Difference Between Google Analytics And Google Webmaster Tool

A. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most widely used web analytics applications. It will give you the following information.

1. Visitor Reports

•             The total number of visitors your website has. It also specifies what are the number of new visitors and  returning visitors

•             The time that your visitors spend on your site.

•             The amount of pages your visitors view.

•             The amount of visitors who landed on your site and left immediately.

•             Geographical location of your website visitors

•             The websites which referred visitors to your site.

2. Web traffic Reports

•             Total number of of people visiting your site on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. It also provides your traffic stats to previous years.

3. Details of Keywords

•             The keywords which brings traffic to your website.

•             The keywords which produces most sales.

•             The keywords which keeps your visitors on your site for longer durations.

4. Content

•             The web pages your visitors visit often.

•             The web pages that brings you more traffic.

•             The pages your visitors most often leave your site.

5. Conversions: The conversion rates for the goals you set on your site.

For more information, you can visit Google Analytics website.

B. Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools reveals how Google looks your site online. Webmasters use this tool to fix problems with the site if any. It offers lot of tools for webmasters with which one can improve the visibility of the site and fix problems if any. It will give you the following information 

1. Crawl Errors

Google webmaster tools give you information about the pages which Google is unable to crawl. This is a very important aspect because if Google cannot crawl your pages, your search engine visibility may go down.  With the help of the tool, one can find out issues if any and resolve it.

2. Search Queries

This is information on your pages Google has returned to searchers for specific queries. The following information is available using webmaster tools.

•             Total number of search queries which returned pages from your site.

•             Your top search queries which returned pages in Google.

•             The number of times your pages were viewed in Google’s search results.

•             The number of times your listings were clicked on for a particular search query.

•             The percentage of times your listing was clicked for a particular search query.

•             The average position of your website for a particular search query.

3. Links

•             The links linking into your site from other websites.

4. Blocked URLS

•             If your site has content you don’t want Google or other search engines to access, use a robots.txt file to specify how search engines should crawl your site’s content. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to find out if your robots.txt is working as expected.

5. Malware

•             Google Webmaster Tools inform you If Google detects any malware on the site.

6. HTML errors

•             Google Webmaster Tools inform you If Google detects any HTML errors on the site.

7. Fetch as Google

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a page to Google. However Google doesn’t guarantee that they will  index every URL we crawl.

For more information, you can visit Google Webmaster Tools website.

Using Keywords Strategically Part - I

Every blog entry you post gives you a new opportunity to use SEO keywords in your content. By performing keyword research, finding the keywords and phrases that searchers looking for a company like yours would most likely use, and then using those keywords strategically in your blog posts, you can really improve your search engine optimization results.

To improve your outcomes, use long-tail keywords that your target audience will likely use during their research as part of the buyer’s journey. But remember to avoid keyword stuffing.

Backlinking

It pays to build relationships with other organizations and websites. Blogging offers you the chance to include links to other relevant websites. As a return, these organizations may link back to your site, which will help you generate even more web traffic that you couldn’t otherwise generate on your own.

It’s important to build relationships with reputable and high-quality websites that fit your niche when backlinking, however. Otherwise, you could be penalized by search engines.

Increasing Your Popularity Rank

Sometimes, SEO is a popularity contest. Search engines will move up your rank on their result pages if they notice that your blog entries are shared frequently and clicked on often. The best way to win this popularity contest is to commit to only publishing high-quality content that your audience will actually want to read. Sharing your blog however you can and suggesting that others do the same can also help.

Why Blogging Is Important

One of the most important reasons why blogging is important, however, is because it can boost your SEO results. Search engine optimization (SEO) involves a series of activities that optimizes your content in order to improve your organic, or “free,” traffic. The better you optimize your blog posts for SEO, the higher your webpages will be listed on search engine result pages, so more people can find your website and get to know your business. In fact, companies that blog typically gain at least twice as much web traffic as those that don’t blog.

Posting Fresh Content on Your Website

Search engines love websites that are updated frequently. This shows them that the websites are fresh and relevant, rather than outdated. Search engines don’t want to list irrelevant, outdated webpages for their users. They want to post the most up-to-date and new content possible to ensure that it’s as useful as possible.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many chances for you to update the other areas of your website. Your company’s history and about us page will never change. Your price page and product pages will only rarely change, if ever. You might update your home page content a couple times a year, at the most.

Starting a blog gives you the opportunity to continuously publish new posts on your site. You can post multiple times a day if you want to. The more fresh content you post, the more pages you’ll have for search engines to index, which means more opportunities to take the #1 spot on search engine result pages.

Key Differences Between Content Marketing and SEO

SEO and content marketing overlap, but there are key differences.

             Aspects of SEO are more technical. This includes the use of correct URLs, title and ALT tags, sitemaps and so on: the stuff that underpins your content marketing strategy.

             Content marketing is broader and isn’t necessarily confined to SEO goals. For example, a publisher should produce excellent content first and foremost as a way of attracting and retaining an audience.

How Content and SEO Can Work Together

There is a school of thought, or at least the perception exists in some quarters, that SEO is merely about creating good content for the search engines to index.

While I’m all for the quality content part, there’s more to it than that. If you haven’t ensured that the on-site SEO groundwork has been done, your content efforts will be wasted.

For example, if your site has a penalty, or Google isn’t indexing pages properly, then you’re going to need some SEO expertise, great content or not. This is why the SEO experts and content teams need to work together. As the stats below show, this isn’t necessarily happening all the time, but there is a desire for closer collaboration.

Here are some ways SEO and content can work together:

1. Creating Original, Quality Content 

While thin content created to provide fodder for Google’s crawlers may have worked to a certain extent a few years ago, it isn’t effective now. Also, weak content produced to make up the numbers will not work from a content marketing perspective, as it will not help to attract and retain readers.

Instead, from an SEO perspective, original and engaging content will set you apart from competitors, as it gives the search engines something to index that can’t be found elsewhere. It also helps your content marketing goals, as original and quality content is far more likely to attract the audience you’re targeting.

Ask yourself whether your content inspires people to linger on your site longer than a minute or so. Does it provide value, such as useful advice that helps them to do their jobs better?

2. Evergreen Content and SEO

Creating evergreen content is a great strategy for improving search rankings, as well as making your site a more useful one. A piece of news will often do well in Google while it’s fresh topical, but will fade thereafter. It doesn’t deliver long-term traffic. However, a more useful article that contains valuable advice and insight will attract the kinds of links and engagement metrics that Google is looking for, and is more likely to perform well in the search rankings over a longer period of time.

3. Keyword Research 

Keyword research is essential for content marketing and SEO to work well together. First of all, the quality has to be in the content you produce, but you should also ensure that the content you spent time creating achieves the exposure it deserves. To achieve this, your content needs to match the search terms that people are using and answer these search queries effectively.

If you use too many technical terms in your articles, this language may not match that which searchers are using. To avoid this, do some keyword research to find out which terms are popular and match the language you use to the way people search

4. Monitoring Keyword Goals

Once you have a list of terms and phrases to target with your content efforts, it’s important to monitor and measure your efforts. Is the content you produce hitting the mark? Is it having an effect on search positions? Don’t expect overnight results; it can take time before you see any shifts in search, and it may be very competitive for certain keywords.

There are no guarantees of success, but a well-applied strategy using focused content will pay off on a long term basis. It’s important to add that, while content can play a key role in achieving SEO goals, it shouldn’t be a slave to those goals. Keywords shouldn’t be crowbarred in so that content quality is affected. The reader shouldn’t notice too much.

5. Link Building

Good content attracts links. Just make sure it’s distributed effectively so that it can get the attention of as big or influential an audience as possible. There’s no great science to this; just create content that people will want to link to and see how it works.

6. Internal Linking

This is an obvious way to use content to help with SEO goals, as well as improving the user experience. Internal linking can help Google crawl your site more effectively, help pages to rank well for certain search terms, and also point users toward content that is relevant to the article they’re reading.

It’s simple enough to put into practice, and should be a part of the thinking when writing and editing content.

7. Measurement

It’s vital to measure the effects of the content you create in terms of SEO goals. If you’re aiming to improve rankings, there are some useful tools out there to track changes in ranking positions and see the results of your efforts.

8. Headlines

Headlines are very important. They should be descriptive and should work hard to convince people to click, but they shouldn’t try too hard. For example, a title such as “10 useful tips to improve your landing pages” is fine, as long as those tips are useful and deliver on the promise. However, “10 awesome tips that will improve your landing pages and make you a millionaire” might be promising more that it can deliver.

Headlines must be written for the Web, and you need to consider the keywords and phrases you use in headlines. How do people search for these topics? How will people find your articles? What do you want to rank for?

Headline length is important too. It shouldn’t be too long, for a number of reasons.

             Google truncates long titles in search results. You want the full headline to be visible in the search results so people are more inclined to click on it.

             Social sharing. For example, if you want people to share your articles on Twitter, the headline should be short enough to allow people to retweet without having to edit it, or to add a comment if they want.

             Emails. If it’s going in a newsletter, especially as the headline, the title should be visible in the subject line

Importance of Video In Digital Marketing

Video marketing techniques are flooding today's social media outlets and websites. These days almost any type of business would benefit from the production of a short video to introduce their products and services. Studies have shown that consumers are at least 64% more likely to purchase a product or service that has video representation. This makes establishing a personal connection with buyers through the means of video marketing a key element in the future of online marketing.

Impressions

There was once a time that attaching a picture of one's products or services was enough to entice buyers. While images can most certainly enhance your business and communicate with a consumer, videos have a much further reaching effect on today's media driven culture. People are presented with so much information that they have to make a decision about what they take the time to read and view. Video promotions will bring a clearer understanding of the benefits of a product or service. Consumers also find it more convenient to watch a video while trying to accomplish other tasks. Providing this convenience to the consumer has proven to be a highly effective marketing technique.

It has been estimated that somewhere close to 75% of business professionals watch promotional videos at least once a week for relevant products and services. At least half of the content is watched straight from YouTube.com. Of those that watch these online ads, half of them will end up visiting the promoted company's website.

Live action ads are also more likely to be shared through social media outlets versus text based information. It's been recently rumoured that Facebook has updated its algorithm to favour video posts above all other types of content. A business now has the ability to reach a larger viewing audience by creating or sharing memorable or funny videos. Video ads and promotions will entice a person to an emotional response. Most often, a person will share information they identify with the most, allowing your business free exposure to a potential clients friends, family, and followers.

Confidence

The rapid growth of e-commerce has resulted in more consumers becoming comfortable with the idea of making their purchases online. This makes it increasingly important for companies to establish an engaging and personal connection. Videos that welcome a consumer to the website (such as this one) gives an immediate association to the product or services. Naturally, movement catches a person's eye and compels the viewer to pay closer attention. Websites that utilise videos to draw the attention of the viewer have an immense advantage over those that rely on simple text and images.

While techniques used for promotions are constantly evolving, consumer behavior still suggests that purchases are made when personal connection has been established. It is normal for a person to feel a greater connection to another person when they have the ability to read body language. Videos bring that association to a consumers mind and allows for greater trust and confidence in a business.

Not only is personal connection established through the use of this form of media, but seeing a product in action will produce a greater faith in its capabilities. The use of eye catching visual media will help a buyer feel more confident in their purchase. This brings trust and credibility to a company's website and products

Online Reputation Management Part - 1

“Online reputation management.” Even if you’ve never heard this phrase before, you probably have a good sense of what it means. The first part (“online reputation”) is easier than ever for you or anyone else to find — just search for your camp’s name in Google.

Finding your online reputation is easy due to two main factors:

1.            Google is smarter than ever before. It features search results based on local factors, can autocomplete user’s searches while they type (called “Google Instant”), and tirelessly crawls the massive number of social networking sites now available.

2.            Local review pages and social networking sites have made it easier than ever for customers and staff (current or former) to rant or rave about your camp online.

The first step in managing your reputation is to be proactive and put your name out there first: “If you don’t have a Web presence, it’s much more likely that if someone posts something negative about their experience with your business, that review is actually going outrank you for your business name. And everybody loves to click on something that’s negative, so it’s much more likely that your customers will see that. Through repeat clicks and searches, it will actually cause that negative review to rank even higher.”

Claim your business on sites like Google Places. That way, your camp’s name appears in the results if someone searches for camps in your area.

he next step is to register the domain name of your Web site. “Even if you don’t have a big site with a whole lot of moving parts and lots of pages or any other flashy features, as long as you have one page with accurate contact information, as well as accurate hours, and an accurate description of your [camp], that’s going to help,”

After claiming your username, fill out your profile on each network. And just like your Web site, make sure you’ve included accurate contact information. “A lot of problems online are caused when someone doesn’t have the means to contact you — the phone number is out of date on your Web site, or the Web site is broken, or something else. And that’s when they turn to other sites to make a complaint, because they weren’t able to get ahold of you,”

Consider linking your social network accounts to your Web site, and vice versa. This practice is called cross-linking. Linking to your Web site in your Twitter bio, for example, allows a follower to seamlessly find more in-depth information about you; and linking to your Twitter account from your Web site allows customers to easily find and follow your witty tweets.

Another way to be proactive about your online reputation is to create positive content. For example, press releases are a great way to get your name out there. Just keep in mind that, lately, Google has been favoring fresh results. That means something that has a date attached to it — a press release or a news result —will typically show up in the search results when it is new. As the news dies down, however, it will actually fall out of the search results. So also try to create long-term, static content that does not have a date associated with it.