If you are using Google Analytics, you would be well familiar with the word bounce rate. Let us see what the definition of bounce rate according to GA is?

According to Google Analytics:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.

You can read the original explanation here at What does Bounce Rate mean?

In a simpler sense, a user visits your website either through your listing in the organic SERPs or through clicking your paid ads and exits from the same page, where it lands without visiting any other page on your website is called bounce and the percentage of bounce is known as bounce rate

There may be two factors which causes this to happen.

• The visitor might be searching for a very small and to the point (say one word) information and your page is highly relevant for what he is searching for, he got what he wanted and quits. For an example, if someone searching for “where was the president George Bush born” and lands to your webpage and finds the answer in the first few lines, there are 99% chances that he will quit the next moment as he has his answers handy.
• The second case is, the visitor does not find what he was searching for and this is the reason for most of the cases of bounced visitors. A visitor searching for information on topic”XYZ”, lands on your webpage and doesn’t find it and pushes the back button without waiting any more.

This is the main case of bounced visitors and you should take every step necessary for reducing it.

You can test different elements on your webpage to reduce bounce rate and increase visitor engagement with the website. I have written some posts regarding how to chose different elements for your webpage and how to prepare great content for your visitors, which you must have a look, it may help you minimize your bounce rate.

Now the question is whether bounce rate affects your organic rankings?

Different SEO’s have contrary views over this topic. Some say yes and some No. But I have experienced that a high bounce rate definitely affects your organic rankings.

Think it in this way. Google always try to provide high quality and relevant results to its users for their query, why would they list a webpage for which they know that users do not like it for a particular query?

Or take it in another way with an offline example. Suppose you are a consultant whose job is to refer people to the persons (list a number of webpages) who can provide solution to their problems (query). Will you keep referring them to a person about whom people complain a lot of time that they didn’t provide the solution they needed. The obvious answer is NO, you won’t.

So now you can think over this that bounce rate really affects your organic rankings, so apply every effort to reduce it.

Do not use blackhat ways: Some webmasters install some malicious script which disables the Back button of the browsers once their website is open, or some other script which blank the referrer when they hit the back button in their browsers, so that the user appears a new one to the search engines. Never try these shady methods, as sooner or later you will be banned for your malicious activities.

In coming posts we will discuss different factors for reducing the bounce rate.

What is your opinion on “bounce rate and organic ranking”, please let us know by posting them in comments.

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There are many crucial factors which should be always considered while planning a new online project. Many newbie internet marketers make this mistake frequently; they do not spend time in doing research and project planning. Their decision is just based on hype, they hear from somewhere that there is money in any niche; they just start running and copying in a blind manner.

Beware and stay away from this mentality….

So what we basically need while doing our research for a new project?

In a simpler sense you need to know lot of things while designing, developing a new project as well as during content preparation.

Basically you want to know (you need to research your market)

1. Age group of the audience
2. purchasing power of the audience
3. educational status of the audience

Let us take an example. Suppose you need to start a website for car insurance (you made up your mind for this, however this niche is super competitive and saturated and starting a new website in this niche is not a very good idea if you are new to this field and have small budget, this is just an example to make you understand the point) J

Now let us check which website has the Google number 1 crown for the keyword “car insurance”

Number 1: www.progresssive.com

Number 2: www.geico.com

Now let us check them one by one

Site: www.progressive.com

Page Rank: 6
Alexa Rank: 6270
Backlinks (Google): 708
Backlinks (Yahoo): 214531
Pages Cached (Google):2080
Domain Age:
Created on…………..: Mon, Nov 17, 1997
Expires on…………..: Sun, Nov 16, 2014

Site: www.geico.com

Page Rank: 07
Alexa Rank: 3702
Backlinks (Google): 676
Backlinks (Yahoo):86203
Pages Cached (Google): 1800
Domain Age:
Creation Date: 22-jul-1995
Expiration Date: 21-jul-2010

I think the data from the top 2 is sufficient to establish the competitiveness of this niche and it will be very hard to appear on first page in a short period of time. Here I am not suggesting you any niche to start with, our topic is something else from this. Now back to the topic.

So we have got some pretty impressive data, do I need something else?

Yes you do. Up to now you have just checked the competition and feasibility of a niche you wish to enter. You need more data about the 3 points which we have discussed in the starting of this article, for planning and developing your website. Ok I got it… Now how and where can I find those data?

There are many ways to research it. The simplest one is to use a website called www.quantcast.com , visit QuantCast and you can get audience data of any website on the internet.

Now in our case let us see what happens, I opened quantcast.com and entered the URL progressive.com for information.

Data you get:

1. Visits per month, people per month with daily, weekly and monthly comparison of visits.( you can know how many people use the website)

2. Which subdomains of the website, are receiving most and least traffic.( you get the data about the various segments of the website, where people are visiting and get an idea of demand)

3. The most important factor is demographics, which tells you about the percentage of male and female visitors, age group of the visitors, ethnicity, percentage of households with kids’ visiting the website, the income level of the visitors and their educational status.

4. At last Lifestyle which tells” People who visit this site are likely to visit sites in these categories” and which other website visitors go apart from the one in question.

Oh my God, now you know everything about your prospective audience. Yes now you have the power, you can now plan the design, look and feel, colors and graphics, content and all other factors of your website. The best part is, as you now have an idea of the educational background and purchasing power of your audience, now you can decide how to market your website, which offers to use and which products to sell.

I would be happy if I was been able to convey the right message to you.

So use QuantCast in your market research and make your planning better.

I do not know what your reasons to join internet marketing are, but the general thing which underlies in every new online project is to invest minimum time, effort, money and gain profits. Atleast I have the same reason when I joined the cyber world.

Like this article or have some questions, post in the comment section and I will try to reply it.

Related Articles:

Spying on your competitors

How to choose various Elements for your webpage

Simple Steps for preparing great content

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This is third and final part of the series 5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate Marketing. if you are new here and missed previous posts, you can read it here at: 5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate Marketing-1, 5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate Marketing-2

Verified and Opted Email List: it is a popular saying in the internet marketing world “The money is in the list”, and it is quite true. If you are not building your list then you are loosing a lot of money, as well as targeted buyers forever.

Why list building is Essential: It is an evident truth that the chance of sale in the first visit is very low and mostly people buy in their third or fourth visit, so if you have to remain in internet business for long, you surely need a list. If you build an opted and verified list, you know for sure the requirement of the person on the list.

Suppose you are selling some dog training ebook and gradually you also build your list, you can sell related products to them later, like some dog training videos or some equipment. The conversion rate is always higher with these lists because you know their requirement before hand.

Now I know for sure that a question started buzzing in your mind. Why will anyone voluntarily provide me his name and email? Your question is right.

As there are NO Free Lunches in the World, you need to offer them something for free and it must be compelling and according to the need of your audience.

For an example if you are selling a dog training related product, you can offer five or six parts mini course for free like “ 5 Parts Mini Course on How to stop your dog from barking”. Free mini series is also an affective tool for promoting your paid product. During your course of sending emails, try to promote your affiliate product in a manner that it doesn’t seems a hard sell, but a value addition to your mini series.

You may feel problem doing the things right, but with time you will find it easy and effective. So start building your list today.

Now for effective responding, you need an effective Autoresponder.

Autoresponder Software: An Autoresponder is software used for sending automated replies and periodic emails.

For an example if someone signs up for your mini series, the Autoresponder will send a verification mail to the given address for confirming the email address, once verified it will then send a welcome email and your series, as configured by you. You can send emails periodically with its help.

There are many Autoresponder available in the market with different pricing structure and depends on the size of your list, but my personal choice is Aweber.

Mini Series for Follow Up: After the users have signed up for your mini email series, now you need content to follow up with them.

Where to arrange content- you can write the content for your mini series your self. If you are unable to do so for whatever reason, you can hire a content writer for the same.

But please make sure the content must be of very high quality.

In your follow up content do not try to become very elaborative, instead provide them information in such a manner that it increases their curiosity for having more. In other words the mini series will warm up the visitor to purchase your affiliate product. So prepare your content in the same manner.

Tracking Tools: Last but not the least you need very efficient tracking for all activity in your affiliate project.

Which data you need to know about your affiliate project?

1. From where is the traffic coming from?
2. Which content is attracting most of the visitors?
3. What is the bounce rate?
4. How much time users are spending on your website.
5. Top exit pages
6. If you are getting organic traffic, which keywords are bringing most of the traffic?

There are lots of more point you need to know, but the above points are very necessary for tweaking your campaign either it is optimizing your website or changing header or images.

If you are bringing in paid traffic by various PPC engines, you need to track your activity at keyword level. Which keywords are bringing in most of the traffic and which keywords are generating sales, so that you can dump your non performing keywords and boost your sales keywords? You also need to test your ads and landing pages for optimum performance

There are lots of tracking tools available in market both paid and free. But Google Analytics is best in my opinion. First of all it is free and you can get very in depth data about your visitors and website. In addition you can create different filters for more.

Hope this information will help in your affiliate marketing endeavor. What do you think, do you need to read more on some specific topics. Please post here.

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If you are new here, you would like to read previous posts on link building here at: Off Page Elements: Increasing your Web Visibility and Reach Part 1,Off Page Elements: Using Articles and Blogs,Off Page Elements: Link Building and Blog Comments

We have discussed several traditional methods of link building, today we will continue with some more discussion on link building and increasing link popularity.

A note about Nofollow: if you are not aware about Nofollow attribute, let us have a little outlook in the background of Nofollow. Google allows you to make any link (both internal and external) un crawlable by using a special tag rel=”Nofollow”.

This tag is used for primarily three purposes.

1. Avoid leaking of link juice to less important pages. Web pages like contact us, privacy statement, shipping and order, cancellation policy have less value in terms of SEO, so Nofollow tags can be used for these pages to avoid leaking of link juice , which in turn will help you to achieve higher page rank for main pages.

2. To stop theme ambiguity. Nofollow tags are very useful in building a theme of a website, in other words its very useful in proper SILOING( discussion in coming posts) of a website. For an example if you are building a website related to wooden furniture and want to base all your keywords on it, you may want to Nofollow all the pages related to basic knowledge of the wooden furniture and all the pages related to fiber and steel furniture.

In this way you can establish a solid theme for your website. A special point to note here is Nofollow tags are only for search engines and not for human visitors these links are still clickable and can funnel traffic.

3. While linking to websites for whom you are not sure about the correctness and authenticity of their information and authority.

What does No follow tags inform to search engines and are they counted in backlinks?

The answers is yes , the links having Nofollow attribute are still crawled by search engines and help in increasing link popularity.

The Nofollow attribute only tells the search engines that the reference, in which the link is used, is not sure. This means if any webpage is linking to another webpage with reference green bags and uses Nofollow attribute, then it marks the search engines that although I am linking this webpage about green bags but I am not sure about the content and authority of the webpage. In other it can be taken as voting a webpage whose authority is not confirmed.

So do not be over concerned about no follow tags in various web2.0 websites and forums. They might not transfer as much link juice but they will help you in increasing your web visibility which will gradually establish your authority in your area.

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This post is the second part of my post related to keyword research, you can read the first post here at: Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path

When it comes to keyword research and selection, there are numerous points which should always be kept in mind during the process because keyword research is the most important part of developing an online business and choosing wrong keywords might ruin all your efforts. So always invest reasonable amount of time for finding the right keywords to start with. 

Long Tail Vs Short Tail Keywords:

Short tail keywords are those keywords, which represent a niche (If you are new to internet marketing, read as “market” for the sake of simplicity). While long tails are those which specify a little deeper in the concerned niche or market. For an example, if we talk about digital camera niche then keyword like “Digital camera” is a broad keyword (read as short tail) and “Kodak digital camera 9 MP” or “Cannon digital camera DX665” are long tail keywords.

Hope you got it.

If we consider commerciability in our research there are two types of keywords.

1. Research Keywords
2. Buying keywords or Money Keywords

For an example, if someone is searching for “digital camera”, might be the surfer is doing some research on digital cameras and not in buying mood, so the probability of sales is low, on the other hand if someone searches for “Cannon digital camera 9 MP DXS-635”, as we can see, this search is for a particular product and the probability of sale is much higher than the previous one. So knowing about right keywords is must because optimizing or doing PPC for wrong keywords will not return anything. Keeping track of your campaigns is also necessary both for SEO and PPC.

But this doesn’t conclude that one should not target broad keywords. Actually the whole game depends upon the budget and goals. If you have a handsome budget you can easily go for keywords like “credit cards”, but if you do not have much to spend , start with long tails(like “HSBC bank credit card London”) and then as time passes , invest more to gain results for short tails

Wide Vs Deep Keywords

Wide keywords refer to all the keywords related to a niche just like, if we talk about “dog training”, keywords like:

dogs training
dog training course
dog obedience training
dog training courses
dog training schools
dog training classes
dog training equipment
dog training class
dog training information
dog training collars
dog training collar
dog agility training

are called as wide keywords as it specifies the keywords related to dog training..

Now for finding deep keywords we need to do some brainstorming. Not only in dog training niche, this is true for all niches, just find different characteristics of the situation or problem. For our dog training example, just try to find out the problems your dog has for which you want to get it trained.

Some common problems are biting, excessive jumping and barking, digging. Apart from this we can also find out different dog breeds like Doberman, Alsatian, German shepherd, pug etc and then prepare our deep keyword list.

Stop dog digging
Stop dog jumping
Stop dog biting
Stop my dog from biting

————————————

Stop Doberman from digging
Stop German shepherd from biting

————————————

German shepherd agility training
Doberman obedience training

————————————

And many more.

Are Keyword Tools Helpful?

The answer is YES and NO. They are indeed helpful if you really know how to use them properly and extract the most from it. If you don’t know to use them properly, you might end up with a wrong keyword list. In my opinion Google keyword research tool and search based keyword tool are best. In addition you can also use Traffic Travis (It has both free and paid versions, but free version is capable enough to extract optimum results).

OK OK I got it all, now tell me, Where to start?

Good now you are ready to find your keywords and start your online business.

Ok I am just opening Google keyword tool, I have extracted my keywords…..

Hey Wait… Again you are missing something…

Before you start your keyword research with Keyword Tool External, Traffic Travis or some other tool, I have a suggestion for you.

Visit different forums and blogs in your niche and try to find out what people are talking and searching about and what are the basic problems of the audience you are going to face and attend ?. I think you got the point.

Always keep in mind if you have the solution of a problem and if you can present it to your niche properly then you are going to sustain in the business. So just spy your market and try to find out the problems and the solutions available and then decide to do things in a different way and you will be the boss of the niche.

Using Forums and Yahoo Answers

Just fireup Google and type “your main keyword” forums.

Like “dog training” forums

You now have a list of several forums, just enter them and try to find out the topics which the members are talking about and in this way you will have an idea of the problems related to the niche. After you have noted down all these things, you are ready to prepare your keyword list.

There is one more effective way, use Yahoo Answers. This is a very good platform to know about your niche. I myself use Yahoo Answers extensively for finding keywords for niche I wish to enter and know nothing about.

Yahoo Answers

Using Google Wonder wheel and suggest for finding right keywords

You might have noticed Google’s new tool, wonderwheel. It’s a very good tool for conducting keyword research and SILOING. I would try to post about silo, its effect on SEO and how to SILO a website in coming days. Google is doing a very good job by providing more effective tools for us webmasters. You now have options to search forums, images, timeline which relates to trends (they provide timeline data from 1800 AD, I do not know whether Larry Page or Sergey Brin were there back in 1800 AD   ), shopping results , videos etc at one place.

In my opinion this is the right process from doing keyword research to finally establishing a successful online business

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