Tag: google

Go Google+ for higher SERPs on Google

Prasad Ajinkya1 Comment

Once you launch a site, the work is not done … in fact the work of a webmaster has just begun! One clear metric for the success of your site (especially early on) is site traffic. Over a period of time as your site matures and you get a better sense of what drives your site, you will tend to discard this metric, but initially it is always traffic.

Search as a major component of Traffic

Traffic Split for kidakaka.com
Screenshot from Google Analytics on the traffic source split. 82% search, 14% direct and 4% referral (I have to drive this up!!)

One good component of traffic is search, traffic that comes searching for content relevant to your subject. Yes! There are people out there who are actively searching for things about which you want to write!! Right from narrow niches such as Pathare Prabhu Recipes to broad gulches such as Being Awesome in Excel.

For content rich websites, Search is a major component contributing to the site’s traffic. For example, 70% of my site’s traffic comes from Google Search! This is actually higher than what I wanted it to be and I try to bring it down by driving traffic via other sources, however I will always want a good fat 40-50% traffic coming to my site via search.

In fact when I started working on my site on a regular basis around 6 months back (as part of my new year resolution), I hardly realized that it would make such a big difference to the traffic split.

How to acquire Organic traffic?

There are a lot of agencies out there who promise that they will ensure that you would start ranking on your set of keywords. Here’s a starter for post for those who want to get into SEO, go read this and stop paying agencies a lot of money for barely scratching the surface.

If you want to acquire organic traffic, then write good content … write about things that move you, about things which you are passionate about. Write from the heart, and forget about those grammatical mistakes. If you have a friend who is a grammar nazi, get him/her to review your post later on.

Ranking that Content higher on Google

So now that you have a stream of content on your site, how to ensure that people who are searching for your subject matter actually end up finding your website?

This is where your friends and social circle comes in!

Sharing your content with friends and getting them like/+1 the content is a social signal that search engines read. This acts like a testimonial for your site in the eyes of the search engine.

See this for yourself, take one article on your site and like this on Google+. Then search for this article via your friend’s Google id … note the before +1 Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) and the after SERP.

Google+, you have my attention

Here is a list of things that you need to get setup on with Google+ –

  • Setup Authorship on Google – This will link your Google+ profile to the content you create. It also ensures that your Google+ profile pic is displayed besides the content you write and this gets shown when someone is searching for the content that you have written. Stats provided by Google on this suggest that linking Authorship will get you a 30% boost in your organic click-through rates Authorship_of_Kidakaka
  • Be active on Google+ – Make this a part of your daily routine. Google+ is good for content discovery, try and meet new people on Google+, focus on increasing the number of people who are in your circles and who have you in their circles. This will increase the visibility of your content on Google for at least those people. In case if you have had some interaction with them, then chances are they would want to read what you have to say about the subject that they are currently searching!
  • Get those Google+ Shares – To initially start off, ask your friends to share your site on Google+. This works. It does wear down on your personal equity, but what are friends for if not to help you out :-D

Don’t simply take my word for this. Even Moz (erstwhile SEOMoz) says that there is correlation between Google +1s and Higher SERPs. In layman’s terms what this means is that the more +1s on Google+ your article gets, the higher will it rank on Google.

So get on this network and start using Google+! Instead of wasting time liking lolcats on Facebook, try and use your spare time

Google Plus banned my Profile

Prasad Ajinkya8 Comments

I am trying to develop a regular rapport with this Google+ since I believe that over a period of time, this will affect in a big way on how search results are displayed to users. I do not have definitive stats which indicate that a person in higher number of circles result in higher SERPs, but this is a gut feel and more on that later. Visiting Google+ and engaging on the social network is part of my daily agenda. If you are a blogger, you should try it out some time.

However, when I logged onto Google+, this is what I saw on the top of my screen

Google+ ban

So I did what any normal person would do.

I raged. Then I calmed down and tried to reason with the system as to why this could be the case. After reading through the myriad of support articles that were linked in the notifications, the only action one could do was delete all content that I had submitted and submit the profile for review.

Google Suspension

After submitting my profile and waiting for a day, the good folks at Google decided that my profile was still violating some of their policies.

As a user, it would have been great if they could clearly point that out, however much to my chagrin there has been no actionable point from Google. Big Brother wants to disable my profile and that’s the way it would stay. An automated system is a good thing, but an iron wall is bad … I cannot even question why my account was suspended … the two documents that suggest probable reasons are Google+ User Content and Conduct Policy and Name Policy.

The former suggests that I have uploaded some content which could be hate comment, spam, …. the later suggests that my name does not seem genuine. I don’t know which allegation is more disturbing. I would love to contest these allegations, but there is no committee with whom I can take this up with … there is simply a red notification about the ban.

I have always been a Google Fan-boy, perhaps I still am, but this system makes me question their approach at trying to launch a social network. If you are spurning away your active users, how do you propose to get more users to stick to your social network?

Visual.ly now supports Google Analytics data

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

 

I love infographics. The way they break out data into beautiful little pictures and help you understand their impact is excellent. However, it can take a fair bit of efforts to create an infographic … believe me, I have tried and used multiple tools to do this. If you are thinking of doing those from the ground up, then you are faced with challenges such as choosing the colours, typography and which data to show in what manner.

If you are design impaired like me, then this steep learning curve is bound to turn you off.

This is where visual.ly really shines through. It provides you with templates for creating infographics. Templates which have been tried and tested and make your job of creating an infographic easy. What’s awesome is that they keep releasing kickass integrations such as this one, where in you simply have to give access to your Google Analytics data and it will create a weekly infographic such as the one above.

If you are a data nerd, then you may not appreciate the findings of this report, but then you should be able to relate to some of these important points. As a webmaster and a data nerd, I am happy that the organic search results have dropped … since now I am slowly looking at other sources of traffic. This drop in organic traffic has come due to a decent rise in social traffic and that makes me a happy webmaster.

Earth Day 2013

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

April 22nd, is Earth Day and you can see that in a beautiful interactive Weather Control Doodle on Google’s home page.

On Earth Day, I would expect people on different social media channels to do multiple idiotic things … such as switching off their electronic devices for an hour. Yes, and that would make a difference when the very social network you are posting on creates more pollution in an hour than what you would in a year!!

I consider myself as a capitalist, someone who loves to see the wheels of industry working and creating things from scratch. When these wheels end up destroying and defiling mother nature, I fall in a conflict of interest. To stop industry all together and work in restoring the world … or to keep destroying the environment and fuel the industry. It’s easy to give the politically correct answer – we need to save the planet, save the earth.

My question is why cannot they co-exist? It’s a foolish notion, but I think this can be done by Going Green. I don’t mean the Going Green which tech companies talk about … but more pragmatic and grass root level things. So apart from shutting down your computer and goofing off for one hour, what green activity are you going to do on Earth Day 2013?

India’s first passenger train journey

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

On 16th April 1853, India’s first passenger train journey began. It started from Bori Bunder in Mumbai, all the way up to Thane. This was a distance of 32 km, wherein 3 coaches were hauled by the engine. Thus started rail transport in India.

India's first passenger train journey

This piece of history came to my notice not because of the local channels, but due to it being covered prominently by international websites such as Google (see their Doodle above) and the detailed article on Wikipedia.

What started off as India’s first passenger train journey, is now a multi-crore business and one of the few profitable industries run by the Government of India. Some of this credit needs to be given to Laloo of course, however what works for the railways is the availability of transport, the cost and it’s efficiency.

I recently traveled from Mumbai to Baroda in the Rajdhani express, and although the quality of food being served has declined over the past decade, the service and efficiency of things have gone up. The entire journey is orchestrated with your travel and you can even predict which course will be served to you with the station that is approaching. So all in all, I would say we have gone quite far since India’s first passenger train journey.

Kudos to the Indian Railways!

RIP Google Reader

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

Google is one organization which I will always respect. The amount of products and web apps that it has released over the years is awesome … it’s not that other companies are not releasing as many products (if not more!). What gets to me is that the sheer number of products that Google releases which I FIND USEFUL.

I agree that as an early adopter I am one of the first to sign-up for betas and also lucky enough to get sneak peeks at a few private betas. However, in any given day the amount of time I spend using Google products is as high as 5 hours (and I am not even including Gmail! Else it could be twice as much).

One such product which I use was Google Reader. Now if you have been around the Google EcoSystem, you would know that Google has decided to pull the plug on Google Reader. Having used Google Reader for the past 8 years, this has come as a shock for me … I have read, shared and liked literally thousands of articles on this great feed aggregator. I realize that over the months, the usage was dipping down .. especially after the integration of Google Plus!

Here’s my small note to a dear friend –

Dear Google Reader,

We had some good times didn’t we? All the starring … and the liking … and the sharing … and even sending a few emails. I always considered you a social network of well informed readers and intellectuals. A social network which was not about looking at photos, but about reading good content.

The great thing was that I could find out which content my friends are recommending and filter all the crappy content out and read the good stuff. You made that happen … and for that I thank you.

All good things have come to an end I guess … and tis with a heavy heart that I am abiding you farewell. I am considering Feedly as your alternative … but Feedly will not replace you. It will simply function as a feed reader which I sorely need.

I will miss you. Rest in Peace.

What is a long tail keyword?

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

I have been writing about the basics of SEO and search based advertising on my blog for quite some time. The common thing in both is that the first interaction in search is always the keyword based search.

Yes, this is the part where our user goes to his favorite search engine (Go Google!) and searches for this keyword. Based on how well this search engine has indexed content, it will display the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Search is keyword based

This bit, every other person will tell you. That you need to be listed for your main keyword.

What people do not realize is that normal people like you or me are beings which adapt to a situation. In the heydays of Google, one simple search term used to help me find the right content.

Case of Crappy Content

The problem is that since then a lot of things have changed, and the sheer amount of crappy content on the internet has increased.

What this means, is that I do not find the right page even after searching the right term! So what does the normal user do after this?

Well, he refines his search … he adds a couple of other terms after his original term … that whittles the search results by a few thousands … and he keeps doing that until he finally finds the page he wanted! The user started with one term … and has finally ended up with a series of terms! But this set of terms has helped him reach to the right piece of information. That’s what matters in the end.

This set of terms the user used in the search engine is called a long tail keyword.

Long tail keywordThe name is because the number of terms keep on growing over a period of time. The longer the tail, the more specific you get about your search.

As content generation and content indexation in a search engine keep on growing … the number of terms required to recall the correct page also grow. Neil Patel discusses this very matter in a very information post on how content length affects conversions.

What does this mean?

So now you know what is a long tail keyword … but what do yo do with this piece of theory?

Well for starters, you get to understand that the longer the keyword, the more niche the audience. This increases the chances of a conversion (if your keyword research and targeting is spot-on). Longer keywords will have lesser impressions, but higher conversions.

This also means that as time goes by, the pressure on publishers (that’s me and you if you are a blogger!) would keep getting higher to write in a much more well defined fashion. I can certainly see this in my writing which has evolved in the past 3-4 years of writing on this blog.