Benefits Of Google Analytics In SEO

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google which offers an easy way to track and report website traffic. Now, Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics service on the web. You may have many visitors to your site but if you don't know any information about them, then it would be meaningless. Google Analytics provides a real-time overview of your website. In addition to visitors information, it provides data on how your website is performing and what all updation you have to do to meet goals. By using this we can know the number of users including real-time visitors, their location, gender, age group, and even devices, platforms, networks used etc. It can monitor social media activities and mobile app traffic. Let's see how one can set up a Google Analytics account.

Steps to create a Google Analytics account

1. Sign up for Google Analytics: Here you need to enter the account name, website name, website URL and choose the time zone. After entering these in appropriate boxes you have to click get tracking ID button and then accept the terms and conditions.
2. Add Tracking ID and Tracking code:  Go to admin tag select your site, copy the tracking ID and paste it in Analytics web property ID of settings in your blog. Then copy the tracking code from the same window and paste it in HTML code before body section by editing theme.
3. Learn about your audience: Arriving at this point you may be able to track your site's traffic and can analyze any data. 

Google Analytics metrics

• Sessions: shows you the number of interactions on your website over a particular time period.
• Users: The users metric gives you the number of users visited your site within a timeframe.
• Page views: The number of views of your web pages is shown. And the reloading of a page is also counted as an additional page view.
• Pages/session: The average number of visited pages per one session.
• Avg.session duration: Indicates the average session duration rather than giving an exact data.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of website visitors who bounced back from your site.

Hope you got an idea about Google Analytics and you can also visit my post on Google Webmaster Tools.

Thasneem M H

Introduction To Google Webmaster Tools In SEO

SEOs tend to use many tools to analyze the technical aspects of a website. One of the important tool webmasters uses is Google Webmaster Tool (GWT) also known as Search console. Google defines it as a mock point where Google and our website communicates with each other. Let's see how webmaster tools help to evaluate and improve your websites. 

Ways to use Webmaster Tools to improve on-page SEO

• HTML Improvements

HTML improvements can be found under Search Appearance in the Search console. This provides information about any issues with meta descriptions, title or contents of your website. With the help of this report, we can easily identify title or meta description issues and these can be optimized by updating them.

• Structured Data

We can find this under Search appearance and is a helpful way to explain the contents of your website to the search engine. Webmaster tools have a feature that shows the type of structured data that Google was able to find on your website.

• Keywords

Google analytics helps to know about keywords, keyword phrases people are using to find your website. It will also detect what keywords you used to optimize the page. This report may help to optimize the site according to the user's query.

• Sitemaps

The Sitemaps section allows you to know the number of pages submitted, indexed along with the last date it was processed.

• Crawl

Crawl info includes Crawl Errors and Crawl Stats. Crawl errors find the site errors or URL errors present in the sites. And Crawl stats give an overview of Google bot activities including the number of pages being crawled or indexed for last 90 days.

• Removing URLs

You can use the Remove URLs feature of GWT to remove any URL from Google's index. Only use this tool if you want to remove a URL permanently.

• Links to your site

This feature shows the links to your websites and we can make sure that non-spammy sites are linking with our sites.

Hope you got a brief idea about Google Webmaster Tools. You can also view my post on Best On-Page Optimization Practice. 

Thasneem M H

Best On Page SEO Optimization Practice

On page SEO 

SEO practices can be mainly classified into two:- on page SEO optimization(on site) and off page SEO optimization(off-site). Let's have a look at on page optimization. On page optimization refers to every modification that we are doing on web pages to improve ranking in search results. There are many different elements we have to consider while optimizing a web page. 

• Title

There are many points we have to keep in mind while modifying an SEO title. It must be error-free and should include focussing keyword. The title we are giving to a web page must contain at least three words and it is better to capitalize each word. Character limitation of the title is 55-60 characters and maximum pixel width is 512 pixels. The limitation of characters may vary according to the pixel width of characters. It's better to avoid the usage of full capital letters. If any two web pages on a website have the same title then keyword cannibalization arises which means they competes each other. If there is no SEO title in a page then Google shows h1 in HTML source as the title. 

• Meta description

The meta description is brief about web page content which must be unique and very impressive. Sometimes it can be content of that page itself. If we don't give a meta description then Google may show the most relevant content on the page. And if there is no relevant contents or no contents at all then some relevant words on the page is shown. The meta description must contain the focussing keyword but no stuffing of keyword. The pixel width capacity of the meta description is 1024 pixels and character limitation of 155-160 characters. In the case of a blog post or articles, the date on which the post is published is shown in the meta description.

• Content optimization

Content optimization is the process of modifying the web page by making the contents more attractive and adding more relevant unique data. The text in a page must be crawlable and must be in simple sentences. It's better to avoid complex sentences having more than 25 words. 

-THASNEEM M H

History And Evolution Of SEO

Google was founded in 1998 as a search engine, its growth was very rapid. So, now let's take a peep into the history and evolution of SEO. In 2001, they introduced web crawler also called spider or google bot which scans the web pages and takes a snapshot. These pages were saved to the database according to various category and processes are crawling, caching and indexing. In order to make the web pages crawlable google gave the access to modify or optimize web pages to webmasters. They tried to give quality search results by avoiding all non-useful data. For that, updation of search algorithms were done.

Initially, the search algorithm was content specific that is the results were given on the basis of focusing keyword's occurrence in web pages. The website having a higher number of searching keyword was ranked top. This resulted in many problems like keyword stuffing, non-ethical SEO practice etc. Here the quality of search results was less so the algorithm was changed to link specific from content specific. In link specific, the ranking was based on the number of links to publishing pages. The quality was not improved much after this updation due to paid links. Then quality link specific came, here ranking was based on page rank or trust value of website which provides the links. After implementing this the website having pagerank began to sell links and for avoiding this, a feature called passing the juice was added to the algorithm.

The revenue of Google was increased after advertisement programme called Google AdWords which include text ads and shopping ads. Google AdSense helped users to make revenue. In 2009 Google suggests and personalized search result was implemented. After the addition of social media signal to the algorithm in 2010, the websites can be shared in social media. Then ranking was influenced by authority value or social media influential value based on interactions in social media.

Google Updations 

Let us have a glance into the updations of Google.

Panda Updation

Google made a strong updation in 2011 called panda updation which was against content spamming includes content duplication, content spinning, thinny pages, grammatical errors and fewer quality contents. Panda 4.0 updation was successful and was added to Google's main algorithm as a permanent filter which helped to remove content spamming.

Penguin Updation

In 2012 Google made another updation called penguin updation which was against link spamming like paid links, link exchange, link farming, internal link, comment spamming, wiki spamming etc. Penguin 4.0 was made real-time updation.

Other Updations

There are some other updations, pigeon updation is related to local ranking or local SEO that means some category listing will be based on the location of the user. Hummingbird updation is related to the semantic search result and Rank brain updation is an advanced version of hummingbird updation which uses Artificial Intelligence(AI) to filter search results. Parked domain updation was done to remove parked domains from search results. Exact Match Domain(EMD) updation punished websites using the exact focusing keyword as the domain name. The pirate update is against duplication of images, contents etc. Mobilegeddon updation was made to make websites mobile friendly, the text must be readable without tapping or zooming the screen. Now the websites which are not mobile friendly are not shown in the search listing.

Hope that you enjoyed the blog and got an idea regarding the history and evolution of SEO.

-THASNEEM M.H