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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You would have heard a lot of cases of Google banning Adsense accounts citing the reason to protect their publishers from any type of fraud. But you will get astonished when you will learn that Google has not paid any tax on its £1.6 billion advertising revenue in Britain last year. This news was published in a leading news paper the Sunday Times.

How much tax they evaded and how they did it: They haven’t paid tax amounting to £450 million in corporation tax to HM Revenue & Customs in 2008. Actually Google diverted all its earnings from advertising received from customers in Britain to its subsidiary in Ireland.

Citing accounts filed with the Companies House in the past week, the daily said, “Google’s 2008 UK corporation tax bill amounted to just £141,519 and that was tax on the interest generated by its cash pile in UK bank deposits.”

The deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, Vince Cable, has urged Google to “pay its fair share” of tax. “Google’s reputation will be severely damaged if it continues to behave in this way. It is ducking its social responsibility,” Cable said.

Yes Google must pay its taxes because they always try to showcase themselves as the president of fair business practices and ethics, now it’s their turn to prove themselves.

What do you all think of this story…. Post your responses in comments

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Spying and intruding into other’s privacy is a very bad habit and punishable by law in many states… but it is vital as well as necessary for your online business.

What does it mean by spying your competitors?

As we all know that to reach at the top there are two ways. First one is to follow the basics, input your hard work and wait for the time when you come at the top. Second way is to spy on those who are already at the top, find out their strategy and implement the same for your business but using better tactics.

Hard work and persistence is no doubt a sure shot way to get success and patience is virtue we all know. But if you ask me which route I will take. I will surely take the second one because life is very short and I cannot give 3, 4 years to visualize my success.

For all of you who are interested in the latter one, today I will discuss some points on how to spy your competitor and reverse engineer their strategy and get to position number one on the organic search( especially Google), overthrowing them out of the game.

Can you think what would be the value of keyword “weight loss” or “car insurance” at the first position of Google?

Let’s check… for the purpose I am using www.semrush.com

Let us take two examples, fist one is “weight loss”, if we check Google the number 1 rank for this keyword goes to website www.webmd.com , now check it in Semrush.

We get the following data. The average CPC for keyword weight loss is $2.63 and the search volume is 450k. Now do the simple math 450k x $2.63. According to Semrush the website is getting search engine traffic worth $15584k.

Our second example is “car insurance”. While I was checking the ranking I got www.progressive.com on number 1, now checking it with Semrush, it is receiving organic traffic worth $24967k.

The data from Semrush may not be perfect, but if we assume only 10% of the figures, you can easily calculate what the worth of being number 1 on Google is.

So I am quite impressed with your argument… now which things I would like to spy on?

Basically you would like to spy on keywords they are ranking organically, keywords they are using for PPC, their daily ads budget, sites which are linking to your competitor,

Organic keywords: find out the keywords for which your competitor is ranking organically and the traffic those keywords attract. After analyzing these keywords you can plan your long time strategy for SEO, starting with the long tail keywords of main phrases and gradually using the short tails.

PPC Keywords: The basic idea behind finding the paid keywords is if they are paying consistently for some keywords to appear on paid result then those keywords must be converting for them. After you compile the list of their paid keywords, view their landing pages. Then plan your strategy using those converting keywords and their long tail phrases. Design your landing page better than them and you will surely hit a jackpot. Also look their daily PPC budget, the more the better.

Backlinks: Find out how many backlinks your competitor have, which sites are linking then and what the anchor texts are used in their backlinks. For this purpose you can use www.backlinkwatch.com and you will know the anchor text of the backlinks, their PR and whether they are follow or Nofollow. You can also use Yahoo Site Explorer for getting the backlinks data for any website. Never depend on the Google backlinks for a website, as Google displays numbers much less than the actual.

Other online tools you can use:

Keyword spy

Spyfu

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What is image optimization: Image optimization is a process of sizing, naming and presenting an image in a way that it becomes feasible for search engines to find it, extract information from it and categorize it so that it can be presented in the image search results for a relevant query of a user.

There is a user perspective also which I will discuss in a minute.

As present, search engines are unable to read any information in an image or graphic and it will take the technology some time when automated bots such like of Google’s or yahoo’s can read the pattern or layout of an image and extract information from them.

So there are some elements which are used to inform search engines about the details and content of an image. Such elements are image name, image alt tags, image title attribute, image reference tag … and some more

So basically image optimization is done to inform search engines about the content of an image, it has become more important because nearly every search engines have lot of image searches and if your images are well optimized for a particular query of keywords, there are chances of getting a lot of traffic through image search alone.

Just have a look how many options Google offer for image search.

You can search for any type, any size or any color of image, guess how would be they categorizing these images… YES right by using all textual factors related to an image (This is my opinion, as I know with my experience, however actual elements considered is only known by Big G)

Now we will discuss some important points about image optimization.

Using proper name: Use proper and relevant names for your images. Many image capturing devices like digital cameras, webcams, scanners etc name images in their saving terminology like DSC302.jpg or scandl%12.jpg etc. This is an improper way to name images. So the correct way of naming is using relevant keywords. Example if you have an image of olive tree, name it like olive-tree-image.jpeg.

Using Proper Format: There are lots of image formats for images and graphics which are used for formatting images. It is better to keep your images in .JPG format and not in .GIF, as the former is standard for images and latter is the standard for graphics. Further discussion about image format is out of scope of this article and if you need to learn more visit here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_file_formats

Using ALT tags: Use proper alt tags which are relevant to your image, do not try to stuff your keywords. Just keep it simple and clear. If you are naming your image as discussed in point 1 above, you can simply keep the alt tag as your image name. But make sure to not use same ALT tag for two or more images on a single page.

Make your images folder accessible to search engines: Make your images folder, the folder where you store your images, accessible to search engines.

Using TITLE attribute: Title attribute add meaning to an image, so use it but here also follow the same old rule, do not stuff keywords and use same title in two or more images on a single page.

Using Image feed: if you have a very large number of images on your website (generally product based websites) then you can also make an image feed just like sitemap and submit it to search engines.

Wherever possible put images in between content.

Keep the number of images on a page to minimum.

While naming the images, in ALT tags and image TITLE attributes used words like pic, picture, photo or image along with the relevant keyword.

User Perspective: The points we have discussed above are mainly for search engines, now we will look some image optimization factors which is related to user experience.

Do not use big and bulky images on a page and it makes the webpage to load slower, which is very irritating from user point of view. An average user will not wait for more than 10-12 seconds for a webpage to load, in this way you are losing a genuine visitor.

The quality of the images used must be above average, do not use distorted or fade images

Always use images which are relevant to the page content.

Do not use scraped images; use your own or use stock images. If you use images from other website without their permission, you will dilute your authority and there are chances to hook in copyright infringement.

Image Optimization Plugins for wordpress: There are plugins available for wordpress users which they can use for optimizing their images. Below are some of them.

SEO Friendly Images

WP Smush.it

You can also try Google Image Labeler

Are some points left behind? Post here to let me know and I will include it in the post..

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