To endow web users with useful and state-of-the-art products and services, Google is always aboard implementing changes in the existing products. The recent addition to the list of updates carried out by Google is the integration of Google Webmasters Tool data and Google Analytics. Earlier in June, Google conducted a pilot program to review this feature and it surfaced as a great hit amongst webmasters, web owners and leading SEO companies. In response to this heartily welcome received, this feature is available to all the webmasters, website owners and SEO companies, for efficient and advanced tracking of websites’ performance.

How to Link Google Webmasters Tool & Google Analytics

Now, before you can avail this latest update introduced by Google, it is required to link the existing accounts at Google Webmasters Tool and Google Analytics. Associating the two accounts is straightforward and it can be accomplished after performing the following steps.

1. Open Webmaster Tools Account.
2. Select the website you want to manage and click on ‘Manage site’ written against the site selected.
3. Dropdown Menu opens. Click on Google Analytics property.
4. Now, select the web property to be associated with the chosen site.
5. Hit Save & both the accounts are linked now.

What Happens on Linking Google Webmasters Tool & Google Analytics

People who were lucky enough to participate in the pilot program might be familiar with the results of the integration of these Google products but a large number of individuals are still unaware of it. Here are mentioned the results of linking Webmasters Tool & Analytics accounts:

1. Webmasters Tool Data in Analytics Report

With linked accounts, the SEO data (from webmasters tool) can be accessed in Google Analytics report, which ultimately helps SEOs as they get all the details at one place.  To locate the search engine optimization data through your Analytics account, follow the below-mentioned steps:

*  Open the Analytics Report Dashboard of the desired website (New Interface).

*  Click on the tab – Traffic Sources (On Left sidebar).

*  Click on Search Engine Optimization option & view detailed information on queries, landing pages and geographical summary.

2. Access Google Analytics from Webmasters Tool Account

Similarly, you can get access to the information in Google Analytics account directly from Webmasters tool without requiring any separate login. By clicking on links such as ‘Sitelinks’, ‘Search Queries’ and ‘Links to your site’ from Webmasters tool, the user is redirected to his Google Analytics account.

This integration between Webmasters Tool and Google Analytics has definitely made webmasters, website owners and even leading SEO companies smile. With the launch of this feature, all the details regarding the performance of the website can be accessed in one place. A single access to both the accounts not just saves time but also assists in keeping the information in an organized manner. For readers who are new to the world of SEO, learning about other recent updates in Google Analytics would help in understanding your website in a better way.

Hosting a website over Internet does not guarantee a prosperous business in the virtual world. Almost every website hosted on Internet stumbles upon varied technical issues and Google Webmaster Tool is a web service, assisting webmasters in dealing with many such technical problems. Google Webmaster Tool provides a gamut of options that can be easily used for diagnosing, troubleshooting and correcting technical problems related to a website. To improve the utility and a better user experience, Google has introduced some changes in the webmasters tool and the changes made are definitely useful for web design companies and SEO agency.

Here you can find some of the latest updates in the Google Webmasters tool which are highly useful for SEO companies.

Track More Queries from Potential Customers

Earlier, SEO companies handling websites were able to view only 100 queries using Google Webmaster Queries. But, after the recent changes made, a pagination button has been added which allows webmasters to view more than one hundred search queries data for the website. With this feature, SEO experts can keep a track of large numbers of queries simultaneously and they can even analyze the queries to find out the needs and requirements of the customers. For instance, if a web design company receives more queries related to a particular service or product, more importance can be given to that specific product.

Graphs for Top Search Queries

Previously, SEO companies could access data about the top search queries through their account at Google Webmaster Tool. For a graphical representation, SEOs in India usually had to prepare graphs and charts on their own by using the data available in the account. However, now, Google creates charts along with providing data and webmasters can utilize their time studying these graphs rather than creating them.

Along with this, SEO India experts can study top search queries data with respect to time as well. By selecting the data range selector, you can easily view what were the top search queries in a particular time frame.

Alerts for Site Health

Erroneous website is one of the most common problems faced by any web design company. For webmasters who handle large numbers of websites, it is daunting to trace which website is running properly and which is not. To solve this problem, Google Webmaster Tool now offers a feature that alerts the website manager on threats and errors in a website.

For reading more on this Google Webmaster Tool update, visit google webmasters blog.

Access Top Search Queries Data from Google Analytics Too!

Reports containing detailed information about top search queries such as impressions, clicks and CTR can now be accessed through Google Analytics as well. To know on how to avail this most recent feature, read here.

A little knowledge is dangerous and the norm is applicable to SEO practices as well. There are serious blunders that webmasters often commit without doing in-detailed study about aforesaid optimization tactics. Here, we have listed five most common mistakes that adversely affect their search engine rankings.

Penalization against Over-Optimization

Search engines check for a number of elements relating to a website that testify its fate on the SERPs. There is a definite penalty for over-compliance with well-established optimization norms as they sound artificial and unethical. Practices involving heavy keyword stuffing, Meta-tag cramming, excessive usage of H1 tags and like practices invites Google and search engine penalization.

Diverting Visitor Through Refresh Meta-tags

Now that refresh Meta-tags is used to instruct a web browser to robotically refresh the current page after a given time frame, it is often used to fetch a different URL as the page is refreshed. However, to promote a certain web pages/services webmasters set the refresh time slot to either very low or zero at times. This practice misleads the browsers and is often regarded as “unnatural” from search engines.

Avoid Too Much Page Edit – It Reduces Consistency

In order to ward off SERP manipulations through drastic keyword, theme or content alteration,   Google is switching between “newer” cache to “older” cache and sometimes both to draw the information. Expect to see drastic changes in the SERPs if you too have implemented “greedy” optimization practices.

Dynamic Pages

Using dynamic pages is often problematic from search engine optimization point of view. The pitfalls include longer URLs, condensed variables etc. and lots of session IDs. These URLs hard to understand and difficult to get crawled by search engines and even create duplicate content on several dynamic URLs.

Connectivity to Bad Sites

Connectivity to Link farms, Free for All – FFA sites, porn sites and other unethical sites leads to search engine penalization. Also, always remember to determine the Google status of “everyone” you often link to as anyone of them may go “bad” and you may be penalized as a consequence, even though you did “nothing wrong”.

Common wisdom holds that because search engine optimization involves various factors and aspects of a website, is there a correlation between web hosting and search engine rankings as well?

The quality and dependability of your web host perhaps holds one the most vital attributes of the whole gamut. The basics say that in order to get ranked on search engines, your site needs to be up and functional all the time to allow Google crawlers index each and every page of your website. However, if your website server is down, search engines cannot crawl the site and index any changes made to it. As a result, all your optimization efforts deliver you zero output. This was about basics, there are other intrinsic factors associated with web hosting that affect SERPs.

1. Does Website Server Location Help with SERPs

Earlier in the dawn of Google, TLD was the key industry standard to find a site’s relevancy for a specific area. However, Google set the trend to check for server’s location, i.e. its IP address to turn the most relevant results in each country. This helped in determining a site’s relevancy for a specific region.

Hence, even if you are not putting much effort into SEO, with your host’s location it is assumed that your site is useful for users of that region, and hence you receive higher rankings.

2. Is my Ranking Affected If Spam Websites Are Sharing My IP Address

Shared hosting is a common phenomenon. It is often observed that hosting companies have a mix of clientele including few to many spamming sites as well. Google and other search engines understand that it is difficult to control the web hosts’ clientele, hence there is no apparent damage to your site’s ranking positions.

However, it calls for an action when there are thousands and thousands of spam/porn sites on your server as they invite you a lot of scrutiny from search engines that might affect your SERPs.

To check who else is sharing your IP address, go to bing.com and search for ip:<ip address>

3. Can Changing Host from one to another Affect SEO Ranking?

Well, it depends. If your web host is located in the same country, you need not worry much in this regard. This is so because

• Your domain name is absolutely the same
• Though your IP address is going to change but it doesn’t matter as you belong to same country.

However, if you want to be extra cautious, you can set your DNA time/your TTL to be as low as 5 minutes, bring up your website on both locations for that time and switch to the new DNS.

As far as you see that the Google bot is able to visit all your pages then you can probably assume that it has registered that DNS has changed to new IP address. However, if you fail to lower your DNS time to lower levels, ideally you should keep your website on both locations for almost 24 hrs and switch to the new IP address. This way your site would see no effect whatsoever due to changes in the IP address.

A couple decades ago, the brand experience was much different than what it is today. It was much more simpler and mainly orchestrated by the brand managers/companies, while consumers had a passive role to play. The stages of brand awareness, perception and involvement were majorly dominated by the brand managers. However today, the world is a very different place. Today’s consumer is evolved, informed and empowered with smart phone devices, ubiquitous internet access and social networks to discuss and hence influence brand experience.

Times are changing faster and the market trends are evolving rapidly. Here, we have listed several relevant trends in the virtual world for merchandisers and marketers to consider as they gear up to plan for the next campaign.

a. The soaring adoption and consumer acceptance at a never-before pace - Today’s consumers are extremely flexible and open to new ideas and technologies. Inventions are latching on and talking off at unprecedented speed, thus thinning the line between change “inventors” and “early followers”.

b. The shift from traditional shopping channels to eCommerce and mCommerce has been really fast - While in the year 2009, worldwide online sales were estimated around $8 trillion, the same is estimated to double the size by 2013. On the similar path, while the mobile commerce market – mCommerce was $42 billion in the previous year (2010), it is projected to touch the whopping figure of $70 billion by the end of coming few years.

c. Increasing cross-channel consumers’ spend - Studies reveal that nearly every internet user in the age of 16-55 has purchased goods on the Internet. Due to the fact that people seems to have less time for shopping nowadays compared to earlier generations, the demand for convenience and information search before making a purchase has increased.  The benefits offered with multiple channels are that customers can search for information in one channel and pursue the purchase transaction stage in another channel. Hence, it is in every brand’s best interest to cater to this highly profitable cross-channel consumer segment.

d. Increased consumer interaction with brands - Though the consumer always had the opportunity to decide for the fate of a brand but blog postings, online feedbacks, ratings and other consumer forums empower them further to influence brand perception more visibly. Consumers’ negative reviews are significantly affecting brand status and because of this shift, producers, retailers and marketers are being extra conscious with content and promotions that consumers will find relevant and trustworthy. The best way to do that is engage them, reward them and convert them into loyal brand advocates.

e. Marketing shift from selling to interacting – Historically, marketing initiatives were driven to push products, bring in sales and create brand awareness as a whole. The customer was being targeted on the basis of pre-defined criteria as derived from previous behaviour patterns and historical purchase behaviours. However, these strategies are not applicable today. Today’s consumer demands real time, experience based marketing. Strategies like loyal consumer cards coupled with location based services make it possible to offer consumers different sort of offers on a real-time as they walk down a store’s aisle or enter a mall premises. Consumers can respond to these direct messages through store walk-ins or by availing special packages.