Businesses differ in more ways than one – differences in strategies, products or services and even on the target market. Since your business is in a way different form any other business venture in the Internet, it is safe to say that you should not measure your success in the same manner as other businesses do.

Everyone takes time to monitor closely the traffic of their sites and there is a great chance that you are one of them. But how exactly does site traffic measure the success of your online business? For instance, you are selling up-scale real estate properties but the majority of your visitors prefers cheaper properties or in worst case cannot afford your product. Yes, you have amazing traffic results, but a problem rises in the quality of your traffic. Quantity alone is not an indicator that you are successful in your business venture or not, especially when the majority of your visitors are not your target market.

What is the Real Measure of Success Online?

In your quest to search for the most effective way of measuring online success, you should opt to look for something that will accurately identify your business growth and progress. Therefore, even before you go on measuring your success you should have something to measure. Goal setting comes into the scene. What is it you want to achieve in your business? Is it happening or not?

What are the specific actions from your clients that you need to realize and make you say that you are successful in your business? Is it the increase in time spent by your clients in the product detail pages of your website? Is it the increase in the purchase of products from your clients? Is it the increase number of traffic from time to time? Is it more conversions from PPC traffic? What are the specific indicators that tell you that you are on your way to your much-desired success? After you have identified the latter, you are already a step closer in finding the specific metric that will measure true success in your business.

If you want your clients to spend more time on the product detail pages of your websites so that they will learn how your services or products can potentially be beneficial to them, the perfect metric for you is the Product Detail Page Entrances and Pageviews per Visit or Time on Site. On the other hand, if you want an increase on your conversions from PPC traffic you may choose the conversion rate and clicks as your main metric. In a nutshell, your business goals must be at all times in line with the measures you take to attain success.

So how far have SEO evolved through the years? If you have been in SEO for quite some time now, perhaps you’re all familiar with those days when the only measuring tool to assess SEO efforts is by a ranking report. Can you still recall picking up your top 50 keywords and put these into a rank checker? What about running a monthly report and establishing whether the 50 keywords ranked high or fell flat in the search rankings?

SEO Shows No Sign of Impeding Its Evolution

Now, what are the significant marks that SEO has truly evolved? Read on.

• Reports are incorporated on link building efforts.
• Started paying attention to conversion rates. Needs to identify what percentage of organic search visitors were filling out lead forms and/or purchasing products from your site.
• Integrating call-tracking and looking at conversion path for one goal – incorporate multi-channel conversion tracking.
• Incorporating boost in natural or organic search traffic from web analytics report.
• Categorizing branded vs. non-branded keyword traffic.

On to the Next Step—SEO Brand Building

The direction when we are heading next seems infinite and yes, promising! Well, if you witnessed the traditional marketing, you’ll get what I mean. Marketing efforts are no longer limited to television, radio and print advertising. It is indeed amusing to ponder where we are heading next. Today, SEO incorporates innovative ways to create and promote content such as video (YouTube views), blog content that goes viral, Infographics and PR relations.

Talking About Brand Building

In terms of brand building, Google makes it more interesting to build a brand in today’s digital marketplace.

Long before, brand building followed a simple formula: Reach (the number of different people who are exposed to the message at least once) X Frequency (the number of times they are exposed to the message) is equivalent to Gross Rating Points (pertains to your marketing campaign’s effectiveness and value.) You know, this formula may be considered obsolete by most marketers. However, it seems that SEO has evolved to the point where it brings us back to this basic formula of reach and frequency once again.

That’s right! Even Google AdWords has promoted reach and frequency metric for CPM-based ad products/ services. So if Google is discussing about it, well most likely, reach and frequency metric has impact in Google’s algorithm. Perhaps we should take this metric as an additional metric to evaluate our SEO efforts, and not just a mere replacement. What do you think?

Venturing in online business entails a continuous process of cutthroat competition. As such, a business enthusiast must have metrics that can measure his online venture success. Without it, one will never know how close or far he is to his success.

Constant evaluation and re-evaluation in your business is necessary to improve your craft. To determine if you are still on track with your SEO success, you have to slow down and take things slowly. Ponder upon the factors affecting your business and study if you are still on your way to success. Your efforts must be carefully evaluated from time to time.

Not a single story of success in SEO is realized without any solid benchmarks. To be able to assess improvement, you should compare progress time after time. Tangible benchmarks are imperative to realize success in SEO business. To determine success, it is necessary to have review of history.

The following are some tips to assess your success in SEO.

1. KPIs and Site Mission – Go back to your company’s KPI’s as well as the mission and vision of your website. Evaluate whether or not you are still on track.
2. Link Profile Evaluation – Review the total anchor text counts with Open Site Explorer.
3. Top Keywords or Key Phrases Review – Utilise Google Webmaster Tools to find out the high or top ranking keywords and key phrases and those similar in nature keywords that you utilise in your account. This will give you a general idea of what Google thinks about your site.
4. Internal Page Links Intensive Review – Assess the link saturated pages of your website using the Google Webmaster Tools. You may find it surprising that you have added page links unconsciously.
5. Are You Utilising the Right Keywords? – Go to your site, examine your pages and its keywords and identify the web pages that rank high for those specific key phrases or keywords. Find out if it is indeed ranking as expected. Whenever you add content, be it a text or images make sure that it supports the overall keyword theme of your page. Avoid incorporating confusing anchor text into you page, search engines like Google might get confused as well.
6. Validate W3C – Run WC3 validation to make sure that the codes that you have is still clean. The constant changes in your site made by designers and developers can cause longer download time.

At this point, you might have decided to evaluate your SEO techniques and ensure your site’s success for this year.

International Search Marketing proved its goal to enhance search engines and provide the most relevant searches every internet user tends to access. With campaigns and structures on the line, the emerging industries also enter into the worldwide web.
 
Google Panda was devised as an update based on mark-up languages in a useful way than the previous one.  It was devised by Navneet Panda to artificially search for websites exhibiting speed and reliable content.  When Google Panda was released in February 2011, the aim of this ranking algorithm was to lower the rank of low-quality sites in the search results and enable the higher-quality ones on top of the list. Now, Google Panda is functional in all searches except for Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.
 
However, last August, the Google Panda was utilized internationally yet it posed a number of challenges especially when the sub-domain or subdirectory structures are written in .com. While it could have been easier if companies were universally presented, the independent ccTLDs are not present to direct them to their targeted links say that the brands being searched or advertised are based outside US. EU, encounters the dilemma since international labels are present and can’t be trimmed down.

Multi-country and multilingual sites also posed problems since the translated contents were similar with little currency signal and differences in title tags. The Panda filter becomes stuck with similar-looking or duplicate contents which pave way for the poor visibility on low-ranking sites and more exposure on the higher ranking sites.

Google devised a solution to fix the mishap during the use of Google Panda. Repairs with several language website problems were presented with “hreflang” and “canonical”. Hreflang is a markup language used to identify the text used in the linked document which is likely taken from the href attitude. However, it is not used to identify the language of text contained in the element itself and only uses the Lang attribute.

Google elaborated that the use of a local subtag in the head tag applied on every URL will assist Google spider identify the content of the page and its intended location. After this, Google will already identify the content for that specific region.

The Basics of Hreflang

The hreflang trait (hreflang: rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”) can be used by many users from all over the globe with its translated content in the language of the specific region. It is utilized in polylingual websites utilizing same web content for all the other web pages. The country, language, as well as the URLs of the web content translated into multiple formats. The pattern or template of the page including the footer and navigation can only be translated while the main web content remains in one language. The pages have similar content but target various regions if the language web content targeted is in US, United Kingdom and Australia, good thing is that the languages can be translated (e.g. Spanish).

The Canonical tag

Canonical tags are used to signal Google that a certain URL is the site and mainly the most significant translated element in the URL content.

Multilingual canonical tag can be used in combination with hreflang. It can also be reliable to web pages which contain same language which targets multiple countries. However, instances may happen in which the clients are being directed to a different language. The content’s version becomes included in the index and is relayed back to the users. Rel=”canonical” on the intended webpage.

In general, hreflang is used for targeting places and rel= canonical offers duplication. However, the fallbacks include specification of location and improvement of settings from time to time which may be time-consuming. The good thing is that, rel=alternate hreflang can be used with ccTLDs which may reduce the people’s use of .com since ccTLDs have greater results.

AdMob was first established in 2006 but in 2009, Google bought it for $750 million. To put it briefly, AdMob is a vast advertising network that focuses merely on mobile advertising. Before we sum up the pros and cons of Google AdMob, let’s discuss first how it works?

Getting Started

It’s not at all expensive to get started on AdMob. First you must top up your account with a minimum of $50, and the rest needs to be prepaid. You must deposit funds in your account using Google Checkout. Ads will continue to run provided that you replenish your account when used up. To keep you from running out of balance, you may set an alert to receive a warning when your funds are running low.

Continuing the process, campaigns permit managing budgets and settings when you come across adCenter and adWords. Here you can set the start date, end date and delivery options.

Moving on to Ad Group

Once you reach Group section, you will be presented with four options:

• Website – To draw traffic to your site
• Application – This permits you to drive downloads of your app for Windows Phone 7, Android or iOs.
• Media – To promote a Kindle book, videos, or iTunes Store listing such as movies, music and television.
• Location and Utilities – Here you can market a local business using click-to-maps and click-to-call options.

Digging into Details

What do you think? As a performance marketer, which of the four options could help you deliver performance marketing campaigns using a mobile advertising space? Let’s say at this point, seemingly the most effective choice is website.

Website gives you the following forms of targeting to tap the right people to spread a message:

1. Target Devices
2. Target Geography
3. Target Wifi vs. mobile operator traffic
4. Target Demographics – Criteria: Men vs. Women and Age Group

Conclusion

Based on the selections available, there is no way to target a more specific market, say prospective buyers near a specific store location. Target Geography does not offer “city targeting”. In terms of granularity, this option is not very impressive. It only offers provincial level for Canada and regional level for U.S.

You probably think it’s best to go back and choose other types of ad group. Location and Utilities ad group and the rest were all the same—poor granularity means ineffective targeting. Try it yourself. This points out to one conclusion. AdMob is a product not targeted for performance marketers rather it is more suitable for brand advertisers.

So here’s the bottom line, there is no competitive way to leverage AdMob successfully for performance marketing, unless you are selling mobile downloads such as music, books, video or apps. It’s also safe to say that you can make use of AdMob as an effective marketing tool if you are offering products with very broad appeal. AdMob drives interest on items that need no targeting. Plus, it prohibits advertisiers to buy ads in real time using data.

People in the world of online marketing surely needs a lot of help they can get from everything. This includes web tool, SEO agency or SEO consultant. There is certainly no harm in getting help from these things or these people especially if you are getting the best techniques on increasing your sales from them. However, it is not necessary that you rely much more on your SEO provider when it comes to decision making. You must set forth a limitation to everything and that includes knowing when or when not to follow what you’re being told.

SEO providers are obliged to give you the appropriate information you need in order for your online marketing campaign to gain higher conversion rates or bigger income. Hence, believing that it would always be best to hire one is not bad at all. But how can you tell it’s about time to stop listening to these people?

There are things and occurrences that your SEO consultant cannot guarantee. Like for instance, several SEO providers are fond of giving their clients a specific timeline to see results. The only thing you can guarantee in this business is you can get to the top by continuing to improve your website content and non-stop building network connections through link building.

What are the most common things you can hear from SEO providers?

SEO providers are expected to tell you the same things you already know about SEO campaigns. These things may include but not limited to the following:

• Optimize your content – As an online marketer, this is definitely a no-brainer statement. The content of the website is the primary reasons why you generate traffic in the first place. Hence, optimizing it is definitely a must.
• Build more connections – Another thing you can hear from your SEO consultant or agency is this cliché statement. Building connections is definitely needed as this way you can better expose your website. You can do this through link building.

Yes. You can hear the same thing you already know. But the important factor in getting SEO provider aside from the fact that you will be told of the things you need to know is that you will be given a privilege to know some genius techniques on how you can do the things you need to do. Like for instance, optimizing your content is a very broad topic. There are a lot of ways on how you can optimize your content, some works well while others don’t. And that is what you would want to know from your provider.

If you are in the online marketing business or SEO world in simplest term then web analytics must have been part of your world too. Web analytics is a tool used by online marketers or website owners to track their website performance in terms of the amount of traffic. It also provides marketing strategies and techniques that can be used to improve any SEO campaign. Most SEOs are using web analytics at the present time to help them in achieving their main goal which is to keep conversion rates hiking.

For most online marketers Google Analytics has been their number one choice when it comes to web analytics. Clearly, the main reason for this is its being free which could definitely offset whatever drawbacks Google Analytics may have. Apparently, Google Analytics has earned tons of merits from SEOs in all parts of the world due to its usefulness even if it’s free for everyone. However, due to SEOs’ continuous search for better web tools that could better improve their businesses, several Google Analytics alternatives came to existence.

Amidst this event, the battle between self-hosted and hosted web analytics started. As you may already know, Google Analytics is a great example of hosted web analytics which most SEOs are used to using. However, more and more online marketers are concluding that self-hosted web analytics is better.

If you are one of those who can’t decide whether to stick to the hosted web analytics you’re using or to migrate to self-hosted, you might want to learn all the advantages each of it can provide you with so you can come to a conclusion.

Hosted Web Analytics Advantages

• The most obvious advantage of a hosted web analytics is you don’t get to handle techie stuffs which self-hosted web analytics demands. In other words, you don’t get to have headache running and coding scripts from time to time.
• You don’t need to be a technical expert to generate the needed reports for your SEO campaign.
• Most hosted web analytics are for free and it won’t require you to spend long hours to operate it.

Self-Hosted Web Analytics Advantages

If you are a beginner in SEO and have nearly no idea how it works, then this article is for you. Now, if you think you are picking up SEO bad habits since your conversion page becomes ineffective, this could be a nice refresher course too. First off, a landing page can make or break your SEO strategy because it is a decisive step in the conversion funnel.

Let’s discuss some top tips on designing an effective landing page.

1. Convert Prospects Into Paying Customers

It is imperative to have a specific call to action. Keep in mind that your goal here is to get new customers, thus driving prospects to your landing page is just an intervening step to realize this end goal.

• Design your landing pages to get a prospective customer to take action. You must present a tasty offer to close a sale.
• Make the landing page special by setting the offer copy and related call to action with the rest of the page.
• Catch your prospective customer’s attention by using lines above and below, contrast and/or a box around the content you want them to focus on.
• Lastly, spell out exactly what can the visitor get from filling out the form or clicking on the link. Make a relevant and interesting offer.

2. Keep On-Page Content and Call to Action with Your Off-Page Proposal Aligned

Visitors may have gotten to your landing page from various sources, take for example your pay-per-click ad, a comparison-shopping engine or probably an article or blog post written by a third-party. With this in mind, take note that visitors may already set an expectation in mind before they would even land on your page. Do you legwork to identify your visitors’ intent and expectations.

3. Minimize distractions! Reduce Text and Simply Your Design.

Avoid using different font colors, font styles and sizes on your page. If possible, refrain from using interactive rich-media content, even images. You may use any of it only when it can significantly convey pertinent information and can directly shore up your conversion goal.

Did you know that plain landing pages are often the most effective conversion drivers? Many studies have shown that landing pages with less content often get higher conversion rates. Make your landing page readable by using simple headlines and brief bullet lists. Avoid long self-promoting marketing talk because oftentimes people won’t read it anyway. Instead, provide a link to supporting pages for the in depth information.

4. Use Images with Caution

Using images is a great idea to provide some visual candy but make sure the image is not too large and not too complex. In other words, keep it neat and simple. Use a caption.

5. Promote recognition by showing Brand Validation

Of course, people always feel more comfortable and secure if they sense an affinity for your product. Use logos of trusted and prominent client brands and/or include badges of media sources that covered your company. Show positive testimonials from your existing clients. Reduce anxiety for your prospective customers by using money-back guarantee seals, acceptable payment methods, safe shopping seals, and more.

6. Test various elements of your landing page.

Remember, the key to continuous improvement is through repetitive testing and tweaking.