Bharati Ahuja

Seven Priorities For SEO 2017

SEO in 2017 is more technical than ever before. The SEO industry has reached an era where, the true identity and importance of SEO services has started being spelt out.

Search engine algorithms now are more sophisticated and can see thru spam more efficiently. So, if you are trying to manipulate the search results using old black hat techniques then you should quit the SEO industry immediately.

seo-2017

The array of seven entities which will create the SEO spectrum for 2017 are:

1. Quality Content:

We all have heard since long that, Content is “King”. Content will continue to reign supreme. As, without quality content, no web presence can serve any purpose. Only when the content is original, informative, compelling, it answers the user queries and also is in the right format, the users will be interested in reading or viewing it. SEO efforts can only help in improving the search presence of the content. But if the bounce rates are high and the content does not serve the purpose of the user then the bots are also going to push the content back in the search results.

2. AMP Compliance and Mobile Friendly:

AMP is an open source initiative by Google launched in October 2015. After working on the AMP Project and indexing AMP, Google has started showing AMP in search results since September 2016.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are lightweight pages designed to load quickly on mobile devices. AMP-compliant pages use a subset of HTML with a few extensions. AMP improves the user experience by reducing the page load time by displaying the lighter version of the web page. If in case the website is not AMP compliant then having a responsive website is a must because mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor.

There are more number of mobile devices than the number of people in the world. Google soon is going to have a separate index for mobile which will be a primary one. If your website is not mobile-friendly or responsive and is neither AMP compliant then having a good mobile search presence is just not possible.

3. Structured Data And Schemas:

Structured data refers to kinds of data with a high level of organization, such as information in a relational database. When information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize and display it in creative ways.

Structured data markup is a text-based organization of data that is included in a file and served from the web. It typically uses the schema.org vocabulary—an open community effort to promote standard structured data in a variety of online applications.

Structured Data on a web page can be provided by using:

JSON-LD is the recommended format. Google is in the process of adding JSON-LD support for all markup-powered features. By adding structured data you are adding meaning and relevance to it for the search engines to correlate better.

Google also encourages the use of structured data by giving information regarding it in Search Console and by offering a structured data testing tool.

The Semantic Web isn’t just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data. Semantics or Structured Data add extra information to help you with the meaning of the information. Web sites using Schemas will be able to get more correlated to the contextual content.

seo-spectrum-2017

4. Artificial Intelligence/RankBrain:

RankBrain by Google, the machine-learning artificial intelligence system is a software which is integrated into the algorithm to mathematically connect words and phrases. RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand.

When a search takes place on Google, the search query now gets accessed by the RankBrain program/software to deliver more relevant search results. Especially if the query is a rare one.

By making the query accessible to software (RankBrain), the software will essentially become able to understand knowledge, think about knowledge via mathematical computations using word and phrase vectors, and create new knowledge. In other words, the software will be able to be more intelligent – not as intelligent as humans perhaps, but more intelligent than say, the word to word mapping is today. Especially for rare queries which need to be understood to deliver results.

For quality search results, Google wants to move away from word to word mapping and reach a level of, understanding the meaning behind the search query. Algorithms today are getting tuned to understand the intent of the user and display results which will be more useful for the user to take decisions or will give him more detailed information about the topic he is searching.

5. Voice Search:

Voice search is the next big frontier which needs to be given importance. The Mobile Voice Study by the Mountain View, CA, a provider of search, online advertising technologies and other Internet products and services found that 55 percent of teens aged 13-18 use voice search every day, while 56 percent of adults said using voice search makes them feel tech-savvy. Voice search is not about rankings or listings but being a part of the conversation.

As we can see that people prefer the video content more than text content when browsing from smartphones and mobile devices. The trend is moving to viewing content and to other formats which save time. Voice search avoids the hassle of keying in the query which is going to be a next big search revolution.

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller said in a Google hangout, at the 23-minute mark, that Google is looking for ways to show webmasters in the Google Search Console how people are finding their pages through voice search. 2017 is the time to prepare for the voice search scenario.

6. Social Media Outreach & Engagement.

Social Media is a platform which is here to stay. The social media sites may gain or lose preference but people surely check the social media accounts to get an idea about the company approach towards its customers.

Search and Social integration will only become stronger by the day and search algorithms will also be smart to filter social spam. Social Media platforms also are working on making their search functionality stronger. Hence, if the user goes to search and then reaches the social media accounts for further information or the user goes to social media accounts and the uses its search/search engines for more details is not imperative. But, having a social media presence is a must for putting your best foot forward and your voice heard.

7. Security

It's been two years since Google started its active campaign for Web security and announced HTTP to be a ranking factor.

‘Trust’ is the icing of the multi layer semantic cake and signature and encryption as the two main structures. Ensuring security for the user can make the website trust worthy for the user.

semantic-layer

Secure sites generate a better CTR and users feel more confident in sharing personal data. eCommerce sites with payment gateways cannot underestimate the importance of having a secure site.

Security is a top priority for Google. Google also gives a ranking boost to HTTPS/SSL sites, provided the site has quality content. Security of a site influences the trust factor. But, moving from HTTP to HTTPS has a series of SEO repercussions which need to be kept in mind.

Just as white light consists of a collection of colors, white hat SEO in 2017 will be the result of the correct implementation of the above mentioned points.

SEO services are becoming niche and are getting a definite meaning and form eventually. Finally, the much-awaited era for genuine SEO is in the offing.

SEO - 01/10/2017

A Humble Request to Search Engine Land Editors

If you are passionate about SEO then www.searchengineland.com has to be on your priority list for latest search updates. Hence, being passionate about SEO and the search industry, I have been an avid reader of the searchenginland.com content. After the official Google Webmaster’s blog https://webmasters.googleblog.com/ the SEL blog is one of the most trusted and reliable sources for any SEO updates.

After my humble experience in this field, I have been a contributor to some reputed blogs like SEJ, SEW, MOZ, Level343 and of course my company blog. The Author profile links are as follows:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/author/bharati-ahuja/

https://searchenginewatch.com/author/bharati-ahuja/

https://moz.com/community/users/170771?170771

http://level343.com/?s=bharati+ahuja&lang=en

https://www.webpro.in/blog/

I thank all the editors of these blogs for accepting my articles and publishing them. As 'guest posting' is a matter of great importance to every SEO, I would like to bring this to your notice. I do understand and respect the fact that, to accept or reject a post is entirely the prerogative of the editor and I surely respect that. I think all authors must have at times faced the dejection of their article being rejected. It is all part of the game.

But, the most frustrating point is when you send a post as per the procedure mentioned on the site you want to contribute to, and:

You do not get any reply for more than 3 weeks
You don’t know if the post has been received or not
You do not have any idea if the post is under review or has been rejected

yesno

I have experienced this with SEL. I would like to bring to your notice that a lot of effort, time and resources are spent on writing a post. Especially for a reputed blog like yours, as every contributor would like to put their best foot forward. Hence if we get a timely reply for acceptance/rejection of the post, it would be very helpful. We can at least publish it on some other platform. I say timely response because as you know that due to the ever evolving nature of the SEO industry the post can be of less or no relevance if the publishing is delayed. This results in a sheer waste of valuable time and effort spent on writing that post.

I have also been communicating on Twitter and thanks for the replies but it does not lead to any definite answers.

https://twitter.com/sengineland/status/803287201681436672

As you mentioned in the Twitter conversation, you surely must be receiving many posts and it must be a challenging task to reply to all but I suggest that you at least mention the status (under review/rejected) of the post in some way. Or, mention that if the contributor does not receive a reply in a specific time he/she should assume that the post is rejected and will not be published.

I am sure every well written, in-depth post, when published, is a mutually beneficial proposition for the writer as well as the blog on which it gets published.

Last but not the least, "Wishing A Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays" to everyone at Search Engine Land.

SEO - 12/21/2016

Rich Cards Enriched with Local Restaurants and Online Courses Verticals

In May 2016 Google announced a new search result format “Rich Cards” for 2 categories, i.e Recipes and Movies. The Rich Cards used schema.org structured mark up, just like the Rich Snippets format. Yesterday, Google announced that they are expanding it to two new verticals for US-based sites: Local restaurants and Online courses.

card2 card1

Google has added: By building Rich Cards, you have a new opportunity to attract more engaged users to your page. Users can swipe through restaurant recommendations from sites like TripAdvisor, Thrillist, Time Out, Eater, and 10Best. In addition to food, users can browse through courses from sites like Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, EdX, Harvard, Udacity, FutureLearn, Edureka, Open University, Udemy, Canvas Network, and NPTEL. AMP HTML is not required for Local restaurant pages and Online Courses rich cards. But, Google recommends that you create AMP pages to further engage users. Users consuming AMP’d content will be able to swipe near instantly from restaurant to restaurant or from recipe to recipe within your site. Users who tap on your Rich Card will be taken near instantly to your AMP page, and be able to swipe between pages within your site. Google is soon moving to add Rich Cards to other verticals too .

News / SEO - 11/22/2016

Digital Performance Management---A Step Ahead, From Insights To Impact

The web is continuously evolving. Today, every business has a website and knows the importance of a holistic web presence. As digital presence providers, we have focused on the earned, paid, and owned presence platforms. We also have been measuring and monitoring the outreach and the inbound traffic to these platforms. The most commonly used tool being the Google Analytics. As the digital efforts mature and the digital presence starts to spread out to search, social, mobile and global, the need to measure, monitor, understand and study the user behavior becomes increasingly important. Once we reach out to the targeted audience and the inbound traffic starts increasing, the next logical step is to move on from:

Content to context
Monitoring analytics to using analytics data for management
Quantity analysis to quality analysis

Digital performance depends on upon three essential factors:

Customer/User experience
IT performance
The business outcome of the digital effort

This is where the Digital Performance Management (DPM) comes into the picture. It focuses on the challenge of connecting the gaps between the user experience, IT performance, and the business goals & results. DPM is performance monitoring which helps business to assess and manage the performance of their website. Usually, analytics and monitoring tools focus on any one of the above factors. These metrics are mostly quantitative and silo in nature. Digital Performance Management analytics focuses on the quality and the quantity metrics to help take decisions.

dpm-analytics

The success of any online business depends on how satisfying the customer journey has been. The customer journey begins when he starts his search on the internet and finds your digital business presence on any media (paid, organic or earned).Digital is not longer a word signifying a certain technology, it is the DNA of every organization. In 2015 Gartner noted that, 89% of companies primarily compete on the basis of customer experience, and that these interactions are becoming rapidly more digital. Forrester estimates that a one-point improvement in a US wireless provider’s Customer Experience Index score (CX Index™) results in an additional $175 million in revenue. The DPM approach thrives when all the following teams work with synergy and have a common goal in mind:

Marketing
Technology
eCommerce
Infrastructure & Operations
Product
Services

Traditional analytics gave data about the performance of a website or the mobile app.DPM analytics goes a step ahead and gives actionable insights to help in decision-making. As the mobile web expanded, from simple website analytics tools which offered visitor and location data we moved on to the Application Performance Management tools getting insights about the mobile applications. As the search engines evolved, the SEOs and search marketers included social media services and the content services into their range of services. I think in order to add more value to their services, the addition of the DPM is the much-needed extension.

Jason Bloomberg, President, Intellyx says:

Application Performance Management tools must evolve to become Digital Performance Management. As the definition of "application" is both expanding and becoming more vague, it's important for these tools to focus on the customer experience end-to-end. That's essentially what we mean by digital performance.

Ann Ruckstuhl, CMO, SOASTA says:

2016 will see the beginning of a mass transition from APM to DPM (Digital Performance Management) with emphasis on front-end performance measurement, testing, and optimization based on analytics insights gained from the holy trinity of data - real user, business outcome and ops metrics. The need of the hour is to offer insights into data, along with the analytics data. Every search marketer with this value-added service to the client is going to future proof its growth and existence. This requires a great understanding between the client and the digital presence provider.

Erwan Paccard, Director of Customer Experience Marketing, Dynatrace says:

DPM collected analytics are uniquely positioned to help break silos by providing detailed insight around user behavior, delivered experience quality and the supporting applications and infrastructure health and performance across channels.

DPM Answers the Following Questions:

Are the conversion goals and revenue targets defined?
Is the infrastructure nurturing the growth rather than becoming a bottleneck?
Are the customers happy?
Is there a synergy between all the teams with a common goal in mind.

As Google always says: “Focus on the user and all else will follow.”

How Does DPM Help in Shifting the Focus on the User/Customer

DPM helps you to facilitate and design a satisfying online journey for the user.
DPM offers insights into the user experience journey from the digital performance perspective.
DPM gives a holistic cohesive view of a company’s performance, aligning strategy, business goals and operations.
DPM helps in predictive analysis.

The DPM software helps the digital marketer to add that layer of intelligence in the reporting. These additional insights help the business owner identify the bottlenecks and issues in the whole online sale process. This kind of reporting, not only give the metrics but also adds the “why” to those metrics. The term “Performance Management” is not new for any business but “Digital Performance Management” has the synthesis of technology and operations at its core. This monitoring is the backbone on which the future online business will be determined for any company.

dpm-intelligence-layer

According to Forrester analysts Milan Hanson and James McCormick's report brief:

Digital Performance Management Is An Evolutionary Step Beyond APM - Digital performance management is APM with a companywide perspective. It goes beyond APM by managing performance in a customer and business context.
Understand The Customer To Understand Performance - Good or bad performance depends on the customer’s expectations, which can be influenced by a range of factors such as geography or even by the customer’s stage in a single transaction.
Adopt A DPM Approach For That Competitive Edge - DPM will subsume APM, providing better insights that lead to action that is more finely tuned to business improvement.

It is high time that the digital marketing agencies start adding this layer of intelligence to forge ahead in the industry. As the majority of the traffic is received from the organic platform, the organic presence providers should be the first one to adapt to this new trend and evolution. http://www.slideshare.net/JenniferFinney/a-new-era-of-digital-performance-management DPM can be implemented by using any specialized software or by creating customized dashboards on Google Analytics. Google Analytics gives us a plethora of data but usually, companies just read reports and are happy with the increase in traffic metrics. By creating dashboards offering quality and quantity metrics the company can identify issues posing as a hurdle for online growth.

Google too is going ahead in this direction by introducing Google Optimize

Yesterday Google sent an email invite to Google Analytics users introducing Google Optimize. The email says: Companies big and small face the same challenge today. With ever more data flooding in, how do marketers act on all the useful insights they've learned? That's where Optimize comes in. Optimize makes it easy to test new online experiences for your customers. It's easy to implement. It's easy to create more personal experiences. And most importantly, it's easy to understand and act on the results. With Optimize you can create and deploy A/B, multivariate or redirect site experiments with our powerful capabilities:

Built on Google Analytics. Test what matters. Use your existing Google Analytics goals and metrics to quickly get an experiment up and running.
Advanced Statistical Modeling. Optimize will model the real-world performance of your experiments for more accurate results.
Sophisticated targeting tools. Deliver the right experience to customers at the right time with advanced experiment targeting.

Google Optimize is easy to use, powerful, and free. Ready to discover better online experiences for your customers? Simple traditional analytics is maturing to a more holistic data analysis and visualization of user behavior, real-world performance of the online business entities thereby giving a direction to the operations and the IT team to improvise further. Just having an overall web presence and having a good website and a mobile application is not enough. The web and the user behavior is ever evolving. The intelligent monitoring and constant changes made to the user experience by analyzing such data is the key to online sustenance. This DPM approach is a recent development and at the initial stages, but it surely going to go a long way. The time to start thinking about it and work out a value-added service for our clients is the way to forge ahead. Let us understand the why behind the analytics metrics, rather than just view them superficially. It is all about capturing more data and delving deep into insights and moving ahead from insights to impact.

Others - 09/30/2016

How To Add Google Analytics To AMP Pages

AMP Pages are the future for mobile search results. Google has announced recently that they will be removing “mobile-friendly” labels from search results and they also announced that they are testing to show AMP pages with a AMP icon in the search results.

AMP-Preview-Results

Hence, soon the AMP pages will move out from the Top Stories section and will be a part of the SERPs. Considering how the mobile usage is exponentially increasing , making your site AMP compliant and tracking its performance is a necessity.

In order to add Google analytics to the AMP Pages, include the following script in the <head>, before the AMP JS library:

<script async custom-element="amp-analytics"
src="//cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-analytics-0.1.js"></script>

Add the amp-analytics element to the body of your page. Then to enable the built-in support for Google Analytics, set the type attribute of the amp-analytics element to 'googleanalytics'. It is recommended to include an id attribute so that you can easily identify each amp-analytics element (e.g. debugging).

<amp-analytics type="googleanalytics" id="analytics1">
...
</amp-analytics>
Note: It is recommended that you set up and use a separate property for AMP measurement.

Some other vendors offering Analytics For AMP Pages are:

Adobe Analytics - marketing.adobe.com
AFS Analytics - afsanalytics.com
AT Internet - developers.atinternet-solutions.com
Chartbeat - support.chartbeat.com
Clicky Web Analytics - clicky.com
Cxense - wiki.cxense.com
Google Analytics - developers.google.com
INFOnline / IVW - www.infonline.de
Krux - help.krux.com
Linkpulse - docs.linkpulse.com
Lotame - mylotame.force.com
mParticle - docs.mparticle.com
Parsely - parsely.com/docs
Piano - vx.piano.io
Quantcast Measurement - quantcast.com

Validation

To check if the analytics code is correctly added one can validate the AMP pages on https://validator.ampproject.org/

Related Posts On AMP:

What Is AMP? All About Accelerated Mobile Pages By Google

AMP Pages To Be Shown In Main Google Search Results – Preview The Experience

Google To Remove Mobile-Friendly Labels and Keep Check On Interstitials For A Better Mobile Search Experience

AMP - Accelerated Mobile Pages / Mobile / SEO - 08/30/2016

Google To Remove Mobile-Friendly Labels and Keep Check On Interstitials For A Better Mobile Search Experience

Google recently announced on their blog that they will soon remove the “Mobile-Friendly” labels from search results.

Google said that they have found that 85% of all pages in the mobile search results now meet this criteria and show the mobile-friendly label.

This does not mean that mobile-friendly criteria is not a ranking signal. It will continue to be a ranking signal but the label will be removed from search results to keep the search results uncluttered. Google will continue providing the mobile usability report in Search Console and the mobile-friendly test to help webmasters evaluate the effect of the mobile-friendly signal on their pages.

Google also added:

“To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.”

Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller.

Here are some examples of techniques that make content less accessible to a user:

Showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page.
Displaying a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.
Using a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content has been inlined underneath the fold.

Examples of interstitials that make content less accessible

Examples of interstitials that make content less accessible

By contrast, here are some examples of techniques that, used responsibly, would not be affected by the new signal:

Interstitials that appear to be in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification.
Login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable. For example, this would include private content such as email or unindexable content that is behind a paywall.
Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible. For example, the app install banners provided by Safari and Chrome are examples of banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space.

Examples of interstitials that would not be affected by the new signal, if used responsibly

Examples of interstitials that would not be affected

AMP - Accelerated Mobile Pages / News / SEO - 08/27/2016

AMP Pages To Be Shown In Main Google Search Results - Preview The Experience

Google posted on its official blog yesterday that the AMP pages shown in the “Top stories” section of

the Google Search Results page on mobile phones are now in the process of being shown across the entire search results page and not just the “Top stories” section. Google says, Since they started working on this mobile experience for users, they have seen incredible global adoption of AMP that has gone beyond the news industry to include e-commerce, entertainment, travel, recipe sites and so on. To date there are more than 150 million AMP docs in the Google index, with over 4 million new ones being added every week. The preview shows an experience where web results that that have AMP versions are labeled with . When you tap on these results, you will be directed to the corresponding AMP page within the AMP viewer. The “Who” page on AMPProject.org has a list of some of the sites already creating AMP content. Google says, they are starting with a preview to get feedback from users, developers and sites so that they can create a better Search experience when they make this feature more broadly available later this year. They also want to give everyone who might be interested in “AMPing up” their content enough time to learn how to implement AMP and to see how their content appears in the demo. And beyond developing AMP pages, Google invites everyone to get involved and contribute to the AMP Project. As the no. of searches from mobile handsets go on increasing at an alarming rate, AMP is

huge and is surely the future which no search marketer can ignore. Speed and optimum content display are the most important aspects for mobile users. Try it out for yourself on your mobile device by navigating to g.co/ampdemo. Please view the screen shot of the preview results as below: AMP-Preview-Results

The preview shows an experience where web results that that have AMP versions are labeled with . When you tap on these results, you will be directed to the corresponding AMP page within the AMP viewer. But if there are errors on the AMP page then the corresponding page is as below: AMP-Errors-Page

AMP - Accelerated Mobile Pages - 08/05/2016

Myntra a FlipKart Ltd. Unit Acquires Jabong for $70 million

Myntra a FlipKart Ltd. Unit acquires Jabong for $70 million. This deal has made FlipKart the no. 1 e-commerce market place. Jabong offers more than 1,500 international high-street brands, sports labels, Indian ethnic and designer labels and over 150,000 styles from more than 1,000 sellers. Flipkart, beat Snapdeal and Future Group in this deal, FlipKart will pay cash for the acquisition, according to a statement by Global Fashion Group (GFG), which owns Jabong. In September 2014, German investor Rocket Internet merged Jabong with four other online fashion retailers in Latin America, Russia, the Middle East, South-east Asia and Australia to create GFG. jabong-myntra

Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, Flipkart's co-founders, confirmed the news by tweeting:

Welcome @JabongIndia to the @Flipkart family. We'll create history together.
— Sachin Bansal (@_sachinbansal) July 26, 2016

Today, @Myntra got bigger! Delighted to welcome @JabongIndia to the @Flipkart group! — binnybansal (@binnybansal) July 26, 2016

Since last one year the sales of Jabong.com owned had been declining and they had stopped offering discounts to reduce its losses to Rs 46.7 crore in 2015 from Rs 159.5 crore in 2014. In 2015 jabong.com was almost sold to Amazon but the deal did not get finalized. “Through the sale of Jabong, we are achieving a milestone in our strategy to refocus and invest in our core markets that show both, significant growth and revenue potential but also a clear and predictable path to profitability,” GFG CEO Romain Voog said in a statement. Binny Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart said: “Fashion and lifestyle is one of the biggest drivers of e-commerce growth in India. We have always believed in the fashion and lifestyle segment and Myntra’s strong performance has reinforced this faith. This acquisition is a continuation of the group’s journey to transform commerce in India. I am happy that we will now be able to offer to millions of customers a wide variety of styles, products and a broad assortment of global as well as Indian brands,” he added. For now Myntra has said it will keep Jabong as a separate entity. This deal strengthens the Bengaluru-based company's prospects of competing with Amazon a in this high-margin business. Welcoming Jabong to the group, Flipkart CEO Binny Bansal sent a letter to all its employees. Here's the text of the letter sent by Bansal: Hi, I am happy to inform you that our group company, Myntra, today acquired Jabong from Global Fashion Group, thus creating India's biggest fashion shopping destination.The acquisition of Jabong further strengthens Flipkart Group's position as the undisputed leader in Fashion and Lifestyle segment in India. As you are aware, Jabong is among India's major fashion multi-brand e-store with more than 1500 on-trend international high-street brands, sports labels, Indian ethnic and designer labels and over 150,000 styles from over a thousand sellers. Myntra and Jabong are all set to define the next generation of online shopping offering the best of brands to Indian consumers.Some of the most iconic global brands that will be exclusive to both the platforms include Dorothy Perkins, Topshop, Tom Tailor, G Raw Star, Bugatti Shoes, The North Face, Forever 21, Swarovski, Timberland and Lacoste. Fashion and lifestyle is one of the biggest drivers of ecommerce growth in India. We have always believed in the fashion and lifestyle segment and Myntra's strong performance has reinforced this faith. This acquisition is a continuation of the group's journey to transform commerce in India. I am happy that we will now be able to offer to millions of customers across our 3 platforms even more wider variety of styles, products and a broad assortment of global as well as Indian brands. Ananth will be leading both Myntra and Jabong platforms. Please join me in welcoming the talented team of Jabong to the Flipkart group. It's an interesting coincidence that Myntra's announcement coincides with the launch of Amazon Prime in India. But, Flipkart already has a Prime like service available in the form of Flipkart First. This provides free shipping and other benefits, much like Amazon Prime.

E-commerce / News - 07/27/2016

IT Sector To Lose 1.4 Million Jobs To Automation By 2021. Are You Upgrading Your Skills To Retain Your Job?

According to an HFS Research, it is said that By 2021, the IT industry worldwide would see a net decrease of 9% in headcount, or about 1.4 million jobs, with countries like the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States also taking hits.

IT industry body The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) said that the report may not have taken into account all the jobs being created by newer technologies.

But all is not disheartening, the HFS report states that though "low-skilled" jobs will fall by 30%, "medium-skilled" jobs will increase by 8% and high-skilled jobs will rise by 56%.
impact of Automation 2021

If low-skilled jobs will be adversely impacted the high-skilled jobs will show a promising rise. Low-skilled jobs are jobs which are repetitive in nature and do not require any special expertise and qualification. Such jobs can be easily automated.

"The BPO industry is going to be facing the problem of robotic process automation in the next two years. This is a challenge the industry and the country will face," Asheesh Mehra, CEO of BPO firm Antworks, said.

On the other hand, high-skilled jobs require creative problem solving, analytics and critical thinking. Implementing automation for such jobs is challenging and the industry is not ready for it yet.

Another report highlights another major issue—the huge gap between new IT jobs created and the number of engineers completing their graduation. Approximately more than 15 lakh new engineers enter the job market every year, but the jobs available for them has shrunk to 2-2.5 lakh. This results in a severe competition among freshers and experienced engineers.

Areas which will see high demand and lucrative salaries are:

big data,
analytics,
machine learning,
mobility,
design,
Internet of Things (IoT) and
artificial intelligence.

Due to big data, the demand for data scientists is on the rise.

Data scientists are not only relevant to IT but sectors like the manufacturing, R&D, banking and financial sectors and the expanding e-commerce companies also need their services.

Big data analysts need to have knowledge of:

computer science,
analytics and statistics skills,
strong communication skills and
a working knowledge of business intelligence tools.As Internet speeds increase, the need for maintaining and managing internet infrastructure is also going to grow.

Experienced people with the following profiles will be in demand:

digital marketing expert,
marketing technologist and
solution architects, who have both business and technical know-how and areable to align the two.

The areas where jobs will show an increase in the future are:

mobile application development
cloud computing
IT infrastructure risk analysis
Online security
Developers with experience in user-interface (UI) and
user-experience (UX)
Data visualization experts with the skills to present data with simplicity
healthcare
transportation
real estate
Operations & Logistics of eCommerce Startups

According to one more blog post by Phil Fersht, The jobs aren't "going away" - they've already pretty much gone .

Hence, if this trend and data proves to be true, only innovation and adapting to the new technologies is going to make the companies survive.

News - 07/11/2016

With Ad Blocking On The Rise and The Mobile Web Expanding, SEO Becomes More Important Than Ever Before

Marketing Land published an article recently stating, “33 percent of internet users will be ad blocking by next year”. They also shared the following details :

Forecaster eMarketer estimates that this year, 70 million people in the US will use ad blockers, representing growth of nearly 35 percent year over year. Next year, the company estimates that nearly 87 million internet users in the US will be blocking ads.
PageFair released a mobile ad-blocking report indicating that 419 million people around the globe were blocking ads on mobile devices. The majority were located in Asia, fewer in North America and Europe.
According to online polling firm CivicScience, 55 percent of survey respondents had ad blockers on their PCs, and 25 percent had them on their smartphones.

The ads are being blocked but the use of search engines is no way on the decline. ad blocking and SEO

As the no. of online users go on increasing multi fold every minute the need for every business to have a quality web presence across all types of devices being used becomes all the more a priority and a necessity and not an option. According to additional statistics:

Around 40% of the world population has an internet connection today.
In 1995, it was less than 1%.
The number of internet users has increased tenfold from 1999 to 2013.
Today there are more than 3 billion people online.
Mobile access to the Internet will be instrumental in bringing the next billion people online.

In today's digital world, we are all living our lives on multiple screens. With affordable devices and easy data plans mobile usage has grown exponentially, almost to the point where it is becoming increasingly clear that people are now using their mobile devices for doing everything they would previously do on a desktop. In fact, Internet searches on smart phone now exceed desktop searches. The mobile Internet does not just liberate us from the constraints of a wired connection, but it offers hundreds of millions around the world their only, or primary, means of accessing the Internet. Second, the mobile Internet does not just extend the reach of the Internet as used on fixed connections, but it offers new functionality in combination with new portable smart devices. The rapid increase in mobile usage has changed the way users look for information on the Internet — to buy or to interact with brands before making their purchase decisions. Here are some stats that show why businesses can no longer afford to treat mobile as an afterthought:

80% of internet users today own a smart phone.(Global Web Index)
In the past two years, the number of consumers that consider mobile as their preferred device for researching products on the Internet has jumped from 25% to 53%. (Marketing Week)
16 to 24 year olds spend an average of 3.25+ hours per day online on a mobile.(Global Web Index via Heidi Cohen)

For business owners and marketers in India, it’s time to pay more attention to mobile because:

85% of India’s digital population access the Internet via mobile
Average mobile time doubled to 3 hours per day in 2015 from 1.5 hours per day in 2012.
In India, mobile contributes to 60% share of all shopping related queries and
over 50% of all travel related queries.(Google India Report via Economic Times)

Marketers must identify these different patterns of user behavior to be able to boost their chances of attracting their target audience and converting a sale. From this standpoint, it’s critical for them to understand and stay current with ‘mobile search’ trends. Mobile using customers are typically more impatient, and even unforgiving, when it comes to website load times. According to some stats shared by Mobile Marketing Engine:

Over 70% of mobile consumers expect web pages to load almost as quickly or faster, as they do on their PC.
74% of them will only wait for 5 seconds or less for a website to load on their device.
46% of them will probably never return to a website if it didn’t load properly on their first try.

Without a fast-loading website, you’re at a greater risk of losing customers to your competitors. With the change in the user behavior, the search engines too are working on the search experience for the mobile web users . To improve the performance of the mobile web and to aid the creation of fast-loading mobile web pages, Google launched an open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in October 2015. Search at Google I/O 2016 too was Dominated By Updates On Mobile Search, App Indexing And Structured Data. Google-io-2016

Google I/O 2016 discussed:

Introduction of rich cards
New Search Console reports
Real-time indexing
Getting up to speed with Accelerated Mobile Pages
A new and improved Structured Data Testing Tool
App Indexing got a new home (and new features)
App streaming

At the Google AMA talk at SMX Advanced this year, Gary Illyes the Standup Trends Analyst at Google (@methode) gave the audience two things regarding the mobile web. danny-sullivan-gary-illyes-smx-advanced-1920-768x432

danny-sullivan-gary-illyes-smx-advanced-1920-768x432

He said that AMP is going to be big, and SEOs and webmasters should think now about getting ready for AMP.
He also said, Currently, Google’s search results for desktop and mobile use the same index and almost all of the same ranking signals. Google is looking to separate some of them out. Google has told us in the past that they are experimenting with this, and Google is clearly still working on a mobile-only index.

All this proves that with the increase in the mobile traffic the focus needs to be on the mobile search presence. As the maximum ad blocking comes from mobile devices. As the paid media is facing a setback due to ad blocking, the focus needs to be on the earned presence and the owned presence. If the site is optimized well and the business has a good interactive social media presence it surely is not only going to help in reaching out to the targeted audience but also help in contributing to the trust factor. But, all this is easier said than done. One needs to have the right approach, patience and a long term strategy to achieve the goal of being found for the right searches. We need to keep in mind that the search engines started with a purpose of giving genuine organic results and not paid results. If any search engine focuses on paid search only it will be deemed as a paid directory and be abandoned. The web has witnessed the decline of many directories over the past decade. The psychological factor also hints that the users trust the organic search results more than the paid results. The future belongs to a platform where unbiased genuine results will be served to the user for whatever searches he makes. The Power Lies In The Hands Of The People (The User) In Co Relation To Search And The WWW. The search engines too gear and navigate their development efforts according to the peoples demand, likes and dislikes and changing search behavior . Hence, as a business owner currently one needs to focus on:

An extremely user friendly website
Optimize it for search engines
Upload regular, relevant and fresh content
Have an interactive, engaging social media presence
Focus on the mobile presence by having a responsive website or/and a Mobile App. Depending on the need, purpose and the target audience.
AMP is just at the initial stages but, now is the time to prepare for the future.

As Bill Gates has rightly said,:

“WE ALWAYS OVERESTIMATE THE CHANGE THAT WILL OCCUR IN THE NEXT TWO YEARS AND UNDERESTIMATE THE CHANGE THAT WILL OCCUR IN THE NEXT TEN. DON’T LET YOURSELF BE LULLED INTO INACTION”

The importance of SEO can never be ignored. Whenever, someone on the web mentions ‘SEO IS DEAD’, it comes back to life with more vigor and vitality. In fact, with the expansion of the mobile web, SEO has got more extended and more technical. As the search algorithms get more sophisticated, the SEO deliverables too get more technical. As SEO now needs to focus more on speed, privacy, security, app challenges like giving the user a seamless experience from being navigated from the app to the website and back.

Google / SEO - 06/28/2016

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