What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. It is specifically useful for optimization of AdWords advertisements and marketing campaigns. Here is the site,http://www.google.com/analytics/ Google Analytics had been redesigned to include better features and is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners. Recently, Google Analytics has integrated the Google Audio Ads also into the program.

And the official Google Analytics blog is,http://analytics.blogspot.com/

Features include,

• Fast Implementation
• Keyword and Campaign Comparison
• Custom Dashboards
• AdWords Integration
• Trend and Date Slider
• Ecommerce Tracking
• Funnel Visualization
• Site Overlay
• Email reports
• GeoTargeting

Industry benchmarking is a newly added feature with Google Analytics. Sharing of google analytics data with Google is yet another option that we can choose. Here is an FAQ on that option;http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=87515&topic=13910#0.1.1_1

Outsource Strategies International (OSI) is a US based company that offers services in SEO, SEM, PPC advertising and more to clients in the US and also globally… …

The 2008 Web 2.0 Summit will take place from November 5-7, 2008 in San Francisco, California. One can sign up for the Web 2.0 Summit newsletter to stay up-to-date on the latest Web 2.0 Summit news and announcements.

Here is the official website:
http://www.web2con.com/

You might require an O’Reilly registration at,
https://members.oreilly.com/account/members/register?x-url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oreillynet.com%2Fcs%2Fnl%2Flogin

Web 2.0 Expo is a companion event to the Web 2 Summit and happens at Moscone West, San Francisco April 22-25, 2008.
More details at http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/content/about/

Other O’ Reilly conference details are listed at,
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/

Outsource Strategies International (OSI) is based in Oklahoma and is a total web based outsourcing solution provider in Search marketing/ optimization and more.

Every website is created with an objective in mind. There are thousands of websites on the Internet. If one is not competitive with regards to the quality of our website we could just get lost among the zillions of sites. The website’s web visibility can become so poor with almost trickling or zero traffic. Therefore care must be taken to properly design and maintain the website well, right from the beginning. And at every stage the website should be assessed. Web assessment is an art and good experience only can make one to judge and assess well a website.

What are the different things that we assess in a website? What are the different questions that we may have to ask during the web assessment of a website? Here are some of the questions:

• Is it easy to navigate the website?
• Is the website enough useful for the business
• Is the web site appealing to the eye?
• How good is the content of the website?
• Do the web pages load soon?
• Is the content relevant to your target audience?
• Can the visitors easily contact the site authorities?
• Is everything functional? (forms /animation etc)
• Is the website search friendly?
• Is it easy to find information on the site?
• Does the site appear on the top listings on a SERP?
• Is the site ready to face other online competition?
• Is the site built according to the SE /W3C guidelines?
• What is the conversion rate for the site?

If satisfactory answers are not received for any of the above questions one must work to improve the situation. The process starts with a proper assessment by professionals. Problem areas have to be first identified before recommendations are made.

This can also be done using many different types of online tools and web analytics like Google analytics. Only when all the different parameters like site’s performance like reports of phone leads, unique visitors, conversion ratios, search engine referral trends and details on incoming traffic etc have been looked into can we be sure that the initial web assessment is complete. Successive assessments are made periodically after the recommendations have been implemented.

OSI (Outsource Strategies International) is a US based company that offers professional services like web assessment SEO, SEM and PPC advertising to clients in all the States.

PPC or Pay per Click management services are about advertisers bidding on keywords which they think the potential customers will use while doing online search. Whenever an online user uses the same keyword that matches with the advertiser’s keyword, the advertisement (also called a sponsored link) gets displayed on the SERP (search engine results page).

What is the PPC management tool/software used for? Well to understand that one must first know about PPC bidding and its management. One must first identify as to how much CPC or (cost per click) can be paid by us. The maximum CPC varies with search engines and over time. Can this process be automated using a PPC management tool? Yes there are PPC bid management tools that are fully automated and does rules-based bidding and lets us manage keyword buys to achieve specific goals. A good PPC bid management tool or software can be very convenient and will almost free us from the hassles of bid management.

The PPC management tools/software can be quite effective and its performance will depend upon the differently available software brands with varying features and possible upgrades. Standalone software can be downloaded from the Internet and can be run from one’s own computer. Such PPC management tools considers many technical factors in a more perfected and better way than is possible manually. These include many features and management of related factors including,

• Conversion rate
• Profit margin/account management
• Support multiple search engine
• Advertising budget
• Paid traffic getting into the site
• Multiple campaign management
• Keyword management
• Taking advantage of bid gaps
• Different strategies for Google /Overture etc
• Customization of rank range
• Bids can be updated from a few seconds to many hours.
• Analysis of ranking position
• Automatic notification of bids
• ROI tracking/ management
• Bidding reports.

Outsource Strategies International (OSI) is a US based company that offers services in SEO, SEM, PPC advertising and more for clients in the US and also globally.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Blogs are indeed a gold mine of SEO/SEM knowledge. Both professionals and aspirants can learn all they want by just making it a point to read the blog posts regularily. It will not only help to keep in touch with what is happening but also learn a lot. It is specifically a must for those who don’t get to attend the various SEO/SEM Summits and Conferences. Please find below links to few of the best SEO blogs available on the Internet.

• http://www.seroundtable.com/
• http://www.seobythesea.com/
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
• http://searchengineland.com/
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/
• http://www.seopedia.org/
• http://www.seobook.com/blog
• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog
• http://www.stuntdubl.com/
• http://www.seochat.com/
• http://www.toprankblog.com/
• http://www.searchengineguide.com/
• http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/
• http://www.martinibuster.net/
• http://videos.webpronews.com/
• http://blog.seoptimise.com/
• http://www.pagetrafficblog.com/

Outsource Strategies International (OSI) is a US based BPO company that offers various outsourcing solutions in SEO, SEM, PPC advertising, content development and much more.

SEO or search engine optimization of a website must start with a proper keyword research. Keyword here refers to the words or phrases that a web searcher types into the Google or any other search engine box. What has to be researched here? Well keyword research is defined as the act of determining those keywords/phrases by which people search for a topic of interest on the Internet. SEO professionals have to thus develop the art of choosing the apt keyword that will be used by the potential customer and then optimize the website/ webpage for such a search. When a particular keyword is used to search our website must be ranked high on the SERP (search engine results page).

Keyword research is a technique that one can master by experience. There are many free and paid keyword research tools available online that can be used. Here are some important points during keyword research that must be kept in mind:

• Get familiar with the target audience
• Select keywords that have high search volume
• Familiarize with the specific industry terms
• General terms are more competitive
• Low volume but very specific keyword can get quality traffic
• Reach a balance with regards to volume and quality
• Better to focus on the specific long tail keyword (those with more than three words)

A website needs to be optimized for the search engines and hence online business website owners always get services from professional SEO/SEM (search engine optimization/marketing) companies. An ongoing SEM campaign will definitely bring in a lot of traffic, but it must be useful traffic. One must be very clear of the objective of a web page or website. If you have a PPC advertisement program then only when the required click or conversion happens can one can say that our SEO/SEM effort has been successful. This is when the importance of measuring bounce rate has to be recognized. So What is a bounce rate?

A bounce rate refers to the rate at which people “reject” a web page on which they have landed. If we use any web analytical software or Google Analytics (GA) it becomes our website. Generally speaking if the visitor sees only one page of the website it is said to be a bounce. Some web analytics go by the time factor. Spending less than 10 seconds on a web page is enough reason to call it a reject. A bounce rate information can be very useful for us to study and improve our online marketing efforts. Bounce rates can be measured for the different keywords and we can identify and isolate those keyword searches that end up with a high bounce rate. This type of bouncing is sure to make us ask questions! Is this not what the visitor or searcher wanted? What can you do on that content/page to retain the search visitor’s presence?

Bounce rates can also be monitored such that we can identify those websites that are sending us traffic that is not of quality. Thus if we have traffic inflow into our website from 4 different websites and identify that visitors that came in from one particular website immediately leave, then we will come to know that something needs to be changed at that source. Here are some of the different factors that determine the bounce rate.

• Search engine ranking of the page
• Type of Audience
• Advertisements
• Survey requests
• Landing Page Design
• Ad and Landing Page
• Messages Emails and Newsletters
• Load time of the web page
• Links to external sites

Online marketing efforts are often directly measured by the conversion rates. If by modifying or changing the webpage content there is a significant change in the percentage of bounce rate and we are able to get more clicks and conversions then we have succeeded. It just shows how well our website visitors are reading our content based on keywords delivering traffic to the website. Online marketing sites must use good and effective web analysis tools and keep their bounce rates at a minimum percentage level.

Outsource Strategies International (OSI) is a US based BPO company that offers services in SEO, SEM, PPC advertising for clients across the US.

SEO or search engine optimization is all about making your website as search friendly as possible. One of the basic methods of making your website search friendly is to always provide the search engines with an important, contextual clue as to the topic of the linked page. This is where the importance of breadcrumbs comes in. The term “breadcrumb” is taken from the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the popular fairytale.

What are breadcrumbs? Breadcrumbs are navigational links that appear below the page header. They are paths that let a user to orient within the website. These links provide a single hierarchical path even though there may be more than one path to access a webpage. Good SEO practices must choose the most frequently used route, or the route with the most appropriate context. They do not necessarily have to follow the directory structure.

There are three types of web breadcrumbs. These are,

• Path breadcrumbs that are dynamic and show the path that the user has taken to reach a page.
• Location breadcrumbs that are static pages located in the website hierarchy.
• Attribute breadcrumbs that give information that categorizes the current page.

Here are some tips for effective navigation and optimization of website:

• Incorporate breadcrumbs into online catalogs
• Checkout catalogs
• Have keyword-rich anchor text
• Limit the number of crumbs to 6 or fewer
• Avoid use of abbreviations
• Capitalize the first letter of each word
• Use full title when it is short
• Titles must be short
• Do not follow a spider’s path for the breadcrumb.

Outsource Strategies International (OSI) is a US based company that offers professional outsourcing services in SEO, SEM, PPC advertising and more for clients in the US and world wide.

If you have a business and most of your business comes from your website, chances are that you have been investing in an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaign for your website and have been getting good and effective professional SEO advice. Now if you have other business competitors who also have their websites but you are not sure if they also have an SEO campaign going on, this ignorance will keep you anxious. But there is a quick solution!

Ok if you want to find out if your competitors are also optimizing their website how do you find out? There is no need for you send some one to spy on your competitors. It will only take a minute for you to get and confirm this information online. All one needs to do is open the competitor’s website and check on its HTML source Code!

Here is how to go about it. Go to the concerned site’s homepage on the browser and click on “view” and choose “Source” and the HTML source code page opens up. If using Internet Explorer 2.x, right-click the Web page, and then click View Source. To view the HTML source code for a Web page that contains frames, right- click the Web page in a frame, and then click View Source.

Now if the page is being optimized you will have to just see if they are using their main keywords in the header tags, the title tags , and in the image alt tags. These are always located near the top of the source code. Also you will find that the text on the web page contains a minimal repeated use of the keyword. These must be more than enough clue to confirm the fact that your competitor is also smart enough to go for website optimization.

There are many free online tools that can be used to get the HTML source code for any website. Here is one such tool;http://www.submitexpress.com/snooper/

It is also a good practice to validate your site’s HTML code. W3C compliance should be implemented for the users, to improve accessibility and usability of the website. Here is the tool;http://validator.w3.org/

Call OSI (Outsource Strategies International) the Oklahoma based company that offers professional services in SEO, SEM, PPC advertising and more for clients globally.

Most SEO (Search Engine Optimization) professionals are good web content developers. So what is web content development? It is the process of publishing of any kind of information on the Internet. Website content can be made up of a combination of text, pictures, audio and video recordings. It consists of these basic different processes.

• Researching of material
• Writing of content
• Collecting/ accumulating content
• Organization of content
• Editing of content

One of the foremost questions the content developer asks is about the details of the target audience and the purpose of the audience. He must also plan and find how and what the audience can gain from the website’s content. How is he going to get this accomplished? Actual details about the site’s visitors, audience, their concerns, needs and requirements etc have to be collected and this data must grow over time. One should not start with a broad group of target audience but stick to a smaller group and then gradually expand.

Once we are sure of our website’s objectives and its target audience, we have to make a list of specific objectives, or goals, for the website to accomplish. Thus if we have products to sell one must make available details and articles about the different products that will be searched by prospective clients. Titles with the right keywords is a very crucial aspect of SEO based article publishing on the website. Content should include photographs of the product/services, its prices, and a detailed product specification along with information about how to order and pay for the product. Needless to say a good web design and a good navigation on the website is a mandatory. One must also be able to attract the visitors with a variety of visual cues.

Every web page must also have hyper text links to other pages of allied interests that the visitor may want to read. A good SEO based web development that avoids spamming and regularly publish web content along with linking to similar website communities will take the site a long way on the road of success.

OSI (Outsource Strategies International) is an Oklahoma based company that offers professional services in SEO, SEM, PPC advertising, content writing and more to clients across the USA and globally.