We know that Google works as optimizer. Initially, it scans the results and present the results according to the priority. The domains with highest number of visitorship, excellent content and comments, makes it apex web page in terms of results. If two content are similar, then most likely Google will notify the one with better elements. This might be one of the reasons why always scraped data do not win on the Search Engines.

Unfortunately, this could be the most valid reason that why Google reveal the results with some misconceptions. There are some sites that steal the content from the original ones and Google starts giving the wrong results because it works on the concept of optimization. Consequently, It perceives the entire matter as authentic and wrongly, emphasize on the fake web domains. The user who is quite innocent doesn’t understand the major complexities of fake web domains and he blindfoldidly, starts visiting these websites.

However, the scraping has fight for its survival because Google may come to know about these fringe activities from other sites and can take strict action against these websites who are involved in breaking the ethics of cyber world.

So, if you want to implant your website on top pages then you must consider the importance of pouring fresh content in it. This will make your web dome special and most transparent of all. Your website will always be accredited genuine by the users.

Simultaneously, this is the complete process by which Google scan its results:-

- From

• pings.
• repeated crawling.
• sitemaps.
• other links pointing to the site.

This will force user to go through your website and it is assured that these pages will be approached daily. Google will always choose the web domain as the rarest of all because transparency holds certain value in the web world.

And it has always been said that adding dates to the URL is not necessarily telling Google that the content is fresh. And we webmasters don’t really need to do it, rather focus on the content upgradation, although adding dates on the webpage/URL is a nice usability tip !

There had been an interesting rise in the number of users accessing their mobile phones to browse a website. This is infact going to be an increasing phenonmena in 2009 because if you go by statistics, the shipments for smart phones are set to grow by 29% around the globe, not to forget that there had been a sharp downfall of 9.1% in mobile handset market. And if you think it happens in developed nations only, then you may be perhaps taken by surprise to know that a web-enabled mobile phone is more saleable in the so-called developing nations thus making it attractive market for companies. And in such scenario, the experience of mobile web users should also be given attention and importance as it would affect the busines directly. Moreover, now a user will share his/her experience in real n virtual world as well.

Like if a teenager finds a certain website not so appealing and friendly on her phone, a client is lost for the site and she would share her frustation with her pals straight away online. Guess even worse, she can express her irritation by showing that site to her friends on her iPhone also. Hence the credibility for brand increases( or decreases) as per functioning of your websites.

And with that some points comes to mind,like:

• What is the impact of mobile users on your business?
• Who are the users of mobile web ?
• How can you bring out a mobile-specific website that works wonder?

If you do not have a technical bent then you can look for the ways you can develop a mobile strategy and if you are technical expert then you find these solutions as a solid base for moblie development.

Browsing a website on a mobile device generally reduces the conversion rate, mainly because of usability issues:

• In a mobile device, navigating the web pages is quite tedious as the users are confronted with a small screen and some touch screen controls.
• Web pages designed for traditional desk-bound users are often too bloated for our limited cellular network, resulting in laborious / terminally long page load times.

A user may not wish to buy something online while browsing your site on his mobile phone though there are chances that he may come back with desktop/laptop browser to complete his transaction if he find initial information interesting and captivating.
For instance, Paul may visit your website over his airtel to check out the price of a sweat shirt, because he is looking forward to get a fair deal,though he may be standing near a sports apparel store. In such scenario if the desired webpage takes too much time in downloading then you have a potential buyer as well as his future visits will also become doubtful.


Top Design Tips for Mobile Sites

Users want a familiar experience, so take your design cues from the navigation styles on mobile handsets and not from the conventional web experience. On a mobile device, users feel more familiar with drilling down through menus to access the content, rather than just having navigation and content on the same page, which will definitely make it crowded and messy. This way a more attractive and user-friendly mobile website can be made.

We find a good range of mobile phones screen resolutions - maintaining design as minimal and linear as far as possible to optimise the experience for all, whilst maintaining page load times really low. Keep in mind that users don’t have to jump around the page. Many devices still only have up or down functionality and non-linear design will make the user experience a nightmare, resulting in low conversion rates and poor ROI.

Make the most of your real estate by avoiding large pictures or logos. Page real estate is so valuable on a mobile site due to constraints in screen resolution and the need for large, clear buttons and boxes: images will add little value to most pages.

Always warn the user before you transfer them from mobile to traditional website. Don’t link to the full site from your mobile homepage: all content important enough to be linked to from here deserves to be redesigned for mobile.


Conclusions

Understand your mobile users even though you cannot visualise a mobile-specific web presence for your brand as for now. Because the world of mobile web users is going to grow fast.

There should be difference in the traditional website and the mobile site of your company, keeping in mind the core users of both. Mobile users will judge your site by the way of their simple and immediate goals and how rapidly they are met, and they will judge your site in the mean course. Also if you fail to live upto the users' expectation, there is much possibility of brand failure and that too publicised in the world of web.

Right now, only a few mobile websites are offering flawless services. Thus,having a good knowledge of users and their goals will not only give the edge over others, but will also ensure a strong customer base.

In case your web pages do not appear on the first page of Google, your presence becomes quite less on the Internet as most visitors are lazy enough to scroll down the front pages.

“ExactFactor” will help you quickly enhance your site's ranking in all major search engines. The immediate benefit is an increase in quality traffic that leads to higher sales. Its efficient search engine optimization techniques and systems ensure you will get the best personal ranking performances for your site and keywords, while taking into account all aspects of search engine methodology.

Although there are so many good websites indicating how to enhance your search rankings, now you can easily monitor your website's rankings via email alerts with Exact Factor tool. You simply have to provide the address of your website and the search keywords that you are looking to rank for - “Exact factor” will send an email alert when pages from your site hit the front page of Google, Yahoo or Windows Live Search.

Not only this, you can track your competing website and know if they ever manages to upbeat your search engine ranking position. The service is free with a limit of 50 keywords per site. It allows you to choose the default google.com for analyzing search engine rankings or select country related domains as google.co.in for local search.

How important is my search engine ranking?

Search engines are a great marketing tool. Nearly 80% of traffic to the average site comes from search engines. About 30 million visitors enter queries in Google.com per day. Anyone arriving at your site through a search engine is looks for a particular product or service and thus is a potential client. There are three major players in the search engine market: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live. with unique site positioning algorithm that analyzes and sorts the results by specific order.

If someone types a specific query in the search engine and your site appears in the results for that query, there is much greater probability that he will click on your site. Most searchers don’t browse after the third page. Recent research has shown that most of users, if they click, will click on one of the first seven listings in a search engine.

For instance, if someone searching for "Fiat Grande Punto" car details and you find your auto portal on top listings in search engine, there is greater probability that your site will get good click giving good traffic to your website.

As a site owner, your target is to get into the top 30 results for specific queries. The higher is the position in the search engine result pages, higher is the traffic. You may have invested in professional and beautifully designed site, but if it is not ranked high on search engines, potential clients are lost to competitors having a higher ranking.

Google has recently released a Firefox add-on called “Page Speed”. Upon integrating with another addition known as “Firebug”, it helps web developers make their page faster. As per Google "Page Speed is a tool we’ve been using internally to improve the performance of our web pages,”

Page Speed is a combination of Firefox Add-on integrated with Firebug which we’ve been using internally to improve the performance of our web pages. When Page Speed is run , one gets immediate suggestions on how one can change web pages to improve their speed. For instance, Page Speed automatically optimizes images for you, giving a compressed image that you can use immediately on the web site. It also deals with issues such as JavaScript and CSS loaded by your page that wasn’t actually used to display the page, which reduces time the users spend waiting for the page to download and display.

In order to make use of it, after installing Page speed and restarted Firefox, expand Firebug and switch to the Page Speed tool tab. Move to your page, then click the “Analyze Performance” button. Soon you will get a handy list of things you did right, and things Google thinks you did wrong.

The latter can be expanded so you can read up on the help provided in regards to issues like “Leverage browser caching”, “Remove unused CSS”, “Combine external JavaScript” and so on also, you can click on the entry to be taken to a longer explanation.

Several tests are performed by Page speed on a site's web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are primarily based on a set of best practices known to foster the web page performance.

Helpful suggestions on how to improve performance and set of scores for each page, are the information webmasters get, when they run Page speed.

Advantages of using Page Speed :

* It makes your site load faster.
* It keeps Internet users engaged with your site.
* It reduces your bandwidth and hosting costs.
* It improves the web! "

Alternative to Yahoo's YSlow, but there are some differences beyond the fact that it is Open Source which will hopefully allow a community to grow :). Infact, Steve Souders, one who developed the first version of YSlow at Yahoo is now working with Google. Don’t know if he is been involved in this project but he has got a wealth of experience in website speed optimization, so hopefully they picked his brain a bit when designing Google Page Speed.

Find more on How to use Google Page Speed and Download Page Speed.

Twitter Search is the most promising aspect of Twitter. The real power of Twitter is the data in the aggregated form. Whether it is Google or any other company they all are interested in Twitter. Why? Not because they are the flavor of the month but because belief, fidelity which companies possess for Twitter. So, Twitter is paralleled to data, everything depends on data.

The most interesting is the beginning of Twitter Search in linking where people may tweet and index. Like if we want to get index Maruti Ritz on Twitter, all we need to tweet it. this step would update twitter search. It states that the twitter page would no longer be only textual tweets but millions of web pages be embedded into it. There would be spam, may be more as in comparison, but the curiosity of the user would nurture it.

Similarly the Twitter search will be indexing the contents of the web pages. This is what Google is doing. Well, Twitter search will not be indexing as many pages as Google does. But the point is that Twitter Search is a different engine in its own way and is not been launched to replace Google. Twitter Search is comparatively a small, potentially curated and real time engine.

The biggest plus point of Twitter Search is the time. It is faster than Google as tweets can be send faster in comparison to the web page which are slow to be build. Well it is not clear that how twitter is going to use web page data in search results.

But the thing which is clear is that Twitter is looking better options to tailor search results. twitter launch would be real interesting in the coming months until and unless Twitter is single and stands still and not Google buys it first.

Analyze your current state

Before you start your SEO implementation, it is a good practice to analyze current state of your site content. Evaluate your goals and priorities. Determine your plan of attack. After you implement a solution do not expect immediate results. Don't be tempted to go straight for a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign such as Google AdWords to promote your site. As I pointed in the Introduction section, what determines your site's placement involves more than one factor.

"SEO Implementation Lifecycle"

Why links matter

PageRank is a value that Google gives to a page based on the number of links pointing to your site. So how do you get other sites to link (or backlink) to your site? You can try the following methods:

• Register with major search engines (Yahoo, OpenDirectory, MSN).
  
• Send press releases about your product or idea that generates free links.
  
• Hire an expert to write something positive about your product and publish in an industry newsletter, magazine or a local newspaper.
  
• Ask to be a featured or sponsored client in a major portal site.
• Ask employees to mention you and your products
• Make reciprocal link requests
• Mention your site in major Blogging sites, Yahoo Answers and Google Groups
• Respond to blogs or queries in Yahoo Answers (just don't over-do it)
• Syndicate your content through external RSS feeds to different sites
• Consider ad campaigns through Google AdWords

Re-engineer your site content

Here are a few basic things you can do to clean up your site and make it Search Engine friendly.

1. Site Hierarchy and text links

Most sites employ DHTML, Flash, Frames and other fancy objects to enhance the end user's experience. While these objects are great to captivate the users attention, Google and other search engines can't understand them and will have trouble interpreting them while crawling your sites. Google introduced the concept of Sitemap that enables Google to discover your site, structure and diagnose any potential problems. Sitemap is especially important if your site has a lot of dynamic content, is brand new, has a lot of archived pages that are not linked well.

Once you created your sitemap, you upload it to your web server's root directory. Use Google's WebMaster tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/) to add your new sitemap. Next time when Google spiders your site, it will index all the URL's it finds in the Sitemap.

To see the specific URLs included in the Google index, do a Google search for site:[yourdomain.com]


2. Use Targeted Keywords

Create a narrow targeted keywords list that you think identifies your site properly.
For example, one would taget new cars in india for a cars website, and tata nano price for a Tata Nano page on the website.
Now Once you identify the keywords, what do you do with them? One obvious thing to do is to add them inside the Meta Keywords tag. In addition, use the keywords generously throughout your page content. Search Engines love a site with fresh descriptive content filled with keywords. This means constantly updating your site with new, fresh content is vital to your overall SEO strategy.


How do you measure SEO?

Measuring your returns on SEO investments is crucial. But once you made the enhancements to your site, do not expect to see immediate results. It could take anywhere from a month to 3 months to see any significant impact on your traffic numbers (assuming you implemented the right SEO steps).

Use a Business Optimization tool like Google Analytics or Omniture to analyze visitors and traffic source data. On Google Analytics, you find a section on Traffic Sources. It provides insight into how visitors find your site, whether through
a) keyword search,
b) or backlinks or
c) people directly typing the site url.


Google Analytics also allows you to see other traffic variables such as
a) Absolute Unique Visitors
b) Page Views
c) Bounce Rates
d) Average Time Spent
In addition you can also set conversion goals to determine how many of those leads converted to an effective sale, which is a key way to measure ROI.Tracking in helps you evaluate the efforts of your marketing strategy whether it is a PPC campaign, banner ads or natural SEO. Tracking also allows you to gain visibility into your end user's behavior and time spent on each page, which allows you to make a decision on where to place ads.


Where to go from here?

After you implement the SEO techniques and realized the improvement in your site ranking, you can't expect to sit back and relax. You need to constantly monitor your ranking and your competitor's ranking and take appropriate steps to stay on top of the list. A continuous enhancement to optimization techniques, keywords tuning, site content, blog entries is necessary to keep your site rank higher in the search results. To outdo your competition, you have to keep your content fresh. This will not only bring new visitors to your site, but also keep the visitors returning to your site.

Some Useful links

Google WebMaster Tools - http://www.google.com/webmasters
Google Analytics               - http://www.google.com/analytics
Google AdWords               - http://adwords.google.com
Yahoo Answers                 - http://answers.yahoo.com

Engagement with Visitor is a very important aspect for any Landing Page. Some points are covered here to know how well your landing page engage dropping visitors.

1. Does the headline on the page follow the same theme as the keyword phrase and ad creative?

Continuity::Maintaining continuity through the entire search life cycle will increase conversion.
Try to have separate ad creative and landing pages that match each of your major keyword phrases.


2. Does the headline sell a benefit and make the reader want to continue reading the copy?

Engaging Headline::The primary purpose of the headline is to attract attention and persuade the visitor to read the copy, and ultimately convert.


3. If you have a form, is it requiring only the absolute minimum amount of information?

Minimize Form Fields::The more fields the visitor has to fill out, the lower conversion rate you'll likely experience.
If there's optional data you'd like to have, try asking for it on the "Thank you" page after the visitor has already given you the must-have information.
Also, make it easy for your prospect to fill in their information by automatically moving the cursor to the next field in fixed format fields, and test populating the city and state fields based on the zip code entered.


4. If you have optional fields, have you clearly identified required versus optional data entry fields on all forms?

Identify Required Fields::Since you'll want to limit the amount of data input required on your forms, if you have fields that are not required, be sure that your visitor clearly sees these are optional fields by using either the customary asterisk or bolding on your required fields.


5. Are all data entry fields clearly labeled with examples if necessary (555-123-4567) and contain format validation with appropriate feedback?

Field Labels::Some studies have shown that placing the field label above the field allowed users to "capture" both the label and the input more easily, resulting in faster completion times.
The drawback to this presentation, though, is the need for more vertical space.
Try to keep your formatting as accommodating as possible.
If you do require a specific format, such as a phone number, specify clearly the required format on both the form and the error message that pops up if the field is completed incorrectly.


6. Does it take 2 or fewer clicks to complete the desired action?

Minimize Clicks to Action::Don't force your visitor to do anymore than the absolute minimum required work.
Every additional click may decrease conversion.


7. Are all images optimally compressed and does the page load quickly?

Page Loading Time::There are more factors besides image size that impact the load time of your page including total page size, number of externally linked CSS files, number of external scripts, hosting company and more.


8. Have you limited navigation away from this page other than a privacy link and a link to your home page on your logo?

Limiting Navigation::In most cases, removing navigation improves conversion.
By giving your visitor navigation options, you give them an easy way to jump away from your offer and result in possibly reducing conversion.


9. Are credibility/trust indicators apparent above the fold or near the submit button?

Building Credibility::Affiliation with industry associations and organizations that advance marketplace trust such as the Better Business Bureau, increase the comfort and confidence level your visitor has in doing business with you.
Prominently display these insignias/logos close to your form.


10. Does your action button convey the benefit, e.g., Download Whitepaper, or Get Quote Now, instead of Submit?

Descriptive Action Button::The action button is the last chance for your interested prospect to change their mind.
Reinforce the deliverable or, even better, the benefit in the text of the button.
Also, including other buttons such as a "Reset" button may hurt conversion.
When you've successfully gotten your prospect to complete the form, make it absolutely clear what to do next.
For e.g. Check out the Get Discount button on Mahindra Xylo webpage to convey visitor to get discount.

11. Does the action button stand out and call attention to itself?

Prominent Action Button::The action button should be quite a bit larger than the surrounding text and stand out on the page.
There is no definitive color that converts the best across all applications; however, you'll want to at a minimum test a green, red and plain grey button.
In some circumstances, such as an offer for a higher end service or a B2B whitepaper, a non-promotional looking plain grey button might perform the best.


12. Do you have a short compelling message immediately above your call-to-action?

Tell Them What To Do::Conversion rates tend to increase when you place an action statement at the top of your form, for instance, "Start here to receive your free 10 minute online consultation".

Related Reads on Landing Page Analysis:
- 10 Tips Marketing Effectiveness
- Offer Clarity
- Readability of copy