What is Site architecture in the context of SEO

We have a good definition of website architecture here. However, in the context of SEO, this means something more specific.

In this article, we talk much more about how well both the user and the Search Engine spiders can be given a clear view about the website. As an overview, we would say that

“A well-structured website should help deliver a seamless experience on navigation and at the same time keep the URLs meaningful and search engine friendly.” 

Why is Site architecture important for SEO?

Without a good architecture, the rankings of the website get heavily affected. Let us see how this happens. 

Use Case

As a use case, imagine a person who is a shoe dealer – “I am a dealer”. He has, say, jogging shoes and executive shoes as his products. He goes on to create a website and shows all the shoes and its variants in one page.

This, ofcourse, is an extreme use case. But trust us when we say this.

There are still websites made like this!

Coming back, “I am a dealer” is happy that he has showcased all the products with beautifully captured photos etc. And his website has menu items – Home, Products, Contact.

For our study, let us consider another shoe dealer – “I am an Awesome Dealer”. He has the same 2 products. But, he has created a well-structured website, with appropriate categorization. So his website’s menu items are – Home, Executive Shoes, Running Shoes, Contact.

User Visit – Analysis

A user arriving at the website of “I am a dealer” would want to buy a running shoes of a certain kind. He or she clicks on the Products page and sees a huge amount of shoes listed. Now, they have to go through the executive shoes also to arrive at the running shoes of their choice. Here, the user is made to go through such a clutter of irrelevant information. This reduces the chances of conversion.

Now, in this case of “I am an Awesome Dealer”, the user arriving at the website, in the very first look, understands the products that are available and only sees the page that the user is interested in. This makes the process swifter and helps the person to choose the right product within a short-time.

In addition, the usage of a filter & sort feature, especially when there are many products, would help the user greatly. These improve the chances of conversion pretty high.

Search Engine Spider – Analysis

For both the use cases, let us look at how the search engine spider views. 

In the first case, “I am a dealer”, the search engine understands that there is a product page. Then there are multiple products in that page. Since products have technical names, those will be used, which will reflect in the URL too. These would be terms which users don’t quite use commonly. This makes it hard for the search engine to clearly understand what the product is about. 

In the second case, “I am an Awesome dealer”, the search engine understands that this website has running shoes and executive shoes. This is because there are separate menu links or URLs used for this. 
So, when a user searches for, say, running shoes, the search engine picks and shows the website of “I am an Awesome Dealer” over “I am a dealer”. This gives a negative effect on the rankings of “I am a shoe dealer” and its Search Ranking would be lower. 

How to work on a good site structure for SEO?

Below are the quick high-level pointers for developing a good site structure:

• Plan well before developing the website.

• Match the products with the terms people commonly used

• Keep the user navigation in mind while creating categories and sub-pages

• Work on a, logical, internal-linking

Read more:

There are scores of articles written which describes the Site architecture at length and breadth. We would suggest you to google it and work on your website. If you find challenges in setting up an seo-friendly website structure, feel free to contact us. We will help you.

The post Site architecture designing for SEO first appeared on Macronimous Blog.

Agile process

For any old-time conventional software developer, “Agile” is a term which never finds a place in their dictionary of software development. However, it was quite shocking to know that the meeting in 2001 would result in a tremendous change in software development around the word “agile”. Software Development, owing to the robustness that it has to provide, could never be thought of being developed in an ‘agile’ fashion. This is something that never enters into the mind of software developers and the teams.

But, yes, this happened, and we have seen the benefits in our company.

In case, you are new to Web Development and especially ‘Agile web development’ here are some basics, before we move on to explaining how we do it. The definition as mentioned in the Agile Alliance is “Agile web Development or Agile software development is an umbrella term for a set of methods and practices based on the values and principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto.

We at Macronimous were swift to figure out the key advantages of Agile web Development and began to implement the same.

To begin with, our Agile Development Team follows the 12 principles as mentioned in the Agile Manifesto. The outworking of the 12 Agile principles by the Agile Team in Macronimous are as follows:

1. Customer Satisfaction: Customers are important for us and there is nothing that gets a higher priority than Customer Satisfaction. We believe and have experienced that continuous delivery of software keeps our customers highly satisfied. This does not begin after months of Sign Up, but asap, as short as a week and sometimes even lesser than that.

2. Software Modification: The pace at which the changes occur in the software industry is mind-boggling, which is not a reality for this industry alone. Hence, our customers from different industries have swiftly changing specifications and end up requesting changes in the software that we tailor-make. The agile development gives the customer a welcome note at the mention of requirement changes, even during later stages of development, unlike the traditional methodology. The highlight is the customer gets a software which is at par with their industry need.

3. Continuous Delivery: We have observed through the years that most businesses are an amalgamation of different processes. If there is a way to develop a couple of processes and then release it to the customer, they get to see the foretaste of what the entire software will look like. The advantage is an immediate and quick feedback. Not only this, this would give a method for tracking the progress.

4. Continuous Client Involvement: Collaboration of client and developers in a continuous manner is very much in the spirit of Agile. The immediate response to such a thought from the developers are, “they(the clients) are a disruption”. Quite not so! In fact, the reverse is true. The absence of continuous involvement from the client is quite disruptive as we have seen over the years that once the entire application is developed, the client comes in and expresses their expectation as a little different. No amounts of the requirements document and sign-ups have quite fixed this gap. This can be completely excluded by way of having a constant feedback through client involvement in the project continuously.

5. Optimized Use of Resources: Who builds the software matters the most. Who is your architect? Who is your coder? How well is the project implemented? These are all the questions that need a serious consideration. Not always experienced people are effective people. One of the blunders that we have observed in the outsource business is companies approaching us for resources having ‘n’ years of experience. Though we try to convey that we have a more efficient person with less than ‘n’ years of experience, too often they turn a deaf ear, and we end up providing what they ask. Since Agile uses flat hierarchy (no hierarchy) it is quite easy to handpick the right person to do the right job.

We haven’t finished yet! There are 7 more advantages that we know of which we will blog in the upcoming months.

In conclusion, our experience is that embracing the agile methodology helps us to deliver outstanding software applications swiftly.

Why not try implementing a couple of the above-mentioned in your team or company. We would be happy to share more details. Else, if you have already implemented, why not share your experience in the below comments section. We would love to hear from you.

The post 5 Proven Advantages of Agile web Development first appeared on Macronimous Blog.

More than a mobile phone, iPhone is looked upon as a lifestyle accessory, which is fun and exciting to use. The main strength of iPhone would be its retaining capability. Similar to most MAC users who would find it difficult to work on other platforms like Windows, most iPhone users will find it difficult to use other mobile phones. This will make the device and its applications grow for a long time.

iPhone application development is unique in a way that it is not mandatory to have a group of people working under an organization to create iPhone applications. It is also well suited for individuals to unleash their creativity and earn a handful of money and fame too. There are applications like tossing a coin, which has attracted a lot of downloads- Kudos to the thought.

Why not you be a part of this revolution? All you need to do is a MAC machine, an iPod or iPhone preferably, Internet connection and Click here to view our first part of the article – “Getting Started with iPhone Development”

The post Getting started with iPhone application development first appeared on Macronimous Blog.

Presume you have worked on site SEO and now you have got Good/desired SEO results with your website – you are on the top of your business competitors with your targeted business keywords.

Thinking of what’s next? Do you want to leave the site with the results that you have attained and  forget SEO since you have got your results? Nope. You shouldn’t.

If your targeted keywords generate enough revenue then think of how much competitive your keywords should be and how many of your competitors will be using those keywords and working for good number of quality links for their site

Search engine algorithm gives better value for frequently updated a site with keywords around the content and for a site that continuously gets quality backlinks.

Watch closely your competitor and find out what they do to compete for your site. Here are the factors that need to be frequently monitored:

1.  Content updates – It is always recommended to fine-tune and update your content at least once in a month or two with keywords around meeting keyword density and keyword prominence.

2. Brushing up your Keywords  – As always monitor your top ranking keywords and fine-tune it according to the number of total search results and compare with your competitor’s activity on those keywords of your target. Check out the areas in your content to know where you can focus your top keywords and build quality backlinks for those keywords as anchor text. Be sure to meet keyword density and do not stuff keywords.

3. External site link juice – Check whether all the links build exits with the time period since some may be removed or moved out to some inner folder level and the algorithm might not identify those backlinks. So, build equal and relevant links as an alternative to those links that had been masked and improve or retain the position with a good number of quality links.

4.  Monitor traffic – Analyzing your traffic is one of the essential factors were you need to know how a site performs with search engine organic clicks and directories or sites referrals. If you notice any drops in traffic, identify those areas and work on them to set your goal.

And also here is a set of questions which you can use it as a checklist that can help you to maintain SEO results and withstand the competition.

• Check how your competitors rank in Google, Yahoo and Bing for your keywords?
•  Have you updated your content that meets current target market and information?
• Are you tweaking your website structure for search engine friendliness that meets current algorithm?
• Are you working on building quality links regularly?
• Are you optimizing your site with the current popular keywords?
•  Are you analyzing your traffic to know from which location your visitors are coming from and optimize the site for those locations based search engines?

These important factors and checklist will help you to measure the site strength and weakness of your site. Now you should have known that search engine optimization is not one-time activity and search engine algorithm gets updated often and competitors fight for your top keywords position. Keep in mind, your website needs continues SEO in order to retain and improve your good SEO results.

Maintaining the SERPs (result/Position) are equally important as your SEO process. Continuous SEO within the process of SEO is necessary to generate  business queries. So keep up the good SEO, Always, do not think about stopping your activities.

The post How to maintain good SEO results you obtained after great efforts? first appeared on Macronimous Blog.

Keyword frequency analysis (single words, two and three words)

The tool helps to pick top 10 keywords in-group of single, double and three-word keyword phrases from a title, Meta description, Meta keyword and ALT-attributes. This tool can be used to find competitors on-page optimization work related to keyword phrases tags.

http://oyoy.eu/page/keywords/

Search engine SPAM detector

The tool analysis and finds whether a web page has followed keyword stuffing, doorway farms, hidden text through JavaScript or by CSS. This tool can be used to find web page aspects that search engines could consider as spam.

https://www.mimecast.com/content/spam-detection-tool/

Backlinks Checker Tool – Backlinks Watch

The tool helps for the best to find everything related to inbound links and covers anchor text, backlinks quality plus limitations with nofollow tag and inbound links Page rank.

http://www.backlinkwatch.com/

Keyword mapping tool

The Keyword Studio tool shows the relation between search terms/keywords in a graphic with a good interface for easier understanding of choosing the right combination of keywords.

https://www.keywordstudio.com

The post 4 SEO Tools you would have missed first appeared on Macronimous Blog.

Now let us see why you should avoid duplicating the content?

First of all, copying the content brings down the understanding of the concept. If you start understanding, it helps you grow. The scriptwriter should understand what something is and how it works. If you copy, you are missing out on that. You are just resurfacing the upper layer and not getting into layers underneath when you do that.

If you are not willing to write on your own, you will not know the exact intention and get stuck at one place. You will not know how to take it forward and the originality of the content will be missing.

While it is just easier to copy the content from someone else, why do you have to create a new one? If you don’t do that, you will not know how exactly it looks like, and you will not be able to read the way it should be read. The final outcome will be an artificial one.

Content Duplication and its impacts on SEO

1. Duplication of content will be considered a spam by all the search engines. There are so many websites with similar products, so the copywriter must be very careful in creating content. Search Engines likes fresh and unique content. It ranks websites depending primarily on the content used in web pages.

2. Changing the phrase of an existing content and rewriting is also considered as content duplication. Search Engines have ways to find out and it is supposed to be spam. This will certainly affect the ranking of a website.

3. When a website is reported to have duplicate content issues, the total number of pages ranked by the search engine will automatically come down. Fewer pages to rank will lessen the rankings and might lead to lower traffic.

4. It is important to make your content unique; otherwise, there is absolutely no point in doing all these. The search engines will not bother to feature your website in its result pages.

5. There is a difference between content duplication “penalties” and “filtering”. When we refer to the penalty in search engine rankings, we actually talk about points being reduced from your overall score, but the truth is, the pages are just filtered like you filter unwanted particles from a can of liquid. Accidently, this filtering can sometimes filter out your good articles too.

Tips to avoid Content Duplication

1. While preparing content, make sure you don’t copy it from somewhere and try to replace the words with exact meanings. The search engines have already come up with a solution to deal with this issue.

2. Before you sit down to write, ask yourself what exactly will create value for your users.

3. Try to get various perspectives, take the good points from them and fill the rest with your own thoughts and creativity. After all, you have to make it happen and move forward.

4. You can be influenced by many, but make sure you don’t copy anything.

So while preparing content, watch out for duplication from search engine’s point of view and as well as loyal customer’s point of view. At the end of the day, it is the search engine and ultimately the customer who are going to “look” at your content, so make sure it is liked by both, otherwise, all the efforts you put in for your business to grow will go wasted.

The post Why you shouldn’t duplicate website content? first appeared on Macronimous Blog.

To start, here is the list

1. Google Webmaster Tools are free and easy to set up through site owner verification process by adding a Google code Meta tag to the page or by creating and uploading a file with Google code. Once you are verified you can access the tools dashboard.
2. Sitemap tool allows you to submit XML Sitemap with details on pages to index and priority to crawl pages. If you don’t have a sitemap create one and submit to site configuration sitemap section.
3. Crawler access tool helps to generate and test robots.txt to specify how search engines should crawl and index site content.
4. When you Google for the information you can see Sitelinks. Sitelinks displays inner links generated by Google and the algorithm depends on how related and useful it is for users queries. You have no control to add but you can block / remove the link from displaying the site links if you don’t want to list.
5. Change of address is a special tool to tell Google about your new domain and helps to move your old site users to your new domain easily. This process has 4 simple steps to follow like content link verification, 301 redirects from old to the new domain, adding and verifying new site to Google webmaster tool and submitting the change of address.
6. Geographic target tool helps to target users in a specific location. You can select the country based on the users you target and it would help for .com, .org and other top-level domains. Country specific domains like .in, co.uk and so are already associated with Country based listing.
7. Preferred domain allows you to select the domain format which you like to display. You have options to select http://www.yourdomain.com and http://yourdomain.com. If you have selected http://www.yourdomain.com and the site inner page links with http://yourdomain.com then search results display URL’s take as http://www.yourdomain.com
8. Crawl rate can be changed depending on the site’s root level depth and default crawl rate is recommended to avoid increase server’s bandwidth. This Crawl rate has no connection with how often Googlebot crawls your site.
9. Top search queries tool has information on your site search keywords impressions and clickthrough ratio along with keywords position.
10. Links to your site tool provides information on inbound links which anchor text for your site pages.
11. Keywords and internal links tool show the common keywords Googlebot sees when it crawl’s the site and internal links shows the total number of pages linked to other pages in your site.
12. Crawl errors is another special tool that lists issues Google encountered when crawling your site. The list includes HTTP, error in sitemaps, not followed pages, not found pages, pages restricted by robots.txt, timed out / unreachable pages for The Web, Mobile HTML, and Mobile WML / XHTML?
13. Crawl stats tool shows statistics on Googlebot activity on pages crawled per day, kilobytes downloaded per day, time spent downloading a page and PageRank distribution.
14. HTML suggestions are provided when Googlebot crawls your site and find issues with your site content. Working on these issues will help your site in better listing and users experience. Here you can find details on Meta description, Title tag and Non-indexable content in your site.

Now ask a question for yourself why don’t I use Google Webmaster tools, if I have as many tools and information from Google for free. Sign into Google Webmaster Tools with your Google account today!

The post Why Google Webmaster tools? first appeared on Macronimous Blog.

Link bait is one of the tasks in link building that takes both quantity and quality in links, relevant and irrelevant to your website through various types of tricks and practices.

The tricks and practices are huge enough and it can’t be covered as a theory since all these tricks would differ from person to person ideas and their needs. Few may try running an SEO competition, quiz or awards that represent their business website or blog and few may try writing negative contents on a branded company or about a high profile person around the web so that many would come forward to have the content link on their website or blog in which they may think such collections that would again get them linked from different website or a blog. This works as a chain.

Now one of the most adopted link bait technique is by providing free tools with a code embedded link back to your site or blog and this has been more successful. In fact, many SEO companies do link baiting as a service in different forms

To link bait or Not to Linkbait?

Many people go with a logic Linkbait by default is something bad, is it so?

Before writing this post I just surfed the web to find what bloggers and industry leaders have experienced about link bait. Few were moderate and few feels it has both bad and good

I would say it is how we use, see and perform to the web. We have a lot of debate on this topic, still, some say it as a spam technique and some say it as a quality information or link distribution. Techniques that are open and user-favorable with a link falls under ethical and they are a good portion of link bait and techniques that are off as said attacking a brand for their website publicity, hidden stuff and spamming through various means falls under unethical that results in bad link bait. As I have already told it is up to us whether link bait is good or bad. Besides I would like to get your opinion about link baiting techniques that you have come across or used

The post To Link bait or Not to Link bait first appeared on Macronimous Blog.

Here  are some top Google tools to increase your sales conversion and ROI

1. Google Search suggest

When you type your business services or products words, Google suggests estimating what you type forth and the words listed are the most searched terms. By this, you can find the user’s search terms and compare with your site theme and go on with page optimization. As well as it does help for off page optimization by getting down with the suggestion of most searched directory keywords.

2. Google alerts

Make use of Alerts to keep track on you competitor activities or industry or getting latest stories on specified key phrases through an email

3. Google Trends

Compare two or more terms to find out the search volume on daily bases that are typed into Google’s search box. The search popularity will be shown in charts and it is easy to find the difference on term search volume

4. Google Adwords keywords

The tool helps to get new keyword ideas and as well you can type your website URL so that Google lists out the search keywords related to your business services or products

5. Google Analytics

This is a web analytics solution offered by Google for free. It gives you an insight on your site traffic and goal conversions. There are several options to track down your daily site visits / page views, keywords search visits, Geo, top contents visited, Goal tracking and much more

6. Google Webmaster tools

This tool helps you to find how Google see your WebPages. You can configure your sitemap about the page to be indexed and all about robots.txt. As well you can track total number of internal and external links, query traffic and diagnose problems if any

7. Search-based Keyword Tool

Using this tool you can get keyword ideas based on specific pages of your site and the keywords listed are from Google search queries

8. Google Insights for Search

This tool helps to compare search volume across categories, geographic distribution, and Properties

9. Google Traffic Estimator Tools

Get quick traffic estimates for search keywords related to target location and bid amount without logging into AdWords account

10. Google Website Optimizer Tool

This tool helps you to improve your existing web pages and traffic by testing your site content and design in relation to users performance.

These free tools are more of a pack from Google and hope you should have got an idea of these tools and how the tools can be used for your business growth exercise

The post 10 Top Google tools to get results in Google first appeared on Macronimous Blog.

(1) Title tag – Equal importance for Both Google and Bing
(2) Keyword prominence – Equal importance for Both Google and Bing
(3) Keyword density – Bing looks for lesser keyword density compared to Google
(4) Link density – Google gives more priority than Bing
(5) H tag – Bing gives more priority than Google
(6) Clean code – Equal importance for Both Google and Bing
(7) Meta tags – Equal importance for Both Google and Bing
(8) Anchor texts – Bing gives more priority than Google
(9) Super relevant content for optimized keywords – Equal importance for Both Google and Bing
(10) Domain age – Bing gives more priority than Google
(11) Site popularity – Google gives more priority than Bing
(12) Social sites in links – Google gives more priority than Bing

BTW, if you are new to Bing and not listed in Bing search results you may submit your site to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

In addition, to list better in Bing you need to implement some additional tasks along with above on page and off page factors.

Configure your site to Bing Webmaster tool http://www.bing.com/webmaster by adding your sitemap.xml file and with an XML file verification code for your site ownership.

And you may also validate your Robots.txt file using the Robots.txt validator tool in the Bing Webmaster section and robots.txt would look like

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /media/

Sitemap: http://www.xyz.com/sitemap.xml

These would help Bing bot to crawl your site pages and lists in search results efficiently

Hope the post helps and more research has to do with the Bing algorithm changes. I will be posting them and then, so keep watching

The post Will SEO efforts for Bing affect the SERPs in Google? first appeared on Macronimous Blog.