Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’

Your website is a great marketing tool. No matter how good you have designed it through your web designing company you need a good support thereafter through an SEO company to turn your intelligently designed website into a conversion tool. Meta elements are the basic informational tags in the HEAD tag of webpage code. Among many meta elements widely known are title, description and keywords. In this post I’ll write about meta description.

In a search engine result page, after the ‘title’ tag, it is ‘meta description’ which catches eye of search engine users. Hence while doing search engine optimization for your website, it is important to make the best use of meta description tag. When done correctly, it will turn to be a very valuable on page optimization tool for increasing website conversion rate.

Meta description is the short snippet of content a search engine uses to display on its search engine results. It acts as the summary of the webpage content. Even though Meta description is not important enough to be a search engine ranking factor it has a great influence on gaining user click through.

The sole reason for search engine optimisation is to get visits for your website from genuine visitors to whom you have value to offer either through products or services or information. SEO service is hence an important tool to do web marketing. Since meta description is what visitors see on the search engine results when they make a query and as this will decide whether they will click on your URL or not, it is only wise not to neglect the meta description tag.

Best practices to write meta description

1. Meta description is like an ad for your website!

So write it like an ad copy! It should be compelling and descriptive about what your web page offers! You might have noticed that matched keywords in the description from the search query are shown in bold in the search engine result. This in fact increases click through rate and helps visitors to quickly glance through the results and decide which page is the most relevant. Recommended length of meta description is 150 – 160 characters.

2. Every page of your website is different.

So maintain the uniqueness of meta description for every page. Duplicate descriptions is a bad practice in SEO . If your website has automatically generated pages (dynamic pages) you can programmatically generate meta descriptions easily.

3. Meta description is nothing but summary of the content in your page.

So make sure it represents the real content on your web page and not as manipulative tool to stuff keywords. While writing them use well researched, targeted keywords to represent the website content.

4. Avoid quotes in your meta description

It is better not to use any quotes or alpha numeric characters. Especially when double quotes used Google truncates the rest of the description. If you should use quotes for emphasizing meaning use single quotes.

The bottom line is, since visitors get interested to look through any link only if it is compelling enough, always keep in mind to communicate the benefits of what you offer in your meta description copy.

For any internet business appropriate website design is the most important factor. Every page of the website should have a call to action element embedded which leads to its sales page. Following are the traits of a well equipped website. Pleasing to eyes design, descriptive content, well organized and easy to navigate pages and the website as a whole optimized for search engines.

It is very important to decide on the type of response you are expecting from the website before you even start to design the website. A successful internet marketing strategy is possible only when you have a website designed to get good response from your viewers and when the marketing strategy is in place. A great design goes hand in hand with content which is customer oriented and SEO friendly. Content is still the king of internet marketing strategy. While incorporating keyword rich website content focused keyword research lays the foundation to the SEO process.

Keyword selection process while providing SEO services addresses following factors:

1. Search volume

2. User’s intention

Expected Search Volume:

During keyword research phase it is natural to select those keywords which yield highest amount of visits. But there is no reason why we should neglect low traffic, long tail keywords! In fact there is a possibility that these low traffic yielding search terms may get more targeted traffic to the website. The significance of these long tail keywords is the conversion rate. It is been found that consumers who search with long term keywords (i.e. search phrase consisting of more than three words) have better understanding of the product or service which they are searching for.

Knowing user’s intention:

When a search query takes place intention of the enquirer is one among the following - Informational, navigational, transactional or multimedia. Informational intent queries are made to get some information about the topic of their interest. Navigational intent queries are made to find some specific website. Transactional intent queries are made to perform some action such as downloads, booking tickets etc. Multimedia intent queries are made to find some pictures or videos on the web. Knowledge of user intention is very important to create a list of most appropriate and beneficial keywords.

After we prepare a targeted keyword list next step is to segregate the keywords into different pages, priority wise. Assuming you have taken care of importance of WebPages in the website design, it is time to prepare a complete keyword strategy for the website’s search engine optimization.

Segregating Keywords into appropriate pages

Understanding the traffic driving factors for specific pages is important. Whether they are related to branding (such as about Us, Home, Branded product information pages) or Product catalog pages or maybe your blog, only relevant keywords should get implemented on a specific page. Existing content on the pages should match with the keywords being targeted. The proper mapping of combination of keywords is necessary and could be done by your SEO Company. Direction of all the subsequent on page and off page Search Engine Optimization tasks will be dependent on this stage!

Only a focused SEO Services will drive sustainable traffic, inquiries and brand awareness throughout the process.

Google’s CEO Larry Page recently announced Google+ stats: 10 Million Google+ users, over 1 billion items shared and received per day, also that G +1 button is being served 2.3 billion times per day. This is a remarkable milestone for Google+ project, though the usage and context of usage is more important and not the numbers which time will decide how users are going to adapt to the new wave.

Before starting any discussion about how plusone can have an impact on Search Engine Optimization, I would like to stress on a fact, it will not kill SEO services but rather will add one more level.

Now that Google’s +1 is also a social vote alongside Facebook’s like and Twitter’s tweet, it certainly has the impact on Search Engine Optimization. Google has in fact already included +1 tracker to its webmaster tools through +1 metrics.

For a URL, the +1’s are gathered from all the sources on the web. That includes Google’s organic search results, paid result, from +1 buttons installed on your website or blog and through Google+.

Note that, on paid results plus ones do not incur any cost on the advertiser, they are automatic. This would in fact open the doors to businesses to combine their SEO and PPC or Search engine marketing in general!

How does Google find your URL through G +1?

It is through 3 ways Google will find your URL.

1. First Step, Specific URL in the plusone button code

This by default does not have a link inside the tags. In that case Google will look for second step.

2. Second Step, Google looks for canonical link

[<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.xyz.com”/>]

Usually link given here is the website link and not the particular webpage or article link in the blog. And in some cases canonical code is altogether absent in WebPages. Even in this case Google looks for web page URL which is being showed in the address bar!

3. Third Step, Google looks for URL in the address bar of browser

Is G +1 anti-spam?

Google is anti- spam from the very beginning. If we take a look on all the popular social networks, they all are diluted from spammers and irrelevant content making the genuine publishers hard to rank higher on the organic results.

But in case of plusone button, giving a +1 is possible only when a user is logged into his/her Google account. When for the first time + 1 is clicked, it is taken as a vote whereas the next one negates it and hence naturally you can get only one +1 no matter how many clicks you give in a row. Additionally Google keeps a track on how many clicks are being sent from the same IP address, if it suspects of an automated process it displays a CAPTCHA. So there is no possibility of using unethical process to manipulate this tool.

Google Chrome has its plus one anything extension already, which lets us +1 any web page even if a particular website has not installed +1 button! Well similarly, Microsoft’s Bing has recently given out new Bing toolbar with Facebook’s universal like button through which you can like and share any content on the web. But the fact is Google has complete control over its +1 button whereas in case of Facebook’s “like“ button it has to rely on third party information! This alone will make the search results which have got ranking boost from +1 social signal more relevant and credible. Even if the actual results will be apparent in a longer run, the fact is it’s already time for web marketing enthusiasts to take the whole Google + project seriously!

You must be planning to improve your website visibility. You are on the right track if you are thinking of SEO Services for your website. Search Engine Optimization is the best way to get your website into the eyes of the maximum number of viewers. But what if this amount can be quantified i.e.; what if it can be seen by Thousands or more at a time? This is where SMO links with SEO. The Search Engine Optimization can give you multiple and targeted views whereas implementing Social Media Optimization in your web marketing strategy can accelerate the growth rate with the exponential speed. But all of this will take time.

In Internet marketing it is true that SEO services play a major role in boosting website ranking, building and maintaining online reputation .Generally marketers emphasize more on SEO. On search engines say Google, Yahoo or Bing your website gets natural listings through SEO without paying extra money. This is only one face of the coin. On the other side Social Media helps to reach maximum number of audience in the informational way because of the huge number of users on social networks. Even in social networks you can get targeted audience, e.g.: on LinkedIn you can reach to professionals, CEOs and CXOs of the companies, Orkut can be used to reach younger population, Facebook to reach mixed kind of population and twitter for reaching up to unlimited followers. This is the biggest advantage of Social Media.

According to the basic principle of marketing a Brand whether it stands for a product or a service is created by the people and identified by the people only. So no marketer can avoid the human factor in case of internet marketing too. Hence the necessary step to take is to integrate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Social Media Optimization (SMO) activities. And this gives the best outcome when SEO and SMO go hand in hand, For example, once you post in your blog, it must be shared on the social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter and other social networks, so that when a person gets the link of your website or blog article he will be able to check your website as well as blog post together. This builds trust among the viewers and if they see the continuity in your online activities, it can convert into reputation later on and you will be recognized as the expert in your domain. So you should always start by remembering that the most important value proposition and monetization opportunities that social media provides is to reach prospects and customers where they are and in the way they want to be reached.

Continuous online activity attracts the attention of prospects as today’s customers are smart enough to recognize the genuine and fake offerings quickly. And once if they find it genuine as per their requirement they’ll visit your website or blog repeatedly to find out your views on a particular topic and they may refer you to others as well and at the end of the day this is the main purpose of Social Media. Hence in internet marketing SEO and SMO both work together so don’t miss the chance of loosing customers by avoiding one of them!!!!