Google Analytics

Google Analytics

Google analytics is a free webservice offered by google which helps to track and report website traffic. It was launched by Google in 2005. It helps to track the visit details like the number of times visited, nature of the visit, browser used, location of visitor (country,city,etc), the time they spend on the site, which all pages were visited, from which webpage they navigated to a particular webpage, device used, network details, network traffic details etc.

Different types of visits

Organic visit: The number of people visited our website as a result of an internet search in search engines like Google, Bing etc. It is very important in seo, as our goal is to increase the organic visits to a site.

Direct traffic: Some people directly enter the url of the website or bookmark some sites for future use. The traffic by these searches is Direct Traffic.

Referral visits: Visits we get through referral links from other websites. 

Social media visits: Visits from social medias like facebook, twitter, etc.

Steps

1. Login to your Google account.
2. Go to www.google.com/analytics.
   
   
   
3. Now click on sign in option on the right side of the webpage.
4. Then from the dropdown list select Analytics, we will be redirected to the following window.
   
   
   
5. Click the Sign up button and the page for new account creation appears in which, we have to fill in the details of our website.
   
   

   

   
   
6. Fill in the details of our website like account name, website name, its url, etc.
7. From the industry category, select the appropriate industry.
8. Be careful while filling the next option, Reporting time zone. It should be based on the time of that country for which we are creating website for.
   
9. Click the Get Tracking ID button. Now a Terms of Service Agreement of Google analytics appear. Choose the respective country from the drop down menu and click on I Accept.
10. Now in the webpage that appears, copy the Tracking ID.
    
11. Now go to blogger, select Settings and from that select the Other option. Then paste the Tracking ID in the Analytic web property id text field under Google Analytics label and click on the Save settings option in the right most side of the window.
    
    
    
12. Now go back to Google Analytics and copy the Tracking code.
    
13. Now go to blogger, then Theme and select the Edit HTML option and paste it in the head section.
    
    
    
14. Now save it by clicking Save theme button. Now the process is completed.
15. Go back to Google Analytics and on the left side, select All Website Data and choose website data.
16. Now select Real time and select Overview. Then we can track the real time overview of our website.

We can also perform other tracking options to get various details like number of visits, details of visitors, time they spend, their location, etc.

Refer to Google Webmaster tools and its verification methods to know more about webmasters.

Bismi Jabbar

Google Webmaster Tools and its Verification methods.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster tools (GWT) now termed as Google Search Console, is the primary mechanism used by Google to communicate with the webmasters. It is a free web service offered by Google for webmasters. It acts as a platform for Google to advice webmasters to optimize their websites and it helps the webmasters to check indexing status and errors.

Verification Steps

Verification is the process by which we prove that we own a particular site that we claim to own. The steps to the verification process is listed.

1. Create a blog
2. Login into your Google Search Console account or Google Webmaster tools account i.e., https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools.
3. Copy the url of the blog with ".com". The url of the blog may be showing country specific i.e., ".in" extension. If it is so, change it to ".com" extension by adding ncr (no country redirect) to the url.
   For example, if our address is in country specific i.e., https://www.blogname.blogspot.in change it to no country specific i.e., https://www.blogname.blogspot.com/ncr and press enter and now the url will be changed in ".com" extension.
4. Now go back to webmaster tools or search console webpage and paste the url to the text field box where website address is to added.
   
   
   
   
   
5. Click on the ADD PROPERTY button.
6. Now we get redirected to another webpage showing various options of verification methods. From that select the option Html tag in the alternate method of search console. Copy the "meta tag " data given like <meta name=google-site-verification" content="...."/>.
   
   
   
   
   
7.  Now go back to blogger dash board. Select the "theme" option and from that select "edit theme" which helps to edit the html of your blog template.
   
   
   
   
   
8. Now look for the <head> in the template html code, and paste the copied meta tag in the head section and click "Save theme" button.
9. Go back to search console and click "Verify" button.
   
   
   
10. Now a message appears with a green tick mark saying "Congratulations, you have successfully verified the ownership of your blog i.e., https://blogname.blogspot.com.

Steps for Fetching and Indexing

1. Now press on the continue button of the verification message. We will be redirected our blog dashboard.
2. In the left side of the dash board, select Crawl and from the dropdown list select "Fetch as Google" option.
   
   
   
3. Now a window appears asking to enter the url.
4. If we need to crawl the url, enter the entire url. Else enter the url of the page to be crawled.
5. Go back to the blog, and copy the url of the blog post to be indexed. Note that we should only need to copy the part of the url avoiding the blog address part.
6. Click the "Fetch" button.
7. Now a window like this appears. Now select as per your needs. If only want to crawl the particular page select first option or if you want to crawl its links also then select 2nd option and press "Go".
   
   
   
   
   
8. Wait for indexing to complete and the process is completed.
   

If you are interested to know more about related topics,  please refer On Page seo optimization.

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On Page seo Techniques

SEO On-page Optimization, is the term referred to the measures that is taken within a website page, in order to improve its ranking in the search results whereas, in Off page optimization, measures are taken outside the website. It is mainly focused to improve the quality of the website. On-Page SEO considers each and every aspects in your website and are optimized to make it both bot and user friendly. Unlike off page seo, on-page seo techniques includes optimizing the content, adding links and images, giving appropriate title and meta-description.

Before going to optimization process, let's take a glance to the structure of the document. A html consists of mainly head and body. The URL, title and meta tag description is on head portion. The content, image, keywords and anchor tag goes to body part. The first thing a google bot notices is the URL of the website. From that google gets a little hint about the content. Then comes the title of the website page and some more information is gathered on what the page actually is. Then after that the meta-description of the meta tag is viewed and some what 90% idea on the page is achieved. Later the h1, contents and images are viewed. Now the complete picture of the page is received to Google and it starts crawling the page and caches the data to data base.

Now you know what is a snippet? Snippet is a small piece of information. In terms of Google, it is a brief idea on what our page is really about. It consists of a title, URL and meta description.

The following describes the different methods used in seo on-page optimization.

ON PAGE OPTIMIZATION METHODS

1.Title Optimization.

2.Meta Description Optimization.

3.Content Optimization.

4.Anchor Text Optimization.

5.Keyword Optimization.

6.Image Optimization.

7.Authorship.

TITLE OPTIMIZATION 

The title name should only contain about 55-60 characters. The Google text visibility is 70 character length and the google pixel width is 512 pixel. So the title should not exceed both limits. That is writing title in all capital letters may lead to increase in pixel width.

The title name should be relevant to the content of the publishing page. It should be apt to the topic discussed. So by viewing the title name itself both Google and user should get a vivid image of what the webpage exactly is.The presence of the focusing keyword in the title in an descriptive manner is an important factor in optimization. It strengthens the chance to get noticed and it reveals the identity of what is being trying to convey. Now the other thing is Google should find it easy to crawl the website.

Another factor to notice is that it should be error free - both grammatical and spelling errors. 

Choose a unique name because giving same name to two same pages in the publishing website may leads to Keyword Cannibalism, where multiple pages targeting to same keyword. Here the listing would occur and another different webpage takes their place. The title names should be impressive and catchy.

CTR and impression are important for listing our webpage in search results. CTR is the measurement of how many times an impression (or a page lists) in a search result through clicks. When title names are not given, then h1 tag is taken as title name and is displayed in the title region of a snippet. If both title and h1 is missing then h2 tag is used as title.

META DESCRIPTION OPTIMIZATION

It gives a brief idea of what the page is about in sentences or in small paragraphs. The title of the page can also be a meta description. In case of webpages, the meta tag description can be up to a limit of 155-160 characters but when it comes to post like article or blog the character limit gets reduced to 155 characters.  The reason is the post being time relevant comes with a date in the beginning which itself contribute some characters.According to the updates of 2014, pixel width for a meta tag description is 1024 pixels.

Like title, meta tag description also needs to be unique. The meta description should also be impressive and relevant to the content else the page will get unnoticed. There is a meta tag named robot whose content value defines how it works. If the robot's content value is not given the default value is considered. If we don't want to crawl a page then the content value is given as contents = "no index" or "no follow".

BODY PORTION OPTIMIZATION

The most visible area in a body part is h1 tag. It is described as the identity of a page in a website. It clearly identifies our webpage and it should be relevant to the content. After h1 tag h2 tag is visited. Content of h1 and h2 can be same, but different one is a good choice. Only after looking into h1 and h2 we checks h3. For a title, 7-8 words can be used. It should be impressive without any spelling errors or grammar mistakes. It should be relevant and should also include focusing keywords in it.

When more than one h1 tags are used, then bot gets confused and put it into sand box which is a temporary storage area. The consequence is that page gets listed in search result but the position won't change. Like this, h2 tag also be one. We should be keen that the tags used h1, h2, h3 and h4 should be relevant to the published content.

ANCHOR TEXT OPTIMIZATION

Anchor text are easily visible to Google. It is the clickable text that the user sees as a result of a link.  The anchor text as a fuel or catalyst in crawling the contents of our publishing page. The use of  anchor text is very useful as it brings visit to our pages. But when usage is more, then equity is passed and also confusion occurs. Equity won't be passed for internal links.

KEYWORD OPTIMIZATION

Keyword density is the occurrence of keywords in respect to the total words in our publishing page. But according to Google, the keyword density is not considered a factor in ranking. But they states that presence of a few occurrence of focusing keywords in our publishing document is a plus point. Keywords using in the beginning of a paragraph or a sentence is a good practice. It will easily catch the attention of both the Google and user. Because both will find the page is appropriate to the search query.

Some claims that making the focusing keyword in bold helps in ranking. But this is not true. But yes, it may help to increase readability and avoid repetition and omitting of sentences and words if our paragraph is big. Also the user will have a satisfaction that they have selected the apt page when they find the focusing keyword in bold which catches their attention quickly. So here the motive is to make the website useful both to bots and users. Some believes that focusing keywords in grey and used before comas or full stop is beneficial. Google neither denied or accepted this.

IMAGE OPTIMIZATION

The image consists of src and alt mainly. The alternative text in a image is alt and src referes to source path. The alt name should be meaningful and should be related to the image. Using irrelevant names can degrade the image. Also the image file name should be meaningful and related to the image. It should be written by words separated by hyphens or underscores. Content of the publishing page and the image should also be related to each other.

AUTHORSHIP OPTIMIZATION

Authorship or editorial power in seo refers to the process by which, author of an article is connected to google to create the ownership of the content. To publish a blog or article, authorship verification is a must process. Authorship optimization is only used for a single article and is not for a website and is the most important on page optimization. It gives authority and validity to content readers. The editorial power is increased as it is posted in many websites.

Bismi Jabbar

I have already published a published a post earlier on the History and Evolution of seo 

History and Evolution of SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is any process that helps to improve search engine rankings for search engines like Google. This article takes you to the world of seo; it's birth and how the notion of seo has evolved massively.

HISTORY OF SEO

Before getting into it, let us peek into the history of Google. Google was started in 1996 as a research project by two PhD students of Stanford University; Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the company formally evolved on 4th September 1998. During the primitive stage, search result for the queries were send to user's mail id and it would have taken about 24 hours to fetch a result. During 2011, Internet was becoming popular among the people around the world and so was the use of search engines. This was also the time period that gave Google a tremendous growth. The apparent Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2011 on WTO of US, not only changed US but also the fortune of Google. Google failed in delivering sufficient details on the tragedy and hence loosing the trust of world. This incident made Google reckless and they urge to solve it as soon as possible. The webmasters pointed that it can be solved by making the websites crawlable. But how? That was another question before Google.

You will be wondering now, who is this webmaster and what is his role in this, isn't it? Actually webmasters are one who controls the changes made to a website.

By the way, what is web crawling and what is its connection with all this process. For that, we should know the Google's search engine optimization techniques. The three steps are Crawling,Caching and Indexing.

Crawling is the process by which an Internet bot/spider scans new or updated pages.The browsed or scanned data are snapshot captured by Google. Now Caching is the action of saving the saved/cached data into the Google's database. At last the result to queries is retrieved by Indexing/mapping the appropriate webpages to the Google's search engine.

Now back to the discussion: How to crawl a website?  The only choice was to reveal their optimization technique among all the webmasters around the globe and this put the chiefs of Google in dilemma. Because those were their secret files and leaking it was unimaginable for them.But there was no other choice left and the "SEO Starters Guide" was opened to world and this marked the beginning of a new era - Search Engine Optimization!

EVOLUTION OF SEO

In the primitive stage of SEO, search engines were niche(content) specific. During this period, there was a trend among the webmasters and the online marketers, to "stuff" webpages full of relevant keywords. This is Keyword stuffing, a black hat seo technique(unethical practice), considered as spamdexing or web spam in which a webpage is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in content of a webpage in attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results. After this Google stopped using keyboard meta tag concept in web ranking. Soon Google changed its tactics from niche specific to link specific. Those websites with more links from other websites were ranked top in search results. But this effort too went vain and google changed the algorithm from link specific to quality link specific. Google introduced Google page rank which decided the quality of a page. For Google it was a trust. To gain ranking the website should possess about more than 200 factors and is ranked out of 10. Now the marketers started to include quality links without improving their website and Google has to introduce "Passing the Juice" concept where equity is passed through links. By this concept, a high rank website who share their link with low rank website experienced lowering of their ranks. Google also allowed a "No follow" mechanism by which equity passing is avoided.

During the period 2003-'08, Google introduced many updates in a hesitating manner. The reason was the revenue flow from their two major products; AdWords and AdSense.

AdWords is an advertising service by Google largely focused on keywords, for businesses wanting to display ads on Google and its advertising network. It enables businesses to set a budget for advertising and only pay when people click the ads.(Pay per click). AdSense is an advertising placement service by Google, designed for website publishers who want to display targeted text, image, or video advertisements on website pages and earn money when site visitors view or click the ads. Google introduced projects like Gmail, Orkut in 2008. In 2008, Google started providing personal assistance by user interaction feature. Personalized search was introduced in 2009 to improve quality of search. Websites with more user responses/interactions were given top ranks in search engines.

Pogo sticking occurs when a user performs a search, clicks on result, very quickly clicks back to the search result page, and clicks on a different result. By 2010, social medias like Facebook gained popularity and Social media signal was introduced and here ranking was based on power values; which are the interactions from influential power value profiles.

IMPORTANT GOOGLE UPDATES

From 2011 onward Google started introducing strong updates which wiped off all the low quality pages from the search results.

PANDA UPDATE

Google algorithm Panda 1.0 was introduced on Feb 23, 2011 and was against the content spamming which includes content duplication, contents of low quality, content spinning and thin content pages.The search engine started to focus a lot more effort on site content and sites with weak, poor quality or irrelevant contents were eradicated from the search engine results.

PENGUIN UPDATE

The Google Penguin Update was released on April 24, 2012 which was against link spamming techniques such as link exchange, paid links, link farming, comment spamming,wiki spamming and guest blogging.

PIGEON UPDATE

Pigeon update was released on July 24,2015 which focuses on images, video, data and local marketing(local seo listing).

HUMMING BIRD UPDATE

Google's Hummingbird released on 20,Aug 2013 introduced semantic search results which provides a deep and detailed information on the search queries.

RANK BRAIN UPDATE

Released in 2015 Oct 26, this update is an advanced version of HummingBird Update.Here Google thinks like an intelligent person and delivers result for users based on the behavior and other features like age, economic background, education of the particular user with the help of AI.

OTHER UPDATES

PIRATE UPDATE

An update which focused on punishing websites which constantly accused of copyright infringement was released on August 2012. DMCA(US Digital Millennium Copy right Act) punishes those who stole copyrighted contents.

PARKED DOMAIN UPDATE

During the 2011-2012 period, a large amount of parked domains (internet domain name is registered but is not in live condition) were reported and Google has to introduce a new update which removed all the parked domains. Some were mistakenly removed and a new update Parked domain bug released to solve it on April 16,2012.

EXACT  MATCH DOMAIN (EMD) UPDATE

Google announced that parked domain which was Exact Match Domains will be  removed from the websites. This led to a large-scale reduction in the presence of EMDs in the search results. This update was announced on 27 September 2012.

MOBILEGEDDON UPDATE

In 2015, April 21 Google declared that website which are not mobile friendly will go down in ranking and just after one year on May 12,2016 Google started ranking websites based on mobile friendly feature and most of the sites were transformed to mobile friendly websites.

Bismi Jabbar