What are Robots?

Web robots also known as spiders or crawlers are programs that travel across the web pages automatically. Search engines like Google and Bing use them to crawl and index the web content. Some of the common purpose for which robots are used are Indexing, HTML validation, Link validation, “What’s New” monitoring, Mirroring.

How It Works?

Before indexing the web pages search engine robots look for the /robots.txt file. This file contains set of instructions for search engines. Based on the instructions found in Robots.txt file, search engines index, selectively index or no index the pages on the site.

Commonly used Instructions

This instruction tells all robots to visit all directories because the wildcard * specifies all robots:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

Instruction to keep all robots out of the website. Use this if the website is not to be indexed.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Instruction to keep any particular robot out of site

User-agent: BadBot

Disallow: /

Instruction to allow a single robot and disallow all others

User-agent: Google

Disallow:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Instruction to read all files except one

User-agent: *

Disallow: /~joe/stuff/

Allow Directive- In order to be compatible to all robots, if one wants to allow single files inside an otherwise disallowed directory, it is necessary to place the Allow directive(s) first, followed by the Disallow, for example:

User-agent: *

Allow: /folder1/myfile.html

Disallow: /folder1/

Instructions to block files of a specific file type (for example, .gif):

User-agent: *

Disallow: /*.gif$

Which robots will follow instructions in robot.txt file?

All legitimate search engines and standard programs while malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.

Where to put robots.txt file

Put your robots.txt file in the top-level directory of your web server where you put your website index file.  For instance, http://www.example.com/robots.txt is a valid location.

Here are some of the possible URL structures with advantages and disadvantages with regards to geotargeting:

In this post, we’ll take a look at what is involved with multi-regional and multi-lingual websites from a search engine point of view.  Let’s understand the meaning of these two terms multi regional and multi-lingual first. A website targeted towards multiple countries is multi regional whereas if some of these are also in different languages it is Multilanguage website too.

Now let’s start with some of the general preparations that are important for launching your ccTLD site.

Ensure Correct Coding

Any error with the base website code will multiply in you multi regional websites. Hence before replicating the code resolve all known issues and bugs with the base website.

Legal Formalities

Make sure you are through with the legal formalities for the region. These requirements may determine how you proceed, for instance whether or not you would be eligible to use a country-specific domain name.

Localization

The very reason for you going for ccTLDs must be addressed properly. Content in local language, ability to offer your products in local currency, local address and phone numbers are some of the critical factors for localizing your website.

Server Location

Though server location can be a factor for ranking in search engines result pages but this signal tends to be quite weak because of the stronger signal that is inclusion of country specific domain name in your URL.  Hence it makes no sense to host your website in local region. This means example.de should not necessarily be hosted in Germany to gain SEO benefits.  It is fine even if you host it in U.S.A. Use your webmaster tool and choose Germany in your target country for .de domain and this will be enough for Search Engine to understand where to show results.

Duplicate Content

It’s okay to have same content on your multi regional website there is no penalty attached to it. But it is good if you can come up with localized content for each ccTLDs.  This is not only good for Search Engines but also good for users visiting on the site. Each country has its own style of writing and uses of language.

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who exited from the page on which they landed. This can be better understood with an example. Suppose 100 visitors on site landed on page A and without checking other pages on the site, 40 people left the website. Technically we say 40 /100 people bounces off the site or bounce rate of the site is 40%.
There can be multiple factors for the bounce. It can be due to visitors landing on page which is not relevant to the keyword through which they reached the page. Or the page design  or visitor couldn’t find what she was looking for?

There is no standard set for high or low bounce rate and this would vary from site to site.  Based on your industry patterns, one should keep eye on bounce rate and try to reduce it.

Exit Rate is the percentage of visitors that left the page out of the total number of visitors that page has received. The difference compared to bounce rate is, an exit rate visitor might have come to the page from another web page on your site then exited your web site. For example a visitor landed on page A and moved to page B and then left the website.

This is critical to analyze in case a particular page of your site has very high exit rate.   Though both the metrics are different, it is extremely important to keep analyzing both these factors.

Low bounce rate and exit rate means customers expectations on your site are perhaps in harmony with your offerings on website.

It takes only a few minutes to get starterd with your  A/B Experiment. All you need is multi variant of your landing page and a conversion page, for e.g thankyou.html.

Here are the steps to get started with your  A/B Experiment.

Step 1

Login to you Adword account and click on website optimizer or use adword credentials to sign in to Google website optimizer directly.

Step 2

Choose A/B Experiment, name your experiment and define original page, variation page(s) & conversion page URLs.

Step 3

Continue with the setup, it offer you an option to do it yourself or in case you want to take help of your webmaster, choose as applicable and continue

Step 4

Copy paste the control and tracking script at the beginning of your original landing page, tracking script at the end of variation page source code and conversion script at the end of your conversion page.  In case you have more than one conversion page, install your conversion script to all conversion page.

Validate once you have installed the code You might see error in validation for your conversion page if the page is dynamically generated. In that case, complete the process of purchase once you reach the conversion page, save it as HTML and upload it. You will see the option to upload your pages, post error message shown during validation.

Once validated, you are ready with your A/B Experiment. Drive traffic through your campaigns to the original page. You can define what percentage of traffic do you want to send to variation page. In case you have 1 variant page it is ideal to distribute 50% of your traffic to each page.

You can view the performance of your page under Reporting tab. Based on the page performance, you can make changes to the content, design and layout of your landing page.

It was Gandhi Jayanti (2nd October- birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi) yesterdayand like all important dates it was expected Google will come up with great ideas to symbolize the man who is a universally recognized apostle of truth, peace and non violence, father of nation for India, and a globally acclaimed leader.

It was expected to see two round Gandhi glasses instead of “oo” in Google or the famous Gandhi stick instead of “L” in Google. But it seems Google PR/branding team feels the date is not worthy enough to be a part of its universal Google Doodle campaign.

“Happy Gandhi Jayanti”

Here’s are the steps to link your Adwords and Anlytics accounts:

•      Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
•     Select the Tools & Analysis tab and choose “Google Analytics.”
•     Select “I already have a Google Analytics account.”
•     From the Existing Google Analytics Account drop-down menu, select the name of the Analytics account you’d like to link to. If you don’t see it listed, you’ll need to first add your AdWords username to your Analytics account as an Account Admin.
•     Keep the checkboxes selected on this page, unless you’re sure you’d like to disable auto-tagging. For importing cost data, read “How can I import my AdWords cost data?”
•     Select Link Account.

And you are done. Now your two accounts Should be linked. If you opted to keep auto-tagging turned on, Analytics will start automatically tagging your AdWords links. You’ll be able to track the behavior of visitors coming from your AdWords ads, making it easier to gauge the ROI of your AdWords budget and make changes as necessary.

Perhaps ‘spam mails’ once the biggest threat to online mailing system is no longer a threat. But even bigger problem today is to keep your inbox free of not so important mail as browsing through them or simply deleting them exhausts your time and almost a torture test for your tolerance level.

Receiving friend request from facebook or someone following you on twitter, breaking news from a news site or not so important message from your friend, technically speaking all these are not spam but are difficult and painful to deal with. BUT NO LONGER !

Google has now come with a remarkable new feature “Priority Inbox” which will now pick most important mails for us based on our email reading habit.

Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”. It analyzes your experience with particular sender – is a message from someone whose mail you tend to open and reply to? Was the e-mail sent only to you, or was it part of an e-mail list? Did the message contain keywords that have proved interesting to you in the past? If a message makes the threshold for importance, Gmail marks it with a small yellow tag. These messages will appear at the top of your inbox, above the rest of your mail.

The more you use it the better will be the filtering. The integration of two buttonsto mark a mail as important and unimportant will train your inbox to filter out mails in future. It is expected that at least you use the feature for 2 weeks before the filters are optimized as per your needs.

Before going deeper into the recently introduced “broad match modifier” let’s quickly recap the other popular keyword match option in Google adwords.

Broad Match

This is the default keyword match option. Choosing broad match option will provide maximum impressions to your ads. If you ad group contains a keyword domain registration, your ads will appear when a user’s search query contains any of the these keywords:
Domain name, domain name registration, buy domain name, register domain, name registration.

Your ads could also show for singular/plural forms, synonyms, and other relevant variations.

Phrase Match

Phrase match is more targeted than broad match, but more flexible than exact match.

If your keywords are in double quotes “domain registration” your ad would be eligible to appear when a user searches on the phrase domain registration with the words in that order. It can also appear for searches that contain other terms as long as it includes the exact phrase you’ve specified.

Domain registration, domain registration Company, domain registration service providers

Your ads will not appear on searches for:
Registration domain name, domains registration, domain name

Exact Match

If you place your ads in brackets [domain registration], your ad would be eligible to appear when a user searches for the specific phrase domain registration, in this order, and without any other terms in the query.
When using this keyword match option, your ads will appear on [domain registration]
Ads won’t show on searches for: domain name registration, domain registration companies, domain names

Negative Match

If your keyword is ‘domain registration’ and you add the negative keyword ‘FAQs,’ your ad will not appear for any searches that contain the word ‘FAQs’

Ads won’t show on searches for:
Domain registration FAQs
It’s a good idea to use negative keyword option, especially when your adgroups contains a lot of broad-matched keywords.

The latest +broad + match +modifier Option

This option is currently available for U.K and Canada advertisers and is in beta phase. To implement broad match modifier just add + before each word. If your keyword is domain registration and you want to use broad match modifier option use +domain +registration.

Each word proceeded by a + has to appear in your potential customer’s search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemming (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren’t considered close variants.

To better understand this I am copy pasting the graphical representation, picking as it is from http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/07/new-keyword-targeting-feature-rolling.html

Previously the Google search algorithms primarily focussed on returning relevant and quality search results. But with the new search indexing system caffeine, Google is now capable of delivering results that are relevant as well as fresh.

I randomly picked the first word that came into my mind and tried searching for the same word on Yahoo, Bing and Google. Here is the result:

The top 5 result has a page that was updated 16 minutes ago. Sometimes, I have seen it to be as fresh as 15-16 seconds ago.

Here are the results from other two popular search engines Yahoo and Bing

Result from Bing

Caffeine undoubtedly is enabling us to see fresher results and has been built with future in mind. With lots of content updates flowing in and across the web, with caffeine we are sure to see updated results every time we request for a query in Google.

What is in there for your customers? Saving, freebies, reward or any other benefits. Show it upfront. Your customer doesn’t care about how amazing your business is? All they are interested in is the benefit they get in associating with your products/services. How does it help them in solving their need/want?

Talk to them

Avoid using I, me, and we and start using you and your. Your prospects are more interested in themselves. Using you and your works better.

Use Active voice

Merely putting CTAs (call to action) like Call now, Click Now, Buy Now, Get Started, Register or something like these will not yield any result unless, your copy is persuasive . Avoid phrases like “This deal will help you save $50” instead rephrase it to “This deal Saves $50 “.