FAQ - Search Engine Optimization

Frequently Ask Questions for SEO

What is a Search Engine?A search engine is an online database of websites that allows Internet users to search for information contained on websites contained in the database by "Keywords".
Keywords are words that Internet searches are likely to use when looking for information on a specific topic. For example, the words "grad schools" would likely be used when looking for information on continuing post-secondary education.
Each search engine has slightly different behaviors and characteristics.

What is a Directory?A directory is a search tool much like a search engine but with a few major differences. Directories tend to employ human editors to review and rank websites submitted to their database. Yahoo! is the most well known example of a directory. Most directories catalog websites based on a variety of topic categories such as Business and Economics, or Arts and Culture. Most directories demand payment before assigning a website review to one of their editors.
What is PPC or Pay Per Click?
Several Search tools are now offering Pay per Click rankings. Companies such as GoTo and iWon allow webmasters the chance to purchase placement in an auction system. StepForth has several plans for managing bidding accounts and finding the least expensive keywords to bid on.
Is there a simple solution to top placement?
There is no simple solution to attaining high search engine rankings. Search engine optimization is time consuming work and requires a healthy knowledge of how the Internet functions and how search engines operate.
Are not all search engines the same?
Each search tool has its own unique characteristics. As businesses, each search tool has found ways to make its service slightly different from other search tools.
Will my website stay at the #1 position once my website is placed there by StepForth?
Search Engine rankings fluctuate frequently, however, if your site is properly maintained by search engine specialists month to month then it is likely that the movement will be confined to within the top10 positions.
My website did not get accepted last time I submitted to the search engines... why?
Search Engine listings are not guaranteed to everyone who posts a website to the Internet. Search engines are for-profit businesses and have the right to refuse to list any site for virtually any reason. At StepForth we specialize in getting sites listed on search engines. We ensure all bases are covered and all necessary elements are present before submitting the finalized site to the search engines or directories.
How long does it take to see results?
It can take between 2 - 12 weeks to see results, depending on each search engine. StepForth starts tracking your website's performance 14 days after submission. We will forward all results as they come in over time. Ask about our reporting services.
How does the Search Engine find websites?There are two ways a search engine can find a website to add to its database. The first and most direct method is to accept submissions from website designers and optimizers. Most search engines have a "submit your URL" section inviting submissions from Internet users.

The second, and least obvious method of finding websites is to send a "spider" to follow each and every link on, off, and through a website. New URLs encountered by the spider will be added to the database. In this way, some search engines will grow very rapidly.
What is a "Spider"?A "spider" is an electronic robot that travels the web examining websites in order to add them to a search engine database and rank them according to the specific ranking criteria for that search engine. Most search engines use spiders to quickly and efficiently canvass the web for information.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of making websites search engine friendly. The process often involves minor modifications to, or additions of, several standard elements of a website.
What do you mean by Search Engine Friendly?
We use this term to describe a website that has specific elements added or modified to attract and please search engine spiders or live directory editors.
Why might I need to have extra elements added to my website?
A search engine spider is an automated program that electronically probes every URL submitted to its database. As the spider is a computer program, it is designed to look for and rank very specific items on each page it probes. If those elements are present, the spider computes a higher ranking than it would if those elements were not present.
If these elements are so important, why didn't they get added when my site was originally designed?
Most website designers haven't learned the importance of search engine friendly design. In almost every case we've encountered, the site designer is a highly skilled and creative person whose job is to put your ideas on the web. More often than not, the designers have not received any training in search engine optimization and don't think about it while pursuing a cool looking design. Search engines are also constantly changing their ranking criteria. They do this to prevent gross manipulation of their search tools. Often, website designers are not fully up to date with changes at search engines. For an example, ask your website designers about Theme Engines. At StepForth, we spend a good portion of our time studying how search engines work and how any sudden changes might effect our clients.
Why don't I just do the work myself and save money?
You can do the work yourself. You will need to continuously update your knowledge of how the various search engines work and any changes made in the way they work. This shouldn't take you too much time. Once you get the hang of it, search engine optimization can be as simple as re-shoeing the brake pads on your car or replacing the motherboard and system bios in your computer.
You should know that if you make a mistake in optimization and submission, it can take months to find the mistake and fix it, resubmit the site and obtain the search engine ranking you desired. Our 10+ years of experience with search engine optimization helps us avoid most mistakes.
What is an Affiliate Program?
A mutually beneficial relationship between a website and a company. The company seeks to either generate more web traffic, sell more products, or seek out potential customers through leads. The website seeks to make a profit by selling ad revenue on the site. Affiliate programs come in many shapes and forms.

What is an Affiliate Network?
This is by far the quickest and easiest way to begin selling advertising on your website. A secondary company called an affiliate network acts as a liaison between the advertiser and your website. The affiliate network sells ad space on your site and then takes a cut of the profit generated from this advertising. This can be an especially good method for small sites or people just starting in the advertising market, because it is extremely difficult to find individual advertisers on your own. In addition, the hardware and software needed to run and track an advertising campaign is all taken care of by the affiliate network.

What is CPS (Cost Per Sale)?
The cost an advertiser pays per sale. This is a very common method of selling advertising. You receive a credit for a sale when a web surfer clicks on one of the ads on your site and ends up buying something from your advertiser's site. A sale does not always occur directly after the click as most advertisers will have a certain time during which both the sale and click through must occur in order to receive credit. This time period is often called the 'cookie duration'.

What is CPL (Cost Per Lead)?
The cost an advertiser pays per lead. This is a very common method of selling advertising. A lead can be anything from an email address for a newsletter to a complete survey that needs to be completely filled out and verified in order to get credit. CPL prices can range greatly depending on the program.

What is CPA (Cost Per Action)?
This term refers to pay per lead and pay per sale affiliate programs.

What is CPC (Cost Per Click)?
The cost an advertiser pays per click.
Does meta tags make your site rank better?
This is NOT true. The fact is that according to the W3C HTML coding standards it is good coding practice to make use of Meta tags. Meta tags are also used by some directories and Yahoo! also admited at looking at meta tags 2 years ago. It is also true that search engines like Google DO NOT care much for meta tags. Meta tags therefore does very little if any for your rankings. It is also good practice not to stuff a bunch of keywords in your meta tags but that the meta tags should be relevant to the theme and keywords targeted on the specific page it is located on.

Is page titles important?
Yes, a good page title assist the search engine in determining the targeted theme of the page. Each page must have it’s own unique title that are representative of the page content. Also just target a single keyword phrase per page title.

Should I target many keywords on a single page?
No, the best strategy is to target a single keyword phrase for every individual page. This can cause a single page to rank for several keywords relevant to the incoming backlinks and the keywords targeted by the page.

What is a reciprocal link?
Reciprocal linking is when you link to a site and they link to your site in return.

What is a triangular link?
This is a link strategy whereby you link to a site form your one domain and they link back to another of your domains.

What is Natural rank

This the rankings that you obtain without paying for position. In Google the paid rankings normally is located on the right hand side of their search results and the natural rankings are the results listed on the entire left hand side of the search results.
What is hidden text?
This is text that is visible to a search engine spider as it views the HTML source code but it is not visually visible to a human visitor. Webmasters usually make use of style sheets and the class attribute to fool search engines. This will definitely end up with a removal and penalty by a search engine when detected.

What is a Doorway page?
These are normally single pages created with the sole purpose to target specific keywords. It usually do not reflect the rest of the site. A splash page can be mistaken as a doorway page and should be avoided as search engines can penalize a domain for the use of doorway pages.

My web design company submitted my site to 1000’s of search engines, do I still need to do SEO?
Submission software is to a large degree a selling mechanism that means nothing to the website. Only a handful of search engines being submitted to are actually useful and those will focus on other factors to determine your site’s rankings. It is a well known fact that Google uses more than 200 factors to rank a website. The only thing that submission software does is letting search engines know that your site is out there. Obtaining backlinks from sites already being indexed however has the same result.
What is SEO?
It is the process that enable search engines to access and understand the content of a site with the end result of improved positioning on the SERPS of relevant search engines in order to obtain relevant targeted referrals with improved conversion ratios, from search engines.

What is Cloaking?
In short cloaking means to determine who visits the website and then presenting the applicable visitor with the site content relevant to their needs. In other words serving Google bot with a different page than for example the Yahoo! spider is cloaking. This will definitely result in a banning of the relevant site in a search engine, if discovered. Enabling actual human visitors to view only information relevant to their needs is not considdered cloaking. Cloaking's main objective is fooling search engines.

What is an Algo?
The abbreviation for algorithm. This is a mathematical formula that determines the ranking of pages in the relevant search engines search results.

Google Analytics Tutorials for Webmaster

Introduction to Google Analytics


History of Google analytics:
Google's analytics service was developed from Urchin Software Corporation's analytics system, Urchin on Demand and Google acquired Urchin Software Corp. in April 2005. In December 2007, Google rolled out the new ga.js page tag which they recommend to use for all new accounts and new profiles for new domains.
How to define?

Google Analytics: It is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the  purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Web analytics is not just a tool for measuring website traffic but can be used as a tool for business research and market research. It is a free and hosted by Google. It shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience.

 Features

Google Analytics has been designed to meet the needs of novice users as well as web analytics experts.

Some of the features include:

• Map Overlay which can help you understand how to best target campaigns by geographic region

• AdWords Integration which makes it easy to track AdWords campaigns and allows you to use Google Analytics from your AdWords interface

• Internal Site Search which allows you to track how people use the search box on your site

• Benchmarking so that you can see whether your site usage metrics underperform or outperform those of your industry vertical.

• Funnel Visualization so that you can optimize your checkout and conversion click-paths

Know How Google Analytics Works for you?

When a visitor accesses a page on your site, a request is made to the webserver to display the page. The page is served and the Google Analytics Tracking Code JavaScript is executed. The Google Analytics Tracking Code, which is a snippet of code that you place on each page of your site, calls the trackPageView() method. At this point, the Google Analytics first-party cookies are read and/or written.

The webpage then sends an invisible gif request containing all the data to the secure Google Analytics reporting server, where the data is captured and processed. Data is processed regularly throughout the day and you can see the results in your reports.

Google Analytics uses only first-party cookies, which are considered safe and non-intrusive by most internet users today. Although many people block third-party cookies from being set by their web browsers, this won’t affect Google Analytics.

Someone who blocks all cookies, however, won’t be tracked by Google Analytics since all the data is passed to the Google Analytics servers via the first-party cookies. Someone who deletes their cookies will still be tracked, but they’ll be identified as a new visitor to the site and Google Analytics won’t be able to attribute their conversions to a prior referring campaign. People delete cookies for many reasons, one of which is to prevent personal data from being captured or reported. But, note that Google Analytics does not report on personally identifiable information. You’ll learn more about cookies as they relate to Google Analytics in a later module.

A much less common scenario is that a visitor to your site has disabled JavaScript on his or her browser. A visitor who disables JavaScript won’t be tracked since the Google Analytics Tracking Code cannot be executed.

Cached pages are saved on a visitor’s local machine and so they’re not served by the webserver. Google Analytics will still track visits to cached pages as long as the visitor is connected to the internet.

JavaScript errors occur when an element of a web page’s script contains an error or fails to execute correctly. If an error occurs before the Google Analytics Tracking Code is executed, the visit to the page won’t be tracked. This is because the error will prevent the remainder of the JavaScript on the page from running. Since we recommend that in most cases you place your Google Analytics Tracking Code at the bottom of the page, JavaScript errors are always a possible cause for data not appearing in your reports.

Google Analytics can track visits from a mobile device as long as the device is capable of executing JavaScript and storing cookies. You can see which devices have been used to access your site by looking at the Browsers report in the Visitor section.

In general, no reporting tool can ever be 100% accurate. You’ll get the most out of web analytics if you focus on trends. Knowing that 20% more visitors converted following a marketing campaign is more powerful than knowing that exactly 10 people visited your site today.

Data Confidentiality

All data collected by Google Analytics is anonymous, including where visitors comes from, how the visitors navigate through the site, and other actions they may perform.

No personally identifiable information is collected.

Google does not share Analytics data with any 3rd parties.

Furthermore, Google optimization, support, and sales staff may only access a client’s data with the client’s permission. You can give permission verbally, over email or through a support ticket that asks for help with a problem or asks a question about your data.

You may elect to share your Google Analytics data “with other Google products”, and Google will use the data to improve the products and services we provide you. Electing to share your data “Anonymously with Google and others” allows you to use benchmarking.

To provide benchmarking, Google removes all identifiable information about your website, then combines the data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries and reports them in an aggregate form.

If you select “do not share my Google Analytics data”, you will not be able to use benchmarking and may not have access to specific ads-related features such as Conversion Optimizer.

Again, regardless of your Data Sharing selections, Google does not share Analytics data with any 3rd parties.

Initial Screen

Understanding the Google Analytics interface will help you find and analyze information more effectively.

When you first login to your Google Analytics account, you’ll see a screen similar to the one on the slide.

In this example, the user has access to three Google Analytics accounts.

Click on the name of the account you would like to access.

Analytics Settings

This takes you to the account-specific page where you manage the set-up and configuration of your account and profiles.

You can toggle to your other Analytics accounts using the drop-down menu at the top right of the page.

Each profile for the selected account is displayed under “Website Profiles”.

From this screen you can access reports for each profile.

You an also edit configuration settings, add filters, add or change user permissions, and add or remove profiles altogether.

Report Interface

Click the “View Reports” link for a profile, and you’ll be taken to the dashboard for that profile.

A sample dashboard is shown on the slide.

We’ve called out the user interface features that are available on all reports.

Your report navigation, scheduled email settings, Help links, data export options, and the calendar.

Note that there are several places to find help information. The Help link on the top right of the page takes you to the Google Analytics Help Center.

Also, on the left margin of the page, you’ll see a Help Resources box with links.


Dashboard

The dashboard is where you put all the summary information about your site that you want to see at a glance. To add a report to the dashboard, just go to the report you want to add and then click Add to Dashboard.

On the dashboard itself, you can position the report summaries however you like and delete the ones you don’t need.

Report Structure

In the left hand navigation, you’ll see that your reports are organized into categories: Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content, Goals, and Ecommerce.

If you don’t have an ecommerce site or don’t have ecommerce reporting enabled, you won’t see the ecommerce section in your navigation.

To view reports, click on any of the categories and the reports available within that category will appear.

Some reports contain additional sub-reports, like the AdWords report under Traffic Sources.

Click the arrow to see the sub-reports.

Setting The Active Date Range

To change your date range, click the arrow next to the active date range displayed at the upper right of all reports.

You can then use the Calendar or the Timeline to select a new date range.

The “Calendar” tab allows you to select date ranges by clicking on the day and month within the calendar or you can type dates in the “Date Range” boxes.

The “Timeline” tab has a date slider that you can resize and move to cover any range of dates.

You can see your site’s traffic trends in the Timeline.

Setting A Comparison Date Range

You can select a date range to compare to the current selected date range.

When using the Timeline to set a comparison date range, you’ll see two date sliders instead of just one.

You can use a comparison date range to see how your site is performing month over month, year over year or even from one day to another.

The date range and comparison date ranges you select will apply to all your reports and graphs.

Graphic By Day, Week And Month

Most reports include an over-time graph at the top. You can make this graph display data by day, week, or month.

Multi-Line Graphs

You can also compare two metrics on the same graph to see how they are correlated.

Click the arrow in the top left of the graph.

Then, click the Compare Two Metrics link and select which two metrics you want to compare.

In this example, we’re graphing visitors versus average time on site.

Graph Roll-Overs

You can roll your mouse over the graph and see actual numbers.

Exporting Report Data

You can export data from any report. There are four formats: PDF, XML, CSV and tab-separated.

Simply click on the Export button at the top of any report page and select the format you want.

Email Reports

Next to the Export button, you’ll see an Email button.

Click it and you’ll see a screen with two tabs: Send Now, and Schedule.

You can schedule reports to be delivered daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.

You also have the option to select what format to send them in, such as PDF or CSV.

The email scheduling feature provides an easy way to automatically distribute specific report data to the people who need it.


Curriculum Links

The Overview reports in each section contain a set of Curriculum links. You can use these links to quickly find information that you need.

In some cases, these links access reports that are not available from the left report navigation.

Title And Breadcrumbs

You can always see where you are in a report hierarchy by looking at the title and the breadcrumbs at the top of the report.

Look at the example on the slide.

From the title, you can see that you are in the Referring Link report and that you’re looking at traffic from the link blogger.com/home.

From the breadcrumbs, you can see that you are in the Referring Sites report hierarchy.

You can click on any of the breadcrumb links to go back to that report.


Narratives And Scorecards

Nearly every report contains a short narrative that summarizes the traffic that’s included in the report.

The scorecard below the narrative provides metric aggregates and averages for the traffic.

Each box in the scorecard contains a question mark button. Clicking it opens a small window that explains how the metric is calculated.


Report Tabs

Most reports provide tabs that show different sets of data.

The Site Usage tab shows metrics such as the number of pages viewed per visit, the average time on site, and the bounce rate.

The Goal Conversion tab shows the conversion rates for each of your goals.

If you’ve enabled ecommerce reporting on your Profile Settings page, you’ll also see an Ecommerce tab.

This tab shows metrics such as Ecommerce revenue, number of transactions, and average value.

The AdWords Campaigns reports have an additional tab called Clicks. This tab contains AdWords related metrics such as clicks, cost, revenue per click and ROI.

Quick Segmentation

You can segment table data in different ways using the Dimension pulldown menu.

So, for example, if you want to see the traffic in your keywords report broken out by City, you just select City from the pulldown menu.

Keyword Reports

In the Keywords and Search Engines reports, you have the option to analyze just paid, just non-paid traffic, or all search traffic.

Simply click on the links above the scorecard to make your selection.

Hourly Reporting

Some reports allow you to view results by hour.

On these reports, you can select the view you want by clicking on the clock button in the top right corner next to “Graph By”.


Report Views

There are five different Views available in most reports. The first icon organizes your report data into a table. This is the default view for many reports.

The second icon allows you to create a pie-chart based on any one of the metrics in the report.

The third icon shows a bar-graph based on any metric you select.

The fourth icon is the comparison bar graph view. It allows you to quickly see whether each entry in the table is performing above or below average.

The fifth icon allows you to instantly see a summary report with graphs for the traffic you’re analyzing.


Sorting Data

Columns within tables can be sorted in both ascending and descending order simply by clicking on the column heading.

The arrows next to the heading title indicate the order in which the results are listed.

A down arrow indicates descending order and an upward arrow indicates ascending order.


Expanding Numbers Of Results Desplayed

By default, all reports with tables display ten rows.

To display more than ten rows, go to the bottom of your report and click the dropdown menu arrow next to “Show rows”.

You can display up to 500 rows per page.

Find Box

You can use the Find box at the bottom left of your reports to narrow or refine your results.

For example, if you are looking at the All Traffic Sources report and you want to only see traffic from the Google domain, you can type in Google and select “containing”.

Or, to exclude all traffic from the Google domain, you would select “excluding”.


Contextual Help Resources

You can get information about any report you’re looking at by clicking one of the Help Resources.

About this Report offers a brief description of the report.

Conversion University provides insight into how you might use and interpret the data.

Common Questions links to Help Center articles that are related to the report.

Create Context For Your Data

When analyzing your traffic, avoid focusing on just a single metric. This pageviews result by itself isn’t actionable because you don’t know what the number really means.

But, when you look at pageviews in the context of other metrics, you start to get clearer picture.

For example, look at the bounce rate. Half of the time that people entered the site through this page, they left the site without looking at any other pages. This page is very important. By comparing the pageviews to the site average, we can see that this page accounts for over 28% of all the pageviews.

How has the performance of this page changed over time?

This page is receiving 20% fewer visits than it did last week and people are spending 10% less time on it. And last week, the bounce rate was only 24% — now it’s double that number.

So, putting data into context can help us ask the right questions and decide on a course of action.

Let’s look at another example.

Creating Context With Visualizations

Here we are looking at the Content by Title report.

We’re using the Compare to Site Average visualization to see which pages have significantly higher bounce rates than the site average.

The bounce rate for the first title is nearly 20% higher than the site average. The red bar shows that it’s performing worse than the site average.

Looking For Trends

Analyzing trends is another useful way to bring context into your analysis.

The graph on the slide shows us that pageviews peaked in May. Did visits increase or did each visitor look at more pages?


Investigating Changes In Trends

Using the Graph Mode to compare Visits and Pageviews, we see that Visits and Pageviews have increased proportionally.

Data Driven Decision Making

Now let’s identify which traffic sources led to the increase in traffic and revenue. We do this by looking at the All Traffic Sources report and clicking on the Ecommerce tab.

Comparing two days of traffic, we find that — although several sources sent an increasing number of visitors to the site — only Google organic and Google referral had a significant impact on revenue.

Therefore, we know that although other campaigns increased overall traffic, they did not bring in purchasers.

This kind of information can help you decide where to focus your promotion and site content resources.

Pageview

In Google Analytics, a pageview is counted every time a page on your website loads.

So, for example, if someone comes to your site and views page A, then page B, then Page A again, and then leaves your site — the total pageviews for the visit is 3.


Visit

A visit — or session — is a period of interaction between a web browser and a website. Closing the browser or staying inactive for more than 30 minutes ends the visit.

For example, let’s say that a visitor is browsing the Google Store, a site that uses Google Analytics. He gets to the second page, and then gets a phone call. He talks on the phone for 31 minutes, during which he does not click anywhere else on the site.

After his call, he continues where he left off. Google Analytics will count this as a second visit, or a new session.

Note that throughout these modules, the words “visit” and “session” may be used interchangeably.

Visitor

A visitor is uniquely identified by a Google Analytics visitor cookie which assigns a random visitor ID to the user, and combines it with the timestamp of the visitor’s first visit.

The combination of the random visitor ID and the timestamp establish a Unique ID for that visitor.

You’ll learn more about the visitor cookie in a subsequent module.

Pageviews, Visits, And Visitors – The Basics

Generally, the Visitors metric will be smaller than the Visits metric which in turn will be smaller than the Pageviews metric.

For example, 1 visitor could visit a site 2 times and generate a total of 5 pageviews.
Pageviews Vs. Unique Pageviews

A pageview is defined as a view of a page that is tracked by the Google Analytics Tracking Code.

If a visitor hits reload after reaching the page, this will be counted as an additional pageview.

If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, an additional pageview will also be recorded.

A unique pageview represents the number of visits during which that page was viewed–whether one or more times. In other words, if a visitor views page A three times during one visit, Google Analytics will count this as three pageviews and one unique pageview.


Absolute Unique” Vs. “New vs. Returning”

The “Absolute Unique Visitors” report counts each visitor during your selected date range only once. So, if visitor A comes to your site 5 times during the selected date range and visitor B comes to your site just once, you will have 2 Absolute Unique Visitors. Remember, a visitor is uniquely identified by a Google Analytics visitor cookie.

The “New vs. Returning” report classifies each visit as coming from either a new visitor or a returning visitor. So when someone visits your site for the first time, the visit is categorized as “Visit from a new visitor.” If the person has browsed your website before, the visit is categorized as “Visit from a returning visitor.”

A high number of new visits suggests that you are successful at driving traffic to your site while a high number of return visits suggests that the site content is engaging enough for visitors to come back.

You can look at the Recency report to see how recently visitors have visited. You can look at the Loyalty report to see how frequently they return. Both the Recency and Loyalty reports are under Visitor Loyalty in the Visitors section.


Pageviews, Visits, And Visitors In Your report

The Pageviews metric can be found in the Visitors Overview and in the Content section reports. Most of the other reports show Pages Viewed per Visit instead of Pageviews.

Unique Pageviews is only found in the Content section.

Almost all of the reports show Visits.

The Visitors metric — in other words the number of visitors who came to your site — is found in the Visitors section.

Time On Page

To calculate Time on Page, Google Analytics compares the timestamps of the visited pages.

For example, in the slide, the visitor saw page A, then page B, and then left the site.

The Time on Page for page A is calculated by subtracting the page A timestamp from the page B timestamp.

So, the Time on Page for page A is 1 minute and 15 seconds.

In order for this calculation to take place, the Google Analytics Tracking Code must be executed on both pages.

The Time on Page for page B is 0 seconds, because there is no subsequent timestamp that Google Analytics can use to calculate the actual Time on Page.


Time On Site

Now, suppose the visitor continued on to a third page before exiting.

The second page now has a Time on Page of 1 minute 10 seconds.

The Time on Site is now calculated as 2 minutes and 25 seconds.


Avg. Time On Page” VS “Avg. Time On Site”

For Average Time on Page, bounces are excluded from the calculation. In other words, any Time on Page of 0 is excluded from the calculation.

For Average Time on Site, bounces remain a part of the calculation.

To calculate Average Time on Site, Google Analytics divides the total time for all visits by the number of visits.

Flash Based Sites

Some sites make extensive use of Flash or other interactive technologies. Often, these kinds of sites don’t load new pages frequently and all the user interaction takes place on a single page.

As a result, it’s common for sites like this to have high bounce rates and low average times on site.

If you have such a site, you may wish to set up your tracking so that virtual pageviews or events are generated as the user performs various activities. You can learn how to do this in the module on Event Tracking and Virtual Page views.

Length Of Visit” VS “Avg. Time On Site”

The Length of Visit report categorizes visits according to the amount of time spent on the site during the visit.

The graph allows you to visualize the entire distribution of visits instead of simply the ‘Average Time on Site’ across all visits. You can see whether a few visits are skewing your ‘Average Time on Site’ upward or downward. The Length of Visit report can be found under Visitor Loyalty in the Visitors section.

Traffic Sources Reports

The reports in the Traffic Sources section show you where your traffic is coming from on the Internet. You can compare your traffic sources against each other to find out which sources send you the highest quality traffic.
Source: search engine optimization tips by SEO Experts Gurgaon

SMO - Social Media Optimization - Social Bookmarking Process

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social Bookmarking is the process in which users tags  their favorite web page for later use. Users save a website on the web instead of saving it to web browser so that It can be seen online from any where they wish and can also be shared with their friends.

Why Social Bookmarking ?

Social Bookmarking is the the easiest and fastest method to promote business around the world. After
bookmarking your business product site on any of the bookmarking site, just share it among the friends like wise the chain will continue and you business will get more exposure on the web. With the help of this chain your business will appear globally.

Social bookmarking generate a lot of traffic & revenue for the website !

Top 10 Social bookmarking and networking sites:

1) Twitter.com
2) Facebook.com
3) Technorati.com
4) Digg.com
5) Propellar.com
6) Reddit.com
6) Mixx.com
7) Fark.com
8) Del.icio.us

We offer Following Services:

On-Page Activities:
- Title Optimization
- Keyword research & analysis
- URL Optimization (url structure and redirection)
- Content Optimization (anchor text, internal linking, keyword density, keyword prominence, Outbound Linking )
- Meta Tag Creation (English and in Regional language)
- XML and HTML sitemap creation
- RSS Creation
- Content writing for the site
- Blog optimization
- PAD file Creation
- Image Optimization
- Video Creation & marketing
- Slide Creation & Optimization
- Site Analysis
- Product Analysis
- Competitor analysis


OFF page optimization:

- Top Directory submission
- Article Marketing (submission & syndication)
- RSS Feed Submission
- Blogging (on top blog sites)
- SMO & Social Networking (Facebook, twitter, digg & Reddit)
- Social Page Creation ( Knol, Hubpages & Squidoo)
- Regional Blogs creation (Like German, french, Spanish, Dutch and Italian)
- Press Release
- Search Engine submission
- Business Listing
- Google local business listing
- Blog submission
- Social Bookmarking
- blog comments
- forum posting
- Quality link building (two way, three way and reciprocal link exchange)
- Guest blog posting
- Download Engine Submission
- Product Review
- Podcasting
- Slide and Documents sharing
- Trade Generation
- Sidewiki
- DMOZ Listing

Other:
- Google analytic and Webmaster Tools
- Custom Report generation
- Traffic report analysis
- Using Google Trends & Google Wheel

Avoid These Link Building Mistakes

All we know that Link building is not only one of the most important SEO activity but also necessary as it plays a very important role to rank keywords on search engines. Making Links can be very expensive in terms of time and money. Therefore it is necessary get quality links from trusted and good sites. There are some mistakes which are should be avoided when building a link:

1) Backlinks have a “nofollow” attribute
2) Using Wrong anchor texts
3) Getting Image link although text link is possible.
4) Not using ALT text for image link
5) Getting Backlinks from irrelevant theme websites
6) Building backlinks from link farm sites/pages.
7) Links from banned sites
8) Getting links from a Link trader that Explicitly sales links
9) Linking to “bad neighbors”
10) Linking from a page that uses cloaking or some black hat seo techniques
11) links from FFA
12) Links from a site that have canonical issue
13) Linking from a fake PR page

Some On-Page SEO Factors

Some On-Page SEO Factors That You Should Keep In Mind for your Site

On Page optimization is the most important and difficult task of search engine optimization. Every webmaster want to be expert in on page but due to lack of knowledge, they are unable to do. With proper on page optimization, your will rank better in search engine.
 1. Sitemaps -  With Sitemap robots easily find all of the pages on the website.
 2. Keywords in your URL – this can help you rank better. In my opinion its not so important for Google but I know for sure that Bing and some other search engines will rank you higher if you have your keyword in your URL.
 3. Title Optimization: Use keyword in your Title
4. Content optimization: Use H1, H2, H3 tag in your body. This can really help you rank higher but don’t overdo it. Maintain Keywords Density, prominence and proximity in the body.
 5. Image Optimization– Use ALT tag for you image with your keywords.
 6. Internal links: For Internal links should contain descriptive keywords – use anchor text.
 7. External Links – Don’t link to bad links (these are websites that google has banned – link farms, spam sites etc),your Page Rank can fall significantly.
 8. Top Level TLD domains – .org , .net , .com seem to rank higher. .Info’s rank lower – that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make .info sites of course if you have good content and good SEO you can get good results.
  9. Changing Meta – Again and again can reduce your rankings. Changing keywords and meta descriptions is bad as well.
10. URL Optimization: Make sure that your url should be static and be short.
11. Robots.txt file: If you want to hide something from search engine crawlers and you don’t want to index pages, then you have to use robot.txt file.

These are very important on-page SEO factors when building a web page. I hope it will help you!

Know Why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is Important for your business ?

Nowadays SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is becoming one of the fastest growing marketing strategy for the business. To sell products and services, more businesses turn to the web, it becomes very important for the business owner to market their products themselves properly on the internet. Here you will learn how SEO can be  the key factor for online marketing your products and services.

A lot of businesses believe that a mere presence on the Internet is good enough to get more customers. However, the truth is very different. Traditional methods of marketing have depended on hard work of professionals who are champions in formulating strategies, having a solid plan - B and knowing their target markets. While the strategic bases of the traditional methods are similar to that of SEO, the mediums of marketing are very different. Let us discuss about the main differences.

A traditional marketing method like advertising on news papers or magazines reaches a limited audience due to various factors such as readership, popularity, business markets and so on. Moreover, tracing back to an advertisement can be very difficult after a period of time. Also, the cost can be a very big factor in some cases as limitations are imposed on the size of the text or pictures. Such limitations can hardly paint the full picture of the business and hence the chances of losing out on a customer are high. Now, let us see how doing SEO on a website can be an advantage.

The website can hold a lot more information about the business. Putting it at the top of Google in itself acts as a measurement of credibility, which can have a positive psychological impact on your audience. That fact that the website is at the top of the pile speaks volumes about its excellence and goes a long way in creating good will. Thus, it can be instrumental in giving your business a boost. With SEO a wider audience can be reached and the needs of the customers can be measured. This can underpin future strategies to market a website. With tools like Google Analytics, goals can be set and achieved and success rates can be measured.

To market your business, you can resort to call calling, telesales and so on. However, with SEO the scenario is completely different. When a website reaches the top of the pile, it is automatically found by customers looking for the service, when searching on different search engines like GOOGLE, YAHOO, Alta Vista and Bing. Hence, the probability to get business is a lot more.