Turn Your Competitor’s SEO Win into Your Gain

Are you competitors ranking higher than you in SERP? This can be frustrating for you at first sight if you have already invested a lot of time and money in marketing your business online. But, another aspect is insightful. You can convert it into gaining some authority backlinks by deeply analyzing your competitors from where they have gained the authority.

SEO is like an Open Source which is same for others as much as for you. Procedures are same but what differs is how creatively you achieve backlinks from high quality authority sites. Rankings will depend on how regularly you analyze your competitors and find opportunities of building authority backlinks. SEO is not the one night show, so your aim should be getting higher rankings of your targeted keywords on top page of SERP because if you will not rank high, you will be losing potential traffic even if you the best in what you do.

If your competitors are ranking higher and getting targeted traffic for the search terms similar to you, analyzing their backlink profile upto deeper level can maximize the opportunity of getting the traffic for you as well. Regular competitor analysis is a great way to understand how to improve your SEO efforts. There are plenty of useful tools available, but without knowing what to look for you won’t get far. Here are some best competitor analysis tools available:

• Cognitive SEO
• Raven Tool
• Open Site Explorer
• Back Link Watch
• Scrapebox

To maximize your efforts of getting authority backlinks from competitors, here are some steps that build the course simple for you:

1. Find the keyword you want to rank higher in SERP and put in Google search.
2. The first 10 results appeared on the page are you main competitors.
3. List all the competitors in your competitor analysis sheet.
4. Find some other related keywords and search in the same way and keep the common competitors aside.
5. Choose any top 5 competitors and check their domain authority, page authority, total no of backlinks etc from Open Site Explorer.
6. Now, export the link profiles of each competitor in a separate sheet.
7.  Once all the links are exported, sort them in ascending order to know the no of links from a single domain.
8. In the next step, filter the links which have low page authority and are no follow.
9. Once the filtration is done, these are the final number of links you need to work on.
10. Choose one link per domain and deeply analyze to get an opportunity for link placement.
11. Keep analyzing other competitors in the same way and run the cycle of it in regular intervals to check for some new links build by your competitors.

      You know that your competitor in winning, but probably they don’t know that you are gaining because of them. So, gain some meaningful backlinks to your business by following above steps and be ready to chase your competitors in the marketing race.

SEO 8/11/2014 No comments

SEO is not a luxury but a necessity

With the thousands of web pages uploading on the server each day, World Wide Web has become overcrowded with the trillions of web pages stored on the web server. The traditional business marketing is slightly moving to online and thus small business owners rushing towards promoting their businesses online with the help of a website and effective online marketing strategy to increase their business reach to people in their target area.

SEO, so called Search Engine Optimization is one of the efficient online marketing tactics that help people to find their targeted customers or customers to find the information they are looking for. But, still more than 50% of webmasters are unaware of the vibrant features and effects of SEO on marketing businesses.

Does a Brand require SEO?

People have been running behind promoting their businesses through SEO and still using the traditional methodologies to attract more customers without knowing that the SEO is completely altered now. Does it make sense if a brand like Adidas, Reebok etc who already have trusted image among their customers need SEO? But yes, they can use other digital marketing methods to market their products via advertisements, posters etc.

SEO is the need of small businesses or startups along with businesses that are in need of promoting their brand image in front of People and help them in getting more targeted customers. SEO aims to motivate the people and drive them towards the businesses and help them in the improving the sales of the products and the services they are involved in. So, my point here is that the webmasters should understand the necessity of SEO rather than making it luxury of no use.

SEO alone is not effective but still necessary

I have been listening since last few years that SEO is dead. But No, it’s not. It is altered to the level of death but still effective if done genuinely. There are other online marketing methods such as social media, pay per client and content marketing that help businesses getting more precise targeted customers and together with SEO they are helpful in exploring the business reach and making a strong brand value among your customers.

Benefits of SEO:

Starting the SEO marketing for a small scale business nurtures countless benefits to it. Here are some unique benefits of SEO that can be helpful for a business to find their targeted users

1. Build brand awareness through higher rankings

2. Find new customers which assures the growth

3. Expand the market reach

4. Build a base of trusted potential customers

5. Higher conversion rates are assured

6. Makes you stand out among your competitors

7. Take your business to the next level

Thus, my motive is to explain the users that the adoption of SEO should not be considered as luxury of your business but should be adopted with the positive mind and should be regarded as the necessary part of the business. SEO should be considered as the integral part of the business process which can generate huge ROI. The SEO is never a luxury for a business which is in the hope to establish a new dimension in the market. SEO only plays a role as luxury when the business has achieved the maximum heights and is famous worldwide. Otherwise, staying in the competitive market is the need of the businesses which are yet to hold a strong foot in the market.

Read more SEO related blogs here.

SEO 8/08/2014 No comments

Awesome Screenshot: A Handy Tool For Capturing Web Pages

Awesome Screenshot!! We call it when we see an amazingly captured web page with well defined texts, notifications and markers to explain the things more specifically. Awesome Screenshot is one of those tools that provide us number of ways to capture a web page with the option to add text, markers and allows us to crop the image as per need. This add on is available for both Mozilla and Chore browsers and have various advantages over keyboard’s print screen command.

How to download “Awesome Screenshot” for Mozilla?

Step 1: Open Mozilla and search for “awesome screenshot plus for mozilla”

Step 2: Add it to Mozilla as shown below

Step 3: Install the plugin from pop up window.

Step 4: Restart Mozilla and you are done.

How to download “Awesome screenshot” for Chrome?

Step 1: Open Chrome and search for “awesome screenshot plus for Chrome”

Step 2: Add it to chrome and you are done.

Once the tool is added to respected browsers, it’s not difficult to use but let’s see how you can get maximum advantage of the tools for different purposes.

Step 1: Once you added the tool on respected browsers, you can see the lens eye installed on the toolbar in top right of your screen.

Step 2: You can select the option of capturing visible part of the page as follows:

Step 3: You can select the option of capturing selected area:

Step 4: You can select the option of capturing the full page.

Step 5: You can select various functions from the awesome screenshot toolbar to enhance the screenshot.

Above the fold, awesome screenshot is a great tool that is quite helpful specially in reporting when you need to indicate or explain with the annotations. Though, it is a well known tool and have been in use at many places but most of the people are still unaware of the usefulness of this small tool. So, for the people who were unaware of this tool, its time to forget "print screen" and replace it with the more powerful tool "Awesome Screenshot" to capture the web pages.

Tools 3/15/2014 No comments

Test your Analytics Skills with Search Giant Google

Google launched Analytics Academy in October 2013 last year to help all digital marketers to test their skills of Google Analytics and get free certification if they successfully qualify the tests. The sole aim of Analytics Academy is to provide tutorials that share vast knowledge of the tactics of managing the Google Analytics Tool and how digital marketers can have the maximum benefit of tool to track the performance of their online business.

                              

Google posted the very first test “Digital Analytics Fundamentals” just after the launching of Analytics academy in October last year which attracted more than 100K digital marketers out of which approximately 30,000 digital marketers were certified by Google for its opening test. Below are the highlights of the topics Google covered in its primary tutorial:

• Understanding and using Google Analytics data
• Collecting actionable data with Google Analytics
• Navigating Google Analytics reports
• Navigating Conversions reports

It was really a miserable moment for all those digital marketers who were unaware of this tutorial and free certification from Google (I was one of them) and another who could not qualify the assessment. Those who missed evaluating their skills for “Digital Analytics Fundamentals” can now read the tutorials on the topics covered in video or text format here to gain some knowledge that will be an added advantage to face the assessments in future.

If you have read the tutorials and gained extensive knowledge about the basics of how Google Analytics Tool works and how one can get benefited from it, tighten up your belts and get ready to give your 100% in the next tutorial from Google. Yes, Google has announced the dates of its next tutorial “Google Analytics Platform Principles”. The course will be active from 11-27 March, 2014 during which you can attend online tutorials, take a test and get certified. The upcoming tutorial will cover the following topics:

• Platform Fundamentals
• Collection
• Processing & Configuration
• Reporting

After reading this news, most of the digital marketers would be excited to register for this tutorial. The registrations are open and you can register before the tutorial starts. You will get  the notification for tutorials on your registered email.

Definitely, the tutorial based on “Google Analytics Platform Principles” will help us to advance our digital marketing skills and I am all set to become skilled at digital analytics tactics. Are you?

Keep yourself updated by browsing the latest search engine news here at my blog.

Search Engines 3/07/2014 No comments

NFC: A new generation technology at your door

How would you feel when you wake up one fine morning and find all the credit, debit cards, your loyalty cards or bills of purchased goods lost from your wallet? Surely you would think of being theft. Come out of this dream as you have been the victim of not theft but of the future. A future where the wallet, purse, paper ticket and pocket have all gone digital and live solely on your smartphone.

Here is the new technology NFC called Near Future Communication that can be in your smartphones already or may be available in every smartphone very soon. NFC is a contact less, wi-fi lite technology standards for smartphones, portable devices  to establish radio communication by bringing them into proximity and soon it could be a regular feature of you commute. Once this technology is in regular practices, I would say keeping your smartphone in  wallet instead of credit cards and coffee shop bills would be a better idea.

How NFC works?

NFC is based on the RFID known as radio frequency identification technology that can transfer small amount of data between two devices keeping at a certain distance. NFC is almost similar to Blue-tooth but have a faster speed in comparison and requires no pairing codes. With the consumption of very low battery, NFC connects you to your bank accounts while you tap your phone on a contact less payment terminal in a shop, railway stations or in coffee shop. In this way your NFC enabled smartphones works similar to your credit cards which you use at payment kiosks. 

What is the future of NFC?

As NFC is termed as the technology of 4th generation and popular with the tag name “mobile wallet”, the future of this technology is very much clear and it can be said that this can be a proven time savy for millions of people. The idea behind calling it mobile wallet is that your smartphones will replace your cash and credit cards. In a single click of your NFC enabled smartphone, you can pay bills and can redeem offers and coupons. NFC works similar to  Google Wallet where you can store all your bank account, credit and debit card information and get a virtual master card to pay for all your purchases.

Asus launched M70 AD NFC enabled desktop computer in India

While most of the people were unaware about the mesmerizing technology in their smartphones, Asus, an electronics company has launched NFC enabled desktop PC in India. The technology allows this desktop to connect with the NFC enabled smartphones, laptops and other wireless machines. Now users can transfer data, music, video files to their smartphones from the desktop and vice a versa. 

The uses of NFC are not limited to data transfers and bill payments but they are beyond what you can presume. One can pay for tickets and boarding passes, pay for car parking meter, opening the doors of BMW car, downloading information, apps, controlling the NFC enabled devices at your home etc. 

Right now, NFC hasn't hit the mainstream yet in terms of usage, but it has the potential that made it so popular and soon it will become the most usable technology around the world. If you have and NFC enabled device, start getting some NFC tags for it and you might be able to make your life easier.

Tech News 2/19/2014 No comments

8 SEO tips for online news websites

Search Engine Optimization is all about getting the traffic which means more visibility on search engines, more readers, and higher significance on your site that leads to indirect income to your business. SEO for news websites is not a new concept. Likewise other small business owners, news publishers also want more visibility, attractions and interests to their news website and that is why news publishers doing SEO to provide news updates to their readers in a very short span of time.

SEO for news websites follow the same strategies apart from submission in Google news, news sitemaps, internal linking and Google authorship. In this post I will share some techniques that can better help you to rank your news website in search engines:

“Write original text and push Google to look at it”

Search engine loves fresh and compelling content, if you write unique, keyword rich articles within a well optimized template, these articles will rank incredibly well than others.  Below I have covered few tips of content optimization that can help ranking the news articles.

• Make use of headings which best describe you web page content.
• Keep your content on single page rather than splitting it into multiple pages because single page are easier   to link than bunch of pages and they can be easily indexed by search engines.
• Maintain proper keyword density.

“Add meta tags and get more search probability”

Meta tags play a vital role in ranking Google news in SERP as it treats meta tags as special tags. Adding meta tags to the articles can help users to find the news they are looking for.

• Add Article heading as the title of the article page.
• Add relevant keywords in keyword meta tags. Up to 10 keywords can be inserted.
• Write a summary of the article as the description of the page.
• Add relevant tags and place the articles under relevant categories.

“Keep URLs short and get quick indexing”

Short URLs are easy to crawl. Google gives preference to shorten URLs while indexing rather than complicated long tail URLs.

• Keep your news article URL short as much as possible so that they are easily indexed by search engines.
• Make sure to place keywords in the URL which are most likely to be searched by the users.
• Optimizing URL makes it search friendly and indirectly it increases search engine traffic.
• The URL of every article must also include a unique number that it is at least 3 digits long.

“Add videos, images and get more user attractions”

Images and videos are more appealing than the bunch of text. Readers prefer watching related images and videos over reading the whole article. Adding the relevant images, videos  alog with the text can bring more user attraction on news articles.

• Insert images in your news website and also name them with the keyword.
• Optimize images by putting alt tag (<alt>) which makes your image read by search engine.
• Upload a video as a part of your news column; make your video understandable to search engines by including text with specific keywords.
• Keep a single story in a single video. Do not mingle multiple stories in one video.

“Add social media and get more social connectivity”

Social engagement is now a part of optimizing your website which brings the most of the traffic. Social media is now a part of SEO, Social sites help more in bringing traffic and is the best platform to increase you brand and is best for promoting news websites.

• Share the news posts on facebook, twitter, LinkedIn & images on Pinterest.
• Add relevant connections, groups and let people like, share the posts.
• Bookmark news articles on social bookmarking sites as soon as they are uploaded.

“Add Authorship and get reputation for news articles”

Google authorship is a useful markup that helps Google find relevant articles by asking publishers to insert links to author pages within the news articles. Author pages are located on the news site and help both readers and search engines to identify the author, providing a short bio, photo, links to his or her website, and other information.

• Be an author for news website and add site in contributor’s section of Google Plus profile.
• Add Google Plus profile URLs in the article source code with rel=”author” tag.

“Submit news sitemap and get more URLs indexed”

XML sitemaps are the best to tell search engine about any URL in your website. For news website there is separate specific NEWS Sitemaps through which we can pass related information to the Search Engine.  

• Submit the news sitemap in webmaster tool.
• Include only most recent added URLs in news sitemap.

“Submit the site in Google news and you are done”

Submitting the news website in Google news is a must to do for ranking the news articles in Google News as well. If the site is submitted in Google News and accepted, The news articles will rank in Google News and website can get more traffic from that source of point.

• Visit Google for guidelines to submit your site in Google News.
• Provide your site's information as requested by Google; such as your website address, the link that displays your contributor's biographies, the type of news you provide, and more.
• Send your site's information to Google news for review. You will be notified by Google if you site will be featured in Google news within seven days of your submission.

Involve the above tips in your news website SEO strategies to gain rankings in search engines. These tips will definitely help to bring more traffic to news website. Stay connected for more tips on news website SEO.

SEO 2/08/2014 No comments

Major search evaluations of Google in 2014

As we all know that the sole aim of Google, a search giant is to provide the finest and accurate results to people what they need and get the things faster so Google is always adding new features time to time. Here in this blog we will discuss some of the recent updates by Google you might have not evaluated:

• => Date selector while searching hotels.
• => Address cards for local business search.
• => Answers to complex questions.
• => Improved stock exchange results.
• => Distance results.

Let’s discuss all these major evaluations one by one:

Date selector while searching hotels: If you would search hotels in your area, Google will show comprehensive comparison results containing 5 best hotels of your area. You can compare the hotels based on their reviews, prices, and photos and grading.

Once user will click on these listings, it will be redirect to The page where planner calendar appears on the window from which you can select the date of trip and results would be refined according to the list of hotels providing availability on those dates.

So if you are planning for a trip with your family, you can now more easily research hotels filtered by user ratings, hotel class, prices and availability.

Address card for local business search: While searching a local place for your area, earlier Google used to show the search results in the seven packs. But, now Google shows the results as if it is fetching the address card of the place you are searching from the bunch of addresses. I simply fired a query in Google as “Cinepolis location in Jaipur” and found below address card from Google in response.

 Answer to complex questions: Google updated its knowledge graph algorithms come up with the more advance search system that is now able to answer even the complex questions. To test the result I searched for “why is the sky blue” and below was the result. That was really cool.

Improved stock exchange results: While searching for the businesses listing in the national stock exchange, Google now generates real time stock report cards. From the tabs present in the chart, you can get the stock price of any frame of time. I fired a query for “Apple Inc” and found the stock report card as follows:

Distance results: This update was for mobile users. Google announced that now mobile users can find the distance between any two locations. No matter how far they are from another location. I tested with my query “distance between jaipur to delhi” and Google generated the report based on my query which was containing the distance, path locator and the time to reach the location. See below:

These were some amazing features Google search has updated and they are really helpful for the people finding the answers to their queries in a better way.

Search Engines 2/02/2014 No comments

MXIT: Chat On With Only Internet In Phone

Hello Folks, are you away connecting to your friends just because you don’t have an android phone? Here is great news for you all and I am sure this will be exciting for you. Yes, now you can connect or chat with your friends and people around the world even if you don’t have an android phone. Now it’s not necessary that you have whatsapp, BBM, WeChat and other android chat applications for chatting. You can now chat with your friends on your ordinary phone but make sure your phone must have an internet connection at least.

MXIT, South Africa’s largest social network has launched MXIT instant mobile messenger in India last Tuesday with hindi support for its Indian users. The most important features of this app are that it can be used on any entry level featured phone and it works on more than 8000 types of phones, smart phones and tablets. Mxit not only provides one to one, one to many but also facilitates many to many chat options currently available in hindi or English. You can chat in more than 10 languages very soon by mid 2014.

It is a free chatting app that works on various platforms like: Java, Nokia, iOS, Android, Blackberry and Window phone operating systems. This app avails some special associated apps related to education in counseling. This app is not only best because it runs on a simple internet based phone but also 300 character message length compare to other android chat apps provide only 140 characters space makes it likely to be used.

Similar to other chat applications, you can create your personal address book in Mxit and soon it will be available with the voicemail facility.

After knowing these many features of Mxit app, you would be deliberately looking for the source to download this app in your ordinary phone. Go ahead and SMS ‘MXIT’ on 57333 to get installation details and procedure on your phone. 

This is a great move by a social network company in India. According to the data calculated, around 700 million Indian people have normal featured phone and this app would be a boon for those mobile users who are unable to purchase expensive smart phones to connect with their friends on chat apps.

Tech News 2/01/2014 No comments