Does Thin Content Hurt Ecommerce Sites and How to Fix It

Google Panda update not only affected traditional websites but its consequences were even on E-commerce sites. Most of the E-commerce businesses were taken off guard with its first hit. What happens if an e-commerce site has been never “hit” by Google updates and if still Panda update has its affect on businesses, but they don’t even recognize it? But this unidentified problem which is like a missed chance hurts the brand manufacturers most.

A successful brand does not even require SEO; even it uses SEO where there is no need for it to worry about any updates. But these successful brands need to take help of SEO until and unless if they have any competition in market with large retailers as competitors.

What does thin content have to do with it?

In these days, as e-commerce sites have put its step forward most of the purchases are carried out online. Search engines provide users to shop online from any devices such as mobiles for convenience. If a brand has trustworthy customers then there will not be any effect of Google updates but in case of new business in online it has to depend only on search. So, online businesses which are new have to follow rules of SEO to gain popularity among online shoppers and should survive from Google updates.

After these Panda updates it will not be sufficient if you drop a pair of keywords on to a page and put it for shoppers. Panda updates have changed rules by concentrating on to text over other aspects. Even it affects brands severely if only images are present without any content. After this update, it is made compulsory that even ecommerce sites have to focus on content like traditional websites.

2012 can be considered as year of content strategy, while in 2013 it’s very important that even ecommerce business have to follow SEO as part of content strategy and also digital strategy. It is essential for ecommerce businesses to identify problem of thin content and find a solution for it.

How to identify ‘thin content’ category pages?

Following are the basic points which are missing on a typical ecommerce sites and help you to recognize thin content category pages:

A paragraph describing category page with three to five sentences and should include a pair of keyword variations.

Links within the paragraph are must and rich with anchor text linking to subcategories, and also associated categories which help search engines understand content relationships.

Another important factor is not to miss alt tags for images as these help search engines to understand what the image is about.

Breadcrumb navigations help out in understanding site-architecture easily and crawl without confusion.
Category heading in H1 tag is of utmost important as it helps search engines to understand meaning of the page in absence of content and is preferred over an image banner.

A title tag should include category name and should be placed first before brand name as search engines read title tags from left to right.

A short friendly URL which includes category name should be placed right after domain name.

So, it is important to follow above rules along with using right keywords which lastly helps in gaining more users and popularity among online users.

5 Must-Have SEO Skills

In present days SEO is changing constantly. Due to this change search engine optimizers are getting a big demand. Below are the SEO skills that every search engine optimizer must follow.

Technical SEO:

  SEO is not only about keyword research and analysis. To make a website better ranking in search results a search engine optimizer must possess the knowledge about technical SEO also. Even On page and Off page optimizations are most helpful for a website to rank well in search results, code is also the major part of a website.

A search engine optimizer must learn about all technical issues like server side settings, server response codes and many more.
A perfect SEO analyst is the one who have the full knowledge in page level as well as server level optimizations.

Social Media Marketing:

We all know how social media marketing is growing widely in today's market. It is the process of getting traffic by marketing in social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, stumble upon and more. You require a strategy that suits to your business goals to market in social media.
Present SEO goal is to get traffic and attract customers through social media. So having knowledge in social media is a must.

Link Building:

 The well known fact is all search engines use links to measure the authority of a website. Link building is a method used to establish relevant, inbound links to a website to rank well in search results. In this you have to measure quality of the links not the quantity of the links.

You have so many traditional ways for link building like directory submissions, bookmarking submissions for high page rank sites and more. With this you will get permanent back links to your website.

Another important one is internal link optimization. It is not enough to do internal link optimization to your own properties; you have to do for social media pages as well.

It's not easy but is useful to get knowledge in both external link building and internal link optimization.

Usability & Information Architecture:

 Site usability is nothing but measuring how the information that you provide in your website is useful for the users, how you place the objects in a page and to check if the page is easy to navigate for the users.
Informational architecture is about the content in your website. It tells about how to organize the content, how to decide your folder structure and how you label the elements in your website and more.
These are important for a website to avoid visitors dropping.

Content Marketing:

Content is the key to attract customers. Content marketing is nothing but creating and sharing valuable content to engage customers. Once in a week changing the new content for specific topics in a website will improve the ranking in search results.

Content marketing is of two types. They are content creation and content distribution. Both are very important.

As a search engine optimizer you need to support content ideas that give more value to the users and search engines.

Three Tools & Hacks to Help Your SEO Efforts

Three things come to your mind when it comes to optimizing websites for search engines:

1.Fast loading websites
2.Advanced reporting for SEO campaigns
3.Conversions

To improve efficiency in your workflow in order to save time for thinking and experimenting rather than wasting time for repetitive work. Therefore one should use hacks and tools to make job easier.

Here the tools and hacks in the following lines:

Speedy Websites

Fast loading web pages are critical for all of us but not because Google considers the loading time in the ranking algorithm, but because to increase websites conversion better. To impress your customers show them the increase in the revenue and conversions during your SEO campaigns by making no mistake which makes your customer happy with the investment.

There are types of great tips on decreasing page loading times which usually need advanced procedures, change in design structure or resolve server configurations. To make things easily you need Google Tag Manager.

Google Tag Manager helps you to manage Google Analytics tracking codes or any other tags. The tag is written in JavaScript. So, if it works with one kind of JavaScript, it can be used anywhere.

The JavaScript codes provided by social network sites like Twitter, Google+ or Facebook slow down the speed of websites when they are repeated more than one time in a page. Remove the scripts to Google Tag Manager which helps to increase loading time down to zero.

Just copy the code provided by social networks and make sure that the tag is placed on all pages. Make sure to remove the code you placed in Google Tag Manager.

You can add the following as well to Google Tag Manager:

1.You can place web fonts, frameworks, web apps or widgets, web analytic codes including Google Analytics.
2.Move custom and inline JavaScript.

By this we can decrease the loading time of a websites.

Advanced SEO Reporting

To maintain long time relationship with your customers accurate SEO reporting is crucial.

The traffic analysis you get from Google & Google Analytics to your websites is not exactly correct, but only good thing that came out is it forces you to dig deeper and look for other key metrics to put you and your customers in right track.

Here are a few ideas for some of the reports that are parts of my SEO dashboards:

1.Landing pages for organic traffic for the webpages
2.Long tail vs. short tail traffic
3.SEO revenue and conversions rates over time

Converting Organic Traffic

Customers feel happy when they see the results even when optimization is in process but we all know that the real impact will take time.

Putting focus on getting results, you can keep customers happy and maintain good partnership with your customers.

Clients want more traffic from search engines for their websites, but what they truly want is to get more revenue out of their sites, therefore one should concentrate on getting organic traffic then revenue comes automatically.

Targeting organic traffic based on the keywords that drove the people to the website, you can use PadiAct.

When you use PadiAct a pop-up is showed to visitors that can take actions on the website matching your targeting definitions.

Email leads are sent immediately to MailChimp where you can set multiple autoresponders to convert many of the people into customers. Based on the sales information you get from the mail and you know the keyword positions that are more likely worth to invest in.

Going the Extra Mile

Social media is becoming more of a ranking factor. Why not use social network to increase your traffic.

Why Search Engine Optimization is Necessary

An important feature of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is making your website easy for both visitors and search engine robots to understand easily. Although search engines have developed to a high degree of complexity, in other ways search engine robots can't see and understand the webpage the same way a human does.

A Common Argument Against SEO

No one engineer would ever make a search engine that needs website to follow certain conditions and rules in order to be ranked SERP.

Suppose you uploaded online a dog photo. A human might explain it as "black colored dog, small sized dog, playing in the garden". But search engines will not understand the photo as like human being.

How to make a search engine understand a photo? The solution is; SEO allows webmasters to provide the idea or evidence that the search engines can use the content to understand easily. Adding proper structured content to your website is essential to Search Engine Optimization. In above example of dog, the solution is given the alt tag and title tag to photo. These tags are understood by the search engines easily.

Spidering and Indexing Problems

   Search engines are machine algorithm; they are not good at completing online forms like login forms. Any content containing hidden content behind the forms may remain hidden from search engines.

Website using a Content Management System (CMS) often creates duplicate versions of the same web page. The search engine robots crawl the entire original content in the webpage.

Errors in your website crawling directive (robots.txt) may lead to blocking search engines.
Poor link structure and content leads to fail of search engines to crawl all of the website content.

Content to Query Matching

Search query or text should be written in the format of people commonly used terms. Example: "food cooling units", for this keywords people commonly use "refrigerators".
Very important is Language and internationalization subtleties. For example, color as colour. Check the keyword what people are searching for and use exact match keyword in your website content.

Location targeting, like targeting content in "polish", when the maximum people who would visit your website are from Japan.

Mixed contextual signals: Suppose you post the title as "Mexico's best coffee" but the actual post is about "vacation resort or restaurants in Canada” which happen to serve great coffee. These types of mixed text or mixed posts create or send confusion signals to search engine robots.

The "Tree Falls in a Forest"

    Search Engine Optimization is not about getting the technical information of search engine friendly web development correct. Search engines are also about marketing. This is the most important concept to understand the functionality of search engines. You can build a perfect structured website, but the content can remain invisible or hidden to search engines unless you promote it.

The meaning of "tree falls in a forest" is that if no one is around to hear the sound, it may not be present at all. This translates to search engines and web content. In terms of SEO, if no one links to your web page content, the search engines may choose to ignore it.

Search engines themselves have no power to imagine (inherent gauge) of quality of the website or web page and no potential way to discover good pieces (part of web content) of content on the website. The power lies only with human beings to discover, comment and link to. Hence, the web content cannot simply be created; it must be shared, liked and talked about. Search engines are doing great job of promoting high quality content on the website that have become popular.

Source:

  http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/why-search-engine-marketing-is-necessary

SEO For Landing Pages Tips and Tricks

A Landing Page is a webpage that targets a particular user or a search engine crawler to access your url. Landing page is a first page of the website which is listed in search engine results page from the results of search query. Landing pages presents information regarding internet marketing campaigns, email and ppc marketing. Landing Pages are easy to track visitor’s action. Landing pages are the way to learn marketing advertisers, which gives importance by search engines.

Two types of Landing Pages

1.Transactional Pages
2.Reference Pages

Transactional Pages: Transactional landing pages gives information about a form and application, or to interact about the objects on page. Transactional landing pages are the part of PPC advertisers to build web traffic into sales.

Reference Pages: A Reference page offers the information about the user and company. This page provides the user click on link information. The information is related to links, images and other elements.

Ensure That Your Landing Page is SEO Effective

1.First target your audience and think how you can reach them. What offers and content could interest them?When they are facing problems provide solutions to that issue.

2.Place the important details on landing page where it can be viewed by visitors and search engine crawlers.

3.This should be first placed in body tag; other information should come after this.

4.Make use of the header tags in main content, so that it can be most visible. Other heading tags should be     less important compared to main h1 tag.

5.At very first the content needs to be crawled.

6.Using large images makes difficulty for crawling, so use the text to describe the products, which can be easily crawlable.

7.Avoid Java script on landing pages, which keep visitors entertained but search engines does not encourage such sort of things.

8.Use two frame models, which split the frames in to two and other one for seo.

9.Avoid pop -ups to, which affects the quality of a website.

10/Avoid using all the links which links to your category pages, use only the exact links with appropriate anchor text.

11.Use important keywords on the page. Overstuffing keywords make the visitors put off, and the spiders cautious.

12Using appropriate anchor text for maximum backlinks is possible.

13.Duplicate content is avoidable.

14.Street address helps search engine results page with location, where users search for business by location. It attracts traffic by addressing visibility placed on landing page.

GOOGLE+ INTRODUCES NEW GOOGLE+ PAGE MANAGER DASHBOARD

Google has recently rolled out a new Google+ page Manager Dashboard. This dashboard gives completely a new look for managing multiple Google+ pages. The new page manager allows you to view all the notifications and the pages you manage and also allows quick access for settings of each page.
      

The old dashboard was useless and it allowed you to see various pages you manage and with a blue box containing "Switch to this page" button - which could be directly done by going to the page itself.

How To Get Started:

The url https://plus.google.com/dashboard can be used to view the pages you manage in Google+ Page Manager. When you visit the page for the first time, you get a notification to let you know about the "A new way to view your Google+ pages" as shown below. You can also have a quick view on the pages which have notifications. When you click the notification number, you can see a new page which shows all your notifications.

The following screen-shot shows the new way to view your Google+ pages:

New Design:
 

New functionality has been added and some basic stats in the new design. The new dashboard shows all the links to "Switch to this page" including the following basic points:

1.The follower count each page has and the time since last post.
2.The notifications icon which appears in red for quick and easy access to page activity.
3.A link which allows to manage Page Managers.
4.Links to edit the profile and the page settings.

Below is the screen-shot of the new Page Manager Dashboard for multiple pages:

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While Google continuously works on small, local businesses with newer Google+ system for social media marketing they benefit a lot