Search Engine Optimization Tips, SEO for Blogs, Search Tips

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Google new Website Optimizer, is a great tool that helps in improving your conversion rates.

Work on your landing pages. Improve your headlines, make them attractive enough to click. Call to action on your page, click here, download etc.

Try different designs by moving your sections here and there. Run the test for two weeks. Find out which page is performing well. Take action by moving the page into the best performing design or layout.

Tips to Improve Reduce Bounce Rates
Most visitors land on your home page. Therefore the content for the “keywords” that drive maxim visitors must be shown right at the top. The reason being if visitors don’t see the content they searched for, they’ll quit the page.

Showcase Related Content
The next thing you must do is show highly related content very prominently on the page.
Example: If you have high bounce on a “how to improve trust in relationships”, then the related content like Communicating Openly, Art of Listening, 10 Ways to Connect to People you Love must be prominently showcased. Related videos, downloads, audio files, shopping items can also be shown at the end of article.

Where do your visitors come from
Find out from where these visitors are coming. That should give you a fair idea of bounce rates.
Good content means low bounce. Write good content. Give what users want. Give more of it and they’ll stick to site.

Build a sticky site
Use sticky elements like free giveaways, feeds, free newsletters, features like polls, comments, downloads, contests to keep and grow your visitors.

Analytics is a great tool to understand your users, analyze traffic behavior and improve your traffic and page rank. Let’s look inside Google Analytics and learn about your content.

The analytics dashboard shows you the traffic for each day. It gives you the number of visitors, time spent per user, no of pages seen per user.

But there’s much more the numbers reveal!
For example, check your “Top Content” in Content Overview. This reveals the top hit pages and gives you the “keywords” used by the users to land on this page. This is an important thing to note.

Tip: You must capitalize on the keywords information of the “most read” pages, by creating more pages on the same subject. And optimizing them with the sprinkling of keywords used by your visitors. This gives visitors more quality content on the same subject leading to more pages being browsed by visitors.

Apart from this, Google Analytics also reveals a ton of information about how users landed on this page, which page did they read next. This gives information about what users are looking for. And helps you create content that keeps on site for long. This also shows what users look for next when they navigate your pages. Study them and implement navigation accordingly where visitors can go through related content with ease.

The source of each of your top content is also revealed in Google Analytics. This helps you tailor make your content, keeping in mind the needs of those countries’ users. And later orient your marketing strategies accordingly.

Find out the previous pages they visited and showcase a list of “next pages visited”, since that’s related content for users as their behavior shows on your site or blog.

The “Top exit pages” need to be carefully analyzed. Where did visitors come from, where did they navigate to and which page did they exit from. Find reasons why they went away – did they get what they wanted or they didn’t find what they were looking for. Were related articles not showcased on these pages. Then work on your findings. Build more content to keep visitors on site.

The “site overlay” shows the percentage of clicks on each of the links shown on the site home page. This helps you understand how a visitors sees and behaves on your home page.

Analyzing your content and implementing more quality content and showing related content helps visitors to find content they want and keeps them on site longer.

Google has improved its ability to crawl and index flash files. And also read the urls in the flash banners on your site. Five cheers to Google’s indexing team.

Google Flash Indexing Interview

Google Flash Indexing Announcement

All text files in any type of SWF whether banners, buttons or ad slots. They can read and crawl all the text and index them. This largely helps sites which may have have important content on those SWF files. Goolge’s algo can’t yet read the images, but I guess that’s not way off. This June 2008 update is a boon to webmasters who for long wondered what to do for getting flash content indexed.

However if your flash file is getting uploaded via a javascript, Google may find it difficult. If the flash file is

Adobe Flash Technology work in making things searchable helped Google in indexing flash content. Web designers would be a delighted lot and can continue their creative work.

Matt Cutts, a Ph.D in Computer graphics, is the Head of Google’s Webspam Team. He was instrumental in launching SafeSearch, Google’s family filter that helps keep the web safe for children.

This Search engine optimization evangelist is Google’s spokesperson for Search quality related issues. A regular at all major Search Engine conferences, Matt Cutts tirelessly travels to meet webmasters across the world, understanding issues and reporting them back to the Google Team to help find solutions.

A subject matter expert on Search Engine Optimization, he often offers his advice and clarifies major SEO and search isssues on his personal blog. Matt Cutts Blog on SEO

Often he also pops up at Google Webmaster Blog

You may also be interested in reading his interviews. Google Webmaster Blog

Why Google Search Engine handles dynamic content best. Google recently announced that it can take care of Dynamic Content and webmasters need not worry about rewriting dynamic urls to shorter static urls.

This is a significant improvement in Google Search advancements. ecommerce, job, shopping sites amongst others serve users varied content depending upon the search parameters (location, price, brand, category etc).

Dynamic content is content created on the fly, such as when a user searches on a ticketing site, for a low cost ticket to LA, it searches the database of information and throws up best results. These results are not actually available as static html page content anywhere on site.

Earlier site owners and webmasters had a tough time getting these indexed. They would resort to creation of thousands of static pages or rewriting their urls using modrewrite softwares. Now, Google’s ability to crawl and handle dynamic content is a boon to webmasters and users.

Should I then redo all static urls
No. Don’t be confused by this announcement. Google SEO team only means to say that Google algorithms can handle changing content much better than before. The existing static urls created on sites with dynamic content should just let it be there. Google will still crawl, index and show them in relevant search results. That’s not a disadvantage at all.

Yahoo though still recommends a different method for authenticated site users.
Yahoo Dynamic Content Rules Though I don’t recommend that.

In case you’re a large site, I recommend reading Arnold’s Indexing dynamic content

Please read the article  on my blog here: http://www.selfgrowthtips.com/2011/07/bloggers-guide-to-accepting-comments-on.html