites do not have as shopping cart. This is because product and services sold on a B2B website require more presale discussion, price negotiation and customisation of the product before a sale is executed.
* B2C websites are more directly responsible for sales as compared to B2B websites. That is why B2C websites are more specific about e-commerce rules and practices.

How to Track Conversion Rates in Google Analytics

How to Track Conversion Rates in Google Analytics

(Page 1 of 4 )

If you use Google Analytics and you're trying to increase the conversions on your website, keep reading. This article will show you how to set up conversion tracking using this service, which is a good first step.

A site's conversion rate is defined as the number of successful transactions divided by the number of total unique visitors. A "successful transaction" is a broad measurement; for an e-commerce website, this could mean a sale, so the conversion rate formula would be the number of sales divided by the total number of unique visitors.

Any webmaster can measure the conversion rate of their website using Google Analytics. This comprises an advanced use of Google Analytics, and is not common to the majority of Google Analytics users.

If you have a clearly defined "successful transaction" in your website, whether it is the number of downloads, number of sales, number of sign-ups, etc. then this article will help you set up Google Analytics to measure your website's conversion rate.

Requirements for setting up conversion rate measurement

Before you can use Google Analytics to measure your site's conversion rate, you need to meet a couple of important requirements. First, you need to have a clear transaction funnel that defines "success." This means that you can identify all possibilities in the flow of transaction from the moment a visitor enters your website all the way down to concluding a "successful transaction."

For example, if you define "successful transaction" as those visitors that submit the contact form, then a random sample of successful paths could include:

  • First possible path: Home page -> Contact form -> Success page (user lands on the home page, then goes to the contact form, fills it in, submits it, and is presented with a success page).

  • Second possible path: Home page -> Page X -> Contact form -> Success page (user lands on the home page, visits Page X, then goes to the contact form to submit an inquiry).

  • Third possible path: Contact form -> Success page (user lands directly on the contact form, maybe coming from search engines or direct traffic).


Now, which you do think defines the "true" successful path of your visitors to complete conversion? Well, it depends on your plan. If you need to measure the quality of your home page content (like how convincing/trustworthy the content is to visitors), then you can require visitors to read/pass the home page first, before submitting any inquiries to you via contact form. In that case, if they land on page x -> contact form -> success page, then it's not considered a true conversion, since it fails to pass by the home page. Your true conversion path in this case should be home page -> contact form -> success page.

The good thing is that Google Analytics can be set up to define the necessary steps that distinguish a "true conversion." What you will need to do, however, is sit down and decide which route you want to define as a true path to visitor conversion in your own website.

The second thing you will need to measure conversions with Google Analytics is a Google account. In fact, if you do not have a Google account, you need to have one before you can use Google Analytics.

The third thing you will need is a success URL that is different from the rest of the URLs on your site. This is a tricky but important requirement. The success URL needs to be entirely different from the URLs in the previous steps. For example, the one in step three will work fine:

Step 1: www.somewebsite.com/

Step 2: www.somewebsite.com/contact.php

Step 3 (success URL): www.somewebsite.com/contact.php?x=success

Or this one is also okay:

Step 1: www.otherwebsiteexample.com

Step 2: www.otherwebsiteexample.com/inquiry

Step 3 (success URL): www.otherwebsiteexample.com/success

But this one is not recommended, as this requires a pretty complex setup:

Step 1: www.somewebsite.com

Step 2: www.somewebsite.com/contactform

Step 3: www.somewebsite.com/contactform#success

All of the above URLs with anchors are not okay, as Google treats them as the same page and not an entirely different URL.

Finally, you will need embedded Google Analytics code. Google cannot track the conversion rate on pages which do not have the embedded Google Analytics code. So if you have a website with Google Analytics installed, it is important to make sure that there is Google Analytics code embedded on pages on which you will need to track conversion.