Seo Knowledge

Friday, 11 March 2016

Importance of Site Speed in SEO Efforts : A SEO Technique

Importance of Site Speed in SEO Efforts

There are many search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that bloggers and website owners could apply to be able to improve page ranking and make websites known to a wider audience. One of the things you must not overlook when doing SEO is ensuring that your web site has decent site speed. Why is site speed important and what can you do to improve yours?

Poor Load Time Affects Readability

Google includes site speed as one of the so-called “signals” in its page ranking algorithms, although it “doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.” According to the Google Webmaster Central Blog, there’s currently less than 1% of search queries that are affected by the site speed signal.

Relevance is what drives online users, upon landing on your page, to want to know more about what your website offers, to navigate deeper into your website pages. However, if it takes too much time to load your site, then all the hard work you put in producing relevant content would be wasted.
Negative Impact for Your Website Ranking

According to an article from Moz.com, poor site speed could negatively hurt your page ranking if your pages take a dreadful amount of time to load. It’s something that could hit you if for instance, your relevancy scores and link metrics are pretty close to that of your competitors’.

Enhanced User Experience

It’s true that the negative effect of slow site speed to your page ranking is minimal and presents no serious cause of alarm, but you might be missing out on chances of further improving your rank if you don’t optimise the speed of your site.

Google, as we know, aims to provide the best experience to online users by constantly fine-tuning its search engine results pages—awarding higher ranking to reputable sites and “punishing” those that try to spam online users. Focus on improving your on-site processes, as much as you implement off-site SEO techniques, and you can bet that Google, and your readers, will surely love you.

Improving Site Speed
Smaller websites usually are easier to optimise for site speed. There are many tools you can use for improving site speed, many of them, Google itself provided. To optimise the loading time and response rates of your pages, you may also try the following basic fixes:

The problem with your site could be not the site speed itself, but your Internet accessibility. Make sure you have fast internet connection and if that still doesn’t improve the speed by which your pages load, then you need to make some on-site adjustments.

Combine all of your CSS into an external file and link to it from the <head> section of each page rather than loading it in the HTML of a page.

Make sure your images are optimised for the web.

Reduce HTTP Requests so the pages will load faster. Do this by reducing the number of items needed to be loaded for each page such as images, scripts, and style sheets.

Combines images used in the background into one image, by using CSS sprites.

Server side caching should be used since it creates an HTML page for a URL.

Use Gzip to compress the size of the page sent to the browser. It can also reduce the file size by up to 70%.

Use a content delivery network (CDN) system so that users can download information from your site faster. Use services like Amazon CloudFront, which is an affordable type of CDN.

301 Redirects force the browser to a new URL. This requires the browser to wait for the HTTP request, slowind down your site. Lessen its use or don’t use it if possible.

Use webmaster tools for tweaking your site speed such as YSLOW and the HTML suggestions in Google Webmaster Tools.

Keyword Planner has replaced Keyword Tool

With Keyword Planner, we've combined the functionality of Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator to make it easier to plan search campaigns. That's why Keyword Tool is no longer available. You can use Keyword Planner to find new keyword and ad group ideas, get performance estimates for them to find the bid and budget that are right for you, and then add them to your campaigns.

Note
The external Keyword Tool is also no longer available. If you want to get keyword ideas using Keyword Planner, make sure to sign in to your AdWords account.

We've also added several new features with Keyword Planner. As you start to use Keyword Planner, you'll likely notice some differences between Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool. Read on to learn more about what has changed.

No match type data for search volume

With Keyword Tool, we showed you broad match statistics by default with the ability to get data for other match types, like phrase and exact match. But with Keyword Planner, you'll get historical statistics only for exact match. To decide what match type to use, add the keyword idea to your plan and review the traffic estimates for each match type. This change will help you get an accurate estimate of how much traffic you can expect to get with different match types. There’s quite a bit of overlap between broad and phrase match keywords, and the search volume statistic in Keyword Tool didn't take that overlap into account. Traffic estimates like click and cost do take this overlap into account, so checking those can help you decide which match type to use.

For example, let's say your keyword is dark chocolate. If you want to check that keyword's average monthly searches, we'll show you the same stats whether you use a broad, phrase, or exact match type with dark chocolate. Traffic estimates like clicks and cost, on the other hand, do take into account keyword match types. For example, if you get estimates for a list of broad match keywords, we'll take into account any overlap between those keywords.

No device targeting

Keyword Planner doesn’t let you specifically target mobile devices, like tablets and mobile phones. By default, it targets all devices, which is in line with recent changes made to AdWords campaigns. We’re working on a feature that’ll allow you to get traffic estimates by device type and set bid adjustments for mobile devices.

Note::::::::::

In general, you'll notice that the average search volume data is higher in Keyword Planner as compared to the exact match search volume data you got with Keyword Tool. That's because we'll show you the average number of searches for a keyword idea on all devices (desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and mobile phones). With Keyword Tool, we showed you average search volume for desktop and laptop computers by default.

Other changes in the data columns

In Keyword Planner, you'll notice several different data columns than those that you were used to seeing in Keyword Tool. Here are the differences:

Local monthly searches and global monthly searches: These two columns have been replaced by the "Average monthly searches" column, simplifying the search volume data you can get. The average monthly search volume is specific to your targeting settings, and you can get data for an entire country or individual cities and regions within a country. Note that you can still get global monthly search data by targeting all locations.

Ad share: This column is being replaced with a new column called ad impression share to help you look for potential impressions.

Google Search Network: This column has been replaced by the network option within the targeting settings. To get data for the entire Search Network, select the "Google and search partners" targeting option.
Search share: This column has been retired.

Approx. CPC (Search): This column has been replaced by the "Avg. CPC" column. You'll get more accurate data in the average cost-per-click column than you did in the approximate cost-per-click column.
Local search trends: This column doesn't appear in the Keyword Planner interface. However, you can still get search volume trends by hovering over the icon in the "Avg. monthly searches" column. You can also see these trends segmented by month when you download your historical statistics from Keyword Planner.

Extracted from webpage: This column has been removed from the Keyword Planner interface. However, you can still get the webpage the keyword idea came from when you download your historical statistics from Keyword Planner. Note that you'll only get this data when you search for keyword and ad group ideas based on a URL, like a webpage on your website.

Next steps

Learn how to use Keyword Planner.

Get more details about the historical statistics and performance estimates you can get with Keyword Planner.
Keywords
Using Keyword Planner to get keyword ideas and traffic estimates
Understanding your Keyword Planner statistics and traffic estimates
Keyword Planner has replaced
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4 Reasons to Spend More on SEO

Google has made dramatic changes in 2013, with the May 22 Penguin update having the biggest impact for small business websites. After some severe reductions in traffic, some webmasters are at least seeing traffic increases in August due, in part, to a Panda softening from Google.
In response, many webmasters are making big shifts in SEO tactics. While long overdue, this is the right move.

Few businesses are looking to move to lower quality SEO services as they now fear Google more than ever. But small businesses run very close to the margin and traditionally resist increasing the SEO budget, regardless of the consequences. Here are four reasons why small business owners should reconsider.

1. Google Asked You To

While many will dismiss this as PR, Google has clearly communicated that they no longer will tolerate SEO tactics that used to work in 2008. Article spinning, keyword stuffing, excessive bookmarks, reborn domains, paid links, thin content, and duplicate content are all not OK.
Even if you haven't received an unnatural link warning, the writing is on the wall. Quality must increase for continued success in SEO. While this message is clearly self-serving for Google, it's important to respect their power in the industry.

2. Recovering From Google Updates is Expensive

There are plenty of websites that have partially recovered from Penguin downgrades, but each case is different. The level of returning traffic varies.
Technical issues on-site are the easiest to fix and should be addressed quickly using Webmaster Tools as the guide. Duplicate content needs to be removed immediately.
Keyword-stuffed titles need to be edited. Thin content, a favorite among many, should be replaced with real content marketing.

Off-site issues, such as bad link building, are particularly hard to fix. It is very ironic that firms now exist to send "link removal request" emails to other firms who were previously retained to build those links.
Small business needs to stop doing bad link building and embrace content marketing. They need to get creative and experiment with newsjacking.

All of these activities cost money. Smart business owners are thinking toward the future and deciding to spend more on SEO now (via higher quality services) to avoid repeating this activity in 2014.

3. SEO Has Merged With Marketing

Many small business webmasters were using a "set-it-and-forget-it" SEO strategy, believing that they need not worry about SEO after hiring a firm. This violates one of the major tenets of business process outsourcing, which is to outsource process and execution, but maintain strict performance monitoring and accountability.

It isn't surprising that many small businesses are feeling buyer's remorse, wishing they had done greater due-diligence in the vendor selection process and better understood the risks associated with SEO.
It should be clear at this point that SEO is no longer a technical exercise and is rapidly merging with marketing and public relations. Smart CEOs recognize the strategic importance of SEO in our digital world. For this reason, they find ways to amplify SEO in allmarketing activities. Ironically, many companies have SEO opportunities they don't harness.

For example, every employee should maintain a "work" Twitter account and share industry news, blog posts and company specials to help spread content. This type of integrated SEO marketing execution is the future, and will draw more budget dollars.

4. SEO ROI Remains High

The data suggests that SEO is still a great investment. This means that small business shouldn't necessarily shop for the cheapest SEO vendor, but consider the return they can make on their money if they spend more:

SEO remains a very high ROI activity.
The cost-per-lead for SEO is still very attractive.
Google has significantly tightened the requirements for high-quality SEO.
Integrated marketing strategies have big efficiencies.

Conclusions

All technologies and industries mature, and price-points typically change dramatically along the way. SEO is following the same playbook as most other young industries.

In the last few years we have seen SEO move from infancy to adolescence, with the Google algorithm updates as mileposts. While SEO will become more difficult and expensive to execute, the return on investment remains high for small business. In the end, ROI is more important than the absolute number of a budget line item.

Advantages and Benefits of Hiring SEO Company

There are lots of Advantages and Benefits of Hiring SEO Company for your own business or services which you are offering to your clients.

See, If one does not have enough knowledge about SEO and he/she themselves take any decision to promote their website in Google then there are highest chances to miss important aspects which may break company’s growth in this high competitive business environment.

Let’s see few Benefits and Advantages of Hiring SEO Company…

- Fully Dedicated Team

- Perfect SEO Plan

- Point to Point SEO Strategy

- Dynamic SEO Changes as per Search Engine Algorithm

- Research of Keywords for Advance Next Gen Business.

These are the main Benefits and Advantages of Hiring SEO Company for your corporate business. Again Hiring SEO Company, will deduct your burden of inhouse SEO which may take more time and less output.

If you are in search of Hiring any SEO Company then you must check above quality in all available options of SEO Companies from which you are going to choose a final one…

Is there any SEO Company in Gujarat ? ?

Yes of course… there are lots of SEO companies in Gujarat. While searching for SEO Company it’s equally important, you make sure about the quality of service it offers.

There are so many companies that do black hat SEO activities which may drop off your ranking and also there are chances to lose visibility from Google. Black hat activates may give fast results so, for the short time you can get benefit but for long time it can diminish your business. So while choosing SEO company, be careful by selecting the SEO company that follows ethical activities and Google standards.

Benefits of choosing SEO company in Gujarat:

    - Affordable rates
    - Guaranteed results
    - Timeliness
    - 24/7 availability

We The Developers – one of the leading SEO companies in Gujarat offers Guaranteed Google Page 1 Ranking service at a very affordable rate. Hurry !!! Take the advantage and give your business a new dimension …
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Google May Be Updating Their Algorithm But They Won’t Confirm It

Many SEOs and webmasters were complaining that their rankings in the Google search results have declined drastically. In addition, many sent me images of their analytics, showing a clear significant drop in traffic from the Google organic source.

I asked Google about both these updates, and for each one, they said they have “nothing to announce.” Meaning, they won’t confirm if there was or was not an update.

We can confirm that the various search results monitoring tools, such as Mozcast, SERPs.com, SERP Metrics and Algoroo all showed volatility on August 21st. Since the September 4th chatter began this morning, we will have to wait for tomorrow to see if the tools show activity for today (the tools are about 24 hours delayed).

Although, there are hundreds of comments on the August 21st post and well over fifty comments on the September 4th post in less than seven hours.

Google does not always confirm updates but we think you should be aware that on August 21st and September 4th, there was enough noise to report to you that Google may have done some sort of algorithmic update.

For more info on the more popular Google updates, see our Google Panda and Google Penguin categories.

5 Tips on Dealing With Small Budget Search Clients

I've been working in online marketing for nearly 10 years now. My experience has ranged from being both in-house and agency side as well as running my own freelance company. Today I run an agency (with other people too) with offices in two countries.

One thing this varied experience has done for me has given me insight into clients who have budgets from $400 per month all the way up to in excess of $40,000 per month. You learn a lot about client relations from both budget spectrums, however, I have found that the smaller the budget, the higher the proportion of maintenance that the client requires (from my experience).

Here are some potential issues you may encounter with small budget clients and solutions for managing expectations from the outset.

For this post, let's assume that "the client" is a new lead that has come in and has a budget of $500 per month. Let's also assume that the client is a "one man band" (up to 5 people), is less than 2 years old, and has no other marketing budget set aside.
1. Expectations of Hours Spent
When I was a freelancer much earlier on in my career I said yes to pretty much any job that fell in my lap. While this was great at the beginning, over time I found that I was working too much in proportion to what my client was paying. As it was early in my career, I was perfectly willing to work extra hours to ensure client retention. But eventually there came a point where it was too much.

Solution

Create an hourly rate and stick to it, even before any contract is signed. Here, the client has $500 to spend each month and you have to consider any outgoings you may have attached to that budget. An example would be to charge $75 per hour, giving you 6 hours of work per month plus $50 to spend.

This expectation may not please your client as that $500 is important to him/her. Six hours may not sound like a lot, but this has to be fair on you too. For $500 the client can't expect a "virtual member of staff" who is on call to answer everything at any point – especially if your hours are fulfilled. The client has to remember that you will have many clients just like him/her, and that they too will have their own expectations.

2. Managing Those Limited Hours Wisely
The term "SEO" is now only part and parcel of a general online marketing strategy that requires work on various aspects, including on-site, content, outreach, CRO, analytical research, social media integration, and reporting. For that $500, you will have to manage this each month to ensure that they have the best quality work done with consideration of that budget, noting that month-on-month you will have to concentrate on different things.

Solution

Each month you will have to set out how much time you want to spend on each task. You can make it slightly easier using a project management document to ensure everything is organized for all clients. Luckily I have created a free project management template for Google Drive which can help you with this.

One thing to note: the client should always be informed of your plans ahead of time as their priorities may not match your own. Concentrate more perhaps on converting visitors rather than sacrificing the majority of your time with outreach.
3. Sacrificing or Simplifying 'Non-Essential' Tasks
Managing those hours may still be tight for you. If you're faced with a task that could potentially take 2 hours to complete, you should seriously consider if there is a way to compress it into a one hour task without loss of quality to the client.

Solution

Create an extremely simple report containing limited data that will, in effect, reduce the time it takes you to produce it. One tip here would be to include less commentary or create a streamlined Google Analytics Dashboard for your client to view that can give them up-to-date information without you having to produce another section about analytics in your report.

Something else to consider is logging the work you do. Trello and Toggl will help you out with this, but having to report on every minute detail of your work is inefficient and has no real value to anyone when the general budget is small – there's no need to log every email you send just for the sake of the client if you're organized enough.
Agree on KPIs
You need to understand the client's business from the outset. The client is investing a lot in you despite having no guarantees of any ROI – SEO is something that can't be measured or forecasted with precision (especially with low budgets), and SEO takes quite a few months to see real results.

However, you still need to decide on what these key performance indicators (KPIs) are and you need to ensure that the client understands that short tail is pretty much impossible unless their short tail keyword targets is a general long tail.

Solution

Let's say that the client is an accountant. You need to ensure that you know what their average client makes for them as one client may make them $2,000 per annum (assuming that the client keeps them year-on-year).
I would also advise to have an agreement of no less than 6 months so that the client understands that no work you do will show any real effect for at least 3 months and that you will need months 4, 5 and 6 to analyze results and prove you have fulfilled your agreed KPIs.
Try to Increase Budgets over Time
Let's say that 6 months have now passed and you've fulfilled the KPIs you agreed at the beginning of the contract. The client may insist that no ROI has been generated, however, you must refer back to your agreed KPIs – if you fulfilled them, then you did your job correctly. Of course, KPIs will be connected to ROI, but sometimes the work you do is only so much.

Using the accountant as a client example again, one KPI would be that you need to increase conversions where a conversion would be defined as an email form completion or telephone call. Once that email is sent or call is placed you have no control as to whether that conversion will turn from a lead into a client for many reasons – the client may not be able to service that lead as intended, there may be a seasonal slump, or the salesman answering the calls and emails may not be good him/herself at converting leads.

Solution

Translate to the client, and be clear, that fulfilling KPIs and ROI aren't always the same thing and ROI is something you can't solely control and therefore can't be held to it to decide on any renewal.

You may also want to suggest (if your first 6 months can prove it) that their budget needs to be increased to show more significant results. The client may always say that they intend to increase their budget, but until they actually do it, they simply won't receive what they expect to receive.

How to Target Multiple Cities with Your SEO

When operating a local business, it is rather easy to garner traffic to a website. When operating throughout multiple cities or wanting to reach those audiences, however, it becomes a bit more difficult to effectively target each location. Nevertheless, there are plenty of search engine optimization strategies that can be utilized to get your business the attention it deserves in more than one city. We will outline a few basic tricks that you can use to begin having your site or business appear in search results in any and every city you wish to target.

Create Separate Pages

Search engine experiments show us that you can only effectively optimize any given page for three to four locations before “overdoing it”. Generally speaking, we are referring to minor and major metropolitan areas; targeting micro-communities within the same metropolitan area can be done rather effectively from one central page. By these standards, a business offering services or products in Los Angeles, New York City, London and Tokyo would want to create separate optimized pages for each locale. Similarly, smaller cities within a state or region may need this approach as well. This helps search engines and gives them the impression that you are not trying to “stuff” the search results.

Use Maps

One of the best ways to optimize your page’s location reputation is by using an embedded map that shows the location you serve or the building from which you operate. Google Maps is excellent and obviously works well with its fellow search engine algorithms. You can easily embed a map of any location by searching for it via Google Maps, clicking the ‘Link’ icon in the upper-right hand corner, followed by copying and pasting the selected HTML code into any part of your web page. This not only shows customers where you are, but also lets search engine spiders and bots know as well.

Try Out Some Keywords

Implementing a variety of different keywords and phrases into each locale’s page design is vital to improving the likelihood that search engines are going to view you favorably. We recommend sticking to 2-3 phrases per page so that it does not appear that you are attempting to circumvent the algorithms set forth by Google, Bing and others. If you are struggling for keyword and phrase ideas, try using Pingler’s Keyword Suggestion Generator, which takes a phrase or words that you put in and suggests alternative keyword and phrase ideas.

Use Google Places

Google Places is a great way to garner attention for your site or business at the local level and is quite simple to setup. All you need is a Google account associated with your website to begin. You can target a specific location and provide the contact information or address of the establishment which will then be reflected in search results for a variety of phrases. When people search for “[specific type of business][city]”, your site will be reflected in Google Places’ results. Google Places is fairly well indexed alongside regular Google algorithms, so the better you perform in the search engine, the higher spot your business or site will have in Places.