Google Sandbox in Search Engine Optimization [SEO]

By SEO Practitioner in Google, SEO
google sandbox effect

The sandbox effect also known as aging delay in search engine optimization, is a hypothetical belief in SEO market that Google has a filter that places all new website under restriction for a certain amount of time to limit them from ranking their keywords in search results.

The main idea behind google sandbox is that google takes some time to consider all the technical aspects of the website, relevancy, consistency and search engine ranking signals to consider for ranking. When the Google is sure of all the aspects of ranking signals, then it will acknowledge the respective keywords for ranking.

Officially google didn’t confirm or deny the existence of the sandbox effect or amount of time it processed. However, as the behaviors of keywords in search analytics, the sandbox effect can be noticed for keywords in terms of ranking.

A reverse sandbox effect is also claimed to exist where new pages with unique content and keywords with less competition can rank in google in early phases. Can happen when the content is viral to reach to a large audience, more interaction and other user metrics that google consider for ranking.

As being a SEO practitioner since 2009, I would like to go for natural methodologies of SEO process for keyword ranking in google. Despite , considering unofficial google sandbox effect seriously, I would like to suggest to keep focus on your site for online reputation, growing traffic from various sources, relevant content development, maintain relationship with your users, optimizing for user metrics, using white hat techniques for ranking and working consistently with your SEO tasks considering all search engine guidelines and google updates so far.

If you are planning to grow your online business organically and naturally in a search engine and looking to identify more scope from your current website status, feel free to write to me at writetohemanta@gmail.com for free SEO audit report and consultation session. I would love to have an opportunity to discuss with you about your project.

What is White Hat SEO Technique?

By SEO Practitioner in SEO
white hat seo technique

White hat SEO technique in search engine optimization process is a practice of implementing optimization strategies that mainly focus on a human audience rather than search engine robotics mechanism and optimize the site in order to improve real clientele behavior under search engine guidelines, facts, rules and policies.

It refers to the statement “Google is Anti-SEO” and hence discard any exploitative and descriptive methods to improve keywords ranking in search results. So the idea of white hat SEO tactics is to promote a website without any tricks or black hat SEO techniques to facilitate users queries.

The white hat SEO routine should consider all google’s optimization guidelines, googles updates so far, penalties checklists and the foundation of google core algorithm.

If you are optimizing your site naturally and not pushing hard enough to manipulate results to grow your site over time, then for sure you are under control with white hat SEO optimization approach. Though here are some points to consider if you are looking for some ideas with white hat SEO procedures:

  • Using relevant title tags and description meta description as per the in-depth quality content.
  • Implementing keyword research techniques like applying LSI to develop content than keyword stuffing.
  • A good navigation practice to drive any user to corresponding pages.
  • Using different elements like text, video, images as a part of the content and optimize individually.
  • Accounting user metrics data for optimization including bounce rate, average time spent, new/returning visitors, overall session and traffic pattern from various sources.
  • Deploying call to action button rather than using push sales, pop-ups and advertisement above the fold
  • Not trying to fool your site visitors with exploitative methods.
  • Focusing on all channel from where a user can drive to the website such as direct traffic sources, organic traffic sources, referrals and social media accounts .
  • Applying organic link building strategies to all pages and working on natural variation than focusing on a single page or homepage and a single keyword for that page.

As google is so focused on its users and exact match relevant results for their queries, application of white hat techniques will always add value to your keywords ranking and overall website performance avoiding any risk whenever google came up with new updates.

If you are looking for white hat SEO technician or SEO analyst to improve your site performance organically, grow traffic from different sources naturally and improve numbers of potential keywords ranking on google, you can write to me at writetomehemanta@gmail.com or add me on skype: hemantamaharjan for free consultation to plan further to promote your business online.

What is Click Through Rate (CTR) in Search Analytics?

By SEO Practitioner in SEO, Web Analytics
what is ctr?

In analytical term, click through rate is a measurement of a total number of clicks against the total number of an impression. More the clicks mean more users drive to the website and a high chance of business conversion. It is a machine learning user metrics to understand a scope to convert your traffic into the business goal and hence is one of the main factors to consider during data analytic and taka a reference for further optimization and changed strategy. For different campaigns with equal impression counts, CTR helps to determine which campaign is performing good and has more potential to success.

CTR can be either for search results page for google, yahoo or bing, facebook advert, google Adwords campaign in display/search network, email newsletter campaign, banner ads or any other marketing campaign that aim to provide an opportunity for any user to click on something they are looking for.

 

How to calculate CTR?

Mathematically, CTR is calculated as

CTR= (Total number of clicks/Total number of impression)x100%

For example: In search analytic, if total impression counts for one keyword is 150 and total number of clicks is 20, then, mathematically the CTR for that keyword is

CTR(Keyword)=20/150=13.33%

For advertisement, it would be

CTR= (Ad clicks/Ad Views)x100%

The Same rule applies for other keywords and marketing campaigns.

 

CTR and SEO

In Search engine optimization process, every online business aims to have the top position in search engine results for invaluable business opportunities. This is because the average impression counts and CTR for position 1-10 in the first phase are higher than in any other pages and the CTR decreases as we move to second, third and consequent pages. Even first, second and third position in the first page of search results has more average CTR than other position on the same page.

In SEO campaign, while working on keywords, people often target their main keywords to rank in top position. This is an ideal case but most of them miss a catch to identify other keywords including long tail keywords that have higher CTR despite low impression counts, low search volume, and low competitions .These keywords can take a huge share of business goals and could be enough to run a business.

For example, You can have some keywords with 1000 impression in search results and 25 clicks resulting 2.5% CTR. But you can also have some keywords with 50 impression counts and 25 clicks resulting 50% CTR. The summary is we should not miss the keywords that have 50% CTR despite only 50 search results impression counts and should optimize to grow more.

 

How to maximize your CTR?

Maximizing you CTR is not a one time job. It depends on user behavior, trending keywords and how you often optimize your campaign to grow your impression counts. Though here are some ideas to consider for CTR growth:

  • Increase your impression counts
  • Optimize your campaign for user
  • Focus on relevancy of content, images, tags etc
  • Use compelling headlines and text.
  • Apply call to action button
  • Check what your competitors are doing
  • Understand the behavior of users and re-optimize your campaign

If you not sure with your current CTR and looking for a more online business opportunity with search analytic, contact me for a free SEO consultation, analytic report, and suggestions to improve your CTR and grab an opportunity to get a business from potential keywords that have high CTR you might be missing.

Local Reviews in Google – Google+ is Not Mandatory NOW

By SEO Practitioner in Google
google map review

Google has now officially updated some major changes on Local reviews withing Google maps. Good news to those all who don’t like to take any hectic of managing google plus as one more social profile and still would like to contribute to local business with reviews. This is because Google has dropped the requirement of Google plus account association in order to add reviews.

Besides Google has updated the user interface for the same function and the catch is Gmail account is still compulsory to contribute your reviews to the local business on Google map.

 

write a local review

 

google account for review

 

sign in for google reviews

 

What is Bounce Rate?

By SEO Practitioner in Web Analytics
what is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is a mathematic figure used for web traffic analysis to understand the users behavior for the pages that they landed from various sources. It is a one of major UI/UX metrics to consider your complete website navigation architecture including how your pages are interlinked with each other.

 

Bounce Rate Calculation

Bounce rate of any page is calculated as a percentage of total bounces per total entrances.

Mathematically,

Bounce rate = (Total Bounces/Total Entrances)X100%

For example: If we have 100 total visitors for the website homepage and 40 of them bounces back without surfing other pages in website, then it’s bounce rate will be

Bounce rate=(40/100)x100%
=40%

The overall website’s bounce rate is calculated in the same fashion.

 

Optimal Bounce Rates For Different Industries

As per google analytics benchmark, the bounce rate of an average website is 40% but in regular practice, it depends on the type of campaign, nature of a content, main motive of the page and how overall conversion is tracked. So depending upon the types of online businesses, the standard value of bounce rate should be following:

  • Content websites 40-60%
  • Lead generation sites 30-50%
  • Blogs 70-98%
  • Retail sites 20-40%
  • Service sites 10-30%
  • Landing pages 70-90%

The higher bounce rates that its optimal value as per industries is one of the major signal that affects ranking and overall website performance. There are numbers of reasons that contribute to high bounce rates and some issues to consider are:

  • Poor Site Architecture
  • Nonrelevant contents
  • Confused Navigation
  • Different from basic design convention
  • Website not optimized for mobile devices
  • Unwanted ads, pop-ups and push sales
  • Not having content variation
  • No use of whitespaces
  • Readability issues with formatting
  • Autoplay audio and videos

However, a user might leave the first landed page if they’ve found the relevant content as per their requirement and bounced back happily. So in this case, we can use the concept of remarketing by pitching relevant topics or offers to drive to other pages so that our bounce rate remains optimal.

 

How to improve bounce rate?

As we have numbers of reasons that can assure to our high bounce rate, we can apply following counterpart to obtain our ideal bounce rate and improve over time

  • Pitch relevant and in-depth content
  • Focus on site structure, navigation, user interface and user interaction
  • Use sidebar and footer section for remarketing
  • Optimize your anchor text and link among pages
  • Learn with self-experience and don’t practice or use anything that you don’t like when you are surfing other websites or pages.

RankBrain and Google Search Results

By SEO Practitioner in Google
RankBrain

RankBrain is one of the most important ranking signals among hundreds of other things inside google’s search engine algorithm that is based on machine learning artificial intelligence system.

Unlike googles earlier updates, RankBrain is a modification of google core algorithm to display meaningful results that the user searches for.

RankBrain is also considered as a part of Hummingbird, google’s one of the key updates that relies on complete meaningful search term than the individual word in that query. The basic idea is to provide best, precise and relevant results for given search term.

The fundamental of RankBrain in search results is to display results on the basis of how computer understands the given queries generalizing the phrases, analyze the logic and process results like having a conversation with users like in real World. So the concept relies on related search analytics and user metrics that impacts on search results and gets improve over time.

In the verse of supplying relevant results for search queries, Google always focused on branding, quality, consistency, reputation, user metrics, authorization, links and social proof, this time, google is exactly trying to communicate with users considering its all other signals. So as per search results, it might not have the exact-match keywords used in the search query, rather the results are displayed in terms of relevancy considering other googles ranking signals plus local search results.

The future of SEO relies on google’s earlier algorithm and updates , and as google announced RankBrain is third most powerful ranking signals of all, being a SEO practitioner I believe in working and planning SEO strategies considering all earlier guidelines and experiences that facilitate users with precise results.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and SEO

By SEO Practitioner in SEO
Latent Semantic Indexing

LSI is a mathematical technique that google algorithm has incorporated to display search results by identifying the patterns in the relationship between terms and concepts with respect to the search queries made.

The approach of Google for LSI algorithm is to avoid repetition of same keywords all the way through the content yet having a relevant content under the given search queries. So using LSI keywords, it adds variation to your content and still get a score on those keywords for ranking without any risk of keyword stuffing penalty.

For example, if your main search keyword was “seo education,” the target should not be on single keywords like seo, education or seo education in relevant content. You should use LSI keywords such as “seo marketing education”, “learn search engine optimization”best seo education”, “seo training” ,”google free seo tools”, “learn seo free”, “seo for higher education”, “search engine education”, “seo learning”, “seo college” etc

There are different methodologies how you can identify and implement LSI keywords. Search results are one of the best sources to find LSI queries. When you try to find something on google, with entering your keywords in google search box, it will automatically display a number of semantic search terms at the bottom of your search engine results page.

lsi on serp

 

Another practice could be identifying from a google keyword planner tool that suggests the numbers of these semantic keyword options.

adwords LSI ideas

 

Apart from google sources, there are numbers of the free third party online LSI generator tools like LSIgraph.com from where you can undertake and implement these LSI terms to your website for optimization, content development, and link building.

LSI generator

 

Whatever the methodologies and practices you integrate to enhance your SEO campaign, the main keywords, and LSI keywords should come into place naturally and the focus should be always on facilitating the users experience with relevant contents that they are looking for.