SEO Lion’s Blog

Do you need a mobile version for your site?

seolion — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:10:06 +0000

This is a stage when there are many websites going mobile. I have already discussed what is the difference between a mobile site and a normal website and some basics to build a mobile version of a site.

Before you actually put in an effort to build a mobile website, you should evaluate whether you really need one. The reason why I am on this point is because of the cost of building a mobile website and the efforts put on it. Do you really need one?

How to find out the real need of a mobile website?

This isn’t a very difficult thing to know, provided you are already using some web analytic tool such as Google Analytics. What you can try is to find out how many of your main website visitors are from mobile devices.

If you are using Google Analytics, you may use the advanced segment for mobile devices . Using this segment you can have a deeper look into your mobile visitors, see the traffic numbers, conversion etc. You can compare this with the overall numbers and figure out whether there are considerable number of mobile visitors to your site and they need to be taken care of, with the addition of a mobile friendly website.

Another solution I can suggest is to use a specialized solution called PercentMobile which a free mobile analytics tool. It gives a very important and straightforward information about a site on which it is implemented – The number of mobile visitors to your site. You need not have to struggle much to get this important information. Apart from this, it also gives other useful insights about your mobile visitors such as pages visited, mobile phone, resolution, and geo segmentation. You can add PercentMobile to your main website, which can tell how many percent of mobile visitors to it. This information is enough for us to decide whether we need a mobile website or not.

You can try out PercentMobile, it free! All you need is an invitation code. Here it is: ‘avinash‘ (without quotes of course).

Avinash Kaushik discussed PercentMobile in his latest webinar. As per him, its a very good free Mobile Analytics tool you should not miss out.

Again, the above is not a one time decision. If you have decided not to go with a mobile website now, it may not hold as a wise decision in a later stage, hence you need to keep an eye on your mobile visitors, the increase in their traffic share, conversion etc. The ones explained above can help you track it and help you on your take on a mobile version of your site.

I appreciate questions & comments..

Web Analytics JS code placement – Top or Bottom of a page?

seolion — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:48:06 +0000

This is one area many get confused – where should the web analytic JavaScript code to paste should go on a page.

There are many places where it can be placed actually, and in fact they are correct to the scenario for that particular page!

Let me explain each placement location in detail

Bottom of the page, just above closing tag: This is the most widely used placement for JS based web analytic solutions. It has its own advantage and disadvantage.Your page might contain a number of elements. The sequence on which these elements are loaded are based on the position at which they are included on a page. The elements (images, scripts etc) on the top portion of a page load prior to the one at the bottom.Consider that you have placed the web analytics code on top portion of the page immediately after opening tag and assume that you are using Google Analytics. Since Google Analytics is free, many users will be using it, and thus provides a heavy load on the server most of the time. Google is a great company who know to tackle these situation, but consider a worst case – server is overloaded and the requests are queued at the server. Your web page will wait for the Google Analytics tracking code to load and since it is at the start of the page, it will give an empty page to the visitor which is struggling to load the contents!Is that a good thing you would like to see as a visitor to a web page? I am sure you will be impatient.On the other side if you have the code at the bottom of the page, the visitor is provided with the page content before the web analytics code is being loaded. So this placement – at the bottom of the page evolved from the usability perspective.Disadvantage: As mentioned, the web analytics data capture begins after the page is loaded. This gives us the risk of the visitor closing the browser or navigating to another page by clicking a link. Result: web analytics data isn’t captured for that particular page / visitor.
Top of the page, inside element: You have the potential risk of having a slow loading web page in this kind of implementation, but here you tend to get a bit more web analytics data being captured compared to the method mentioned above. User sees the page after it is been tracked. This placement is widely used in eCommerce shopping carts and checkout pages. If you are using Google Analytics and capturing eCommerece transactions, you must use this placement to make proper calls to eCommerce tracking methods of GA.

Inside

of a page: This is not a widely used method, but can be handy in certain situations. Imagine you have another set of JavaScript code which accidentally has a variable name or a function name same as Google Analytics which you are using as the web analytics tool. Here you will have a conflict and either one or both of the code snippets malfunction. If you place the web analytics tracking code inside and above rest of the JS, you might eliminate this risk. Please Note: This particular method is suggested for Google Analytics. If you are using other web analytic solutions, please contact your vendor before using this method!

I would like to repeat, the most widely used JS tracking code placement is at the bottom of the page, just above . Tracking all visitors isn’t important most of the time, but to make the website function well to the visitor is the first and foremost criteria – which need not be forgotten!

Mobile Device specific reports in Google Analytics using Advanced Segments

seolion — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 10:49:08 +0000

I have gone through few interesting blog posts on tracking mobile devices using Google Analytics.

Basically I hve seen three methods:

Using a duplicate profile and using an include filter, to include traffic from mobile device operating systems.
Using the advanced segment feature of Google Analytics, creating an advanced segment of mobile device operating systems.
Using the advanced segment feature of Google Analytics, creating an advanced segment of mobile device screen resolutions.

Of the three, I feel the last two are better, considering the fact that we need not switch profiles to see mobile reports and reports containing all reports, you are saving a duplicate profile. Remember there is an upper limit for the number of profiles you can have in an account.

I have created these particular segments and would like to share it with you.

You can add this Advanced segment for mobile device traffic in Google Analytics based on Operating systems by clicking the preceding link. During installation of this segment on your account, you can actually verify how I have created this segment. I have actually used the condition ‘containing’ specific words in the OS names than actually giving the exact names.

Thanks to Bryson Meunier for his advanced segment using screen resolutions, read the post at http://www.brysonmeunier.com/mobile-analytics-with-google-analytics/ . I have modified his segment to include devices with higher screen resolutions and you can download Advanced segment for mobile devices on Google Analytics based on Screen Sizes by clicking the preceding link.

Test both the segments above and contribute your ideas to improve them and share with everyone. You can contribute to this initiative by suggesting any OS which is missing in list and by testing this segment on your account, or a device’s screen resolution which isn’t covered in the regex.

Post your thoughts!

I’m now a Google Analytics Qualified Individual with 100% score!

seolion — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:20:13 +0000

Google introduced test and certification for Google Analytics last March, since then It was running in my mind to complete it. I was preparing for my Implementation certification in Omniture SiteCatalyst, so thought going at GAIQ will be something good to start with.

Anyways Google Analytics and Omniture SiteCatalyst are entirely different web analytic tools, but getting certified in both is certainly a value addition to my resume, I have now cleared GAIQ with a maximum score of 100%

You can view my GAIQ test record at the official test site. Well, that shows my real name! (SEOLion is my nickname, please read my about page to know more about me)

Here is my certificate from Google Analytics which is valid for next 18 months!

Well, getting a high score in GAIQ may not be tough, I am sure not many get the magical number of 100%, luckily I have it!

GAIQ Preparation

Google has provided a comprehensive study material to prepare for GAIQ (Google Analytics Individual Qualification) at Google Conversion university. One should have gone through the material completely and understood key points discussed in order to tackle some of the tricky questions at the test.

The primary point to start with is a Google Analytics account. Since its free, you can try implementing on your website / blog. This I would say must to understand how Google Analytics captures data. After implementing GA code on to the site, you should have validated and seen that all pages are being tracked and shown on the report. This is the basic implementation. Now comes cross-domain tracking. This scenario is similar to tracking on a third party shopping cart without breaking the user session. Advanced implementation includes event tracking. I have experimented event tracking my selves, hence tackling questions related to that wasn’t tough for me.

Virtual page views is another important thing to know in Google Analytics, fortunately I had enough hands on on these while setting up goal tracking on an Ajax based site.

Filters, Goal conversion tracking related questions can be tackled if you have some prior experience working with these or you have gone through the material in detail and have done some extra research on these area.

Regular expressions is one of the tough area in the test, but one can make use of the regular expression builder to answer the questions.

I never had hands on on e-commerce tracking, but understanding the study material was sufficient to answer questions related to that.

Profiles in Google analytics was something new for me, but again the tutorial made it very easy to grasp it. I have duplicate profiles already put in action after learning them.

So overall my preparation lasted for a couple of weeks, could have been lesser if full attention was on this.

I would suggest one to take notes while going through the material. Having your account side by side can help you understand better. Since the test isn’t on an exam hall, you are free to have your account open in another browser, along with tools like regex builder. Going through the voice tutorial isn’t a very good option in between your test, your notes can get very handy if you have taken them enough.

Good luck to the ones about to take up GAIQ. Please let me know your queries, I am more happy to assist you.

What next?

Feel free to contact me if you feel I can be consulted for your project involving Google Analytics

Do you wish to follow my tweets in Twitter? Find my Twitter profile link in the contact page.

Building Mobile Friendly Websites from Scratch !

seolion — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:51:25 +0000

Are you looking ahead to build a mobile website? May be you need to first evaluate whether you really need a mobile version of your site. If you have concluded that you really need one, read the rmaining of this post.

‘Building Mobile Friendly Websites’ was one topic presented at the India SearchMasters conference at Google India on 28th of Feb 2009. Presenter Ankit Gupta from Google gave a very good insight to this topic, which made me digg a bit deeper into this subject. Thats why this post !

Why you need to build a website for Mobile devices?

When I write this post, I am parallely logged in to GMail from my SonyEricsson’s Opera Mini browser! Well I am not the only one who use internet on mobile, there are many people who use internet on mobile. If you think you are in India and it would cost a lot to use internet on mobile, you are wrong. I am paying just INR 99 to my operator Airtel per month to use unlimited internet time on mobile!

People use internet on mobile phones for various purposes, to check email, check stock quotes, browse websites, find a location on maps on mobile etc. You can even book rail tickets in india through mobile ! (Thanks to IRCTC’s java mobile app).

Mobile is a very tiny device which people can carry effortlessly, so adding internet on mobile can make people more comfortable while on the move, and they do browse websites on the move.

Suppose they know your website and they are regular visitors to your websites from a desktop/laptop, but while on the move, dont you think that they might visit your site on mobile? And dont you think that you need to pay attention to these visitors from mobile, when the numbers of these mobile internet users are growing worldwide?

Okay.. If you are convinced about the need to make your website mobile friendly, I have put in some information for you. Read on..

Is a mobile website different from a normal website?

I would like to post some myths and explanations here first

Mobile websites use .mobi extension -
.Mobi is just another domain extension.
Mobile websites are built on another domain, separate from the main site – This isn’t necessary, you can run mobile websites on the same domain using some server tricks or on a subdomain

Why a Mobile website is different from a main website?

Mobile phones are getting smarter and smarter every day, but still there are few limitations of a mobile browser

Screen Size – This is a major limitation on a mobile website, you can’t fit a normal webpage on a mobile browser.
WAP/XHTML compliance – Initial mobile browsers render only WAP pages, new mobile phones do render HTML/XHTML content.
JavaScript and Flash – Only modern mobile browsers execute JavaScript and have Flash lite to play flash content.

Putting Everything Together

Its very difficult to build a single website which run well on any browsers, as a developer one would have experienced the difficulty to make a cross browser compatible website.

Building a Mobile Website

So, a mobile website is not just a set of WAP files which can run on any browser, a good mobile website is one which renders in a WAP browser as well as run on a high end mobile browser, making use of JavaScript and Flash too.

How to make it possible?

For making an effective mobile website, one need a right mix of both server technologies as well as front end technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavScript etc.

On the presentation side, one has to build web pages which is very lightweight. It takes time to load on a mobile device with a slow connection, hence one has to be very careful not to add too much of decorations to the page and increase the size.

As the mobile devices have lesser screen size, we need to add content blocks vertically than horizontally. The traditional left navigation, content, right navigation will not work good for mobile phones and it would be an extra burden for the user to use the horizontal scroll to see content hidden on the right navigation.

Stick with a validated HTML code, it helps the browser to render the page properly.

So the core system must contain libraries which identify the type of mobile browser and decide what type of content which can be served to the browser. Say on a wap browser, the server responds with only wap content and on a browser like Google’s Android browser, respond with an interactive website content with JavaScript.

As I told server side libraries, dont panic that you need to create them your own, there are something like WURFL to make your job easier. Check out http://wurfl.sourceforge.net

WURFL is an XML configuration file which lists all the available mobile devices and its properties. One can match the user agent string to take out the properties of the device which is creating the web page request. You can identify the device properties such as display width and height using this file, along with other important parameters such as javascript and flash compatibility. Knowing these properties, serving a suitable version of mobile content becomes easy.

When someone types www.yourdomain.com from a mobile device !

As I explained earlier, a mobile website need not necessarily be hosted on anoter domain. In this case, when someone types yourdomain.com from a mobile browser, you can use the WURFL library to identify the browser and redirect the visitor to a mobile friendly page at m.yourdomain.com, or even you can show a mobile friendly page on the same URL without redirecting the visitor. I would prefer the second option, than using a different subdomain for mobile. Rest of the action continues on the mobile page. Optionally you can add an option to the visitor to switch back and forth between the mobile version and the standard website – this is again preferred.

This post is an attempt to clarify the doubts others raised when I was at the Indian Search Masters 2009 at Google India Bangalore. Please leave your valuable feedbacks and queries here, that would help me enhance this content better ! Thanks!

Will validated HTML boost SEO performance?

seolion — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:29:16 +0000

This question was raised by one of the attendees at India SearchMasters 2009 conference at Google India on 28th Feb 2009.

Adam Lasnik, Google’s Search Evangelist answered this query. Obviously the answer was, there is no direct correlation between validated code and SEO performance. What he meant was, the there will not be any ranking weightage given to a page because it uses validated code.

This does not mean that one should use any kind of crap HTML coding. It is still very important in SEO perspective. The primary requirement for any page to appear for targetted keyword is that the content should be properly crawled and indexed by GoogleBot.

In my earlier post I have mentioned how to use the w3c validator tool to fine tune your code correcting your validation errors.

If any Googler is reading this post, could you add your valuable comments about this topic?

A Day in Google – India Search Masters 2009

seolion — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:27:47 +0000

Well, it was my first webmaster event in my four year stint in internet marketing and webmastering so far.

I had a four hour sleep before rushing to Google India – Bangalore for the India Search Masters Conference 2009 – http://www.indiasearchmasters.com

Main purpose of this event was to make Indian Webmasters aware of various tools offered by Google (almost all free) to improve the quality of sites, make it appear in search results better and on how to make use of the detailed reports provided by Google Analytics. Also the aim was to interact with Indian webmasters and increase their interaction with Google through such forums where one get to know more about SEO/SEM/Web Analytics and get their website related issues sorted out by other experts.

The event started with a welcome note by Vivaik Bharadwaaj (Manager of the Google Search Quality Evaluation team in India and Korea) followed by a session on Google Webmaster Central and Best Practices by Adam Lasnik (Google’s first Search Evangelist).

I was eagerly waiting for the videos at youtube and good to see them in May, many days after the real event.
Here is Vivaik Bharadwaaj with his welcome note.

Google Webmaster Central and Best Practices by Adam Lasnik

After the coffee break, we had a session on Google Webmaster Help Forum and its use by Koti Ivaturi (Search Quality team member, Google) followed by a hands on session by Adam Lasnik.

In the hands on session, Adam evaluated Redbus.in and tarladalal.com for their strengths and weaknesses and areas for improvement in terms of better search results in Google. These sites were handpicked from the lots submitted by attendees (I didnt submit any ). I do it myselves J/K.

After the lunch break, Dr. Rajat Mukherjee (Group product manager at Google) presented a topic on Google Custom Search, various aspects and types of Google custom search and on how it can add value to a website.

This was followed by a much more technical and web development related topic by Ankit Gupta (Google, Bangalore) on Building Mobile Friendly Websites. As you know this blog is acessible on mobile (as it is validated XTML code) and I do know how to make a website mobile friendly, still this session was of great interest for me (I rate myself as a techie internet marketer, or in simple terms neither a 100% techie nor a 100% marketer ).

We had a session on Google Analytics and Website Optimizer by Deepak Kumar (Google Analytics team, works on Google’s Website Optimizer at Google Hyderabad) to mark the end of a very useful interactive web masters conference conducted by Google India.

I had an opportunity to pose for a snap with Adam Lasnik, though I wanted it with every presenter.

My friends and ex-colleagues at Natural Search, Narayan Kulkarni and Pradeep SV also attended the conference with me.

I do not have much snaps to share, but we were informed that the videos of these presentations will be soon available in Youtube. So I will update this post with those. Stay tuned.

[UPDATE]
This isn’t bad too.

India Search Masters 2009

Keywords in Image ALT attributes

seolion — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:41:31 +0000

What is an ALT Attribute for image and what is the use

You migt have seen the HTML image tag like alt=”ALTERNATE TEXT” />

The ALTERNATE TEXT is the one which gets shown in the browser just in case the image could not be loaded by the browser. It was primarily for saying what you wanted to convey from the message in the absence of this image.

As per the latest HTML and XHTML standards, its mandatory to keep alternate text in any image we use in a web page.

How this can be used in SEO ?

Image alt attribute is one way to say what your web page talk about. Search engine identify what your page talks about to rank them for search terms. For this search engine crawlers index websites and read the web page content and tags. Main areas a search engine spider will look are meta tags, document title, header tags , content and also alt tags. Alt tag says about an image, and image must be related to what the web page is about too, hence it makes sense.

Its always a good practise to incluse keywords inside the alt attributes for images. Again, do remember stuffing keywords can be harmful anywhere including alt attributes.

Cookie basics

seolion — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:18:06 +0000

What is a Cookie?

Cookies, HTTP Cookies, Web Cookies or Tracking Cookies are small pieces of data stored by a website on client system. This data is sent back to the web server which initially set the cookie for any additional hit to the web server.

What are the uses of cookies ?

Cookies are majorly used for user authentication and carrying the active session across different page visits by a visitor in a visit session.

Say user A has a login at xyz.com. There is a login page where A enters his login details and goes ahead browsing pages in XYZ.com. Now cookies can be a method by which xyz.com distinguish user A as the same person visiting different pages at xyz.com.

Web analytic tools use cookies to calculate unique visitors.

How a cookie is set ?

Cookies can be set by javaScript or any server sided script.

JavaScript cookie example

Setting a cookie
document.cookie = “COOKIE NAME”+”=”+”COOKIE VALUE”+ “;expires=”+”EXPIRY DATE”+”;domain=”+”DOMAIN”;

COOKIE NAME is a string as a name for cookie, Value is a piece of data, EXPIRY DATE is created by using Date.toGMTString() method of javascript. Expiry value and domain are optional.

Reading a cookie

Reading a cookie is not straight forward. All the cookies set for a domain are available in document.cookie variable as a string. We need to have utility functions to read a specific cookie.

PHP Example

Setting cookie
bool setcookie ( string $name [, string $value [, int $expire [, string $path [, string $domain [, bool $secure [, bool $httponly ]]]]]] )

Reading a cookie

The cookie is directly readable from the $_COOKIE global variable as $_COOKIE[$name]

Same origin policy related to browsers and cookies

In simple terms the explanation of same origin policy would be, if xyz.com sets cookie, only javascript code in a page at xyz.com or a server sided script at xyz.com can only read the cookie. This is a browser policy. If www.xyz.com sets the cookie, the same way only www.xyz.com page js code / server sided script can only read cookie.

Same cookie over all subdomains

If you would like to share the same cookie data across all subdomains of a site, say xyz.com, the domain parameter in a setCookie function should be .xyz.com (dot at the start of the base domain name. No www’s in it !!)

References

HTTP Cookie on WikiPedia

How web beacons perform web analytics data collection

seolion — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:07:19 +0000

How does web beacons work? if you have asked the question any time and would like to know still, read on !

If you are looking forward to know how does an analytics tag work or what is a web beacon, this post might help you.
A web beacon is usually a 1X1 pixel transparent image which gets embedded into a web page or an email message which acts as a way to exchange data between the client and the web analytics data collection server.

Lets see how web beacons really work and transfer data to the server.

Web beacons through javascript tags

The usual web analytics data collection method being used is by means of javascript tags. Each web page which need to be analyzed or tracked contains few lines of javascript code. Following is an example of statcounter code (which is taken out of this page itself, as I use statcounter as one of the web analytics tool. Its free!!)


<script type="text/javascript">

script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.statcounter.com/counter/counter_xhtml.js">script>
<noscript>

noscript>

Let me explain what this code does.

In first 4 lines of this code, few statcounter account related variables are being initialized (such as sc_project, sc_invisible etc). The last part of the code is inclusion of an external js file from the statcounter.

The code from statcounter does many things. For example it finds out the referring URL to the current page you are viewing, the page’s URL, title of the page, your browser’s resolution, your IP address etc etc).

Now comes the web beacon. The web analytics data is collected by the script from statcounter. And at the end of this initial process of collecting information, the data need to be passed to the statcounter server. This is achieved by use of a web beacon or image plug. An image request URL is formatted appending all the variables and values which need to be passed. Javascript outputs an tag with this URL as the src attribute. When the browser renders this image, the script at statcounter.com collects the data present in the query string and sends out the 1X1 transparent image as the response (it was a request for an image – remember that).

Web beacons as part of a mobile specific web page

You would have seen a