Increase Conversions of Website

f you’re anything like me, it’s easy to "finish and forget" when it comes to web development. Once a website is live and the boss or client is happy, we close the project, kick off our shoes and crack a beer.
Part of the problem with this approach is the ever changing landscape online. Something that converts visitors today, might not be working two months from now (in some cases, it may not be working in the first place, but no one took the time to test it).

Redesigning a website, or even a single page, can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Re-opening a project that you so happily completed can take major mental willpower. However, improving a website doesn’t need to take weeks, or even days. I’m a believer in baby steps: making incremental progress, small victories, minor adjustments with big results.
That’s where my 45-minute plan comes into play. In less time than you spend watching The Bachelor each week, you can have a dramatic (and measurable) effect on your website.
Keep in mind, all times are approximate (and people work at different paces).

0 to 5 Minutes

Select a page where you can have the greatest impact
Surprisingly, this may not always be your homepage. Instead of trusting your gut, a little digging in Google Analytics (or your favorite analytics tool) can show you exactly where to start.

Here are some ideas on finding pages that you can work on:
Navigate to your "top landing pages" or "top entrance pages" report (in Google Analytics, this is found under "Content" on the left sidebar).
Use a filter to remove pages with minimal traffic (see the "Advanced Filter" link at the bottom of the table).
Sort your pages by bounce rate.
Select the biggest loser: the page with the most potential for improvement (a combination of high visits and bounce rate).

5 to 15 Minutes

Use free (or cheap) tools to determine which areas on the page need the most attention
If you really want to stick to 45 minutes, you won’t have time to use a lot of tools, but even using one will give you the insight you need to make an improvement.

Here are some tips and tools that you can help up your conversion rates:
Get free advice from the design and development professionals on Concept Feedback. You can find more tools like Concept Feedback in my previous post "10 Excellent Feedback Tools for Web Designers".
See how people interact with your site using Userfly or ClickTale (extra credit: set up an informal user test with your neighbor, or use a remote testing service like UserTesting or Feedback Army).
Use heat maps to quickly see what’s popular and what’s overlooked. CrazyEgg and clickdensity both provide heat map tools.
Setup a quick survey with Survey Monkey, or a poll with PollDaddy to see what your users want.
Still need help? Here is a quick list of high impact items you could be testing:

• Headline copy
• Buttons (size, color and location)
• Calls to action
• Whitespace
• Advertisement density
• Value proposition
• Text size
• Images
• Color scheme (There are many tools for picking colors)

Find more tools that you can use through these articles:

• 7 Tools You Should Be Using For Better Web Designs
• 7 Incredibly Useful Tools for Evaluating a Web Design
• 10 Promising Free Web Analytics Tools

15 to 40 Minutes

Define the top 3 items from your research and implement the changes
Chances are that you’ll discover a hundred different things you could change, but remember, the key is incremental improvement and not a complete overhaul. So choose the items that you believe will have the most impact, and start there.
Keep in mind that the changes you make don’t need to be perfect—this is going to be a work in progress.
As soon as you’ve narrowed down your list to three, develop the content and code a test page right away. Limiting your list to three items keeps the project manageable. Don’t try to overdo it: you’ll be surprised how much impact just three seemingly minor adjustments can make.
If you get done with three and still want to try new changes—great!—this needs to be an ongoing process. However, don’t let an overwhelming list of ideas prevent you from action.

40 to 45 Minutes

Split test your new page, rinse and repeat

Once your new page is ready, set up an A/B split test in Google Website Optimizer to track the results. Make sure to select a conversion page that accurately reflects your primary goal for that page.
Depending on the amount of traffic your page receives, you should be able to determine relatively quickly (anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks) what effect your changes made. If you’ve done your due diligence, you’ll most likely be rewarded for your effort with an increase in conversion rates, and sometimes your tweaks can result in substantial improvements.
However, you may find that your new page performs about the same, or in some cases, worse. But that’s the beauty of testing! Every test, whether successful or not, provides you with new knowledge about your site: what works and what doesn’t.
So—now that you’ve spent 10 minutes reading this—take the next 45 to improve your website. And please, come back here and let me know how it goes!
Source : Six Revisions

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What Google+ Can Do That Facebook Can't

1. Easily share photos, links, or posts with only select friends

One of Google+'s signature features is called Circles, which lets you create mini friends lists, or social circles, within your larger network. You can customize groups fairly easily, with drag-and-drop actions, to limit who can see what. When you share something, you share it to a circle or multiple circles.

In Facebook, you have a few options for limiting who can see what, but it's not nearly as easy to manage. First, the "limited profile" setting can restrict selected connections from seeing everything—they only see a limited amount. Second, you can create Friends Lists (although it's not drag-and-drop), to which you can apply privacy setting; but if you want to post to your wall and only make it visible to a specific people such as the people on your Friends List, you have to click the lock icon next to the post, click "customize," choose "specific people" from the drop-down list, and then remember name of the list you created.

Another way Facebook lets you restrict your circle of friends is with Facebook Groups, but that's treated more like a forum with admins rather than just a sub-set of your real-life friends. Facebook Groups do come in handy, though, when you want to meet new people, as not all groups are private; some are open for anyone to join.

2. Plan details of an event with live video chat

Google+ has a free, multi-user video chat feature called Hangouts—Facebook has nothing like this. Integrating the video chat right into a social network makes a lot of sense, especially when coupled with other Google products, like Calendar. If you're collaborating with friends to host a party, travel together, or create a project, the ability to hold a video chat right within the context of all the other information goes well beyond what Facebook can do with event-planning.

3. Watch a YouTube video in real-time with friends

Within Hangouts, you and your friends can watch and search for YouTube videos together as a group. And anyone in the hangout has access to the controls to play, pause, or search for a new video. When you start the video, the group chat mutes everyone by default (to minimize echoes), but there's a button labeled Push to Talk that overrides it. In Facebook, the closest you can come to watching videos with other people is to do it asynchronously, and discuss it with comments, which is a whole lot less lively than Google's solution. One note in Google+ is that you have to watch those YouTube clips in Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer.

4. Curate content based on your interests

Another new concept in Google's social network is that Google should do one thing it already does fairly well: point you toward content that you want to find and explore. Google calls this new element Sparks, and it leverages a lot of what Google already does, but with more of an entertainment angle.

In Facebook, you can become a fan of or "like" a product, place, service, or what have you, but you can't actually cultivate an interest. Sparks instead delivers articles, blogs, and other content from the entire web—not just from within the social network platform—based on terms that you enter. You can save terms and return to them at any time to browse new content, and you can add circles or individuals to an item to share it with them.

With Facebook, you don't so much save search terms as have them automatically scoured so that Facebook can bring up ads that it thinks are relevant (and to be fair, this happens in Gmail as well). You end up seeing a lot of ads that aren't applicable to you just because you once made an inane analogy about a mustache-bleaching kit.

5. Instantly upload photos and videos to the cloud, but decide later how to share them

Google+ mobile apps (coming soon), will have an auto-upload feature so that any photo or video you take on your phone using the app (rather than the phone's built-in camera) will automatically be uploaded to your account, ready to share. The content doesn’t go public right away, so you can decide later who will get to see it. The next time you log into Google from your desktop, a number in the status bar will show how many new uploads you have on deck, ready to share.

Uploading photos and videos this way removes the worry of making an embarrassing photo public to every person you're connected to (or in Facebook, anyone who can see your full profile). Currently, photos and videos in Google+ stay ready in the queue for only eight hours after upload.

6. Quit

Have you ever tried to delete your Facebook account? The option is so buried it's nearly impossible to find. Deactivating a Facebook account is slightly easier, but it doesn't actually remove your entire presence from Facebook. Friends can still invite you to events, tag you in photos, or ask you to join groups after your account is deactivated—you just won't know about it.

Google+ on the other hand lets people leave easily. Facebook has received a lot of flak for not being upfront with users about certain default privacy settings and the like, so it actually is rather important that users are able to easily delete their Google+ accounts. And like Facebook, Google+ lets you download all your data (photos, messages) so you won't lose anything if you quit.

Source: http://www.pcmag.com/slideshows/

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Tips To Conduct a Quality Score Audit

First, let’s quickly review…

What factors into the quality score calculation

• Clickthrough rate (CTR)
• Ad history
• Landing page relevance
• Landing page speed

This is a simplistic view; in reality, there are lots of factors that influence the quality score calculation and you can read more about them in this more comprehensive post.
What’s most critical is this: CTR is the single biggest determinant of QS. If you have fantastic CTR – assuming you landing page loads normally – you’ll usually have great QS.

How to improve quality score

Here’s a quick guide to get you started.

• Separate the good from the bad. Start with the hatchet, and then we’ll use the scalpel. Set up a filter using AdWords Editor for all keywords with QS < 7. Cut all of those keywords and put them in a separate campaign(s).

The traditional school of thought around QS is that, although it’s only reported in the AdWords interface at the keyword-level, there’s actually adgroup-level and campaign-level QS too. The higher the overall QS of your adgroups and campaigns, the better.
You also want to isolate the QS < 7 keywords in order to troubleshoot them.

• Figure out why the QS is poor. Bad QS indicates poor relevance. Luckily, Google helps you troubleshoot this, at least in broad strokes, if you mouse over the little speech bubble in the “Status” column when looking at the “Keywords” view.

It can also be useful to try the diagnostic tool (the “Ad Preview and Diagnosis” link shown above). In the case above, though, there are no clear issues with the QS. It’s just that the keyword / ad combo isn’t all that fantastic when compared against others for this search term. The thing to do in this case is, well, see point “a” below.
Here are a few common reasons your QS sucks:

• Your keywords need to be tightly related to the ads in your adgroup. If your keywords are thematically all over the place, your overall CTR will come down and impact QS.
• The destination page where you’re sending people who click your ad isn’t clearly relevant to the content of your ad. If your ad is for flowers, that landing page better be about flowers.
• Your ad copy doesn’t contain the words in the keyword phrase you’re bidding on. This comes back to having small, tightly thematic adgroups. Your ads need to say to users, “You searched for pretty red flowers, and I’m all about pretty red flowers.”
• Your landing page loads too slowly. It isn’t super common that your page loads so slowly that Google dings you with respect to quality score.
• This is a controversial one, but Google account teams have confirmed it to me in the past: you’re simply not bidding enough. If you’re in a competitive space and your bid is leaving you with a poor average position (5-8, let’s say), your position results in a poor CTR and that poor CTR impacts your QS. Harsh but true.

The only solution here is to create a single-keyword adgroups, A/B test ads that are super relevant, and raise your bid. If you achieve decent position and start to get that CTR up, developing some good CTR history will help you and can eventually make the term less expensive.

• Raise your CTR. Sounds easy enough. How?

• • Make your ad copy laser-targeted. How to write good AdWords ad copy is a whole other beast, but at minimum, know that you need to say what you’re offering in the ad headline, match it to the specific words the user searched, repeat those words throughout the ad (but don’t overdo it – the ad needs to read like it makes sense or you’ll lose credibility), and capitalize the first letter of each word, excluding prepositions, conjunctions, etc.
  • Try this exercise. Google one of your top keywords and take a look at what competitors’ ad copy focuses on. Check out the search I conducted below to buy herbal tea online.

What do you notice about each of the ads? The first one emphasizes health benefits. The second one touts a testimonial (I’m not sure who Sir Jason Winters is, but if I’m ignorant, just let me know in the comments). J The third promotes its tea as “award winning” and offers a coupon code. The fourth ad is all about low prices and free shipping.
Now, go into your own AdWords account and create 3 ads tied to a few of your highest-volume keywords. Make sure they’re related closely enough to share an adgroup. Focus each of the 3 ads on a completely different benefit. One can be price-oriented with a coupon code; another can talk about all the great press you’ve gotten on CNN and the BBC.
Measure their respective CTRs and get a sense for what your customers care about most. Then, kill the 2 underperformers and create 2 new ads focused on the winning benefit, using different wording. Test tweaks to description line 2, for instance. This is how you refine ad copy to lock down a great CTR and a solid quality score.

The bottom line

While there’s no one-size-fits-all QS solution, and no one knows exactly how the algorithm works, we do know you’re typically rewarded with good QS when you build strong account history with highly relevant ads that point to good landing pages.
If you adhere to guidelines from the “layman’s 30-minute SEM audit,” develop single-keyword adgroups and maximize traffic coming from exact match keywords – that often covers half the battle when it comes to quality score optimization.

Source : Search Engine Journa
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Google's Real Time Search Is Now Offline

Google's real time search launched in 2009 and added some significant features in 2010, goes Offline as Google’s deal with Twitter expires.

Google sent this explanation:
Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2.
While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google

Twitter sent this:
Since October 2009, Twitter has provided Google with the stream of public tweets for incorporation into their real-time search product and other uses. That agreement has now expired. We continue to provide this type of access to Microsoft, Yahoo!, NTT Docomo, Yahoo! Japan and dozens of other smaller developers. And, we work with Google in many other ways.

For its part, Google said:
 Twitter has been a valuable partner for nearly two years, and we remain open to exploring other collaborations in the future.

Google has temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. They are exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned.

Some other features removed my Google are - Wonder Wheel, Image Search by Dimension
As part of the initial stage of Google redesign that they'll be rolling out over the next few months, Google have removed the Wonder Wheel search tool.

Google said they made the change for three reasons:

•    Focus :Whether you’re searching, emailing or looking for a map, the only thing you should be concerned about is getting what you want. Our job is to provide the tools and features that will get you there quickly and easily. With the design changes in the coming weeks and months, we’re bringing forward the stuff that matters to you and getting all the other clutter out of your way. Even simple changes, like using bolder colors for actionable buttons or hiding navigation buttons until they’re actually needed, can help you better focus on only what you need at the moment.
•    Elasticity: In the early days, there was pretty much just one way to use Google: on a desktop computer with an average-sized monitor. Over a decade later, all it takes is a look around one’s home or office at the various mobile devices, tablets, high-resolution monitors and TVs to see a plethora of ways to access the web. The new design will soon allow you to seamlessly transition from one device to another and have a consistent visual experience. We aim to bring you this flexibility without sacrificing style or usefulness.
•    Effortlessness: Our design philosophy is to combine power with simplicity. We want to keep our look simple and clean, but behind the seemingly simple design, use new technologies like HTML5, WebGL and the latest, fastest browsers to make sure you have all the power of the web behind you.

Source : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

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SEO Interview Questions - Whiteboard Friday

We've all been in difficult interview situations - you get a hard question and go on and on and on without giving a solid answer. In our realm, though, there are some SEO best practices that are so well established that everyone should know and be able to describe them to other people. If you're a business looking to hire an SEO (in-house, contractor, or otherwise), there's no better way to gauge an SEO's abilities than to ask them about basic SEO definitions and strategies. Similarly, SEOs looking for work should be prepared for a comprehensive interview that tests both their knowledge and their creative abilities. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about some of the questions that might come up in interviews for SEO positions and how to answer them (as well as discussing why interviewees should ask these questions). Have a good question for interviewers? Let us know in the comments!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about SEO interview questions, how there are a lot of times in your professional life when you're going to be either interviewing someone who might be working with you on an SEO team inside your company, who might be contracting for you, perhaps a consultant, you're interview someone, you're the CMO or the VP of marketing and you want to know who all these SEO people know their stuff. It can actually be kind of tough to know what questions to ask unless you've got some background experience. Likewise if you are someone who might be interviewing for an SEO position, if you're someone who is a consultant and might be talking to some clients and you want to be prepared for the questions that they're going to throw at you, this Whiteboard Friday is for you.

So in the SEO interview process, the questions that I would ask, these are very SEO specific ones. So in every interview, particularly when you're bringing someone on to your team, you're going to asking questions about cultural fit and background and their biography, like what have they done in their past. Are they going to be a good fit for your team? Are they going to be able to handle the responsibilities? Does their work/life balance work with sort of organization you've got? I'm not going to talk about that stuff. I am going to talk about the very specific knowledge kinds of things that you want to use with an SEO or that you want to be prepared for as an SEO when you're going into these types of discussions.

So the first general section, the section that I start with is general knowledge. This is a great way to feel out whether someone is comfortable and capable. I would use these, honestly if we were doing this, I would be using these on phone screens or maybe even in the interview process, like right in the form field just to get a sense, like, "Does this person have a good sense of SEO? Do they know things like, what's a rel=canonical? What does it do? How does it work? How do search engines treat the meta refresh? What's an image title versus an alt attribute?" So you've got different properties of a particular graphic or an image, and you want to know that the SEO person understands. "Yeah, I know that image title describes the image, but it isn't necessarily being used by search engines to the same degree that the alt attribute is. It doesn't show up when you hover in Firefox. It's not going to become the image label in Google image search, those kinds of things, versus the alt attribute that gets used as anchor text when the image links off to somewhere. So those kinds of things.

You might even have a question like, "How do you remove personalization from search results?" What you want to see is somebody goes, "Oh, yeah, yeah, it's google.com/search?Q=whatever the search term is &pws=0." You find someone who can write off search strings and tell you, "How do I change the country language code?" "Well, you just add in &gl=uk. To get the UK or 'us' to get the US." You want to see that sort of knowledge that indicates that they're really deep into the process of doing SEO. They live and breathe this stuff. They know it like the back of their hand. That's what you want to see from an SEO, and this general knowledge section is a great way to get a sense of that.

Now next up, I like to get a little deeper and understand a person's thought process and be able to explain your thought process to somebody else. That's why we have a section on strategy and tactics. So this is asking questions that will elicit a response that indicates to you how well this person can really do the functions of SEO. A lot of this general knowledge stuff they should have a good background, but if they miss a few of these questions, it's fine. They can always go learn them. They can go look them up. They'll figure it out, it's okay. But you really want to know things like, "Do they understand how to run a keyword research campaign? Do they understand how to run link building? Do they understand what's involved in a content strategy? What does that mean? It doesn't just mean a blog, does it?" It's all sorts of different things.

So I like asking broad questions like, "How would you create a site to rank for give them a keyword or a set of keywords?" Like, "I am getting into the men's fashion industry. Just imagine for me, brainstorm with me a site that's going to perform really well in men's fashion." And if you hear things like, "Well, I would like to build a site that naturally incents lots of creators, lots of designers of clothing, and lots of brands to put their stuff on our site. So it will be a big important site where lots of people will come to. They'll put their stuff up and they'll essentially promote it for us, but we have a lot of unique form fields and unique content that they have to fill out so that the content itself is unique and it doesn't just look like the manufacturer's suggested description across everything else, because we don't want to have duplicate content problems." That's shows some level of depth in terms of thinking. It gives you a sense of how they'll tackle problems.

You can ask questions like, "What are some of your favorite scalable link building tactics?" And if they say something like, "Well, I really like contacting webmasters." No, like, "Nope, you're clearly missing this word scalable and also probably favorite, because nobody really likes contacting webmasters." That's the least fun part the SEO's link building job. But if they say things like, "Well, I really like building up popular social accounts," or, "I like running a blog and building up content to attract a community," those are pretty good answers. If they say things like, "I really think that content syndication or image licensing or badges and embeddable widgets is a great link building strategy that's scalable," those are great answers. You want to hear that kind of stuff.

"How would you get video content into Google?" More of a tactical question, but it gives you a sense of some of the knowledge and then how they do it. So if you hear a question like that and the person gives you a response and they say, "Well, Google has this video protocol." All right, they do, Google does have a video protocol. But what you really want to hear is, "Oh, it's great! What I like to do is make content using YouTube or Wistia or Vimeo," or whatever it is, whatever their preferred video hosting service of choice is and let them tell you why that is, "and then embed it on our pages and we use the video XML sitemaps feed to send to Google so that appears as rich snippets in the search results." Perfect, this person clearly understands the tactical knowledge, and maybe they don't even know how to craft it. I don't know how to write a video XML sitemap. I couldn't start writing you the protocols from scratch, but I can go find it online and copy what Google suggests it needs to be. I just need to have the knowledge of how to do that.

So that strategy and tactics section, also really important.

Last up. I do like to ask about some tools and metrics because this can give you a great sense of both an SEO's depth as well as they way they think about a lot of problems. Because the field of SEO, granted, is some art, some science, and a lot of research and learning and trying new things, the tools and metrics, the statistics that we use, the correlation data kinds of things, the link data that comes out of Yahoo Site Explorer, or Bing Webmaster tools, or the Google link command, or Exalead, or Majestic SEO, or SEOmoz, you want to know that they've got a good grasp on, "Oh, here's all the ways that I could potentially get that data and here's why I like this one and I don't like this one. I like the Bing or the MSN Ad Center or the keyword tool. I don't like the Google keyword tool. I really don't like some keyword tool here, but I think Keyword Spy's great or SpyFu is awesome," or whatever it is. And you want to know, not just what those tools are, but how do they evaluate them.

That gives you a really good sense for how that person thinks about problems, how they're going to attack things, whether they're a critical thinker or whether they just take things on face value, which in the SEO world is not a great idea. Like even the things that I might be telling you on Whiteboard Fridays, you probably want to verify for yourself. So things like, "What data would you use to use to judge the value of a link?" And you want to hear things like, "Well, I'd try and gets some metrics around how important the domain is, how important that specific page is. I'd try and get some metrics about where is that link going to be placed, what sort anchor text will it use, how many other links are on that page, where do they point to, or they spammy or manipulative, or are they good and authentic?" Those kinds of things. "What tools do you use to measure competitors' keywords and traffic?" And if they tell you, "Well, I really like this SpyFu or KeyCompete, or some of these other ones, Compete.com has a competitive intelligence tool. Hitwise has one, very enterprise level." Hey, yeah, those are good ways to measure keywords.

On the traffic question, if they say, "Well, I really like, Alexa." I'd be like, "You do? Why do you like Alexa? What do you find useful about it?" There are good answers, which is, "Well, for the top 1,000 or 5,000 sites on the Web, Alexa's pretty good at saying what the relative difference is between them." Which is relatively true, most of the time at least. But for those sites in the tail, sites in the midrange, Alexa's terrible. You kind of want to hear, "Well, none of the data sources are particularly excellent, but I like to look at Google Trends for websites, or Compete.com, or I like to look at Quantcast. I like to compare across the set. But I really like to look at maybe how many people are subscribing to their blog through Google Reader. That's a great signal." It's let's you know that person is thinking more deeply about these questions.

"How do you measure social activity on a site?" That's more of a broad based question. Like, "Do you just track tweets? Do you have some sort of an analytics tracking? What do you set up for that? Are you using something simple like a shared count? Do you have a statistics dashboard? Would you be using a Twitter client to be measuring that?" Whatever they've got.

If you ask these questions or you can answer these questions, I think you're going to do a lot to cement a good relationship between things. If you're in SEO right now and you're thinking to yourself, "Boy, I'm not sure I can answer all those questions that Rand had on the board," I mean, these aren't the toughest things that'll get tossed at you at an interview. They shouldn't be definitely. So you might want to spend some time having good answers to these questions, thinking hard about these things, researching them. And likewise, if you're an employer or a contractor and you're trying to find SEO people to work for you, do consulting work, you definitely want to amass a good set of these. I would actually recommend trying to ask relatively consistently again and again with the same people because having that consistency between questions let's you really grade people on the same level. If you change up your questions every time, it can get tough to remember how well a candidate might have done against another one.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Posted by Aaron Wheeler
Source : - SEOmoz

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Don’t Underestimate Google Ranking Factors

These ranking factors are gaining importance or haven’t been as popularly accepted as they deserve

Site Speed – site speed is an official ranking factor that Google has been pushing quite hard for a while. Despite this, I still see plenty of sites that don’t seem to care. They load huge images where you don’t need any or are cluttered with widgets and rich media that take too long to load. Especially on mobile phones, Google prefers sites that load quickly.

Social Signals – Twitter, Quora and even Friendfeed get used by Google Social search to populate your social search results, but these services also influence regular results. Hundreds of tweets by real accounts with some authority can push your site significantly. A few tweets by authority accounts or even one Google Buzz mention can get you indexed. Google just acquired social media analytics tool PostRank so they can measure this even better.

Usability – with the Google ”Panda” high quality update, user experience as chekecd by human quality raters and automatically measured by algorithms have been introduced as a direct ranking factor.

Outgoing Links – it has already been two years since Matt Cutts disclosed that outgoing links to authority sites are a positive ranking factor like bad neighborhoods are a negative one. These days some of the most renowned SEOs advise linking out not just for direct ranking benefit, and link out a lot themselves.

Google +1 – with the launch of Google +1 it has been announced that +1 votes will count as a ranking factor. There are still penalty of sites who don’t seem to care. Inserting a +1 button is easier than a Facebook-like widget.

Branding – over the years, branding has seemingly become one of the most important ranking factors for Google. Make sure that people know your name and link to you using it. This way you ensure that you will be created as a brand while generic sites get downranked. It’s even feasible that Google counts the number of mentions of your name or brand that do not link to you. The more you get talked about the better, of course.

SERP CTR – Google can measure how many people actually click your site in search results. You can even see the numbers in Google Webmaster Tools. The less people do click, the less valuable it must be is the logic I’m afraid. Make sure you sport an enticing meta description and title tag. Don’t just stuff keywords in there like 10 years ago.

Readability – Google is also measuring the readability level of a text. For instance, most of my blog posts don’t require a university degree to get understood. That might be an advantage in many cases, unless someone needs scientific advice of course.

Ads to content-ratio – too many ads on your site may mean bad karma as your site might get considered to be a thin content site with more ad than actual text. If you use Adsense, this might be even easier to determine.

Site topic – what is a page about? Increasingly, search engines try to understand the meaning of a query to return the best results. Google is still at a very early stage of this, but it already matters what the page linking to you deals with. So placing an SEO article on a gardening site may not work in the future.

Page age (not domain age) – Google is increasingly keen on displaying dates on your articles and posts. While it’s not yet clear whether it’s a direct ranking factor as well, it will surely impact your click-through rate. The older the date, the less likely people are to click.

Link velocity – by link velocity, we describe the actual number of links a site gets in a particular time frame. If you get links too fast, you may end up in a Google filter. On the other hand, a good viral campaign with a large number of links in a matter of hours or days can propel you to the top accordingly.

Link decay – as content gets older, many links in it end up being broken. Or even worse, some of them redirect to bad neighbourhoods. So link decay may hurt in two ways, by either showing that your content is now obsolete or by hurting it directly by linking to spammy or rogue sites.

Internal link anchor text – the actual anchor text your internal links have can be a major ranking factor. So don’t link ”services” in the menu but ”seo services”.

Alt text – in 2009 it seemed that alt text, the text you add in the alt attribute on images, may be one of the most important ranking factors on page. I admit that I still neglect this ranking factor, sometimes due to sheer haste and laziness. Blind users are only aware of the alt descriptions so you may want to think twice and add them.

On page link position – over the years, Google has been stepping up its efforts to identify where a particular link is on a webpage, in the footer, sidebar or the editorial part of the content. These days editorial links are best, of course.

Natural link profile – a natural link profile consists of all kinds of links: branded ones, deep links, nofollow links, even links from low quality scraper sites. By now it’s quite sure that Google has to look at the overall link profile of a site. If your site has only links from one geographical area, sites on one specific topic or specific links (e.g. blog comments), for example, this may mean that you will be ranked accordingly.

Deep link ratio – with the new Panda algorithm, sites with many pages that have no external incoming links have suffered. Until now it was enough to have enough authority from the homepage to push thousands of pages down in the hierarchy. From now, deep links get even more important for so called long tail content.

Link geography – as noted above, UK-based links are good for UK sites that want to rank in the UK. If you want to also rank well in the US, you want to make sure you publish and promote your posts while most US citizens are awake (not in the morning UK time). This also works for tweets, as some tests have already shown.

Backlink diversity – links from a lot of different sites are important not only for the natural link profile. Backlink diversity is similar to domain popularity and ultimately part of a natural link profile. This ranking factor has been around for ages, and some people have seemingly forgotten about it.

Just consider this: a new site is buying links from a few high PageRank sites and has barely any other links from domains with no Google authority. Doesn’t it look suspicious?

These ranking factors are losing ground or are even negative ranking factors

Facebook likes – in recent days there’s been a lot of news coming in that Facebook likes do not count as much or at all for Google rankings. Until now, after a disclosure a few months ago, it was assumed that Google counts public likes from profiles that are visible to everyone (like mine is for example).

Exact match domains – for years, so-called exact match domains e.g. seo.com for the query [seo] have been the best bet to rank quickly and stay on top. The good times seem to be over, however; branding gets more important, and even an exact match generic keyword domain is no guarantee of ranking these days.

Backlink anchor text – when every link to your site from the Web has the same anchor text, such as “seo agency”, this will be easily detected by Google. The anchor text of incoming links gets monitored more closely, so using it in an over-optimised way might even hurt you.

h1 headlines – some already old studies suggest that the h1 tag has lost much of the impact it once might have had on Google results. h2 and even smaller headlines most probably counted for more until now. Other specialists tend to dismiss h-tag altogether these days. I’m not sure here, but headlines are not a place to stuff keywords in anymore.

Top level domain – the TLD, that is the .com .co.uk or .fr ending of your domain, doesn’t count that much these days. Sites with .ly, .me, .is and other similarly exotic top level domains can rank well now without major disadvantages. Just look at Good.is – it even outranks Good.com.

Server location – my own SEO blog over at SEO 2.0 has been ranking for years in the US, despite being hosted in Germany. So while hosting locally is a good thing, it won’t stop you from ranking when you get your SEO strategy right and earn links from your target market. I considered moving it, but I decided that the change would not be significant enough to justify the risks of moving.

Content length - I remember when one of the most common pieces of SEO advice was to write content that is at least 200 words long. Also, over the years, pages with very long on-site copy have traditionally ranked better than short ones. Now that Google has cracked down on content farms that focused on size not quality, it would seem that content length is not a signal of utmost importance anymore.

Backlink number – I also remember a time when you looked at the sheer number of links a site had. Soon the number turned completely useless because of thousands of footer links from ”partners” many websites got. With the appearance of widely used CMS systems like WordPress and Drupal, Google has taken measures to curb the footer link game.

Keyword density – the higher the keyword density, the more likely you get penalised by Google for keyword stuffing. Keyword density is not a metric most serious SEO practicioners use in 2011. While it’s good to mention your actual keywords on page, any suggested density of several per cent is nonsense and barely readable.

Meta keywords tag – no major search engine uses the meta keywords tag as a ranking factor these days, yet some blogs still advise you to use it for SEO. Some SEO experts assume that it’s even a negative ranking factor. Google might be checking whether the keywords mentioned in it are also found on page, and if they aren’t, you might get downranked.

Of course, ranking by itself is not the only thing important in SEO, but if your SEO strategy is based on outdated ranking signals that do not matter anymore, while you ignore the most important current ones, you may be heading in the wrong direction.

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Google+ Tips to Enhance Your Google Plus Experience

some useful Google+ Tips shared by Matt Cutts and users who responded on his post at Google+. All these tips are handy and let you experience the actual power of Google+ (PLUS). Check them below:
1. Click on Profile pictures to rotate through them.
2. Click ‘j‘ to navigate down to the next item or ‘k‘ to navigate up when checking the stream using keyboard.
3. To add formatting to your text, use the simple trick below.

• (*)bold(*): Add * before and after the message.
• (_)italics(_): Add _ before and after the message.
• (-)strike-through(-): Add - before and after the message.

For example: *Hello* _everyone_ -Mayur- will appear as shown below:

4. Click on “Limited” next to the timestamp to find out the actual list of persons with whom you are sharing a particular post.

5. Add a + or @ signal to mention someone specifically in a post.

6. Click on the Timestamp to get the permalink (web URL) of any post.

7. Share your post with Public or Circle/Circles only. You can even share a post with an individual by typing their name or email address. A very useful one!

8. What’s more, you can even edit the photos uploaded by you. It’s easy and flawless.

Open any picture uploaded by you or visit the gallery. Select Actions > Edit photo.

Then improve your not so good photos by adding some smart effects to them in a click.
9. Unlike Gmail, you can Resize the Chat Box in Google+. To do so, just drag the box by its corner or sides.

10. If you’re annoyed with some post that is getting lots of comments and thus irritating you with notifications. Just Mute the post. You can even Block any person and can Report Abuse against him.

11. Set Options for any post made by you by clicking the grey drop-down ‘Options’ icon. You can choose to Edit it, Delete it, Disable comment or Disable Resharing a post.

12. Tired of receiving notifications for a particular post you made or commented on? Just hit “Mute this post” to get rid of it.

13. Share a post or check notifications on Google+ directly from within Gmail account without opening a separate webpage for Google+. Now that’s seamless integration.

14. See how your profile appears to others – Input his/her username, select Edit profile, make the alterations to your profile only for that specific person. Something unique!

15. While on the Home tab, press twice the q key on the keyboard to search and add people to your chat list. (Press q 2nd time after a gap of sec).
16. Hitting Enter when focused on a Post opens up the comment box.
17. Set delivery preferences and tick mark desired entries under “Receive Notifications”. Visit this link to edit the settings: https://plus.google.com/settings/plus
18. What’s that Incoming option under Stream? "Incoming" stream is stuff from people who are sharing with you, but who you haven’t added to a circle.
19. Give feedback – Found any bug or have a tip to suggest? Just click Send feedback from lower right corner, cool part is you can highlight the faulty area and report about it.
20. Trick to Invite anyone to Google+ even if you don’t have invites – Make a post, Share it with that person using his email address. Then ask him to click Learn more about Google+ in the received email. On opening it, he would be able to Join Google+.
Update – Check more New Tips below:
21. New Bonus Tip – How to Enable Email Feature on your Google+ Profile
22. Use the Scroll wheel of your mouse to Navigate through the Photos in the gallery.
23. Enable Chat for Circles – How to Chat with People in your Google+ Circle
24. Drag and Drop Photos, Videos and Links directly to post box from your desktop.

Tip credit: Gerard Sanz
25. Manage how People from your Circles appears to everyone on your Profile – Open your Google+ profile and edit it. Then click the round black-grey icon and select the desired options. You can also choose to hide the “Have you in Circles” box.

Tip credit: Dave Bort
Thanks to Matt Cutts and various responders for sharing most of these cool tips.


by Mayur
Source : WebTricz.Com

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Standard "Benchmarking" Report in Your Google Analytics Account

1. Introduction

Welcome to the first volume of the Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter!
This month, we are replacing the standard "benchmarking" report in your Google Analytics account with data shared in this newsletter. We are using this newsletter as an experiment to surface more useful or interesting data to Analytics users. Data contained here comes from all websites which have opted-in anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics. Only those website administrators which have enabled this anonymous data sharing will receive this "benchmarking" newsletter.
You may be wondering, how many websites are in this "anonymous data sharing" pool? Currently, hundreds of thousands, and we've endeavored to make all of the metrics here statistically significant.
The date range of comparison for this newsletter is from November 1, 2010 - February 1, 2011. Comparison is done with data from November 1, 2009 - February 1, 2010. Absolute metrics such as total # visits, pageviews, or conversions for all opted-in websites are not reported.
To simplify the prose, the phrase "websites" will represent "websites which have opted into anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics" for the rest of this newsletter.

2. Site Metrics

Compared to a year ago, websites have seen reduced pages / visit, average time on site, as well as bounce rate.

	11/1/09 - 2/1/10	11/1/10 - 2/1/11	Difference
Pages/Visit	4.9	4.5	-0.4
Bounce Rate	48.2%	47.0%	-1.2%
Avg Time on Site	5:49	5:23	-0:26

2.1 Breakdown by Geography

Our anonymous database has aggregated geographic breakdown at the country level. Here are a few representative countries and their respective aggregate metrics. The first number in each cell represents the metric for the date range 11/1/10-2/1/11. The parenthesized number is the Year over Year delta compared to a year ago.

Country	Pages / Visit	Bounce Rate	Avg Time on Site
United States	4.7 (-0.1)	42.5% (-6.1%)	6:06 (-0:10)
United Kingdom	4.9 (-0.3)	41.5% (+0.2%)	5:38 (-0.27)
France	4.4 (-0.4)	49.7% (+1.4%)	4:40 (-0:08)
Brazil	4.1 (-0.1)	47.8% (-2.9%)	5:20 (+0:03)
China	4.1 (-0.1)	58.2% (+1.0%)	3:46 (+0:37)
Japan	3.9 (-0.1)	48.6% (-9.0%)	3:47 (-2:59)

For bounce rate, the distribution by country is plotted below: The distribution above is annotated with some countries -- which seem to indicate a story of leisure and stage of economic development. For a related metric: average time on site, the distribution by country is plotted below: The type of countries annotated in the average time on site graph above seem to be in reverse order as those in the bounce rate distribution.

2.2 Breakdown by Traffic Sources

Traffic sources below are identified by how the "source" and "medium""" parameters are received by the Google Analytics collecting servers. Here is an article describing what these designations refer to.

Traffic Sources	Pages / Visit	Bounce Rate	Avg Time on Site
Direct	4.0 (-0.5)	47.2% (-4.0%)	5:21 (-0:07)
Referral	5.0 (+0.1)	43.1% (-1.1%)	6:36 (-1:48)
Organic Search	4.9 (-0.1)	47.9% (-1.1%)	4:43 (+0:06)
CPC Search	5.6 (+0.0)	41.4 (-1.7%)	3:57(+0:07)

2.4 Conversion Rate Distribution

Many marketers' favorite metric is conversion rate. Here is the worldwide distribution of Google Analytics "goal conversion rate" by country.
Would anyone have guessed that states which are known for conversions are also high for their citizens' goal conversion rate? Note that for some states with few population, the statistical significance of the conversion metric comes into doubt.

3. Traffic Sources

Traffic sources below are identified by how the "source" and "medium" parameters are received by the Google Analytics collecting servers. Here is an article describing what these designations refer to.

% Visits from Sources	11/1/09 - 2/1/10	11/1/10 - 2/1/11	Difference
Direct	36.5%	36.8%	+0.3%
Referral	21.0%	19.4%	-1.6%
Search Engines	27.0%	28.0%	+1.0%
Other	15.5%	15.8%	+0.3%

4. Operating Systems

Browsers and Operation Systems (OS) are identified by the "referrer" string sent by users' browsers.

% Visits from OS	11/1/09 - 2/1/10	11/1/10 - 2/1/11	Difference
Windows	89.9%	84.8%	-5.1%
Macintosh	4.5%	5.2%	+0.7%
Linux	0.6%	0.7%	+0.1%
Other	5%	9.3%	+4.3%

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