convonix---seo-services---blogs

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 08:00:05 +0100

There are nearly 3 billion people using the internet. People use search engines like Google, YAHOO! And Bing to find out more about a certain thing, find out information or for a variety of other reasons. When a person queries a search engine with a word or a phrase, the search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a specialist in web pages, images, information and other types of files.

So what exactly is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO as its more commonly called is quite simple to understand. SEO helps a website or a page of a website to rank higher than its current rank on search engine result pages. As a rule of thumb, the higher a page is ranked on a results page, the more visitors it will receive from the users of that particular search engine. SEO is an important domain of internet marketing. Taking into account the working of a search engine, the most common keywords for which users query, and also which search engine is used more by users, SEO can be quite an influential tool in the internet marketing and e-commerce domain.

SEO may involve making changes to a website’s content, HTML and associate coding to increase relevance to the target keywords and phrases. These changes can be small and when seen individually, may not represent a lot at first glance. However, the sum of all these changes when brought together can have a hugely positive effect on the rankings of the website and on your site's user experience and performance in organic search results.

The workings of SEO

Indexing:

Search engines use crawlers to see what content is present on a page. . Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that are not discoverable by automatically following links. Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines.

Preventing Indexing of Certain Pages:

There are pages on a website which the owners or the webmasters can instruct a search engine not to crawl. They can instruct search engine spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots. When a spider visits a website, the robots.txt is the first file crawled. This file is then parsed and will provide instructions to the crawler as to which pages to not crawl.

Important aspects to know:

Since the initial stages of SEO, various techniques have been used to increase the rankings of web pages. Linking pages of the website to provide more links to the more important pages may improve its visibility. Fresh original content that contains widely used keyword phrases can also result in growth in traffic. Content when updated leads to engines crawling back to give additional weight to the page and this can push the rankings up. One of the most important things is to add relevant and useful keywords to the page’s meta data which includes meta description and title tag. Pages which can be accesses using multiple URL’s can be normalized using the canonical tag or 301 redirect.

Online Brand Monitoring - Basics - Purpose and Needs

Fri, 29 Nov 2013 13:05:17 +0100

What exactly is brand monitoring?

The internet is vast. People post all sorts of things on the internet. In addition, the advent of social media has made the internet bigger than ever. It is the best means of communicating and reaching out to people. Imagine this, before the internet existed, businesses didn’t really know what customers thought of them unless they used focus groups or saw a drop in sales. Now, consumers are everyone what they think of a business, good or bad. The customer’s viewpoint is readily available. What a brand needs to do is find out where exactly they’ve been mentioned, understand it and respond. This is online brand monitoring in a nutshell.

Why do we need to do it?

Brand monitoring helps in many ways. It is useful in not only understanding customer feedback and suggestions but can also be used as a great opportunity to focus in on areas where you, as a brand can build up a good reputation. You get to know the overall sentiment towards a brand; where it’s doing a good job and where it’s not. Apart from actually knowing who your customer base is, you can also take new product or service ideas from the. This kind of real-time feedback is another huge plus point. Many people worry about negative things about their brand online. However, knowing them helps you build and protect your online reputation.

How to monitor a brand?
Monitoring is about responding. A comment, question, query, complain, etc., you can reach out and reassure your customers that you’re there to solve any problem they may face. With the advent of social media and an increase in the number of blogs, finding a way to stay on top of this is a must.

There are many tools present to help you monitor a brand online

Trackur is a comprehensive social media monitoring tool that you can use to monitor your brand mentions across Twitter, Facebook, and other top social networks. Viralheat Social Sentiment helps you see whether mentions of your brand on social media are mostly positive, negative, or neutral. Good old Google Alerts lets you save searches for your brand and get notifications via email or RSS when new results are found on Google. Klout is a website that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social influence via the ‘Klout Score’, which is a numerical value between 1 and 100. In determining the user score, Klout measures the size of a user’s social media network and correlates the content created to measure how other users interact with that content.

Monitoring on social networks:

Twitter:

To keep track of mentions on Twitter, it’s imperative to pay attention to hashtags (#), ‘@ replies’ and mentions. HootSuite allows us to set up streams of Twitter searches for your brand name and keywords related to your brand. Convonix has proprietary software called ‘Iristrack’ used to track Twitter mentions. It helps us know when, where and what is being talked about your brand online. It provides you with an easy visualization of the platforms where your brand has been mentioned.

Facebook:

People can like or comment on a post and can even start a conversation here. We need to get involved in these conversations along with those fans start. Irrespective of how they mention your brand, it is important to respond. Using Iristrack, Convonix has the ability to track Facebook posts. It helps us in understanding the general sentiment towards a brand online and provides you with an easy visualization of the platforms where your brand has been mentioned.

Monitoring Online Searches:

Google Alerts are a great way to keep tabs on any mention of our brand online. Some conversations aren’t happening on traditional social networks. They’re happening on blogs, websites, and in news stories. Google Alert is an excellent way to keep a close eye on any mention online. It is highly relevant because many places where a brand is mentioned aren’t really on any social networks, but on news websites, online media and blogs. Google Alerts let us set the obvious things, such as our brand name and product names, and then specify how and when we want the results to arrive. They can be sent to our inbox, or can be sent to an RSS reader.

Blogs:

Responding to blogs or comments on blogs is hugely important. Many blogs have become popular with people looking to seek support or vent about a particular product. With a rise in the number of blog comments, blogging software that alerts us about each new comment mentioning our brand is a must.

Summary:

A brand’s presence online is very important and understanding the sentiment towards a brand is vital. Apart from marketing your products and services, it is one of the most important things a brand can do. This is important regardless of whether you are experiencing a crisis or receiving any negative attention from media outlets. Hence, monitoring a brand online is a great way to understanding its standing and identifying areas where improvement is necessary.

A Pragmatic Approach Towards Google Analytics

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:03:08 +0100

Ranking is not the only yardstick that measures your SEO performance. Webmasters often wonder if there is a single indicator can manifest their performance. While rankings are a key metric to assess your working, they pose certain limitations that make it necessary to take into consideration the bigger picture in Web Analytics.

Why it is not all about high rankings?

Keywords with not many searches have higher chances of ranking while they may not be capable of indicating the site‘s growth. Besides, the search results might change from person to person depending upon the person’s searches i.e. web history, bookmark history, geographic locations, etc. High Google rankings can also be of no use if they do not pull in enquiries. In addition, when you have a limited set of keywords, there are high chances of your traffic remaining low.

Metrics you must consider:

Non branded traffic- When you detach the traffic from the keywords that cater to your company, product name, you will be availed of the juncture of real keyword based traffic from the time you have started.

Search engine propelled traffic percentage: You need to ascertain your search engine based traffic by excluding the cost involved in advertising including Google Adwords. Keeping a track of this will enable you to have a grip over the total cost. When your search engine based traffic percentage increases over time, there are reasons for you to cheer as you can cut down on your advertising cost over time.

User engagement and bounce rates: What many may not know is that high user interactions will have a direct impact on one’s ranking. Hence, one must also acknowledge the level of engagement in the website. High bounce rate is clearly a bad sign and has to be taken into consideration regularly with the objective of reducing them.

Goal Conversions: Fix some business goals. It is obvious the success of every business is directly related to the company’s profits. Hence, it is necessary to compare your revenues and set a target. Incase you are not achieving the same; it is time to modify your strategies.

It is necessary for every business to set up a Google Analytics account in order to have a clear idea about your performance in every aspect. Website analytics will also highlight your strength and weakness giving more scope for improvisation. The embedded javascript on all the pages of your site will give you an overview of visitors, traffic sources, goal conversions, and content quality.

Summary: Webmasters must not merely reckon on ranks and have a broad approach towards Google Analytics. They must consider other metrics in web analytics including non-branded traffic, traffic propelled by search engines, user engagement level in the site, goal conversions, etc.

Search Media Marketing: The “Like” Business

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:05:58 +0100

Social media platforms are emerging as the latest marketing tools for brands. May it be a local restaurant, a medium sized company or a MNC, being on Facebook is becoming important so as to connect with their target audience. The portion of Facebook marketing is surely more in comparison in planning and implementation for social media marketing strategy due to its specific targeted reach to the audience.

Facebook has been a driving tool more than Twitter and Youtube because of the millions of log-ins each hour. The marketing ecosystem of Facebook which is comprised of brands creating their page is easy to manage and track. Gathering a huge active Facebook fan following is the dream of many upcoming brands today.

How will it help?

The key for successful search media marketing campaigns is to learn what the audience is looking and reaching their screens even before they ask for it. In Facebook, it becomes important to know when most of the target audience is active and what topics are currently being “shared” or “liked”. To increase the user engagement on Facebook , marketers need to know which is the best time to post their content on the page. After posting it, the next possible thing is to engage users by reverting to their comments. This page can become the sole medium of communication between the brand-owners and the brand-users.

Posting content once or twice in day brings higher user engagement according to a study. Facebook posts gather more visibility if they are short, crisp and enticing. Posting lengthy content doesn’t get much attention as no one like to click “See more” and read the whole post. Another way to engage users is to ask questions, have regular contests, give away freebies and devise offers exclusively for Facebook fans. The posts which update fill in the blanks post (for e.g. I like _____ in monsoon) gather 9 times more comments than just pure marketing posts. The strategy is to have one out of every three posts to be product/service posts.

With Facebook, content still remains the king and it is important to keep the posts simple and short. Using jargons, complicated words and raw language tone will not gather the required insight. While facebook marketing is still in infancy stage, the strategy which works best is yet to be figured out. The strategy would be different for each page owner. But it is all governed by a single thing- “LIKE”.

Summary: Facebook marketing is the most opted way for marketers, in social media marketing nowadays. While the perfect strategy for the success of brand pages on Facebook is yet to be figured out, there are some points worth having a look to increase user engagement on Facebook.

Online Reputation for Businesses: Why and How?

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 13:56:27 +0100

Online Reputation Management has become a part and parcel of a company‘s process. ‘Word of mouth’ has always been a highly effective tool, be it spreading positivity or negativity. The feasibility and the liberty that the Internet renders has made it even more potential, making Online Reputation Management a must for a company. The reputation a company takes years to build can shatter with one negative tweet about it going viral. Every company wants the top 10 results for its search name to talk about its website, blog, other accounts, substantial information about it, and be free of criticisms and complaints. While this is not entirely possible, we list a few tips that may help you safeguard your company’s reputation effectively:

1. Site Optimization with Company’s Name

With this, you can persuade Google that your site is poised to be the ultimate authority in the name of your company. Hence, optimizing several pages of your site with your company’s name will serve the purpose. Besides promoting the website, this will work to your advantage, as it will reserve a place for itself in the top and push down negative content.

2. Expand your online presence

The entire phenomenon of Online Reputation Management revolves around being pro- active considering the fact that it will alleviate the damage, if any caused. It is unrealistic to dream about owning all the top 10 results for your name. Instead, you can expand your social presence and strengthen it to an extent that Google will weigh it over the negative results. Choose LinkedIn over other sites incase you are apprehensive about managing and monitoring a number of social networking sites and wish to limit the same to one.

3. Monitoring Search Results Continuously

Take the efforts to monitor search results for your name and do not restrict yourself to the first page. While many may not go beyond the first page, there are chances that the negative ones on page second or third that you never noticed top your first page suddenly. All that you have to do is Google your name .

4. Counteract Negative Content if any

While not everything about you (online information about you) may be in your control, you can always try contacting the webmaster of the particular site or the content creator. If that does not work out, you have the right to explain and defend yourself at the same place.

5. Keep an eye on your Wikipedia page

The top results (within the four atleast) for a company searches generally features its Wikipedia entry. This is why one must always monitor one’s Wikipedia page irrespective of the fact that you cannot control it fully, with the platform allowing anyone to edit it. However, you can always seek help from the Wiki community incase you find anything false or inappropriate.

Varied experts in the industry provide o nline reputation management services Safeguard your company’s reputation and keep it out of the harm’s way

Summary: Online Reputation Management is inevitable at today’s time when it does not take a minute for information to go online. Creating the website on your name, diversifying your online presence, Counteracting Negative comment and constantly monitoring the Wikipedia by an online reputation management service expert page will help.

About: This article is written by Convonix, a leading internet marketing firm, which specializes in providing online reputation management services. Being a dynamic field, online reputation management requires constant research and versatile strategies to achieve its goals.

How Your Competitor Can Be Your Best Tutor?

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:19:43 +0100

Your performance will always be judged based on your counterparts, be it any discipline. We all adhere to the rank system and Search Engine Optimization is no exception. It is vital to keep an eye on your competitor’s strategy and be aware of their whereabouts. Competitive analysis has often been deemed as a part and parcel of the company’s strategy.

A few tips for effective competitive analysis:

1. 1. Know your Competitors - Decide who your competitors are. It is necessary that they have to be your counterparts. In case you have opened a small online website that sells books, you cannot expect it to rank ahead of Infibeam or Flipkart. You must target sites in your niche and the ones that rank well for your key keywords. This analysis may give you a long list of competitors whom it is impossible to monitor. Your competitors can be the ones who appear topmost on Google’s search list when you search in Google with your target keywords.

2. Examine these sites - Once you are done with identifying them, you need to visit these sites and study them carefully. Have a proper understanding of their content (quantity and quality), the nature of URLs (static or dynamic), their design, their title tags, meta description and URL naming convention. You must also try to study their authority on the online turf other than just pondering on the organic SERP.

3. 3. Analyze the keywords that your competitor’s employ - SEO mechanism revolves around keywords. Know why the site ranks ahead or below you. Irrespective of belonging to the same niche, their keywords may differ from yours. This can help you grasp with a completely different perspective. Tools like Website keyword suggestion tool can be used to compare your and your competitor’s keywords, and determine their efficiency.

4. 4. Research on the backlinks they bank on - Backlinks act as a nucleus for SEO rankings. Probing into the study of their backlinks will help you understand their approach towards SEO. Incase you find them to be of good quality, you can contact them too. A few tools you can use to analyze the same include Backlink Summary and Backlink Anchor Text Analysis.

5. Consider Other SEO factors - Think beyond keyword analysis. Check their ranking on search engines other than Google like Yahoo and Bing. Also, check the number of indexed pages in the site.

6. Study their Social Media Presence - At present, presence in social media is indispensable. Start your ranking with social bookmarking. Check their status and updates on trending social bookmarking sites. If they are highly popular on social media sites and garnered good response, try to comprehend the reason for the same.

7. Peek into their PPC strategy - PPC is one of the most effective means to drive traffic to your site. With tools like Analyze Competition by Google, you can directly compare your PPC performance with your competitors.

While this may seem to be eating up a lot of your time and energy, it will definitely make you aware of a different perspective and approach. You can learn both from their correctness and from mistakes.

Summary: Your competitor is the best person from whom you can learn. Examining their sites and its feature and comparing it with your site will make you aware of your strength and weaknesses. Understanding their strategy with respect to PPC, keyword, backlinks will acquaint you with a few ideas and techniques that you could employ in your site.?yola-link-is-coming=true

About: This article is written by Convonix, a leading internet marketing firm and the first dedicated firm to offer SEO in India.Convonix regularly disseminates research content on the dynamic field of Search Engine Optimization.

Women More Social Media Savvy than Men

Wed, 30 May 2012 14:00:58 +0100

“The social media sites have succeeded in wooing more women than men,” says a new study by British Telecom. With the objective of understanding the preferences of internet users and the differences of usage between the two genders, this survey catered to around 2000 British individuals.

The study discovered that around 54% of women use social networking sites compared to 34% men. Similarly, there were more women than men who deemed to miss social media the most incase the internet dies. The results may not seem surprising considering the fact that women are more inquisitive by their nature, paving way for their inclination towards social media.

This study also debunked some common myths regarding the internet habits of the two sexes. It showed that nine percent of women played online games in comparison to eight percent of men. It also probed into the fact that men use content sharing websites like YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo more than women do, relatively. Around 13% of men are dependent on content sharing websites compared to 8% of women.

Women also claimed to use the internet to make them aware of the latest shopping deals while men asserted their use to enhance their learning and understanding of varied topics. Even sites like Pinterest fascinated more women than men.

Joohn Petter, Managing Director of BT’s Retail Consumer Division mentioned that this research has enabled him to comprehend the role of the internet in the life of many and strengthened his knowledge about social media marketing. It also puts into light how it influences both the gender differently making it apparent that Men and women are from different planets.

Summary:

According to a research by British Telecom, it has been observed that social media sites engage more women than men. While 54% women admitted using social media sites, the number of men using social networking sites was less accounting to 34%. This research also explored the differences between the two genders with respect to their internet usage.

Mistakes To Avoid while Optimizing the Website

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 12:06:24 +0100

It is increasingly difficult to get hold of one’s attention with innumerable websites accessible to one. We all have copious amount of information availed to us at a beck and call. To stand out in the crowd and catch the eye of a visitor is getting increasingly strenuous with the mounting number of websites and the cut throat competition they are experiencing. In this race to plead and persuade consumers, advertisers tend to focus on short term objectives ignoring the reasonability involved in digital advertising. Some horrendous mistakes to win the attention of consumers can take a toll on your website in the long run and they need to be avoided.

Keyword Stuffing:

While many consider keyword stuffing to be an unethical SEO technique , it is the most commonly used practice to be at the top of the listings. Overloading the content with keywords just to increase the number of occurrences of the keyword will not help. Search Engines no more are taken in with unnecessary use of keywords and have become smarter to identify and differentiate relevant use of keywords from stuffing. Piling up the title and meta- tags with keywords pointlessly can only reduce your website to rubble on the SERP. The reader is ought to get frustrated when he /she had to read the same word after every six or seven words.

Unprincipled Backlinks:

Backlinks surely serve as an effective medium to enhance the visibility of one’s website. However, immoral use of back links might not work to one’s benefit. Creating websites to support backlinks or work on the basis of link exchanges can lead to the websites getting banned also. The source of the backlinks has to be trustworthy to avoid any kind of discrepancy.

Low quality content:

Content is considered to be the king according to the latest updates that Google has been incorporating. Informative content with the right context is what may appeal to search engines. Content with no relevance simply filled with keywords can only lead to a downfall failing to strike a chord with the readers.

A consistent effort with sensible SEO strategies is what can actually uplift the rank of your website.

Facebook Tweaks Social Media Analytics Tool ‘Facebook Insights’

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:31:23 +0100

Web analytics tools are a great way to evaluate the performance of a website and the effectiveness of the various online marketing activities that go into making it more visible and popular. This includes marketing activities undertaken on search engines as well as social media. And while gauging the performance with respect to search is a relatively hassle-free task, the same does not hold true when it comes to assessing social media analytics. This is largely because many of the existing tools for measuring social media analytics are limited in their scope of measurement. While they determine factors like number of likes, share, comments and re-tweets, a more in-depth analysis has never really been made available.

But recently, social networking monolith Facebook has stepped up the ante by ringing in significant improvements in its analytics tool ‘Facebook Insights’ with an aim of providing a comprehensive look into a pages’ reach and other important metrics to support better Facebook marketing efforts. The most significant upgrade is that from now on web marketers will be able to gauge their ‘overall reach’ on Facebook. This can be seen through the newly introduced features like ‘Friends of Fans’ (a metric which outlines the number of prospective people you can reach out to if each of your fans were to share your content), ‘People Talking About This’ (a metric which determines the number of unique people who have shared your content over the week’s time) and ‘Weekly Total Reach’ (a metric which identifies the number of people who have seen the content your fans have shared on their respective pages over the week).

Another upgrade in Facebook’s social media analytics is the introduction of ‘Post Frequency’ graph which reflects the correlation between the frequency of posts and how it influences fans (with respect to ‘People Talking About This and Weekly Total Reach) in a line graph format. Similarly, a tabulated representation has been made available which accounts the level of engagement of posts. It displays every post that has been made on your page along with its reach, number of engaged users, number of people talking about this and its virility.

Such insights are definitely welcomed by marketers to understand better the reach and impact of their social engagement activities. The purpose of any web analytics is to estimate better steps for future efforts and this upgrade in Facebook Insights is one step closer to better measurement of social media activities.

Utilize Video SEO to Improve Search Engine Rankings

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 11:00:03 +0100

In the Internet Marketing era, video search engine optimization plays a very significant role. As a matter of fact, there are 53 percent more chances of people viewing videos than browsing traditional web pages. Videos generate more natural and organic traffic than any other type of content on the internet. People prefer viewing video clips and sharing them if they like it. In fact, several brands have gained popularity through videos which went viral on the internet.

Video SEO refers to a set of strategies designed to ensure that search engines find your video content, index it and display it on the search engine result page for a set of keywords. It deals with utilizing videos such as footages, screen captures, slide exhibits and PowerPoint presentations for optimization of your website. Inculcating appropriate Video search engine optimization techniques can help you improvise your brand image and generate more traffic than your competitor websites. Utilizing video SEO to benefit your website is not a tough task; the challenging task is creating a video which will create frenzy on the internet.

One thing that you should bear in mind when dealing with video SEO is that, search engines do not view the video for ranking it but rely on title and meta-data to determine the content of your video. Most of the video content is invisible to Google’s crawler. If you want your video content to be indexed by the crawler, it is wiser to submit it using a video sitemap. Also include a robots.txt file on all video pages for better optimization. Google allows you to submit meta-data but it does not influence your search engine ranking largely. You can improve your search engine ranking by submitting title tags which match the title of your video.

There are many other techniques to improve your website’s ranking using video SEO. Video search engine optimization is a winning strategy and you should certainly use it to your advantage over traditional SEO techniques.