Copywriting has received its own renovation with age and has now appeared in a completely new format. Its inclination to the traditional forms like print, radio and television is revamped with the evolution of a new dimension, the ‘Online website copywriting’. The skills and techniques of online copywriters are multi-pronged and more diverse than the traditional writers. The reason is that the competition that they face is much more critical as their copy should be good enough so as to attract clients and should also list in top search engine listings.

The writing patterns of online copywriters differ a lot from traditional writers. For example, if an online writer is writing for a sales page of a website then he has to make sure that the page attracts search engines in addition to making it more intriguing to the human eye. So, they have to blend keywords in their sentence formations, unknown in the traditions form of copywriting. It is more challenging and reasonably demands more of a writer’s talent than simply potential writing-skills.

Professionalism is absolutely essential for this form of writing. Only an experienced online writer can write immaculate copies for online business owners. Such writers can create good copies while simultaneously meeting the sale ends of the clients. To find a sound writer who can write in a lucid language, grammatically correct and keyword rich content is tough. But the ideal candidate can be discovered in two ways. First it would be wise to tab on the freelance writers with a good knowledge base. There are many excellent writers capable of providing your business unflinching services. You can also avail services that connect freelancers with business owners. But then it may always be a little time consuming to find the perfect candidate. Then working out things with a professional company may also be rewarding as they have ‘employed staff of talented writers’ who have the experience of writing for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes.

It is only the written text on your website that determines the credibility of your site as regards, products, knowledge and services. Your copy may help to inspire, motivate and educate people. So, to determine the purpose of your copy is very vital and it may always differ from your nascent need to bring sale of a product. So, just informing about a product can automatically result in its sale. Online medium is a means to spread your message and so it is much more diverse than an advertising tool.

If you are looking for professional copywriting services and search engine optimization for your website, contact us.

Tags: online copywriting, web content creation
Posted in Content Creation, SEO | No Comments »

Local searches have been gaining more and more importance on the internet. In fact, the growth of local searches over web searches has been more in last few years according to ComScore.

According to Wikipedia, “Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings.”

Now, if a person is looking for web design services, he or she would tend to add “My Town” in the search string like “web design delhi”. This way the user narrows down the search looking for a local service provider or local vendor for the goods and services he or she is looking for.

Local Search and SEO

Now how does this information translates into leveraging the business growth? Its very important now to optimize and promote your website for local searches. The major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have already started a local business directory and it is positioned on the top of search results if the search string contain the location.

For example, if you search for Dry cleaners in Noida on google, you will get the results like this.

In fact, even if you don’t have a website, you can list in the google’s local business center. So, this is a great way to promote your business to the locality.

Local Search Optimization

If you own a website, make use of location as one of the keyword or use it with your services or products. Apart from local results, you will gain from the web results also. You can take following actions to leverage the local search growth to benefit your business:

1. Submit your website or business to Local search engines like:
   1. Google Local Business Center
   2. Yahoo Local Merchant
   3. Bing Local Listing Center
   4. Ask Business Search
2. Submit your website to Local Yellow Pages like:
   1. Indianyellowpages.com
   2. Superpages.com
   3. Sulekha.com
   4. And many others
3. Submit your website to Local directories:
   1. Hotfrog.com
   2. Justdial.com
   3. Citysquares.com
   4. Yelp.com and Burrp.com
   5. Many other directories
4. Local Press Releases are very important to promote the new products or services launches. You can use a number of free PR directories to submit and distribute your press release.
5. Location specific keywords optimization is of paramount importance to rank higher for local searches.
6. Contact Information on website.

As the local searches are gaining importance, don’t forget to include it in your digital marketing strategy.

For a Local Search Optimization strategy, contact us for a free consultation and website analysis.

Tags: google business listing, Local search optimization tips, local searches
Posted in Google, SEO | No Comments »

A website is designed to be found by your potential customers. This makes it important to design the website to be appealing as well as search engine friendly. There is a misconception that a SEO friendly web design will not be very attractive because the designer has to make compromises. If you take care of the basic guidelines of SEO friendly web design, you don’t need to worry about the design limits.

The search engines understand only text to collect the information about your website and rank you based on that. So, every piece of information on your website should be either in the text form or supported by text. If you are using an image, an ALT tag describing the image will be sufficient for the search engines.

The basic tips for a great website with SEO friendly design which shall help you achieve good rankings are:

• Simple and relevant content – Have the content on the site simple and straightforward. Use the words in the content which people would type to reach your website. Don’t stuff the content with words for SEO as that may hamper the readability of the content. Keep the sentences shorter than 18-20 words.
• User friendly navigation- The navigation on the site should be text based and less than 3 levels deep. Each of the site pages should be accessible by at least one text link.
• Page Title – The page title is a small line of text displayed on the browser title bar. Its also the first place the search spiders crawl. Have the title text be relevant and unique for each web page.
• Meta description and keywords – The meta description and keywords provide information about the relevancy of the web page to a set of key phrases. So, use relevant and proper meta data on each web page. Again, make the meta data unique for each page so that each page is tagged for relevant key phrases in the search engines.
• Optimize images – The search engines cannot read the text embedded in images. So, make use of ALT tags for each image and make the ALT text descriptive and unique.
• Sitemap – A proper sitemap is very important both for website usability as well as SEO friendliness. Have a HTML sitemap on the website with link from each page. The HTML sitemap should contain text links to each page of the website. In addition, you can generate XML sitemaps and submit them to Google and other search engines. It tells and helps the spiders which of your pages to crawl.
• W3C Validation – Having a valid html code and valid css is important for improving accessibility of the website as well as SEO friendly. If your web page has coding errors, it may hamper the spiders to crawl your web page. Avoid using tables and frames in the html.
• Browser Compatibility – Ensure that your website is compatible with the major browsers so that the user experience is great.
• SEF URLs – The website URLs should be short and meaningful. You can use the relevant key phrase in the URL. If your website is dynamic CMS based, make sure that the URLs are static. The URLs with ? may not be readable by all search spiders.
• Inter-linking – The relevant key phrases in the content within a web page should be linked with the proper pages. This helps the search spiders to understand the hierarchy of the website structure and improves the link juice of important pages. Keep the number of links on a web page reasonable.

There are several other factors specific to a design which are important for SEO friendly website. In addition, the SEO friendliness will help bring in traffic to your website but your website should be well optimized for conversion, so that the visitors can be turned into customers.

If you are looking for a SEO friendly web design, Contact Us for a free consultation.

Tags: design optimization, on page SEO, SEO friendly web design
Posted in SEO, Web Design and Usability | No Comments »

Google has completed the new web indexing system called Caffeine. As the name suggests, the search results are going to be high on relevancy and freshness. Now about 50% of the search results you see on the google will be fresh entries on the web. So, if now somebody search for World Cup Soccer, the related news and blogs will be available much sooner in the search results as compared to before.

The growing volume of content is one reason to build this new search indexing system. But then the other good reasons are increasing number of posts of videos, news items, images and real-time updates that make the web all the more complex.  Moreover, the expectations of people are also rising. Surfers want instant access to relevant content and publishers too want to be discovered the moment they upload a file. So, Caffeine is giant step forward in the evolution of the web. Caffeine being multi-dimensional overcomes the drawbacks of the old indexing system. The old system had the structure of layers and so it took more time to refresh a layer as the entire web had to be analyzed for updating information.

With Caffeine, it is completely different. According to Google Blog, “With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.”

Will Google Caffeine affects SEO?

There is no appreciable effect on the rankings of normal web pages. But as the core concept behind Caffeine is better results based on freshness of content, its really important to generate unique and fresh content on regular basis.

Tags: google caffeine, google search results
Posted in Google, SEO | 1 Comment »

Bounce Rate is one of the important part of web site traffic analysis. It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

For example: if 100 users visit your site and 25 of those 100 users stay to see one page only then your Bounce Rate is 25%.

The formula used to calculate bounce rate is:

Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing Only One Page / Total Number of Visits to that page

When bounce happens?

Any of these actions can result in a bounce:

• The visitor clicks on a link to a page which takes him to another site
• The visitor closes the window or that particular tab
• The visitor enters a news URL in the same window or tab
• The visitor clicks the “Back” button to leave the site
• The visitor’s browser remains idle for a long time and the session expires

What Bounce rate signify?

Generally speaking, the bounce rate of less than 30-35% is fine, around 50% is cause of little concern and more than 70% needs attention.

There is no absolute scale to derive a conclusion based on bounce rate as the significance depends on the type of the website. For example- in the case of an ecommerce site or online store, the user tends to browse for the product of choice. There may be lot of options for the same products or number of related products. This leads to lot of clicks due to which the bounce rate of an ecommerce site will tend to be low.

Whereas in the case of niche based blog, a user visiting the site may be looking for a specific topic and was led by the search engine or a link from an external site to that particular blog post. This way, the visitor will leave the site after going through that post leading to a higher bounce rate.

So,  it is important to analyze the type of website and the page views per visit before jumping on conclusions about the bounce rate.

What results in a poor bounce rate?

There are some specific reasons for a poor bounce rate which should be worked on not just to improve the bounce rate but overall betterment of the website:

1. Website design and usability
   The user is very short of time nowadays. It takes seconds for him to leave the site if the website is not professional looking or the content is not precise or the navigation is hard to follow. So, its really important for the website to be user-friendly.
2. Site speed
   The website speed is another factor for turning off the user. Its also now a criteria by search engines like Google for the site rankings. So, prefer a fast loading site with optimal of heavy elements like flash.
3. Linking from reliable site
   If a visitor comes on the site by clicking on a link in the blog post of one of his favorite blog, he will stay longer as the link is on his trusted site. So, its important to link your website from good websites and directories.
4. Browser compatibility and accessibility
   It may be possible that your website is not rendered properly on a user’s browser like Safari or Chrome. The website should be cross-browser compatible and accessible as per the W3C standards.
5. Target audience profile
   Its important to know your audience profile. If your audience is not internet savvy, its preferred to have easy controls and navigation on the website. A proper help section and search feature will help tremendously.
6. 404 Error page
   If a user comes on your website page directly by clicking on a link in the search engine or another website and that page is no longer available on your website, its important to have a 404 error page which contains the complete sitemap of the site. This way, the user can find the correct page. A search would also be an additional help.

Tags: bounce rate, web analytics
Posted in Analytics, Conversion Optimization | No Comments »

Number of languages that are spoken in the world today, exceed the 6000 mark. But most of these languages are only spoken in the local level and do not find any representation on the internet. It is believed that it comprises of only 4 % of people to represent for the 96 % of local languages.  Languages such as German, French, Italian and Spanish that find place on the web also have scare percentage of people to speak them. Though this is the scenario, but then, when it comes to marketing, people are found to prefer local languages to buy products from websites. This has made local languages very important component for the SEO strategy – Multilingual Marketing.

To harness the area of multilingual marketing, EvoMantra has build expertise with forming SEO strategy to promote the websites with local languages. EvoMantra specialises in implementing local languages support on the website as well as promote it.

Once the websites are created, it is found that their promotion also becomes simple. The reason is that keyword saturation for non-English sites is much less as compared to the English sites. So, the visibility of such sites also increases in the search engine searches. Seeing the possibility of high positions in search result listings for local keyword based searches, companies have started to make websites in local languages. They are specifically targeted to consumers of a region. For example, a car insurance company would also make a French website for its customers who speak only French language. Now, for the SEO team promoting this site on local language also becomes easier than the English website as the resources required are much less in-comparison to its English Counterpart.

Tags: International SEO, Multilingual marketing, Multilingual SEO
Posted in SEO | No Comments »

Creating content, sharing and publishing them on the internet is the core component of social media marketing. Companies that are planning to include social media marketing in their overall internet marketing plan need to first understand the key components that make a successful social media strategy.

An in-depth understanding of social web is vital for framing the road-map so as to develop a working strategy for social media participation. For anyone who is initiating into social media arena, it is absolutely essential that they keep their eyes wide open and listen to what others are saying. Listening relates them to realities and prepares them for future course of action.

We recommend Forrester POST method for an effective social media strategy. We have added the measurement as a separate step – “Analytics” to the method:

P is for People: Who is your target audience? How are they reachable? What are their capabilities? Its very important to think of your audience when forming a strategy. For a specialized tattoo maker, a niche Facebook group may be a great idea but for a hotel, a positive set of ratings and reviews will play a better role.

O is for Objectives: What are your objectives? Are you planning a website or leveraging an application to listen to your customers or to talk with them? Do you want to provide support or motivate them? And how will you measure your success?

S is for Strategy: Strategy here means defining the end results you like to achieve. Are you looking for increase in sales? Are you looking for engaging huge number of people for brand awareness? Are you looking for better support services? Or are you looking for better reviews and ratings? Imagine the end results and you’ll know where to begin.

T is for Technology: Once you know who and why, you can decide with confidence HOW? A community? A wiki or A blog? Facebook? Twitter? Flickr?

A is for Analytics: What shall be the parameters of success to achieve the objectives you’ve identified? What shall be the tools to measure the parameters and what shall be frequency of measurement? This will help you to understand the next steps – whether you need to continue with the existing strategy or need to re-strategize?

With a sound strategy and commitment to listen and learn with specific objectives in mind will help you leverage the social media marketing. Social media strategy should be focused on long term benefits for the organization.

Read more about our social media marketing services or contact us to schedule a consultation.

Tags: POST method, social marketing, social media, social media strategy
Posted in Social Media Marketing | No Comments »