An Introduction to Google Search Console

A Service offered by Google that monitors your site’s performance in Google search results. Once it is created it quickly tracks the performance of your site and gets valuable insights. It shows that which part of your website needs more focus. Google search console gives you access to detailed reports and ensures whether Google can find your website. Through Google search console you can see errors on your site and other sites that link to your site. It was formerly known as Google Webmaster Central and then Google Webmaster Tools until taking the current name in 2015.

Google search console helps website owners, webmasters, web marketers, and SEO professionals to monitor their website performance in the Google search index. Its features include information about search appearance, search traffic, technical status updates, crawl data, and additional educational resources. It helps you to determine whether people are visiting your site on a mobile device or desktop computer. It helps you to find and fix website errors, submit a sitemap, and create and check a robots.txt file. It’s a must tool for all site owners as it gives you an incredible amount of information about how your site is doing in search.

An Overview of Google Analytics

What is Google Analytics?

A Free web analytics service offered by Google which is a basic analytical tool that tracks and reports website traffic. Anyone having a Google account can access this service. It’s applicable for small and medium-sized retail websites. This Service was launched in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin. It is the most widely used web analytics service on the web. Users can collect information about people through Google analytics dashboard if their websites are linked to social networking sites such as Facebook and twitter. In case you don’t have a Google analytics account you can always sign up freely by typing the url https://www.google.com/analytics/. It’s a free tool that can help you track your digital marketing effectiveness.

Features of Google Analytics

• Adds latest version of Google Analytics JavaScript to every page
• The account can be linked by just log in with Google and selecting the required website.It will automatically include the appropriate code. There is no need to copy and paste any code or know your GA ID.
• Shows a summary dashboard with page views, users, and pages per session and bounce rate for the past 7 days as compared to the previous 7 days.
• You know where your visitors are coming from as it shows the top 5 traffic sources.
• Sign up for alerts via email or Slack when your content is taking off
• Allows you to disable tracking for any role like Admins, or Editors so your analytics represent real visitors
• You can view your dashboards on any device as it is fully optimized and mobile friendly.
• Integration with other Google products, such as Ad Words, Public Data Explorer and Website Optimizer.

How does Google Analytics Work?

Google Analytics puts several lines of tracking code into the code of your website. It records various activities of your users when they visit your website, along with the attributes (such as age, gender, interests) of these users. It sends all that information to the Google Analytics server once the user exits your website. It aggregates the data collected from your website in multiple ways, primarily by four levels such as User level, Session level, Page view level and Event level.

Ria Santhosh

An Introduction to On Page optimization in SEO

 What is On-Page Optimization?

On Page, Optimization is a method of optimizing each and every web page in order to rank higher and increase the relevant traffic in search engines. It also refers to the factors that will have an impact on your website and web page listing in natural search results. It has to do with both technical SEO and the content of your web pages. It’s all about configuring the structural elements of your website in order to increase search engine visibility

On Page SEO Techniques

1. SEO Title

       

SEO Title is the title displayed on the search engine result pages. Each of your pages and posts should have a unique title and it should be impressive. It should not be written in full capital letters as the pixel width will exceed. It should not have any grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. It should be written in 55-60 characters and should contain the focusing keyword of that page.

      

2. Meta Description

A Meta description is an attribute within the Meta tag that summarizes a web page's content. The description and content should always be given in double quotes.

   ie, 

<meta name="description"  "content" . 

  

It should be written in 155-160 characters and must not be given in full capital letters. The description should be unique and should contain the focused keyword. It should limit to 155 characters for blog posts and article posts since it has date shown in the search result listing. 

  

         

3. Body Tags 

The content should be divided into smaller sections and paragraphs while writing articles. A heading can be given for these sections where H1, H2, H3, H4 etc tags are used. Generally, H1 tags are given for the main page title and it should be given if the title is not relevant. The subheadings are being given H2, H3 etc. Only one H1 tag should be there for your web page as more than one is restricted. It should be catching and should guide the people properly. H1 Tag should contain a minimum of three words and if more than one is used the page can be stored in the sandbox. In case of H2 only one is good and advisable but in some cases, 2 are given. H2 tags should not exceed 10 words and if irrelevant H2 is given it will not match. Secondary keywords can be given in H2 but the content should be matching. In case of H3, 2 or 3 H3 tags are given.   
                   

4. Content

The content of the page is the most important factor for search result position. It's what the user sees and important to the search engines. The sentences of the content should be simple and should not be lengthy. While writing the content always use the focused keyword in the first sentence in the pages which are to be published. It’s always good to arrange the keywords before a comma or full stop.  

                                              

          

5. Image optimization

Adding images and optimizing it improves the quality of your content. It's always good to use free images in your content. Optimization begins with choosing the right file name. Never save it in the default file name like .jpg, .png etc. It’s always good to use hyphens as word separators while saving images. While inserting an image into tour content always add ALT Tags to provide more detail about your images. The Alt tag should describe the image and should include the targeted keyword. The ALT Tag can be given as rel

    <img src="image.jpg” alt=”alternative text” title =”image title”/>

6. Authorship Optimization

Authorship optimization provides a way to achieve editorial power while publishing articles. rel="author" attribute is used by the web authors to identify themselves. It is established when you link your Google plus profile with your content. 

     

           

              

Ria Santhosh

History and Evolution of SEO

An Introduction to SEO

SEO, popularly known as search engine optimization is widely used in Google today. It is the world’s most popular search engine which is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It began when the first web search engine was launched in 1991. In 1996 the co-founders of Google began building a search engine which was called as backrub initially. Google.com was registered as a domain name in September 1997.

Microsoft released Bing in June 2009. The previous editions of bing were known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search. As search engines began more widely used the site owners started to get wise. When more and more people began connected to the internet to find information easily and quickly the main problem was the quality of that information. While search engine results matched words from user queries the site owners began to use keywords widely over and over again in order to improve the rankings and drive traffic to their pages.

Beginning of SEO 

Google began to provide guidelines for white hat SEO during the process of making search engine technology. Google was a search engine in 2001 which set the tone for some of the initial major algorithm updates. When online marketers began to stuff their web pages with full of relevant keywords to rank well in Google the first major Google algorithm was launched in 2003. In 2005 the search engines launched “ rel = no follow”attribute in order to stop the page rank and authority from being passed on and thereby helping the webmasters to eliminate the poor quality links that have put to manipulate search engine rankings.

In 2008 Google released the suggestion box that gave SEOs the power to gain further insights into how users surf the web and interact with certain pages. Google algorithm panda 1.0 was released in 2011 against content spamming and also to eliminate the sites which are weak and are of poor quality. In 2012 Google Penguin update was released in order to protect the websites against link spamming like buying links and obtaining them through link networks which are designed to boost up Google rankings. Google began to reward websites that placed their efforts into engaging users in 2013 by answering their questions with rich, information and original content. The focus was more on blog posts and social media marketing, among other disciplines.

In 2015 a machine learning technology called rank brain was introduced against artificial intelligence in order to deliver smarter and targeting search results. The head of the search of Google Andrey Lipattsev confirmed that the most vital factors are links, content and rank brain in 2016.

Ria Santhosh