We’re going to take a look at two of these powerful tools to equip you to set goals for your website and get vital information, like from which step potential customers could be leaving your website.

What are are Google Analytics Goals?

A goal in Google Analytics terminology can be understood as the accomplishment of a task you would like your users to complete on your website. For instance, goals can be completing a sign-up page, subscribing to a newsletter, completing an order, or a simple click on a link that leads to a news article. Google Analytics Goals allow you to measure the number of times a task (goal) is accomplished. In the Search Engine marketing parlance, this is commonly known as conversion rate.

Whenever a user successfully arrives at a particular webpage, it indicates the completion of a goal. For instance, “Thank You” page tells you that the user has successfully placed an order on your ecommerce website. Similarly, “Products” page signifies the successful completion of the goal of attracting the leads to view the listings.

What are Google Analytics Funnels?

Try and think of a funnel like a raodmap, the route that your visitor will take to reach the goal. In other words, funnels outline the path taken by the users to arrive at a destination. For instance, if the goal is a “Thank You” page on an ecommerce website, the funnels could be the products listing page, individual product page, checkout page, shipping details page and the payment page. So, each funnel is essentially a page that eventually will lead the user to the goals page.

Google Funnels allow you to define these pages within the goal so that you can see exactly the funnel page where the visitors abandon the goal and where they went after abandoning it. A Funnel Visualisation Report is generated, which outlines the funnel path of the visitors.

Benefits of Google Analytics Goals and Google Funnels

Google Analytics Goals and Google Funnels offer multiple benefits for your e-business. These include:

1. You can easily define goals and funnels for your business. This will help you analyse the strengths and weaknesses of your products and/or services.

2. By learning the conversion rates, you get to know the efficiency of your internet marketing campaign and take necessary corrective measures as and when required. Your marketing strategy may need revision or there may be something inherently wrong with your products and/or services. There may be any reason for low conversions. Google Analytics Goals and Funnels will help you identify the underperforming aspects of your online business so that you can act accordingly.

3. Once you learn about the behaviour of your target customers, increasing the conversion rate becomes a whole lot easier, as you can then make changes to your website or product pricing or any other aspect that is putting off the visitors and not converting into goals.

4. Sometimes, upon analysing the figures shown by Google Goals and Funnels, you may come across a serious flaw in the functionality of your website. For instance, a link, which is vital to accomplish the goal, may not be working at all or malfunctioning. You can then rectify such technical faults in the website.

5. Essentially, Google Analytics Goals and Google Analytics Funnels provide you with important data relating to the performance of your  online business. This is highly technical information, which is difficult to measure. The best part is that you are getting it for free. Without spending a penny, Google Goals and Funnels empower you to make your online business a success.

As always, if you need any help in setting up your Google Analytics Goals and Funnels – get in touch today.

Pioneered by the people behind Google Search Engine, Google+ can be understood as an amalgam of social networking and identity service. Some of the features in the popular Gmail, like Google Buzz, Google Reader and Google Profiles, have been integrated into Google+ to make this social networking platform more dynamic. Besides, Google+ also features some of the intuitive tools, like:

1. Circles: It’s a tool that empowers the users to organise their contacts into different “circles”, like Family, Friends, Room mates, etc. For easy organisation, you can simply drag-and-drop from the contacts list into any of these “circles”.

2. Sparks: Improving upon Google Reader, “sparks” lists the content in the categories matching your interests (like tech, health, etc.) along with the links to related content. Each topic gets its own “spark” page.

3. Hangouts: “Hangouts” feature allows the users to video chat with the people in their circles.

4. Huddles: “Huddles” feature allows the users to send group messages within the “circles”.

5. Instant Upload: Using this feature, the users can instantly upload the picture, on to their Google+ account, as they click from their smartphones.

6. +1 Button: This button lets the user to recommend a website or a particular page on the website. It is similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, but when combined with Google search results, +1 Button becomes much more powerful than any of its competitors’ similar offering.

Google has also unveiled their proprietary Operating System – Android – for the smart phones with built-in Google+ capabilities and easy-to-download apps to make your Google+ experience more enriching.

Google+ for Businesses

Google+ can be an effective marketing tool for the start-ups as well as the established corporations. The businesses can make good use of Google+ Pages, which is a powerful tool incorporated within Google+ specifically for the purpose of enabling the businesses to spread the word about their offerings and other useful information. Here are some ways Google+ can help your business and transform it into a reputed brand:

1. You can easily publish text, audio, images, video and other relevant content on your Google+ Pages. By involving your followers by asking questions and indulging them in a healthy discussion, you can sense the mood of the target audience. You can also make your posts public for maximum visibility. You can also make use of Hangouts feature to set-up one-click face-to-face conversation with your followers and seek their views, opinions, suggestions, troubleshoot and product feedback.

2. Google+ Badges allows inter-connectivity between the official website and the Google+ page of the business. It’s a simple sidebar widget that has the ability to +1, see personal annotations, and add the page to a circle, directly from the website. Another related and powerful Google+ tool for marketing purposes is Google+ Direct Connect, which enables users to go directly to the Google+ page of the business by entering ‘+’ followed by the name of the business page in Google search.

3. Google+ also features a host of tools to analyse the Google+ activity for your business. For instance, Google+ Search informs you about the opinions of the people about your business or brand. Ripples is another feature that gives you the tools to know who is sharing and re-sharing your content and who are the “experts” that people tend to follow the most. You can use this information to add the influential followers to you circle for targeted marketing campaign. Besides, there are traditional Google Analytics tools to give you an insight into the performance of your website content. All these tools can be used to learn how the Google+ social campaign impacts your bottom line and accordingly, fine tune your products/services.

A Secured Socket Layer (SSL), also known as Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a security protocol that was created by Netscape in order to have secure transactions among the web browsers and servers. Essentially, it is a digital certificate that serves twin purposes:

a) authentication of the identity of a website; and

b) encryption of information sent to the server by the browser.

The SSL certificate brings in a sense of confidence among the visitors and users of the website as to its credentials and reliability. Most commonly, SSL technology is used by ecommerce websites and banking gateways when transferring sensitive financial information in order to process user requests. The user can verify the security of the connection by checking the protocol in the address bar (instead of the usual “http://”, the address starts from “https://”, where ‘s’ stands for secure). The interaction with the secure server is facilitated by the web browser and it is terminated only when the transaction is complete from the secure server’s end.

Contents of SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate comprises of the following information:

i. Name of the certificate holder

ii. Serial Number

iii. Expiry date of the certificate

iv. A copy of the public key of the certificate holder

v. Digital signature of the authority issuing the certificate. e.g: GoDaddy SSL Certificate

The SSL certificates can be purchased from the certifying authorities after verification.

Basis of SSL

SSL is based on encryption technology, which can be understood as the process of scrambling data and turning it into an unreadable and undecipherable form that can be descrambled into readable format only with the corresponding decryption key.

How Does SSL Work?

SSL offers security through public/private key encryption. The process is also known as asymmetric encryption or public key encryption.

The message is encrypted using public key, which is a string of letters and numbers. Only the owner of the message can read it using the private key, which is corresponding to that public key. This private key is kept confidential from the world at large. The encryption-decryption can also be facilitated vice-versa, i.e., encryption using private key and decryption using public key in order to have a secure one-on-one conversation.

What is the Difference Between 128-bit and 256-bit Encryption?

The length of the public and private keys is either 128-bit or 256-bit. The greater the length of the key, the stronger the encryption! So, 256-bit encryption is considered stronger than 128-bit encryption.

A bit is a single value and can be either 0 or 1. Now, in a 128-bit key, the cipher would be 128-bits long, which means that there are about 3.4 x 10e38 possible combinations and that is a huge number to crack the encryption. And in a 256-bit key, the cipher would be 256-bits long, which means that there are about 1.5 x10e77 possible combinations and that is exponentially stronger than 128-bit encryption.

What is the Requirement of SSL certificate?

With booming commercial and financial transactions being carried out on the internet at a breathtaking pace, the risk of theft of sensitive personal and financial data of the users is at an all time high. The cyber criminals are always on the prowl to steal such sensitive information and to use it for their advantage. However, SSL certificate ensures that the data is transferred in an encrypted manner in order to make it as difficult as possible for anyone perpetrating man-in-the-middle attacks on the servers to decipher the information. Moreover, the users these days have become increasingly aware about the need for SSL certificate for a website dealing with sensitive personal and/or financial information of the users.

Do I Need an SSL Certificate?

This depends on the type of website you have and how sensitive the information is that your website visitors are disclosing. Some merchants, such as Google Checkout, will require you to have a SSL certificate.

As always, if you need any help or require any further information, get in touch.

Press releases are, often, scrutinised closely by reputed wire services (PRWeb, Business Wire, PR Newswire, Marketwire, PrimeNewswire, etc.) before acceptance. Therefore, it becomes increasingly difficult to optimise them for the Search Engines. However, you can use these tips to make your press releases SEO-friendly.

1. Keywords Placement: Any good SEO web page must comprise of intelligent use of keywords throughout – without being excessive and in-your-face as far as keyword density is considered. The placement of keywords/key-phrases, especially in the headline, is extremely important for a high Search Engine ranking. Generally accepted keyword density is 2-2.5%.

2. Know Your Keywords: Before worrying about keyword placement and density, you need to know the keywords for your website. ‘Keywords’ can be understood as the words or phrases that are closely associated with your website and that the users most likely key-in the search box of the Search Engines to look up for relevant websites.

3. Write for the Target Audience: A well-written targeted press release will attract higher search engine ranking than a keywords-stuffed press release. There is little point in striving to achieve higher ranking if the readers leave the press release without clicking the back link. They need to be fed with useful information, which will convince them to visit your website. In this regard, always try to use terms, which are easily and commonly understood by the masses. Jargon should, ideally, be avoided, unless unavoidable.

4. Some Text Tricks: You can follow these simple tricks in order to make your press release SEO-friendly:

(a) While writing the URL of your website, do not miss out on the “http://” part. Some wire sites make the link unclickable, if the Protocol used by the site is not included.

(b) Bold important words and phrases (other than keywords) to improve readability of your press release.

(c) Always include a back link in “Additional Information” (or similar) section.

(d) Include anchor links on the keywords for quick navigation to your website, if the reader doesn’t want to read the full press release.

(e) Try to use most of the keywords at least once in the first 200-250 words.

(f) It may seem like an overemphasis, but your press release must be newsworthy in order to generate the right search engine coverage.

5. Remain Updated: SEO principles and guidelines keep on evolving with leading Search Engines tweaking and strengthening their algorithms for most relevant search results. For instance, the recent Panda update in Google algorithm has affected the rankings of lots of websites. Therefore, you must be on the lookout for latest SEO updates from reliable sources, which are freely available on the internet.

6. Solicit Advice from Experts: Many online journalists, bloggers and industry people offer excellent inputs about their search habits and experiences in producing newsworthy engaging and SEO-friendly content.  So, don’t hesitate to ask for help if you find yourself challenged to write an SEO press release – we’re here to help.

Here is list some Press Release websites (some free some, some paid) to get you started.

- Business Wire
- PR Newswire
- PRWeb
- 24-7 Press Release
- PR Zoom
- PR Leap
- Webwire
- ClickPress
- PR.com
- PR Log
- eReleases
- MarketWire

1. Directory Submission

Online business directories are an inexpensive way of generating backlinks and decent traffic to your website. These business directories are divided into categories and sub-categories in order to present the listings in an organised manner. Some of the top online directories include DMOZ, Yahoo, Canny Link, Business Directory, etc. However, there are other directories catering to the specific businesses. Additionally, there are trade organisation websites that offer directory services as well. Therefore, it is recommended to do a Google Search and find the best directories for submitting your website to. The thumb rule is not to miss key directories, while keeping your eye on emerging and potentially beneficial directories that can increase targeted traffic to your website.

2. Article Writing and Submission

Article writing on useful topics has been one of the favourite promotion tools among the Webmasters for a long time. The process is simple.

• First, identify a few topics related to the products and/or services offered by your website (“How to…” and “Useful Tips …” articles are considered as the most sought after by the users).
• Then, write the articles incorporating your own thoughts and expressions (you can get inspiration from other similar articles on the internet, but your article should be in your own words and must have an element of distinctness in order to generate reader interest).
• Don’t forget to include a backlink to your website at the bottom of your article. Generally, the link is included in the “Author’s Bio” section so that the users can read through the article without any distraction. If they like the article, the readers generally click through the link to learn more about the topic.
• Now, submit these articles to multiple article directories for free, like EzineArticles, eHow,  GoArticles, The Free Library, etc. Additionally, you may also incorporate these articles on your website itself or the newsletters, which you send to the registered users of your website.

3. News Releases

News or press releases are an excellent mode of spreading the word about any newsworthy developments on your website. Any new offering or development, which is considered to have a positive impact on the targeted users of your website, can be announced to the world through press releases that are carried out by multiple websites. You can also simply send these press releases via email, fax or regular mail to newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, magazines, etc.

4. Get Involved with the Social Media Community

Social networking websites, like Facebook, Twiiter, LinkedIn, etc. have a massive fan following. These are the hottest forums to make the advertising campaign for your website viral. Join these popular social media and exploit the power of internet by sharing your website details with your friends, relatives and fans.

5. Participate in Online Forums and Discussion Lists

Website traffic can be greatly enhanced by the intelligent use of several free online forums and discussion lists. These forums and lists are generally used by the users to post their queries and doubts about products/services/websites. You can constructively participate in these forums and discussions, and include a backlink to your website in your messages.

6. Ask for E-Mail Sign-ups

Your marketing campaign (online or offline) should be focussed towards aggressively soliciting maximum sign-ups on your website, which will generate lots of targeted leads for your website.

We hope these ideas help to get more traffic and better search engine rankings – as always, if you need any help or would like us to market your website for you, get in touch today.

There is a simple answer to this; “No”. Why? Well, aside from any copyright law infringement, you’ll certainly won’t be doing yourself any favours as far as the search engine rankings are concerned.  Google in particular will certainly come down heavy on you so in this post we’re going to look at exactly what is the Google duplicate content penalty, what does it mean to you and how can you avoid it?

What is Google Duplicate Content Penalty?

Most commonly understood, Google Duplicate Content Penalty refers to a drop in Google rankings of a web page due to the presence of scraped or duplicate content. The duplicate content can be either or both of the following:

(a) Same content appearing on different web pages within a website, i.e., same information being displayed on more than one URL of a particular website, or intra-website duplicate content;

(b) Same content appearing on different websites, i.e., same information being displayed on more than one URL on the internet, or inter-website duplicate content.

The content need not be 100% identical. It could fall into “duplicate” category if it is substantially similar.

However, if we go by the official version of Google, there is nothing like a “duplicate content penalty” imposed by Google Search Engine. But in the same breath, Google contradicts itself when it says:

“There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you’re scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value.” Ummmmmm.

The mystery surrounding Google Duplicate Content Penalty has magnified somewhat with the introduction of ‘Panda’ update to Google’s search algorithm, which has affected many sites by downgrading their content’s reliability.

Google Red Lines

Notwithstanding the rigmarole put forth by Google regarding the factual position on duplicate content, there are some red lines that Google disapprove of. These are:

1) Malicious duplicate content, i.e., deliberate duplication of content with an eye on attaining higher ranking on results page. This practice is discouraged due to poor user experience from the visibility of identical content across multiple web pages on the internet.

2) Two versions of same article/content, i.e., if a web page features both HTML and printer-friendly versions, only one of them will find mention and be considered while determining the rankings on results page.

3) Multiple pages, sub-domains and domains with substantially similar content.

4) Typical affiliate websites that do not use original content and generally, scrape from the product website or from other affiliate websites.

How to Avoid the So-Called Google Duplicate Content Penalty?

If you just want a simple response to this answer, it’s “to be honest and write content yourself without indulging in copy-paste techniques.” Besides, here are some of the measures you can take to avoid getting in the negative books of Google:

(i) Regular Updates to your web pages help a great deal in steering clear of the issues arising out of duplicate content. Moreover, Google algorithm has a penchant for refreshed and updated web pages. A blog, for instance, should ideally be updated on a daily basis to maximize its leverage over Google rankings.

(ii) Clean Links must be provided on the web pages. If you are providing any links on the webs pages, make sure they are not dead and do not lead to dubious and malicious websites. Moreover quality links and the absence of bad links will improve the “authority factor” of your website, which Google always appreciates.

(iii) Don’t Publish Stubs or empty pages. If you don’t have any quality content for any page, better not to publish such page, rather than publishing an empty page. And if you have to publish such stubs, make sure to use noindex meta tag to avoid the page from indexing.

(iv) Careful Syndication of content on other sites. It is always advisable to include a back link to your article on every site on which it is syndicated.

(v) Common Precautions, like avoid repetitions; be consistent in linking; and as far as possible, be original in publishing content.

Hope this helps.

If you, like many people, struggle writing your own content, don’t worry – help is as hand. Get in touch with us to today and ask about our copy writing services.

Use these details below:

• The Expiry Date can be any time in the future.
• An optional Start Date can be any time in the past.

If you wish for an ALL DATA MATCH then enter:

CV2 = 123

Billing Address Numbers  = 88

Billing Post Code Numbers = 412

If you enter anything other than the above AVS/CV2 details then you will get NOT MATCHED.

You’ll also need to enter the 3D Secure password as “password” (please note this is case sensitive) so that the 3D Secure authentication returns Fully Authenticated.

All transactions will FAIL / be DECLINED on the test server if you use any other card numbers other than the ones provided above.

Please note that the SagePay test server is not integrated with any banks, therefore no monies will be transferred as a result of these tests.

So, who does Google want to protect us from? Well, there are multiple parties that can have access to your queries and use the data for promoting their own products/services. For instance, the Network Administrators, ISPs, Webmasters of other websites all require this data to draw up effective business and marketing strategies.

The destination sites will be able to know that the visitor has come from Google search, but he will not be able to easily decipher the query used by the user to visit the website. Moreover, using Google Webmaster Tools, the Webmasters will also be able to access the “aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days”.

The advertisers too need not fret over Google Encrypted Search, as they can still measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns and improve them, since their browser can send the relevant query over the network.

Need for Google Encrypted Search

Google felt the need for encrypting its search results due to increasing concerns about the privacy of the users. Moreover, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been on the forefront clamouring for all the Internet connections to be secured under its campaign “HTTPS Everywhere”. Since Google is among the most used search engines around the world, it makes sense to secure the connection by encrypting the search results of the logged-in users.

Criticism of Google Encrypted Search

1. Google Encrypted Search does not totally apply to the Google ads. When a user clicks an ad appearing on the Google results page, the Webmaster will be able to know that the visitor came from Google. So, the visitor-tracking is still not completely ruled out even after the introduction of Google Encrypted Search.

2. Another major loophole of the Google Encrypted Search is that it works only when the user is logged in to the Google services.

Many internet security experts and internet marketers have trashed Google Encrypted Search and raised doubts about Google’s real intentions. According to some, this is an attempt by Google to “barter the data in order to leverage security as a quality control factor”.

Useful Tips for Internet Marketers to Absorb Encryption Impact

(a) Foremost, the internet marketers must benchmark the performance of keyword search data – both historically as well as on an ongoing basis.

(b) The Google Webmaster Tools must be re-evaluated.

(c) Communication of changes to the team members and the management is quintessential.

(d) Communication with third party reporting and marketing vendors is equally important.

The internet marketers need not lose sleep over Google Encrypted Search and its impact on their working, as by Google’s own admission, this change won’t affect more than 10% searches. And the good news is that thus far, the impact has been minimal.

Thus, Google Encrypted Search is a step in the right direction, but Google needs to allay the fears of the internet marketers concerning its long term plans, as the company is being increasingly seen as monopolizing the internet, and the way the internet marketing revolves around the Google searches, the fears of marketers are not entirely unfound.

Step 1. Open up your your functions.php file and add the following code snippet:

register_nav_menus(array(‘primary’=>__(‘Primary Menu’),));

You can add as many menus throughout your theme as you like. To do this you’ll need to add this:

register_nav_menus(array(‘primary’=>__(‘Primary Menu’),

‘secondary’=>__(‘Secondary Menu’),));

Step 2. Then you’ll need to replace the existing menu items with this:

<?php wp_nav_menu( array( ‘sort_column’ => ‘menu_order’, ‘container_class’ => ‘menu-header’ )  ); if (is_home()) ?>

Open the header.php file a look for the existing navigation div. Then delete your menu items and replace it with the above code between your unordered lists <u>HERE</ul> .

For example:

<div id=”navigation”>
<ul>
<?php wp_nav_menu( array( ‘sort_column’ => ‘menu_order’, ‘container_class’ => ‘menu-header’ )  ); if (is_home()) ?>
</ul>
</div>

Step 3. Once you’ve added this go to your Appearance > Menus and add a name for your new menu, press the create menu button. Then choose the “primary” menu from the drop down in the Theme Locations. Save it and you’re done.

After enabling WordPress menus the CSS active state is not showing!

One thing you may find is that the “active” state for your menu does not work. You’ll need to add some additional CSS to your parent div for this to work correctly. Basically you want WordPress to show the active state class for parent and child elements.

Add this CSS code:

#navigation .current_page_item a:link, #navigation .current_page_item a:visited{
color: #000;
}

That’s it, enabling WordPress menus has never been so easy. If you need any help just ask!

What should you do?

Firstly, if your image is for website usage only it does not need to be any larger than 72dpi (dots per inch) and if you’re uploading it directly from your camera chances are that the image will be between 240dpi and 300dpi which is great for print but totally unnecessary use online.

Secondly, your image does not need to be any wider than 1000 pixels as most of your visitors entire screen resolution will be no more than 1024 pixels.

So what can you do to help keep your website super fast? Use a online image re-sizer such as: http://www.webresizer.com/resizer/