SEO Kolkata - Experienced SEO Consultant India, Kolkata

This is really strange and while I have a feel that it might be a temporary glitch I can't help but panic a bit. My blog had a subscriber count which used to vary between 75 to 80. Yesterday the subscriber count has suddenly dropped to 45.

I am completely clueless how can the feed subscriber count drop so drastically in one day. While I tried to look up the issue in Google it seems many other bloggers are facing the same problem but there has been no official announcement from FeedBurner or Google ( now that Feedburner is a Google property)

If you are also seeing any such abnormal drop in your FeedBurner count please drop a note in the comment.

Update:
Now that the blogosphere is going crazy about the drop in FeedBurner subscriber stats Google has finally taken the time to put a short reply. As expected this is a glitch in their system with Feedfetcher that keeps track of your feed subscribers on Google Feed Reader and iGoogle. This is what they say about the sudden drop in the feed count.

" Issue: We are observing reduced subscriber totals reported by Google Feedfetcher for many feeds. This number represents subscribers you may have via Google Reader and iGoogle. These lower totals have occurred over the past two days. We’re working closely with the Feedfetcher team to determine when a resolution might be possible.

Workaround: None. Please bear in mind feeds are available as usual and subscribers (feed and email) are receiving any updates you may be posting. This is a reporting issue only. "

Labels: feed count, feed readers, Feedburner, subscriber count

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Google Adwords is undoubtedly the most popular PPC platform. Over the years Google Adwords interface has undergone a lot of changes and from the extremely simplistic design it is now a bit cluttered and can be a bit confusing to new users.

As with most things Google there is a constant effort to improve the applications and interface and after a long time now they are about to launch a brand new interface for Google Adwords. One of my accounts has been fortunately white-listed to use the interface in its beta stage.

The new Adwords interface is simply superb and would make managing large accounts a breeze. In fact, I would think with some more modification to the new interface and adding a few features here and there might make it capable enough for campaign managers to do away with the Adwords Editor.

I have spent around an hour or so on the new Adwords interface and there are already a bunch of features that I see. I am sure that this new interface would evolve further and would bring in many more features. For now here are few of the things that I have noticed in the new Adwords Interface.

Features in Google Adwords New Version

a) Supports IE 7, Firefox 3 and Chrome

b) Left hand side menu that shows all the campaigns and on clicking the campaign it shows the ad groups under it. Basically a tree structure menu somewhat similar to Google Analytics

c) There is a contextual help menu on the left hand side that shows help questions related to the page on which the user is.

d) A graphical representation is displayed on the upper part of the page.

e) At any level the graph can be customized by the user. The user can display the graph based on one metric or Two metrics as per their choice and also the user has got options to choose the metrics they want to display in the graph from a drop-down list - available metrics -> Clicks, Impressions, CTR, Avg. CPC, Cost, Avg. Pos.

e) Change the daily budget or keyword bid by simply clicking on it. It pops a small text box in the same location where you can put the new figure and save.

f) Keywords can be edited similarly

g) Negative keywords can be added easily. Once the user is in the Ad group level, Clicking on the "negative Keywords" link opens two boxes through which you can add negative keywords at both Campaign level and Ad Group level.

h)The drop down on top right ( below the date picker) allows you to hide the graph, apply filter to the existing data, and also customize columns. I personally find the filter facility intriguing as it can be very helpful to monitor and optimize campaigns when you are dealing with campaigns with huge number of Ad groups. The filter can be applied based on multiple parameters or on single parameter and includes all the major parameters that any search marketer might need to monitor in their campaign.

i)There are tabs for Ad Groups, Keywords, Networks and Ads that shows data across all campaigns when any of them are clicked from the main campaign page. If you have already selected a campaign or adgroup before clicking on any of the tabs you get to see the relevant data specific to your selection.

Few scope of improvements

a) The filters would be more useful if there is an option to filter keywords by strings. At present it allows to filter only by metrics.

b) Destination URLs are not clickable - for advertisers using redirects like DART search URL or other similar application it is important to check that destination URLs are working properly.

c) Navigation between the tabs is relatively slow compared to the other parts of the application

I will continue to explore the interface and see what other features are packed in to this new Adwords interface. In case you got lucky to test this new interface as well, feel free to share your views and any other feature that you might have found in the comments section.

You can also sign up for using the Beta version of this New Adwords interface here.

Labels: Google Adwords, interface, new design, new feature, new version

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Twitter is undoubtedly the most popular micro-blogging platform today and is extremely popular among bloggers, internet marketers and other web savvy people. Twitter has also been an effective source in driving traffics to blog and marketers have been using this pretty effectively. There are already tools in the market that would automatically get new posts from your blog feeds and post them to Twitter under your profile.

While this might be an easy way for you to present your blog post to the Twitterati, people soon realize that these are automated messages and tends to ignore them. Also, not 100% of your posts are good, but with this even the most silliest ones are posted on Twitter which tends to do more harm to your reputation than any good.

However, if you really want to use Twitter the way it should be and want your readers to Twit your good posts, you can do that as well. Just integrate some small code snippets in your blog and you are done.

Integrating Twitter with WordPress Blogs

Method 1

Step 1: Open the header.php file of WordPress and insert the following lines just before the closing </HEAD> tag.

---

<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="http://bit.ly/javascript-api.js?version=latest&login=tweettrackjs&apiKey=R_7e9987b2fd13d7e4e881f9cbb168f523">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="http://s.bit.ly/TweetAndTrack.js?v=1.01">
</script>
<?php } ?>

---

Step 2: Open the single.php file and insert the following line just below the_content() function.

---

<a href="#" onclick="return TweetAndTrack.open(this, '<?php echo get_permalink();?>');">
<span style="display:none;">Reading: <?php the_title();?></span>
Tweet This: Send Page to Twitter</a>

---

Method 2

You can use the Plugin offered by Twit This. It's really really good and easy to use however, it would require the users to give their Twitter user id and password.

Integrating Twitter with Blogger Blogs ( Blogspot )

Twitter with Blogger Widget Templates

a) Go to Blog layout and then click Edit HTML. You will see a link for "Expand Widget template" , Click on it.

b) Copy the entire code and save it in a notepad for backup. Never ever do any tweak to your widget templates without taking a proper backup, they can be pretty messy to fix once you break them.

c) Find the line that has got the class post-footer in the XML template.

d) Copy the code below and paste it near the class

---

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<script charset='utf-8' src='http://bit.ly/javascriptapi.js?version=latest&amp;login=tweettrackjs&amp;
apiKey=R_7e9987b2fd13d7e4e881f9cbb168f523' type='text/javascript'/>
<script charset='utf-8' src='http://s.bit.ly/TweetAndTrack.js?v=1.01' type='text/javascript'/>
<a expr:onclick='&quot;return TweetAndTrack.open(this, \&quot;&quot; + data:post.url +
&quot;\&quot;);&quot;' href='#'>
<span style='display:none;'>Check This: <data:post.title/></span>Twit This</a> </b:if>

---

Integrating Twitter with Blogger Classic Template ( Blogspot)a) Go to the templates tab in the blogger dashboard

b) Copy and paste the existing template code in a notepad for backup. These templates are relatively easy to fix but why take a chance ?

c) Find the lines

---

<div class="post"><h2><a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" title="permalink">
<$BlogItemTitle$></a>

---

d) Paste the code below beside this. This will get the "Twit This" link to appear beside your blog post title.

---

<ItemPage>
<a href='javascript:(function(){TwitThisPop=window.open
(%22http://twitthis.com/twit?url=%22+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+%22&amp;
title=%22+((document.title)%20?%20encodeURIComponent(document.title.replace
(/^\s*|\s*$/g,%27%27))%20:%20%22%22),%20%22TwitThisPop%22,%20%22width=600,
%20height=500,%20location,%20status,%20scrollbars,
%20resizable,%20dependent=yes%22);
%20setTimeout
(%22TwitThisPop.focus()%22,%20100);%20})()'>Twit This</a></ItemPage>

---

e) If you want to put the Twit This link after the post , paste the code just below

---

<div class="text"><$BlogItemBody$>

---

Points to Note:
a) The code above would get the Twit This link only on your individual post pages and not on your blog home page. This is done in this way because the code picks up the URL of the current page and if this code appears on the home page of your blogger blog it would post the home page URL to Twitter when someone clicks on it but the post might move from the home page after a week and visitors ollowing the Twitter link would not find the proper content.

b) The blogger classic template is using the TwitThis service and would require visitors to put in their user id and password while posting to Twitter.

Related post: SEO for Blogspot - Blogger Blogs

Labels: Blogger, Blogspot, Twitter, WordPress, WP

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During the US election we have seen what a pivotal role the digital media can play in political campaigns. A large part of Barack Obama's success in the US presidential election has been attributed to the massive yet well planned online campaign that they did.

Following the footsteps, LK Advani from BJP has launched an online political campaign. It is definitely praiseworthy to see such a veteran leader like Mr. Advani adopting the digital media for his campaign and I believe this would bring some change to the way political parties in India have been thinking of doing their campaigns.

This is a massive campaign, pretty similar to Obama's however, this is not strategic - that is the key difference. BJP has been running this campaign through Google Adwords program and while they seem to have somewhat limited presense in the search network they are to be found everywhere in the content network.

Some of you might think what's wrong with that - it would give them a larger share of voice and gain more eyeballs. Well, how do you think it would look if an ad says Advani for PM when a porn video is being played in YouTube ? What about an Advani ad in Russianbrides.com ? What about an Advani ad in a UK IceHockey website ?

Don't you think placing ads for a veteran political leader in a not-so-decent website would harm his image ? Do you think a person watching a porn video in YouTube would have any interest ( at that particular point of time) to look at Advani for PM ads or visit his website ? Where is the user engagement ??



I am not sure who is running this campaign for BJP/ Mr. Advani but I strongly feel that a lot of the money that is being put into this campaign is getting wasted and some of this money might even be creating a negative influence on Advani's candidature.

It's good that we are trying to take our political campaigns to the next level by adopting the digital media but can't we do this in a more sensible and strategic way ?

Labels: Adwords, BJP, internet, LK Advani, political campaign, politics

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The other day I received a request from one of my clients to do a little research on Hosting companies in UK and provide him with a review of UK hosts based on which he wanted to select a hosting company for his new project. after submitting the detailed report ( much more detailed than what you see below) I thought I would put up a summary of a few web hosting companies that I found to be really good. May be this would help some of my readers as well..

1and1 Hosting - Clearly one of my favorite hosts. They offer an extremely reliable service at a reasonable price. There are multiple packages both for Windows and Linux hosting. Linux hosting ranges from £0.99/month to £11.99/month and Microsoft/ Windows Hosting is available from £2.99/month to £13.99/month.

While most of their features are comparable to other hosting providers, they excel in customer support. They are also extremely serious about information security and tends top verify account owners whenever they have any doubt about fraudulent activities.

I have typically seen a 100% up time with 1and1 and have never really received any complain from any of my clients either.

In addition when you buy any 1 and1 hosting package you get one Free domain and all their packages come with a 60 Day Monyeback guarantee.

KNetHosting.co.uk - A very cheap and reliable hosting service if you are looking for Linux hosting. Their packages start from as low as £14.95/ year and goes upto £84.95/year. The packages offer generous bandwidth and storage capability and also they offer unlimited email accounts with all their packages. Also all packages have Fantastico Software Library included in them which is rare to find for such cheap web hosting services.

Cpanel provides an easy to use user interface and continuous data backups through R1 soft provides additional protection against virus attacks, hacks etc. Even the basic account allows you to host as many as 5 domains in the same account.

Support is available 24/7, though you will hardly need any because of the easy to use Cpanel interface, Fantastico software and Web Builder software that comes along with your hosting package.

If price is your main concern Knet Hosting is definitely a good option that you should consider.

EUKHost - They are one of the reputed hosting companies in UK. Their Linux hosting packages start from £29.99/year and goes upto 79.99/year. Windows hosting packages vary from £49.99/year to 99.99/year. While their offerings are comparable to 1and 1 and KNet Hosting, they probably offer a few more scripts within the packages compared to the other two. All their packages have same features available irrespective of cost except for the number of domains you are allowed to host, the bandwidth and the storage capacity. They also offer 24x7 support via email, chat and phone call.

Labels: Hoster, Server, site review, UK, Web hosting

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For most businesses and clients who run an Adwords campaign one of the key parameters based on which they tend to judge the success of the campaign is clicks or number of visitors. I often get clients who would ask me if we commit a monthly budget of $xxxx how many visitors can you send us. In this case we are actually missing the proper picture of the campaign and we would probably fail completely in analyzing the success of an Adwords campaign if our focus remains completely on visitors.

As an Internet marketing consultant I feel that it is my duty to educate my clients where necessary and this is one of the key areas that I often spend hours explaining to them. To properly measure the success of an Adwords campaign we need to track much more than just visitors to the site.

Google Analytics makes it a breeze to get all the necessary data and here are few parameters that I feel we should always track in a Adwords campaign ( any paid search campaign, for that matter)

• Clicks - Yes, I never said don't track clicks. This is a basic information that most Adwords advertisers or clients would be interested in .
  
  
• CTR - Click Through Rate is another important factor, it would definitely show the rate of response to your ads. A low CTR tells you that its time to check your ad copies ( also might be due to low average position)
  
  
• Bounce Rate - As an Adwords consultant I feel this is one of the key factors that people should track but often doesn't. Your campaign might have a high CTR, and get good number of visitors but what if 90% of your visitors leave the website just after arriving on the landing page. Does that do any good to you ? It basically consumes a lot of your budget, shows a lot of traffic to your website but doesn't get you any or very minimal conversion. It is important that we track the bounce rate on a regular basis at a Keyword level and try to keep it as low as possible.
  
  Typically when you see high bounce rate for a keyword, check your landing page. It is often seen that if the landing page doesn't match the keywords or doesn't talk in same lines as your ad copy your visitors would bounce off pretty fast.
  
  
• Conversion & Conversion Rate - Goes without saying that almost all Adwords advertisers would track their goal conversion and the conversion rate. If you have a lot of keywords in broad match and you see conversions coming from some of the long tailed keywords initiated by the Broad match terms, try to detect them through your Google Analytics, pick them up separately and put them in a separate Ad group on Exact Match. This will ensure that these keywords get their fair share of budget and you are likely to see an imediate boost in your campaign.
  
  
• Call To Action Tagging - Though not really a part of analytics tagging your call to action links gets you extremely important analytical data. It tells you a lot about your landing page, which call to actions are working for you and which are not. Adwords has got an inbuilt tool for tagging links which can come very handy for this purpose, however, if you are tagging a link make sure to test the link after you add it to your website. It is often seen that due to improper tagging some of your key links stops functioning.
  
  
• Also you can look at the average time spent on site by visitors, number of pages visited etc at a keyword and ad group level to judge the quality of traffic your Adwords campaign is sending to your website. For these you would however need to use the Custom Reports feature in Google Analytics.

CPC or Cost per Click is again an important parameter to be measured , however, as it is a very common and relatively simple parameter that is measured by almost everyone I have not gone into the details of it.

What do you guys measure for your Adwords accounts or what other parameters do you think is important to measure for an Adwords campaign ?

Related Article: How to Improve Your Google Adwords Quality Score

Labels: Adwords, bounce rate, conversion rate, Google, Google analytics

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Labels: back links, Bob Dylan, Google, matt Cutts, Page Rank, PR

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I often receive emails and questions about various SEO tools and how effective they are from my readers and at times from some potential clients asking me which SEO tools do I use and for what. Now people who know me and my work process a bit they know am not a big fan of SEO tools, I believe tools are just good enough to get various types of data but that is just 10 % of a complete SEO process and the success of a SEO campaign depends largely on the analysis, strategy and the implementation of the campaign.

Having said that I must also admit that there are certain cases when we need to use tools and there are some tools for link analysis which can actually be very helpful for SEO consultants like us.

a) Analyze Backlinks - Just put in your domain and hit the search. It gets you almost all necessary info for your links except for the PageRank. You can see the URL, anchor text, total number of outbound links on that page, total links to that page, Title of the page. In addition, if you would like to see if there is a specific text used in that page, you can specify that during the search and the tool is smart enough to check if the link page contains the specified text in the source code.

b) Link Diagnosis - Another nice cool tool for analyzing links however to get full advantage of this tool you will need to install the Firefox extention for this. The web version just shows the links but does not provide much details. The Firefox extention however provides you with a lot of information on backlinks which includes Google PageRank, anchor text, whether the link is no-follow, most popular anchor text, some nice graphs and charts showing the anchor txt and PR distribution and the best part is all these can be exported to CSV format.

c) Smart PageRank - Again a good tool that shows Anchor Text, Page Rank and also whether a link is no follow. They also give you an opion to set preference. While I have used this tool numerous times just before writing this post, I tried checking the tool once again and found it broken, hope the guys fix it fast.

SEOMoz also offers a ery nice tool for backlink analysis however, it is available only for its premium members.

Besides all these the tool that I use most commonly to check back links as well as other info about websites is Google Webmaster Central, it is indeed a very useful resource for webmasters.

Labels: back links, backlink checker, links, seo tools

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I mentioned about making a detailed post about the Google Search Masters conference as I could not live blog the entire session due to some technical issue. It is pretty late to do that as I suppose most readers have already got a fair idea about the things discussed in the conference from other blogs, however, I would just take this opportunity to post about a few small and easy to ignore points that caught my attention during the various talks in the conference.

a) The Googlers repeatedly stated the importance of joining and participating the webmaster communities, particularly Google Webmaster Help Forum and the Official Google webmaster community in Orkut. Also encouraged the use of Google Webmaster Central and the data available there.

b) If you are buying a old domain, it is important to verify & check links through Webmaster Central. If you see any possible issues it is important to file a reconsideration request.

c) In answer to one of the question Adam Lasnic clearly agrees that Google analytics data is used to judge the quality of the website.

d) In another conversation it comes up that while the directory structure of a website doesn't really matter to Google, they definitely look at how many clicks it takes to reach a page to judge the importance of a page in a website.

e) In answer to a qustion about Link building, Adam stated, "Do not worry too much about relevancy" - thrashing the well established concept of having back links from related websites. He mentioned it is good if you have related back links but even non related links are good as long as they are natural and comes from good quality websites.

f) Table based HTML Vs. CSS layout - Adam stated clearly the Google have no preference as such and it can crawl almost all possible HTML structures unless the internal navigation structure is not horribly bad or the pages are protected by robots.txt

g) Also mentioned Validation is great for usability but not a factor that Google considers for ranking.

h) If a site that we link to changes hand and the content on that website undergoes complete change and becomes a part of bad neighborhood - is that a risk for our website ? In answer to this Adam mentions that Google doesn't look at each link individually, rather it looks at overall trends and aggregates. Google understands legacy so change in nature of link due to change of website ownership would not affect any website.

f) Is there a possibility of duplicate content penalty if your content is copied by other websites ? Adam said that Googlr has got the technology to identify original source of content and this type of situations typically does not initiate any penalty. Google however, does not look at the time of publication because Google might index content in a copied website before it indexes the original source.

In case of synidcated content like article directories as long as there is a "Follow" link to the original source Google is able to identify the original source of the content and credit it for the same.

g) Microformats - Google does not understand Microformats at present but they are working on it and in near future as Microformats become more popular they should be able to index them.

h) Adam repeatedly stressed on the use of sitemaps both HTML and XML to make it easier for Google bot to index all the pages. He clearly mentioned that this would not help with organic rankings though.

i) For multimedia content like video, images and audio files it is important to add context to it by putting good content around them. This helps search engines to judge the multimedia elements

j) For Geo targeting, Google uses the TLD, physical location of server, information obtained through Geo targeting tool in GWT as well as the language used.

k) It is important to test websites in browsers with JavaScript turned off. That gives a clear idea of what Google bot gets to see while crawling the page.

Besides the above points there were discussion on Google Custom Search Engine where Dr. Rajat Mukherjee explained the concept of custom search engine and how this can be used.

Ankit Gupta gave a nice presentation on the Mobile friendly websites - why they are needed, wat are the things to keep in mind while building websites for mobile users, the challenges etc. I will make another post covering these points soon.

Deepak Jain had a talk on Google Analytics & website optimizer. He explained how these tools work and the advantages of using them. He also focused on the metrics that should be tracked and how the data can be used to improve conversion.

Some Photos From Google Search Masters 2009

Google Search Masters 2009 Conference

In discussion with Adam Lasnic

Google Goodies :)

Some more photos from Google Search Masters 2009

Labels: Google Conference, Google Search Masters 2009, SEO conference India

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