Methods to reduce your site Bounce Rate –

Bounce Rate is a calculation of the number of visitors that exit a site directly from the page they entered, without viewing any other page of the website. It can be said that having high percentage of bounce rate for your website will lead to low conversion rates. To find out the Bounce Rate of your site, you can login to your Google Analytics account, & check under the “Content Overview” or “Top Content” page.

A few reasons of having high bounce rate are the following:

• Website is attracting wrong kind of visitors.
• Irrelevant ads selected in PPC Campaign.
• The loading time of the page takes long time, hence visitors leave.
• Visitors are facing a not user friendly landing page or a confusing content.

These are 8 simple ways to lower your Bounce Rate:

1. Build a user friendly Navigation (Menu)

You hyperlinks structure are the superpower of the web. Your web site requires to be user friendly, just like a menu card in hotel, that allows the visitor to find what he wishes easily. Avoid positioning the menu at the bottom, attempt to organize the pages into categories and don’t forget that all important pages should not be more than 3 clicks away from the homepage. Proposing relevant products or services and targeting links in strategic place in the text is something worth exercising. Try employing text links that carry keywords and avoid flash menus.

2. Use an attractive Website Layout / Design

The layout of your website is one of the most important factors. Test employing an eye friendly color, keep off animations that will pop up in the midst of the page that could distract or irritate the visitor. Structured content without selective information spill over in one page can present your message to the visitors effectively. Avoid utilizing template sites and make the layout designed through a professional. Make a point to check that the HTML of your website is valid in order to experience the same result in all the browsers.

3. Avoid Page loading time, keep page size small

Make sure you have optimized the size of your images, keep the text/html code ratio low and try your best to keep the loading time as low as possible as it affects the user’s experience.

4. Construct well written content

Check that the title, the headers and the metatags of each page are relevant with the content. Make an abstract in the first paragraph or try to resolve all the visitor’s questions in the beginning of your page.

5. Optimize keywords correctly

When it comes to SEO, always optimize the pages for relevant keywords. Each page should target to 1 or 2 terms. Make sure they have a good keyword density and that they appear in the important parts of the document such as the titles and headers. Do not try to trick the users and Google by including unrelated or too generic keywords. Even if you manage to rank first, the users will leave right away and you will increase the Bounce Rate.

6. Pursue Quality Links

Attempt to acquire many good links pointing to your page. Make sure they carry the correct anchor text. You can hook other webmasters to link to your pages by placing genuine content in your pages. Try to avoid link exchange as in most of the cases one of the 2 linkers loses more PageRank.

7. Take off your PPC Campaign using priority keywords

Consider starting a Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign on the important keywords of your site. Make sure you will pay a reasonable price per click and select the ones that are relevant to you content. Pay attention to the bidding management of your PPC campaign. Bid for the right keywords in order to avoid wrong traffic.

8. Study the reports

As a webmaster, when you measure how productive the online marketing campaign was, you should not only take into account the amount of traffic, the PageRank or the page views of your site but also focus on the Bounce Rate, the Average Time on Site, the Pages/Visit and the Conversion Rates. Use a web analytics tool like Google Analytics, define your goals, study the reports, categorize your visitors based on their behavior and redesign your SEO plan when needed.

Here are some simple thinks to have in mind:

• The user must find what he searches for. On an average it should be about 8 seconds before he leaves the page.
• The content (titles, headers, texts) of your page should be clear and easy to read.
• Get to the point and do not distract the user with popups, huge ad banners, tones of links etc.
• Give him the option to search or suggest him something relative pages.

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Video Sites are doing well in the search engines as in line with text-based websites in the search engines. There are several Video optimization techniques and ways that help you get on the top in the SERP’s. Thanks to Google and other search engines that have made videos searches easier and user-friendly. Today, surfing the web has become a big phenomena and surfing the web for videos has become a great business in itself.

What are the effective Video Optimization Techniques that can lead to a successful Video Campaign?

Video Optimization: On-Page Techniques:

1) Always have HTML CODE that surrounds your Video. Have informative content.
2) Check the FILENAME for your video is accurate. Make it keyword rich.
3) Work on the META TAGS for your video. Do it for all individual frames/scenes if possible.
4) Have the keyword “VIDEO” in your tags, filename. Don’t forget the content.
5) VIDEO SITEMAPS are a must. The form of Sitemap should be RSS or MRSS (Media Really Simple Syndication)

Video Optimization: Off Page Techniques:

1) Practice VIDEO BLOGGING. Also popularly known and Vlogging.
2) Share videos on various VIDEO SHARING SITES. Popular ones are Eyespot, Grouper, Jumpcut, Our Media, Revver, Video Egg, Vimeo, VSocial, Multiple, and ESnips.
3) Submit to various VIDEO SEARCH ENGINES. Popular ones are Google Video, Yahoo Video, You Tube, Photo Bucket, MetaCafe, Veoh, Crackle, My Space, Blinkx TV, and Daily Motion

These Video Optimizing techniques will help you gain a foothold and grab a significant place in the SERP’s. Please don’t forget the usual SEO workflow to be followed for engaging traffic and gaining good page rank practices.

Video Optimization Checklist:
1) Video Optimization On-Page Activities
2) Video Optimization Off-Page Activities
3) Video Optimization Technical Activities
a) Less Code
b) No Flash Based Videos
c) Length of the Video
d) Quality of the Video
e) Video Availability in Multiple Formats
f) Video Ratings
g) Video Comments/Likes/Dislikes

This Strategy works and if you follow, it will help you run above your competitors in the search engine ranking race and driving quality traffic to your website.

Thanks for reading!! Will be back the next week with a new post.

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The concept of organic Search or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as it is known arose after the birth of Google in the late 90s. Businessmen & advertisers realized that there did exist one of the most cost-effective methods to promote their business & propel it to a higher level. Webmasters realized the importance of attaining higher ranks in Search Engines for the most relevant keywords to their businesses as it brought increased traffic & also led to higher visibility of their pages.

Initially, the emphasis was mainly laid on keywords, html tags, titles, and other on-site factors, which got higher rankings easily. Once Search Engines realized what was happening they changed their algorithms. More emphasis was then laid on content optimization & user friendliness. So again people started competing with each other on the same criteria, this time the spotlight being on technical issues like having flash & hardcoded JavaScript links replaced by XML files, which is considered more Search Friendly. The current trend at Google is to favor websites built around themes instead of keywords.  Latent semantic Indexing or LSI, as this process is called, is at the forefront of search engine optimization and will be for the foreseeable future.

So what exactly is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)? On technical SEO grounds it could be defined as the process of retrieving relevant pages by matching the terms of a search query with the same text found in all web pages. So even though “Dog” & “Puppy” mean the same thing, a page containing more instances of either of them will rank better when one of the mentioned terms is searched for in Google. The very reason Google is looking forward to implement this as its major ranking criteria is because there are many ways for a user to express a given concept using different words (synonyms) and also because most words have multiple meanings (polysemy). In either case, the chances of producing accurate/relevant results appear bleak. It is suggested that in the near future if one looks for cementing their presence in the SERP’s, concentrating on LSI techniques would be more profitable instead of other tried & tested methods that continue to be proven futile.

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The internal linking structure as well as directory structure of the website / web pages throughout the whole website is very important. There are many contents/products that anyone cannot insert all the data on only the homepage. There has to be other pages where we have to insert appropriate data at appropriate places. Deep pages have more keywords rich contents rather than only home page & those pages are needed to be optimized for better rankings.

There are many ways in which one can define Internal Linking Structure as per their website. The following are the different ways in which once can define internal linking structure:

1. Simple Anchor Text Links / Simple Hyper Text Links
2. Image Navigation Icons or Buttons
3. JavaScript Dropdown/Pull down  Menu or DHTML Dropdown / Pulldown Menu
4. Animated Gifs and Flash Navigation
5. Image Map Navigation
6. Frameset / Framed Navigation

In this post we will cover only the second point that is Image Navigation Icons or Buttons

Image Navigation Icons or Buttons

Image navigation icons & buttons are also popular as simple anchor text links navigation. The Images are the graphic which have many extensions & used for many purposes. Generally .GIF images or. JPEG images are used as their size can be controlled. These image links are linked to either an absolute URL or relative URL. For example, Images navigation would look like this <a href=”sitemap.html”><img src=”images/sitemap.gif”></a>. The anchor tags are already discussed in previous post  <a href=”sitemap.html”>. As you can see the <img src=”images/sitemap.gif”> is in the place of the anchor text. Here “img” in the tag stands for image and “src” is the source, so the piece of code says image source is found in the directory images and is named as logo.gif. Wrapping the <a href=”sitemap.html”></a> around the image activates that image as a link.

There are many plus points of using image navigation icons or buttons; however simple anchor text links are considered to be most effective ones. One of the plus points for including image is high-impact fonts and colors that are not supported in regular HTML Language. Increasing the look of the links on your site can help attract more clicks by the end user to the page of interest. However, search engines cannot crawl these images except Google Images. If the graphic is really an Image representation of a word – such as Sitemap – then how does a search engine get to know that? In all cases where graphics are used as navigation, it is good to use an alternative text within the source code of the image. For example, one can include alt=”” attribute in addition to Image tag. Above Example can be rewritten with alt attribute as <a href=”sitemap.html”><img src=”images/sitemap.gif” alt=”Resultrix Sitemap”></a>

The alt (alternative) attribute gives search engines as well as viewers the ability to assign a meaning to the graphic, in place of the anchor text if images are blocked or missing. Hence, it is important to use keyword specific words that apply to the page you are linking to in the alternative tag area.

Many Websites uses mouseovers for better effects. Mouseovers is a simple JavaScript that automatically switches the image on the screen to a different image when visitors just mouse over to that particular image. They primarily change the color or size of the image to show the difference. The problem is not with the image, it is with the JavaScript code that generates the mouseover affect which is not search engine friendly.

JavaScript not only activates the mouseover action. Now-a-days most of the websites are using JavaScript to create main navigation drop downs to cover many links with some nice effects. In our Next post we will discuss about JS Drop Downs covering all the points.

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SEO in 2009 – New Trends & Happenings

2009 has passed by & incomes 2010. The apparent custom in the Online media is to push mostly useless year in review top ten lists at the world, which is why we should be no different. So here are the “Top Ten SEO Developments of 2009”

10. Small Business Websites Trying SEO Increased rapidly

The economy sucked big time. Small business websites started to look at Internet as a major source of income. Soon small business realized that one of the best ways to fight the economy is to not lag behind in the Internet marketing.

9. Google’s Rankings importance reduced over the year

Bruce Clay went a bit far by saying rankings are dead. They’re maimed for sure, but definitely still alive.

But rankings are not the only thing that matter. They are, at most, a means to an end. And with personalized search, rankings became harder and harder to consistently track. Instead, it became important to track:

• Traffic from organic search.
• Keywords that are generating traffic. Are they or non-branded?
• Bounce rate from organic search visits. How many visitors from organic search look at one page and leave without clicking to another page? The more folks that leave, the higher your bounce rate. A high bounce rate is bad.

8. Yahoo! claims to have stopped supporting the keyword meta tag, even though it apparently still does.

The internet & the internet users are old enough to see things like meta tags come and go. Probably not so weird to some of you young people out there, but to a thirty something who learned HTML in PICO and Elm by raiding page sources before there was any such thing as an editor, it’s somewhat startling to think about it.

7. Google announces that rel=nofollow no longer works for PageRank sculpting, even though it apparently still does.

Yes, that is the pattern all SEO people can see. That the search engines, whose job it is to hide the magic formula from us might mislead us is disappointing, but not surprising. It certainly throws us all off the scent, at least for awhile.

6. BING launched in July 2009

BING was launched by Microsoft in July, 09. It started with a share of 0.4 % but achieved a market share of 9.4 % at the end of the same month. Due to this, Google’s market share dropped down by 1 % to 64.6 %, while Yahoo remained unchanged.

5. Real-time search gets more weight-age

When MJ died suddenly in June, the fact is that he brought the entire internet to a screeching halt as an entire planet full of people dropped whatever they were doing to read and talk about it online. It resulted in Twitter collapsing, which Google thought was under a denial of service attack. The news results available were clearly not up to date. And Jeff Goldblum was collateral damage as rumors of his untimely demise ran unchecked since the search engines. Jeff got the last laugh when he appeared on the Colbert Report to takeoff his own death rumors and Google and Bing got down hard to get real-time search live. Unfortunately, real time search is sorely easy to manipulate, as Natalie Portman can likely testify. With or without real time search, celebrity death rumors will always find their way to the mainstream.

4. Google Caffeine – SEO’s worldwide waiting to see for the difference

Seriously, this is the SEO equivalent of being stuck circling across a runaway, since there isn’t a runway available for you in Chicago. Fact is, Caffeine will likely be a very good update, and we’re all probably hyperventilating over a bunch of nothing. But let’s simply admit it – the SEO community thrives on its own panic. If it wasn’t Caffeine, it would be something else, like the recent updates to Google’s personalized search methodology.

3. Personalized search breaks the traditional SEO ranking metrics.

Rankings have been the conventional metric on which to base your invoicing, but they’re really just a proxy for conversions. Conversions are the entire point. If you’re a wearing a Blue shirt in Spencers, and people in Spencers are seeking Blue shirt, Google is MORE likely to list you in its search result because it’s working to deliver results that are relevant to both the subject and the searcher’s location. Ultimately, this represents a true benefit to the client. If I’m optimizing my Spencers client’s site from my office in Mumbai, your search results are not going to be what the Spencers searcher sees, the results are probably better. Therefore, the client benefits.

2. Social media, the growth & recognition

When it concerns to Social media, it’s the overall consensus that 2009 constituted of social media’s breaking through party. The question has developed from “What is Twitter?” to “How are you using Twitter?” Even your Mom must have got a Facebook account and harasses you each day about when you’re going to get around to posting the latest photographs of your graduation. How do you recognise when a technology has really arrived? Simple, when your Mom has it & can actually use it.

1. Real-Time Search went LIVE with Google & Bing

Google and Bing have embarked on introducing an arena that constitutes a key change in the Search Engine space. Real-time search will probably form a lot of what people expect 2010. Companies that sat with the sidelines attempting to solve their Twitter scheme instantly to bring this conversation to the forefront.

Google and Bing now provide fantastic distribution for Twitter, and people who held no concept of Twitter will instantly be uncovered. With Facebook bringing in user status updates to real-time search, the service will exclusive grow more robust. Marketers will have to rethink organic rankings to accommodate these raw scrolling listings, as they may cast off eye tracking tougher than universal results already do.

Some steps that Search Engine Experts practiced in 2009

• Created ideas that can spread & encourage users to spread them (SMM activities)
• Understanding the viral marketing importance of your category
• Build a presence on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter
• Encourage your users to bookmark your sites in browsers & on web services
• Use of buttons / clicks to let users share by email
• Increase the number of RSS users
• Build links from socials sites, forget about nofollow

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