All About Social Media & Its Significance

In this day and age, Social Media is the buzzword far and wide. With the ever rising popularity of platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and many others, the usage of social media continues to upturn at an implausible rate.

The nuances involved with the intensifying usage of these social media platforms can be ascertained with the multifarious benefits that they provide to business organizations. Any corporation that covets to have great presence in the online world through the use of these media will experience a number of benefits including:

• Reduced Cost – When ingenuity, trend and creativeness are combined with optimized content, you will increase your business’s visibility by incurring cost that is extremely reasonable.

• Responsiveness – The openness of social media makes it one of the most fruitful associations with your customers. Answering their queries, going through their suggestions, et cetera becomes possible owing to the too way communication that these platforms offer.

• Creating Brand Awareness – With the vast number of visitors at social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, establishing your brand name can assist in increasing the visibility of your business.

• Market Research – Individuals express their thoughts, penchants and disinclinations on these social media websites without any reluctance. When you know about their likings and preferences, you can easily tweak your products or service offerings accordingly- getting the benefit of market research without incurring any extra money.

• Enhanced Customer Service - Social media websites help in responding to customers’ inquiries and apprehensions right away in a prompt manner. Thereby, leading to increased customer satisfaction and better customer service for any business.

In a nut shell, there are various advantages of getting your brand social. Given that you can manage your connections wisely and sensibly, sky would be the limit for your company’s success via these social media networks. Get going and make the best use of them!

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All About Website Testing & Google Search

Recently, Google has provided a great insight into Website Testing & Google Search. Taking into the queries about whether website testing—such as A/B or multivariate testing—affects a site’s performance in search results, Google has come up with a set of guidelines that are significant for testing any website.
But before we cite the details, a little briefing on Website Testing is necessary.

Website testing means trying out different versions of your website (or a part of your website), and gathering data about how users respond to every single version. With this, one can ascertain which version shows the best performance – which of the versions results in the most purchases, or signups, or whatever you want the users to do. Once the test is concluded, you can update your website with the best content out of the lot.

A/B testing is running a test by generating multiple versions of a page, each with its own distinctive URL. When users try to access the original URL, some of them are redirected to each of the variant URLs. In this way, you can assess the effectiveness of each page by comparing the behavior of the users pertaining to different pages.

Multivariate testing is using software to change different parts of your website quickly. With the help of variations you can test multiple parts of the page; be it a heading, a photo, or the ‘Add to Cart’ button, etc. The software will show variations of each of these sections to users in varied groupings and then you can statistically evaluate which of the variations are the most successful.

Now, we shall bring up the imperative guidelines for running an effective test with minimal impact on your site’s search performance, as stated by Google.

• No cloaking: Cloaking—showing one set of content to humans, and a different set to Googlebot—is against the Google Webmaster Guidelines, whether you’re running a test or not. It should be ensured that you’re not deciding whether to serve the test, or which content variant to serve, based on user-agent. It has to be remembered that infringing Google Webmaster’s Guidelines can get your site demoted or removed from Google search results. So, act wisely.
  
• Use rel=“canonical”: Google suggested that if you’re running an A/B test with multiple URLs, you can use the rel=“canonical” link attribute on all of your alternate URLs to indicate that the original URL is the preferred version. Google recommend using rel=“canonical” rather than a noindex meta tag because it more closely matches your intent in this situation.
  
• Use 302s, not 301s: As per Google, if you’re running an A/B test that redirects users from the original URL to a variation URL, use a 302 (temporary) redirect, not a 301 (permanent) redirect. This will help in making search engines aware that this redirect is temporary & it will only be in place as long as you’re running the experiment. So, they should keep the original URL in their index rather than replacing it with the target of the redirect (the test page). JavaScript-based redirects are also satisfactory.
  
• Only run the experiment as long as necessary: The time required for a trustworthy test depends on factors like your conversion rates, and the amount of traffic your website gets. A good testing tool should tell you when you’ve gathered enough data to draw a reliable conclusion. Once the test is concluded, you should update your site with the desired content variation(s) and remove all the elements of the test as soon as possible, such as alternate URLs or testing scripts and markup.

If Google discovers a site running an experiment for a needlessly long time, it may construe this as an endeavor to mislead search engines and thus, it will take the necessary action in view of that. This is particularly true if you’re providing one content variant to a large proportion of your users.

Google enunciates that all these recommendations should result in your tests having little or no impact on your site in search results. However, depending on what type of content you’re testing, it may not even matter much if Googlebot crawls or indexes some of your content variations while you’re testing. Furthermore, if Google crawls your site often enough to notice and index your experiment, it will perhaps index the subsequent updates you make to your site fairly fast once you have finished the experiment.

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Happy Independence Day

“Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge... At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
The lines above are taken from the memorable speech delivered by Jawaharlal Nehru to the Constituent Assembly of India in New Delhi on 14 August, 1947.

It was that day when the whole nation woke up breathing in the air of freedom and rejoicing the bloom that embarked a new beginning. This freedom to India didn’t come easily. It called for the sacrifices of numerous innocent lives and the martyrdom of many brave souls of the country.

It gave India a novelty of its own and India got acknowledged as a sovereign country. After several years of colonial rule, this freedom was not only awaited but was necessary for the subsistence of India’s identity.

It won’t be wrong to say that from that time on 15th August, our Independence Day, has become a day of special meaning for the whole nation. Commemorated with our national flag, the tricolor essence, kites, patriotic songs, speeches and much more, this day is not less than a festival in the country!

We, at IDS Logic, pay our heartfelt tribute to all the brave martyrs who struggled for our freedom and we wish all the compatriots a very Happy Independence Day!

Jai Hind!

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Google Pushing Out Panda Update 3.9 Tonight

Google says it will roll out the latest update to its Panda algorithm later tonight.

The company posted the news a few minutes ago on Twitter, saying this update will affect about one percent of search results.

By our count, this is Panda Update 3.9. The previous update, 3.8, occurred just about a month ago — on June 25th.

Panda rolled out initially in February 2011 and was designed to remove low-quality/thin content from Google’s search results.

Source:http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-3-9-128529

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Google's Cutts: Links Still More Powerful Than Social Signals

Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, was interviewed at SMX Advanced by Danny Sullivan. The latest video snippet was of links versus social signals.

My take away was that Matt Cutts says links are still, for the foreseeable future, going to be a more powerful signal for search rankings than social signals. Cutts does say that in ten years that may change but right now, links are indeed more important.

Links versus social signals is one of those debates in the SEO world that is heating up.

Social does factor in big time when you are on Google+ and searching logged in. But in terms of a core ranking signal for users who are not logged in? Well, Matt Cutts would know best.

Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-links-social-15396.html

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