Web Analytics

What is Web Analytics?
Web Analytics is the methodological study of online/offline patterns and trends. It is a technique that is used to collect, measure, report, and analyze your website data. It is normally carried out to analyze the performance of a website. We use web analytics to track key metrics and analyze visitors’ activity and traffic flow.

Importance of Web Analytics
We need Web Analytics to assess the success rate of a website and its associated business. Using Web Analytics, we can: 
1. Assess web content problems so that they can be rectified 
2. Have a clear perspective of website trends 
3. Monitor web traffic and user flow 
4. Demonstrate goals acquisition 
5. Figure out potential keywords 
6. Identify segments for improvement 
7. Find out referring sources 
The primary objective of carrying out Web Analytics is to optimize the website in order to provide better user experience. Take a look at the following illustration. It depicts the process of web analytics. 
 1. Set the business goals.
2. To track the goal achievement, set the Key Performance Indicators (KPI). 
3. Collect correct and suitable data. 
4. To extract insights, Analyze data. 
5. Based on assumptions learned from the data analysis, Test alternatives. 
6. Based on either data analysis or website testing, Implement insights.

Pre-analysis Report
Pre-analysis refers to the process of analyzing the website/project before working on it in depth. In this report, we provide 
1. A list of keywords related to the business – these keywords may be presented in excel sheet with their traffic and competition mentioned.
2. The current status of the website – The traffic coming to the website through Google Analytics and the ranking of the website on keywords through Google Webmaster. If they are not submitted to either of the tools, there are other tools available on the internet to check their status- ahrefs, seomoz, etc.
3. The errors/scope of improvement in the site related to SEO – The errors on the website with respect to the seo. These errors can be analyzed through the site audit tools available online- seositecheckup, seoptimer, raven tools, etc.

What is Content Analysis?

Content marketing is known by many names such as inbound marketing, corporate journalism, branded media, native advertising, and customer publishing to name a few. However, the basic idea behind the strategy remains the same, i.e., to create and distribute content that engages and attracts a targeted audience, while encouraging them to take action which is profitable to a business. And this marketing can be done through a number of ways- from the website to the social media platforms, YouTube videos, blogs, articles, emails, e-newsletter, research papers, case studies, eBooks, mobile apps, podcasts, webinars, infographics, etc. 
1. Pages and Landing Pages- the landing pages are the best kind to promote the content. These pages must be designed in such a way that not only they tempt the user to click on a link in the site but also to share the content. Keep in mind not to overdo the pages, just keep in simple but keep it related to what the user has been looking for. And the page must be seo-friendly.
2. Site search- If your site does not include a search box, you’re missing out on an excellent avenue for insight into your visitors. These sitemap not only help the user to find what they what but also gives us an idea what the user has been for at the first place.

Finding Love with your work

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” –Steve Jobs

We all get caught up in the widespread misconception that the only way to start loving your work life, is to quit your day job, move to an Island resort and start your own business from a beachside villa sipping exotic cocktails. This surely makes for sweet post for social media followers, the truth is that finding fulfilling work may involve starting your own venture, but it can also mean learning and sharing your gifts by working in a company, whether it’s a large, medium or a tiny start-up. Stop being a victim. People often think the grass is always greener on the other side yet when they jump over the fence they realise it’s the same stuff. If you can make it work where you are right now, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble. Im going to outline a few proven points that helps you develop some fondness for you job.

Get up to speed on your field.

If you become complacent about trends, you’ll get left behind. Then, when new and interesting opportunities do arise at work, you might not be nimble enough to grab them. Instead of whining about how you hate your job or boss invest that effort in upgrading yourself and/or keeping up with trend changes in your related field. Being in the know can inspire you to think of projects you might be able to nominate yourself for at work or start on your own.

Make a change, even a small one. 

Boredom is often at the root of unhappiness at work. So take a single step toward modifying what’s getting you down. Challenge yourself to look for one area that would give you more joy at work and then make it happen. If you persistently add worth to what you bring to the job, chances are your boss will notice and reward you for it. –Kerry Hannon 

Find out how the work or company you’re working for, aligns with who you are.   

Explore what attracted you to take the job in the first place. Really make sure you come up with some concrete answers on this one as this is the critical foundation for you learning to love your work. Think about how your values and beliefs are aligned with the work you’re doing or the company you’re working for. List at least 5 things that made you take the job.

Identify people in your Office or Nearby you connect with.

Having people with shared interests at work is one of the key drivers of engagement in the workplace so make sure you make some friends if you haven’t got any. This doesn’t mean you have to force it. This is about getting to know your colleagues on a personal level. Who and how they are outside work? Things they like to do? Places they frequent? You might find similarities that you didn’t even know existed and these similarities will help you create connections with your coworkers. Create a pleasant atmosphere. Contribute towards creating a pleasant work environment. Do not gossip in the office as it just creates negativity all around. Do not listen to any gossip either. Minimise your time with people that you do not resonate with or like. Learn to have more fun at work. Laugh more and chill out. Perform with a more fun orientated approach. Do not have your identity too strongly tied to the job you do. Give up thinking that your work life “should” be a certain way.

“The people who make it to the top – whether they’re musicians, or great chefs, or corporate honchos – are addicted to their calling … [they] are the ones who’d be doing whatever it is they love, even if they weren’t being paid.”-Quincy Jones

Creativity and Marketing

​“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”  – Mary Lou Cook

In recent times Marketing goes beyond words and pictures that go into ad campaigns but the need to master data analytics, customer experience, and product design. Question is does this additions in anyway affect the creativity of the profession?

The answer is No! In the past, marketing measured success by sticking to budgets and winning creative awards. Today, the ability to measure data and adjust strategies in real-time enables marketing to prove its value to the business in entirely new ways.

Today, creative marketers need to operate more like entrepreneurs, continuously adjusting to sustain the product/market fit (i.e the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand).

Marketing is no longer about mastering the use of traditional channels, but more of constantly innovating and utilizing creative solutions that will maximize returns. 

The way people communicate, assess and analyse information has drastically changed and given that mobile phones are now a part of our DNA, communication marketers must reach people through this channel in more creative and aesthetic ways. 

To grab peoples attention or differentiate your message demands creativity.

According to a study by Werner Reinartz and Peter Saffert, the relative effectiveness of adding creativity to a campaign can vary significantly. They found the most effective combination of creative tactics to drive purchases was originality (elements that move away from the obvious and commonplace) plus elaboration (extend simple ideas so they become more intricate). Originality and elaboration had almost double the impact of flexibility (links the product to a range of different uses or ideas) and artistic value (often viewed as a piece of art rather than a sales pitch).

The same way having a great conversation makes you reflect on it later, so should your ad. It’s not always about what is said on the surface, but the subtext behind the text — the gray area where you find the complexity and influence. The impact of your marketing rests solely on your ability to resonate with an audience that may not have the creative mindset. 

“We all have different paths to the same destination.”

Marketers now have to become more creative in selecting their promotional mix elements to ensure that they effectively reach their audience via the channels they use. ​

A marketers goal is not to make art, but to make an impact on results.

 

More on Search Engine Algorithm

How to recover from an SEO penalty

Now that you have figured out the cause of the penalty, now is the time for recovery. And here are a few things you can try- 

• Don’t panic. Even massive websites suffer from penalties.

• Disavow troublesome links. Ask Google not to count troublesome links that are harming your website

• Get some links removed. While disavow is good, it’s not perfect. Try to manually remove the links. 

• Request reconsideration if your penalty was manual. 

• Wait it out. Sometimes it takes Google a while to act on your changes and disavow requests, and then it could take a while for it to re-crawl your site. 

In a few cases, it’s better to abandon a site rather than fight a Google penalty: if your domain has been tarnished, there’s little you can do. But most penalties can be fixed with a little effort, some hard work and an ethical approach to rebuilding your site.

Google Search Algorithms

Google Panda

Google Panda is a change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The name “Panda” comes from Google engineer Navneet Panda, who developed the technology that made it possible for Google to create and implement the algorithm. The change aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” or “thin sites”, in particular “content farms”, and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.

Google Penguin

Google Penguin is a codename for a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. The update is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared black-hat SEO techniques involved in increasing artificially the ranking of a webpage by manipulating the number of links pointing to the page. Such tactics are commonly described as link schemes.

Google Hummingbird

The Hummingbird update was the first major update to Google’s search algorithm since the 2010 “Caffeine Update”, but even that was limited primarily to improving the indexing of information rather than sorting of information. Google started using Hummingbird about August 30, 2013, and announced the change on September 26 on the eve of the company’s 15th anniversary. Hummingbird is about synonyms but also about context. Google always had synonyms, but with Hummingbird it is also able to judge context—thereby judging the intent of a person carrying out a search, to determine what they are trying to find out. This concept is called semantic search. Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query—the whole sentence or conversation or meaning—is taken into account. Michelle Hill said Hummingbird is about “understanding intent”.

Steve Masters wrote, “The Hummingbird approach should be inspirational to anyone managing and planning content—if you aren’t already thinking like Hummingbird, you should be. In a nutshell, think about why people are looking for something rather than what they are looking for.

Google EMD

The EMD Update — for “Exact Match Domain” — is a filter Google launched in September 2012 to prevent poor quality sites from ranking well simply because they had words that match search terms in their domain names. 

EMD gets its name because it targets “exact match domains,” which are domains that exactly match the search terms that they hope to be found for. Google specifically said EMD was designed to go after poor quality sites that also have exact match domain names. If you do a search for “Google,” you still find plenty of Google web sites that all have “Google” in the domain name. EMD didn’t wipe them out because those sites are deemed to have quality content. EMD is more likely hitting domains like online-computer-training-schools.com; it’s a fairly generic name with lots of keywords in it but no real brand recognition. Domains like this are often purchased by someone hoping that just having all the words they want to be found for (“online computer training schools”) will help them rank well. But such sites also often lacked any really quality content.

   

Introduction to Search Engine Algorithm (SEA)

What is Search engine algorithm?
Before learning about Google algorithm, let us first know what exactly an algorithm is. An algorithm is a set of instructions to solve a problem in finite number of steps. And Google Algorithm follows the same definition and rule of algorithm. It is a very complex algorithm that serves the result and it changes relatively frequently.

Why Search engines update algorithm?

The digital world is now more hyped-up, dynamic and influential than ever before. The constant need to deliver the best result to the users has always been the priority of the search engines. The same has been for Google. And hence to keep up the changing requirement of the user and the need to deliver the most relevant result, Google updates its algorithm. Google also changes its algorithm to eliminate the sites and content they may harm the users.

Why Search engines penalize websites?

A Google penalty is the negative impact of the search engine on the website ranking. It may be a by-product of the algorithm update or if the website has intentionally used black-hat techniques.

The reasons why your website may be penalized-

1. Buying links to increase the number of backlinks coming to your site.

2. Excessive number of reciprocal links.

3. High quantity of duplicate linksInternal 404 error.

4. Black hat techniques like- keyword stuffing, hidden links, hidden content.

5. Using the links in the footer section to pass excessive link juice.

6. Missing the sitemap data.

7. Broken external links.

8. Neglecting Hreflang- ‘Hreflang’ is designed to notify Google that you have intentionally published duplicate content for different languages or localities.

9. Website Timing out again and again.

10. Affiliate links all over the website.

11. Overusing the Meta tags in the website.

12. The slow loading speed of the website.

13. Hacked content.

14. Link to suspicious sites.

15. Excessive blocking of the site using the robots.txt file.

16. Over optimizing of the website.

17. Too many outbound links.

18. Error codes in website- apart from 404 error , there are other errors in the like 302(temporary redirection), 500 errors, etc can also lead to penalty.

19. Poor mobile websites.

20. Domain has a bad reputation.

21. Using link farm i.e. multiple links at one place or link spamming.

All these error may not be the direct reason to penalize the website but play a part in the process.

How to determine if your website is penalized

If the website has been penalized then, it is not the end of the world. You can recover from a penalty by following some steps. But, first how to know whether your website has been penalized or not? Penalties can be automatic or manual. With manual penalties, you’ll probably be told, but you may not always know you’ve been targeted if the cause is algorithmic. For algorithmic penalties, here are some clues to know-

1. Your website is not ranking well for your brand name any more. That’s a dead giveaway. Even if your site doesn’t rank for much else, it should at least do well on that one keyword.

2. Any page one positions you had are slipping back to page two or three without any action on your part.

3. PageRank for your site has inexplicably dropped from a respectable two or three to a big fat zero (or a measly PR of one).

4. The entire website has been removed from Google’s cached search results overnight.

5. Running a site search – site:yourdomain.com keyword – yields no results.

6. Your listing – when you eventually find it in Google – is for a page on your site other than the home page.