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Category: SEO

Google Penguin 3.0 – Diagnosis & Recovery Steps
It has been over a year since Google announced Penguin 2.0 update and we had shared our thoughts on it. Since Penguin 3.0 update was announced by Google on Oct 17, 2014 – it was estimated to affect less than 1% of English queries as Moz pointed out. John Mueller from Google had said that this update could roll out over the next few weeks.

This update is intended at reducing “web-spam” at a much higher and sophisticated level than Penguin 2.0 update. Let us now try to understand how this update actually works. First & foremost, Penguin 3.0 update is pretty much similar to the preceding updates with the main intention being reducing web-spam by demoting sites with bad link profiles (removing websites from Google Index which have acquired “paid links” over the years). Google experts say this is a refresh. This essentially means the algorithm was re-run to release sites that fixed their issues and to demote sites that had issues that weren’t picked earlier. Site owners & SEO experts may have to be ready to witness fluctuation in traffic and rankings.

Diagnosis & Recovery Steps for Google Penguin 3.0

If your website has seen drastic changes in organic traffic and/or keyword ranks over the last few weeks here are a few steps to consider immediately:
1. Check for sources of links to the site
Bad or paid links may also be a factor if you are affected by this update. Check for links from paid directories, irrelevant forums and non-industry specific sites
1. Use Diagnosis tools effectively
Google Webmaster tools and other tools like Moz come in handy. Conduct detailed tests using these tools and update your website profile. If your site is linked with some shady sites, then usage of Disavow tool can be an added advantage. Disavow tool on Google Webmaster lets you start disassociating from such poor/bad-links.
1. Disassociate from bad reputation sites
If your website is associated with sites of bad reputation including paid ones identified by the above mentioned steps, this is the right time to disengage yourself from these associations.

Having said all of the above, be aware of with whom you are linking to in the future. Share your feedback and comments in the comment section below.

Contact us to learn more. Have a happy spam free experience on the Net!
December 5, 2014
Ten Ways to Optimize Website Speed
After quality content, page speed is the most important website feature. But all too often people think that optimizing website speed at the time they create a website or blog is wasted effort. They couldn’t be any more wrong. As the popularity of your website expands, testing for page speed becomes absolutely imperative.

WHY WEBSITE SPEED?

In a word, search engine rankings.While optimized website speed is important from a user’s perspective, search engines reward it with higher rankings because speed is critical for robots scanning a website. If a competitor’s website loads faster than yours it will take a better position ahead of you on the search engine results page. The performance of a website is important, but so too is increasing website load time speed. Regularly monitor your website load time and take necessary measures to increase the site speed.

BEST SEO TIPS TO OPTIMIZE THE WEBSITE SPEED
1. Minimize HTTP Requests
According to Yahoo, 85% of web page load time is spent downloading the different components of the page (e.g. images, style sheets, and scripts). An HTTP request is multiplied when there are duplicate scripts in the code. Identify and remove these duplicate scripts.

The quickest way to improve site speed is to simplify your design.
- Use CSS scripts to combine multiple images
- Combine background images into a single image
- Combine multiple style sheets into one
- Use Script tag on your HTML page
- Reduce scripts
1. Optimize Image Size
Images often contain additional comments and use unnecessary colors. Make images as small as possible so that the browser does not have to resize them.

Use image editing tools to:
- Crop your images to the correct size
- Save in JPEG format
- Reduce color depth to the lowest acceptable level
- Remove image comments
- Specify image dimensions
1. Minify Resources
Minification, the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code without changing its functionality, helps to reduce its size and improve load time.

Eliminate extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation in your code to keep your pages as lean as possible.

Minification tools available online include:
- To minify HTML, PageSpeed Insights Chrome Extension (generates an optimized version of your HTML code)
- To minify CSS, YUI Compressor
- To minify JavaScript, JSMin , YUI Compressor
1. Add CSS at the top and JS at the bottom
Your pages load faster with style sheet references added to the head of your HTML document because it allows the pages to gradually render the styles. Style sheets also improve page load time.

Browsers can only download two components per hostname at any given time. Adding your scripts towards the top blocks everything below during the initial page load, and gives the impression of the page loading slower.

To avoid this situation, place your style sheet at the beginning or <Head>of the HTML document and scripts references at the end, right before closing the <Body> tag.
1. Caching your web pages
When you visit a web page for the first time, your browser requests all the web page image files, CSS Scripts and Java files to load from the website’s server, taking up precious page load time. Caching your website saves these file resources to the browser, and the files can be retrieved from the cached files rather than downloading them again from the network.
1. Install a cache plugin
Caching plugins permit you to publish static rather than dynamic HTML files, reducing the time a page takes to load. Additional caching features include minification, caching of feeds, Gzipping, and Content Delivery Network (CDN) support.
1. Compress and optimize your content
Compressing your website content will have a huge impact on reducing load times. Large pages with recurring high-quality content are slow to download. The best way to speed up the load time is to zip the pages, called compression. This saves bandwidth as well as the download time it takes to view your website. It’s biggest impact is on web page load time. Be sure to configure the server to return zipped content.

You can also compress and optimize your CSS and JavaScript files by combining them and minifying the source code.
1. Reduce 301 redirects
Avoiding redirects increases serving speed. Every time a 301 redirect is used, it forces the browser to a new URL which increases page-loading time. The solution? Check for broken links and fix them immediately.
1. Reduce the number of unnecessary plugins
A site that needs plugins may slow your web page loading speed. Too many plugins create safety issues, and often cause crashes.

Try to measure server performance after disabling the plugins. This way you can identify any plugins that hamper your site speed.

Web page speed is a metric that should not be ignored if you are concerned about providing the best user experience. You can examine and check website speed through free services like Google Site Speed Test and Pingdom.
1. Avoid text graphics
Some sites may need formal text to make the web page look attractive. However, text in the form of an image takes up a lot of the web page size and is of no SEO benefit. Don’t use text styles in CSS and keep everything in text format in its place.

Take Away

Optimizing your website loading speed is an essential task because search engines reward fast loading websites. Hopefully, these best practices will be of some help. What has or hasn’t worked for you? We would love to know. Contact us now to optimize your website!
December 3, 2014
Effective Ways of Improving Your Business Using Local SEO
Local SEO is becoming one of the most essential components of every business or brand that wants long-term success across search engines. Location-specific searches and the results that go along with them suggests that local business owners need to step up their game in terms of local SEO.

At present, Google alone has to manage more than 100 billion searches per month from around the world. Among them:
- 4 billion queries generated from desktops per month in the United States alone have local intent.
- 50% of all the mobile queries have local intent.
Local SEO is a great way to target customers by allowing the local businesses to get featured before their customers are looking for them. Higher a business ranks in this local search result, greater are its chances of being noticed by a potential customer.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO has grown significantly over the last few years, particularly due to the rise of smart phone usage and better connectivity all around. Although it has lot of similarities with organic SEO, it is ultimately very different.

Local SEO is focused on providing results that are relevant to a searcher based on his/her current location.

Why Local SEO Matters?

The number of search queries with local relevance is increasing due to the growth of mobile search. More and more local customers use mobile phones and mobile ‘apps’ to find best local business while they’re walking around.

In order for Google and other search engines to serve users with the most relevant information using the vast amount of data they have about us, local based results will become more and more prevalent. So the search engines rely on information including local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results to the user.

The rise of location-specific search of late makes it incumbent on local business owners to seriously start considering ways to scale their local SEO efforts. With the recent Google Pigeon update, local businesses are scrambling in a frenzied manner reacting to the changes.

How to Optimize Your Business for Local Search?

1. Create Google+ Local Entry and Optimize

Claim your listing on Google+ Local. If you have already claimed your Google Places page, then it can automatically be moved to Google+ Local, and hence you can manage your Google+ Local page from your original Google Places dashboard. When you appear on Google, you make it easier for the customers to find information regarding your business online. They can see the contact information, hours of operation, direction, as well as the reviews and the ratings.

2. Encourage Reviews To Add Credibility To Your Business

Online reviews are playing an increasingly critical role in driving consumers’ purchasing decisions. The quantity and quality of reviews also strongly influences how your business appears in local business listing results. Note that having a more positive score (quality) is more important than quantity of reviews.

3. Build and Optimize Citations

NAP (name, address, phone number) citations are a key ranking factor in local SEO. Local citations from quality directories and other locally relevant sites are still very important to gain higher local SEO ranking on Google search. Google crawls them and compares them with the address data on the company’s website. Citations increase the trustworthiness of the company.

4. Local SEO Website Optimization

Optimize the website for local search; include some geo-specific information so that the search engines understand the locations you are trying to target.
- Use your City and State names in your Title tags, Meta descriptions, and in the content of your site appropriately.
- Make sure you website provider is making use of the Schema Local Markup, specifically for the Place and the Organization tags.
5. Ensure Your Business Website is Mobile Friendly

Google has also recently indicated that one in three US mobile queries is now ‘local’ and 87% of people use their phone when on the go. Google also found that 95% of mobile users look up local information on their phones and the primary functions are calling or visiting a business place. When you are on top of your local SEO, you have a better chance of ranking higher for mobile SEO too.

Conclusion

Local search engine optimization is becoming increasingly important, especially because of the rising number of searches via mobile devices. Google is using a combination of proximity, reviews, citations, and other factors to prioritize Local SEO results. Local SEO trends are rising as of now and they are only going to get better and more significant in the future. Now is the time for you to take advantage of local search engine optimization and boost your business before your competitors gain an edge over you.

Image Source: SearchEngineLand
October 22, 2014
The Google Penguin Algorithm is Reborn

After more than a year, Google has officially come up with a streamlined version of the Penguin algorithm which is being referred to as the Penguin 3.0 Update. The Google Penguin Algorithm was initially announced in April 2012. It was basically a deterrent mechanism for webmasters who indulged in Black Hat SEO techniques. These include but not limited to, deviously increasing the ranking of a web page by manipulating the number of links pointing to it. These tactics are commonly called link schemes which are in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Google penalizes such websites by lowering their ranking and blacklisting them so that genuine websites have a fair chance of ranking higher on the search engine.

In order to prove that your website is clean in the eyes of the Penguin, take special care to see to it that your links are all genuine. Black Hat specialists realized long back that if you have links from an authoritative site then your site is also ranked highly in the search engine. Hence they started buying links on a big scale and started creating link farms wherein you could choose which links you want to be associated with, for your website. Soon Google got a whiff of it and it started taking stringent actions. Thus, the Penguin algorithm was born.

Penguin 3.0 is more of a re-write of the original Penguin algorithm than just being a refreshed version. So you need to be extra cautious in order to pass muster as far as Penguin 3.0 is concerned. Beware of paid links or text ads that pass PageRank since it is a clear violation of Google guidelines. Get rid of poor quality backlinks. Do not use the same optimized anchor text on too many links since Google thinks you are confusing the user and hence you will not be ranked higher.

Penguin is a filter algorithm that sits on top of the search algorithm in order to check for fraudulent links and penalize the websites indulging in it. Penguin is not too concerned about the content on your website but is more interested in the links that point to your website. So webmasters need to abandon all Black Hat techniques in their quest for higher search engine rankings now.

The best way to find out whether your site has been affected by the Penguin algorithm is to check the traffic to your website on the day Google launches a major update. The most effective way to do this is using the Penguin Penalty Checker Tool. That way you can take note if Google is penalizing you for some issues related to links pointing to your website. If in case you are being penalized then you need to rectify it at the earliest. If your website does not show any changes in the traffic on the day a major update is launched then you probably might be safe. But confirm it by getting an audit done for your website and find out if there are any objectionable issues with regards to your website that might cause your site to drop in the search engine results page.

If unfortunately you have been hit by Penguin 3.0 and whatever you do does not seem to alleviate the matter then you will have to wait until the next Penguin update or release to authenticate what you have done is according to Google’s diktats. If you feel that some obnoxious website is trying to spam you by linking to your website in order to lower your PageRank then you can tell Google to ignore such websites by using the Disavow Links Tool.

Quality content is always the most important aspect of your website to attract links from reputable sources. Never pay for links since that could make you vulnerable to getting blacklisted by Google. Always build your site with the end-user in mind. Consider it a given that the users are seeking using a smooth interface to navigate effortlessly on your website. That way you are bound to get a good ranking on Google search.

Connect with Google Certified Professionals to find out what this updates means to your website.

October 21, 2014
Effective Ways of Measuring Your Content Marketing Efforts
Did you know that 92% of companies that blogged multiple times a day acquired customers via their blogs this year? It is time to take full advantage of this content marketing craze by reaching out to your customers with the right content.

The Rise of Content Marketing

All Google updates have led to one conclusion by SEO experts: Content is King. It all started in 2011, when the search query “content marketing” began its rising trend, and has now grown to be extremely common. Creating quality content for your business has major benefits for your search engine optimization, social media marketing, and your company’s overall branding.

What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is the new way to get higher search rankings and increased sales by creating useful, informative content that is appealing both to your target group and also to Google and other search engines. The motive is to attract, obtain and engage a clearly defined target audience in order to drive profitable customer interactions.

By answering the most frequently asked questions with respect to your content, your company can become the most credible resource for your domain and gain new leads that convert to customers in the long term.

Image Source: Iciweb

What types of content should you create?

If you are looking for opportunities to generate more results from your marketing efforts, you need to look at establishing a content marketing strategy. This Pyramid highlights a variety of different types of content that need to be taken into consideration:

Content Marketing: Parts as a whole
1. Creating Valuable Content: Content needs to be created for your audience with the objective of informing and educating them, by simultaneously boosting your credibility and connections with consumers. This can be done in the form of articles, eBooks, press releases, white papers, blogs, webinars, posts, infographics, etc.
2. Distributing that Content: This unique content needs to be then shared with users through social networking websites, blogs, through e-mail marketing and other platforms where your viewers are active, provided your content is suitable for that particular platform. Once your content strategy has been recognized, metrics need to be defined in order to accurately measure and monitor your success.
Take a look at metrics to effectively measure the content marketing efforts:
1. Brand Lift: “Brand lift” is the blanket term for a brand’s increase in customer or audience perception. This is a concept that has its roots in online advertising (brand advertising, to be more specific) and refers to an increased awareness of the brand (product, or contribution), attitude (view on quality, value and appeal), recall (ability to evoke), favorability (likelihood to recommend), and intent (likelihood to purchase)-all of which can be a challenge to measure.One way to measure the rise or fall in the sentiment of your brand in the long run is through social media. Once we have a plan in place, we create content that promotes your brand and conveys your expertise, distributing it over the right channels to ensure effective placement. When highly consumable content gets published in front of your target audience, you can begin to gain authority and thought leadership in your industry. Increased authority in your space not only helps to retain customers, but also generate awareness and trust in your brand. This creates an organic sales funnel that can dramatically increase conversions.Ultimately, this increased inbound traffic improves your overall branding.
2. Social Media Success: This is a metric that allows you to better understand where the social traffic is coming from. By observing the gross amount of social media success, your business will be able to understand what type of content was well received, on what platforms and by which users. It also helps explain how these social actions are affecting your other marketing channels too.The “social media content” widget looks at how many “social actions” were taken while viewing your content. These can include:Interactions – Likes, Comments, Shares, Replies, Retweets, and so on.Reach – The percentage of fans that have seen your post from your page.Engagement Rates –A formula for quantifying a brand’s success.This is a valuable performance measure, as it displays that visitors didn’t just passively leave the web page open for an extent of time, or click through to other web pages because they were bored. It shows that they actually appreciated your content enough to share it within their network.
3. Onsite Engagement and content effectiveness: Once traffic is driven to your website from the variety of content that has been distributed to your audiences, the hope is that this effort will drive repeat traffic to your web site. The metrics in Google Analytics helps measure whether the content you’re creating is engaging enough to draw traffic to your website from the search engines. This allows you to make two conclusions about those pieces of content that are attracting a lot of readers and giving you a lot of their time.Firstly, that content is building relationships by compelling readers to return. Secondly, that valuable content is creating an increase by facilitating repeat exposures.This is a valuable way of determining if your content marketing efforts are driving real value to your business. If your content efforts are often the most viewed part of your website, it might be safe to say that your audience is finding value and that you are educating them on a particular expertise.
4. Google Analytics audience Widget: Google Analytics is a collection of widgets that allows you to quickly visualize your data. The audience related widgets on the Google Analytics dashboard provide information about viewers. The visitor’s pie chart gives an idea of the number of visitors that revisited the website because they found well optimized content in search engines.Some of these are:“Content behavior metrics” Helps to determine the number of new/revisiting users. Also helps to check whether the content you are creating is engaging enough to draw traffic to your website or not.“Site Content metrics effects” Shows the website’s ALL/ landing pages performance metrics which helps in determining which page content played an important role to get the visitors on the website.Lastly, “GEO metrics effects on content strategy” shows you where in the world your visitors are from. You can use this data to improve your content in all kinds of ways, such as:‘Visitor Language use’ helps in optimizing multi-language websites.‘Location area’: helps to determine the place / nearby places of the visitor, hence it can be helpful in optimization / filtering the content related to location.By using Google Analytics we can measure the content effectiveness using real data. It is always helpful to see what is effective and to avoid what is not.
5. Lead Generation: One of the most valuable metrics to monitor when it comes to your content marketing efforts is if lead generation efforts have increased. Lead generation is important because leads are the most likely people to convert and make your business revenue grow. This is where we start determining whether the content marketing efforts are making financial sense.When a visitor signs up on a website, he/she enters his/her contact information to have access to exclusive content created by the company about business. This visitor is a new lead who can eventually become a paying customer. It is important to measure the rate at which leads are being generated from the website content to see what type of content is working to get more traction from your web visitors.Successful content solicits a certain response from your target audience. For instance, taking advantage of a special gift or promo being offered and filling up information sheets that converts visits into leads.
6. Conversions: Consumption is the most basic and most measurable type of metric you can use to measure content marketing success. It is straightforward and deals with real figures and statistics. It states how many people actually consumed your content. Google Analytics, Website platforms and social media insights already have these tools available for you to use and the only thing left for you to do is use them and gain better insights about your content consumption. Content marketers and conversion optimization professionals have a glorious collaboration ahead.
7. Thought Leadership: Content marketing can describe a business as being an expert or a thought leader in an industry which can lead to many invaluable benefits. Becoming a thought leader and a trusted source of information will gradually gain more traffic, follows, and subscriptions, leads, and conversions over time. Social signals get a boost when website owners refer your work and when social media followers share the content. Take a step back and observe the media mentions of your content, if other thought leaders refer to your content, if the media is requesting for your contribution on certain topics or requests the leaders to speak at business events.Look at how your content is performing and helping you to position your company as a thought leader. By becoming an industry known expert, your content could continue to gain more traffic, follows, subscriptions, leads, and conversions over time. Overall, there are several ways to measure the performance of content marketing strategies.What metrics does your organization use to measure your content marketing? How often are you analyzing the results of your content strategy? I’d love to hear about your experience with your content marketing strategy. Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Blog contributed by Anu Gupta, SEO Analyst, Position²
October 15, 2014
Take Your Mobile App Marketing Campaigns to the Next Level with Deep Linking
What separates a successful mobile app from an unsuccessful one? Design, ease of use, demand, effectiveness, etc. all play their part.

The truth is, however, that effective marketing can make a huge difference between an app that is a commercial success and one that gets lost amongst the ever burgeoning crowd of daily released apps.

In addition to putting some marketing effort behind you app’s promotion, it’s incredible how many app developers and marketers aren’t aware of capabilities of mobile app such as what mobile deep linking is, never mind how to use it to benefit their marketing campaigns.

Let’s take a quick look at a few steps you can take to significantly enhance the success of your app through smarter marketing with deep links.

What is Mobile App Deep Linking?

Mobile app deep links in search results allows users to click links to view specific content within your app, or download your app, depending on if they have your app installed. If a person doesn’t have your app installed and clicks on a deep link, they will automatically be directed to your app’s page in the App Store so they can download your app before proceeding to your deep link landing page within an app.

If a person doesn’t have the app installed and clicks on a deep link, they will automatically be directed to the app’s page in the App Store so the user can download the app before proceeding to the deep link destination. Deep linking helps simplify the conversion friction by shortening the users’ flow to the piece of content, product or promo they are interested in which convince user to a buyer.

Image source

How deep link works?

Allowing your mobile app to be launched via a link is a necessary first step to making it accessible from the web. This enables promotional efforts (email, social posts, ads, etc.) to lead users directly into your mobile app which is typically a better and more seamless experience for your customers.

If your mobile app is already set up to handle a URI, you are ready to create optimized links that detect if the app is present on a user’s device and then takes them to the mobile app content they are looking for!

What is URI?

In short, a URI is really just a link. The most common kind is a web link (http://www.google.com) which when clicked instructs the browser to render a web page. A mobile app URI is another type of link that allows a user to launch an app—not just a browser—when clicked; for example, youtube:dQw4w9WgXcQ will bring up a video in the YouTube app if it is installed. On both iOS and Android, any mobile app can indicate that it handles URIs, and for this reason, URIs are an ideal mechanism by which mobile apps can be launched from the web.

Benefit from deep linking?

For apps such as shopping, travel, hotel booking, music and news the ability to send users to a specific product, offer or promo page can have tremendous effect over conversion rates and ultimately revenues. For example, if deep linking is enabled, the user can be navigated directly to a certain hotel booking page for which he has seen an advertisement instead of the app’s home page.

Does deep linking works only for users that have the app already installed? Not true.

Deep linking benefits both pre-installed and new users. There are programs that can carry forward the saved request. If the user doesn’t have the app installed, he/she is sent to the App store and, upon opening the app after the installation, is directly taken to the deep linked page for the user requested content.

Even though deep linking is only used as a re-engagement mechanism to bring users back inside the app, it has an enormous potential to drive conversions and ROI.

Why Mobile Deep Linking Important?

Deep linking helps every mobile app which has multiple screens, products or sections to offer for the interested customer. This means that instead of making every user open your app’s main screen and then manually navigate, deep links can take them directly to the desired page.

There are a number of reasons why mobile deep linking is incredibly important.

Deep linking:
- Allows you to highlight areas of your app which do not get lot traffic. With deep links you can easily point to specific areas of you app that you want to highlight and “refresh.”
- Allows you to enhance the flow of your app, encouraging users to engage and view specific content. This could be anything from media content to new subsequent products offered by yourself or affiliates.
- It also allows you to exponentially increase the revenue. By encouraging visitors to engage with, and view other sections within your app, you will be able to align ads with the most relevant content, significantly increasing the conversion rate.
- Allows your app to be more discoverable. Since Google now indexes deep links within apps, more of your content can be found from user queries with the search engine.
- Helps drive re-engagement. For example, a retail company can notify existing customers about the current promotion and drive interested users directly to the product page. It’s time to think beyond the install and start driving value post download!
- Improves the experience of your cross channel marketing campaigns. You can use a deep link for the destination of your promotions across email, social, third parties and your website.
- Removes several layers in the conversion funnel. When users don’t have to navigate through your app to get to the offer or intended destination, you’ll likely lose fewer users through the conversion funnel.
- Helps you understand cross-channel measurement. With the ability to track and measure user experience with deep links, marketers will have a better understanding of how mobile fits into the buying path and the gain insight into the full impact of mobile in their marketing strategy.
Effective Way of Optimizing Mobile App Deep Linking

Google also provided a list of best practices to consider when adding deep links to your app:
- Identify the URI of the section to be linked is most critical – Publishers must specify app deep links for their homepages, or else the links won’t show up.
- App deep links should only be included for canonical web URLs.
- Not all website URLs in a Sitemap need to have a corresponding app deep link. Do not include app deep links that aren’t supported by your app.
- If you are a news site and use News Sitemaps, be sure to include your deep link annotations in the News Sitemaps, as well as your general Sitemaps.
- Don’t provide annotations for deep links that execute native ARM code. This enables app indexing to work for all platforms.
- Make sure the back button behavior of your app leads directly back to the search results page.
Mobile deep linking the future

Mobile web use has been declining, while mobile app use continues to spike, now occupying 86% of the average US mobile consumer’s time. If deep links weren’t a part of your mobile engagement strategy before, it’s time to consider adding them. As mobile app use rises, deep links gain traction. Right now, they make for better app discovery, engagement and conversion with richer opportunities. In the future, when deep links are adopted at scale, they will make navigating between apps similar to how we navigate between web browsers, with more fluid pathways.

Blog contributed by Rajkumar Raju, Assistant Manager-SEO, Position² Inc.
October 6, 2014
Surviving the post-Hummingbird era
Google officially released the Humming bird update almost a year ago on Sep 26, 2013 & we at Position² had shared our thoughts then. This update was perceived not to be a worrisome algorithm update. But, this can make SEO’s scratch their heads as the approach towards website optimization changes after Humming bird.

So what does this update mean to Marketers?

It is estimated that Humming bird affected 90% of search queries & made SEO practices more strict & difficult too. With Humming bird – the underlying layers of the search algorithm have undergone a change and are now more in sync with semantics. This stresses the need to move on from a keyword-focus SEO strategy to landing page level, context based approach while optimizing a site for natural search. Content on site should sound like an answer to relevant search query raised by users.

Search crawlers are now capable of identifying & listing technical aspects of a website that co-relate with Search rankings. Most important amongst them are Page load time, 302 re-directs, and keyword stuffed metas. Overall on-page factors will remain the most important aspect to focus on while catering to a post-Humming bird era website.

Although Humming bird may not be as impactful as a Penguin or a Panda; the overall effect lies in the manner in which focus will now shift from keyword-rich content to semantic type of content.

We see the following impact from Humming Bird:

Search engines will evolve to be smart engines
- Paradigm shift in focus : rather than ranking for a query, try to provide the “best” answer for that query
- Comparison based semantic searches will be served with results from comparison sites: Eg: if the search query goes as “flipkart v/s snapdeal” – Search engines will list review sites, comparison websites & aggregators on top
- Location based search results will be future – Geo enhancements as part of Search results is already underway – These will also meet Google Pigeon algorithm update guidelines
Having said about the implications, let us now look at some best-practices & useful considerations for survival in a post-Humming bird era:

Technical:
- Ensure that the website in focus is up-to-date with the latest technologies such as responsive web design, hreflang for international landing pages.
- Define your website architecture and place content in a neat, easy-to-access manner – not only for Search engines but for users too. Remember search engines now cater to consumer behavior
- Follow best practices of on-page optimization such as on-page Schema Markup, Social Media tags such as Twitter cards, OGP etc.
Content:
- Target keywords which are more likely to be used by users (don’t ignore long tail) – as all these contribute in the “semantic” world
- Have meaningful, grammatical error-free content which resonates to users search intent
- Create content to answer the 5 W’s of your product/service – Who, What, When, Why, Where?
Position²’s PoV:

Our SEO focus has always been on improving the overall health & diagnostics of the site as part of optimization & also delivering the best user-experience on the website. Our thorough audits evaluates close to 40 technical parameters crucial for SEO. In addition, we also provide QC checklists & guidelines for enhancing website architecture.

In addition to the technical aspect, our detailed, well-researched content calendars are in place catering to primary & long-tail keywords to ensure that there are regular content refreshes happening on the site. We also stress on having an optimized presence on social media to boost organic search presence.

As Google has aptly named this algorithm to be “precise and fast” like the Humming bird itself, expectations are that sites need to perform to answer precise search queries & of course need to fast!

Put in your comments and share your thoughts on the Humming Bird experience and how it changed the way you approached SEO.

Contributed by Chetan Rajasekaraiah, Senior SEO Specialist, SEO Team

Image source
September 24, 2014
6 Tips for Conversion Rate Optimization
SEO is an important component of most companies’ online marketing investment. But good SEO is a job half done, because it only brings in prospects. To support your SEO, you need to run Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) initiatives to see that the prospects you have brought in actually end up doing what you want them to do – buy from you, subscribe to your email newsletter, recommend friends to buy your product, share your content, etc.

Your website SEO will get you traffic. But that’s just the beginning. There is a lot to consider after that. For example:
- How relevant is that traffic?
- What are your conversion rates and how can they be improved?
- Is enough of your audience converting? If not, what can you do about it?
Here is a 6 step checklist that will help you in your CRO efforts:

1. Setting your objectives

It’s important to define your objectives. This is the basis for building your website to make your audience take actions that will help you achieve your objectives. Want them to buy? Set up an ecom store. Want them to leave their contact details? Provide a form for them to fill in. Align your website with your objectives.

2. Research

Effective CRO requires thorough research. Understanding your audience and their online behavior is crucial for conversions. If you know what they are looking for, what the drivers of their behavior are, then you know what you need to do to get conversions. It’s important to remember that research is a continuous process and its inputs help you fine tune your initiatives to keep conversions improving.

3. Understand your website and its effectiveness

This understanding will help build your web pages so that they contribute to more conversions. A conversion is the end result you want out of every site visit. It’s important that you determine what constitutes a conversion for you: product subscriptions, service sign-ups, collateral downloads/ subscriptions, enquiry calls etc.

The advantage is that everything that happens on your site can be tracked. This creates a wealth of data for you to analyze and see what’s working and what isn’t.

Record current statistics on number of site visits, bounce rates, conversion rates and amount of time spent on site. Mark up the landing pages that were visited the most. Nailing these details will give you a clear view of conversion goals for your website. Focus on strengthening those pages that are falling behind in contributing to conversions. The clearer the conversion goals are, the easier it is to turn traffic into conversions.

Outline your sales funnel by combining analytics, research and landing page optimization. You can visualize your sales pipeline better by knowing the landing pages that are performing the best.

4. Website design and layout

Designing your website and planning the layout is crucial in the plan to lead website visitors on the path towards conversions. Your website should guide the visitor’s journey to conversion. Interlink pages so that it is easier for visitors to move from one page to another. Your CRO strategy should include a plan for developing necessary collateral that will move website visitors from being a browser, to making a choice and finally to a buyer. Your CRO and landing page optimization practices should support improvement of conversion rates.

5. Testing

It’s important to test your pages and see which are working best. Testing has to be continuous because what works tends to change with time and the audience. You don’t want to be in a position where your pages are not working any longer and you don’t know it. There are two important kinds of tests you can run:
- A/B testing
  Build multiple designs for entire web pages in need of conversion optimization and test them out. Monitor and note behavior on all designs you are testing.
- Multivariate testing
  Develop multiple new designs for selected elements on the web pages you are optimizing while considering the elements that interact with each other. Your website traffic will come across combinations of the elements you have targeted and you can record their actions.
6. Integrate social efforts

Your CRO strategy can start early – even before visitors come to your site. When you integrate social efforts with CRO, you know why your audience is visiting your site and your chances of conversion are much higher than otherwise. Your social media campaigns can prime your audience and bring them to your site, ready for conversion.

What do you think helps improve conversion rates? Have you worked on your CRO? Let us know.
August 20, 2014
Pigeon – Local Search Algorithm update from Google
One of the biggest updates to local search was announced just over a week ago. The last local search update was on 10/2012 (65-Pack Update).

Image source: Mozcast

As Mozcast reports, there has been a decline in local search results over the last week. Linda Buquet, Google Local specialist says that this is a major update and in the future, Google’s local search will have stronger ties to web search signals.

The Pigeon update will bring in the following changes:
- More visibility to local search results on SERPs
- Yelp problem solved – Yelp results will now be included as part of local listing
- Boost for other local directories
Image source: SearchEngineLand
- Benefit for big directory sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor – they now rank prominently on search results for local search queries
This update is currently being rolled out for US English queries and is likely to be extended to other regions. A complete update of Pigeon would have knee-deep effects…

Looking at this from a SEO perspective:
- Local search directories get higher visibility
- Vertical specific big directories will stand out with more benefits. A search on Google for “sushi bars hawaii” now no longer displays the 7-pack results. This is now replaced by top directories.
- Website authority will be directly linked to local search results. Google’s intent is to provide useful, relevant and accurate search results to users
- Local carousels will be displayed with good images and customer reviews attracting good rankings
Position²’s POV

Although at first glance this update might seem more relevant to B2C businesses, at Position² we believe it will benefit B2B firms as well. To help our clients (in B2B and B2C worlds), we are rolling out many new initiatives to help with local search. Some of those include:
- Basic principle of local SEO, i.e., NAP – Name, Address and Placement are not to be forgotten
- Creation and optimization of listing on Google + Local pages. We share a detailed G+ strategy with our clients and help them implement the same. We see great results from this strategy. However, this has to be managed even after the G+ strategy has been provided.
- Optimizing on Google Maps to be given importance along with integration of Google Maps and user-generated reviews
- Customer reviews and ratings to be updated on G+ local pages
- Having good presence on business-specific local search directories
- Including schema to help Google show personalized results
Have noticed changes in your site’s local search rankings? Tell us in the comments box below.

Stay tuned to Google as the update is still being rolled out!

Contributed by Chetan Rajasekaraiah, Senior SEO Specialist, SEO team
August 13, 2014
The ‘must have’ SEO features for an ecommerce site
ECommerce/online shopping is the trend of the day. It will continue to grow and is expected to outrun ‘normal shopping’. At this pace, product companies need to prepare to compete with seasoned players in the market.

Organic search space is dominated by the Amazons and Walmarts of the world. There are of course, several factors which contribute to this, like the number of pages, the number of visitors, the brand equation and the online spends of these companies.

Given these, what should a normal player in the ecommerce space be doing to ensure that his website lists at the top of SERPs?

Optimizing e-commerce websites is not an easy task. Strategies for ecommerce SEO need to be based on retail marketing and should also be in sync with recent search algorithm trends. From an SEO perspective, here’s what should be looked at for e-commerce sites:

1. Keyword Selection

Keyword research for any ecommerce site should be based on thorough market research and industry competition. Search engines, with their updated algorithms, intend to deliver best possible results to the user. So, understanding consumer search behavior is important.

Consumer specific, long tail and geo-specific keywords should not be ignored.

2. User Experience and Website Loading Time

With growing competition in the online space, user experience becomes an important consideration. Sites need to provide the ‘shopping’ experience for users. Better user experience and engagement ratio on the website receive rewards and recognition from search engines.

Smart search algorithms now focus on ranking websites based on the above factors and other metrics like page load time.

3. Website Structure and On-page Factors

The structure of the website needs to be in line with search engine guidelines. The content should be written primarily for users.

Other on-page factors include:
- URLs
  - Keep URLs short and simple
  - Include keywords and use hyphens as separators
  - Avoid query strings
- Unique meta data
  - Have niche page title and descriptions
  - Avoid duplicate content
  - Focus on improving CTAs by using compelling descriptions
- Navigation with breadcrumbs
  - Maintain consistent structure for navigation
  - Provide links to category and product pages
  - Use breadcrumbs efficiently
- Category and product pages
  - Optimize product pages for long tail keywords
  - Embed videos
  - Post images which have high resolution (for example, product images on Amazon)
  - Encourage user reviews
Image Source: Amazon.com
- Schema markup (rich snippets, structured data, microdata)
  - Leverage schema for products and breadcrumbs
  - Add schema markup for product reviews, improve trust and gain better CTA
Search Query: Barnes and Noble Coupons

4. Mobile Optimization

Google recommends using responsive web design.
- Optimize for mobile queries (mobile and desktop users don’t search alike)
- Have compressed images for faster rendering
- Keep it local
- Give importance to CTAs and store locators
Image Source: Google Developers

5. Social Integration
- Have social plug-ins on category and product pages
- Allow users to login through social profiles (social sign in)
- Make user reviews/comments on social channels visible on the website
- Share user-generated content
Image Source: Apple Store

While the above are tips for boosting organic traffic to an e-commerce site, the real strength lies in the quality and service of the products offered. A great customer journey on site followed by great customer service reaps rich dividends!

Happy Shopping!

Do you have anything to add to this blog? Post your comments in the box below!

Contributed by Chetan Rajasekaraiah, Senior SEO Specialist, SEO team
July 23, 2014