Web analytics entails measuring, collecting as well as analysing web data. Through the process of analysing this information you will be better able to comprehend how effective your website is. With this information you will be able to optimise your website for improved usage.

Before starting to use any new tools, such as Google Analytics, it is important to understand the value and outcomes of the specific benefits offered by web analytics.

Monitor your visitors and users

Web analytics can provide key metrics and statistics such as visits, unique visits, bounce rates, top content, top keywords, referrer sites and traffic source.

Optimise your website

Once you have identified trends in user behaviour, you will have sufficient information to take actions like changing the content on top landing pages, changing or adding to the site’s navigation structure, adding additional calls to action on the home page or restricting URLs.

Formulate a sales and digital marketing plan

After analysing the web data, key insights can be drawn from reports which can have a direct effect on digital marketing plans. For example, online customer trends may help marketers to leverage a specific product or target a certain geographical location merely by analysing data to see the top traffic sources.

PPC campaigns may change keyword bids or email campaigns may highlight different products due to seasonal consumer trends. Even the frequency and time of day can affect the success of a digital marketing campaign.

Measure the profit contribution from online marketing initiatives

All businesses that have an online presence should use web analytics to calculate their Internet marketing profit contributions. Using tools such as Google Analytics also enables you to create goals with specific values. Completing these goals helps to monitor goal conversion rates and allows for effective site optimisation.

Predict future trends

Over time you will start to see trends in online behaviour. When traffic to your site is high you will be able to see which pages are more popular, what causes an increase in traffic and where the majority of visitors come from. These trends help to predict future behaviour making it easier to plan and execute future digital marketing campaigns based on past experience.

Keep track of the competition

It is critical to analyse and follow your competition:

• How much traffic do they get?
• Where does the traffic come from and where is it going?
• Is it possible to intercept this traffic and guide online users to your site instead?

For example, perform a search for terms that relate to your website. Take note which competitors appear on the first page of search results and in sponsored links. Visit each competitor’s website and view their source code. Here, you will be able to see their metadata:

• Title
• Description
• Keywords

This is just one small example of how you can study your competitors’ SEO and online marketing techniques.

Searching for key terms and comparing your own website ranking in relation to your competitors is always a useful exercise as it affects how often your brand is seen and is a good benchmark to compare your own company against your competitors.

CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. High conversion is the strategy to complete that action. CRO is the process of optimizing the site to enhance the conversion rate to complete a specific action.

Conversion Rate is a key tool in e-commerce, which reveals the percentage of the site’s total traffic completing a specific goal. The result is the higher the conversion rate, the better growth.

Let’s define a conversion rate on which you want to track to calculate the conversion rate.

You can assume a sale as your conversion. Whenever you are tracking the number of leads you get and the number of resulting sales (conversions), you can calculate your conversion rate −

ConversionRate=TotalNumberofSalesNumberofLeads×100ConversionRate=TotalNumberofSalesNumberofLeads×100

You can determine various acts like what the value of a lead is and how many leads you need each month to grow your business and for that how much you should pay for advertising.

What is CRO?

Conversion Rate Optimization is −

• A structured and systematic approach to improving the performance of the website.
• Informed by insights − specifically, analytics and user feedback.
• Defined by the website’s unique objectives and needs (KPIs).
• Taking the traffic that you already have and making the most of it.

What CRO is Not

Conversion Rate Optimization is not −

• Based on the guesses, hunches, or what everyone else is doing.
• Driven by the highest paid person’s opinion.
• About getting as many users as possible, regardless of the quality or engagement.

Why do Companies Use CRO?

CRO plays key role to increase the efficiency of critical processes. Following are the critical things decided by CRO:

• A/B testing − What is A/B testing? In basic terms, you set up two different landing pages, each has a different element from the other. Your site presents the “A” version of these pages to half your traffic and the “B” version to the remaining half. Then you can see whether or not a small change to a call-to-action (CTA) can make a difference in conversion rates.
• Customer Journey Analysis − How did your customers progress from brand awareness to purchase? Also often referred to as a Conversion Funnel.
• Cart abandonment analysis − Investigate the cause of not checking out, once the items have been added to a shopping cart.
• Segmentation − Segmentation shows approaches to grouping prospects and customers to deliver more relevant communications and offers for better response rates to these communications.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a method of purchasing targeted advertising space on Internet platforms that takes advantage of organic search terms. Advertisers pay the owners of a web space, such as a search engine results page or a specific webpage, a certain amount of money each time an Internet user clicks on their specific ad. This takes many different forms and has evolved since the technology was first introduced at a 1998 TED conference by Idealab founder Bill Gross.

Search engines like Google and Bing are some of the most prolific providers of PPC space (See also Search Marketing). Instead of placing their ads on specific websites where they believe they will find customers, advertisers enter into deals with search engine platforms. That advertiser’s website appears higher in search engine results, allowing a smaller company to boost their visability in the absense of traditional search engine optimization methods.

For example, a car company that wants to market its 2012 pickup truck could pay Google to insert an advertising link to the car company’s website whenever a user types terms like “pickup truck” and “new truck 2012” into the Google search bar.

Who Uses Pay-Per-Click Marketing?

Today, pay-per-click marketing is commonly used by a variety of businesses and organizations ranging from smaller companies selling goods, to political campaigns hoping to raise awareness about an issues.

Business owners are attracted to pay-per-click marketing because it can be highly effective at a low cost. PPC allows a business to reach people who are likely to already be interested in what the business sells, because many PPC advertisements only appear on websites and search engine results pages that are related to the product.

For political campaigns or other awareness-raising efforts, pay-per-click can also be a cost-effective way to reach likely stakeholders. If a campaign to create no-leash areas for dog owners in the city of Denver wanted to use PPC to raise awareness about the issue or even encourage donations, it could use Bing to place an ad link on search results pages generated by keywords about Denver, dogs, and no-leash areas.

Implementing a Pay-Per-Click Campaign

Depending on its structure, a pay-per-click marketing campaign can be a very frugal or a very expensive form of advertising. An organization that has never used PPC before should start with a small campaign on a limited budget, and then expand the scope of the next campaign based on lessons learned from the first foray.

Before signing up with a pay-per-click service and spending any money, an advertiser should identify who the ad will target and where it will be most effective. Marketers usually first use web analytics software to track web traffic, determining the best location for the advertisement (See also Behavioral Marketing).

Because of the pervasiveness of PPC, some services, especially those on major search engines, can be highly competitive. A small, local taco restaurant, for instance, should think twice about getting into a bidding war with Taco Bell over premium pay-per-click ad space on Google.

Pay-per-click ad space in search engines is the most popular in the field. Here’s how much of the market the major search engines of the world each control in August of 2012.

Many modern pay-per-click packages are very flexible, allowing advertisers to set a limited budget for each day, week, or month, as well as allowing advertisers to freeze the service upon request. An advertiser can allot a monthly PPC ad budget of a certain amount, like $600, and then ask the ad space provider to take down the ad once the number of clicks reaches that limit. This is not only a great way to keep simple financial records during the marketing campaign; it is also an excellent way to control just how many people visit the company website. Such control allows for very straightforward analytics and manageable customer interactions.

Pay-per-click marketing works best as short campaigns, usually ranging from one to three months. The advertiser should analyze the effectiveness of each campaign and then adjust keywords, placement, and budget allocation to capitalize on the data from previous campaigns.

Career with Pay-Per-Click Marketing

A good pay-per-click campaign involves every member of a marketing team, combining the expertise of technical and creative positions. These are just a few examples of the many career tracks involved with PPC strategies.

Data Analyst

The proper placement of a pay-per-click ad and the effectiveness of that ad once placed are determined by the analysis of things like site traffic and web page evaluation. Data analysts use software and other technical skills to perform these calculations and make recommendations based on them.

Education/Experience

A career in data analysis begins with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, math, computer science, or business. It requires high computer literacy and the ability to communicate complex technical concepts in simple, non-technical ways. Previous experience in systems administration or database management can be helpful as well.

Well Designer

Internet users often experience pay-per-click advertising through images like banner ads or through text-based links. Both will lead to the advertiser’s website. A web designer uses skills in computer programming and visual presentation to make visual ads appealing and ensure potential customers have a good understanding of what their options are once they reach a product website.

Education/Experience

Web designers should have a bachelor’s degree in marketing, design, or computer science. Because web design positions require the creation of professional-quality visual materials, a portfolio of past designs can greatly increase the appeal of an aspiring designer’s resume.

Content Specialist

While web designers concentrate on the visual and structural elements of the marketing materials connected to a pay-per-click campaign, content specialists engineer the overall message of the product. They write the text of ad materials and develop the tone of the company brand for each campaign.

Education/Experience

Content specialists should have a bachelor’s degree in marketing, business, English, or communications. A background in copywriting and search engine optimization is very helpful. As with web design, content specialist resumes greatly benefit from the inclusion of work samples.

Learning Pay-Per-Click Strategies

In today’s Internet-dominated business world, marketing education programs now include instruction in Internet advertising, which involves many elements of a pay-per-click strategy (See also Web Marketing). This includes training with software like Adobe InDesign and Dreamweaver for web design, and to customer relationship programs such as SalesForce and analytics software from industry leaders like SAS. Aspiring content specialists will learn the core principles of brand management and the most up-to-date wisdom on keyword usage.

Marketing education classes open up many other great careers with a curriculum that covers other important spheres of knowledge. Tomorrow’s managers will benefit from studies in the best practices of business administration and finance, while those interested in brand development study customer psychology and social trends.

Marketing programs are very hands-on learning experiences. They use texts written by contemporary marketing experts, case studies of real-world marketing campaigns, and student-run simulations to prepare tomorrow’s marketing professionals for careers in fast-paced work environments. The Internet has resulted in a vast array of new marketing systems like pay-per-click, so those who enter the work force with a thorough education in these systems have a great advantage over those who are stuck learning on the job.

Mobile marketing generally refers to marketing on or with mobile devices. It can include any marketing activities though mobile whether it is an online shopping or sms notification for a product advertisement. According to Andreas Kaplan, a professor and specialist of marketing, defines mobile marketing as “any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device”.

It is similar to internet marketing where marketers need user in order to provide services and advertising their products. Mobile marketing includes research to understand mobile user’s nature, designing according to mobile platform, and adopting various techniques of mobile marketing strategies. Make sure that people are continuously getting emails, sms, mms, and other means of advertisement in order to get connected with you.

Mobile marketing, Customers, and Business World

Mobile marketing is a revolutionary marketing tact in business world. It introduces easier and better way to communicate directly with customers and advertise products. Ecommerce business can be easily enhanced. Marketers now contact users according to their natures and requirements. They can research and find what kind of services or products are being searched by customers and notify them based on this research.

Customers can easily get what they are looking for, because marketers notify them with the best deals and services. Customers can buy and enjoy services with feedback and reviews. These feedback and reviews also seem helpful to other customers as well.

Importance of Mobile Marketing

Today, a large fraction of population access internet through mobile rather than laptop or desktop. Mobile’s portability feature enables a user to get in touch with world through internet from anywhere and anytime. Increasing number of internet and mobile user drags a revolutionary trend in marketing sector called Mobile marketing. Here are some reasons which can explain mobile marketing importance in these days:

1. Availability of quick services anytime

People want good, easy and quick services. They are looking for a service provider which can fulfill their requirements anytime, anywhere, and can be easily reached. A company can contact a user via mobile marketing techniques. A customer can also send feedback easily.

2. Mobile has become an undetachable part of life

Mobile is a necessary part of daily life. It can easily carried to anywhere and that’s why becomes a favorite device for e-shopping in leisure time.

3. Mobile is not only used for e-shopping but also used in physical store

A physical store also uses mobile services for providing services and advertising. Many store will save your number to notify you about special products and discounts offers.

4. SMS Marketing

SMS and MMS marketing bring a tremendous change in marketing. Now users are getting offers and discounts or get notified for sale via sms or mms.

5. Mobile search index becomes primary contents for ranking

Google is going to make search index based on mobile search ranking rather than desktop search ranking. So your website search ranking will be based on mobile searching rather than desktop searching.

6. Importance of Mobile advertisement

Advertising on mobile sites or directly to mobile seems more effective in marketing.

Mobile Marketing Strategies

These days, most of the people are investing time on internet via smart phones. They start and end their days with mobile. I think mobile is the first thing needed after waking up in the morning and last thing used before going to bed. It means your websites has been visited mostly via mobile in comparison of desktop. So you should follow a strategy in order to expand and enhance your business based on mobile marketing.

Now marketing strategies should be changed to attract mobile users via internet. This change forced people to follow mobile marketing strategy. Business should have an important place for mobile marketing otherwise it will definitely affect your business. You can improve your business by adopting trendy techniques of mobile marketing and advertising.

1. SMS marketing: It is true that a SMS is checked by a user in less time. So, SMS is a perfect way to contact a customer for their requirement and for advertisement.
2. MMS marketing: Text, video, audio, and image slideshow can be delivered via MMS to users for advertise your business or products. Mobile marketing helps you to understand nature of your customer. You can verify about service requirements of a user and you can help them via MMS.
3. Push notification: It is a flash text to notify users to advertise products and services. It is easily visible to user instead of SMS.
4. App-based marketing: Mobile platform based App of an ecommerce website can be effectively used in a business promotion. You just have to maintain search ranking of app in a store to make it visible.
5. In-game mobile marketing: Marketers used to provide promoting messages within games. This is called mobile advergaming or ad-funded mobile game.
6. QR codes: QR code is an alternative of URL typing. One can go to a page by scanning a 2D image instead of typing a URL.
7. Bluetooth: Some marketers use hotspot to deliver Content Marketing. It is a permission based and a radio-based technology and free of cost. It is an effective way of advertising products. Greatly effective, in case user has activated DND for such advertisements. It works on fact that whenever a customer will comes in range with activated Bluetooth, starts getting notification and ads.
8. Proximity service: Proximity systems or marketing based on GSM also called SMS-CB (Short message Service- Cell Broadcast. This will help in broadcast of messages to all users in a specific geographical area.
9. Location-based services: Location based services are specially conducted through cell phone networks. It is used to send advertise or other messages to user based on location.
10. Voice mail: Marketers can send a voice SMS or a prerecorded message without making any ring for advertising their business.

Effect of Mobile First Index Experiment on Mobile marketing

With respect to mobile marketing, you should specially take care of your mobile site’s search ranking. So you should take special care of your website’s behavior on mobile devices. It should be mobile friendly to keep whole content clearly visible. Make sure that your website is mobile friendly or launch a mobile version or app of your website.

Google is going to launch Mobile First Index based search engine. Now you have to make a website more friendly to mobile user rather than desktop user in order to achieve good search ranking. Your mobile friendly sites should have features of:

1. Mobile as well as user friendly
2. Good speed
3. Perfect touch controls

Privacy and Security in Mobile Marketing

In mobile marketing, privacy and security cannot be ignored. Since details of a user like contact number and other details have to be maintained in mobile marketing, so marketers should take special care towards Privacy and security of these details. Some steps which should followed for mobile marketing are:

1. Important details of customers should not be shared with anyone under any circumstances.
2. Marketers should have permission for messaging to users. They should follow a proper process in which user can enable and block messages and other services.

While building your mobile App there are certain things that needs to be work out

1. Growing your social media presence : Building a steady social media following on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr
2. Driving engagement across the app: Focus your efforts on encouraging ongoing engagement and keep updating fresh content so to prevent users from losing interest in your app
3. Increasing app store ratings : Try to improve rating of your app, this will drive a lot traffic to your app
4. A steady rise in app downloads: There is always more revenue when there is more download of your App, so if you have a valuable product it automatically increase the download rate.

Promo video for mobile APP

As a part of viral marketing campaign, a promo video is quite essential.

• Create a promo videos which is short and informative.
• Highlight all your app’s key features and point out why your app is better than its competitors
• Also, include screen shot of your app as well
• Once the video is ready you have to be active in marketing or distributing that video over the web. Post it on forums, use social sites like Facebook and twitter to reach out maximum, upload it to youtube and so on.

Web Analytics

Web analytics is the study, analyses and reporting of a web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. This technique is useful to measure how many people have visited a site, and how frequent they have visited the site or what route they have opted to reach your site. Web analytics is very useful from the point of administrator as they can figure it out which area of the site is popular and which area is not.

Web analytics software can be used to monitor whether your site page are working properly or not. There are various web analytics software available in market, some of them are Google Analytics, Adobe site catalyst, IBM coremetrics web analytics, IBM’s Unica Netsight, yahoo marketing dashboard, Piwik, Moz and so on.

A good analytic tool should meet following criteria

• Can you re-analyze data if you decide to change something
• Can you re-analyze subsets of your logs for more focused views
• How many web pages does the solution track per month
• What is the total cost of ownership
• Does it integrate easily with other sources of data

• Permission based list building: It is a creation of an email list by providing a sign up box for for prospective e-mail contacts and confirming their approval with a follow up email
• Campaign creation: The capability to organize and structure large volumes of e-mail messages by branding, theme and schedule
• Online reporting: Track the sending of individual email campaigns and at what rates they were opened and which e-mails are not open or bounced
• Rich content Integration: Addition of graphics, video, audio and test using templates,drag and drop editor
• List Management: The ability to organize, segment, edit, grow and manage a database of customer or client e-mail contact information

How to implement successful e-mail marketing campaign

There are some simple tips for effective e-mail marketing

• To grab the attention of your readers, make sure that your subject line or title should stand out. Need to keep message short and to the point
• Your logo needs to be highlighted clearly at the top of the e-mail
• Stress first two or three lines of your e-mail to make an impact
• Provide link for the landing page on your website
• Collect e-mail addresses at offline events like trade shows and import them into your database and send them a welcome email
• Promote offers and e-mail sign up through Google plus company page

Automate scheduling for e-mail

E-mail schedule can be of great help when one has to mail same document or message to different people on regular basis in bulk. Automation of e-mails are not restricted to sending and receiving mail but also account for other activities like deleting unwanted emails automatically, save e-mail attachments into local folders, e-mail integration with text files or csv and so on. Aweber is one such platform where you can manage and automate your mail and schedule your mail according. As shown in screenshot below, we have schedule each message or tutorial on JavaScript and send to subscribers by scheduling it one after the other.

There are many e-mail service providers which does not have automation scheduling in-built, for them extensions are available and can add on this extension to their mailing system. For example, “Boomerang” which can be used in Google chrome or Firefox for scheduling e-mails. Mail Chimp is another mail manager where you can set data, time , batch delivery and so on for your mail .

The important feature of mail chimp is that it keeps the track record for their subscribers and give information like who all have looked into your messages, which links they clicked and from where they have access the link ( Geo-location) and vice versa.

The activity of driving the website traffic through social media sites in known as Social Media Marketing.

What is Social Media?

Social Media facilitates to participate in Social networking. The visibility of the business can be improved by share the posts on various social media platforms. For news updates, marketing, education and entertainment, Social Media is considered as one of the best sources.

Briefly describe the history of Social Media Marketing

Though social media is a new trend, the roots stretch way long back to the beginning of the computer era. The first progenitor of the social media, Usernets was launched in 1979. Usernets facilitated the users to post on the news groups. Then launched Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), which was more advanced and facilitated the users to login and interact. The precursors to BBS are the online services like progidy. Later came the instant messaging of internet chat.

The social networks were developed in 90s when dating sites and forums were on the peak, but which did not facilitated the users in making the friends list. To overcome this feature, Six degrees was launched which facilitated in creating the profile and listing the pears. Later a sensation was created in social media by the emergence of blogging. Some other websites like BlackPlanet and MiGente have emerged which facilitated in profile creation and adding of the friends.

Post 2000, in 2002 Friendster was launched by Apple which was used by millions. In 2003, Hi5, Linkedin and MySpace were launched. Facebook was launched in 2004 and washed out MySpace, Orkut, Multiply, etc., and is still expanding.

Since 2000, Social Media has bloomed to horizon and is still expanding limitlessly. In addition to this sharing of media, other real-time updates were introduced like Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Also the advertising system of the Facebook was launched in 2007.

What is the Importance of Social Media?

The most powerful channel of marketing in Social Media, which can change the game of the business. It facilitates with the flexibility in communicating at both the personal levels and business levels.

The search media is used by the business owners to improve on search rankings, leads, sales and traffic by reducing the marketing expenses. On personal front social media is used for connecting with the friends and the near ones.

What is Social Media Strategy for Business?

Any business gets a great boost from a wisely implemented Social Media Organization (SMO) strategy. The setting of the clear and well-defined business goals and objectives leads to obtain maximum benefits out of social media. Any well-defined and well-laid SMO strategy needs to have the following points as the backbone:

• The goals set must be measurable and achievable.
• Know the customers
• The market and its trends need to be researched.
• Reflect the presence of the business on more social networking platforms.
• The core topics related to the business need to be chosen and are used in content.
• Set Social Engagement parameters
• The use of the resources needs to be planned.
• The results are to be traced.

What are the Key concepts of Social Media strategy?

The key concepts of the SMO Strategy are as follows:

• Aim for building reputation by depicting oneself as a trusted source or business.
• Encourage more engagement and sharing.
• Be an authorized name in your industry.
• Gear up originality.
• Keep it social.
• Master over the media platforms.
• Optimize every single point that hinders the efforts.

How a Business Profile is created in Social Media Marketing?

The business profile created must have a well-defined personal and proficiency statement of the business and should be very powerful and impactful

• The competitor’s business has to be studied, their strong points need to be analyzed and they have to be added to the business.
• The prominent features which enables the business to stand out among others need to be added.
• Include the milestones achieved by the company.
• Address and other details need to be added
• Data and statistics need to be included.
• The renowned vendor to be listed
• In order to get noticed by the web crawler, some keywords need to be added.

What is Brand Awareness in Social Media Marketing?

The degree to which a brand name is known is termed as Brand awareness. The trust of the customer is solidified by using the brand name and hence the brand name should overshadow the products. The promotion of the brand name facilitates in growing the business and getting over the obsolete state of the business.

Social Media Marketing helps in branding the business and to increase the public profile. This can be done by:

• Choosing appropriate Social Media Channel for the business.
• Finalizing the social content strategy
• Developing a strong social content strategy.
• Participate in good conversation with the customers to let them feel more connected.
• Track all the metrics such as potential reach, conversation share, links etc.

What is Social Media Engagement?

The process by which potential customers are reached and are interacted with the help of Social Media is known as Social Media Engagement. It is done with the intention of drawing the attention towards a particular product or a service. This channel also facilitates the customers to share the relationships with the vendors.

In order to grab more out of less, the social media engagement norms need to be strategized.

• The fans are reached by using the Social Channels.
• The events organized are announced using Social Media platforms.
• The posts of the audience are to be entertained.
• Participate in valuable and educational conversations by using the Social Media Circles.
• Participate in Social Media groups.

The engagement efforts are traced by measuring the engagement level. It is measured in terms of ratio between the social platforms used to the social platforms not used for engaging. It is considered that the bond with the audience is stronger if the level of the ration is higher.

What is Viral Marketing in Social Media Marketing?

Virtual Marketing includes the hot infectious topic. It is known as ‘exposing an idea’ for a cause. In order to boost the message, the message is sent viral by passing from one to another.

The social media channels use Social Media Viral Marketing for creating the brand awareness by spreading the messages.

Examples of Viral Marketing

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge – Increased media attention is received by the ALS Association by socking the world, where the celebrities also participated.

Ashton Kutcher hits 1M − Ashton has been a seeding strategist who influenced his fans by an influencing message that went viral.

Hotmail went viral – By the link in the footer of the mail sent from the Hotmail account saying ‘Want a free email account? Sign-up for Hotmail today’, which spread viral and became a hit.

Planning a successful link building campaign

In order to plan and execute a successful link building campaign for your site, you first need to understand that link building is a long and tedious process. One that requires skillfulness and extensive knowledge on the topic of SEO.

However if you persevere, stick to white-hat rules of SEO, animal-proof (Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird) your SEO campaigns by staying updated, you will eventually taste the fruit of success.

Fundamental off-page SEO concepts

Before we begin the link building process, let’s first go through and understand some fundamental concepts.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is an inbound or incoming link (hyperlink) to a particular website, referenced from another website. Search engines rely on links to crawl the web and evaluate the authority and relevance of millions of websites.

What is an anchor text?

An anchor text is the text you click on that takes you to a referenced url. i.e. (This sentence is an anchor text).

It is recommended that the anchor texts of inbound links be diverse (mix of target and non-target keywords, brand mentions, synonyms of target keywords, non-related words, etc.) and not all “exact match” to the target keyword that a site is aiming to rank highly for on the SRPs.

A link profile with majority of inbound links that have exact-match anchor texts looks very unnatural, and search engines will devalue these inbound links or even de-index the site.

Anatomy of a Strong Backlink

• High domain authority
• High PageRank
• High TrustRank
• Relevant co-citations
• Relevant page title
• Relevant content topic
• Target keywords in anchor text
• Placed in main content area
• Age of page
• Age of backlink
• Dofollow link

High Domain Authority

All inbound links pointing to a website’s main domain (www.example.com) as well as its internal pages contribute to the domain authority.

Getting a backlink from a high domain authority site is always valuable. Sometimes, that is all you need in order to get on the 1^st page of Google for a target keyphrase.

High PageRank

PageRank is only one of over 200 ranking factors which Google uses to calculate and decide which page should rank over another.

Inbound links pointing specifically to an internal page of a particular website contributes to the PageRank of the specific page.

However if a page of say PageRank 6 has two outgoing links, the outgoing PageRank is diluted into half (PageRank 3 each).

With everything else equal (i.e. Relevant page title, equal number of backlinks, etc.), a site with a higher PageRank will rank above the site with a lower PageRank.

High TrustRank

Sites that receive a lot of quality relevant inbound links are more trusted than sites that receive lots of inbound links from low-quality, spammy sites.

Getting a link directly from a very trusted site such as Entrepreneur.com will increase your site’s TrustRank tremendously. Obtaining a second-tier, third-tier, or fourth-tier link will also increase your site’s TrustRank but the value starts to drop the further it goes.

Let’s have a look at the following scenario:

Your website provides financial consultation and you are not able to get a link directly from Entrepreneur.com. However you’re able to obtain a third-tier link from one of the websites that Entrepreneur.com links to.

Entrepreneur.com => Financesite.com => Bizservices.com => Yourfinancialsite.com

100% TrustRank => 50% TrustRank => 25% TrustRank => 12.5% TrustRank

The above figures are made up and only used to demonstrate the point.

Relevant Co-citations

If you are getting inbound links from an external page (Page A) and it is linking to Page B and Page C which are both relevant to your site’s content topic, this is a strong signal to search engines that your site is relevant to that particular topic.

Relevant Page Title

The page title should summarize the page’s content topic. Or rather, the main content topic should reflect the title of the page. Search engines use the page title as an important ranking factor when it comes to displaying relevant search results to the user.

Relevant Content Topic

Similar to the above Relevant Page Title ranking factor, an inbound link from a page with relevant content topic to your site will increase your relevancy score.

Target Keywords in Anchor Text

The anchor text of a link is another ranking signal that search engines use. The wide-spread belief before the 2012 Google Penguin Update was that a keyword rich anchor text was a strong ranking factor.

As a result, many webmasters started over-optimizing their inbound anchor texts by stuffing their target keywords in (exact match), in attempt to manipulate their rankings. Majority of the sites with over-optimized keyword-rich anchor texts who were hit by the update saw a big drop in rankings.

Post-Penguin, anchor texts should not be over-optimized. i.e. If you want to rank for “financial consultation”, your anchor texts shouldn’t all be “financial consultation”. There should be a good mix of different types of anchor text. It should sound natural as if someone were to mention your brand name in a conversion.

Here are a few examples of the different types of anchor texts a property/real estate website should have a good mix of:

Exact match – “Properties for sale”

Broad match – “List of properties for sale” or “Properties for sale in [country]”

Synonyms and related search terms – “Condos for sale” or “Private property for sale”

Brand mentions – “Realtoria Property Investment Firm”

Non-related – “visit this page” or “click here”

It’s good to have a couple of inbound links with exact match anchor text from high domain authority sites. Just make sure it looks natural and doesn’t make up the majority of your backlink profile.

Placed in Main Content Area

The location of the backlink is also an important factor. A footer link isn’t worth as much as a sidebar link, and a sidebar link isn’t worth as much as an editorial link in the main content section.

Age of Page

How long a page has been in Google’s index is also a ranking factor. Creating a website is getting much simpler. There has been an increasing number of fly-by-night sites and many webpages come and go frequently. Therefore the older the page, the more trustworthy it is (provided it is frequently updated).

Age of Backlink

Similarly, the older the backlink, the more TrustRank it gets.

Dofollow Link

Dofollow links are regular links without the rel=“nofollow” attribute in the HTML code and they allow PageRank or Link Juice to be passed on to the linked page.

Example of a regular dofollow link (allows PageRank to be passed on):

<a href=“http://example.com/”>anchor text</a>

Example of a nofollow link (doesn’t allow PageRank to be passed on):

<a href=“http://example.com/” rel=“nofollow”>anchor text</a>

While you’re in the process of acquiring dofollow links, you also want to obtain nofollow links.

Although you won’t get any PageRank from a nofollow link, the main reason you also want to include nofollow links in your link profile is that search engines are able crawl a nofollow link and read its anchor text.

Even though you don’t get any PageRank flow, you’d still be awarded points for relevancy. Not to mention a link profile with thousands of dofollow inbound links and without a single nofollow backlink looks a little fishy.

In a Nutshell…

Basically you want to acquire as many backlinks from other sites that are closely related to the topic of your site and your site’s internal pages.

You also want a diverse and natural-looking link profile;

Links from different types of sites (blogs, news sites, .edu & .gov sites, forums, directories, social media, etc…) with natural linking patterns, and a good mix of dofollow and nofollow links. (No heavily keyword-optimized anchor texts!)

External SEO is basically link building and creating social signals for search engines to determine the authority of your site as well as the context of your site. Here’s a guide to SEO link building you should really check out.

Do be careful however not to violate any of Google’s Content Quality Guidelines or participate in link schemes (A.k.a. Black-hat SEO) while in the “joyous” process of link building. As long as you avoid doing any Black-hat SEO, you’re most probably doing White-hat SEO.

I hope this beginner’s SEO tutorial has given you a better understanding on the topic of SEO as a whole. To have a more holistic digital marketing landscape, we cover the core modules of Digital Marketing that includes :

• Digital Marketing Strategy
• Content Marketing Strategy
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Digital Advertising
• Social Media Marketing
• Digital Marketing Analytics with Google Analytics

with an optional inclusion of a Capstone Practicum Project that provides you with an opportunity to apply actionable strategies to your next digital marketing campaign.

There are 4 main steps when it comes to internal SEO – Keyword Research, Organizing Site Structure, Constructing Content, and On-Page Optimization. Let’s go through each step one by one.

Keyword Research: Competitive Market Research

Long-tail keywords

When starting out, you want to look out for as many long-tail keywords as you can. Long-tail keywords (more words) are not as difficult to rank highly for as generic keywords (fewer words). Long-tail keywords are also more specific to a user search query and are more likely to result in a conversion.

Start with a generic theme i.e. “Website Design”, if you are a web designer, then expand your list of keywords from there i.e. “Ecommerce Web Design”, “Affordable Web Design”, etc…

Use the Google Keyword Planner to conduct your SEO keyword research.

Researching for new keywords

If you’re building a brand new site, keyword research should be the first thing you do before filling up your site with content. If you’re already running a site, it is also good practice to constantly expand your list of target keywords.

Keyword research can help you discover what consumers are actually searching for. When you know what your consumers are looking or asking for, you can better design your content to answer their queries by speaking to them in their language. For example if you know people are searching for the exact keyphrase “How do you make a website”, you can create an article titled “How to Make/Create a Your Own Website”.

You can develop a variety of content ideas just by going through your list of keywords.

You want to build a long list of keywords before you start constructing and organizing your articles.

Below is an example of a list of keywords generated by a web design firm:

Referencing the above list of keywords, a web design firm will have a good idea of which keywords to optimize for and how to structure their website (SEO Siloing). i.e.

Web design packages
=> custom web design
=> affordable web design

Analyzing existing keywords that your site is already ranking for

If your site is already up and running for some time, you may want to sign up for Google Analytics (if you haven’t already) and check which keywords your current visitors have been using to get to your site. These keywords in your analytics report are likely the keywords that you are already ranking well for, so you want to put more focus on them first.

Once you’ve identified these keywords, the next step is to focus your internal optimization efforts on these keywords in the next 3 steps – Organizing site structure, constructing content, and on-page optimization.

Organizing Site Structure: SEO Siloing (Website Theming)

Remember the shopping mall example? Let’s say you love electronic products and your focus is on building the largest electronics shopping centre in town. If your shopping mall has a specific theme i.e. Electronics Centre and all retail shops in your shopping mall are dealing with electronic goods and categorized into different electronic themes at different levels, as opposed to a generic theme i.e. Downtown Shopping Mall with only a few electronic retail shops, chances are your Electronic Centre will stand out in consumers’ minds whenever they think of buying any electronic products.

Similarly, Google and other search engines like Yahoo! & Bing give preference to theme-specific sites when deciding which results to show for a relevant user search query. But if you’ve already built a multi-themed site and want to rank for themed-specific search terms, it’s not the end of the world.

Introducing SEO Siloing/Website Theming/Content Hubs

As mentioned, Google, Yahoo! & Bing favour sites that are theme-specific. Sites with clear structures, relevant high-quality content, and written in clean and neat code (no flash, minimal javascript, use HTML for most of their site) also tend to do very well in the search engines.

Therefore it is safe to assume that you do not need to have only one topic on any one site in order to rank well for a theme-specific keyword.

Another scenario would be a box of macarons.

1^st Scenario: A box of Green Macarons, Brown Macarons, and Red Macarons mixed together.

In this scenario, search engines will likely classify this site as “A box of Macarons”.

2^nd Scenario: A box of Green Macarons, A box of Brown Macarons, A box of Red Macarons all separated into different boxes.

In the second scenario, search engines will likely classify these 3 sites as… A box of Green Macarons, A box of Brown Macarons, A box of Red Macarons.

3^rd Scenario: A box of Green Macarons, Brown Macarons, and Red Macarons organized into separate sections.

In the third scenario, search engines can clearly distinguish between the 3 different themes of macarons and index them according to their specific themes.

So what is a silo in terms of SEO?

A silo is a group of theme-specific subjects or topics in a website.

What is SEO siloing and why is it important in search engine optimization?

SEO siloing is the process of organizing different groups of content topics into specific categories. Much like a bookstore organizing different genres of books into different sections.

In terms of SEO, this organizational structure is very important in order for the search engines to understand the theme and intention of your website and rank your site accordingly.

There are two methods of SEO siloing. Physical siloing and Virtual siloing.

Physical Siloing

Physical siloing is organizing similar-topic content into similar categories or directories. Much like organizing your computer files into different folders.

Virtual Siloing

Virtual siloing on the other hand, is utilizing internal links to relate subject-specific content to one another. i.e. linking from one blogpost to another, whereby both blogposts exist in different directories or categories.

Diagram of a Silo-ed Site Structure:

Above example: How a dating niche content site organizes its site structure.

Sitemaps

You also want to create a HTML or XML sitemap and submit it to the search engines. It’s recommended to include a HTML sitemap for your visitors to refer to and an XML sitemap to submit to the search engines.

You can create your sitemap using free sitemap generator tools like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Constructing Content: Creating Your Landing Pages

What are landing pages?

Landing pages are the pages that your visitors directly land onto when they click on a search result. It is important that your landing pages capture your visitor’s attention and lead them to the inner pages of your site.

If your landing page doesn’t answer the search query or isn’t compelling enough and majority of visitors landing on your landing page click the “back” button and go back to the search results, you’d likely see your rankings dipping over time.

There are three steps you should follow in order when constructing your landing pages:

1) Plan your article using your researched keywords.

2) Write your article, keeping your keywords in mind.

3) Insert your keywords where appropriate. In the title tag, content body, image alt tags, and subheadings.

On-Page Optimization: On-Page SEO Factors

Once you’ve completed steps 1 to 3, you’re ready for step 4 of the internal SEO process.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

What goes into SEO?

To understand the true meaning of SEO, let’s break that definition down and look at the parts:

• Quality of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they’re coming to your site because Google tells them you’re a resource for Apple computers when really you’re a farmer selling apples, that is not quality traffic. Instead you want to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in products that you offer.
• Quantity of traffic. Once you have the right people clicking through from those search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.
• Organic results. Ads make up a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don’t have to pay for.

Organic search traffic is specifically any unpaid traffic that comes from SERPs.

How SEO works

You might think of a search engine as a website you visit to type (or speak) a question into a box and Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or whatever search engine you’re using magically replies with a long list of links to webpages that could potentially answer your question.

That’s true. But have you ever stopped to consider what’s behind those magical lists of links?

Here’s how it works: Google (or any search engine you’re using) has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers bring all those 1s and 0s back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.

There are a lot of factors that go into a search engine’s algorithm, and here’s how a group of experts ranked their importance:

That’s all the SE (search engine) of SEO.

The O part of SEO—optimization—is where the people who write all that content and put it on their sites are gussying that content and those sites up so search engines will be able to understand what they’re seeing, and the users who arrive via search will like what they see.

Optimization can take many forms. It’s everything from making sure the title tags and meta descriptions are both informative and the right length to pointing internal links at pages you’re proud of.

Learning SEO

This section of our site is here to help you learn anything you want about SEO. If you’re completely new to the topic, start at the very beginning and read the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. If you need advice on a specific topic, dig in wherever suits you.

Here’s a general overview:

Building an SEO-friendly site

Once you’re ready to start walking that SEO walk, it’s time to apply those SEO techniques to a site, whether it’s brand new or an old one you’re improving.

These pages will help you get started with everything from selecting an SEO-friendly domain name to best practices for internal links.

Content and related markup

A site isn’t really a site until you have content. But SEO for content has enough specific variables that we’ve given it its own section.  if you’re curious about keyword research, how to write SEO-friendly copy, and the kind of markup that helps search engines understand just what your content is really about.

On-site topics

You’ve already learned a lot about on-site topics by delving into content and related markup. Now it’s time to get technical with information about robots.txt.

Link-related topics

Dig deep into everything you ever needed to know about links from anchor text to redirection. Read this series of pages to understand how and when to use nofollow and whether guest blogging is actually dead. If you’re more into the link building side of things (working to improve the rankings on your site by earning links),

List of Major Search Engines
Google
Yahoo
Bing/MSN

Spider

A search engine spider is a program that a search engine uses to seek out information on web in an automated manner. Spider also known as a bot, robot, or crawler. It follows links throughout the Internet, grabbing content from sites and adding it to search engine databases.

Crawling

Crawling is the process in which the crawler, bot, or spider which finds the documents on the World Wide Web.

Web crawling is how the web spiders find documents on the web. The web spider typically starts crawling with the help of URL’s from the popular websites like Yahoo, MSN, etc, extracting the outgoing URL’S and crawls them. The spider crawls through the documents and run them through a spam and duplicates content filter placing then in the web index.

Indexing

Indexing is the process of recording information for easy and quick retrieval upon a search query.

Indexing is the second major step a search engine takes to deliver information to your fingertips. A search engine must maintain a copy of all the content it finds during the crawl process, and store it in an index for easy retrieval. Without an index a search engine would have to re-run the crawl process for every search query performed. How exactly a search engine’s web index is designed and maintained is fairly complex and as an SEO it is beyond the need to know all the technical details.

As SEO’s we spend most of our time figuring out the Ranking part of the process, but the basics of indexing should be known and understood.

Cache Date

It’s the Date and time left by the spider when it has crawled the particular page of your website.

What is Website?

A website is a set of related web pages which are served from a single web domain and is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet through an Internet address known as a Uniform resource locator(URL). A webpage is a page with formatting instructions of Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML, XHTML).

What is Keyword?

Keyword research is considered an important aspect in the search marketing field. Ranking for the “right” keywords is the main factor for your website. While analyzing your market’s keyword demand, you not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole.

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. Many SEO experts consider the optimum keyword density to be 1 to 3 percent. Using a keyword more than that could be considered search spam.

Keywords Research and Analysis

Keyword research is considered as one of the most important aspect, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field.

Keyword research is the first step of analysis that any SEO practitioner should work upon in a search engine optimization (SEO) project. It’s an extremely important component in the overall analysis since it is from the keyword research that we determine the optimum keywords to rank for.

You really need to study the website wholly which you are optimizing for and its business competitors to get a feel of the industry and get an idea once you complete the keyword research.

You need to understand the audience you will be marketing to and the relevancy of these keywords to that audience. There are also other subtle differences such as whether your business markets to the consumer or to other businesses.

Google Sandbox effect

Whenever you make new website and make it live, the website would not appear in Google Search immediately. It may take up to 2 – 3 weeks or also a month’s time to show in search results. Why So?? Reason being, whenever search engines see a new registered website they don’t index or save the pages immediately. Search Engines will check many factors like the Quality of the Website, links, content. Basically Google takes time to examine your website until it gets mature enough to be allowed to the Top Positions club. Many SEO experts have seen in practice that new sites, no matter how well optimized, don’t rank high on Google, while on MSN and Yahoo they catch quickly. So it’s simple. It’s never easy for newcomers to enter a market and there are obstacles of different kinds. For newcomers to the world of search engines, the obstacle is called a sandbox.

Page Rank

Page Rank is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites in their search engine results. Page Rank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages.

According to Google: “Page Rank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.”

Page Rank is a link analysis algorithm and it assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the Page Rank of E and denoted by PR(E)