I’ve been working in the SEO industry for quite a while now and feel that using analytics really helps you to better understand your site, the users coming in to your site and their behavior when they are actually navigating through the pages. In some ways you can say that analytics is a mirror for a site and goes a long way to help you understand site usability.

Not long ago there was Urchin that provided all the statistics, although I must confess that it was all numbers in there and sometimes you wouldn’t blame a person if he/she were to zone out after looking at all those numbers.

Then in mid 2007 Google came up with the new and improved version of Google Analytics and the world of web analytics completely changed. You had user friendly graphs, pie-charts, maps, statistics and the works, all free of cost. All you had to do was to upload a simple code on the pages of your site and you were ready to go.
For Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I feel that Google Analytics is both advantageous and disadvantageous. Let’s talk about a few advantages first.
1. Distribution of Traffic
I love the way Google uses a pie chart to show a breakup of the major traffic sources. You get to know exactly how many visitors enter your site directly (typing the domain name in the browser) vis-à-vis organic search results, paid search results (if you run a PPC campaign), referrals and other sources.
2. Keyword Analytics
This, I feel is by far the most SEO friendly data as it gives you all the information as to which keywords people are using to enter your site on search engines. In short it lets you peek into the mind of your visitors and potential customers. You can get detailed reports on which keywords are driving the organic search traffic to your site and which are not. You can also get an idea as to which PPC keywords work for you and can be targeted for SEO. It also helps in a major way to chalk out a list of negative keywords for your site and get ideas for fresh content and products.
3. Map Overlay
This is the feature I like the most interactive as it shows a geographical distribution of the traffic coming in to the site on a world map. It helps you to know about the countries and cities that generate the most traffic.

Now a few disadvantages for the SEO campaign of the site.
1. JavaScript Code
Everyone who’s anyone in the SEO business is familiar that Google Analytics uses a JavaScript code. Moreover it is a common known fact that JavaScript is not search engine friendly and may act as spider stopper for Search Engine Spiders and Bots.
2. Dependency on Google
By using Google Analytics you solely rely on Google for all your data. Moreover there is no such facility as yet for archiving this data in a proper format. You are stuck if Google decides to change the reporting system one fine day and you have absolutely no control over it.

In short, every one of us is solely on Google’s mercy and has to abide by its rules, which I think is not fair at times.

Unlike the popular belief that only SEO and PPC campaigns help increase the conversion rate on a website, I think Website Usability is also an important factor. Both website usability and SEO/SEM are iterative processes, meaning that methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a work in progress.
“On the Web, findability is a huge challenge. Can your users find your website? If they do, Can they find their way around your website? And, can they find your products and services despite your website? When you start asking these sorts of questions, it becomes obvious there’s no bright line separating usability, findability, information architecture, and SEO.” said Peter Morville, President of Semantic Studios.

There are various elements that can annoy your users :
1. Illegible Fonts: Small fonts or fonts that don’t match the look of your site.
2. Links & Navigation: The links that have been visited by the user should be displayed in a different color to avoid confusing the user. For sites with a lot of links, navigation becomes easier when the user can distinguish between the visited and the unvisited links.
3.Violating design conventions: Inconsistency is another major issue. All the pages on the site should maintain a flow. The pages should have some sort of consistency and not look like different websites altogether. e.g. the colors of the pages, the positions of certain links like the “sign-out” button etc..
4. Product differentiation & comparison: Emphasize what your site offers that’s of value to users and how your services differ from those of key competitors
5. Make the site’s purpose clear: Include a one-sentence tag line – Include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does.
6. Help users find what they need: clear search box
7. Other Errors: Typos, bugs in the script, corrupted data and linkrot(unused links)

At the heart of iterative design is the objective observation of interaction between users and an interface: not focus groups, not web analytics, and not an SEO professional’s personal opinion about website usability.

I researched about the pros and cons of absolute and relative internal linking and this is what I have understood from whatever I have read:

From an SEO perspective, it does not really matter whether we use absolute or relative internal links. A search engine’s visibility or the ranking for a page is not affected by an internal link showing the complete target path, say “www.domain.com/page.html” or simply a relative path, say “/page.html”. The reason for this being that search engines convert relative links into absolute links automatically.

However , I shall enlist a few advantages of using either of the two options:

Points In Favor Of Absolute Internal Linking

- Suppose an external page links to your website using “domain.com” instead of “www.domain.com”. In that case, there is the possibility of a spider following that link and then indexing pages of the website as “domain.com/page.html” instead of “www.domain.com/page.html”. Now, for some reason if the search engine decides that it indexes your pages for “domain.com” and not with “www.domain.com”, in that case, you could suddenly lose rankings for all the keywords for “www.domain.com”. This case is highly circumstantial and chances of the search engines behaving in the way described above is almost negligible.

- Another circumstantial case is when someone downloads a copy of your entire website content and puts it up on his/her domain. If the person assumes that the internal linking is relative, he/she will not bother to change the internal link target paths, whereas if the internal links are absolute links, they shall still be linking to pages on your website and using webstats, you can actually get to know whether your content is being copied or not.

- A very valid point in favor of absolute links is when one is trying to optimize a PDF file. Generally, people download a PDF file onto their desktop and also e-mail them. It is very important to know that spiders crawl links in a PDF file too. Now, suppose you have to downloaded a PDF file onto your desktop. If the internal link in the content is relative, then the page shall not be loaded. Of course, spiders do not download PDF files but still, using relative internal linking hampers the usability factor in this case.

Points In Favor Of Relative Internal Linking

- There is only one critical point in favor of relative internal links, better usability. A shorter code means lesser download time and the page being displayed faster. Target pages from absolute links take more time to load and hence, from a usability point of view, it is a huge disadvantage. Spiders are not affected by download times but humans are. If a page takes too long to download, you’ll simply hit the cancel button and this can be a major problem for conversions.

Overall, it is pretty obvious that relative internal linking would be the preferred option for an SEO campaign because of its usability advantage.

Tring Tring Tring…There goes my mobile phone again. Mobile phones have become a way of life these days; you can’t survive without them even for a minute. This world of mobile communication and the concept of getting data on your finger tips has just got better.
Imagine, you travel to a relatively unknown place and want some local information and you don’t have the luxury of the internet. In this case how cool it would be if a service existed which allowed you to call in, give your search query and have the results sent to your mobile via an SMS. These kinds of services do operate in certain cities only for the local public, but none of the major search engines were involved in these services until now. But then times are changing fast when it comes to technology.
Google has recently launched a pilot phone search service which makes information of any local business, movie timings, flight updates and more accessible from any phone. Way to go!! That’s really awesome. The best part about it is its free. That’s like getting information anytime, anywhere free of cost. Google offers you information either via SMS or it will be read out you.
Personally, I think that this will work and can’t wait for this service to be launched in full scale. Local Phone Search companies beware, here comes Google. Knowing Google once it successfully tests out the feasibility of this campaign a paid search advertising model is not far.

When we hear the word “Backlinks”, the first thing that comes to our mind is numbers. This site has 100 backlinks, so and so site has 1000 backlinks and so on. But now the numbers game is slowly dying, as building quality backlinks has become much more important than building too many links. Quality and relevant backlinks are two very important considerations in Search Engine Optimization. A backlink from a site that has quality content as well as content related to the theme of your website is much better than a backlink from a inadequately optimized or irrelevant website.

It is way better to get trusted backlinks. Finding sites that have “Real Backlinks” and getting your links on real pages is really cool and winning trust can be done. The only issue here is, it takes a long time to get your links on real pages e.g. the home page of relevant and high PR websites. But at the end of the day, it is worth getting these trusted links than just increasing the volume of links crazily from irrelevant and poorly optimized sites.

Quality backlinks are a must and numbers are not that important anymore. This is the reason why a site might rank high inspite of having a few backlinks.

Was checking out the new ‘Insights’ tool by Google. I started out with analysing the statistics for my favourite keyword, “Search Engine Optimization“. The results were really surprising. According to the tool, the ‘Regional Interest’ for this keyword is highest for India, followed by Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, and then the United States.

Also, the ‘Interest over Time’ shows that the interest (searches) for this keyword has reduced since 2004. It shows that the ‘Interest’ was at its peak in mid 2004; after which there has been a drop in the interest for the keyword.

Do I conclude from this data that the keyword ‘Search Engine Optimization’ is searched the most in India? The implications of this conclusion can be quite misleading. Do I conclude that over the past few years, SEO has been losing its importance? The actual industry scenario paints a different picture for this inference as well.

Guess it really takes an insight to draw coherent conclusions on the basis of available data and its practicality.

Google Product Search formerly known as Froogle is in beta testing phase. Its interface provides a text box to enter the product you are looking for and list the vendors selling that particular product along with other attributes such as the color, brand, description and price. Currently it is available only for few countries mainly US and UK. Again like in SEO it makes sense if the product listing appears on first three pages. To get ranked on first three pages the data feed needs to be optimized. We need to implement all the SEO friendly modifications so as to rank higher.

Now, the question is- ‘Does the optimized Google data feed increase the organic search engine traffic?’  I would say Yes to greater extent it helps improve your traffic. Once for a particular keyword your results start showing on search engines it boosts your traffic.

For E.g. On Google.co.uk for Widefitshoes.co.uk one of the primary keyword “mens wide shoes” ranks #1 for shopping results and is followed by SEO result.

Data feed - Mens wide shoes

Change is the flavor of the season for the observant eyes in SEO.

Recent scrutiny shows that Google’s organic search results have been changing pretty frequently. Moreover these changes are not little ones but HUGE jumps! Websites that have enjoyed positions 1 and 2 for several years are seeing their positions challenged.

And yet Google’s market share in search continues to increase. A recent report showed Google has captured around 75% of the market share in search. Assuming these statistics are correct then this is a really big figure!
The only conclusion is that Google is getting much faster and way smarter.  From hyper-indexing of blogs within minutes of posting to creating their own portal for user-generated information, they are inching closer to monopolizing the data on the World Wide Web. I can only offer guesstimates as to how and why this is happening.

Once upon a time Google adjusted the entire index at the same time.  It was known in inner circles as the ‘Google Dance’ and SEO’s world over watched it VERY closely. After a while the ‘dance’ changed and began to toggle the rankings and rotate geographical areas unexpectedly before settling within a few days. The PageRank became only one of the many parameters involved in the overall ranking process.

There has been a barrage of information or mini-“insights” on their search techniques on the Google Official Blog. Considering all of these it is clear- Google is changing! Google’s claim to fame is SEARCH. They will always need to stay ahead of the curve in this field and that’s exactly what we’re seeing!

The transition from student to professional life is an enormous one. A huge chasm has to be crossed before you can emerge as a working professional. The first job is the montessori school of your career where you learn the basics of your trade, professionalism, office etiquette etc.

Well, Search Engine Optimization turns out to be the trade I’ve opted for and Convonix Inc. my place of work! Convonix is one of the high end and bigger Internet Marketing firms in India with a lot of services like SEO, PPC, and Reputation Management etc under its umbrella.

What makes this place great to work in is first and foremost its friendly fun atmosphere! The underlying basic is that each one is professional to the core and the primary mantra everyone abides by is- “Never miss a deadline”.

The learning here each day is immeasurable. The key is the convonite policies of encouraging research, information sharing and inclusion. All research, findings, methodology and successes are transparent within the company. Another rule which I personally benefit greatly from is ASK QUESTIONS! Nothing is off limits and there is always someone ready and willing to answer your questions and offer guidance. Each fresher here has been outfitted with the essential basics and then been given a free rein to work and the freedom to develop their own style.

I look forward to a long happy and satisfying time here at Convonix Inc.