SEO Notes » search engine optimization

Using Advanced Segmentation tools in Google Analytics

Bhagwad — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:32:46 +0000

Google Analytics can be overwhelming at times. Once your traffic begins to cross a certain limit – say a 100 unique visitors a day after removing PPC visits, you need to fine tune that data and figure out the broad classes of visitors that are coming to your site. For example, say you have a particular category X with several products in it. You want to analyze data for only that category. You want to see whether search visits are increasing or decreasing and which keywords are being used to reach it.

With Google Advanced segmentation tools, this is now possible. The best part is, the segmentation parameters need not be restricted to certain pages. You can segment your visitors based on say the time they spend on your site, or only new visitors – or even certain search phrases that contain certain keywords. For example, you can see the trend of visits to your site from all phrases that contain a certain phrase.

The tool is a bit advanced, but even for non professional users, it allows you to play around with the data and take a look at it in many different ways. This is the essence of understanding your customers and gaining insights that can help you serve them better. Try it and see. You’ll be amazed!

Noindex vs Nofollow

Bhagwad — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:48:22 +0000

There’s quite a bit of confusion prevailing in the web community between the meta tags noindex and nofollow. People have been wondering what the implications are for the various combinations. So this post aims to clear this up.

To start off with “index, follow” is the default behavior. The “index” meta tag on a page means that the search engine will include the page in the SERPs. “noindex” means that the page will be dropped from the results only! However, the search engines will crawl it and follow links out of it. It also means that a “noindex” page will accumulate PageRank.

“nofollow” on the other hand means that a search engine will not follow the links on that particular page and will also not allow PR to flow out of it. The page can still be included in the SERPs though. So if you have a blog which say has a lot of archive pages, you might consider using “noindex” on those pages, but not “nofollow” because you want the Search Engines to follow links to to other pages from the archives for easy indexing.

You can also use “nofollow” on individual links to pages like the “Contact us” page where you don’t want the search engines to go and waste link juice. This is a perfectly acceptable practice and Google has publicly stated that “PR sculpting” as it is called is quite ok.

All Links are not created Equal

Bhagwad — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:29:45 +0000

The original patent for Google’s PageRank algorithm focused solely on a mathematical calculation based on the number of links to a website. A simple normalization and voila! – we had the PageRank. Humans however, are very clever at manipulating systems to their advantage, and soon it was necessary to introduce other elements into the calculation. Two of the most important variables are Trust and Relevance.

Basically it means that a link to your site from another site whose subject matter is similar to yours carries more weight than a link that comes from elsewhere. The “Trust” quotient is a measure of a page’s authority and how qualified it is to make a good “vote” (link) to a page. Certain sites like government websites from example, have a high level of trust. But this is due to the nature of their content and the links that point to them – not because they have .org or .edu as their suffix as many people tend to think.

Therefore, it’s worthwhile expending a lot of effort to get links from authority websites instead of trading links with unrelated blogs. Of course, this is easier said than done as a lot of people would give a lot to be linked to from these sites. But then that’s why they’re worth it! If everyone would be doing it, then it wouldn’t be valuable.