Whenever you surf internet you just type a specific URL on the browser and a particular sites opens. But have you ever thought what must the logic behind designing an URL. URLs are like one of the most simplistic parts of SEO, but there are loads of query which surfers or online geeks generally have. Below mentioned are some of the very simple and easy guidelines to help you out with making the best out of URLs.  Hopefully these best practices can help a few folks make use of best practices before it becomes an issue down the road. So here are 12 best practices for optimizing URL structures: #1: Describe Your Content: An URL which is evident is a great URL. If a user can look at the address bar (or a pasted link) and make an accurate guess about the content of ...

The frequently asked question that does the rounds of forums, social media and emails is the about the insights about Google Analytics data. There are numerous Google analytics users across the world who is only concerned with the number of page views or the visitors, even though they have the accounts for years. But this idea is very wrong. It is like not using Web analytics tools to its maximum potential. Let us take you into the world of better opportunities with Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you can get the latest interface to measure the data. Here are the steps involved. #1: Setup Goals: This is a very straight forward point though most commonly neglected by the users. You should setup goals after you have installed the tracking code. The goals tha...

The importance of social media is felt by one and all. Though it might seem a trivial issue at first but most of us are aware of the value of social media and the role that it plays in the social media sphere. It is a mammoth task to find out the whereabouts of the internet traffic that your website is seeing. The exact measure of internet traffic that is provided by social media websites to your website, you must make use of Google Analytics. It has all the answers that you might be on the look out for. March 2012 saw the introduction of the latest Social Report suite from Google Analytics . It has all the features that one needs to measure the amount of internet traffic that a certain website is seeing from social media domains as well as sharing of certain websit...

Have you ever wanted to track beyond just page views and visitors? It is very important to figure out whether your website is actually helping your business or not. Here Google Analytics does a great job. But to get actionable metrics out of Google Analytics, you need to set up a few things first.  Tracking Goals & Conversions One of its prime features is tracking your goals and then its conversions; goals may be anything, ranging from the Purchase of a product to the completion of an email list sign up or Download of an eBook. In order to set up a goal, you’d need to first go to your website’s profile in Google Analytics and click on the “Admin” tab: you’d find here a tab for Goals. Click on the +Goal link to begin adding goals. Enter a short, descr...

Conversions are one of the most important metric which often gets overlooked. We often focus so hard on one main conversion point and forget about other visitor engagements that exist on our sites. These other engagement points or less-important conversions are what experts call “micro conversions.” World-renowned analytics expert Avinash Kaushik, in his Excellent Analytics Tip series recommends: Focus on measuring your macro (overall) conversions, but for optimal awesomeness identify and measure your micro conversions as well. He also explains the benefits of tracking both micro and macro conversions: It will force you to understand the multiple persona’s on your website, trust me that in of itself is worth a million bucks. It will encourage you to...

Have you ever wondered from where your website visitors come from, rather than just a domain referral from Facebook, Twitter or Google?  How about finding out if the large banner on your homepage drives more traffic to your products than the smaller banner in your sidebar? While tracking your online success Google Analytics can help you get insights from your data. For example if you have a Google AdWords account integrated with your Google Analytics account, then you can monitor your AdWords campaigns within Google Analytics. Now, if you are not assigning visitors from different sources to Google Analytics Campaigns, then you won’t be able to properly segment.  Without proper segmentation, it’s hard to make actionable insights. If you’re looking for these ki...

SEO campaigns are constantly evolving with changes to search engine algorithms and search tactics. Keyword priorities also change over time as your site moves up and down in search rankings. This makes SEO campaigns tricky to manage. Traditional project management techniques don’t cut it so managers need to think outside the box. Scrum is an Agile framework designed for managing software development projects. However, we feel that SEO managers can learn a lot from it! Here are 3 things SEO managers can learn from Scrum:   1. Sprints Sprints are at the core of Scrum. The workload of a project is broken up into segments and completed in sprints that can be anything from a day to a month. A Sprint Planning Meeting is held before each sprint to establish the goals ...

Local businesses have it rough. Not only do they typically lack the financial backing that national businesses have, but they also are focused on a more limited target market than their national counterparts. Aside from competing with large national brands, you have to compete against other local businesses. So what do you need to know to position your business to get the exposure it needs? Implementing a local SEO strategy is a great way to keep your business competitive online. Over the past few months, Google has been focusing more on local search results by incorporating Places results into organic search results. Making sure you utilize local SEO best practices will help the chances your business will appear in one of these spots on page 1. By implementing local ...

  Okay, so your site has been hacked. It is a common problem to many webmasters despite of their hard work to protect their sites from being hacked. Google explains this in their Webmaster Tools Help Forum: If your site has been infected, it is generally because some vulnerability has allowed a hacker to take control of your site. The hacker may change the content of the site (for example, to add spam), or add additional pages to the site, usually with the intent of phishing (tricking users into parting with personal and credit card information). Alternatively, they may inject malicious code (malware)—for example, scripts or iFrames that pull content from another website that tries to attack any computer that views the page. The term “malware” covers a...

Almost every year search engines make a significant number of changes in how they evaluate content on a website. Here are 8 tips on SEO best practices from pros in 2012. Title Tags Keyword Relevancy – Creating a descriptive, keyword-laden title tag is important for increasing rankings in search engines. When your title tag matches the search query exactly than it’s 100% relevant for it. (Optimal Format: Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name) Length (70 characters) – Google only shows 70 characters on its search results page (SERP). Whereas an ellipsis – “…” to indicate that a title tag has been cut off. So make sure that your primary keyword is at the beginning while the brand is at the end. seomoz had a great post on t...